Source : google photo Synopsis : I have thought about writing and discuss the issue of serious mental health problems that bedevil so many people in our society due to many reasons and look into the problems so many people face and how they try to cope with them.
In our neighborhood lived a family we knew quite well. They had 18 brothers and sisters so we felt quite sorry for the mother who had to bear so many children causing her poor health among other issues. Their father often came to my father for advice on what to do and how to limit his ever-growing family but I do not know what my father said to him. The youngest was a girl of my age who was very pretty and friendly but her sister slightly older than her was no less. They were active during the festivity season of Durga Pooja and in fact the whole family participated in Pooja in one way or the other so we knew them well and visited them. I was happy when the two daughters got married but their parents had to sell their house to pay for the marriage that involved hefty dowry for the daughters so they moved away and lived in another part of the town in a rented place. It was quite unfortunate for them to lose their nice house due to the financial problems so we saw them rarely afterwards but somehow got some news of them once in a while. One news that really made me sad was of the elder girl who got married was mistreated by her husband and in-laws to the extent that she lost her mental balance and became insane. It was so hard for me to imagine that beautiful girl I knew to be totally insane and in a mental asylum somewhere living among other inmates. People who lose their mental balance and sent to the mental asylums are often forgotten by their families and rarely visited which makes the mental patients all the more pitiful. The mental asylums in India are the true horror stories in a country that claims to make so much progress but not in the mental health care as far as I know. These government-run asylums are poorly managed, poorly funded and in bad conditions where the mental patients are kept like animals, some even restrained if they show the tendency of violence so everyone suffers. I still can’t imagine that pretty girl in a horrible place like that even today and feel sad. What mental and physical abuse she suffered in the hands of her husband and in-laws that made her lose her mental balance, we will never know. There is another case that I should write about. She was a child of perhaps 12 years of age and quite lovely who used to come to our house and sit with us while we did our homework. Ma used to feed her because she often looked hungry and wore tattered clothes. We just thought that she was a poor child but nothing was wrong with her until one day we heard that she had hit her teacher with her shoes for some reason prompting the school to expel her. It all went downhill from there. A few years later one day we saw her being restrained by several men in front of our house but she fought them like a tigress and tried to bite them. She had become insane. We never knew why. What made her change from that sweet kid to what she had become? Was she abused in her family and why would anyone abuse a child who only needed love and protection? One day she was found drowned in the river but we do not know to this day what really happened. Was it a suicide or was it a murder? The mental health is a very serious issue that affects so many people and so many families. I know another family in our neighborhood where a very cruel fellow mistreated his daughter who had very high IQ and was brilliant so she became insane and was locked up in a room all the time. We could see her pitiful face through the window grills but could do nothing. This bad person also mistreated his wife so finally the community elders asked this fellow to leave. I still do not know what happened to that brilliant girl who was so abused and why by her own father. Some people lose their mental acuity at a certain age called dementia that precedes Alzheimer’s disease but they are not mentally insane. They become forgetful and childlike in old age. They live with their loved ones who take care of them and always keep an eye on them. US president Ronald Reagan became like that due to the Alzheimer’s disease but he was well looked after. The insanity is a different issue altogether. There are changes that occur in the brain but it is a gradual process and in early stages can be stopped or even reversed by giving them proper care by expert staff trained to do so. Needless to say that such care and treatment in special hospitals can be costly and can be of long duration so it is not for the poor people who have no medical insurance or other means like that girl in our neighborhood so they end up in mental asylums that are like hell. There was a movie made in Bengali long ago on this issue where Suchitra Sen was a nurse who took care of mental patients in a hospital in the hills of Darjeeling. She fell in love with one of her patients and took great care to bring back his mental health but he one day left the hospital after full recovery and never knew that the nurse loved him. She then lost her mental balance and became insane. Suchitra Sen’s acting was superb in that movie that made her a big star but the movie also showed a hidden curse called insanity in our society that most people avoid talking about because it is so painful. I think that the mental health issue is related to the environment in which a person lives so cruel parents or step parents, step siblings or acute poverty can all play a role in developing mental issues in a person who is abused but I think it also depends on the person who is frail and subject to emotional stress coming from the environment where he or she lives that can trigger mental illness and can make it progressively worse. At an early stage such illness can be helped by proper care and expert medical doctor’s advice who are trained to handle such cases. In many other cases, a genetic pre disposition to mental disorder that runs in a family can be passed on to the next generation. I know another case where a boy born to the second wife of a person was so pampered by the parents that he lost his mental balance. He was given the best food and clothes when his siblings were not, showing extreme favor to him but in this case perhaps it had more to do with the mental state of the parents who treated the boy this way and neglected other kids. The boy was just a victim as they usually are. In some countries , people who have such problems in their marriage or families are encouraged to receive counseling from psychiatrist who often can pinpoint the issues and advice how to deal with them so the stress that comes from marital or other related things can be solved through such counseling. But how does one go about getting help in mental cases? Can a mentally disturbed person go to a doctor and ask for help? Can he seek counseling from a psychiatrist who charges a hefty fee for just one hour and says “your time is up. Come back next week”. Should there be a time limit on such help? Most of the mental patients in their early stages cry out for help from anyone who would listen and give plenty of hints to those who would listen and have sympathy for their conditions. Insanity at an early stage should not be confused with a dim-witted person who can’t express himself, has no mental acuity who may also have speech problem like stuttering. Mental health patients suffer damage to their brain either through trauma that may come after a serious injury to the head or a psychological shock that may come from a failed love like in case of that nurse in the movie of Suchitra Sen. Sensitive people suffer more than insensitive ones because they need more love, care and understanding than the tough ones who can handle tough situations without apparent harm to their brain. A severe blow to the head like the kind the boxers suffer can lead to mental health issues like Mohamed Ali who became a vegetable and could not take care of himself. I am not sure if Ali became mentally disturbed or not but I know that he had serious health issues due to his injuries to his head. If the parents have serious problems in raising their children properly and in giving them a nurturing environment to grow in, then often the outcome of such environment can lead to mental health issues in children like that 12-year-old child I wrote early about. Such parents need counseling but who can make them seek such help and who can pay for it? Most people who have problems do not like to admit that they have one so do not seek help. But a child who is innocent will try to reach out to people who will or can help him. I had a roommate in California who was lonely and took drugs that I did not know about. He liked to join me for walks in the night when I talked to him about many things. Apparently no one paid any attention to him and talked to him this way so he followed me around like a puppy.
