मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Monday, April 07, 2008

Did Workers Let Indian Textile Industry Down?

Roger Cohen said (The New York Times March 31, 2008):

“…Everything passes. In the 17th century, China and India accounted for more than half the world’s economic output. After a modest interlude, the pendulum is swinging back to them at a speed the West has not grasped.

It’s the end of the era of the white man; and, before it even began in earnest, of the white woman, too.”

A lot of India’s economic output was generated by its textile industry, once as “sexy” as its today’s IT industry.

Hendrik Weiler observed: “India had the most advanced steel and textile industries at the beginning of the 19th century. Britain pirated India's technology, shut much of its advanced industries and forbade its exports, forcing it to buy second-rate British products in a closed market. Fertile land was stolen from Indian food farmers and converted to growing opium, which was then forced on the Chinese.”

I found the word “piracy” most interesting in above analysis.

But there is another viewpoint.

Susan Wolcott, Gregory Clark claim:

“Between 1890 and 1938 Japan experienced rapid economic growth. India stagnated. This national divergence was reflected in the performance of both countries' leading modern industry, cotton textiles. The parallels between national and industry performance suggest the problems of the Indian textile industry may have been those of India as a whole. Weak management is widely blamed for poor performance in textiles. An analysis of managerial decisions in Bombay shows, however, that on all measurable dimensions Indian managers performed as well as they could. The problem instead was one factor they could not change-the effort levels of Indian workers.

“Why Nations Fail: Managerial Decisions and Performance in Indian Cotton Textiles, 1890-1938” (The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 397-423)

Jared Diamond asked in his classic “Guns, Germs, and Steel/ The Fates of Human Societies” (1997):

“Was there anything about India’s environment predisposing toward rigid socioeconomic castes, with grave consequences for the development of technology in India?”

I don’t know about castes but is it possible that India’s oppressive hot weather and polluted drinking water may have had something to do with its workers’ low productivity?

When I read social history of late 19th / early 20th century Maharashtra, as presented in contemporary literature*, I see death - in the form of typhoid, plague, TB, influenza, pneumonia, cholera etc.- stalking young working Indians, our great and great-great grand-dads.

[* One such excellent source for the period of 1860-1920 is Laxmibai Tilak’s लक्ष्मीबाई टिळक classic Smritichitre स्मृतिचित्रे (Memory-pictures) 1934]


Artist: Leonard Dove The New Yorker 28 March 1931