Category Archives: Culture

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

Will we overcome? Pramada Menon

2 Comments

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 →

Culture, Empire/ Imperialism, Identities, Movements, Politics

The meaning of “Obama” and the history of a friendship

21 Comments

At the Mexico Olympics in 1968, this photograph of American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos standing on the victory podium with heads bowed and black-gloved fists raised in a Black Power salute in protest at racism in the USA, became the iconic image of the age.

1968_salute

In the fraught years since 1968, the weight of living through the aftermath put a heavy burden on the friendship of Carlos and Smith. In separate interviews with the Los Angeles Times it was revealed that they have barely spoken to each other since the early 1990s, despite living just a short drive apart in southern California. Smith described their relationship as “strained”. Carlos would call his former team-mate only “Mister Smith”.

Continue reading The meaning of “Obama” and the history of a friendship →

Culture, Images, Language

Reading Swarup, Watching Boyle

22 Comments

When I read Vikas Swarup’s Q & A a year or so ago, I was intrigued and disappointed equally. I felt the author had focused all his energies on the tight and intricate plot, moving rapidly through it with no slip-ups, but this resulted in a grand plot outline rather than a novel. The prose is functional, characters inked in strongly but with little nuance, and when it all comes together with a click at the end, it is sort of morbidly satisfying, but one feels cheated nevertheless. All the more so because the story lingers stubbornly in memory.

I was interested enough keep track of Swarup, and found an interview in which he said that after writing four chapters he had to wind it up in a month since he was getting posted back to India and knew he would not have time for it back home.

“It was August 2003, and I had one more month in London. The plot was in my mind, so I took up the challenge and wrote down the remaining chapters in one month. Over one weekend I wrote 20,000 words.”

Well, that certainly explained the strange slightness and lack of density – the author’s hurry to reach the finish line shows drastically.

After seeing Slumdog Millionaire though, Q & A in retrospect appears serpentine in its complexity, so completely has Danny Boyle  extracted the simplest and most predictable story line out of it. Continue reading Reading Swarup, Watching Boyle →

Culture, Everyday Life, Identities, Mirror Worlds, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Fight Terror – Stop Thinking

2 Comments

Oxford Book Store in Mumbai was visited by a cop about ten days ago, and offered a friendly caution to be “careful” about stocking books and CDs related to Pakistan, as the shop might be “targeted” after the recent terror strikes in Mumbai.

Trick question: The reason the cop dropped in was

a) to reassure the store that they would receive police protection in case such threats materialize

b) to pass on a message from Raj Thackeray

(Hint. Looks like there are two options, but there is only one)

Continue reading Fight Terror – Stop Thinking →

Culture, Genders, Law, Technology

Surrogacy Politics: Imrana Qadeer & Mary E. John

23 Comments

This guest post has been sent by IMRANA QADEER and MARY E. JOHN

Surrogacy is suddenly front-page news. First there was the uncertain future of baby Manji, following the divorce of her Japanese commissioning parents; then the happy pictures of an Israeli gay couple with their son born to a Bombay-based surrogate mother. India is becoming a cheap location for foreigners wanting to use ‘assisted reproductive technologies’ (ART) and local clinics are promoting surrogacy arrangements because they are seen as lucrative ventures. While there is hardly any public debate on the ethical, social, epidemiological and medical questions around infertility and surrogacy, the extremely problematic ART Regulatory Bill (2008) is being hurried through. It barely addresses important concerns and ignores national health and population norms. It permits, for instance, three surrogate pregnancies to a woman.

Continue reading Surrogacy Politics: Imrana Qadeer & Mary E. John →

Culture, Debates, Excavation, Politics, Theory

John Milton Takes a Stand? Prasanta Chakravarty

2 Comments

This is a guest post by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY

[Dissidence comes along with responsibility. If that sounds an utter sell out, one has to look back no further than the career and oeuvre of John Milton, whose 400th Anniversary is being celebrated around the world.]

Students of English literature usually do not prefer meddling too much with politics, especially if that comes in the way of appreciating the hermeneutics of the text, the lyricism set aside for the work of art. Sophisticated scholars have learnt to deftly negotiate and work with Marxism, new historicism and cultural criticism, without compromising on the finer points of close reading. They have also welcomed areas like textual studies and performance and newer genres like memoirs, broadsheets, travelogues, petitions, graphic fiction and so forth within the critical ambit with a careful eye that such forays do not destabilize the Great Book tradition. Students of politics and the political, on the other hand, have a certain distrust for soft aesthetic options. In one interesting recent interview, James Scott, who routinely uses Zola and Tolstoy in his classes and works, lamented in jest on his status at the Yale Political Science Department as an outlier, blaming it onto the ascendancy and monopoly of formal and rational choice models in the discipline.

