While I took the liberty of discussing various typologies of autobiographical narratives in the previous chapter, I do wonder, like Mandelstam (1991), about the songs in the souls of my respondents that were not brought to bear in their impromptu rendition of their life tales. Were the rhythms in their life tales fortuitous or do they offer a partial glimpse into one's consciousness or is it both a chance and an active construction? My penchant is to recognize the boundary line, although not absolute and impermeable, between the lived life and the narrated life. I take my respondents' narratives as their selective representations – both by chance and by choice – of their experiences and my own analysis, in turn, is yet another re-presentation of their life stories and therefore, there are many layers of dialogic relationships. Bakhtin (1981) reiterates frequently that we must never confuse “the represented world with the world outside the text (naïve realism); nor must we confuse the authorcreator of a work with the author as a human being (naïve biographism)” (p. 253). Thus, the immediate reality is that the lived life and the narrated life are indissolubly tied up and are in a continual process of mutual interaction. The disjunction can neither be fused nor torn apart.

The closest English translation for the Sanskrit word Katha is “story,” but this English word tends to convert the “active verb” into a “passive noun.” Etymologically, the word Katha is derived from the Sanskrit root Kath, which means “to converse with, tell, relate, narrate, speak out, explain” (Monier-Williams 1899, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary) and Katha, therefore, best translates as an act of “storying” or “telling,” which includes the tellers, the tales and the listeners. The dialogical angle is fundamental to the Katha activity. A common expression to begin a story very often is not necessarily, “let me tell you a story,” but “shall we tell ourselves some stories” or “shall we do some storying” or “do you want to spin some stories?” Katha is not just a single story, but it is at once personal, social and spiritual. At a subjective level, my concerns are with the ways in which the individual makes connections with the “all-pervasive” social and spiritual text. The relationship that one establishes with the text is dependent on both the level of knowledge, and the degree of engagement with the text, which in turn is dependent on the modes of encounter with the text.

An active understanding, according to the Bhagavad Gita, is equivalent to action, in which there are many actors. Knowledge (product), the knower (subject), the tools for acquiring knowledge (instruments) and the application of these tools (processes) and the object of knowledge (known) are all equal partners in this act. In the Philosophy of Act, Bakhtin (1993) expresses similar sentiment, and he says, “every thought of mine, along with its content, is an act or deed that I perform” (p. 3). For Bakhtin, removing the “thought” from its concrete “act” results in invalidating the thought itself. He writes,

My focus in this chapter on the reading act is on the indivisibility of the “content/sense moments” and the “individual/historical moments” that Bakhtin points out.

If we extend the definition of myth given by Roland Barthes (1989), then perhaps “epic” is also a type of speech – a certain “mode of signification” – whether the signifying is through words or any other semiotic material, it must appear to be grand, exalted and eternal. Even if the chosen signifier is plain and arbitrary, because of its connection to the signified, its value is heightened or it gets sanctified. Without the superlative degree in tone and in manner of speech, it would not successfully signify the epic. In the current study, regardless of the nature of discourse that readers construct about the text, there is one common denominator, and that is that the epic world is situated in the zone of distant past. However, this does not mean that the text is frozen in time and space; if anything, it blends with the immediate present and in this process of fusing, some old meanings are erased and new meanings that suit the contemporary needs are inserted and then located in that arbitrarily defined “distant past.”

The distinction between the epic and the novel is a critical one for Bakhtin, because certain inherent features in their own right characterize them.

Exchanges in the Flow of Time

In the grand itihas (history of ideas) that this epic embodies, no individual – however noble their deeds might be, and no idea, despite its seeming idealism, is perfect and pure. This grand text of Indian civilization, even as it appears to be outmeasuring space and outlasting time, invites every generation living within the confines of its culture and facing the forces of history, to the semantic field of uncertainties and ambiguities. The act of reading is the meeting point of multiple histories, those of the individual, the recent cultural and the ancient. During the interpretive encounter, the boundaries between here and now and what lies beyond in time and space, shift. This book is about the exchanges that occur in the flow of time.

The nature of the exchange is varied; some enter the flow to discover dimensions about self, text and history, while others evade the flow to make sense of the text in a detached manner. The narratives convincingly demonstrate the limitations of monologic voices and the productivity of dialogic consciousness in every domain of development.

The classic Sanskrit play Sakuntala by Kalidasa was a major source of inspiration for the German Romantic poet, Goethe, who was captivated by the complexity of the plot structure, the beauty of its imagery and, above all, the melding of earthly conduct and heavenly edicts (Miller, 1984). Stories cast a spell in the oral-based Indian culture, playing a unique role in the Indian ontology. Tales are the semiotic fields within which individuals make sense of their existence in the world. In turn, individual psyche also becomes the semiotic field where the tales get acted out. The engagement with the tales is precisely that – a play – like spinning tops at the street corner. Storytellers and listeners participate in spinning narratives to make them more vibrant, enticing other playmates to intensify the game. There is a great deal of preoccupation with the act of “storying” in India, as psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar observes:

The single biggest policy challenge facing Asia is how to sustain rapid economic growth that reduces poverty and is socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable. The challenges–and opportunities–are all the greater given rapid population growth in much of the region, the need to rebalance growth in light of the global financial crisis, and the multiple challenges of responding to climate change. This timely book brings together some of the latest research and findings on poverty reduction, inequality, and conceptual and policy issues of inclusive growth in Asia.

The book highlights Asia's remarkable economic achievements. Between 1990 and 2008, the region's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) increased almost three-fold, expanding 5.7% a year. Growth was most pronounced in East Asia, at over 8% a year, driven largely by the People's Republic of China (PRC). It was also solid in many countries in Southeast Asia—where the shock of the 1997/98 financial crisis was particularly strong—and, more recently, in India. But per capita GDP growth was nowhere near as robust elsewhere. The economy of Central and West Asia grew just 1.3% annually over 1990–2008, and the Pacific only 0.3%.

In much of Asia, rapid growth has improved the livelihoods of vast numbers of people. The percentage of people living below the $1.25-a-day poverty line fell from 52.3% in 1990 to 27.1% in 2005. The poverty reduction was the largest in the PRC, where it fell from 60.2% in 1990 to 15.9% in 2005, but it was also significant in many other countries.

Introduction

There is a deeply unequal sharing of the burdens of life between women and men in most parts of the world. While gender inequality can take many different forms, this chapter focuses on gender inequality in earnings in the labor market–an important dimension of promoting broad-based or inclusive growth (Behrman and Zhang 1995)–in the context of Thailand and Viet Nam.

The gender pay gap is universal, but its size varies by country. This chapter analyzes the disparity in terms of three factors: individual characteristics, occupational segregation, and gender discrimination in the labor market. Of the many studies that have attempted to explain such earnings disparity, Oaxaca (1973) pioneered a decomposition methodology that explains the male-female wage gap by two components: one shows the difference due to observable male and female characteristics and the other captures the difference in the earnings' generating function, and is sometimes interpreted as a measure of discrimination. Other prominent studies on the gender differential in earnings include: Cotton (1988), which analyzed costs and benefits of discrimination; Neumark (1988), which proposed an alternative procedure from a particular Beckerian discrimination model; and Oaxaca and Ransom (1988 and 1994), which proposed a procedure to estimate the nondiscriminatory wage structure in analyzing union/non-union wage differentials.

This chapter proposes a decomposition methodology to explain the welfare disparity between male and female workers in terms of occupational segregation by gender, discrimination within occupations, and inequality in earnings.