Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Capitalism without discontentment is like Christianity without hell, if I may paraphrase Frank Borman. Discontentment is an integral part of the capitalist system because the system is stuck at the lowest levels of human aspirations. Psychologist Abraham Maslow arranged human aspirations in a pyramid-shaped continuum, ranging from the inferior needs which are largely focused on the body to the higher needs of the psyche, culminating in what one may call the soul. Most of us are familiar with Maslow’s pyramid. Nevertheless, let me present it below if only to remind us of certain details.  You will easily notice that capitalism is stuck at the lowest of Maslow’s hierarchy of aspirations. The most successful businesses of capitalism cater to our physical and simpler psychological needs. Oil and gas, mining, constructions, textile, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, electronics, telecommunications, insurance, banking… none of these touches those aspirations of ours that bring us deeper ...

Is Capitalism collapsing under its own weight?  German thinker Wolfgang Streeck believes it is.  He has written a book about it: How Will Capitalism End?   I don’t think I’ll read that book because the only review I read says that “it makes for tough reading.”  Though I don’t really mind tough books, economics is not my cup of tea. Capitalism has weakened many systems that people would like to have.  By nurturing individualism, it has weakened society.  Its cutthroat competition has weakened human cooperation.  By subjugating everything to money and trade, it has weakened human values as well as political systems.  Yes, the trader is more powerful today than the politician, thanks to capitalism.  That’s a situation which the shrewd politician won’t like at least though right now we have the politician and the trader colluding with each other. Streeck argues that the weakening of social and political systems has generated five syst...

Source Christopher McDougall told us the story of the lion and the gazelle in the African jungle.  Both the lion and the gazelle have to outrun the other in order to survive.  Unless the lion runs faster than the gazelle, it will starve to death.  Unless the gazelle outruns the lion, it will become the latter’s food. That is also the policy of capitalism.  The richest one percent of India’s population own 58% of the country’s total wealth, says Oxfam’s latest report .  In plain figures, just 57 Indians own as much wealth as about 875,000,000 other Indians.  India is a jungle of lions and gazelles where the latter may die under the wheels of Land Cruisers driven by the former while they sleep huddled together on the footpaths after the weary day in a sweatshop. There’s much wealth in India.  But the majority of people are poor.  You will find this majority sleeping on the footpaths if you take a walk in the cities at night.  Yo...

Capitalism has never anywhere provided good houses at moderate cost. Housing, it seems unnecessary to stress, is an important adjunct of a successful urban life. Nor does capitalism provide good health services, and when people live close together with attendant health risks, these too are important. Nor does capitalism provide efficient transportation for people—another essential of the life of the Metropolis. In Western Europe and Japan the failure of capitalism in the fields of housing, health and transportation is largely, though not completely, accepted. There industries have been intensively socialized. In the United States there remains the conviction that, however contrary the experience, private enterprise will eventually serve. Source A personage no less than John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that in his book, The Age of Uncertainty (1977).  America has succeeded in exporting that belief to quite many countries.  India, under the present leadership, is the la...

The political leaders in Delhi are driving the cars of their citizens underground.  Civic Centre on Minto Road is an imposing tower complex that overlooks both Old and New Delhi.  It houses the Municipal Corporations of Delhi, both Old and New.  If you are an ordinary citizen, even if you are driving the costliest car you can afford, you will be asked to park your precious vehicle underground.  All overground parking space is meant for the politicians and their cronies.  Even SUVs bearing an inscription somewhere on or near its number plate claiming allegiance to some politician will get access to the overground parking space.  All the rest will go snaking down to the pit below. In 1895, H G Wells wrote a novel titled The Time Machine in which the author imagined the future of the capitalist world as divided between the Eloi and the Morlocks, people overground and underground.  The Eloi were the capitalists whose vision was grant enough to s...

Source “Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”  Jesus said that [ Mathew 13:12 ].  Jesus was speaking about certain inner qualities, particularly the ability to perceive and understand.  “ T he top one percent of the wealthiest people on the planet own nearly fifty percent of the world's assets while the bottom fifty percent of the global population combined own less than one percent of the world's wealth,” says John Queally quoting latest statistics.  Jesus lived in a time when human societies were organised around religion and the values and principles considered important by religion.  We are living in a time when the societies revolve round economy and economic considerations.  But what Jesus said holds good even today.  Those who have are getting more in our world too: the rich are getting richer.  And the poor are being eliminated....

Keith Chen, associate professor of economics at Yale University, wanted to test Adam Smith’s confident and classical assertion that man is the only animal that engaged in commerce and monetary exchange.  “Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that, ” Smith had written. For his experiment, Chen chose a group of 7 capuchins.  The capuchin is a species of small monkeys with a very small brain.  They spend most of their active life engaged in two activities: food and sex.  Hence, thought Chen, they are quite similar to human beings.  In fact, the capuchins are so greedy for food that they can overeat, and then throw up what they had eaten in order to eat more.  What will happen if such creatures are taught to make use of money? Chen and Venkat Lakshminarayanan worked with the 7 capuchins kept at a lab set up by Laurie Santos, a psychologist.  Firs...

Europe was labouring under the weight of a socio-political system when Enlightenment dawned on it in the 17 th and 18 th centuries.  Most European countries had a hierarchical system with the King or the Queen occupying the top position claiming to have derived his/her power directly from none other than God.  Then there were the priests of the Church who not only brought God’s power to the King or the Queen but also enjoyed a lot of benefits of that power in their own royal ways.  Below the clergy reclined the aristocrats.  All these three together sucked the blood of the common people who did all the work and paid all the taxes. The philosophers who questioned this system usually belonged to the aristocratic classes.  But they possessed the sensitivity to feel the inhumanity of the system.  Thus Rousseau (1712-1778) lamented the chains that shackled man everywhere.  The encyclopaedists redefined ‘political authority’ and ‘natural liberty’....

