More on Marx by Benjamin Kunkel

How much is too much? A review of two books by David Harvey.

A readable article about Marx

Marx at 193 by John Lanchester

Another May Day

Karl Marx's birthday. There is a spate of articles about Karl Marx. It seems to me that Marx's critique of capitalism is incisive but his ideas towards solutions are not. Among the several article, I noticed one by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl which combines some ideas of Marx with those of Henry George and some new suggestions, The real villain behind our new gilded age  "But the true villain would be familiar to anyone who lived through the previous one: market (that is, monopoly) power." 
There is An interview with Glen  in which he spells out some of the ideas. One of them: "The idea of the proposal is that you would self-assess the value of all major private property you own, aside from personal effects. For all significant private property, you would self-assess the value, you would pay tax on the assessed value, and then you would have to stand ready to sell that property to anybody who wants to purchase it at that price.”
The new book by Eric Posner and Glen Wel to be out soon has couple of sections available at Google books Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society 
The book seems very controversial already.
A review and comments at Marginal Revolution.

About blockchain again

Fake food is a problem, Alibaba hopes blockchain is the cure by Richard Cook from Asia Times
Blockchain insiders tell us why we don't need blockchain from FT Alphaville (may need registration)

A recent article about social capital in Italy

Long term persistence  by Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza
and Luigi Zingales

Abstract:

Is social capital long lasting? Does it affect long term economic performance? To answer these questions we test Putnam's conjecture that today marked differences in social capital between the North and South of Italy were due to the culture of independence fostered by the free city-states experience in the North of Italy at the turn of the first millennium. We show that the medieval experience of independence has an impact on social capital within the North, even when we instrument for the probability of becoming a city-state with historical factors (such as the Etruscan origin of the city and the presence of a bishop in year 1,000). More importantly, we show that the difference in social capital among towns that in the Middle Ages had the characteristics to become independent and towns that did not exists only in the North (where most of these towns became independent) and not in the South (where the power of the Norman kingdom prevented them from doing so). Our difference in difference estimates suggest that at least 50% of the North-South gap in social capital is due to the lack of a free city-state experience in the South.

Beyond the Fertile Crescent

“Their findings suggest that researchers looking to better understand very early human behavior perhaps need to widen their search beyond the Fertile Crescent.” From Wooden Shigir idol found to be over twice as old as Egyptian pyramids 

Marion Foucade on Economics

Economics: reviled because it matters Both Marion Foucade and Michael Reay appeared in this blog a few times before.

A book review by Rahul Govind

Interpreting Hegel's India Seems a very fine essay though he is not happy with the book. Articles from EPW are usually online for four weeks.

Time to relearn?

Hints of Human Evolution in Chimpanzees That Endure a Savanna’s Heat by Carl Zimmer 

A comment by Ratnesh Madhur

Ratnesh Mathur India's Haves pay themselves to create a bigger gap with the Have-Nots - Just 34.5 mn of India's 480 mn working population have jobs ( i.e. employment contracts with a tenor in excess of 90 days). Rest of the country works on dehadi/daily-wages. While each of the 29 state governments define the statutory daily wage of their area, the real dehadi across India is quite consistent at approx Rs 120 ( men) & Rs 100 ( women)for 8 hours of work, across the country & it reflects in the India country GDP per capita of Rs 5700 ( per month). Off the 34.5 mn jobs in India, 22.5 mn jobs are in the government ( central, state & public sector), including the world's 3rd largest army. 

The overall pool of Indian Govt. wages of its 22.5 mn workers, along with pension payments for its retirees ( Nearly Rs 3 lac crores ( Rs 1.25 lac govt+ Rs 0.7 lac defence + Rs 0.25 lac govt pension+ Rs 0.5 lac defence pension), is already more than 25% of India's total Annual Revenue ( including all taxes) of approx Rs 10 lac crores, in 2014-15 budget. Now with the 7th Pay Commission, the Central Government folks are getting an additional 23.5% increase, with the minimum wage of a new clerk increased to Rs 18000 ( More than 3 times India's GDP per capita) & maximum to Rs 225000, per month ( 40 times India's GDP per capita). There are more government pensioners than actual government workers & they too will benefit from the increase. (Nearly 80% of the Indian army workers take pre-mature retirement at the age of 36 & join private sector jobs, since they get pension benefits for life after that age). And to top it all, these government folks think of themselves as " Middle Class" & " Lower Middle Class" of India ! All government jobs are based on a one-time entry & are secure for life, unless terminated for fraud. They are the only citizens of India who are healthcare insured for life. Yet lateral recruitment even at the upper echelons is negligible. Meriotcracy is a function of sucking up to elected politicians & the government entrance exam rank/results achieved, after college. 

And if you think shrinking total number of Indian government servants & political positions is the answer, think again. Shrinking needs to happen at the top & middle layers. In absolute numbers, India's total govt. size ( central+state) of 23 mn as a percentage of 480 mn working population is miniscule (5%), compared to western countries. In Germany ( a country without a defence force), Czech Rep & most of central Europe , approx 22 to 25% of the entire working population, works for the government. In Scandinavian countries, it goes up to 30 to 32% of the working population. Indian government needs more foot-soldiers as population increases from 1.2 billion to 1.6 billion in next 30 years. Yet, as %age of GDP, the 22.5 mn sarkari workers already consume as much of the country's GDP in wages, as European countries do. Wage rationalization was needed, across the board, not this increase. Just last month, for UP government peon jobs , more than 370+ PhDs applied, in addition to several lac graduates. The value of the sarkari perks is where the hidden wages, really are. Transparency of wages through monetization of perks into cash compensation, is actually the need of the hour. If you want to see how politician & government servant wage metrics in more details, please see this IMF analysis ( https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/tnm/2010/tnm1015.pdf )

Like in banks & private sector, first you have to define the "wage pool" , as a function of the geography/market's " revenue" . Then you have to define the JDs/ Roles. Rationalize the headcount. Only then do you do the basic wage + incentives process, linked to the nature of the job. If you go ahead & create monetary incentives beyond basic wages for all roles, the whole process becomes unmanageable. That is where the Indian government already is. Rationalization of headcount needs to be done in tandem with rationalization of roles.
.......
The above was in a post by Namit Arora linking to an article on big government https://evonomics.com/freedom-prosperity-big-government/ 

