20 April 2014

motivational


हमें अच्छे -से-अच्छे अवसर दिए जाते हैं,पर हम अपनी मनः स्थिति के अनुरूप ही उनका चुनाव करते हैं 

एक आदमी कहीं से गुजर रहा था, तभी उसने सड़क के किनारे बंधे हाथियों को देखा, और अचानक रुक गया. उसने देखा कि हाथियों के अगले पैर में एक रस्सी बंधी हुई है, उसे इस बात का बड़ा अचरज हुआ की हाथी जैसे विशालकाय जीव लोहे की जंजीरों की जगह बस एक छोटी सी रस्सी से बंधे हुए हैं!!! ये स्पष्ठ था कि हाथी जब चाहते तब अपने बंधन तोड़ कर कहीं भी जा सकते थे, पर किसी वजह से वो ऐसा नहीं कर रहे थे.
उसने पास खड़े महावत से पूछा कि भला ये हाथी किस प्रकार इतनी शांति से खड़े हैं और भागने का प्रयास नही कर रहे हैं ? तब महावत ने कहा, ” इन हाथियों को छोटे पर से ही इन रस्सियों से बाँधा जाता है, उस समय इनके पास इतनी शक्ति नहीं होती की इस बंधन को तोड़ सकें. बार-बार प्रयास करने पर भी रस्सी ना तोड़ पाने के कारण उन्हें धीरे-धीरे यकीन होता जाता है कि वो इन रस्सियों नहीं तोड़ सकते,और बड़े होने पर भी उनका ये यकीन बना रहता है, इसलिए वो कभी इसे तोड़ने का प्रयास ही नहीं करते.”
आदमी आश्चर्य में पड़ गया कि ये ताकतवर जानवर सिर्फ इसलिए अपना बंधन नहीं तोड़ सकते क्योंकि वो इस बात में यकीन करते हैं!!
इन हाथियों की तरह ही हममें से कितने लोग सिर्फ पहले मिली असफलता के कारण ये मान बैठते हैं कि अब हमसे ये काम हो ही नहीं सकता और अपनी ही बनायीं हुई मानसिक जंजीरों में जकड़े-जकड़े पूरा जीवन गुजार देते हैं.

याद रखिये असफलता जीवन का एक हिस्सा है ,और निरंतर प्रयास करने से ही सफलता मिलती है. यदि आप भी ऐसे किसी बंधन में बंधें हैं जो आपको अपने सपने सच करने से रोक रहा है तो उसे तोड़ डालिए….. आप हाथी नहीं इंसान हैं.


social

सुप्रीम कोर्ट ने किन्नरों को स्त्री और पुरुष से अलग तीसरे लैंगिक समूह की तरह मान्यता देने का फैसला किया है। अदालत ने केंद्र और राज्य सरकारों से कहा है कि वे इस तीसरे लैंगिक समूह को समाज का एक उपेक्षित और पिछड़ा वर्ग मानकर उनकी भलाई के लिए विशेष सुविधाएं मुहैया कराएं। भारत दुनिया में पहला देश है, जहां ऐसा कदम उठाया गया है। अदालत ने यह भी कहा कि ऐसा करने के लिए संविधान या कानूनों में किसी भी तरह केफेरबदल की जरूरत नहीं है, क्योंकि भारतीय संविधान में ही सभी नागरिकों के लिए समान अधिकारों का प्रावधान है। हर किसी को बिना किसी भेदभाव के वे सारे के सारे अधिकार मिलने ही चाहिए, जो संविधान में बताए गए हैं। लैंगिक रुझान की वजह से देश में किसी को भी इन अधिकारों से वंचित नहीं किया जा सकता। दिक्कत यह है कि किन्नरों को समाज में अच्छी नजरों से नहीं देखा जाता, इस सामाजिक दुराग्रह को दूर करने के लिए मानवीय नजरिये की जरूरत है। यह तभी हो सकेगा, जब एक तो उनके प्रति समाज का नजरिया बदले और दूसरे उन्हें समाज में एक उपयोगी भूमिका और सम्मानजनक स्थान मिले।

