During vacations some college boys from south India came to Delhi. They rented a taxi for sight-seeing. The driver was an old Sardarji and boys being boys, they began cracking Sardar jokes, just to tease the old man. To their surprise, the old fellow remained unperturbed.
At the end of the sight-seeing tour, they paid the cab hire charges. The Sardar returned the change and he gave each one of them a ten rupee note extra and said, "Sons, since morning you have been telling Sardar jokes. I listened to them all and let me tell you, some of them were in bad taste. Still, I don't mind because I know that you are young and are yet to see the world. But I have one request. I am giving you ten rupees each. Give it to the first Sardar beggar that you come across in this or any other city."
Years later, one of the group of boys recounts, "That ten-rupee note is still with me. I could not find a single Sardar begging anywhere."
Sikhs contribute:
33% of total income tax
67% of total charities
45% of the Indian Army
59,000 plus Gurudwaras serve langar, free of charge, to over 60 lakh people every day!
And all this when Sikhs form only 1.4% of the Indian population.
Vijendra Gupta of New Delhi in Khushwant Singh's column in Hindustan Times. Here
The question “What is strategy?” has spurred numerous doctoral dissertations, countless hours of research, and hearty disagreement among serious management thinkers. Perhaps this is why many executives also struggle with it. Nonetheless, decision makers seeking to steer a business to sustained success need a succinct and pragmatic response. After all, it can only help executives to have a shared definition of strategy when they are creating, communicating, and implementing a strategy for their business.
So, what is a business strategy? Strategy is different from vision, mission, goals, priorities, and plans. It is the result of choices executives make, on where to play and how to win, to maximize long-term value.
Ken Favaro, with Kasturi Rangan and Evan Hirsh in Strategy business. Here
The mosquito beats its wings some 500 times a second; human beings can manage to wave their arms to a very limited extent in the same amount of time. If scientists could ever build such a powerful mechanism, it would soon burn up due to the intense friction. And yet a mosquito accomplishes this feat for as long as it lives, flying at a high speed in the direction it chooses and for as long as it desires. In addition, it has been endowed with the most perfect maneuvering and landing abilities.
A mosquito requires a high level of oxygen to beat its wings at this speed. Therefore, it has a special respiratory passage that immediately reaches every cell in its body. Since this passage is directly connected to the outside air, its cells engage in oxygen exchange without the need for any intermediate substances. As a result, a mosquito never becomes tired.
Creating such a wing in a creature that is less than1 cm(0.4 inch) in size, together with a respiratory system that makes this possible, is a display of Allah’s astonishing artistry. No coincidence can give rise to such a perfect mechanism in such a complex life form and endow it with perfect functioning, or give it a pair of wings that can beat 500 times per second simultaneously. Such a flawless creature and its amazing wings could not have come into being through random stages, as proposed by Darwin:
Verily whoever dwells in the heavens or the Earth belongs to Allah. Those who invoke others instead of Allah, associating them with Him in His Divinity, only follow conjectures and are merely guessing. (Surah Yunus, 66)
Harun Yahya in Radiance weekly. Here
America now has
• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• the greatest inequality of incomes;
• the lowest social mobility;
• the lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;
• the worst score on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index;
• the highest expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP, yet all this money accompanied by the highest infant mortality rate, the highest prevalence of mental health problems, the highest obesity rate, the highest percentage of people going without health care due to cost, the highest consumption of antidepressants per capita, and the shortest life expectancy at birth;
• the next-to-lowest score for student performance in math and middling performance in science and reading;
• the highest homicide rate;
• the largest prison population in absolute terms and per capita;
• the highest carbon dioxide emissions and the highest water consumption per capita;
• the lowest score on Yale’s Environmental Performance Index (except for Belgium) and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Denmark);
• the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of national income (except for Japan and Italy);
• the highest military spending both in total and as a percentage of GDP; and
• the largest international arms sales.
