In 1961, Lloyd Fernando, just past his teens and then attached to the Standard Chartered Bank or SCB in Colombo, holding a Diploma in Banking from the prestigious Chartered Institute of Bankers or CIB, London, was forced to make a hard choice, a choice which economists would call ‘a choice under uncertainty. Strictly speaking, it was not a choice under uncertainty proper but a choice between certainty and uncertainty that only an extreme risk taker would consider. His choice was whether to give up a lucrative and promising banking career with prospects for serving overseas stations, an ambition which would stir the imagination of many a young man, to pursue academic studies in economics in an extraordinary and unknown place at that time, called the People’s Friendship University in Moscow, popularly known as the Lumumba University.
SCB was a reputed international bank with a track record of more than 100 years and Lloyd was one of the few Diploma holders in its Colombo Branch. Young, enterprising and free thinking, he would have cut himself a good banker in the years to come. In the opposite, economics was a new field of study and Lumumba was unknown to Ceylonese who had known only the universities in the British Empire or the United States. To make matters worse, that university had Russian as the medium of instructions and that too was a totally strange language to Ceylonese who had been mainly exposed to English because of the long colonial heritage. So, when he was offered a scholarship to study at Lumumba by the Soviet Government, it was obvious that he was to walk from light to darkness or from an assured life to complete void and wilderness.
Yet he chose uncertainty. Was he stupid in making that choice? I ask him.
Unapologetic Leftist
We were in his third floor office in the Postgraduate Institute of Management or PIM overlooking the panoramic view of Borella and beyond. His students were walking into his office freely to meet his office colleagues who were also present there, but he was undisturbed and attentive to me. Well articulated but soft spoken, Lloyd assumed a mild smile across his face when he took his memory back to those crucial days in 1960.
“I was actively engaged in the left – oriented trade union work in the bank” he reminisces with no apology in his tone. “The Management wanted me to give it up because I was now going to be promoted to the executive level, which I refused. So, my banking career with that type of rebellious attitude was at stake. But, of course, with my professional banking qualifications, I could have joined either the Bank of Ceylon or the newly established People’s Bank and advanced my career in either institution. But I ruled out that option”
“But you could have chosen a British university or for that matter a local university. Why Lumumba?” I ask him.
“I had a rebel within me who loved taking risks and enjoying new experiences. Surely, I had to forego five years of my youth for this new adventure. But the rebel, encouraged by my trade union colleagues who were sympathetic toward the Soviet Union, forced me to take that perilous and difficult path. So, I ended up at Lumumba, along with some 28 Ceylonese scholars. I chose studying economics and planning for my degree”
That was how Lloyd, risk taker and adventure seeker, ended up in doing a five – year Master’s Degree in economics and planning at the now famous Lumumba University in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR. The University still exists and prospers with a new vision and mission, but the USSR is no more.
Educator of fellow public servants
I met Lloyd decades later in 1989. At that time, he had already completed a doctorate at another prestigious university, the University of Sussex in the UK, and was the Director of National Planning of the Ministry of Finance and Planning of the Government of Sri Lanka. The then government had set up a vital committee called the Committee of Development Secretaries under the Chairmanship of the Cabinet Secretary earlier and of the Secretary to the Treasury later to formulate and implement the government’s development programmes and Lloyd was the Committee’s secretary. I had to represent the Central Bank on the Committee.
I recall one particular instance in which a chairman of a state manufacturing corporation complained about the products of his corporation being competed out by cheaper imports and wanted the government to ban such imports. When the tide at the meeting was about to move in favour of this pleading chairman who obviously had grounds for his complaint, Lloyd entered the discussion using his articulated language skills. He praised the Chairman for coming out with his grievance which was based on valid grounds. But Lloyd told his fellow development secretaries that the mode of world trade has changed from earlier one-way trade to ‘intra-industry trade’ where a country would simultaneously import and export the same commodity. So the manufacturing corporation which had problems at that time should endeavour to acquire advanced technology of manufacturing and find new markets outside the country. The development secretaries accordingly advised the Chairman to come up with a viable proposal for foreign collaboration and move the corporation from one catering to the local market to one selling outside.
