Ostalgie

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, almost all symbols of the former German Democratic Republic (DDR in German) have been removed. Regardless of the fact that former inhabitants of the DDR now live in a predominantly free-market economy, many still prefer to purchase household items that remind them of life in the old republic.

This socio-economic and sociocultural phenomenon is known in Germany as Ostalgie; it is a portmanteau that describes nostalgia for East Germany combining the German words Nostalgie meaning ‘nostalgia’ and Ost meaning ‘east’.

‘Now some people are longing for the old hermit’s cell like a childhood treehouse. That’s harmless; West Germans find it horrifying, East Germans find it touching.’ – Christoph Dieckmann (10 December 1993) “Der Schnee von gestern”, Die Zeit

‘The archival practices of collection and display can have a similar, if unintended, implication. Imagine what it must be like for many eastern Germans to walk into a museum and be surrounded by the things in their own living rooms. The effect of such historicizations of the present is uncanny (in the sense of a ‘strangeness of that which is most familiar’ [Ivy 1995:23]); The past is connected to the present by distancing it in space and time. […]

‘Ostalgic’ practices reveal a highly complicated relationship between personal histories, disadvantage, dispossession, the betrayal of promises, and the social worlds of production and consumption. These practices thus not only reflect and constitute important identity transformations in a period of intense social discord, but also reveal the politics, ambiguities, and paradoxes of memory, nostalgia, and resistance, all of which are linked to the paths, diversions, and multiple meanings of East German things.’

– Berdahl, Daphne (1999) ‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the present: Memory, longing, and East German things, Ethnos, 64: 2, 192—211

The Economics of Digging a Hole

‘If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.’

– Keynes. J.M. (1936) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Book III: The Propensity to Consume London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan p. 129

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Whenever the Torah is dropped on the floor, tradition holds that every person in the room must fast for 40 days in atonement.

One in four Canadian children between 7 and 12 are obese.

Approximately half the inhabitants of Indonesia live on the island of Java.

Jeremy Clarkson’s parents ran a business selling tea cosies before they invented the stuffed Paddington Bear.

The hemline index is supposed to predict how the market will fare. Coined in 1926 by U.S. economist George Taylor, the idea has been spookily accurate. When skirts get shorter, the market goes up.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

Cleavage in Politics

Cleavage is not just the space between a woman’s breasts, it can mean a lot of things: in biology, it is the repeated division of a cell into daughter cells after mitosis; in chemistry, it is the splitting of a large molecule into smaller ones; and in politics, the division of voters into voting blocs.

English is unique in the way it uses the word ‘cleavage’ for all these different phenomena.

“Breasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality.” – Iris Marion Young

Political systems are characterised by cleavages. These are the metaphorical lines which divide members of the community into different sides. Cleavage lines are mainly founded on values, ethnicity, language or socioeconomic status.

Specific issues, political parties and ideology on the other hand are not the bases for cleavage, but they may well be indicative of the fundamental value conflicts which do constitute the lines of cleavage in a particular system.

The Merchant Banker

City Gent: Miss Godfrey, could you send in Mr Ford please. (to himself) Now where’s that dictionary. ah yes – here we are, inner life… inner life … (a knock on the door) Come in. (Mr Ford: enters, he is collecting for charity with a tin) Ah, Mr Ford: isn’t it?
Mr Ford: That’s right.
City Gent: How do you do. I’m a merchant banker.
Mr Ford: How do you do Mr…
City Gent: Er… I forget my name for the moment but I am a merchant banker.

Mr Ford: Oh. I wondered whether you’d like to contribute to the orphan’s home. (he rattles the tin)
City Gent: Well I don’t want to show my hand too early, but actually here at Slater Nazi we are quite keen to get into orphans, you know, developing market and all that… what sort of sum did you have in mind?
Mr Ford: Well… er… you’re a rich man.
City Gent: Yes, I am. Yes. Yes, very very rich. Quite phenomenally wealthy. Yes, I do own the most startling quantifies of cash. Yes, quite right… you’re rather a smart young lad aren’t you. We could do with somebody like you to feed the pantomime horse. Very smart.
Mr Ford: Thank you, sir.
City Gent: Now, you were saying. I’m very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very rich.

Mr Ford: So er, how about a pound?
City Gent: A pound. Yes, I see. Now this loan would be secured by the…
Mr Ford: It’s not a loan, sir.
City Gent: What?
Mr Ford: It’s not a loan.
City Gent: Ah.
Mr Ford: You get one of these, sir. (he gives him a flag)
City Gent: It’s a bit small for a share certificate isn’t it? Look, I think I’d better run this over to our legal department. If you could possibly pop back on Friday…

Mr Ford: Well do you have to do that, couldn’t you just give me the pound?
City Gent: Yes, but you see I don’t know what it’s for.
Mr Ford: It’s for the orphans.
City Gent: Yes?
Mr Ford: It’s a gift.
City Gent: A what?
Mr Ford: A gift.
City Gent: Oh a gift!
Mr Ford: Yes.
City Gent: A tax dodge.
Mr Ford: No, no, no, no.
City Gent: No? Well, I’m awfully sorry I don’t understand. Can you just explain exactly what you want.
Mr Ford: Well, I want you to give me a pound, and then I go away and give it to the orphans.
City Gent: Yes?
Mr Ford: Well, that’s it.

