Introduction: The Tithonus Fallacy

In his The Living End, Guy Brown (2008) effectively calls to mind a Greek myth – the story of Tithonus – to frame the debate about whether we can live longer lives and cure the geriatric diseases and disabilities that currently affect later life. In Greek mythology, Tithonus, a mortal, falls in love with Eos, the goddess of dawn. Realizing that Tithonus must die eventually, she asks Zeus to grant her lover immortality. Zeus, who is a jealous god, grants Eos's wish, but literally so. While Tithonus enjoys immortality, he does not also enjoy eternal youth. As Tithonus becomes old and decrepit, he also becomes demented and a burden. Driven to despair by his senile babbling, Eos turns her decaying lover into a cicada whose endless chirruping provides a parody of the babbling of the ageing Tithonus. The claim of contemporary immortalism is that medical science can ultimately grant us both immortality and eternal youth. By contrast, critics of medical science are allegedly committing the Tithonus fallacy of assuming that living forever is not desirable since senility will inevitably accompany longevity. Immortalists argue that people with the benefits of prolongevity can also be youthful, live fulfilling and happy lives and enjoy the benefits of continuous employment and social participation. In the short term, these claims look utopian since, in old age, people, as a matter of fact, do accumulate disease and disability.

‘Life has become better,’ the Stalinist slogan of 1935 ran, ‘has become gayer.’ But is that really what happiness is about? All that jollity, all those ‘carnivals’ in Moscow's Gorky Park, and so forth, of those times did, in fact, make Soviet life ‘gayer’, more fun, for their brief duration; but happiness in general arguably refers to a state of longer duration, as when we say, ‘He or she has a happy marriage,’ or ‘X is happy in their job,’ etc. I would put happiness a register or two above contentment, but below bliss. Happiness is not about the ecstatic, but more about a fairly even, stable and positive state of being; perhaps about a sense of self-fulfillment.

As it happens, there has been a spate of books and articles on happiness lately, including a history of happiness. The consensus: sociologists have established that although people are living better now versus a few decades ago, they are less happy. Commentators are even proposing a new version of the guns-versus-butter dilemma; governments allegedly now have to choose between greater material well-being for their citizens and greater happiness. As we look at Stalinist Russia, we can see this alternative less as a dilemma than in terms of competing aims. On the one hand, the state sought to raise the standard of living, to increase the supply of creature comforts and consumer goods. But on the other hand, it was arguably more concerned with what it saw as self-fulfillment for its citizenry.

In April of 1930, the women's magazine Zhenskii zhurnal (Women's Journal) offered its resourceful reader instructions on how to make a ‘panneau’, or wall decoration. (Fig. 6.1) This sumptuous object was to be achieved by appliqué design on plain fabric, ‘basic cotton, hessian or canvas’. The reader of Zhenskii zhurnal—like that of other women's magazines of the time such as Rabotnitsa (Working Woman) and Iskusstvo odevat'sia (The Art of Dressing)—was, it is to be presumed, skilled in appliqué, for articles introducing and developing the technique and applying it to the production of all manner of useful household objects were common in editions of such magazines from the mid-1920s on.

Appliqué was just one aspect of the category known as rukodelie (literally, a thing made with one's hands), which appeared increasingly prominently in the female press. From 1926 until the early 1930s, each issue of Zhenskii zhurnal contained a one-page section with the heading ‘Rukodelie’ and instructions on how to make objects for the home. In 1930, the heading was changed to the more portentous ‘Remeslo i prikladnoe iskusstvo’ (Craft and Applied Arts), but the content remained essentially unchanged.

INSTITUTIONAL EMBEDDEDNESS AND ECONOMIC DIVERSIFICATION IN RURAL INDIA

The growth of the Indian economy is likely to be constrained in the next future by the low level of socio-economic development experienced by rural areas. While the rest of the country is experiencing an increasing rate of growth, the Indian countryside is lagging behind, with slower growth rate, widespread poverty and increasing inequality. The contrast between urban/metropolitan India and rural India is more and more evident, both for the large dimension of the population that is still living and working in rural areas and for the increasing gaps between urban and rural living and working standards.

There is evidence (Harriss-White, 2003) that the pattern of growth in rural areas exerts highly negative externalities on society and environment. This is found both in agriculture – in which social and economic backwardness and deprivation coexist with rapid capitalist change and pollution – and in rural non-farm activities – in which competitiveness is pursued through low labour and resource costs. Because of this pattern of growth, the Indian rural economy is moving along the ‘low road of destructive competition’ (Pyke and Sengenberger, 1992) that leads to the depletion of the available resources and makes minimum standards of social protection for the population hardly possible in the medium to long run.

To assess the pattern of growth in the Indian countryside and its impact on living standards it is necessary to focus on three main traits that distinguish the economy and society in contemporary rural India.