A few years later, the corporation which earlier complained of foreign competition became one of the few corporations which, through its newly acquired technology, managed to sell its product not only in Sri Lanka but also in the neighbouring India, Pakistan and Maldives.
So, I observe in hindsight, well meaning advice at the correct time saved the country’s future tax payers from having to shoulder a huge burden in the form of rescuing another public enterprise.
Lumumba days
I took him back to his Lumumba days. Was it a training in economics or an indoctrination to a new ideology? The popular view of many was that the Soviet Union used these scholarships to build up a cadre in Asia, Africa and Latin America that were sympathetic to the Marxist cause. Many had charged that it was like providing economic benefits to the vulnerable poor to have them converted to a new religion. Was it what Lloyd experienced in Lumumba?
“I was a socialist when I went to Lumumba. Therefore, there was no question about an ideological conversion. As an active trade unionist, I had the opportunity of getting mixed up with such socialist giants like N.M Perera, Colvin R de Silva, Pieter Keuneman, S.A. Wickramasinghe and N. Shanmugathasan and the like” he admits. “It was in fact N Shanmugathasan who trained us trade union leaders to look at the political philosophy from a different angle. For example, in one of the lectures, when we defined democracy in the popular Lincolnian way as the system of government of the people, by the people and for the people, Shan immediately asked us who these people are. Are they the same? That was my entry into class analysis.”
If Lloyd was a converted Marxist when he went to Lumumba, was there anything new he could have learned there? I wondered.
“Yes’ he says. “Our knowledge of Marxism was very crude at that time, confined to slogans. It was the professors at Lumumba who took us through the scientific discipline of dialectical materialism and class struggle. We had to study the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin critically. We had students from Asia, Africa and Latin America apart from Russia and the other Soviet Republics. It was not easy to pour ideology down their throats. In the end, I was a veteran communist or as the Russians used to say a ‘Stharee (old) Bolshevik’. So, the Marxism that we learned at Lumumba was very different to the street Marxism we had learned here.”
Not a blind Marxist
It still puzzled me. Was Lloyd a die–hard Marxist who believed that everything that is to do with the Soviet Union and Marxism was for the benefit of the people? In a brief write up on his reminiscences of a being a Stharee Bolshevik which he had written much later, he has confessed as follows.
“I believed in socialism. But I was unable to distinguish between socialism and sovietism. I believed in the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat, as the highest form of democracy’. Strangely, it was Pieter Keuneman in one of his visits to Moscow who told me ‘don’t be stupid.’ I believed in the ‘role of the Party’ as expounded by Lenin in ‘What is to be done’. I believed in the theory of ‘democratic centralism’. I believed in the total ownership of the means of production and distribution by the socialist state’. The mixed economies of Eastern Europe were forgiven for they were in a ‘transitional stage’. Central Planning was the locomotive of socialist development’. GDP calculations which included Services, was considered a bourgeois deviation. The Soviet calculation was called Gross Material Product. Prices had to be fixed. In the Soviet Union, there was no price inflation; only the queues got longer. International trade was a residual activity, to be conducted only when there was not enough local production, making it necessary to import, or when there was a surplus, which could be exported. The problem is that no one wanted to buy soviet products, except raw materials. Trade with Eastern Europe and the developing countries therefore had to be on barter terms”
“It took me some time to realize that the Soviet Communist Party was doing some soul searching with the emergence of Khrushchev and was gradually changing. We were told that Stalin would never have been endorsed by Lenin. Khrushchev was trying to re- establish socialist democracy, arguably through a process of liberalisation, which he said was in line with Lenin’s thinking. Not everyone though, believed him. We were told that at one of the Central Committee meetings a ‘bold Alec’ had made a long speech arguing that there was no difference between ‘then and now’. After he had spoken and taken his seat, Khrushchev asked him: ‘tell me Ivan Georgevich (perhaps not the exact name) where will you go after this meeting’ and ‘where would I, except home’ was the reply. Khrushchev triumphantly turned to the audience and said ‘that my dear friends, is the difference”. Khrushchev’s pointer was that in the old era, Ivan would have straightaway gone to a labour camp for rehabilitation because he dared to question the Soviet leadership.
