“
Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.
”
”
B.R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste)
“
The Constitution. . . illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law--all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.
”
”
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
“
If I have to take police protection in my own country from my own people, then there is something wrong with me, I'm fighting within the framework of the Indian constitution and it is not against anyone, but for everyone.
”
”
Narendra Dabholkar
“
Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.AMD
”
”
Founding Fathers (The United States Constitution)
“
The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation--all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate by the Constitution of the United States.
”
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Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
“
The life or lives of man may be regarded as constituting a curve —an arc of time-experience subtended by the duration of the individual Will to Life.
”
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Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (The Dance of Siva, Vol 1: Fourteen Indian Essays)
“
We jettisoned our medical practices of the 1780s while retaining the Constitution. But Native American medicinal practitioners who abandon their traditional ways to embrace pasteurization from France and antibiotics from England are seen as compromising their Indian-ness. We can alter our modes of transportation or housing while remaining "American". Indians cannot and stay "Indian" in our eyes.
”
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James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
“
Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people—the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California’s shore, at the end of the open road. Shine, perishing republic.
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”
Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
“
My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite
the government's false claims.
- Harry Hariom Choudhary.
”
”
Harry Hariom Choudhary
“
Let us celebrate the occasion of Indian Constitution Day by being good citizens of India who respect and abide by the constitution of our country.
”
”
Bhawna Dehariya
“
The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation—all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate, by the Constitution of the United States, drafted at a convention of Revolutionary leaders in Philadelphia.
”
”
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
“
As much as the constitutionality of the state emphasizes the spreading of social and economic equality and scientific temper, it does not, however, explicitly talk about the unequal stakes inherited by the traditional power brokers. The reconciliation of the horrid past that manifests into the present remains unacknowledged. As a result, the question of reparation and inherited privilege does not feature in the discussions of dominant-caste people. This lack of historical accountability creates a group of self-declared nationalists, religionists, supremacists and merit holders that parade around as pundits proffering distorted versions of Indian society.
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”
Suraj Yengde (Caste Matters)
“
It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is—a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one, who was once defined by the American Constitution as “three-fifths” of a man, and who, according to the Dred Scott decision, had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. And today, a hundred years after his technical emancipation, he remains—with the possible exception of the American Indian—the most despised creature in his country.
”
”
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
“
My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the-Government's false claims.
- Harry Hariom Choudhary.
”
”
Harry Hariom Choudhary
“
What do think about abortion?”
“I could feel the tension growing in the plane. I dropped my head, acknowledging that we had very different value systems for our lives. Then I thought of a way to respond to his question.
“You’re Jewish, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said defensively. “I told you I was!”
“Do you know how Hitler persuaded the German people to destroy more than six million of your Jewish ancestors?” The man looked at me expectantly, so I continued. ”He convinced them that Jews were not human and then exterminated your people like rats.”
I could see that I had his attention, so I went on. “Do you understand how Americans enslaved, tortured, and killed millions of Africans? We dehumanized them so our constitution didn’t apply to them, and then we treated them worse than animals.”
“How about the Native Americans?” I pressed. “Do you have any idea how we managed to hunt Indians like wild animals, drive them out of their own land, burn their villages, rape their women, and slaughter their children? Do you have any clue how everyday people turned into cruel murderers?”
My Jewish friend was silent, and his eyes were filling with tears as I made my point. “We made people believe that the Native Americans were wild savages, not real human beings, and then we brutalized them without any conviction of wrongdoing! Now do you understand how we have persuaded mothers to kill their own babies? We took the word fetus, which is the Latin word for ‘offspring,’ and redefined it to dehumanize the unborn. We told mothers, ‘That is not really a baby you are carrying in your belly; it is a fetus, tissue that suddenly forms into a human being just seconds before it exits the womb.’ In doing so, we were able to assert that, in the issue of abortion, there is only one person’s human rights to consider, and then we convinced mothers that disposing of fetal tissue (terminating the life of their babies) was a woman’s right. Our constitution no longer protects the unborn because they are not real people. They are just lifeless blobs of tissue.”
By now, tears were flowing down his cheeks. I looked right into his eyes and said, “Your people, the Native Americans, and the African Americans should be the greatest defenders of the unborn on the planet. After all, you know what it’s like for society to redefine you so that they can destroy your races. But ironically, your races have the highest abortion rates in this country! Somebody is still trying to exterminate your people, and you don’t even realize it. The names have changed, but the plot remains the same!”
Finally he couldn’t handle it anymore. He blurted out, “I have never heard anything like this before. I am hanging out with the wrong people. I have been deceived!
”
”
Kris Vallotton
“
Ramanujan was not the first foreigner to retreat into his shell in a new country; indeed, his was the typical response, not the exceptional one. One later study of Asian and African students in Britain observed that a sense of exclusion “from the life of the community … constituted one of the most serious problems with which they were confronted … [and had] a serious psychological effect” upon them. Another study, this time of Indian students in particular, reported that while 83 percent of them saw friends more or less every day back in India, just 17 percent did while in England.
”
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Robert Kanigel (The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan)
“
I mean to say, millions of people, no doubt, are so constituted that they scream with joy and excitement at the spectacle of a stuffed porcupine-fish or a glass jar of seeds from Western Australia - but not Bertram. No; if you will take the word of one who would not deceive you, not Bertram. By the time we had tottered out of the Gold Coast village and were working towards the Palace of Machinery, everything pointed to my shortly executing a quiet sneak in the direction of that rather jolly Planters' Bar in the West Indian section. ...
There are certain moments in life when words are not needed. I looked at Biffy, Biffy looked at me. A perfect understanding linked our two souls.
"?"
"!"
Three minutes later we had joined the Planters.
I have never been in the West Indies, but I am in a position to state that in certain of the fundamentals of life they are streets ahead of our European civilisation. The man behind the counter, as kindly a bloke as I ever wish to meet, seemed to guess our requirements the moment we hove in view. Scarcely had our elbows touched the wood before he was leaping to and fro, bringing down a new bottle with each leap. A planter, apparently, does not consider he has had a drink unless it contains at least seven ingredients, and I'm not saying, mind you, that he isn't right. The man behind the bar told us the things were called Green Swizzles; and, if ever I marry and have a son, Green Swizzle Wooster is the name that will go down on the register, in memory of the day his father's life was saved at Wembley.
”
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P.G. Wodehouse (Carry On, Jeeves (Jeeves, #3))
“
wealthy conservatives at the ballot box. The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law—all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.
