What I learn from my friends (Roorkee chapter)

Families teach us social behavior and along with that certain constraints. Constraints can be in term of what not to do as a part of social behavior and it is a result of familial experience over time. But, it's among the friends, where we learn beyond those constraints. This happens because of equal say amongst friends and collective risk taking while adventuring unconventional activities.

This is my experience at IIT Roorkee with an entirely different set of friends and my learning from them. At the time of my admission into IIT Roorkee, I was introvert, refrain from public speaking, under-confident (inferiority feeling when met with a student with fluent English) and in a habit of lying to hide my weakness or status. But on positive note I want to remain honest to few, have a decent aptitude and believe in hard work to learn and excel.
Once inside the campus and in next four years, after interacting with friends I learned a lot what to do and not to do and this had a deep impact on my personality. The results of these learning are visible over a period of time into my behavior and character. Some of my key takeaways from few friends:

Friend 1: I never had seen such an individual who is so much confident, fearless and intelligent. Inside a GD room during campus placement, I would never ever ask for pen from panel itself (obviously because of introvert nature); but this guy did that. And he taught me to be natural, not to fear of societal bondage and rituals. But at the same time, he was not consistent and having a poor emotional quotient (gradually improved a lot with exposure to friend circle).

Friend 2: This guy's simplicity and no nonsense attitude is worth to be learnt and practiced in real life. I although inspired from this but couldn't bring that into my life till now. But what I learn from him regarding not to do is never following a path blindly. You should always keep your eyes and ear open while preparing to achieve something.

Friend 3: I didn't have any sense of style, either in dressing or in conversation. This guy reminded me of the importance of presentation and sharpness in life (still lacking a lot). Also from him, I learn how not to waste time. And from his experience in life, I realized the importance of farsightedness and rational decision making in life.

Friend 4: This guy made me realized that extreme of everything is bad. And you have to balance your family, friends, love life and academics at the same time. But one thing that made this guy stand apart was his people skills and this quality was the savior for him. People skill is something, I always wish to master.

Friend 5: I never understood the rationality behind his behavior. Only learning, I am having from this guy is what not to do. He may act in a way, that show me 'the way' not to be followed. It may be a disaster for him but a learning for others like me.

Friend 6: This guy has a lot of traits to be learnt. But the problem here is inside me, because I never took the initiative or feeling of learning from him because of my competitive nature. I always tried to excel more than him and rarely took notice of his abilities and behavior to be followed.

I don't feel that after graduation I became perfect with my learning from these pals. But I do feel that my personality has improved a lot and it will take time to personalize those envious traits. But one thing I can confidently say, that forty years down the line, these guys will definitely have a contribution to my success (up to whatever extent that success will be).

Missing girl from the classroom

Education system of India, can only fulfill the dream of developed India by making Indian demography a dividend rather than being a disaster as going by current trend of poor skills of Indian youths. But this education system (government funded institutions) is suffering from poor teaching skills, absence of teachers in government funded schools and poor attendance of students. And often, one leads to another; absence of teachers demotivates students from attending schools and absence of students has been an excuse as given by teachers.
Well, these are the obvious reasons, but beyond there are few other infrastructural and sociological reasons. And I realized this on one of my trip to a girls high school in Jharkhand. As I entered a class-room of official strength of 100 but there were meagre 30 girls in the classroom. I enquired into the reason and beyond the usual reasons of low skill level of teachers and their absence; the reasons were unavailability of transportation fare to schools for poor girls (who comprise a major chunk of students), unavailability of time to girl child to go to school after finishing household activities.
These institutions are the only hope for poor tribal and rural students. And the institutions are mainly located in cities and towns, and access to such institutions require distance to be covered by bus, jeep , train or even auto-rickshaws. But these require the cost to bear for transportation, and for those daily wage earners it was very difficult to give 20INR as transportation cost to their wards to attend school.
Girls get the opportunity to visit the (sacred) school only when their parents get the wage.
While for girls from cities and towns, the sociological factors are inhibiting factors in accessing schools. In morning, they are first entitled to feed their brothers and fathers as well as cleaning the house and then go to schools. As a result, many a days they don't find time to attend the school.
And when I enquire about the so called usual reasons; the response are quite different. Their expectations are not that huge from teachers but the problem is regarding the time, infrastructure and money being provided by their families/government to reach and attend schools.

