Introduction

In a society like India, where it has not been possible for the state to extend social security to all its citizens, people tend to work as long as they can so that they may be able to support themselves during periods when they have no gainful employment. This applies to interruptions in employment caused by retrenchment, sickness, disablement, as well as advanced old age. Obviously, as old age advances into the seventies and eighties, opportunities for gainful employment get increasingly limited.

The need to engage in gainful employment, even after formal retirement from a given employment may arise due to a variety of reasons:

1. (a) There are specific instances where employees are not entitled to any retirement benefits; eg. casual workers and self-employed persons;

2. (b) In respect of several categories of regularly employed salaried persons, they may be entitled to, at the time of retirement, a onetime payment of gratuity based on salary last drawn and a provident fund based on contributions made during the period of service;

3. (c) In a relatively limited number of cases, salaried employees are entitled to a regular monthly pension in addition to the normal gratuity and provident fund payments.

It is important to note that the maximum pension which civil servants in India are currently entitled to is one half of the basic pay last drawn (plus dearness relief based on cost of living index).

DIFFERENCES?

Differences in culture, ethnicity and nationality are assets, as well as, hazards in a world becoming technically smaller every day. Most of the feuds and wars of the 1990s, all of them catastrophes to millions of people, resulted in cultural, ethnic or religious tensions.

Taking advantage of the situation in Bhutan, beginning from 1991, the propaganda machinery of the Royal Government of Bhutan has been disseminating information that the present crisis in the country is an ethnic conflict fought between the Buddhist Drukpas (supposedly the sons of the soil) and the Hindu Lhotshampas (alleged to be recent migrants). […] To understand the Bhutanese refugee problem, one needs to understand the ethnic background of the refugees and other groups of population in Bhutan.

The present refugee population in Nepal and a little in India consists of Lhotshampas who are people of Nepali origin; they had migrated to Bhutan from Nepal, through Sikkim and West Bengal, in the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were settled in the southern districts of Samchi, Chukha, Chirang, Dagapela, Gaylegphug and Samdrupjonkhar.

Prior to this refugee crisis, foreigners seem not to have known that Bhutan had people of Nepali origin. The tourism booklets depicted Bhutan as the land of the Drukpas. The ruling Ngalungs who are concentrated in the north-west valleys of Haa, Paro and Thimphuinsist that the central Kheng people and eastern Bhutanese (Sharchops) also fall under the nomenclature of Drukpas, as has happened in Nepal, where there exist multiple communities under one nationality.

Introduction

Over the past 25 years, Latin American governments have undertaken a structural-adjustment process including, among other actions, the elimination of trade barriers, privatization of large public domestic firms and deregulation of markets. This move towards deregulation and market reform has included a new embrace of foreign direct investment, even in the strategic oil and gas industries. Considering the former regulations and polices in this sector introduced during the nationalization wave of the 1970s, the transformation has been amazing: foreign investors have not only been welcomed but have even granted proprietary rights over extracted oil. Most Latin American oiland- gas-producing countries agreed to fix royalties at very low levels. Furthermore, the 1990s witnessed the rise of bilateralism (bilateral investment treaties (BITs) plus International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) jurisdiction), which transformed the institutional framework governing the relationship between foreign investors and host states.

Paradoxically, after a decade of market-friendly reforms and neoliberal policies, the beginning of the new millennium was marked by economic crisis, social conflict, and political turmoil.

The Andean countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela) are usually grouped together for analytic purposes. However, the countries on which this chapter focuses (Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela) share some particularities, calling for an analysis separate from the rest (Colombia and Peru).

Can the marginalized speak? Can ‘we’, who have not lost our homes, truly understand the nuances of the words of pain and agony expressed by the displaced/refugees? It is a difficult task no doubt, especially from the point of the theoretical jigsaw, proposed by postmodern writers. But, disregarding such academic nonsense, people in every age have come forward to the suffering humanity – with sympathy to listen to their voices and with commitment stand by them.