Continue reading John Milton Takes a Stand? Prasanta Chakravarty →

Bad ideas, Capitalism, Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Language, Media politics, Politics

The Battle of Mumbai

5 Comments

Guest post by BALMURLI NATRAJAN, a member of the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI)

The Battle of Mumbai did not begin on November 26, 2008. There was no clear beginning, regardless of what somnambulists who have just woken up, or saber-rattlers who have been sharpening their tools for a while, pronounce. Like all modern wars, it burst into public view over the internet, unannounced and in full-swing. Continue reading The Battle of Mumbai →

Culture

India’s fault lines, explored in a film about a Delhi thief – Trisha Gupta

3 Comments

Guest post by TRISHA GUPTA

Fifteen minutes into Dibakar Banerjee’s new film, a bunch of lower middle class Delhi boys are beating up a private school kid whose one refrain is a pleading “Jaan de bhai, extra class hai“. They don’t stop. But at one point, the gangly teenaged sardar pauses in his pummelling to make the padhaaku kid answer a crucial question, “Yeh greeting card mein likha kya hota hai?” Continue reading India’s fault lines, explored in a film about a Delhi thief – Trisha Gupta →

Capitalism, Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Images, Media politics, Violence/Conflict

Sandra Samuel, Faces and the ‘Nouveau’ Media – Monobina Gupta

8 Comments

Guest post by MONOBINA GUPTA

“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of a cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalistic industry, along plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good die like dogs, for no good reason.”

– Hunter Thompson in Generation of Swine

We, in the business of media, are running a trade in ‘faces;’ swapping ordinary ones for the attractive, distorting news coverage and not really giving a damn about it. But the craft of journalism was not always so warped. We made it so.

Continue reading Sandra Samuel, Faces and the ‘Nouveau’ Media – Monobina Gupta →

Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Government, Identities, Politics, Theory, Violence/Conflict

Mumbai terror, the revolt of the elites and Life itself

26 Comments

You have said everything there is to say, and felt everything there is to feel. You have shouted angrily or reflected seriously or stated in the calm tone of conviction that terrorists are as authoritarian as the states they target, that terrorists have no religion, that terrorists are cowards who target soft civilian populations. You have despaired at the carnage wreaked on a city sick and tired of having to be “resilient”; of having faced one disaster after the other – from floods to targeted attacks on specific communities to bomb blasts – and “emerged with its spirit intact”. Your heart has clenched painfully at the inconsolable tears of baby Moshe; at the blood-spattered, newly motherless one-year old Viraj in an exhausted Head Constable Salunkhe’s arms, entrusted to him by his father, a utensil seller wounded by bullets at CST. You have gazed numbly at the image of Maharashtra ATS Chief Hemant Karkare’s young son with drawn countenance bearing the ritual paraphernalia of his father’s cremation ceremonies. Despite yourself you felt a sudden glimmer of hope steal into you at the stony dignity in Kavita Karkare’s dry-eyed grief at her husband’s funeral, at her steadfast bindi and her coloured sari. You have hated yourself for being relieved that those you know in that poor torn city are safe, when hundreds you did not know were not.

In fear and foreboding the feeling has overcome you – “What lies ahead of us now?”

But after all of that, after all of the sorrow and the grieving, in the midst of absolute despair, when you start to think again – STOP. Continue reading Mumbai terror, the revolt of the elites and Life itself →

Bad ideas, Capitalism, Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Images, Media politics, Politics

Hotel Taj: Icon of whose India? Gnani Sankaran

26 Comments

Gnani Sankaran is a noted Tamil writer who lives in Chennai.

Watching at least four English news channels surfing from one to another during the last 60 hours of terror strike made me feel a terror of another kind. The terror of assaulting one’s mind and sensitivity with cameras, sound bites and non-stop blabbers. All these channels have been trying to manufacture my consent for a big lie called – Hotel Taj the icon of India.

Read this scathing critique of the media here.

Culture, Everyday Life, Identities, Politics, Right watch, Theory, Violence/Conflict

The Fascist Mind: Reading Mein Kampf Today

Leave a comment

NOTES ON THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY

It is highly instructive to go through the range of comments that some of our recent posts on terrorism and violence have elicited. Apart from some of the more mindless ones, there have also been some that raise supposedly substantive questions but in a manner that presupposes the answers. The very manner of raising the ‘questions’ is such that any answer but the one contained in the ‘question’ is bound to bring forth a volley of charges to which the comments themselves stand witness.

