India And Bharat

The Preamble to The Constitution of India begins with, ‘WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA….  Article 1, Clause (1) of The Constitution of India states, “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”. In the Preamble, ‘India’ is not followed by the explanatory name ‘Bharat’.

India is perhaps the only country of the world which has two official names.

Why did the framers of our Constitution, with all their nationalistic fervour, decide to continue with the name ‘India’ and not choose the name ‘Bharat’?

Somewhere, I had read that the reason for this was that the name of country was long recorded as ‘India’ in the United Nations Organisation and all other international organizations. Although the country was called ‘Bharat’ in the ancient texts including the Vedas, this name had not been legally recorded anywhere either in India or in the outside world. Had we given the country the  name ‘Bharat’ in the Constitution, we would have legally become a new State since the region was partitioned and a new country, ‘Pakistan’ was carved out of it. ‘Bharat’ would have legally become a ‘new’ State like Pakistan. India was one of the original member-countries which had joined the U N O when it was formed in 1945. ‘Bharat’ would have, like Pakistan, become a new member of U N O.

However, when I searched for this in the Constituent Assembly Debates from internet, I could 
not locate any discussion about this legal aspect about the choice of the name of the country, 

Many people are under the impression that ‘India’ is the name given to us by the British rulers. This is not a fact. The name ‘Bharat’ appears in the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas as well as the epic Mahabharat. Our country was originally called 'Bharat' after Bharat, the brave son of Shakuntala and Dushyant. When the Persians came, they called it 'Sindhu Desh' after the river Sindhu. The word ‘India’ began to be used when the Greeks came here in the 3^rd Century B C. Many know that when Alexander asked Puru, the defeated King of Sindhu, how the latter would like to be treated, he replied that he expected to be treated like a King by another King. The Greeks called the Sindhu river as ‘Indus’. They came across this river when they entered the area and so, called the country as ‘India’. Since then, our country has been known as ‘India’ in the international community.  

When Columbus set out on the sea-route, he landed, in 1492, in what later came to be known as America (so named after Amerigo Vespuccii, who landed in The New World in 1501 and realized that it was a new country and not India.) That is why the native South Americans are still called ‘Red Indians’.

(By the way, as the river Sindhu became a part of Pakistan, one member of the Constituent Assembly suggested in a lighter vain that Pakistan should be named ‘Hindustan’! The word ‘Hindustan’ is linked to the river Sindhu and has nothing to do with Hindu religion.)

The Constituent Assembly formed several Committees to discuss and prepare Drafts of the different parts of the Constitution. Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel headed 2 important Committes, viz. ‘Union Powers Committee’ and ‘State Powers Committee’ respectively. Similarly, there were other Committees to deal with Fundamental Rights and other parts of the proposed Constitution. Reports of all these Committees were processed, compiled and collated by the Secretariat of the Constituent Assembly, headed by S. N. Mukherjee, who was the chief draftsman. He was assisted by an expert ‘Constitutional Advisor’, B. N. Rau, a retired  I C S Officer.  

The Constituent Assembly then appointed a ‘Committee to Scrutinise the Draft Constitution’, headed by Dr. B. R.Ambedkar. The other Members were Gobind Ballav Pant, K M Munshi, Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer,N Gopalaswamy Ayyangar and T T Krishnamachari.This Committee was and is popularly known as Drafting Committee. This Committee finalized the Draft Constitution which was presented to the Constituent Assembly for discussion and adoption with necessary changes. This Draft contained Article 1 (1) which stated, “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”.

 When Article 1 of the Draft Constitution was discussed in the Constituent Assembly, the debate was on whether the country should be named as ‘India’, or ‘Union of India’ or ‘United States of India’.  Piloting the Draft, Dr. Ambedkar said, “India has been known as ‘India’ throughout history and all these past years. As a member of U N O, the name of the country is India and all agreements are signed as such.”   