Life is an experience and not just a bunch of paychecks

And every day, from school bus ride in the morning to a film in the night; we wish for possession of lot many materialistic things related to cars, bikes, gadgets and many others. If not, we are (so called) motivated by relatives and neighbors to be jealous of competing friends regarding aiming for bigger salaries, bigger cars and bigger homes. And in the way, we would tend to miss many life changing opportunities.
Risk is an eternal part of life that makes it enthralling, beautiful and memorable. Maybe, because of that in the previous times Kings used to hunt and went for wars (although ethically and morally wrong). But this important ingredient is missing from the life of a middle class family; that further lead to missing such opportunities in life. Either going for a start-up or leaving the job to work on a social cause or following passion like photography, painting or any other; the middle class mindset (risk averse) prevent us from following such.
Such opportunities (successful or failure) beyond their monetary importance are implicitly carrying the messages of innovation and inner happiness. But the paychecks rarely have such implicit meaning and only have obligations, so called secure obligations. But in life, what remains after all the events are the thrill associated with it, the adrenaline rush and the memories; which can't be purchased with the paychecks but through experience (with those opportunities). That's what life is.

MGNREGA

A lot of hue and cry going on over the tweaking of labor:material ratio from 60:40 to 51:49 as well as over the overall benefit of MGNREGA the so called ROI.
MGNREGA standing as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was started in 2005 is a demand driven right to work programme to rural India. It aims at ensuring 100 days of productive work to rural households during off agricultural season ensuring a minimum wage. The purpose behind the programme included ensuring a minimum wage rate to agricultural labourers by providing them a bargaining tool, preventing the off season migration from undeveloped rural areas, reducing poverty through wage based empowerment of poor, women empowerment through increased women labor force participation ratio, uplifment of oppressed classes like SC and ST and implicitly increasing literacy level among destitute's children by providing working opportunities to parents. The program is very noble in its objectives and labor:material ratio of 60:40 is in right direction towards labor intensive works to be carried.
Now 9 years after its deployment, time has come to analyze the actual benefits caused by MGNREGA and at what costs. It has been observed that number of days an average worker is provided with work is a meagre 46 days in 2013-14 with a outlay of 33000 crore of INR. Also, the quality of infrastructure built under MGNREGA are of inferior standards. A lot many reasons are there behind this debacle, starting from poor governance in job card distribution, poor coordination among departments over transfer of funds leading to delay in payment of wages, poor coordination among different social sector programmes like PMGSY, MGNREGA, NBA (Nirmal Bharat Abhiyaan transferred to Swachha Bharat Abhiyaan), poor implementation of information, education and communication of programmes among rural people, awareness among PRI over their power in conducting social audits of programme, and mal-functioning grievance redressal mechanism. Another major cause which has been said to be responsible for poor quality of infrastructure is less inclusion of material expenditure. Another ground on which MGNREGA has been criticized is the rising food inflation in India and the blame is on increased rural wages in agriculture (MGNREGA minimum wage has been increased from 67 in 2006-07 to 132 in 2013-14).
Under such reasons, there are talks of scrapping MGNREGA to improve the quality of constructional works being carried out and focus towards infrastructural built up to boost manufacturing.
At this point, we should rather revise the major objectives of MGNREGA and its role in achieving those and then look at the reasons behind its failure. And if those failure can be rooted out in a sustainable and profitable manner or to scrap the programme. MGNREGA achievement has been mixed across the states, while it has been more successful in southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu who together provided 23% of working hours under MGNREGA using smart card, social audit by panchayats, use of ICT in payment of wages and closing all loopholes and dedicated grievance redressal mechanism. While in poor states like UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa there are the major leakage in the funds. But the impact is more widespread in these backward states only reducing the migration from the tribal areas of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh with availability of works and high involvement of women (near about 45% ) which has actually been one of its major objective.
Coming to quality of construction, in the rising awareness towards environment and world moving from GDP level of growth to Gross Happiness Index and Happy Planet Index of development, there is need to carry out eco-friendly construction practices and use of natural resources. And this is what has been practiced in many of the rural blocks in rainwater harvesting, irrigation infrastructure and development projects and if it has not been done, professional teams have to be deployed at rural level to achieve this. To the point of MGNREGA causing inflation, it's contribution to inflation is very less with respect to structural causes (protein based diet and low output of pulses and livestock, poor agricultural infrastructure in terms of cold storage and warehousing, increase in MSP under rich farmer lobbying). Anyway inflation is synonymous to decreasing unemployment as per philips curve and if that inflation is coming on the empowerment of poor agricultural labourers, it must be accepted. And efforts should be rather on decreasing structural causes.
The recent govt. initiative for special focus on 2500 backward blocks through enhanced funding and deployment of Cluster based professional teams to assist the panchayats in carrying out productive work in an environmentally friendly manner is in the right direction of streamlining MGNREGA. At the same time, learning is there for poor performing states from states like AP and Tamil Nadu which has shown the way of blocking leakage through use of ICT initiatives. MGNREGA has been a great innovation towards achieving equality in rural society which need to be nurtured rather than scrapped.