The poor chap finally dropped out of college and disappeared for good but here was a case where someone could have helped him get off the drugs and get some sense into his troubled head so that he could finish his college education. I do not know if he developed mental issues later that were degenerative in nature but he was crying out for help silently in his own way and did not get it. You hear frequently in the news that someone has killed his parents or siblings in a fit of rage and shows no remorse in doing so. Can a person be so mentally disturbed that he can take such drastic measures and not feel anything? Could it be due to mental illness? Could mental apathy and a lack of conscience be considered a precursor to mental illness later on? We now live in a state of stress everywhere. We live in polluted, over crowded cities elbow to elbow with very little room for a free space or park or garden. People who live in apartments like pigeons in pigeon holes are stressed because living in close proximity with others can cause severe stress. Then there are job related stresses people suffer from. Others live a stressful life because of daily commute in crowded trains to their work place like in Japan. People who constantly feel the pressure of living this way are stressed so they often act irrationally resulting in road rage accidents or even shootings. People here in the Philippines have shot dead others in a simple parking dispute or over a toothpick but such behavior is a symptom of a wider malaise, a deeper psychological problem some people have in their life. The modern living has its downside because living under constant stress has its consequences that in some people causes detrimental changes in their brains that makes them do things they regret doing during a moment of temporary insanity but can it lead to more serious problems down the road? I have brought up many issues here related to mental health but I do not know the answers to them in a meaningful way. What I do know is that paying attention to someone who is asking for help early on is a positive step anyone can and should take. The government should pay more attention to those who suffer mental health problems and give more resources to the hospitals and mental asylums but the government can only do so much. A more proactive approach should always start with the family where a person can get support and help in the form of loving care and a nurturing environment. Like all diseases, mental health is a degenerative process that can be arrested if given help at the right time.
Source : Google photo of the Golden temple in Amritsar, India Synopsis : I usually write about social issues so I thought what could be more social than food in India where people really go out to enjoy food in other's company which is a great social event. India is known for its great food but only very few who have visited have learned its rich diversity in food and its very rich culinary history where various recipes from various parts of the world have been blended to create something unique to each region.
You will find dazzling varieties of food with the local twist in each part of the great country called India , some vegetarian and others non vegetarian that will surprise you and your taste buds in a way that will make you feel that you are literally in heaven. That is why I named this blog The heavenly foods of India that will show you foods from Imphal to Chennai and Bengaluru in the south. The videos are self explanatory so do not need my comments. I have tasted foods in many countries but none compare to the taste and quality of Indian food some of which are displayed in the following videos. It is not for nothing that India is called the country of spices but what is amazing is how they use the spices to bring out so unique taste in food that only Indians know how. But I start the blog with not food but the visit to Amritsar Golden temple and the Sikh religion that makes Amritsar the holiest city of their very unique religion. In the later part of the video the reporter will also show you a very unique feature of Sikh religion that welcomes anyone irrespective of their religion, caste, color, race or ethnicity to their temple and feeds everyone who so wishes all day , every day of the year. They never stop. You will see them feeding Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Jews and the Sikhs all together because they welcome all. This is a very unique feature of their faith. Other faiths have a lot to learn from them about tolerance of other faiths. Most people outside India do not know much about the Sikh religion and how it originated hundreds of years ago there , what are its main features and why the Sikhs wear turban and do not shave their facial hair. Some Sikhs living in the United States have been mistakenly identified as Muslims and have been attacked by the ignorant people who have never heard about their great religion. Here in the Philippines the Sikhs are misunderstood and stereo typed as Indians . They are Indians but they are unlike any other people in India where all the religions of the world thrive and co exist peacefully although there have been some communal tensions due to some quarrels and some misunderstanding or fanatical zeal that I will write about here. In summary, some Sikh militant activists rallied to separate from India and form their own country, Khalistan and took refuge in the