H V Kamath proposed that the Draft Article 1(1) should be amended as:

(i)                 Bharat, or in the English language, India, shall be a Union of States, or

(ii)               Hind, or in the English language, India, shall be a Union of States.

Personally, he preferred the first.

Kamalapati Tripathy felt that it would have been more proper to say, ‘Bharat, that is, India”.

H V Kamath’s proposal was negated by a vote of 51 to 38.

Apparently, the Constituent Assembly never considered ‘Bharat’ as the only name of the country. ( I shall be glad to be proved wrong.)

The Draft Constitution was prepared in English language and adopted as such by the Constituent Assembly.

After this Draft in English was adopted, a Hindi translation of the Constitution was prepared. This translation was approved by the Constituent Assembly as the official version. The 308 members signed the hand-written English and Hindi versions of the Constitution on the 24th January, 1950. When the original version was adopted on the 26th November, 1949, 284 members had signed it.

The original Constitution is hand-written with beautiful calligraphy, each page beautified and decorated by artists including Beohar Ram Manohar Sinha and Nandalal Bose (the famous painter) from Shantiniketan.

Years later, there was a controversy as it was said that after all, a translation was only a translation and could never be same thing as the original. Apparently, this legal conundrum is yet to be resolved. Hair- splitting?

Perhaps, had the Constitution been first prepared in Hindi and then translated into English, the sole name 'Bharat' would have been chosen or 'Bharat' would have been followed by the explanatory words 'that is India'.

But then, the framers of our Constitution, a large number of whom were lawyers, were familiar with British jurisprudence and the language used in the Courts at that time, was (and even now, is) English.   

Interestingly and incongruously, there was a reference to the British House of Commons in our Constitution as adopted by the Constituent Assembly. Article 105(3) originally read as:

 In other respects, the powers, privileges and immunities of each House of Parliament and of  its members and the Committees of each House shall be such as may from time to time be defined by Parliament by law, and, until so defined, shall be those of the members of House of Commons of United Kingdom.

The reference in the Constitution of a sovereign country to the practice (U. K. does not have a written Constitution.) in another country was odd. In 1978, when the Janata Government led by Morarjee Desai was in power, the last part was amended as:

  .. shall be those of that House and its members and committees immediately before the coming into force of section 15 of the Constitution (Forty Fourth Amendment) Act, 1978.

The original Article 194(3) dealing with the powers and privileges of members of State Legislatures was similarly amended in 1978.   

This is a queer situation and if one asks what these privileges were before the Amendment, it will lead one to the British House of Commons!

It may be pertinent to add here that these ‘powers and privileges’ of the legislators have not yet been defined either by our Parliament or any State Legislature. Parliamentary privileges continue to be in a nebulous area and have on occasions, been used to punish and harass citizens and journalists.

  

By the way, the Constitution was adopted the on 29^th November, 1949 and it came into force on the 26^th January, 1950. This date was chosen to commemorate the 26^th January, which was declared as the ‘Independence Day’ by the nationalist leaders led by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhiji and these leaders were confident of freeing India from foreign rule. However, they declared that if India would be given dominion status like Australia and Canada by the end of 1929, the demand for full freedom would be deferred.  A session of the Indian National Congress was being held at Lahore on the 31st December, 1929.Since no such assurance came, at the stroke of midnight on the 31st December, 1929, Indian National Congress declared 'independence'. It was decided that on the 26th January, 1930, people all over the country would take the Pledge of Freedom. That date was called 'Independence Day' and every year, till the 15th August,1948, the 26th January, was celebrated as such.

