Ecology/Environment, Everyday Life

Royal Purple with a Green Crown

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There is a story about Birbal and Akbar that goes something like this:

One day Akbar invited Birbal to join him at Lunch, one of the dishes served was the Brinjal, called Baigan in Hindustani, akbar liked the preparation and said as much, Birbal not only agreed but also praised the vegetable to high heavens, talking about its great qualities and about its ancient roots in the Indian lore.  Several days later he was invited for another meal with the Emperor and this time too Brinjal was on the Menu, Akbar did not like the preparation said that Baigan was an affront to finer sensibilities, Birbal promptly agreed and added that it had no taste of its own, had the consistency and colour of mud and destroyed anything that it was cooked with. Akbar remembered the fulsome praise that Birbal had just a few days earlier heaped upon the vegetable and reminded him. Birbal bowed his head and said, my lord, I am beholden to you, not to the Brinjal. Continue reading Royal Purple with a Green Crown →

Capitalism, Countryside, Ecology/Environment, Empire/ Imperialism, Everyday Life, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Green Hunt: The Anatomy of An Operation

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An operation is underway in Central India, but no one really knows what it is. Variously described as a media myth, a comprehensive hearts and minds strategy, and an all-out offensive by paramilitary forces and the state forces along the borders of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, Operation Green Hunt has become a shoebox of news clippings, police reports, public demonstrations and armed encounters.

Depending on the definition, Green Hunt either began in July 2009, September 2009 or November 2009. Speaking off record, senior policemen confirmed that the intensification of “search and comb” operations in Chhattisgarh began as early as July last year. In September 2009 the press reported on the progress of “Operation Green Hunt”: a massive 3 day joint operation in which the central CoBRA force and state police battled Naxal forces in Dantewada. Continue reading Green Hunt: The Anatomy of An Operation →

Centre watch, Empire/ Imperialism, Everyday Life, Frontiers, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Uncanny parallels between Beg’s and Shah’s deaths

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This is a guest post by Akhilesh Upadhyay

The gruesome murder on Sunday of media entrepreneur Jamim Shah, 47, has brought back chilling memories of June 29, 1998. On that day, Mirza Dilshad Beg, a sitting lawmaker, was gunned down outside his home in Siphal, Kathmandu. It was a dark night and the hillside neighbourhood looked darker still due to load-shedding, when we (reporters and photographers from Kantipur and The Kathmandu Post) arrived at the scene, soon after the 9.30 hit-and-run incident.

The newsroom had received a tip-off from a local who had heard what he suspected were gun-shots. It was an innocent world in many ways. Nepalis were still unfamiliar with sounds of bombs and gun-shots, the Maoist-waged “people’s war” was still in its infancy, violent deaths still shook everybody, and political assassination was unheard of. But what shocked the Nepalis most was how ugly games from powerful external forces could play out in Nepal, as it watched haplessly. The incident also gave many of us in the newsroom a first-hand lesson on forces which operate from behind the scene. Two of the theories that made the rounds then clearly pointed at the cross-border nature of the operation; the third one was that Beg’s death had to do with “family problems,” which turned out to be false. Continue reading Uncanny parallels between Beg’s and Shah’s deaths →

Ecology/Environment, Everyday Life, Excavation, Language, Metropolis, Violence/Conflict

Drop A Beat, Turn Up My Symphony

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This is a guest post by John Bevan

Nearly half the 8 million population of Haiti, (the size of Wales, Belize and El Salvador— seems that was one of the standard sizes for countries at the time) lived in the Capital Port-au-Prince.  So the elimination of the Capital approximates to the loss of half the country’s entire infrastructure, limited as it was.  The loss of many of its intellectuals and elected politicians, few enough in the first place, given the brain-drain northwards, with some third of Haitians living in the US, adds to the knock the country has taken.