Golden Temple of Amritsar, from where they tried to mobilize all Sikhs to their cause through an armed revolt. The Indian army encircled the temple and, after a long battle, killed all the militants but the temple was also damaged by the fighting. This undermined the feeling of some Sikhs in the armed forces who tried to reach Amritsar to provide military assistance to the rebels, but were arrested. The Sikhs who were the bodyguards of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi murdered her in New Delhi because she had ordered the attack on their temple in Amritsar. Later, the temple was repaired thoroughly. Birth of Sikhism in India: (source: Wikipedia) Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world, with about 20 to 30 million Sikhs in the world. There are about 500,000 Sikhs each in the United States and Great Britain. Here are 5 things to know about faith. The sacred book of Sikhs, "Guru Granth Sahib," teaches that there is one God, that men and women are fundamentally good and equal before God, that everyone has direct access to God. and that the way to get closer to God is to serve our fellow men. Sikh religion was founded in 1469 by Guru Nanak in the Punjab region of India. Guru Nanak and his nine successors shaped the fundamental beliefs of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sikhism has evolved in times of religious persecution. Two of the Sikh gurus - Guru Arjan (1563-1605) and Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621-1675) - were tortured and executed by the Mughal rulers after refusing to convert to Islam. The persecution of the Sikhs triggered the founding of the Khalsa as an order to protect freedom of conscience and religion, endowed with the qualities of a "Sant-Sipāhī" - a holy soldier. The Khalsa was founded by the last Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh. All Sikhs must believe in five K (Kirpan, Kachcha, Kesh, Kara and Kanghi), which means that they must always wear a dagger or a small knife (Kirpan), an undergarment called kachcha, should not cut hair or shave (Kesh), wear a steel or silver bracelet (Kara) and hold a comb in the hair (Kanghi). They are forbidden to drink alcohol, cut their hair, have sex with Muslims, commit adultery, eat halal meat and have priests. The Muslims who invaded India several centuries ago brought with them the ideology that Hindus must accept Islam, either by coercion or by force, so that they massacred the population en masse when they refused to convert to Islam. A particular group of Hindus who were so persecuted and threatened with death fought back and swore never to give up their faith, so they became armed and protected themselves. They lived a harsh life so they grew their hair and beard and learned martial art to protect themselves and their women laying the foundation of a new faith called Sikhhism and built a magnificent temple in Amritsar that they covered entirely with gold. This temple keeps the original and sacred scripture called Guru Granth sahib that is read everyday throughout the year. This recitation has not stopped since the temple was built centuries ago. It is the sacred duty of all Sikhs to visit the temple at least once in their lifetime no matter where in the world they live. Photography is not allowed inside the temple so you can't see the splendor and breathtaking view from inside but a visit to the grounds in itself is awe inspiring as the video will show you. The Sikhs carry Hindu names as a testament to the fact that they were Hindus but with a twist. They spell their names slightly differently from Hindus to differentiate themselves from the rest so Jitendra becomes Jatinder, Surendra becomes Surinder etc. Sikhs are wonderful people. They are fierce fighters in the defense forces of India. They are very hard working and honest and they are very intelligent and have attained very high posts in the government. One became the President of India and another became the most decorated chief of the Indian Air Force. They have also spread out through out the world and can be found in many countries where they have settled down. So I hope you will learn something about the great Sikh people by watching this video. 1. The Golden temple in Amritsar, Punjab, India
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n4oOiU1BC8
2. Food in Chennai , South India
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0U7aUbTqrk
3. Food in Bengaluru in Karnataka, South India
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY9v6JCq6AM
4. Food in Imphal in North Eastern State Manipur, India.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP272JO8FgA
Note: Imphal is the capital of Manipur State in northeastern India. Netaji Bose and his army fought the British and raised the Indian flag for the first time after his victory there but did not succeed in liberating the whole of India.The inhabitants of this region seem different from the rest of the Indians because of their ethnic origin in the mountain tribes of Myanmar and southern China. Their food is also different from other spicy dishes in the country, but it is delicious.
Synopsis : This blog highlights the problem of mis communication today that is exacerbated by the new technology of cell phones and the media. The need to communicate through abbreviation of words and a mixture of two or more languages has had significant influence on how people communicate or mis communicate.