”
”
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
“
No wonder so many philosophers walked. Socrates, of course, liked nothing more than strolling in the agora. Nietzsche regularly embarked on spirited two-hour jaunts in the Swiss Alps, convinced “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Thomas Hobbes had a walking stick custom made with a portable inkwell attached so he could record his thoughts as he ambled. Thoreau regularly took four-hour treks across the Concord countryside, his capacious pockets overflowing with nuts, seeds, flowers, Indian arrowheads, and other treasures. Immanuel Kant, naturally, maintained a highly regimented walking routine. Every day, he’d eat lunch at 12:45 p.m., then depart for a one-hour constitutional — never more, never less — on the same boulevard in Königsberg, Prussia (now Russia). So unwavering was Kant’s routine that the people of Königsberg set their watches by his perambulations.
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Eric Weiner (The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)
“
India’s post-independence leadership eschewed parochial nationalism in favor of civic nationalism where the rights and privileges of being Indian were conceived as arising not from some pre-existent modes of belonging—religion, race, or ethnicity—but instead from participation in a collective political endeavor.
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Bibek Debroy (Getting India Back on Track: An Action Agenda for Reform)
“
Another view of the Constitution was put forward early in the twentieth century by the historian Charles Beard (arousing anger and indignation, including a denunciatory editorial in the New York Times). He wrote in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution: Inasmuch as the primary object of a government, beyond the mere repression of physical violence, is the making of the rules which determine the property relations of members of society, the dominant classes whose rights are thus to be determined must perforce obtain from the government such rules as are consonant with the larger interests necessary to the continuance of their economic processes, or they must themselves control the organs of government. In short, Beard said, the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates. Beard applied this general idea to the Constitution, by studying the economic backgrounds and political ideas of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up the Constitution. He found that a majority of them were lawyers by profession, that most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out at interest, and that forty of the fifty-five held government bonds, according to the records of the Treasury Department. Thus, Beard found that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the moneylenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slaveowners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds. Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups. He wanted to make it clear that he did not think the Constitution was written merely to benefit the Founding Fathers personally, although one could not ignore the $150,000 fortune of Benjamin Franklin, the connections of Alexander Hamilton to wealthy interests through his father-in-law and brother-in-law, the great slave plantations of James Madison, the enormous landholdings of George Washington. Rather, it was to benefit the groups the Founders represented, the “economic interests they understood and felt in concrete, definite form through their own personal experience.
”
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
“
It is noteworthy that the Southern states were such strong defenders of national power at the Constitutional Convention. Having recently been conquered by the British, living in constant tension with various Indian tribes, and sharing a substantial border with hostile European powers, the South chose the plan that would best serve its interests. Only a strong, well-financed government could deter and repel hostile enemies.
”
”
Chris DeRose (Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, The Bill of Rights, and The Election that Saved a Nation)
“
The Indian national movement is also an example of how the constitutional space offered by the existing structure could be used without getting co-opted by it. It did not completely reject this space, as such rejection in democratic societies entails heavy costs in terms of hegemonic influence and often leads to isolation — but entered it and used it effectively in combination with non-constitutional struggle to overthrow the existing structure.
”
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Bipan Chandra (India's Struggle for Independence)
“
Parallel to the idea of the US Constitution as covenant, politicians, journalists, teachers, and even professional historians chant like a mantra that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” From its beginning, the United States has welcomed—indeed, often solicited, even bribed—immigrants to repopulate conquered territories “cleansed” of their Indigenous inhabitants. From the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants were recruited to work mines, raze forests, construct canals and railroads, and labor in sweatshops, factories, and commercial farm fields. In the late twentieth century, technical and medical workers were recruited. The requirements for their formal citizenship were simple: adhere to the sacred covenant through taking the Citizenship Oath, pledging loyalty to the flag, and regarding those outside the covenant as enemies or potential enemies of the exceptional country that has adopted them, often after they escaped hunger, war, or repression, which in turn were often caused by US militarism or economic sanctions. Yet no matter how much immigrants might strive to prove themselves to be as hardworking and patriotic as descendants of the original settlers, and despite the rhetoric of E pluribus unum, they are suspect. The old stock against which they are judged inferior includes not only those who fought in the fifteen-year war for independence from Britain but also, and perhaps more important, those who fought and shed (Indian) blood, before and after independence, in order to acquire the land. These are the descendants of English Pilgrims, Scots, Scots-Irish, and Huguenot French—Calvinists all—who took the land bequeathed to them in the sacred covenant that predated the creation of the independent United States. These were the settlers who fought their way over the Appalachians into the fertile Ohio Valley region, and it is they who claimed blood sacrifice for their country. Immigrants, to be accepted, must prove their fidelity to the covenant and what it stands for.
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3))
“
The removal of the Indians was explained by Lewis Cass—Secretary of War, governor of the Michigan territory, minister to France, presidential candidate: A principle of progressive improvement seems almost inherent in human nature. . . . We are all striving in the career of life to acquire riches of honor, or power, or some other object, whose possession is to realize the day dreams of our imaginations; and the aggregate of these efforts constitutes the advance of society. But there is little of this in the constitution of our savages.
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
“
One of those classes, a constitutional law seminar of sixteen students, became a kind of family for me. We called ourselves the island of misfit toys, as there was no real unifying force to our team—a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia, the supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants, a black Canadian with decades’ worth of street smarts, a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil rights attorney born a few minutes from Yale’s campus, and an extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor, among others—but we became excellent friends.
”
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J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
“
The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors. The Muslims react to this fact by referring to the Negro as “the so-called American Negro” and substituting for the names inherited from slavery the letter “X.” It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is—a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one, who was once defined by the American Constitution as “three-fifths” of a man, and who, according to the Dred Scott decision, had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. And today, a hundred years after his technical emancipation, he remains—with the possible exception of the American Indian—the most despised creature in his country.
”
”
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
“
Early farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty to an unusual extent—the Haudenosaunee especially, but many others, too. (“Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty,” said colonist James Adair of the Ani Yun Wiya [Cherokee].) Important historically, these were the free people encountered by France and Britain—personifications of democratic self-government so vivid that some historians and activists have argued that the Great Law of Peace directly inspired the U.S. Constitution.
”
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Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
“
This issue was joined in a dispute over protection for the free exercise of religion that first divided the justices and then became the source of conflict between the Court and Congress. In a 1990 decision, the Court had withheld protection from individuals who claimed that their religious beliefs required an exemption from a generally applicable law. In that case, Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, the Court ruled that American Indians who used the hallucinogenic drug peyote in religious rituals were not constitutionally entitled to unemployment benefits when they were fired for violating their employer’s rule against drug use.
”
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Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Before this, the Cherokees had, like Indian tribes in general, done without formal government. As Van Every puts it: The foundation principle of Indian government had always been the rejection of government. The freedom of the individual was regarded by practically all Indians north of Mexico as a canon infinitely more precious than the individual’s duty to his community or nation. This anarchistic attitude ruled all behavior, beginning with the smallest social unit, the family. The Indian parent was constitutionally reluctant to discipline his children. Their every exhibition of self-will was accepted as a favorable indication of the development of maturing character. . . .
