The Undesired and the Neglected

The theory of natural selection evident in the animal kingdom is at work in most Indian cities. Survival of the fittest is another ruthless concept on display in the Indian cities. The sufferers on both counts are the 93% of the Indian working class which is in the unorganized sector enjoying minimum rights as compared to the 7% elite working class Indians. The condition of Migrant workers in the 93% unorganized sector is worse than the others. Before I really delve into the issues of migrant rights and reforms let us get acquainted with some core facts so that we can get a better understanding of the issue. Do know that when I say labor I refer to the migrant working class in the 93% unorganized sector working class. According to census 2001, 27.78% of Indian population was urban while 78.22% of Indian population was rural. In the 1950s 15% of Indian population was urban while the rest was rural. Clearly the pace of urbanization has been slow as compared to the overall population growth thereby promoting migration from deprived rural areas to the more prosperous urban areas. Millions of migrant workers from the rural as well as underprivileged areas flock to other cities in search of greener pastures so that they could sustain their families back home. As a result of which we see a huge seasonal in surge of migrants in various cities and big towns in India. These laborers work under strenuous conditions and often with no labor and human rights thereby depending entirely on the employer to decide their rights. As is clear, these migrant laborers enjoy little or no labor rights as compared to the organized sector workers. These laborers often are subjected to mental, physical and emotional harassment. The fact that these migrant laborers are also from same nation as themselves is often forgotten by their employees who leave no stone unturned to seep out even the last drop of their blood.

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Yesterday as I was walking across ranade road in Mumbai I became witness to a minor accident where a motorcycle was hit by a taxi. There were no damages- physical as well as economical- on the scene but still the reaction with which the young men got off from the bike and started thrashing the poor taxi guy without getting into the reasons of the accident was heart wrecking and forced me to rethink my ideas about the empowerment of the migrant workers/laborers. The fact that two constables were standing nearby doing nothing further compounded my fears. Would the reaction have been the same in the hometown of the taxi driver or was it that the bikers knew that the taxi driver won’t be able to do anything as he was a migrant? How would have the constables reacted in the hometown of the taxi driver? What the incident taught me was that unless all the states come together on the centre stage and form a committee under the centre’s leadership and tackle the issues of migration, these incidents will continue unabated. Yes the labor rights will continue to be compromised. Of course the above incident may be passed off as a hate attack but the fact is that in the absence of strong grievance redresssal system for the migrant workers such incidents will happen again and the inhabitants will continue their violent pursuits against the migrants with impunity. So what we can do to improve the condition of migrant workers?
The reasons behind migration are simple and easy to understand and tell us why the migrants are forced to leave their hometown. The most prominent of these reasons is the scourge of unemployment which is at an alarmingly high rate in the rural areas thereby forcing migration. Many a times, unavailability of proper education, healthcare and sanitation also forces migration. Although we have celebrated more than 60 years of our independence the fruits of development have not really percolated to the weaker sections of the society. This inequitable growth also forces migration to more successful regions. This fact is evident from the fact that rather than having multiple business centric cities we only have 4-5 cities where 70-80% of India’s business happens. This results in the uneven distribution of employment and wealth thereby promoting migration especially of migrant workers. It doesn’t come to us as a surprise if we consider the fact of India being ranked 132 among 180 nations in the annual Human development index (conducted by UNDP) behind this backdrop. In fact it is a testimony to the fact that we have inequitable growth in the country. So what can we do? A few solutions to the problem of migrants especially of unskilled nature are
Financial and social inclusion

•  Application of technology in the empowerment of the poor

•  Building and sustaining of multiple centers of business cities

•  Encouragement of entrepreneurship in backward/underdeveloped areas through financial means

•  Labor reforms

•  Focus on empowerment through education

•  Encouraging small/medium sector industries in rural areas with Public as well as private sector banks as partners

•  Spreading of awareness about labor rights

 Proper deliverance of social services by the government by checking on corruption
***All the above points and some other points will be discussed in detail in the next article

