Educators From India

"My lover's gone off to some foreign country, sopping wet at our doorway I watch the clouds rupture. Mira says, nothing can harm him. This passion has yet to be slaked."

"The Great Dancer is my husband," Mira says, "rain washes off all the other colors.”"

"One night as I walked in the desert the mountains rode on my shoulders and the sky became my heart, and the earth - my own body, I explored. Every object began to wink at me, and Mira wisely calculated thinking, My charms must be at their height now would be a good time to rush into his arms, maybe He won't drop me so quick."

"Don't forget love; it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe."

"I want you to have this, all the beauty in my eyes, and the grace of my mouth, all the splendor of my strength, all the wonder of the musk parts of my body, for are we not talking about real love, real love?”"

"Mother, I have bargained and bought Govinda! Let some say:Cheap!Let some say:Costly! I have weighed in the balance. Let some say:He is in the house, some say!In the woods! Sporting in the company of Radha! When Meera’s Lord Giridhar Krishna comes, love."

"For your sake, I gave up all pleasures, Now why are you making me long for you? You create the pang of separation inside the bosom So that you can come and quench it? O! Lord! Now I will not leave you Smilingly, call me soon! Meera is your servant in birth after birth Unite me with you in every limb."

"Mira sang of her love for Krishna with such simplicity and directness that in her songs millions have found a voice and echo of their own God-yearning."

"There is nothing highly wrought bout Mira's style, and no erotic element in her poetry whatsoever. But with her they are instruments used to express a deep and personally felt emotion. She may use the marriage-bed as a symbol of mystical union with God in the manner of Saint -- poets, or as a symbol of the devotee's readiness to give the Lord all that is in his power. But in Mira's poetry there is no tendency to luxuriate in devotional feelings tinged with eroticism."

"Love is something absolutely unselfish, that which has no thought beyond the glorification and adoration of the object upon which our affections are bestowed. It is a quality which bows down and worships and asks nothing in return. Merely to love is the sole request that true love has to ask. It is said of a Hindu saint (Mirabai) that when she was married, she said to her husband, the king, that she was already married. To whom?" asked the king. To God," was the reply."

"SEWA is now the largest union in India, with a membership of around 1.2 million women."

"[So], in 1972, we started SEWA, the Self Employed Women’s Association. SEWA in many respects is a microcosm of the general picture of the informal sector, in India and worldwide."

"Women predominate in the lower strata of employment."

"...as I worked with the unionized labor, of the much larger labor force that was outside the purview of the protective labor laws, of any form of social security, access to justice, access to financial services, anything. That tugged at my heart. And those people were unorganized and had no strength to act to seek remedies."

"We were rebuilding the nation, looking to a more just society. It was a time when many of us were going to the villages to live there. We were a generation that had no confusion in our minds as to how to do things. Gandhiji had shown the way. This atmosphere infused politics and the way we did things."

"Ela Bhatt has upended the old ways of thinking and compelled all of us to raise our collective ambitions about what we can do to."

"Even in places where it is most stark, people still should be able to develop their ambitions and direct them toward building better lives. And Ela and SEWA have proven that,"

"The work that she has done through the Self-Employed Women's Association is not only about finding solutions to the problems of poverty. At its most basic level, Ela's work is about fairness, about giving every person the chance to achieve his or her dreams, to make the most of his or her God-given potential'no matter how rich or poor, no matter whether they work in a factory or a home or on the side of a road."

"So for her contribution to India and particularly the women of India, and to the global community, it is my honour to present the first Global Fairness Award to my friend, Ela Bhatt""

"She (Bhatt) has helped not only women in India but women in South Africa, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and inspired so many others to find their own way forward to overcome long legacies of inequality and unfairness. She has helped us imagine and then work toward a fairer world."

"All my life I have worked to change concepts, and that begins with how people see and understand the problems."

"Every human being has something, a spiritual element, that makes them want to do better, to reach higher."

"What we really are looking for is self reliance and that is how we should measure success. I don’t much like the word empowerment, but self-reliance is the foundation of SEWA’s approach,."

"Microfinance is the best example of success in the kinds of systemic institutional areas."

"Systems are needed, for example for management, accounting, skill development and MIS to serve the needs of the working poor."

"Injustice happens at many levels, from the grass roots to the top. And one of the keys of SEWA’s vision and action is linking them."

"SEWA is about political action, and that has always been at the heart of what we have done. It is about changing the balance of power in favor of the poor. That has meant constant tension, with big farmers, moneylenders, contractors, big traders, government, local panchayats, and so on."

"The country is moving in a different direction, times have changed. But for me Gandhiji’s values are still the frame, still alive and valid."

"I am Hindu, and my activism is very much framed within that context, of karma as meaning action."

"[SEWA] have been doing many different things, leading the SEWA movement which is about economic freedom for the poor, women, and self employed."

"I grew up in the time around India’s independence, in the aura of a country fighting for its freedom. It was a heady and idealistic time, and we were all infected with a spirit of optimism, and the spirit of Gandhiji."

"Through women, what exists and is real, what is traditional, historical, modern and cultural, given the opportunity, is upgraded. That is what the challenge to bring peace is about."

"…Poverty and violence are not God made, they are man made. Poverty and peace cannot coexist."

"…Inner peace is important, but I have always felt that living a daily life with peace is the end. So in reality individual peace and global peace are not separate. They are one and the same."

"Teachers do not care…It is not because teachers are badly paid and the teachers are organized but they do not teach. If we don’t respect them it is because we see them doing other business than teaching."