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
“
With its federal government that can supersede state and local law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus, its bicameral legislature (members of one branch being elected at fixed intervals), and its denial of suffrage to women, slaves, and the unpropertied, the Constitution as originally enacted was sharply different from the Great Law. In addition, the Constitution’s emphasis on protecting private property runs contrary to Haudenosaunee traditions of communal ownership. But in a larger sense, it seems to me, the claim is correct. The Framers of the Constitution, like most North American colonists, lived at a time when Indians were large presences in their lives—ones that naturally influenced their ideas and actions.
”
”
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
“
States. It was not easy for Chinese to get into the country. In 1882 Congress had passed a law suspending the entry of Chinese laborers and “all persons of the Chinese race” except officials, teachers, students, tourists, and merchants, at the same time formally prohibiting the naturalization of Chinese. The 1882 Act was the culmination of decades of anti-Chinese propaganda and discrimination. In 1852 California Governor John Bigler described Chinese immigrants as “contract coolies, avaricious, ignorant of moral obligations, incapable of being assimilated and dangerous to the welfare of the state.” In 1854 the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a white man for killing a Chinese miner by invoking Section 14 of the California Criminal Act, which specified that “no Black or mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a white man.” In support of the decision Chief Justice Hugh Murray declared that “to let Chinese testify in a court of law would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship. And then we might see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.” In 1879 the California State constitution prohibited corporations and municipal works from hiring Chinese and authorized cities to remove Chinese from their boundaries.1 My father never told us how he got around the restrictions of the Exclusion Act, and we knew better than to probe because it was generally understood that the distinction between being here legally and illegally was a shadowy one.
”
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Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
“
In fact, Hinduism�s pervading influence seems to go much earlier than Christianity. American mathematician, A. Seindenberg, has for example shown that the Sulbasutras, the ancient Vedic science of mathematics, constitute the source of mathematics in the Antic world, from Babylon to Greece : � the arithmetic equations of the Sulbasutras he writes, were used in the observation of the triangle by the Babylonians, as well as in the edification of Egyptian pyramids, in particular the funeral altar in form of pyramid known in the vedic world as smasana-cit (Seindenberg 1978: 329). In astronomy too, the "Indus" (from the valley of the Indus) have left a universal legacy, determining for instance the dates of solstices, as noted by 18th century French astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly : � the movement of stars which was calculated by Hindus 4500 years ago, does not differ even by a minute from the tables which we are using today". And he concludes: "the Hindu systems of astronomy are much more ancient than those of the Egyptians - even the Jews derived from the Hindus their knowledge �. There is also no doubt that the Greeks heavily borrowed from the "Indus". Danielou notes that the Greek cult of Dionysos, which later became Bacchus with the Romans, is a branch of Shivaism : � Greeks spoke of India as the sacred territory of Dionysos and even historians of Alexander the Great identified the Indian Shiva with Dionysos and mention the dates and legends of the Puranas �. French philosopher and Le Monde journalist Jean-Paul Droit, recently wrote in his book "The Forgetfulness of India" that � the Greeks loved so much Indian philosophy, that Demetrios Galianos had even translated the Bhagavad Gita �.
”
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François Gautier (A Western journalist on India: The ferengi's columns)
“
Trail of Tears, “these forced migrations” whose “fearful evils…are impossible to imagine…. I have witnessed evils,” Tocqueville admits a couple of paragraphs later, “I would find it impossible to relate.”* Regarding the plight of Indians in the United States, words practically fail Tocqueville. As for black people, they seem less fated for extinction than Native Americans, but their situation is nevertheless dire: black people, enslaved or free, “only constitute an unhappy remnant, a poor little wandering tribe, lost in the midst of an immense nation which owns all the land.” Such an assessment seems strange, if not ridiculous, to the twenty-first-century ear, since “this poor little wandering tribe” comprised more than two million people, more than 18 percent of the total population. Tocqueville very clearly realizes that slavery damages southern white people as well as the southern economy. Because of slavery, southern white people’s customs and character compare poorly with those of other Americans.
”
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Nell Irvin Painter (The History of White People)
“
claque, aka canned laughter It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s nothing new under the sun (a heavenly body, by the way, that some Indian ascetics stare at till they go blind). I knew that some things had a history—the Constitution, rhythm and blues, Canada—but it’s the odd little things that surprise me with their storied past. This first struck me when I was reading about anesthetics and I learned that, in the early 1840s, it became fashionable to hold parties where guests would inhale nitrous oxide out of bladders. In other words, Whip-it parties! We held the exact same kind of parties in high school. We’d buy fourteen cans of Reddi-Wip and suck on them till we had successfully obliterated a couple of million neurons and face-planted on my friend Andy’s couch. And we thought we were so cutting edge. And now, I learn about claque, which is essentially a highbrow French word for canned laughter. Canned laughter was invented long before Lucille Ball stuffed chocolates in her face or Ralph Kramden threatened his wife with extreme violence. It goes back to the 4th century B.C., when Greek playwrights hired bands of helpers to laugh at their comedies in order to influence the judges. The Romans also stacked the audience, but they were apparently more interested in applause than chuckles: Nero—emperor and wannabe musician—employed a group of five thousand knights and soldiers to accompany him on his concert tours. But the golden age of canned laughter came in 19th-century France. Almost every theater in France was forced to hire a band called a claque—from claquer, “to clap.” The influential claque leaders, called the chefs de claque, got a monthly payment from the actors. And the brilliant innovation they came up with was specialization. Each claque member had his or her own important job to perform: There were the rieurs, who laughed loudly during comedies. There were the bisseurs, who shouted for encores. There were the commissaires, who would elbow their neighbors and say, “This is the good part.” And my favorite of all, the pleureuses, women who were paid good francs to weep at the sad parts of tragedies. I love this idea. I’m not sure why the networks never thought of canned crying. You’d be watching an ER episode, and a softball player would come in with a bat splinter through his forehead, and you’d hear a little whimper in the background, turning into a wave of sobs. Julie already has trouble keeping her cheeks dry, seeing as she cried during the Joe Millionaire finale. If they added canned crying, she’d be a mess.
”
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A.J. Jacobs (The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World)
“
Whereas the slave cargoes gathered on the African coast reconfigured the normative boundaries of social life, the slave communities in the Americas exploded those boundaries beyond recognition. If an Akan-speaking migrant lived to complete a year on a west Indian sugar estate, he or she was likely by the end of that time to have come into close contact with unrelated Akan strangers as well as with Ga, Guan, or Adangbe speakers in the holding station on the African littoral, with Ewe speakers on the slave ship, and with Angolans, Biafrans, and Senegambians on the plantation. This was the composite we call diasporic Africa—an Africa that constituted not the continent on European maps, but rather the plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them.
