Ayn Rand - Objectivism

Its time I spoke about Objectivism and Ayn Rand. I read Fountainhead 3 years ago. To be frank, at that time I never knew anything about Ayn Rand or Objectivism. The book was written pretty well given the author is from Russia. In the coming years, I learnt about objectivism through internet. I recently saw a documentary about (Gautam is gonna kill me for this, but I saw it even before you could warn me). The title of the documentary is "Ayn Rand - A sense of Life". After watching it , I decided to write about this topic someday and I think I have the time to write it now.

Ayn Rand was short and precise about her philosophy. This is what she asked people to do, "Be Selfish!!!” .She should be absolute nuts to say that people should be selfish. She defies all Religion in this world. It also had some archive footage about Ms. Rand talking about how everyone should be selfish and she was supportive of capitalism. I thought Ayn Rand was utter rubbish, I know I may get the ire of some of the readers, but How can one live without helping others. The irony is Cecile B. Demille helped Ayn Rand to get a job in his studio and that kick started her writing career. I found it foolish when someone else helps you create a career; you say that you must be selfish. I think Ms. Rand missed the whole point.

Every religion in this world preaches that we have to help others in some way or the other. Feynman says that the moral part of a religion is the only thing that he accepts from a religion. Ms. Rand is an atheist that does not mean that she can say whatever she thinks. I think she missed the whole point, and in the documentary she was taking her characters in her book for her philosophy.

I thought that Ms. Rand missed the whole point. Each and every action that a man takes is to satisfy his conscience. For e.g., when a guy offers something to a beggar, he is happy that he has helped a poor guy. Inherently, he does that because it gives him satisfaction, otherwise he would not have offered anything to that beggar. Even if he is a miser and doesn’t give anything to that beggar, he does that because that makes him happy. So every action that a man does is for his satisfy his inner greediness. By satisfying his inner self, he also helps another person. Is this wrong? Ms. Rand says it is wrong and I say Ms. Rand is wrong. She staunchly opposes Socialism. What a joke?

In a particular interview she was caught unawares by the host, the guy asked her she felt when her husband died. She thought that she wished that she can be with him when he meets St.Peter in heaven in support of him. So the host told her that it was against objectivism (he was right). She said something and escaped that question. If she wants to help his husband, doesn’t that action goes against her philosophy? Every philosophy has some flaws, but Ms. Rand’s philosophy is full of flaws. How can a selfish person write about Love? In Ms. Rand stories, love plays a major part. A selfish guy cannot love. A guy loves a girl and will do anything to make her happy which in turn makes him happy.

I was also angry that she was supporting the capitalist policy of America and she started to campaign for it. We can see what selfishness and capitalism (of US and UK) has brought to this world. We have numerous example, Iraq, Afghanisthan , etc…. They wont go and fight the militants in Africa, because there is nothing in Africa. Their sole interest is the oil rich countries and that’s why they went for Iraq , when there is no sign of WMD in there, get control of all the oil resource and start a civil war and devastate the whole country. Their next target could be Iran. During time when people need care and peace, I thought that documentary to be piece of s*** and Ayn Rand’s philosophy to be utter crap.

our brothers who suffer... Safi karmachars... thuppuravu thozhilaaLigaL... sewer workers...

yesterday was when our common drains leaked like its a miniature black river, spoiling our day altogether... in the evening, the khaki-clad guy was called in... he came in with a nice smile on his face, chit chatted with his co-worker for a while and after changing into bare minimum, he got into work... yes, sewerage work...

Sewerage Work

“It is a familiar sight for residents: A frail man, drenched in raw sewage, looking out from a manhole. He dives into the sewer, scoops a bucketful of the dirt, comes out and hands it over to a co-worker before plunging again. the worker repeats this inhuman operation several times and yet manages to survive the hazards.there are several unfortunate men who have lost their lives while making a livelihood by cleaning the city’s sewers with a network of about 3,000 km length.
The underground sewers of Chennai have become death traps for workers and little seems to have been done to prevent the loss of innocent lives. Last year, 30-year-old Ramesh choked to death when he stepped into a Metro water sewer at Pulianthope. On another day, Shanmugham (47) met with a similar fate at Purasawalkam. On both occasions, firemen reached the spot after the workers died.
interestingly, Karnataka was the first state to ban the practice as early as the 1970s, but the practice continues there to this day. There are about 10,000 to 15,000 manual scavengers clearing away the human shit in the Hi-Tech capital of India, Bangalore, also known as the ‘Silicon Valley of India’, the state capital of Karnataka.They lived in segregated housing with minimal amenities.
Banning manual scavenging did not stop the exploitation of Dalits. Exploitation has taken on a new form over many decades and it is purely the cities that have built underground sewerage systems. The workers, all men, are assigned to carry out the maintenance of sewers and also to unclog them—a normal procedure in many countries one might think. But what makes it horrific in the Indian context is that the work is carried out under vile conditions—the worker, without any protective gear, dives into the raw sewage through a narrow manhole and cleans the sewer manually. The work is even more hazardous than the manual scavenging that the women do, as the worker is immersed completely in raw sewage. In India, industrial waste is also directly mixed with domestic sewage exposing workers not only to biological hazards but also to dangerous chemicals.
Ironically instead of improving the work conditions or investing in machinery and protective equipment the municipalities have started to subcontract the sewerage cleaning jobs to private contractors so that they escape prime responsibility. This has resulted in even lower wages and absolutely no security for them. a Dalit dying in the sewers is a non-event. With so little wages and no benefits it is hard to understand how any Dalit can get any sort of education for their children to make use of the wonderful reservations (quotas) that the government has promised; it seems the only reservation they have 100 percent is to work in filthy sewers.

an NGO study found the presence of toxic chemicals like chlorides, hydrochlorides, sulphates, nitrates, and even metals like mercury, lead, and chromium. they found about 680 ailments among them.

