Thursday, January 7, 2010

Linguistic sweatshops

By Dr Tariq Rahman
Like sweatshops the world over the call centres of Pakistan are the new sites for the extension of globalised capitalist market practices and the ideology which underlies them. –File Sweatshops exist because workers in poor countries take lower wages to do the same kind of labour as their counterparts in developed, postindustrial societies. Corporate investors can get their products manufactured cheaply and sell these at a much higher price with their brand name.

Call centres are also based on this basic principle. They exist because the rapid development in communications, especially the telephone and Internet, make it possible to communicate all over the globe virtually almost without any time lag.

What makes them exist and multiply is their contribution to maximising profits of corporate giants. As wages for call centre employees are higher in the US and Europe it is cheaper for entrepreneurs there to hire workers in Asia who are paid a lower wage.
Call centres perform two functions: they receive calls from abroad, providing services to western customers, or, they call clients in western countries to sell them goods and services (outgoing).

Pakistani call centre workers are referred to as Customer Services Representatives (CSRs). They try to adopt either an American or a British accent when they interact with foreigners on the telephone in their daily work.

Most call centres have business dealings with America. Clearly it is the American accent which serves as linguistic capital for call centre workers since it can be sold in the market for a job with higher wages than would ordinarily be available to young people of their age in Pakistan.

The situation is akin to the days of British colonialism when people aspired to ‘received pronunciation’ (RP) — or ‘Oxbridge’ as it was sometimes called in India. They were appropriately called ‘brown sahibs.’ A response of dominated groups everywhere is to accept the norms, values, tastes, cultural and linguistic superiority, etc., of the dominant group voluntarily, according to Italian philosopher and political theorist Antonio Gramsci.

Linguistic ideology makes us believe that certain languages and accents are superior to others. This determines our attitudes and it is in the context of linguistic attitudes that the linguistic policies and practices of call centres should be understood.

First, a number of young people acquire the desired foreign accent of English which they call the ‘neutralisation of accent.’ Within call centres there are advertisements of trainers claiming to conduct ‘accent neutralisation courses’ ranging from a few weeks to three months. In the hall where the calls are received and made there are notices proclaiming an ‘English only’ policy.

Secondly, the employees have to use foreign names and not disclose their location. I noticed that nobody I interviewed thought there was anything wrong about discouraging the speaking of Urdu and other Pakistani languages in the call centres nor did anybody complain about hiding the true names and places of work of the agents.

The language ideology behind such kinds of practices is a subset of that of English in the rest of society. The British-American pronunciation is valued to the exclusion of all other pronunciations of Pakistani English. This alienates call centre employees from other speakers. The fact that it may not be such an important issue for other speakers of English results in greater distance.

However, the call centres are so few that their workers’ thoughts do not affect society as a whole. They cannot impose their linguistic ideology on anyone. They can only look down on other users of Pakistani English in private.

Call centres are generally situated in modern, glass-and-metal glittering buildings with modern furniture and ample lighting. Security is tight and access to the CSRs is controlled by managers and other administrative cadres. Call centres are a replica, or perhaps a shadow, of life in the US. The lights turn the night into day — the day in the US and Britain. There are four clocks on the wall giving the four American time zones. Young people, mostly boys in T-shirts and jeans speak in an American accent which, in some cases, is obviously affected.

Their body language is also like that of Americans. They have ‘mimicked’ it. The whole atmosphere is pseudo-American with people addressing each other with American-sounding pseudonyms and using greetings like ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ and ‘I am good.’ I could not find any resistance to the idea that their identity was being managed and, in fact, they themselves chose to represent an alien identity through pronunciation and pseudonyms.

Like sweatshops the world over the call centres of Pakistan are the new sites for the extension of globalised capitalist market practices and the ideology which underlies them.

They create a virtual reality in which language, accent, names, locations and identities in a hegemonic centre (America) are invested with value which is exchanged for money. However, the process entails greater acquiescence in discourses of western hegemony and alienation from one’s own cultural reality.

The employees accept the philosophy of work, opportunity and business so well that they do not realise that they are being colonised in ways much more drastic and far-reaching than ever before.

Their agency is reduced in the name of efficiency and standardisation and even their time is colonised and reversed. As most of them accept this colonisation, they support global capital and represent themselves as agents of a homogenising and westernising ideology which is privileged by the expansion of the free market all over the world.

Though alienated from their own cultures, the workers of call centres do, nevertheless, form part of a global workforce which lives in perpetual exile having cut itself off from the roots of its identity. The very existence of this kind of labour force marks all things western (American) as being ‘normal’ and, therefore, legitimises capitalism as the natural condition of existence.