Like any geographic entity, diasporic Africa varies according to the perspective from which it is surveyed. Viewed from a cartographic standpoint (in essence, the view of early modern Europeans), diasporic Africa is a constellation of discrete ethnic and language groups; if one adopts this perspective, the defining question becomes whether or not the various constituent groups in the slave community shared a culture.
Only by approaching these questions from the vantage point of Africans as migrants, however, can we hope to understand how Africans themselves experienced and negotiated their American worlds. If in the regime of the market Africans’ most socially relevant feature was their exchangeability, for Africans as immigrants the most socially relevant feature was their isolation, their desperate need to restore some measure of social life to counterbalance the alienation engendered by their social death. Without some means of achieving that vital equilibrium thanks to which even the socially dead could expect to occupy a viable place in society, slaves could foresee only further descent into an endless purgatory.
”
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Stephanie E. Smallwood (Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora)
“
Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.”
James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.”
The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution.
James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.”
Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past — the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating — it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present — in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.
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Aldous Huxley (Jesting Pilate)
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Such a marvelous opportunity wasted. I mean for us, by us. Indians feel it too, don’t they? I mean, in spite of the proud chests and all the excitement of sitting down as free men at their own desks to work out a constitution. Won’t that constitution be a sort of love letter to the English—the kind an abandoned lover writes when the affair has ended in what passes at the time as civilized and dignified mutual recognition of incompatability? In a world grown suddenly dull because the beloved, thank God, has gone, offering his killing and unpredictable and selfish affections elsewhere, you attempt to recapture, don’t you, the moments of significant pleasure—which may not have been mutual at all, but anyway existed. But this recapture is always impossible. You settle for the second-rate, you settle for the lesson you appear to have learned and forget the lesson you hoped to learn and might have learned, and so learn nothing at all, because the second-rate is the world’s common factor, and any damned fool people can teach it, any damned fool people can inherit it.
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Paul Scott (The Jewel in the Crown (The Raj Quartet, #1))
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Roughly speaking: more than forty held government bonds. More than twenty were moneylenders. Over fifteen were slave owners. The rest an assortment of land and debt speculators. And most dabbled in more than one category. George Washington, for example, was a slave owner, a moneylender, a land speculator, and the largest holder of government IOUs in the country. Who was not at the Convention is as interesting as who was: unrepresented were small farmers, shopkeepers, Revolutionary War veterans, laborers, indentured servants, and, of course, slaves, Indians, and women. What we have instead is a small circle of capitalist elites with George Washington at the center. They were (if we’re to believe only half of what Beard tells us) a rogues’ gallery of scoundrels, scalawags, moneylenders, stockjobbers,XXIX embezzlers, and, as it would turn out, traitors. Not to mention lawyers. Men, it would be fair to say, drawn to the power of their own purses.
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Ed Asner (The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs)
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Expectations and anomalies are mutually constitutive- they make each other. To assert that a person or an event is analogous cannot help but serve to create and reinforce other expectations
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Philip J. Deloria (Indians in Unexpected Places)
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In India, a "bride burning"—to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry—takes place approximately once every two hours, but these rarely constitute news. In the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan, five thousand women and girls have been doused in kerosene and set alight by family members or in-laws—or, perhaps worse, been seared with acid—for perceived disobedience just in the last nine years. Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian governments were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved, people shrug.
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Nicholas D. Kristof (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
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This wider history notwithstanding, I believe India still constitutes a special case. Its distinctiveness is threefold. First, the tradition of the thinker-activist persisted far longer in India than elsewhere. While the men who founded the United States in the late eighteenth century had fascinating ideas about democracy and nationhood, thereafter American politicians have merely governed and ruled, or sometimes misgoverned and misruled.1 Their ideas, such as these are, have come from professional ideologues or intellectuals. On the other hand, from the first decades of the nineteenth century until the last decades of the twentieth century, the most influential political thinkers in India were, as often as not, its most influential political actors. Long before India was conceived of as a nation, in the extended run-up to Indian independence, and in the first few decades of freedom, the most interesting reflections on society and politics were offered by men (and women) who were in the thick of political action. Second, the relevance of individual thinkers too has lasted longer in India. For instance, Lenin’s ideas were influential for about seventy years, that is to say, from the time the Soviet state was founded to the time it disappeared. Mao’s heyday was even shorter—roughly three decades, from the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 to the repudiation by Deng Xiaoping of his mentor’s ideas in the late 1970s. Turning to politicians in Western Europe, Churchill’s impassioned defence of the British Empire would find no takers after the 1950s. De Gaulle was famous for his invocation of the ‘grandeur de la France’, but those sentiments have now been (fortunately?) diluted and domesticated by the consolidation of the European Union. On the other hand, as this book will demonstrate, Indian thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still speak in many ways to the concerns of the present. A third difference has to do with the greater diversity of thinkers within the Indian political tradition. Even Gandhi and Nehru never held the kind of canonical status within their country as Mao or Lenin did in theirs. At any given moment, there were as many Indians who were opposed to their ideas as were guided by them. Moreover, the range of issues debated and acted upon by politicians and social reformers appears to have been far greater in India than in other countries. This depth and diversity of thought was, as I argue below, in good part a product of the depth and diversity of the society itself.
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Ramachandra Guha (Makers of Modern India)
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India needs a progressive leader to represent her locally as well as internationally.She needs a dignified ,vociferous statesman , to represent her, talk for her, talk about her, talk to her and bring out the best out of her. I support a progressive, hate-free government for the future of my country. Every human deserves due respect and honour for being all that he or she is, however it cannot be denied an ounce of learning (with all humility) certainly aids in building a strong nation in every aspect. For eons India is known for her ideals, her diversity , and that she cherishes freedom and equality. Now any one who she calls her leader cannot be allowed to puncture the constitutional fabric and infringe on the privileges she has enjoyed for years ,especially after independence. Fellow citizens need to rise from sleep, that apathetic stupor, to realisation of the danger that she was plunged into in the recent past ,and the imminent danger posed to the constitutional fabric, the economy of India, and the image of India. India needs to rise above the constant bickering within her walls, as the wise saying goes, a house divided within herself cannot stand. The torch of peace that we light within our walls will help us glow and light the world. Awaiting results.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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India needs a progressive leader to represent her locally as well as internationally.She needs a dignified ,vociferous statesman , to represent her, talk for her, talk about her, talk to her and bring out the best out of her. I support a progressive, hate-free government for the future of my country. Every human deserves due respect and honour for being all that he or she is, however it cannot be denied an ounce of learning (with all humility) certainly aids in building a strong nation in every aspect. For eons India is known for her ideals, her diversity , and that she cherishes freedom and equality. Now any one who she calls her leader cannot be allowed to puncture the constitutional fabric and infringe on the privileges she has enjoyed for years ,especially after independence. Fellow citizens need to rise from sleep, that apathetic stupor, to realisation of the danger that she was plunged into in the recent past ,and the imminent danger posed to the constitutional fabric, the economy of India, and the image of India. India needs to rise above the constant bickering within her walls, as the wise saying goes, a house divided within herself cannot stand. The torch of peace that we light within our walls will help us glow and light the world.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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India had witnessed the destructive dances of its intelligence organisations during the Emergency regime and the regime that followed. Indian democracy can be as oppressive as the regime of Idi Amin. There is no dearth of evidence to support this statement. Rights of the citizen are more frequently violated even under normal circumstances. A shaky ruler can run amuck and rock the foundation of the country. The present system is not good enough to ensure free democracy and constitutional liberty. Mere government notifications are not good enough to give legal status to the prime intelligence organisations, which have evolved along with the political system of the country and democratic aspirations of the people. If the systemic evolution has made the administrative services and other spheres of national activities accountable to the elected representatives of the people why the most powerful tools of the state machinery should be kept under the wrap of secrecy and the hazards of informality that can be misused and manipulated by a few politicians?