Once in my class of communication in California our professor said that he wanted to have an experiment to prove the importance of communication in our daily life. So he asked one student to come forward and gave him a written page that had a short story he had written and told him to memorize it and tell the story to the next student who in his or her turn will say it to the next student. Many students were from other countries. We all waited to hear the last student who had just heard the story so he was now asked to repeat the story in front of the class. It was hilarious because what he said was a far cry from the original so the whole class broke up in laughter. The professor said that this is a great problem of communication because each time a story is retold, it changes a bit until almost nothing remains of the original in the end. Why and how much the story changes a bit every time depends upon the comprehension of the story teller. The point was well made because we face this situation in our daily life and were eager to learn the solution to the problem of miscommunication. It happens very frequently between people ( but not limited to it ) whose mother tongue is not English so a great many factors come to play in deciphering what someone says in English or a language that is not their mother tongue. So the problem of miscommunication is a worldwide phenomenon that can create numerous problems between people. I would like to explore various reasons why people mis communicate and suggest that it has something to do with the culture, the deficiency of the mother tongue that often does not have equivalent words of English, the rules of grammar, certain English alphabets that do not exist in other languages and a lack of comprehension of certain words in English. In the movie King and I , the Thai queen addressed the female British teacher of her children as Sir because as she explained “ You are scientific”. In her culture the scientific people must be called Sir. Her son also had problem with the word snow and claimed that there is no such thing as snow because he had never seen it. When the missionaries tried to explain to the natives in the Amazon forest how Jesus died, they had a terrible time describing to them what a cross was so they substituted it with a tree that the natives understood but laughed saying it is a terrible way to die in a tree and suggested other better places. In their primitive language there was no word for cross. I came across such problems in Vietnam where they have no word for ice in their language so they say nuoc da meaning stone water or water that turns stone like that is a close approximation of the word ice. They also do not have a word for helicopter so they say a flying machine that goes up and down which is a literal description of a helicopter. Leave it to the ingenious Vietnamese to come up with words even if they have to invent it through approximation. In some languages like Tagalog, there is no past tense so they have issues with past as well as future tense that may cause a lot of misunderstanding when they try to understand English. Their grammar, their composition of a sentence and their conjugation pronunciations all are very different from other languages that complicate the matter of understanding so they resort to assumptions when they fail to understand something. This can result in varying degree of miscommunication between an English speaker and themselves. They also have problems of comprehension when they speak in Tagalog or Tagalish to each other because they are quick to assume something. Now let me write about the effect of culture that plays a very important role in the communication process as I will illustrate here. A fellow was once invited for dinner by a Bolivian fellow with these words.” Sir, we will have dinner at your house tomorrow “ so the gentleman was a bit surprised but prepared dinner at his house and waited in vain. The Bolivian gentleman also prepared dinner at his house in vain creating great confusion. The next day they met again and asked why there was this gaffe so the Bolivian gentleman explained that in their culture they say that my house is your house as a sign of welcome which was totally misunderstood by the European gentleman. I have been subjected to such gaffe myself except that an American totally forgot that he had invited us for lunch that we had accepted so it was not funny and my sweet wife was very annoyed. So cultural insensitivity or a misunderstanding of a foreign culture can create great problems in communication even if both parties are fluent in English. I am always amused at how two people communicate in their own language and end up mis communicating face to face or through text messaging that is now the vogue. There is now an epidemic of fake news that spreads like wildfire through the social media because of this problem of miscommunication. When a person repeats to someone something he got from a third hand source then you can imagine the problem it creates. My professor in California was right when he proved that people repeat something always after making some changes on their own that creates fake news. I notice this problem here in the Philippines where almost all the maids have cell phones and buy a load worth 25 pesos that allows them to chat or text without limit the whole day so they are prime suspects in spreading fake news. Recently they spread the news that so and so had died because they had it from a third source who got her information all wrong. This causes a lot of consternation because spreading fake news can create problems for some. When someone speaks or sends text messages whole day to use up her 25 pesos worth of load, you can be sure that some mischief is made. I blame the advent of cheap cellular phones that are changing the way most people now communicate and the phone companies that sell the 25 pesos load to let people chatter whole day without limit. The maids do not realize that they are spending a great deal of their money per month on useless chatter that spreads fake news. The phone companies are smart and make a great deal of money from these poorly paid maids among others this way because they have figured out long ago that selling a costly monthly plan is an uphill struggle for them but 25 pesos sounds cheap. The simple arithmetic has never been the strong point of poor people. It is the same way the soap companies make a great deal of money by selling 5 pesos sachet of soap or shampoo but have a hard time selling a shampoo bottle for 350 pesos although it is cheaper to buy a bottle that poor people do not understand. They are also strongly influenced by the barrio culture where everyone will borrow the big shampoo bottle if the words get around so they buy the sachet. The communication is strongly influenced by the culture. In a culture where the nuances of a language like English are not understood, misunderstanding occurs. English is a very rich language because there are more than one way to say the same thing and has borrowed heavily from other languages to enrich itself. It also continuously invents new words, idioms and new ways to make the communication understood. The technology based words that have been invented have become main stream and more are being added each year. I tried telling a joke to someone here once that totally fell flat on a local who did not get it and was confused. It went something like this: A fellow approached a girl for a dance who declined so he said : Oh! I am sorry I did not see your wooden leg. This is pure English sarcasm that the local did not understand and asked me if really the girl had wooden leg. He failed to get the joke. So the effective communication