Economist in transition
So, Lloyd was in a transitional era in the Soviet Union and he too went through that transition. The ground reality all around him made him think differently – differently from what he had learned as a wide – eyed gullible teenager back at home.
“We found that Soviet productivity which was at a high level at the time it went for industrialisation had fallen well below that of developed capitalist countries” he says. So, the Soviet Union could not sustain its phenomenally high growth rates for long. In the first few years, they had concentrated on producing capital goods starving the people of consumer goods. So, there were wide spread shortages and the queues got longer day by day. Suddenly, goods appeared in the shops and people lined up in front of the shops without knowing even what was being distributed. The popular joke was that one would join the queue with a volume of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and would finish reading it by the time he got to the front of the queue, and then to find that the good for sale was a mere broomstick”
Defects in national planning
This ground reality all around him allowed Lloyd to look at the fundamental weaknesses in the Soviet system. He found the centralised planning in the system as the main culprit. The Soviet Central Planning Authority known as GOSPLAN determined all inputs and outputs throughout the country including the remote areas. This was a gigantic task and could not be done accurately. “The problem was…” he says. “…even the local planning organisations had to use these numbers determined at the centre. There were myriads of such commodities and to produce all of them, these numbers had to be used. GOSPLAN did not allow any variation in the technicality of production or the number. There was no role for consumer preferences which were considered as a bourgeois luxury. While capital goods could be produced in this manner, consumer goods could not be. So, the result was either severe shortages or stockpiling of surpluses”.
“This paved way for liberalisation of the Soviet planning model” recalls Lloyd. One prominent champion of liberalisation was Professor Liberman of the University of Kharkov. He proposed to use enterprise profits, instead of output targets, as the basis for planning so that enterprises would get freedom to produce goods efficiently in line with consumer demand. Efficiency here meant meeting the required quality levels while generating a surplus so that a part of the surplus could be given to managers as an incentive bonus. Liberman had argued that that was the only way to improve Soviet productivity levels which had fallen much below those of competing capitalist countries.
Lloyd says that he faced a dilemma during this Soviet transitional era. He was caught between two poles: he wanted to find a market socialism solution to the economic problems of Ceylon without compromising his deference toward Lenin. In his reminiscences, he has confessed as follows: “I had the privilege of working for my thesis under the tutelage of Prof. Kaldamasov, head of the material balances department of GOSPLAN. He was, however not equipped to handle my questions, which were inspired by my desire to find socialist solutions to the problems of Ceylon, which was a mixed economy. Ideas of ‘market socialism’ therefore could not elude my search for knowledge. Meanwhile, ‘bourgeois democratic’ values with due deference to V.I. Lenin, were too ingrained in my soul to be easily dismissed. I was not worried that the Soviet ‘one party’ state would become the norm, for Eastern Europe had a variety of parties, though the Communist party played the hegemonic role. What bothered me was the one candidate election, which was hailed by the Soviets as something to be emulated by those wanting to build socialism”
Anti – personality cultist
Lloyd being a free thinker and a believer in equal opportunities for all did not endorse the personality cults that were being promoted across all the socialist countries. In China, it was Mao Tsetung, in North Korea, it was Kim Il Sung, in Viet Nam it was Ho Chi Minh and in Romania, it was Ceausescu. The communist parties of these countries had tried to get people to venerate these cult leaders blindly despite the obvious weaknesses in them as people who could lead their nations forward in a global economy. It was therefore a soul searching exercise for Lloyd. In his reminiscences, he admits that “…this is where I found common ground with the Soviet dissident Joseph Brodsky, even though I did not fully appreciate his example of Lenin. Brodsky said he started despising Lenin already, when he was in the first grade in school, ‘not so much because of his political philosophy or practice, about which, at the age of seven (he) knew very little, but because of his omnipresent image, which plagued almost every textbook, every class wall, postage stamp, money and what not, depicting the man at various ages and stages of his life’ All this, according to my teachers, however happened only after Lenin’s death, giving an excuse to Stalin to erect statues for himself. Khrushchev dismantled all of them. Even though he did not put up statues of himself, as I could recall, he promoted vigorous use of his words of wisdom as scientific truth in the textbooks”
