Friday, October 04, 2013

The Word Madisey

English: Abhishek Pratap Shah is a Nepalese po...
English: Abhishek Pratap Shah is a Nepalese politician, belonging to the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(published in Vishwa Sandesh)

The Word Madisey
By Paramendra Bhagat
www.paramendra.com

The word madisey is like the word nigger. It is hate speech. There is no nice way to say it. There is no tone of voice that is right. You can call someone a Teraiwasi. You can call someone a Madhesi. There is a Madhesi Janadhikar Forum, there is no Madisey Janadhikar Forum. Someone from Mithila is a Maithil. I take great pride in my heritage. But hate speech is inexcusable. You can call me Indian, I am half Indian. But hate speech is a whole different paradigm.

Suman Timilsina was national president of the Non Resident Nepali Association when he said the m-word, in a public speech too. I took great exception to it. My blog post taking offense is still in the archives online. Timilsina is nowhere to be seen anywhere in the public space. He does not belong.

I was at the Woodside Café with some friends a few months ago. Someone at an adjacent table but within hearing distance kept saying the m-word. He also used the “dhoti” term quite liberally. He was not anyone I knew or who knew me. He was not talking to me. The guy was using the hate terms to talk about his Indian boss in the city. Obviously he would not say that to the boss’ face. This was not racism that was coming out of any claim to superiority. I did not speak a word of protest. But I arranged to have tea with my friend a week or two later. And I asked about that guy. Who was that “namak haram,” I asked. The underwear that guy is wearing he must have bought with the money his boss gives him, I guessed out loud. But look at the racist way he was talking about his boss.

Some of the poorest white folks in the deep South are some of the most racist white folks in America today. White folks in the northeast and along the West Coast look down upon them, so they look for people to look down upon too. They look in the direction of Africa. Poor Nepalis talking racist about Indians fall in some similar weird category. That is like low income senior citizens in my homevillage in Nepal thinking white Christians are lower than the so-called untouchables. It is a fabricated superiority mindset that might not go away anytime soon but it has absolutely no basis in reality. The socio-economic indicators provide no leverage to that way of thinking.

The word madisey is like the word nigger. The word Madhesi is like the word Negro. The word Teraiwasi is akin to the term African American. Teraiwasi is a respectable term. But the word Madhesi has cultural connotations. 40% of the Teraiwasis today are of hill origin. They are not culturally Madhesi. The word Madhesi encompasses the Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Tharu, Urdu, Hindi and Marwari speakers.

Madisey, bhote, and jyapu are not nice terms. I hear in Britain Paki is a similar derogatory term for all South Asians. The respectable term of course would be Desi. Many Nepalis protest the use of that word. To me that is like saying a Nepali is not South Asian. Of course a Nepali is a South Asian. Of course a Nepali is a Desi.

The term Bahadur and pakhey are also derogatory. I disapprove of the use of the word Bahadur in India. It is hate speech. But that use does not justify the use of the word madisey. I support the idea of a Gorkhaland state in India and all peaceful action that will lead to its creation.

There is some major work to be done to create a positive pan South Asian identity in Jackson Heights. The community is at peace and the crime rate is low, but it is too fragmented. Most people stay within their comfort zones socially. There are the country groups, and there are the various ethnic groups within those country groups. The right to peaceful assembly is a basic human right and rightly so. So I am not going to protest the various pretexts people find to come together. But I think effort has to be made to create a larger tent.

At one end you are an individual and you need your personal space and dignity. At the other end you are part of the humanity at large. And there are many groups in between, all of which deserve to co-exist peacefully.

You can make a practical case to simply ignore some Neanderthals making peaceful use of hate speech. The positive change might not come fast enough. But I think it is a fairly simple proposition to say hate speech should meet social ostracism. A community that makes the effort towards positive interactions will be a more productive community.

There are practical implications. Hate speech gets in the way of the riches. A community that tolerates hate speech will not cut all possible business deals and will lag behind. New, higher levels of cooperation will not be an option for a Nepali community that is okay with the use of the word madisey. That word creates roadblocks and gets in the way of wealth creation.