On work

The mythology of work by Peter Fleming
(Un) learning about jobs & work by Madhukar Shukla

Peter Norman

Peter Norman to be recognised for role in 1968 Black Power salute
More about that statue The white man in the photo of the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics)

More people adopting Miyawaki technique

Building a forest in the heart of Karachi and also some collaboration with India 

Aruna Tella

My efforts to help Aruna Tella in her endeavours seems to be taking some shape. Recently my old friend and her brother in law Nalluri Gopalakrishnaiah demarcated his land in Mangamuru, now essentially a suburb of Ongole, to will to his son. He is willing to advise his son to give some of the land under Aruna’s trusteeship for various ventures like, Short Stay Home, Family Counselling Centre, Centre for women empowerment etc and the family may even help with some of the construction. Jhansi is favourable to donate some money when we sell our house and move to a smaller house. We hope that over the next five years or so, we will be able to do some thing concrete to continue the work and cherish the memory of this remarkable lady.

An old UBI experiment in Canada

 On the Canadian prairie, a basic income experiment it seems to have been rather successful but was dropped by the conservative government which come later. There is also a discussion about the current Finland experiment in Naked Capitalism. Yes Smith seems to be against it but it all depends how it is planned and done I guess. Here is the link to the Naked Capitalism discussion Was Finland’s Universal Basic Income Program A Failure?  

The coming IQ trap in education?

Steven HSU on the recent article by Philip Ball New Statesman: "like it or not, the debate about whether genes affect intelligence is over
Philip Ball’s article which may need searching the Internet The IQ trap: how the study of genetics could transform education 

Libraries

Reading North: Books in the Arctic Oula has run a mobile library in the Nordic Arctic for 40 years, but as retirement looms the bus' future is uncertain.

An older one from P.Sainath The wilderness library 

Tributes to Rajani

అభిప్రాయం: ఒక్క రజనీ - ఒకే ఒక్క రజనీ!
And anolder one from Sreenivas Paruchuri
తెలుగు లలిత సంగీతంలో “రజనీ” గంధం 

The continuing Afroz Shaw saga

Filthy Mumbai beach rebreeds turtles, thanks to a city lawyer "Shah's herculean efforts - removing more than 13 million kg of toxic waste by working non-stop every weekend since 2015 - had borne fruit with the hatching of the turtles, a phenomenon that last happened on Versova two decades ago."

More about Freeman Dyson

i have not paid much attention to Freeman Dyson. I always felt that his contributions to Physics were ok but not in the same league as those of Richard Feynman and a few others. But Freeman Dyson has    great knowledge of diverse areas and still writes lucidly. His climate scepticism seems to have caused angst to various people and the following articles have discussion of this aspect, all from a few years ago.
The civil heretic from The New York Times
Letters to a heretic from The Independent
The danger of cosmic genius from The Atlantic

Two book reviews by Freeman Dyson

A wonderful review The key to everything, a review of

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

Freeman Dyson not only points out good points of the book as well as what is missing and words of caution towards the end:

“The last time humans invented a grand unified theory to make our existence sustainable was when Karl Marx came up with dialectical materialism. The theory had great success in changing human behavior over large areas of our planet. But the changes did not prove to be sustainable, and the theory did not remain unified. It seems likely that West’s theory will run into similar difficulties.

The choice of an imagined future is always a matter of taste. West chooses sustainability as the goal and the Grand Unified Theory as the means to achieve it. My taste is the opposite. I see human freedom as the goal and the creativity of small human societies as the means to achieve it. Freedom is the divine spark that causes human children to rebel against grand unified theories imposed by their parents.”

Along the way, Freeman Dyson points out “West is evidently unaware of Fang and Li’s insight.” 

The insight is explained in an earlier review of Freeman Dyson:

“This gloomy picture of the future was known as the heat death. Learned scientists and scholars portrayed the heat death as our inevitable fate. The paradox appears when we look out at the real universe and see nothing resembling the heat death. Both in the world of astronomy and in the world of biology, we see evolution moving in the opposite direction, from disorder to order, from death to life. Everywhere we see new and intricately ordered structures arising out of primeval chaos. The most obvious and familiar example of order growing out of chaos is the emergence of our ordered system of sun and planets out of a featureless cloud of interstellar dust and gas.

Fang’s chapter “How Order Was Born of Chaos” is a beautiful piece of scientific explanation. He explains the paradox of order and disorder as a consequence of the peculiar behavior of gravity. Unlike other kinds of energy, gravitational energy is predominantly negative. Our gravitational energy becomes more and more negative as we walk downhill toward the center of the earth. In any situation where gravitational energy is dominant, temperature and energy flow in opposite directions. The flow of heat works against the heat death, making warm objects hotter and cool objects colder. Instead of disappearing, temperature differences grow as time goes on. In the universe as a whole, gravitational energy is always dominant, and so the heat death never happens. Order grows out of chaos because we live in a universe with structures dominated by gravity. The dismal images of doom and gloom associated with the heat death turn out to be illusory. Fang’s understanding of the paradox brings us into a hopeful universe, with beauty and diversity growing around us as we move into the future.”

This passage from his review of the autobiography of Fang Lizhi The heritage of a great man.

Too many men

China, India grapple with the consequences of too many men Longish read.

A Telugu lullaby

https://archive.org/details/DharmaDevataSantakumariMeevantidenandiMaKannePapa From  Dharma Devatha  1952

On Syria

Robert Fish Searching for truth in the rubble of Douma... “War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.”
General background from two years ago from Robert Kennedy Jr. Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria

After a flu injection

Just had a flu injection at government medical centre. First a doctor inquired about the general background and then sent me to a nurse. The injection was gentle and I was asked to wait for fifteen minutes after the injection to see whether there were any adverse reactions and was then advised on watch to in the next few days. I find that it is generally like this in government medical centres here though some like Monash Medical Centre are quite crowded. Once you get in to the system, there is little waiting time, doctors are good and equipment excellent. Around 1988, I lived in a very poor area and most of dental care, except for dentures, was free. It seems that even dentures were free earlier. But some benefits started disappearing due to pressure from private practitioners and pharmacies companies. Even now the services are excellent for pensioners like me though there is waiting time for some non life threatening ailments like cataracts. That allows me to send about 10-20 percent of my pension ( I have no savings) to projects in India. May be good government services allow people to a bit more benevolent though it is not clear where the government is coming from. At one time it was from mining at home and abroad in which some poor countries were exploited heavily.