Change in ideology
Lloyd found that the ‘Stharee Bolshevik’ in him was changing pretty fast. His change was accelerated by his intercourse with another intellectual of high esteem at that time in the Soviet Union. That was Professor Vasilchuk, a strong communist and guest lecturer at the Higher Party School. Says Lloyd about Vasilchuk: “The search for socialist market based development, using planning models led me to long discussions with Professor Vasilchuk. He was a strong communist and was a guest lecturer at the Higher Party School. But, he was different to others, who followed the dogma. He taught us history of economic thought in the Economics & Planning Faculty and was well versed in ‘bourgeois economics’. He was willing to engage in an open political economy discourse, though from a Marxist perspective. We agreed that in newly emerging ‘socialist’ regimes of Asia and Africa, it would be impossible, unnecessary and even dangerous to push for total state ownership. While one could make a case for state ownership of natural monopolies such as power and energy, railways, telecommunications, airports and harbours, highways – the list seems to be dwindling in the present context – it was difficult to justify it in the case of consumer goods. A much flaunted argument such as low prices had been already debunked, for state ownership provides monopoly power with little incentive for productivity increases, the only basis for lowering of prices or improvement of quality. Otherwise, it is an argument for subsidies. On the basis of state ownership, already Algeria, Egypt, Iraq and Syria were socialist”
The young Stharee Bolshevik who went to the Soviet Union on a Soviet Scholarship with a lot of ideals in his head eventually became disillusioned about everything he saw and experienced. He saw the gradual crumbling of the Soviet Empire though it was not immediately visible to the rest of the world at that time. It could limp forward putting up a bold face and hiding its growing ailments for sometime. However, the eventual collapse of the empire took place decades later in 1989 after Lloyd had completed a doctorate at a bourgeois university, namely, the University of Sussex in the UK and been seamlessly integrated to a free market economy policy regime as a ‘central planner of a different kind’.
The Planning Man without a plan
After returning to Ceylon in 1966, Lloyd worked for a brief period in the Ceylon Steel Corporation. The choice was due to his writing the Master’s thesis on ‘Economics of Steel Foundry’ for which he had to work for three months in two large steel manufacturing enterprises to gain practical knowledge on the technicalities of steel manufacturing. “Those steel factories were huge” he says. “In fact, one I worked for my thesis and located in a place called Cheripoviets which was a steel town like Pittsburgh in USA. There I had to learn A to Z of steel making and, without that practical knowledge, they don’t accept your thesis. Since I was very proficient in Russian, I didn’t have any problem in communicating with their engineers or floor workers” But his destiny forced him to move out pretty soon. He joined the Ministry of Planning as a planning officer which was at that time under the able stewardship of Dr Gamini Corea, its Secretary. Under Gamini Corea, Lloyd says, there was a planning process at the Ministry, but it was simply a ‘system of planning without a plan’.
I become puzzled. How one can implement planning without a plan? I ask him.
“Gamini Corea believed in macroeconomic control of the economy. But, preparation of a plan was a time consuming activity and we lose a great part of our time in the preparation of the plan thereby cutting down the time available for its implementation. This fact was borne out in both the Ten Year Plan of 1958 and the Five Year Plan of 1971. One reason for their failure was the significantly long time they took for their preparation” explains Lloyd. He thinks, in hindsight, that it was the best period of economic management –planning without a plan- when a small coterie of highly skilled economists and other professionals in the Planning Ministry gave direction and leadership to the development process. For Lloyd it was a tremendous learning experience.
Sussex experience
From the Ministry of Planning, Lloyd got a scholarship in 1971 to pursue his doctoral studies at the University of Sussex, UK. That was a rare experience for any academic: studying both behind the iron curtain and outside the iron curtain. How did he feel the difference? I ask him.
“Sussex and especially its Institute of Development Studies or IDS was a little radical at that time. There too, I was exposed to Marxist political economy, but with a more critical approach to its applications. We read Marx’s Das Kapital again, but this time more critically and comparatively with other political economic philosophies. Some of the professors at IDS were strong Marxists” he elaborates.
What was the research he did for his doctorate? I ask him.