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Maloy Krishna Dhar (Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer)
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Should not a ‘free India’ enact laws to administer its intelligence community both at the Centre and in the States? Should not the country safeguard its future from errant leaders like Indira and Sanjay Gandhi, who mercilessly used the intelligence and enforcement machineries to execute the dictates of national emergency? Who can prevent the fundamentalist political entities to use these functional agencies to impose on the nation their brand of nationalism? Only the constitutional system can do that.
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Maloy Krishna Dhar (Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer)
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The pioneers of the post-independence IB must be saluted for giving the country an efficient tool of national security in spite of the fact that the ruling class generally tried to use it for protecting and promoting their elite club. They never thought it fit to adopt a constitutionally validated Act to govern the IB and its sister organisations. The IB and the R&AW etc are the only organs of the government that are not accountable to any elected constitutional body of India and are not governed by any Act of the Parliament. They are subsidiary bureaus and departments.
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Maloy Krishna Dhar (Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer)
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In fact, the post independence Indian political and bureaucratic rulers had succeeded in enshrining the cult of violence as a semi-statutory means of grievance redressal. They allowed the genuine aspirations of the people to be trampled and ignored and subsequently handling the violent venting of the accumulated frustration as a law and order problem. The state governments and the Union ministry of internal affairs had perfected the battle order of deputing police and paramilitary forces to fighting the violent segment of the people, who were, at the first instance, were allowed to choose violent means to express their genuine and perceived grievances over peaceful constitutional means. Somewhere some vested interests in the political and bureaucratic edifices of the country worked assiduously to bury the concepts of constitutional grievance redressing mechanics and promoted the cult of violence. They blindly followed the British attitude in dealing with the post-independent Indians who had assumedly given themselves an elaborate constitution and several layers of legal guarantees. The politicians and bureaucrats simply looted the public exchequer in the name of maintaining law and order. They were neither interested nor capable of addressing the grievances of the people.
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Maloy Krishna Dhar (Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer)
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Jefferson’s decision to acquire Louisiana without seeking a constitutional amendment expanded the powers of the executive in ways that would likely have driven Jefferson to distraction had another man been president. Much of his political life, though, had been devoted to the study and the wise exercise of power. He did what had to be done to preserve the possibility of republicanism and progress. Things were neat only in theory. And despite his love of ideas and image of himself, Thomas Jefferson was as much a man of action as he was of theory. Indian
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Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
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It is in the legitimation of death that the transcending potency of symbolic universes manifests itself most clearly, and the fundamental terror-assuaging character of the ultimate legitimations of the paramount reality of everyday life is revealed. The primacy of the social objectivations of everyday life can retain its subjective plausibility only if it is constantly protected against terror. On the level of meaning, the institutional order represents a shield against terror. To be anomic, therefore, means to be deprived of this shield and to be exposed, alone, to the onslaught of nightmare. While the horror of aloneness is probably already given in the constitutional sociality of man, it manifests itself on the level of meaning in man’s incapacity to sustain a meaningful existence in isolation from the nomic constructions of society. The symbolic universe shelters the individual from ultimate terror by bestowing ultimate legitimation upon the protective structures of the institutional order.75 Very much the same may be said about the social (as against the just discussed individual) significance of symbolic universes. They are sheltering canopies over the institutional order as well as over individual biography. They also provide the delimitation of social reality; that is, they set the limits of what is relevant in terms of social interaction. One extreme possibility of this, sometimes approximated in primitive societies, is the definition of everything as social reality; even inorganic matter is dealt with in social terms. A narrower, and more common, delimitation includes only the organic or animal worlds. The symbolic universe assigns ranks to various phenomena in a hierarchy of being, defining the range of the social within this hierarchy.76 Needless to say, such ranks are also assigned to different types of men, and it frequently happens that broad categories of such types (sometimes everyone outside the collectivity in question) are defined as other than or less than human. This is commonly expressed linguistically (in the extreme case, with the name of the collectivity being equivalent to the term “human”). This is not too rare, even in civilized societies. For example, the symbolic universe of traditional India assigned a status to the outcastes that was closer to that of animals than to the human status of the upper castes (an operation ultimately legitimated in the theory of karma-samsara, which embraced all beings, human or otherwise), and as recently as the Spanish conquests in America it was possible for the Spaniards to conceive of the Indians as belonging to a different species (this operation being legitimated in a less comprehensive manner by a theory that “proved” that the Indians could not be descended from Adam and Eve). The
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Peter L. Berger (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)
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All about Yoga Beauty Health.Yoga is a gathering of physical, mental, and otherworldly practices or teaches which started in antiquated India. There is a wide assortment of Yoga schools, practices, and objectives in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Among the most surely understood sorts of yoga are Hatha yoga and Rāja yoga. The birthplaces of yoga have been theorized to go back to pre-Vedic Indian conventions; it is said in the Rigveda however in all probability created around the 6th and fifth hundreds of years BCE,in antiquated India's parsimonious and śramaṇa developments. The order of most punctual writings depicting yoga-practices is indistinct, varyingly credited to Hindu Upanishads. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali date from the main portion of the first thousand years CE, however just picked up noticeable quality in the West in the twentieth century. Hatha yoga writings risen around the eleventh century with sources in tantra
Yoga masters from India later acquainted yoga with the west after the accomplishment of Swami Vivekananda in the late nineteenth and mid twentieth century. In the 1980s, yoga wound up noticeably well known as an arrangement of physical exercise over the Western world.Yoga in Indian conventions, be that as it may, is more than physical exercise; it has a reflective and otherworldly center. One of the six noteworthy standard schools of Hinduism is likewise called Yoga, which has its own epistemology and transcendentalism, and is firmly identified with Hindu Samkhya reasoning.
