Stages of the Family Life Cycle...

Stages of the Family Life Cycle

Stage One: Single young adults leave home

Here the emotional change is from the reliance on the family to acceptance of emotional and financial responsibility for ourselves. Second-order changes include differentiation of self in relation to family of origin. This means we neither blindly accept what our parents believe or want us to do, nor do we automatically respond negatively to their requests. Our beliefs and behaviors are now part of our own identity, though we will change and refine what we believe throughout our lives. Also, during this period we develop intimate peer relationships on a deeper level than we had previously and become finacially independent.

Stage Two: The new couple joins their families through marriage or living together

The major emotional transition during this phase is through commitment to the new system. Second-order change involves the formation of a marital system and realignment of relationships with extended families and friends that includes our spouses.

Stage Three: Families with young children

Emotionally we must now accept new members into the system. This isn't hard initially because babies come to us in sweet innocent packages that open our hearts. Unfortunately, in the middle of the night we may wonder what we've gotten ourselves into. Nevertheless, we adjust the marital system to make space for our children, juggling childrearing, financial and household tasks. Second-order change also ocurs with the realignment of relationships with extended family as it opens to include the parenting and grandparenting roles.

Stage Four: Families with adolescents

Emotional transitions are hard here for the whole family because we need to increase the flexibility of families boundaries to include children's independence and grandparents' frailities. As noted above, second-order change is required in order for the shifting of the parent-child relationship to permit adolescents to move in and out of the system. Now there is a new focus on midlife marital and career issues and the beginning shift toward joint caring for the older generation when both children and aging parents demand our attention, creating what is now called the sandwich generation.

Stage Five: Launching children and moving on

This is one of the transitions that can be most emotionally difficult for parents as they now need to accept a multitude of exits from and entries into the family system. If the choices of the children leaving the nest are compatible with the values and expectations of the parents, the transition can be relatively easy and enjoyable, especially if the parents successfully navigate their second-order changes, such as renegotiation of the marital system as a couple rather than as simply parents. Other developmental changes include development of adult-to-adult relationships between us and our grown children, inclusion of in-laws and grandchildren, and dealing with the disabilities and death of our own parents.  for what can happen when transitions in this stage become particularly bumpy.)

Stage Six: Families in later life

When Erikson discusses this stage, he focuses on how we as individuals either review our lives with acceptance and a sense of accomplishment or with bitterness and regret. A family systems approach, however, is interested in how the family as a unit responds and sees the key emotional principle as accepting the shifting of generational roles. Second-order changes require us to maintain our own interests and functioning as a couple in face of physiological decline. We shift our focus onto the middle generation (the children who are still in stage five) and support them as they launch their own children. In this process the younger generation needs to make room for the wisdom and experience of the elderly, supporting the older generation without overfunctioning for them. Other second-order change includes dealing with the loss of our spouse, siblings, and others peers and the preparation for our own death and the end of our generation.

Corruption, Lokpal and the IAS brotherhood... 20

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          There is an IAS officer in the state that I live in. In 2003, he disappeared without informing his bosses. For five years there was no trace of him, officially that is. Everybody knew that he was in the US. The government (read his colleagues in the IAS) was kind enough to persist with his ‘service’ and merely mark him "AWOL" (absent without leave). Then one day in 2008 he showed up. The government made motions of asking him why he was missing from service but he provided some answers that would put the mythological Shravan Kumar to shame (that his father in law who lived in a different city in India was unwell and he was tending to his medical needs all this while!). “Satisfied” with these answers, the government took back the officer. Of course, anywhere in the private sector he would have lost his job within a few weeks of his absconding. But this is not the end of the story. On December 31, 2011, that is, over the weekend, the officer retired on attaining the age of superannuation. To make his exit smooth, the government (read other IAS babus) on the last day of his service closed an inquiry pertaining to some alleged wrongdoing by him long ago. If the file had not been closed the gentleman would not have got his pension. A typical case of the government being one of IAS officers, by IAS officers and for IAS officers?

