hinduism today april/may/june, 2009
Vegetarianism -
An Ethical Diet for Peace and Plenty
Good health, spirituality, sound ethics, balanced ecology and favorable
economics are among the reasons a plant-based diet beats meat-eating today
b y R . P. J a i n
This editorial is drawn from a talk given by the author during the
Gandhi Peace Panel lectures on October 2, 2008, at the Eastern
Connecticut State University, Willimantic, Connecticut, USA.
In india, the land of ahimsa, or nonviolence, people have
traditionally been vegetarian. Hailing from a family of staunch
vegetarians, I consider myself fortunate to be living in harmony
with the principles of nature. As a Jain follower, I strongly advocate
a vegetarian diet, which I find superior
not only from a moral stance, but also from
the health and culinary points of view.
Guests at our home, coming from both vegetarian
and nonvegetarian backgrounds, are
always overwhelmed with what they describe
as the unbelievable taste and richness
of our vegetarian cuisine.
Sadly, in recent times many Hindus, Jains
and Buddhists, especially of the younger
generation, are no longer so strict about our
precepts and have taken to nonvegetarian
food, mostly following the misconception
that meat-eating is healthy. Truth be told, a
vegetarian diet is actually much healthier
than one based on animal protein. It is argued
that there is a lot of protein in meat
and eggs, but we do not need so much concentrated
protein in our diet. There is plenty
of protein in nuts, seeds, pulses and dairy
products, which are also far easier to digest.
Vegetarianism supports mental and physical
health as well as spiritual cultivation. Fruits,
vegetables, pulses, nuts and milk products
provide a balanced diet which does not
make our system toxic. This is primarily because when an animal is
killed, it becomes dead matter. In the case of many vegetables, if we
eat part of the vegetable and re-plant another part, it can grow again;
it is still a living organism.
It is a healthy sign that more and more people in the US, UK, Europe
and other parts of the world are taking to a vegetarian diet in
modern times, chiefly due to health reasons. There is a growing acceptance
in the West that vegetarianism connotes a more positive
way of living than flesh eating. In India, the
pilgrimage destination of Haridwar still
enjoys the status of being a vegetarian city.
Even in Japan, known to be virtually 100
percent nonvegetarian, you can now find
vegetarian restaurants.
My friend Martin Gluckman, who runs
the Vedic Society and teaches organic and
ayurvedic cooking in South Africa, hails
Indian vegetarianism thusly: “India has the
world’s greatest cuisine and most variety
of dishes, boasting to its amazing cultural
and spiritual heritage. It has a time-tested
vegetarian cuisine offering a delight for all
senses and the heart. India can be proud to
have the world’s largest per-capita number
of vegetarians (I have read reports of more
than 40%). No other country can make such
a statement of humanity and nonviolence.
The vegetarian culture and lifestyle is India’s
Cornucopia: Ladies vend fresh vegetables
at a market in Pushkar, Rajasthan; (above)
a few of the many spices that make Indian
food so distinctive and delicious
april/may/june, 2 0 0 9 hindu i sm t oday 39
greatest achievement and gift to the world. Only in years to come
will the true value of this gift be known.”
It is important that we remain vegetarian not only for our health
and nutrition, but from the points of view of spirituality, compassion,
ethics, ecology and economics as well.
When we see the end product of meat in the supermarket or
leather in the shoe store, there is a long chain of violence that created
it. These products endorse and perpetuate violence in our society,
which contributes to the terrorism that is rampant across the world.
Eating habits reflect upon a human being’s thoughts, speech and
behavior. A nonvegetarian diet makes one prone to violence.
By moving away from food of violence we can move rapidly toward
world peace. Albert Einstein averred, “It is my view that the
vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on human
temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.”
When a helpless animal is killed by a deliberate act of violence, it
dies in great dread. Its body is flush with hormones produced by fear.
These toxic substances enter the body of the person who eats the
flesh and adversely affect his or her body and mind. I have always
wondered, how can the carcass of an animal that died in mortal fear
give good health and refined, spiritual inclinations to its consumer?
Additionally, meat production is one of the most environmentally
damaging industries in terms of pollution and inefficient use of agricultural
land. According to a 2006 report from the United Nations
Food & Agriculture Organization, livestock production is responsible
for more greenhouse gasses than all the motor vehicles in the
world, plus it severely degrades land and water.
It is also necessary to remove the myth and argument that vegetarians
will not get enough food if nonvegetarians do not eat meat.
This is a fallacy. It has been conclusively proven that more people
can be sustained on vegetarian food than a diet based on meat. Livestock
occupy over 30 percent of our planet’s land surface, and 33
percent of global arable land is used to grow their feed, pointing to
why a meat-based diet requires seven times more land than a plantbased
diet. Thus, one of the easiest ways to help restore our environment
and feed more people is to stop raising and killing animals for
human consumption. We have no right to take the life of an animal
when we cannot give it.
Economically, a vegetarian diet is preferable to a nonvegetarian
diet. The same energy one can get from meat and eggs one can get
from pulses and cereals. It actually costs three or four times as much
money to produce an equivalent amount of calories from animal
sources as from vegetable sources.
Some people may worry that self-control and too much care
about nature would hamper development and bring about poverty.
We know too well, however, that the more we consume, the more
expensive things become, leading to the growth of the destitute
class. Reckless commercial development also results in economic
and social crises, bringing further suffering to the poor. Ahimsa, or
nonharm, does not deny economic development; it only exercises
self-control, limits our desires. Desires are endless. More and more
desires give rise to materialism and extraordinary greed, far beyond
basic human needs and sustainable consumption.
Greed results in the destruction of the very roots of our life. If we
want to prevent the world from becoming a barren desert and our
societies from growing into monstrous systems of injustice and
suffering, self-control and nonviolence appear as the only reasonable
answer—not only for Jains, but for people of any creed. For any
spiritual being, the destruction of life, be it in the air, the water or on
the ground, is a sin. But even if you do not subscribe to this principle,
you will agree that reckless destruction of life could eventually lead
to mankind’s own demise. Jainism is not the only Indian school
advocating nonviolence and self-control as central principles. Buddhism
and Hinduism equally preach them. Ππ
Sustenance: (top to bottom) Cows are
vegetarian. They represent the animal
kingdom to Hindus, deserving our care
and respect; Indian vegetarian cuisine
is abundant with tasty dishes, from this
simple, spicy okra curry to the thick,
hearty chick pea dal
al l photos shut t ers tock exc e p t as not ed
hindui sm today
R.P. Jain, left, is a director of Motilal
Banarsidass, a celebrated publisher of
spiritual and religious books in India.
E-mail: mlbd100@gmail.com.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Aano bhadra krtavo yantu vishwatah
"Let noble thoughts come to me from all directions"
- RIG VEDA
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Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
"Ozymandias," by Percy Bysshe Shelley
An old favorite.
The poem "Ozymandias," by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818):
WSJ.com August 22nd, 2009
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
The poem "Ozymandias," by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818):
WSJ.com August 22nd, 2009
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Sunday, July 19, 2009
NAIPAUL: Writing the wrongs of racism, roughed up in South Africa
Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul were photographed by Khadija Bradlow in Soweto this morning, on a visit to the Hector Pieterson Memorial.
Said Bradlow of the moment, “Both were very visibly moved”.
Writing the wrongs of racism
Fred Khumalo Published:Jul 18, 2009
TAPPING INTO PULSE OF A COUNTRY: Fred Khumalo and author VS Naipaul talk about South Africa at The Grace in Rosebank, Johannesburg. Picture: SIMPHIWE NKWALI
"He wanted to know: why the obsession with race when Mandela set the tone for non-racial dispensation"
"We agreed that it doesn’t help to sweep it under the carpet. To heal, we need to talk about the problem"
=====
Nobel author roughed up
Published:Jul 18, 2009
Nobel literature laureate VS Naipaul and his wife were accosted in Johannesburg yesterday.
The altercation occurred near The Grace Hotel in Rosebank, northern Johannesburg. Naipaul’s wife, Nadira, said they were on their way to the Lion Park, northwest of the city, when a “smart” car forced their chauffeur-driven van off the road.
The couple were accompanied by a friend, Khadija Bradlow, who has been showing them around.
“I really thought we were being hijacked. I thought this is it, it’s happening. They all told us that Johannesburg is a very criminal city and now it’s happening to us,” said Nadira
“(My husband) is shaken but he’s okay. He just felt helpless.”
Bradlow said two men of Middle-Eastern or Indian descent, dressed in dark suits and wearing dark glasses, jumped out of the unmarked white car and started shouting at them, demanding their IDs and wanting to know if they were Zimbabwean.
Once satisfied that the party was not Zimbabwean, the men wanted to know if they had drugs on them.
Bradlow said they had not reported the incident to police as they were unable to take down the car’s registration plates.
Naipaul, who is in South Africa to do research on a novel, is due to leave this week
---------
Renowned author quizzes journo, moi, on state of the nation
It was one of those deliciously ironic moments: a newspaper journalist being interviewed by a Nobel laureate for literature.
VS Naipaul had quietly sneaked into South Africa, and set about interviewing a cross section of locals for his next book, an ambitious tome focusing on African religions and African spirituality.
While Sir Vidia, the appropriate address since his knighthood, has written numerous texts about the continent, both fiction and non-fiction, his search for new material has taken him to Nigeria, Uganda and Gabon.
Friends vehemently tried to dissuade him and his wife Nadira, herself a writer, from coming to South Africa (‘Are you mad? Do you have death wishes? That is the crime capital of the world.’).
Sir Vidia, who was once described by a critic as an eagle who sits high on his perch and watches everything below — and misses nothing, decided he wanted to come to South Africa for this book, which he says will be his last in a successful career spanning more than five decades.
They say water flows because of gravity; people flow because of symbols. And on the continent, attractive symbols lie in the south. South Africa epitomises the continent in all its complexity: a wounded history, multiculturalism, the restlessness and, most importantly, hope.
It was therefore inevitable that Sir Vidia would succumb to gravity and venture south.
He had read about the racial problems of our country’s past but what struck him upon his arrival was more than the residue of the past. He had not expected such a multiplicity of identities — which extend beyond black and white. There are cultural identities (I am Zulu before I am South African), religious identities (I am Muslim before I am South African), sexual identities (I am gay before I am South African) and many others.
And overshadowing all of these identities is the obsession with race.
Sir Vidia set about identifying his targets, people he would speak to in an attempt to unravel the cultural/religious story of post-apartheid South Africa. At some stage he spoke to a kwaito artist, who told him Nelson Mandela had betrayed black people. He compromised too much.
In addition to the controversial kwaito artist, Sir Vidia decided to interview a journalist. Ignoring protestations from the journalist that journos are not good interviewing material, the world-renowned author and thinker insisted on meeting the journalist at his own house — “because he can only make a judgment on the character he is interviewing once he has seen him (the character) in his own environment”, his aide explained.
It’s always touching and amazing to look at one’s country through other people’s eyes. They see what your eyes skip past or what you subconsciously choose to ignore. Issues such as the race question.
The interaction between Sir Vidia, his wife and the journalist spread over three nights, during which they spoke over tea, enjoyed dinner and went to the theatre to watch a play that draws upon our immediate past in order to better understand the present.
Sir Vidia wanted to know: why the obsession with race when Mandela had already set the tone for a non-racial dispensation?
When a South African speaks about a fellow countryman he is bound to say something like: “I am talking about that Indian guy with a big beard” and so on.
Sir Vidia could not help remarking on how race is used descriptively. The journalist responded that 15 years is too short for us to shake off the yoke of race.
We come from a past where a white person with only a Std 4 education was deemed superior to Dr Nthato Motlana or Dr AB Xuma with all their education and international exposure — by virtue of the colour of his skin. We come from a past where black people could not own houses in the cities and suburbs, even if they could afford them. That’s the racial crucible in which we were shaped.
Mandela and Tutu’s exhortation to the nation to embrace non-racialism after 1994 provided warm and positive symbolism that the nation needed at that time, a crutch it could use to hobble into a new country, in pursuit of a rather elusive non-racial consciousness.
At this point of the discussion, Nadira noted that some of her friends blamed the resurgence of race-consciousness on Thabo Mbeki.
However, she disagreed. She thought Mbeki was correct when he made his observation about South Africa being a country of two nations — one rich and white, and the other black and poor. He had to make the country pause to take stock before blindly singing an empty non-racial song, argued Nadira.
The journalist pointed out that Mbeki-bashing had become a national pastime. Nowadays everyone hates Mbeki and what he stood for, even in instances when he was correct.
Those who supported Mbeki during his tenure have become as scarce as hen’s teeth or, more appropriately, as scarce as the white people who propped up apartheid for more than four decades.
When Mbeki made his two-nations remark, he was only, like a journalist, reporting on what he was seeing on the ground. That there were a few black billionaires who had sprouted overnight, did not erase the reality of millions of poorly educated, unemployed and starving black people next to millions of whites with a good education, secure jobs and roofs over their heads.
The journalist continued: “Personally, I am an optimist and in the left wing and sometimes liberal circles that I move in, even though we are conscious of race, we choose not to obsess over it. When we comfort ourselves as South Africans, we always pat each other on the backs, and say: ‘Ah, thank God the past is over. We have moved on.’”
Moved on to what exactly, Sir Vidia wanted to know.
The journalist hesitated before responding that the country had jettisoned statutory racism — and was now in a limbo, caught between that terrible past and the uncertain future. The legacy of the past is too great to shake off that easily as the nation trudges, uncertainly, towards the utopia of non-racialism.
There is a danger though, intervened Sir Vidia, that the obsession with race might prove counter-productive in the long run. He referred to the experience of his native Trinidad. For a long time, that country hobbled along as a nation of Indo-Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians, and some other minorities. There was tension (subtle as it was at times) between the races.
Sir Vidia noted, sadly, that during the tenure of Eric Williams, a one-time black-power adherent who reigned as prime minister from 1956 until his death in 1981, the island was in the grip of a sad form of race-consciousness.
While it might have been an attempt at empowering the descendants of slaves, the race-consciousness tended to racialise everything and had debilitating results, he argued.
But over the years these tensions ebbed and the country embraced a state of nationhood, where individuals saw themselves as Trinidadians. Period. No ethnic prefixes.
How did the Trinidadians do it, the journalist wondered.
Time healed the wounds, Sir Vidia responded. But, he added, the people also spoke about the problem rather than sweeping it under the carpet.
On that note both Sir Vidia and the journalist, moi, agreed.
If South Africans don’t continue to speak openly about the problem, we will remain a “simple” people, said Sir Vidia. By “simple” people he meant those who lack intellectual rigour, who lack a moral backbone, who lack a vision of who they would like to be as a nation, a people who, when they lose an argument, resort to race.
Again, the journalist agreed.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Human Trafficking in Trinidad, Venezuela, and the Caribbean
HUMAN TRAFFICKING - Trinidad and Venezuela
Trinidad and Tobago is a destination and transit country
for women and children trafficked for the purpose of
commercial sexual exploitation. In some instances,
women and girls from Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana,
Suriname, and the Dominican Republic have been
identified as trafficking victims in Trinidadian brothels
and casinos. Last year the government identified
five Colombian victims in the country; neighboring
governments in Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname
identified additional victims. Foreign victims, including
women who voluntarily enter the country to engage in
prostitution, may subsequently be trafficked after being
deceived by unscrupulous recruiters about the true nature
and conditions of their employment. Additional reporting
suggests that men from China and Guyana may be
trafficked to Trinidad and Tobago for labor exploitation
in construction and other sectors. Trinidad and Tobago
also is a transit point to Caribbean destinations such as
Barbados and the Netherlands Antilles for traffickers and
their victims.
The Government of Trinidad and Tobago does not fully
comply with the minimum standards for the elimination
of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to
do so. During the reporting period, senior Trinidadian
officials publicly condemned human trafficking, noting
that the country is a destination point for trafficked
persons. The government worked closely with IOM and
other Caribbean governments to draft model antitrafficking
laws for the region, and to develop standards
for victim repatriation and care. The government also
increased anti-trafficking training for law enforcement,
and collaborated with IOM on additional awarenessraising
measures. However, vigorous government efforts
to investigate and prosecute trafficking crimes under
existing laws remained lacking, and adequate victim
services were extremely limited.
Recommendations for Trinidad and Tobago: Enact
legislation to prohibit all forms of human trafficking;
increase efforts to investigate and prosecute trafficking
offenses, and to convict and sentence trafficking
offenders; increase victim services and protection
efforts, particularly for foreign victims; develop formal
procedures to identify trafficking victims among
vulnerable populations; continue to increase antitrafficking
training and efforts to raise public awareness.
Prosecution
The Government of Trinidad and Tobago demonstrated
some progress in anti-trafficking law enforcement efforts
over the last year. While Trinidad and Tobago has no
specific laws prohibiting human trafficking, trafficking
offenders could be prosecuted under trafficking-related
offenses such as kidnapping, rape, or procuring a person
for prostitution. Penalties for such crimes range from
15 years’ to life imprisonment, which are sufficiently
stringent and commensurate with penalties prescribed for
other serious crimes. Last year the government worked
closely with IOM and neighboring countries to draft
model anti-trafficking legislation for the Caribbean, and
engaged experts from the Canadian High Commission
to assist with writing an anti-trafficking law for Trinidad
and Tobago. During the reporting period, the government
achieved no prosecutions, convictions, or sentences
of trafficking offenders. In past years, Trinidadian law
enforcement have utilized proactive strategies such
as brothel raids to enforce anti-prostitution laws and
prosecute the owners of such establishments, though
formal procedures to identify trafficking victims during
such operations are not typically utilized. In partnership
with IOM, the government provided anti-trafficking
training to more than 1,500 law enforcement officers last
year, and published reference guides for immigration and
police personnel. No allegations of trafficking-related
corruption were reported.
Protection
The Trinidadian government made limited efforts to
assist trafficking victims during the reporting period,
relying on international organizations and NGOs to
provide care and services for identified victims. The
government encouraged crime victims, including
trafficking victims, to assist with the investigation and
prosecution of offenders, and provided interpreters for
non-English speaking complainants. Foreign victims
were not eligible to receive government-provided services
such as medical assistance, counseling, or legal assistance
with filing a complaint. Moreover, the government did
not employ formal procedures for identifying victims of
sex or labor trafficking among vulnerable populations,
such as prostituted women in brothels or foreign migrant
workers. The government did not provide foreign
trafficking victims with legal alternatives to removal to
countries where they may face hardship or retribution;
most foreign victims were detained and deported without
being identified as trafficking victims. However, the
government recently instituted a protocol where identified
foreign trafficking victims are maintained in NGO safe
houses until authorities in the victim’s home country
can be contacted to assist with travel documents and
repatriation. In January 2009, government immigration
officials met with Colombian counterparts to discuss
procedures for identifying and sheltering Colombian
trafficking victims found in Trinidad and Tobago, as well
as their safe return to Colombia; the workshop occurred
due to a 2007 brothel raid in which more than 70
Colombian nationals, some of whom were believed to be
trafficking victims, were detained and deported for being
in Trinidad and Tobago illegally.