Jackson Heights is only a few blocks of India but it is the most famous Indian neighborhood in all of North America. For a Nepali to talk hate speech against Indians in a place like Jackson Heights has got to be one of the less wise things. Don’t do it.
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The For Profit Sector

Mother Teresa of Calcutta (26.8.1919-5.9.1997)...
Mother Teresa of Calcutta (26.8.1919-5.9.1997); at a pro-life meeting in 1986 in Bonn, Germany (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(published in Vishwa Sandesh)

The For Profit Sector
By Paramendra Bhagat (www.paramendra.com)

More than 80% of the people in America work for private companies. That is how they put food on the table. Another 15% or so work for the government. This economy requires 5% of the people to stay unemployed if it is to have a robust labor market. As in, a 100% employment rate is highly undesirable. That is why governments deem it worth it to issue out unemployment benefits: keeps the labor market fluid. The non profit sector steps in for those who don’t receive unemployment benefits or welfare checks. And then there are the uncared for untouched by the private, public and non profit sectors. Those seek Mother Teresa. Sadly, that still leaves a segment of the population that is truly uncared for, especially so in the global context.

In poor countries the private sector might be weak, the public sector might be relatively too dominant and getting in the way, the non profit sector might be overly strained or barely existent. But even there most people work private sector jobs to put food on the table for their families. That includes the informal sector in countries like India. The informal sector of the Indian economy comprised of businesses that don’t hold licenses and don’t pay taxes is rather large. And then there is the mafia that also largely revolves around money making. In some countries of Latin America the drug mafia is so large it functions as a parallel government. The Mumbai origin Dawood Ibrahim is listed as one of the 40 richest people in the world.

In the scheme of things I think the royal throne goes to the entrepreneurs in their multitudes. Entrepreneurs are not rich, greedy people lording over the hapless. They are people who create wealth and jobs. They pay taxes with which governments invest in people’s education, health and infrastructure. Entrepreneurs literally create wealth out of thin air. Bill Gates’ 50 billion dollars is not money he stole from someone. Those 50 billion dollars simply did not exist before he came along. And good thing he is putting that money to good use through his foundation. He has been fighting poverty like he were some kind of a Maoist.

The corporation is one of the greatest inventions ever. And entrepreneurship makes sense for people in all income brackets. I am a huge fan of micro lending. Everyone deserves access to not only education and health but also credit.

Abraham Lincoln did what no entrepreneur could have: he ended slavery. And someone like Gandhi is both Lincoln and Mother Teresa. Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh ran his enterprise like a non profit. There is no denying the role of the leaders of various sectors. But as a country like Nepal moves towards a decided economic focus, I think appreciation for entrepreneurship will have to take deep root in the culture.

A country like Nepal that has numerous communist parties and it looks like most of the major non communist parties also call themselves socialist, I think interesting concoctions can be imagined. You can have companies that are partly owned by the government, you can have companies that are majority owned by the government. But for the most part it is best if the government stays out.

A left leaning country runs the danger of wanting to kill the hen that lays the golden egg. Nehru was key to India’s independence, but he also gave the country his gift of socialism, which was well meaning, and perhaps made Cold War sense to him, but that has also meant the legacy of too much red tape and misallocated resources with India ending up with the much derided “Hindu rate of growth” for decades.

Unleashing the entrepreneurship potential of the new generation in Nepal is partly a policy challenge. Some warning signs are the mindless, xenophobic rhetoric against Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) that seems to have a permanent place among a segment of the Nepali political spectrum. The choice is clear. You can bring in foreign capital, or you can send away your workers to Dubai and Malaysia to labor in uncertain circumstances. After Baburam Bhattarai signed BIPPA, a pro FDI agreement, his own Deputy Prime Minister stood up against it to score cheap, misguided political points. I was perplexed. Hostility to FDI is a sure recipe to a perpetuation of poverty in Nepal. Is poverty what Nepali nationalism all about? As in, to lose poverty is to lose the essence of what Nepal is all about? Beats me.

China never tires of pointing out how much more FDI it attracts year after year as compared to India. FDI is not only a good thing, it is something any sensible country competes for. That includes the rich economies.

I would hope that the Maoists would learn to respect entrepreneurs the way they have worked hard to accept other political parties. Their pro poor origins would be best reflected in the resources they should be able to marshal for education, health and infrastructure. Get the literacy rate up dramatically, up the vaccination rates. Train tens of thousands of health care workers and send them out to the villages, Mao style. But do not kill the hen that lays the golden egg. Let entrepreneurs run full speed.
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