Disregard to human traits while accounting?

Sometimes, I am not able to understand the standards of accounting at all! The place where I used to learn French was non-profit, but still I believe they do look at minimizing losses (since of course language institutes can never run at profit!). They used to charge extremely low, and if I compare it with a similar non-profit which used to charge at least three times to students learning German, located in the same city, then it really moves me to pity sometimes. An argument can be put forth, that if the fees were higher, it would be a turnoff for students (besides being harsh on someone who really wants to learn the language). I know that many who even complete all their levels are really not passionate about the language; they just drift. But then there are some who find it so tough and are at least that honest to themselves that rather than drift meaninglessly they drop out, and I think it is this student crowd that the institute must charge higher, because otherwise the libraries remain more poorly stocked, there are fewer film screenings, and fewer lights glowing somewhere.

Now what I've seen over the years is that the advanced levels have higher fees! And that's true even if they have teachers competent to teach at any level, so it's not a matter of having more expensive teachers for higher levels. And even if an institute follows the policy of paying a teacher a surcharge if she takes a higher-level course, then also I believe that this surcharge must be accrued from the fees of lower-level students, rather than that of higher-level ones. Simply because at the initial two levels, and especially the first, if there is a batch of 30 students, 20 or more are simply there because it's fashionable to learn French. They will drop out now or by the second level! The other 10 might suffer at this stage, but rather than keeping the fees low at all levels or spiking fees at higher levels, the costs should be covered here, since an institute also has a duty to see to that it is running and that the students who really want to learn are better served.

White Suits: The Nexus

If the Tuskegee runners could be CDC, then there's nothing left to surprise in the US-led medical system: except that now and then we do get the glimpse of a horrible truth, a sick megaprofit industry lying behind, through films like The Constant Gardener or The Verdict, or through such reports: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-medical-madoff-anesthestesiologist-faked-data

The problems are manifold, and they start with the unholy nexus between practitioners, pharma companies and researchers. From the ground level, a medical rep knows who is prescribing what and in that proportions the reward is given. In India, it could be cartels of wine, a holiday at Bangkok with 'girls', and so on; the same holiday-makers are respectable wise-looking men in white suits, who you think as God. Problems go deeper in the Western world: because of a show of concern for accountability. Hospitals could be church-run ones, or important components of medical colleges: even if something wrong is found out, the argument is why to lose years of credibility, why let the trust get eroded over 'one small thing'? After all, they easily persuade themselves, by remaining quiet we're only doing a larger good: and the perpetrator is just given a silent rap on the knuckles. One is caught, the other thousands are not.

The problem with Scott Reuben kind of fraud is that a token measure like that of Johns Hopkins (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601202&sid=aIvIUq6pvKS8&refer=healthcare) won't really help: Reuben hasn't taken any gift, he was just on 'research grants', paid directly to him. Payment through institution would simply mean a more rampant corruption, nothing else. What would help is that medical institutions stop the race for new breakthroughs, newer and more effective and more fast-working medicines, and stop keep getting in news and publications: there is not that much research needed.

Almost everyone does a PhD now. Research on a myriad of irrelevant topics. Of course then they come up with strange conclusions: with a motley group of 20, they even conclude that "bondage sex is good for you" or "your heart", whatever. Newspapers of a certain bias and tabloids who think everything is on a frivolous par in this world pounce upon such news items: and along with the WAG who bared it all, the pop singer who again has a paedophilia hearing, the sportstar who hit a goal yesterday, and the social worker who brought out a rally in support of some displaced community and an actress who turned vegetarian, we also have a researcher who finally brought on the benefits of some kinky activity. What kind of research are we paying funds for? What kind of education system is it that teaches men to publish, regardless of whether there's trash inside or gold, better if trash?

A problem lies also outside of the immediate medical framework: the publishing world. Publishers want anything: anything which libraries lap up, and which is written by someone cited a lot, and with a very good 'About the Author' to write on the blurb. As long as that need is getting served, they will take anything. To fool you into believing that they are conscientious guardians of information, they will set up an elaborate peer review system. A blind process. They will find out through contacts or just a Google search (horrible!) some names who seem to have worked or know something about that particular stream, and contact those with offers of reviewing. Very few reviewers do their job: for others, it's simply different things. From as bad as maybe greedy even about the honorarium payment, to reading greedily the manuscripts so that they can 'learn' of latest advances and pinch later for their own dream manuscripts, to simply feeling good about themselves without thinking are they really qualified or not, knowledgeable enough or not. Why was Scott Reuben's false data not caught in peer review? Or maybe someone did question, but the publisher just wants a minimum number of favourable peer reviews, doesn't it? And then it can go gung-ho.