Babies at the ‘right’ time may decrease gender pay gap

The 10-Year Baby Window That Is the Key to the Women’s Pay Gap 

George Orwell, warts and all

The Quixote of cant, a gripping review of a new book on George Orwell, reviews by Martin Tyrrell. The book is by David Ramsey Steele Orwell your Orwell : A Worldview on the Slab

About Aryan migration

Aryan migration: Everything you need to know about the new study on Indian genetics by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan with links to longer articles.

Long read about how babies learn

How babies learn- and why robots can't compete. "More than words, it took a human being for a baby to learn language.”

Dependence on trade?

When nature says 'Enough!': the river that appeared overnight in Argentina 

Review of book on democracy

Democracy in peril by Sanford Levinson. Mostly about America.  A quote:
“Mostly about American democracy “As he wrote in Federalist 63, “The true distinction” of the new system of government created in Philadelphia “lies IN THE TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE PEOPLE, IN THEIR COLLECTIVE CAPACITY, from any share” in actually making specific decisions of policy. (The capitalization, incidentally, is Madison’s.) The Constitution, though “ordained” in the name of “We the People,” unlike almost all subsequent state constitutions written in America (and many new constitutions written abroad), deprives the people of the ability to engage in even a scintilla of what is often called “direct democracy.” Consider only the initiative and referendum found in many countries and in at least 26 of the states within the United States (the most famous, or infamous, being California). ”

Dani Rodrik on globalization

Globalization has contributed to tearing societies apart An excerpt
“I think globalization has contributed to tearing societies apart. You can see some of that in terms of greater inequality, but you can also see it in the increase of what one might call “social distance” between different groups in society: those who are globally networked and feel themselves to be part of a cosmopolitan group that don’t recognize or need national borders, who have the assets and the mobility to take advantage of the world economy, and those who think that their fates are tied up with local communities, that don’t have the assets or the resources and networks. It’s a social and cultural cleavage that globalization has deepened by having very asymmetric effects on different groups.”

on Ilaiyaraaja, composer from Tamilnadu

Why many Ilaiyaraaja songs sound as if they emerged from a jam session with Salil Chowdhury
Related Ten Electronic Extroverts from the Middle East and South Asia, Part 2. Andy Votel has this to say “The opinion that I’ve saved the best for last is technically undeniable, because whatever “genre” of music you choose to like/love/promote/protect/politicise/over-intellectualize/despise/defend or pretend to enjoy Ilaiyaraaja has done it! Even if it only lasted for four bars. And even if there were no less than two other styles of music playing at the same time.”

Book review of ' Who We Are and How We Got Here' by David Reich

Humanity’s Genes Reveal Its Tangled History by Razib Khan of Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich. An op-ed by David Reich based on a chapter in the book How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
More comments about the book and the op-ed by Razib Khan here. 

A recommended paper

Recommended by Steven HSU at Information Processing.
Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics. Gigerenzer G1, Gaissmaier W2, Kurz-Milcke E2, Schwartz LM3, Woloshin S3.
HSU also links to this Video
From the comments to Hsu’s post Survival benefit seen for some patients when cardiologists are away at academic conferences.

The punishing reach of racism

 Via a NYTimes summarises a report of Raj Chetty and others Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys. Apparently women are less affected. The full paper via A Marginal Revolution report.

Privatization

The origins of privatisation, agriculture etc are not clear to me. It seems that there were several different styles of life coexisting at the same time for hundreds of years and in the case of agriculture for nearly five thousand years acoording to James Scott in ‘Against the grain’. About privatisation Michael Hudson formed a particular view in the late nineties after a research seminar. Below is a review of the seminar proceedings. The question is, or al least it seems to me, why a particular view prevailed after a long gestation. Is it game theoretic or is it imitation of more successful societies at some period. Can we draw some lesions from the more recent and better recorded past? Like Americanisation?
Review of the seminar
Privatization of Land: How it all began (1995) ( lot of misprints)
A recent discussion in Jacobin by Matt Bruenig.

The immortal dinner

Two posts by Colin Silver about a dinner 1817 in which Keats and Wordsworth participate. There are also two recent books about the dinner reviewed here and here.

Reading less but still informed

How to read less news but be more informed, according to a futurist

 “The important news will find you. It will.” 

Khamosh Pani

A Pakistani From 1979 about the beginnings of fundamentalism YouTube link 

Recent breakthroughs about human evolution

Everything We Learned in One Year About Thousands of Years of Human Evolution Seven breakthroughs rewrote our history. 

Obituary of Stephen Hawking

By Roger Penrose Mind over Matter from The Guardian.

How to Think Like Shakespeare

How to Think Like Shakespeare Actually it is more about self-education despite the available programs.
An article about ‘double translation’ here.

Graeber and Wengrow on history

How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that's already happened) DAVID GRAEBER DAVID WENGROW
Check also the comments. The alternative they offer seems weak; essentially saying that the clues are in the family. “The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.”

Gender imbalance

I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories says Ed Yong.
Women, peace and security index India between Bangla Deshmukh and Pakistan at 131 out of 152. Check the list here.

Some articles on intelligence

What is Intelligence, Anyway? by Isaac Asimov
Artificial Intelligence: How we help machines learn
Possibly related Indians study hard and get MBA, may be buy Mercedes but lack creativity: Apple co-founder Steve Woz One can ask similar questions about why Dalits are not in the upper echelons of various hierarchies in India. Possibly we develop stable strategies for survival in given environments, possibly these are hardwired and the above may be a reflection of that.

ఒకేఒక్కసారి ఎగాదిగా చూసి And some other Telugu songs

Some Telugu songs 

on self sufficiency and cash economy

“Bit by bit, they began to come, to escape problems at home for a while, to make friends or just earn some money. Tabbasum Momin, programme manager, SSP, says women were asked to cultivate everything that could be consumed at home, on just one acre of the family farm. In the remaining land, the men could continue growing cash crops.

