A talisman for 2012

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore

The real Tarhir Square

Read Mariz Tadros' account of the protests against the army's brutal treatment of women in recent days. Excerpts:

While women took part fully in the uprisings that led to the ousting of Mubarak, this demonstration was different: they were more than participants, they were the leaders. They spoke, and everyone listened. They shouted and everyone- men and women responded back . And it was not just the urban women who were leading, it was the village women in their black gallabiyyas who were raising their voices and everyone answering back even louder. As people marched around and around in Tahrir Square carrying banners against the military, carrying a large picture of the woman who was stripped and dragged from her hair across the square by a soldier, while another soldier was shown about to stomp her bare stomach with his shoe-the determination not to let this rest was strong.

Anyone who equates Jantar Mantar with Tahrir Square has absolutely no idea what they are talking about...

Weekday bloggers



From my Google Reader - The blue bars stand for the 'Items Posted' and the orange bars for 'Items Read'

Bloggers on my reading list like their weekends off...and so do I

Unsustainable development can be hard to tell

A recent Fight Entropy post had me thinking - can you really tell unsustainable development when you see it? For that matter, can you even tell sustainable development when you see it? Questions that come to mind immediately - 'where' are you standing when you see it; 'who' are you, 'what' colour are your lenses and 'when' did you see it?

This is no excuse for unsustainable development - but a plea that knowing what it is can be pretty damn hard sometimes. Yes, one needs to spot early signs that things are not quite right - with our battery of M&E tools and evaluation techniques, we are probably in a better place than we ever were...

But it also comes down to this - at the micro-level, 'development' setting typically has 'us' - a bunch of (relatively) better-off folks - using aid and making value judgements for 'them', whose power to choose is limited. And labels such as sustainable or unsustainable are what we decide to attach on to each other's projects and programmes (amongst ourselves) and sometimes on to 'their' traditional practices. We usually have a choice. Do they? 

Recycling a gem: logframe and Gandhi

Try logframe-ing a revolution!
H/T - Duncan Green

Pushing an Indian agenda for aid

India is no longer dependent on aid, and this independence may allow India to get more out of the aid it receives. It has only to ask

Full post here, on livemint