('Dominion status' means that the British monarch remains the official Head of State but complete freedom is given to the area. India was in this position till the 26th January, 1950, when our Constitution came into force, India became a Republic and Dr. Rajendra Prasad took over as the Interim President on the 26th January, 1950. He was elected as the full-fledged President after the Parliament and State Assemblies were formed following the First General Elections in 1952. From 1950 to 1952, the Constituent Assembly functioned as the Provisional Parliament. Australia and Canada continue to be British Dominions with the British Queen as their formal Head of State. Their Governors General - Australians and Canadians - are appointed by the British Queen. Lord Mountbatten was the last Vice-Roy and the first Governor General of India. He was Governor General of India from the 15th August, 1947 to the 21st June, 1948. C. Rajagopalachari (the first Indian G.G. and the last G.G. of India) was the Governor General of India from 21.06.1948 to 26.01.1950.)    

Isn’t it time to amend the Constitution to name the country as ‘Bharat’ only, at the latest, before we celebrate the centenary year of our independence in 2047?

Happy Republic Day!

Jai Hind, Jai Bharat!

TAIL PIECE:

Can we visualize a day when a ‘United States of India’, comprising the present India, Pakistan and Bangladesh will be formed? Even, Mynamar, (the erstwhile Burma) which was a part of India till 1936, can be invited to join it!  Isn't the region called 'the Indian sub-continent'?

The Destitute Plant

In my post, ‘You Can’t Order A Plant to Grow’, I have shared how I rescued a guava plant from certain death. It has since grown into a healthy plant. Here is another similar story.

The other day, while working in my garden I noticed that a dry coconut was lying on stone-slab at a relatively less visited spot. I thought that a mature coconut has dropped from one of the coconut plants, which is a common occurence. When I went to collect and bring it my house for consumption, I noticed that a rudimentary plant had sprouted from the top of the coconut. I was amazed!!! The mature coconut must have been lying on the stone for months during the rainy season, had absorbed water from rains and has sprouted.

Normally, for plantation a mature coconut is to placed (upright) for several months till the water inside is reduced substantially. Then it has to be planted in earth with half of the fruit over the earth. It has to be watered regularly. it takes a couple of months to sprout. After the sapling grows up to a substantial height, the sapling becomes ready for transplantation. In this case, it had sprouted on its own without any human intervention!

I was reminded of the situation where a human baby is found miraculously alive under the debris of a disaster caused by some natural calamity days after the happening.

As we act on finding such a baby, I immediately brought the fruit into my house. I put it in a bucket and poured sufficient water into it. Since the dry coconut started floating on the surface, I brought a large piece of rock and strategically placed it on the coconut so that remained submerged under the water so that water would seep into it and breathe life into the derelict plant. The coconut was dehydrated due to long exposure to the elements. My intention was to initially provide sufficient water to the growing plant. I kept the coconut submerged under for 36 hours, prepared a pit in my garden during this period and planted the sapling in it.

I am lucky that the sapling had not died for want of water. I have been watering it regularly. I am glad that it is responding to the rescue operation.

Luckily the coconut was lying upside up in the correct position which helped it to sprout. Had it fallen upside down, the water inside would have touched the tip inside and the coconut would have got rotten. When I told this to the wife, she said that it was perhaps God’s will that the coconut should sprout and grow into a tall tree.

A thought about destitute babies who die in infancy due to lack of nutrition and who are not lucky enough to be discovered and rescued by someone filled my mind.

I am keenly watching the plant daily in the morning, at noon and again in the afternoon.

Grow my baby, grow, thrive and flourish! 

Soon you will reach out to the sky, yet rooted to the ground. Isn't holding head high with feet firmly rooted to the ground  a mark of leadership?

  

When Everybody Blamed Nobody

This is the story of four people named 'Everybody', 'Somebody', 'Anybody' and 'Nobody'. 

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. 

Anybody could have done it. but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about it as it was Everybody's job. 

Everybody thought that Anybody could do it but Nobody realised that Everybody would not do it. 

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody, when actually Nobody accused Anybody!  

                                            - Graham Gibbs in 'Learning in Teams'
TAIL PIECE

Everybody's business is Nobody's business!!! 

Happy New Year

Wishing all a Very Very Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Let us celebrate the New Year with Vinaini!