In 2006, the main Port-au-Prince daily proudly lead with the story- “Haiti there at World Cup Final”- referring not to their football team but Wyclef  Jean who sang a duet with Shakira before the France-Italy final in Berlin.  Wyclef boosted the image and self-image of Haitians a few years earlier when he won a Grammy for the 1996 Fugees album, The Score, and accepted it while wearing a Haitian flag, Haitians still being at the bottom of the pile of all US immigrant groups.  He rarely appears on videos without the flag somewhere about his body. Continue reading Drop A Beat, Turn Up My Symphony →

Identities, Images, Left watch, Media politics, Violence/Conflict

The Many ‘Vices’ of Chitralekha

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Chitralekha, a dalit woman from Payyanur, Kannur, has been in the news since 2005, for her open challenge to the CITU in that left bastion. An autorickshaw driver, she had protested at the CITU’s constant interference at work and the intensely male hostility against her presence in an almost exclusively male line of work. Braving ‘character-assault’ from the CITU which called her a ‘loose woman’, a ‘regular drunk’ and so on, she continued working until,in December 2005, her autorickshaw was burned down. She fought, however, and was supported by various Dalit, Feminists and Citizen’s initiatives. In June 2008, she procured a new autorickshaw with their support. This did not mean that she was now acceptable to the CITU . Now recently, she complained that the CITU had seized a chance encounter to beat her and her husband, and the police, who arrived on the scene, took them to the police station and unleashed even worse violence. Her complaints have been ignored or treated with hostility by the mainstream media in Kerala. Activists and concerned persons in and outside Kerala, however, have rallied to her support. Continue reading The Many ‘Vices’ of Chitralekha →

Bad ideas

A response from a Sri Lankan friend: Priya Thangaraja

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By PRIYA THANGARAJAH

The last two days have left me like I have just come from a storm and I dont even feel the tingling of rain drops on me. But this began long before. The state media I hear showed movies of Idi Amin and Hitler and a constant barrage of pro Mahinda Rajapakse propaganda. “they were brainwashed” is what I am hearing. I agree with everyone that its not like we had a better option. A military man who got rid of many when asked to get rid of one cant be the harbinger of a new era. Continue reading A response from a Sri Lankan friend: Priya Thangaraja →
Bad ideas, Frontiers, Violence/Conflict

The absurd theatre of Sri Lanka, applauded by India

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Every time I go to Sri Lanka, my historical sensibility gets heightened. I still remember this huge hoarding of Mahinda Rajapaksa ‘lovingly’ holding an old woman, obviously Tamil as she was wearing a pottu. That woman could be one of the 2.5 lakh people who have lost their homes, belonging and land in the war. She could be part of the other lakhs who have lost all of this in the more than twenty-five years of war.

The day before yesterday, 26th January, was the first ‘free’ election ‘after the war’. During the months before the election, 700 incidents of violence were reported, leading to the death and injury of many. Yesterday, as the results rolled out, chaos hit the streets of Colombo. We don’t even have enough information about what happened in the rest of the country yesterday. Rumours were floating about. I shall not dwell on the rumours and provide them legitimacy, although I am tempted to, as some of them are shocking and could be true. Ethics come in the way. Continue reading The absurd theatre of Sri Lanka, applauded by India →
Bad ideas, Capitalism, Everyday Life, Metropolis, Violence/Conflict

The Suicide of Sense

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Mumbai has been in the grip of a wave of student suicides this past month. According to the Mumbai Mirror, as many as 25 suicides have taken place in the city in the new year, most of which have been by students. As expected, the media has tripped over itself reporting every sordid and tragic detail of the students’ personal lives, and public anxiety in Mumbai is climbing to the level of all-round hysteria. The general consensus is that there is too much pressure on young minds from schools and parents; the Maharashtra State government has reacted by issuing directives to all eight regional education boards in the state asking principals to arrange workshops to identify depressed students and urge them to seek psychiatric help. State education minister Balasaheb Thorat has promised a stress-free curriculum in school boards, and followed this up by a new rule that allows failure in one subject for an overall pass result in the SSC. A south Mumbai hospital has recruited a former depressive who has a history of three suicide attempts to counsel others against suicide. The Thane Mental Hospital has in the meanwhile gone one step ahead and created what they call a ‘20-minute anti-suicide psycho drama skit’ to be performed on the streets and in educational institutions. According to hospital superintendent Dr. Sanjay Kumavat, the skit will focus on the trauma that family members go through when a child commits suicide, and the ‘problems created by such a situation’ (Mumbai Mirror Jan 18th 2010) – this will hopefully prevent them from taking the proverbial ‘drastic step’.