The whole problem is that we laid down frameworks and systems and policies so that we can use them as checklists and be right: we can come to each position and then check against those and see oh whether we are safe. But what is really happening is this: we start by ticking off the items in the checklist. We start with "can we be safe here?" and then we just somehow manipulate the thing to be safe on the checklist: the checklist has become the god. Because we're no longer interested in what we started for, why we started for, we have forgotten our burning ideals of youth and childhood and everything: we just want more impact factor, more citations, more awards, more honor, more medicines, more billions of dollars that help elect in more and more presidents, more big brands and bigger diseases!

Tehelka: Obsessed with framing

After many years, today I bought a magazine: if you exclude the Gujarati magazine Safari (knowledge-based), I have now not read an Indian magazine for quite many years now. None at all on politics, business, “current affairs”, sports, fashion, photography, travel, food, bikes, computers, gizmos, cars, and whatever else is there! I bought the Tehelka. Apart from the premium put on sensationalism at every moment right from the cover itself, the shoddy production values, and the lack of any depth in the case of any article (worse than India Today, if it is still today as it was many years back), I was stunned by the extraordinary amount of what I call “situating”. I am referring to the September issue (Vol. 5, issue 36).

The first interesting bit starts from the cover photo of a boy, a boy burnt in the tension simmering in Orissa between Hindus and Christians. Designed to sell? Yes, maybe, considering that we’ve got an ad for NCR region’s tallest towers having “apartments with plunge pools” at the back cover. What a juxtaposition! On top of the cover, instead of reading a headline for a news, for something that has happened, I see a headline “Bihar overrun: A government-aided national calamity”, is the emphasis on the calamity and doing something about it, or on pointing fingers at the government? Or rather, just pointing fingers? At anybody, just point them. Yes, the journalist serves to bring out the truth, to bring out the nonchalant attitude of the officials involved in the rescue effort. But specifics don’t make generalities, first of all. Maybe, the article inside has just a bad writing style, after all it’s very current throughout the world. Take a specific example and imply that this is what is happening everywhere (because you know that people infer too easily a specific example to be a typical example). The article mildly fingers, gives the usual data regarding number of boats, displaced, marooned, dead and missing, villages, days, whatever: I thought that newspapers must have already done that in a better way. Ok, but you need to place things in context, or even in perspective? That’s why the figures? Great. So, where is the rest. A specific example, sweeping statement, and some figures: and the article is done within 2 pages. Who reads it? Does the reader then feel very great that he has done something for the Bihari flood-stricken? Or does he discuss the marooned and debate the correct figure with his colleague over lunch? Or does he assume himself supremely intelligent, since he ‘knows all’ and ‘can see through all’? Is that so? Maybe, that’s true. The last possibility. Yes, sometimes. But what’s important? To sieve things and get at the bottom of them drinking coffee in your armchair, or do something, change the face of world, its attitude? No, I don’t mean rallies, protests, strikes, mass campaigns. Maybe, they help. But I mean real thinking, tactful thinking on what to do, and then doing it. Not “I won’t stand this”, get together and bear some brunt, and feel good. No. Did it serve the purpose? What did you do actually? Better, change the media first of all. Why do people read a Tehelka? Change people, ask them about reading, why do they read it? They want information? Ok, we will give you better. You don’t want it too complicated. Ok, we will give it you slimmed, toned-down (but slip in something somewhere). And, most importantly, don’t “situate”.

Most intellectuals, the so-called ones, do a lot of it. So they align with causes they know nothing about. And then they situate to make themselves look better, make world look horrible, and thus actually make things more horrible. Maybe, the world is horrible. But holding a mirror isn’t going to give any confidence. No. Hold a false mirror. So that it sees a beautiful reflection and gets inspired. After all, truth is nothing but imagination, isn’t it? Look at the photos of the magazine. Why do they need to show undue stress where there is none? Why to horrify? And whom? The coffee-table readers who are going to spend fifteen rupees or more to buy you? Look at the photo on page 30, the cover story photo. Of course, the photographer doesn’t know how to make an impact, that’s another story. He should have focussed upon the bell, and keep the people in blur. That would have been really impactful. But I don’t agree with the slightly un-straight photo, the amount of burnt property shown in the foreground (of course, considering the caption, “… ruins of a church”), the font of the title caption superimposed on the image “In the name of God”. No. Pure sensationalism. By the way, the photo nowhere seems to show me “ruins” of any building. The people are clearly situated. Some are looking at the camera, they couldn’t resist it. But since all have been asked to look pondering, thinking about future, and don’t look at the camera, there are some who do that, but unfortunately are not good actors. Since after all once the cameraman goes, finding a good story with good shots to boot, they do have to think about future and how to live. Why to live. The next page’s photo is even worse, and caption is simply difficult to understand (“Ashes to ashes”!). No need to comment on the photo on p. 38 at all, completely tasteless, strainingly related. Of course, if you are situating, you should know how to pretend. All the photos in article “Undercover watchdogs” (starting on p. 44) seem to be that of models more to me than real men. Which is why, when you take a photo, it already gets determined: since you decide some instant when you want to take a photo, and you decide the instant when you do take the photo. So, it’s never reality, it’s always “framed”. Unfortunately, even with the best of photographers, it’s also “situated”: the photographed also is determined. Could be anything: his pose, his location in the photo, how much he will be in focus or out of it, how much in blur or out of it, his expression, and the very fact of his being “suitable” for the subject on which the photographer is working. That’s real unfortunate!

