“Bhrashtamev Jayate”

Talking about social media today in India, I think it’s important to start off with some global basics. The first is of course is that the freedom of expression is fundamental. That’s my belief and commitment as a citizen, and as somebody who uses all media, social and otherwise — social and anti-social!

Freedom of expression is the mortar that binds together the bricks of our freedom and it’s also the open window embedded in those bricks. We need freedom of expression to guarantee all of our other acts. In this country we are all entitled to receive and send information thorough electronic networks, to share information, whether through the newspaper, the TV screen or online websites and to do so without censorship and restriction. This is fundamental to the kind of world which we all live in.

As a common man ( Indian citizen), I am conscious how fortunate we are to live in a country that guarantees us that right. People in some developing countries have to contend with the argument that development and freedom of expression are incompatible – that the media, for instance, must serve the ends of development as defined by the government, or operate only within the boundaries of what the social and religious authorities define as permissible.  The developing world is full of writers, artists and journalists who have to function in societies which do not grant them this freedom.  For them freedom of expression is the oxygen of their own survival, and that of their society, but they are stifled.  In countries where truth is what the government or the religious establishment says is true, freedom of expression is essential to depict alternative truths which the society needs to accommodate in order to survive.

And yet it is all too often absent, because in many countries, there are those who question the value of freedom of speech in their societies, those who argue that it threatens stability and endangers progress, those who still consider freedom of speech a Western import, an imposition from abroad and not the indigenous expression of every people’s demand for freedom. What has always struck me about this argument is that it is never made by the people, but by governments, never by the powerless but by the powerful, never by the voiceless, but by those whose voices are all that can be heard.  Let us put this argument once and for all to the only test that matters :- the choice of every people, to know more or know less, to be heard or be silenced, to stand up or kneel down. Only freedom of expression will allow the world’s oppressed and underprivileged a way out of the darkness that shrouds their voices, and their hopes.  The Internet has been giving them this choice as never before.

But then beyond that, and beyond the way in which social media reflects our freedom of expression, we have to go into how the information society of the 21st century provides citizens with full information to allow democratic participation at all levels in determining their own future.

Technology has become the biggest asset for those who seek to promote and protect freedom of expression around the world. The exciting thing about social media is that the new digital technology offers great possibilities for enhancing traditional media and combining them with new media.

The Internet has been made possible by advances in technology that have also transformed the traditional media. Traditional media, and especially radio and television, remain the sole form of access to the information society for much of the world’s population, including the very poor and the illiterate. The poorest, and the illiterate, have not yet been able to use social media and the internet. But even the rest of us rely on traditional media, we can’t wish them away. There is increasing convergence between television and the internet and soon we can try and see how we can marry modern technologies to actually make serious progress in the world.

Today, however, our focus is on social media. Look at the extraordinary transformation that is happening. Just a day after he was sworn in as our President, Pranab Mukherjee announced that he would be opening a Facebook account to receive and respond to the queries from the public. In fact, his fellow Bengali, Mamata Banerjee, has beaten him to it, with a popular and widely read website that the media mines daily for new stories about her views. Just three years ago, when there was a toll on social media, it was fashionable for Indian politicians to sneer at the use of social media. Today our own President made it clear that these are essential tools for clear, accountable and credible political leadership. The governments of the world or the big institutions of power have become more vulnerable today because of the fact that the new media technology has exposed them to the uncontrolled impact of instant news. And so the fact is that when we speak about the social media, we can’t get away from understanding the impact of new technology on the way the world is working.

Technology is such that everybody has a mobile phone in there pocket and you can do far more than when you could have first acquired a mobile phone. Now, you can take pictures, you can take videos, you can transmit them and go on the internet. Something like 5 billion people worldwide, including 84% of Americans, more than 70% of Chinese and at least 60% of Indians, today use mobile phones. You can all get your messages out more rapidly. The strength of this is that you can enable ordinary people to issue and disseminate even raw footage or compellingly authentic images before the mainstream media or the government can actually do so. So you can open up a social media space even not being a professional media person. 

“Bhrashtamev Jayate” The immoral relationships are always harmful for a house hold. Fight against internet censorship and website Ban for our own development !

Man and Wife or a Marriage Contract !

Gone are the times when you had a pet name and there were rhythm divine Valium allies in your arms all the time as they are getting married nowadays ! I have found that marriage is just a way of saying that a person has found the one they love and want no other. Marriage has changed over the years, as we have become dishonest with ourselves. We have used marriage over the years as a tool for control, power or wealth, while being dishonest with the ones we marry. Society has also deemed that we must be with one person, so we lie and live as society tells us hiding the fact that some are not the one lover type. 