“During that period, an important issue was the trade relationships among nations. Multilateral trade was complex and demanding and many developing countries had embraced bilateral trade to sell their surplus goods in exchange for the goods they needed. So, I wrote my thesis on ‘Bilateral Trade and Payments Agreements as an Instrument of Trade Policy in Sri Lanka’. I tried to show that those trade agreements, if properly managed, could help us in the short run, but in the long run we had to move into the multilateral trading system”.
But Lloyd could not complete his thesis in a single stretch. Owing to the exigency of service, he was called back to the Ministry in 1974 and could think of his thesis only after 1977. He proceeded to Sussex in 1978, completed the writing of the thesis in one year and got his D.Phil Degree in 1979. On return to the Ministry, he had to serve in its international economic cooperation division and later in 1982, he was appointed as Director of National Planning.
National planning era
Lloyd had some disappointing experience about Soviet planning. Now he heads Sri Lanka’s
national planning department. Was it an irony that he was asked to head this institution? I wonder and ask him about it.
“We didn’t go into a comprehensive planning system like in the Soviet Union. Our planning was to identify public sector priorities and prepare a plan consistent with the macro and sectoral strategies. The document was called the Public Investment Programme or PIP which was prepared annually on a rolling plan basis for the ensuing five years. This was the document which we submitted to the Aid Group Meeting in May every year and it was prepared in consultation with the donors. It provided much needed discipline to the government sector, since no project was accepted by Cabinet unless it had gone through the PIP process.”
The economic policy stance of Sri Lanka since 1977 highlighted the private sector as the engine of growth. If it is so, then, why should Sri Lanka assign a role to the public sector? Isn’t it a contradiction? I start wondering.
Lloyd continued his elaboration as if he had read my mind.
“True that the private sector is the engine of growth” he says. “But that engine should have a driver. Without a driver, how could the engine move? So, the public sector has to play the role of driver and with public sector guidance, private sector could move forward. All what we did in the Public Investment Programme was to provide the needed infrastructure facilities and policy direction for the private sector. So, our handling national planning at the Ministry was not inconsistent with the accepted economic policy of the government of the day”
Good rules for government expenditure
Does he believe in the need for prioritising public expenditure by the government? I ask him.
“Yes, the government expenditures should be appropriately prioritised to enable the private sector to function as the engine of growth. That is what exactly was done, as mentioned earlier, through the discipline of the PIP. It was a difficult task, because various government organs want to have their pet projects funded through the government expenditure programmes. On many occasions, those pet projects are not priorities but mechanisms to bolster the image of the politicians concerned. Our duty at the National Planning was to evaluate them objectively in terms of the government’s accepted policy stance and submit our observations to the Cabinet through the Minister of Finance. Almost on every occasion, our recommendations were accepted by the Cabinet. This was an incentive for officers in the National Planning Department to do a professional job not influenced by the politicians concerned. I recall that all the Finance Ministers under whom we worked did not make an undue interference in our work”
. Lloyd’s deep conviction about the need for building the country’s research capability and the knowledge base of the public servants led him to undertake several other assignments.
Institute of Policy Studies
The need for conducting objective and independent research beyond what the central bank has been doing was one such activity he got engaged in. With the support of the Dutch government, he helped the establishment of the Institute of Policy Studies or IPS as an independent and self supporting organisation to conduct objective research on various development issues facing the country. Lloyd functioned as its Director in the initial period and later as a member of the Board.
One of his major achievements he thinks, because of the impediments he had to face, was the establishment of the Administrative Reforms Committee headed by Shelton Wanasinghe, in 1986. His boss, Ronnie de Mel, the Minister of Finance and Planning was very supportive but he found it difficult to convince the President to set up a Commission. He was generally not supportive of dealing with structural issues that had a long gestation period to yield results. So the Minister asked Lloyd to speak to the World Bank with whom Sri Lanka had a structural adjustment programme. Lloyd spoke to the Vice President, David Hopper, who sent an acquaintance of Lloyd from Sussex days, Geoff Lamb, to Colombo to consult and write a few paragraphs on the need for administrative reforms in the World Bank’s Country Economic Memorandum or CEM on Sri Lanka. It was traditional to exchange first drafts of the PIP and the CEM. And when the first draft came it was shown to the President, who still insisted that there was no need for a Commission and agreed to appoint a Committee. Shelton Wanasinghe made some far reaching recommendations, which were published in 1987 and “it is unfortunate” Lloyd says that “they are yet to see the light of day as proposed”.
