The Sponsor and the Sponsored

One advantage with journalists is they can articulate their opinions and ideas as facts. If you own a newspaper, it makes things slightly easier. If you are writing an article in academic journals, it is a good practice to mention about the funding agencies. In fact, it is mandatory sometimes. This might be a formality in most of the cases but it is very important in certain cases to put the discussion in perspective.

For example, in the study of social, political, and economic theories, the information about the funding agencies is quite critical not in establishing the ideas investigated in any particular article but to have a wider perspective of the motivation behind such investigations. How does it matter? Why the knowledge about motivation is important? The social, political, and economic theories (some scientific theories too!) depend on the framework over which you build theories.

If you start with Marxist theory, you might analyse a situation in a completely different manner compared to someone who starts with Capitalist ideas. Who is right? We do not know. If the framework is not the focus of an article, it is better to write a word about it. If you do not write it explicitly, then naming the funding agencies would help immensely to identify the framework.

For instance, Congress Party will probably never sponsor a project titled "Why Sonia Gandhi should not be in party committees?" just like how Chinese government will probably sponsor a project titled "Why Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh, etc., should belong to China?"

Naming the sponsor is important. But journalists can get away with that.

N. Ram visited Tibet in June 2007 along with four other Indian journalists (who are they? Read articles about Tibet in the coming days. You may come to know). He has written an article on Tibet. He has also warned that an article on the politics of Tibet would follow.

From the article (and loud thinking is in italics):

The world’s highest railway, Mr. Tsiren exulted, “has ushered in a new millennium for Tibet. It is the realisation of a dream of two generations, of great importance to the Tibetan people. It has greatly reduced the cost of transportation. We have taken one more step towards the modernisation of Tibet and the deeper integration of the regional economy with the Chinese economy.”

Deeper integration of the regional economy with the Chinese economy?? What is the difference between integration and occupation?

Taking the cue from ‘independence for Tibet’ propaganda, the romantics see the railway as the ultimate destabiliser of Tibet’s culture, religion, demography, and environment.

Independence for Tibet is a propaganda??

In a historical essay published in the New-York Daily Tribune in 1853, Karl Marx analysed the potential of the railway to end India’s “village isolation … this self-sufficient inertia … with a given scale of low conveniences … without the desires and efforts indispensable to social advance.” He famously predicted that “the railway system will … become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry” and, further, that “modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labour.”

We all know very well the importance of railways. Moreover, we also know how Indian railway system has dissolved the hereditary divisions of labour!!!

Apprehensions about the railway’s adverse effects on the environment and wildlife have proved exaggerated if not wholly baseless. The real threat to Tibet’s environment comes not from the railway but from global warming.

Blame the global warming for everything!! Thanks Global warming. We, humans, are using you nicely to our convenience.

That Tibet under the Dalai Lama-headed theocracy had no schools worth speaking about, and that the illiteracy rate was 95 per cent, are indisputable facts.

Similar story was told about Indians during British rule. Thanks Shri. Dharampal. We now know better. Such an illiterate country is also the storehouse of many Buddhist traditions.

The Chinese socialist system showcases the “fast, coordinated, and healthy development of education” in Tibet Autonomous Region as a solid achievement of liberation and especially of the post-1979 reform.

Oh! No. This is not a propaganda. Do not call the chinese action as propaganda!!

N. Ram also mentioned about wordly wise monks.

Thanks China. Thanks Ram.

With scrupulous respect for the language, culture, religious beliefs and constitutionally mandated autonomy of the Tibetan people, rising China is eminently capable of achieving the all-round development.

Hahahaha!!! Haha!!! That is not a joke. Please do not laugh. Listen to me. China do respect Tibetan culture. They do respect the cultural revolution. Do not laugh. Ram is not joking.

Let us wait for Ram's second article. The sponsor is the sponsored.

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Shri. Dharampal

From wikipedia:

Dharampal, is a Gandhian thinker, historian and major philosopher from India. He authored The Beautiful Tree, and Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century, among other seminal works. He was born in January 1922 into a rich Vaish family of Kandhla, a small town in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh.

Among the established Indian historians, Dharampal has yet to find his place compared to the sheer significance of his contributions. His books are based painstakingly, and entirely, on colonial British documents of East India Company, and commissioned surveys, conducted in parts of India, before the annexation of India. His writings are abundantly rich in written references and references, to documents outlining the deliberate colonization agenda of British imperialism. He shows the determination of British civil servants in colonizing India as per set patterns, often referred by Gandhi as "divide and rule" rationale.

Dharampal effectively dispelled colonial myths and facile untruths about Bharat, the deliberate underplaying of civilizational achievements, and at bringing out the real strength, structure and working of the Indian society.

He passed away on October 24, 2006 at Sevagram (Gandhi’s ashram) near Wardha (Maharashtra).

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From the article written by D. P. Agarwal:

An encounter, which affected Dharampal greatly in this context, is best recounted here in his own words:

Around 1960, I was travelling from Gwalior to Delhi by a day train, a 6 or 7 hour journey in a 3rd class compartment when I met a group of people and I think in a way that meeting gave me a view of India, the larger India. The train was crowded. Some people however made a place for me. And there was this group of people, about twelve of them, some three or four women and seven or eight men. I asked them where they were coming from. They said that they had been on a pilgrimage, three months long, up to Rameshwaram, among other places. They came from two different villages north of Lucknow. They had various bundles of things and some earthen pots with them.

I asked, what did they have in those pots. They said that they had taken their own food from home. They had taken all the necessities for their food-atta, ghee, sugar - with them, and some amounts of these were still left over. The women didn't seem to mind much people trampling over them in the crowded compartment, but they did feel unhappy if someone touched their bundles and pots of food with their feet.

And then I said they must all be from one jati, from a single caste group. They said, 'No, no! We are not from one jati, we are from several jatis.' I said, how could that be? They said that there was no jati on a yatra-not on a pilgrimage. I didn't know that. I was around 38 years old, and like many others in this country who know little about the ways of the ordinary Indian-the peasants, artisans and other village folks.

And then I said, 'Did you go to Madras? Did you go to Bombay?' 'Yes! We passed through those places,' 'Did you see anything there?' 'No, we did not have any time!' It went on like that. I mentioned various important places of modern India. They had passed through most, but had not cared to visit any.

Then I said, 'You are going to Delhi now?' 'Yes!' 'You will stop in Delhi?' 'No, we only have to change trains there. We're going to Haridwar!' I said, 'This is the capital of free India. Won't you see it?' I meant it. I was not joking. They said, 'No! We don't have time. May be some other day. Not now. We have to go to Haridwar. And then we have to get back home.'

We talked perhaps 5 or 6 hours. At the end of it I began to wonder, who is going to look after this India?

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From Gurumurthy's article:

By meticulous research of the British sources over decades, Dharampal demolished the myth that India was backward educationally or economically when the British entered. Citing the Christian missionary William Adam’s report on indigenous education in Bengal and Bihar in 1835 and 1838, Dharampal established that at that time there were 100,000 schools in Bengal, one school for about 500 boys; that the indigenous medical system that included inoculation against small-pox.

Not many know of Dharampal or of his work because they have still not heard of the Indian past he had discovered.

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