But one voice has not faltered during Europe’s refugee crisis

Angela Merkel's. "We will cope" :
"However, we cannot turn back time nor can we fast-forward years into the future – and one inescapable fact remains: there are hundreds of thousands of refugees in Europe. They are here now and they will keep coming. The hundreds of thousands are fleeing war, they leave home to embark on perilous, often fatal, journeys because their home is no more. And no fence, wishful thinking or amount of aid money alone will change this.
The choice is ultimately between doing what is necessary to save lives, or turning away. On this particular decision, Merkel stands tall above her European counterparts. Sadly, she stands almost alone."
And The Indispensable European From The Economist

A maid who was a millionaire

The Strange. True Sory of  How a Chairman at McKinsey Made Millions of Dollars of His Maid by Nilita Vachani Check also Inside Job in The Caravan

How will Bihar election affect Modi agenda?

"The prime minister's priorities to date make it abundantly clear that he is plotting no dramatic rupture with the past; he is committed to an incremental programme of economic change. India's democratic system and important divides within his own alliance, provide enough checks and balances to mean that he is is unlikely to deviate from this course.

Wherever possible, the Modi regime will circumvent a divided parliament, deploying executive action and pushing reforms that can be adopted by India's states, where a divided national parliament poses no obstacle. In short, don't expect Mr Modi to dwell on Bihar for too long." says Milan Vaishnav.

More political versions of Bihar victory

From a review of "The Brothers Bihari" by Sankarshan Thakur, written on October 28, 2015:
"The relation (friendship and enmity) to which the BJP refers to in the hoarding is well-known - that between Mr Kumar and former chief minister Lalu Prasad. Friends of their youth, both began their careers as student leaders during anti-Emergency movements led by Jaya Prakash Narayan; led the backward castes in their state on the path of self-determination; fell out and fought each other, with Mr Kumar crafting the downfall of Mr Prasad from a seemingly invincible citadel of power; and now, are united yet again to stall the juggernaut that is Prime Minister Narendra Modi's electoral success......Mr Kumar put all this hope at stake by breaking away from the BJP - whom he needed to oust Mr Prasad - in 2013, after it became apparent that Mr Modi would be the prime ministerial candidate of the NDA. Mr Thakur provides an explanation for this move, for which Mr Kumar had to pay dearly in the Lok Sabha elections last year: "'I cannot work with this man,' he (Mr Kumar) told me… 'Narendra Modi goes beyond electoral battles, it is a battle of ideas.'" Now this battle is playing itself out in the polling booths of Bihar. It will possibly determine the political future of the country."
By Vivek Kaul from November, 2014  gives the numbers and says "This pragmatism worked in the recent by-election. Now Nitish is trying to build an even more formidable alliance by getting the left parties together as well. And this alliance, if it comes together, will be even more difficult to beat, the brand Modi notwithstanding."
More here and here. These generally give the hope and numbers to show that if Modi does not change his ways, he may not last more than a term.

Some stories behind the Bihar win of Nitish and Lalu

Prashant Kishor: Man behibd Modi LS campaign crafts Nitish win (Vijay Murthy on November 9):
"People close to him have told HT that Kishor does not care much for ideology or parties. He prefers leaders who ‘deliver’ and strongly feels Indian elections will continue to turn more presidential.

“People think of parties as too vague and amorphous. They want accountability. And can hold leaders for promises they have made,” said a source.

And so he began working to turn the Bihar election into a presidential contest. Brand Nitish was reinforced. He coined catchy slogans like “Bihar me bahaar ho, Nitish Kumar ho”."

From July, 2015 The leader and his machine (by Vandita Mishra):

"The group in the office on Strand Road is part of a larger 300-plus team of the Indian Political Action Committee (IPAC) that is mostly, about 70 per cent, made up of IIT graduates who have left high-paying jobs in MNCs to join the Nitish campaign. A need to be part of something larger and bigger, to connect and contribute to the “social” and the “political”, had earlier led some of them to the Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG) that worked on Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha campaign in 2013-2104 — the leftover CAG has now flowed into the IPAC. Others have come directly to the IPAC. Very few, only two in the core team, belong to Bihar. All are taking a break from their jobs, and though there is much talk about “risk-taking”, they seem to have little or no insecurity about finding another one. For now, till the election is done, they are offering their services to the “Leader”.....All are taking a break from their jobs, and though there is much talk about “risk-taking”, they seem to have little or no insecurity about finding another one. For now, till the election is done, they are offering their services to the “Leader”......the Prashant Kishor strategy, in the country for Modi, and for Nitish in Bihar, is to set up the teams and systems that will organise and streamline the resources and energies needed to package and promote the Leader. Even though electoral contests in India have always been presidential, this single-minded focus and this organised machine is new and remarkable.,,,,Nitish, moreover, has seemed especially unsettled and disoriented ever since he broke the JD(U)-BJP alliance after Modi’s coronation as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in June 2013, and then suffered a setback in the Lok Sabha election in 2014.