It is believed that Job Charnock stepped out gingerly from his merchant boat onto the banks of the river Ganga near the village Kalikata on 24 August 1690. This brought to the world the news of a tiny Bengal village, Kalikata. But was Kalikata really unknown till then? Though the history of the city is generally dated from Charnock's entry, this story of the origin was challenged by the Sabarna Roy Chaudhury family. Signed on 10 November 1698, at Barisha Atchala, the deed of lease of the three villages of Bengal – Sutanuti, Kalikata and Govindapur, was drawn up between Sabarna Ray Chaudhury's family and Job Charnock's son-in-law Charles Eyere. Till recently, this event had been viewed as the moment at which Calcutta entered the history of Bengal. But when, on 16 May 2003, in a case that became famous as the Calcutta Birthday Case, the High Court of Calcutta ruled that neither could ‘Charnock be regarded as the founder of Calcutta, nor (could) the claim that Calcutta was born on 24 August, 1690’ be substantiated historically, that judgement was almost entirely based on the finding that the history of Calcutta stretched way into the centuries past before Charnock had even set foot on Indian soil. The city of Kalikata or Calcutta has emerged through a very long history that spans over five or six centuries. The poet Bipradas Piplai's Manasa Vijaya, written in 1495, alludes to a place called Kalikatah.

The present paper is an attempt to discuss the paradox that is critical to making sense of ‘democratic India’ or democracy in India and lies at the heart of the radical democratic enterprise in the country. Simply stated, the paradox of Indian democracy lies is the continued coexistence of democracy and poverty in India since independence. Or to state it more carefully, the paradox involves the continued existence of electoral democracy with mass participation, along with mass poverty. This chapter attempts to develop an explanatory framework that gives us a sense of the mechanism that makes this paradox possible and allows us to understand the changes over time and differences across the various states in the relationship of democracy with poverty.

The paper includes two parts. In the first part, it specifies the meaning of the two crucial terms – democracy and poverty, and defends the claim that their coexistence is indeed a paradox, that there is something to be surprised about their being together. It sketches a simple model of why we should expect electoral democracy with mass participation to expend its principal energy and resources in reducing mass poverty. It then goes on to suggest that in the case of India, the paradox is deeper than what is thought of, for some of the most common reasons for which democracies do not attend to poverty do not apply in the case of India.

Introduction

Policies of economic growth led by exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) have been the main driving forces behind Thailand' economic progress. Trade and FDI performance has increased considerably since the second half of the 1980s, even accounting for the sluggish period around the 1997/98 financial crisis. While economic ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the People' Republic of China (PRC); Hong Kong, China; Japan; the Republic of Korea; and Taipei,China have considerably strengthened, links with South Asia remain weak. There is much room for improvement, therefore, especially given Thailand' geographical position and potential to serve as a bridge between East and South Asia. Increasing FDIs from both the PRC and India could likewise be first steps toward deepening economic relationships between the two Asian subregions.

Thailand is actively taking part in a number of regional trade agreements, at both the multilateral and bilateral levels. In addition to the ASEAN Free Trade Area, Thailand has bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) with Australia, India, and New Zealand, as well as a regional trading agreement under the China-ASEAN FTA. Thailand has also been unilaterally reducing its tariff barriers, as evidenced by a fall in average applied tariff rates. The Government also implements trade and investment promotion programs that include (i) the provision of financial facilities and bilateral financial arrangements; (ii) the establishment of overseas export promotion offices; and (iii) the launching of investment privileges such as export processing zones (EPZs), special economic zones (SEZs), and industrial estates.

One of the first Jews to arrive in Calcutta towards the end of the eighteenth century was Shalom Aharon Ovadiah HaCohen. He was an ambitious young merchant from Alleppo who came to Calcutta via Surat. Interested in establishing trading links from London to Shanghai, Shalom and the other early Jewish settlers traded in indigo, ivory, cotton, yarn, gold leaf, silk, Veniceware, precious stones, coffee, and cash crops like sesame oil, jute, sugar, spices, indigo and later, opium. Shalom was soon joined by his nephew Moses Simon Duek HaCohen, who played a key role in framing the first constitution of the community. Around this time also arrived, for a brief period, Joseph Ezra whose son David Ezra, was soon to return to Calcutta and begin to create the Ezra empire. With uncanny foresight, David invested in real estate, realizing that the dingy and disreputable streets of Calcutta would soon be commanding a high price as the capital of British India.

The two famed synagogues of Calcutta are the Beth El and the Maghen David. Though the first generations of Calcutta Jews spoke Judeo–Arabic at home, by the 1890s English was widely spoken. They also moved to a select residential area south of Park Street and began to take a prominent role in Calcutta's public life.

The Jewish community of Kolkata was part of the colonial elite and two Jewish clubs were established in the city, the Judean and Maccabi clubs, which became the haunts for social intermingling of the richer Jews families.

David Lloyd George was born near Manchester on January 17, 1863, an irony, to be sure, for the most famous Welshman in recent memory. His father William George, originally from Pembrokeshire in Wales, had become headmaster of an elementary school in Manchester. Failing health forced William George to abandon teaching and to return to Pembrokeshire where he died of pneumonia in June 1864, leaving behind two small children and a wife (Elizabeth) who was expecting a third. Left practically penniless, Elizabeth was forced to move in with her brother Richard and her mother in Llanystumdwy, not far from Criccieth. Richard Lloyd was a lifelong bachelor and, to his credit, looked after his sister's family as if it were his own. He was an unpaid Baptist preacher, self-educated, highly intelligent, passionate about Welsh culture and history, and a die-hard Liberal. He made a comfortable living carrying on a shoemaking business, so that young David and his siblings grew up without enduring privation in a stable and loving environment. At school it was clear that David was bright, with a phenomenal memory and he excelled in mathematics, history and geography. His formal education came to an end in 1878 when, thanks to uncle Lloyd's connections, a post was found for him in a leading law firm in nearby Portmadoc and the following year he was articled to the junior partner for a period of five years.

