indiamedia

The ‘real’ Breaking News

2011-07-14T01:26:00.000+01:00

Terror attacks take lives. They also leave lots of tell-tale signs. It is for us to recognise these signs. And forget to learn from them. As usual.
I refer to the latest blasts in India’s financial capital, Mumbai. In the evening of July 13, 2011. It wasn’t a Friday. But then.
It is not the deaths that I write about. Nor about the reasons. Certainly not about the ensuing pathos. Cynical? No. I am a journalist. I do report. But mostly observe than report. An acquired skill. A necessary evil tool of the academic I am turning into.
I was switching between the three Indian news channels I get in Leicester. NDTV. Star News. Aajtak.
Breaking News everywhere. In leaking red. NDTV: Terror Returns To Mumbai. Star News: “Mumbai Par Phir Hamla (Mumbai Attacked Again). Aajtak: “Mumbai Par Hamla” (Attack On Mumbai).
You cannot beat Indian journalists in using technology. The three competitors had their OB Vans at all the three blast spots. Visuals were aplenty. So, no loop of the same stuff. The reporters looked harassed, drained. Their voices were hoarse: One of the professional hazards of Indian broadcast journalism is the reporters don’t talk to their audiences, but shout ‘to’ them. Whether in a crowded street or at an opera.
The first half hour was devoted to live reporting. Uncut, live feed from the spot with the reporters’ commentary over the phone.
Then started the coverage of the blasts.
The subsequent three hours were a treat to students of journalism focusing on “Coalition Journalism”. The nexus of journalism and officialdom.
The dead in Mumbai were still being sifted from the debris and shifted to the morgues. The wounded were still being rushed to the hospitals. The police and forensic teams were trying to find clues. Eyewitnesses were desperately recalling the bloody scenes.
But the channels were already looking at the “larger picture”. The Breaking News tablets erupted on all the channels. “Prime Minister condemns the blasts”; “Home Minister flying to Mumbai”; “Home Minister briefs the Prime Minister”; “Government: We will get to the bottom of it”; Maharashtra Chief Minister shocked; “Police block all escape routes”; “Centre: All help to Maharashtra government”; “Centre: It is a terrorist attack”; Home Minister: It is a coordinated attack”; “Chief Minister visits hospital to see injured”; “Obama condemns blasts”; “Hilary Clinton promises all help to India”; “Pakistan condemns attacks”; “Our correspondent was first to reach spot”; “We are first in bringing you the blast visuals”; “Our reliable sources say Molotov cocktails were used”.
NDTV beats all other channels with the first big exclusive of the evening. Its senior correspondent, Srinivasan Jain, is on camera, live, with the Maharashtra chief minister next to him. Tells Jain to the camera something to this effect: “The blasts are a test case for the chief minister who took oath of office only recently.” Then come the erudite questions: “Sir, can you now give us the big picture, that is, how many blasts occurred, how many died, who is responsible, etc?”; “Where have the bodies of the dead been taken?”; “We are told some IEDs (Improvised Exclusive Device) are used, do you agree?”; “Sir, I know you don’t want to speculate on who was behind the blasts, but a certain terrorist group normally uses IEDs. Do you want to speculate?”; “Sir, there have been a series of attacks on Mumbai, there is a sense of frustration, why are these happening?” “Sir, last question. In the last eight years I have been in Mumbai I have seen several blasts and what I have noticed is that on all these occasions that people of Mumbai have always remained calm and not got provoked into violence disturbing communal harmony. Do you have a message to the people of Mumbai?”; “One final question, Sir, are there are any terrorist sleeper cells who might have been behind the blasts?” Finally: “Thank you, Sir, for your time. Best of luck in your attempts to bring peace to the people. (Now looking at the camera) That was the Maharashtra chief minister exclusively talking to NDTV”. Luckily, the chief minister’s responses were more informative and pertinent.
The group editor of NDTV then came on air, rather her voice, with an exclusive, something to this effect: “The Prime Minister is being briefed about the blasts. The Home Minister has met him and given him the updates. The government has just now issued a statement saying the people of Mumbai should remain calm.
Would a viewer be more informed by these breaking news snippets? Anyone who says yes has to have his or her head examined.
The next couple of hours were a treat to students of journalism focusing on “Package Journalism”. The nexus of journalism and narcissism. The winner was Star News. It had two packages ready. The first one, with loud, eerie music drowning the voiceover, was a series of five pictures. Each picture with its own sting: “Pehla Tasveer” (first picture” and so on. The sting was followed by the selected picture. Not a picture but a frozen video shot.And so on. The second package was similar to the first, but instead of picture, it was a “voice”. That is, a quote from the ordinary citizen from the spot. Either severally or jointly they did not inform the viewer on what actually happening at the spot.
By this time it was midnight in India. The graveyard shift was in. No more fresh information forthcoming. The focus was on “Tearjerk Journalism”. Stories of people saying how they have saved people, dragged bodies out of the debris, noticed the blasts, etc. The emphasis was on how “brave” Mumbaikars (people living in Mumbai) were.
With live television the only medium at such times, there was no other option for the Indian viewers to get information. Given the information rolling out as described above, I cannot say how informed the Indian public was in the first few hours after the blasts.
I checked the social networking sites, which were ultra busy, and the wires and the posts on online newspapers, from India and abroad. See the link below for what I think was an informed piece written for a western audience, and with some perspective, in the early hours after the blasts, that appeared in the India site of the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576443753384835910.html
I leave you to your opinion.
This, after the national broadcast media conducted several introspections in the last two years on how to report breaking news on terrorist blasts, especially in Mumbai. When the first major string of blasts occurred in Mumbai in 1993 – shortly after rightwing Hindu extremists demolished the Babri Masjid in the east Indian town of Ayodhya, Indian broadcast journalism was in the final stages of its birth. By the time the second, major attacks (there were some minor ones in between) happened in 2008 – dubbed the “Mumbai Terror Attacks”, the broadcast media had come of age. Yet, the confusing, contradictory, wrongful, even inflammatory reportage on televison led to a major debate. The journalists and editors, facing public outrage, promised to learn the lesson. The reportage particularly by a senior journalist of NDTV, Barkha Dutt, had come in for special criticism. She stuck to Delhi this time. But if the lessons were learnt, it did not show tonight.
Journalists will be journalists. And some of them never learn. But an interesting thing I noticed in this round of Mumbai attacks relates to “Citizen Journalism”, forcing me to ask the question: Has Citizen Journalism come of age?
My PhD supervisor, Prof. Stuart Allan, was one of the earliest academics to focus on Citizen journalism and his book, News Culture (2004, OUP) recalls the heady, initial attempts at “citizen produced coverage” immediately after the 9/11 blasts in the US. Allan refers to Sam Pax, the well-known blogger from inside Iraq whose internet dispatches became popular world wide because, as the author writes, “Salam’s posts offered readers a stronger sense of immediacy, an emotional feel for life on the ground, than more traditional sites”. Pax himself is quoted as saying why he felt the need to post information: “...(because) it is just somebody should be telling this because journalists weren’t”.
Like elsewhere in the world, it did not take much time in Citizen Journalists becoming the source, sometimes primary, of news and visuals in India. The trend picked up in the middle of the last decade. I remember, when I was working for an Indian channel, how we used to get calls from people saying they had a MMS of a crime or whatever and whether we would use it. Those days, it was new to us journalists and our bosses used to confer with the senior management and the legal executives on the use of such information, eventually using it anyway.
As a result – certainly not because of editorial decisions – more, distant, inaccessible, even rural, areas of India came to be covered by the national news channels. The journalists saw this as yet another source of “exclusive breaking news” and began encouraging people to report. Subsequently the channels began to run lop-strips at the bottom of their screens, giving their internet addresses for the citizens to mail their information to. Later on, it became common norm for the channel anchors to invite contributions from the pubic whenever major events took place. Eventually, reports by Citizen Journalists became a regular diet of these channels.
But the begging question is: What impact did this wooing have on Citizen Journalists? That brings me to the crucial point I noticed in the coverage of today’s Mumbia blasts. I could clearly see in the visuals shown on the channels scores of flashes erupting from among the onlookers at the blast spots. I thought nothing of them initially. But when I looked closely, I realised they were flashes of mobile phone cameras. People were busy shooting the scenes with their mobile phones and trying to send them to social networks or the news channels. Look at the Citizen photos on the NDTV website, for instance.
As I sat through the night watching the visuals on the three channels, I noticed something that gave me a start. There was a brief shot where two or three people were trying to clear a damaged two-wheeler near a body and the debris. A large crowd had encircled the spot. Only a few were watching the action. And many of the rest were clicking away. Perhaps they thought capturing the scene was more important than helping out. In some other scenes on one channel where the reporter was interviewing eyewitnesses, I heard a voice off-camera of some one amid the din saying, “You can see the pictures on my phone which I clicked right after the blast”. There was a scene of an ordinary going close to a body for a better focussed shot, oblivious of other people trying to clear the body. There were other scenes of the police trying to shoo away mobile phone-using people who certainly were not journalists.
Have we raised a Frankenstein, I asked myself, in the name of Citizen Journalism? Were such events of human tragedy nothing more than opportunities for ordinary people to celebrate a moment of fame by capturing the tragedy on their mobile phones? Is communal mentality, the help-the-needy instinct, of ordinary people subsumed by the hunger for citizen reporting? What will happen next? Will kids film their parents fighting at home and mail the video to the police? Would we have some pathological killer capturing the killing of a person on a cell phone and send it to a seedy channel? What will happen if each and every person became a Citizen Journalist – what if everyone stops thinking like a human being and starts thinking like a journalist? Should we take a re-look at our stated distancing from Activist Journalism because we simply, no longer can wind the clock back on Citizen Journalism?
As journalist and academic I think these are questions we will be forced to contend with. If not now, then at the time of the next blast. This is the real Breaking News.

The Indian Cause: Caught between ascetic thuggery and moronic intellectualism

2011-06-03T12:38:00.002+01:00

I have been watching the antics of the latest saffronite, Ramdev, and the writings of a P3-journalist-in-the-making, Manu Joseph, for some time now. The former’s vernacular sophistication matches the latter’s urban mundaneness. Between these two poles lies India’s misery and its miserable future.
The respected journalist, first. He does not like Ramdev, but is willing to bet his life on Indian politicians, even if they are bad. Why? Because they have a stake in politics and therefore, they will do what they can to do the right things. If he indeed believes what he writes, he should go back to journalism school.
As to the saffronite, I suspect two things. One, that he is genuinely mad. His utterings like ‘no need for high denomination currency notes’, his stance against gays, his argument that yoga can cure homosexuality, all these are rants. He is happy owing a Rs. 1200-crore empire selling oils and seeds and drugs and pickles and pani-puri masalas. Now he wants to extend his repertoire to solve social problems through yoga. I wouldn’t mind his antics as long as he is out of the public sphere with his brand advertisements.
The second is, if true, a more dangerous trait. He is a true saffron, unlike the fake saffron fiend, the BJP. Ramdev, well-versed in backward caste politics of UP, may have also concluded that the BJP variety saffron can no longer draw votes from the millions of Indian idiots; not because these Indians are lesser idiots now, but because these idiots are consumers now. What these fellows need is not temporal intellectualism, but a bit of temporal gratification of their consumerist cravings. Something like do a bit of tummy breathing to get into your Armani. The bearded man is adept at this kind of a thing. Perhaps he thinks the time has come for him to either give the BJP a push, or push himself into the centre of Indian politics. The poor Anna Hazare, ravaged as he himself was by subversive Indian industrialists and politicians, had already showed him the way.
I knew of this Ramdev fellow when he was in tatters, going round little places teaching pranayama. I saw him genuinely teaching yoga. I saw him grow popular as his camps grew. I now see his appetite grow as well. You need a genuine platform to articulate your fake ideals.
He rants about black money abroad. Does he publicise his company’s accounts? He rants about ‘zero technology’ Indian stuff. So, why does he move about in an American aircraft? There’s more which need not be dealt with here.
The thing to note is that a political public sphere in India today is informed by the likes of Manu Joseph and Ramdev. Anything more to be said?
Interestingly, Ramdev, I must say, understands the meaning of political timing. He began ranting about his political philosophy when the left, the centrist and right parties are in a mess.
The left parties, I sincerely hope, never recover from the shameful drubbing in West Bengal. For too long have they gotten away with violation of human rights, skinhead organizational culture and retrograde ideology. To borrow the ‘F’ word from Gordon Ramsay, they have truly F’d up West Bengal for generations to come. Any idiot who defends the Left Front policies, like the ban on teaching of English in primary schools for instance, is exactly that, an idiot. They liked the Red Book, so they indulged in spilling blood – of political rivals – for years in the state. They did not brook classes, so they permeated a class of their own in the state. They turned the people who did not leave the state for good into intellectual morons, bleating communist jargon they never understood, while the leaders helped themselves to wealth by all crooked means they blame the Congress of adopting.
The centrists. Actually, the Congress has always been on the ‘right’ of the centre, only the previous mixed economy model giving the impression that it is to the left of it. The after-colonials, as wily, vicious and cunning as their white masters, continue to occupy the moral central place in the country’s politics. And unlike before, cowards too. No single political class has so systematically eroded democratic institutions and discredited the country’s social and cultural structures as the Congress has done since Independence. I shiver to think if there would not have been another Emergency now had Indira Gandhi been the Prime Minister. Ramdev is lucky too as he would by now have been felled by army bullets, the pretext probably re-coined as ‘saffronistan’.
The rightists. The less said about them, the better. They murder people as in Gujarat, they bring down old buildings like in Ayodhya, they cause riots like all over the country, they escort international terrorists home, they have the country’s biggest neo-nazi, brownshirt organization, and yet they brazenly call themselves the saviours of Bharat. But they know their time is up. The muscles of their rascally political fronts are weakening, whether in Maharashtra or Delhi or Uttar Pradesh. They know people prefer Armani to brand Ayodhya. But they also know that the petty minds of the majority of their supporters can still be milked for political ends.
No wonder this political class, not tuned to a member of the civil society taking them on, was surprised when Anna Hazare took to the streets. Hazare has lots of faults with him. But at least he threw the first stone. What happened to him? He was desecrated by the people within days, by people – who else but stupid journalists and so-called intelligentsia – bothered more about their phony arm-chair arguments than the causes of the common people. And then steps in Ramdev. Again his detractors – the very same people – are wary. The leftists because they think he is saffron. The rights because they think he is a stronger saffron. The centrists because they think he is a fake saffron.
True that where Hazare was stupid, Ramdev is wily. Condemn them, but why condemn the cause? Because the cause is not lucrative. It involves too much giving and less of taking. What’s the use of a cause without profit? Now you can understand why these fake intellectuals on social media networks ravaged not just Hazare but also the Lokpal Bill proposal, why they will ravage Ramdev but also the accountability proposals.
They hate Ramdev because he bettered them at their own game. They are like the Manu Josephs who are already telling you that the corrupt politicians are better than Ramdev. They are the true status quo-ists.
What to do with them?