This is where a machine, of the kind Prashant Kishor offers, can prove to be seductive and useful — at the very least, it offers information from a standpoint that is relatively disinterested.

It could also be said that in Bihar the space for a campaign obsessively focused on the leader, as opposed to ideas and ideology, has existed for some time now, waiting to be filled."

Other reports from Shivam Vij on July 15 and Sanjay Singh.on November 8. From Sanjay Singh's report:

"It is difficult to assess whether it was his conviction in Nitish or it was his disillusionment with Modi or he had certain messages to convey to some top leaders in BJP, Amit Shah included, that he decided to join the Bihar chief minister and JD(U) boss.

“I wanted to see whether I was only riding a wave be at the right place at the right time with right person or something is there in me to turn around an election and win it. I am testing that for me (all by himself),” Kishor would often say in his interactions. “For once, the BJP should also get to know that”, he would add.

Kishor’s critics in JD(U) used to accuse Nitish for “outsourcing not only his campaign, but also his politics to him.” But Nitish kept his faith in him. “Prashant Kishor is from Bihar and he wants to do something for it,” he would say."

And Shimam Vij says (July 15, 2015)"It is unlikely that the JD(U) will be any different from the BJP. Parties cannot outsource campaigning in the long run. The only solution, however remote, is to transform themselves into the kind of machines that Kishor’s CAG was, or I-PAC is today.

Since the BJP gave up on the CAG and it became defunct, some of its key members have joined other political parties, including the Congress, the DMK and the Aam Aadmi Party. Some have gone back to their old careers, disillusioned that they didn’t get to aid policy work with the new government. It remains to be seen where Kishor will end up.

In the end, a Narendra Modi needs Amit Shah more than Prashant Kishor. Elections come and go, but a party can only rely on the loyalty of its own leaders. Its relations with external consultants, no matter how brilliant, will be transactional."

Modi routed in Bihar

"His government has few lasting successes to chalk up on economic and social development, or on foreign affairs. Modi has launched many campaigns such as Make in India, Digital India, and Clean India, but he has failed to show firm results in reforming the way that India is run, and has developed a reputation for being more interested in personal glory and symbolism than in implementation. That is in stark contrast to his reputation as chief minister of Gujarat before last year’s general election.

He has also failed to build constructive relations with chief ministers of states, including some run by BJP politicians who do not belong to his camp in the party, as well as those from other political parties. The lieutenant governor of Delhi, who reports to Modi’s home ministry and has some key administrative responsibilities, has continually tried to undermine Arvind Kejriwal, leader of the populist Aam Aadmi Party that defeated the BJP earlier this year.

Abroad, Modi has had major successes with more than 20 high-profile foreign trips, such as the one he is about to make to the UK, and he has even been billed in the past few days by Forbes’ magazine as the world’s ninth most powerful person. But there have been few firm investments from tens of billions of dollar promises he has reaped in places ranging from China and the US to Japan and Dubai, and little evidence of real power.

In South Asia, he has squandered much of a constructive approach that he began to adopt last year with India’s neighbours. Government policy on Pakistan has little coherence, and Modi’s successful efforts at establishing good relations with Nepal have turned into a disaster with a blockade of oil and other supplies from India, triggered by a constitutional row in Nepal. India also last week inexplicably lodged a formal complaint at the United Nations for the first time over Nepal’s human rights record.

The impression in all these areas is that the prime minister is not focussing on following through and implementing the announcements he has made. Much will now depend on how he reacts to today’s defeat – whether he reshuffles his ministers and sidelines those wh

o have been the most disruptive, and whether he begins to emerge and act as a statesman and leader.

Perhaps the unkindest remark on tele"vision, as today’s results have been emerging, came from Vir Sanghvi, a veteran commentator. Referring to Modi’s UK trip and the overseas Indians’ Wembley Stadium event he said, “He might win in Leicester or Wembley but not in Bihar.""”. from Narendra Modi and the BJP routed in Bihar state election by John Elliot (via Akshay Regulagedda). John Elliot's blog. Another recent post Nitish Kumar achieved a lot but can he drive entrepreneurial development?

