Klara’s Universe

Language is not only characteristic to human beings, it equally relies on human characteristics and values of tolerance, understanding and reaching out. The existence of languages implies the tolerance of listening, because “All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer”. (Robert Louis Stevenson) Moreover, learning other languages enables you to better and objectively analyse your own. As the great Goethe warned, “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own”. A Swedish proverb says that “The trouble with foreign languages is, you have to think before your speak” and in fact, each language enriches its master with a different perspective of the world and triggers different cognitive-analytical processes.

Language is a living organism. Language continuously changes in both content and shape, in both time and space, because, to borrow the words of Victor Hugo, “A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it”. New generations entail new ideas and the discovery of a new language entails new ways of formulating ideas. This sharing of goods and exchange of ideas has historically contributed to spreading awareness of and lead to the concept of a common identity.

Globalization was born out of the same impulse to communicate, to reach out and explore. It therefore equally implies the necessity of a common ground for communication and relies on the pre-requisite existence of a lingua franca. As proved by Ferdinand de Saussure‘s linguistic research, a language becomes lingua franca based on the gradual tolerance of it by the community and not on a unanimously endorsed agreement. When becoming lingua franca, a language also inherits the multiple responsibilities of a common media. Its strength relies, as formulated by Goethe centuries ago, not in rejecting what is foreign but in assimilating it: “The force of a language does not consist of rejecting what is foreign but of swallowing it”.

A lingua franca has therefore the responsibility to show tolerance and engage in efforts of protecting other languages and cultures. It should equally help avoid misunderstandings and provide a rational common base for consensus, because more often than not, “Language is the source of misunderstandings”. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) One of the pre-requisites for a language to be used on a global scale, as previously stated, is easing the flow of human resources and ideas. Ensuring the continuity of this flow is also a vital task for a widespread language. It has been repeatedly underlined that knowledge of languages not only guarantees a comfortable travelling experience, but also acts as a self-defining mechanism. In Anton Chekhov’s words, “Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport”.

After Latin and French in Europe or Chinese and Persian in Asia, it is the turn of English to play the key role of lingua franca in our highly globalised and technological world. As with its illustrious predecessors, English’s status as a lingua franca today is a real fact and subjecting it to debates based on the moral dichotomy of good and bad is already an irrelevant endeavour. However, the English language itself has certain features that recommend it as a successful lingua franca. Leaving aside the debatable claim to its simplified grammatical and syntactical structure, it is undisputable that English is constituted of a wide variety of languages: the basic grammar and structure are those of Germanic languages (Anglo-Saxon) and many basic vocabulary elements come from the Celtic languages (Briton, Gaelic, etc), whereas elaborate vocabulary and concepts are inherited from the Romance languages (mainly French) and Latin. In addition, contemporary English has already merged with other languages to create new varieties: Afro-American English, Singlish, Hinglish, Franglais etc. and represents the base for many creole languages or pidgins: Nigerian Pidgin, Jamaican Patois, etc. It is also considered to be the most globally taught second language and its worldwide influence reflects in the high level of English borrowings in many other languages across the world. Moreover, simplified versions like Basic English and Special English have already emerged, a process not alien to the vernacularization of Latin throughout the Roman Empire.

What the world needs now is a new concept of globalization. It is time to shun away old notions of globalization as an offspring of colonization, rooted in exploitation and imposition of culture and language. Globalization today must rely on mutualism and promote sustainability and tolerance among the highly diversified cultures of the world. In order to achieve that it is essential to shift the focus from a monocultural to a multicultural approach to globalisation, where a lingua franca such as English will facilitate the spread of ideas and the mediation of political and economical issues but this time, between countries and cultures communicating on an equal footing/ from equal positions.

Globalization and Languages is the title of this year’s joint conference of United Nations University and UNESCO, to take place at the UNU Headquarters in Tokyo this week on August 27-28. I will be giving a hand on both days and will certainly attend it. More information can be found at:

Globalization and Languages Official Website

Girls’ education has rightly gained the spotlight in recent years as an important strategy to achieve not just one, but many of the international targets set at the Millennium Summit in 2000. It has been widely documented that getting girls into schools is essential not only to put the goal for universal primary education on track and empower women, but has a central role in the struggle to achieve other MDGs, if not all. South Asia is the region where the boys/girls student ratio in access to primary schooling has seen the most dramatic change and India is outperforming some of its neighbours in South Asia in reducing poverty and improving child and maternal health. Based on the results of many well-documented studies, it has become clear that women’s education has a strong positive impact on several other social development areas in India and this paper aims to set a comprehensive and global perspective on the role of girls’ education and achieving the MDGs.