Continue reading The Suicide of Sense →

Bad ideas, Culture, Everyday Life, Metropolis

Miss Rajdhani Contest

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You are cordially invited
Identities, Metropolis

A Republic of Cities

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From the Indian Express this morning.

Independent India was built, imagined and judged by its villages; by gram swaraj. The nation was rarely, if ever, imagined by its founders to be led (Chandigarh aside) by its cities. Cities were spaces of the other — of colonial empires and cantonments, of a modernity that had come first in the garb of colonialism — separate from the “inner” nation, which, authentic and unsullied, lived on in the villages. As Nehru once famously said: “we want to urbanise India’s villages; not take away the people from villages to towns.”

This ambiguity over the city and the reductive stereotypes it inhabits has had a long innings; and yet has begun to change. The urban has begun to rise not just demographically but politically, electorally, socially, culturally and economically to become the defining problem space of the ‘new India.’ Cities, for better and worse, have caught our imagination.

Culture, Debates, Theory

Of SubTerrains and Seismology: Notes on the Contemporaneous in India

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Guest post by MOHD. SABIH AHMED

Of SubTerrains and Seismology: Notes on the Contemporaneous in India [1]

If the starting point of an enquiry is to investigate into the larger ambit of cultural production in which a notional unity of ‘contemporary art’ is one formation, the study of alternative systems/networks/formations would not suffice merely as mapping them as ‘alternative art’ in the same field. Instead, the demand would be to trace the contexts that give rise to a necessity for peculiar and disparate kinds of alternatives, and how certain cases instigate the field, maybe even risk rearranging the very conceptual and pragmatic constituents of that field.

This paper is a series of ponderings, questions, and a hesitant proposition regarding the above-mentioned, as much as it is an exposition on the state of affairs of that notional unity that is ‘Contemporary Art in India’. Continue reading Of SubTerrains and Seismology: Notes on the Contemporaneous in India →

Bad ideas, Government, Identities, Law, Scams, Violence/Conflict

Enemy Property

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There have been several news reports recently about attempts by the builder Mafia to capture properties near the Jama Masjid in Shahjehanabad (popularly, known as old Delhi) to build a 100 room hotel. Reports have also suggested the involvement of a local politician, though the politician has refuted the allegations very firmly.

This piece is not about the builder mafia or the local politician, but about another issue that has cropped up during the investigation of the attempted land grab. It has been found that the ownership of one of the properties is under dispute and a case has been going on for close to two decades.

The reports say that the disputed property belongs to the “custodian of enemy properties”. Even a cursory reading of the reports would reveal the identity of the original owners of these properties. The original owners of these properties were Muslims of Delhi.

Muslims, who had lived in Shahjehanabad for generations, some for centuries like the families of my ancestors. Continue reading Enemy Property →

Countryside, Law, Violence/Conflict

The police detain 3 more in Gompad case

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Konta: The mystery surrounding the killing of nine Adivasis in Gompad village in Dantewada district in October last year is deepening, with the Chhattisgarh police detaining three more witnesses to the incident and restricting all access to the area on the pretext of Operation Green Hunt.

Operation Green Hunt is a catch-all phrase, used by the police and media alike, for all major anti-naxal offensives since July 2009.

As previously reported by The Hindu, the Chhattisgarh police have assumed total control over the movements of Sodi Sambho – one of several witnesses in a Supreme Court petition that alleges that the 9 civilians were killed by the security forces.