From Sify News

Jean Dreze dropped

from speaker's list at government conference:
"While none from the government was ready to speak on this faux pas, questions were raised if this was yet another sign of rising intolerance “of the other view” in the country.   Asked if the rising intolerance impacted India’s onward economic march, Prof Dreze said: “Tolerance is a value in its own right, we don’t have to justify it by arguing that it has economic returns. Still, I think that Raghuram Rajan had a point when he said that open debate and enquiry foster economic progress. This is not primarily because investors are put off by intolerance - investors care about profits, not communal harmony and that sort of thing. It is because economic progress depends on human creativity, innovation and initiative, all of which benefit from freedom of thought and expression. All this, of course, is a little speculative, and that’s another reason for valuing tolerance for its own sake rather than as an economic asset”. "

And a phone Call from the Chancellor

 Berlin Accomplices:The German Government role in the VW scandal from Spiegel online via The Automatic Earth. At the end "In the end, VDA President Matthias Wissmann was able to win over the chancellor. On the morning of the Commission meeting, several of those involved say, Merkel called Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. At the end of the conversation, the discrepancy to conformity factor had been decided upon: 2.1.

Perhaps, though, that should be seen as progress. The automobile industry, after all, wasn't able to get everything it asked for."

Mukul Kesavan on Trilokpuri riots

Thirty years after: The Trilokpuri riots in Delhi:
"The thing to remember about these hardscrabble neighbourhoods is that given their origins, their residents weren’t citizens, they were desperately poor clients dependent on the State and its political operatives for every basic facility and amenity. Nothing was theirs by right; even more than in the rest of India, their lives depended on the vagaries of local politics and their access (or lack of it), to patronage and ‘protection’.

Old urban neighbourhoods where communities have lived adjacently or intermingled over many generations sometimes develop inter-community networks that help their residents negotiate communal flashpoints without violence, as Ashutosh Varshney has shown in his book, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life. But in urban settlements created by bureaucratic fiat as holding pens for Delhi’s poor, life is a Hobbesian zero-sum game where common sense consists of staying on the right side of Leviathan and its grubbing agents.

This dependency, this permanent state of clientage is why the Congress-directed pogrom of 1984 was bloodiest in the resettlement colonies. Contrary to the durable urban myth that riots are engineered by ‘outsiders’, the Sikh residents of Trilokpuri and Kalyanpuri were killed by their neighbours, by people they lived with and recognized. Their killers weren’t inherently evil: their urban circumstance had made them creatures of a vicious State apparatus and they jumped to do its bidding."

Soutik Biswas also comments Why the riots in Delhi's Trilokpuri are significant

Bottle gourd seedlings

In the three pots in front. Don't know what works in growth. Planted at the same time but in different localities and now shifted to the same place.

25 years, 36,000 post cards

(via Madhukar Shukla) "As a teenager, a poor villager in Andhra Pradesh wanted to join the postal service. With no money for higher education, a job with the government agency could have made his life secure.

But a relative supported him financially and sent him to medical school. That changed the life of Araveeti Ramayogaiah, who went on to become a pediatrician. Decades later, his day-to-day practice became inseparable from the postal service.

For almost 25 years, Ramayogaiah wrote and sent postcards to India’s poor, especially women, telling them about ways to prevent – rather than cure – diseases. The good doctor died in Hyderabad in September this year at the age of 65. The inexpensive postcard was Ramayogaiah’s solution to private hospitals, which are typically inaccessible and unaffordable for many of India’s poor." from 25 years, 36,000 post cards: How one doctor's gesture helped India's rural poor to stay healthy
Meanwhile from a new venture of  J. Craig Venter "You will get a custom-made iPad app to navigate data about yourself. Also, your wallet will be at least $25,000 lighter."

Kshama Sawant seems to be winning again

"She rejects the role of saviour, however. She explained that in the case of the housing crisis, government has a vital role to play in cracking down on slumlords, passing a strong tenants rights bill and rent control, but the message is, “I’m not going to solve your problem, the message is, you need to get organized.”