According to the The National Geographic report, more than 100 workers die every year in sewer ‘accidents’ due to inhalation of toxic gases (methane etc.) or drowning in excrement. No official data are available about the number of workers who are killed cleaning the sewers; estimates based on newspaper reports give a rough figure of well over 1,000 a year across India.
“Rainy seasons are worst when the sewers get flooded. The manholes have a small circumference and we have to dive without any rope attached and at times it is difficult to find the way back due to the dark waters. Many of our colleagues have perished and we might also die but this is the only livelihood we have. No one here lives to old age, if one does not die in an accident, a disease kills him,” one worker reported to the PRIA researcher.

Some of the preliminary findings from the The Centre for Education and Communication (CEC), another NGO's study: • Few workers in age group 50-59; most die before retirement• 35 percent literacy• Monthly wage for daily wagers Rs 2,950 ($67)• More than 40 percent of workers are not permanent though more than 90 percent of them have been working for more than five years continuously• 60 percent of workers enter manholes more than 10 times a month• Acute illnesses: eye irritation, upper respiratory tract irritation , difficulty in breathing, skin rash , cut and injury . Chronic illnesses: fatigue, watering/burning of eyes, cough , skin irritation , skin roughness , skin rash , lower backache • Little awareness about hazards at work;• No knowledge about protective gear except safety belts • 35 percent immunised against tetanus; no immunisation for hepatitis B or typhoid fever


what can we do about it?

the questions which raise in our minds after reading this ... :
1: what will i do when i encounter a person in my neighborhood, my apartments who does sewerage cleaning work?

2: what do you think we can possibly do to end such practices?

3: when there are machines available now in India to do even menial jobs, why not machines eliminate them altogether? and if you are an engineer, what can you do towards making such machines?

4: how much will you pay him? do you think paying him a little more can really undo the harm that happens to his body? 100? 200? a thousand rupees??

5: what awareness can we create in the people ? what kind of medical care and precautionary seminars can we ourselves do towards such people?

6:lastly, would you care to give him a cup of coffee in your favourite mug after he cleans himself after he is done with cleaning your bowel products?

Some Advertisements to make people think!

Some Advertisements to make people think!

An Agricultural Crime Against Humanity

Biofuels could kill more people than the Iraq war.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th November 2007

It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava(1). The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought(2). It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums.

This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur, as “a crime against humanity”(3). Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel(4): the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels - made from wood or straw or waste - become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people’s mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve.

Even the International Monetary Fund, always ready to immolate the poor on the altar of business, now warns that using food to produce biofuels “might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further.”(5) This week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls “a very serious crisis”(6). Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.

The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%(7). Biofuels aren’t entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.

They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political choices. They create the impression that governments can cut carbon emissions and - as Ruth Kelly, the British transport secretary, announced last week(8) - keep expanding the transport networks. New figures show that British drivers puttered past the 500 billion kilometre mark for the first time last year(9). But it doesn’t matter: we just have to change the fuel we use. No one has to be confronted. The demands of the motoring lobby and the business groups clamouring for new infrastructure can be met. The people being pushed off their land remain unheard.

In principle, burning biofuels merely releases the carbon they accumulated when they were growing. Even when you take into account the energy costs of harvesting, refining and transporting the fuel, they produce less net carbon than petroleum products. The law the British government passed a fortnight ago - by 2010, 5% of our road transport fuel must come from crops(10) - will, it claims, save between 700,000 and 800,000 tonnes of carbon a year(11). It derives this figure by framing the question carefully. If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts, you find that they cause more warming than petroleum.

A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - which is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of over 80% of the world’s biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel(12). This is before you account for the changes in land use.

A paper published in Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels(13). Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%(14). That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.

The British government says it will strive to ensure that “only the most sustainable biofuels” will be used in the UK(15). It has no means of enforcing this aim - it admits that if it tried to impose a binding standard it would break world trade rules(16). But even if “sustainability” could be enforced, what exactly does it mean? You could, for example, ban palm oil from new plantations. This is the most destructive kind of biofuel, driving deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. But the ban would change nothing. As Carl Bek-Nielsen, vice chairman of Malaysia’s United Plantations Bhd, remarked, “even if it is another oil that goes into biodiesel, that other oil then needs to be replaced. Either way, there’s going to be a vacuum and palm oil can fill that vacuum.”(17) The knock-on effects cause the destruction you are trying to avoid. The only sustainable biofuel is recycled waste oil, but the available volumes are tiny(18).

At this point the biofuels industry starts shouting “jatropha!” It is not yet a swear word, but it soon will be. Jatropha is a tough weed with oily seeds that grows in the tropics. This summer Bob Geldof, who never misses an opportunity to promote simplistic solutions to complex problems, arrived in Swaziland in the role of “special adviser” to a biofuels firm. Because it can grow on marginal land, jatropha, he claimed, is a “life-changing” plant, which will offer jobs, cash crops and economic power to African smallholders(19).

Yes, it can grow on poor land and be cultivated by smallholders. But it can also grow on fertile land and be cultivated by largeholders. If there is one blindingly obvious fact about biofuel it’s that it is not a smallholder crop. It is an internationally-traded commodity which travels well and can be stored indefinitely, with no premium for local or organic produce. Already the Indian government is planning 14m hectares of jatropha plantations(20). In August the first riots took place among the peasant farmers being driven off the land to make way for them(21).

If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong.

www.monbiot.com