The government has already started working on the theoretical aspect of the above points. Take for instance the Unique Identification Authority (UID) under the chairmanship of Mr. Nandan Nilekeni which will present a database of over a billion people thereby making it easier for the government to deliver their services effectively and efficiently. Also while in the tenth plan allocation to education was 7.7 percent it has increase to an unprecedent 19 percent in the 11th plan. Although many other measures such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan,National Rural Employment Guarantee Act(NREGA)and others has reduced migration to an extent but still a lot needs to be done by the government. We should not forget that historically India’s Achilles heel has been the implementation part or the actual deliverance of service and various schemes to people it is actually targeted at. So let’s hope that this time around we will see a change from the earlier times and that the past mistakes will not be repeated and we will see a more resurgent and confident India where the principles of equality prevails. May god bless India!!!!!!!!
*data has been collected from reliable government sources 

- Sunny Gusain

"STAY HUNGRY STAY FOOLISH"

Transcript of Commencement Speech at Stanford given by Steve Jobs

THE LEGENDARY SPEECH THAT HAS INSPIRED ME AND MILLIONS LIKE ME. I HOPE IT INSPIRES YOU AS WELL.

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much.

"Beyond the Obvious- Part 1"

In this 21st century world, we have been exploded with all kinds of data ranging from GDP numbers to the inflation figures, gross revenue to net profits, export numbers to cricket scores, and much more. But to most of the ordinary mortals, this data is either incomprehensible or irrelevant without the requisite human side or human touch to this data. Take for instance the GDP number. India’s GDP grew at 7.9% in the second quarter of the current fiscal year, which is a very strong growth figure for the economy and makes India the second fastest growing economy in the world after China. Now try telling this to an old lady, who is living in a slum, can barely walk and is far satisfied with the world if she gets three meals a day than anything else. The relevance of the GDP number to this old lady, who is living in a crotchety shanty, is the same as for a rainbow to a blind man. You can keep praising the beauty of the rainbow but to a blind man even the beautiful rainbow is nothing but the ubiquitous darkness.

Over the years, I have met many people who say nothing or very little has changed for them since India decided to adopt liberal policies towards trade and began opening its economy to the outside world( or should I rather say the inside world). But it is equally true that I have witnessed great successes with my own eyes. I have got a lot of motivation through some of these success stories, so I think it would be appropriate for me to write a true story which inspires us to never give up, no matter how bad the circumstances get. This is a true personal account of how one can escape from the clutches of poverty to a much better and prosperous life. The story is beyond the facts and figures we often see and quote in public.

The story:
The time is 1987, and this woman works as a domestic help. She is only 20 and has a lean body with only a hint of fat. Even though she is 20 she appears like she is 30 already. She is a mother of a three year old son and is pregnant again with a 7 month old fetus growing inside her womb. She can barely walk with her pregnancy but rather than resting at home, she decides to go to work. She knows that she has to go and work, or else she would not be able to feed her 3 year old son and the coming baby. She works at five different households on a given day. She goes to work, reluctant or otherwise, lest her children might have to beg. She is illiterate and gets an average of Rs.20 per household that realizes an income of Rs.100 per month for her. The income is barely enough to satisfy the family ration for a month but still she makes it a point to save some money. She has one thing which makes her stand out amongst the crowd. What is it? She is a visionary in a true sense. She is ahead of her peers in understanding the world and the state she is in. Her husband also shares the same vision, albeit a bit reluctantly. Their vision, their hard work and their ability to work under adverse conditions, even though they have no rainbow in sight, is remarkable and is symbolic of the true Indian spirit.

With one hand on her bulged stomach, she mops the floor with the other hand, barely showing the pain and uneasiness we expect a 7 months pregnant lady to show. She works relentlessly, talks to the memsabs cheerfully where she works and, during this time, quietly gathers useful information about how to raise a child. She is determined to use the information given to her and help her children get a better future. The atmosphere is not always amiable in these households and she has to put up with all the pestering she gets every now and then. But, in spite of all this she is pleased. What is it that makes her so pleased? It’s the vision. What vision?

She mops, she washes she cooks. She believes and she knows she’s right with her vision. She understands the world as good as a bureaucrat, politician or an educationist. She knows that tomorrow will be better than today. This thought pleases her to an extent that she forgets her present day hardships in the hope of a better tomorrow. Her vision is not a complicated jigsaw puzzle. Her vision is simple enough for mortals like you and me to understand, but the means she has to employ to realize the vision is way beyond our comprehension. What is the vision??

Read the full story- “Beyond the obvious”- part 2. Next post……………….