Re: [bm] Introductions(13/02/2006)

[Moderator BharatUdayMission]

Dear Surojitji,

 We appreciate your concern. We would like you to please join http://groups.google.com/group/BM_discussion  group and make your concern known through that. The main group is meant for important things of BM concerning all members like announcements, introduction of new member. For details about criterions, please visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bharatudaymission/files/Organization/ and read file "Mail Moderation Crieteria".

 

Thanks and Regards,

Moderators

--
"We have only one Passion
The Rise of a Great Nation."

www.bharatudaymission.org

 

==================Orginal Message=================================

Hello All,

I like all the enthusiasm we have here.

But we should try to understand that to have a broad base we need to include people from all ranks in the society. What I mean is I would like to see participation from people in more varieties of professions. We should not get branded as an elitist organization.

Important would be to identify people with solid economics, political science and policy backgrounds. Before deciding on policy we need to decide on our political compus, core principles. And it needs to be little more substanial and deeper than the files I've seen in the Yahoo group.

Some questions. Are we a socialist party or do we believe that markets usually work and govt. should be limited to maintaining law and order and facilitating efficient markets? What are our ideas of the organization of the state? Is freedom most important to us or is it welfare of the masses?

Too many times intellectuals have tried to do "good to society" and assumed that they know better than the masses and thus creating a centrally planned economy with heavy goverment intervention is the best. These efforts often failed. Worst example of this is of course communism.

What's our belief on Liberty? (On this issue I would highly recommend interested group members to read Isaiah Berlin's "Two  Concepts of Liberty".).

What's our belief on Indian identity and culture? This is a serious issue. Amartya Sen touches very briefly on this in his latest book "The Argumentative Indian". He is coming up with a new book on Indian identity. We don't need to copy his ideas. But we need to think through this issue.

Policy decisions would come from our fundamental beliefs on these (and many other) critical issues. Just blindly jumping into policy might result in creating bunch of conflicting policies that don't match with our beliefs.

Discussions need to go beyond pure expression of exuberance and emotion. Learnings from the experience of developing and developed economies of last hundred years need to be closely looked at.

Just my 2 cents.

Best regards,
Surojit


Surojit Chatterjee