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Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Plot construction of Twilight in Delhi

Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi is a well knit and brilliantly constructed novel. It consists of four parts and every part has the chapters which gave additional meaning to the course of events. The plot is constructed in a particular style—in the act of narration. Every character is in descriptive or in evaluating style which gives additional significance and beauty to the plot. Mostly the plot revolves around the family of Mir Nihal representing on symbolical level the Muslim class's present and past life. The Novelist Ahmed All relates a person's tale in this novel that, in the end, looks alienated and apart from the surroundings and all this happens only through his out dated attitude in the present condition.
Ahmed Ali has utilized his events of the story to construct an organic whole in the shape of plot of the novel "Twilight in Delhi". This thing tells us about his expertise in the field of novel-writing or fiction-writing as such. The novel under reference has basically been designed by the writer to give us a rich glimpse of the Indian Muslim society along with its customs, traditions and ways. This purpose has been achieved by the writer by taking a large number of characters from the span of 1911-1919 from the city of Delhi from among the Muslim population. As it is not inside his goal to tell the readers anything about the Hindu society, so he does not include any Hindu character in the novel, so much so that even the bania (basically the money lender of the sub-continent society) of the novel is Saddiq, a Muslim, although mostly Hindus were the banias of the sub-continent.

The plot of Twilight is Delhi "seems purposeful in every way. There are many characters and events only included in the novel to make the novel realistic and to give a true colouring to the Muslim Indian society as such. Nawab Puttan is one of such characters. His character has nothing important to do with the advancement of the story. Still he is very important for the reasons that he is the representation of Nawahi culture and life. For giving complete a social picture of the Indian Muslim Society, Ahmed Ali has told us in detail about Ramazan and the traditions of Ramazan. He tells us a detail about how Eed is celebrated, and including that famous, classical verse used at this occasion by numberless people:

"It is the day of Eid, my dear,
Ah come, let me embrace thee.
It is the custom and besides
There's time and opportunity "

Mir Nihal, in his sixties has a family, a mistress named Babban Jan from whom he gets mental and sexual levels pleasure. He has a son, Asghar, a boy in twenties, who desperately wants to marry a girl, Bilqeece. His marriage takes place after a huge amount of resistance from Mir Nihal's side. In the background of these events, Ahmed All has portrayed a graphic picture of historical moments of violence and tyranny in this novel and also the pathetic condition of Delhi on a big canvass. The marriage of Asghar is caught in a fiasco and the relations weaken day by day and after Bilqeece's death the whole scenario changes. Asghar thinks himelf responsible for her death but Bilqeece's younger sister Zohra again turns Asghar to the beauty of life. Zohra, a young girl, full of charming and alluring beauty, fascinates him to marry her but finally nothing happens according to his desires. In the end we see Mir Nihal as a paralyzed man who has faced many hard blows from fate like, death of Babban Jan, death of his pigeons and the end of his rule—all pathetic. His wife Begum Nihal, who has spent her life honestly and devotedly, is unable to retain happiness in Mir Nihal's life.
In the background, the plot of the novel advances through the story of the freedom struggle of the people of India and of the Indian Muslims. We read about the fall of Delhi and about the fateful time for Jama Masjid, Delhi, as well as for the Muslims of Delhi. We read about the fires burning petrol depots and the royal canopy at Delhi-Darbar before it was held. We read about rallies, procession, agitation, marches and strikes. We read about the non-cooperative movement. So we see the advancement of the struggle for freedom going in the background of the story of the novel. But the thing is so well knit into the texture of the plot that we are ready to take it as an integral part of the main story.

The story, which started from the first section, shows every character's attitude and ordinary view about life. All the subsequent events end in the forth part where we get not the conclusion but the actual condition that if they spend the same life they shall not be able to retain themselves in the changing conditions.
Whatever be the criticism, the plot, on the whole, is compact; there is very little irrelevant or unnecessary. Even the smallest details promote the action, produce the necessary atmosphere and fulfil the purpose of the novel. The concentration on the main theme is well maintained to achieve the desired purpose. All the strings are gathered at the end to give the final touch. Thus the plot construction in Twilight in Delhi, is nothing but remarkable. There can be arguments that the plot has some drawbacks or loose ends but it was never easy to pack a fastly changing culture in limited pages and Ahmed Ali's realistic technique in describing the actual conditions is not only brilliant but also shows his precision in every way.

Plot Construction Of ADAM BEDE

The plot of Adam Bede is much better constructed, more coherent and well-knit, than that of many a contemporary novel. The novel is a compact whole, it is like a well-constructed building from which not a single brick can be taken out without damaging the whole structure. There are four different stories in the novel (a) Adam-Hetty love story (b) Arthur-Hetty Sorrel love-story (c) Adam-Dinah love-story, and (d) The mutual relations of -Arthur and Adam. Adam Bede is plotted to hold in balance two interrelated stories by means of ironies duplications and contrasts. The first story relates to its titular hero's search for independence and a partner for life, while the second is concerned with his beloved Hetty Sorrel's seduction by his friend Arthur Donnithorne. The first story ends in its saddened hero's marriage with the Methodist woman-preacher Dinah Morris, while the second leads to Hetty's transportation for the murder of her child through Arthur and Arthur's voluntary exile from Hayslope.

