The Middle Ground

Some time back I attended a talk on Microfinance by Kalpana Karunakaran*. There were around 20 other fellow classmates, all post-graduate students, gathered in the little classroom at six in the evening. Curiosity about Micro finance brought most of us there, after a long day of difficult sessions. Kalpana, an excellent facilitator – we were soon to discover, started the discussion by throwing an open question: What do we mean by Micro finance? The answers that came up included almost all aspects of micro credit –people in villages belonging to the low income group have no access to any form of credit, so they form small groups and borrow small amounts of money. But what did the poor need the money for and why banks wouldn’t help them, how SHGs came to their rescue, how SHGs are different from MFIs - were questions which set our grey cells in Brownian motion. What resulted from the interesting discussion were simple answers to the above questions. The following points summarize my lea...

Diwali has always been symbolic of the triumph of the good over evil. In many parts of India, it also signifies the replacement of the old with new, which is why, in many homes, walls are white-washed and dusty corners are cleaned, new utensils and jewellery are bought and old clothes are doled out to the poor. It is this latter idea that is my way of identifying with the festival of lights. However, as Diwali approaches this time, I think about a different kind of cleansing - that of one's inner self. If you are thinking that the rest of this blog would be a patronizing passage on morality and virtuousness or on the infinite powers of yoga and meditation(both are infinitely powerful, though), then you are mistaken. On the contrary, I shall write about some techniques I discovered, to deal with pain. Although these techniques can be used by anyone, they might be more applicable to women, the reason being that women incorporate feelings into their actions and the...