When India gained independence from the colonial rulers one of the cardinal challenges before the nascent nation was poverty.  The rampant poverty persuaded Nehru to opt for a welfare economy based much on the principles of socialism, though America had already begun to ride the exhilarating waves of capitalism.  At the same time, in 1947, an American professor of philosophy wrote the following lines: “ The tremendous concentration of wealth at one end of the social scale is matched (perhaps overmatched) by a concentration of poverty at the other end.  A dazzling prosperity in the urban rich hardly conceals the infamous and degrading lot imposed upon ... social victims.  No one can look upon this scene with clear eyes and then suppose that justice is being done .” The author of these lines was victimised much for his radical views.  He was Barrows Dunham and his controversial book was Man Against Myth .  In the introduction to the book, Dunham...

Pratap got into the old style elevator of the 14-storey building in Connaught Place.  He was going to pay the premium of his Relevance Life Insurance at the office on the 8 th floor.  Built during the days of the British Raj, the building which looked quite ghostly had elevators with grille doors.  Pratap drew both the grilles shut and pressed on number 8 on the panel.  As the lift was about to raise itself with a thud, a shabbily dressed man with a grisly beard crept into it through the grille. “How did you that?” asked Pratap whose rationalism couldn’t accept a solid body making its way through iron bars. “I am a ghost,” said the fellow traveller. “Oh, I see.”  Pratap looked at the guy with his rationalist eye and wondered what this phenomenon could be.  E=mc 2 .  Mass can be converted into energy.  But not this way.  Pratap was still exercising his rational brain when the ghost started sobbing louder than the noise produ...

Christians all over the world commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus today, Good Friday.  Jesus, in all probability, did not intend to found a new religion; he wished to reform his own religion, Judaism.  This is the opinion of many well known theologians like Hans Kung.  In his brief history, The Catholic Church [Phoenix Press, 2002], Kung says, “... he (Jesus) did not seek to found a separate community distinct from Israel with its own creed and cult, or to call to life an organization with its own constitution and offices, let alone a great religious edifice.  No, according to all the evidences, Jesus did not found a church in his lifetime.” (page 12) In Dostoevsky’s novel The Karamazov Brothers , there is a Grand Inquisitor who asks Jesus who appeared in Russia teaching people freedom and love, “Why do you come to disturb us?”  Will Jesus be a nuisance to the Church and its leaders if he comes again today?  Will the priests seek a way to el...

Fiction My husband was arrested tonight.  What was his crime?  He used a bicycle to travel from home to his office and back.  We live in Bhatti Mines, a wild side of Delhi where the jungle mingles with the spiritual.  Bhatti Mines is a reserved forest, strictly speaking.  But the forest has been encroached upon by people of all sorts.  They say that we are encroachers too though we lived here long before the land was declared reserved forest.  They tried to throw us out of here many, many years ago.  We refused to go.  So Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s infamous son, decided to leave this land to us.  Our ancestors called it Sanjay Colony in his honour.  Our ancestors were too illiterate to know what Sanjay Gandhi meant, let alone what his politics meant.  Today, long after Sanjay Gandhi and his sterilisations are dead, when the land has been declared reserved forest, there are all kinds of religious people who cal...

“The poor are poor not because the rich are rich,” says Robert J. Samuelson in his Washington Post column reproduced in The Hindu .  In 1968, the sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the phrase ‘the Mathew Effect’ for the phenomenon of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.  The name Mathew came from the Bible.  Jesus said, according to Mathew’s gospel, “For to him who has more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” [Mathew 13:12].  Jesus did not live in a time which promoted capitalism and its wealth-creating ideology.  Jesus was far, far from being a capitalist.  In fact, he would have been the ideal communist, had he been allowed to have his way by the various leaders of his time (political as well as religious).  What he meant was that those who have the spirit of life in them will be given more of that, and those who are just bullshit will get lost. ...

An anecdote and an afterthought Every Monday the staff had to stay back for an hour after office for the Weekly Assessment Meeting.  Boss would speak out his Scrutiny Report.  He blamed each member of the staff for one failure or another.  “Sir,” one of the staff dared to ask one day, “don’t you ever find anything good in any of us?  We complete all the tasks in time, bring in huge profits, and the company is running well.” “Whoever said the company is not running well?” thundered Boss.  “This is your problem.  You are a thoroughly negative person and hence you see everything negatively.” The staff responded with a positive silence.  After Boss had taken charge, over a dozen staff had lost their jobs for crimes far less serious than questioning Boss. Afterthought A docile worker who does as ordered without question is the ideal worker in the corporate world.  Famous French intellectual, Foucault, said that.  T...

Fiction http://www.flickr.com/groups/kidz_art_program/pool/16817853@N00/ “One day in the life of a residential school teacher,” I began writing the blog. “What do you think you are?” asked my wife with marked irritation.   “Ivan Denisovich?” Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is the protagonist of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, One Day in the Life Ivan Denisovich .   Ivan was a prisoner in a Stalinist labour camp in Russia.   The fellow was an innocent peasant, almost illiterate, and very simple.   The prison routine was meant to dehumanise the prisoners, but Ivan survived.   He survived because he found meaning in that absurdly oppressive life, a meaning found by living intensively.   He slogged like a slave and ate like a wolf.   When he worked on a brick wall he worked as though every inch of it belonged to him.   He was a Sisyphus without the spirit of rebellion.   He was proud of whatever he did. “I’m Boxer,” I replied to ...