Inflation

1. Inflation is the phenomenon of rise in prices of the goods and services over a period of time. It can be both desirable and non-desirable depending upon the quantitative limit of Inflation and is caused out of a number of reasons from demand supply gap more often, rise in prices of raw materials, disdain in the supply chain of the system, black-marketing and hoarding and many others.
2. Inflation can be measured in a variety of different ways. One way is to measure it at different levels of supply chain like at whole price level and is known as Wholesale Price Index (WPI) and at retailer level called as Consumer Price Index (CPI). Also number of goods and services included inside them can vary depending on the decision making body of the country or the state. It can be calculated differently for different sets of people depending on their consumption pattern like CPI-Industrial workers (CPI-IW) and CPI-Agricultural Labors (CPI-AL). In India they are collected and published by different organizations from Ministry of Statistics to Ministry of Labor.
3. Inflation is desirable when it is in limits and in coherence with development and growth in terms of production and demand. Different central banks across the world target a sustainable inflation rate which is normally in the range of 2-4% year on year. Such inflation rate has proven to be in line with growth in GDP and assures benefit to all the stakeholders of the system. Federal Bank of US target inflation rate of 1--2% to sustain a growth rate of 3-5% of their economy, similarly European Central Bank targets inflation rate of 2% to sustain growth rate of 3-4%. German Bundesbank (before formation of ECB) has proved its mettle in fighting inflation to keep it below 2% and this sustained high growth for german manufacturers throughout the cold war period.
4. While on the other hand inflation may proved to be undesirable when it is beyond the comfortable range of 4-6%. Such inflation rate is not sustainable and mainly caused out of abrupt hike in prices of raw materials, increased cost of production out of regulatory reasons, hoarding, black-marketing or may be because of lack of competition in the market. Such high rate of inflation is harmful  because of increase in prices of goods and thus hampering its consumption and thus hampering the demand and ultimately growth of the sector. It also erodes the faith of foreign investors into the economy of the country and lead to flight off of foreign investors. Along with high inflation, demand of the goods come down and as per Demand Supply curve; this will further pull down production leading to unemployment and less investment into the economy. In the short run, this will cause slowdown and high inflation prolonged for a long time duration will push the sector into recession.
5. In context of India, since independence inflation has been predominant out of number of factors. At some instant, inflation is there in food grains in pre green revolution era out of drought and crop failure limiting the supply of food grains; at other instant inflation is there in capital and durable items because of increase in prices of raw materials and regulatory reasons like that of vehicles because of shortage of coal and electricity inflating price of steel and then to vehicles. Inflation has thus, a wide reaching affect to multiple sectors. The worst form of inflation is due to malpractices like hoarding of goods creating artificial shortage with motives of earning high profits. Such practices are very common to India from the time of britishers and specially in the food grains as they are essential items of consumption.
6. In the current scenario, inflation is high and is hovering around 8-12% in case of CPI because of reasons including high govt. expenditure through MGNREGA and other social assistance programmes pushing more money into the market, continuous increase in MSP (minimum support price) of cereals and other food items pushing cost at the procurement level, as well as malpractices of hoarding.
7. Although all sections of society is affected by high inflation as it leads to wiping off the savings of the families and individuals. But the worst effected people are marginally poor who are continuously moving in and out of the poverty line and specially because of high inflation in case of foods and essential items. In the absence of govt. support, they have been pushed below the subsistence level
8. Govt. across the world use to take multiple steps to check high inflation. The leading fight against inflation is carried on by central banks who through target based inflation increase/decrease the interest rates to control the flow of money into the market (more money in the hands of people pushes up the demand of the goods). This they do through changing the rates at which they lend money to the banks and other regulated institutions and thus affecting cost to money. In case of India, Reserve Bank of India is leading in this fight with target inflation of 4+_2%, through repo and reverse repo rates.
9. Besides this, govt. across the world ensure the prices of the goods and commodities not to breach a certain level by controlling the import and export of those goods and commodities. Further controlling the prices of essential commodities through acts and laws like Essential Commodities Act in case of India. Laws across the world have been made to check hoarding of commodities and black-marketing of such goods.
10. In-spite of such measures high inflation is prevalent in society sometimes because of poor implementation of laws and rules, poor forecasting in case of central banks, natural calamities and poor planning at production level. The war against high inflation has to be continuously fought through existing and innovative tools with firm hands in the interest of the society and economy as a whole.