 

Read on. In the same state an IAS officer has been named in an FIR for a major case filed by the CBI as accused number 1. The case relates to loss of hundreds of crores to the exchequer. There are many other accused including “unknown some” in the FIR. But the CBI has gone ahead and arrested these unknown some and even as they are spending time behind bars, this IAS gentleman is very much in his office. Of course, I am not saying that the officer is guilty, but the fact is that he is accused number 1. Incidentally the gentleman is the principal secretary, department of home of the state government and nobody thought it fit to at least shift him to a less important post pending the FIR. What sort of signal does the public get when the accused No. 1 in a major case of corruption continues to function as the principal secretary, department of home? But as I said this is a case of a government of IAS officers, by IAS officers and for IAS officers. This is the biggest brotherhood in the country but yet the Lokpal Bill thrust by Anna Hazare and acquiesced in by the Union government concentrates more on bringing in the 55 lakh Group C and D employees under the ambit of the proposed ombudsman. This is only going to add to the burden of the Lokpal’s machinery and will result in an enormous burden on the exchequer, while the big fish will continue to flourish.

You want to hear more stories? There is an upcoming golf club in this city. A decade or so ago, golfers keen to pursue their game went and met the chief secretary asking him for land. The chief secretary said that it was fine but asked for a concession, senior government officers (read mostly IAS officers) must be allowed to become members of the club at nominal rates and they should also have a say in the management of the club (never forget even if they do not know the g of golf). So a decade later, while genuine golfers pay Rs 7.5 lakhs for a lifetime membership, the IAS brotherhood pays peanuts: Rs15,000 for the membership that brings along with it other club facilities for socializing, eating and drinking. More concessions are given to these superbabus: they were allowed to pass over the membership to not only their kin but also third parties for a nominal fee (opening up scope for black marketeering?). The story has not ended. Now that the club is growing bigger, the superbabus want to increase the number of memberships for them. At present, there are 200 babu members but more joining the ranks of babudom they are demanding 100 more.

I guess that the golfers can do nothing to resist this because the premises of the club is adjacent to a 500-year-old historical fort that is under the charge of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). The golf greens has now started encroaching on the premises of the fort. But the ASI is silent. Why? Possibly this is because both the ASI director general and his boss the secretary, department of culture, are IAS officers. The story doing the rounds is that the latter is a golfer but it is quite possible that the duo at Delhi are not even aware of these violations. The funniest thing is that the government of India (GOI) is now sending (or has recently sent) a proposal to Unesco so that the fort and its premises can be declared a heritage site. Perhaps for these superbabus, golf greens is an example of the type of heritage that must be protected in this country.

These are a few examples of wrongdoing perpetrated by the IAS brotherhood that I have seen in this city. There are many other examples too numerous to be recounted. I am sure there are equally potent one in other states. I am quite convinced by what I see around that a large number of IAS officers are rank corrupt, though an equally large number are honest to the core. The really corrupt ones have made tens of crores. And for the information of the ilk of Baba Ramdev, this money is not kept in Swiss Banks. It is deployed to buy land and to run benami businesses. Everybody knows the names of corrupt IAS officers but nothing can be done to them. Many of them move around as if they are paragons of virtue. Anna Hazare and his team instead of concentrating on that elusive Lokpal Bill that focuses on 55 lakh small employees should think about how to tackle the big fish. For this is required an understanding of what makes these big babus corrupt.

Many so-called intellectuals think that corruption in the IAS can be controlled by increase their salaries to a sufficiently high level. They point to the ICS officers of the British times who were honest. But they miss the main point. The ICS officers were honest because they had no elected government to report to. Today’s politician coming up all the way through the grind for a five year term wants to break even or make profits to try to get elected for a new term. So he does illegal things and forces the superbabus to toe his line. But the superbabus of IAS can resist: because theirs is an almost lifetime employment till the age of superannuation. Nobody can sack them or throw them out of employment. The maximum that can be done is to be transferred to positions that have no scope for work and therefore corruption. But so used they have become to good life that many of them have started collaborating with the netas. It is this corruption and wrongdoing of IAS babus that has to be curbed first. This is what Anna an his team and in fact all of us should concentrate on instead of trying to nab that traffic constable who takes Rs 50 to look the other way as you jump the signals.

Don't come back to Gulf, Iran warns US carrier; oil prices jump above $101...

TEHRAN: Iran's army chief on Tuesday warned an American aircraft carrier not to return to the Persian Gulf in Tehran's latest tough rhetoric over the strategic waterway, part of a feud with the United States over new sanctions that has sparked a jump in oil prices. Gen. Ataollah Salehi spoke as a 10-day Iranian naval exercise ended near the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf. Iranian officials have said the drill aimed to show that Iran could close the vital oil passage, as it has threatened to do if the United States enacts strong new sanctions over Iran's nuclear program.