The American Tea Partiers: Brewing a Hazardous Political Toxin

2011-01-09T22:40:00.001Z

For all his sense of objectivity, commentator Leonard Pitts (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorialsopinion/2011663096_pitts22.html)
bares a pat of his self at the end of his column by using the ‘us-them’ binary. He is not being conservative, but invites the accusation of displaying characteristics of one. On the face of it, the Birther politics may smell of racial discontent after Obama’s victory, but to limit the analysis to merely to the singular perception of race is not entirely correct.
In most capitalist societies, centrist politics of reconditioning have been answered not by the mainstream, politically-correct, rightists, but by the extreme fringe among them who cloak their politics under the garb of mere conservatism. The bring-back-America-of-my-dreams kind. The Republicans are happy to let the fringe have its day as long as they don’t have to officially support the fringe and yet derive political benefit out of its politics. The eat-cake-have-it-too kind.
The Tea Partiers pre-existed Obama. Remember, the post 9/11 days when Glenn Beck started his pet 9/12 Project? The ultimate conservative who is critical of Hollywood liberalism, supports of the war in Iraq, opposes multiculturalism, political correctness, euthanasia, anti-smoking regulations and overt homosexuality in TV and on film. He is also pro-life, by the way.
Even conservative analysts, for instance David Frum, describe Beck as “a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility”.
Frum was right on the first one, marginally erring on the second. The American South – the original South – is becoming the fulcrum of conservative politics in America today. And those conservatives have a valid argument. Way back in the early 1980s, sociologist John Shelton Reed, in his book, ‘One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture’, labeled white Southerners a “quasi-ethnic regional group”. No American region values its local culture as the South. Socially conservative, part of the Evangelical Protestant Bible belt, this region has been, in the last few decades, trying to adjust itself erosion of its exclusive culture because of the arrival of northerners and Hispanics. Historian Edward L. Ayers writes in “What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History” how difficult it is to the southerners to quietly accept what they call the declining exclusivity of “an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, real, more unified and distinct”.
This exclusivity bares itself prominently during election times in the USA: Go back to the Republican debates in the last election in states like Texas, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee on issues ranging from race to abortion, gay rights, morality, religion and even foreign relations. Cowboy Bush could never make a mistake because he is a southerner!
But then economically, except for Florida and Virginia, the South has been suffering for a long time. Disgruntled tax payers on the one hand, the worst poverty rates in the USA on the other as reflected in lower household incomes, increasing number of unemployed and homeless and reducing number of graduates. Of course, it must be mentioned here that the South has a relatively larger population of African Americans than other regions and the whites-only statistics fare much better than the Southern average.
It is from this burning pit that the Tea Partiers have emerged, even notwithstanding the fact that some of their leaders have their political and economic bases elsewhere. At the height of the Obama Birth Certificate controversy, almost all of the law suits seeking Obama to come out with his ‘original’ birth certificate were filed in courts in Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, Arizona and Texas! In the recent mid-term elections, from which states were most of the Republicans victors? No guesses.
I argue that the biggest conundrum for white and black America today is: What is Obama? In the last two years, they have not been able to succinctly resolve this issue. Obama is not your average African American, like Bush was the average Texan. He is an Ivy Leaguer. He is of the post-1960s America and thus escaped having to take the civil rights movement path to national politics. He is not a true American Black: His forefathers were not brought to the USA as slaves. He is not a heartland American, but a Hawaiian. He is not a religionist in the strict American sense.
So, how to categorise this person? Because without categorising him, you can’t attack him politically and as mentioned above, he does not fit into the traditional categories. Naturally, irrespective of what else he may be, he is still a Black. That is some consolation to his attackers. But race is not a politically correct tool to discredit a politician in the we-are-all-equal America; even the conservatives today shy away from raking up race at least in public.
But in politics where there is wile there is a way. Obama must be a ‘Marxist’ and Hussein definitely is a ‘Muslim’. If you go back to the early campaigning days of the last Presidential election, you will hear these two words among the most popular in the conservative rumour mill. The mainstream Conservatives would not dare use those words in public. Not that they would mind if some one else, with even a modicum of conservative credentials, utters them. Arrives on the American political scene a failed lawyer from Illinois, a frivolous politician, a known anti-Semite and an irritable litigator: Andy Martin. This fellow who was not allowed entry into the bar because he was paranoid was the saviour. And what did he say? In 2004 , weeks after the Democratic National Convention, for the first time, Obama was called a Muslim. By Martin. The New York Times says pernicious rumors that Barack Obama is “secretly a Muslim” can be traced back to him. That, if you recall, led to the Islamic Madarasa story which claimed that Obama had attended a Madarasa when he was Indonesia. Obama only once officially reacted to these religious insinuations saying: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” That brought out more rumours from conspiracy lunatics like the Martins that Obama is doing a disservice to American by not condemning the Muslims for 9/11!!
The Tea Partiers don’t openly call Obama a Muslim. They are the cowardly type who best shoot from somebody else’s shoulder. They call him a ‘Marxist’ instead. The ‘M’ word again. But the reasons given by Martin and the Partiers is the same: Obama is out to wreck America.
What is the solution they propose? They waited for an opportunity. Obama gave it to them in 2000 when House Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 without a single Republican vote. The $787 billion “emergency” expenditure was seen as a demonstration of wasteful spending and an egregious growth of government. |Then the stage was set for the Tea Partiers as rumours emerged that all types of tax increases were on the anvil. The Partiers finally had the motive and the masses to motivate. And the rest of the Tea Partiers movement is history. One small observation: The Tea Partiers want a small central government with more power to the states, thereby reducing the size and scope of government and “promoting the American ideals of self-reliance and personal integrity” in the bargain.
Did we hear this before? Yes, of course, from Glenn Beck and his 9/12 Project, regarded by him as a pro-limited government movement that favors honesty, hope, humility, hard work, personal responsibility and, gratitude. A media personality who is quite popular in the USA (?), Beck cleverly tied in the 9/11 attacks and what he calls the original American values in one string. Only fools would say there is no connection with the ‘Islamist’ attacks on America on 9/11 and the call for bringing back American values.
So, in the last couple of years, what we see is a third political lobby in the making in the USA which identifies itself neither with the Democrats nor with the Republicans. There are the Partiers of course. Then there are the Glenn Beckers. Then the Jerome Corsis and Alan Keyes. There are the dumb hacks who would do anything, even project the Partiers as they do, to catch eyeballs, like the Liz Cheneys, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannitys or Camile Paglias.
Then come the big guns, the Presidential contenders for 2012, the likes of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, highest-rated commentator of Fox News Glenn Beck, Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Backman, former CNN commentator Lou Dobbs (ha!), former Florida House speaker Marco Rubio, Governor Gary Johnson, the most conservative of Senators Jim DeMint, Representative Joe Wilson, Governor Rick Terry, former Representative Dick Army.
As the 2012 Presidential election nears, we may well see these various political drifts trying to merge into one political entity – the third force – with a conservative agenda not palatable even to the worst of the Republicans, confident of victory. Their premise, at least, is correct. If the Americans can vote for a Bush and an Obama, why not the Tea Partiers? After all, the American dream is for everyone and any one, isn’t it?
The spirit of Barry Goldwater and his panacea form American ills -- small government, free enterprise and a strong national defense – lives on 50 years later in today’s America. Only, Goldwater’s crusade is now in the hands of social conservatives and the religious extreme right who call Obama a Marxist or a Muslim.
It’s not about race alone.
If only the average Mac-eating, Coke-drinking American sees through them. And in time.

When a channel has blood on its hands: Rakhi Ka Insaaf or Reality Killer Inc.?

2010-11-14T03:54:00.002Z

I write this blog with a sense of unrequited shame and impotent anger.

George Ade, an American humorist and playwright, once said: “In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of popular entertainment.” In India, television channels, without exception, wouldn’t think twice of showing worms mating if it would give them ratings. So, why should Imagine TV be an exception?

The biography of Sameer Nair, channel CEO, on the channel’s website claims: Imagine has carved an identity for itself with its unique, break-through reality programming and soul stirring dramas. Ramayan, Rakhi Ka Swayamvar, Bandini, Jyoti, Raaz Pichle Janam Ka, Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jayega, Devi are some of the programs that have helped establish Imagine firmly in the market.

Nair can now proudly extend his biography to say that his channel’s programmes can also be credited with the death, character assassination or public humiliation of ordinary Indian citizens.

The reference is to the most obnoxious and inhuman of reality shows ever shown: Rakhi Ka Insaaf (RKI).

On November 11, Laxman Prasad, a 25-year-old from Jhansi in central India passed away. Apparently he had stopped eating following a bout of extreme depression. It was caused by his appearance, along with his wife he wedded earlier this year, on RKI, a sham reality show on human relationships. It is presented by the most disgusting television personality ever, who goes by the name of Rakhi Sawant. She has the authority to say anything, mostly the most foul, to the participants. That’s Imagine TV’s ode to liberalism, I suppose.

Reflecting on the marital discord between Prasad and his wife, Sawant called him names, including describing him as an ‘impotent’. After the show, Prasad went into depression which apparently caused his death.

His uncle told the media: “Ever since he was humiliated and called names by the anchor in the programme aired on October 23, he had become an object of rebuke. This had caused him mental agony and he stopped taking food. We had gone to the programme hoping that it would help resolve Laxman's marital problems with Anita, whom he had married on February 19 this year. However, instead of finding a solution, unfounded charges were levelled against us by Rakhi who also branded Laxman as impotent.”

A person whose own character is ever in question has the audacious power to question the character of the participant! (I may be accused of being a male chauvinist by those who feel if men can be characterless and abusive then women have an equal right to be so. So be it. If that is how they calculate gender equality then Rakhi Sawant is their emancipator!)

Earlier, a Muslim widow from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh similarly fell foul in the show. Her son was in the custody of her sisters. On the show, Rakhi Sawant described the widow as characterless. A secret video showing the widow embracing a man was also shown. Since then the lady is missing from her home. If she is still alive, she would understand what Prasad went through.

Who murdered Prasad? Who is responsible for the video recording of the widow? Rakhi Sawant? No. She’s just a two-penny fiend in human shape – to borrow the phrase from Wodehouse -- who would have otherwise led a life of pathetic obscurity had not the greedy television industry raised her to this level for furthering their self interests in the name of socially uplifting entertainment. It is the television channel which is the culprit.

I have my faults, but when it comes to the programmes of Imagine TV, I draw the line. As a journalist I have seen worse, but this touches the nadir. I ensure that my daughter does not get to watch it at all. Living outside India, we initially thought that our daughter would get a peek into Indian culture if she watched Indian channels. Initially when it was new, we used to watch Imagine TV. Then it dawned in me that if people outside India watched its shows, they would not be incorrect in assuming that women in India are generally rascals, without character, vengeful, deceiving, lustful, cheating, diabolic. In sum: Dirty. And the men, unrivaled followers of de Sade.

Because that is how the women are characterized in Imagine TV’s shows. Take Jyoti, the lead in the eponymous serial. An educated girl with a supposedly independent mind, she comes across as a dumb muff, willing to suffer ignominies without a word. Or, the lead character in Bandini, who calls her husband ‘maalik’ (lord). (As if suffering oppression stoically is the Indian way to true womanhood! I don’t know what the women in the families of the channel bosses think of these shows.)

Or the other reality show in which dozens of Indian girls shamelessly parade in front of Rahul Mahajan, who has a record for using drugs and beating his wife (later, wives), for one of them to be worthy enough to be chosen as his wife. The woman who finally won, got to marry him but left him shortly complaining he used to beat and abuse her!

Indian or no Indian, I don’t want my daughter to draw inspiration from such characterisations. More importantly, I don’t want my daughter to get the impression that women in India are usually in possession of such a character as portrayed by Imagine TV. By showing women as eternally facing oppression, Imagine TV is only espousing the cause of the male chauvinist pig and certainly not that of emancipation of women. If Sameer Nair and company think otherwise they better see a shrink.

But now they should be staring at a prison sentence. Prasad’s death has raised, or lowered, the bar of civic sense. Thanks to them, we have long crossed the threshold of decency and decorum. We have now entered the arena of violence and mayhem in the name of family entertainment. It is as if Imagine TV has turned the clock back to Roman times when popular culture was epitomized by humans killing humans in a stadium. If Imagine TV is not restrained now, we will soon see live incest and orgies. We are a step away from being Caligulas.

Someone said there is no point burning dirty books; better make people not read them. I don’t prescribe to it in general, but in the case of Imagine TV I am certain it should meet a similar fate. In the name of reality shows, it is cheating ordinary people, it is guilty of breaching privacy of people (as in videotaping in the Saharanpur widow case), it is manipulating the baser instinct of people – voyeurism – it is building aspirations for a recidivist society.

But in the larger context, why blame Imagine TV? People do a lot of things for money, even picking it up with their mouths from a pile of shit. The blame lies in us, Indians. By watching such programmes we are bringing our repressive baser instincts into our family domains. The Sameer Nairs wouldn’t come up with such shows if they didn’t know us better. We get what we deserve. Shame on us.

Last year, Pallavi, a 32-year-old mother committed suicide after watching a reality show called Sach Ka Saamna. Early this year a young Mumbai girl committed suicide after not performing well in the Boogie-Woogie show.

There are many more Prasads and Pallavis in our families awaiting their fateful moments. I will ensure that my daughter leads a happy life with true knowledge of Indian culture certainly not learnt from the Indian television distortionists. The rest can go to hell if they volunteer to fall prey to the culture, nay, killer vultures of Indian general entertainment television.

Someone who read this piece tried to advise me to keep my cool and be a responsible writer. I thought, if Rakhi Sawant has the freedom to say what she wants, I have a similar freedom too. The only difference is, her words kill people and mine, I hope in vain, kills the show itself.

Is it Ram save the believers? Or save Ram from the believers?

2010-10-01T19:27:00.001+01:00

The Indian judicial system is insane. The Ayodhya dispute judgment is proof enough. The judgment is a travesty of justice. It is a majority (2-1) judgment only because it technically conforms to the legal definition of a majority decision. Possibly, the dissent gives it the legitimacy it lacks.
I am told I can criticize judgments, but not question the motives of judges. Here, I am only questioning their beliefs. You will not be chastised for thinking the judges were overawed by the presence of Lord Ram as a petitioner. Deconstruct the two vocal judges; find a Hindu and a Muslim. Justice, go shag.
I am still not clear what the judges really wanted to say. The only point they agreed upon was to divide the disputed place among the three involved parties. Otherwise, they disagreed on everything else. Worse, their pronouncements were based on myth and hearsay couched as ‘belief’. Belief of the majority.

Let me take you through the charade.

1. Which structure existed before the Hindu lumpens installed some idols inside it in 1949?
The Hindu judge says: Disputed structure was always treated, considered and believed to be a mosque and practised by Mohammedans for worship accordingly.
Then why should the area on which that structure stood before it was demolished be given to the Hindus? The same Hindu judge says: …. the part of the land which is held by this Court to be the place of birth of Lord Rama according to the faith and belief of Hindus.
He accepts it was a Muslim structure, but still gives it to the Hindus. Why? Not because of evidence provided by the Archaeological Survey of India. But because of the belief of Hindus. Then what about the Muslim belief which the same judge also attests to? The Hindu judge went by the majority belief.

2. Who built the three-domed structure?
The Hindu judge says: The plaintiffs have failed to prove that the building in dispute was built by Babar or by Mir Baqi. In the absence of any otherwise pleadings and material it is difficult to hold as to when and by whom the disputed structure was constructed but this much is clear that the same was constructed before the visit of Joseph Tieffenthaler in Oudh area between 1766 to 1771.
The Muslim judge says: The disputed structure was constructed as mosque by or under orders of Babar. It is not proved by direct evidence that premises in dispute including constructed portion belonged to Babar or the person who constructed the mosque or under whose orders it was constructed.
Can you believe both judges looked at the same evidence to come to such conclusions! Why? Because one was Hindu, the other was Muslim.

3. Was a structure demolished to build the three-domed structure?
The Hindu judge says: The building in dispute was constructed after demolition of Non-Islamic religious structure, i.e., a Hindu temple.
The Muslim judge says: No temple was demolished for constructing the mosque. Mosque was constructed over the ruins of temples which were lying in utter ruins since a very long time before the construction of mosque and some material thereof was used in construction of the mosque.
The Muslim judge at least obliquely admits that the ruins over which the structure was built were of temples. But the Hindu judge believes for sure that any non-Islamic structure has to be a Hindu temple. Simple man, he.

4. What is the earliest evidence of the three-domed structure being used for prayers?
The Hindu judge: It is held that the muslims at least from 1860 and onwards have visited the inner courtyard in the premises in dispute and have offered Namaj there at. The last Namaj was offered on 16th December, 1949. It is held that building in question was not exclusively used by the members of muslim community. After 1856-57 outer courtyard exclusively used by Hindu and inner courtyard had been visited for the purpose of worship by the members of both the communities.
The Muslim judge: That much before 1855 Ram Chabutra and Seeta Rasoi had come into existence and Hindus were worshipping in the same. It was very very unique and absolutely unprecedented situation that in side the boundary wall and compound of the mosque Hindu religious places were there which were actually being worshipped along with offerings of Namaz by Muslims in the mosque.
A rare agreement that both Hindus and Muslims were worshipping in the same area in the mid-19th century, but that it were the Muslims who were solely worshipping inside the three-domed structure. The Hindu judge would have admitted, at least to himself, that the Hindus had never, never worshipped inside the three-domed structure. Which logically means that the Hindus violated all ethics by stealthily installing some Hindu idols inside the three-domed structure in 1949. Remember, this was just two years after India’s independence and the violent Partition which saw many Muslims from around Ayodhya migrate to Pakistan, leaving their homes and property to be usurped by the locals. The locals could have been Hindus.

5. Was there a Hindu idol inside the three-domed structure before 1949?
The Hindu judge: The idol in question kept under the Shikhar existed there prior to 6th December, 1992 but not from time immemorial and instead kept thereat in the night of 22nd/23rd December, 1949.
The Muslim judge: That for a very long time till the construction of the mosque it was treated/believed by Hindus that some where in a very large area of which premises in dispute is a very small part birth place of Lord Ram was situated, however, the belief did not relate to any specified small area within that bigger area specifically the premises in dispute.
The Muslim judge is more forthcoming on this issue.

6. When and how did the Hindus claim for the first time that their deity Ram was born at the site of the three-domed structure?
The Hindu judge: It is held that the place of birth, as believed and worshipped by Hindus, is the area covered under the central dome of the three domed structure, i.e., the disputed structure in the inner courtyard in the premises of dispute.
The Muslim judge: That after some time of construction of the mosque Hindus started identifying the premises in dispute as exact birth place of Lord Ram or a place wherein exact birth place was situated. That for some decades before 1949 Hindus started treating/believing the place beneath the Central dome of mosque (where at present make sift temple stands) to be exact birth place of Lord Ram.
The Muslim judge is more forthcoming on the issue than the Hindu judge who understands belief.