ऐसे लोगों के प्रति भारतीय समाज का नजरिया इस फैसले से बदल सके, तो बहुत अच्छा होगा। हमारे समाज में किन्नरों के प्रति दोहरा रवैया अपनाया जाता है। एक ओर समाज में खुशी के मौकों पर इनकी मौजूदगी को शुभ माना गया है और इस तरह से इनके लिए रोजी-रोटी का इंतजाम किया गया है, तो दूसरी ओर इनके प्रति ऐसा दुराग्रह है कि ये सामान्य रोजगार या शिक्षा हासिल नहीं कर सकते। ऐसे में, इस वर्ग के लोग गा-बजाकर भीख मांगने या यौन व्यापार की मजबूरी में ही फंसे रहते हैं। ऐतिहासिक रूप से भारत में ऐसे लोग इस तरह सामान्य समाज से बाहर नहीं थे। इतिहास में यह दर्ज है कि कई किन्नर राजाओं की सेना में काम करते थे या छोटे-मोटे शासक भी बने। ब्रिटिश राज के शुरू में यौन शुचिता का जो मॉडल अख्तियार किया गया, उसमें स्त्री और पुरुष के अलावा तमाम दूसरे यौन रुझानों को अपराध का दर्जा मिल गया। इससे ये लोग अलग-थलग पड़ गए। कानूनन अलग दर्जा न मिलने की वजह से ये कई नागरिक अधिकारों से भी वंचित रह गए।

सुप्रीम कोर्ट के फैसले में यह भी कहा गया है कि स्त्री और पुरुष से इतर अगर किसी का यौन रुझान है, तो उसे इस रुझान या पहचान को जगजाहिर करने की स्वतंत्रता होनी चाहिए। अब चाहे वोटर पहचान पत्र हो, ड्राइविंग लाइसेंस हो या पासपोर्ट, इस तीसरे समूह के लोगों को अपने को स्त्री या पुरुष की तरह दर्ज करवाने की बाध्यता नहीं होगी। हालांकि सुप्रीम कोर्ट का यह फैसला कई तरह से ऐतिहासिक है, लेकिन इस तीसरे लैंगिक समूह को बराबरी के लिए अभी एक लंबा रास्ता तय करना होगा। सबसे बड़ी जरूरत इनको शैक्षणिक सुविधाएं मुहैया करवाने की है और यह आसान नहीं है। शिक्षा के बाद आम रोजगारों में इनके लिए जगह बनाना, और फिर देश की मुख्यधारा में इन्हें शामिल करना भी बहुत कठिन काम होगा। लेकिन इसी के बाद ये अपने परंपरागत पेशों से बाहर निकल पाएंगे। उनके प्रति समाज के रवैये और उन्हें लेकर बने उसके नजरिये को बदलना कानूनी अधिकार मिलने से कहीं ज्यादा मुश्किल है। इसके लिए लंबे समय तक सतत प्रयास करने होंगे। अब इस फैसले के बाद देश के कानून निर्माताओं को समलैंगिकता के बारे में धारा 377 पर भी पुनर्विचार करना होगा, क्योंकि ये दोनों मामले जुड़े हुए हैं। सुप्रीम कोर्ट ने एक शुरुआत की है, इसके आगे सरकार और समाज को इस उपेक्षित वर्ग के लिए काम करना होगा।

Problems of higher education in india


Learning as commodity

The fact that hardly any Indian institution of higher education figures in the list of top 200 prepared by The Times Higher Educational Supplement is taken by many as proof of the poverty of higher education in the country. Indeed, on several occasions, President Pranab Mukherjee himself has expressed anguish that very few Indian institutions figure on the THES list.

It would follow from this those institutions which do figure on this list, or are close to doing so, are of good quality, while the crisis in this sector only afflicts those numerous institutions, especially state universities, which are way below the mark. Implicit in the focus on THES and such other lists is the view that within the dualistic structure of Indian higher education, with a few elite institutions at the top and vast numbers of poor institutions below, the former are more or less "all right", while the crisis is confined only to the latter. This view, however, is incorrect.