The strait, leading into the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea, is the only possible route for tankers transporting crude from the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf to markets. A sixth of the world's oil exports passes through it every day.

Oil prices rose to over $101 a barrel on Tuesday amid concerns that rising tensions between Western powers and Iran could lead to crude supply disruptions. By early afternoon in Europe, benchmark crude for February delivery was up $2.67 to $101.50 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The jump came a day after Iran test-fired a surface-to-surface cruise missile as part of the maneuvers, prompting Iran's navy chief to boast that the strait is "completely under our control."

Salehi's warning for the US aircraft carrier not to come back seemed aimed at further depicting the strait and the Gulf as under Iran's domination, though there was little way to enforce his warning without military action. The strait is divided between Iran and Oman's territorial waters, and international law requires them to allow free passage through it.

"We recommend to the American warship that passed through the Strait of Hormuz and went to Gulf of Oman not to return to the Persian Gulf," Salehi was quoted as saying by the state news agency IRNA.

He said Iran's enemies have understood the message of the naval exercises, saying, "We have no plan to begin any irrational act but we are ready against any threat."

The aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis and another vessel exited the Gulf through the Hormuz Strait a week ago, after a visit to Dubai's Jebel Ali port, according to the US Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet. The Fleet did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Salehi's warning.

Iran's sabre-rattling over the strait and the Gulf has come in response to US preparations to impose tough new sanctions that would ban dealings with Iran's Central Bank. That would deeply hurt Iran's oil exports since most countries and companies use the bank to conduct purchases of Iranian crude. Iran relies on oil revenues for around 80 per cent of its budget, meaning a cut-off would be devastating to its already weakening economy.

President Barack Obama has signed the sanctions into law but has not yet enacted them. The sanctions would be the strongest yet by the US, aimed at forcing Tehran to back of its nuclear program, which many in the West say is intended to produce a nuclear weapon. Iran denies the claim, saying its program is peaceful.

French foreign minister Alain Juppe said on Tuesday that is country wants Europe to agree on similar sanctions against Iran by Jan 30 to show its determination to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. He told the French television station i>TELE that there is "no doubt" that Iran is continuing with plans to build a bomb.

Iran's naval maneuvers took place over a 1,250-mile (2,000-kilometer) stretch of water beyond the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, as well as parts of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, according to Iranian officials.

A leading Iranian lawmaker said on Sunday the maneuvers served as practice for closing the strait if the West enacts sanctions blocking Iranian oil sales. Top Iranian officials made the same threat last week.

The Hit Man’s Dilemma (lite)

The Hit Man’s Dilemma (lite)

“Don’t take this personal, it’s just business”

My essay is about the tension between the impersonal conditions of social life and the persons who inevitably carry it out. This relationship is poorly understood, perhaps never more than now, when the difference between individual citizens and business corporations operating on a scale larger than some countries has become obscured. My starting point is a legendary remark made in a movie by a professional killer to his victim, “Don’t take this personal, it’s just business.” But, according to my favorite American dictionary, a “person” is “a living human being” and what could be more personal than taking his life? Perhaps the hit man is referring to his own attitude, not to the effect. Killing people is a matter of routine for him, a “business”. Why should business be impersonal and, if it is, how can that be reconciled with the person who practices it?

Ideas are impersonal, human life is not. So, at one level, the issue is the relative priority to be accorded to life and ideas. Because the encounter is live and therefore already personal, the hit man has to warn his victim (and perhaps himself) not to take it so. It would seem that the personal and the impersonal are hard to separate in practice. Our language and culture contain the ongoing history of this attempt to separate social life into two distinct spheres. This is the core of capitalism’s moral economy; and gangster movies offer a vicarious opportunity to relive its contradictions.

At the heart of our public culture lies an impenetrable confusion of people, things and ideas. We no longer know how to act or in what context of mutual interdependence. The feminists were right to insist that the personal is political. The political too is often necessarily personal. But, if we relied on persons alone to make society, we would be back to feudalism or its modern equivalent, criminal mafias. There must be impersonal institutions that, at least in principle, work for everyone, regardless of who they are or who they know. We have never been more conscious of ourselves as unique personalities; yet the impersonal engines of society lie far beyond our grasp. What place is there for the humanity of individual persons in the dehumanized social frameworks we live by? This is the hit man’s dilemma and it is ours too.