between two people depends a great deal on the understanding of the nuances, the context, the cultural background and the spoken or written words. A rich vocabulary does not hurt either. The cell phone more than anything else has made people lazy so they abbreviate practically any word that can be abbreviated so Please is pls, Oh my God is OMG, Holy cow is HC, See you later is c u lter, Thanks is tks, Thank you is TY , at the moment is ATM, laughing out loud is LOL etc. The spelling ability of people deteriorates rapidly and in proportion to the rise of cell phone usage. If we go back to pre-cell phone days we find that people communicated better in spoken and written English because the emphasis was given on good grammar, good spelling ability, good writing skills and good oratory skills in schools. The penmanship is another matter that needs mention here. We were taught how to write legibly in high school using fountain pen but the advent of cheap ball point pens has wreaked havoc on penmanship of kids. I thought that only the medical doctors are born with ball point pens in their hand. In our school days we all used fountain pens although they leaked in our pockets making Ma very frustrated. I was so surprised that the kids are not taught dictation and conjugation in their grade schools here that we had to learn as the building block to learn to speak English properly. So it is not the fault of the students but the teachers who just did not have the skills to teach English the way it should have been taught. You mix that with poor spelling ability and the need to abbreviate everything plus poor grammatical skills and you have a person who cannot make himself understood to anyone. Once I was asked to attend a court hearing here although I was not a litigant myself and was surprised that the court clerk who was taking dictation kept on interrupting and asking for spellings. To make the matter worse, the witness was asked the questions in English to which he replied in Tagalog that had to be translated back making a mockery of the court. The idiot clerk did not help the matter either. So I think that the good communication skill depends upon the mastery of a language that a child learns as his mother tongue and gradually builds up his vocabulary and ways of expression as he grows up but learning only from his mother or people around him how to speak is not enough. He grows up speaking vulgar language if that is what he hears all the time so a school can help him learn to speak his mother tongue better and provide him with books to increase his vocabulary and literary skills. Some kids take English as a major in college who are interested in a career of journalism later. Good writers and orators are not born that way but are trained by professionals who insist on basic fluency to build on later. People who can’t write a decent resume don’t get called for job interviews and people who can’t express themselves well during the interview don’t get hired so we can all understand how important it is to learn to communicate in our everyday life. I found that one way to increase the vocabulary is to read the classics and develop the habit of reading. It is not a costly habit because there are many free libraries where you can borrow books from. If you want to imitate pure British accent and learn to speak like them, then watch the BBC news and their programs everyday. Read my blog Forming habits . Now the trend worldwide is to speak in a mixture of two or more languages so we hear Tagalish, Hinglish, Chinglish etc. that sounds truly awful but expedient. But when such languages get into classroom then you get used to it and later speak only that way. I do not blame the kids but I do blame the environment in which he grows up that dictates his speaking, reading and writing skills. How can a kid learn good English if his parents only speak Tagalish? How does he learn English if the media like TV and movies only use Tagalish? How does he learn good English if his college professors also speak Tagalish? When a mixed language becomes mainstream, it can only impede a person to learn a language well if it is not his mother tongue, especially if it is not his mother tongue. I have always stressed the need for a fluent home language that both parents speak so a child learns from them. It is no secret that rural children grow up speaking fluent Tagalog because their parents do not speak anything else but the kids growing up in mixed language home end up like most kids today who can’t speak a straight language in English or Tagalog or any other language. The world of employment is cruel and does not forgive those who do not develop their speaking, reading and writing skills in college but those who do have a clear advantage over them. The secret to good communication is no secret at all because it all depends upon how well you speak any language and how well you understand it. If you can succeed in making anyone understand you 100%, you have done well. Take a hint from Adolf Hitler. He was a great orator and communicator.
Why some people remain single? Source : Google photo Synopsis :Men and women remain single for many reasons. Some of the reasons are discussed in the blog here that have to do with the rules of the societies where they live, others depend on economic and eligibility factors. Here the blog differentiates between the forced celibacy and the voluntary one, the later depending on religious aspirations of a person so both are looked at.
This topic remained at the back of my mind for quite some time because I did not get around writing about it for one reason or other until now. When I saw hundreds of thousands of ascetics converging at Prayagraj for the Ardha Kumbha Mela this week in India, it made me think of the reasons why some people remain single and choose a life that is so different from the average people. We can right away see two types of people who remain unmarried. Those who choose to be and those who do not. In the first category are the religious people that I will discuss here. In India and elsewhere there are those men and women who decide at some point that they should choose the life of ascetics and renounce everything in life because they want to devote the rest of their life to spirituality and become free of the chains of mundane life that bind most people. They become what Hindus call sadhus or “good people” who have no family, no permanent friends, no home, no income to sustain them, no desire for material things and who embrace a life of wandering ascetics. They eat only when someone gives them some food, they sleep under the tree or anywhere they find shelter and they wear saffron clothes. They do not cut their hair or beard, do not wear shoes and do not live among people anywhere. It is a hard life they choose of their own volition because they feel a higher calling that makes them live the life they do. Some give up everything including the clothes so they wander around completely naked and are called Naga sadhus. Some women also take the life of wandering sadhus. They congregate in holy places like Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) during certain religious festivals like Kumbha Mela that is held every 12 years, and then they vanish as suddenly as they appear. No one knows where most of them live and how they live but it is known that some live in monasteries or caves in the mountains while others live in camps called Akharas in Hindi meaning a place where they are fed and cared for by people who organize and pay for such camps. Then there are monks who dedicate their life to serve the poor and join monasteries that run orphanages, schools, hospitals and old age homes for the poor and destitute. They