Prevention
In collaboration with international and local NGOs, the
government increased its efforts to educate the public
about the dangers of trafficking. Senior government
officials condemned human trafficking publicly, and
emphasized the need to protect victims. During 2008, law
enforcement officers and an IOM expert on investigating
and prosecuting sexual offenses conducted several raids
of brothels where foreign women engage in prostitution,
thus addressing demand for commercial sex acts by
arresting and prosecuting “clients.” The ILO and the
government distributed informational brochures on
regional child labor and protection concerns such as
slavery, debt bondage, child drug trafficking, prostitution,
and trafficking children in the Caribbean. The
government also enacted laws to keep children in school,
and raised the working age from 14 to 16 as measures
to prevent child labor. No additional efforts to reduce
demand for adult forced labor were reported.
US: Venezuela and Human Trafficking - Department of State
The US Department of State released its ninth annual Trafficking in Persons Report that sheds light on the faces of modern-day slavery and on new facets of this global problem.
Country narrative for Venezuela
"Venezuela is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. Venezuelan women and girls are trafficked within the country for commercial sexual exploitation, lured from poor interior regions to urban and tourist areas such as Caracas and Margarita Island.
Victims are often recruited through false job offers, and subsequently coerced into prostitution. Some Venezuelan children are forced to work as street beggars or as domestic servants.
Venezuelan women and girls are trafficked transnationally for commercial sexual exploitation to Mexico, in addition to Caribbean destinations such as Trinidad and Tobago, the Netherlands Antilles, and the Dominican Republic. A common trafficking route is for victims to transit Curacao en route to The Netherlands and other countries in Western Europe.
Men, women, and children from Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Asian nations such as the People’s Republic of China are trafficked to and through Venezuela, and may be subjected to commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. A more recent trend appears to be increased human trafficking activity in Venezuela’s Orinoco River Basin area and border regions of Tachira State, where political violence and infiltration by armed rebel groups are common.
The Government of Venezuela does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so. Despite these overall significant efforts, the government did not show evidence of progress in convicting and sentencing trafficking offenders and providing adequate assistance to victims; therefore, Venezuela is placed on Tier 2 Watch List.
Recommendations for Venezuela: Amend existing laws to prohibit and adequately punish all forms of trafficking in persons, particularly the internal trafficking of men and boys; intensify efforts to investigate and prosecute trafficking offenses, and convict and punish trafficking offenders; investigate reports of trafficking complicity by public officials; provide greater assistance and services to trafficking victims; consider designating a coordinator to lead the government’s anti-trafficking efforts; and improve data collection for trafficking crimes.
Prosecution
The Government of Venezuela made limited anti-trafficking law enforcement efforts over the last year, though Venezuelan law prohibits most forms of human trafficking. In 2007, the government enacted the Organic Law on the Right of Women to a Violence-Free Life. Article 56 of this recently enacted law prohibits the trafficking of women and girls for the purposes of sexual exploitation, forced labor, slavery, irregular adoption, or organ extraction, prescribing punishments of 15 to 20 years’ imprisonment. Articles 46 and 47 prohibit forced prostitution and sexual slavery, and carry penalties of 15 to 20 years’ imprisonment. These anti-trafficking provisions, however, do not address the internal trafficking of adult males or boys.
Article 16 of the Organic Law Against Organized Crime, enacted in 2005, prohibits trafficking across international borders for labor or sexual exploitation, and prescribes penalties of 10 to 18 years’ imprisonment. The above penalties are sufficiently stringent, and commensurate with those for other serious crimes, such as rape. Prosecutors also can use Venezuela’s Child Protection Act and various articles of the penal code to prosecute the internal trafficking of children, though many of these statutes carry extremely low penalties -- typically a maximum of three months in jail or fines. Despite existing legal tools for punishing many forms of human trafficking, the Venezuelan government did not report any convictions or sentences of trafficking offenders in 2008.
However, the government opened six investigations of transnational sex trafficking, one investigation of transnational labor trafficking, and one investigation of suspected internal trafficking. International organizations indicated that the government cooperated with INTERPOL on transnational trafficking cases, and increased screening for potential trafficking crimes at airports and borders. There were no confirmed reports of government complicity with human trafficking in 2008, though corruption among public officials, particularly related to the issuance of false identity documents, appeared to be widespread. Moreover, many Venezuelan law enforcement officials reportedly did not distinguish between human trafficking and alien smuggling offenses.
Protection
The government sustained limited efforts to assist trafficking victims during the reporting period. The government did not operate shelters accessible to or dedicated for trafficking victims, relying on NGOs and international organizations to provide the bulk of victim assistance.
The government operated a national 24-hour hotline through which it received trafficking complaints, and directed trafficking victims to NGOs for care. Government-provided psychological and medical examinations were available for trafficking victims, but additional victim services such as follow-up medical aid, legal assistance with filing a complaint, job training, and reintegration assistance remained lacking. The government reportedly increased, however, the availability of psychological services for trafficking victims during the past year.
Police reported that most trafficking victims were reluctant to testify in court against their traffickers because of long court delays and fear of reprisals. According to NGOs, the government did not have a formal mechanism for identifying trafficking victims among vulnerable populations, such as women in prostitution.
There were no reports of victims being jailed or penalized for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked. The government reportedly had a policy of providing refugee status or other legal protections for foreign victims who faced retribution if returned to their country of origin. The government also assisted with the repatriation of 28 Chinese nationals who had been subjected to labor trafficking last year.
Prevention
The Venezuelan government increased its efforts to prevent human trafficking over the year by providing some funding to NGOs for education activities, conducting widespread public awareness campaigns about the dangers of human trafficking, and continuing anti-trafficking training for government officials. The government advertised its hotline number, aired public service announcements, and widely distributed materials against commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, and child sex tourism.
The government collaborated with NGOs and international organizations on other anti-trafficking efforts, but relations with these organizations were reportedly mixed. Moreover, high turnover of government personnel, particularly lack of an anti-trafficking coordinator, appears to have hampered the government’s anti-trafficking progress.
While many government officials acknowledge that human trafficking is a problem in the country, some tended to view the nation as principally a transit point, demonstrating less recognition of internal trafficking concerns, such as children trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. No specific activities to reduce demand for commercial sex acts or forced labor were reported."
---
Read the whole report here:
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/123365.pdf
==========
Human Trafficking Concerns in the Commonwealth Caribbean:
the 2009 U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report in focus
1. Background Human Trafficking
1. Human trafficking is the recruitment, transporting, providing or
obtaining a person for labour or services. This includes inter alia
bonded labour, forced labour (for example involuntary domestic
servitude), forced child labour, involving children in armed conflict,
and sex trafficking (including the sexual exploitation of children).
Trafficking of persons is defined in the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress
and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children
(2000), supplementing the United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime (the so-called Palermo Protocol).
Article 3 of this Protocol defines ‘trafficking in persons’1.
2. Recent Concerns Regarding Human Trafficking in the Caribbean
1. The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) London office
monitors, reports and raises awareness regarding human rights issues
in Commonwealth member states within the Western hemisphere, this
includes the Caribbean. Thus, the inclusion of Caribbean
Commonwealth members in this year’s U.S. State Department
Trafficking in Persons Report (hereinafter TIP Report), is of particular
concern.
2. In previous years few Caribbean states and overseas territories
appeared in the TIP Reports. For example, human trafficking in St..
Vincent and the Grenadines has not previously been addressed. The
previous lack of information on trafficking of persons in these reports
reflects a wider lack of awareness and reporting on human rights issues
1 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children
(2000) available at http://untreaty.un.org/English/TreatyEvent2003/Texts/treaty2E.pdf (accessed 19
June 2009)
in Caribbean members of the Commonwealth. However, this report
offers a window into troubling reports of human trafficking in places
like St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize and Guyana.
3. The Commonwealth Caribbean states mentioned in 2009’s TIP Report
are Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica and
Trinidad and Tobago. Especially troubling is the inclusion of Belize,
Guyana and St. Vincent and the Grenadines on the ‘special watch list’2.
According to the U.S. those countries on the ‘watch list’ do not comply
fully with minimum standards set by American law for cooperating in
efforts to reduce the increase of human trafficking. They have
effectively been placed on notice that they may face political and
economic sanctions unless their record improves... continued here:
http://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/london/hr_in_caribbean/human_trafficking_in_the_caribbean_june_2009.pdf
Trinidad and Tobago is a destination and transit country
for women and children trafficked for the purpose of
commercial sexual exploitation. In some instances,
women and girls from Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana,
Suriname, and the Dominican Republic have been
identified as trafficking victims in Trinidadian brothels
and casinos. Last year the government identified
five Colombian victims in the country; neighboring
governments in Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname
identified additional victims. Foreign victims, including
women who voluntarily enter the country to engage in
prostitution, may subsequently be trafficked after being
deceived by unscrupulous recruiters about the true nature
and conditions of their employment. Additional reporting
suggests that men from China and Guyana may be
trafficked to Trinidad and Tobago for labor exploitation
in construction and other sectors. Trinidad and Tobago
also is a transit point to Caribbean destinations such as
Barbados and the Netherlands Antilles for traffickers and
their victims.
The Government of Trinidad and Tobago does not fully
comply with the minimum standards for the elimination
of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to
do so. During the reporting period, senior Trinidadian
officials publicly condemned human trafficking, noting
that the country is a destination point for trafficked
persons. The government worked closely with IOM and
other Caribbean governments to draft model antitrafficking
laws for the region, and to develop standards
for victim repatriation and care. The government also
increased anti-trafficking training for law enforcement,
and collaborated with IOM on additional awarenessraising
measures. However, vigorous government efforts
to investigate and prosecute trafficking crimes under
existing laws remained lacking, and adequate victim
services were extremely limited.
Recommendations for Trinidad and Tobago: Enact
legislation to prohibit all forms of human trafficking;
increase efforts to investigate and prosecute trafficking
offenses, and to convict and sentence trafficking
offenders; increase victim services and protection
efforts, particularly for foreign victims; develop formal
procedures to identify trafficking victims among
vulnerable populations; continue to increase antitrafficking
training and efforts to raise public awareness.
Prosecution
The Government of Trinidad and Tobago demonstrated
some progress in anti-trafficking law enforcement efforts
over the last year. While Trinidad and Tobago has no
specific laws prohibiting human trafficking, trafficking
offenders could be prosecuted under trafficking-related
offenses such as kidnapping, rape, or procuring a person
for prostitution. Penalties for such crimes range from
15 years’ to life imprisonment, which are sufficiently
stringent and commensurate with penalties prescribed for
other serious crimes. Last year the government worked
closely with IOM and neighboring countries to draft
model anti-trafficking legislation for the Caribbean, and
engaged experts from the Canadian High Commission
to assist with writing an anti-trafficking law for Trinidad
and Tobago. During the reporting period, the government
achieved no prosecutions, convictions, or sentences
of trafficking offenders. In past years, Trinidadian law
enforcement have utilized proactive strategies such
as brothel raids to enforce anti-prostitution laws and
prosecute the owners of such establishments, though
formal procedures to identify trafficking victims during
such operations are not typically utilized. In partnership
with IOM, the government provided anti-trafficking
training to more than 1,500 law enforcement officers last
year, and published reference guides for immigration and
police personnel. No allegations of trafficking-related
corruption were reported.
Protection
The Trinidadian government made limited efforts to
assist trafficking victims during the reporting period,
relying on international organizations and NGOs to
provide care and services for identified victims. The
government encouraged crime victims, including
trafficking victims, to assist with the investigation and
prosecution of offenders, and provided interpreters for
non-English speaking complainants. Foreign victims
were not eligible to receive government-provided services
such as medical assistance, counseling, or legal assistance
with filing a complaint. Moreover, the government did
not employ formal procedures for identifying victims of
sex or labor trafficking among vulnerable populations,
such as prostituted women in brothels or foreign migrant
workers. The government did not provide foreign
trafficking victims with legal alternatives to removal to
countries where they may face hardship or retribution;
most foreign victims were detained and deported without
being identified as trafficking victims. However, the
government recently instituted a protocol where identified
foreign trafficking victims are maintained in NGO safe
houses until authorities in the victim’s home country
can be contacted to assist with travel documents and
repatriation. In January 2009, government immigration
officials met with Colombian counterparts to discuss
procedures for identifying and sheltering Colombian
trafficking victims found in Trinidad and Tobago, as well
as their safe return to Colombia; the workshop occurred
due to a 2007 brothel raid in which more than 70
Colombian nationals, some of whom were believed to be
trafficking victims, were detained and deported for being
in Trinidad and Tobago illegally.
Prevention
In collaboration with international and local NGOs, the
government increased its efforts to educate the public
about the dangers of trafficking. Senior government
officials condemned human trafficking publicly, and
emphasized the need to protect victims. During 2008, law
enforcement officers and an IOM expert on investigating
and prosecuting sexual offenses conducted several raids
of brothels where foreign women engage in prostitution,
thus addressing demand for commercial sex acts by
arresting and prosecuting “clients.” The ILO and the
government distributed informational brochures on
regional child labor and protection concerns such as
slavery, debt bondage, child drug trafficking, prostitution,
and trafficking children in the Caribbean. The
government also enacted laws to keep children in school,
and raised the working age from 14 to 16 as measures
to prevent child labor. No additional efforts to reduce
demand for adult forced labor were reported.
US: Venezuela and Human Trafficking - Department of State
The US Department of State released its ninth annual Trafficking in Persons Report that sheds light on the faces of modern-day slavery and on new facets of this global problem.
Country narrative for Venezuela
"Venezuela is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. Venezuelan women and girls are trafficked within the country for commercial sexual exploitation, lured from poor interior regions to urban and tourist areas such as Caracas and Margarita Island.
Victims are often recruited through false job offers, and subsequently coerced into prostitution. Some Venezuelan children are forced to work as street beggars or as domestic servants.
Venezuelan women and girls are trafficked transnationally for commercial sexual exploitation to Mexico, in addition to Caribbean destinations such as Trinidad and Tobago, the Netherlands Antilles, and the Dominican Republic. A common trafficking route is for victims to transit Curacao en route to The Netherlands and other countries in Western Europe.
Men, women, and children from Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Asian nations such as the People’s Republic of China are trafficked to and through Venezuela, and may be subjected to commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. A more recent trend appears to be increased human trafficking activity in Venezuela’s Orinoco River Basin area and border regions of Tachira State, where political violence and infiltration by armed rebel groups are common.
The Government of Venezuela does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so. Despite these overall significant efforts, the government did not show evidence of progress in convicting and sentencing trafficking offenders and providing adequate assistance to victims; therefore, Venezuela is placed on Tier 2 Watch List.
Recommendations for Venezuela: Amend existing laws to prohibit and adequately punish all forms of trafficking in persons, particularly the internal trafficking of men and boys; intensify efforts to investigate and prosecute trafficking offenses, and convict and punish trafficking offenders; investigate reports of trafficking complicity by public officials; provide greater assistance and services to trafficking victims; consider designating a coordinator to lead the government’s anti-trafficking efforts; and improve data collection for trafficking crimes.
Prosecution
The Government of Venezuela made limited anti-trafficking law enforcement efforts over the last year, though Venezuelan law prohibits most forms of human trafficking. In 2007, the government enacted the Organic Law on the Right of Women to a Violence-Free Life. Article 56 of this recently enacted law prohibits the trafficking of women and girls for the purposes of sexual exploitation, forced labor, slavery, irregular adoption, or organ extraction, prescribing punishments of 15 to 20 years’ imprisonment. Articles 46 and 47 prohibit forced prostitution and sexual slavery, and carry penalties of 15 to 20 years’ imprisonment. These anti-trafficking provisions, however, do not address the internal trafficking of adult males or boys.
Article 16 of the Organic Law Against Organized Crime, enacted in 2005, prohibits trafficking across international borders for labor or sexual exploitation, and prescribes penalties of 10 to 18 years’ imprisonment. The above penalties are sufficiently stringent, and commensurate with those for other serious crimes, such as rape. Prosecutors also can use Venezuela’s Child Protection Act and various articles of the penal code to prosecute the internal trafficking of children, though many of these statutes carry extremely low penalties -- typically a maximum of three months in jail or fines. Despite existing legal tools for punishing many forms of human trafficking, the Venezuelan government did not report any convictions or sentences of trafficking offenders in 2008.
However, the government opened six investigations of transnational sex trafficking, one investigation of transnational labor trafficking, and one investigation of suspected internal trafficking. International organizations indicated that the government cooperated with INTERPOL on transnational trafficking cases, and increased screening for potential trafficking crimes at airports and borders. There were no confirmed reports of government complicity with human trafficking in 2008, though corruption among public officials, particularly related to the issuance of false identity documents, appeared to be widespread. Moreover, many Venezuelan law enforcement officials reportedly did not distinguish between human trafficking and alien smuggling offenses.
Protection
The government sustained limited efforts to assist trafficking victims during the reporting period. The government did not operate shelters accessible to or dedicated for trafficking victims, relying on NGOs and international organizations to provide the bulk of victim assistance.
The government operated a national 24-hour hotline through which it received trafficking complaints, and directed trafficking victims to NGOs for care. Government-provided psychological and medical examinations were available for trafficking victims, but additional victim services such as follow-up medical aid, legal assistance with filing a complaint, job training, and reintegration assistance remained lacking. The government reportedly increased, however, the availability of psychological services for trafficking victims during the past year.
Police reported that most trafficking victims were reluctant to testify in court against their traffickers because of long court delays and fear of reprisals. According to NGOs, the government did not have a formal mechanism for identifying trafficking victims among vulnerable populations, such as women in prostitution.
There were no reports of victims being jailed or penalized for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked. The government reportedly had a policy of providing refugee status or other legal protections for foreign victims who faced retribution if returned to their country of origin. The government also assisted with the repatriation of 28 Chinese nationals who had been subjected to labor trafficking last year.
Prevention
The Venezuelan government increased its efforts to prevent human trafficking over the year by providing some funding to NGOs for education activities, conducting widespread public awareness campaigns about the dangers of human trafficking, and continuing anti-trafficking training for government officials. The government advertised its hotline number, aired public service announcements, and widely distributed materials against commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, and child sex tourism.
