E-Democracy in India

Elections used to be such a messy affair in the old days in India. The special ink they used to mark the index finger of the voter could stain your clothes. Some people found ways of getting the ink of their fingers and voted multiple times. 

Political parties would bring truckloads of people to vote for their chosen candidates. There would be mass rallies, spontaneous fighting or ‘hungama’ as it’s called in India. But still democracy functioned. 

In 1977 the ordinary Indian people voted the despotic Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had declared emergency and ruled by decree, out of power. She eventually was sentenced to prison, and then brought back by a landslide majority at the elections resulting in more 'hungama'. Electronic voting has changed much of this. 

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Democracy has Ancient Roots in India

Athenian democracy from around 510 B.C is well-known but there was democracy in other places also in those days.

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Democracy is not new in India. Sudhodhana, the father of Buddha was a democratically elected king in the sixth century B.C. This fact is not known very much. 

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Some people, especially from the USA, love to lecture that they are taking democracy everywhere and they don't spare Indians either. They don't like being told back that malfunctions in their own ballot system brought a president widely acknowledged to be the worst to power. Unknown to them and also to most of the world the largest democracy in the world is also a functioning E-Democracy.

How is E-Democracy Different?

What now is an E-democracy? 

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The term originates from the combination of the words ’electronic’ and ’democracy’. It usually means the usage of electronic facilities such as the Internet for implementing democratic processes like voting in a republic or representative democracy. The term digital democracy is also used for e-democracy. There is even an institute e-Democracy Centre, dedicated to studying e-democracy.  The centre is based at the newly founded Zentrum für Demokratie Aarau (centre for Democracy at Aarau) at the University of Zürich. 

Electronic voting has been successfully used in countries like Estonia, Brazil, India, Ireland, and the United States. The second aspect of a functioning democracy, i.e., citizens providing checks and balances for the functioning of the elected representatives by electronic means - it remains to be seen how Indians are able to achieve that.

Technology is the enabler and not the solution

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The central challenge is to integrate new technological means with traditional or "offline" methods of access to information as well as channels of consulting and engaging the public in policy-making decisions. 

Quantity does not mean quality so the standards must be kept high. Probably the biggest barrier to engaging people successfully in online engagement of policy-making is not technological but rather cultural, organisational and a mindset issue. Richard E. Sclove makes this point  in "Democracy and Technology" - "The technologies we use are the results of human choices and not the product of forces beyond human control." 

Gorbachev - the Second John Reed in Moscow or in a New Ad?

John Reed (1887-1920), the American journalist, poet and communist, famous for describing the Bolshevik Revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World is only one of the seven non-Russians buried in the Kremlin. 

Being buried in the Kremlin necropolis is the greatest honour for Russians (similar to being buried in the Westminster Cathedral in England). People buried there (either full grave or only ashes in the wall):

1. Inessa Armand (France)
2. Bill Haywood (USA)
3. Otto Wille Kuusinen (Finland)
4. Sen Katayama (Japan)
5. C E Ruthenberg (USA)
6. Jenö Landler (Hungary)
7. John Reed (USA)

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Are they going to break with the tradition of having Soviet leaders automatically buried in the Kremlin necropolis now that the Soviet Union does not exist any more? They buried Boris Yeltsin in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow along with Soviet leaders like Andrei Gromyko and Russian luminaries like Sergei Eisenstein and Mikhail Bulgakov.

Gorbachev or Gorby has always been openly pro-Western and was close friends with Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan. Gorbymania in the West died down as he lost power. Many of the younger generation nowadays don't even know his name. Would he also be buried in Kremlin like John Reed when he dies? 

 There is a 14^th century proverb from England

 “A reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks do fall”. 

Has Gorbachev become a reed in order to survive the winds of change? 

There is also a Jamaican proverb 

” When cotton-tree tumble down every nanny-goat want fe jump over” (When the mighty fall the weak want to take advantage).

The ex-supreme leader of the Soviet Union, Mihail Gorbachev, maintains himself by advertising. This time it's Louis Vuitton bags. 

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He’s been at it before, advertising Pizza Hut, so he knows how the gig works. 

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As a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Grammy award winner, he is quite a media person. 

In 2007, speaking at New Orleans, he volunteered to lead the people of New Orleans in a revolution in 2011 if the US government failed to repair the levees by then. 

What would Gorbachev be sponsored by if this American Revolution ever took place - 

• Camel Boots
• Che Guevara T-shirts
• Castro Cigars
• Mao Jackets 
• Putin After-Shave? 

How would President Obama or McCain react to that?

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If we compare the Kremlin, as a burial place, to an equally high profile cemetery in USA, it would of course be Arlington National Cemetery. There are only three non-Americans buried there. Sadly no Russians among them.

1. Larry Thorne or the swashbuckling Lauri Törni for the people of Finland (he is also a former Waffen-SS member and thus a former Nazi)
2. Orde Charles Wingate (UK, born and died in India but interred in Arlington)
3. Pierre Charles L'enfant (France)

Would the Americans ever consider burying Gorbachev in Hollywood or for that matter in Arlington? Hardly.

Is Love a Mammalian Prerogative or is it universal among all living beings?

