Category Archives: Bad ideas

Bad ideas, Debates, Genders, Violence/Conflict

Where have they disappeared?

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Aman Kachroo is not the first teen to die of ragging. But there is one curious first: this time the death has not led to any ‘public debate’.

This time the defenders of ragging are silent. Who knows, maybe some of them have changed their views and are now lighting candles at Jantar Mantar. There are no TV debates calling ragging fun. This time no one is arguing that a murder case should not be used to defame the socially productive ‘tradition’ of ragging. This time nobody is asking how boys will become men unless they are ragged, and nobody is calling the victims sissies.

What has changed? Continue reading Where have they disappeared? →

Bad ideas, Frontiers, Right watch

Omid Reza Misayafi

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omid

Omid Reza Misayafi was a blogger.

That is not why he has lost his life in prison.

It’s because of what he wrote.

Bad ideas, Identities, Images

The Discreet Poison of Aamir

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Aaamir the film

Aamir, a film about a man on the run, was released in June 2008, it was one of those rare films that was praised by critics and liked by viewers. I did not like the film, I was in fact very upset and disturbed about the film and thought about giving expression to my angst in writing, but this outpouring of powerful emotions never materialised, I would probably have never gotten down to writing this piece had Delhi 6 not arrived on the scene. Continue reading The Discreet Poison of Aamir →

Bad ideas, Capitalism, Government

How to know if (when) your bank is insolvent

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Analysing a bank’s financial statements is a bit like suing your family lawyer for malpractice; the jury may be on your side but the evidence is invariably circumstantial.  However, in times such as these  when even charities are screwed by their bankers – it is best not to trust anyone. Worry not, we at Kafila are not just concerned with playing theory-theory and pseudo-secular Hindu-bashing, we are also deeply concerned about the financial crisis – it has a direct impact on the bonuses taken home by our CEO and board-members. Accordingly, I offer you a simple step by step way to figure out when your bank will go under.Written in an easy conversational style, this post is an invaluable tool pedagogic for Kafila readers both young and old. Stay with me guys, this is going to be fun.

First a bit of background: In May 2008, Vikram Pandit finally stamped his authority on the behemoth company that he had been chosen to lead. Signalling a bold break from the past, he replaced Citigroup’s 2007 slogan “Let’s get it done” by reviving Citigroup’s 1970s slogan “The Citi Never Sleeps”.   While the new/old ad campaign is sure to bring back memories of more profitable times, the firm’s precarious financial situation suggests that The Citi apart, Pandit won’t be getting much rest either. Mystery Question: What will it take to wipe Citi out?

Continue reading How to know if (when) your bank is insolvent →

Bad ideas, Centre watch, Frontiers

Israel(i Man) seduces India(n Woman)

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Here’s how a state-owned Israeli defence firm tries to get business from India’s Defence Ministry:

The Danger Room blog said the text implied that the “Indian military is somehow like a helpless woman who needs to feel safe and sheltered.”

Rafael dismissed the criticism of its film and said that it made movies with a local theme for every international defense expo. A movie, one company source said, made for a defense expo in Brazil focused on soccer and weapons. Another movie, for a US audience, focused on football.

“We try to make the movies about the place where the defense expo is located,” the company source said, adding that in previous years Rafael had won prizes for its pavilions and marketing techniques. [The Jerusalem Post]

Bad ideas, Debates, Left watch

Save the left from left scholars

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I have just returned from an atrocious talk delivered by a famous Nepal expert, David Seddon, who claims to belong to the ‘old British Marxist tradition of Eric Hobsbawm and E P Thompson’.

So this Mr Seddon is well known in Nepal for a book he wrote three decades back – Nepal in Crisis. More recently, he got along with a local activist to edit a book on the People’s War.

Now, Seddon sahib comes here. He tells a Nepali audience how he is worried about the rising violence and the ‘law and order’ problem. He links the violence with identity – “people feel they have a legitimate basis to pick arms and throw stones because they belong to a caste and ethnic group.” He tells the audience, many of whom have struggled for long to bring some change in the exclusionary Nepali state structure, that ‘identity politics is profoundly undemocratic and federalism is not necessary.” And here is the clincher, “When your constituent assembly members adopted a federal democratic republic, I am sure they were thinking only about the republic part. No one really thought about the federal part.” Continue reading Save the left from left scholars →

Bad ideas, Media politics, Technology

Fifteen Reasons Why Your Rant is Not Even a Good Rant

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‘In the wake’, as journalistic cliches go, of the Pink Chaddi campaign there’s a curious phenomenon of the Pink Chaddi campaigners finding more critics than those who went to a pub to and beat up women to get prime time attention. The latest is an article that, yawn, critiques internet activism as an echo chamber of the elite.