Our politicians are constantly invoking America’s superiority and exceptionalism. True, the data is piling up to confirm that we’re Number One, but in exactly the way we don’t want to be—at the bottom.
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The American political system is in deep trouble for another reason—it is moving from democracy to plutocracy and corporatocracy, supported by the ascendancy of market fundamentalism and a strident antiregulation, antigovernment, antitax ideology. The hard truth is that our political system today is simply incapable of meeting the great challenges described here. What we have is third-rate governance at a time when the challenges we face require first-rate governance.
America thus confronts a daunting array of challenges in the maintenance of our people’s well-being, in the conduct of our international affairs, in the management of our planet’s natural assets, and in the workings of our politics. Taken together, these challenges place in grave peril much that we hold dear.
The America we must seek for our children and grandchildren is not the America we have today. If we are going to change things for the better, we must first understand the forces that led us to this sea of troubles. When big problems emerge across the entire spectrum of national life, it cannot be due to small reasons. We have encompassing problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political system. By understanding these flaws, we can end them and move forward in a very different direction.
*****
Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines families and communities; it is leading us to environmental calamity; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting our deepest human needs.
Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing the things that would make us, and the country, better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction, and levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially. We have entered the realm of what ecological economist Herman Daly calls “uneconomic growth.” Environmentally, we see a world in which growth has brought us to a situation where more of the same will quite literally ruin the planet. Politically, the growth imperative is a big part of how we the people are controlled: the necessity for growth gives the real power to those who have the finance and technology to deliver it.
*****
The following transformations hold the key to moving to a new political economy. Consider each as a transition from today to tomorrow.
• Economic growth: from growth fetish to post-growth society, from mere GDP growth to growth in human welfare and democratically determined priorities.
• The market: from near laissez-faire to powerful market governance in the public interest.
• The corporation: from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, from one ownership and motivation model to new business models and the democratization of capital.
• Money and finance: from Wall Street to Main Street, from money created through bank debt to money created by government.
• Social conditions: from economic insecurity to security, from vast inequities to fundamental fairness.
• Indicators: from GDP (“grossly distorted picture”) to accurate measures of social and environmental health and quality of life.
• Consumerism: from consumerism and affluenza to sufficiency and mindful consumption, from more to enough.
• Communities: from runaway enterprise and throwaway communities to vital local economies, from social rootlessness to rootedness and solidarity.
• Dominant cultural values: from having to being, from getting to giving, from richer to better, from separate to connected, from apart from nature to part of nature, from transcendent to interdependent, from today to tomorrow.
• Politics: from weak democracy to strong, from creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy to true popular sovereignty.
• Foreign policy and the military: from American exceptionalism to America as a normal nation, from hard power to soft, from military prowess to real security.
James Gustave Speth in Orion. Here
After the Punjab fiasco Congress must have courage to look into it and ponder over Proportionate Electoral System and its benefits. India must adopt a political system which strengthen its integrity yet be more representative.
It is also a fact that if BSP support PES, it has larger chances in the electoral system. Even today, as far as vote share is concern, Mayawati has got 26% of total votes polled in UP which should have given her 105 seats in the current assembly in PES.
India will pay a heavy price if we do not shift to a better political alternative which is more representative in nature and yet unite India and its diverse communities where those who do not vote to a particular parties do not get thrashed as happening in Uttar-Pradesh at the moment., a system which give minorities their right to participate in power on equitable term and not at the mercy of a dominant community.
The current trend of democracy revolve around ‘particular’ community in each states which cobble together a few others ‘like minded’ while pitched in against those who ‘differ’. This has resulted in chaos and virtual caste war in different parts of the country which media may be reporting some time and hiding at other. Uttar-Pradesh will go through this phase now and it is the biggest challenge but then the poll results of Uttar-Pradesh and Punjab are an opportunity for those who fights for genuine representative democracy to push forward agenda for Proportionate Electorate System.
Vidya Bhushan Rawat in Counter currents.
Here
