From kitchen to workplace

Over the last few days I have been involved in a hunt for makers of decorative candles. I called one of the local directory services for help and was given a list of half a dozen just in my neighbourhood. I started calling them one by one. The first lady who I shall call Mrs. Kapoor was having an argument with her husband when I telephoned. Apologising profusely and with a couple of bitter references to ‘men and their fussy ways’ she invited me over.

Mrs. K lived in a large seaside flat. She had just finished serving her teenage son lunch and was sitting with a visitor when I walked in. I was ushered to a corner where on a chipped coffee table were displayed a range of dusty wax items. As she showed off each one, the plump middle-aged woman with sindoor spilling onto her forehead informed me that she also conducted classes for a host of activities: cooking, food decoration etc. etc.

Woman number two — they all appeared to be women — apologised for her inattention the first time I called. She had been talking to a foreign buyer on the other line, she explained, who had a substantial order — she being the only one or so she claimed with a certain special mould in all of Asia. When I told her what I was looking for she instantly agreed to supply it. Wax umbrellas? Hearts? she asked coming up with the most inappropriate suggestions. “Anything you want dear.”

Option number three was young and unassuming and turned out to be the most promising. As her mother-in-law brought me water and her three-year-old son raced around the spacious drawing room we discus-sed business and I placed my order. All three women, whether they are aware of it or not, are part of a global trend that has been evident for a decade now of women becoming entrepreneurs. The trend has been widespread. In places as diverse as Japan, Australia, Latin America and Portugal women entrepreneurs are on the rise. In India, the New Delhi-based Federation of Indian Women Entrepreneurs has 20,000 members. Statistical data broken down by gender is not easily available, yet research suggests that in economies undergoing structural change women are countering unemployment by turning entrepreneurial albeit from very low levels.

John Naisbitt, author of the well-known Megatrends series and Patricia Aburdene in a study of corporate change claimed that “significant change occurs when there is a confluence of changing values and economic necessity.”

Both factors have co-existed for a while now in India and have been responsible for the rising numbers of women going out to work. The phenomenon of rising female entrepreneurship particularly on a small scale however has a certain specificity with regard to women. Unequal occupational opportunities mean, for instance, that women develop different skills from men and create ventures that suit those skills. Given social expectations of women with regard to responsibility towards the family and low mobility, women find entrepreneurship a way of balancing work and home.

In time these differences will probably decrease. At the seventh global conference on women and entrepreneurship last year the Karnataka-based association AWAKE put out case studies that showed women storming traditionally male areas of operation by turning to sculpting, cycle repair and manufacturing products such as jute bags and television antennas. The point I am making however has not so much to do with feminism or with economic necessity but a certain attitude that is becoming more and more visible in urban India.

Female entrepreneurship is not a new phenomenon. The garment export business in particular attracted scores of women. But the trend has burgeoned in recent times. Anyone who surfed the many women’s portals that started up during the dotcom boom, for instance, would have seen much attention devoted to hobbies with tips on turning them into businesses, listings of flexitime jobs and advice on running a home enterprise. Women even in small towns are flooding professional courses of various kinds. A girl I know who leaves a one-year-old baby and takes two buses and a train to come to work claims she would not stay at home even if could afford to because she would just get ‘bored’. All these are indicators of a shifting mindset that equates self-fulfillment with work that is different from the traditional responsibilities of childbearing and running a home.

The shift is significant because it carries the potential of unleashing the energies of a segment of the population that despite its access to education and social privileges has been largely dormant thanks to traditional expectations. I am referring of course to the middle class housewife. Like Mrs. K she may still be confused, lack savvy and let her domestic life seep uncontrollably into her business. But what she does appear to have in abundance is energy that is just waiting to be tapped.

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India remains firmly on the list of 90 countries that still retain capital punishment

It was to be expected that the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the man guilty of the Oklahoma city bombing which killed 168 people in 1995, would spark off a familiar bout of soul searching over capital punishment in the US. Worldwide though opposition has been growing to this controversial form of justice. Since World War II limitations placed on the use of the death penalty have been increasing steadily. Amnesty International estimates that an average of three countries have been joining the ranks of the abolitionists every year just over the last decade. Seventy five countries, including Australia, Cambodia, Canada, France, Germany, East Timor, Greece, Mauritius, Nepal, South Africa and the UK, have abolished the death penalty altogether. Fourteen countries (Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Mexico, etc) apply it only for very extraordinary crimes (crimes under military law or exceptional cases) and twenty are abolitionist in practice: Bhutan, Brunei, Gambia, Maldives, Sri Lanka and others.

In December 2000 opponents of the death penalty presented the United Nations with a petition signed by 3.2 million signatories from 146 countries, including the Dalai Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury and writer Umberto Eco. Last year Italy highlighted its opposition to the practice by flooding the Colosseum with light for 48 hours every time a death penalty was suspended or commuted or a country banned capital punishment. Even in countries where capital punishment is provided for, public support for it has been decreasing. In Taiwan support is reportedly down from over 70 per cent a few years ago. Vietnam’s most prominent Buddhist dissident called on it to ‘‘follow the example of civilised nations and abolish capital punishment altogether’’. And even in the US, the most prominent votary of the ‘‘eye for an eye’’ principle, the size of public support appears to be shrinking (65 per cent from 80 per cent in 1994).

India remains firmly on the list of about 90 countries that still retain capital punishment, a list that includes nations like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Thailand. For an issue that has been the subject of so much rethinking all over the globe — from the introduction of more humane methods of execution to privacy to total abolition — there has been surprisingly little public debate here in recent times. Last July a national campaign against the death penalty was launched by a conglomeration of jurists and human rights campaigners, headed by
former Supreme Court Justice Krishna Iyer, who met in New Delhi and called for a moratorium on the death penalty for ten years followed by abolition. Would there be popular support for the move? In a recent television discussion, when a journalist in the audience posed the question of a ban on capital punishment in India, following the debate over Timothy McVeigh, all three politicians from separate parties on the panel vigorously opposed a ban, maintaining that the death penalty was necessary; 70 per cent of the audience agreed with them.

The arguments put forward were the same ones that have been quoted for years by supporters of the death penalty: deterrence and retribution. Both are highly emotive issues. The first appears to be based on perception rather than fact: there is little evidence in the public arena to show that capital punishment has actually acted as a deterrent or to prove that its abolition would give an impetus to crime.

The second is a more subjective matter. Justice to the victim or at least to the victim’s near and dear ones is at the core of it. In the McVeigh case there was a man who having lost his daughter, a human rights activist in the Oklahoma bombing, campaigned against McVeigh’s execution and helped other relatives who were similarly seeking to come to terms with their loss. There were others, however, who made it a point to attend the execution and expressed feelings of calm and vindication following the event. Whether retribution should be the motive of a legal proceeding is of course a moot point. As a letter writer said in the New York Times: ‘‘All we have achieved through Mr. McVeigh’s execution is the fulfillment of his desire. Killing is wrong, whether by explosives or by lethal injection.’’

But perhaps the most powerful arguments against capital punishment are to be found in literature, in recent books on the subject. Bestselling author John Grisham’s The Chamber is a compelling and disturbing narration of an aging convict’s agonising wait for the gas chamber. And in Shashi Warrier’s Hangman’s Journal, the words of the hangman who has killed more than a hundred convicts for the state offer thought for reflection to a society committed to legal execution: ‘‘Killing a man is like closing a door for ever, and when you do it you lose a part of yourself for ever.’’

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