If that happens, Seattle may become an incubator for 21st-century socialism. " from 

With Kshama Sawant Claiming Reelection Victory, Seattle Doubles Down on Socialism via Lambert Strether of Naked Capitalism

Dalit cooks and Indian Schools

Madhukar Shukla posted this story about the appointment of a Dalit cook in a Karnataka village school led to a boycott by upper caste villagers: "Radhamma is a Scheduled Caste, and the condition that she not make food is the only way she can retain her job of head cook at the Government Higher Primary School in Kagganahalli village in Kolar district of Karnataka. In January 2014, there were 118 students at the school, from Classes I to VIII. Since her appointment in February 2014, 100 have left. The remaining 18 continue on the condition, laid down by their parents, that Radhamma not make the mid-may meal."
There are several similar stories from other parts of India, U.P in 2010,, Tamil Nadu in 2012 and Karnataka itself from the school wherte the chief minister studied. The chief minister Siddaramaiah seems relatively progressive and the issue was resolved though various other problems remain accordding to this Caravan story.  More about the cief minister here "A leader of Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has said the chief minister of the southern state of Karnataka would be beheaded if he dared to eat beef in the town of Shivamogga. "Let him eat beef at Gopi Circle in Shivamogga. If he does so, he will be beheaded. We won't think twice about that," S N Channabasappa, former president of the local municipal council in Shivamogga district, was quoted as saying by the daily Deccan Herald.

Siddaramaiah, who belongs to the Congress Party, is the highest elected leader in the state. He had earlier said he has no qualms about eating cow's meat. "Nobody could stop me from eating beef, pork or any other meat if I wished to," Siddaramaiah told reporters in Bengaluru on Sunday (1 November)."

enerally, these midday meals are not that great accordin to India's untouchable midday meals:
"Whereas extra caution will eliminate lizards and rats, India’s cruel and lousy caste system will sadly be around for centuries."
O.S. Radhamma case update(11, Nov. 2015) http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/express-report-prods-karnataka-to-act-end-dalit-cooks-boycott/?SocialMedia

Animalas against cruelty

Aussie Optimism Program

From Curtin University; article in Huffington Post:
"A five-year-old's ability to learn mental resilience is being demonstrated in an Australian program with astounding results.

Aussie Optimism is an in-school class that treats mental health like maths or science, teaching children from Year 1 up to Year 8 how to identify their emotions and put their lives into perspective.

Co-director Rosanna Ronney told The Huffington Post Australia graduates had less likelihood of mental health difficulties and suicidal behavior. A study also showed participants were able to more quickly recover from depressive behaviour when compared to the general population. They were also shown to be less likely to drink or smoke later in life.

"I think it’s a little bit like learning spelling and maths, you can’t do too much mental health resilience training," Ronney told HuffPost Australia."

Report. They are on FaceBook too

Trudeau's cabinet

Impressive in terms representing various groups. How they will handle veteren bureaucrats ia another question.
Full list

A talk about Rachakonda Viswanatha Sastry

Here includes a transcript:
".నాకు కన్యాశుల్కం అంటే ఇష్టం గనుక నేనింత బాగా రాయగలిగేను" 

Staring at computers at night

can fry your brains. Here's one easy fix.

Rajendra Singh awarded Stockholm Water Prize

An ancient Indian technoloy is helping India's 'water man" save thousands of parched villages
A write up from 2005 Water Warriors: Rainwater Harvesting to ReplenishUnderground Water (Rajasthan, India) The article has updates upto February 2014.

RTE working in some places

From The Hindu article Leading from within "This government-run Primary School in Hamirpur district in Uttar Pradesh is one of the eight per cent of schools in India that comply with most of the norms and standards stipulated in the RTE Act. The RTE Act that came into being on April 1, 2010, casts a legal obligation on the Central and State Governments to implement the fundamental right of children to free and compulsory education. It lays down detailed guidelines for the development of curriculum, training of teachers and pupil-teacher ratios. Furthermore, it emphasises child-centric and child-friendly learning and an environment that is free of fear, trauma and anxiety for children. It has been exactly five years since the RTE Act came into being, and only a fraction of its promise has been fulfilled across the country.

Even that fraction throws up impressive statistics: 110 million children are served meals in the mid-day meal scheme making it the world’s largest school-feeding programme; 199 million children are in schools and studying. A study by the Azim Premji Foundation, quoted in the report released by the RTE Forum recently, shows that in semi-urban and rural areas, the belief that private school education is better than government schools is a myth. This was reflected in the experience of the parents in this village in Hamirpur too."

See also Five education initiatives that are changing India The above is not one of them.