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Category Archives: Everyday Life
Why Delhi voted and Mumbai didn’t
These have been doing the rounds on Facebook.
Ten reasons why South Mumbai did not vote
by Abhinav Dhar
10. Clashed with Salsa class
9. Election whites not drycleaned
8. No candidate a hottie
7. Tony Jethmalani contesting from suburbs. Sigh
6. No valet parking at booth
5. Spotted servant in queue ahead of us
4. Driver not come
3. “Elections over dude, Obama won!”
2. No party tackling real issues, eg, reduce Gold Gym rates
1. No home delivery!
Why Delhi turned up to vote
By Madhavan Narayanan
1. They loved the Tata Tea ad
2. They saw the Chopras go out, and thought they must overtake the Lancer from left
3. Bunty’s girlfriend wanted it when they were going out for some Chinese
4. Diwan Saheb on second floor persuaded them. He is jaaaint saactry in DPCC
5. Without stable government, real estate will not revive
6. Election Commission directly asked Pappu. So nice of them
7. Grandfather started talking on Partition, and they had to run
8. Auntyji hoped some TV crew will come and take a soundbite
9. Baba Ramdev said it is good for health
And finally
10. They had to beat the Bambaiyaas. Izzat ka sawaal hai, hainji?
Barter – is that what they’re calling it now?
It’s a world on the downturn out there.
And new and creative ways of handling the situation emerge. Imagine a journalist accepting some old jeans (in very good condition), some rice, atta and vegetables (and also sugar) from the newspaper proprietor in exchange for her reporting. Meanwhile, an ad agency employee opts for day-old newspapers and fruits for every successful slogan he coins.
Impossible?
Continue reading Barter – is that what they’re calling it now?
Another sort of touch
The British queen placed a royal hand around the American First Lady’s waist, who graciously reciprocated, and a million words and images were launched in the world media on that historical moment.
How come we never got to see this other Touching Moment in London involving another Obama? Thanks to Dilip Simeon, who was sent this by a friend, I received this picture of what happened when Barack Hussein was entering 10, Downing Street on April 1, 2009.
There he is, a British police officer joyously breaching protocol while ushering a black American president into the British corridors of power. As the caption in the forwarded message said – “the two brothers couldn’t resist the historic moment!”
(Reuters/Toby Melville)
That’s it for now, folks.
A sham called election reporting
A ‘Kashmiri’ ‘Gurjar’ ‘Muslim’ is contesting the Dausa Lok Sabha seat. As an independent. For the simple reason that after delimitation, Dausa became a reserved constituency. Rerseved for the Scheduled Tribes. Meenas are ST’s. Gurjars wanted to be ST’s. Not only didn’t they not get that, they were deprived of Dausa, where the feudal PIlots had been Gurjar kings.
So someone thought of this simple idea: get a Kashmiri Gurjar. Kashmiri Gurjars are ST’s.
That candidate is campaigning around Dausa, and I gather that even the Brahmins of the area are supporting him! Him! A Kashmiri Muslim Gurjar! Continue reading A sham called election reporting
Afghan Women Protest New Law on Home Life
About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times that number, walked the streets of Kabul on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.
‘The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.’
‘”Get out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”….It was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning.’ Read the full story by Dexter Filkins here.
[Courtesy: SACW]
Dignifying Jade Goody, or, What Jade Goody actually connotes: D. Parthasarthy
guest post by D. PARTHASARTHY
When newspaper columnists become self-righteous, it is usually because they see a good way of capturing reader interest by moralizing about an issue. After all, tabloids around the world regularly make fortunes by generating a false sense of moral outrage and indignation through stories of the indiscretions and ineptitudes, sufferings and misfortunes of celebrities and of not so famous people. It is a sign of irony as well as an indication of the way in which neo-liberal capitalist media works, that the consequences of alienation engendered by an individualist ideology is fodder for sensationalist reporting, but also a tool for mobilizing collective conscience against alienated individuals, and for preventing communities from understanding the real reasons for alienation.
Continue reading Dignifying Jade Goody, or, What Jade Goody actually connotes: D. Parthasarthy
Cultural Policing in Dakshina Kannada: Vigilante Attacks on Women and Minorities
[This summary comes to us from ARVIND NARRAIN (ALF) of a report brought out by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Karnataka (PUCL-K) in the wake of the attacks on women in Mangalore by cadres of the Hindu right-wing Sri Ram Sene.]