The ADB
Lloyd left the public service in 1993 to function as the Alternate Executive Director of the Manila based Asian Development Bank or ADB. “ADB was a new learning experience for me” he admits. “It gave me the opportunity to interact and develop friendship with top representatives of member governments such as from the US, China, European Union, Japan, Korea and India and a host of others. I also had the opportunity of meeting famous visiting economists from Yale, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge as well as from India, Pakistan, Japan and China. Some of them are still in touch with me.”
Then, on return from the ADB, Lloyd got himself engaged in training public servants through a distance learning system. With the support of the Norwegian Government’s foreign development arm, NORAD, he set up a private learning institute called World View Institute to conduct this training programme, which covered senior government officers in all the provinces in the country.
He also headed Sri Lanka’s premier socio-economic research institute, the Marga Institute, as its Chairman for five years.
Then, he joined the Postgraduate Institute of Management of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura as a Programme Director and helped PIM to launch its Master of Public Administration Programme as a blended learning programme. His flagship course was the recently introduced Chief Innovation Officer or CIO programme to train some promising public officers throughout the country to function as change agents.
University don
Why does he think that public servants need training in capacity building? I ask him.
“As I told you, the public sector is the driver of the engine of growth. To drive any engine, the drivers need to have proper training. Unfortunately in Sri Lanka, public servants get very rare opportunities to train themselves. So, I thought that it would be my pay back to the government as a responsible citizen to help public servants to receive their needed training. I got myself involved in these projects because of that” he explains.
Lloyd, though a “retired old man” as he calls himself now, maintains his health very well. He runs about the office like a young man of thirties. I ask him about the secret.
“The main thing is that you have to keep yourself occupied in one thing or another. I read a lot, write a lot and contribute to academic work a lot. They help me to keep my mental faculties in the same sharpness as they were, say some twenty years ago. I am a late sleeper as well as a late riser. Above all, what has kept me going so far is my sense of humour. I am a firm believer that if one is to keep a good health, one has to laugh a lot” he starts laughing as he says so, provoking his office colleagues to look our way.
All his office colleagues after learning of the cause of the sudden outburst nod their heads in confirmation.
Lover of Music and “Bathroom Singer”
But there is yet another side to his life, which only his closest friends, mostly from his Moscow days, know. That is his passion for music. “Music…” he says “…has added spice to my life”. How many people in Sri Lanka know that he sang a Russian Romantic Ballad, I met you, which was the hallmark of the great Ivan Koslovsky, at the Kremlin Palace of Congress in the presence of some of the Soviet Government top brass? But he dismisses that as a fluke opportunity to a ‘promising’ university student. He says that the University was so serious about his tenor voice that they asked Firsanov, a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union to train him. Lloyd was so lackadaisical in attending classes, Firsanov, to use Lloyd’s words, asked him to “buzz off.”’ In fact, after a performance at the Dhom Druzhbi (Friendship House), another People’s Artist, the famous base baritone, Yevgeni Kipkala, told Lloyd , “Molodoi Cheloviek (young man), you have talent but remember talent is only one percent, it is 99 percent hard work if you want to be a good singer”. Lloyd says in yet another tone of humour that he “kept loyal to that one percent and remained a bathroom singer”.
Lloyd’s versatility of music interest ranges from western classical to Karnatic and Uttara Bharatha Sangeet. This interest he attributes to his Guru Fr Marcelline Jayakody at St. Peter’s College, where grew up from Kindergarten to HSC. While he loves symphonies and Piano Concertos, he gets carried away listening to Pavroti, Andreas Bocheli, Kiri Te Kanawa, Celine Dion, Pankaj Mallick, Saigal, Bhimsen Joshi and our own Amaradeva, whom he adores. No wonder he is still young at heart.
I ask about his family. “My daughter, Thushara, is a banker working in Singapore. She completed her education at the University of Aberdeen in the UK. My wife, Chitranjanie, is the source of inspiration to all of us. Without her, nothing would have been possible” he says with a deep sense of gratitude. His daughter has helped them to graduate to the status of ‘proud grandparents’ recently.
