c# - ODP.NET Oracle.ManagedDataAccess causes ORA-12537 network session end of file -

Tomorrow really is the first day of the new century, experts tell us, but it is also a second chance to sit back and look at the big picture. It is now plausible that India will solve its economic problem in the first half of the 21st century. The problem, of course, is our age-old worry that there is not enough to go around. Some parts of Asia are already affluent and others have seen the light. For the first time in history Indians will also emerge from the struggle against want, and it will not happen evenly. Some regions will get there before others-e.g. Gujarat will be twenty years ahead of Bihar. The reason this will happen is simply a matter of arithmetic. India has experienced five to seven per cent sustained annual economic growth over the past two decades, which has more than tripled the middle class. More recently, population growth has begun to slow, and in 1998 it was down to 1.7 percent compared to our historic 2.2 per cent. Literacy has also begun to climb-it had reached 62 percent in 1997 compared to 52 in 1990. If our economy continues to grow at its current par rate of seven percent for the next two to three decades-and there is no reason why it should not--then half of India (that is, the west and the south) should turn middle class in the first quarter of the century and the other half should get there in the second quarter. If growth accelerates to say eight per cent with greater reforms, then this happy day may well arrive sooner. At that point poverty will not vanish, but the poor will become a manageable fifteen per cent of the population, and the politics of the country will also change. The question is, then what? Once anxiety about making ends meet diminishes, then people's thoughts will turn elsewhere, perhaps to culture. Some believe that by then India, like the rest of the world, will have turned into "McWorld", the phoney and fictitious global culture of American consumerism. I disagree. The Indian way is robust, and has been built into our psyche for centuries. The antiquity of Indian tradition is less impressive than its extraordinary continuity, and this is because it has been able to adapt to alien virtues. We survived the Mughals, the British, and we will survive Coca Cola (although, the latter's challenge is far stronger.) What is the Indian way? An American scholar, John Koller, writes that its central idea (at least, for 85 per cent of Indians) is the possibility of human liberation from our fragmented, finite and suffering existence. It is based on the insight that the basic energising power of the cosmos and of human beings is the same. Because we have an impressive capacity for thinking, imagining, and acting to shape our world, the writers of the Upanishads believed that there must be a link between the dynamic energy of human beings and of the universe. Our world of distinct and separate objects must be manifestation of a more fundamental unity. Initially developed in the Vedas and Upanishads, this idea of undivided wholeness went on to inspire various Indian ways of the Buddha, the Jains, the Yoga systems, and even the Sufi and Bhakti saints. Indians have always known that their gods and goddesses are symbols of reality rather than reality itself. As symbols they point beyond themselves to the ultimate. That is why a Hindu can say in the same breath that there are millions of gods, but only one God. Within a family the father may be attached to Ganapati, an uncle may worship Vishnu, the mother Krishna and the son could be an atheist. In this syncretic attitude originates the spirit of tolerance of the Indian way. Although Indians are fond of rational argument, they all seem to agree that reason is limited when it comes to comprehending the deepest reality. Reason differentiates and compares and is thus a good faculty for exploring the empirical world. It fails when it comes to comprehending undivided and undifferentiated reality. Hence Indians of various persuasions look to meditation and direct insight. We regard our day to day life as superficial and in bondage to the law of karma, which determines mundane happiness, suffering and repeated births and deaths. We can free ourselves from karma in various ways-by knowledge according to Jains, by self-less action according to Gita, by devotion according to bhakti saints and Sufis. Whatever way one chooses, the Indian way is a way to freedom from human bondage based on the wonderful potential for perfection of ordinary human beings. It is also our strongest defence against "McWorld".