also give up every comfort of life and assume a monastic name and cut all ties with their previous lives and relatives. The Rama Krishna Mission monks are known for their dedication and services but there are many other such monasteries for men and women in India such people join and live the life of monks or sadhus. The convent of Mother Theresa in Kolkata is well known for their charity work for the very poor people. The higher call of spirituality that some respond to is an age old practice in all religions so we see numerous monasteries in Europe that are very secluded and difficult to reach because the monks who live there do not want to mix with the people and prefer their self-imposed seclusion from the world. They grow their own food and make their own simple clothes and everything they need so they can spend all their life to prayers and spirituality. You will find such secluded monasteries in the high mountains or deep in some desert oasis that are very hard to reach. These monks keep the tradition of keeping ancient knowledge alive through meticulous translations and record keeping of ancient texts like the Gospels that have come to light in Egypt or elsewhere like the Qumran or Dead Sea scrolls. The Buddhist monks have kept their traditions of calligraphy, ancient knowledge of science and mathematics and even martial arts in very secluded monasteries where they live the life of spirituality unstained by the contact of the common people. The Muslim too have their ascetics called the Sufi saints who wander as sadhus who have renounced the world willingly and are revered by the people who seek their blessings so we see in all the religions , people who voluntarily choose the life of spirituality but it is a hard life and not for everybody. I now come to the common people like you and me in the second category who want to live the life in a normal way meaning we get some education, get an employment somewhere and marry someday to raise a family, then hope to die in retirement someday somewhere surrounded by people we know and love. Our society is composed of such common people that make normal life possible in any country. We the people grow food for everybody, run the economy and create businesses that employ others, man the machines that run the factories and fight for the safekeeping of freedom of our country and the society. We choose our government through votes and change the government also through votes where democracy is practiced. Our lives are as different from the wandering sadhus or monks or Sufi sadhus as possible yet many of us are somewhat spiritual although in no way we can be equated with the ascetics who devote their whole life to spirituality and denounce everything that we the mortals can’t denounce. It is the aspiration of the common people to find someone to marry and raise the family just like the animals do in order to procreate and continue the life generation after generation. But the animals do not worry about marriage and social customs that bind us and procreate when the need arises. We on the other hand have created the rules which we expect all the members of our society to obey and live by in order to maintain a credible and moral society based on certain tenets of religion that includes marriage. So marriage is nothing but a societal approval of sorts that permits the man and woman to live together and raise the family meaning procreate the off springs. The rules of marriage and numerous rituals vary from society to society and from one religion to the next but they do exist to emphasize the need for such rules and rituals to maintain the traditions of people. In primitive societies where people also procreate, they may have simpler rules based on their necessities and resources that may be very limited but nevertheless important. They all feel the need for a life partner and stick together through good as well as bad times. Now I am finally coming to the point of this blog where I want to discuss why some people remain single so the previous part was necessary to create the background and a point of reference for this topic. Most common people do not want to remain single by choice because everyone seeks a partner. It may be due to the biological necessity of both men and women to procreate to continue the life to the next generation but not always. For some people they seek a partner on platonic terms so that they can be together in old age looking after each other although many married people at a certain age move on to the platonic part due to age or other reasons. Now it seems to me that women depend more on their family meaning parents and relatives to look for a suitable mate in traditional societies where marriages are arranged between two families by the parents. Men also depend on their parents to find suitable mates for them in such cases so the traditional society as a whole discourages boyfriend girlfriend relationships. This is what I call the tribal society where a lot of restrictions are put on women and not much on men to maintain the tribal laws the violation of which by anyone is severely punished in some societies through honor killings that we read about frequently in Pakistan and other very strict tribal societies. Hindus are not as strict as the Muslims when it comes to tribal laws but they too try to maintain the status quo as much as possible although not going to the extreme of honor killings. Why people resort to honor killings and why mostly women are blamed for bringing dishonor to their families through their act of elopement or having sex outside marriage and not men is perhaps a subject of a future blog. In some countries like China there are more eligible men than women due to their one child policy so many men remain unmarried due to this shortage while in other countries the reverse may be true like here in the Philippines. One word that stands out among others is the status of eligibility that defines who is marriageable and who is not in traditional societies like in China or India. This means the groom must be handsome, tall if possible with good education and a stable and good job but it is the earning capacity that is more emphasized than any other because it determines how the groom will take care of his wife and the future progeny. Now in the era of rise of feminism in some parts of the world, the women take the leading role and decide by themselves who they will marry and often disregard the earning capacity of their partners if they are earning a good salary but the male dominated traditional societies reject such trends out of hand. There it is the role of the man to provide for the family and not the wife. When I discuss the eligibility aspect of any man or woman for marriage, I am tempted to mention the case of the Philippines because here it seems to me that more women go to college and get good jobs later than men so many remain unmarried because they cannot find their match. A college graduate who earns a good salary wishes to find a man with similar or better standing although this rule does not apply to men. An educated man who has a good job may marry a woman who is less educated and may be limited to the role of a housewife because in the man’s world, women take a second subservient role. Some women even give up their career and prefer being a perfect housewife and a loving parent. I know because I married one. A fellow in our neighborhood was teased relentlessly by his companions when his father in law built a nice house for his daughter because it is the job of the man to build a house for his wife and not his father in law. So their marriage ended in separation because divorce is not allowed under the law here. If we look at the