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HYDERABAD FRIDAY 4 | NOVEMBER 2011 MORE COWBELL DELEB
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Something extra that will take a project A dead celebrity, particularly one or endeavour to a higher level used to endorse products
OP-ED
or more children each, the UN says. In rural Africa, Ive come across women who have never heard of birth control. According to estimates from the Guttmacher Institute, a respected research group, 215 million women want to avoid getting pregnant but have no access to contraception. Whats needed isnt just birthcontrol pills or IUDs. Its also girls education and womens rights starting with an end to child marriages for educated women mostly have fewer children. In times past, the biggest barrier to reducing birth rates has been a lack of access to contraceptives, the Population Institute notes in a new report. Today, the biggest barrier is gender inequality. The seven billion population milestone is also a reminder that we need more research for better contraceptives. One breakthrough is an inexpensive vaginal ring that releases hormones, lasts a year and should not require a doctor. Developed by the Population Council, it has completed Phase 3 trials and seems highly effective. It could even contain medication to reduce the risk of an infection with the AIDS virus. Traditionally, support for birth control was bipartisan. The Roman Catholic hierarchy was opposed, but Republican presidents like Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush provided strong support. Then family planning became tarnished by overzealous and coercive programs in China and India, and contraception became entangled in Americas abortion wars. Many well-meaning religious conservatives turned against it, and funding lagged. The result was, paradoxically, more abortions. When contraception is unavailable, the likely consequence is not less sex, but more pregnancy. Contraception already prevents 112 million abortions a year, by UN estimates. The United Nations Population Fund is a bte noire for conservatives, but its promotion of contraception means that it may have reduced abortions more than any organisation in the world. Republicans are seeking to cut more money from global family planning which, in poor countries, would mean more abortions and more women dying in childbirth. Conservatives have also sought to slash Title X Family Planning programmes within the United States. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that in a year these domestic programmes avert 973,000 unintended pregnancies, of which 406,000 would end in abortions. Guttmacher calculates that these family-planning centres in the United States actually save taxpayers roughly $3.4 billion annually that would otherwise be spent on pregnancies and babies. Finally, a ray of hope: A group of evangelical Christians, led by Richard Cizik of The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, is drafting a broad statement of support for family planning. It emphasises that family planning reduces abortion and lives lost in childbirth. Family planning is morally laudable in Christian terms because of its contribution to family well-being, womens health, and the prevention of abortion, the draft says. Amen! Contraceptives no more cause sex than umbrellas cause rain. So as we greet the seven-billionth human, lets try to delay the arrival of the eight billionth. We should all be able to agree on voluntary family planning as a cost-effective strategy to reduce poverty, conflict and environmental damage. If you think family planning is expensive, you havent priced babies. By arrangement with the New York Times
Alchemy of silence
Shiv Visvanathan
Dividing Lines
ears ago, my friend, philosopher R a m u Gandhi and I were walking through Kamla Nagar, an area at the outskirts of Delhi University. It was festival time and megaphones were rending the air. Ramu was extremely irritated with the noise and dubbed it Ravana Electronics. He longed for a bit of silence. Ever the teacher, Ramu reminded me noise is not the opposite of silence. Silence is something more, it is a journey, a craft, and then lapsed into silence himself. The recent reports that Anna Hazare had taken maun vrat, a vow of silence, reminded me of the old story. I wished Ramu had been around. He would have produced a few exemplary performances around the event. I realise I am a poor surrogate for Indias most inventive philosopher. Silence for Ramu, was a pilgrimage, a search groping into the very interiority of the self. Silence needed prayer but went beyond prayer. It was dialogue. Silence talked but in a different way and we misunderstand the power of silence. The English language sees silence as passive. It talks of the silence of the grave, the silence of the weak. It does not see silence as spiritual humus for harmony, for recovery for a literal recollection of the self. One must see silence not as erasure but as an awakening of possibilities. One meditates in silence; one often prays in silence, one grieves in silence. There is an alchemy to it. Ramu might have said we think of silence in the same way we confuse fasting and dieting. Dieting is a calorific idea, a search for physiological balance, or a technique of a fashion aesthetic. Fasting is an experiment with the self, a search for harmony, a fine-tuning of the spirit. When Gandhi fasted during his satyagraha, he sought a harmony. Fasting was a fine-tuning of the music of the self. Gandhi fasted as part of his quest for brahmacharya. Anna Hazare understood this when he explained in an interview that he could fast for so many days because of his celibacy. There is a danger, however, in reading this simplistically. Silence is not a technique. One cannot take a vow of silence to avoid publicity or embarrassment. Silence cannot be tactical. It is a ritual and like most rituals demands that the body be
home within itself and the cosmos. Silence is that real experiment with truth, the truth of the self. It is a demand on the self and cannot become as it does, occasionally, for Mr Hazare, an advertisement for the self. Then silence becomes philistine and a maun vrat, an inability to cope with the cacophony of the self. Silence invites the mystical, the mysterious and the meditative. Silence in its singular fullness is different from the silences that history talks about. The metaphysics of each is different. One author who understood silences was the great English novelist Virginia Woolf. Silence, for Woolf, was not just part of a womans statement of being; it was integral to her writing style. Silence provided the rhythms between language and space, sound and silence. Silence gave
One hopes Annas silence is a prayer that his colleagues restrain their cacophony. It should be a signal that he is readying himself for a deeper struggle.
plasticity to a sentence made it elastic, energetic and diverse. It provided a beat to life and language. The critic Ganesh Devy talked of silence in terms of a genocidal act of being silenced. He explains that the linguistic tragedy of India is that we officially recognise as languages only those that carry the appendage of script. Languages without scripts cease to be, officially, languages. Since tribal languages lack script, they are not, officially, languages. Devy argues that it is silencing
of cultures, a muting of voices and truths that constitutes an Indian tragedy. I have explored a variety of silences to ask where does maun vrat as an idea stand. The idea of vrat is a promise to a self and a cosmos. As a promise it is a sacrament not a contract. It becomes a sacramental rendering of the self through the ritual of silence. It must be used frugally and not as a threat, to hammer home something. Silence cannot be a provocation, an act of thuggery where you bludgeon another into submission. It cannot be an act of trickery. It is ritual invitation to be true to oneself so one can be true to the integrity of a collective situation. One hopes Mr Hazares silence is a prayer that his colleagues restrain their cacophony. It should be a signal that he is readying himself for a deeper struggle. Silence as a ritual has to be beyond threat and blackmail. Unfortunately, the publicity around Mr Hazare misses this. Mr Hazares decision almost becomes an act of eccentricity or a spiritual spectacle. There is a sadness here that the media escalates by reading his silence as a timetable. This destroys the spiritual salience of the act. Instead of an epic of silence, it becomes a limerick and acquires a slapstick quality. Mr Hazare must use his silence to reflect on his movement and the sheer cacophony it has created in the later phases of the struggle. In fact, the silence of Mr Hazare brings out the circus like noise of Kiran Bedi. Her arguments sound like speeches of a sales woman selling patent medicines. Only the power of silence can turn the noise of protest into welcome music. I keep wondering how Ramu Gandhi would read Mr Hazare. He would have joined the protest. I can imagine him watching quizzically, sympathetically, whimsically wondering whether Mr Hazare would ever have shades of the equanimity of Ramana (maharishi). The comedy of silence would have intrigued him. The writer is a social science nomad
Nicholas D. Kristof
Weve seen that family planning works. Women in India average 2.6 children. Mexican women who averaged more than seven children have now dropped to 2.2.
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