The government collaborated with NGOs and international organizations on other anti-trafficking efforts, but relations with these organizations were reportedly mixed. Moreover, high turnover of government personnel, particularly lack of an anti-trafficking coordinator, appears to have hampered the government’s anti-trafficking progress.
While many government officials acknowledge that human trafficking is a problem in the country, some tended to view the nation as principally a transit point, demonstrating less recognition of internal trafficking concerns, such as children trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. No specific activities to reduce demand for commercial sex acts or forced labor were reported."
---
Read the whole report here:
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/123365.pdf
==========
Human Trafficking Concerns in the Commonwealth Caribbean:
the 2009 U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report in focus
1. Background Human Trafficking
1. Human trafficking is the recruitment, transporting, providing or
obtaining a person for labour or services. This includes inter alia
bonded labour, forced labour (for example involuntary domestic
servitude), forced child labour, involving children in armed conflict,
and sex trafficking (including the sexual exploitation of children).
Trafficking of persons is defined in the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress
and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children
(2000), supplementing the United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime (the so-called Palermo Protocol).
Article 3 of this Protocol defines ‘trafficking in persons’1.
2. Recent Concerns Regarding Human Trafficking in the Caribbean
1. The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) London office
monitors, reports and raises awareness regarding human rights issues
in Commonwealth member states within the Western hemisphere, this
includes the Caribbean. Thus, the inclusion of Caribbean
Commonwealth members in this year’s U.S. State Department
Trafficking in Persons Report (hereinafter TIP Report), is of particular
concern.
2. In previous years few Caribbean states and overseas territories
appeared in the TIP Reports. For example, human trafficking in St..
Vincent and the Grenadines has not previously been addressed. The
previous lack of information on trafficking of persons in these reports
reflects a wider lack of awareness and reporting on human rights issues
1 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children
(2000) available at http://untreaty.un.org/English/TreatyEvent2003/Texts/treaty2E.pdf (accessed 19
June 2009)
in Caribbean members of the Commonwealth. However, this report
offers a window into troubling reports of human trafficking in places
like St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize and Guyana.
3. The Commonwealth Caribbean states mentioned in 2009’s TIP Report
are Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica and
Trinidad and Tobago. Especially troubling is the inclusion of Belize,
Guyana and St. Vincent and the Grenadines on the ‘special watch list’2.
According to the U.S. those countries on the ‘watch list’ do not comply
fully with minimum standards set by American law for cooperating in
efforts to reduce the increase of human trafficking. They have
effectively been placed on notice that they may face political and
economic sanctions unless their record improves... continued here:
http://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/london/hr_in_caribbean/human_trafficking_in_the_caribbean_june_2009.pdf
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
NAIPAUL WRITING NEW BOOK
NAIPAUL WRITING NEW BOOK
New agent? New Book? Doesn't look like a man about to retire but he keeping low, ducking and running while in South Africa. Could be a book about the Indian Diaspora in Africa.
Crabby Old Book Agents Fight Over Trinidadian Nobel Laureate
By Richard Lawson
Book agent fight! Book agent fight! Wily Andrew Wylie has stolen Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul away from his old partner and mentor, Gillon Aitken. The 76-year-old author was likely wooed astray with promises of more monies and better international representation.
------------------
NAIPAUL DUCKING AND RUNNING IN SOUTH AFFRICA
from SA Times
Alert! Has anybody seen this man?
Yes, that’s Nobel Prize-winning author VS Naipaul - and the going rumour is that he’s in South Africa right now, doing research on a new book. On religion? Possibly on religion. We’ve heard that he’s doing a book on religion. But that’s pure speculation, reproduced here to give this post the semblance of substance.
Said book requires him to be in Johannesburg, among other southern African locales, and so even at this very moment his head might be bending over a text in the Johannesburg Library, for instance - or his footsteps might be echoing through the Hector Pieterson Memorial or the Apartheid Museum, or his hair might be flapping in the wind on the Gold Reef City Tower of Terror.
OK, perhaps not the last. But we have it on good authority from no fewer than three sources that the great author is most definitely in town, though it’s all hush-hush.
When VS Naipaul - who has a bit of a history with this continent - visits Africa, it’s big news, and BOOK SA is keen to bring you more on his trip. We’re thus shamelessly going to place a bounty on his head: anyone who can shed additional light on “Naipaul in South Africa 2009″ should write to naipaul@book.co.za with your tip; and anyone who can supply BOOK SA with a bona fide photograph of the author in Johannesburg that we can publish will receive a handsome sum (by SA Lit standards). Perhaps you should familiarise yourself with his many cunning guises - click here for a gallery of recent pics.
Can VS Naipaul be crowdsourced? Let’s find out. Welcome, Sir Vidia, to our beloved country!
------------------------------------
New agent? New Book? Doesn't look like a man about to retire but he keeping low, ducking and running while in South Africa. Could be a book about the Indian Diaspora in Africa.
Crabby Old Book Agents Fight Over Trinidadian Nobel Laureate
By Richard Lawson
Book agent fight! Book agent fight! Wily Andrew Wylie has stolen Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul away from his old partner and mentor, Gillon Aitken. The 76-year-old author was likely wooed astray with promises of more monies and better international representation.
------------------
NAIPAUL DUCKING AND RUNNING IN SOUTH AFFRICA
from SA Times
Alert! Has anybody seen this man?
Yes, that’s Nobel Prize-winning author VS Naipaul - and the going rumour is that he’s in South Africa right now, doing research on a new book. On religion? Possibly on religion. We’ve heard that he’s doing a book on religion. But that’s pure speculation, reproduced here to give this post the semblance of substance.
Said book requires him to be in Johannesburg, among other southern African locales, and so even at this very moment his head might be bending over a text in the Johannesburg Library, for instance - or his footsteps might be echoing through the Hector Pieterson Memorial or the Apartheid Museum, or his hair might be flapping in the wind on the Gold Reef City Tower of Terror.
OK, perhaps not the last. But we have it on good authority from no fewer than three sources that the great author is most definitely in town, though it’s all hush-hush.
When VS Naipaul - who has a bit of a history with this continent - visits Africa, it’s big news, and BOOK SA is keen to bring you more on his trip. We’re thus shamelessly going to place a bounty on his head: anyone who can shed additional light on “Naipaul in South Africa 2009″ should write to naipaul@book.co.za with your tip; and anyone who can supply BOOK SA with a bona fide photograph of the author in Johannesburg that we can publish will receive a handsome sum (by SA Lit standards). Perhaps you should familiarise yourself with his many cunning guises - click here for a gallery of recent pics.
Can VS Naipaul be crowdsourced? Let’s find out. Welcome, Sir Vidia, to our beloved country!
------------------------------------
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Freud in the slips: Cricket and the Art of Psychoanalysis
Cricket and the Art of Psychoanalysis
Today’s idea: Test cricket and psychoanalysis are a lot alike — but out of tune with a world that demands quick results. That’s our loss, argues a former cricket captain and Britain’s leading psychoanalyst.
Psych-out.Psychology | Cricket “requires intelligence, astuteness and an ability to withstand long periods where nothing much happens, while keeping alert for the moment when action erupts—not unlike psychoanalysis itself,” writes Edward Marriott in the British magazine Prospect.
So, little surprise that his profile subject, Mike Brearley, former England cricket captain turned Britain’s top psychoanalyst, is unhappy that both test cricket and traditional psychotherapy are under threat from brasher, speedier rivals like Twenty20 cricket and cognitive behavioral therapy — the latter favored by the cost-conscious National Health Service.
“Cricket matches, like works of art and psychoanalytic sessions, are usually uneven,” Brearley reasons, yet all often yield rewards to those who are patient over the long haul. It’s an insight with relevance across the pond, to judge from this separate article on the intersections of baseball, cricket and psychology. [Prospect, The American]
http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/cricket-and-the-art-of-psychoanalysis/?hp
July 2009 |
Freud in the slips
Both test cricket and psychoanalysis are out of tune with a world that demands quick results. That’s our loss, argues former England cricket captain Mike Brearley, now Britain’s leading psychoanalyst
Edward Marriott is a psychodynamic counsellor working in private practice and the NHS
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10860
Twenty-eight years ago, a cricket match entered sporting folklore. That year, 1981, was an Ashes year and Australia, like this year, was expected to prevail. England lost the first test, drew the second, and found their talismanic all-rounder Ian Botham crippled by the burden of captaincy. Only after Botham failed with the bat in the second test did England make the bold and, as it turned out, inspired move to recall as captain a man whose batting was less than Bothamesque, but whose leadership was already legendary.
Mike Brearley had passed the role to Botham after a string of successes including taking England to the 1979 Cricket World Cup final. What he achieved upon his return was the more remarkable for being unexpected. The third test, at Headingley, began badly. Australia declared on 401, with England managing only 174 in reply and being made to follow on. The rest is legend. Botham scored a fearless 149 not out, aided by Graham Dilley’s 56; before Bob Willis and Botham tore through Australia, bowling them out for 111, and victory.
Key to this astonishing comeback was Brearley’s reinvigoration of Botham, using a combination of carrot and stick. Before the match Brearley said that Botham would score a century and take 12 wickets; then, when Botham was bowling hesitantly, Brearley withdrew him from the attack and dubbed him the “sidestep queen” to goad him into action. Then, when Botham went in to bat, Brearley told him to “go for it, enjoy yourself.” England went on to win the series; and Brearley quietly resigned the captaincy and retired. He’d represented England in 39 tests, with 18 victories as captain, and only four defeats. Having had previous stints as a lecturer in philosophy, he set about training as a psychoanalyst, a profession he has followed for the last 24 years.
It is an interesting change of career, but perhaps not an altogether surprising one. Cricket, particularly in its five-day form, requires intelligence, astuteness and an ability to withstand long periods where nothing much happens while keeping alert for the moment when action erupts—not unlike psychoanalysis itself. Certainly, despite its genteel reputation, few games are as psychologically arduous. On-field aggression is rife: former Australian captain Steve Waugh once described his sledging techniques as “mental disintegration”; while South African batsman Daryll Cullinan was so distressed by Shane Warne’s intimidation that he took time out for therapy, only to be greeted on his return with the words “I’m going to send you straight back to the leather couch,” from his tormentor. Long foreign tours have also seen intense homesickness suffered by players like Steven Harmison, and contributed to Marcus Trescothick’s breakdown and resignation from the England side in 2006. Brearley, writing the introduction to Silence of the Heart, David Frith’s 2001 book about cricket suicides, says that “the uncertainty of cricket” forces “its participants to come to terms with symbolic deaths on a daily basis… [and] can be disillusioning and anxiety-creating.” And retirement can be uniquely stressful—in recent times at least one ex-England player, the wicket keeper David Bairstow, has taken his own life. Many ex-cricketers, Brearley wrote, don’t find work that fits their skills, ending up with jobs “which merely make use of a man’s name… Such a man loses his authenticity. And if he fails, the humiliation, which is felt by some to contrast dramatically with the excitement and success that went before, may be terrible.”
Today—at the start of a new Ashes series, arguably the most intense of all cricketing encounters—both long-form psychotherapy and long-form cricket seem in decline. In a quick-fix world there appears to be less tolerance for approaches—whether sporting or psychotherapeutic—that take time. In May, Chris Gayle, the West Indies’ captain, said that he “wouldn’t be so sad” if test cricket died out. Gayle, like many big stars, has made a fortune from the Indian Premier League, and clearly prefers the shorter Twenty20 game. The meagre 4,000 tickets sold for the opening day of the second test against the West Indies on 14th May seemed to indicate that English crowds, too, shared some of his feelings.
Psychoanalysis faces a different, but related dilemma. With the government pouring money into short-term psychological treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), psychoanalytic therapies, of which psychoanalysis is the most intense and long term, are feeling threatened (see also Alexander Linklater on psychiatry, p76). This is why Brearley, who since qualifying as a psychoanalyst in 1985 has shunned the spotlight—notwithstanding his cricket writings for the Observer—has opened the door of his basement consulting room in north London on a warm spring day and agreed to open up for questioning.
As president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the training ground for such luminaries as Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby, Brearley is now Britain’s senior psychoanalyst. In person, he is thoughtful and serious, but also humorous and self-deprecating; and happy to discuss his two professional evolutions. He first encountered psychoanalysis at Cambridge, where he read classics and moral sciences and captained the cricket team. “I got interested theoretically. The professor of philosophy was John Wisdom, who wrote a book called Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis… He and one or two other people at Cambridge opened my eyes. That, and reading English literature, enlarged my sense of human emotions and what goes on under the surface, the complexity of human emotion.”
Brearley’s PhD, which he never finished—“I didn’t have to; I got a teaching job without it”—explored the meaning behind different types of behaviours. But his interest has never been just theoretical: at Cambridge, he also volunteered for the Samaritans. Speaking to people in distress, he “was interested to listen to them and they didn’t ring off readily. It was the first contact I had with people who were in emotional distress.”
His interest in personal behaviour and motivation was also arguably his greatest strength as a cricketer. As Rodney Hogg, the Australian fast bowler, put it: “He has a degree in people.” Botham, in the foreword to Phoenix from the Ashes, Brearley’s book about the 1981 series, had this to say: “There is something about Brears. He knows how I feel and what I’m thinking… I took stuff from him that I’d clip other guys round the ear for.” Ed Smith told me how he asked Brearley for advice during his 2002-06 stint as Middlesex captain, a post Brearley also held. Smith says Brearley’s approach was to “tell stories rather than give prescriptive advice. He is very good at explaining the complexity of situations. A lot of people in sport pretend things are very easy, and much management speak is built around this idea.
Mike was so much more subtle. He always understood contingency and risk.” Non cricketers, too, have found his ideas helpful. Film director Sam Mendes turned to Brearley’s book The Art of Captaincy (1985) for inspiration while directing American Beauty. Mendes described him as “a philosopher-sportsman whose tactical skill has not been equalled since.” Brearley, though, admits that it was not always this way. As a young man he was prone to arrogance, especially when, at 22, he was selected as a “young hopeful” to tour South Africa. But he wasn’t picked for the test matches and “left to get on with things in the nets. I was bored. But worse I was resistant to learning—though I would have heartily denied it at the time.” One day, practising in Durban, “a sallow man in a brown trilby hat” offered him tips on his batting, which Brearley ignored. The man turned out to be Walter Hammond, one of the game’s greatest batsmen, who Brearley later learned was dying of cancer. This, he says, was “my lowest point, or my most arrogant point; my attitude was like a young violinist refusing a tip from Maxim Vengerov.”
By 1981 this arrogance—and the envy and fear that Brearley says it can often mask—had presumably lessened, not least because Brearley, who had wanted to be a psychoanalyst since university, had by then been a psychoanalytic patient for three years—wrestling with “aggression, envy, jealousy, suspicion, and insecurity.” It’s hard to say to what extent these character traits remain today, although his understanding of his darker side must help him understand similar qualities in his players—just as in his patients. He began his own analysis, he says, not just because it was a requirement for his new career (all analysts must first undergo analysis themselves) but for personal development. “Psychoanalysis is an opportunity… to get to know yourself as thoroughly as you can. I always liked [psychoanalyst Wilfred] Bion’s phrase that his job as a psychoanalyst is to introduce the patient to that person with whom he’ll have most dealings in his life, namely himself… as if one has never met oneself at all.”
Psychoanalysis was born 113 years ago when Freud applied the term “psychical analysis” to his treatment of disturbed patients. It takes time, and an intense period of personal therapy (five times a week throughout training) to become a psychoanalyst, in contrast to CBT which does not require practitioners to undergo therapy before working with patients. CBT, now the NHS treatment of choice, was developed in the 1960s by American psychoanalyst, Aaron T Beck.
Depressed patients, Beck found, had spontaneous streams of negative thoughts about themselves, the world and the future. If patients could identify and evaluate these thoughts, he claimed it was quickly possible to think more realistically and feel better emotionally. Correctly prescribed, CBT can be effective, as Brearley acknowledges. “I met a man recently who told me that he’d great difficulty with speaking, and he went for CBT and was helped to understand something about his life, and he was given exercises and, over a few months his difficulty improved, and it hasn’t come back. Who is to contradict such a witness? What a good thing that this man’s life was changed by 12 sessions.”
Yet the two approaches, Brearley says, are quite different. Psychoanalysts, he says, are trying to “free the person over a large range of his mind, his emotional being, his activities, his behaviours, his feelings, his creativity, to expand his mind. Which is why the term ‘shrink’ is so objectionable.” Yet such treatment is expensive, and while some long-term psychoanalytic therapies are available on the NHS, they are prescribed only rarely, and are vulnerable to cost-cutting. Still, he thinks it has had a deep influence on NHS clinical thinking, and throughout society. “Psychoanalysis has always been a fringe activity in Britain. It never had that cachet that it had in the US from the 1940s to the 1970s. But as a source of research it’s always been extremely important, in terms of understanding the mind.… It’s also had a great influence on group therapy, on education, in certain fringe ways on the arts.”
Psychoanalysts try to access the unconscious by emphasising “transference,” or the way hidden feelings resurface in a therapeutic relationship. Brearley says that unlike CBT psychoanalysis “puts emphasis on negative transference,” or the negative feelings that the patient might experience towards the therapist (echoing similar emotions in other relationships). Without such a focus, he implies, there would have been no room, in cases such as his own, for addressing underlying difficulties such as envy and aggression. To be effective in this way the psychoanalyst must also be anonymous. Brearley, though, has always been something of a celebrity analyst, and admits that some patients “have found my being known as an ex-cricketer quite difficult.” But, he adds, “it can be worked with, taken up as material… grist to the mill.”
Yet his profession is pitted against the spirit of the age—against what Brearley sees as the pervasive pressure of the “short-termism” which also applies to cricket. His is a therapy which puts “emphasis on the intuitive, the unconscious, on what you can learn slowly and that takes a great deal of time to get to. It puts emphasis on the fact that you can’t control everything.” Brearley also questions theories of happiness from the likes of Richard Layard (a prominent advocate of CBT), saying: “There’s nothing wrong with happiness, but what constitutes happiness? How do you distinguish between the different sorts of happiness? The happiness you can get from a drug, or from a relationship, or from a great novel?” He adds that although “happiness can be enhanced by analysis,” the process is more likely to “enhance emotional liveliness and vigour” and that “obstacles to happiness can be lessened, if not overcome.”