Women began to cultivate over 20 types of produce, including vegetables, cereals, pulses and fruits. They did not have to invest in buying seeds, fertilisers or pesticides as they were taught how to make them the traditional way using crops like neem. Says Ms. Momin, “The women began to cultivate more than what they needed for the home. And naturally, they began to sell these.”” From

Game-changer in quiet villages of Solapur 

(  is Madhukar Shukla) It seems some changes are possible when subsistence is involved. It is not clear how such things work for enterprising classes with more resources.

Peter Richerson’s review of ‘The ages of discord’ by Peter Turchin

A Dynamic Analysis of American Socio-Political History A Review of Ages of Discord: A Structural Demographic Analysis of American History by Peter Turchin
Also a reddit review by somebody based on a review,; the author does not want to read the book.

On blockchain technology

The blockchain paradox: Why distributed ledger technologies may do little to transform the economy ( via Namit Arora) : “Regardless of the model, my point is that blockchain technologies cannot escape the problem of governance.”
Also The great cryptocurrency heist :”Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust”

Pankaj Mishra reviews a book of Ta-Nehisi Coates

A flavour of the review “The intimate relationship between America’s internal and external wars, established by its original sin, has long been clear. The question was always how long mainstream intellectuals could continue to offer fig-leaf euphemisms for shock-and-awe racism, and suppress an entwined history of white supremacism and militarisation with fables about American exceptionalism, liberalism’s long battle with totalitarianism, and that sort of thing. Hurricane Katrina, coming after the non-discovery of WMDs in Iraq, undermined liberal faith in Bush’s heavily racialised war. American claims to global moral leadership since the 1960s had depended greatly on the apparent breakthrough of the civil rights movement, and the sidelining of the bigots who screamed: ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever’. In New Orleans, black bodies naked before the elements of the world – elements which included trigger-happy Blackwater mercenaries guarding the rich – made it clear that old-style racial separation had been replaced by sharply defined zones of prosperity and destitution: segregation for ever. But the apparent successes of social liberalism, culminating in Obama’s election, managed to obscure the new regimes of racial sequester for a while longer. Since the 1990s, the bonanzas of free trade and financial deregulation had helped breed greater tolerance for racial and sexual variety, primarily among the privileged – the CIA under Obama set up a recruiting office at the Miami Beach Gay Pride parade. Overt racism and homophobia had become taboo, even as imprisonment or premature death removed 1.5 million black men from public life. Diversification and multiculturalism among upwardly mobile, college-educated elites went together with mass incarceration at home and endless military interventions abroad.” from a review of We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates in ( book available here) Why do white people like what I write?

Rahul Banerjee on our trip to Pandutalab(v)

Visitors to Pandutalab 

The colony of cooks-5

As mentioned before, I quit the colony around 2007 leaving the Short Stay Home in charge of the people of the colony and a new leadership grew which was not to the best interests of the colony. Some of them tried to sell of the land on which the Short Stay Home was built and when they did not succeed, they tried to built a temple on part of it. Over years, I had to make efforts to get hold of the land and succeeded. Meanwhile, the old home which was sturdy was demolished. It remains to build a good house useful for the public but meanwhile I am busy running Swadhar Greh with nobody willing to take charge of it. Apparently women with family problems who have shown some independence is not a popular theme and we  get very little funding outside the government sources. The funds usually come late and we have to take loans, sometimes at high interest, to run the home. This and the counselling centre take most of my time these days.
Meanwhile, the municipality decided to appeal in the A.P. High Court, the decision of the Zilla Court in our favour ( we have entered the case as a third party and have been funding the proceedings). This meant that a new and somewhat expensive lawyer had to be hired in Hyderabad. Now the new leadership of the colony was not of much help and I was approached to raise funds etc. for the proceedings. The case is still going on. Perhaps it was routine to appeal and we are expected to win after the previous two decisions in our favour and the colony established for more than two decades. But the case goes on, perhaps due to the lack of enough judges in the High Court, and money has to be raised to help with the proceedings.

