On the whole an undistinguished family, the Curzons of Keddleston Hall, an imposing eighteenth-century mansion in Derbyshire, traced their aristocratic lineage back to the Norman Conquest. George Curzon was however considered exceptional by his prep school headmaster and he lived up to his early promise at Eton and Balliol (though unaccountably he left Oxford without a first class degree). Already tipped for high office he made the tour of Greece and the Holy Land in 1883, then four years later, between 1887 and 1894, started a series of journeys, one round the world, and all taking in the East. Curzon had been from his schooldays an ardent imperialist and these travels had a political purpose. In 1891 he was briefly under-secretary at the India Office in Salisbury's short-lived government. At the same period the aspiring politician was busy writing letters to the Times about Britain's foreign policy in the East. There followed three books each mixing travel narration with observations on the political and strategic issues raised by the different areas through which the author had travelled. Both Russia in Central Asia (1889) and Persia and the Persian Question (1892) focus on the ‘Great Game’, or Britain and Russia's clash of interests in the East with the defence of India the core concern. Problems of the Far East (1894) surveyed Britain's possessions in the Far East and the growing threat of Japan.

Everyone remembers that dizzying passage in King Lear when Edgar recounts to his father the effects of leaning over a non-existent cliff. What we recall is the stupendous clarity of the visualization, heralded by that line which ‘haunted’ Keats, ‘Hark, do you hear the sea?’ Edgar speaks of the fear of falling but, as commentators since Johnson have noticed, ‘diffuses his attention to distinct objects’:

John Bayley picks up Johnson's comment, ‘the crows impede your fall’, and argues that what the imagination is doing here is not plummeting to a depth but soaring into a different universe in its exhilarating observation of particulars, so characteristic of the liberating force of Shakespeare's poetry: crows, choughs, samphire-gatherer, the mice-like fishers and ‘diminished’ bark are points marking a free flight rather than free fall. Should the lines have been ‘all precipice, – all vacuum’ as Johnson believed? His own critical deprecation was full of zestful substantives:

Introduction: The Tithonus Fallacy

In his The Living End, Guy Brown (2008) effectively calls to mind a Greek myth – the story of Tithonus – to frame the debate about whether we can live longer lives and cure the geriatric diseases and disabilities that currently affect later life. In Greek mythology, Tithonus, a mortal, falls in love with Eos, the goddess of dawn. Realizing that Tithonus must die eventually, she asks Zeus to grant her lover immortality. Zeus, who is a jealous god, grants Eos's wish, but literally so. While Tithonus enjoys immortality, he does not also enjoy eternal youth. As Tithonus becomes old and decrepit, he also becomes demented and a burden. Driven to despair by his senile babbling, Eos turns her decaying lover into a cicada whose endless chirruping provides a parody of the babbling of the ageing Tithonus. The claim of contemporary immortalism is that medical science can ultimately grant us both immortality and eternal youth. By contrast, critics of medical science are allegedly committing the Tithonus fallacy of assuming that living forever is not desirable since senility will inevitably accompany longevity. Immortalists argue that people with the benefits of prolongevity can also be youthful, live fulfilling and happy lives and enjoy the benefits of continuous employment and social participation. In the short term, these claims look utopian since, in old age, people, as a matter of fact, do accumulate disease and disability.

‘Life has become better,’ the Stalinist slogan of 1935 ran, ‘has become gayer.’ But is that really what happiness is about? All that jollity, all those ‘carnivals’ in Moscow's Gorky Park, and so forth, of those times did, in fact, make Soviet life ‘gayer’, more fun, for their brief duration; but happiness in general arguably refers to a state of longer duration, as when we say, ‘He or she has a happy marriage,’ or ‘X is happy in their job,’ etc. I would put happiness a register or two above contentment, but below bliss. Happiness is not about the ecstatic, but more about a fairly even, stable and positive state of being; perhaps about a sense of self-fulfillment.

As it happens, there has been a spate of books and articles on happiness lately, including a history of happiness. The consensus: sociologists have established that although people are living better now versus a few decades ago, they are less happy. Commentators are even proposing a new version of the guns-versus-butter dilemma; governments allegedly now have to choose between greater material well-being for their citizens and greater happiness. As we look at Stalinist Russia, we can see this alternative less as a dilemma than in terms of competing aims. On the one hand, the state sought to raise the standard of living, to increase the supply of creature comforts and consumer goods. But on the other hand, it was arguably more concerned with what it saw as self-fulfillment for its citizenry.

In April of 1930, the women's magazine Zhenskii zhurnal (Women's Journal) offered its resourceful reader instructions on how to make a ‘panneau’, or wall decoration. (Fig. 6.1) This sumptuous object was to be achieved by appliqué design on plain fabric, ‘basic cotton, hessian or canvas’. The reader of Zhenskii zhurnal—like that of other women's magazines of the time such as Rabotnitsa (Working Woman) and Iskusstvo odevat'sia (The Art of Dressing)—was, it is to be presumed, skilled in appliqué, for articles introducing and developing the technique and applying it to the production of all manner of useful household objects were common in editions of such magazines from the mid-1920s on.