Yes, but does psychoanalysis work? It is a much debated question. But in October 2008 the first large-scale research into the effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy to appear in a major medical journal concluded that these kind of therapies were more effective than short-term or behavioural approaches for certain disorders. As its author Falk Leichsenring, of the University of Giessen in Germany, put it: “There is evidence that, for patients with chronic mental disorders or personality disorders, short-term psychotherapy is not sufficient.” Brearley says that while the NHS has “a right to know if someone is getting better or being helped” his profession must “be careful not to let our thinking become interfered with by that kind of instrumental thinking.” He is treading carefully: aware of the need to defend his profession from those who accuse it of being expensive and unverified, while pointing out that psychoanalysis, although not amenable to testing through controlled experiments, is backed-up by a number of “long-term studies and other methods suitable to a social science.”
It is here, in particular, that Brearley sees a telling parallel with cricket. Too many rules make batsmen less spontaneous, just as an analyst “has to be open to whatever comes; you must not have too many preconceptions about what’s to come or you’ll get into a mess. Wilfred Bion said you have to act without memory or desire. That means putting aside from one’s conscious mind most of the time the technical rules, just as in batting you have to be open to the ball that actually comes down to you… to say that you could lay down a set of rules about what makes a good batsman would either be vapid or it would be too narrow.” In short, rules and guidelines of the kind increasingly found in treatments like CBT need to be used sparingly in psychoanalysis, with its focus on the messier business of unearthing feelings buried in the unconscious.
As president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Brearley has been trying to win over funding bodies to his gradual, unstructured approach. But it is hard: “How do you show that what you do is of value without distorting the description of what you do? To give a parallel example, I heard just before Easter that the judges of England were complaining against the department of justice for bringing in new regulations for sentencing. They said it removed their skill and discretion as judges if they had to state in advance exactly what criteria added up to what sentence. I think there’s something of that for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytical therapists.”
So what does he see as the future of psychoanalysis? His outlook is cautious. “Maybe the best that’s going to be offered [in the public sector] is the odd specialist place where intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy can take place for a certain number of people, and where the research can go on, which will also filter down into other forms of therapy.” He still feels psychoanalysis has a role in “helping the helpers,” providing forums where health-service workers can reflect upon their frontline experiences. “And we have to try to encourage the NHS to recognise the value of psychoanalytic therapy, even in limited form, for such things as depression, anxiety, borderline and narcissistic disorders.” Isn’t this a rather defeatist conclusion? “Perhaps,” he concedes. “But in many areas of the NHS it is needed.”
Convincing the NHS to provide more psychoanalysis at a time of retrenchment may provide Brearley with his toughest test of captaincy. But being out at the front is his place. Such a role, he believes, means being “willing, and comfortable enough, to tell people what to do; to think, at least some of the time, that you are right, though it’s very dangerous if you only think you’re right, or always think you’re always right.” Crucial to this success in cricket, he thinks, was getting others “to think like captains… When I first played for Middlesex if you hadn’t been playing for the county for about 15 years or for England for about ten years people weren’t interested in your opinion.” Brearley says teams play better when everyone is thinking “what should we all be doing?”
In trying to lead his profession he takes further solace from another lesson learned from both his professions: endurance. “After you’ve been fielding for two days, and you haven’t scored any runs, dropped a couple of catches, and people are shouting at you and it’s very hot, it can feel very gruelling.” With psychoanalysis, too, sometimes you “have to stick at it.” The treatment aims to bring forward “all the aspects of personality of the patient.” And some of these personae may be hard for the analyst to deal with: “If someone is persistently hostile, negative, depressed and withdrawn, one can be the recipient of a good deal of denigration and scorn”; although here, again, captaining tempestuous sportsmen like Botham must have helped. A tolerance of boredom is also important, as Brearley wrote in one of his Observer columns: “Cricket matches, like works of art and psychoanalytic sessions, are usually uneven. Even in the closest and best contests there are passages of entrenchment, of defensive play, of phases where one side or both are keeping things ticking over.” Sometimes, just as on long days in the outfield, the psychoanalyst has to have “the ability to stay with not knowing.”
***
Brearley is only too happy to offer thoughts on the England captaincy and the future of test cricket. Often, he says, the best captains aren’t the best players; and indeed his batting average was just 22.88 over 66 test innings, with no centuries. “The Bothams, the Flintoffs and the Pietersens have not on the whole had happy times as captain. I was in favour of Botham… though I felt they should have waited a bit longer… But that was probably a mistake. The best player, the most extrovert individual is, of course, not necessarily the best captain.” Such captains, he says, include Nasser Hussain, Mike Atherton and Andrew Strauss, who “seems pretty good so far.” And his prediction for the Ashes series? “Two-two.”
Strauss, like Brearley, is passionate about test cricket, which needs prominent champions if it is to survive. Just as psychoanalysis informs other forms of psychotherapy, Brearley thinks test cricket has much to teach the shorter game. “Twenty20 is very exciting, and good things can happen in it, but it’s important to keep test cricket too. The skills derived from test cricket can underpin the Twenty20 skills. And a greater range of cricketing ability and personality is revealed through five-day cricket than it is through Twenty20. There are parallels to each of these points in the comparison between psychoanalysis and things like CBT.”
It’s a persuasive comparison, but not one that will guarantee test cricket’s survival. “Maybe it will turn out that test cricket has no long-term future,” he admits. “Certainly the ICC will have to be careful not to make it too routine. Pitches will have to be much better for the game than the recent ones in the West Indies and Chester-le-Street. But we have to persuade people that many valuable things take time. You can’t speed up the St Matthew Passion.” Brearley points to the critical drubbing that Joseph Conrad received for his novel Chance (1913), and Conrad’s own riposte, published as part of the introduction to the second edition, in which he wrote: “No doubt by selecting a certain method and taking great pains the whole story might have been written out on a cigarette paper. For that matter the whole history of mankind could be written thus if only approached with sufficient detachment. The history of men on this earth since the beginning of ages may be resumed in one phrase of infinite poignancy: They were born, they suffered, they died… But in the infinitely minute stories about men and women it is my lot on earth to narrate I am not capable of such detachment.” Psychoanalysis, Brearley says, “tells stories in similar depth, with repetitions from different points of view... These things take time, as does test cricket.”
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10860
Today’s idea: Test cricket and psychoanalysis are a lot alike — but out of tune with a world that demands quick results. That’s our loss, argues a former cricket captain and Britain’s leading psychoanalyst.
Psych-out.Psychology | Cricket “requires intelligence, astuteness and an ability to withstand long periods where nothing much happens, while keeping alert for the moment when action erupts—not unlike psychoanalysis itself,” writes Edward Marriott in the British magazine Prospect.
So, little surprise that his profile subject, Mike Brearley, former England cricket captain turned Britain’s top psychoanalyst, is unhappy that both test cricket and traditional psychotherapy are under threat from brasher, speedier rivals like Twenty20 cricket and cognitive behavioral therapy — the latter favored by the cost-conscious National Health Service.
“Cricket matches, like works of art and psychoanalytic sessions, are usually uneven,” Brearley reasons, yet all often yield rewards to those who are patient over the long haul. It’s an insight with relevance across the pond, to judge from this separate article on the intersections of baseball, cricket and psychology. [Prospect, The American]
http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/cricket-and-the-art-of-psychoanalysis/?hp
July 2009 |
Freud in the slips
Both test cricket and psychoanalysis are out of tune with a world that demands quick results. That’s our loss, argues former England cricket captain Mike Brearley, now Britain’s leading psychoanalyst
Edward Marriott is a psychodynamic counsellor working in private practice and the NHS
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10860
Twenty-eight years ago, a cricket match entered sporting folklore. That year, 1981, was an Ashes year and Australia, like this year, was expected to prevail. England lost the first test, drew the second, and found their talismanic all-rounder Ian Botham crippled by the burden of captaincy. Only after Botham failed with the bat in the second test did England make the bold and, as it turned out, inspired move to recall as captain a man whose batting was less than Bothamesque, but whose leadership was already legendary.
Mike Brearley had passed the role to Botham after a string of successes including taking England to the 1979 Cricket World Cup final. What he achieved upon his return was the more remarkable for being unexpected. The third test, at Headingley, began badly. Australia declared on 401, with England managing only 174 in reply and being made to follow on. The rest is legend. Botham scored a fearless 149 not out, aided by Graham Dilley’s 56; before Bob Willis and Botham tore through Australia, bowling them out for 111, and victory.
Key to this astonishing comeback was Brearley’s reinvigoration of Botham, using a combination of carrot and stick. Before the match Brearley said that Botham would score a century and take 12 wickets; then, when Botham was bowling hesitantly, Brearley withdrew him from the attack and dubbed him the “sidestep queen” to goad him into action. Then, when Botham went in to bat, Brearley told him to “go for it, enjoy yourself.” England went on to win the series; and Brearley quietly resigned the captaincy and retired. He’d represented England in 39 tests, with 18 victories as captain, and only four defeats. Having had previous stints as a lecturer in philosophy, he set about training as a psychoanalyst, a profession he has followed for the last 24 years.
It is an interesting change of career, but perhaps not an altogether surprising one. Cricket, particularly in its five-day form, requires intelligence, astuteness and an ability to withstand long periods where nothing much happens while keeping alert for the moment when action erupts—not unlike psychoanalysis itself. Certainly, despite its genteel reputation, few games are as psychologically arduous. On-field aggression is rife: former Australian captain Steve Waugh once described his sledging techniques as “mental disintegration”; while South African batsman Daryll Cullinan was so distressed by Shane Warne’s intimidation that he took time out for therapy, only to be greeted on his return with the words “I’m going to send you straight back to the leather couch,” from his tormentor. Long foreign tours have also seen intense homesickness suffered by players like Steven Harmison, and contributed to Marcus Trescothick’s breakdown and resignation from the England side in 2006. Brearley, writing the introduction to Silence of the Heart, David Frith’s 2001 book about cricket suicides, says that “the uncertainty of cricket” forces “its participants to come to terms with symbolic deaths on a daily basis… [and] can be disillusioning and anxiety-creating.” And retirement can be uniquely stressful—in recent times at least one ex-England player, the wicket keeper David Bairstow, has taken his own life. Many ex-cricketers, Brearley wrote, don’t find work that fits their skills, ending up with jobs “which merely make use of a man’s name… Such a man loses his authenticity. And if he fails, the humiliation, which is felt by some to contrast dramatically with the excitement and success that went before, may be terrible.”
Today—at the start of a new Ashes series, arguably the most intense of all cricketing encounters—both long-form psychotherapy and long-form cricket seem in decline. In a quick-fix world there appears to be less tolerance for approaches—whether sporting or psychotherapeutic—that take time. In May, Chris Gayle, the West Indies’ captain, said that he “wouldn’t be so sad” if test cricket died out. Gayle, like many big stars, has made a fortune from the Indian Premier League, and clearly prefers the shorter Twenty20 game. The meagre 4,000 tickets sold for the opening day of the second test against the West Indies on 14th May seemed to indicate that English crowds, too, shared some of his feelings.
Psychoanalysis faces a different, but related dilemma. With the government pouring money into short-term psychological treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), psychoanalytic therapies, of which psychoanalysis is the most intense and long term, are feeling threatened (see also Alexander Linklater on psychiatry, p76). This is why Brearley, who since qualifying as a psychoanalyst in 1985 has shunned the spotlight—notwithstanding his cricket writings for the Observer—has opened the door of his basement consulting room in north London on a warm spring day and agreed to open up for questioning.
As president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the training ground for such luminaries as Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby, Brearley is now Britain’s senior psychoanalyst. In person, he is thoughtful and serious, but also humorous and self-deprecating; and happy to discuss his two professional evolutions. He first encountered psychoanalysis at Cambridge, where he read classics and moral sciences and captained the cricket team. “I got interested theoretically. The professor of philosophy was John Wisdom, who wrote a book called Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis… He and one or two other people at Cambridge opened my eyes. That, and reading English literature, enlarged my sense of human emotions and what goes on under the surface, the complexity of human emotion.”
Brearley’s PhD, which he never finished—“I didn’t have to; I got a teaching job without it”—explored the meaning behind different types of behaviours. But his interest has never been just theoretical: at Cambridge, he also volunteered for the Samaritans. Speaking to people in distress, he “was interested to listen to them and they didn’t ring off readily. It was the first contact I had with people who were in emotional distress.”
His interest in personal behaviour and motivation was also arguably his greatest strength as a cricketer. As Rodney Hogg, the Australian fast bowler, put it: “He has a degree in people.” Botham, in the foreword to Phoenix from the Ashes, Brearley’s book about the 1981 series, had this to say: “There is something about Brears. He knows how I feel and what I’m thinking… I took stuff from him that I’d clip other guys round the ear for.” Ed Smith told me how he asked Brearley for advice during his 2002-06 stint as Middlesex captain, a post Brearley also held. Smith says Brearley’s approach was to “tell stories rather than give prescriptive advice. He is very good at explaining the complexity of situations. A lot of people in sport pretend things are very easy, and much management speak is built around this idea.
Mike was so much more subtle. He always understood contingency and risk.” Non cricketers, too, have found his ideas helpful. Film director Sam Mendes turned to Brearley’s book The Art of Captaincy (1985) for inspiration while directing American Beauty. Mendes described him as “a philosopher-sportsman whose tactical skill has not been equalled since.” Brearley, though, admits that it was not always this way. As a young man he was prone to arrogance, especially when, at 22, he was selected as a “young hopeful” to tour South Africa. But he wasn’t picked for the test matches and “left to get on with things in the nets. I was bored. But worse I was resistant to learning—though I would have heartily denied it at the time.” One day, practising in Durban, “a sallow man in a brown trilby hat” offered him tips on his batting, which Brearley ignored. The man turned out to be Walter Hammond, one of the game’s greatest batsmen, who Brearley later learned was dying of cancer. This, he says, was “my lowest point, or my most arrogant point; my attitude was like a young violinist refusing a tip from Maxim Vengerov.”
By 1981 this arrogance—and the envy and fear that Brearley says it can often mask—had presumably lessened, not least because Brearley, who had wanted to be a psychoanalyst since university, had by then been a psychoanalytic patient for three years—wrestling with “aggression, envy, jealousy, suspicion, and insecurity.” It’s hard to say to what extent these character traits remain today, although his understanding of his darker side must help him understand similar qualities in his players—just as in his patients. He began his own analysis, he says, not just because it was a requirement for his new career (all analysts must first undergo analysis themselves) but for personal development. “Psychoanalysis is an opportunity… to get to know yourself as thoroughly as you can. I always liked [psychoanalyst Wilfred] Bion’s phrase that his job as a psychoanalyst is to introduce the patient to that person with whom he’ll have most dealings in his life, namely himself… as if one has never met oneself at all.”
Psychoanalysis was born 113 years ago when Freud applied the term “psychical analysis” to his treatment of disturbed patients. It takes time, and an intense period of personal therapy (five times a week throughout training) to become a psychoanalyst, in contrast to CBT which does not require practitioners to undergo therapy before working with patients. CBT, now the NHS treatment of choice, was developed in the 1960s by American psychoanalyst, Aaron T Beck.
Depressed patients, Beck found, had spontaneous streams of negative thoughts about themselves, the world and the future. If patients could identify and evaluate these thoughts, he claimed it was quickly possible to think more realistically and feel better emotionally. Correctly prescribed, CBT can be effective, as Brearley acknowledges. “I met a man recently who told me that he’d great difficulty with speaking, and he went for CBT and was helped to understand something about his life, and he was given exercises and, over a few months his difficulty improved, and it hasn’t come back. Who is to contradict such a witness? What a good thing that this man’s life was changed by 12 sessions.”
Yet the two approaches, Brearley says, are quite different. Psychoanalysts, he says, are trying to “free the person over a large range of his mind, his emotional being, his activities, his behaviours, his feelings, his creativity, to expand his mind. Which is why the term ‘shrink’ is so objectionable.” Yet such treatment is expensive, and while some long-term psychoanalytic therapies are available on the NHS, they are prescribed only rarely, and are vulnerable to cost-cutting. Still, he thinks it has had a deep influence on NHS clinical thinking, and throughout society. “Psychoanalysis has always been a fringe activity in Britain. It never had that cachet that it had in the US from the 1940s to the 1970s. But as a source of research it’s always been extremely important, in terms of understanding the mind.… It’s also had a great influence on group therapy, on education, in certain fringe ways on the arts.”
Psychoanalysts try to access the unconscious by emphasising “transference,” or the way hidden feelings resurface in a therapeutic relationship. Brearley says that unlike CBT psychoanalysis “puts emphasis on negative transference,” or the negative feelings that the patient might experience towards the therapist (echoing similar emotions in other relationships). Without such a focus, he implies, there would have been no room, in cases such as his own, for addressing underlying difficulties such as envy and aggression. To be effective in this way the psychoanalyst must also be anonymous. Brearley, though, has always been something of a celebrity analyst, and admits that some patients “have found my being known as an ex-cricketer quite difficult.” But, he adds, “it can be worked with, taken up as material… grist to the mill.”
Yet his profession is pitted against the spirit of the age—against what Brearley sees as the pervasive pressure of the “short-termism” which also applies to cricket. His is a therapy which puts “emphasis on the intuitive, the unconscious, on what you can learn slowly and that takes a great deal of time to get to. It puts emphasis on the fact that you can’t control everything.” Brearley also questions theories of happiness from the likes of Richard Layard (a prominent advocate of CBT), saying: “There’s nothing wrong with happiness, but what constitutes happiness? How do you distinguish between the different sorts of happiness? The happiness you can get from a drug, or from a relationship, or from a great novel?” He adds that although “happiness can be enhanced by analysis,” the process is more likely to “enhance emotional liveliness and vigour” and that “obstacles to happiness can be lessened, if not overcome.”
Yes, but does psychoanalysis work? It is a much debated question. But in October 2008 the first large-scale research into the effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy to appear in a major medical journal concluded that these kind of therapies were more effective than short-term or behavioural approaches for certain disorders. As its author Falk Leichsenring, of the University of Giessen in Germany, put it: “There is evidence that, for patients with chronic mental disorders or personality disorders, short-term psychotherapy is not sufficient.” Brearley says that while the NHS has “a right to know if someone is getting better or being helped” his profession must “be careful not to let our thinking become interfered with by that kind of instrumental thinking.” He is treading carefully: aware of the need to defend his profession from those who accuse it of being expensive and unverified, while pointing out that psychoanalysis, although not amenable to testing through controlled experiments, is backed-up by a number of “long-term studies and other methods suitable to a social science.”
It is here, in particular, that Brearley sees a telling parallel with cricket. Too many rules make batsmen less spontaneous, just as an analyst “has to be open to whatever comes; you must not have too many preconceptions about what’s to come or you’ll get into a mess. Wilfred Bion said you have to act without memory or desire. That means putting aside from one’s conscious mind most of the time the technical rules, just as in batting you have to be open to the ball that actually comes down to you… to say that you could lay down a set of rules about what makes a good batsman would either be vapid or it would be too narrow.” In short, rules and guidelines of the kind increasingly found in treatments like CBT need to be used sparingly in psychoanalysis, with its focus on the messier business of unearthing feelings buried in the unconscious.