The essence of the dualistic structure of Indian higher education is that both sides of it are crisisridden, the first group experiencing as much of a crisis as the second. Although their crises are of different kinds, they are interrelated, constituting two sides of the same coin.

The crisis of the second group is obvious and getting worse by the day because of the fiscal squeeze on state governments, which are their main funding agencies. Most of them now make do with guest faculty or temporary faculty instead of permanent faculty, since they lack resources. Guest faculty and temporary faculty are paid a pittance, much lower than permanent faculty, and are deprived of all benefits including pensions. They have little incentive, scarcely any institutional commitment, and often supplement their meagre incomes by giving private tuition, which leaves them little time for keeping up with new intellectual developments in their fields, let alone for any research or deeper academic cogitations.

Some state universities do not even have funds to employ temporary faculty; they simply let the students fend for themselves. I remember once, as a member of a University Grants Commission committee, being told that the economics department of a university that used to be quite prestigious not long ago had only three faculty members to look after the MA, MPhil and PhD programmes. The students had to cover large parts of the syllabus entirely on their own, with literally zero teaching by faculty members.

The students produced by these institutions are also left to fend for themselves on a job market that is anyway characterized by an excess supply of job- seekers. They end up either jobless or with jobs that have nothing to do with their inclinations and with whatever education they manage to acquire. The neo- liberal economic regime has aggravated the crisis of this particular academic universe. Tax concessions to the rich in the name of development, combined with limits on government borrowing enforced through fiscal responsibility legislation, have restricted the total resources available to Central and state governments as a whole; and among them the Centre has claimed the lion's share, forcing cash- strapped state governments to squeeze higher education. To be sure, state governments cannot escape culpability on many counts, but they have operated within fairly tight structural constraints.

These constraints, and their fallout, are visible not just in India but elsewhere in the world as well. Even in the United States there is a tendency to replace permanent faculty with adjunct faculty, which is paid a pittance, in the current atmosphere of austerity. In fact, out of total faculty strength of 1.5 million in the higher- education sector of the US at present, as many as 1 million — those is, almost two- thirds — are adjunct faculty. This, apart from violating the basic principle of "equal pay for equal work", does great damage to the quality of higher education. No doubt, the US scene is not as bleak as the Indian one, but very similar tendencies are at work there as well.

It is hardly surprising that in this situation there has been a mushrooming of private profitmaking institutions offering courses in technical subjects in particular, where the excess supply of jobseekers is less. They charge exorbitant fees, which often force students to take education loans, and to pay back these loans they have to turn themselves into commodities, selling themselves to the buyers who offer the maximum price. Many educationists actually fear that when the demand for job- seekers goes down, the pressure to pay back debt may cause a spate of student suicides, much the same way as we have peasant suicides. This sector, in short, is marked by the shameless commodification of education.

One of the hallmarks of a commodity is that it is no longer a "usevalue", or a thing of utility, for the seller. The products of this privateeducation sector, therefore, are not oriented to deriving creative satisfaction from their work; and correspondingly, they do not derive any creative satisfaction from using the input — namely, education — that goes into producing the commodity which they are themselves. The private education sector converts education into a commodity and takes all creativity out of it, which necessarily makes it second- rate. It is noteworthy that in the US, for instance, institutions of higher education are either state- funded or run by private charitable endowments.

They are not meant to be profit- making entities. Radical criticism no doubt accuses institutions run by private charitable endowments of transgressing into moneymaking — but it remains a case of transgression. Commodification, however, started long before the boom in private institutions. Publicly- funded institutions like the IITs, IIMs, and medical institutes, which were supposed to aid the country's quest for self- reliant development, were from the very beginning major sites of brain drain, with absolutely no restrictions imposed by the government.

The process of commodification, already evident in the brain drain, has now reached a stage where such institutions are ranked according to the initial salaries that their students command when they are offered placements at the interviews arranged by placement cells within them.