The novels of George Eliot are "organic wholes" inasmuch as the story, the character and the social environment are well-integrated. The social environment forms the outer circle which envelopes the inner circle.In Adam Bede the life of Hayslope envelops the tragedy. We come to know all grades of its society, artisans, labourers, farmers, rector, schoolmaster, innkeeper and Squire. It is an active community in which most men or women have work to do and their character is affected by that work.

There is also thematic unity. The story grows like a plant out of the idea or theme that, failure to resist temptation is a moral weakness, and any yielding to temptation is sure to be followed by divine punishment and consequent suffering. This theme is inter-linked with the theme of moral enlightenment, self-education and regeneration. The moment of dis¬enchantment, when- all illusions and self-deceptions are shattered, comes to all alike. This is illustrated by the stories of Arthur, Hetty and Adam. Such are the themes out of which the story evolves step by step, logically and inexorably, and the characters and their stories are seen but to be the exposition or illustration of these themes and ideas.

"The central tragedy is intimately connected with this background. The full effect of Arthur's yielding to the sensual appeal of Hetty's childlike prettiness and of all that ensues depends upon the relations of both characters to their world. The pride and well-grounded self-respect of the Poysers, established in the reader's mind by the vivid pictures of their surroundings, their working day, their home life, their Sunday observance, and the neighbours' opinion of them, all play their part in causing the tragedy and in heightening the bitterness of its effect. "Arthur's upbringing, his relations with his grandfather, the Squire, his high conception of the love and esteem he will earn from all his dependants when he inherits the land, determine the price he must pay for his weakness. There is no part of what we have learnt of the outer circle that does not affect our sense of the inner. In its setting this commonplace story becomes widely significant. The simple, well-contrived pattern conveys the sense of a social structure enclosing four human beings as completely as the soil encloses the roots of a growing plant and, in doing so; it illustrates one aspect of the author's vision of life."

It may also be mentioned that the novelist has succeeded in capturing the slow, leisurely pace of rural life, as it was lived in, isolated communities like that of Hayslope, before the coming of the railways. Dorothy V. Ghent says in this connection, "the pace of Adam Bede is set to Mrs. Poyser's clock, to all that, slow toil and activity that have made daylight and living valuable. Slower, organically, invisibly slow at the months of Hetty's pregnancy; the Poyser's clock, the clock at the Chase, do not keep this time with their eights and nines and half past nines. This other deep, hidden animal time drags the whole pace down to that of poor Hetty's journey in despair, a blind automatism of animal night where the ticking of the human clock cannot be heard."

Even the best of us have their faults and weaknesses and so has Adam Bede, despite its being one of the best constructed novels of the age. Its ending particularly has come in for a good deal of criticism. It has been pointed out that the marriage of Adam and Dinah is not properly motivated, and so it seems unnatural and forced, a mere yielding to contemporary conventions that the hero and heroine of the novel must be happily united at the end. In this connection Lettice Cooper's comments are interesting and worth quoting at some length: "The weakness of the book, besides the oppressive virtue of Adam and Dinah is, as with many Victorian novels, the sacrifice of probability to plot, and the tidiness of the ending. George Eliot was moving towards a new kind of novel in which representation of life was to be more important than the resolution of a plot, but she was still partly bound by the old convention: Hetty's pardon, so dramatically and improbably brought to the place of execution by Arthur Donnithorne, is an artificial device to spare the reader. In the relationship between Hetty and Arthur and in all that grows out of it, there is a sense of destiny which is falsified by this resolution. Again while Adam's love for Hetty is utterly convincing, and the thing that brings him most to life as a human being, his final marriage to Dinah has none of that inevitability, but seems like a mechanical device to round off the story."

But these are flaws in a rich tapestry of rural life of the time, the farm, the cottage, the workshop, the Rectory, the great house. It is a picture of a society based on the land, a society still stable, a hierarchy in which each order has its own rights. The novel has its faults, but they are minor faults and they in no way detract from the novelist's skill in construction. It should be judged in the context of the age in which it was written and not by modern standards.

Plot Construction Of ADAM BEDE

The plot of Adam Bede is much better constructed, more coherent and well-knit, than that of many a contemporary novel. The novel is a compact whole, it is like a well-constructed building from which not a single brick can be taken out without damaging the whole structure. There are four different stories in the novel (a) Adam-Hetty love story (b) Arthur-Hetty Sorrel love-story (c) Adam-Dinah love-story, and (d) The mutual relations of -Arthur and Adam. Adam Bede is plotted to hold in balance two interrelated stories by means of ironies duplications and contrasts. The first story relates to its titular hero's search for independence and a partner for life, while the second is concerned with his beloved Hetty Sorrel's seduction by his friend Arthur Donnithorne. The first story ends in its saddened hero's marriage with the Methodist woman-preacher Dinah Morris, while the second leads to Hetty's transportation for the murder of her child through Arthur and Arthur's voluntary exile from Hayslope.