Refugee Watch, the committed friend of the refugees/displaced people of the world, has occasionally sought to present such voices to its readers in the form of interviews or sometimes through ‘personal’ correspondence. The literature of marginalized voices, expressed in the forms of personal diaries, letters and interviews, also known as ‘testimonials’, should not be judged as statements of ‘pure’ truth. Beyond the conventional yardsticks of truth or falsity, they can be seen as catharsis – the process of venting out the emotions of the victim/marginalized. Thus, besides having factual and historical importance, they give us a chance to understand ‘the mind’ of the refugees, or rather ‘minds’.

In this section, we have chosen some of this literature, voiced by the victims and also by a sympathetic observer. Needless to say that the issues and problems raised here are very much relevant and living even today.

This volume is a major contribution to a growing body of literature that questions the assumptions of market reforms undertaken in Latin America in recent decades, on the basis that market reforms did not deliver on their basic promise: rapid economic growth. Indeed, even when we take into account the recent period of exceptional conditions in international commodity and capital markets that has facilitated rapid growth in Latin America since 2004, the rate of GDP growth in the region has been 3.3 percent from 1990 to 2007 (and only 2.5 percent if the point of reference is 1980), far short of that achieved during the phase of import-substitution industrialization—or, as I prefer to call it, state-led industrialization—when Latin America grew at an average rate of 5.5 percent a year. Another set of criticisms relates, of course, to the disappointing social effects of market reforms. Again, a simple reflection of this fact is that only in 2005 did Latin America return to the poverty levels of 1980—i.e., the region experienced not a decade, but a quarter century lost in terms of poverty reduction.

The volume concentrates on one of the major aspects of the globalization and liberalization processes: the growing role played by multinational corporations (MNCs) and the opening up of the Latin American economies to foreign direct investment (FDI). Drawing on case studies from about half of the countries in the region, it explores the determinants of FDI, the role that it has played in advancing environmental sustainability, and some political economy issues associated with such investments.

BAR DANCERS AND DIFFERING PERCEPTIONS

An important feature of a rally organized by bar owners against police raids in Mumbai on 20 August 2004 was the emergence of the bar dancer. A large number of girls with their faces covered were at the forefront of the rally holding up placards with blown up pictures of semiclad Bollywood stars. It was a statement questioning the hypocritical moralilty of the state and civil society. […] The media reported that there were around 75,000 bar dancers in the city of Mumbai and its suburbs and they had organized themselves into a union to resist police raids.

The mushrooming of an entire industry called the ‘dance bars’ had escaped the notice of the women's movement in the city. Everyone in Mumbai was aware that there were some exclusive ‘ladies bars’. But usually women, especially those unaccompanied by men, were stopped at the entrance. So many of us did not have any inside information regarding the bar dancers. But the 20th August rally changed all that.

Soon after the rally, Ms Varsha Kale, the President of the Bar Girls Union approached us (the legal centre of Majlis) to represent them through an ‘Intervener Application’ in the Writ Petition filed by the bar owners. During the discussion with the bar dancers, it emerged that while for the bar owners it was a question of business losses, for the bar girls it was an issue of human dignity and right to livelihood.

In 1970, after two decades of European exile broken only by his brief return in 1957–58 to make Touch of Evil–one of the many films a Hollywood studio took away from him–Orson Welles (1915–1985) came home to Hollywood to make his last feature, The Other Side of the Wind. Funding the production largely from his own pocket and shooting entirely outside the system, the fragmented filming finally wrapped in 1976. Thirty years on, the movie, infamously, remains unedited and unreleased, bound up by bad luck, personal feuds and byzantine legal tangles that saw the negatives actually physically locked out of reach in a vault in Paris for decades.