It was only after the continuous telecast of the images of the women who were subjected to an horrific assault by cadres of the Sri Ram Sene in a pub in Mangalore on January 24, 2009, that public attention gravitated towards what was happening in Mangalore. Self styled vigilante groups in Dakshina Kannada have begun to police social interactions between members of different religious communities such as boys and girls drinking juice together or sitting together on a bus merely because they come from different religious communities. Cultural policing also targets women in particular and lays down norms with respect to public spaces they can occupy and the clothes which they can wear. Cultural policing has as its primary target, young people. From Shefantunde (16) who was attacked for talking to a Hindu girl to a college student Shruti and Shabeeb for talking on a bus to Anishwita (23), Akeel Mohammmad (24) and Pramilla(22) for drinking a juice together, its the young which has come under vicious attack. Perhaps we also need to think of the young not just as victims but indeed as agents of social transformation who through their everyday acts of fraternal living are fulfilling the promise of the Indian Constitution and thereby imperiling the ideological agenda of those who see India differently. Cultural policing aims to punish all those who try to live out the meaning of the Preamble’s promise of ‘fraternity’ and is a fundamental attack on the very Constitutional order. The promise of fraternity held out in the Preamble is what is contested at its very roots by cultural policing. What cultural policing wants to produce are monolithic self-enclosed communities with no form of social interaction between them. It is antithetical to the idea of ‘We, the people of India’ and insists that India is no more one nation, but rather a collection of separate peoples. This Report documents how sixty years after independence, the vision of the framers of the Constitution is sought to be so completely repudiated by organizations which are bent on ripping out the heart of Indian Constitutionalism.
The full report is available on the Alternative Law Forum website and can be accessed here.
The Great House Hunt
A rather fierce debate has been raging at Kafila, the instigator is Zainab, a “Muslim” married to a “Telugu Brahmin” who discovered how deep is the hold of antediluvian ideas and practices in a city that has for sometime been touted as the hub of 21st century India.
She wrote a simple account of her experiences while searching for a house on rent in Bangalore. The piece also touched upon issues like communal profiling, stereotyping entire communities and such like. Some of those commentating on the piece have made ‘clever’ attempts at obfuscation by raising issues like loan quotas for Muslims and such other totally extraneous arguments. Never having studied economics, banking and/or commerce, never having had the resources to apply for a bank loan and not having my life enriched by the immensely educational experience of house hunting in Bombay and Bangalore, I will not try to take on Ipsita or comment on the secular practice of discrimination against all house hunters if they do not belong to the caste, religion, region, gender or economic status of the landlord. Continue reading The Great House Hunt
The Rise of the Underground – A New Discovery?
Believe it or not, experts at the World Bank and the IMF are disovering the virtues of something we at Kafila have been, off and on, debating: the so-called ‘underground economy’, the ‘informal sector’ or what has also been called the sphere of ‘noncorporate capital’.
“Economists have long thought the underground economy — the vast, unregulated market encompassing everything from street vendors to unlicensed cab drivers — was bad news for the world economy. Now it’s taking on a new role as one of the last safe havens in a darkening financial climate, forcing analysts to rethink their views”, states a recent Wall Street Journal report from Ahmedabad. Continue reading The Rise of the Underground – A New Discovery?
The Shame of A Name
This has never happened to me before. But then, there is always a first time for everything in life.
My name is Zainab Bawa.
“Are you Punjabi?”
“Are you Parsi?”
“What are you?” Arjun bhai, the hawker outside VT station had once asked me. “Muslim,” I had replied. And then, very bashfully, he said to me, “Just asking. Could not make out. You speak such good Marathi. And then, after all, we are all of the humanity kind – you cut my finger, the blood that oozes out will be the same as yours.” Continue reading The Shame of A Name
Women’s Day 2009, Thrissur
Smile Pinki, Pinki Sonkar
If you’ve recovered from your Post-Slumdog Stress Disorder, may I dare to write a short post about Smile Pinki, the short documentary that also won an Oscar and that is also set in India? Continue reading Smile Pinki, Pinki Sonkar
Civility, Harmuniya Bajaiyke: Prasanta Chakravarty
This guest post was sent to us by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY
A recent exchange in a congregation addressing the nature of contemporary civil society caught my attention. This was a formal gathering where there was supposed to be a pitch on an idea tentatively christened civility index: that is, whether it was possible to empirically measure civility and come up with some conceptual conclusions, as well as have more practical usages once such indicators will have been developed. A searching question came from someone who had spent a lifetime fighting liberal centrism and opportunism. “Why do you call the whole thing civility index,” she inquired, “civility connotes propriety and manner and etiquette, when you are interested to scale human capacities, right?”
This is a fundamental and worthy question, especially keeping in mind that certain variants of civil society discourse has caught the imagination of many invested in democracy right now, even as they wish to steer clear of old leftist certainties and eschew easy liberal pluralism at once. Are propriety and etiquette wholly irrelevant to our understanding of modern civil society? Is manner rudimentary to civil society, counterproductive to doing anything worthwhile? Does civility dilute the associational potential of civil society—human capacities being robbed off by issues of mere conduct and comportment? Are traditional societies uncivil by definition? And does civility, more than just civil, civic or public, betray fashionable elitism unabashedly?