Beauty is a normal for a creature, thought, protest, individual or place that gives a perceptual ordeal of delight or fulfillment. Magnificence is examined as a major aspect of style, culture, social brain research, theory and human science. A "perfect delight" is an element which is respected, or has includes broadly ascribed to excellence in a specific culture, for flawlessness. Grotesqueness is thought to be the inverse of excellence. The experience of "magnificence" regularly includes a translation of some substance as being in adjust and amicability with nature, which may prompt sentiments of fascination and passionate prosperity. Since this can be a subjective ordeal, it is frequently said that "excellence is entirely subjective.
Health is the level of practical and metabolic proficiency of a living being. In people it is the capacity of people or groups to adjust and self-oversee when confronting physical, mental, mental and social changes with condition. The World Health Organization (WHO) characterized wellbeing in its more extensive sense in its 1948 constitution as "a condition of finish physical, mental, and social prosperity and not simply the nonappearance of sickness or ailment. This definition has been liable to contention, specifically as lacking operational esteem, the uncertainty in creating durable wellbeing procedures, and on account of the issue made by utilization of "finish". Different definitions have been proposed, among which a current definition that associates wellbeing and individual fulfillment. Order frameworks, for example, the WHO Family of International Classifications, including the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), are usually used to characterize and measure the parts of wellbeing.
yogabeautyhealth.com
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Ikram
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The government and the mining companies are digging away in villages, virgin forests, pure rivers, and the very values of equality and constitutionality. So great was their greed that even the locals, generally ignorant of the ways of government and corporates, were galvanized into protests that continue to draw attention to the predatory nature of Indian capitalism.
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Josy Joseph (A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India)
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While referring to the Bill of Rights in the Indian Constitution, Ivor Jennings pointed to these features, saying: ‘The Indian reaction (in enacting the Bill of Rights) like the American reaction, is in a large measure a product of the British rule’.7
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Asok Kumar Ganguly (Landmark Judgments That Changed India)
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Gandhi refused to accept that tanks and bombs constituted a nation’s ultimate strength. To him, the health, education and unity of a nation’s people were more important.
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Rajmohan Gandhi (Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings)
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Article 370 of the Indian Constitution dictates that the state of Jammu and Kashmir govern all matters except those surrendered to the Union of India.
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David G. Atwill (Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa's Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960)
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Indian courts had long ruled that they were unable to intervene in the rights of non-state subjects because Article 370 of the Indian Constitution dictates that the state of Jammu and Kashmir govern all matters except those surrendered to the Union of India. Recently, however, in a case challenging the limitations of Indian federal guidlines as they relate to federal finance laws, the court asserted broadly (and against decades of legal precedent) that the constitution of Jammu and Kashmir did not supersede that of India: It is rather disturbing to note that various parts of the judgment speak of the absolute sovereign power of the State of Jammu & Kashmir. It is necessary to reiterate that Section 3 of the Constitution of Jammu & Kashmir, which was framed by a Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of universal adult franchise, makes a ringing declaration that the State of Jammu & Kashmir is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India.
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David G. Atwill (Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa's Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960)
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the Indian-born Zoroastrians. Although Parsis accounted for just 6 percent of Bombay’s total inhabitants, they constituted one-third of its lawyers.
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Sujata Massey (The Widows of Malabar Hill (Perveen Mistry, #1))
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Savarkar took on Nehru’s repeated attacks on the Hindu Sangathanist leadership. Reacting to one of Nehru’s assertion that any attempt by Hindu Sangathanist leaders to establish a Hindu Rashtra in India would meet the same fate that Hitler and Mussolini met in Europe, Savarkar denounced his threats through a statement on 22 October 1947. As if the mere demand for a Hindu Raj constitutes a danger to his Government so much more imminent, impending, incalculably disastrous as to call for his immediate attention than the already established Moslem Raj in Pakistan where fanatical atrocities, arson, bloodshed and butchery have been the order of the day . . . Pusillanimous enough to tolerate these diabolical actions and threats on the part of the Moslems against his ‘Indian Union’ Pandit Nehru and his pseudo-nationalistic section in the Congress are delivering mock heroics against the Hindus and swearing that they will fight tooth and nail against those who demand a Hindu Raj.
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Vikram Sampath (Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966)
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The Lakotas were the true horse-and-buffalo Sioux of popular imagination, and they constituted nearly half the Sioux nation.
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Peter Cozzens (The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West)
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The pro-independent Kashmir organisations , on the other hand, would love to see the constitutional arrangement be scrapped because Kashmir in their view would then “become a clear Indian military occupation” without a “legal instrument” guiding its relationship with the Indian Union.
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Kashmir -1947-2019
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the first global war began in 1754 with the killing of a French Canadian officer in America’s backcountry. The slaying of Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville on May 28, 1754, forty miles south of the Forks of the Ohio (modern-day Pittsburgh), occurred at the hands of colonial and Indian fighters led by a young Virginia officer named George Washington.
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Akhil Reed Amar (The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840)
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Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people — the following preparations would be essential:
1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of trouble.
2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment.
3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations.
4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easy manipulated and dominated that scattered individuals.
5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority.
6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test for loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order.
7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns.
8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots.
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Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
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Together these constitute a huge body of works and the fact that they were transmitted orally for many centuries is unique and unparalleled anywhere else in the world. A lifetime would be required to study these alone. These works are the wellspring from which Indian culture is derived. Vedic cosmogony explains why India has tolerated all forms of worship has given birth to four religions, has provided succour to refugees of two other religions, and has naively invited and accepted expansionist cults that threaten its core philosophy.
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Shiv Sastry (Aryan Invasion: Myth or Fact?: Uncovering the evidence)
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India's Judges fare better than its gods as Contempt of Court protects their dignity while its Constitution throws the latter to the wolves for Muslims proclaim that there's no god but Allah and the evangelists propagate that the Hindu deities are false
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BS Murtht
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The solution of the Punjab problem may lie in a radical redrafting of the Indian Constitution to produce a federation that gives more regional autonomy. Punjab is not the only region to have been in conflict with the centre, but it is the only one in which religion and politics have united to create a powerful opposition.
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W. Owen Cole (Sikhism - An Introduction: Teach Yourself)
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In looking backward over human history we find that it comprises various cultures, as the Egyptian, Indian, Classical, and Western. Each of these cultures is a vast, living, human organism, endowed with an ego, a personality, with a metaphysical structure, a culture-soul. The culture soul expresses itself in all the phenomena of its history, in peoples and nations, in language and literature, in government, science, the arts, and all other conceivable human manifestations. These are the expression forms of the soul and together constitute the culture. Through them the soul actualizes itself and history is thus a culture-soul in process of becoming.
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Neema Parvini (The Prophets of Doom)
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education constitutes empowerment, then most middle-class women in India have willingly allowed themselves to be disempowered in exchange for what are essentially some frivolous freedoms. They have resignedly convinced themselves to abandon their own dreams and career aspirations to cater to the demands at home.