Do the good and bad exist?

An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of natural phenomena or expressions of the wrath of God depends upon the structuring of a discursive field (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985:108). Reading above took me in a natural course to something that I have often pondered over and never could find any solution, maybe because I also didn't want to think very deeply since after a while all the thoughts begin to swirl just in a circuit. Now, before anyone asks, that why I am worrying their heads off with something that I have myself not been able to determine, the answer is just that I am hoping that writing this would scratch some of the cobwebs off my mind and may elicit a response or two from aimless wanderers over the Internet, a medium that I respect highly for the scope that it provides to vagabonds. Now, what the above sentence means is something which somehow clashes with what I have held the essence of life until now. If I could determine exactly where is that "somehow," then maybe I could be nearer home, but no, not now. What the above sentence meant for me in a far-reaching manner was that there's no good or bad in this world unless there's someone to define it, or a definition somehow in any case. Otherwise, everything is just an event, having its cause and effect (I recollect David Hume here, who I think used to be on similar lines; forgive me, I don't like or read philosophy, too abstract for us fools of the earth).
Of course, traditions, rituals, and all other daily practices are given sanctimony through the definitions that are prevalent. So that if a woman in India (especially in northern India) is supposed to don a "bindi" on her forehead to indicate that she is married and the husband is living, it becomes a sort of binding rule in those parts, and no woman herself would even think that such a thing may not be done and yet her husband will continue to live. What the authors themselves have said above, that the falling of a brick may be the constructed in terms of natural phenomena or wrath of God, it is upto the society that is giving it definition. But does this hold for all the things in this world? In the Roman times, there used to be arenas where men and animals used to fight each other until one of them used to die. Not only the king but the whole population used to rejoice in these "bloodthirsty" spectacles; the collective conscience of today's world has marched a lot forward (or rather, backward) than those times. This used to be a sport. Now suppose there was no person then who saw anything condemnable in these sports. So, then, did the thing stop being despicable? Was it then the best of, the manliest of sports? Only, looking with today's eyes, was it barbarian? The question is simply how intrinsic is the good in good and the bad in bad? Is good and bad also dependent on definitions or can they exist independently? Of course, nothing can be independent in itself, but what I mean is the potential goodness of an act an object in itself with that act being the subject, or is that there has to be a definition to which the attribute of that act is subjected? Of course, if, say, there would be no man, no thinking animal, then there would be no such questions only, there would "really" be not any good or bad, for there would be no one to define them, no one for whom to define them. But, is such an abstract theory applicable to the human state of affairs? If there would be no life on earth, the sun would be wasted. So, the sun is as much dependent on the plant as the plant on the sun. But, then again, the sun being "wasted" is our conception, is our imagination. The sun itself doesn't feel that it's being wasted, and so there's no wastage. Or is there a wastage?

I think that of course there is a wastage, and that is why I say that all these are abstract theories, which actually do not fit well to the human society, the society that has evolved over time. When a revolutionary fights for his ideas, he fights for "his" ideas and he doesn't care about anyone else in this world. So, even if the whole world pronounces the opposite, he will fight for something that he thinks is right, for something that he shares in. He fights for a definition that is not there at all in the world, and so, maybe, he should not be fighting at all. For, outside of himself, there is no such definition what he has, and so according to this sort of philosophy, his definiton itself is unneeded, for the world is going on fine without him, for the world has already got the definitions of good and bad, and he doesn't fit the bill. If his theories have no existence out of himself, according to this philosophy, as I understand it, there is no concrete platform only on which he could stand. So, then, according to this philosophy, either he has to promulagate an existence outside of himself for his theories, by propagating them, by making followers of himself, by creating a large base who then begin to define the theory, or he has to die and fade out in the "natural course of action." And the world moves on. It is as simple a case of how anything is constructed; and based on the constructions, events happen, and the cycle goes on similarly. But the only answer that I don't get is how did the revolutionary got his idealism; from where? How and why does the construction of an event take a specific direction only, and not some other direction? Why is it that only some things have evolved to being classified as idealistic, while the others have not been? Is there something intrinsically good and bad to the thoughts and actions of man?

I have not taken any definite stand here. So, you can forget about me being egotistic. I hope that this would invite some cursory remarks at least.