Since all that it does is nit-picking about online activism in India, it may not be a bad idea to do some similar frisking of the article itself. Continue reading Fifteen Reasons Why Your Rant is Not Even a Good Rant →

Bad ideas

SC Order on Blogger

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:)

finally the order, and so its definitely not precedent in any manner Continue reading SC Order on Blogger →

Bad ideas

Supreme Court on Liability of Bloggers

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While I still dont have a copy of the order/ judgment, there have been news reports about the Supreme Court holding that a person who starts a blog/ community page cannot claim that it was a community page and not meant for public consumption. I will update this the moment I get hold of the order, but just wanted to flag this for the moment, because of the serious implications that it can have. While bloggers and web content have always been subject to the same rules that determine other forms of publication, there are a number of issues and questions involved in the liability of online content, including whether the author of a blog can be held liable for comments / posts by others. Continue reading Supreme Court on Liability of Bloggers →

Bad ideas, Debates

Can you repeat the Question? Slumdog gets an answer WRONG!

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In our continuing converage of all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small – I stumbled across this excellent little piece by Rajeev Shrivastava in the 13th February issue of Friday Review of The Hindu. (It was also posted on the Sarai Readerlist). While Kafila has been debating the merits/de-merits, context and meaning of Slumdog Millionaire (in much the way that only we can); Shrivastava’s piece brings back memories of one of our earliest debates on Kafila on Sahir Ludhianvi and film lyricists-which featured pieces by Sohail Hashmi (Thinking about Sahir Ludhianvi) and Mahmood Farooqui (Pal do pal ka shayar).

To quote Shrivastav:

Continue reading Can you repeat the Question? Slumdog gets an answer WRONG! →

Bad ideas, Culture, Everyday Life, Violence/Conflict

A Kingdom of Crabs…

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A kingdom of crabs ascends

here on stones

heavy enough to sink our faith

if we tie it to them.

 

But a mile away

from this promenade

my friend sucking a succulent crab leg

quips, the only way to pin

these bastards down

is to press with the index finger

their carapace to the ground.

 

Ah! The heavist thing

these legs carry

makes them a morsel

for a sea screaming I’m hungry!

 

Cheers!

Bad ideas, Centre watch, Everyday Life, Language, Left watch, Politics, Right watch, Sports, Technology

Healthy Debate

Our disclaimer page reads:

1. Personal attacks are not okay! Passionate, even angry critiques are great, but you want to hold off on the invective. This is an online forum, not a prize contest on the bad words we are sure everyone knows.

2. We want Kafila to be a forum in which we can explore complex ideas together. Polarised for/against debates or WWF-type slanging matches help nobody.

3. All of us who write here have an investment in the issues posed in Kafila. So for us these exchanges are not merely academic or for point-scoring.

In line with that, a public service message about trolls, as much for ourselves as anyone else!

please_do_not_feed_the_troll

From here.

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Genders, Images, Right watch, Sex

Will we overcome? Pramada Menon

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This is a guest post by PRAMADA MENON

Sundays are days for doing nothing much. Often I sit in front of the television and surf and watch many, many movies until all the story lines start merging into one. It’s fun because it does not require you to think. If one switches on a news channel, the chances are that you will start to splutter like mustard seeds in oil, since there is so much to splutter about – Nirmala Venkatesh, a member of the central government’s National Commission for Women, was put in charge of a three-member panel to investigate the attack on the women at a pub in Mangalore at 4pm in the evening. The way she sees it, Venkatesh is supposed to have said, women have the right to enjoy themselves but should also recognize societal limits. As part of her inquiry, she said, she plans to meet with the attackers, the bar owner and the families of the young women to see whether their parents
allowed them to go out to pubs every night at midnight. “My personal advice: Women should be very careful,” she said. “I can’t just roam after midnight.”

Continue reading Will we overcome? Pramada Menon →

Bad ideas, Government, Law, Politics, Right watch, Scams, Violence/Conflict

Dead Hence Guilty?

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“Governments have always lied. They naturally deny it, even long after it is abundantly clear that they have lied, trailing multiple red herrings, dismissing inconvenient evidence, implying that there is counter-evidence they are not free to produce. When a lie can no longer be credibly denied it is justified, usually by an appeal to the national interest. Governments of modern representative democracies are no different, even if they are more liable than dictators to be exposed.”
– Colin Leys, Quoted in Socialist Register, 2006

The National Capital Region (NCR) witnessed a police encounter on the eve of the republic day. Two young men who were supposedly carrying a big cache of arms and ammunition were killed on the spot. We were told that this duo was part of a larger LeT module, which wanted to wreak havoc in the capital.
The killings of the two young men did not cause much uproar.
The police officers appeared jubilant over this episode for foiling such attempt. To blunt any possible criticism of the incident a due enquiry was also ordered by the powers that be and has even promised that it would be completed in a stipulated time.