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Nilanjana Bhowmick (LIES OUR MOTHERS TOLD US The Indian Woman’s Burden)
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If no one answers your call make a stride and walk alone when everyone is closed and shut Open your mind and speak alone If they turn away and desert and the wild path obstacles exerts trample the thorns no matter the hurt And Alone along blood-lined track traverse If no one holds up the light and a fierce storm troubles the night, with the thunder flame of pain ignite your heart, alone,and let it burn bright These
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David Sunder Singh (INDIAN CONSTITUTION -A Ray of Hope-)
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The demographic challenge was as real as the economic one: whereas in 1870 there were five Europeans to every Indian living in Durban, by 1890 the ratio was closer to two to one. The pattern was similar in other towns of Natal, where, again, Europeans constituted about 40 per cent of the population and the Indians a threatening 20 per cent. As Robert Huttenback has written, this ‘increasing urban concentration of Indians particularly frightened and offended many European settlers to whom it connoted both domestic propinquity and increased commercial competition’.
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Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi Before India)
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Match the following: A. Mandamus 1. Direction to an official for the performance of a duty B. Habeas Corpus 2. Release of an illegally detained person C. Certiorari 3. Transferring of a case from an inferior court to a court of higher jurisdiction D. Quo Warranto 4. Calling upon one to show by what authority he holds or claims a franchise or office A B C D (a) 1 2 3 4
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Indian Polity and Constitution Editorial Board (Indian Polity and Constitution : Objective: For all Competitive Exams)
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For all her cheekiness, Sonja Schlesin was devoted to Gandhi and his cause. Hers was a double or perhaps triple transgression: a white, Jewish woman expressing her solidarity with persecuted Indian males. Much later, her employer gratefully recalled what his struggle owed her. This ‘young girl’, he wrote, ‘soon constituted herself the watchman and warder of the morality not only of my office but of the whole movement’. Thus Pathans, Patels, ex-indentured men, Indians of all classes and ages surrounded her, sought her advice and followed it. Europeans in South Africa would generally never travel in the same railway compartment as Indians, and in the Transvaal they are even prohibited from doing so. Yet Miss Schlesin would deliberately sit in the third class compartment for Indians like other Satyragrahis and even resist the guards who interfered with her.13
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Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi Before India)
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To sum up, these provisions deal with the citizenship of (a) persons domiciled in India; (b) persons migrated from Pakistan; (c) persons migrated to Pakistan but later returned; and (d) persons of Indian origin residing outside India. The other constitutional provisions with respect to the citizenship are as follows: 1.No person shall be a citizen of India or be deemed to be a citizen of India, if he has voluntarily acquired the citizenship of any foreign state (Article 9). 2.Every person who is or is deemed to be a citizen of India shall continue to be such citizen, subject to the provisions of any law made by Parliament (Article 10). 3.Parliament shall have the power to make any provision with respect to the acquisition and termination of citizenship and all other matters relating to citizenship (Article 11).
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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Under the original Constitution of J&K (1957), the head of the state and head of the government were designated as Sadar-i-Riyasat (President) and Wazir-i-Azam (Prime Minister) respectively.
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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Brazil’s constitution guarantees permanent possession of a particular territory to the Indians who have traditionally occupied it. But landgrabs are routinely justified by claims that no one is there,
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Scott Wallace (The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes)
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Therefore, the Burmese felt no particular urge to understand their colonial rulers. This indifference was also encouraged by British attitudes. While the Englishman tended to see the Hindus as ‘serious’, ‘mysterious’, ‘deep’, ‘introverted’, and so on, he usually saw the Burmese as ‘gay’, ‘open’, ‘careless’, ‘childlike’, not a people who needed deep philosophical interpretation. The Burmese returned the compliment by assuming that there was not much that they needed to know about the Englishman beyond the necessities of unavoidable intercourse between the ruler and the ruled. How different it was from India, with the earnest, almost obsessive desire for comprehension at the intellectual level that was producing a string of scholars and philosophers in the western mould! It was true that such Indians constituted only a tiny section of the population, but their impact was strong on the upper classes; and they set the tone for those who would be leaders in the independence movements that were to gather momentum in the twentieth century. II
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Suu Kyi, Aung San (Freedom from Fear: And Other Writings)
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Jackson read the Indian treaties in much the same way that Democrats and progressives today read the U.S. Constitution. They care little about what it says; they interpret it to mean what they want it to mean. Jackson
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Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
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The Constitution provides for a bicameral legislature consisting of an Upper House (Rajya Sabha) and a Lower House (Lok Sabha). The Rajya Sabha represents the states of Indian Federation, while the Lok Sabha represents the people of India as a whole. The Rajya Sabha (even though a less powerful chamber) is required to maintain the federal equilibrium by protecting the interests of the states against the undue interference of the Centre.
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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there are all-India services (IAS, IPS, and IFS) which are common to both the Centre and the states. The members of these services are recruited and trained by the Centre which also possess ultimate control over them. Thus, these services violate the principle of federalism under the Constitution.
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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Articles 168 to 212 in Part VI of the Constitution deal with the organisation, composition, duration, officers, procedures, privileges, powers and so on of the state legislature. Though these are similar to that of Parliament, there are some differences as well.
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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Section. 2. The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature. No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen. Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three. When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies. The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.
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Garrett Epps (Wrong and Dangerous: Ten Right Wing Myths about Our Constitution)
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Originally (1949), the Constitution contained a Preamble, 395 Articles (divided into 22 Parts) and 8 Schedules. Presently (2013), it consists of a Preamble, about 465 Articles (divided into 25 Parts) and 12 Schedules2. The various amendments carried out since 1951 have deleted about 20 Articles and one Part (VII) and added about 85 Articles, four Parts (IVA, IXA, IXB and XIVA) and four Schedules (9, 10, 11 and 12). No other Constitution in the world has so many Articles and Schedules3.
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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the term ‘Federation’ has nowhere been used in the Constitution. Article 1, on the other hand, describes India as a ‘Union of States’ which implies two things: one, Indian Federation is not the result of an agreement by the states; and two, no state has the right to secede from the federation.
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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The term ‘secular’ too was added by the 42nd Constitutional Amendment Act of 1976.
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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The Indian Constitution embodies the positive concept of secularism ie, all religions in our country (irrespective of their strength) have the same status and support from the state10.
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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problem of Indian popular cinema lies not only at the interface between the local and the global in the constitution of a politics of cultural difference, but must also be seen in terms of the internal hierarchies that are involved in the constitution of a national culture.
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Anonymous
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the Fundamental Rights are not absolute and subject to reasonable restrictions. Further, they are not sacrosanct and can be curtailed or repealed by the Parliament through a constitutional amendment act. They can also be suspended during the operation of a National Emergency except the rights guaranteed by Articles 20 and 21.