Continue reading Civility, Harmuniya Bajaiyke: Prasanta Chakravarty
The Arrest of Shamim Modi at Industrialists’ Behest
Activist Working for Rights of Tribal People Arrested
Ms Shamim (nee Meghani) Modi, a law graduate working among the tribals in Betul district, Madhya Pradesh, has had to pay a heavy price for taking up the cause of tribal people and other industrial workers. Shamim, who works with the Samajwadi Jan Parishad (an organization of socialist-Gandhian orientation) has been put behind bars in Hoshangabad jail for exposing the corrupt nexus between politicians and the mining mafia. She was arrested in gross violation of democratic rights on 10th February 2009 from her residence at Harda, M.P. The process of attempting to secure bail from M.P High Court is now on.
The arrest was made on false charges, one of instigating tribals to ‘attack forest officials’ and another of ‘kidnapping with the intention to kill’ these officials! These charges were brought against her (and her husband) two years ago in 2007. Subsequently no enquiries were conducted, and no follow-up was done but the fact that these charges hung over their heads was presumably meant to cow them down. These charges have suddenly been resurrected because the administration has been under pressure from industrialist lobbies. Earlier, the trial court had rejected her bail plea despite the fact that the person supposed to have been ‘kidnapped’ was said to be present in court and denied any such thing. Another evidence, if any was still required, of the deep nexuses of power that operate at these levels. Continue reading The Arrest of Shamim Modi at Industrialists’ Behest
A Kingdom of Crabs…
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!
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!
From here.
A Hundred Years to Valentine’s Day
The Manglore-style of violence against women is clearly not the style of the politically powerful guardians of sexual morality in Kerala. But maybe the style is more or less redundant over here: there are very few pub-going local (or local-looking) women over here. How convenient for us women of Kerala that we Malayalees live in social arrangements that insist on sexual segregation in public spaces and institutions.
This is of course related to the particular history of gender and spatiality that unfolded between the mid-19th and 20th centuries in Kerala.Spatial categories have always underwritten caste and gender exclusion in Malayalee society. Take for instance, the derogatory term chanthapennungal (‘market women’) that refers to women who get their way through loud and vociferous argument – who work for their livelihood in market-space and reject feminine modesty. The chanthapennu is the very antithesis of taravattil pirannaval (‘she who was born in an aristocratic homestead’). Thus the woman whose daily life and labours involves traversing spaces outside the domestic and the familial is forever poised at the brink — she is who may, at any instant, collapse into being chantappennu.In traditional Malayalee society, family spaces were named by caste and constructed through caste practices and gender norms. For instance, the Brahmin home was referred to as Illam or Mana; the Nair homestead as Taravadu or Idam.In other words, a generalized notion of domestic space housing the family was absent. Indeed, the observance of spatial regulations was often taken to be crucial in shaping feminine moral qualities found characteristic of the aristocracy — and hardly vice-versa.
Will we overcome? Pramada Menon
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.”
Interview with Jacques Ranciere
Interview with Jacques Rancière
Conducted by Lawrence Liang
Lodi Gardens, Delhi, 5th February 2009
Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is Emeritus Professor, Philosophy, at the University of Paris (St. Denis). He came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with Louis Althusser, the Marxist philosopher. He subsequently broke away from Althusser and wrote The Nights of Labour, a work that examined the philosophical and poetical writings of workers in 19th century France. Through an examination of the lives of these worker autodidacts, Rancière introduced a new way of thinking about the idea of the worker, and of the injunction that divides between those entitled to a life in thought and those born to do manual labour.
He went on to write The Philosopher and His Poor which looks at the figure of the poor artisan from classical philosophy down to Marx and Sartre. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, inspired by the experiences of a radical early 19th century teacher, Joseph Jacotot, Rancière sought to rethink the idea of pedagogy away from the idea of moving form the unknown to the known and from those who possess knowledge to those who don’t, to look at how all forms of ignorance are also conditions of knowledge.
He was in Delhi recently, on the occasion of the release of the Hindi language edition of The Nights of Labour.
In Cold Blood: Abuses by Armed Groups
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, USA, UK, Spain, the Russian Federation, to name a few, are a testimony to the cruel attacks on civilians and other human rights abuses in the recent past by non-state armed groups, including terrorist groups. They are showing utter disdain for the lives of civilians and others, continuing a pattern of serious crimes and crimes against humanity. They fail to abide by even the most basic standards of humanitarian law. The attacks and other abuses by armed groups are so frequent and the security situation so grave, that it is impossible to calculate with any confidence the true toll upon the civilian population, let alone the long term consequences that so many people inevitably suffer.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 