All posts by Aman Sethi

Countryside, Ecology/Environment

Welcome to Ore-issa

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Forest Degradation -Orissa

As the shadows lengthen along Keonjhar’s main street, the tube-lit sign above Hotel Arjun flickers to life, illuminating both – the front entrance of the hotel and the cigarette seller adjacent to it. A solitary traffic policeman walks up to the junction right outside the hotel, and assumes his position on at the most significant crossing in town.

Fifteen kilometers down the road the ground shivers as a queue, over a kilometer long, shudders to life. Engine after engine revs up as a convoy, several hundred trucks strong, begins the next stage of the 325 kilometer journey from the iron rich district of Keonjhar in North Orissa to the port of Paradip on the coast. Continue reading Welcome to Ore-issa →

Right watch, Violence/Conflict

Apko Goli Kisne Mari?

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[I wrote the following report in July 2002 when a group of us -including some present-day Kafila writers – worked in a riot relief camp in Vatwa, Ahmedabad. Before Gujarat, and this report, I was an unhappy student of Chemistry in Delhi University, un-sure of what i wanted to do post-graduation. I’m not saying that I chose to become a journalist specifically after the Gujarat riots; but this was the first long report I had ever written, and revealed to me the possibilities of journalism – not as a tool of communication and dissemination, but as a means to make the world intelligible to one’s self. Gujarat in 2002 did something to you that could not pin-point, but having left you knew that something profound had changed. Re-reading it (before posting), I found myself ( as a journalist) a little embarrassed by some of the conclusions I drew, some of the sentences I constructed, and some of the grammar I bridged. But I have resisted the urge to correct it beyond a spell-check.]

6th July 2002

When I arrive in Ahmendabad, 3 months have passed since the grisly horror of Febuary, but the scars are still there for all to see. All except for the State Government i.e., which continues to turn a blind eye to the plight of the victims. The people of Gujarat are a study in numbness, a numbness which hangs heavy in the air, and affects all who touch it, including myself. After a point, the sight of burnt buildings and broken localities no longer produce a feeling of outrage and horror, and instead I lapse into a mood of hollow despair. Continue reading Apko Goli Kisne Mari? →

Bad ideas, Media politics, Theory

A cruel and unusual punishment

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(Or how I came to love the Press)
As I stepped out of B.’s house last night, I pulled my jacket close to ward of the cold and veered vaguely to the right as I looked for my car. I felt in the pocket for the car’s central-locking remote, and on finding it, pressed the un-lock button on the device. I heard my sister’s trusty Wagon-R tick-tock in recognition out on the left. On the left course! I had parked the car on left. I usually parked on the right under the streetlight, but this time my space had been taken. So I had parked on the left. I corrected course and lurched decisively to the left – the source of the sound, and the site of the parked car.

My ear it seems, had picked up the sound – measured it in terms of intensity – and my brain had decoded it and accorded it a positional characteristic. So this car was approximately 20 degrees behind my left ear. I looked – there it was, I walked up to it and drove home.

“ Continue reading A cruel and unusual punishment →

Debates, Media politics

In search of the Dalit journalist redux

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“Sensation prevailed after four persons of a family were murdered over illicit relations at Khairlanji village…” read the blatantly false lead of the article of a Nagpur based paper a few days after the Khairlanji atrocity. “School, colleges and shops shut down in Nagpur on Friday during a day-long bandh,” read another. As the national media slowly took cognizance of the Khairlanji atrocity, weeks after an entire family was humiliated, raped and killed, the tenor and limits of media discourse on Dalits became apparent once more.

While expressing shock and disbelief at the sheer brutality of the incident, media pundits bemoaned the damage to public property (in this case, the Deccan Queen), the losses to the exchequer, and the savagery of the Dalit “other”. “Citizen activism takes on the textures and shades of citizens, after all,” noted a well-meaning reporter in leading weekly, before concluding that “Upper middle class India lit candles, whether at India Gate or on news websites; young Dalit India torched trains.” The simplistic and stereotypical media coverage of the month-long Dalit protests has re-ignited a debate that first gained prominence in 1996. Continue reading In search of the Dalit journalist redux →

Right watch, Violence/Conflict

Kherlanji, Aligarh and the Provincial Armed Constabulary

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The horrific massacre at Kherlanji and the protests that have followed have, once again, raised troubling questions on the impartiality of the Police force. The following is an article that i wrote for Frontline in the aftermath of the Aligarh riots in April 2006. The article finally didn’t make it – not because of a conspiracy of silence – but because another correspondent had already filed; but I think it might answer the “What were the police doing?” question that we often find ourselves asking.

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“The mob is frenzied and frightening. But you can run from the mob. You can’t run away from a police bullet,” says Sarfaraz Khan, a resident of Aligarh. When he heard the mob coming, Khan’s son, Shadab pulled down the shop shutters and headed home, but never made it. As he scrambled up long slope that separates Muslim settlement at Tantan Para Farsh from the Hindu settlement at Kanvari Farsh, Shadab was cut down by a bullet that sliced through his neck with clinical precision. He was nineteen. By afternoon on the 6 April 2006, police firing in the riot hit town of Aligarh had claimed three more casualties: Naved was 16, Sarfaraz was 22, and Azam was 24 years old. Another 17 people were wounded. Continue reading Kherlanji, Aligarh and the Provincial Armed Constabulary →

Media politics

Manoj Mishra gets his TV spot.

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“In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false,” wrote Guy Debord in “The Society of the Spectacle”, his ground-breaking situationist text on mass-media and reality. Forty years after the text was published, on 15 August 2006, Manoj Mishra, a transport contractor in Gaya, Bihar, died in an attempt to generate the ultimate visual image of protest against the non-payment of his dues. Goaded on by a battery of television news cameras, Mishra doused himself with diesel and set himself on fire as the cameras recorded his death. Reports in national newspapers suggest that camera-persons went to the extent of handing him a diesel-soaked rag, and assuring him of rescue once their footage was complete. In the event, private security guards came to his rescue and rushed him to the Patna Medical College Hospital, but by then it was too late. He succumbed to his burns en-route. Continue reading Manoj Mishra gets his TV spot. →