The colony of cooks-4:1994-2007

By this rime I was a full activist for TDP. I was also taking part in various agitations and movements from earlier times. Earlier from the eighties when I was with the Communist Party, there was a fight to get fishermen the right to sell their produce in the market without interference from a contractor, various women’s movements, and also a movement to get fair prices for milk producers where I was hurt in a lathicharge. Now there were movements like protest against indecency (asleela vyatirekodyamam), Consumer’s movement (viniyogagadarula udyamam), literature type activities, protests against liquor consumption in illegal outlets ( belts shops).
This was towards the end of 1994 after.we won the case in the municipal court. At this juncture, the assembly elections took place. We in the cooks colony campaigned for TDP and one Eedara Haribabu  became the MLA as TDP candidate. Some of the TDP candidates also became members of the Municipal Committee ex officio  and the balance in the committee shifted in the favour of TDP. We were expecting more good things to happen when I got a shock in the form of a call from the Munkcipal Chairman who belonged to the Congress Party. He said though he was from a different party, he did not want to appeal the Municipal Court decision in favour of the poor people but the current MLA Haribabu wanted to appeal in the District (Zilla) Court. I was furious and dashed off on my scooter to confront the MLA. My younger friends Gangadhar and Lakhminarayana tried in vain to prevent me and followed me on their vehicles. By the time I reached the Municipal office, the. lA already left the place. By that time Gangadhar and Lakshminarayana caught up with and physically prevented me from proceeding any further. This was early 1995 and I am still not sure what I would have done if I had caught up with the MLA. In any case, the  MLA helped us later with the sanction of a boring well to the colony.
During this period, I was also caught up with various administrative positions with TDP. I also developed as a speaker, singer, poet. Possibly, NTR bestowing attention on me on three different occasions ( once as a speaker, once as a singer and once as an anti liquor agitator)by garlanding me might have helped in improving my image in the public. And C.B. Naidu too appreciated my work and sanctioned the administrative positions I held. I was a member of the Price Monitoring Committee from 1995-98, Jury Member for Nandi awards from 1996-1998, a director of the Mineral Development corporation from 1998-2000 and Regional Organiser (RO) for Women Welfare and Child Development Department from 2000-2005.
But my commitment to the colony continued, and I actually lived in the colony from 1997-2004 running the Short Stay Home whereas my husband Balakrishna lived with the children in our own house since he felt that both of us living in the colony may seem like we got the place for ourselves. During this period, the Short Stay Home also became a hub of activity for women activists and it was not uncommon to see 10-15 of them there on a given day and discussing various issues. They also helped us with our colony problems. Some of the Dalit women leaders probably cut their teeth during that time. These include Betapudi Rajeswari, ,G.Mary Ratnakumari and others. And some of the women in the colony also developed in to leadership roles.
During this time, we also started a Dpep(?) school for children, these were not regular schools but schools run by volunteers with encouragement from the government. Even children from outside the colony attended our school. The youth in the colony helped with various tasks like digging a big hole for a step well storage tank, making reasonable earthen roads etc. Some of the younger people who helped were Ravi, Shyam,Siva, Venkaiah and even younger people like Jagadish, Suresh, Raja, Kishore, Subbarao and others. We also collected the evidence needed for the court, gathered finances for the case, Karavadi Raghavarao continued to argue ably for us. Dr. A.P. Vithal continued to encourage us and provided financial support. He also treated the children living in unhealthy and conditions of malnutrition. Many other contacts that we made during the political processes possibly helped our profile. Finally, we won the Zilla Court too. This was around 2004-2005. We also got back some of the land we lost with the help of Mantri Sreenivasarao. Some people who gave up hope and left came back. We also facilitated Pushpamba who proved to be an excellent witness on our behalf. For some unknown reason Pushpamba, a graceful old lady committed suicide later, just leaving a note that she was taking her own life.
At this stage, despite my protests, the colony was named as Aruna Colony my many and a board was put up with that name. But trouble was brewing. Some of the people who became leaders during the struggle felt this as a threat to their leadership. They colluded with a lady councillor in the municipality and removed the board. I already moved back to my home, husband and children in 2004. I felt that it was time to move on for good from the colony. Around 2007, I left to the colony the Short Stay Home I built in honour of mother Tella Narayanamma, and made it in to a committee Hall. I thought that it was the end of my Association with the colony of cooks. But it was not be. The rest, next time.

P.S. There was a hiccup in posting from India after the previous post. Many of the next few appeared on Facebook. 

The colony of cooks-3:The first court case 1991-94 ( continued)

The Revenue Department refused to survey the land for allotment. We had to hire a private surveyor to do this. He surveyed, made room for roads and we finally allotted about 750 square feet of land for each person. There were two other allotments. One for me in a corner where I built a Short Stay Home for women and another for Mattibandi (cart of soil) Venkaiah who helped us at cheap rates to fill up the allotted plots again with fresh earth. Meanwhile, there was fresh trouble. We heard that several politicians were making representation to our local M.P. to cancel our allotments. His name was Magunti Subbaramieddi, and we heard that he was in Tirupati making arrangements for a Congrss Party session. We hired a Commander Jeep and made a dash to Tirupati to meet him.i and Saraswati Lakshmi Kumari were in the front seat and Sesharatnamma, Vijayamma., Singaiah, Raja and others in the back seats. We met Sri Subbaramireddy. He said that he knew Babu (C.B.Naidu) well and that he would speak to him ( by that time, they were in different parties but there were family friendships). Since we could not afford to keep the Jeep for the night, we started back immediately. I was at the end of the front seat of the Jeep and I did not sleep during the previous two nights. Around midnight, Lakshmi Kumari suddenly pulled me inside. Apparently, I fell asleep and was about to fall and if Lakshmi Kuari had not pulled me inside, I would not have been here to tell you the story.
By 92-93, we somehow built our houses, many of them tin sheds, after a lots financial struggles. However, our troubles continued. The Municipality used to dump rubbish on our land. Some rowdies burnt the huts without tin roofs. Luckily the damage was contained with our collective efforts and finally by a fire engine. A complaint to the Collector took care of the dumping of rubbish. We took turns to keep vigil during the nights to protect the houses from vandals and rowdies.At one time there was a rumpor that there was price of one lakh rupees on my head and some rowdies were hired from a neighboring district to assassinate me. I was unaware of these rumours and once went home on a scooter driven by Lakshmi Kumar. She was blasted by my husband who just then heard the rumours. We had help too. Our lawyer Karavadi Raghavarao encouraged us. The local S.I. Murali Krishna used to visit us often.
At the same time,APMAS (Andhra Pradesh Mahila Abhyudaya Samiti) with Ramalakshmi Arudra, Dr. K.V.Krishna Kumari, Roudri and others encouraged us. We ( the cooks group) started participating in some of the activities like movement against excessive prices, indecent pictures,... some of the younger people started Yuva Jana Abhyudaya Samiti and it was encouraged by the elders. Lenin was supposed to have said ‘every cook must learn to rule the state’. We probably made a start on this. The women in the movement used to try to protect the colony in the night with big ladles available to them and in the day moved around the government offices with me leaving the houses in the care of their husbands. This went on until 1994.
Then we had municipal elections. Mantri Sreenivasa Rao contested on behalf of the Congress Party, Venkata Rao on behalf of TDP, me and Matte Raghava Rani as independents. Sreenivasa Rao won the election and as soon as he won, he sanctioned electricity to the Colony. We used this for organising payment of taxes. Raghavarao argued well for us in the Municipal Court and one Pushpamba proved to be an excellent witness for us. And we won the case in 1994. As soon as we won our folks went around to various goddesses to honour their previous vows, took me along and also treated me as a goddess. I tried to dissuade them from doing this since it would be very natural to treat me as a devil if I made mistakes. This caution proved to be useful in the next few years.