The above are but a sniff. Read the full text of the judgment for the fragrance. By the way, I don’t know if the Hindu deity called Ram is aware he has been dragged to court as well by his believers?
Here is the suit: O.O.S. No. 5 of 1989 (R.S.NO. 236/1989
Bhagwan Sri Rama Virajman & Ors. Vs. Sri Rajendra Singh & Ors.
Here is the explanation of the suit: The instant suit was filed on behalf of the deities and Sri Ram Janm Bhumi through the next friend, praying that the defendants be restrained not to interfere in the construction of the temple of plaintiff nos. 1 and 2 on the ground that the deities are perpetual minors and against them Limitation Laws do not run.
So, is Ram a god or a human?
Anyway, here is what the court has to say on Ram: This Court is of the view that place of birth that is Ram Janm Bhumi is a juristic person. The deity also attained the divinity like Agni, Vayu, Kedarnath. Asthan is personified as the spirit of divine worshipped as the birth place of Ram Lala or Lord Ram as a child. Spirit of divine ever remains present every where at all times for any one to invoke at any shape or form in accordance with his own aspirations and it can be shapeless and formless also.
I read and re-read this paragraph and even pinched myself because I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Was it part of a judgment or an RSS pamphlet?

One can go on and on taking potshots at the judgment which runs into thousands of pages. It is already getting boring and had it not been considered the most crucial judgment in India’s history – as a dumb tv journalist in India kept on telling his believers – it wouldn’t have been given a second glance even by a third-rate lawyer.

As of today, India is no longer a secular state. It is a Hindu nation exhibiting theocratic tendencies. Evidence need not assist the cause of justice. Spiritual belief, of the majority kind, is the quiet, safe, substitute. For all the cynicism, the judgment may actually help resolve the Ayodhya dispute. But even then, the fact will remain that the reconciliation was achieved on the basis of a judgment based on puerile, but politically safe, grounds. It makes us Hindus first, Indians next. It is a new politico-religious binary we have to get used to.

I have half a mind to meet a local criminal in Patna, the capital of Bihar, who, when I used to work there in the 1980s, decided to install a statue of a Hindu monkey god right in the middle of a busy street. In a few months, he erected a brick structure around the statue. A brief while later, he hired a priest to perform ‘puja’. Slowly but surely, the locals, who originally protested against the installation saying it was causing traffic jams, started visitng the place. And soon, it was called a temple. When I visited Patna a few years ago, I saw this criminal had now turned into a bearded man in saffron clothing and wooden sandals. One of his henchmen told me he had given up crime because the temple was paying him much more. I want to tell this fellow to encourage some locals to file a suit against him and his temple. The court will eventually side with him because it will believe in his belief in his god sitting on the middle of the street. So what if the evidence shows that the god is obstructing traffic?

In India anything can happen. Because Indians are foolish believers in a polity which does not want them but their majority status to serve its own ends. Left, Centre or Right. It’s the turn of the Right today. India Shining, those who killed a Gandhi and brought down a mosque once said. India Believing, they say now, mockingly. Ram serves all. Believe it.

NRIs? Grow up. They are HTIs: Happen To be Indians

2010-09-05T01:23:00.001+01:00

I was watching the latest Bollywood film released this week, ‘We Are Family’ at a theatre in Leicester. Something was nagging me. Something seemed out of place. The puzzle solved itself when the film ended with the scroll of acknowledgements.
The background score appeared in the top third of the scroll and quite low down appeared the names of the playback singers alongside the songs sequenced in the way they appear in the film.
It was a typical Hollywood scroll.
More to come. I did not see a single visual of India in the entire film. Part of it was shot in some Mumbai studio, but the outside scenes were entirely Australian. Sydney, to be precise. I didn’t see a single brown face other than the actors. And half the time they conversed in English. The Hindi they spoke you won’t hear anywhere in India. It’s typical NRI Hindi. I know because my daughter speaks the same way.
If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that it was a Hollywood film about an Indian family Down Under.
I think the globalisation of Bollywood since Dilwale Dulhaniyan Le Jayenge and Hum Aapke Hain Kaun – which introduced the non-resident Gujarati life-style to India – to Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna and Namaste London -- which swayed under the influence of western family values – to New York and Kites – which still had something of India lingering in them – is now complete with We Are Family.
Not just Bollywood, current films in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, even Oriya have begun to represent India in a non-Indian environment.
And why not? For instance, in my home town of Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh and the neighbouring city of Vijayawada, it is a fact that at least one member of each house lives abroad. The same is true, even if in varying degrees, for most states in India.
In the 1960s and 1970s, my paternal grandmother used to say it was a punishment visiting her children’s families in Delhi or Madras. There’s nothing in these cities, no culture, no ‘samskar’, no proper way of bringing up children, she would moan. But by the end of her life, she had travelled abroad more times than even some of her other sons and daughters! She could tell the difference between a burger and a ciabatta, told us that Universal is much better than the Vauhini Studio in Madras, didn’t like flying Air India and thought Des Pardes was the most un-Indian film she ever saw.
Her children who live abroad even today pay their annual visits to India, the men exchanging their loafers and jackets for the simple pant-and-shirt, the ladies digging out their sarees from the store rooms. They take their children on tours to Indian cities and temples in a faint attempt to pass on their Indianness to the next generation. But for the current generation – my cousins and their children -- Indianness ends with their names, that is, if ‘Subramanyam’ has not become ‘Mony’.
One of them wrote to me after seeing Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham: Guys like Amitabh Bachchan (who plays Shah Rukh Khan’s father) still exist in India? I asked the same chappie about We Are Family. He said: It’s cool. That’s how it is out here. Would you tell your children in a matter-of-fact manner that you had cancer, the Indian in me asked him. Why not? No point getting emotional about it. They’ll have to grow up one day and the best you can do is prepare them for the future. He said. Would an Indian mother, er, mom, agree to train another woman to take her place as shown in the film? The Indian in me wouldn’t let go. Where are you, cousin? A friend of mine brought home a step-dad for her children a month after the hubby died and they don’t have any problems. He intoned. I wanted to ask if anyone had cared to check how the children were adjusting. But I stopped myself.
We Are Family destroys many Indian assumptions, the foremost being you are an Indian wherever you are. Wrong. There is a clear disconnect between India and the Indian diaspora. India may continue to be delusional about Indians living abroad remaining Indian. Hardly. The concept of ‘pravasi bhartiya’ that the Pawars, Modis and Chandrababu Naidus institutionalised to promote the supposition that the Indian diaspora is the prime example of India shining is a charade.
Nine out of 10 Indians settled abroad did so because they hated the Indian system. Now they are Americans or Europeans and all the PIO cards India can print would not make them return ‘home’. They are married to their present, living cultures and they must be comfortable with it. If India wants to show them off as its brood, as a cap in its feather, let it. It doesn’t harm them. I have been away from India for nearly five years now and I am beginning to understand how the roots wither as generations expand. If Dev Patel, who played the protagonist kid in Slumdog Millionaire, prefers acting in Hollywood movies to Bollywood ones, no one can accuse him of being un-Indian.
There’s a video library in Leicester run by a Punjabi in his 50s who makes regular visits back home. He tells me that the VHS tapes and CDs of the pre-1990 Indian films are gathering dust because only the ‘buddhe log’ (old people) ask for them. The hot sellers are Indian films extensively shot abroad and show life-styles and cultures the youngsters can relate to. He thinks We Are Family is going to earn him much more than any other recent film.
What he says may be true for him, though I know that there is still a craze for the old B&Ws. Many families abroad send their children to Indian dance or music schools. They perform ‘puja’ during festivals, downloading the ‘vidhan’ (method of doing the puja) from the internet. The temples and gurdwaras get a regular stream of worshippers. But to interpret this as proof of them being Indian is a misnomer.
We Are Family sets the record straight. It reflects the current cultural moorings of a family in a setting far from Indian shores. It is coincidental that the said family happens to be of Indian origin. Remember, you don’t even know the surname of the family. You don’t see pictures of their parents and grand parents. You don’t know which part of India they come from and whether the cancer patient’s family in India had been informed. I don’t think you even see the ‘pundit’ who performs the marriage at the end of the film. You don’t see anyone, even the youngest child, weeping, save the patient herself. Emotions are kept to a minimum and you would find the relationships a bit cold by Indian standards. Not that there is dearth of either emotion or warmth. Only it is expressed in a way perhaps largely alien in India.
I can keep on dissecting the film, but the conclusion doesn’t change. We need to grow up. The USP of India lies within its own boundaries. Latching on to the diaspora doesn’t help. We have left it to Bollywood to reflect Indianness abroad. Ironic that it is a Bollywood film-maker who has latched on to the diaspora audience for his return on investment who drops the scales from our eyes.

Aarushi: Her killer's is a lesser crime than sleaze-starved Indian media's

2010-08-10T12:40:00.007+01:00

This is with reference to an article by Mr. Manoj Mitta in The Times of India on August 8, 2010, headlined ‘Aarushi coverage reignites debate on media coverage’. This is the link to that article: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Aarushi-coverage-reignites-debate-on-media-restraint/articleshow/6273245.cms

Dear Manoj Mitta,
How easy for you to say that in the Arushi murder investigation case, the ‘real’ culprit is the CBI?
Just as the person who gives a bribe is as much a culprit as the one asking for it, the media is a ‘real’ culprit too.
Take your own paper, TOI, for instance. Why didn’t you or any one else report the grounds on which the supreme court issued notices to TOI along with two others?
Was it self-preservation or self-censorship? I can understand the journalists today need to survive first in order to cry from the pulpit. But surely self-restraint could have been observed by TOI when reporting about the case in the first place?
What can I say about the journalistic sobriety and corporate responsibility of a paper as TOI which can do anything to earn a penny. Remember, how TOI once sold its own mast head as advertising space? For that matter, it was a tough experience opening the link to your article in the TOI as I had to negotiate links to marriage and advertisement sites popping up endlessly before I could read what you wrote on such a serious issue.
You should go through the TOI archives to see how precipitously anti-Arushi its coverage was from day one.
The larger issue is the media, in India, today is a self-server. Nothing else. Had Arushi belonged to a poor family living in a slum, the reputable TOI wouldn’t even have bothered to covered the original crime in the first place. This is true for each and every publication and broadcaster who claims to undergo a journalistic routine in this country.
The Supreme Court correctly described the media as ‘irresponsible press’. Only the court waited thus far to say it. We have heard of the Indian courts suo moto trying to restrain excesses of various kinds in the past. What happened to the courts in Arushi’s case? Weren’t the judges reading the papers? Or did they realise that the late Arushi’s reputation had been tarnished by the media only after her father went to the court?
When the Arushi story broke all those years ago, I had the opportunity to talk to most print and TV journalists covering the case. Initially the novices – the bite carriers – were sent out to do the story. The talk, in newsrooms and the Press club, essentially was around who among the girl and her parents was sleeping with whom. But once the big bosses realised the story’s potential, and their own scope for self-doodling in signed columns or on live television, they took over. Bereft as they are all, without exception, of common sense and without a modicum of shame, they spilt their guts out, trying to stereotype Arushi as nothing less than a hooker. They made out their parents to be nothing short of night-time Romeos and Juliets.
I will not condescend to even talk about what the NOIDA police or the CBI did, beneath contempt as they truly are. Or, for that matter, Renuka Chowdhry, the then minister who shed crocodile tears and thus gained media mileage of her own by brandishing the press as sensationalist. Did she even go to Arushi’s house even once? What with her being a woman, a wife, a mother and all? Pooh.
The bile comes up when I see and read so-called senior journalists sitting in arm chairs in air-conditioned cubicles talk of human rights and individual privacy and media ethics and what not when in fact they are nothing but insensitive lackeys of media profiteers.
Let Arushi rest in peace. As Indian journalists that is the least the lot can do for her after all that it has already done. And next time when any of you are called on to the stage to accept an award for courageous,distinguished, human or social journalism, try to run away as far as possible. If not, I know none of you wouldn’t, at least cover your face while accepting such awards.
I remember a journalist, a cut-throat one at that, who would go out to tarnish women complaining of rape. One day, his own niece was raped. And I saw him – this now helpless hack – in tears calling up fellow hacks in other papers to condemn the rape and importantly, not to mention the name of his niece as that would spoil her future. I don’t know how the fellow hacks responded to his please, but I, with a hand over my heart, can say I took the opportunity to tell him without mincing words that he was reaping what he himself had sown, notwithstanding all my sympathies for his niece.
I know that journalists won’t change. Until it happens to them. Not that I wish it. But I can’t stop Arushi’s family from wanting to. Or, those hundreds and thousands of nameless, faceless Indians who are daily victims of the mighty pen-pushers.
Manoj, don’t take it personally. I know you as one of the most honest and sensitive of journalists I have come across. But then, even God makes mistakes sometimes.
What about me when I was a journalist, you or anyone can ask. I quit the shit when I found myself a lone voice. I didn’t care for the money or the position. Not a society-changing act, but better than the rest, I believe.

Indian Judiciary: Courting Mythology

2010-05-23T10:03:00.002+01:00

If The Times of India on May 22 is to be believed, a judge of the Punjab and Haryana high court has quietly re-written India’s millennia-old history. And, but for a solitary piece in the TOI, India is yet to take note of it.

Justice Rajive Bhalla, according to TOI On May 22, “recently” observed that “Maharishi Valmiki was not a dacoit before turning into a sage and writing the Ramayana”. The learned judge had no concrete proof – either a birth certificate or an ancient police FIR – so he based his observation on a research by a Punjab University scholar. Why was no proof submitted before him? The judge reportedly said that “actual facts appear to be lost in the mists of antiquity”.

The TOI correspondent also says about the nature of research by the scholar which became the judge’s basis for his observation: “The judge stated the salient features of the research, saying that “from Vedic literature up to 9th century AD, there is no reference as such that Maharishi Valmiki led a life of a dacoit or highwayman.” It was also stated that in his own work ‘Ramayana’, Valmiki is called Bhagwan, Muni, Rishi and Maharishi and no reference of his highwaymanship is available there.”

How did Valmiki’s past become the current topic for judicial discourse? The TOI tells us: “Justice Bhalla was hearing an appeal by a national television channel, asking the court to quash an FIR filed against it in Jalandhar for airing a serial that raised a question about Valmiki being a dacoit before he turned into a sage.” Understandably, I think, the protest was filed a member of the Valmiki community.

Here are two interesting reactions posted at the end of the TOI report:

Phadnis, Mumbai: “Courts have no business to pass Judgments on such issues. This is not a matter of Law. Whether the belief about Valmiki is correct or not is another matter. Many parts of the Ramayana or Mahabharata are controversial. Are the Courts going to Rule on such matters?”

M. Pankaj, New Delhi: “A mythology mixes facts, fiction, reality and divinity all to express the author's ideals and views. It cannot be ascertained or adjudged one way or another. Indeed media should be responsible, but religious believers should also not be over sensitive or angry since it shows the lack of their inner-confidence in their own belief. Focus on the substance…not on the superficial or what others say ...”

Since when has mythology come to be questioned in courts? Anything can happen in India. Remember, how the proposed Sethusamudram Project – envisaging a navigable sea route around the Indian peninsula passing through the Sri Lankan strait – was mired in controversy with the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party and dumb Hindu fanatics moving the courts saying the project would destroy a bridge – Rama Setu – apparently built by monkeys to help Rama – the protagonist of the Hindu epic Ramayana – to cross over into Sri Lanka to free his wife, Sita, from the clutches of the villain-king, Ravana.

That was in 2007. The then Congress government had submitted an affidavit in the Supreme Court of India, with reports of the Archaeological Survey of India as appendices, that the existence of Rama was questionable and therefore not germane to the Sethusamudram Project. But imagine the power of the faithful! The government of India, foreseeing political oblivion if it did not bow before the protestors, subsequently withdrew that affidavit.

There are similarties in both cases:

1. In the Valmiki case, the defendants say they went by mythology while portraying Valmiki’s dacoit past. Justice Bhalla, despite his curt observation, leaves himself an escape valve by saying that “actual facts appear to be lost in the mists of antiquity”.
2. In the Sethusamudram case, the government says there is no “scientific” evidence of the fabled Ram Setu and yet withdraws its report. The Supreme Court order curtly asks for continuation of the Project in the interim, but orders that “the Ram Setu should not be touched”.

The similarity is that both the courts, despite their clear observations, seem hesitant to actually and directly challenge mythology and popular belief. What if?...the doubt lingers in their honourable minds.

These cases suggest that the mosaic of sanity covering the Indian judiciary, however thinly, is beginning to crack. This can only spell disaster for the country’s future for the following reasons:

1. The Indian judiciary’s sense of justice deems that heresay is no evidence. Now it becomes the judiciary’s responsibility whether mythology and belief fall under the category of heresay or not. If not, the above observations by the two courts are unjustified.
2. A judicial case is fought on the basis of facts. Facts, as I know them, are supposed to be tangible evidences which can be physically examined for verification. In the Valmiki case, the court ruling is based on a researcher’s evidence which contains no tangible proof other than claiming that there are no references of Valmiki’s dacoit past found in ancient Hindu/Indian literature. I do not know if the researcher has added a disclaimer that the literature she has gone through is all that exists and there is no possibility of other, yet unknown, literature existing. In short, there is no way of claiming that mere absence of the said reference in literature is clear, unequivocal proof that the reference never existed at all. There is a question of reasonable doubt here. So, is the researcher’s evidence an incontrovertible ‘fact’ in judicial terms? I think not. Similarly, in the Sethusamudram case, the court only asks the government not to disturb the Ram Setu, without giving any reasons. Does this mean that the court, as the case continues, thinks it will come across evidence that will prove the Hindus right and the Archaeological Survey of India wrong? The doubt lingers.

