Life and Spirituality

Many of my recent posts have focused on economic, political and social issues. The hope was of making a contribution, howsoever small to alleviating human distress and increasing human happiness. However, the fact is that focusing on such issues does not purify the soul as easily as communing with nature does, and it is the purest of souls, the yogis whose consciousness is united with the universal consciousness who are able to make significant and dramatic contributions towards improving the human situation. It is because of the contribution of innumerable such yogis that human civilization has been advancing slowly but surely over time. Although many complain about the present day one per cent economy, an economy in which one per cent of the population controls 99 per cent of the resources, not very long ago in human society it was a one person economy, where one person controlled and owned 99 per cent of the resources of a nation. Indeed in a few countries of the world it is st...

Eugène Delacroix, The Prisoner of Chillon    I n the past prisoner’s were kept in very poor conditions such as castle dungeons and fed on leftovers. With time humanity has advanced so that conditions of prisons have vastly improved. With that has increased the expense of maintaining these prisons. Criminal are put in prisons for many reasons, the primary one being that society should be protected from criminals and that imprisonment is a deterrent for crime. There is also the hope that the criminal would reform. However, let us see if these aims are being met. First of all the expense is something that the public bears and because of it public debt rises. The living condition of prisons has improved to the extent that in most countries of the world prisoners get better food for free than a large segment of the population at large. There have been cases of persons who commit petty crimes just so that they can get free lodgings in prison. Recently there was the cas...

Rule of Ten for greater Equality Do you know? Th at Chief Executives of many corporations make in a month what the lowest paid worker of the same organization would make in a life time (Thirty to forty years of work life) With the legally binding rule of ten in place, it becomes in the interest of company bosses to increase minimum wages within their organizations to the extent possible, or their own wages cannot be increased, while making it impossible for them to collect huge and obscene compensations. All that is required is a simple law that prescribes the maximum permissible ratio between the highest and lowest compensation that any organization or corporation may have. R ecently there has been a hue and cry about the high salary and bonuses that some corporate executives, especially bankers are drawing. The occupy movement that has erupted in many countries around the world represents this anguish of people. New sources of communication make expressing t...

O ften at around five 5 p.m., I go out for an evening walk around my neighborhood or to a shopping area nearby. Yesterday as I was out on a walk, I spotted a group of around ten rural laborers returning from work at some construction site in the area. They were indeed a bubbly and cheerful lot, laughing and joking with each other as they walked briskly towards their temporary urban shelter. The exuberance was certainly far greater than other rich or middle class neighbors that I encounter on these evening walks. It is a common sight most evenings. These simple rustic labor folk that drop into the city from time to time from nearby rural areas do so to make some extra money. In recent years there has been much economic progress in India, but such progress is in the main confined to urban areas. In the villages, life has not yet changed substantially. Most villagers are farmers but their farm holding are small and they do not have money to invest in intensive modern farming. As a...

In a comment of my last post it was mentioned that rural living might be good for some individuals. Present day urban life usually involves an eight-hour workday along with commuting that may be up to one to two hours a day for the round trip. This leaves little time for an individual for himself or herself and it is not surprising then that some individuals who go through that for most of their lives get dehumanized. It is not written in any scripture that the normal workday should be a fixed eight hours, day in and day out. I have lived in towns and countries where the work hours were from eight a.m. to one p.m. six days a week and commuting time to work was just five minutes. However, that is an exception rather than the rule. In ancient times the normal working hours of an individual varied throughout the year. There were weeks of round-the-clock work followed by weeks of lean hours. In modern times this sort of thing has become confined to a few areas of life such as farmers and s...

T he last two posts described a configuration for farm lots titled as AM farms. This one provides a few more details. Essentially, AM farms were described as farm lots that are two hundred feet wide and half a mile deep on the average, yielding farm lots of a little over ten acres each. Each of the farm lots would be of unequal size if they face a curving road as shown in the adjoining figure. Curving roads are more natural for rural areas. Often such roads are laid so that they are on lowest ground to catch the run off rainwater. However, AM farms are such that they are not completely rural but rather semi urban because of their configuration and because a depth of two hundred feet is permitted for construction of homes as well as commercial establishments such as shops, restaurants, pub, primary school, produce shop, motels etc. A width of two hundred feet on the road is sufficient to set up both a residential home as well as a commercial establishment if the width is divided i...

NOTE: do read the older post http://someitemshave.blogspot.in/2011/10/towards-green-life.html for a background to this one. S ome of my earlier posts have alluded to the possibility of a return to land as a way of creating jobs in developed economies such as that of the USA that is trying to deal with this issue. The last post described a layout of farmlands in designed narrow strips so as to minimize some of the hardships faced by rural communities. May I call these AM farms for convenience here. Let us consider a fifty into fifty mile irrigated land area divided up into AM farms and try and estimate roughly the expenses for creating them and the number of jobs that might be created by doing so. It would be necessary to divide the landmass into a grid of roads that are a mile apart in order to provide road access to all the farms for the purpose. One square mile of land area results in 50 AM farms laid back to back and facing two roads that are...