The colony of cooks-3: The first court case 1991-94

Below I will describe the years of struggle in Aruna’s own words transcribed by me. This is what she remembered during a few days of December, 2017 when I spent some weeks in Ongole. The dates may not be entirely accurate but she has newspaper cuttings from that period and a more accurate account can be put together at some stage. The story so far is that a swamp land near the Ongole bus station was sanctioned for cooks colony by the Revenue Department.The cooks drained the land to some extent and built a few huts on the higher ground. The Municipality went to court against the Revenue Department for sanctioning the land without their consent. The society formed by the cooks entered the case as the third party respondent with Karavadi Raghavarao arguming for them. There was a stay order since the cooks were already in possession of the land. Though the cooks were not supposed to do any thing more until the final decision was given by the court, the conditions were unlivable with only bits of higher ground in the swamp and Swampy conditions with mosquitoes all around. Back to Aruna.
The grant of valuable land in the middle of the town was not appreciated by either the political parties including leftist ones or the various wings of the government. It was around this time I shifted from Communist Party to Telugu Desai Party.The shift did not help. But some particular politicians off and on and some individuals interested in the welfare of the poor helped us as I continued to lead the cooks in establishing the colony. I will mention some of these names as I go along and might have forgotten some names, I hope to include some of the other names in a fuller account later on. Some of the early supporters I remember are Dr. A.P.Vithal, A.V.S. ( movie artist)Dr. Chavali Santikumar and various other progressives.There was a police officer, the late Murali Krishna who was S.I. at that time and became a D.S.P. later on provided us with protection. Apart from the political parties who were opposing us, there were also other establishments like the Veterinary Department,R.T.C. , Ekalavya Colony nearby who were claiming parts of the land sanctioned to us and also started encroaching on the land sanctioned to us. Then there were rowdies harassing us and we did not know at whose behest.And we did not have the minimal infrastructure to establish the colony. We decided to proceed with establishing the colony despite the limitations imposed by the judgement of maintaingn the status quo.
The first problem was to fill up the land outside the higher ground on which we established the huts. At that time we had communal meals with lanterns and candles. Finally I decided to proceed with the development of the colony and sold my gold bangles to start the proceedings. Dr. A.P. Vithal also helped with the finances. The first step was to fill up the land away from the huts. The rubbish dump to the Municipality was close to us. We spoke to the drivers of the tractors dumping the rubbish and during the next few months diverted thousands of tractors of rubbish, at the cost of twenty rupees to each load, to fill up the rest of our allotted land. The smell was unbearable but we had to stay there to make sure that the rubbish was dumped on our lot. Some of the people who stood guard to achieve this were Sesharatnamma, Saraswati Lakshmi Kumari, Sivapraxad, Rajyalakshmi, Koteswararao,Shyam and others. Once Sivaprasad was badly hurt by glass pieces while rearranging the rubbish but did not flinch. I tried to help him and I too was hurt. Then the attention of all shifted to me and after that I stopped getting in to the rubbish and just guided the others. Those were difficult times with mosquitos all around. We used smoke tablets to drive them away to some extent, bought mosquito nets and blankets for protection during the nights. Finally, we filled the dump some time during 1992. The nest job is to fill up the land with proper soil to cover the rubbish. We felt that unless we built semi-proper houses on that land, it would be difficult to keep the land. It was also necessary to make proper house allotments instead of the huts we arbitrarily built earlier. ( to be continued)

How Inequality works “The political upheavals and populist incursions of the past few years owe much to widespread perceptions of inequality and economic injustice in advanced economies. While median wages have stagnated, incomes at the top have continued to rise, and there is growing evidence to suggest that the two phenomena are connected.“
World’s richest become 1 trillion richer in 2017

Teaching reading

“This is what I want for my students. First, I want them to read a book, all the way through. I want them to find something difficult and do it anyway. Then, I want them to notice what a powerful tool literature is, to understand that without it we can’t know ourselves or the society we live in. I want them to discover that if they learn to handle language they’ll no longer be helpless, drowning in sugary gratification. Finally, I want them to see that reading breeds thinking, and thinking breeds resistance, and surely, especially right now, that is a good thing.“ from 'The difficulty is the point': teaching spoon-fed students how to really read 

A birth in the Short Stay Home (Swadhar Greh)

This is currently run by Aruna Tella under the auspices of APMAS. Yesterday night, one of the girls here gave birth to her second child, a son again. The pains started around one in the morning but the girls could not get a response from the hospital. Aruna Tella was woken up around three a.m. and somehow the voice of the person who spoke mattered and an ambulance was arranged immediately. The birth came around four thirty in the morning. There was no doctor at that time though one was supposed to be present. But the ambulance and the treatment were free thanks to a scheme introduced by CBNaidu and improved by Y. Raja Sekhara Reddy.
Some of the cases I have seen here are from lower middle classes with failed marriages often arranged by parents for underage girls. The girl’s case is one such. Parents forcibly married her to a person who turned out to be a drunkard and wife beater. She could not take it and came to the house with one child. Then there was reconcialiation for few months and she came back again pregnant. At some stage she developed a relationship with somebody she liked. She claims that the second child is his and possibly the first child too. Luckily, he is prepared to marry.
She was taken to the hospital by two other girls who were also in the home after difficult relationships. The first girl was in love with a person of different caste and her parents were against it. She joined the home and started working hoping to marry after she turned eighteen. She started working and fell in love with another at work. The first lover was heartbroken and tried to commit suicide. After that failed attempt, he continued to implore her and she complained about him to the police for harassment. The other girl came from better economic background and waiting for her lover to complete his studies. But she does not want to share work with others and often pays others to her share of work. There are some problems of fights, thefts and so on but in emergencies, they seem to come to each other’s aid.

some of these problems seem related to sex and marriage. There is an impression that extramarital affairs have been generally on the rise. The cause of these problems may be the desire of the parents to marrying off the girl’s at a young age with their own norms of alliances, property, status etc and not taking in to account the temparement of the children.