situation in India, we find that many beautiful and eligible women who are college educated and have jobs can’t get married due to the exorbitant demands of dowry from the groom’s parents. In poor families with many daughters, a father is hard pressed to come up with the suitable dowry so many girls remain unmarried. They are also not allowed to have boyfriends. In more open societies where men and women choose their mates , the question of eligibility always looms in the background although some women may prefer to overlook them because they want to get married no matter what resulting in many problems later on. The lower self-esteem of the man who is less educated and earns less than his wife can lead to marital troubles down the road that may cause divorce or separation. So the eligibility in terms of education and earning ability does matter in any society open or closed ones. Now this issue of self-esteem is very important in any marriage. I think another reason among many others is the dominance factor in men and women. No one really wants to be dominated by another person in a marriage but more so a man than a woman so you will find many female school teachers or college teachers who remain unmarried because they tend to portray the image of dominance that men shy away from. I know a woman who is now over 50 years of age and a manager of an Insurance firm that earns her a handsome salary remained unmarried because she is dominant, dark and not very good looking although she is a wonderful person once you get to know her. But another dark and not so good looking woman got marriage proposal once the potential groom found out that she is a citizen of Australia and will mean a quick citizenship for him in the Promised Land. Here the citizenship factor overrode the dark skin color and ugliness of the woman so they got married and live in the Promised Land hopefully happily ever after. Now I come to the part where many women over a certain age who have either left their partners because of divorce or legal separation find themselves in the market for a second chance. Some of them can be seen in bars drinking and keeping an eye on who walks in. If a handsome gent comes in and sits down in a corner by himself nursing a drink, the women ask the bartender to send the gent the drink of his choice and pick up the tab. This is not a made up scenario because you will see this sort of thing in the movies all the time that reflect the reality of the modern society in some countries. If the gentleman accepts the drink from the woman, she then winks and invites him to join her at her table or will boldly sit down at his table. The rest does not need to be elaborated here because it can go either way. Many women have learned to their dismay that the handsome gentleman is not a gentleman at all but a real life monster that beats women and rapes them and may have criminal records yards long. Another scenario is the dance clubs where such men and women congregate to dance and drink with strangers with a streak of abandon and recklessness that may end up tragically for some of them. So there is no easy answer to the question of forced celibacy in common people. Different cultures offer different remedies but none of them are perfect as I mentioned earlier. In the matter of heart, women and men find themselves guided by other factors that may not be practical or even approved by the society so they take their chances and later find that they made a mistake. We are after all human so liable to make mistakes .The important point is to learn from our mistakes and move on. Being unmarried is not the end of life. In fact it can be quite exhilarating with a sense of freedom that is denied in a home and hearth type of situation. What is more important is the purpose in your life and your commitment to it. The rest does not matter.
Source : Google photo of rice fields in Sapa, Vietnam Synopsis :Of all types of occupations, I think farming is the most difficult and laborious one. Most people in this world who live in towns and cities and are not farmers have no idea what it takes to grow food that they buy at the supermarket. They have never been to a farming community to see for themselves how hard the farmers work and under what conditions. Many have never seen a rice or wheat plant.
Once someone told me that she asked a simple question to her friends who were all Americans . The question was How many teats a cow has. Some one said five, some said three and others said two but no one got it right because they had never been to a farm and seen a cow up close. This is not an isolated case. An American woman who had never seen a rice plant asked me how we got the green rice that we prepared for her and did the green rice come directly from the plant? We were amused at her ignorance and explained that we used a food color to make it green. We take our food for granted and never know what it takes to produce them because people who never do any physical work except typing using a key board in an air conditioned office do not have any idea of the sheer work required to grow the food that we then buy at a local store so today I wanted to write something about the farmers of this world who feed us but are not given due credit or understanding of their hard life. Farming of any sort is hard work but rice farming takes the cake when it comes to sheer back breaking hard work. The farmer has to first prepare the land meaning he has to plow the field full of water and level the paddies with a plank or a leveler. Then he has to get up at 4 or 5 am and pull the seedlings from the seedbed and tie them in bundles and distribute the bundles throughout his fields which may contain several paddies.
Source : Google photo of rice seedlings transported to fields Then comes the hardest part of all. The planting has to be done manually so hundreds of men , women and even youngsters start planting the seedlings one at a time in straight rows by bending from waist down in thick mud of the paddy that may be anything but clean. It may have sharp objects in the mud, leeches or worms but they must keep at it the whole day under the scorching heat of the tropics with only short breaks for lunch. At the end of their day their whole body aches from head to toe due to this hard work that they must repeat until all the fields are thus planted. There are mechanical rice planters used in some countries but most of the poor rice farmers can't afford them so it is still done manually. Then comes weeding by pushing a weeder between the rows of plants hour after hour, day after day and week after week until the job gets done. Then comes spraying the entire field to protect the plants from insect pests . This means carrying a heavy knap sack sprayer and walking through mud under the sun. Then comes the harvest after 120 days or so that is also a back breaking job because the plants have to be harvested by hand and carried to a thresher to separate the grains from the plant. If you have never done such work in your life then you should know that it is a dirty job that will make you very itchy all over your body. I know because I have done such work myself when I was doing my field research here in the Philippines and Vietnam. Source : Google photo of rice harvesting in Asia So don't be fooled by the emerald sea of rice paddies planted so neatly and the golden mature fields that you will see from your car if you happen to pass through the rural areas. It takes a great deal of hard work to produce the grains you call rice and no they are not green from the plants. My topic today is farming and the capitalistic system in many countries where small farmers are disappearing giving way to large corporations that