As president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Brearley has been trying to win over funding bodies to his gradual, unstructured approach. But it is hard: “How do you show that what you do is of value without distorting the description of what you do? To give a parallel example, I heard just before Easter that the judges of England were complaining against the department of justice for bringing in new regulations for sentencing. They said it removed their skill and discretion as judges if they had to state in advance exactly what criteria added up to what sentence. I think there’s something of that for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytical therapists.”
So what does he see as the future of psychoanalysis? His outlook is cautious. “Maybe the best that’s going to be offered [in the public sector] is the odd specialist place where intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy can take place for a certain number of people, and where the research can go on, which will also filter down into other forms of therapy.” He still feels psychoanalysis has a role in “helping the helpers,” providing forums where health-service workers can reflect upon their frontline experiences. “And we have to try to encourage the NHS to recognise the value of psychoanalytic therapy, even in limited form, for such things as depression, anxiety, borderline and narcissistic disorders.” Isn’t this a rather defeatist conclusion? “Perhaps,” he concedes. “But in many areas of the NHS it is needed.”
Convincing the NHS to provide more psychoanalysis at a time of retrenchment may provide Brearley with his toughest test of captaincy. But being out at the front is his place. Such a role, he believes, means being “willing, and comfortable enough, to tell people what to do; to think, at least some of the time, that you are right, though it’s very dangerous if you only think you’re right, or always think you’re always right.” Crucial to this success in cricket, he thinks, was getting others “to think like captains… When I first played for Middlesex if you hadn’t been playing for the county for about 15 years or for England for about ten years people weren’t interested in your opinion.” Brearley says teams play better when everyone is thinking “what should we all be doing?”
In trying to lead his profession he takes further solace from another lesson learned from both his professions: endurance. “After you’ve been fielding for two days, and you haven’t scored any runs, dropped a couple of catches, and people are shouting at you and it’s very hot, it can feel very gruelling.” With psychoanalysis, too, sometimes you “have to stick at it.” The treatment aims to bring forward “all the aspects of personality of the patient.” And some of these personae may be hard for the analyst to deal with: “If someone is persistently hostile, negative, depressed and withdrawn, one can be the recipient of a good deal of denigration and scorn”; although here, again, captaining tempestuous sportsmen like Botham must have helped. A tolerance of boredom is also important, as Brearley wrote in one of his Observer columns: “Cricket matches, like works of art and psychoanalytic sessions, are usually uneven. Even in the closest and best contests there are passages of entrenchment, of defensive play, of phases where one side or both are keeping things ticking over.” Sometimes, just as on long days in the outfield, the psychoanalyst has to have “the ability to stay with not knowing.”
***
Brearley is only too happy to offer thoughts on the England captaincy and the future of test cricket. Often, he says, the best captains aren’t the best players; and indeed his batting average was just 22.88 over 66 test innings, with no centuries. “The Bothams, the Flintoffs and the Pietersens have not on the whole had happy times as captain. I was in favour of Botham… though I felt they should have waited a bit longer… But that was probably a mistake. The best player, the most extrovert individual is, of course, not necessarily the best captain.” Such captains, he says, include Nasser Hussain, Mike Atherton and Andrew Strauss, who “seems pretty good so far.” And his prediction for the Ashes series? “Two-two.”
Strauss, like Brearley, is passionate about test cricket, which needs prominent champions if it is to survive. Just as psychoanalysis informs other forms of psychotherapy, Brearley thinks test cricket has much to teach the shorter game. “Twenty20 is very exciting, and good things can happen in it, but it’s important to keep test cricket too. The skills derived from test cricket can underpin the Twenty20 skills. And a greater range of cricketing ability and personality is revealed through five-day cricket than it is through Twenty20. There are parallels to each of these points in the comparison between psychoanalysis and things like CBT.”
It’s a persuasive comparison, but not one that will guarantee test cricket’s survival. “Maybe it will turn out that test cricket has no long-term future,” he admits. “Certainly the ICC will have to be careful not to make it too routine. Pitches will have to be much better for the game than the recent ones in the West Indies and Chester-le-Street. But we have to persuade people that many valuable things take time. You can’t speed up the St Matthew Passion.” Brearley points to the critical drubbing that Joseph Conrad received for his novel Chance (1913), and Conrad’s own riposte, published as part of the introduction to the second edition, in which he wrote: “No doubt by selecting a certain method and taking great pains the whole story might have been written out on a cigarette paper. For that matter the whole history of mankind could be written thus if only approached with sufficient detachment. The history of men on this earth since the beginning of ages may be resumed in one phrase of infinite poignancy: They were born, they suffered, they died… But in the infinitely minute stories about men and women it is my lot on earth to narrate I am not capable of such detachment.” Psychoanalysis, Brearley says, “tells stories in similar depth, with repetitions from different points of view... These things take time, as does test cricket.”
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10860
Cricket and baseball are twin brothers, separated at birth.
As American as…Cricket
By Roger Bate
Friday, July 3, 2009
http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/as-american-as-cricket
Cricket and baseball are twin brothers, separated at birth.
I cannot remember the first time I heard an American say “cricket is so boring: it lasts for days and still ends in a draw.” Let’s just say it was not this decade or the one before that. I am not going to try and explain cricket—the rules are too complex for a short article. Or to persuade you that cricket is a great game—hundreds of millions of Indians, Pakistanis, South Africans, Zimbabweans, Sri Lankans, Australians, New Zealanders, Bangladeshis, West Indians, Kenyans, Dutch, Welsh, Scots, and English, like me, know it is.
It is fair to say if you do not like baseball, then you will not like cricket. But if you do, read on a little longer.
There are many similarities between baseball and cricket. They are duels of batter (batsman) and pitcher (bowler). They showcase highly individualized, skillful players striving for a collective goal. They are slow, staccato games with plenty of pauses for the audience (and indeed players) to consider what could happen next. Both can move from the seemingly pedestrian to vibrant excitement in less than a second.
A cricket bowler is allowed to target the batsman’s body and head—intimidation both physical and psychological is a big part of the game. They are sports with tremendous history and fabulous rivalries. While there is no love lost between Red Sox Nation and Yankees fans, India and Pakistan almost went to war over cricket (and who knows, they still might). Both sports boast legendary players who elevated the game to new heights. Born at roughly the same time as Babe Ruth, Australian great Don Bradman dominated cricket for nearly 20 years. When Bradman told Ruth that a batter did not have to run on contact in cricket the Babe barked “Just too easy!” Yet Babe Ruth eventually became fascinated by cricket.
Good sports can be enjoyed at many levels. The casual observer enjoys soaking up the atmosphere and beer; the serious fans obsess over the minutiae. Both sports are adored and enriched by lovers and users of data. When Bradman, by then Sir Donald, died in February 2001, the New York Times estimated that were he to have been as far ahead of the crowd in baseball stats as he was at cricket, his lifetime batting average would be an astonishing .392 (in cricket his average was 99.94, the next best is roughly 61).
The differences between the two games are in some respects more interesting. Baseball’s emphasis is on power. There is nothing more explosive in sport than the successful uncoiling of a great baseball swing. To get the ball even most of the way to the fence requires significant strength (to say nothing of timing). In cricket, consistent contact by the batsman (as he is known) and the use of skillful deflections in the 360 degree scoring area mean slighter characters can dominate as compared with baseball. Indeed, arguably the greatest batsman currently playing is a 5 feet 5 inches tall native of Bombay. Sachin Tendulkar has God-like status in India. He is even mentioned during the gameshow scenes in the Oscar-winning movie “Slumdog Millionaire.” Tendulkar would make a reasonably good baseball player. I would imagine him batting first in the lineup and playing in the infield. But he probably would not have the best stats on his own team, let alone the world. Someone like Ryan Howard of the Phillies might be able to play for a decent cricket team, but his immobility would make him a liability.
They are sports with tremendous history and fabulous rivalries (whilst the Red Sox may hate the Yankees, India and Pakistan almost went to war over cricket).The most important difference between the two sports has to do with pressure. Professional sport is often about being able to relax and perform at the moment expectation is greatest. In cricket, because the batsman does not have to run on contact, he can bat for hours if successful; yet he is just one miss away from ending his day’s work. The pressure is disproportionately on his shoulders. In baseball, the odds are that on every pitch the batter will miss. The pressure with each pitch, then, is disproportionately on the pitcher, where a walk is a worry, a run a disappointment, a grand slam a meltdown and often the end of his day’s work.
Cricket never really took off in the United States and there are numerous—and often competing—explanations. One contributing factor was the relative mobility of Americans throughout colonial times and the early days of the republic, which made maintaining cricket grounds uneconomic. Cricket requires a very flat surface (the pitch) and the bowlers (pitchers) generally bounce the ball off the pitch. If the surface is uneven it can make batting so problematic as to make the game impossible to play. An international match earlier this year involving England in Antigua, which was supposed to last five days, was abandoned after nine balls (pitches) because the condition of the ground was too poor.
Henry Chadwick, the Englishman who helped to organize and define baseball in its early days, instead cited the restlessness of the American character. In 1850 he said, “Americans do not care to dawdle—what they do, they want to do in a hurry. In baseball, all is lightning. Thus the reason for American antipathy to cricket can be readily understood.”1
Perhaps the relative coarseness of the young American republic played a role. “Cricket? It civilizes people and makes them gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket,” said Robert Mugabe, the despotic leader of Zimbabwe. I rarely see eye to eye with Mad Bob, but he has a point. There is no doubt that cricket is a game of good manners.
The most important difference between the two sports is who is generally under pressure. Professional sport is often about being able to relax and perform at the moment expectation is greatest.For example, golf is the only other game I can think of where etiquette dictates calling a foul on oneself. “Walking”—calling oneself out in cricket—used to be commonplace at all levels of the game, and it still is on prep school playing fields. Even today some cricketers walk at the highest international levels, occasionally causing the loss of a contest as a result. Adam Gilchrist, the great Australian wicket keeper (catcher), deserves special mention in this regard. At the professional level, shows of dissent—and they can be as minor as shaking one’s head at the umpire’s decision—can cause the loss of some or all of your match fee.
But while cricket should be gentlemanly it is rarely genteel. I have herniated discs playing tennis, broken bones playing rugby, thrown up through exhaustion from rowing, but cricket is the only sport I have played where I have been carried from the field unconscious. A cricket bowler is allowed to target the batsman’s body and head—intimidation both physical and psychological is a big part of the game. It is a war of attrition; concentration and pressure are everything.
I have learned to love baseball since moving to America in 2001, and would have loved to have played as a child. I have Kevin Hassett to thank for alerting me to the maze of baseball statistics. I think American lovers of baseball would learn to love cricket, too. John Paul Getty was famously tutored by Mick Jagger and I intend to turn at least one American on to the sport. After all, it is not all cucumber sandwiches and tea, but a gritty, hard-fought duel, the best in sport.
Roger Bate is Legatum Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He played cricket for his English county until the age of 16 when he switched sports to (attempt to) become a tennis professional.
FURTHER READING: Bate regularly writes for The American on international health policy.Image by Darren Wamboldt/Bergman Group.
http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/as-american-as-cricket
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. This is quoted from Playing Hardball by E.T. Smith. Smith’s book provides great insight into a comparison of the two games, and I have drawn liberally from it in this article.
By Roger Bate
Friday, July 3, 2009
http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/as-american-as-cricket
Cricket and baseball are twin brothers, separated at birth.
I cannot remember the first time I heard an American say “cricket is so boring: it lasts for days and still ends in a draw.” Let’s just say it was not this decade or the one before that. I am not going to try and explain cricket—the rules are too complex for a short article. Or to persuade you that cricket is a great game—hundreds of millions of Indians, Pakistanis, South Africans, Zimbabweans, Sri Lankans, Australians, New Zealanders, Bangladeshis, West Indians, Kenyans, Dutch, Welsh, Scots, and English, like me, know it is.
It is fair to say if you do not like baseball, then you will not like cricket. But if you do, read on a little longer.
There are many similarities between baseball and cricket. They are duels of batter (batsman) and pitcher (bowler). They showcase highly individualized, skillful players striving for a collective goal. They are slow, staccato games with plenty of pauses for the audience (and indeed players) to consider what could happen next. Both can move from the seemingly pedestrian to vibrant excitement in less than a second.
A cricket bowler is allowed to target the batsman’s body and head—intimidation both physical and psychological is a big part of the game. They are sports with tremendous history and fabulous rivalries. While there is no love lost between Red Sox Nation and Yankees fans, India and Pakistan almost went to war over cricket (and who knows, they still might). Both sports boast legendary players who elevated the game to new heights. Born at roughly the same time as Babe Ruth, Australian great Don Bradman dominated cricket for nearly 20 years. When Bradman told Ruth that a batter did not have to run on contact in cricket the Babe barked “Just too easy!” Yet Babe Ruth eventually became fascinated by cricket.
Good sports can be enjoyed at many levels. The casual observer enjoys soaking up the atmosphere and beer; the serious fans obsess over the minutiae. Both sports are adored and enriched by lovers and users of data. When Bradman, by then Sir Donald, died in February 2001, the New York Times estimated that were he to have been as far ahead of the crowd in baseball stats as he was at cricket, his lifetime batting average would be an astonishing .392 (in cricket his average was 99.94, the next best is roughly 61).
The differences between the two games are in some respects more interesting. Baseball’s emphasis is on power. There is nothing more explosive in sport than the successful uncoiling of a great baseball swing. To get the ball even most of the way to the fence requires significant strength (to say nothing of timing). In cricket, consistent contact by the batsman (as he is known) and the use of skillful deflections in the 360 degree scoring area mean slighter characters can dominate as compared with baseball. Indeed, arguably the greatest batsman currently playing is a 5 feet 5 inches tall native of Bombay. Sachin Tendulkar has God-like status in India. He is even mentioned during the gameshow scenes in the Oscar-winning movie “Slumdog Millionaire.” Tendulkar would make a reasonably good baseball player. I would imagine him batting first in the lineup and playing in the infield. But he probably would not have the best stats on his own team, let alone the world. Someone like Ryan Howard of the Phillies might be able to play for a decent cricket team, but his immobility would make him a liability.
They are sports with tremendous history and fabulous rivalries (whilst the Red Sox may hate the Yankees, India and Pakistan almost went to war over cricket).The most important difference between the two sports has to do with pressure. Professional sport is often about being able to relax and perform at the moment expectation is greatest. In cricket, because the batsman does not have to run on contact, he can bat for hours if successful; yet he is just one miss away from ending his day’s work. The pressure is disproportionately on his shoulders. In baseball, the odds are that on every pitch the batter will miss. The pressure with each pitch, then, is disproportionately on the pitcher, where a walk is a worry, a run a disappointment, a grand slam a meltdown and often the end of his day’s work.
Cricket never really took off in the United States and there are numerous—and often competing—explanations. One contributing factor was the relative mobility of Americans throughout colonial times and the early days of the republic, which made maintaining cricket grounds uneconomic. Cricket requires a very flat surface (the pitch) and the bowlers (pitchers) generally bounce the ball off the pitch. If the surface is uneven it can make batting so problematic as to make the game impossible to play. An international match earlier this year involving England in Antigua, which was supposed to last five days, was abandoned after nine balls (pitches) because the condition of the ground was too poor.
Henry Chadwick, the Englishman who helped to organize and define baseball in its early days, instead cited the restlessness of the American character. In 1850 he said, “Americans do not care to dawdle—what they do, they want to do in a hurry. In baseball, all is lightning. Thus the reason for American antipathy to cricket can be readily understood.”1
Perhaps the relative coarseness of the young American republic played a role. “Cricket? It civilizes people and makes them gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket,” said Robert Mugabe, the despotic leader of Zimbabwe. I rarely see eye to eye with Mad Bob, but he has a point. There is no doubt that cricket is a game of good manners.
The most important difference between the two sports is who is generally under pressure. Professional sport is often about being able to relax and perform at the moment expectation is greatest.For example, golf is the only other game I can think of where etiquette dictates calling a foul on oneself. “Walking”—calling oneself out in cricket—used to be commonplace at all levels of the game, and it still is on prep school playing fields. Even today some cricketers walk at the highest international levels, occasionally causing the loss of a contest as a result. Adam Gilchrist, the great Australian wicket keeper (catcher), deserves special mention in this regard. At the professional level, shows of dissent—and they can be as minor as shaking one’s head at the umpire’s decision—can cause the loss of some or all of your match fee.
But while cricket should be gentlemanly it is rarely genteel. I have herniated discs playing tennis, broken bones playing rugby, thrown up through exhaustion from rowing, but cricket is the only sport I have played where I have been carried from the field unconscious. A cricket bowler is allowed to target the batsman’s body and head—intimidation both physical and psychological is a big part of the game. It is a war of attrition; concentration and pressure are everything.
I have learned to love baseball since moving to America in 2001, and would have loved to have played as a child. I have Kevin Hassett to thank for alerting me to the maze of baseball statistics. I think American lovers of baseball would learn to love cricket, too. John Paul Getty was famously tutored by Mick Jagger and I intend to turn at least one American on to the sport. After all, it is not all cucumber sandwiches and tea, but a gritty, hard-fought duel, the best in sport.
Roger Bate is Legatum Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He played cricket for his English county until the age of 16 when he switched sports to (attempt to) become a tennis professional.
FURTHER READING: Bate regularly writes for The American on international health policy.Image by Darren Wamboldt/Bergman Group.
http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/as-american-as-cricket
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. This is quoted from Playing Hardball by E.T. Smith. Smith’s book provides great insight into a comparison of the two games, and I have drawn liberally from it in this article.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Callaloo Or Tossed Salad?: East Indians And The Cultural Politics Of Identity In Trinidad
Munasinghe, Viranjini.
Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle for Inclusion in Trinidad
Journal of Asian American Studies - Volume 4, Number 1, February 2001, pp. 1-34
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle for Inclusion in Trinidad Viranjini Munasinghe
Introduction
There is, . . . an attitude gaining increasing acceptance in our society, that those of African descent are somehow more Trinidadian than everyone else. As foolish as this is, it is being accepted hook, line and sinker by many. There are those also, who argue . . . that other groups must "prove" their Trinidadianness by giving up their heritage, spending all their time listening to calypsos and "carnivalising" everything they do, even religiously significant events, and even to go to the extent of wholesale intermarriage, as though this were some cure. In articulating the predicament faced by Trinidadians of non-African descent in the Caribbean nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago, this anonymous writer unwittingly addresses a fundamental concern of our times -- namely, the contestation over the power to define the cultural coordinates of the symbolic space of the nation. In the age of the hyphenated "nation-state, " this tenuous if mythical congruence between nation and state is reproduced through hegemonic processes whereby a privileged race and class seek to establish a metonymic relation to the nation. Such a relation provides the ideological cornerstone for...