However, with the Indian courts not shying away from pronouncing on things mythological, I want ruling on the following:

It is generally believed – mind the word, ‘believed’ – that Valmiki belonged for the Kirata Bhil Adivasi, a tribal caste. It is this belief that brings together members of the caste and similar castes under the umbrella of the entire Valmiki community in India (and in Pakistan!)Now, there is another ‘belief’ that, as stated in Wikipedia, Valmiki re-incarnated himself as a Brahmin in the 15th century. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsidas)

The Wikipedia says: “Tulsidas is regarded as an incarnation of the great sage Valmiki. In Bhavishyottar Purana, Lord Shiva tells Parvati how Valmiki got a boon from Hanuman to sing the glories of Lord Rama in vernacular language in the Kali Yuga. This prophecy of Lord Shiva materialised on the Shraavan Shukla Saptami, Vikrami Samvat 1554 when Valmiki reincarnated as Tulsidas.

“Valmikistulasidasaha Kalou Devi Bhavishayati; Ramachanadrakathaametaam Bhashabhadhdhaan Karishyatihi. (Bhavishyottar Purana, Pratisarga Parva, 4.20).

“Nabhadas, a contemporary of Tulsidas and a great devotee, also describes Tulsidas as incarnation of Valmiki in his work Bhaktmaal. Even the Ramanandi sect (Tulsidas belonged to this sect) firmly believes that it was Valmiki himself who incarnated as Tulsidas in the Kali Yuga.”

If I believe all this to be true, then I will come to certain conclusions:

1. Valmiki should no longer be considered a tribal, but a Brahmin.
2. This means the Valmiki caste grouping falls under the Brahmin category.
3. This means the community now has all rights to all Brahmin rites.
4. This means the community can no longer avail of benefits the government offers to tribal communities in terms of reservation and other social benefits.

Now, suppose I move the courts to certify these conclusions on the basis of evidence available in Wikipedia, will I win my case? Going by the precedents, I should.

If not, do I have the right to move the courts, again, to nullify every social, cultural and political custom that exists in the geographical region called India and which is based on the tenets of Hinduism on the ground that Hinduism is not a religion, is a collection of beliefs and there is no evidence, especially written, of its history?

Won’t I be taken for a fool?

I rest my case.

Note: No disrespect to the Valmikis

Caste in India is the real outcast

2010-05-17T11:46:00.004+01:00

This blog is in response to an article by distinguished journalist, Mr. A.J. Philip, in the newspaper he edits, The Herald of India. Here is the link to the original article: http://www.heraldofindia.com/article.php?id=489

Dear Mr. Philip,
Your reference to Bihar brings back lots of memories of my own stint as a journalist in that state. A senior colleague of mine, the late Arvind Das, used to call Bihar the centre of the universe, given the state's social complexities. While I appreciate your views on caste, and do abhor discrimination of any kind, I would like to point out a couple of things. Discrimination is as Darwinian as oppression. The evolution of a society is studied through the many cycles of catharsis that it has experienced. Our sociologists and historians have been trying for centuries to simply understand what is India and why is India different from any other society in the world. I have not found a decent answer yet in my many readings. I feel a society has to be seen in its living past and living present. Ignoring or denying any variable of that society and then attempting to study its evolution is a backfiring proposition. We may abhor cateism, we may deny we are casteists, but that does not make casteism go away. For the simple reason that our actions of the present have their moorings not only in our geneology but also in our cultural past. These actions define our identity, our location in society, whether we believe or not. Our society has evolved over thousands of years, its culture influenced by societies from across the seas at frequent intervals of history, now more so and at faster intervals because of the factor of globalisation. Some of the best Sikhs I know, professionals all in various countries abroad, came from Khalsa College. I know of two youngsters currently at an IIT who proudly say they are the alumni of the Brahman-Bhumihar Collegiate in Muzaffarpur. I know of many families with liberal values subscribing to caste-based matrimony publications. And so forth. Are these people casteist? I'd say yes. And any other answer conveys self-denial. More than ever before I today feel the need for a full-fledged caste census in India. For, never before has our society seen siesmic social and cultural changes as like now, what with India in the vortex of globalisation. There are many who predict a homogenous mass of peoples in a few generations' time. That would be the time of a society, truly classless and casteless. That would also be a time to forget where this society came from because for the citizens of that future society, their past would be an alien, long-forgotten, un-understandable phenomenon. In short, the legacy of this society of our times and our past will not remain even a memory. Why? Because nobody in our times cares to write a true account of it in the first place. I challenge any sociologist or historian to refute that their research of the Indian society is based on half or quarter knowledge considering the singular fact that never in our history has an accurate data of the caste composition been made available. Furthermore, histories and social texts are contructed realities and mediated by the ideologies of their authors. For example, I want to recall the controversy created when social and history theoreticians of the Left and Right fought over the origins of Ayodhya in the 1990s. Secondly, histories are written by conquerors, whether Hindu, Pashto, Iranian, Persian or Christian. And we have never had any clear interest in the subaltern and native histories except some works which in any case have never become mainstream reading material. For example, how many Indians even know what Kamban Ramayan is? See, even our so-called national epics have not escaped the scalpel of a divided society. So, when I say I am a a Vaidi ki Velanati Brahmin from Vemuru village in the coastal Andhra region of south India, am I speaking the truth? I have no way of verifying it. None of us Indians have. The point is, when we talk of caste even if to deny it, we have no historical or cultural basis to do so. That is why I support the caste census. Let us at least know what is that multi-cultural society we are a part of? We have already lived quite long in a social oblivion, basing our identities and ideologies developed out of socio-cultural castles built merely on belief. What we need is a new sociology of our not-so-new past.

Dear Swapan, BJP no different from Labour

2010-05-09T11:43:00.001+01:00

All that can be said of Swapan Dasgupta is that he writes good English. What he writes about is bunkum -- I am sorry to say that -- if you read his front-page piece in The Pioneer on Sunday. He is all out criticising British PM Brown for trying to cobble up a government with the help of Liberal Democrats. It is going against the wishes of the people, he says, Cameron style. He lambasts Brown for readily agreeing to reform the British electoral process in return for Clegg's support. This is not done, this is not justice, this is not democracy, he laments. Perhaps he thinks Indian readers are idiots. That is why he has conveniently brushed under the carpet what the dead and beaten BJP is doing to somehow remain in circulation. For example, the BJP's attempts to come to power in whatever way in Jharkhand. Or, for that matter, the so-called alliance based on compromises including the BJP's own position on Aydodhya, to cobble up an alliance governmetn at the Centre. He flays Brown for trying to undo a 60-year-old electoral law just to appease the LibDems and without the backup of the electorate. For one, he again conveniently forgets how the BJP thrust upon unsuspecting Indians a 5000-year-old lie or fantasy about Ayodhya. For another, Brown in the same breath said there would be referendum. For yet another, if Dasgupta thinks a mere change of law cannot make the budget deficit of Britain go away, he should be told in equally clear terms that a dumb mound of earth in a place called Ayodhya cannot make India's poverty go away. He looks quite ill wearing the collar of a pedagogue. Best he returns to what he is -- a good journalist -- for which he has always been respected.

IPL corruption: Sharjah it to save the culprits?

2010-04-25T09:36:00.004+01:00

I was talking to my brother-in-law, Prasanna Ojha, in Mumbai early Sunday morning. He is a senior banker and avid cricket lover. We didn’t have time to talk things personal as the conversation was mostly around the IPL controversy. Put off by the dirt surrounding the League, Prasanna observed: I think the IPL won’t last long. It’s going the Sharjah way. It will be wound up, if only to protect the real culprits who’ve used the IPL to make and launder dirty money.

Gem of a thought. Original. I was surprised how our Indian media, agog over the IPL controversy, never thought of this angle. After all it is a thought and thoughts more than facts govern journalism, don’t they!

For 15 years everybody who was somebody in the Sharjah circuit made money. There are umpteen reports and investigations into match-fixing and player-buying. Careers of many cricketers were botched up as a result. As luck would have it, a timely bout of strained India-Pakistan relations was just the excuse the culprits needed to kill the golden goose that was Sharjah. Was any official, ever so minor, ever brought to book? No.

So, what’s stopping the real crooks behind IPL to do a Sharjah? Notwithstanding the fact that the franchisees would lose money or that companies and corporations which bought rights of television, logos, tickets, travel, accommodation, etc, would move courts for breach of contracts?

I feel there’s someone everyone’s trying to protect. And this someone is the chap who should be hanged for everything wrong with IPL. And this someone is known to all. The man who painstakingly won the epithet of ‘would-have-been-Prime-Minister’. The man who, it is said, is worth all smugglers put together in black money. The man who has the blood of thousands of farmers who committed suicide. The man who can stop off-loading of grain or other food stuff at Indian ports till such time that local prices shoot up. The man who controls a metropolis. The man who with support of a single-digit number of MPs can blackmail the government. Do I need to name him? Only morons would say yes.

The tax authorities were already on to the IPL dirt even before the present controversy arose. The Shashi Tharoor-Lalit Modi spat, intentional or not, only hastened the inevitable outcome that the IPL books would one day have to be checked. Lalit Modi has a lot to answer for, least for his so-called dictatorial attitude. He is what he is because of his ability to wheel and deal and not because of his short temper.
The question at hand is: Has Lalit Modi fallen out with his mentor, the man described above? On this tenuous answer hangs the future of IPL and a lot more. If yes, there’s going to be a catharsis. If not, let’s all look forward to IPL 2011.

In India where cricket is religion, cricket is politics too. Crass politics at that. Can the present Indian government dare to take a decisive decision on the IPL? A big, fat no. It is too busy in self-preservation. What if Sharad Pawar and the NCP break-away if they are to lose by any decisive government action? On such silly excuses is laid the future of this country! Shame!

But the opposition fares no better. Incidentally, have you heard the BJP cry foul about the corruption charges against IPL? Again, a big, fat no. Instead, the BJP cried hoarse about Tharoor who, in any case, was incidental to the real controversy surrounding IPL. Why?

Because, something the moronic parliamentarians could never do inside the august House – come together on a national issue – they have achieved it to hide the IPL dirt. The ruling Congress, opposition BJP and semi-conductor NCP are all involved with IPL. Rajiv Shukla, Arun Jaitley and of course the Pawar-Patel duo. Why politics, even cricket makes strange bedfellows. It is now left to cricket’s political have-nots, the Left parties, to cry about the real issue of corruption in IPL. But who cares for these guys? If they are honest about wanting to know the truth about IPL, it is only because they have not yet got the opportunity to be dishonest. They share no cake of the IPL pie. That’s all.

With politics in the hands of such corrupts and dimwits, IPL should be able to thrive. The BCCI, which perhaps is the most corrupt body in India, and to that matter the Indian government itself, do not have the balls to emulate the English cricket board. When the investment fraud of Texas billionaire Allen Stanford came to light, the English Cricket Board lost no time in severing all ties with his Stanford Cricket Series.

I have been keenly watching the fables and the fabulous passed off as IPL news in NDTV by Prannoy and his disciples. I studiously ignore Star for the simple reason that its main anchor still can’t sit or stand still and is devoid of basic broadcasting intelligence. Aajtak, on the other hand, continues to be refreshing, what with fresh and still freckled kids replacing professionals to dig out the IPL truth all by themselves with the help of non-exissting sources. (Maybe I really am acute scpetic to feel this way.)

The semi-retired and senile journalists, experts and politicians who make up a large part of the furniture in the NDTV studios continue to confuse the viewers mostly through calculated ignorance. In the last week, all their studio shows focussed only on IPL, just as their news fillers in the advertisement wheel. But at the end of the day, they didn’t amount to anything other than the information put out by agencies or the IPL culprits themselves on social networking sites. The one issue these forms of wood spoke at length was whether the government would go in for a JPC (joint parliamentary committee) to probe the IPL issue. Were they suggesting a way out for the culprits to go scot free, considering these very experts have in the past exposed the JPC for what it really is – the most legal form for hiding the dirt under the carpet? What was laughable was that these guys should be talking of a JPC when even politicians, like Abhishek Manu Singhvi of the Congress, were admitting on record that a JPC is ‘not binding on anyone at all’!

Of course, I must mention Barkha Dutt, whose unrivalled investigation brought her face to face with Pretty Zinta, part-owner of King’s Eleven from Punjab. She asks Zinta leading questions about the latter’s stake in the team and Zinta gives led answers to the effect that she is completely above board. And for some good reason, she also gives a clean chit to Shah Rukh Khan of Kolkata Knight Riders. Was Dutt fronting for Zinta’s real or contrived innocence? It is fair to give all parties in a controversy to have their say. But Dutt appeared desperate to get Zinta to say that she is innocent. Obviously, the ‘Padma’ journalist had done no homework. Otherwise the questions would have been direct and hitting. I think after frauds and sycophants, it will be the turn of the journalists to re-invent the Indian tradition of respecting elders or the powerful, as the case may be, by touching their feet or saying ‘Sir’ and ‘Madame’.

In the end, I doubt if the truth will come out at all. After all, the IPL culprits have the best possible defence batting for them: a cowardly government, a lame duck media, the partnership between the Congress and the BJP in the IPL and, of course, the Indian people who’d rather show the other cheek too, in the Gandhian way, if that would get them a chance to sit in a private box to watch cricket live from the stadium.

If there are any Indians who are exceptions to this ancient vestige of intellectual slavery, let them come out to ensure they are heard above the din of the silence of the lambs.

PS: We’ll have to wait for IPL 2011 to see if the foreign players will be keen to join the league after this scandal. As it is, many senior international players have retired despite auction selections, many top rankers from the 2008 auction have completed their three-year contracts, and very few known faces remain for being auctioned in 2011. Unless the organisers look at our neighbours, who failed to get in in 2010, to fill the slots.