Konark Festival

The Konark Festival was organized from the 1^st to the 5^th December this year. This annual dance festival, featuring major classical dance forms of India, is organized against the backdrop of the famous Konark temple, by the Department of Tourism, Govt. of Odisha. I longed to watch this Festival by being present at the venue but since Konark is 60 km away from Bhubaneswar and returning at night is not convenient, I suppressed my desire. However, to my good luck, it was announced that the programme would be telecast live by DD Bharati. I was overjoyed. So I was glued to the TV from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM on all 5 days.

The first item of the first evening was an Odissi dance presentation by Madhavi Mudgal and Group from New Delhi. She is an established danseuse and choreographer and set the tone for the 5-day event. The other item of the evening was Kuchipudi by Raja Radha Reddy and Group from the nation’s capital. I was eager and curious to watch the husband-wife duo dance together. The stage at Konark is quite large and no solo or duet performance is included. The presentation of the Group was very enjoyable. I have written about Raja and Radha Reddy in my post ‘Pati Pani Aur Woh’. Raja first married Radha and later, her sister Kaushalya also married him. Kaushalya is an accomplished dancer in her own right. That evening, Kaushalya was in the group playing the accompanying music.

Raja and Radha were married when he was 11 and she, 5. Later, so impressed Kaushalya was by the dance-skills of her sister’s husband that Kaushalya insisted on marrying him without delay. They came to an agreement to be a threesome. The two sisters each have a daughter by him, Yamini and Bhavna. The children, two half-sisters also have taken to dancing. In the following two videos, Raja, Radha and Kaushalya’s daughter talk about their life and dance.

The two items of the second evening were Mohiniattam by Bharati Shivaji and Group from New Delhi and Odissi dance by Meera Das and Group from Cuttack, the former capital of Odisha. The first item of the third evening was Odissi dance by a Group led by Kasturi Pattanaik who has set up a dance academy at New Delhi. The second item was Bharatanatyam by Mallika Sarabhai and her Group from Ahmedabad. Mallika is the daughter of the famous space scientist Vikram Sarabhai and the dance exponent Mrinalini Sarabhai.

The fourth evening started with the Assamese Satriya dance by Anita Sharma and her Group from Guwahati. I had never had the opportunity to watch a presentation of this dance form. Here is a sample of it.

The second item of that evening was Odissi dance by Surupa Sen and her Group from Bengaluru. The item was a fusion of Odissi dance with modern and contemporary dance forms. The fifth evening saw presentations of Kathak by Malabika Mitra and her Group from Kolkata. The last evening started with Kathak by Malabika Mitra and her Group from Kolkata.    

  

The 5^th and concluding day of the Festival saw a Kathak presentation by Malabika Mitra and Group from Kolkata and an Odissi dance presentation by students of Guru Kelu Charan Mohapatra Odissi Research Centre, Bhubaneswar and of Utkal University of Culture.

On each evening, there was a jugalbandi of performing and visual arts. As the world famous danseuses and danseurs were presenting dance numbers with intricate nuances, the artist Baladev  Maharatha of B K Art College, Bhubaneswar, was busy painting masterpieces reflecting the theme of the dance numbers being presented on the stage alongside. It was a feast for the eyes. By the time the dance programme of the evening came to a close, the painting also was completed.

While the precincts of the Konark temple were reverberating with the dance and music in the evenings, an International Sand Art Festival was going on 3 km away on the beach of river Chandrabhaga. Thirty sand artists from India were busy every day, creating sand sculptures on the golden sand.   

Here is a link to the Konark Dance Festival 2012.

There is another annual event called Konark Music and Dance Festival which takes place nearby. It is organized by Konark Natya Mandap founded by Guru Gangadhar Pradhan. It is available on YouTube.

The Hundredth Flower

This post is the hundredth flower in my garden.

