Suchergebnisse

Velcheru Narayana Rao, Text and Tradition in South India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016, 490 pp; and David Shulman, Tamil: A Biography, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016, 416 pp.

Christophe Jaffrelot and Narender Kumar (Eds), Dr. Ambedkar and Democracy: An Anthology. Oxford University Press, 2018, 263 pp., £34.99. ISBN: 978-0199483167, ISBN-10: 0199483167.

This article is an attempt to examine the salient features of a lower caste revolt began in Kerala in the nineteenth century. It was led by Narayana Guru (1854–1928), a spiritual leader with a distinctive urge to break free from the rules of pollution demarcated by Brahmins in the practice of knowledge. I argue that in the wake of this movement, a strong assertion of community was represented by the Ezhava, a caste which suffered pollution in Hinduism. The defining characteristic of this community today is that of a class—the OBC. In the existing lacunae of non-governmental categories to define the nature of this community, and the philosophy of Advaita remaining an impediment rather than an empowerment to expand the central notions of his thought, I argue that the transition from caste to community represented by Narayana Guru can no longer be situated in the discourse either of Sanskritization or of subalternity, but of the use of technologies of deification.

The present paper attempts to study the revitalisation of Ayurveda in Colonial Tamil region and the contributions of Pandit Srinivasa Narayana Iyengar in the movement. Western medicine was introduced initially for benefit of Europeans in British India and later extended to the Indian population was a 'tool' of empire. Gradually, Colonial government and practitioners of Western medicine stigmatised Ayurveda as irrational, dangerous and superstitious medicine and strived to marginalise it in the government policies and public sphere which paved the way to get cultural domination over colonised. As a result, physicians of Ayurveda attempted to revitalise their medicines through professionalization, systematisation and standardisation. Besides, they instituted printing presses and published numerable tracts, pamphlets, journals and books to counter the hegemony of Western medicine. In this contest, the meanings and boundary of Ayurveda were reconfigured and medical practices (written in regional languages) which did not fit into newly constructed medical identity – Ayurveda, were marginalized from the boundary of Ayurveda though they were part and parcel of the system until the late nineteenth century. As a response, an alternative medical identity – Tamil Siddha Medicine – was constructed by Tamil physicians in Colonial Tamil region. In this milieu, the present study traces the valuable contributions of Pandit Srinivasa Narayana Iyengar in promoting Ayurveda and solving the disputes among Sanskrit Ayurveda and Tamil Siddha practitioners in colonial Tamil region.

Internationalizing firms often find developing host-country resources challenging as they simultaneously attempt to replicate the resources that worked well in the home country and adapt them to fit the context of the host country. On the basis of a longitudinal study of the expansion of India-domiciled Narayana Health (NH), a tertiary healthcare provider, to the contextually distinct Cayman Islands, we propose a recombination-based internationalization model that allows us to offer a new conception of this replication–adaptation tradeoff. Recombination entails creating anew in the host country by drawing from, adapting, and integrating diverse resources developed earlier in heterogeneous settings in the home country. We theoretically explore the mechanisms underlying such recombination processes in organizational settings.

Narayana Hrudayalaya (NH) in Bangalore, India is one of the largest hospitals in the world. Its status as one of the largest cardiac surgery centers is becoming mythical. The rich come for better cardiac care, and the poor come for the world's merciful care. NH was founded in May 2001 and is the pet project of the famous cardiac surgeon team led by Dr. Devi Shetty under the umbrella of the Asia Heart Foundation. NH grew quickly and was soon able to receive patients from around the world. Internal and external environmental factors, including political, economic, sociocultural and technological aspects, have affected the case of NH. Several lessons can be learned from the success of Dr. Shetty's project. Most impressively, we see how one person's dream can change the world. We prefer to think of Dr. Shetty's achievements as a smile that has become an attitude, not the laughter that would vanish soon afterward. One of our primary recommendations is to start an in-situ school of management to teach the scientific basis of management and leadership. The development of candid and knowledgeable leaders with clear visions and ground-level grasps of reality is critical for our rapidly evolving healthcare system and enabling resources and efforts to be directed the right way.

Covid-19 exposed the fragility and inadequacies in India's health care system, especially in its public health services. The sudden lockdown imposed during the first wave of the virus severely impacted the livelihoods of millions of migrant workers. Then, in spite of warnings about an impending second wave of infection, the government's failure to prepare the health infrastructure, together with delays in vaccine distribution, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Unlike the first wave of infection, the second wave impacted rural India very badly. Taking into consideration the existing social hierarchies and inequalities, it was marginalised groups of the population who bore the brunt of the pandemic. This article analyses the failures of the Indian government in handling the Covid-19 crisis, especially during the second wave, and concludes by suggesting ways in which the state needs to intervene to avert disasters of this kind in the future. It argues for the adoption of a 'rights-based' approach to public health on the grounds that successive governments have not been properly held to account for their long-term failures to address the issue. (Asian Aff/GIGA)

Optimal tax design attempts to resolve a well-known trade-off: namely, that high taxes are bad insofar as they discourage people from working, but good to the degree that, by redistributing wealth, they help insure people against productivity shocks. Until recently, however, economic research on this question either ignored people's uncertainty about their future productivities or imposed strong and unrealistic functional form restrictions on taxes. In response to these problems, the new dynamic public finance was developed to study the design of optimal taxes given only minimal restrictions on the set of possible tax instruments, and on the nature of shocks affecting people in the economy. In this book, Narayana Kocherlakota surveys and discusses this exciting new approach to public finance. An important book for advanced PhD courses in public finance and macroeconomics, The New Dynamic Public Finance provides a formal connection between the problem of dynamic optimal taxation and dynamic principal-agent contracting theory. This connection means that the properties of solutions to principal-agent problems can be used to determine the properties of optimal tax systems. The book shows that such optimal tax systems necessarily involve asset income taxes, which may depend in sophisticated ways on current and past labor incomes. It also addresses the implications of this new approach for qualitative properties of optimal monetary policy, optimal government debt policy, and optimal bequest taxes. In addition, the book describes computational methods for approximate calculation of optimal taxes, and discusses possible paths for future research.

Among the various factors that contributed for the transformation of Kerala into a modern democratic society the role played by Sree Narayana movement was most significant. Realising that the political power was the master key to social progress, the leaders of the movement came into tacit understanding with non Hindus, made permutations and combinations with them to maintain and strengthen their position in the society. Through their protests, incessant conflicts and assertions, they succeeded in transforming the pyramidal social structure of Kerala into pillar structure. From the position of caste victims they could elevate themselves to the makers of their own destinies. They also succeeded in politicising the social relations. The philosophies and pragmatic approaches propounded by Narayana Guru for the material and spiritual advancement of the backward caste people of Kerala was found successful that contributed for the social transformation from structural relations to human relations and from caste hierarchical structure to inter-personal relations