Commodification is inimical to creativity. It is also impervious to the social role of education. Not surprisingly, therefore, even within those institutions, which make it to the THES list or are on the verge of doing so, casteism, communalism, inegalitarian views, even contempt or at best unconcern for the poor, and patriarchal attitudes like demanding dowry, all of which, besides being objectionable, are also against the values enshrined in the Constitution on which modern India is founded, are quite prevalent among students. This was not always the case.

Many of these institutions were cradles of egalitarian and radical thought not long ago, despite the trend towards commodification implicit in the brain drain. But neoliberalism has made material selfseeking and self- promotion, to the detriment of any creative quest for self- realization, which necessarily brings in its wake a social concern, a pervasive trait among their students.

S ince education must be concerned with arousing sensitivity to one's surroundings, in particular a social sensitivity (or, to borrow a Gamscian term, since education must produce in societies like ours a group of " organic intellectuals of the people"), one would not be far wrong in saying that in the best of our institutions we are not providing education in the true sense. The readiness with which students in our front- ranking institutions are reportedly succumbing to the so- called " wave" generated by a person widely tipped to be the next prime minister of the country, despite his lack of contrition over, if not actual complicity in, a pogrom against the Muslims in 2002 in the state he led, testifies to a failure in our higher education system.
One cannot of course cavil at students choosing one kind of politics over another, but one has not heard of campuses in our elite institutions having massive debates over support to the person in question, which is worrying. It suggests not just a lack of sensitivity to the feelings of minorities, not just a lack of concern for secular values, but above all a lack of quest for freedom and self- realization; for one cannot be free if one's fellow human beings feel oppressed. It reflects an advanced process of commodification, of both education and its products, even in our front- ranking institutions. At both ends of the spectrum of higher education, therefore, we have a crisis. The dualistic structure exacerbated by the neo- liberal regime prevents proper education in the institutions below because of a lack of resources; it prevents proper education in the institutions above by making it a commodity. The quest for a place in the THES list will further exacerbate this dualism, further commodify education, and further aggravate its crisis.

defence exercise


Indo-French Air exercise ‘Garuda-5'
Jodhpur: India and France would start a ten-day joint Air exercise ‘Garuda-5′, aimed at training the pilots and crew of Indian and French fighters in air superiority operations in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur airbase from June 3, IAF sources said.
Both the Indian Air Force and French Air Force would be engaged in various missions ranging from close combat engagement of large forces, slow mover protection, and protecting and engaging high-value aerial assets in the exercise at the strategic airbase near Indo-Pak border, they said.

The flying consisting of air to air refuelling, basic and advanced fighter interceptions, protection of high-value aerial targets and group combat manoeuvring would be the main focus of the exercise, IAF sources said.

Objective of the exercise is to expose IAF Pilots to French Fighter Tactics and French Pilots to Indian Fighter Tactics, to expose IAF Aircrew to Air to Air Refuelling, Cross-servicing of a common type between ground crews and Understanding basic concepts of each countries fighter operations.

Four Rafale multi-role fighter aircraft and one air Refueler aircraft with more than 100 personnel would form the France delegation.

“The focus of the Air Exercise from June 3 to June 13 is learning from each other’s best practices,” Defence spokesperson Col SD Goswami told PTI today.

ukraine crisis

East vs West: Flashpoint Ukraine

The question many nations of the world are asking is whether the relatively brief period of the post-Cold War era is over. It would perhaps be premature to slot the Ukraine crisis as the beginning of a new version of an old division of the world. But beyond the shrill rhetoric emanating from Moscow, Washington and other world capitals, we are witnessing more than a conflict of interests. What is happening is the West’s denial of the right of the Russian Federation to safeguard its geopolitical interests.

What President Putin is trying to accomplish after annexing the Crimean peninsula following the West’s pre-emptive action in signing on Ukraine into the European Union at the cost of Russia is to ensure that a country of 45 million people in a vast area bordering on its flank is not absorbed into NATO. Moreover, half of this country consists of primary Russian-speakers and have deep cultural, religious and trade links with the Russian Federation.