Continue reading Dead Hence Guilty? →

Bad ideas, Centre watch, Empire/ Imperialism

Republic Day in Srinagar

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rdayorder1

By the way, belated Happy Republic Day! Say it loud and clear brother, lest you also get an order like this one of these days!

(Thanks, Chandni Parekh.) Continue reading Republic Day in Srinagar →

Bad ideas

Truly important questions

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On another first day, with its inevitable attempts to divide things into new and old at the end of all the “rapid change” that the world apparently is going through at every second of every news channel’s life, a [to me, lovely] reminder that times have not changed all that much:

Google reports that urban Indians top “how to” search in 2008 was “how to lose weight.” But, at number two, shyly sneaking in was: “how to kiss.”

now there is something worth learning in 2009.

Bad ideas, Genders, Government, Identities, Images, Media politics, Politics

Families and Dynasties, Lettered and Unlettered – Monobina Gupta

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Minister in the Rajasthan government
Golma Devi, Minister in the Rajasthan government

Guest Post by MONOBINA GUPTA

It is jarring, to put it mildly, that Times of India, a leading daily, engaged in a high-profile ‘Teach India’ campaign should publish a front page story mocking the unlettered. This story exhibits a strange callousness in its reporting about the very constituency of people the campaign is hoping to address…or ‘uplift’…
The story published in the TOI on December 20, smacks of arrogance as it speaks disdainfully of an unlettered woman legislator recently elected in Rajasthan’s assembly elections. Golma Devi, elected from the Mahuwa constituency is the butt of ridicule and lament in this article authored by P J Joychen. The author, it seems, cannot get over the fact that an unlettered person like Golma Devi has been elevated to the rank of a minister in the Ashok Gehlot government.

No, she is not a history sheeter; nor does she have a scam hot on her heels. She is nevertheless an offender – in the sense of ‘offending’ your ‘sensibilities’ – in the supercilious eye of the media; an object of ridicule. Her offense: her of lack of reading and writing skills.

Continue reading Families and Dynasties, Lettered and Unlettered – Monobina Gupta →

Bad ideas, Law, Violence/Conflict

Rajeev Dhavan on The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act

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I have asked two colleagues who have been working on civil liberties in the war against terror to do an analysis of the Amendment to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the National Investigation Agency Act, and  its implications. But in the meanwhile, here is a useful analysis by Rajeev Dhavan where he describes the amendment as a return of POTA and TADA. As if to fulfill Shuddha’s prophecies, the government according to Dhavan has created a law where everyone is suspect

India’s Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA): The Return of POTA & TADA

After months in pre-trial detention under brutal investigation, the police will extract even untruths. The Bill casts a shadow on all of us. It is founded on the principle that everyone is suspicious or a suspect, with no fine distinction between the two. We are creating a suspicious state to empower suspicious officials and citizenry to act suspiciously against any supposed suspect. This Bill goes further than TADA or POTA in its creation of a suspicious state. India must fight terrorism, but the last thing India wants to be is a terrorist anti-terrorist state. – Rajeev Dhavan Continue reading Rajeev Dhavan on The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act →

Bad ideas, Everyday Life, Government, Law, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Your Rights End Where My Terror Begins

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A phone in poll today on CNN-IBN’s Face the Nation:

Should human rights take a back-seat in favour of tougher terror laws?

65% say Yes!

Thus speaketh the great Indian middle-class- Enough is enough!

Continue reading Your Rights End Where My Terror Begins →

Bad ideas

Mera Joota Hai Iraqi!

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With utmost seriousness, the news clip replays the incident twelve times for our viewing pleasure, while the ‘LIVE’ on the top right-hand of the screen glints promisingly. Ah yes gentle reader, if wishes were horses…  The Guardian helpfully accompanies the clip with cultural commentary for its readers, just in case we were in any doubt as to the symbolic significance of the action:

In the Arab world, throwing shoes at somebody is considered a serious insult, as is even showing them the soles of one’s footwear, as demonstrated by jubilant Iraqis towards the statue of Saddam Hussein as it was toppled in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion.

Always good to be up on native customs in the global village.

Continue reading Mera Joota Hai Iraqi! →

Bad ideas, Capitalism, Media politics

The press freedom bogey

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…is raised every time there’s talk of a law “regulating” TV News channels in India. A rajya Sabha committee now says self-regulation is not enough, the media needs a set of rules from the government. I think that one shoudn’t necessarily view the idea of a law, or regulation, with suspicion. After the despicable 26/11 coverage and even before, many channels have lost the right to hide their TRP-driven sensationalism behind the free speech bogey. 

That may sound self-contradictory, but see what the committee has concluded on the subject:

Continue reading The press freedom bogey →