Hinduism should embrace capitalism!

Unlike other religions, Hinduism includes not only social and moral principles, but also economic guidelines. The economic structure is not defined in other religions and made it easy for the people in other countries to embrace democracy and capitalism. The caste system , which is one of the roots of the religion, inhibits change in economic system. In a free economy, division of labor does not make sense. It's a new world where country is made of small and large corporations. It's not anymore combinations of landlords, shopkeepers and untouchables.

Goverment needs to stop officially associating people to their castes and stop providing incentives to people based on their caste. At the same time, families with low income need to given enough incentives so that they can handle higher costs of food, clothing, education and basic medical services. These incentives should be based on poverty level of a person rather than the caste into which he is born.

As everyone is aware, this proposal will have huge political implications in India. Governments which propose such a kind of system will cease to exist the next day.

First step should be to reduce incentives for people who rely on current reservation system. There should be new incentives for low-income families independent of which caste they are born into. These incentives should far exceed the incentives given today for lower caste people. People can only choose one incentive or the other. This will one day lead to a situation where caste based incentives do not matter at all.

Private companies which are extremely scary of government regulating reservations in private sector should finance such a system.

Why is it good to be self-centered?

I realized a new fact of life while reading the famous book "Seven habits of highly effective people" yesterday. One of the chapters talks about different centers people have at different times in their lives.

The book talks about "money-centeredness", "work-centeredness", "power-centeredness", "family-centeredness", "spouse-centeredness", "self-centeredness" and "pleasure-centeredness". It also has a table with resemblances of people with these charecteristics. The most noteworthy point is that people with any particular centeredness get that aspect of life wrong!!!! Weird, right!!!

People with family centeredness tend to judge their kids and spouse very often. These people tend to like their family members conditionally and become emotionally dependent on them.

The problem is worse for people with spouse centeredness. When a person is dependent on the person with whom he/she is in conflict, both need and conflict are compounded. This leads to fights, withdrawal, aggressiveness and resentment.

People with work-centeredness receive all of their wisdom and power from their work, rendering them ineffective in other areas of life.

Pleasure-centered people tend to get bored with fun after certain point, interpreting all of life in terms of pleasure it provides.

One of the worst is friend/enemy centeredness. People put their enemies at center of their life and measure their enemies' wealth, character and other material possessions. They unknowingly let their enemies control their mind.

Self-centeredness is where people put themselves ahead of everything else in their day-to-day actions and decisions. They believe in a set of principles (right or wrong) around which they guide their complete lives. Since they rely on fixed set of principles, they also tend to become independent in their daily actions and have strong resistance to become inter-dependent. They restrain from empowering other people with their knowledge as their whole security comes from their knowledge and expertise.

People who are passionate, self-driven, principle-oriented tend to become independent and less interdependent. Resistance to become interdependent might hinder them from succeeding in professional life, but self-centeredness should let these people succeed everywhere else.

There are fewer things to fix in "self-centered" people than those with all other centerednesses. Next time someone blames you that you are self-centered, take it as a compliment.