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_asian_american_studies/v004/ 4.1munasinghe.html
------------ --------
Book: Callaloo Or Tossed Salad?: East Indians And The Cultural Politics Of Identity In Trinidad
Callaloo or Tossed Salad? is a historical and ethnographic case study of the politics of cultural struggle between two traditionally subordinate ancestral groups in Trinidad, those claiming African and Indian descent. Viranjini Munasinghe argues that East Indians in Trinidad seek to become a legitimate part of the nation by redefining what it means to be Trinidadian, not by changing what it means to be Indian. In her view, Indo-Trinidadians' recent and ongoing struggle for national and cultural identity builds from dissatisfaction with the place they were originally assigned within Trinidadian society.
The author examines how Indo-Trinidadian leaders in Trinidad have come to challenge the implicit claim that their ethnic identity is antithetical to their national identity. Their political and cultural strategy seeks to change the national image of Trinidad by introducing Indian elements alongside those of the dominant Afro-Caribbean (Creole) culture.
Munasinghe analyzes a number of broad theoretical issues: the moral, political, and cultural dimensions of identity; the relation between ethnicity and the nation; and the possible autonomy of New World nationalisms from European forms. She details how principles of exclusion continue to operate in nationalist projects that celebrate ancestral diversity and multiculturalism. Drawing on the insights of theorists who use creolization to understand the emergence of Afro-American cultures, Munasinghe argues that Indo-Trinidadians can be considered Creole because they, like Afro-Trinidadians, are creators and not just bearers of culture.
April 22, 2002
The Indian Community in Trinidad:
An Interview with Viranjini Munasinghe
Viranjini Munasinghe is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Cornell University. Her new book, Callaloo or Tossed Salad?: East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad
AsiaSource spoke with the scholar from her office at Cornell University. (Cornell University Press, 2001), is an historical and ethnographic study of an Indian community in the Caribbean, with an emphasis on the politics of cultural conflict between Trinidadians of Indian and African descent. By redefining the term "creole" to include the Indo-Trinidadian community, Professor Munasinghe portrays Indo-Trinidadians as active creators of a unique, hybrid culture.
Can you explain the title of your book? Why is food a good metaphor to discuss the debate between pluralism and homogenization in Trinidad?
The use of food as metaphor for the nation is not limited to Trinidad but characteristic of most nationalist discourses. Trinidadians often use the local West Indian dish "callaloo" as a metaphor for the nation. This stew, made from the leaves of the dasheen bush and flavored with okra and coconut milk, serves as a fitting image for their nation because it conveys both native origins (in the New World) and the containment of diverse elements within a single unit. However, many Indo-Trinidadian cultural and political activists I spoke with during my fieldwork in 1999 and 2000 took exception to this metaphor for the Trinidad nation. They argued that since the ingredients making up the "callaloo" are boiled down to an indistinguishable mush, the original ingredients lose their respective identities and blend into one homogeneous taste. They disapproved of this metaphor because it represented an extreme level of blending or "mixture." Instead they opted for the metaphor of the "tossed salad"--an image which also signified diversity but one where, unlike the callaloo, each diverse ingredient maintained its originally distinct and unique identity. Thus the food metaphors of the callaloo and the tossed salad for the nation of Trinidad and Tobago convey very different ideas of mixture -- callaloo depicting a process of mixture that produces homogeneity and tossed salad signifying the co-existence of diverse elements in pluralism. Indo-Trinidadians who are intent on preserving what they believe to be their unique and distinct "Indian" identity are against a "callaloo" nation because of the extent of biological and cultural mixing signified by this metaphor.
Can you discuss the historical circumstances of Indian immigration to Trinidad? When did this movement occur and what factors influenced it?
When the slaves were emancipated in the British Caribbean in 1838, the planters looked for alternative supplies of docile and servile labor that could replace the labor of the former slaves. Planters claimed that emancipation caused a labor shortage in many of the British Caribbean colonies such as Trinidad. However, I, along with a host of other scholars, argue that it was not that labor was in short supply but that former slaves were no longer willing to labor under the terms offered by planters. Therefore, planters had to look for a controllable (as opposed to "free") labor force to work in the sugar plantations.
Some colonies such as Trinidad were particularly well poised to realize huge profits with increased sugar cultivation because many of their resources were still unexploited. The planters and the British Government instituted what some academics such as Hugh Tinker have labeled "a new system of slavery," or indenture, to provide the planters with the desired labor. After brief experimentation with different groups, India, a British colony, became the major source of this alternative labor supply. India was a suitable source because India's population was vast, the majority accustomed to agricultural labor under tropical conditions, and because the country was under British control there was no need for negotiations with foreign authorities. Living conditions were also grim for many Indians in the nineteenth century due to famine, disease, overpopulation and the increasing encroachment of the East India Company. As a result, many Indians were destitute and looked to opportunities outside of India in order to improve their impoverished lives. Between 1845 and 1917 (when indenture was abolished due to pressure from Indian nationalists) approximately 143,939 Indians came to Trinidad.
How and when were differences between South Asian immigrants such as caste, sect, region, language, and religion collapsed into a singular “Indo-Trinidadian” identity? Did any of these differences survive?
While the common perception is that Indian immigrants constituted a homogenous group because the vast majority who settled in Trinidad came from the densely populated central plain of the Ganges in northeast India (the United Provinces, Oudh, Bihar and Orissa), they were in fact a very diverse group characterized by religious, caste, linguistic and regional differences. While it is hard to pinpoint a date for the attenuation of these distinctions, once in Trinidad this originally diverse population of Indians developed into a relatively homogeneous group with the emergence of a common language, Bhojpuri, the standardization of Hinduism, the attenuation of the caste system whereby only certain distinctions now carried valence, and changes in the family structure in which certain features of the joint-family structure still persisted, but in modified form. Religious divisions between Hindus and Muslims, caste distinctions between Brahmins and Chamars and to a lesser extent, regional differences between the few "Madrasis" (South Indians) and the rest of the Indo-Trinidadians whose ancestral origins lie in northern India, still persist today.
What role does India play in the Indo-Trinidadian imagination? How much contact is there between India and the Indo-Trinidadian community? Has there been travel and exchange in both directions?
India plays a large role in the Indo-Trinidadian imagination. While Indo-Trinidadians insist on their commitment and loyalty to the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, they also express pride in their Indian ancestry. They don't see these two identities as necessarily in contradiction.
Identification with India heightened in the 1930s when the independence movement in India added vigor to the Indo-Trinidadian consciousness. As early as the 1930s, young Indo-Trinidadian intellectuals began staging island-wide demonstrations in support of India's demand for freedom. Public meetings held in Indo-Trinidadian majority areas opened and closed with Indian patriotic songs and "Vande Matram," the Indian national anthem. Many of the Indo-Trinidadian organizations formed during this period, like the India Club, were intent on spreading knowledge about India and things Indian. Wealthy Indo-Trinidadians visited India and contributed generously to famine relief funds. Visits from a host of Indian missionaries and cultural leaders generated new interest, especially among the Indo-Trinidadian middle class, in the language and culture of their "mother country." The first Indian movie, "Bala Joban" was shown to enthralled audiences in Trinidad in 1935.
Contact with India continues today and India as imaginary homeland has much symbolic import for Indo-Trinidadians. Yet, most Indo-Trinidadians will emphatically insist on their Trinidadian identity. While the wider society tends to view Indo-Trinidadian identification with India as a statement of disloyalty to the nation of Trinidad, Indo-Trinidadians see it differently. They insist they can be Indian and Trinidadian at the same time. My book explores why Indian and Trinidadian identities have historically developed as mutually exclusive identities, and the strategies through which Indo-Trinidadian cultural activists attempt to redefine Trinidadian national identity to include Indian elements. The Indo-Trinidadian dilemma of being viewed as strangers or outsiders in their society of settlement because of their ancestral culture is quite typical of how immigrant Asians are viewed generally. Asians, as in the United States, are often viewed by other groups as unassimilables or as perpetual strangers because of the unusually heavy cultural baggage imputed to them.
Can you discuss the process of creolization? In your book you argue that Indo-Trinidadians themselves are a product of creolization rather than inheritors of a strict ancestral culture. Can you explain this?
Creolization is a concept primarily identified with the Caribbean to describe and analyze processes of cultural adaptation and change within deeply hierarchical systems (the plantation/slavery complex and the race/color hierarchy that accompanied it) whereby new cultural forms emerged in the New World. A combination of the Spanish words "criar" (to create, to imagine) and "colon" (a colonist, a founder, a settler), the term Creole in the British Caribbean refers to people and things that constitute a mix of elements originating in the Old World. Through this mix of Old World forms, cultures and people indigenous to the New World were created. The terms creole and creolization, however, emphasize primarily the synthesis of African and European Old World elements, thereby excluding Indians. Thus while those with African and European ancestry are labeled Creoles, Indo-Trinidadians are never considered to be Creole. The implications of this exclusion from creole status is significant for Indo-Trinidadians.
Creolization also implied indigenization whereby foreign elements could become native to the New World through creative mixings. Thus, all persons and things “Creole” signified native status in Trinidad, and by extension the New World. East Indians who were considered unmixables because they were thought to be so saturated with an ancient (albeit inferior) civilization, were as a consequence not accorded Creole or native status in Trinidad. Thus, Indo-Trinidadians have been symbolically positioned as outside of the nation of Trinidad before and since independence in 1962.
My book examines the material and ideological mechanisms through which Indo-Trinidadians were positioned outside the creolization process and thereby the Trinidad nation. By examining Indo-Trinidadian practices and behaviors, I argue that Indo-Trinidadians too can be considered creole because they are active creators of new cultural forms indigenous to the New World rather than being mere reproducers of ancestral cultural forms.
What historical factors contributed to the development of the Indo-Trinidadian community as distinct and isolated from the larger Trinidadian population?
Historically a host of factors functioned to situate East Indians as separate from the rest of Creole society. Soon after arrival in Trinidad, Indian indentured laborers were banished to the sugar estates concentrated in the flatland or rolling hills of the western side of the island, later known as the sugar belt, thereby subjecting them to spatial isolation. As indentured laborers they were legally differentiated from the rest of the population and were subject to a number of laws that restricted their mobility and hence their contact with the wider society. Occupationally too, they were confined to the cultivation and processing of cane. Thus the majority of East Indians were confined to the rural agricultural sector. Religious and cultural differences coupled with their inability to speak English, underscored their alienation from the rest of the population. Symbolically too, East Indians were represented as outsiders. Since the Indian presence was thought to be only temporary, very little effort was made by the colonial government to integrate East Indians into the rest of society. Even education functioned to separate East Indians. The Canadian Presbyterian Missions catered exclusively to East Indians and instruction was in Hindi.
How does colonial race theory inform contemporary politics on the island? To what extent is the tension between Trinidadians of Indian and African descent an inherited legacy of colonialism?
Colonial policies and racial theories continue to influence contemporary politics on the island. The division between the two major ethnic groups comprising Trinidad's population, the Afro-Trinidadian and the Indo-Trinidadian, which is marked and reproduced by race rhetoric and ethnic stereotypes with both groups jealously guarding what they believe to be their legitimate terrain, can be traced to colonial policy. East Indians were brought to Trinidad as "scab labor" to drive down the bargaining power of the Afro-Trinidadians. Thus, East Indians from the beginning occupied a structurally antagonistic position to Afro-Trinidadians.
Planters were also instrumental in creating particular kinds of discourses about the character of the "Indian" and the "Negro" in order to make their case for the need for indentured labor. Caricatures of the luxury-loving, lazy, immoral Negro and of the docile, hardworking and cunning Indian abound in planter discourses of the period soon after emancipation. Many of these derogatory racial stereotypes continue to this day as the two groups use these same caricatures to undermine one another. Unfortunately, as is the case with ethnic/racial stereotypes, these negative racial traits are thought to signify natural characteristics of the respective groups and the specific colonial history that led to the creation of such discourse is forgotten or remains unacknowledged. A major concern in this book is to historically situate and understand the development of race relations between Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians and to examine the continuities and disjunctures between the colonial and postcolonial periods.
Interview conducted by Michelle Caswell, AsiaSource.
http://www.asiasource.org/society/callaloo.cfm
Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle for Inclusion in Trinidad
Journal of Asian American Studies - Volume 4, Number 1, February 2001, pp. 1-34
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle for Inclusion in Trinidad Viranjini Munasinghe
Introduction
There is, . . . an attitude gaining increasing acceptance in our society, that those of African descent are somehow more Trinidadian than everyone else. As foolish as this is, it is being accepted hook, line and sinker by many. There are those also, who argue . . . that other groups must "prove" their Trinidadianness by giving up their heritage, spending all their time listening to calypsos and "carnivalising" everything they do, even religiously significant events, and even to go to the extent of wholesale intermarriage, as though this were some cure. In articulating the predicament faced by Trinidadians of non-African descent in the Caribbean nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago, this anonymous writer unwittingly addresses a fundamental concern of our times -- namely, the contestation over the power to define the cultural coordinates of the symbolic space of the nation. In the age of the hyphenated "nation-state, " this tenuous if mythical congruence between nation and state is reproduced through hegemonic processes whereby a privileged race and class seek to establish a metonymic relation to the nation. Such a relation provides the ideological cornerstone for...
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_asian_american_studies/v004/ 4.1munasinghe.html
------------ --------
Book: Callaloo Or Tossed Salad?: East Indians And The Cultural Politics Of Identity In Trinidad
Callaloo or Tossed Salad? is a historical and ethnographic case study of the politics of cultural struggle between two traditionally subordinate ancestral groups in Trinidad, those claiming African and Indian descent. Viranjini Munasinghe argues that East Indians in Trinidad seek to become a legitimate part of the nation by redefining what it means to be Trinidadian, not by changing what it means to be Indian. In her view, Indo-Trinidadians' recent and ongoing struggle for national and cultural identity builds from dissatisfaction with the place they were originally assigned within Trinidadian society.
The author examines how Indo-Trinidadian leaders in Trinidad have come to challenge the implicit claim that their ethnic identity is antithetical to their national identity. Their political and cultural strategy seeks to change the national image of Trinidad by introducing Indian elements alongside those of the dominant Afro-Caribbean (Creole) culture.
Munasinghe analyzes a number of broad theoretical issues: the moral, political, and cultural dimensions of identity; the relation between ethnicity and the nation; and the possible autonomy of New World nationalisms from European forms. She details how principles of exclusion continue to operate in nationalist projects that celebrate ancestral diversity and multiculturalism. Drawing on the insights of theorists who use creolization to understand the emergence of Afro-American cultures, Munasinghe argues that Indo-Trinidadians can be considered Creole because they, like Afro-Trinidadians, are creators and not just bearers of culture.
April 22, 2002
The Indian Community in Trinidad:
An Interview with Viranjini Munasinghe
Viranjini Munasinghe is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Cornell University. Her new book, Callaloo or Tossed Salad?: East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad
AsiaSource spoke with the scholar from her office at Cornell University. (Cornell University Press, 2001), is an historical and ethnographic study of an Indian community in the Caribbean, with an emphasis on the politics of cultural conflict between Trinidadians of Indian and African descent. By redefining the term "creole" to include the Indo-Trinidadian community, Professor Munasinghe portrays Indo-Trinidadians as active creators of a unique, hybrid culture.
Can you explain the title of your book? Why is food a good metaphor to discuss the debate between pluralism and homogenization in Trinidad?
The use of food as metaphor for the nation is not limited to Trinidad but characteristic of most nationalist discourses. Trinidadians often use the local West Indian dish "callaloo" as a metaphor for the nation. This stew, made from the leaves of the dasheen bush and flavored with okra and coconut milk, serves as a fitting image for their nation because it conveys both native origins (in the New World) and the containment of diverse elements within a single unit. However, many Indo-Trinidadian cultural and political activists I spoke with during my fieldwork in 1999 and 2000 took exception to this metaphor for the Trinidad nation. They argued that since the ingredients making up the "callaloo" are boiled down to an indistinguishable mush, the original ingredients lose their respective identities and blend into one homogeneous taste. They disapproved of this metaphor because it represented an extreme level of blending or "mixture." Instead they opted for the metaphor of the "tossed salad"--an image which also signified diversity but one where, unlike the callaloo, each diverse ingredient maintained its originally distinct and unique identity. Thus the food metaphors of the callaloo and the tossed salad for the nation of Trinidad and Tobago convey very different ideas of mixture -- callaloo depicting a process of mixture that produces homogeneity and tossed salad signifying the co-existence of diverse elements in pluralism. Indo-Trinidadians who are intent on preserving what they believe to be their unique and distinct "Indian" identity are against a "callaloo" nation because of the extent of biological and cultural mixing signified by this metaphor.
Can you discuss the historical circumstances of Indian immigration to Trinidad? When did this movement occur and what factors influenced it?
When the slaves were emancipated in the British Caribbean in 1838, the planters looked for alternative supplies of docile and servile labor that could replace the labor of the former slaves. Planters claimed that emancipation caused a labor shortage in many of the British Caribbean colonies such as Trinidad. However, I, along with a host of other scholars, argue that it was not that labor was in short supply but that former slaves were no longer willing to labor under the terms offered by planters. Therefore, planters had to look for a controllable (as opposed to "free") labor force to work in the sugar plantations.
Some colonies such as Trinidad were particularly well poised to realize huge profits with increased sugar cultivation because many of their resources were still unexploited. The planters and the British Government instituted what some academics such as Hugh Tinker have labeled "a new system of slavery," or indenture, to provide the planters with the desired labor. After brief experimentation with different groups, India, a British colony, became the major source of this alternative labor supply. India was a suitable source because India's population was vast, the majority accustomed to agricultural labor under tropical conditions, and because the country was under British control there was no need for negotiations with foreign authorities. Living conditions were also grim for many Indians in the nineteenth century due to famine, disease, overpopulation and the increasing encroachment of the East India Company. As a result, many Indians were destitute and looked to opportunities outside of India in order to improve their impoverished lives. Between 1845 and 1917 (when indenture was abolished due to pressure from Indian nationalists) approximately 143,939 Indians came to Trinidad.
How and when were differences between South Asian immigrants such as caste, sect, region, language, and religion collapsed into a singular “Indo-Trinidadian” identity? Did any of these differences survive?