It is widely recognised that educated women can not only take better care of their own health and that of their offspring, they can also improve their work and income, participate in sustainable development and gain a more prominent role in the partnership for development. These are in fact the major areas the MDGs are mostly concerned with. But while many isolated studies linking girls’ education and reproductive behaviour or mother’s education and children’s health, there are few studies that cast a comprehensive view of the impact of girls’ education on each of the MDGs.

In terms of gender parity in primary schools, South Asia has climbed up two places from holding the lowest position in the regions’ chart in 1991 with a ratio of about 0.75, to reaching a ratio of 0.93 by 2005 and out coming Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab States. Home to the world’s largest illiterate population (268.4 million), a 65 percentage of which are women, India still has a long way to catch up with on its way to achieving several MDGs. Although performing much better than some of its neighbours in South Asia in several of the MDGs, and largely due to its large population, India still houses a large number of people living with HIV/AIDS, has increased rates of child and maternal mortality and is among the top countries where deforestation and access to safe drinking water are a major issue. It is therefore especially meaningful to look at India as an example of a country where the recent boom in increased girls’ enrolment and completion rates has the potential of being the key to improving its performance in many other international targets.

 

In an increasingly globalised world, which has seen the recent surge of various regional associations across the globe, new issues of identity and integration arise as a necessity for states and individuals to define themselves on the global stage. On the other hand, the role of education in helping define identities is but too well known to educationalists and not only. It is therefore not surprising that recently there is, an “increasingly globally structure agenda for education”. (Dale and Petterson, 2002) As the main engines for developing human resources and promoting ideologies, universities are being the educational institutions most exposed to such phenomena as “globalisation” and “regionalisation”. The recent increase in programmes offered in English in universities across the globe is one such trend clearly connected to increased human mobility and regional integration.

 

It is therefore highly relevant to look into the provision of higher education in English and try to establish a correlation between the existence of such educational arrangements and the students’ perspective on issues like regional integration and identity. English is recognised by many as the lingua franca of the contemporary world. However there are many who challenge its legitimacy and are rather reluctant to consider it as such. The students’ opinion on the problem of establishing a common language is also an interesting topic for analysis in this regard.

In international relations integration can be observed at various levels, from national integration to globalisation. Asian integration is an example of regional integration, similar to other worldwide initiatives, the most famous and successful of which is European integration. The phenomenon is far from being new. Integration has existed historically as a constant component of human society and historically has reached its highest potential in the context of multinational empires and colonisation. Asia has an ancient tradition of empires and countries such as China and India are until today highly heterogeneous states where different ethnicities, languages and religions coexist. Most Asian countries experienced colonisation at some point in history and their links to different European countries, their culture and language can still be observed throughout Asia today.

 

Arguably the most culturally and religiously diverse continent, Asia faces its greatest difficulties in terms of cultural integration. On the global stage, steps have been taking towards including higher education among trade agreements such as GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services). As previously seen, some of the regional associations have also taken certain steps towards approaching the area of higher education, but they are yet to concretely materialise into generally accepted norms.

Human Security Approach for Global Health, The Lancet, July 5^th 2008

Toyako Framework for Action on Global Health, Report of the G8 Health Experts Group

1. Summary

Published on the eve of the G8 Summit, both papers are meant as a memento and a recommendations list for the world’s leaders and their countries’ policies in terms of global health. Needless to say, as a the heads of the world’s leading economies, these leaders are the key to increasing the international aid scheme, so vital for achieving the MDGs, for eliminating infectious diseases, decreasing maternal and child mortality ratios, reinforcing sexual health measures and family planning and other health related international targets.