Understandably, Russia is keen to prevent the complete encirclement of its motherland by a western military organisation. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the weak leaders that took over the fragmented successor state, the US and West European nations trod all over Russia, breaking legions of promises, to co-opt the former constituents of the Soviet Union such as the Baltic states but also countries like Poland. The new attempt was to take in the land mass of Ukraine and Georgia, among others, to tighten the noose.

The Russian Federation sent its military into Georgia to carve out two areas of the country into independent states in 2008, a warning the West chose to ignore. In the long negotiations with former President Viktor Yenukovych, the European Union sought to co-opt Ukraine into the West through the European Union and later NATO. He balked at the prospect of putting his signature at the last minute because he was not prepared to face Russian wrath.

In any event, Moscow made his task easier by giving him a loan of $15-billion and a hefty discount on gas prices, the lifeline of Ukraine’s energy needs. This decision of the former President led to months of demonstration in Kiev’s Maidan, to be ostentatiously cheered by high-level representatives of the United States and West European countries ultimately leading to sniper shootings and an interim agreement among the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland in the presence of a Russian representative calling for a presidential election by the end of the year. But the demonstrators on the Maidan had tasted blood, tore the agreement before it was dry and proclaimed a revolution.

An interim government was formed, the imprisoned former leader Yulia Tymoshenko was released from confinement and addressed the crowds. To save himself from harm, Mr Yanukovych fled to Russia. The European Union quickly signed an agreement with the interim leaders, keeping some provisions in abeyance until the expedited presidential election would be held towards the end of May. All this was par for the course. But subsequent events, including bouts of rebellion in the eastern region the US is charging Russia with instigating, imply that the West will continue the encirclement of the Russian Federation at an unacceptable cost.

There is much talk in Western capitals on how Russia’s actions have re-energised a drooping NATO, how the West European nations must increase their defence budgets, on the permanent stationing of NATO troops on European soil, in addition to the increased air patrolling of NATO nations’ borders. The point of these moves is that the West has not accepted the fact that Moscow is fighting to safeguard its national interests as best it can after losing out to the West following the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, has spelled out his country’s demands. It wants a federal constitution for Ukraine, with the regions given a great measure of autonomy in administering their affairs, a guarantee for the official status of the Russian language and a constitutional provision that it would not enter NATO. In other words, Ukraine will remain non-aligned between the European Union and Russia while dealing and trading with both. Thus far, the US has rejected the idea of a new federal constitution.

Beyond the slated meetings among the US, Russia and other interested parties, the underlying problem is the West’s refusal to give weight to legitimate Russian strategic interests which is something akin to a hostile power signing on Mexico for its own geopolitical interests at Washington’s expense. Perhaps Washington and West European capitals wish to complete the diminution of the Russian Federation in the world. The argument over Russia’s form of government as opposed to the growing ranks of democracies does not wash because the West has frequently supped with the devil and continues to do so for reasons of state and geopolitical interests. The question here is not how evil and dictatorial President Putin is in running his country and its foreign policy but in how Russia conceives Western actions to be damaging to its core interests. At present Russia and the West are talking past, rather than to, each other. True, the West has tacitly accepted the reincorporation of Crimea, in view of its tangled history and it being the base of the important Russian Black Sea Fleet. But it is not prepared to go further in guaranteeing that Moscow’s legitimate concerns on Ukraine be accommodated.

No one wants a new hot war in Europe or anywhere else. The options the West is formulating revolve round increasingly stinging economic sanctions which would make life difficult for the Russian Federation. Such sanctions would come at a cost to West European nations, which receive a substantial portion of their gas and oil supplies from Russia, apart from London being a favourite place for Russian oligarchs to park their billions.

The alternatives seem to be between a new round of economic blood-letting before arriving at a compromise and a decision to seek a fair compromise for safeguarding Ukraine’s integrity while taking into account Moscow’s legitimate interests.

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UKPCS2012 FINAL RESULT SAMVEG IAS DEHRADUN

    Heartfelt congratulations to all my dear student .this was outstanding performance .this was possible due to ...