The novels of George Eliot are "organic wholes" inasmuch as the story, the character and the social environment are well-integrated. The social environment forms the outer circle which envelopes the inner circle.In Adam Bede the life of Hayslope envelops the tragedy. We come to know all grades of its society, artisans, labourers, farmers, rector, schoolmaster, innkeeper and Squire. It is an active community in which most men or women have work to do and their character is affected by that work.

There is also thematic unity. The story grows like a plant out of the idea or theme that, failure to resist temptation is a moral weakness, and any yielding to temptation is sure to be followed by divine punishment and consequent suffering. This theme is inter-linked with the theme of moral enlightenment, self-education and regeneration. The moment of dis¬enchantment, when- all illusions and self-deceptions are shattered, comes to all alike. This is illustrated by the stories of Arthur, Hetty and Adam. Such are the themes out of which the story evolves step by step, logically and inexorably, and the characters and their stories are seen but to be the exposition or illustration of these themes and ideas.

"The central tragedy is intimately connected with this background. The full effect of Arthur's yielding to the sensual appeal of Hetty's childlike prettiness and of all that ensues depends upon the relations of both characters to their world. The pride and well-grounded self-respect of the Poysers, established in the reader's mind by the vivid pictures of their surroundings, their working day, their home life, their Sunday observance, and the neighbours' opinion of them, all play their part in causing the tragedy and in heightening the bitterness of its effect. "Arthur's upbringing, his relations with his grandfather, the Squire, his high conception of the love and esteem he will earn from all his dependants when he inherits the land, determine the price he must pay for his weakness. There is no part of what we have learnt of the outer circle that does not affect our sense of the inner. In its setting this commonplace story becomes widely significant. The simple, well-contrived pattern conveys the sense of a social structure enclosing four human beings as completely as the soil encloses the roots of a growing plant and, in doing so; it illustrates one aspect of the author's vision of life."

It may also be mentioned that the novelist has succeeded in capturing the slow, leisurely pace of rural life, as it was lived in, isolated communities like that of Hayslope, before the coming of the railways. Dorothy V. Ghent says in this connection, "the pace of Adam Bede is set to Mrs. Poyser's clock, to all that, slow toil and activity that have made daylight and living valuable. Slower, organically, invisibly slow at the months of Hetty's pregnancy; the Poyser's clock, the clock at the Chase, do not keep this time with their eights and nines and half past nines. This other deep, hidden animal time drags the whole pace down to that of poor Hetty's journey in despair, a blind automatism of animal night where the ticking of the human clock cannot be heard."

Even the best of us have their faults and weaknesses and so has Adam Bede, despite its being one of the best constructed novels of the age. Its ending particularly has come in for a good deal of criticism. It has been pointed out that the marriage of Adam and Dinah is not properly motivated, and so it seems unnatural and forced, a mere yielding to contemporary conventions that the hero and heroine of the novel must be happily united at the end. In this connection Lettice Cooper's comments are interesting and worth quoting at some length: "The weakness of the book, besides the oppressive virtue of Adam and Dinah is, as with many Victorian novels, the sacrifice of probability to plot, and the tidiness of the ending. George Eliot was moving towards a new kind of novel in which representation of life was to be more important than the resolution of a plot, but she was still partly bound by the old convention: Hetty's pardon, so dramatically and improbably brought to the place of execution by Arthur Donnithorne, is an artificial device to spare the reader. In the relationship between Hetty and Arthur and in all that grows out of it, there is a sense of destiny which is falsified by this resolution. Again while Adam's love for Hetty is utterly convincing, and the thing that brings him most to life as a human being, his final marriage to Dinah has none of that inevitability, but seems like a mechanical device to round off the story."

But these are flaws in a rich tapestry of rural life of the time, the farm, the cottage, the workshop, the Rectory, the great house. It is a picture of a society based on the land, a society still stable, a hierarchy in which each order has its own rights. The novel has its faults, but they are minor faults and they in no way detract from the novelist's skill in construction. It should be judged in the context of the age in which it was written and not by modern standards.

