This volume is not based on conventional in-depth study of ideas of T major philosophers and thinkers. The contemporary debates relating to the concepts of human agency and the writing of 'history from below resonate with my subjective questions and queries, that were forming in the course of my experiences and challenges in various ascribed and achieved social roles while growing up in India and later in the North American society. This connection, between prevailing academic debates and my own deep personal concerns for similar issues, further confirmed the idea that personal questions are not necessarily always separate issues but are very much connected with the larger whole, called society. Such awareness contributed in enhancing my teaching of Sociological courses as I consciously began to find ways to: (a) make sense of these questions and debates for my North American students; (b) explain the relevance of these questions in the context of students' own historical background and prejudices-that is North America-and in their daily lives and their aspirations to become plumbers, carpenters, gardeners, builders, chefs, mechanics, social workers (who are generally mothers on welfare) and nurses and so on. Thus, my efforts were shaped deeply by everyday challenges and experiences: as a teacher, as a student (earlier in India and later in the USA), as a woman (single by choice), as a migrant, as a lower middle class woman from Punjabi speaking family (relocated in a provincial industrial town after partition of India) with Hindi based schooling and with crude colonial linguistic tools coping with the elite (predominantly male) world of English speaking academia, as a so-called "Third World', and as a so called 'colored' person. All these challenges in India and in the USA-together have shaped the final outcome of this volume. This is not to deny the direct or indirect influences of various historians, philosophers, thinkers, and contemporary discourses either on my writings or thinking, but to highlight a different route to scholarship. This different route to scholarship further validates the theoretical framework suggested in this volume.
Since social life belongs to human conscious life and reflective capacities, one cannot significantly address human being without addressing the intrinsic sociality of mind". Arthur Childe.
"A vision of a future social onder is based on a concept of human nature." Noam Chomsky.
"It is possible for us to choose to value creativity. It is by choosing ta value certain qualitative elements of the process of becoming, that we can find a pathway towards the open society," Carl Rogers.
"Actions are creative even though their social values are very different and there is no distinction regarding the degree of creativity." Carl Rogers.
We are living in the era of 'alternatives" and individual "choices" W which are available in terms of the varieties of consumer goods, services, life styles, medical systems, spiritual salvation, and ideas of individual empowerment. But with all the creative choices and alternatives that are available in all walks of life, it is surprising that in resolving the issue of poverty along with other inequalities and 'underdevelopment the same creative minds could only repeat the old formula of modernization through the increased number of sweatshops. The issue of poverty has acquired a new urgency in our time, because at the turn of 21st century when agriculture and food production technology is highly advanced, more than two billion people are living below poverty line in the world mostly in Africa, Asia, South Asia, and Latin Ameri-can (AFASALA) countries. The UN Commission of Refugees (2002) states that eleven million children are living as refugees in the world. The United Nations Report (2000), informs us that the number of undernourished children in 1995 was estimated at 54 million in Latin America, 121 million in Africa, and 363 million in Asia. At the same time, the income of the richest 10 percent of the US population (around 25 million people) now equals that of the poorest 43 percent of world population or some 2 billion people (UN Human Development Report 2002:17-19).
Another estimate shows that with all the abundance of food in the world 800 million people are starving. South and central Asia have by far the highest malnutrition levels, in percentage terms as well as in absolute numbers. Asia and Africa also have a high birth rate in com-parison to the European countries and Japan which have a declining or zero birth rate. This difference in birth rate also means that in the near future larger number of people from the poorer world will depend on migration to fill the gap between countries that cannot feed their people while wealthy countries would be seeking a labor force to perform their services. To a large extent this is already taking place. For example, in the year 1990 about 80 million people were living outside the country of their birth, but in the year 2000, the number of such people increased to 150 million. United Nations has calculated that to keep the proportion of working to nonworking people at 1995 level, the European Union must take in 1.4 million immigrants a year-more than the number who now enter legally and illegally combined (Margarouis, 2002:16). While ignoring these living and working conditions of people around the world, the scholars-both within the west and non-western world-are advocating the idea that we have reached the "End of History," that there is "no alternative to capitalism," and "this is the best we can have," and for this supposedly "best" system, "80 percent of the world population has to pay the price for the 20 percent people in the world to live a better life."
Western economists continue to promote the idea of more sweat-shops for poor countries, while also admitting the failure of the projects of modernization and development. For example, when recently a large number of college and university students in the USA started protesting against worldwide sweatshop conditions and low wages, 250 economists including noble prize Laureate Robert Lucan, and lawyers, under the leadership of an Indian economist teaching in Columbia University, Jagdish Bhagwati, issued a joint statement to the Presidents of those colleges and universities that, "urging companies to raise the wages of their workers in developing countries above the prevailing market aver-age to those nations...would limit the number of jobs in those countries and...worsen the collective welfare of the very workers in poor countries who are supposed to be helped."
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