On Friday, armed policemen and Special Police Officers (SPO) lined the length of the highway from Dantewada town to Konta, the block headquarters closest to Gompad, stopping vehicles and questioning commuters. Travelling with local journalists Anil Mishra of Nayi Duniya and Yashwant Yadav of Navbharat, this correspondent was repeatedly detained along the route and told that Gompad village was out of bounds as a major anti-naxal operation was underway. Non-journalists were, however, let through.

Continue reading The police detain 3 more in Gompad case →

Debates, Government, Movements, Politics

Presidential Elections, Minorities and Political Space

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The following is the write up of my talk given at the Centre for Society and Religion on January 11th, 2010.  I have articulated some of these concerns in greater depth in my recent article in the January 9th, 2010 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly titled, ‘State Power, State Patronage and Elections in Sri Lanka’.

Presidential Elections, Minorities and Political Space

First, I want to thank the organisers for inviting me to speak here at the Centre for Society and Religion (CSR), an institution that embodies a great tradition of conscious political engagement.  It is an honour to be given this privilege and I hope this series of discussions at CSR on the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections is the beginning of many discussions and debates on important political issues facing the peoples of our country.  Indeed, the space that has opened up in recent weeks in the context of the elections should be expanded by all social institutions and social forums concerned about peace, justice and democracy.  I for one believe that the debates, the social pressures and the mobilisations in the lead up to and after elections are at times even more important than the act of electing a President or other political representatives. Continue reading Presidential Elections, Minorities and Political Space →

Left watch, Movements, Politics

Jyoti Basu and the Passing of an Era

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Jyoti Basu, Promode Dasgupta and Saroj Mukherjee
Jyoti Basu, Promode Dasgupta and Saroj Mukherjee

With the passing away of Jyoti Basu, the curtain comes down on an entire chapter of communist history in this country. Basu may have been the last of a generation that learnt its politics in the stormy days of the anticolonial struggle and who lived through the ups and downs of politics – from the underground days of the 1930s and 1940s to the initiation into the ways of parliamentary democracy. The long engagement with parliamentary democracy was to lead to Basu’s – and the communists’ – long stint in power. And Basu was one of those rare communists for whom democracy was not a mere strategic imperative but a value to be internalized.

Basu belonged to a generation of communists who worked their way from the bottom up. Trained in Law in England, Basu returned to India, determined to work in the communist movement. Muzaffar Ahmed, the then secretary of the undivided communist party sent him to work among the railway workers. It was there, working among and organizing the railway workers that Basu entered mass politics.  It was probably in this process that Basu developed his distinctive style of politics – a style that we have yet to understand fully.

Continue reading Jyoti Basu and the Passing of an Era →

Left watch, Movements, Politics

Remembering Jyoti Basu: Monobina Gupta

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This is a Guest Post by MONOBINA GUPTA

Jyoti Basu
Jyoti Basu

While waiting endlessly at the CPI-M headquarters in Delhi, we, the Left-beat reporters, often used to say how incredibly dull the beat would be in the absence of Jyoti Basu, Indrajit Gupta, and Harkishen Singh Surjeet. With their distinctive personalities and distinct style, each one had livened up the tedious job of keeping track of the Left parties and their leaders. Indrajit Gupta would speak in a baritone voice, trotting out gruff answers; the ever-amiable Harkishen Singh Surjeet, never failed to pick up the phone, was always ready to share a laugh with us. But of these three colourful Communist stalwarts, it was Basu who used to keep us most preoccupied, with his ‘read-between-the-line’ one-liners, exasperatingly short, brusque replies, sometimes even with outright sarcasm or rudeness.

Continue reading Remembering Jyoti Basu: Monobina Gupta →

Images, Mirror Worlds, Politics

Asim Butt (1978-2010)

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Self-portrait as Christ. 1998. Oil on board, paper, and wax palimpsest.