Art of Characterization in "Twilight in Delhi"

In "Twilight in Delhi" Ahmed All has used descriptive method to show the characters in the development of novel's plot. Every character is close to the actual condition of Delhi. Ali's realistic mode of expression in describing the relation of plot and character is remarkable. The opening section of the novel and its first chapter seems as a prologue to city's actual condition and its inhabitants. When we go through the novel, we find that the writer has used the art of characterization as a nice tool to realize his end. He has a plot and for the completion of the plot the characters come at the stage at a particular time and then leave the stage. Still there is one central character that is most of the time there in one or the other manner. This is the main male character of Mir Nihal who plays the pivotal role in the book novel. All the events have a direct or indirect bearing at his character: all the characters are related to his character in one or the other way. So the spot light remains most of the time on Mir Nihal.
Mir Nihal's character has been portrayed with utmost precision and accuracy. He is a man who has witnessed the last event/episode of the surrender of Delhi on 14th September, 1857, the fateful day, with his own eyes. He is a patriot in the core of his heart. He feels pain and torture at Hindustan's slavery but he believes in direct use of sword (i.e., weapons) to liberate his country whereas people are resorting to some other "useless" ways and means, like rallies, marches, strike and non-cooperative movement.
Mir Nihal's character is a representative of the older generation who has seen the country going into the clutches of slavery with his own eyes. So he hates the rulers. On the other end is Asghar, his younger son, who likes the English fashion and ways. Although, he also represents Indian Muslim culture in his own way but he belongs to the younger generation and, as such, differs with Mir Nihal. Both of them are having their own singing and dancing girls: Mir Nihal has Babban Jan and Mir Asghar has Mushtari Bai but the former "keeps" Babban Jan till her death whereas the latter leaves Mushtari Bai in the lurch and starts loving Bilqeece so intensively that he leaves no stone unturned for her achievement as a wife. It is another story that he, even then, does not keep himself limited and goes out on his romantic adventures or errands to find out new women for him.
The novel is a collective novel. The advantage of this form is that the collective life of a whole society can be presented through the ideas and actions of a group against the background of a revolutionary movement or war, as is generally the case in such works. But to present a social whole in the mirror of everyday life where no extraordinary or exciting events take place, and yet produce a novel that is successful from the points of view of art and technique is most difficult indeed. But Ahmed Ali has done it. The author has taken one family and shown what its members experience in their day to day life. All these are simple, insignificant things, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, festivals and fairs, marriage, birth, death, naive love affairs, quarrels and arguments. The arrangement and selection of these incidents in the novel have been given a fundamental and universal significance.
Ahmad Ali is depicting the story of the dying Indian Muslim society in his novel, so he picks and chooses from the society only such characters that can be helpful to him in the context. These characters may be as overwhelming as Mir Nihal and Asghar and these may be as summarized as Kabiruddin, the elder brother of Asghar, and Habibuddin. We hardly see Kabiruddin in any scene of the novel. Similar is the case with Ashfaq, the nephew of Begam Jamal, who has married with the eldest daughter of Begam and Mirza Shahbaz Beg. These are the characters that perform their duty behind the scenes. Even Ahmad Wazir, the family barber of Mir Nihal, has to perform his duty at two places in the novel. Dilchain and Ghafoor do the duties of servants in zanana and mardana of Mir Nihal's house. Once Dilchain wears men's clothes (at the age of near about 60) and dances in a lewd manner on the occasion of the marriage of Asghar. But all this is done to represent the dying Indian Muslim culture.
As the society depicted in the novel is basically a male-oriented society, so we see that generally males are taking lead in all the matters of importance and generally females are lagging behind or following them. Strangely enough, if we look deeply into the matter, there are two trees growing in the middle of the courtyard of Mir Nihal's house. One is the date-palm tree. It is tall and manly. The other is the henna tree. It is small and womanly. And, as such, the "male" date palm tree has been talked about at more times and in more manners (although we never see any dates being plucked from the tree!) than the "female" henna tree has been talked about (although henna leaves are practically plucked from the tree and applied for practical utilization!).
Ahmed All also shows a complete picture of female class. Female characters like Begum Nihal, Dilchain, Babban Jan, Begum Shahbaz, Bilqeece, and Zohra—all of them are the part and parcel of this man-made community. They have their own ways of living which the outside world is unable to comprehend and they themselves are not able to understand their frustrated life. It seems that Ali has tried his level best to maintain a connection between the characters and the historical events. The events of the 14 September 1857 which are described in the Twilight of Delhi, have close relation with them. There are also many historical events which are portrayed in this novel like Mir Nihal and Begam Nihal's remembering about the pathetic conditions of British tyranny.
So if we look at Ali's art of characterization on large canvas we can say, he has used direct as well as indirect way of describing the characters. Every character, from its appearance to his way of life, is remarkably close to reality. we see that different characters of the novel Twilight in Delhi (by Ahmed Ali) advance the plot of the novel in their own peculiar manner So it can be said that Ahmed Ali has superbly portrayed the condition of Delhi and her inhabitants and his art of characterization shows his sagacity and brilliance of thought.

