Reflection

Christ Church College, University of Oxford

Many days, I would be seated on a cozy couch on the upper level of the Barnes & Noble bookstore near my house; books by Thomas Friedman and Dan Brown would be lying on the side table along with a Starbucks Caramel Frappuccino or just a plain black coffee (hot chocolate). While the amenities at Barnes & Noble far exceeded those available at my house, the view that presented itself through the large windows was the one thing that brought me to the bookstore every week. Seeing the cars speed by, I would ask myself how I ended up the way I did. Trying the answer the question, memories would race through my head reminding me how it all began in the summer of 2010.

As sweat trickling down my face, I finish my morning run with Meagan and Elizabeth on the last Saturday of Oxford and walked wearily towards my room in Sainsbury after breakfast; England had been experiencing an overwhelming clear weather season. No sooner had I taken a step across the threshold a phone call from aboard was waiting for me. My mum and dad told me, with an exultant tone, that I would soon be moving back to America. The sudden news sent shivers down my spine, freezing it even in the unusual weather. I managed to put a faint smile across my face. Yet on the inside I started dreading the day I would have to leave the place I had called my home for the past two months. Finally though, in the August of 2010, the dusk of the inevitable day soon led me to the dawn of native dirt.

During the course of my journey to the United States, I heard my sis exhale in optimistic relief, “You no longer have to study abroad”. I failed to understand how she could overlook the cruelty of the situation. I wanted to know how leaving everything I had done that summer, behind me could possibly make my life better. Every attempt of security made me grieve even more. I did not want to forgo my past, my friends, and my school.

Said Business School, University of Oxford

After twenty two hours of flying, driving, running, and waiting, I finally landed in Atlanta. As soon as I acquainted myself to the familiar surroundings, I came to realize the true gravity of the situation. I started to perceive the absence of my closest friends, of familiar faces at various events, of my partners in the early morning runs, and even of the humidity-less air. I felt more grief than Achilles did when Patroclus was killed in battle; I bore a composed expression on my face yet was unmistakably weeping on the insides.

Kakuzo Okakaura speaks volumes about life; he stresses that the art of life is a constant readjustment to our surroundings. The whole episode of moving back has taught me various facts of life. Sometimes you have to distance yourself from something not only to realize its sublime importance but also to gain a more profound understanding of it. I have made many friends all of whom hail from diverse backgrounds. More importantly, I have learnt that even though you have to adjust to your new surroundings, you can always maintain a connection with your past

Firenze, Italia

As I arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, I was consumed with excitement. The American Airlines flight headed to Rome, Italy was on time and ready to board at 2:30 pm. After a delicious cup of an over-priced airport coffee, I was ready to see the world. As we arrive at the Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport, we immediately boarded the high-speed train headed for Firenze, Italia. After about 90 minutes, I arrived. After I checked in at Hotel Mediterrano, I experienced another breathtaking view from my balcony. The first thing I noticed was the amazing landscape of this historic town as Brunelleschi’s Duomo dominated the skyline of Florence. I knew I had to go out and see Florence. Without even unpacking, I took my leather messenger bag and started walking towards the Uffizi Square.

            As I passed through the Florence Army base, Hotel Ritz and tons and tons of Gelato shops, I finally made it to Uffizi Square. The square, surrounded by mammoth statues of David and mythological heroes, was probably the busiest area of Florence. It was a place where one can spend hours and hours just sitting and relaxing. Later that night, it turned out that an outdoor musical performance was about to take place with a grand piano in front of the governor’s office.

            The next day, after a scenic run through a mountain at 5:30am, I witnessed one of the most beautiful sunrises ever. The view from the mountain overlooking Florence was profoundly surreal and astonishing. The first thing on the To Do list was to eat Gelato and it turned out that we were in town for the Grand Gelato Festival in Firenze. This hybrid between ice cream and smoothie tasted absolutely phenomenal as it easily melts into one’s mouth causing an instant refreshing sensation in the hot Florence weather.

            Florence is known for the towering dome of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (St. Mary’s Basilica of Florence); therefore, a few of us decided to climb the Duomo. After 430 flights of stairs and a few hundred feet, we reached the summit of the tallest architectural marvel in Florence. Now, for this view I will let the picture speak its thousand words…

On Healthcare

It’s a familiar joke:

Patient: Doc, it hurts when I do this!

(Patient stabs himself in the eye)

Doc: Well then don’t do that!

What’s left out of the joke is the two hundred-dollar price tag that the doctor tacks on to those five words.  This country has a problem, and it’s healthcare.  It’s unavailable to some, and completely unaffordable to far too many.