While the common perception is that Indian immigrants constituted a homogenous group because the vast majority who settled in Trinidad came from the densely populated central plain of the Ganges in northeast India (the United Provinces, Oudh, Bihar and Orissa), they were in fact a very diverse group characterized by religious, caste, linguistic and regional differences. While it is hard to pinpoint a date for the attenuation of these distinctions, once in Trinidad this originally diverse population of Indians developed into a relatively homogeneous group with the emergence of a common language, Bhojpuri, the standardization of Hinduism, the attenuation of the caste system whereby only certain distinctions now carried valence, and changes in the family structure in which certain features of the joint-family structure still persisted, but in modified form. Religious divisions between Hindus and Muslims, caste distinctions between Brahmins and Chamars and to a lesser extent, regional differences between the few "Madrasis" (South Indians) and the rest of the Indo-Trinidadians whose ancestral origins lie in northern India, still persist today.
What role does India play in the Indo-Trinidadian imagination? How much contact is there between India and the Indo-Trinidadian community? Has there been travel and exchange in both directions?
India plays a large role in the Indo-Trinidadian imagination. While Indo-Trinidadians insist on their commitment and loyalty to the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, they also express pride in their Indian ancestry. They don't see these two identities as necessarily in contradiction.
Identification with India heightened in the 1930s when the independence movement in India added vigor to the Indo-Trinidadian consciousness. As early as the 1930s, young Indo-Trinidadian intellectuals began staging island-wide demonstrations in support of India's demand for freedom. Public meetings held in Indo-Trinidadian majority areas opened and closed with Indian patriotic songs and "Vande Matram," the Indian national anthem. Many of the Indo-Trinidadian organizations formed during this period, like the India Club, were intent on spreading knowledge about India and things Indian. Wealthy Indo-Trinidadians visited India and contributed generously to famine relief funds. Visits from a host of Indian missionaries and cultural leaders generated new interest, especially among the Indo-Trinidadian middle class, in the language and culture of their "mother country." The first Indian movie, "Bala Joban" was shown to enthralled audiences in Trinidad in 1935.
Contact with India continues today and India as imaginary homeland has much symbolic import for Indo-Trinidadians. Yet, most Indo-Trinidadians will emphatically insist on their Trinidadian identity. While the wider society tends to view Indo-Trinidadian identification with India as a statement of disloyalty to the nation of Trinidad, Indo-Trinidadians see it differently. They insist they can be Indian and Trinidadian at the same time. My book explores why Indian and Trinidadian identities have historically developed as mutually exclusive identities, and the strategies through which Indo-Trinidadian cultural activists attempt to redefine Trinidadian national identity to include Indian elements. The Indo-Trinidadian dilemma of being viewed as strangers or outsiders in their society of settlement because of their ancestral culture is quite typical of how immigrant Asians are viewed generally. Asians, as in the United States, are often viewed by other groups as unassimilables or as perpetual strangers because of the unusually heavy cultural baggage imputed to them.
Can you discuss the process of creolization? In your book you argue that Indo-Trinidadians themselves are a product of creolization rather than inheritors of a strict ancestral culture. Can you explain this?
Creolization is a concept primarily identified with the Caribbean to describe and analyze processes of cultural adaptation and change within deeply hierarchical systems (the plantation/slavery complex and the race/color hierarchy that accompanied it) whereby new cultural forms emerged in the New World. A combination of the Spanish words "criar" (to create, to imagine) and "colon" (a colonist, a founder, a settler), the term Creole in the British Caribbean refers to people and things that constitute a mix of elements originating in the Old World. Through this mix of Old World forms, cultures and people indigenous to the New World were created. The terms creole and creolization, however, emphasize primarily the synthesis of African and European Old World elements, thereby excluding Indians. Thus while those with African and European ancestry are labeled Creoles, Indo-Trinidadians are never considered to be Creole. The implications of this exclusion from creole status is significant for Indo-Trinidadians.
Creolization also implied indigenization whereby foreign elements could become native to the New World through creative mixings. Thus, all persons and things “Creole” signified native status in Trinidad, and by extension the New World. East Indians who were considered unmixables because they were thought to be so saturated with an ancient (albeit inferior) civilization, were as a consequence not accorded Creole or native status in Trinidad. Thus, Indo-Trinidadians have been symbolically positioned as outside of the nation of Trinidad before and since independence in 1962.
My book examines the material and ideological mechanisms through which Indo-Trinidadians were positioned outside the creolization process and thereby the Trinidad nation. By examining Indo-Trinidadian practices and behaviors, I argue that Indo-Trinidadians too can be considered creole because they are active creators of new cultural forms indigenous to the New World rather than being mere reproducers of ancestral cultural forms.
What historical factors contributed to the development of the Indo-Trinidadian community as distinct and isolated from the larger Trinidadian population?
Historically a host of factors functioned to situate East Indians as separate from the rest of Creole society. Soon after arrival in Trinidad, Indian indentured laborers were banished to the sugar estates concentrated in the flatland or rolling hills of the western side of the island, later known as the sugar belt, thereby subjecting them to spatial isolation. As indentured laborers they were legally differentiated from the rest of the population and were subject to a number of laws that restricted their mobility and hence their contact with the wider society. Occupationally too, they were confined to the cultivation and processing of cane. Thus the majority of East Indians were confined to the rural agricultural sector. Religious and cultural differences coupled with their inability to speak English, underscored their alienation from the rest of the population. Symbolically too, East Indians were represented as outsiders. Since the Indian presence was thought to be only temporary, very little effort was made by the colonial government to integrate East Indians into the rest of society. Even education functioned to separate East Indians. The Canadian Presbyterian Missions catered exclusively to East Indians and instruction was in Hindi.
How does colonial race theory inform contemporary politics on the island? To what extent is the tension between Trinidadians of Indian and African descent an inherited legacy of colonialism?
Colonial policies and racial theories continue to influence contemporary politics on the island. The division between the two major ethnic groups comprising Trinidad's population, the Afro-Trinidadian and the Indo-Trinidadian, which is marked and reproduced by race rhetoric and ethnic stereotypes with both groups jealously guarding what they believe to be their legitimate terrain, can be traced to colonial policy. East Indians were brought to Trinidad as "scab labor" to drive down the bargaining power of the Afro-Trinidadians. Thus, East Indians from the beginning occupied a structurally antagonistic position to Afro-Trinidadians.
Planters were also instrumental in creating particular kinds of discourses about the character of the "Indian" and the "Negro" in order to make their case for the need for indentured labor. Caricatures of the luxury-loving, lazy, immoral Negro and of the docile, hardworking and cunning Indian abound in planter discourses of the period soon after emancipation. Many of these derogatory racial stereotypes continue to this day as the two groups use these same caricatures to undermine one another. Unfortunately, as is the case with ethnic/racial stereotypes, these negative racial traits are thought to signify natural characteristics of the respective groups and the specific colonial history that led to the creation of such discourse is forgotten or remains unacknowledged. A major concern in this book is to historically situate and understand the development of race relations between Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians and to examine the continuities and disjunctures between the colonial and postcolonial periods.
Interview conducted by Michelle Caswell, AsiaSource.
http://www.asiasource.org/society/callaloo.cfm
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
There's an art to writing on Facebook or Twitter -- really
There's an art to writing on Facebook or Twitter -- really
By Maria Puente, USA TODAY
Not so long ago, people used to keep diaries to record their quotidian doings — privately, of course. Now people keep Facebook and Twitter accounts, updating their status daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute, and almost nothing is private.
Worse, the modern status update is not always compelling reading.
Feeding the cat
Watching TV
Eating a tuna sandwich
To be fair, even great diarists of the past had bad days: Samuel Pepys, the Englishman whose journals clarified a big chunk of the 17th century for historians, sometimes had nothing more imaginative to say than: And so to bed.
Surely we could do better 350 years later?
"We all have to go to status-update charm school," jokes Hal Niedzviecki, author of The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, who joined a slew of online social networks to investigate how they are changing the definition of privacy. "Just one in every million status updates is worth reading, maybe one in every 5 million if you're looking for poetics."
Never mind poetics. Coherence would be nice.
There's no doubt that social-media networks are fantastic communication machines. They allow people to feel connected to a virtual community, make new friends and keep old ones, learn things they didn't know. They encourage people to write more (that can't be bad) and write well and concisely (which is hard, trust us). They are a new form of entertainment (and marketing) that can occupy people for hours in any given day.
"Great blogging is great writing, and it turns out great Twittering is great writing — it's the haiku form of blogging," says Debbie Weil, a consultant on social media and author of The Corporate Blogging Book.
But the art of the status update is not much of an art form for millions of people on Facebook, where users can post details of what they're doing for all their friends to see, or on Twitter, where people post tweets about what they're doing that potentially every user can see.
Mundane to clever
Funny, clever and sassy updates and tweets stand out because they are the exception. Boring, vapid or just TMI — too much information — updates often dominate in cyberspace.
Sheri Peterson, 47, a social worker in Santa Rosa, Calf., is new to Facebook and sometimes can't believe the humdrum nature of what she's reading.
"Some friends — college-educated adults — consistently give lousy updates, such as Got up; went to store; came home; watched TV," she says. "Nothing about what kind of store or even what they bought. Was it specialty cheese or incontinence supplies? Nothing about what show they're watching, which could create conversation: 'You like watching Galloping Gourmet reruns? So do I!' "
Although most of these social-media sites have been around now for at least a few years, it appears many users haven't quite grasped the idea. For some reason, they think their friends and family, plus total strangers, care that they're, say, Thinking big thoughts. Yet they don't actually explain those big thoughts and, in the case of Twitter, do it effectively in just 140 characters or less.
"No one cares if you're On the way to the airport, Checking bags or Arrived in Kansas," says Avery Roth, 23, a public relations coordinator in Dallas. "People who update their status hourly need to cool it. It's also a little vain."
The most inane updates, says Karyn Cronin, 32, an administrative assistant in St. Paul, say things like Just got back from the grocery store with all the kids, and boy are we exhausted. "That's just lame," says Cronin, who tries to make her friends laugh by using famous movie lines for her status updates: Karyn can't handle the truth, or Karyn feels a disturbance in the Force.
Slowly, style and etiquette rules for status updates are evolving, as people get more practice and as skillful updaters become more recognized. There's already a Facebook app called Status King, which allows users to nominate and vote on funny and clever status updates, and buy a T-shirt emblazoned with a favorite. (A recent example: Suzanne is thinking: Change is inevitable ... except from a vending machine.)
Jeffrey Harmon, 26, of Provo, Utah, and his siblings launched Status King in January and already thousands of updates are posted. (Sample favorite: Jared is wondering where he's going and why he's in a hand basket.)
"People spend hours and hours thinking up status updates to win a free T-shirt," Harmon says. He says status updates can be useful for telling friends and family where you are —Jeff is at Disneyland — without having to make dozens of phone calls. But because so many people have Twitter and Facebook accounts, information overload can build up and spill over to recipients who don't know Jeff or care that he is at Disneyland.
"The Internet is going through a maturing stage right now," Harmon says. "The only things you should post on Facebook are the things you'd tell your friends in real life. But a lot of people treat it as a personal journal, and they vent. They don't realize they are sharing with all my friends."
When Stephen Stewart, 48, an energy company executive in Sugar Land, Texas, joined Facebook a few months ago, he was shocked when some friends shared private matters in updates.
"One was griping about her bosses — I had to shoot her a private message: 'What are you doing? Delete that comment,' " he says.
Making a connection
So what makes a good status update? "Personality," says Adam Ostrow, editor in chief of Mashable.com, an online publication that covers social networking. "Personality is really what drives people to (follow) you, especially on Twitter."
How to improve your updates? "Follow others who are funny, clear and concise and mimic them, or Twitter a bunch and figure out what people respond to," says Sarah Milstein, co-author of The Twitter Book.
Think before you tweet, Ostrow advises. "If this (tweet) were the last thing you ever published, would it be something to be proud of?"
Here's an example of how to improve an update, courtesy of Alison Bailin Batz, 28, a public relations executive in Phoenix and Twitter aficionado: A friend tweets that she just ate some tasty frozen yogurt — and that's it. Why such a useless post? Turns out she was excited because her local frozen yogurt shop was giving away free scoops that day.
"THAT is what (she) should have posted — information that I can use, in this case, free food," Batz says. "We're in the 'whee!' stage of social networking. The trend for 2010 is that everyone is going to cut back, filter, decide whether we really need to follow 1,000 people if they're not interesting. Next year, only the best tweeters survive."
Of course, there is disagreement about what's the best. Milstein argues that even the most banal updates serve a purpose.
"An individual post may not be interesting, but over the course of weeks you build a meaningful picture of somebody, you get a sense of the rhythms of someone's life," she says. Still, "people have to choose to read your updates (on Twitter), and if you're boring, they won't follow you. It's a medium that rewards interestingness."
Interestingness must be in short supply. Anne Trubek, a writer and associate professor of composition and rhetoric at Oberlin College who is studying status updates as a developing 21st-century literary form, sorted them into four categories for her column in the online magazine GOOD: The prosaic (Jill is baking bread); the informative (Jack loves this article from GOOD, followed by the link); the clever and funny (Johnny thinks Obama should be sworn in a few more times, just to be EXTRA safe); and the poetic or nonsensical (If Jim were a cloud, he would rain Earl Grey tea).
Trubek likes them all, especially for the brevity that forces people to think and write in new ways.
"In the past 10 years, with e-mail and now Facebook and IMing and texting and Twitter, people feel more connected to writing as a form of expression, and that is wonderful and refreshing," she says.
Indeed, Niedzviecki says, maybe it's just elitism to expect soaring poetry in a status update, when most ordinary people are just looking for a connection they can relate to.
"Most people are not going to have the time or opportunity to find clever links and have interesting things to say 24 hours a day — that's what the celebrities and gurus we follow do, it's their 24-hour job to be entertaining," he says. "For the rest of us, it's, hey, I just ordered takeout.
"And that's fine. There's a charm to that."
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2009-06-09-status-writing-online_N.htm
By Maria Puente, USA TODAY
Not so long ago, people used to keep diaries to record their quotidian doings — privately, of course. Now people keep Facebook and Twitter accounts, updating their status daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute, and almost nothing is private.
Worse, the modern status update is not always compelling reading.
Feeding the cat
Watching TV
Eating a tuna sandwich
To be fair, even great diarists of the past had bad days: Samuel Pepys, the Englishman whose journals clarified a big chunk of the 17th century for historians, sometimes had nothing more imaginative to say than: And so to bed.
Surely we could do better 350 years later?
"We all have to go to status-update charm school," jokes Hal Niedzviecki, author of The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, who joined a slew of online social networks to investigate how they are changing the definition of privacy. "Just one in every million status updates is worth reading, maybe one in every 5 million if you're looking for poetics."
Never mind poetics. Coherence would be nice.
There's no doubt that social-media networks are fantastic communication machines. They allow people to feel connected to a virtual community, make new friends and keep old ones, learn things they didn't know. They encourage people to write more (that can't be bad) and write well and concisely (which is hard, trust us). They are a new form of entertainment (and marketing) that can occupy people for hours in any given day.
"Great blogging is great writing, and it turns out great Twittering is great writing — it's the haiku form of blogging," says Debbie Weil, a consultant on social media and author of The Corporate Blogging Book.
But the art of the status update is not much of an art form for millions of people on Facebook, where users can post details of what they're doing for all their friends to see, or on Twitter, where people post tweets about what they're doing that potentially every user can see.
Mundane to clever
Funny, clever and sassy updates and tweets stand out because they are the exception. Boring, vapid or just TMI — too much information — updates often dominate in cyberspace.
Sheri Peterson, 47, a social worker in Santa Rosa, Calf., is new to Facebook and sometimes can't believe the humdrum nature of what she's reading.
"Some friends — college-educated adults — consistently give lousy updates, such as Got up; went to store; came home; watched TV," she says. "Nothing about what kind of store or even what they bought. Was it specialty cheese or incontinence supplies? Nothing about what show they're watching, which could create conversation: 'You like watching Galloping Gourmet reruns? So do I!' "
Although most of these social-media sites have been around now for at least a few years, it appears many users haven't quite grasped the idea. For some reason, they think their friends and family, plus total strangers, care that they're, say, Thinking big thoughts. Yet they don't actually explain those big thoughts and, in the case of Twitter, do it effectively in just 140 characters or less.
"No one cares if you're On the way to the airport, Checking bags or Arrived in Kansas," says Avery Roth, 23, a public relations coordinator in Dallas. "People who update their status hourly need to cool it. It's also a little vain."
The most inane updates, says Karyn Cronin, 32, an administrative assistant in St. Paul, say things like Just got back from the grocery store with all the kids, and boy are we exhausted. "That's just lame," says Cronin, who tries to make her friends laugh by using famous movie lines for her status updates: Karyn can't handle the truth, or Karyn feels a disturbance in the Force.
Slowly, style and etiquette rules for status updates are evolving, as people get more practice and as skillful updaters become more recognized. There's already a Facebook app called Status King, which allows users to nominate and vote on funny and clever status updates, and buy a T-shirt emblazoned with a favorite. (A recent example: Suzanne is thinking: Change is inevitable ... except from a vending machine.)
Jeffrey Harmon, 26, of Provo, Utah, and his siblings launched Status King in January and already thousands of updates are posted. (Sample favorite: Jared is wondering where he's going and why he's in a hand basket.)
"People spend hours and hours thinking up status updates to win a free T-shirt," Harmon says. He says status updates can be useful for telling friends and family where you are —Jeff is at Disneyland — without having to make dozens of phone calls. But because so many people have Twitter and Facebook accounts, information overload can build up and spill over to recipients who don't know Jeff or care that he is at Disneyland.
"The Internet is going through a maturing stage right now," Harmon says. "The only things you should post on Facebook are the things you'd tell your friends in real life. But a lot of people treat it as a personal journal, and they vent. They don't realize they are sharing with all my friends."
When Stephen Stewart, 48, an energy company executive in Sugar Land, Texas, joined Facebook a few months ago, he was shocked when some friends shared private matters in updates.
"One was griping about her bosses — I had to shoot her a private message: 'What are you doing? Delete that comment,' " he says.
Making a connection
So what makes a good status update? "Personality," says Adam Ostrow, editor in chief of Mashable.com, an online publication that covers social networking. "Personality is really what drives people to (follow) you, especially on Twitter."
How to improve your updates? "Follow others who are funny, clear and concise and mimic them, or Twitter a bunch and figure out what people respond to," says Sarah Milstein, co-author of The Twitter Book.
Think before you tweet, Ostrow advises. "If this (tweet) were the last thing you ever published, would it be something to be proud of?"