KANU SANYAL: MASTER OF A MIS-TREATED CONCEPT

2010-03-24T11:27:00.001Z

“Kanu Sanyal is dead…one less headache for India.” A blogger, who should at best remain unnamed for his or her irreverence to history, wrote on the day the last surviving member of the naxalite trio of Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, died.
All the three died in penury. Majumdar in penury of thought, Sanyal in penury of conviction and Santhal in penury of action. That should sum up the exercise in gun-class communism in India, now in the throes of capitalism. Or,should it?
It was amusing to read the reviews, analyses and obituaries post-Sanyal’s death. It was as if Naksal Bari (that’s how it is still spelt in the local district gazette) was an error of youth fondly remembered in old age; much akin to the trespasses indulged during the college years and hilariously recalled in later reunions.
Some reviews treated Naksal Bari as merely a symbol of in-fighting between the extreme and moderate communist groups in Bengal. Some others, understandably academics, saw it as a logical successor to the Tebagha and Andhra movements of the 1940s. Some international floaters argued that it was the outcome of the vascillation of the Indian communists between the expansionist Chinese and the revisionist Russians (as the two called each other in the 1960s). But nobody saw it as a live symbol of what is still happening in India: the continuing stamping out of the poor by first the zamindars, then the forward castes and now, the capitalist middle class.
Within the communist system, the traditionalists – CPI and CPM – have always arrogated to themselves the right to rule the poor and nurture them as vote banks, copying the Congress, and saw the ‘naxalites’ as an aberration to be dealt with sternly if their interests – the poor – were interfered with. The late Jyoti Basu, who had no problem in forming Bengal’s first non-Congress coalition with a leader of a rightist Bangla Party as chief minister, equally had no problem in dealing death blows on the Majumdar-Sanyal-Santhal trio (a journalist even called them a ‘triad’, a term usually used to describe criminal gangs in China and Japan!). His funeral was mammoth in scale. I wonder if Sanyal’s family could find even four pall bearers.
A political party evolves its own checks and balances, even against the wishes of its leadership. And more often than not, it is always an extremist group from within which tempers the main party. The Congress, for example, has a brutal history of ordering the killings of Indian citizens, whether in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Bihar, Telangana or the North-East. It would have been more brutal but for its skirmish with the radical policies of Subhash Chandra Bose. The communists, perpetrators of the worst kind of oppression in West Bengal for decades, would have rivaled Pol Pot had they not encountered the ‘naxalite’ leaders in the 1960s; having violently suppressed the movement, the mainline communists could not have themselves nurtured extreme thoughts, if, for nothing, at least for public consumption.
We have seen our politicians shed morality as fast as the youth change their I-pods. We have seen the politicians shamelessly baiting the poor into further ignominy with their ‘India shining’ placards. We have seen the politicians turn themselves into an incestuous class blurring distinctions of ideologies and affiliations, the scent of middle class surpluses mentoring their politics.
They have a lot to learn from Naksal Bari.
Naksal Bari caught the attention of India because of the context in which it was orchestrated. The post-China war, Radio Peking’s open congratulations, and important of all, the ‘revolution’ taking place in a communist-run state. Out of this unique triangulation of contexts, hundreds of Naksal Baris have occurred in other regions in India, but never commanded such attention, prompting the movement’s proponents and opponents alike to increase the stakes. The organized gang represented by the communist-led state won the day; the unorganized ‘naxalites’, even today, trying to conserve energy to fight another day.
The ‘naxalites’, simply put, wanted to teach a powerful nexus a few lessons. The nexus was of the local ‘zamindar’ (biggest of landed gentry) naturally from a forward caste, local ‘daroga’ (sub-inspector), the local ‘sarpanch’ (head of the village) and the local money-lender. Between them they ruled the village on behalf of a similar nexus at the ‘taluk’ level, then the district level, then the state level, then the national level. The ruled were the small traders, small or landless peasants and labourers. Despite their mutual interdependence that an agricultural economy dictated, it was the sheer power wielded by the nexus that subjugated the latter as by natural right.
In 1987, when I was working for The Time of India in Bihar, I was invited by a team of CPI-ML (Liberation) to eyewitness the progress they made in emancipating the villagers from the tyranny of the nexus. I was taken by car, tempo and later on foot, in the middle of the night, to a village in Jehanabad district. It was like a Russian or Chinese commissar accompanying the media to a sanitized village. I heard the labourers say how happy they were because they were employed for at least 70 per cent of the year in contrast to a few weeks some years ago. I took some of the villagers out of the earshot of my ‘guides’. Did they get the minimum wage? No. The big farmer’s accountant took his cut, the money-lender took his interest on the labourer’s loan and finally, the local Liberation members forced a voluntary contribution to keep on helping them achieve their freedom. The women obviously were paid less then men. They told me of organized rapes of themselves or their daughters and daughters-in-law and of the futility in going to the police. The landless peasants, working as labourers, told me they were paid mostly in kind. The going rate of payment in kind had not changed sinced the 1950s in the Bengal-Bihar-Orissa regions: It a bojha (sheaf) for every 21 bojhas, for rabi harvesting; 4 kachi seers (local weight) of paddy during sowing time. In the ‘bojha’ system, the peasant can embrace as much of the standing crop a he or she can at one go: that’s his or hers to chaff the waste and eat. Even here, the farmer’s accountant ensured that the person with the shortest hands was allowed to take the ‘bojha’. My guides told me: “These things happen, but the important thing is they get the ‘bojhas’ in each and every season. We ensure this.” I tried to make them understand that the ‘bojha’ system in the region is as old as the caste system itself. It fell on deaf ears.
Are the ‘naxalites’ to blame for the constancy of payment or are they to be commended for ensuring even such payments are at least regular? In my own presence, the brother of the village’s richest farmer went by on a motorcycle. The peasants, as by custom, stood with their heads bowed even as my guides turned their heads away. As we were returning from the village, my guides led me to a tea shop. I gathered it was owned by the brother-in-law of the local sub-inspector. Apparently, my guides and the policeman were not only of the same caste, but the same ‘biradari’ (community) as well. So much for class-less consciousness. Strange but true, in the 1989 parliamentary elections, when I was touring the Bhojpur area – which was to return India’s first naxalite as a parliamentarian – I came across a couple of my former guides sitting in a brand new campaign jeep and smoking filtered cigarettes and wearing North Star keds.
The problem with ‘naxalism’ was and is the theoretical framework not matching the reality on the ground. What may have worked (?) in Russia or China after first forcing the different peoples to become one uniform mass with uniform thoughts, could not have worked in alien culture like India’s where all the parties – the oppressor, the oppressed and the reformer – shared the same diverse culture and could not exist outside it. “In communist Russia even the most minor of state officials is more powerful than the biggest minister,” the late Vinod Mishra, the Liberation leader of Bihar, once acknowledged to me when I went to meet him in Dhanbad after his late marriage even as his armed, underground outfit was falling apart around him after the Liberation’s decision to take part in parliamentary politics.
It is the socio-cultural dynamics and politics of India – the only Indian characteristic that ironically bridges the rich-poor gap in the country – that is least understood both by the ‘naxalites’ and the officialdom of the state. There are a few who realize that the manner of tackling ‘naxalism’ is not by treating it as a criminal matter to be dealt with by the police. But either they choose to remain silent or are silenced.
Throughout my tenure of five years in Bihar, I tried to follow and understand the ‘naxalite’ movement in the state which began when a lower caste school teacher, Jagdish Mahto, was beaten up by the goons of a forward caste candidate in the 1967 general elections in Ekwari village in Bhojpur district. The incident opened Mahto’s eyes to the oppression around him and Jagdish ‘Master’ was born, who did not shy away from organizing the opporessed into a force, trying to end their subjugation even through violence. For the ‘naxalites’ in retreat from Bengal, this was a God (?) send. His wife, Kamaleswari Devi, told me years after his death: “Yes, he became popular. I am proud of him. But the reality is, nothing has changed.” There are some sub-altern historians in Bihar who shy away from seeing ‘Master’ as a naxalite and instead compare him with what are called social brigans (a la Robin Hood) like Nakshatra Malakar, or the many Yadavs from the ‘diara (riverbank, swampy land) areas of Munger and Patna districts and Sasaram. Perhaps it serves their purpose in dishing out a simple social history of oppression without complicating it by introducing the element of ‘naxalism’.
By mid-1988, the Liberation group of CPI-ML was in the throes of a major argument over the continuance of underground armed struggle in Bihar. They were neither moving forward nor going backward. A revisionist group took things in its hand and started a campaign for the party to come overground. I was the only journalist to have written in detail about this exercise, correctly prophesying (on the basis of some truthful admissions from the concerned horses’ mouths) that the party would enter the political fray in 1989. There were many reactions to my article, one of them a sweet telephone call in my office from someone who introduced himself: “I am Kanu Sanyal, speaking. I am in Dhanbad. I read your report. Let us meet sometime.” The meeting happened after the 1989 elections and by then Vinod Mishra was barely three years away from appearing in public for the first time at a rally in Calcutta.
We talked for three or four hours, at a tea shop on Fraser Road in Patna. Sanyal had come to meet the son of a friend of his, a local journalist. Given the image I had of him as the original ‘naxalite’, I was disappointed by his low-key appearance. He was dressed in a white full shirt, blue trousers and Bata chappals and carrying a black plastic bag. He wouldn’t talk much about the Naksal Bari days, but had much to say about the futility of the entire movement in its current shape. India is too big a country to even be ruled, not to talk of staging a revolution, was the gist of his argument. He was promoting education as the only weapon to fight the factors causing oppression. “The world is changing fast. What we did in those days now looks to me as an affair of an affected youth. Guns are not the solution. Only when the poor are aware of their rights can they do something about it.” And on, he went. His utter dislike of the traditional communists was, of course, apparent as most of his analogies were situated in West Bengal or Tripura.
Did he mean to say that the concept of Indian ‘naxalism’ was a blunder, I asked him. He gave me a serious look. I still remember his words which are appearing in print for the first time here and I quote from a distant memory: “You cannot turn back on Naksal Bari. Or the off-shoots of that movement, however lumpenised they may be today. They have created a stir in the hearts of the poor who now realize that they have not been born to be slaves. In time, more and more of them will realize this. And then a change will come.”
Was Naksal Bari then a catalyst for future change? Don’t try to deconstruct the past, he waved a finger at me. As I shook hands with him, Sanyal gave me a toothy smile and patting my back said: “If you can read Bangla, look up a novel called Mahakaler Rather Ghora by Samaresh Babu. It is about my friend, Jangal Santhal, the action man. I was only an organizer and Charu was the ideas man, but Santhal…..”

MULAYAM SINGH YADAV: WRESTLING WITH WOMEN’S WORTH

2010-03-24T11:25:00.000Z

“Vartmaan swaroop men mahila aarakshan vidheyak pass hua tho sansad men udyogpatiyon evam adhikariyon ki aisi-aisi ladkiyaan aa jayengi jinhe dekhkar ladke peeche se seeti bajayenge.”
(If the Women’s Reservation Bill is passed in its present form, then such daughters of industrialists and officials will enter Parliament who would invite catcalls and whistles from the boys.)
Thus spake Mulayam Singh Yadav, one of India’s senior, surviving socialist leaders and former defence minister of India and former chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh.
Yadav made this comment while unveiling the statue of India’s biggest socialist ever, the late Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, at the eponymous hospital in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
The statement reflects the level of thinking of this insolent male chauvinist who would use or throw women for his political ends without any compunction. He perhaps forgot in the heat of the moment that he himself has in the past encouraged daughters and wives of officers and industrialists and even Bollywood actresses, not to talk of his own daughter-in-law, to enter politics by giving tickets to them in parliamentary or assembly elections.
The statement is nothing new. His anti-women stance came to the fore even earlier too, when, on March 14, Yadav described the Women’s Reservation Bill as an “international conspiracy” to weaken democracy. How would that happen?
The IANS news agency reported: “He was of the view that 33 percent reservation for women in legislatures would finally make it a nearly all-women parliament…. ‘just imagine what would be the fate of this nation in the hands of inexperienced leadership, with both Pakistan and China sitting across our borders with their own nefarious designs’?”
“I am not opposed to reservation for women, but I am opposed to the bill in its present form,” he added, perhaps not to be seen as a misogynist. http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/politics/mulayam-fears-an-all-women-parliament_100334553.html
What is interesting is the venue – the unveiling of Dr. Lohia’s statue – Yadav used to vent his sexist bias. For his information, the web site of Dr. Lohia – whose ardent follower he claims to be – says this about the attitude of India’s pioneering socialist leader towards women:
“More than half of our population comprises women. Their condition is pathetic. Cooking food, breeding children and being a slave to her husband -this is woman's fate. A woman is not considered equal to a man, such is the blind belief sustained through the ages. The law has guaranteed equality to women, but that is only on paper. Equality has not been practiced. Hence jobs must be reserved for women in all walks of life. They must be freed from the tyranny of homework. The latent talent of women should be brought to the limelight. Society does not progress as long as women remain oppressed. Society must be rid of deep-rooted beliefs and old practices. Beginning with women in villages every woman should be given justice. Lohia strove for this cause. According to him the emancipation of women was the foundation of social revolution; without this there can be no prosperity.”http://www.drlohiacentenary.org/index_more.html

Shah Rukh's Khan

2010-02-15T00:49:00.000Z

I saw ‘My Name Is Khan’ on the second day of its release in Leicester, where I now reside. I wasn’t alone, but with my wife and daughter. It was the 1130pm show and the cinema hall was nearly full. I noticed lots of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indian Muslims. The Leicester brigade of Ugandan Gujaratis and Singh Sahebs from both sides of the Punjab made up the rest.

The same evening, much of the Asian diaspora was watching the film in several cities in the UK, including Bristol, Manchester, London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bardford, etc. Unlike ever in the past, this film was released in each and every, repeat, each and every cinema house of the small and big towns in the UK. Same story in the US and a host of other countries, I gathered later.

My wife told me Shah Rukh Khan had acted very well. The best, she gushed. I generally don’t disagree with my wife, knowing well how much she adores him. But I said to myself, perhaps SRK himself was diffident about his acting, given the kind of publicity stunts he devised at least two months before the film’s release. My views of the devalued Indian broadcast media are well-known among my friends, but I must say these channels do rise to occasions, such as this, to delve into greater depths of pitiable marketing. The channels breathed, lived, ate, what not, SRK. And all of them were exclusive coverage. NDTV repeated the telecast of Barkha Dutt’s exclusive with SRK almost every hour on the eve of the film’s release. I pitied Raj Kapoor and Nargis and Dilip Kumar, even Keshto Mukherji, for never having lived in the age of global live communications. Who knows, Sri 420 would have been the national film of Burkina Faso or Mother India would have been translated into Swahili.

Lest my dislike for SRK become apparent, here are some random thoughts about the film which manufactured controversy (Chomsky listening?) and made a certain cartoonist-turned-petty-politician see red. It is my belief that all the unintended comments of SRK always had an intended target.

The credit goes to him for raking up the Hindu-Muslim controversy that preceded the film’s release. What the stupid chiefs of the various Senas did was to merely react, along predictable lines. But SRK is clever. He was not bothered about a pre-reaction in India alone. He wanted it wherever the Asian diaspora lives, particularly abroad. Remember, the first time anyone heard of the film was when there was a news report that SRK had been subjected to a body search at an airport in the US because his name was…well….Khan!

The first thought that came to my mind was about the war for superiority among religions. Religions cannot co-exist, because their differences are the very basis for their existence. By the same logic, followers of religions cannot co-exist either. But then we human beings are said to be different from animals because we can reason. And this reasoning has left us with certain rules that allow religionists co-exist if they follow certain rules. That’s when politics enters the fray. The father of the Indian Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar – who laid down some of these rules -- may have had his reasons to embrace Buddhism, but that very act was a political one, making it clear that Hinduism practised untouchability and, therefore, Buddhism was superior. This was less than a century ago. The Hinduism-Islam feud goes back centuries. So the case with Islam and Christianity, and so on.

In this backdrop, when the preamble of the Indian Constitution says that India is a ‘secular’ republic, it is only attesting the fact that people of this country practice several religions, and not necessarily that people of this country practice several religions peacefully. There is no peace in conflict. And if there were no conflict, there wouldn’t be so many religions in the first place.

Religious co-existence, to my mind, is a political act, crafted carefully to nurture certain assumptions that characterise a nation or a state. It is not a social tool. Just like poverty. Will you give away part of your wealth to a beggar of your own volition? No. You need to be taxed to take that money away from you to redistribute. Like female infanticide. You need laws to stop you from killing your girl child. Like caste. You need laws to make you co-exist with a person of another caste.

So is the case with religion. Ambedkar was one example. Yesudas is another. Shouldn’t the high priests of Guruvayoor be hanged in public because they have committed the same crime as those who bought the Babri Masjid down? Or, at the very least, shouldn’t they be banned from hearing songs in praise of Lord Krishna sung by Yesudas? Why was Yesudas, a Christian, allowed to sing Hindu songs in the first place? How dare Valmeeki, a lower caste, write the Ramayana? How could we tolerate an Austrian nun in Calcutta? Would there have been four battles of Panipat in all if Akbar had not married Jodha?

See, how complicated this damn talk about religion is? Luckily we have politics which saves us from ourselves and religions, which touts secularism in the face of fundamentalism, nation-building in the face of a violent, religious migration, reservation in the face of caste conflict. Politics is omni-potent. It gives birth to a conflict, it nurtures it, it destroys it. Politics itself is no constant, evolving over time. Like in the present, ‘My Name Is Khan’.

Two things go in his favour, clearly. Bollywood has now reached a stage where a Muslim character in a film need not be a lackey of a Hindu hero and keep proving his loyalty to his community and his country, in that order. Mr. Khan, to that extent, now shares the celluloid pedestal with Mr. Bharat insofar as cinematic reflection of Indian politics is concerned. To that extent, Mr. Khan is the ideal cenotaph for Tamas and Garam Hawa.

Secondly, Mr. Khan introspects about the ills of the misguided among his fellow religionists – perhaps the first of its kind in Indian cinema on Muslim identity – and that give him a place in the hall of flame inhabited by the Meerabais and Munnabhais.

I want to ask SRK why he made the film, other than to make more money. Did he have a political message to convey other than that has been conveying through television and Twitter throughout the pre-release period? Did he think the Indian Muslims would react to the film in the same manner as Muslims in other parts of the world? Perhaps the 9/11 backdrop was created to make the film contemporaneous to Muslims across the globe? I don’t know if SRK had a message to convey, because he has not said so other than mouthing secularist phrases as explanations.

Given the political campaign that preceded the film’s release, it has to have a message. But what? I tried watching the film seriously for clues. For instance, Khan’s failure to meet President Bush, Khan’s natural affinity for Afro-Americans, his (un)intentional travels through the southern states like Arizona and Georgia, his insistence on being called Khan even by his wife instead of by his first name, Rizvan, the absence of the ubiquitous mark on the forehead of every practising Muslim (as shown without fail in Indian films!). But most important of all, the character of Khan and his message, ‘I am Khan, but I am not a terrorist’, preferring to hide himself inside the body of an autistic person who with his mannerisms disarms any overt criticism of what Khan has to say.

In the end, is it a film to educate people about Asperger’s Syndrome (because the titles carry an explanation about it), or how religion can disharmonise relations between inter-religious couples, or about the western mistrust of the followers of Islam, or of the true Islam that preaches peace as much as any other religion? I know one thing. There’s nothing apolitical about it.

SRK should know. He owes the Indian television audiences at least that much for overwhelming us with his presence all these months. As the film ended, I didn’t know who stood tall. SRK or Khan?

Otherwise, it’s just another Bollywood film.

Keralites alone sex-starved? Not all Indians?