My first post was published on the 16^th May, 2010. I was encouraged – nay, prodded – by one who was later called by a fellow blogger, the.orchestra.of.life, as his ‘Blog Mother’. After reading this, I had commented that she is my blog mother too, although biologically she is my daughter whom I call ‘Daughter !!’. I must confess that I was a little – indeed, very - shaky to traverse the arena as I was –and am still - only a marginally literate person as far as computers and internet are concerned.

I still silently laugh when I recall the day when the head of the Circle Office of my Bank called me and told me, “From tomorrow you will be the TOE of the Circle.” I was at a loss to understand what he was saying. Then it occurred to me that TOE meant ‘Technology Overseeing Executive’. The earlier TOE had been transferred, (His earlier designation was DM-IT, Divisional Manager – Information Technology, and teasingly he was called “Dam-It’) and I was to step into his shoes and oversee the Technology Management of the Circle, in other words, look after the computerization of the Branches and Offices of the Bank under our Circle. Much earlier, I had once headed a partially computerized Branch but there were so many trained youngsters in the Branch that technical matters hardly came to me. This first brush of mine with computers did not rub me much. But I had now no escape and so had to accept the Big Boss’s diktat. Even then, my personal handling of computers was confined to sending and receiving e-mail. To my relief, my official duty was to ‘manage’ technology and not handle it much.

I used to send long e-mails to the daughters and these were narratives of my experiences, of the places I visited and, some times, my views. After my retirement, during a visit to Daughter II, she suggested a way for filling my free time. “Why don’t you start blogging?, she suggested. To dilute my fear of computers, she retrieved one of my old e-mails to her, chiseled it and posted it as my first blog-post. Then she prodded me to edit and convert some of my e-mails to blog-posts. Since then, I have progressed a little bit in the area and so here I am, releasing my hundredth post!

While doing this, I am reminded of the fact that a few months ago, Sachin Tendulkar scored his Hundredth Century and the cricket-world went ga ga over it. He has scored Centuries in 51 Tests and 49 ODIs, making a total of a hundred. Of course a few odd critics said that you cannot add 51 potatoes and 49 oranges and call it a hundred! In their view, a person can be credited with a hundred Centuries only if it is in either 100 Tests or 100 One Day Internationals!!

The late Chinese leader, Mao Zedong once said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” This was to encourage emergence of a lot of ideas. In the course of a speech in February, 1957, he said, “Letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend, is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and sciences and a flourishing culture in our land.” The slogan was used during the late 1950’s when the Chinese intelligentsia was invited to criticize the political system and bring to the surface, its flaws. However, it is suspected that the initiative was a deliberate attempt to bring out the secret dissidents into open by encouraging them to show themselves as critical of the Government. Such suspicion arose out of the fact that many of those who put forward views which were unwelcome to Mao, were executed.

This slogan is commonly misquoted as, ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom.’

However, the misquotation improves the idea of letting a number of ideas emerge.

To celebrate my 100th post let me a get a thousand Chinese hands dance.

Time Management

Very often, we hear people saying, “ I want to do this but I don’t find time.”? It was Henry Ford who said, “The busy man has time for everything.” When a person says that he/she has no time what it really means that he/she is not able to manage his/her time. Time-management is life-management. One who manages her/his time can manage her/his life.

When a person really wants to do something she/he will definitely find the time to do it. The way lies in prioritizing the tasks on hand. The most important task should get priority no. 1. This way, one should prioritise the things one wants to do in order of their importance. The least important task should be the last item in this list.

Stephen Covey, author of First Things First, narrates the story of a speaker who demonstrates as he speaks to his audience about filling a bucket with rocks, gravel, sand and water. He first puts rocks into the bucket and asks, “Is the bucket full?” The audience says, “Yes.” Then he puts gravel into the rock-filled bucket and watching him, people realize that the bucket can take more. Then he puts first sand and then water into the bucket and declares that the bucket is full. The audience realizes that it truly is full only now! Stephen Covey explains that if one tries to fill the bucket in any other order, not as many rocks, or as much gravel or sand could have been accommodated.