ARISTOTLE’S VIEWS ON TRAGIC PLOT

In the poetics, Aristotle devotes considerable attention to an examination of the nature, structure and constituent elements of the ideal tragic plot. Tragedy is the representation of action: and action consists of incidents and events. Plot is the arrangement or organization of these incidents and events, and without it there is no coherence and hence no tragic effect. We notice a strong predilection towards cause and effect in Aristotle, from which arises this insistence on continuity, plausibility and visible links between various parts of the story. A fantastic, piecemeal jumble of incidents would be unlikely to arouse any pity-fear feeling, or in fact, any feeling other than confusion and irritation. Modern drama has sometimes ignored this rule deliberately, experimenting with the so-called ‘philosophies’ of confusion or absurdity, but the experiments have not usually succeeded in finding consistent votaries. Of course, there is a general movement away from plot towards character in the evolution of western drama, and ‘character’ is plot has sometimes been asserted about the productions of dramatists like Ibsen. Since then, with the introduction of closed halls, good lighting and acoustics, the possibilities in this direction have improved immensely.
Even so, it is probable that Aristotle’s observation still holds true character without plot would produce no drama. The plot is a cause and effect succession, and clearly it has to be a limited one, otherwise the succession could continue to infinity in either direction. In presenting the life history of some person, the dramatist is forced to confine his writings to a selected portion of that person’s life. Aristotle’s rule for making such a selection is that the action should have a beginning, a middle and an end; the beginning is that which is not obviously linked with some proceeding episode, the ending is that which is not linked with some preceding episode, the ending is that which is not linked with anything coming after it, and the middle is that which is linked with both the beginning and the end.
This is necessitated by the limitations imposed by the capacity of the audience to comprehend and sit comfortably through a dramatic performance. If the play is too long, the audience will tend to forget the beginning and will not be able to conceive of it as a whole. If it is too short, it will have little impact and significance.
The plot should be as significant as time and audience-appreciation will allow. The more massive the plot, the more telling will be its effect, and the greater the achievement of tragic magnitude. For the same reason, the plot should be complex rather than simple, allowing for richness and diversity of action within the main framework.
The Unities:
The plot should have unity. This has been a point of debate among critics, but it is now generally agreed that the only kind of unity on which Aristotle insists is that of action, which once again really means that the plot should have recognizable, plausible links leading logically from the beginning, through the middle, to the end. He has mentioned elsewhere that it would be better if the action of the play could be limited to the movement of the sun, which could be interpreted either as twelve hours or as twenty-four, but this statement, thrown off casually as a desirable value, should never have become an authority for the ‘rule’ of the unity of time, as it did later. The third unity that of place, can muster little support in Aristotle’s text, but it is implicit in the forgoing observations. Obviously, unity of place will make achievement of unity of action easier.
To have the conduct hopping from one part of the world to the other would break up the continuity as well as strain the credibility of the audience. Yet, against this, it is fair to state that both in matters of time and place, the audience is capable of stretching a point without effort. No sense of incongruity is felt when the whole life-time of a man is compressed into a performance three hours long or if part of the action takes place in Islamabad and the other in Lahore, London or anywhere.

Peripety and Discovery:

Two other elements are introduced as desirable additions to the plot. One is peripety or the ironic twist: the hero should be shown as expecting one thing and in fact gaining something else. The example given is that of Oedipus, who, in desiring to hear the truth about his antecedents from Tiresius, something which he probably thought would help him to get peace of mind, brings about the tragedy which engulfs his whole family. The other is discovery, in which the identity of a person, hitherto disguised or hidden, is revealed to the other characters. Both peripety and discovery are within the action of the play, that is, the characters that are expected not to have the knowledge which the audience has. The ironic twist in Oedipus is no ironic twist for the audience, which knows fully well what will happen. Likewise, unless the tragedist wishes to introduce an element of mystery into his play, a disguised character is only disguised for the other characters in the play, not for the playgoers. There is a special kind of anticipatory excitement in waiting for the reaction of man on the stage to something which is new for him but not for us. All this helps to build up the emotions in the audience so that by the time the unraveling of the play takes place the mixed bag of emotions contribute one to the other to cause the feelings of pity and fear to boil over and wash away.

The denouement:

While devising their plots, the poets should take great care to make their denouements or ‘resolutions’ effective and successful. Unraveling of the plot should be done, naturally and logically, and not by the use of arbitrary devices, like chance, supernatural intervention, etc. “Gods should intervene only where it became necessary to explain the past, or announce future events external to the action.” Aristotle does not regard Poetic Justice as essential for Tragedy. According to him it is more in keeping with the spirit of comedy. Poetic Justice implies that rewards and punishments are meted out according to the deserts of the dramatic personages, while the essence of tragedy is that suffering is far in excess of the fault or error of the hero.

Friday, January 1, 2010

EFFECT OF GLOBALIOZATION ON POVERTY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: AN INSIGHT FROM FOUR IMPORTANT TRANSMISSON MECHANISMS

MUHMMAD ASIM

Abstract. This review analyses four transmission mechanisms through which globalization impacts poverty alleviation. Specifically it accesses the impact of globalization on poverty via trade openness, technology transfers, institutional and ecological patterns and global shocks. The literature reviewed challenges the commonly heard criticisms for and against globalization by investigating relatively unexplored areas within these mechanisms. The highlights of the findings are as follows: Trade openness is found to create both gainers and losers among the poor. Higher international technological transfers can reduce poverty but risk loosing ecological resilience which can adversely affect the agricultural sector and the poor. There is no conclusive evidence of significant risk to poor from global shocks relative to local shocks. These findings point to the need of combining globalization experience with redistributive policies, improvements in human capital and institutional adjustments if the experience is to be more pro-poor.