Fortunately, the Senate is working hard to pass the biggest healthcare reform that this country has seen in decades.  The bill will mandate that all American citizens have healthcare, and support this by “Healthcare Exchanges” in 2014, from which Americans can choose from similar healthcare plans from many different providers and compare prices.  The bill will also increase medicare coverage to around fifteen million more Americans, and adds restrictions on insurance companies that prevent them from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions.  The combination of all of these factors leads experts to believe that 94% of Americans will have health coverage by the end of the next decade.

Unfortunately, the bill has plenty of flaws.  The first one is that it lacks a central, Federally controlled and nation-wide public option.  The fact is, even with the new healthcare exchange opening up, there will still be a lot of people who will not be able to afford health insurance.  This is exacerbated by the fact that coverage will be mandatory, and just like many states have instituted monthly fines for those who lack automotive insurance, people who lack health insurance can look at a fine of about $500 per month.  That hardly seems like a solution to increasing healthcare coverage and lowering costs.  A second issue with the bill is that it does not go far enough to regulate insurance corporations.  While they do now have to give anyone a policy, regardless of preexisting conditions, there is no legislation to stop them from charging exorbitant rates to those people who do have some sort of major health issue.

I firmly believe that a complete overhaul of the system is necessary, and this bill is a good start, but it’s really not enough.

Article: Click Here

The White House Stance: Click Here

House Resolution 3590 (2076 page Healthcare Bill): Click Here

University Budget Cuts

Because of the current economic crises, universities like many companies and state agencies are facing significant budget cuts . How these cuts are imposed on academic units (colleges, departments) and non-academic units (physical plant, student services) will have a major impact in both the short-term and long-term on the ability of the university to carry our its core missions of teaching and research. How universities make their budget cuts is not only of great concern to their faculty and staff, but increasingly to students and their parents.

To deal effectively with budget cuts, the central missions of the university, teaching and research, need to be preserved at all costs and even enhanced, if possible. In descending order of importance, these two missions require:

a. Tenure-track and other faculty,

b. Undergraduate and graduate students,

c. Classrooms, laboratories and other facilities,

d. Academic colleges, departments and programs, and

e. Support staff and facilities.

University administrators when facing budget cuts typically will claim that these cuts will be made strategically, that is, in such a way that the core missions of the university are preserved. However, internal and external politics often make this very difficult to do. Nevertheless, many universities have developed guidelines or principles for dealing with them. The following guidelines or principles were gleaned from budget-reduction plans developed at a number of universities.

(1) Conserve core academic programs.

(2) Preserve the university’s ability to recruit and retain students.

(3) Ensure that students can graduate on time.

(4) Target budget cuts with a view to improving academic programs and units.

(5) Suspend filling administrative and support positions whose loss will not affect the short-term operation of academic programs or units.

(6) Eliminate administrative and support positions with minimal impact on academic programs.

(7) Lower administrative/operating costs of colleges and other units.

(8) Consolidate the duties of administrators and support staff.

(9) Adopt alternative methods for delivering courses.

(10) Use internal resources (teaching assistatns, postdocs, or lecturers) to fill open faculty lines until conditions improve rather than closing lines.

(11) Eliminate course duplication among departments and colleges.

(12) Consolidate small or similar departments into larger units to save on operational and administrative costs.

(13) Eliminate off-campus academic programs.

(14) Eliminate unneeded committees and task forces to free up faculty and staff time.

(15) Have qualified administrators teach.

(16) Eliminate or outsource support programs.

(17 ) Make better use of the summer session to generate revenues.

(18) Encourage staff and faculty to take unpaid leaves with a guarantee that they will have their positions and salaries back when they return.

(19) Offer early retirement incentives.

(20) Defer building maintenance.

(21) Reduce building and grounds upkeep.

Unfortunately, many administrators are, in reality, not making strategic budget cuts. Instead, across the board cuts in faculty and staff benefits are common, as is indiscriminately closing open faculty and staff lines. Cuts in staff or faculty lines, however, are not suppose to result in cuts in services, including the number of courses being taught. Administrators seem to believe that staff and faculty are not “fully employed” and that they can easily take more duties without adversely affecting the performance of their duties. As any faculty and staff member knows, this is not true. University faculty typically work over 60+ hrs per week.

A Look Inside 1984

So I came across my old research paper I wrote in the tenth grade. I found it very intriguing as I analyzed 1984 by George Orwell. This book was the start to my exciting interests in international ideologies and politics.

Enjoy.