Continue reading The Fascist Mind: Reading Mein Kampf Today →

Culture, Debates, Identities, Movements, Politics, Theory, Violence/Conflict

Ecstatic Archaisms of Aurobindo Ghose – Prasanta Chakravarty

3 Comments

Guest post by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY

In Reflections on Revolutionary Violence Aditya Nigam makes some nuanced points about the nature of Maoist violence and by contrast, comments on the bedrock character of democracy itself. Can we trace the sublime cult of blood and gore further down, to the founding principles of Forward Bloc, for instance? Or espy it in the millennial longings of a few Gita wielding swadeshis, for that matter? One may begin to see a pattern.

Continue reading Ecstatic Archaisms of Aurobindo Ghose – Prasanta Chakravarty →

Culture, Debates, Empire/ Imperialism, Identities, Movements, Politics

The ‘Obama Moment’: Sangay Mishra and Jinee Lokaneeta

4 Comments

The ‘Obama Moment’ and Conversations on Race
Guest post by SANGAY MISHRA and JINEE LOKANEETA

[The ‘Obama moment’ is much more than the man. Elementary, one would have thought. But maybe not. For, it has been intriguing to watch and listen to people – radical and nonradical liberal alike – mock this moment in a cynical, ‘we-know-it-all’ and ‘what-do-you-expect?’ mode. Intriguing, because, somewhere the insinuation is that those who celebrate are just being carried away by an ephemeral event. Maybe. It seems however, and the authors argue below, that this persona we now know as ‘Obama’ was not there even a year or two ago; he emerged in this present form, through a series of ‘encounters’ – with race, with his own history and with ‘blackness’. In his present form, Obama is produced by a certain African American investment in the earlier Obama (of, say, the pre-campaign Obama). – AN]

Much as the Obama victory on the 4th of November was expected and already predicted by a number of polls, the reaction to his victory both inside and outside the United States was breathtaking.

Continue reading The ‘Obama Moment’: Sangay Mishra and Jinee Lokaneeta →

Bad ideas, Culture, Everyday Life, Identities, Politics, Right watch

Bhaiyya Troubles in Mumbai

5 Comments

The Juhu Versova beach is divided into two sections, guarded by two stray dogs and the bare dirty arses of bhaiyyas who step off their kholis to shit straight into the sea. The other side of the invisible divide is reserved for the civil society which comes to walk, exercise and meditate in the morning. Including well off bhaiyyas like ourselves.

Returning from the beach when I accosted the panwalla by calling him bhaiyya, three bystanders gave me a sharp look. I figured they were marathi manoos. Leaving the shop I tried to inject some pathos by saying that it has become so dangerous to call anyone bhaiyya these days. They did smile, all of them. But I detected a gleam of satisfaction in their expression.

Continue reading Bhaiyya Troubles in Mumbai →

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Identities, Language, Politics

हि‍न्दी के वर्जित प्रदेश में…

9 Comments
[यह लेख कुछ अरसा पहले वाक् पत्रिका के लिए लिखा गया था – पुराने दोस्त सुधीश पचौरी के इसरार पर। जब यह लेख लिख रहा था तब से अब तक हालात कुछ बदल चुके हैं। इसे लिखते वक़्त तक भी मुझे यह गुमान था कि शायद एक रोज़ मैं हिन्दी के क़िलानुमा परिसर में घुस पाने क़ामयाब हो पाउंगा। हज़ार पहरों में घिरे इस क़िले में एक रोज़ ज़रूर दाखिल होने का मौक़ा मिलेगा। मगर इधर कुछ समय से ऐसा लगने लगा है कि यह क़त्तई मुमकिन नहीं है। हिन्दी के पहरेदार ऐसा कभी न होने देंगे। लिहाज़ा अब इस क़िले में घुसने की कोशिश छोड़ कर हिन्दुस्तानी के खुले और बे-पहरा मैदान में, खुली हवा में टहलना चाहता हूँ। कह देना चाहता हूँ पहरेदारों से कि मैं आप के मुल्क का बाशिंदा नहीं हूँ। मैं एक लावारिस मगर आज़ाद ज़ुबान में पला बढ़ा और वही मेरी ज़मीन है। अलविदा। – आदित्य निगम]
एक ज़माना हुआ हिन्दी से जूझते हुए। यह दीगर बात है कि हिन्दीवालों को इसकी ख़बर तक नहीं। हो भी क्यों? आप बेचते ही क्या हैं?
Continue reading हि‍न्दी के वर्जित प्रदेश में… →
Culture, Everyday Life