1. INTRODUCTION
Globalization has generated a global debate over its usefulness especially its impact on developing countries and the poverty within these countries. The debate is valuable not because it seeks to identify whether globalization is beneficial or harmful to poverty alleviation but because it identifies several ways in which globalization impacts the bottom quintile of world’s population. The insights thus gained can serve as a powerful tool to identify policies that can make the globalization experience and the gains there from more pro-poor.
The aim of this review is to identify some of the channels through which globalization impacts poverty, both favorably and adversely. Specifically, the next section reviews the works of Ravallion (2006), Aggarwal (2006), Graff et al. (2006) and Ligon (2006). They focus on the impact of globalization on poverty via the trade openness, openness-technology-institutions-ecology, technology transfers and vulnerability channels. Section three highlights the contributions of the papers and offers a critical appraisal. Section four concludes.
2. OVERVIEW OF THE PAPERS
2.1 Ravallion (2006)-Trade Openness Channel
Ravallion (2006) examines the relationship between trade openness and poverty through both macro and micro empirical lenses. His first macro lens employs aggregate cross-country regressions and argues that they fail to establish any causal impact of trade volume on poverty mainly because of omitted variable biases. His second macro lens undertake a time series analysis of China which was chosen because it experienced both a massive expansion in trade volume and a dramatic fall in poverty during the early 1980s. Ravallion (2006) again argues that the evidence does not suggest that trade reform has been an important factor in reducing poverty as the relationship is not robust to additional controls and suffers from problems like endogeniety of trade volume in the regression. Rather, Ravallion points out to a range of non-trade factors that appear to have played a more important role in explaining China’s success against absolute poverty. For instance, he shows that the bulk of the poverty reduction in China occurred during the phase of agricultural de-collectivization and increases in food prices procurement rather than in subsequent trade-opening phase.
However, Ravallion (2006) finds that under a set of specific conditions, trade opening could clearly be very effective in alleviating poverty. This motivated the micro lens analysis. Specifically, Ravallion (2006) used a Computable General Equilibrium Model to investigate the impact on households of WTO accession in China and cereal de-protection in Morocco. The micro studies indicate a considerable heterogeneity in the welfare impacts of trade openness, with both gainers and losers among the poor. For both countries, rural families, especially those engaged in agriculture and having relatively few workers and with weak economic links to the outside economy through migration, tend to loose; urban households tend to gain. Ravallion concludes that these covariates of the individual gains can be exploited in designing compensatory policies and that the trade reforms should be accompanied with well-designed social protection policies.
2.2 Aggarwal (2006) - Openness-Technology-Institutions Channel for Ecosystems
Aggarwal (2006) examines the interactive effects of openness, technology transfers and institutions on the resilience of the local ecosystems, on which the poor depend for their livelihood. She argues that trade liberalization policies in developing countries often leads to specialization in the production of a narrow range of natural resource based activities. The resulting loss of bio-diversity reduces the number of pathways through which stress in the environment can be absorbed, thus reducing the resilience of the ecosystem Aggarwal (2006). Also, international transferS of technology lead to a shift towards more modern resource management practices that have very short term time horizons (Aggarwal, 2006); firms and even farmers expect quick results and pay-offs. Aggarwal argues that the short term production goals cause the institutions to be more rigid and less responsive to environmental feedbacks unlike their traditional orientation. These changes such as , mono-cropping , carried out over vast tracts of land, also lead to a loss of resilience by reducing functional diversity and increasing spatial uniformity in grassland ecosystems. The loss of resilience, in turn, makes the primary producers, especially the poor, more vulnerable to price volatility and shocks such as draughts. The author concludes by suggesting that the governance structure of the institutions should be re-designed such that they overlap the scale of ecosystems that often transcend political boundaries. This could potentially reduce the negative effects of globalization on the environment and the local poor.
2.3 Graff et al. (2006) - Technology Channel
Graff et al. (2006) focus on the technology channel. While Aggarwal (2006) focused on the harmful effects of technology transfers, Graff et al. (2006) argue that North-South biotechnology transfers can dramatically raise food productivity and rural incomes in developing countries. Furthermore, they point out that the policies that aim to facilitate the transfers, however, need to adapt to the fact that fruits of technology diffusion depends on the absorption capacities of the developing countries, particularly their institutional and financial capacities, as well as on the level of human development. Given an appropriate institutional setting, the acquired biotechnology can reduce poverty by raising agricultural productivity for poor farmers and by reducing the food prices for landless farm workers and the urban poor. The authors stress the need to establish institutions with local capacity for technology innovation and adaptation and an ability to reduce transaction costs of technology diffusion and provide standardization, transparency and access to information for property rights. Specifically, the authors describe International Property Rights Clearing House (IRPCH), a new kind of institution intended to be potentially capable of overcoming the lack of access to intellectual property rights.
