A comment on Research

"According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drowning is the second-leading cause of accidental death among children; and black children and teenagers, from ages 5 to 19, are 2.3 times more likely to drown than whites in this age group. For children 10 to 14, the rate is five times higher."

The above statement has been extracted from an article i read in the New York Times dated June 19,2006 written by Lynn Zinser, the article explores the reasons behind the high drowning rates of African Americans in general and Afro American childeren in particular.  One of the reasons that the article states for this phenomenon is the myth that African Americans are inherently incapable of swimming, this myth arises from the fact that the African slaves when they were brought to America were deleberately not taught to swim or were kept away from it as the owners saw it as a tool to escape. Thus this produces  generations of nonswimmers in the community. The article goes on to explain the other reasons for the drowning rates and also the efforts of the government and the voluntary organizations to counter this trend.

The question pertinent to the Indian context is that if there are any trends similar these in our country. The unfortunate truth is that arts and social sciences receive such a stepchild like treatment, that such questions are never asked if not researched. The caste structure in India is a much more primitive and deeply entrenched part of our society, where segregation and discrimination are the dirty truths of daily life. Thus it warrants a much more dedicated and vociferous approach and academic research.

Commodity Fetishism and Human relations

Recently I was asked a question by a friend of mine about the rules that governed the phenomenon of attraction, this question was the follow up of a discussion on commodity fetishism, a concept discussed by Marx in Capital vol.1 where he theorises that in a capitalist society commodities playing such a pivotal role that they start encroaching upon every facet of the society. Niche spaces of human character like the relations people build with others and the emotions which lie behind them start showing signs of consumerism in them. Bonds of friendship, love, loyalty and trust start having commodities as their foundations instead plain emotions. This phenomenon occurs to such extent that after a point it will seem as though the commodities have started forging relations among them with the human facet as a background. It was in light of this theory that my friend had asked me the question, she was curious to know if there was actually an element of truth to this theory, that the relations that we build an the emotions that we express are actually only to mask the real relations that we had forged with the commodities that the other person possessed. The theory makes a lot of sense to me, but to claim a complete absence of emotions is false. Our society in my view is divided into innumerable fragments based on standard of living. Although in broader perspective class serves as an indicator of economic status, but the fragments I am talking of are intra class. There is constant overlapping of these fragments as they are very similar and belong to the same class but there are slight variations among them based on asset ownership and the quality of those assets.

It is almost always that various relationships are forged within these overlapping social spheres. And especially when we talk of attraction and getting romantically involved    with someone the social fragment which the two individuals belong to plays a prominent   role. This process takes place subconsciously and it is only after this process that individuals experience feelings like attraction, 'love', etc. I can cite numerous examples of this process, people of similar economic status go to similar social recreational spaces, educational spaces. Although we can find counter examples, but I doubt that there will be a lot. So again i find it impossible not to refer to our films, but this time I would disagree with them as the case in which the rich girl falls for the poor guy almost never happens in the real world.