In this story, our time is the bucket and the big rocks are the most important tasks; the next important things are the gravel, sand and water in that order. If we start with filling the bucket first with water, sand or gravel, we would miss the most important thing, the rocks. The lesson of the story is that we should first arrange tasks on hand in order of their importance and start doing the most important task first. (Here we need not waste our time over the thought that if one first fills the bucket with water, the bucket can still take rocks, gravel and sand and the excess water will flow out. 'Water' here can be treated in a different sense and we can ignore this normal nature of water.)

If we do not prioritise the tasks, we shall miss out the important things.

Another way of managing time is to arrange things to do in order of our control over them. The item over which we have no control, for example the rush-hour traffic, should be on the top and the item over which we have full control should be at the bottom. We should try managing the time of items over which we have full control and move up to the next upper item, so that we will have some elbow-room while attending to tasks in situations over which we have no or least control.

The 80-20 Rule can be applied to time-management also. Eighty percent of the things we do in a day have only 20 percent value for us. Twenty percent of the tasks on our hand have eighty percent value. Hence we should concentrate on these 20 percent of the tasks, which should be our top priority. These are like the rocks in Covey’s story. If we fill our time first with ‘water’ or ‘sand’ in the story, we shall have no time left for the ‘rocks’, which give us eighty percent value.

In the present day of information-explosion and our unceasing accessibility thanks to mobile phones and communication-revolution, the demands on our time have increased manifold. Hence choosing what we can and should ignore has become one of the most important tools of time-management.

So throughout the day, ask yourself: What can I do now, which would be the most useful and beneficial this moment?

SOME TIME-SAVERS:

1. When we go to some place where we know we may have to wait for some time, like going to the airport or railway station to receive someone or visiting our doctor or our hair-dresser, we can carry some light reading material like magazines which we plan to read, so that the waiting time can be gainfully utilized. The hair-dresser or the doctor may be keeping some reading materials to keep  the waiting customers occupied but these may not be of much use to you even if you read them for ‘time pass’ which will be really 'time-kill'.

      2. While traveling in a bus or car, which may not be suitable for reading, utilize the time for     

           thinking or planning.

       3.  Remember the Store Management Principle  PEEP - a Place for Everything and Everything in its Place. The second part is more important, everything in its  place.

So, keep back everything in its place after using it.   Arrange things in your kitchen, on your study table and in your office room properly and uncluttered, so that you don’t have to waste time searching for things. While working in my garden, I use different tools, big and small. Sometimes, due to laziness I would place the tool wherever I would be working and would forget to bring it while  leaving the spot. Because of this, sometimes I temporarily lose small tools and have to waste a lot of time searching for them. On one occasion, I found a lost small tool after about a year!!! It had got embedded under the earth and resurfaced when I dug the spot for some other work.

In the same way we have 'lost' some household items at the time of some of my several transfers when I was working with my Bank. We usually found these at the time of my next transfer!                        

4. In office, follow the principle that you don’t have to see the same paper twice. Dispose incoming letters the first time you see them.

5. Do not postpone doing things. Remember the saying, ‘Jo kaal karna hai, aaj karo; jo aaj karma hai, abhi karo’. (Do today what is to be done tomorrow; do now what is to be  done today.)
6. Do not postpone; just do it. 
7. Never put off till tomorrow, anything that you can dump for ever. 
8. Nothing gives you more free time than being punctual.    
 

TAIL PIECE:

Q. What is the meaning of the word ‘procrastinate’?.

A. I shall look into the dictionary tomorrow.

2. a.I am going to stop putting off things - starting from tomorrow 

     b.Boss to subordinate: "Procrastination isn't your worst problem. I like it when you put off  
         your mistakes till tomorrow." - Cartoon by Randy Glasbergen