Heavenly Havens

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A few days back I posted excerpts from Amitav Ghosh's talk to Kaushik Mitter in DC.

I was aghast at the crippling cost of US College Education which an average student has to keep bearing for the next 20 to 30 years of their working life:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2011/06/ours-theirs.html

I thought Britain was different...apparently it was...till last year.

I was amazed to read the gripping article 'Hard Times in Britain' by Farrukh Dhondy in the center-spread of DC last Saturday and am tempted to quote from it:

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....The present coalition government has passed an act which will require, for example, my youngest daughter Tir, who applies later this year for a university place, which she takes up in 2012, to borrow from the government....[anything up to 70,000 pounds sterling (half a crore rupees) including fees and living expenses]...her brother and sisters who all went to very good universities (Leeds, Sussex and Cambridge) didn't have to borrow and don't have to spend years of their earning lives paying back.

This new fee hike, against which students have vigorously protested, will certainly mean that fewer pupils from the working classes will consider a university education. It may be that the Tories whose philosophy stresses the virtues of pluck, competition, entrepreneurship, survival of the fittest, dog-gently-eat-dog and proposes that reduced welfare benefits support the hindmost, don't have the same ideas of meritocracy as the Oxford dictionary.

The electoral parliamentary system requires that all politicians have to pose as as generators, facilitators and reformers of the mechanisms of social mobility. They all have to tell the population that Arbeit macht Rich, but in a world in which bankers, who gamble with other people's money and charge them back charges for doing it take millions of pounds in bonuses each year while workers face inflation and increases in tax on normal purchases and fuel, it's not very convincing...

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Strong words...

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The other day I was talking about how the Scandinavians feel proud to pay their taxes.

Here is why:

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http://www.linkedin.com/answers/finance-accounting/economics/FIN_ECO/722180-1952514

Bottom line about Scandinavian nations:

-Get free healthcare

-Get free education from kindergarten through university (free BSc, MSc and even PhD degrees)

-Give 1 year of maternity leave to women and 3 months paternity leave to men

-Get generous unemployment benefits (money and even a place to live and food if necessary), but people don’t take advantage of those benefits.

-Have an almost homogeneous standard of living, everybody has good living conditions. There are no ghettos or bad parts of the city

-They all have a similar after tax income, so there is not much envy or frustration.

-They have a high level of transparency and honesty when getting job opportunities. You don’t get a job because of your network of contacts or friends; instead you get the job because you are the one with the best qualifications.

-There is a very low level of corruption in the government, public and private sectors

-On a per capita basis, violence levels and theft incidents are much lower

-On a per capita basis, they have a highly educated workforce (university level)

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gpspeak

Would I be rather born there next time around?

No, sorry sir, I am a child of sunshine, warmth and riotous color round the year...and Chinthal Bastis...

Ramakrishna Parmahamsa Garu said it sweetly:

"Take a dung beetle and place it in a flower basket...it will die instantly of suffocation...chatpat morey jaabe"

I love the pell-mell of India.

Heaven is most boring...ask Mark Twain or Bernard Shaw.

http://twainquotes.com/Heaven.html

For me it is Repeat Order...again and again...


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