In the intervening years, as scratched and smuggled clips and script extracts have leaked out, Welles' final film's legend has grown. Shot on the run around L.A. and in Arizona, with a reportedly dazzling central performance from John Huston, the movie tells a story that strangely parallels its own making: the doomed tale of an embattled, aging, old-school director, trying to make a film to compete with the sex-and-symbolism flicks of the young guns of the New Hollywood of the early 1970s. A movie about making movies, it has become the Holy Grail of Welles' career, his Rosebud–perhaps the slyest, most mystifyingly revealing statement he ever committed to celluloid.

Welles spent the last decade of his life fighting to have his film released. Twenty-one years after his death, that fight goes on.

Introduction

Within Europe, there is a contradiction between the progressive image of the Netherlands and its local practice. The country has been portrayed as an overly generous wealthy welfare state with progressive forms of citizenship, evidenced by legislative acts concerning a number of areas such as euthanasia, gay marriages and drug use. Politically, the relatively active civil society, the long history of party coalitions and the tradition of a so-called tripartite ruling have formed an image of tolerance and mutual respect. A close examination of these progressive legislations reveals a nuanced interpretation of the notion of ‘citizenship’ with practical consequences on gender and race relations. Whereas legislation concerning gay marriage and euthanasia bases itself on the notion of rights and duties between the individual citizen and the state, in the domain of care, the notion of rights and duties are displaced from this relationship and cited in ‘citizen-to-citizen’ relations.

Although north European welfare states have been undergoing similar demographic and economic changes that led to reforms and care policies have acquired features of ‘citizen-to-citizen’ relations, the Dutch experience shows that issues of care have less political visibility and the nuclear family is particularly emphasized. For instance, in Scandinavian countries, public debates on private and unpaid caretaking activities have led to gender neutral forms of public and private care provision.

INTRODUCTION

The world is now characterized by extensive and rapid movements of people. An increasingly important issue for industrialized countries, such as Australia, is the rising number of people who are becoming displaced within their homelands as a result of a multitude of interconnected factors. The majority of displaced persons and refugees in our region are women and children. Yet, they are severely underrepresented in refugee determination processes, claims for asylum and settlement. This paper will examine women's experiences of forced migration and the neoliberal global context in which they occur. Over the past two decades the implementation of neoliberal policies in both the north and south have not only resulted in colossal displacements, but have simultaneously given rise to exclusionary politics. While globalization conjures up a vision of a borderless world, as a result of free flow of goods, this paper will show that increasingly nation states have closed their borders to the displaced, emphasizing the distinction between ‘economic’ migrants and political refugees.

[…] The persistent dichotomy of internal and external displacement, and the failure to classify as refugees those who have not crossed an international border, despite the escalation of their numbers in developing countries in the Asian region exemplifies the Eurocentric nature of refugee discourse. The complex processes of decolonization and increased integration of the world economy have set in motion large-scale population movements that render meaningless distinct categories of dislocations.

Introduction

This chapter tries to compare the social settings of elders within intergenerational relationships in Colombo, Sri Lanka and urban Holland. It mainly focuses on the so-called ‘private contract’, while occasionally referring to the so-called ‘public contract’. Finally, it refers to some preliminary results of visiting senior homes in Colombo of all religious backgrounds, while mainly focusing on the women inmates of two established Buddhist homes in Colombo (in total, data from 27 homes were collected).

These terms have been taken from the comparative study of Akiko Hashimoto on elders in US and Japan (1996). With the public contract, the focus is on the elder as a citizen and forms of state or commercial provisions. With the private contract, the focus is on the relations an elder has with family, a wider circle of friends, neighbours, acquaintances and community. For me, the value of Hashimoto's approach is her perspective of viewing the two contracts as a continuum – the public contract and policymaking equally being part of the social–cultural realm.

Comparison and Intergenerational Relations

Akiko Hashimoto's comparative study on Japanese and American perspectives on ageing provides a framework within which to reflect on expectations of family relations next to expectations of governmental services, both of which are (partly) taken for granted within one sociocultural and political context. Thus, specific sociocultural settings (can) differ in certain crucial respects.