Addendum to The Colony of cooks-2

I would like to point out some special problems faced by women in these agitations. In this particular struggle, we had to meet politicians and officials. They were generally courteous but even during this brief period, there were a couple of disconcerting instances.
Once we had to meet a politician known for his fondness for the other sex, and I met him with a couple of cooks. After a meeting, the politician asked me to meet him alone in the evening. We were a bit vary of the prospect. The other two ladies were reluctant to let me go alone. They said that they would come along with me, wait outside and if I did not come out in five minutes they would burst in to the office. They also said that they were prepared to give up their allotment but would not leave me to the whims of a known womaniser. Possibly apart from the desire to finish the process that I started, the loyalty of such friends kept me going. Once inside, I reminded the politician that I was friends with his son and he addressed me ‘akka’. I also told him how good looking his granddaughter was. Anyway after five minutes, the other ladies came in and the meeting ended without much problems and there was no further trouble with the politician.
The second time, there was a municipal council meeting about the sanction of the land to us and we met and requested the councillors not to object to our request. The resolution supporting us almost passed but there was one dissenter. Since it was the last council meeting before the next elections, the matter was sent to an officer to either uphold or squandered the dissent. The official also knew me from other agitations in which I was participating at that time. He wanted to discuss the matter privately with me. But I went with my colleagues when I met him next and the official upheld the dissent and that was how the matter was sent to the court in the first place but the judge upheld the status quo. But as they say correlation is not the same as causation.

The colony of cooks-2 : sanction of the land, beginnings of housing and legal problems

We met in our house, formulated the aims and by-laws of the society and registered it under the name  ‘Prakasam jilla vantapanivarala samshema sangham’. This was in 1991. For the beginning ceremony, we invited the district collector Sri Abbanna, Zilla Parishat Chairman Sri Gutta Venkatasubbiah and other local luminaries. It was not really the season for cooks and during the speeches, one of the cooks collapsed out of hunger. The district collector was moved by this incident and recommended the grant of land. An assignment committee was formed with help of then current MLA Bacchala Balaiah, MP Magunti Subburamireddi, Mandal Revenue Officer Venkateswalu and it was decided to assign land to a hundred cooks. Originally, I hoped to get land in the suburbs where the cooks could build roomy houses with greenery around. But the MRO felt that a swamp near the bus top would be more convenient for nearby villagers who will be able to hire the cooks soon after getting to the town. Finally a smaller piece of swamp land near the bus top was granted to the society. This was on August 23, 1991 on the occasion of Tanguturi Prakasam’ birthday, a day that I still remember. Unfortunately, this was also a piece of valuable real estate and the cause of some future problems.

Three weeks before, I had a major operation but immediately got in to the swing of things. The swamp was full of thorny shrubs and one could not even enter it. We collected some money and drained the swamp and cut down the shrubs. Soon, a few pieces of high ground showed up and we built a few huts on the high ground and started cooking facilities for all on a larger piece of high ground. I stayed with the cooks and ate with them. The huts were full of mosquitoes and we had to keep covering the children with bedsheets during the night. It was also the cause of some friction at home. Though my husband Kumpalli Balakrishna generally encouraged me in social work, he did not appreciate my long absences and also felt that living in these unhygenenic conditions was not good in my state. But I could not stop once we started since there were problems every moment that had to be solved. We worked day and night , used to sing songs part of the time and brought to some shape the land with dirty water around.

Then, trouble came in the shape of a person from the municipality. This representative said that the Revenue Department granted the land without the permission from the Municipality and that if we wanted to avoid trouble we should grease some palms. We were already hard up with financial problems building the colony and much more work had to be done to fill the swamp and construct at least temporary residences. In any case, the land was sanctioned to us and we did not have the resources to pay bribes. The Municipality went to court against the Revenue Department and we went to the court as third party in the litigation and Karavadi Raghavarao argued on our behalf. The court ordered to maintain the status quo since we were already in possession of the land. Once the order came to maintain the status quo, we started efforts to fill up the swamp. But there were more problems ahead...

The colony of cooks-1

in a series of posts, I plan to describe the work of Aruna Tella in establishing a housing colony of cooks. This time, I have the benefit of some notes given by her. I will describe the work in her own words.
It was possibly 1988. I was 33 and undergoing some training camp in politics with a wing of the communist party, it is another matter that I shifted to Telugu Desai Party later on. Political parties were not that important in my life. Wherever I went I used to try to meet the poor and working classes and there was a desire to help them. During this sojourn, I met one of the cooks at the camp by name Sesharatnamma and got in to a conversation with her. She described some of their problems. Their work seasonal and during periods when there was no work, they used live on borrowed money. The workers came from various castes since the work consisted of several parts from cutting vegetables to cleaning vessels and actual cook(ing. They all lived together during the work season. But they had problems getting to their temporary homes since there both men and women in the groups going home at odd times and there was harassment by the police. She said that if they had a union and fixed residences they could escape these problems and requested me to find a place through the government agencies for their residence. I was impressed by her demeanour, gave her my address and asked her to meet me at a convenient time. In due course, this led to the establishment of ‘vantapanivarala samshe a sangham’ ( which roughly translates as ‘The society for the welfare of cooks’).
Things stood still for a while until I suddenly had a phone call from Sesharatnamma. She was arrested allegedly for prostitution and asked for my help. I went to the police station, argued with the police and got her out. Then I reminded her that if they had Association and leaders, they could have possibly avoided this kind of problems. She immediately gathered many in her profession for a meeting and invited me to the meeting. All agreed to form a society and named it ‘Prakasam Jilla Vantapanivarala Samshema Sangham’ this was in 1991. We then organised a meeting in our house ( those days, we had our own house) to register the society

New findings about memory

Light-Triggered Genes Reveal the Hidden Workings of Memory “Neuroscientists gained several surprising insights into memory this year, including the discovery that the brain creates multiple copies of memories at once — even though it hides the long-term copy from our awareness at first.”

A mental case

I have been staying near the Short Stay Home of APMAS ( Andhra Pradesh Mahila Abhyudaya Samiti) (addressMIG-163, Housing Board,Ongole 523001)and go there daily to eat with Aruna Tella and others. I have been listening to the stories of hundreds of women who passed through the home who came here to escape abuse at home. Many end in temporary reconcialation, others get some training and help to look after themselves. There are also some cases of mental instability caused by problems at home. These may end up with temporary or permanent problems. One such case was described in A dedicated lady, where the lady’s condition has improved but delusions remain. Most of the girls I have seen look better than average looking girls and that may be part of their problem. I will refrain from giving actual names or photos for obvious reasons. Here is a traumatic case from this year.