2010-01-25T02:45:00.000Z

Communist muffs on a war path against sex is akin to Shiv Sena hoodlums running amok on Valentine’s day. Both are same sides – ideologically and politically -- of the same coin. But that is a different topic.
What is my concern is a person like Paul Zachariah’s description of the current Mallu polity as ‘sex-starved’. But when was Kerala sex-sated, ever? Or, for that matter, India?
Music director Vinu Thomas says in an interview: “When people elsewhere think of Kerala, they invariably speak about adult films. I tell you the real reason behind this. Ours is a small state, with limited income. The film industry too is weak, but highly talented. Adult movies are a periodic development based on the available resources and financial viability. Call it easy money making, assured returns or like that.”
The first adult rated Mallu film was Kalayan Rathriyil, directed by IV Sasi. The second adult film, Avalude Ravukal, is also directed by him. That was in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, came Sathrathil Oru Ratri, directed by Sankaran Nair. This film became extremely popular at that time and was shown in all the ‘adult’ movie halls of every major town and city in India. I saw this film in the Light House theatre in Hyderabad in 1978. Light House was considered a ‘bad’ and ‘dirty’ theatre by my parents, like all parents in the country. Anyway, coming to the point, during what is called the golden period of Mallu cinema – late 1970s to early 1990s – there were hardly any ‘dirty’ movies out of Kerala. But the phenomenon returned in the form of ‘Shakeela films’ after the turn of the century. The highs and lows of the adult film history run parallel to the fate of the film industry there: ‘dirty’ films being dished out whenever the mainstream cinema started making flops.
Sex has no political bedfellow. Sex sells. That’s all.
The issue today is not whether moral policing is good or bad. The issue is that today, sex is out of the closet, not just in the slums and chawls where it has always been in the open, but in the moralistic, casteist, orthodox, middle class Indian homes where the ‘first night’ meant, till recently, sex without frills or foreplay, a ritual to be completed with the lights out.
My daughter, aged a half over 7, is going to be taught sex education in her school next year. She is in the UK, but there are many schools in India where sex education is part of the curriculum. Thanks to the internet, today’s children know more about sex at their age than those of previous generations.
The main issue is, as Shyam Benegal once said, humans have an interest in different kinds of prurient pleasures and as individuals, they have to find a way to deal with it.
I remember meeting the late Vijay Anand in 2001 or 2002 when he censor board chief. At that time he was considering a request from the Kerala regional board of certification for screening pornographic films in select theatres in an attempt to 'save' mainstream cinema in the state. Anand was very much in its favour, and told me he preferred certifying adult films as ‘x-rated’ and allowing their legal screening in separate theatres than to use scissors (Of course, he exited soon after and was replaced by a BJP footnote called Arvind Trivedi whose idea of permissive sex on film never went beyond fleeting kisses.)
Anand realized that in several parts of the country, some producers shoot two versions of a film, one with openly sexual scenes and another that is more regular and acceptable to the censor board. Commonly in small cinemas in satellite towns across the country, theatre owners interpolate 'sexually explicit' scenes into films certified for public viewing, he told me. He even had figures with him of police raids on internet cafes allowing customers to log on to adult web sites. He wanted this sex-with-lights-off attitudes to end by not making sex a moral issue.
Is the subject of sex, then, about permissiveness or liberalism? One thing is sure: it certainly is not about calling all Mallus sex-starved.

India a dream still, at 60

2010-01-25T02:40:00.000Z

I was watching a white man's ode to India -- Slumdog Millionaire -- on, where else (?), channel 135 of Sky in the UK. And then I came across your piece. A brown man's ode to the original Slumdog.
Nehru was the Danny Boyle of his day. He discovered India, but ruled an imaginary India. He preferred the HIndu civil code instead of the uniform civil code; failed to uinderstand the need for a population policy; did not realise that a mixed-economy model also needed socio-economic infrastructure and building educational facilities in the rural areas; he was in a hurry to create states on a linguistic basis, not realising the impact of imposing Hindi as the official language everywhere; he was over-dependent on the public sector which encouraged bureaucratisation, institutionalised corruption and turned trade unionism into rowdyism.
Ambedkar, the gentleman you write about in the piece, said: “If you ask me, my ideal would be the society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. An ideal society should be mobile and full of channels of conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts.”
Sixty years later, it seems an ideal Indian society is tne one only imagined. Like Nehru's India or Boyle's Dharavi. Because the real India is cruel.
Around 350 million – as much India’s wealthy middle class, are illiterate. A similar number of people are below the poverty line. Half of them lack access to drinking water. Half the country’s billion-odd population lacks basic sanitation facilities. Half of India’s children cannot get basic nutrition. Nearly three-fourths of rural India cannot access timely medical facilities and effective medication. ... See More
The girl child continues to be a stigma. Caste inequalities hamper economic and social progress. Linguistic and regional divides boo the concept of India’s inherent strength; it’s so-called nity in diversity. Save the top institutions, education standards are falling as it stands reduced to a mere profit-making venture. Corruption stands tall as ever, as the high priest of development; religious extremism, the high priestess of culture.
Politics in India is all about unbridled freedom for pelf and power to dissent and destroy. The ends justify the means for politicians or police, thieves or armed revolutionaries. Diversity in India can now be explained as people straight-jacketed in vote banks of caste, community, religion, language or region. Indians are bereft of national idols or ideals.
Of course, India rises as one voice when Sachin Tendulkar falls to a wrong decision or Amitabh Bachchan is admitted to a hospital or an Indian student is man-handled in Australia. India also rises as one voice when a Kargil happens or a Mumbai explodes in terror. That's what our news channels show and that's what we, who have no time to see the real India save a couple of minutes to dish out an article on it, prefer to watch.
Indians do believe in a vague sense of oneness. They are as yet unclear what this oneness is, but for them the truth lies somewhere between Tendulkar’s bat and Siachen’s last military outpost, between novel scammer Harshad Mehta and nobel winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, between Do Bigha Zameen and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, between Tata’s |Jaguar and A. R. Rehman’s Jai Ho.
What awakens us Indians to reality is what comes off as reality in celluloid.

Marathi Sachin

2009-11-23T23:27:00.000Z

There's an ageing lunatic in Bombay (I insist on calling the city the way I choose to) and two mad cousins. They are the dogs of regionalist and linguistic wars. They have written their personal Mein Kampfs on how to come to power. These morons are of the view that only people who speak Marathi and are Marathi should live in Maharashtra. But for a small army of trash, the rest of the state does not support them. They use different weapons, from pamphlets to newspapers, to lathis and swords, to achieve their end. .
There's none they haven't targetted. I suppose it is a dubious distinction for anyone of importance not to be in their list of punishables. Sachin Tendulkar was one such, till recently. Now he has lost that distinction too.
The ageing lunatic is angry with Sachin because he said he is an Indian, while being a Maharashtrian. Because he said language, like caste and creed, do not bar any Indian from any place in India his or her home. That's blashphemous, the lunatic fringe concluded. So, they targetted the batsman.
The ageing lunatic wrote that Sachin has done nothing for Maharashtra through cricket. Do they expect him to stop playing for India until all the final eleven are from the same state? Do they expect the cricket team to speak in Marathi while in Maharashtra?
Someone was heard saying: The lunatics should be arrested. The question is: Why havent' they been arrested already?

Living with Liberhan

2009-11-23T23:01:00.000Z

The family was discussing the Liberhan Commission report on November 23, 2009. Apparently an Indian newspaper got hold of sections of the report. An Indian news channel followed it up with studio discussions throughout the day. The last one was the family discussion. This is a highily knit family. You can see them, or a combination of them, on this channel almost every day. It is more of a Mutual Admiration Society of editors, bureaucrats and politicians, present and past. They debate and argue on things national and societal and political, for appearances sake. Because the family comes first. So what if in the process they are evidence of the nexus between the Indian media and politics. They arrogate to themselves the right to think on behalf of India and Indians. They are arrogant enough to pass off heresays as facts. They are the self-styled arbiters of the Indian mind. They play out a P3 game show every evening.
On November 23 the family was discussing the Liberhan Leak and its implications. After a marathon session, they labelled the report as a joke, the findings as dumb and concluded it was not worth the paper it was written on. And they went home, happily after telling the Indian audience they could go on demolishing temples and mosques and churches and even zoos and latrines with impunity and without fear of punishment. They concluded that the Indian state was a non-governable body.
The fact they forgot to mention, intentionally, was that they being a part of that very same society and politics they were laughing at, they should be laughed at, too.
Barkha Dutt was as usual anchoring the show. Vir Sanghvi and Swapan Dasgupta were the editorial pulpits. Shekhar Gupta was not present as it was his paper, the Indian Express, which apparently printed the Liberhan Leak. The rest of the cast were the usual political suspects who are distinguishable from the channel staff because of the sheer fact that they do'nt as yet carry the channel ID.
The issue was whom to blame for the demolition of the Babri Masjid. That question was twisted a number of times until the issue was whom did Liberhan indict for the demolition. Another round of twists and it was who should pay the price for the demolition. Yet another twist turned the issue into what took Liberhan 17 years to come out with the report. And so it went on for two hours.
They managed to steer the blame away from the BJP and towards the Congress. They were merciless in attacking a person now dead: PN Narasimha Rao, who as Prime Minister in 1992, remained silent as the Masjid came down. The collective idea was to protect the current leadership of both parties, the Congress and the BJP. To make the family secular, the head of the Muslim Personal Law Board was invited to the table. To make it unbiased, a former bad boy who founded the lumpen arm of the BJP was also invited. They were the props, because the air time was entirely for the family alone.
I think most Indian journalists may have watched this show on the channel, mostly because they had nothing else to do or they couhldn't find a table at the Press Club. Most of them may have worked for, with or under the family members at least once in their careers and so, would know, if they cared to, how these members have made a volte face in these 17 years. Archives would show what they said in 1992 and what they said on November 23, 2009. Possibly, as members of the global village of India, they decided that religious quibblings did not go down well with a march towards globalisation. They were in a hurry to forget what happened in 1992. That is why the reiteration, irrespective of right, left or centre, that 17 long years have passed since the demolition. That is why the reiteration that the Liberhan report is a sham and cannot lead to any judicial conviction for the accused. Let sleeping karsewaks lie. That's their motto.
What a shame to call them journalists or politicians or bureaucrats.

Pitching Against Brown

2009-11-23T22:29:00.001Z

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FORAY Sunday, November 22, 2009 Email Print

Pitching against Brown

Venkata Vemuri

The gunny bags from Afghanistan are now veritable millstones around Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s neck. Growing calls for a pullout of British troops have put him on the defensive and for all practical purposes he has begun a countdown for Britain’s exit from the war in Afghanistan.That is how the British media sees the Prime Minister’s most recent announcement for a meeting of Nato allies in London next January to set in motion the process of transfer — a district-by-district transfer to full Afghan control in 2010.His office says the proposed meeting is no exit summit, but it is more Brown’s way of reassuring an anxious public that the British mission in Afghanistan is not indefinite. Deaths of British soldiers are being reported almost on a daily basis in recent weeks and calls by their relatives to bring back the troops are gaining popular support.The Prime Minister’s aides are saying Brown is unhappy that the people do not realise that it is the British presence in Afghanistan that is keeping the country safe from terrorism. Yet, Brown’s Nato summit call is being seen as a matter of political expedience, given his unenviable task of leading Labour into a General Election next year amid growing public frustration with unchecked unemployment and price rise.His own Cabinet is also at unease with the rising death toll which stands at 230 at last count. Welsh secretary Peter Hains became the first Cabinet Minister to question the Government’s Afghanistan strategy by openly saying earlier this week that “we need to get a grip on it”.Black & WhiteAs if Brown’s headaches are not enough, a Labour candidate seeking election to a London council caused much embarrassment to the Prime Minister just a day before this Wednesday’s Queen’s speech before both Houses of Parliament by calling her a “parasite” and “vermin”.Peter White, who is seeking election to Havering Borough Council next year, posted a message on the Facebook page of a Conservative MP, Andrew Rosindell, who wanted the Queen’s diamond jubilee in 2012 be celebrated with a national holiday.The message says: “What is the point of celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of someone who is born into a position of privilege, she is a parasite and milks this country for everything she can… Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with a public holiday but lets (sic) have one that means something, rather than celebrating vermin.”White has been summoned by his party for an explanation and possibly his words may cost him his candidature.Dravid-ianSachin Tendulkar was, of course, the cynosure of British media when he completed 20 years as a cricketer, but The Times’ kudos went to Rahul Dravid for an entirely different reason: The fitness of the Indian “Wall”.The newspaper says it is largely due to Dravid’s “astounding fitness” that he is only less than 2,000 runs behind Tendulkar in Tests even though he made his debut seven years after the little master.Highlighting the fact that Dravid missed out on just one test out of 135 India played since his debut, it says: “… but otherwise has had no tweaked thingies, no sprained whatsits, no snuffles and coughs, no selectorial whims, no missing the bus, no disciplinary breaches, no excuses. Tendulkar, by contrast, has played in only 121 of those games. Even Gods can have mortal moments.”Wi-fi zoneThe town of Swindon in England is to become the country’s first wi-fi town with free Internet access for its population. Nearly £1 million will be spent in placing 1,400 access points on street lamps, ensuring no one within the town’s boundary is left out of range of a wireless connection after next April.The free access will, however, be limited to certain hours in a day. Swindon, home to a number of high-tech businesses, already has the country’s highest broadband usage. The service will also be available to visitors to the town, upon payment of a one-off fee for access.There are many towns and cities of Britain whose city centres have free wi-fi, but Swindon will be the first case of the whole town having wireless access.Fake incestThe British Home Office is ever on the prowl to deport illegal immigrants, but is shut-eyed when it comes to checking on its own staff. A Nigerian, who works in the Home Office, came up with a daring plan, that included him ‘marrying’ his own daughter, to get British visas for his family back home, and nearly succeeded.Jelili Adesanya, employed as an occupational health nurse for the Home Office working with immigration officials at Gatwick airport, has been a British resident for 30 years and holds a British passport. He wanted his daughter, her husband and their children to live in the UK. So, he faked a wedding ceremony in Lagos and fooled British officials into giving his daughter permission to live in the UK by making them believe she was his wife. Had the case not been exposed, the next step in the saga would have been the ‘wife’ eventually divorcing her ‘husband’ and then marrying her real husband so that the entire family could then stay in the UK.A whistleblower sent letters — including specific details such as names, addresses, passport numbers and even a copy of the wedding photograph — to the High Commission in Lagos and the UK Border Agency. When nothing happened, he emailed then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and Ministers Vernon Coaker and Phil Woolas this February. He heard nothing. The Home Office eventually launched action after the incident was reported by the media.

Outsider Tirade Goes On

2009-11-23T22:28:00.001Z

Outsider tirade goes on

Venkata Vemuri

Immigration is a sensitive word to utter in Westminster ever since Nick Griffin of the right-wing British National Party came on BBC’s Question Time. One, Prime Minister Gordon Brown finds to his annoyance, he cannot either swallow or spit it out. But ever since Griffin said the country’s population would shortly cross 70 million if the immigrants were not kept out, there has been a churning in Labour ranks on how to deal with the issue.Someone in Brown’s team must have suggested that the way out with minimum political damage is to acknowledge that uncontrolled immigration is problematic. A private poll by the Unite trade union showed that immigration is the most burning political issue for Labour supporters with the potential of turning them towards even the BNP, or not making them vote at all.And the Prime Minister spoke out, promising to tighten the immigration rules by reducing the number of professions which can recruit from outside Europe. It was, perhaps, his first speech on the issue of immigration since he took office.Here is what he said: “We will remove more occupations and therefore thousands more posts from the list of those eligible for entry under the points-based system.” The BBC thinks engineers, skilled chefs and care workers could be among the affected professionals.But Brown’s next utterance on the larger immigration debate unmasks his real motive in speaking about immigration without any, as the media says, news peg. “I have never agreed with the lazy elitism that dismisses immigration as an issue, or portrays anyone who has concerns about immigration as a racist. Immigration is not an issue for fringe parties nor a taboo subject.It is a question at the heart of our politics, a question about what it means to be British; about the values we hold dear and the responsibilities we expect of those coming into our country; about how we secure the skills we need to compete in the global economy; about how we preserve and strengthen our communities.”The British media was quick to point out that the speech will be seen as an effort to give meaning to his promise of “British jobs for British workers”. Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: “Gordon Brown's speech had a completely hollow ring to it. This is the Government that tried to cover up a deliberate policy of increasing immigration and the Prime Minister's comments show that he has no idea about how to deal with the whole question of immigration now.”Your turn, Griffin. Creating waves Surfers of Bournemouth on England’s south coast always complained that their coast gets poor-quality waves. So the city council parted with £3 million for an artificial surf reef. Europe’s first. The reef opened recently after the completion of a two-year construction project, 200 metres offshore and to the east of Boscombe Pier, the main beach head of Bournemouth, which saw 55 giant sandbags covering an area the size of a football pitch laid on the sea floor.When winds sweep the coast, the ensuing groundswells — which used to slump on to the beach as weak waves earlier — are helped by the reef to turn into head-high waves which are ridable. The council feels it will have its return on investment in no time as hundreds of surfers now throng the beach.Vigil 24X7A British citizen is watched and monitored by the State surveillance apparatus like no other in the world. And now comes a law which requires telecom companies and Internet service providers to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they are contacting, when, where and which websites they are visiting.As per the new rules, known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme, public authorities will not be able to view the contents of these emails or phone calls, but they can see the Internet addresses, dates, times and users of telephone numbers and texts.They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to access the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.But there is little support for the law among the public. The British Home Office admitted last week that only a third of respondents to its six-month consultation on the issue supported the new proposal, with half of them fearing that the scheme lacked sufficient safeguards to protect the highly personal data from abuse.The Conservatives made known their opposition by describing the move as “Mission Creep”. Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights body Liberty, warned: “Law-abiding people have sustained too many blanket attacks on their privacy and they’ve had enough.” Queer bandsBritish teen girls may be banned from wearing harmless looking, prettily coloured jelly bracelets that are freely available in stores. The problem is not with the bracelets, but a sexual game they are associated with.Apparently each colour denotes a type of sexual act. And when a boy snaps a bracelet with a particular colour, the girl will have to perform the act that colour denotes. A yellow bracelet denotes a simple hug. A blue one means oral sex. Other colours signify escalating grades of sexual activity. A black bracelet means going the whole way.These are popularly known as “shag bands” which have become popular across the country and parents are horrified that even children who do not understand the significance of wearing them – primary schoolers as young as 8 – are aware of what the bands signify.The concept of the “shag band” is not new. There were similar bracelets in the ’80s and ‘90s and were known in some schools in the UK as “f*** me” bracelets. In the USA they are called “snopes”.The protests have already begun. The leading voice is of Mary Creagh, MP from Wakefiled in northern England, who wants the bands banned. “There is nothing intrinsically wrong with plastic bracelets — you can’t ban plastic bands — but there is something offensive about packaging and marketing something as a ‘shag band’ and having it on sale unrestricted,” she says.The Carmarthenshire County Council, in Wales, has moved to ban the bracelets, which sell for as little as 75p for a pack of six.But one teacher on the Times Educational Supplement website writes: “They are bracelets — nothing more, nothing less. If the kids wearing them want to attach silly labels to them, let them. I very much doubt they actually act on it.”