Here's an example of how to improve an update, courtesy of Alison Bailin Batz, 28, a public relations executive in Phoenix and Twitter aficionado: A friend tweets that she just ate some tasty frozen yogurt — and that's it. Why such a useless post? Turns out she was excited because her local frozen yogurt shop was giving away free scoops that day.
"THAT is what (she) should have posted — information that I can use, in this case, free food," Batz says. "We're in the 'whee!' stage of social networking. The trend for 2010 is that everyone is going to cut back, filter, decide whether we really need to follow 1,000 people if they're not interesting. Next year, only the best tweeters survive."
Of course, there is disagreement about what's the best. Milstein argues that even the most banal updates serve a purpose.
"An individual post may not be interesting, but over the course of weeks you build a meaningful picture of somebody, you get a sense of the rhythms of someone's life," she says. Still, "people have to choose to read your updates (on Twitter), and if you're boring, they won't follow you. It's a medium that rewards interestingness."
Interestingness must be in short supply. Anne Trubek, a writer and associate professor of composition and rhetoric at Oberlin College who is studying status updates as a developing 21st-century literary form, sorted them into four categories for her column in the online magazine GOOD: The prosaic (Jill is baking bread); the informative (Jack loves this article from GOOD, followed by the link); the clever and funny (Johnny thinks Obama should be sworn in a few more times, just to be EXTRA safe); and the poetic or nonsensical (If Jim were a cloud, he would rain Earl Grey tea).
Trubek likes them all, especially for the brevity that forces people to think and write in new ways.
"In the past 10 years, with e-mail and now Facebook and IMing and texting and Twitter, people feel more connected to writing as a form of expression, and that is wonderful and refreshing," she says.
Indeed, Niedzviecki says, maybe it's just elitism to expect soaring poetry in a status update, when most ordinary people are just looking for a connection they can relate to.
"Most people are not going to have the time or opportunity to find clever links and have interesting things to say 24 hours a day — that's what the celebrities and gurus we follow do, it's their 24-hour job to be entertaining," he says. "For the rest of us, it's, hey, I just ordered takeout.
"And that's fine. There's a charm to that."
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2009-06-09-status-writing-online_N.htm
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Vegetarianism: Plants are also having life, so killing plants should also be a sin? How can animals do "sadhana"?
Questions and Answers on the Importance of Vegetarianism
By Sugunendra Theertha Swami
The following questions were put before Sri Sugunendra Theertha Swamji of Udupi Puthige Matha (of the Madhva Sampradaya) by devotees during his visit to Detroit.
Question One:
Plants are also having life, so killing plants should also be a sin. Thus in what way is vegetarian food better than non-vegetarian food, in terms of killing or committing "sin"?
Answer by Sugunendra Theertha Swamiji:
This is a very good question. It is true that plants also have "life" and killing plants is also sin. So the best way to observe total non-violence is to follow "Shiloncha Vraththi". That is to take only those fruits which have naturally fallen from the trees or plants. In this way we are doing harm to no one. But everyone can not follow that vow. We have to take food in order to survive and sustain this body. It is a necessity of survival. But we need to take that path which is less sinful and does less harm to other jivas (living entities).
Now there are two reasons to say that vegetarian food is having insignificant sin. Many of the plants like rice, wheat, etc., are having life only for one crop time. Once their yield is over, they die naturally, even if we don't cut them. So by cutting those plants (which have already died) we are doing less sin or no sin at all. In many other plants, like mango, coconut, etc., by plucking the fruit, we are not killing the plants, and so we are doing very minimal sin or no sin at all. So vegetarian food is less sinful. More over, it is inevitable for our survival, but non-vegetarian food is a luxury to us and we can survive even if we avoid that. It is more sinful since we need to kill animals all of the time.
Next we need to know why certain acts are sinful. Each and every life (whether plant, animal, or human) has come to this world to do "sadhana" (spiritual practices), so that they may get a better birth next life and finally get "moksha" (liberation). Whenever such "sadhana" opportunities are cut short, it becomes a sin. For plants there is not much "sadhana" available to them. They can not do any kind of physical or mental activities in terms of "sadhana". So by cutting them, we are not doing much harm to their "sadhana" or reducing their opportunity for "sadhana" (spiritual practice). So it is not so sinful. But animals can do a good amount of "sadhana" by means of physical and mental activities. By killing them, we are cutting short their opportunities to do "sadhana" towards their liberation (moksha). Thus it is much more sinful.
To support this aspect further I will give an example. "Suicide" is considered as the greatest sin, even though no one else is troubled other than the one individual, because God has given us this wonderful body and mind to do "sadhana" by which we work towards moksha. By rejecting this offer or by cutting short this "sadhana", we are insulting God and betraying him. Thus suicide is considered highly sinful. There is another example in the scriptures I would like to cite. Suppose there is a very, very old man, incapable of doing any physical and mental activities. Then according to the scriptures he can enter into fire to end his life. That is not considered a sin because he cannot do any more "sadhana" by himself or through others. So in general, any act which is cutting short our, or others', "sadhana" is considered as a sin. Thus from this angle, vegetarians are committing less sins than those who eat meat.
Question Two:
We were thinking that only human beings have thinking ability, and thus only they can do "sadhana" (spiritual practices), but that other animals could not. Is this concept false? How can animals do "sadhana"?
Answer by Sugunendra Theertha Swamiji:
This is not true. All animals can also do "sadhana" (spiritual practices). Otherwise there is a fundamental problem in the universal system. If animals cannot do "sadhana", they can not get better lives, which lead to the human life. If they can not get a human life, then they can not get moksha (liberation) at all at any time. This is not true, thus it is proven that animals also do "sadhana" and get better lives.
They do "sadhana" by their mental activities. We can see a lot of differences in the behaviors of various animals. In the same category of, say cat, dog or cow, we can see a lot of difference between two animals. For example some are soft, some are sensitive, some are more active, etc. This is due to their mental "sadhana". Also in children, who are not having developed thinking power, we can see many differences. We have seen a child, in Bombay, around 2 years old. He loves Krishna like anything. While sleeping, he tightly hugs a Krishna idol. He does not drink milk without offering to Krishna. He always wants to listen to Krishna's stories. He always wants to see the puja of Krishna. It is really amazing to witness. This is all due to previous "samskara" (purification). Like this, animals also will have their own previous samskara and "sadhana".
Question Three:
Is it true that in olden days, the sages used to eat meat? There is an incident of Agasthya Muni eating meat in the "Vathapi - Ilvala" story.
Answer by Sugunendra Theertha Swamiji:
Yes, we can see some mention about such things in very old stories. We need to understand clearly why and under what circumstances they used to consume meat. Firstly, they used to take meat, but not as their regular food. The animal would be offered to 'yajna', the sacred fire, and then the sages, having very high yogic power, would consume the meat as a prasada of the yajna. Due to this auspicious activity (of yajna), the animal would go to the heavens. In the story of Agusthya Muni, when he said ' vathapi jirno bhava', he was digested immediately. Such was the power of the sages in those days.
But today meat is not approved for religious people such as brahmanas. First we need to understand why we consume food. It is to have good health. Health means not only the physical health, but the mental health also plays a very important role. That's why in Sanskrit it is known as "swasthya", which means mental peace, purity and health. Meat or non-vegetarian food improves the body, but not the mind. So for those people who need to have physical strength, like soldiers, meat is not prohibited. Soldiers do not need to have as much thinking power. They have to fight like machines. But for spiritual people such as brahmanas, mental power is the more important. We need to have peace and purity of mind, stability and concentration of mind. For such people meat is prohibited. Since ages our ancestors were eating vegetarian food, and so brahmanas are generally considered as soft, kind hearted, stable and intelligent people. If we start consuming meat, slowly we will loose all these good qualities. We will not see these negative changes overnight. It takes time but we will see the changes clearly in the later generations.
Question Four:
There are many noble laureates who are meat eaters. How can we explain that?
Answer by Sugunendra Theertha Swamiji:
Getting a noble prize is not at all a yardstick to measure the peace and purity, stability and concentration of someone's mind. It is known that the suicide rate is high in scientists as well. Actually scientists are more disturbed in their mind. Due to this, they get activated and get involved deeply in something and come out with some new concepts or ideas. For their success, the basic reason is not the peaceful mind, but their disturbed mind. Generally brahmanas who are suppose to have the mental capacity to understand "brahman" (God), need to have a very good concentration power for performing "japa" (mantra chanting) and "tapa" (austerities). They are supposed to be people who are not mentally disturbed. In olden days even if they consumed meat, they used to keep up their mental stability and peace of mind due to their yogic power or "tapas" (severe austerity). But now in the present age of kali-yuga, our mental powers and concentration powers are getting reduced. We are loosing our purity and peace of mind due to various reasons. As such, the sattvic atmosphere and sattvic qualities are reducing because we are not doing enough japa, tapa, etc. So if we start consuming meat we will loose all our good mental qualities very quickly. In kaliyuga, meat is strictly prohibited for brahmanas. It is also sinful for all people, as mentioned in the previous answers.
Question Five:
Is it not a sin to kill silkworms for silk cloth, or to kill deers for making deer skin meditation mats?
Answer by Sugunendra Theertha Swamiji:
The short answer is that it is a sin if we do it for trading purposes. For a detailed answer, first we need to understand what is sin. It is not a substance associated with a particular activity. The same activity can result in either sin or no sin depending upon the purpose, intention and circumstance. For example, killing in general is a sin, but killing a demon or murderer is not a sin. Similarly, in olden days kings used to go for hunting. It was not considered a sin because they used to kill only those wild animals which were troublesome to the sages and the nearby villagers. Similarly if we kill animals to avoid being killed, it is not a sin. As said earlier, every creature in this world is here for doing "sadhana". In this world the priority is for those who are doing greater "sadhana". To accomplish that, if others have to sacrifice their "sadhana", there is no harm in that. For example, assume that there are two students in a house. One is preparing for second grade and the other is preparing for a college medical exam. Though both are preparing for their exams, we consider that the medical exam is more important and give preference to him. If needed, we may ask the other student to sacrifice his preparation, because he will not lose much. Similarly, in this world, the living entity who is doing a higher level of sadhana, gets preference. So for the benefit of the higher sadhana, others performing lesser sadhana may be sacrificed without any sin. If we are preparing silk for God's pooja, then it is not a sin. But if we are preparing silk for decorating ourselves, then it is a sin. So we need to understand what is the purpose of the action, and what is going to be achieved finally.
http://www.indiadivine.org/articles/992/1/Questions-and-Answers-on-the-Importance-of-Vegetarianism/Page1.html
By Sugunendra Theertha Swami
The following questions were put before Sri Sugunendra Theertha Swamji of Udupi Puthige Matha (of the Madhva Sampradaya) by devotees during his visit to Detroit.
Question One:
Plants are also having life, so killing plants should also be a sin. Thus in what way is vegetarian food better than non-vegetarian food, in terms of killing or committing "sin"?
Answer by Sugunendra Theertha Swamiji:
This is a very good question. It is true that plants also have "life" and killing plants is also sin. So the best way to observe total non-violence is to follow "Shiloncha Vraththi". That is to take only those fruits which have naturally fallen from the trees or plants. In this way we are doing harm to no one. But everyone can not follow that vow. We have to take food in order to survive and sustain this body. It is a necessity of survival. But we need to take that path which is less sinful and does less harm to other jivas (living entities).
Now there are two reasons to say that vegetarian food is having insignificant sin. Many of the plants like rice, wheat, etc., are having life only for one crop time. Once their yield is over, they die naturally, even if we don't cut them. So by cutting those plants (which have already died) we are doing less sin or no sin at all. In many other plants, like mango, coconut, etc., by plucking the fruit, we are not killing the plants, and so we are doing very minimal sin or no sin at all. So vegetarian food is less sinful. More over, it is inevitable for our survival, but non-vegetarian food is a luxury to us and we can survive even if we avoid that. It is more sinful since we need to kill animals all of the time.
Next we need to know why certain acts are sinful. Each and every life (whether plant, animal, or human) has come to this world to do "sadhana" (spiritual practices), so that they may get a better birth next life and finally get "moksha" (liberation). Whenever such "sadhana" opportunities are cut short, it becomes a sin. For plants there is not much "sadhana" available to them. They can not do any kind of physical or mental activities in terms of "sadhana". So by cutting them, we are not doing much harm to their "sadhana" or reducing their opportunity for "sadhana" (spiritual practice). So it is not so sinful. But animals can do a good amount of "sadhana" by means of physical and mental activities. By killing them, we are cutting short their opportunities to do "sadhana" towards their liberation (moksha). Thus it is much more sinful.
To support this aspect further I will give an example. "Suicide" is considered as the greatest sin, even though no one else is troubled other than the one individual, because God has given us this wonderful body and mind to do "sadhana" by which we work towards moksha. By rejecting this offer or by cutting short this "sadhana", we are insulting God and betraying him. Thus suicide is considered highly sinful. There is another example in the scriptures I would like to cite. Suppose there is a very, very old man, incapable of doing any physical and mental activities. Then according to the scriptures he can enter into fire to end his life. That is not considered a sin because he cannot do any more "sadhana" by himself or through others. So in general, any act which is cutting short our, or others', "sadhana" is considered as a sin. Thus from this angle, vegetarians are committing less sins than those who eat meat.
Question Two:
We were thinking that only human beings have thinking ability, and thus only they can do "sadhana" (spiritual practices), but that other animals could not. Is this concept false? How can animals do "sadhana"?
Answer by Sugunendra Theertha Swamiji:
This is not true. All animals can also do "sadhana" (spiritual practices). Otherwise there is a fundamental problem in the universal system. If animals cannot do "sadhana", they can not get better lives, which lead to the human life. If they can not get a human life, then they can not get moksha (liberation) at all at any time. This is not true, thus it is proven that animals also do "sadhana" and get better lives.
They do "sadhana" by their mental activities. We can see a lot of differences in the behaviors of various animals. In the same category of, say cat, dog or cow, we can see a lot of difference between two animals. For example some are soft, some are sensitive, some are more active, etc. This is due to their mental "sadhana". Also in children, who are not having developed thinking power, we can see many differences. We have seen a child, in Bombay, around 2 years old. He loves Krishna like anything. While sleeping, he tightly hugs a Krishna idol. He does not drink milk without offering to Krishna. He always wants to listen to Krishna's stories. He always wants to see the puja of Krishna. It is really amazing to witness. This is all due to previous "samskara" (purification). Like this, animals also will have their own previous samskara and "sadhana".
Question Three:
Is it true that in olden days, the sages used to eat meat? There is an incident of Agasthya Muni eating meat in the "Vathapi - Ilvala" story.
Answer by Sugunendra Theertha Swamiji:
Yes, we can see some mention about such things in very old stories. We need to understand clearly why and under what circumstances they used to consume meat. Firstly, they used to take meat, but not as their regular food. The animal would be offered to 'yajna', the sacred fire, and then the sages, having very high yogic power, would consume the meat as a prasada of the yajna. Due to this auspicious activity (of yajna), the animal would go to the heavens. In the story of Agusthya Muni, when he said ' vathapi jirno bhava', he was digested immediately. Such was the power of the sages in those days.
But today meat is not approved for religious people such as brahmanas. First we need to understand why we consume food. It is to have good health. Health means not only the physical health, but the mental health also plays a very important role. That's why in Sanskrit it is known as "swasthya", which means mental peace, purity and health. Meat or non-vegetarian food improves the body, but not the mind. So for those people who need to have physical strength, like soldiers, meat is not prohibited. Soldiers do not need to have as much thinking power. They have to fight like machines. But for spiritual people such as brahmanas, mental power is the more important. We need to have peace and purity of mind, stability and concentration of mind. For such people meat is prohibited. Since ages our ancestors were eating vegetarian food, and so brahmanas are generally considered as soft, kind hearted, stable and intelligent people. If we start consuming meat, slowly we will loose all these good qualities. We will not see these negative changes overnight. It takes time but we will see the changes clearly in the later generations.
Question Four:
There are many noble laureates who are meat eaters. How can we explain that?
Answer by Sugunendra Theertha Swamiji:
Getting a noble prize is not at all a yardstick to measure the peace and purity, stability and concentration of someone's mind. It is known that the suicide rate is high in scientists as well. Actually scientists are more disturbed in their mind. Due to this, they get activated and get involved deeply in something and come out with some new concepts or ideas. For their success, the basic reason is not the peaceful mind, but their disturbed mind. Generally brahmanas who are suppose to have the mental capacity to understand "brahman" (God), need to have a very good concentration power for performing "japa" (mantra chanting) and "tapa" (austerities). They are supposed to be people who are not mentally disturbed. In olden days even if they consumed meat, they used to keep up their mental stability and peace of mind due to their yogic power or "tapas" (severe austerity). But now in the present age of kali-yuga, our mental powers and concentration powers are getting reduced. We are loosing our purity and peace of mind due to various reasons. As such, the sattvic atmosphere and sattvic qualities are reducing because we are not doing enough japa, tapa, etc. So if we start consuming meat we will loose all our good mental qualities very quickly. In kaliyuga, meat is strictly prohibited for brahmanas. It is also sinful for all people, as mentioned in the previous answers.
Question Five:
Is it not a sin to kill silkworms for silk cloth, or to kill deers for making deer skin meditation mats?
Answer by Sugunendra Theertha Swamiji:
The short answer is that it is a sin if we do it for trading purposes. For a detailed answer, first we need to understand what is sin. It is not a substance associated with a particular activity. The same activity can result in either sin or no sin depending upon the purpose, intention and circumstance. For example, killing in general is a sin, but killing a demon or murderer is not a sin. Similarly, in olden days kings used to go for hunting. It was not considered a sin because they used to kill only those wild animals which were troublesome to the sages and the nearby villagers. Similarly if we kill animals to avoid being killed, it is not a sin. As said earlier, every creature in this world is here for doing "sadhana". In this world the priority is for those who are doing greater "sadhana". To accomplish that, if others have to sacrifice their "sadhana", there is no harm in that. For example, assume that there are two students in a house. One is preparing for second grade and the other is preparing for a college medical exam. Though both are preparing for their exams, we consider that the medical exam is more important and give preference to him. If needed, we may ask the other student to sacrifice his preparation, because he will not lose much. Similarly, in this world, the living entity who is doing a higher level of sadhana, gets preference. So for the benefit of the higher sadhana, others performing lesser sadhana may be sacrificed without any sin. If we are preparing silk for God's pooja, then it is not a sin. But if we are preparing silk for decorating ourselves, then it is a sin. So we need to understand what is the purpose of the action, and what is going to be achieved finally.
http://www.indiadivine.org/articles/992/1/Questions-and-Answers-on-the-Importance-of-Vegetarianism/Page1.html
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