The first paper focuses on the need to reinterpret access to basic health services on a human rights basis, targeting individuals and not just communities at large. Written by a team of Japanese experts, it is rather specifically addressed to the Japanese government, praising its past initiatives and claiming rapid further development of health-related support in the future. The second paper is more comprehensive and represents a list of general recommendations regarding strengthening of commitment and financing in the field of global health and it is equally based on a dual approach of praising past achievements and reiterating the need for further improvement. Both papers agree on the imperious necessity of including global health on this and future G8 meetings’ agenda.

2. Discussion points

 

I got accepted to both Waseda University and the Renault Foundation MBA program.
I still haven’t really made up my mind.
I thought I wanted Waseda but the Japanese government takes annoyingly too much time to deliberate if they ‘ll extend my scholarship or not. I will be informed only on the 25th of February…
Should I add that I am supposed to quit my current apartment by 29th February? No way to find a nice apartment which on top of everything accepts foreigners in only 4 days…
And my graduation thesis has merely reached its half…

Life is complicated huh?:P

    Glimpses of Christmas decorations dominating the major centers of Tokyo since early November, almost 2 months before the celebration day itself.  Paradoxically, Japan is far from being even close to a Christian country and the Christmas Day is not one of the otherwise many days off that all salarymen enjoy throughout the year, while people seldomly even give a thought about it in their homes. Here Xmas lives only in the stores and around them, a means for attracting more clients and therefore profit. In a word, commerciocracy at its best!

Santa’s reindeers in Shinjuku

Pile of Xmas presents in Roppongi Hills

Xmas trees cover the sidewalks of Ginza boulevard

Nowadays, Christmas has become such a universal holiday that it is celebrated even by Buddhist Thais, Hindu Indians, Shinto Japanese and unbelievers across the Earth. It is no longer the deeply spiritual Christian holiday, celebrating a long-awaited miracle: the Birth of God’s only son, descended on earth to wash the sins of humankind. From this perspective, it has become highly necessary to reevaluate the meaning and the entire concept of Christmas, as it exists today in our highly-modern and globalised society. Santa Claus, the Christmas tree, the carols or the ‘’traditional’’ Christmas steak and cake, all these symbols have undertook a deep change in time, transforming Christmas in the highly commercial, materialistic celebration of the modern age and its achievements.

Christmas is a word derived from the combination of ‘’Christ’’, the name of Jesus Christ and ‘’mas’’ or ‘’mass’’, the holy ceremony held in church, therefore a profoundly Christian ritual. The very name of this holiday in English suggests its deep Christian meaning, as in the night between the 24^th and 25^th of December, the long awaited Messiah, or the Son of God, was born to Virgin Mary in Bethlehem. In the Christian calendar, Christmas is, together with Easter, one of the two greatest celebrations across the year. A time for reconciliation - with one-self, with the world, with God - and a time for prayer and reflection, this holiday has been celebrated only in church and in people’s own hearts for centuries.

However, this patriarchal dimension drastically changed in the 19^th century and further on, in the 20^th century, with the rapid expansion of industry, technology and trade. It is for example, Charles Dickens who introduced, through his well-known story, A Christmas Carol, the ‘’traditional’’ Christmas carols, presents and turkey steak, as well as a sense of generosity and belonging, transforming Christmas into a family, rather than a personal holiday. Today, the custom of going back home for Christmas dinner or exchanging presents with the loved ones on Christmas day has long surpassed the religious and ethnic boundaries. Moreover, even these not-so-ancient traditions are recently being replaced by even more frivolous phenomena like the Christmas shopping spree, the annual pop stars’ Christmas concerts, the boring office Christmas parties, the hurry of commercially displaying Christmas decorations even as early as two months in advance or the countless Santas that flood the department stores on Christmas’ eve.

Today, it is neither the birth of Jesus Christ, nor a time for giving and forgiving that people celebrate on Christmas day, but a series of highly commercial symbols: the fire-place-hung socks, the Christmas tree, the reindeer-dragged-sleigh, the red and white Santa Claus. Santa Claus, who can track back his origins to the Byzantine Saint Nicholas has nothing of a saint nowadays: his round, bulging belly, his famous, over-commercialised laughter, his residence at the North Pole, his helping leprechauns, his pagan-named reindeers or his Coca-Cola colored outfit. All this iconic elements of the modern Christmas have nothing to do with God, whose birth it was supposed to celebrate. But they have a lot to do with our own infatuation of modern men, great achievers and spenders, more interested in putting on the Christmas decorations and eating the turkey steak than in analyzing one selves and becoming better persons, or, even more, in reflecting upon the meaning of the Bethlehem born miracle.