Karachi-basd artist Asim Butt committed suicide yesterday by hanging himself to death. He was only 31, and his work made waves. Part of the Stuckist art movement, he made figurative paintings, most notably a series of seven portraying a dog’s carcass. He was also a graffiti artist, painting red the walls of Karachi. His best known graffiti work was the eject symbol painted all over towards the end of General Musharraf’s rule.

Read this moving tribute by a journalist friend and this one with a lot of links at Stuckism.com. You can pay homage here, but most of all, see his pictures and paintings on his own Facebook profile.

As one of the tributes on Facebook reads, good people die early.

Bad ideas, Culture, Everyday Life, Left watch, Politics, Sex, Violence/Conflict

Inaugurated: The Malabar Moral Police!

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The dastardly attack on the eminent writer Paul Zachariah by the DYFI in the CPM fortress of Payyanur in north Kerala on 10 January has been roundly condemned across the political spectrum in Kerala. Zacharia was heckled and abused at a literary seminar organized by a publisher for  criticizing the moral policing  practiced by the official left in Kerala. He condemned the recent DYFI-PDP joint ‘moral action’ against the Congress leader Rajmohan Unnithan and a Sewa Dal leader which, according to the the DYFI leadership, were ‘provocative’. Zacharia was accosted by a gang of men when he was about to leave Payyanur and openly threatened. He was told that such talk was not permitted in the left bastion of Payyanur; when the threat did not produce the desired reaction, they resorted to physical intimidation, and relented only after the intervention of the organizers who are CPM sympathizers, and other writers present there. The day after, prominent leaders in the CPM, including the Chief Minister and the Minister for Education, condemned the action. Continue reading Inaugurated: The Malabar Moral Police! →

Countryside, Violence/Conflict

Where is Sodi Sambho?

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Raipur: Sodi Sambho was last seen in public on January 3 this year, when the Chhattisgarh Police intercepted her as she was en route to Delhi to receive treatment for a bullet wound.

Since then, neither the press nor her lawyer has been able to access her.

Ms. Sambho is a key witness in a petition filed in the Supreme Court which alleges that security forces fired upon and killed nine Adivasis in a ‘sanitisation operation’ at Gompad village, Dantewada district on October 1 2009.

Continue reading Where is Sodi Sambho? →

Bad ideas, Everyday Life

City Walls That Talk II

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This image comes to us from Anand Vivek Taneja

Politics, Theory

The Two Zizeks

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Slavoj Zizek spoke on Tragedy and Farce in Delhi on January 5, 2010. He spoke for about an hour and a half, then I responded for about 18 minutes, then he came back spiritedly for about forty-five minutes. This post is in two parts. The first part is the brief intervention I made at Stein Auditorium. In the second part of this post, I expand on my critique in the light of his response. I could not of course, speak after he had spoken the second time, so I’m doing it here.

I

A jinn appeared to a man and granted him three wishes. First, said the man excitedly, I want to be Slavoj Zizek. You idiot, said the jinn. You are Slavoj Zizek.

This is one of the many stories that the internet throws up on the eminent Slovenian Lacanian whom it has been our pleasure to listen to today. His own jokes and anecdotes are of course legendary, the medium through which he makes complex theoretical points. It thus becomes the burden of every unfortunate person writing about him or commenting on his work, to tell a few jokes themselves. Often Profesor Zizek’s own.

So. It struck me that the truth of the joke with which I began is that Slavoj Zizek longs to be Slavoj Zizek. He never quite makes it, though, because Zizek keeps escaping himself. In an interview to The Guardian a couple of years ago, he was asked – What do you most dislike about your appearance? And he replied – That it makes me appear the way I really am.

Having followed Professor Zizek’s work for a while now in growing bewilderment, I understand his predicament There are at least two Zizeks in there, and whichever one manifests himself, Slavoj is taken aback and rather dissatisfied. This is me? He seems to ask.

Continue reading The Two Zizeks →

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