Appliqué was just one aspect of the category known as rukodelie (literally, a thing made with one's hands), which appeared increasingly prominently in the female press. From 1926 until the early 1930s, each issue of Zhenskii zhurnal contained a one-page section with the heading ‘Rukodelie’ and instructions on how to make objects for the home. In 1930, the heading was changed to the more portentous ‘Remeslo i prikladnoe iskusstvo’ (Craft and Applied Arts), but the content remained essentially unchanged.

INSTITUTIONAL EMBEDDEDNESS AND ECONOMIC DIVERSIFICATION IN RURAL INDIA

The growth of the Indian economy is likely to be constrained in the next future by the low level of socio-economic development experienced by rural areas. While the rest of the country is experiencing an increasing rate of growth, the Indian countryside is lagging behind, with slower growth rate, widespread poverty and increasing inequality. The contrast between urban/metropolitan India and rural India is more and more evident, both for the large dimension of the population that is still living and working in rural areas and for the increasing gaps between urban and rural living and working standards.

There is evidence (Harriss-White, 2003) that the pattern of growth in rural areas exerts highly negative externalities on society and environment. This is found both in agriculture – in which social and economic backwardness and deprivation coexist with rapid capitalist change and pollution – and in rural non-farm activities – in which competitiveness is pursued through low labour and resource costs. Because of this pattern of growth, the Indian rural economy is moving along the ‘low road of destructive competition’ (Pyke and Sengenberger, 1992) that leads to the depletion of the available resources and makes minimum standards of social protection for the population hardly possible in the medium to long run.

To assess the pattern of growth in the Indian countryside and its impact on living standards it is necessary to focus on three main traits that distinguish the economy and society in contemporary rural India.

It is believed that Job Charnock stepped out gingerly from his merchant boat onto the banks of the river Ganga near the village Kalikata on 24 August 1690. This brought to the world the news of a tiny Bengal village, Kalikata. But was Kalikata really unknown till then? Though the history of the city is generally dated from Charnock's entry, this story of the origin was challenged by the Sabarna Roy Chaudhury family. Signed on 10 November 1698, at Barisha Atchala, the deed of lease of the three villages of Bengal – Sutanuti, Kalikata and Govindapur, was drawn up between Sabarna Ray Chaudhury's family and Job Charnock's son-in-law Charles Eyere. Till recently, this event had been viewed as the moment at which Calcutta entered the history of Bengal. But when, on 16 May 2003, in a case that became famous as the Calcutta Birthday Case, the High Court of Calcutta ruled that neither could ‘Charnock be regarded as the founder of Calcutta, nor (could) the claim that Calcutta was born on 24 August, 1690’ be substantiated historically, that judgement was almost entirely based on the finding that the history of Calcutta stretched way into the centuries past before Charnock had even set foot on Indian soil. The city of Kalikata or Calcutta has emerged through a very long history that spans over five or six centuries. The poet Bipradas Piplai's Manasa Vijaya, written in 1495, alludes to a place called Kalikatah.

The present paper is an attempt to discuss the paradox that is critical to making sense of ‘democratic India’ or democracy in India and lies at the heart of the radical democratic enterprise in the country. Simply stated, the paradox of Indian democracy lies is the continued coexistence of democracy and poverty in India since independence. Or to state it more carefully, the paradox involves the continued existence of electoral democracy with mass participation, along with mass poverty. This chapter attempts to develop an explanatory framework that gives us a sense of the mechanism that makes this paradox possible and allows us to understand the changes over time and differences across the various states in the relationship of democracy with poverty.

The paper includes two parts. In the first part, it specifies the meaning of the two crucial terms – democracy and poverty, and defends the claim that their coexistence is indeed a paradox, that there is something to be surprised about their being together. It sketches a simple model of why we should expect electoral democracy with mass participation to expend its principal energy and resources in reducing mass poverty. It then goes on to suggest that in the case of India, the paradox is deeper than what is thought of, for some of the most common reasons for which democracies do not attend to poverty do not apply in the case of India.

Introduction

Policies of economic growth led by exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) have been the main driving forces behind Thailand' economic progress. Trade and FDI performance has increased considerably since the second half of the 1980s, even accounting for the sluggish period around the 1997/98 financial crisis. While economic ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the People' Republic of China (PRC); Hong Kong, China; Japan; the Republic of Korea; and Taipei,China have considerably strengthened, links with South Asia remain weak. There is much room for improvement, therefore, especially given Thailand' geographical position and potential to serve as a bridge between East and South Asia. Increasing FDIs from both the PRC and India could likewise be first steps toward deepening economic relationships between the two Asian subregions.

Thailand is actively taking part in a number of regional trade agreements, at both the multilateral and bilateral levels. In addition to the ASEAN Free Trade Area, Thailand has bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) with Australia, India, and New Zealand, as well as a regional trading agreement under the China-ASEAN FTA. Thailand has also been unilaterally reducing its tariff barriers, as evidenced by a fall in average applied tariff rates. The Government also implements trade and investment promotion programs that include (i) the provision of financial facilities and bilateral financial arrangements; (ii) the establishment of overseas export promotion offices; and (iii) the launching of investment privileges such as export processing zones (EPZs), special economic zones (SEZs), and industrial estates.