Totalitarianism: The Dystopian Ideology

      The 1930s and 40s was a time of turmoil in the world. Countries were at war, people even thought that it was time for the apocalypse. World War I and World War II dominated the first half of the twentieth century, power was the goal and countries were willing to move mountains to obtain it. It was the power hungry dictators that threatened world peace, as the central figures in the World Wars, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin bought fear into the world’s eyes. George Orwell saw the rise of totalitarian regimes and wrote his books as a warning of these governments. Animal Farm, a famous novel by Orwell, portrays how a society’s ideologies can be manipulated with the wrong people in power. Nineteen Eighty-Four, another famous novel by Orwell, introduces the idea of physiological manipulation, where the mind is the source of control. In this novel, Big Brother is portrayed as a demagogue of a nation, Oceania, and The Party is the ruling body of the state. Nineteen Eighty-Four is about the life of Winston Smith in a dictatorship. Winston lives in a state where fear is the key and opposition is dangerous. Orwell Wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948, as he witnessed the horrors of World War II and the rise of threatening dictatorships. Orwell cautions the philosophy of the 1940s authoritarian rule through the depiction of the utopian ideology of The Party that has gone wrong.


      Every political ideology has one goal, to create a utopia. Democracy tries to achieve it by giving the power to the people, Aristocracy tries by giving the power to a few individuals, and Dictatorship by giving total control to one individual. Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a mixture between a dictatorship and an aristocracy. Big Brother is portrayed as a despot that instills fear through his depiction of an omnipresent tyrannical ruler, and The Party is the ruling body of Oceania that enforces the laws. Total control is their policy, and The Party believes that totalitarianism is the only way to achieve a utopia. Many people have their own sense of utopias, the Party chooses to “void privacy, emotion, individuality, and freedom” by controlling the people’s mind, the Party can create their own version of a perfect world (Serafin 2964). Totalitarianism was adopted by many governments; dictatorship is often adopted when a country is in need. Adolf Hitler assumed power when Germany was going through disastrous depression as they lost World War I. The people look up to this charismatic leader that assured a utopian society. Dictators try to make their own perfect world, first “seize power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay paradise where human beings would be free and equal” (Orwell 263). Despots assure this paradise, then when put into power they create a dystopia. The Party in Nineteen- Eighty-Four uses a different kind of approach. The Party uses the mind to manipulate ideas and thoughts “and states impositions of will upon thoughts and truths” (“Nineteen Eighty-Four” 1). Using thought control and physiological deviation to make people think they live in an ideal society, The Party creates a perfect ideology. Since nothing in this world can be perfect, Oceania becomes anything but ideal. Newspeak is another example of how The Party enforces their control. “Newspeak is the only language where the vocabulary gets smaller,” this causes the brain to “narrow the range of thought” so that people do not have to think (Orwell 52). Therefore The Party does the thinking and controls the mind for them. Orwell shows a nightmarish version of a dystopia, “the ideological project of Nineteen Eighty-Four is to represent the destruction of human individuality and the human community by totalitarianism,” which was actually a huge fear in the 1940s and the central ideology of Big Brother and The Party (Wanner 7).


      The Party is the ruling class of the totalitarian government that is established in Oceania. The Party created a hierarchical system similar to that of the feudal system of the Medieval Period; Big Brother at the top, then the Inner Party, then Outer Party, and followed by the Poles. The Poles make up 85 percent of the population, however they have no power, freedom, or equality, “poles are portrayed as subhumans…” just as the serfs were in the Middle Ages (Resch 163). The Outer Party members are the educated yet unimportant people. They work as regular people and have to conform to society. The main character, Winston Smith, is apart of the Outer Party and works in the Ministry of Truth. The Inner Party is the Clergy class of the Middle Ages. They are the ones in charge, even though less the two percent of the population, have are the ones with power. Then finally the despot of the nation, Big Brother, even though one has really seen him, he instills fear in the people by having an omniscient characteristic and make sure no one rebels against the party (Serafin 2964). The Party’s slogan, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” is a paradoxical statements that helps assure the citizens of Oceania stay in the hands of The Party (Orwell 1). To help assure this the Party establishes three core ministries that control the nation’s government: Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Truth. The Ministry of Peace conducts the perpetual war on the three other nations of the world. This insures that the people’s hatred is focused on the other nations instead of The Party itself. The Ministry of Love is responsible for the recognition, observation, capture and torture of rebels and enemies of Party. Brainwashing is the key to the Party’s success, O’Brian said to Winston in the Ministry of Love, “We convert, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him…we shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves” (Orwell 285). It is stated that privacy is the most important aspect of life. “The world of Nineteen Eighty- Four does not allow privacy for the individual and does not allow the individual to have a personal identity” (“Nineteen Eighty-Four” 1). The Ministry of Love makes sure the adversaries are put down no matter what. Finally the Ministry of Truth is the Party’s propaganda machine. Another way to control the mind is to control history, “thought control is executed through the falsification of history” (“Nineteen Eighty-Four” 1). Winston job is just that, rewriting history to fit The Party’s needs. The Ministry of Truth also invents new language, the concept of Newspeak uses “language as a tool of the government to exercise and ensure control its populace” making the people think less, letting The Party think for them. Orwell brought forth these ideas by observing the totalitarian regimes established in the 1940s. The actions of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini, directly influenced the structure of the Party.