The story started around 2009-2010 in a small town nearby called Giddaluru. A girl in eighth grade, who was living with her father who worked for the military and a step mother, started absconding from classes and wandering around the town and forest nearby. The indications are that she was sexually abused by several people. Then, one day this year, her father found her unconscious in the forest and brought her to a hospital in Giddaluru. Her condition was quite bad, body full of various infections and head full of lice. As soon as she recovered consciousness, she accused her father of sexual molestation. A case was registered against him and she was brought to the Short Stay Home ( now called Swadhar Gruha) in Ongole since that is the only centre around which caters to such unfortunate women. She started getting treatment for her infections and her head had to shaved off to get rid of lice. There were also signs of mental instability and she used to pass urine wherever she liked. Some of the other girls took care of her cleaning her and around her and these included the dedicated lady above who had her own mental problems. She also started getting treatment from a psychiatrist in a government hospital and showed improvement on all fronts. But in a few months ( her total stay in the Short Stay Home was for approximately six months) her condition deteriorated again and she also started hitting people who went to assist her, though sometimes she exempted the dedicated lady. Aruna Tella felt that there were no chances for permanent improvement and that she should be sent to a regular mental hospital. But the doctor felt that her condition was improving under his treatment and refused to recommend such an option. This lasted until she attacked the doctor and he had to hide behind a table. Finally the doctor recommended her to be taken away to a hospital.

At this stage Aruna Tella attended a public meeting and spoke of her frustrations running the Short Stay Home ( now called Swadhar Gruha). One of the audience was a retired police officer from Giddaluru and he immediately phoned the current C.I. who responded by sending an ambulance at his own expense (apparently the government does not provide finds for such expenses to the Short Stay Home or the police). This process took about a week and they needed the permission from the magistrate to transport her to the mental hospital in Vizag. But the magistrate wanted a new certificate from a doctor again because of the delay. The C.I. took the trouble to wait at a doctor’s place until he returned from an assignment and finally the girl who is 21 now was ready to be sent to vizag. The dedicated lady and another lady went along with lots of clothes to change whenever the girl urinated and finally took her to Vizag where the hospital refused to admit her since it was a Sunday. Again the C.I. From Giddaluru had to intervene through police connections to get her admi

That was about a month and half ago and there is another twist to the story. The girl’s condition seems to have improved vastly in Vizag and she made a confession. Apparently, infidelity among military wives is suspected because of their long absences from home. Such suspicions were raised in her father’s case. One day she came home and saw her mother’s head split by an axe, allegedly killed by her father and that started her trauma. And when her almost lifeless body was found by her father and taken to a hospital, after partial recovery she accused him to revenge for her mother’s murder. The case is still going on. The father may escape one accusation and face another.

This seems to be the kind of problems that people face when they run Short Stay Homes. As it is, they develop reputations as brothels since the girls are usually better looking than average girls. There is shortness and delay of funding and no funds for medical needs. Generally public is not sympathetic to such places as the girls have shown some pluck and independence. I think that they deserve more sympathy and help.

There is another evolving story of delay in funds, government officials imposing arbitrary rules for new certificates of verification and so on for delayed funds which are already sanctioned. When I suggested to Aruna Tella that newspapers should take up such stories, her response was that pro-government papers do not publish such stories. But in general, there seem to be several schemes in place by the government with usual delivery problems and red tape.

Sent from my iPad

Iran next?

Iraq, Syria, Iran…Are We To Destroy Iran Next? From The American Conservative

Bryan Caplan on college education

A summary of his book, it seems. Interesting in parts.

About driving

It’s time to start thinking of driving like smoking “People still smoke, but it is controlled and expensive and those who do it are looked down upon by those who do not. People were told that smoking was sexy and fun and even good for you. We learned the truth and changed; it is time to do the same with cars. Driving is not a morally neutral act.”

On globalisation

The great globalisation lie by Dani Rodrik
A problem that India currently faces WTO Meet Likely to Be a Washout as India and US Clash Over Food Security

Some recent activities

I have interacted a little with various NGOs during the last couple of days at * మానవతా మిత్రమండలి - 5 వ సమావేశం B. C. T. / Bhagavathula chharitable Trust - ( యలమంచిలి దగ్గరే వున్న వెంకటాపురం గ్రామం ). This is in Visakhapatnam district. The activists from here, Vijayanagaram and Srikakulam districts; there are also some from Vijawada and Ongole. The impression I get is that these organisations, some old and some new, are in the process of developing self sustainable communities of various sizes based on cooperating groups of people. The first requirement seems food security. Then various other activities like providing employment within or near the community, communal activities like music, dances. The basic aim seems to be to develop self sustainable communities with outsiders playing some role with funds, stimulating activities both cultural and economic emphasising on cooperation. There seems to be emphasis on ’proper’ education from preprimary stage. They also try to use children to influence parents and community in activities like farming, group dynamics, stopping open defecation, drinking etc. For some reason, these seem more prevalent in this area, perhaps due to large number of tribals. With emergence of new groups, lot of them apolitical and prepared to work with government and other aid agencies, during the last few years gives some hope. But I am a new observer and have not really understood the range and scope of these activities.

Steven Mithen reviews ‘Against the grain’ by James Scott

interesting review Why did we start farming?
“His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on a narrative of human progress and on the ideal of the city/nation-state..... Why hunter-gatherers passed up their affluent lifestyle in favour of far more onerous and risky existences growing a narrow range of crops and managing livestock is a fundamental question to which we have no good answer. Was it by choice, or was that first sowing of seed a trap, locking people into a seasonal cycle of planting and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape?
......
In Scott’s picture, the barbarians and the city-states were entirely dependent on each other for their existence. They rose and fell together: the Huns and the Romans; the ‘Sea People’ and the Egyptians. And for the vast part of recorded history the majority of people lived in the barbarian world. Scott’s view is that the barbarian Golden Age ended as recently as four hundred years ago, when the power of the state finally became overwhelming, partly due to the invention of durable gunpowder. Which is, of course, a means to make fire sparked by flint – a return to the ‘moment’ 400,000 years earlier which marked the beginning not of the steady rise of civilisation, but rather the muddled and messy affair that is the human past.“