Historical Background

A long period of instability and fragmentation followed the end of the Safavid dynasty (1736) and the brief reign of Nadir Shah (1736–1747). Although Zand rule created order and prosperity in the southern part of the country for most of the second half of the eighteenth century, a unifying force only arose at the century's end in the form of the Qajars. Before his assassination in 1797 Aqa Muhammad Qajar, who ended the Zand dynasty, re-instated to the Persian Empire its former territories in the Caucasus. Acting to defend her interests in India by pre-empting Afghanistan's expansion into Persia and thence India, as well as possible French invasion, in 1799 Britain sent an embassy led by John Malcolm. This reached Tehran the following year and resulted in the signing of two Anglo-Persian treaties: one promised economic cooperation, the other British support in defending Persia against both Afghanistan and France. However when Russia attacked his kingdom's Caucasian provinces, Fath Ali Shah (ruled 1797–1834) turned in 1807 to France for help, signing a treaty and receiving a French military mission. But when Napoleon settled with Russia at Tilsit he left Persia prey once more to her northern neighbour. Diplomatic manoeuvres were then resumed by Britain. London sent Harford Jones who negotiated a new treaty with the Shah only for John Malcolm to arrive from India in February 1810.

It is now more than 50 years since we have become a republican democracy. Even 50 years is a long time, and within 50 years dramatic changes can take place in a nation's life. Let me provide one or two examples of such dramatic changes. We know that the most powerful, feared, respected and perhaps the most despised emperor of the Mughals, Aurangzeb, who took the Mughal Empire to the zenith of its power, died in 1707, and exactly in 50 years, in 1757, the Battle of Plassey took place, which marked the end of the mighty Mughals and the beginning of a completely new chapter in India's history. Could anybody anticipate this at the time of Aurangzeb's death? To give another example: on 22 June 1897, London was celebrating Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee with great pomp and splendour, for it was not merely a celebration but also an emphatic assertion of Great Britain's lone superpower status in the world. Across the Atlantic, The New York Times, desperately feeling the need to make the US a part of this glorious moment, editorialized, ‘we are a part of the Greater Britain which seems so plainly destined to dominate this planet’. Again, in exactly 50 years time, in 1947, the most precious jewel would be removed from the British Crown and Great Britain would lose its superpower status forever to none other than the US.

INTRODUCTION

The failure of credit markets in catering to the poor residing in the rural areas of the developing economies is well recognized. The credit markets are particularly problematic because the lenders are unaware of the creditworthiness of the borrowers more often than not. The poor individuals may have workable ideas and relevant experience, but often lack so-called ‘collateral’ to be deposited with the lender and appropriated in case of project failure and possibility of default by the borrowers. The formal sector may enjoy a comparative advantage over the informal sector in intermediating funds over space and reaping scale economics, but it seems to fare worse in solving information and enforcement problems (Besley, 1995). Formal lending institutions mostly cannot accept collateral in non-monetary forms. The informational problems arise because the rural credit markets in developing economies are often characterized by limited liability, in which a borrower repays fully only when the project is successful, but her liability is otherwise limited by her resources. For poor borrowers without any collateral, the repayment is possible only when success comes. In such situations, since the borrowers do not internalize the risk completely, a loan that cannot be properly monitored may be used in overly risky activities or used for some other purpose than what it is primarily intended for. With high monitoring and transaction costs of catering to a large number of poor borrowers in remote rural area, the formal lending institutions see lending to the rural poor as a very risky business.

Calcutta has, since its origin and at different points in time, always allured people. Because of its strategic, geographic and commercial position, along with various historical, economic and political reasons, people from not only numerous corners of the country and the neighbouring states, but also from far off places, have come to the city. Alongside internal migration, there has always been a kaleidoscopic inflow of people from distant lands. Particularly since its emergence as the capital of British India and as the centre for trade of entire South-East Asia and China, a deluge of international immigrants like Dutch, French, Jews, Chinese and Armenians have given the city its cosmopolitan character. Hence, the city has always portrayed itself as a mosaic of a large number of diverse ethnic groups, who had set their foot on this land of opportunities in search of fate and fortune, having different cultures, languages and religions.

The existence of the Armenian community in Calcutta came into the limelight recently when His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, as a part of His 10-days (23 February–4 March 2007) Pontifical Visit to India, came down from Etchmiadzin in Armenia to meet and bless the Indian–Armenian diaspora of the city. This was after more than 40 years since His Holiness Vazgen I, the Catholicos from 1955–1994, visited the country in 1963, when the foundation stone of the present building of the Armenian College was laid on 9 December of that year.