In Lloyd, I see a professional who has gone through the mill the hard way. Everything he has got in his life, he has earned them in that way. The smile in his face, the sense of humour he expresses and the toughness he displays in handling matters do testify to the fullness of life he is leading today.
This is what I see in this Stharee Bolshevik turned bourgeois national planner.
(Medical Xpress) -- A case of a 36-year-old woman who began to literally 'feel' noise about a year and a half after suffering a stroke sparked a new research project by neuroscientist Tony Ro from the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University. Research and imagery of the brain revealed that a link had grown between the woman’s auditory region and the somatosensory region, essentially connecting her hearing to her touch sensation.
"O Vishnu! It is only by the grace of Thy Name that we are capable of offering hymns to Thee. So we should adore and pray to Thy NAMA alone." (Shrila Bhaktivinoda Thakura, Nama-bhajana)
It doesn’t matter where you go or what the current makeup of society is, there will always be those who are insistent on their specific dogmas, spiritual or otherwise. Some are fixed to their scientific advancements, trying to find new ways to disprove the seemingly obtuse and nonbelievable justifications provided by the religionists pertaining to the workings of nature. Indeed, with each new discovery comes a perceived further cracking of the armor of 
Despite the rational objections raised to these theories, the scientists will wholeheartedly stand firm. Indeed, if someone should logically challenge prevailing theories such as manmade global warming, the detractors will be tarred and feathered in public and be labeled as lunatics or deniers. Along with the ardent followers of science, there are also those who remain insistent on their principles of faith. “Jesus Christ is the only God. All other worshiped figures are simply idols that cause the worshipers to fall down into hell…Praise be Allah, the only Lord. All others are doomed if they do not accept Him.” Why God would limit Himself to one personality and why the requirement to surrender out of fear and panic are questions not addressed by such mentalities. When competing viewpoints are presented, there is only more anger and entrenchment of the positions developed off of blind faith and sentimentalism.
If God is superior and we are inferior, how are we supposed to act? Why are we on earth, and how do we know who God is anyway? The names of the Lord clear up all of these questions. From the disposition between the two entities comes an ideal relationship, one that the individual souls are naturally inclined towards adopting. The servant becomes glorified and takes on their true nature when they act in the service of the superior entity without motivation and without interruption. Lest anyone think this suggests slavery, the service mentality is already evidenced in every activity. The child serves the parents, the parents the grandparents, the wife the husband, the husband the wife, the CEO the shareholders, the businessman the customer, the politician the constituents, etc. In every sphere of life there is this server-and-served paradigm. Even the most selfish individuals are simply serving their own senses.
From the acharya’s example, we see that instead of stopping our activities altogether or finding even more avenues for sense gratification, the way to truly tap into our reservoir of love is to purify our service mentality. Even the scientist is acting on his penchant for service, though his efforts are directed towards the wrong area. The more the challenge is mounted against the Supreme Lord and His authority, the longer the individual remains ignorant of their loving connection to Him. The longer the forgetfulness of the Supreme Spirit and His eternal worthiness of worship continues, the longer the sincere soul is shut out from enjoying the divine pastimes found in the spiritual world. Indeed, the fuel of the engine of 
Identifying the need to worship God is one thing, but actually carrying out service to Him is another. The holy name again proves to be helpful. The transcendental sound vibrations representing the Supreme Lord are non-different from Him. As such, whoever is fortunate enough to break free from the illusory effects of material nature and sincerely adopt a chanting regimen whose foundation is the recitation of mantras like, “
If God is great, why not chant His names all the time? For those clinging firmly to their dogmatic insistence, there is no requirement to specifically chant Vishnu’s names. If they truly love their specific object of worship, they can chant whatever holy names they know of in the same way. The key is to remain God conscious at all times, a disposition which automatically brings about all other good qualities like peacefulness, self-control, kindness, tolerance, and respect for other forms of life. Saying that you love God and then mercilessly killing His innocent children in the form of 
The holy name is God Himself, so the more the 
This beautiful Lake front property was designed by the late and famous Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa. His work has a tremendous impact upon architecture throughout the Asian region.