2.4 Ligon (2006) - Vulnerability Channel
Ligon (2006) focuses on vulnerability channel whereby globalization can increase uncertainty from variation in income and expenditure caused by global shocks. The authors expect that risk averse poor households are particularly likely to suffer from greater volatility in their income streams from international shocks. They undertake a cross-country panel analysis to distinguish the impact of global shocks, country-specific shocks and globalization shocks on poor quintile consumption growth. It points out that the global and globalization shocks are of minor importance relative to country-specific shocks. The authors interpret this evidence with a caveat due to incompleteness of data.
3. ANALYSIS
The papers in this review challenge the widely heard generalizations from both sides of the globalization debate. More importantly, they identify different transmission channels through which globalization impacts poverty and explain relatively unexplored areas within these channels. From the insights thus gained, they offer practical policy prescriptions for developing countries to orient their globalization experience towards poverty reduction.
Ravallion’s (2006) work can, firstly, be seen as a powerful critique of macro-econometric framework employed to research the impact of globalization on poverty reduction. He points out various biases in such an analysis including the endogeniety problem and omitted variable biases. Secondly, his micro lens analysis of China and Morocco that identify gainers and losers among the poor due to globalization reveal important insights, especially for designing compensatory policies. Particularly, his finding from China that at early stages of development, agriculture sector has a far greater impact on poverty reduction than the secondary and tertiary sectors is a valuable lesson (Thorbecke & Nissanke, 2006). Although, his findings are true for the countries he has chosen, they may not hold for other developing countries. He, nevertheless, contributes a simulation technique for analysis that can be readily applied to other countries as well.
Aggarwal’s (2006) analysis is novel to the globalization debate. She links globalization to the environment through a focus on renewable resources while most of the earlier research had focused on industrial pollutants (Aggarwal, 2006). Within this she has attempted to analyze the interaction between ecological systems and human systems while the earlier research focused on a single resource in isolation (Aggarwal, 2006). The linkages she has identified, however, need to be developed more completely and tested empirically. The outcomes cautions the policy makers that openness and technological spillovers in the agriculture sector may reduce the resilience of the ecosystems and thus adversely affect the poor, hence pointing to a need to establish ecosystem-protecting institutions.
While Aggarwal (2006) stressed on the harmful aspects of international technological spillovers on rural poverty, Graff et al. (2006) insists on speeding up biotechnological spillovers to reduce poverty. Unlike Aggarwal (2006) she argues that the evidence on the impact of biotechnology on reducing biodiversity is mixed and depends on the instruments of intellectual property rights. Her major contribution is that she has identified ways to raise technology transfers. Her idea of IRPCH to raise the transfers and reduce the harmful effects on the environment is compelling but it is a long term agenda while the issues raised by Aggarwal need more immediate attention.
Lastly, Legion identified yet another channel through which globalization could impact on the poor, that is, making them more vulnerable to external shocks. They point that although global shocks are relatively unimportant relative to domestic shocks, the results must be taken with caution due to incomplete data. They, nevertheless, point to an important channel and draft a way of analyzing its impact which can be utilized once better data is available over time.
4. CONCLUSION
Overall, the analysis in this review analyses four channels through which globalization impacts poverty. Based on the relevant literature, it points to the inadequacy of macro analysis of the impact of trade openness on poverty and finds that globalization creates both gainers and losers among the poor, thus stressing the need for appropriate redistribution policies. It also points out that while openness and international technology spillovers to the agriculture sector can reduce poverty, there is a need for institutional set up that ensures both more technology transfers and that the transfers do not harm the environment, particularly the resilience of the ecosystem that is tied to rural poverty. Finally, it mentions that there is no conclusive evidence on weather globalization raises the vulnerability of poor to world-wide shocks.
References
Agarwal, Rimjhim M. (2006). Globalization, Local Ecosystems, and the Rural Poor. World Development. 34(8), 1405 – 1418.
Graff, G., Roland-Holst and D. Zilberman (2006).Agricultural biotechnology and poverty reduction in low-income countries. World Development, 34(8), 1430 – 1445.
Ligon, E. (2006). Poverty and the welfare costs of risk associated with globalization
World Development, 34(8), 1446 – 1457.
Thorbecke, E., and M. Nissanke (2006). Introduction: The Impact of Globalization on the World’s Poor. World Development. 34(8), 1333 – 1337.
Ravallion, M. (2006). Looking Beyond Averages in the Trade and Poverty Debate. World Development. 34(8), 1374-1392.