"realities of our own countries rather than catching up with the western economic models, [Bhatt urged] the people to follow a principle which ensures six basic necessities- food, shelter, clothing, primary education, primary healthcare and primary banking- are available within a 100 mile distance. If these necessities are locally produced and consumed, we will have the growth of a new holistic economy."

"...tribute to her unflinching zeal towards the betterment of women in society."

"MIA and NIA languages are not, strictly speaking, derived from the language of the Rigveda or from Classical Sanskrit […] these Aryans of the eastern tracts seem to be different from the Midland or Vedic Aryans in many respects―in religious observances, in many practices, in dialect […] these Aryans were distinct from those other Aryans of the West among whom the Vedic culture grew up, distinct in dialect, in religion and in practices... The morphology of Vedic […] retains most faithfully the inflections of primitive Indo-European."

"“Throughout the whole range of Urdu literature in its first phase… the atmosphere of this literature is provokingly un-Indian - it is that of Persia. Early Urdu poets never so much as mention the great physical features of India - its Himalayas, its rivers like the Ganges, the Jamuna, the Sindhu, the Godavari, etc; but of course mountains and streams of Persia, and rivers of Central Asia are always there. Indian flowers, Indian plants are unknown; only Persian flowers and plants which the poet could see only in a garden. There was a deliberate shutting of the eye to everything Indian, to everything not mentioned or treated in Persian poetry… A language and literature which came to base itself upon an ideology which denied on the Indian soil the very existence of India and Indian culture, could not but be met with a challenge from some of the Indian adherents of their national culture; and that challenge was in the form of highly Sanskritized Hindi’.”"

"The first Bengali with a scientific insight to attack the problems of the language was the poet Rabindranath Tagore; and it is flattering for the votaries of philology, to find in one who is the greatest writer in the language, and a great poet and seer for all time, a keen philologist as well, distinguished alike by an assiduous enquiry into the facts of the language as by a scholarly appreciation of the methods and findings of the modern Western philologist. The work of Rabindranath is in the shape of a few essays (now collected in one volume) on Bengali Phonetics, Bengali Onomatopoetics, and on the Bengali noun, and on other topics, the earliest of which appeared in the early nineties, and some fresh papers appeared only several years ago. These papers may be said to have shown to the Bengali enquiring into the problems of his language the proper lines of approaching them."

"However, many applied optimization problems have not been considered yet. It is necessary to use optimization methods of quantum and bio-molecular systems, because of the practical importance of the implementation of physical processes satisfying the required quality criteria. Most of the attention is focused on the following problems: … 2. Mathematical modeling of controlled physical and chemical processes in the brain; [to] consider the brain as a quantum macroscopic object (Gomatam, 1999)."

"I have benefited from… working with Ravi Gomatam on his ["Towards a Consciousness-Based, Realist Interpretation of Quantum Theory--Integrating Bohr and Einstein"](1998)"

"As science went further and further into the external world, they ended up inside the atom where to their surprise they saw consciousness staring them in the face!"

"In this sense, we agree with Gomatam (1999) who argues for a revision of our notion of macroscopic objects in accord with quantum non-separability. Indeed, the key to progress in quantum gravity may lie in a willingness to abandon stalwart concepts of dynamism such as energy, momentum, force, and even causation at the fundamental level of modeling."

"I was very interested in the talk by Dr. Ravi Gomatam… because he showed, by some nice arguments that the proper way to think of quantum mechanics is in terms of relationships… This is a new way of thinking, which is perhaps how we can get out of the confusions we seems to be in at present moment. It may be that this how we should be doing science."

"Two features of QT are commonly taken to be fundamentally non-classical: the absolute randomness of single events in the atomic regime, and the need for a permanent record of the experiment obtained using a macroscopic experimental arrangement…QT can also be applied to the larger system consisting of the original atomic system plus the macroscopic experimental arrangement. In this case, however, the larger system needs to interact with another stage of macroscopic recording. Since this procedure can continue ad infinitum, and is decisively terminated only when the result of an experiment is interpreted by a conscious observer, some noted quantum theorists have promoted the view that the quantum theory has some nexus with the consciousness of the observer..."

"The Schrödinger equation, which is at the heart of quantum theory, is applicable in principle to both microscopic and macroscopic regimes. Thus, it would seem that we already have in hand a non-classical theory of macroscopic dynamics, if only we can apply the Schrödinger equation to the macroscopic realm. However, this possibility has been largely ignored in the literature because the current statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics presumes the classicality of the observed macroscopic world to start with. But the Schrödinger equation does not support this presumption. The state of superposition never collapses under Schrödinger evolution."

"Quantum physicists today are reconciled to randomness at the individual event level, but to expect causality to underlie statistical quantum phenomena is reasonable. Suppose a person shakes an ink pen such that ink spots are formed on a white wall, in what appears for all intents and purposes, randomly. Let us further suppose the random ink spots accumulate to form precise pictures of different known persons' faces every time. We will not regard the overall result to be a happenchance; we are apt to suspect there must be a "method" to the person who is shaking the ink pen."

"Any high school boy or girl knows how to calculate the force with which a stone he or she throws will hit someone in the face, but nothing in those equations they use will tell them whether or not to throw it…To solve the problem of values we must know what is valuable. Consciousness is the most valuable commodity…To bring values into science, we need to connect science with what is valuable—consciousness."

"Scientific realism in classical (i.e. pre-quantum) physics has remained compatible with the naive realism of everyday thinking on the whole; whereas it has proven impossible to find any consistent way to visualize the world underlying quantum theory in terms of our pictures in the everyday world. The general conclusion is that in quantum theory naive realism, although necessary at the level of observations, fails at the microscopic level."