operate millions of hectares of fertile land and use massive farm machineries that do the land preparation , planting, weeding and all other work to grow the crops and harvest . There you will see many air conditioned machines operated by a few that cover a lot of ground in a single day. Only large corporations have a lot of money to buy the large machines that do the job so efficiently leaving the small farmers to their own resources that are so limited. I will now tell you how the capitalistic system pushes out small farmers in favor of large corporations that take over the production of food on a large scale. In the United States less than 3 percent of the total population of the country is engaged in farming hence the ignorance of the 97% people who say cows have 3 teats or less. But there was a time when this was not so. May be one hundred years ago there were many small farmers but they did not have the resources the large companies have so they were gradually forced out. This is happening in many countries where the mechanization is replacing manual labor in the fields even in some rice growing regions. One rich businessman started to farm in Brazil investing billions of dollars and thought that complete mechanization of rice crop will give him great profit but he was wrong. His expensive machines bogged down and rusted in the deep mud of the rice paddies so after suffering great loss, the whole project was abandoned. Here is a story that is quite interesting so I will mention it here. There was a prosperous farmer somewhere in the United States who had over 600 acres ( they still use acres there) that he cultivated well and was known as a progressive farmer but one day he died leaving his widow and the house and a lot of farm related debt. The poor widow did not know a thing about farming so the fields remained fallow generating no income for her. So she failed to pay her taxes that prompted the government to take away a part of her land as recompense every year until nothing was left of once prosperous farm. When she was left with nothing but only the house she lived in, they threatened to take that as well and put her on the street so a plea was made to the governor to save her and give her the reprieve she so badly needed so that was granted. I wonder what would have happened if she was white but that is another issue altogether. The capitalist system is based on making money at any cost so it disregards the plight of small farmers and leaves them to fend for themselves which they find hard to do but the tax collectors are relentless as I mentioned about the black widow above so they sell their land and try to find other jobs. This is easier said than done because jobs are scarce for poorly educated farmers who have no other skills than farming. The small scale dairy farmers or those who raise chickens or hogs face the same problems as other small farmers and are often subject to exploitations by the rich corporations that ask them to raise chickens or hogs for them and pay them a low price in return to maximise their profit margins. Ask any chicken farmer in Arkansas how they fare and they will tell you their sad stories of exploitation. These rich corporations then employ immigrant women from the poor communities and pay them minimum wages to de feather the chicken and gut them whole day. Gutting a chicken is a very hard job that these poor women do for low wages and can't complain if they get nerve damage and swollen and very painful hands. When women can't work any more or slow down, they are summarily fired. I see the same kind of exploitation here in the Philippines where the rice farmers borrow the money from the rich Chinese mill owners to buy the seeds and fertilizer etc. to grow their crop which they are required to sell to the Mill owner who deducts all the loans plus the interest leaving the farmer as poor as before so the cycle of exploitation continues year after year with no improvement in the life of a poor farmer. I was shocked when the beautiful cotton the Malian farmers grew at a great cost and very hard labor was bought by the Cotton ginning mills at a low price. They did the same thing and deducted all the loans given to farmers plus interest and said that the cotton was of poor quality and dirty etc. so this sort of exploitation goes on everywhere. I had earlier written a blog on how the rich landlords in some part of India exploited the poor share croppers that led to a revolt and a farmer called Man Singh emerged as the Robin Hood to save the farmers from abuse.But guess what happened to Man Singh? One day he was riddled with 64 bullets by the police who hunted him day and night. In India many farmers who are heavily indebted to the money lenders commit suicide out of desperation so now some politicians find it convenient to pass the farm bill that forgives the debt or reduces it because they want farm votes. They should have gone after the moneylenders who use usury to make money and put them in jail but they are rich so nothing happens to them. I still favor a government that does not tax poor farmers and makes farm loans available to them. This is the approach the Government of India has taken which brings a great relief to farmers who number in hundreds of millions. The new government there is building farm to market roads, bringing electricity to most of the villages, giving them subsidy for diesel fuel to run their pumps for irrigation, buying the farm products at an assured rate that is then distributed to all Indians at a subsidized rate. But subsidy at such a grand scale costs billions of dollars in India that has to come from other sources of revenue. Poor countries that can't afford subsidies leave the poor farmers to the loan sharks and unscrupulous money lenders. The farmers are the salt of this earth. They grow the food we eat everyday. Without them the country will starve or will have to import food from somewhere else so the farmers need all the help they can get. Any system that exploits the farmer puts food production in danger. Any country that favors rich corporations to manage agriculture hurts the poor farmers who are not trained for any other job. In countries where more than half the population is engaged in small scale farming face serious challenges to improve the lot of such farmers. That is where the exploitation of farmers is also rife. The collective farms of the former Soviet Union was a failure because the farmers did not own the land so had no incentive to produce anything. They were paid poor wages but the collective farms were very inefficient and not very productive so it failed. The farmers must own their land to have the incentive to produce anything. The countries that have succeeded in implementing an effective land reform program like in Cuba have become self sufficient in food production. As a country develops and where infrastructures are built, it helps the farming community in many ways that helps them grow more food that they can sell to buyers easily when the farm to market roads are built. Eventually the farming population in many countries will decline leading to more mechanization but it should not happen at the cost of making them destitute. That is the flaw in the capitalistic system. If all the hard work to grow food is taken over my machines someday then it can only be a good thing but only if the farmers are given alternative to make a decent living in other jobs. That can only come from education and training . This is happening to some communities where the youngsters are not interested in farming so they try to get some education and skills that make them employable in other jobs. Planting rice is a back breaking job. I know because I have done it.