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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during the winter of 2012–2013, the Federal Court ruled that Métis and non– Status Indians had the same rights as Status Indians under the Constitution. This gives
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John Ralston Saul (The Comeback: How Aboriginals Are Reclaiming Power And Influence)
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Benjamin Franklin Learned about Democracy by Observing Native Americans One of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, actually spent quite a lot of time observing and socializing with the Iroquois tribe. During his interactions with the Native Americans, Franklin noticed that the Iroquois was in fact, a union of different tribes that were ruled by one chief. Their chief would only remain in power if the other tribes supported his actions, which technically made him an elected official. The Iroquois also had in place a system of checks and balances to make sure that no one abused their authority. Some historians speculate that Franklin introduced many of the things he learned from his interactions with the Native Americans when he and the other Founding Fathers drafted the United States Constitution.
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William D. Willis (American History: US History: An Overview of the Most Important People & Events. The History of United States: From Indians, to "Contemporary" History ... Native Americans, Indians, New York Book 1))
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With 60 percent of all prisoners being prisoners of color, that leaves 39-40 percent as white. The 60 percent “prisoners of color,” though, is of course not a homogeneous group. Within that 60 percent, according to studies of the 2010 U.S. census, the largest group of color is made up of “non-hispanic Blacks” who make up a full 40 percent of all the U.S. incarcerated in federal, state, and local prisons and jails.[82] The next largest group among prisoners of color is that of “non-white Hispanics,” or Latinos, who make up 19 percent of all incarcerated. Then one drops down to Asian/Asian-American and Pacific Islander (A/AAPI) groups and American Indian groups, each constituting about 1 percent of all incarcerated. (The
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Mark Lewis Taylor (The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, 2nd Edition)
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It is unlikely that we will hit a home run anytime soon but if we are unable to get rid of offensive sports team nicknames, we will strike out.
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Adam Dodek (The Canadian Constitution)
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The Constitution provides for the abolition or creation of legislative councils in states. Accordingly, the Parliament can abolish a legislative council (where it already exists) or create it (where it does not exist), if the legislative assembly of the concerned state passes a resolution to that effect. Such a specific resolution must be passed by the state assembly by a special majority, that is, a majority of the total membership of the assembly and a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of the assembly present and voting. This Act of Parliament is not to be deemed as an amendment of the Constitution for the purposes of Article 368 and is passed like an ordinary piece of legislation (ie, by simple majority).
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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the American Constitution provides for ‘due process of law’ against that of ‘procedure established by law’ which is contained in the Indian Constitution. The difference between the two is : ‘The due process of law gives wide scope to the Supreme Court to grant protection to the rights of its citizens. It can declare laws violative of these rights void not only on substantive grounds of being unlawful, but also on procedural grounds of being unreasonable. Our Supreme Court, while determining the constitutionality of a law, however examines only the substantive question i.e., whether the law is within the powers of the authority concerned or not. It is not expected to go into the question of its reasonableness, suitability or policy implications.
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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Fundamental Duties: Respect the Constitution, National Flag, and National Anthem. Follow the good ideas that helped India become free. Protect the unity and safety of India. Defend the country and help the country when needed. Get along with all people in India, irrespective of their differences. Stand up against practices that harm women's dignity. Value and preserve India's diverse culture and history. Protect the environment and be kind to animals. Think scientifically and be curious about learning new things. Take care of public property, and do not use violence. Always try to do your best and help the country succeed.
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Sree Krishna Seelam (Indian Law For A Common Man: A simple Law guide for every Indian. Master the fundamentals of Law in 3 hours.)
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The rest of section eight lays out the other things that Congress is allowed to do. The list is pretty extensive, so we will hit the high points. - Borrow money. - Regulate trade between other countries, between the states, and between Indian tribes. - Develop rules for Naturalization. - Print money and provide punishment for printing fake money. - Establish a post office. - Promote the progress of science and useful arts. - Set up federal courts that are subordinate to the Supreme Court. - Punish Pirates and other offenses committed on the high Seas. - Declare war. - Raise and support an Army and Navy as well as make the rules for governing them. - Call up the Militia to execute laws, quell an uprising, or repel a foreign invasion. - Provide a system for States to man, equip, and train their own Militias. - Allow the Federal government to buy land to set up government buildings, forts, docks, etc.
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John Vandusen (Blueprint of Freedom: Simplified Guide to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution)
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the installation of Congress ministries in six large provinces of British India was a major milestone in the constitutional history of the subcontinent. Much more power had devolved on to the shoulder of Indians than at any previous time in the history of the Raj. Indeed, since precolonial regimes were themselves devoid of democratic representation, and were run by unelected kings who nominated their ministers, this was the furthest that Indians had thus far got in the direction of self-rule, swaraj. Surely it was now only a matter of years before the Congress, and India, achieved the next step, of Dominion Status, thus to place themselves on par with Canada, Australiaand South Africa.
A sign of how much of a departure from colonial practice these elections were is underlined in a humble office order issued by the Central Provinces government after their own Congress ministry was installed. It was signed by an Indian ICS officer, C.M. Trivedi, then serving as the secretary to the general administration department. The order was sent to all commissioners and deputy commissioners, the chief conservator of forests, the inspector general of police, all secretaries to government, and a host of other senior officials (including the military secretary and the governor), almost all of whom were, of course, British. The text of the order was short and simple, albeit, in the eyes of its recipients, not altogether sweet. It read: ‘In future Mr. Gandhi should be referred to in all correspondence as “Mahatma Gandhi”.
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Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World)
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The Indians, they had found, were too unruly to keep as a labor force, and remained an obstacle to expansion. Black slaves were easier to control, and their profitability for southern plantations was bringing an enormous increase in the importation of slaves, who were becoming a majority in some colonies and constituted one-fifth of the entire colonial population. But the blacks were not totally submissive, and as their numbers grew, the prospect of slave rebellion grew.
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
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Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic”.65
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Arundhati Roy (The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste: The Debate Between B. R. Ambedkar and M. K. Gandhi)
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the term ‘Federation’ has nowhere been used in the Constitution. Article 1, on the other hand, describes India as a ‘Union of States’ which implies two things: one, Indian Federation is not the result of an agreement by the states; and two, no state has the right to secede from the federation.
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M Laxmikanth (Indian Polity For Civil Services and Other State Examinations| 6th revised edition)
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True faith and good education distinguish Germans from white Americans, who come across in May’s novels as blasphemous and utterly uneducated. Indeed, it is Old Shatterhand’s “Europeanness”—meaning his Germanness in a cultural sense, and not his whiteness in any kind of purely racial category—that constitutes his intellectual and spiritual-religious superiority, distinguishing him not only from the Indians, but also Anglo-Americans:
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Andrei S. Markovits (Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (The Public Square Book 5))