There is nothing wrong with marriage, as long as you are honest and truly believe that you have found the one you want to spend the rest of your life with. Its all about honesty, if you do not want marriage then do not get into it, if you want multiple partners then tell them that. Be honest and do what you feel is right, no piece of paper will ever make a difference with the person whom you love.

Most of the time there is a lot of societal expectation or pressure to marry. There is still a stigma to having an illegitimate child. There are few women on this planet outside of Earth where women will be content living with their partner and raising children with no expectation of marriage - as they put it "getting married let me know you were serious about making this work".

And they are right - getting married changed their thought process a lot - he wanted to be with her but his brain kept thinking in terms of "my plans" instead of "our plans" before getting married because it's the socially expected thing to do after you've been together for a while. Marriage adds a low pass filters in the relationship, i.e., stabilizes it. Marriage makes it procedurally harder to leave each other and often degrades your BATNA (Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement) because it brings you out of the dating game (Most marriages entail socially accepted exclusivity).

The subconscious fear of "Who will cry when I die" drives us to find and live with a life long partner. We then "marry" to "inform" , the society, about the bond . And the reason behind informing the society is to create for ourselves, a "threat of social rejection/ridicule" thus an attempt to  ensure that "There will be someone who will cry when I die".

Now coming to the point why am i so worried about all this. I have no obvious, rational reason to get married. I come from a very liberal family, and no one would care if my girlfriend and I just continue to live together. Both of us is religious and so are our parents. We keep separate bank accounts. I am a financial imbecile, so though I've heard there are "tax implications," I've never paid attention to them.

I have friends that have been together without getting married. Some have been coupled longer than I have. As far as I'm concerned, they are just as "married" as I am not.

And yet getting married is no way tremendously important to me. I am very glad that I have not done it, and a large part of my identity is to be a ripe and soulfully spoilt "husband." 

So our mothers will stop nagging us to get married and start nagging us to have children.

Partly, this is due to conditioning. Liberal as they were, my parents were married. My grandparents were married. When I was a kid, all my friends had parents who were married. Thankfully, I never thought getting married as "what one had to do." I will never marry someone whom I wasn't devoted to. But I did think that if I ever find a real partner, I would marry her.

Mostly, it has to do with making a commitment. Marriage, to me, is an arbitrary ceremony. (And a fun one, though as of now I have never got to taste my own damn groom cake!) There are other ways of committing, but, from my point of view, there is no problem with using the traditional one. It had the advantage of being tied to my symbolism and my emotions, due to years of conditioning: looking at my parents' wedding album, watching Hollywood movies, etc.

 

What it comes down to a promise and so did my girlfriend that's what marriage is to me: a promise. Some people make promises all the time. Some people break promises all the time. But I rarely break promises. I also rarely make promises. So for me to make one ... it's a pretty big deal.

A lot of people are profoundly affected by the spoken word, and I'm no exception. A marriage vow is an example of performative language, which, at its most absurd, is a kind of magical thinking: like when superstitious people think it's going to rain because someone said, "I hope it doesn't rain."

I'm truly not an atheist but is a materialist but not a skeptic, so I don't believe in magic words. Still, words do have an emotional effect on me. And, after all, what is a promise??? My promise -- to stay with my girlfriend until deal -- doesn't exist, except as neuronal patterns in my brain and hers. So, I suppose, the magic words are sort of ways to start a mental program running. And continually thinking of myself as her husband are ways to keep the program running. Now thats the view of a computer engineer with weeds cells implanted in my brain.  

 

Marriage is never a "thing" that needs to be scored on a check box. And I don't think it wrong in any way if someone wants to "explore the untouched word" in one word its called "curiosity". I do agree that still in many parts of this country marriage is a gate pass for sex. But before that I seriously want to ask "Is having sex a wrong deed? You are in a matured age ofcourse you should have. And why not tie up together in a better acceptable bond so that no one can raise a hand." After marriage people do not have sex ONLY. How can we forget the guys/girls who gets married because they want to, not because of having sex, because they want to experience responsibilities, at that age they want someone to share their time and space.
 

You want to marry someone with whom you want to grow old, someone whose happiness will mean the world to you. Whose sagging body will never affect you from loving him. Whose pain will hurt you as much as your own. Whose happiness will fill you with joy.

At last, why do you marry because you have to. What is important is life-long companionship and undying affection. Marriage is a not about hanging around and having fun. Nor is it something that must be done under pressure. Marriage comes with a lot of responsibility. Acceptance, love, forgiveness, patience, affection, and mutual understanding can actually make a marriage successful as a result of the grandest, covetous and bona fide love, which actually builds over a period of time between the two. But, it's sure-fire that people don't marry for merely meeting their satyr or nymphomania. There are numerous 'pleasure houses' everywhere in every country be it India, which are easily accessible by every lecher. Marriage by and large renders the ultimate stability to our life along with joiê-de-vivrê, and a hope for wholesome senescence.