Sir Mark's Guinea Ghost

2009-11-23T22:27:00.001Z

Sir Mark’s Guinea ghost

Venkata Vemuri

The past keeps pursuing Sir Mark, the son of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His alleged role in a plan to overthrow the Government of Equatorial Guinea in western Africa in 2004 has come back to haunt him with another accused now saying the alleged coup plotters including Sir Mark should “face justice”.A former SAS officer, Simon Mann, said to be the second in command of the plotting team, has returned to London earlier this week after being pardoned and released from jail in Equatorial Guinea. He now wants to be a witness for the prosecution in Britain and has implicated Sir Mark and a London-based businessman, Ely Calil, for planning and financing the coup.The plotters wanted to overthrow Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, President of Equatorial Guinea. However, Mann and 70 mercenaries were arrested at Harare airport in Zimbabwe in 2004. Extradited to Equatorial Guinea, he was sent to prison for 34 years. But Mann was released after serving only 16 months and officials in London said among the factors believed to have played a part in his release was his willingness to give evidence against others.As to Sir Mark, he was arrested by the South African police in 2004, and the following year he admitted financing a helicopter and received a suspended sentence and a fine of £265,000.Mann said: “As far as I’m concerned, I am very anxious that Calil, Thatcher and one or two of the others, should face justice.” Sources said that the only likelihood of any prosecution would be if Mann turned Queen’s Evidence, offering him immunity in return for giving evidence against others. Sir Mark did not comment.Booze buzzAlcohol abuse is a ticking time bomb in Britain and there are now calls for increasing the minimum drinking age and pricing controls on alcohol after it was revealed more and more minors and retired people are taking to it. The Government has not yet reacted to the issue which is fast becoming the British media’s talking point, after a recent survey revealed that one-third of children aged 11 to 15 who drink, consume more than 15 units in a week, the equivalent of seven pints of lager or one-and-a-half bottles of average strength wine. It means 178,560 children in England are consuming more alcohol in a week than the recommended limit for an adult woman.The survey conducted in all the police station area if England and Scotland showed that younger people are being struck with liver cirrhosis than ever before. Just under one-fifth of children or 558,000 children, aged 11 to 15-year-old have consumed alcohol. The amount of alcohol children are taking, on average, has increased from 5.3 units in 1990 to 9.2 units in 2007.Pensioners too accounted for 357,300 alcohol-related hospital admissions in England in 2007-8, a 75 per cent rise in just five years. The survey found that 13 per cent of over-60s said that they had drunk more since retiring, either to ease feelings of depression or because of bereavement.All goofed upHe’s called the Minister for gaffes in British Parliament. And the latest by Home Office Minister Phil Woolas provoked fury in the House by claiming British troops are fighting in Afghanistan in part to keep immigration under control.Woolas told some members of Parliament during a meeting of the home affairs select committee: “If this country and others were to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban were able to take control of Afghanistan, our evidence is that the number of asylum seekers coming to the EU would significantly increase. An argument that is not aired strongly enough in my view is the benefit of the presence of our armed forces and other countries is to help us control immigration.”The opposition benches vent their anger against the Government as his comments came on the very day five British soldiers were killed allegedly by a rogue Afghan police constable.Fun signsThe Times newspaper has launched its third annual competition for the funniest road signs in Britain. Sample some of them:
Bedlam (in North Yorkshire): Please drive carefully
Big Sand (in Wester Ross, Highland): No Beach Access
Bleary (near Co Armagh): Welcome to Bleary
Old (in Northamptonshire): Please drive carefully.

Pocket Full of Woes

2009-11-23T22:26:00.001Z

Pocket full of woes

Venkata Vemuri

British MPs are gearing up to discuss a major issue in the august House next week. No, it’s not about recession or the postal strike or even the EU presidential election. It’s about their allowances which are facing an executive axe.Following the MPs’ expenses scandal which exposed scores of members misusing their allowances, a Parliamentary watchdog is planning to reform the system of allowances. The move has been greeted with predictable howls of outrage from some at Westmin-ster.Some of these measures leaked to the Press include:
Parachute payments worth up to £65,000 for MPs standing down will be phased out after the next election.
The scrapping of the £25-a-day subsistence payment for food, introduced in the spring.
Those living within an hour's commute of Westminster will not be allowed to claim expenses for a second home. MPs will only be allowed to rent flats costing up to £1,250 a month.
MPs will be barred from employing family members in their offices; order MPs to sack currently employed relatives within five years.
Claims for food, furniture, mortgages and some other items will be prohibited.But more than the MPs, it is their wives who are crying foul over the expected harsh measures. More than 200 MPs currently employ spouses and other family members. Some wives have already consulted their union representatives and are threatening to take legal action if they are forced to quit. The MPs are insisting they should not be punished because of a few bad apples. The wife of Conservative MP from North Thanet, Roger Gale, who is employed by him, says: "I was very well qualified to do the job when I first started, coming up for 27 years ago, and I'm still very well qualified so am I not allowed to apply for my own job anymore?" Bra-vo!Tabloid press in Cambridge? True, and it is ruffling the feathers of the university's tradition-bound gentry. Some students are bringing out a tabloid, The Tab, complete with its Page 3 girls. It appears online and provides the latest celebrity gossip and sport news and has proved hugely popular with 80,000 hits in its first week.There’s a Totty section featuring scantily-clad women students and features like Bra-vo about the large bra sizes of Cambridge students. The university's traditional student Press is furious, and the student union’s women’s officer Natalie Szarek has called for the Tab Totty section to be axed from the site.She claims the pictures “reproduce and reinforce harmful attitudes towards women. Semi-naked women in provocative positions are being shoved in freshers’ faces. We can do better as a university,” she adds.Three male students who paid £500 each to set up the website say the students' union is a "sad dinosaur" which is upset that The Tab is stealing readers from traditional university papers like Varsity and Cambridge Student. One of the trio, third-year student Taymoor Atighetchi, says: “There’s a huge amount of snobbery around. We do not think what we are doing is sexist. It was always our intention to have a debate about these issues. The website is a tongue-in-cheek version of the tabloid newspaper — we are not just emulating it.”Racist overdriveA major debate in British schools these days is on what construes as a racist spat among schoolchildren. As of now, under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, schools in England and Wales have to report “racist incidents” to local authorities. Teachers are made to fill in lengthy forms about name-calling, jokes etc. A recent report says, an estimated 2,50,000 racist incidents have been reported in schools since 2002. But a civil liberties group The Manifesto Group, questions the numbers, saying children are being branded racist before they even know what the term means and playground spats are being turned into full-blown racial incidents.The Group has brought out a report— The Myth of Racist Kids — which lists 5,000 incidents in Yorkshire schools between 2006/07, the majority of which were in primary schools. In Essex, most incidents involved children between the ages of nine and 11.The report’s author Adrian Hart says: “Such actions (by teachers) can create divisions where none existed. There are a small number of cases of sustained targeted bullying, and schools certainly need to deal with those. But most of these 'racist incidents' are just kids falling out. They don't need re-educating out of their prejudice — they and their teachers need to be left alone.”However, schools minister Diana Johnson says: “If racist bullying is not dealt with in schools, then this will send a powerful message to children that racism is acceptable — not only in schools but in society as a whole.”Fat chanceObesity is slowly becoming a national dilemma. One out of four Britons is obese and latest figures reveal that in the last year obesity-related admissions to hospitals jumped by 60 per cent.There were 8,085 admissions to hospital for obesity in 2008-09, up from 5,056 the previous year and 1,746 in 2003-04, official figures from the NHS Information Centre show.The figures were released just a week after it emerged that the world’s heaviest man could be airlifted from his home in Ipswich for specialist care. Paul Mason, 48, a former engineer who weighs 70 stone, is due to undergo surgery to help him lose weight but struggles to leave his home.And it’s already telling on the National Health Service which is spending taxpayers’ money to buy wider and sturdier hospital beds, ambulances and lifting equipment.Surgery is officially the first line treatment for patients with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 50. Some of the surgical procedures cost up to £12,000.

This Is Not Breaking News

2009-11-23T22:24:00.000Z

This is not breaking news

Venkata Vemuri

Trivialising a terrorist strike story by making its coverage indistinguishable from that of a sensational story has left 24x7 news channels looking utterly silly and frightfully immature. Broadcast journalism in India is no longer in its infancy and its practitioners claim they are masters at their job. It's time for them to prove itI was a broadcast journalist in India and so when news about the string of terror attacks in Mumbai broke on the evening of November 26, I knew exactly what to expect from the television channels there. They would 'break' the news, send their OB vans to the spot and lay siege to it, the coverage will be characterised by visuals running in loops, anchors and field reporters saying the same thing over and over again, bringing 'experts' into their studios, introducing a sentimental element of how 'Bharat' is under attack, churning out labels like '9/11' or something like 'maut ka aatank', trying to solve the mystery about the attackers by themselves, apportioning blame on the police for 'arriving late', and finally, ensuring that everything put out on the screen in 'exclusive'.The news channels, by and large, did not belie my expectations. And that is the point of this article. Whether it is a story about a stampede in a temple, a boy falling into a manhole, a thief being beaten up by the public, the Sensex going up or down, or an act of terrorism, the treatment by channels more or less follows the above routine. If one cares to go through the archives, one would find a striking similarity in even the words and phrases used then and now. Indian journalists have been reporting on conflicts and terrorism for over two decades now, from the militancy in Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir and the North-Eastern States, the low-intensity conflict on the India-Pakistan border, and in recent years, the number of attacks on several Indian cities -- even the Indian Parliament -- by terrorist groups.What is missing from reporting on terrorism in India, unfortunately, is the big picture, not only in terms of (a) exhaustive reportage on the event, but also in terms of (b) the geopolitical impact in the global sense.The first points to the gullibility of the journalists, the second to their lack of awareness. Whether both notions are wrong and such impressions are primarily caused by the newsroom chaos in handling breaking news, it is up to the channels to introspect.Keeping cool in breaking news situations is a basic tenet of journalism. A channel's coverage depends on it. Every news channel has its own editorial crisis news committee that oversees how breaking news is treated. But somewhere along the way, things snap.Often it is found there is no one in the newsroom drawing up coverage plans and directing the news team. But it is the 'live' element that dictates the coverage plan. As a result, a dish-it-as-it-comes mentality takes over. It is the duty of the newsroom seniors to ensure that information is not repeated throughout the news wheel, but is refreshed frequently. It is true that new information is flashed as soon as it comes, but it does not stand out in the general melee of visual loops and continuous, non-informative chats.In the initial hours of the Mumbai attacks, foreign channels were far ahead with factual information, which they culled out from blogs and chat rooms -- inputs coming from the guests in the hotels -- and strengthened with details from interviews, including with guests at the two hotels attacked by the terrorists.Broadcast journalism in India is no longer in its infancy and many of its practitioners have reported on conflicts worldwide and, therefore, there is no excuse for substandard coverage of such a serious issue. Secrecy and chaos on part of the official agencies and lack of access by journalists both played a role in this blank phase of news on the second day. Indian journalists, routinely attuned to covering crime, often find it difficult to cope with such situations. How to keep their channels moving forward? Lack of knowledge about the country's anti-terrorism apparatus, the types of agencies and personnel involved, and general information about their operational techniques hindered the journalists. Uninformed theories, reporters' opinions, even rumours were reported as news.Such reportage looks childish. Like, for instance, a channel showed its reporter, standing at the back of one of the Mumbai hotels, telling the audience that the police were clever enough to post themselves at the hotel's rear so that the terrorists would not be able to escape unnoticed. And that was an 'exclusive' report! Of course, the security agencies themselves exhibited an unprofessional manner in the way they happily chatted with the media about the operations. They did not even cordon off the hotels -- the first rule at a crime scene -- and the presence of media and onlookers turned the entire event into a 'tamasha'. And yet the Government had the gumption to issue notices to some news channels on coverage of the operations. Funny! But the point to ponder is: If a channel gets information of an ongoing security operation, should it use it with discretion to ensure that broadcast of such information does not harm the operation itself?What Indian broadcast journalism should now look for is specialised reporting on terrorism. Treating a terrorist strike story in the same way as a child falling into a manhole will not help, simply because news channels influence people's perceptions and an unprofessional approach to news dissemination can result in inappropriate fallouts. Also, terrorism is not a domestic issue restricted to the borders of one country. There was no attempt to see the strikes in the perspective of the global, or even sub-continental, spread of terrorism. This calls for journalists undergoing training programmes in terrorism reporting, on the lines of conflict reporting.It is also vital to develop a professional attitude when dealing with terrorism and not giving in to bouts of sentimentality and competition. It is professional to break the news first, but a race to break it can be hazardous in such situations, with accuracy, objectivity and credibility being the first victims.-- The writer is a senior Indian journalist, currently doing his PhD in the UK. vevemuri@gmail.com

We Need Nuclear Tests

2009-11-23T22:22:00.000Z

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 New Delhi Today's Issue
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We need nuclear tests
Venkata Vemuri