City Gent: No, no, no, I don’t follow this at all, I mean, I don’t want to seem stupid but it looks to me as though I’m a pound down on the whole deal.
Mr Ford: Well, yes you are.
City Gent: I am! Well, what is my incentive to give you the pound?
Mr Ford: Well the incentive is – to make the orphans happy.
City Gent: (genuinely puzzled) Happy?… You quite sure you’ve got this right?
Mr Ford: Yes, lots of people give me money.
City Gent: What, just like that?
Mr Ford: Yes.
City Gent: Must be sick. I don’t suppose you could give me a list of their names and addresses could you?
Mr Ford: No, I just go up to them in the street and ask.
City Gent: Good lord! That’s the most exciting new idea I’ve heard in years! It’s so simple it’s brilliant! Well, if that idea of yours isn’t worth a pound I’d like to know what is. (he takes the tin from Ford)
Mr Ford: Oh, thank you, sir.

City Gent: The only trouble is, you gave me the idea before I’d given you the pound. And that’s not good business.
Mr Ford: Isn’t it?
City Gent: No, I’m afraid it isn’t. So, um, off you go. (he pulls a lever opening a trap door under Ford’s feet and Ford falls through with a yelp) Nice to do business with you.

– Chapman. G., Cleese. J., Idle. E., Jones. T., Palin. M. Monty Python’s Flying Circus (Episode 30, Series 3) 1972.

On The Fundamental Problem With American Political Discourse

“The problem with the discourse situation in America is capitalism. That’s the problem with it because you can make a lot money by being an assassin. A lot of money. Whether you’re right-wing or left-wing, you go in and you’re a hater – radio, cable, in print, whatever, you get paid. And there are people who do that. And they go in – they don’t even believe half the stuff they say – and they just rip it up. And they get paid a lot of money. And that has coarsened everything. They’re phonies. Capitalism drives that. There are Americans who want to hear hate, and they hear it, and that has just blown it all up.”

– Bill O’Reilly

Dabbawalas

A dabbawala, also spelled as dabbawalla or dabbawallah; literally meaning box person, is a person in India, most commonly found in the city of Mumbai, who is employed in a unique service industry whose primary business is collecting the freshly cooked food in lunch boxes from the residences of the office workers, mostly in the suburbs, delivering it to their respective workplaces and returning the empty boxes back to the customer’s residence by using various modes of transport.

A collecting dabbawala on a bicycle

Instead of going home for lunch or paying for a meal in a café, many office workers have a cooked meal sent either from their home, or sometimes from a caterer who essentially cooks and delivers the meal in lunch boxes and then have the empty lunch boxes collected and re-sent the same day. This is usually done for a monthly fee. The meal is cooked in the morning and sent in lunch boxes carried by dabbawalas, who have a complex association and hierarchy across the city of Mumbai.

In the morning, a collecting dabbawala, usually on bicycle, collects dabbas either from a worker’s home or from the dabba makers. The dabbas have some sort of distinguishing mark on them, such as a colour or symbol.

The dabbawala then takes them to a designated sorting place, where he and other collecting dabbawalas sort and bundle the lunch boxes into groups. The grouped boxes are put in the coaches of trains, with markings to identify the destination of the box. The markings include the rail station to unload the boxes and the building address where the box has to be delivered.

At each station, boxes are handed over to a local dabbawala, who delivers them. The empty boxes, after lunch, are again collected and sent back to the respective houses.

The barely literate and barefoot delivery men form links in the extensive delivery chain, there is no system of documentation at all. A simple colour coding system doubles as an identification system for the destination and recipient. There are no multiple elaborate layers of management either — just three layers.

Each dabbawala is also required to contribute a minimum capital in kind, in the form of two bicycles, a wooden crate for the dabbas, white cotton kurta-pyjamas, and the white trademark Gandhi cap called a topi. The return on capital is ensured by monthly division of the earnings of each unit. Each dabbawala, regardless of role, gets paid about two to four thousand rupees per month. That equates to around £25–50 or US$40–80.

A typical home-cooked lunch delivered by a dabbawala

In 2002, Forbes Magazine found its reliability to be that of a six sigma standard — a standard method which seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects or errors and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It is a standard that is only given to an industry which makes less than one mistake every 3,4 million tasks.

More than 175,000 to 200,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality.

According to a recent survey, the dabbawalas make less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries, despite most of the delivery staff being illiterate. That works out to an accuracy level of 99,9996%.

See other: Admin’s Choice Posts