This is a guest post by Rijul Kochhar
Combining field and event, camp is in effect spatial practice.[…] Camps are spaces where states of emergency or legal exception have become the rule. [They offer] the setting for the normative permanence of a suspended rule of law.
~Charlie Hailey, Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space
The story of Aadhar is not unknown—a new, cutting edge piece of documentary practice jack-booted for this 21st century, it seeks to cull out fraudulent persons tied to dubious places or circumstances (words like ‘ghosts’, ‘fakes’, ‘frauds’, ‘duplicates’ abound in its context). Paeans to the powers of biometrics have been sung from numerous citadels of power—the project’s uniqueness lies in its capacity to channel biological anatomy to a singular fantasy of individually-determined (and fixed) citizenship; its ability to weed out duplication and duplicity in favour of fool-proof individuality; its promise to identify seamlessly; its realization of that ultimate bureaucratic fantasy that seeks to eliminate the noisiness of personhood and the messiness of individual lives by inaugurating a system of identity constructed and at once accomplished through a 12-digit number tied to the bedrock of fingerprints and iris-scans. These seductive powers of identity and technology, long wished for by visions and bureaucratic pursuits of rationality, contrast against fears of the invasion of privacy, the dangers of centralising data, and the abuse of powers and of information by functionaries of government, as well as—by no means less important—prospects of technological malfunction in the field of civic services or anatomical recalcitrance.
Continue reading The lives of documents: on the sorrows of AADHAR: Rijul Kochhar
This is a guest post by RIA DE and ACHUTH AJIT: English, the language of a united collective; but also a language that found itself wanting today, as if unable to express the most basic of needs, the most just of demands. Of all days today English was at its banal best. As if clichés had eaten into it, gnawed the life out of it, bent it into prosaicness. Like “We Want Justice.” As we gather here today, at the English and Foreign Languages University – an institution that is just 5 years old with already four student deaths to its tally – to protest the high-handed and insensitive treatment of Mudasir Kamran, to honor his memory, and most of all to claim on his behalf, and on the behalf of all of us, the students at this University demand and urge “We Want Justice”. The prosaic cliché of this oft-repeated slogan was unable to state on our behalf the bare life of it as well as the spontaneity and the enormity of it. 
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 