So here is the contract if you are ready to do it :-  "I, ____, take you, ____, to be my lawfully wedded(husband/wife), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part."

 

Change is inevitable ! But you must not lose yourself .

A hundred years ago, people didn't talk about changing the world — not in the way we speak of it today. In 1912, there weren't movements for the eradication of poverty or disease, or even an understanding of their scale. Then came Woodrow Wilson's dream of the League of Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the formation of the United Nations. From there, Gandhi, the civil rights movement, and speeches by President and Robert Kennedy that declared, "We need men who dream of things that never were," and that spoke of "a new world society." There was Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, delivered at the age of 34, and Neil Armstrong walking on the surface of the moon at the age of 38. Their youth brought a feeling of youthfulness to humanity itself, and gave people the sense that nothing is impossible.

This moment in the long arc of history launched a change-the-world movement that never existed before, including change-the-world vocations on a major scale — from the Peace Corps to an explosion in the growth of opportunities in the nonprofit sector, which employs more than 10 million people today. And in the last decade or so, the genre has become even more refined: social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, L3C low-profit corporations, B corporations, the charitable endurance event industry, and more. New infrastructures have arisen to support it, from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, TED and Good, to the Social Enterprise Program at Harvard. Most major universities now have nonprofit management programs that didn't exist ten years ago. And courses on philanthropy are now even taught at the undergraduate level at many Universities, and many other colleges.

With the growth of these structures and opportunities has come an emphasis on doing, often to the exclusion of being. The competition to be the one who changes the world can be as cut-throat, if not more, than the competition among fast-food chains, or cosmetics companies, or movie studios. Lost in this new era is the notion that one can still make a difference in business, even absent any corporate social responsibility program. How would the charities trying to change the world operate without the manufacturers that make the equipment for their medical clinics, or without General Electric providing them with light bulbs? How would a "social enterprise" like PlanetTran, the hybrid car service, operate without Toyota, who makes the Prius, which constitutes their fleet? And in the absence of industrial farmers and national grocery chains, we would find ourselves in need of a great deal more charity, and a lot further away from the goal of changing the world, to boot.

Paradoxically, this new era of limitlessness often serves to limit the imaginations of the young people it attracts. It can obscure their real and natural passions. If you want to change the world, you have to go into the change-the-world sector, the times say. And so a young girl, whose calling — and whose value to the world — may really be to dance, or to build an industry, is hypnotized into becoming the fundraising director for an NGO. Imagine if someone had held up Gandhi to a young Frank Lloyd Wright, as Gandhi is held up to our young people today, and the incredible architect decided to go run a nonprofit soup kitchen as a result. What a tragedy. And what a setback that would have been for architecture and design.

Individual economic futures are at risk, as well. While we may envision a new world, the donating public and nonprofit sector are still stuck philosophically in Puritan times, demanding that nonprofit employees work for sacrificial wages, as a sign that their hearts are in the right place. And in another paradox, they ask the people who would dream a new dream for the world to abandon the economic dreams they have for themselves.

These are complicated times for making a true difference. Perhaps much more than they were for Amelia Earhart, Rosa Parks, and Henry Ford. So, what difference does being (as opposed to doing) make? Presence? Listening? What difference does passion make? Peace of mind? A slow pace? Excellence? What difference does industry make, when it creates new products and jobs that make life better for others? All of these things exist independent of the change-the-world sector. And, the change-the-world industry itself cannot possibly change the world if forced to play by a set of Puritan economic rules than fundamentally work against it — low wages, no charity stock market, disdain for advertising and marketing, and the expectation of immediate results.

I get e-mails all the time from people who are grappling with these issues — many from clients and executives wondering whether they should go into the for-profit sector or the nonprofit sector, or asking how they can reconcile their dreams of a better world with the economic dreams they have for themselves. Others are from corporate executives feeling a dearth of purpose, and asking for career advice. Still others are from nonprofit leaders frustrated by a system that works against the dreams that brought them into the sector in the first place. People are suffering from a crisis of meaning, and not in small part because the definitions of meaning have been re-engineered by a culture confused about it itself. The feedback I get has inspired me to delve more deeply into these issues as part of the work that my company does with a specific curriculum called Change Course, which explores the intersection of money and meaning.

Somehow the dream of changing the world ended up changing the quality of our dreams. It's not natural. When this era of profound human potential combines with authentic human passions, unlimited by artificial categories and boxes, then the world can really change, into something including — but far more profound than — the world without human suffering we have begun to imagine.