In its crazy run for an easier and more comfortable life, the modern man often forgets and loses touch with the spirituality. Ancient cultural traditions and beliefs are endangered more than ever nowadays, with the sudden rise of globalisation. Perhaps one can say Christmas is just one of them, a particular Christian holiday transformed into the universal celebration of the metropolitan world we live in. But the highly commercialised Christmas means more than the mere loss of some religious values, but the degree of spiritual and cultural void humankind has reached, celebrating the shape, and not the content. And no matter how cosmopolitan and tolerant we want our world to be, we can and should neither tolerate snobbishness, nor celebrate the superficiality in it.

 L’existence humaine se déroulant dès toujours dans l’inévitabilité de deux moments, de la naissance et de la mort, entre lesquels on peut tracer une ligne étroite, un ‘chemin’, la perception de la vie comme voyage n’est pas une invention proustienne. On la rencontre déjà dans L’Odyssée, œuvre fondamentale de la littérature occidentale, dans Gargantua et Pantagruel, le grand roman du français médiéval, ensuite dans Candide et dans toute la série des romans picaresques dont Don Quichotte représente la parodie, aussi bien que dans les pèlerinages romantiques de Childe Harold et de René, les héros de Byron et Chateaubriand et les tribulations de Fabrice del Dongo, le fameux anti-héros stendhalien. On y voit en effet toute une tradition littéraire occidentale envisageant l’existence humaine se déroulant sous le signe d’Hermès, l’ancien dieu grec des chemins et des voyages, pour n’en compter pas que le voyage est au fond le sujet de toute épopée originaire, de Gilgamesh à Ramayana.

 

Cependant c’est Proust qui englobant toute cette longue tradition parvient à en trouver une nouvelle tournure, bâtant son œuvre à travers un minutieux réseau de voyages en chemin de fer entre les pôles centraux de son long roman : Combray, Paris, Balbec. Nouvelle dimension du voyage en général, le voyage en chemin de fer prend une connotation spéciale chez Proust, à travers l’antithèse y incarnée entre le progrès de la science et l’aliénation de l’individu. Représentation de la vie par la grande diversité de tableaux de la vie quotidienne qu’on y surprend et par les différentes expériences auxquelles elle donne occasion, le voyage en train semble symboliser la vie dans toute sa totalité. Empruntant un peu de l’imaginaire de Zola, le chemin de fer est à la même fois le symbole de la mort, un départ suggérant toujours une petite tragédie, une absence et qu’est-ce que la mort sinon une absence éternelle ?

Le chemin de fer se trouve converti ainsi dans l’incarnation du destin, parce qu’il ne suffit qu’une petite tournure de la voie ferrée pour que le narrateur se trouve soit face au lever de soleil, soit au paysage nocturne, de la même manière soudaine et incontrôlable dont l’être humain se trouve parfois plein d’optimisme et de joie de vivre, parfois noyé dans la tristesse et le plus noir désespoir. 

              A travers ces tableaux tridimensionnels, Marcel Proust réinvente l’ancien concept de la vie-voyage en lui donnant des nouvelles et inédites interprétations, démontrant au même temps le loisir avec lequel un grand génie littéraire peut trouver des moyens toujours frais de discuter des thèmes antiques comme le destin humain. On a souvent remarqué que l’originalité de Proust réside dans son style, dans sa manière révolutionnaire d’écrire, dans son inépuisable capacité de trouver les formules les plus inattendues et éclatantes pour exprimer des faits tout à fait banals. Mais sa grande œuvre, A la recherche du temps perdu trahit aussi sa préoccupation ininterrompue de trouver non pas seulement la forme, mais aussi le sens, le sens de l’existence. C’est sans doute cette préoccupation qui l’a conduit vers les conclusions finales de son long roman, celles de la mémoire comme lien entre passé, présent et futur et de l’existence humaine comme voyage oscillatoire et incertain entre les certitudes de la vie et de la mort.