The politics, pragmatics and promise of money

The politics, pragmatics and promise of money

Edited extracts from a recorded conversation between Keith Hart and Bill Maurer
Marina Del Rey.

KH: There are quite profound similarities and differences between us. My version of the dialectic is that, if we want the quite significant differences to remain under control, we have to establish a framework of sameness to start with, because I really think that we’re very different in style. So I would like to start by trying to establish how some of the questions that we’re posing are the same or similar, how we came to invest so much in the study of money as anthropologists.
BM: There is one similarity that struck me in reading all your work in advance of this meeting. Both of us refuse, as you put it, to demonize money. There’s no reason why it can’t be remade anew by us for some other ends. I’ve been very frustrated by the anthropological literature. It often presents a familiar story: capitalism comes to town and then all of a sudden all that is solid melts into air; things fall apart. It’s the end of the world. And we know what happens: the story is written as if we already know the end of it: dispossession, exploitation, wealth will flow up and so on. On the one hand, yes, that’s what happens. But on the other hand, if we say that it is what always happens when there is the kind of monetization or commoditization associated with “capitalism,” then we’re never going to see the unintended effects of it when they are right in front of our noses.

Neither man nor woman - HIJRA

I just finished reading a fascinating book called Neither Man Nor Woman: the Hijras of India by Serena Nanda (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing 1990, ISBN 0-534-12204-3). 

For those of you who may not have heard of them, the hijras are a group of people in India who constitute a third gender category, considered by themselves and by others to be neither men nor women. The term "hijra" is often translated as "eunuch" and the archetypal hijra is raised as a man and undergoes ritual removal of the genitals to become a hijra. However, as Nanda shows, many hijras come from other sexually ambiguous backgrounds: they may be born intersexed, be born male or female and fail to develop fully at puberty, or be males who choose to live as hijras without ever undergoing the castration procedure. The cultural category "hijra" appears to be a magnet for a variety of sexual and gender conditions: ambiguous sexual anatomy, impotence, infertility, homosexuality, and others which may not have an analogue in Western cultures. 

The traditional role of hijras in Indian society is to sing and dance at weddings and ceremonies surrounding the birth of a boy. They dress as women and their performances include comic parodies of the manners and body language of women. They are believed to have special powers to ward off or expose impotence and infertility. Hijras constitute a sect within Hinduism, worshipping Bahuchara, an aspect of the Hindu mother goddess, but many hijras come from Muslim backgrounds and/or consider themselves Muslims. Their status in Hindu society is ambivalent: although they are revered for their special powers, they are also feared, in part because they may use extortion-like methods the exercise their right to perform and earn their fees. The typical threat is to cause a scandal at a public function by exposing their altered genitals. They have the reputation of recruiting new hijras by kidnapping and emasculating boys, although Nanda found no evidence that this is true. 

Not all hijras also earn their living as performers. Other common hijra occupations include begging and prostitution. The sexuality of hijras is another area of seeming paradox: hijras claim the religious status of sannyasis or ascetics, having taken the extreme step of removing their genitalia. Nevertheless many hijras work as prostitutes, many have non-hijra men as husbands, and many seem to be attracted to hijra life after becoming homosexually active in adolescence. 

Nanda's book is a very readable anthropological monograph. After background chapters on the culture, religion and biological status of hijras, she treats us to four separate portraits of individual hijras. Then she sums up with an intercultural comparison of hijras with other alternative gender roles including the berdache of native North America and the transsexuals of modern Western societies. One intriguing point is that although many societies accept the ambiguity of gender by institutionalizing a third gender role, Western society seems quite fixated on the concept that every human being is either male or female. Even homosexuals and transsexuals in Western society are considered to be firmly of one gender or the other, transsexuals in particular being required to assert their complete identification with their non-birth gender before being considered for surgery. The idea that individuals could have mixed or alternative gender identities, although common in many cultures, is quite foreign to the West. 

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in sexuality, anthropology or India.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

WITH THE BEGINNING OF THIS YEAR…
MAY YOU AND I BRING THE CHANGE THAT WE WANT…
WITH LOT OF AWARENESS AND MAGNIFICENT KNOWLEDGE…
WE WILL MAKE THE WORLD THE BETTER PLACE…
ONCE AGAIN A HAPPY NEW YEAR…. AMD WISHES FOR THE YEAR AHEAD…