When will India stand up for its own rights? The ongoing debate on the India-US nuclear deal skirts long-term issues linked to India's nuclear deterrence. It's facetious to describe the deal, as it exists, as good for India -- it is exactly the oppositeThe level of political debate in India on the nuclear deal with the US is as abysmal as the surreptitious attempt by the Indian bureaucracy to push it through on the ground that it is a matter of 'national pride'. Neither the Left, nor the Opposition, and certainly not the Manmohan Singh Government, has taken the people of India into confidence on the real issues that are of concern.These issues are crucial for India's long-term foreign and nuclear policies. We should be more concerned with India's strategic role vis-?-vis a futuristic -- but possible -- stand-off between China and the US, rather than the short-term gains in terms of nuclear energy or the one-upmanship game with Pakistan. India is already capable of tackling the last two.Let us proceed step by step. What did we achieve after the 1998 nuclear tests? It is an unspoken truth that the tests failed to validate some of India's warhead designs. Couple this with the fact that India is yet to possess comprehensive missile technology which can deliver warheads up to China, not merely Pakistan. Only when we have such a combination can we be confident that India has a credible nuclear deterrent. How do we reach that stage? By conducting more nuclear tests while continuing to make progress with the missile systems.Is India in a position to conduct more nuclear tests? India has offered a voluntary moratorium on further nuclear testing. If the nuclear deal comes through, the moratorium will no longer be voluntary, but legally binding on us. The proposed amendment to the US law that will make the nuclear deal official is that the American President will, from time to time, certify that India has not tested a nuclear device. Which means, if India conducts a test in the future, the deal becomes void.So, without a nuclear test, any thought of becoming a nuclear power or having a credible nuclear deterrent is a pipe dream.Then comes the issue related to availability of fissionable material for nuclear weaponisation. India has agreed, under the draft agreement of the deal, to identify and separate civil and military nuclear programmes. India has also agreed to place the civil facilities under IAEA safeguards. There are two issues here. First, the deal will not overnight give India the status of a nuclear weapons state. Far from it. It will be recognised as a non-nuclear weapons state which is not a signatory to the NPT. To that extent, India will be better off than Pakistan. That is not what India will be satisfied with, but has no option but to accept it. Second, once the civil facilities are under IAEA safeguards, there will be restrictions on the fissionable material for use in India's military facilities. India's nuclear doctrine depends on the availability of this material. For, the number of nuclear warheads India wishes to have to achieve the critical state of deterrence is determined by, first of all, India's threat perception and next, the material available for weaponisation. According to India's nuclear doctrine as it stands today, the limit of critical deterrence depends on its threat perception. Which means India can increase its nuclear stockpile if the threat perception increases. Such a doctrine allows India the advantage of not having to tie itself to a certain number of warheads. However, the IAEA safeguards will mean, at least theoretically, a weakened deterrence if India's adversaries increase their stockpiles. For, in such a situation, increasing India's own stockpile will depend on how much un-safeguarded material is available to it.According to an AP report on the draft of the safeguards agreement, a "key clause appears to call into question the effectiveness of any IAEA effort to ensure India's civilian nuclear activities do not aid its military's atomic weapons programme". The draft agreement in the preamble talks of India taking "corrective measures" to ensure uninterrupted operation of its civil nuclear reactors in the event of disruption of supplies. Possibly the only 'corrective measure' is India withdrawing some of the safeguarded civil facilities from the IAEA list so that the fissionable material can be used for military purposes. Having said that, the safeguards issue is not as serious as the moratorium on testing. It is well known that India has the capability to develop its own nuclear plants. Moreover, despite the agreement it will remain India's right to classify future nuclear plants as civil or military, thus giving the country an escape valve.What the entire debate on the deal boils down to, is this: Does India feel it requires a credible nuclear deterrent against China? If so, it has to clearly state its position before the current form of the deal is signed. Otherwise, its dream of having a credible deterrent and being a major nuclear power is washed out. Yes, India needs a nuclear deterrent against China insofar as its future geo-political stakes are concerned. Then why is the UPA Government shying away from stating this to the US? One point that goes in India's favour -- and a very vital one at that -- is that the US cannot face a standoff with China without the support of India. For facing China, both need each other. It is also true that the US excursions into Asia have a black and bleak record of failure. Vietnam, for example. In the future, any standoff with China can only be on the issue of Taiwan. And the odds of the US going it alone, without India's aid, are high. Let us just assume that the current deal actually goes through. Theoretically it is possible that the US itself may go in for nuclear testing in the future, thus allowing India to do so too. How is that possible? The current deal has a clause which says that India will assume responsibilities and reap the same benefits as accruing to states with advanced nuclear technology like the US. The flip side, however, is what if the US does not undertake tests in future? It is a big if.The nuclear deal by itself does not much harm Indian interests as long as India retains the right to conduct nuclear tests in the future. Indian bureaucrats, like the messy mice that they are, are already indulging in vacuous arguments that India's moratorium on tests is unilateral and, therefore, what is a unilateral proposition cannot be bound by an agreement. The why not get this included in the piece of paper?India is at present in a political turmoil over the deal. It may all come to a naught if the deal is not passed in the current session of the US Congress. The basic legal paper of the deal, called the Hyde Act, 2006, has a provision that the final agreement between the US and India can be taken up by the Congress for passage only if the Congress is in a continuous session for 30 days. There is a recess of the Congress in August, which leaves less than 40 days before the Congress adjourns on September 26, 2008.The 123 Agreement cannot come for passage until the IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers Group okay the deal. How long will that take? It may come up for passage by IAEA in the coming three weeks, but indications are that the NSG may not convene on the issue till September. If so, there is no option but to wait for the post-Bush Administration to assume office. What have the Democrats in mind about the deal?More importantly, when will India stand up for its own rights? That is the prime issue. What is happening in India right now has so far nothing to do with this serious debate.-- The writer, a senior journalist, is doing his PhD at Bournemouth University, UK.

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Is Obama the Moses of African Americans?

2008-11-11T19:45:00.000Z

given that bush is among the most dangerous person on earth to have ever held office, he was probably passing a snide comment when he told obama...'go have fun'. perhaps he thinks only pure blooded americans like him can run a top office.
having said that, let us not be misled into thinking even for a minute that obama is the rescuer. he is sharp and a politician to boot. he correctly assessed the nation's mood against bush and made his plans accordingly and succeeded. the emotional rhythm of his speeches hardly matches the premeditated steps he has taken since his victory.
he always knew the african americans would back him. after all, as his speeches -- likened to martin luther and mandela -- suggest, he was trying to 'empower' the 'un- and under-represented, in this case, fellow 'blacks' if i may use the negative word.do you think now that obama has won the african americans will have a cosier life? hardly. all they will have is a 'sense', and only 'sense', of being empowered.
there are many eminent african amerians in every field of life who have made it to top. and obama tops the list. but a vast majority of the african americans are unlike their successful brethren (or sistren to satisfy the sexists). they are poor, uneducated, taken to drugs and crime -- a result of their bleak conditions. they will continue to rot in their own world, shunned by everyone, including the successful african americans.
in world history, members of an unrepresented class or race have, with some brave exceptions, ridden to power with the help of the superior class or race of their times. and once having tasted power, they have always tried more to retain that power by trying to emulate the superior class or race than to consolidate their base among their own class or race by uplifiting their fellows. obama will prove no exception.
i will be happy to be proved wrong.

British conundrum: twit or twat?

2008-08-23T16:20:00.000+01:00

Britons are farthest from being prudes when it comes to salacious writing. They have the entire Victorian era to swear by. Using a questionable vowel in a four-letter word normally does not cause panic, unless if it appears in a book for children.

Jacqueline Wilson has arrived at this literary truth the hard way.

One of Britain’s best selling authors has been made to look foolish after a grand parent decided she will not have her grand niece read Wilson’s My Sister Jodie when she found that the four-letter word, twit, appears later in the text as twat.

A misprint or not, the woman’s complaint has led the book’s publishers, Random House, to remove the word from the next edition and superstore, Asda, to remove it from its shelves across the country.

It all began when Anne Dixon from Co Durham, bought a copy of the book as a gift for her great-niece Eve Coulson, aged 9.

As a precaution - to make sure that the book was not too sad for Eve, not to check for obsenity - Dixon, 55, decided to read it herself. “I got to the page where the reference was made to a ‘toffeenosed twit',” she said. “On the next page the word changed. I thought I was mistaken, but I saw to my shock it had been repeated twice again.

“I am not a prude. In fact, I am quite broadminded, but this is completely inappropriate for children. They should not have to be subjected to trash and vulgarity. I did not expect this from a well-respected author and do not want my young niece to have to see this obscene slang.”

Dixon sent an e-mail to Dame Jacqueline but when she did not reply she complained to the Stanley branch of Asda, from which she had bought the book. Asda has now withdrawn the title from its stores nationwide until it is amended by Random House.

Perhaps the reason for Dame Jacqueline's failure to reply was sheer embarrassment. According to Random House sources, she was unaware of the word's reference to the female genitalia. Her dictionary, The Times was told, listed it as meaning “a foolish or despicable person”.

The Collins English dictionary gives three meanings for the word, twat: “The female genitals, a girl or woman considered sexually and a foolish or despicable person (unknown origin)”, in that order.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary says twat means “vulva” often used in the “vulgar”, its origin “unknown”.

However, a dictionary for kids on the web, http://dictionary.kids.net.au/word/twat
offers the meaning: “A man who is a stupid incompetent fool”.

The mother of everything British, Encyclopedia Britannica, has no results for the word on its web site at all. It tells you: “There are currently no full text results for your search: ‘twat’. Please check to see if you spelt your query correctly. Or, try a different or more general query term”.

Twit, on the other hand, means “a silly person” or “fool” in all dictionaries.

No wonder, then, that British authors preferring to spell twit with an ‘a’, to give them the benefit of doubt, may have chosen to go for the non-sexual meaning of the word.

To that extent, Dame Jacqueline is in good company. The poet Robert Browning included it in his dramatic poem Pippa Passes (1841), under perhaps the mistaken impression that it meant some kind of nun's headwear: “The owls and bats/ Cowls and twats/ Monks and nuns/ In a cloister's moods.”
The popular theory is that Browning was misled by a scurrilous poem of 1660, which included the couplet: “They'd talk't of his having a Cardinall's Hat/ They'd send him as soon an Old Nun's Twat.”
Dame Jacqueline, who has sold more than 20million books in Britain and whose stories have been translated into more than 30 languages, also has the support of John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. He said: “I do not think it is felt to be the worst swear word in the language. It is used to mean a mere fool without any indication of what its original meaning is. I am a bit surprised that it has been taken out.”
A spokeswoman for Random House said: “We are very sorry if anyone is offended by the language. Jacqueline Wilson aims to reflect the realities of modern life. In the context of the character we felt the word was used in a way that accurately portrayed how children like Jodie and her friends would speak to each other. We have sold over 150,000 copies of the book since March this year and have only received three complaints.”

Is that three cheers for the twit?

First individual Olympic gold for India

2008-08-11T09:37:00.000+01:00

The numbers first. Since the first modern Olympics in 1900, India has won 8 golds and a silver for team game hockey, one individual gold in shooting (2008), two individual silvers in sprint, and 4 individual bronzes. A grand total of seven individual medals out of 16. Of these, two were won by a Britisher, Norman Pritchard, then representing India. That leaves five medals won by Indian Indians in 108 years.
Perhaps this is progress. Just as the poor in India are becoming poorer at a slower rate, just as cities are getting polluted at a lesser rate than before, the birth rate is also coming down ever so slowly, a marginal decrease in the number of primary school dropouts.
The list of Indian achievements is unending. If it is a drop in the ocean, it's all about how each drop makes an ocean.
There's no stopping the Indian media today. Newspaper reporters and TV teams and their OB vans have been staking out at the residences of Abhinav Bindra, the new Indian wunderkind. Anyone, human or pet, who even remotely knows him, would have been interviewed before the day ends. Political parties and local resident associations must have by now hired the best musical bands, fetched the best of the dry colours left over from last Holi, and budding mimics of plyaback singers who are dime a dozen in every street, to begin celebrating the Indian achievement (the timing of the celebration strangely coinciding with the arrival of the electronic media). Astrologers will have a field day in news television studios.
The media will not rest until they record a phone conversation between Bindra and his mother and father, until the family has visited a place of worship and thanked the God, the Country and India's great past, in that order.
The religious problem in Jammu over a piece of religious land takes backstage today. The courts may or may not pronounce judgments. There will be no one to hear complaints about lack of water in municipal taps or the short-circuitting of an electric transformer. The government ministers will be with their secretaries, checking their appointments with tv news stations at prime time. The country will also conveniently ignore the country's inglorious defeat in the third cricket test against Sri Lanka.

All, thanks to Abhinav Bindra. He made India forget its ills, weaknesses, corruption, atrocities, abuses, poverty, illiteracy and what not. He made the rich and the poor alike sing his country's praise. By night, India would have appropriated Bindra's achievement as its own, a reflection of its 5,000-year past, a precursor to the future when India will emerge a power to reckon with.
Will we Indians ever learn to be honest to ourselves for once by not taking the credit for someone else's success? If Bindra won the gold in Beijing today, it was because he was successful in bucking the system.
There are thousands of Bindras out there in India who are waiting to similarly overcome the system for personal success. How many will eventually succeed?

India shuld stand up for its N-rights, deal or no deal

2008-07-10T03:23:00.000+01:00

India should stand up for its nuclear rights, deal or no deal
Venkata Vemuri

The level of political debate in India on the Nuclear deal with the US is as abysmal as the surreptitious attempt by the Indian bureaucracy to push it through on the ground that it is a matter of national pride. Neither the Left, nor the Opposition, and certainly not the Manmohan Singh government, has taken the Indian public into confidence on the real issues that are of concern.

These issues are crucial for India’s long-term foreign and nuclear policies. We should be more concerned with India’s strategic role vis-à-vis a futuristic – but possible -- stand-off between China and the US, rather than the short-term gains in terms of nuclear energy or the one-upmanship game with Pakistan. India is already capable of tackling the last two.

Let us proceed step by step. What did we achieve after the 1998 nuclear tests? It is an unspoken truth that the tests failed to validate India’s warhead designs. When we talk of warheads, we can only be talking of nuclear missiles capable of reaching China, not Pakistan. Only when we have such missiles can we be confident that India has a credible nuclear deterrent. How do we reach that stage? Naturally by conducting more nuclear tests.

Is India in a position to conduct more such tests? India has offered a voluntary moratorium on further nuclear testing. If the N-deal comes through, the moratorium will no longer be voluntary, but legally binding on us. The proposed amendment to US law that will make the N-deal official is that the American President will, from time to time, certify that India has not tested a nuclear device. Which means, if India conducts a test in the future, the deal becomes void.

So, without a nuclear test, any thought of becoming a nuclear power or having a credible nuclear deterrent is a pipe dream.

The issue relates to availability of fissionable material for nuclear weaponisation. India has agreed, under the draft agreement of the deal, to identify and separate civil and military nuclear programmes. India has also agreed to place the civil facilities under the IAEA.

There are two issues here. One, the deal will not overnight give India the status of a nuclear weapons state. Far from it. It will be recognized as a non-nuclear weapons state which is not a signatory to the NPT. To that extent, India will be better off than Pakistan. That is not what India will be satisfied with, but has no option but to accept it.

Secondly, once the civil facilities are under IAEA safeguards, there will be restrictions on the fissionable material for use in India’s military facilities. India’s nuclear doctrine depends on the availability of this material. For, the number of nuclear warheads India wishes to have to achieve the critical state of deterrence is determined by, first of all, India’s threat perception and next, the material available for weaponisation.

According to India’s nuclear doctrine as it stands today, the limit of critical deterrence depends on its threat perception. Which means India can increase its nuclear stockpile if the threat perception increases. Such a doctrine allows India the advantage of not having to tie itself to a certain number of warheads. However, the IAEA safeguards will mean, at least theoretically, a weakened deterrence if India’s adversaries increase their stockpiles. For, in such a situation, increasing India’s own stockpile will depend on how much un-safeguarded material is available to it.

Having said that, the safeguards issue is not as serious as the moratorium on testing. It is well known that India has the capability to develop its own nuclear plants. Moreover, despite the agreement it will remain India’s right to classify future nuclear plants as civil or military, thus giving the country an escape valve.

What the entire debate on the deal boils down to, is this: Does India feel it requires a credible nuclear deterrent against China? If so, it has to clearly state its position before the current form of the deal is signed. Otherwise, its dream of having a credible deterrent and being a major nuclear power is washed out.

Yes, India needs a nuclear deterrent against China insofar as its future geo-political stakes are concerned. Then why is the current Indian government shying away from stating this to the US? One point that goes in India’s favour – and a very vital one at that – is that the US cannot face a standoff with China without the support of India. For facing China, both need each other. It is also true that the US excursions into Asia have a black and bleak record of failure. Vietnam, for example. In the future, any standoff with China can only be on the issue of Taiwan. And the odds of the US going it alone, without India’s aid, are high.

Let us just assume that the current deal actually goes through. Theoretically it is possible that the US itself may go in for nuclear testing in the future, thus allowing India to do so too. How is that possible? The current deal has a clause which says that India will assume responsibilities and reap the same benefits as accruing to states with advanced nuclear technology like the US. The flip side, however, is what if the US does not undertake tests in future?

It is a big if.

The nuclear deal by itself does not much harm Indian interests as long as India retains the right to conduct nuclear tests in the future. Indian bureaucrats, like the messy mice that they are, are already indulging in vacuous arguments that India’s moratorium on tests is unilateral and therefore, what is a unilateral proposition cannot be bound by an agreement. The why not get this included in the piece of paper?

India is at present in a political turmoil over the deal. It may all come to a naught if the deal is not passed in the current session of the US Congress. The basic legal paper of the deal, called the Hyde Act, 2006, has a provision that the final agreement between the US and India can be taken up by the Congress for passage only if the Congress is in a continuous session for 30 days. There is a recess of the Congress in August, which leaves less than 40 days before the Congress adjourns on September 26, 2008. The agreement cannot come for passage until the IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group okay the deal. How long will that take? If it takes more than a fortnight, there is no option but to wait for the post-Bush administration to assume office. What have the Democrats in mind about the deal?

More importantly, when will India stand up for its own rights? That is the prime issue. What is happening in India right now has so far nothing to do with this serious debate.

Cricket and the TV Carnival

2008-05-02T12:28:00.000+01:00

Nothing makes news in India anymore than the IPL. The Indian Premier League is the umbrella organisation conducting an unofficial, purely entertaining, T20 cricket tournament in the country. The teams are owned by famous film stars like Shahrukh Khan and Preity Zinta, business magnates like Mukesh Ambani and Vijay Mallya. The matches are telecast live during prime time in the country. Such is the craze that television ratings, both for entertainment and news, have taken a beating they will never forget. The news universe has actually shrunk by 5 per cent, and the news producers in the scores of news channels are at their wits' end trying to stay in the game. The entertainment channels are worse off, given their advertisement commitments. When the IPL announced the tournament, people and pundits laughed if off. The newspersons smirked. The entertainers wrote it off. Now is the time to lick the wounds.
What does this unmatched popularity for the IPL show mean in terms of viewers' tastes and their sudden shift from all news and entertainment? It is clearly a subject for primary research.