Love is an abstract concept yet so concrete that nothing else matters. 

Love has managed to remain beyond all human attempts to describe and define it, not to talk about controlling it.

One can experience love but cannot sufficiently explain it to another who has never experienced it.

Philosophers, poets, artists and singers have tried to describe love for the entire length of recorded history. Humans and divine beings in all mythology and religion deals with different forms and expressions of love, loss of love and consequences of love not socially accepted. 

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What is considered taboo or punishable by death in one context is the norm or highest ideal in another, e.g., falling a love with and marrying a partner is considered a fundamental right in Western democracies but in many other societies one gets harsh penalties for such behaviour.

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Some scientists approach love through a biological model of sex and tend to view love as a mammalian drive like thirst or hunger. Helen Fisher in her book, Anatomy of Love takes a scientific look and divides the experience of love into three partly overlapping stages: 

1. Lust
2. Attraction and 
3. Attachment. 

What about post-attachment love then? Does love end in attachment and there is no room for non-attachment in love? Hmm! Frightening thought!

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Lust exposes humans to others, romantic attraction encourages people to focus their energy on mating, and attachment involves tolerating the spouse long enough to rear a child into infancy. 

If we view the positive connotations of love, we could see loving as: 

• acting intentionally
• in sympathetic response to others
• towards promoting mutual well-being.

Is love only a mammalian prerogative? 

How do we know that reptilians or insects never feel love?

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How do we know that the buzzing of a bumblebee is not a serenade or the movement of a tapeworm is not an erotic dance?

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Here is another way of looking at love through words of poetry.

Two worlds inside our brains - Two interconnected hemispheres

What happens inside our brains is the most fascinating mystery of the universe. 

If in doubt about your cerebral capacity, think about the following facts about the human brain.

• The human brain is said to have 100 billion neurons, like the number of stars in our galaxy. There is indeed a principle in alchemy - as within, so without.

We know that the human brain has two interconnected hemispheres though we are not usually aware of their differences in functioning. The hemispheres communicate with each other through a thick band of 200-250 million nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. 

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It seems that each hemisphere of the brain is dominant for specific behaviours:

• the right brain is dominant for spatial abilities, face recognition, visual imagery and music 
• the left brain may be more dominant for calculations, math and logical abilities. 

These are generalisations and in healthy people, the two hemispheres work together and share information through the corpus callosum. Much of what we know about the right and left hemispheres comes from studies of people who have had the corpus callosum split or suffered other injuries affecting brain structures or specific areas of the brain.

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Insider Description of a Stroke Impairing Brain Functions

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor tells from personal experience the different roles each brain hemisphere play and what happens when a stroke begins to shut down brain functions.

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During a massive stroke she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding - she studied and remembered every moment and describes it here. This is a fascinating description of experiencing a stroke, shared by a highly trained and experienced neuroanatomist.

We live in two worlds: an outer world of things and a rich inner world

We live in two worlds! Now, this may seem very strange but we do live in two distinct worlds. 

The first is a world of things, events and other people.

Then we also live in an inner world of thoughts, impressions and reactions to outer stimuli.

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These two worlds are very different. The outer world contains all that is needed to create experience for us except one thing we all desperately seek - happiness.


Is it True that Greater Happiness Can be Found in the Inner World?

The problem with satisfaction and 'happiness' in the outer sphere of activity is that it is conditional. When the conditions change, dissatisfaction enters.

Greater happiness can be found only in the inner world. Everything that we can find in the outer world can bring satisfaction, pride, joy but all these may turn stale and seem transitory. Thus we can observe two important things about life.

• There are people who have much in the outer world yet are not happy. 
• There are people who need very little on the outside to find happiness in the inner world. 

But it doesn't follow that if you have little possessions, you'll automatically be happier. Studying happy people would reveal the success formula to be rather a state of mind, which is a function of the inner world.

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Trying to satisfy the hunger within by getting more and more is an endless process. The thirst is never quenched.

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So, how does one achieve tranquility, gratefulness and true contentment while being truly what we are, without deadening our senses and desensitising our feelings. Yes, it is possible.

Achieving this is the art of living - so simple essentially yet so difficult. It is a matter of spirit. 

The first picture is from a shop window in Munich, Germany. I spent a lovely Easter there with friends.


PERMA = Positive Psychology Approach to Happiness

Martin Seligman, the famous American psychologist (his concept of learned helplessness is very much utilised by scientific and clinical psychologists) has suggested 5 items that seem to bring happiness more often than not:

1. Pleasure (sensory pleasure e.g. warm baths and tasty foods)
2. Engagement (the mysterious state called flow when we are absorbed yet challenged in doing something)
3. Relationships (human relationships are a good indicator of life satisfaction)
4. Meaning (belonging to something larger than self or a quest)
5. Accomplishments (realising tangible goals)

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Here, the yardstick is not how much money you have, or the size of your car or the value of your house or how impressive the job title sounds.

The five items are very much about achieving a significant balance between inner world and outer world matters. It does not mean that the quantity the items bring more pleasure, but the individual experience of them. So, one slice of pizza can bring more happiness than six whole pizzas, in the right circumstances.

The clue is that it is not other people who dictate the criteria, but the criteria comes from within us.