      Absolute power was the goal of the dictators in 1930s and 1940s. The totalitarian faces were ready to go to extreme means to obtain supremacy in the world. Many can say “the role of Big Brother can be found in Adolf Hitler…” (Wanner 1). The well known Nazi dictator rose from nothing to one of the most powerful leader in the world. As a soldier of the Great War, he began his hatred toward the world. When Germany was in a time of need, they would look to one person that would assure protection. Just as Big Brother, Adolf Hitler used many appealing and charismatic language to attract the people, Hitler offered safety and a utopia to Germany; therefore people fell to his feet (Wanner 1). Right when he was named Chancellor of Germany he abolished the democratic ideals and declared himself the dictator. In Orwell’s review the Hitler’s Mein Kampf he states “Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life” (Wanner 1). From his book he declares his ideology superior and therefore a reason to spread it by many means necessary. Joseph Stalin was another cruel and unusual dictator. The Soviet Union actually sided with the Allied Forces in World War II. “The enemy of your enemy is your friend,” by this statement, the United States and the Soviet Union had a common enemy: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. The reason was that was so was because Communist ideals and Fascist ideal are totally opposite. The battle of power and influence was the central goal. Stalin was also known for his inhuman actions against his people, brainwashing, torture, and void of privacy were the central philosophy of the Soviet Union just as The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Stalin’s cruel tactics influenced Orwell to incorporate it into his novel. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written to warn the threats of the power hungry dictators of the World War II era, it was the “… 20^th century totalitarianism, which provided the primary inspiration for the dystopia of Orwell’s novel” (Wanner 1). This novel was meant as a caution against the evils of totalitarianism.


      Orwell based this book on the events that were happening in 1948, when he wrote this book, “living through the atrocities of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin…of mental and physical tortures…Orwell painted a picture of 1984” warning the outcome of these ruthless demagogues (“Nineteen Eighty-Four” 1). Something needed to be done; Orwell had the idea of writing this book as a propaganda tool against absolutism. Having seen two devastating World Wars, “Orwell was greatly influenced by the social and political events of the period,” Orwell also witnesses the “world situation becoming increasingly more threatening” as communist Soviet Union was becoming more powerful (Wanner 2964). Orwell sought end the spread of this totalitarian ideology by creating a novel solely to ridicule the ideas of it. The idea of an absolute political system may look good on paper, but the sole purpose of a dictatorship was power “not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power” (Orwell 263). To satisfy this greed government would do anything, even if it meant the destruction of lives. To stress the importance of the people of a nation, George Orwell introduced the poles in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the hope of the country, “If there is hope, it lies in the poles,” 85% percent of the population was the poles (Orwell 69). Orwell tries to educate to mass populations that it is in the hands of the majority, not the few to govern a nation.


      Orwell observes the future as a totalitarian state, “Oceania is a dystopian negation of Orwell’s vision of England” with a “government with wrong members in control” (Wanner 1547). Nineteen Eighty-Four is about a regular man, Winston Smith, defying the laws of conformity and the laws of the land, knowing what is right he faces the oppressing government knowing the outcome would surely be death. This novel portrays totalitarianism as a dystopian ideology, “…the horrors of world war, the subsequent division of Europe into Eastern and Western blocs, and the formidable reality of atomic warfare,” Orwell created a nightmarish version of the mythical future (Serafin 2964).

Works Cited

"Nineteen Eighty-Four." Masterplots, Revised Second Edition (1996). Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. CHS Media Center, Carrollton, GA. 21 February 2008. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=MOL9320000231&site=lrc-live>.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 1950.

Resch, Robert Paul. "Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four." boundary 2 24.1 (Spring 1997): 137. Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. CHS Media Center, Carrollton, GA. 21 February 2008. <http://search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=9706253030&site=lrc-live>.

Serafin, Stevens. “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Ed. Kirk H. Beetz, Ph.D. 1996 ed.

Wanner, Adrian. "The Underground Man as Big Brother: Dostoevsky's and Orwell's Anti-Utopia." Utopian Studies 8.1 (1997): 77. Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. CHS Media Center, Carrollton, GA. 21 February 2008. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=4788703&site=lrc-live>. 

GOP Conference

The President takes questions from Republican members of the House of Representatives at the GOP House Issues Conference in Baltimore, MD.


Enjoy.



-Akshar Patel