Give a try....

Not only in present times, even our previous generation or the generations much before them; youths always would have fallen in love with someone or other in their life. And most of time, they used to have a background check of the special girl/boy and very few used to have the courage to accept the feeling in front of him/her. And many a times, most of them let the feelings fade on grounds of the boy/girl being from different religion, class or caste of the society. The basic deterrent here is the social malaise like communal-ism, caste-ism, class difference and others on the basis of which we limit our emotions. 

Now, going against the usual process which very of us used to practice also; in-spite of the human created deterrent if we go along with the divine feeling of love and accept that feeling in front of him/her. There can be series of consequences, either accepted or dejected or in a between of the two. Well, the motive here is neither to force your feeling on the other nor to be dis-heartened by the rejection; the basic motive to promote these feelings is to respect free thinking and feelings and more than that to get over the social malaise of casteism, communalism regionalism and others. 

Because in the later part of our life, when we come across the real life incidents of murder, riots and mass murder in the name of religion or inequalities in society on grounds of caste and favoritism; rather than taking sides in such conflicts we should respect that godly feeling of love. And amid all these conflicts, we should rather strengthen harmony. The evils that we used to encounter in our later life can be encountered only with feeling of love and some rosily experience with family and loved ones that we encounter in our early life and it is these experiences that keep us going in the right directions in presence of evils all around us. 

Indo-US relations: How it can shape in future?

India after independence, despite being founding fathers to Non Aligned Movement was more aligned to USSR owing to its inherent socialism in domestic development policies adopted by Indian politician. But after 1991 i.e. end of cold war, India review its foreign policy and developing closer ties with European ties and US; also taking care of its investment need in infrastructure and technological needs after New Economic Policy 1991.
In the present uni-polar world growing more towards multipolar; India relations with US is not in upswing corroborating to Khobragade issues as well as other contentious issues at WTO negotiations. But with single party govt. in India and changing world with west asia crisis, Ukraine crisis, South china sea crisis and many more, Indo-US relations will depend on different happenings at different fronts.
Nuclear Energy Front
After the signing of Henry J Hyde Indo-US Peaceful Atomic Cooperation Act which paves the way for India to buy US nuclear reactors and fuel for civilian use also including the 123 agreement on same; there is growing hope for peaceful cooperation. Although, the bone of contention can be the liability clause for US firms engaging into the same.
Trade Relations Front
India need for transfer of technology and measure to boost foreign trade and with US as major market for IT outsourcing, trade relations will move on more healthier path. India balance of trade surplus with  US has grown twice to $20 billion from 2009 to 2013. Although, at WTO and Climate change conferences and negotiations, US strongly pressing against benefits enjoyed by India and China as a developing economy rather than being into emerging economy.
Strategic Front
US being awry of China and its China containment policy with supporting Japan and Taiwan in East will go for supporting India in the west. Also with a history of restrained Indo-China relations and china policy of encircling India through string of pearls and Maritime Silk Route; India will prefer to have heavyweights by its side. In the recent past, US relation with Pakistan is in frills because of growing Islamist extremism and US drone attacks on Pakistan Afghanistan border. This further alienates India in recent future to have bilateral talks with US at much higher level.
Besides, that US still had pressing situations in Afghanistan and Iraq and premature withdrawal from america's commitments in those countries would make US to have asian ally for reconstruction. And these perfectly suits Indian viewpoint where Afghanistan stability is important from regional security and Iraq's political stability is needed to take care of India's burgeoning energy import bills.
Russia, India's closest ally but recent incidents of military helicopter sale to Pakistan and growing proximity with China after Ukraine crisis force India to raise concern with Russia at talks with US by its side.