Durga Puja as a Homecoming Metaphor – Prasanta Chakravarty

9 Comments

(This is a guest post. It was also published in Hindustan Times, October 2, 2008)

Tagore’s short tale Kabuliwallah concludes right in the middle of autumn—saratkaal. Mini’s marriage takes place during the puja holidays, and Rahman’s own Parbati awaits her father’s return in her distant mountain home. Even as Mini prepares to initiate her journey to her in-laws, Rahman, having been released from his own figurative abode-of-the-in-laws, the jail, seeks home afresh in his “… mountains, the glens, and the forests of his distant home, with his cottage in its setting, and the free and independent life of far-away wilds.” Uma’s arche story is reinvented by Tagore and a secret bond is established between two fathers. But such weaving of the puranic akhyan as a homecoming narrative is realized, or used to be realized shall we say, at a different order where home is also a matter of participating in a certain generous spirit during the pujas. The essence of Kabuliwallah lies in basking in such an aura of human generosity. So, the fundamental question to me is whether such a spirit can be glimpsed during the pujas even today without being overly sentimental about it.

Continue reading Durga Puja as a Homecoming Metaphor – Prasanta Chakravarty →

Bad ideas, Culture, Everyday Life

Phool Walon Ki Sair

1 Comment

Akbar Shah Saani (the second) ruled over a rapidly disintegrating empire between 1806 to 1837. It was during his time that the East India Company dispensed with even the fig leaf of ruling in the name of the Mughal Monarch and removed his name from the Persian texts that appeared on the coins struck by the company in the areas under their control.

Bahadur Shah Zafar who succeeded him was not Akbar Shah Saani’s choice as his successor, Akbar Shah was, in fact, under great pressure by one of his queens, Mumtaz Begum to declare her son Mirza Jahangir as the successor. Akbar Shah would have probably accepted this demand but Mirza Jahangir had fallen foul of the British and they will have none of this.

The Phool Walon Ki Sair or Sair-e-gul-Faroshan that is celebrated with much fanfare and official patronage had its beginning in a fracas between Mirza Jahangir and Sir Archibald Seton, the then British resident at Delhi. According to contemporary records of the event, Mirza Jahangir was extremely resentful of the manner in which the British threw their weight around the Red Fort and violated all customs and traditions. He was a strong man, moved around with a band of his followers and kept getting into arguments with the Goras. Continue reading Phool Walon Ki Sair →

Bad ideas, Culture, Excavation, Identities, Images, Language

Mother Kerala

23 Comments
Mother Kerala
Mother Kerala

Continue reading Mother Kerala →

Countryside, Culture, Everyday Life, Frontiers, Identities, Violence/Conflict

Do gods and saints weep?

45 Comments

The star of fortune has risen for Malayali women, not in this world but in the next. Catholics in Kerala celebrated the canonization of Sr. Alphonsa, a young nun from Kudamaloor in Kottayam district, who passed away after a life of intense bodily suffering and prayer in 1946, as a ray of hope in hard times. Becoming a nun and leading a life of asceticism were never easy choices. That too, for a eligible, beautiful young woman in early 20th century Kerala, born in a small village, whose guardians were determined to see her respectably married. Given to excruciatingly difficult forms of prayer even as a child, Alphonsa resisted her maternal aunt’s plans dramatically by trying to disfigure herself. She jumped into a smouldering ash-pit; badly burned, she climbed out. The family was so taken aback that they gave in to her desire to become a nun. Continue reading Do gods and saints weep? →

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Identities, Politics, Right watch, Violence/Conflict

Converting lions to elephants

4 Comments

As the most hideous kinds of violence are unleashed on Christians in Orissa and Karnataka by proud Hindu terrorists, one issue that the liberal Hindu mind-set stumbles over is that of conversions. Of course, violence is bad, it bleats, nothing justifies killings, but mass conversions, you know…

Conversions. Images of Muslim hordes waving their fierce banners, sweeping across the North Indian plains; images of sly Christian missionaries swindling innocent tribals and dalits with food and education and social status, into accepting an alien god. The liberal Hindu, who would never dream of converting anybody to Hinduism, shrinks at these images.

Aditya has drawn our attention to Ambedkar’s clear-eyed insight into why Hinduism is not a proselytizing religion. Can you convert a non-Hindu into a Brahmin? Nope.

Continue reading Converting lions to elephants →