Bad ideas, Debates, Excavation, Media politics

Shahid Amin on Memory, Media and the Historian’s Practice

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[We bring you this piece by well known historian of the Subaltern Studies group, on the media’s hyperactivity on the ‘disclosures’ made by Lady Pamela Mountbatten, as he reflects on the historian’s responsibility. This article was first published in Daily News and Analysis.]

Publishing hype and a contentious presidential election have fortuitously brought two very dissimilar lady residents of the Viceregal House to media attention in the last week. On the same day when we read the details about Pratibha Patil’s victory, an interview was televised with the youngest daughter of Lady and Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy and Vicereine of Raisina Hill. Transcripts of the interview, occasioned by the publication of India Remembered: A Personal Account, co-authored by Lady Pamela Hicks, nee
Mountbatten and her daughter, have been carried in several newspapers.

Media-persons have been burning their phone lines trying to get sound bytes from historians about whether or not, ‘in actual fact’, the Edwina-Nehru intense, platonic relationship allowed the Last Viceroy to influence slyly our remarkable first PM. For there were moments, as the author recalls in the interview, when Panditji and the Lady were allowed by the Earl and his daughters to be left alone, “sitting on a sofa in the study or something”.

Continue reading Shahid Amin on Memory, Media and the Historian’s Practice →

Capitalism, Debates, Politics

Slavery Exists in the UK Today: Report

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“Urban Britain is heading for Victorian levels of inequality”
“The chasm between rich and poor seen in London today resembles the Manchester that Engels described in the 1840s” – so run the headlines of an interesting story in The Guardian by Tristram Hunt. Hunt, who is working on a new biography of Engels, finds interesting parallels of contemporary London, its social segregation and inequality with the London described by Engels in his Conditions of the Working Class in England: The poverty and and exploitation side by side with the sharp increase in middle class power on the one hand and its concentration in the hands of the filthy rich – 1 percent of the population controlling 24 percent of the national wealth. So much for the ‘trickle down’ effect. Hunt’s story itself is based on a report released last Tuesday (17 July). Some Glimpses of the report:

As the UK marks the 200th anniversary of legislation for the abolition of the slave trade, a new report shows how modern forms of slavery occur in the UK. Written by leading experts in the field, this report is the first comprehensive review of evidence about the extent of slavery in the UK today.

Contemporary slavery in the UK, produced by a joint research team from the University of Hull and Anti-Slavery International for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), examines the nature of modern slavery and the conditions under which it occurs. It also contains detailed accounts of the circumstances being faced by those enslaved….

Slavery in contemporary Britain cannot be seen in isolation. Most of those working as slaves in the UK have come from elsewhere, often legally. This makes slavery an international issue. Many relationships of enslavement trap people by withdrawing their passports or ID documents, making escape unlikely. Evidence shows that those who protest about the appalling working conditions may be beaten, abused, raped, deported or even killed.

Government, Law

Take a moment to help STOP TORTURE in India

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Dear friends,
Amnesty International expresses its support for victims of torture and ill-treatment, past and present and condemns its practice in India. As of June 26, the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Amnesty International India is intensifying its work against torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by launching a campaign against torture and ill-treatment in the ‘war on terror’.
The victims of torture in India span far and wide, be it disadvantaged social, political or ethnic groups like the dalits, women and adivasis or be it in Jammu and Kashmir, the North East, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and other areas affected by the acts of state and non-state actors.
India has signed, but not ratified the Convention against Torture. It is one of only 8 countries that have not done so. Amnesty International India has on several occasions expressed grave concerns over the fact that torture and ill-treatment continue to be endemic throughout India and continue to deny human dignity to thousands of individuals.

Continue reading Take a moment to help STOP TORTURE in India →

Government, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Bangladesh: Faces of Emergency and Human Rights Issues

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Cholesh Richil had no charges of corruption or criminal activity in Bangladesh, which is ruled under emergency and a civilian caretaker government, backed by the army. An outspoken leader of the Garo indigenous community, who live in the Modhupur area north of Dhaka, Cholesh had been campaigning against the construction of a so-called ‘eco (ecology) park’ on their ancestral land, on the grounds that it would deprive them of their land and means of livelihood. He was arrested by the Joint Forces (army and police) personnel on 18 March 2007 and taken to Modhupur Kakraidh temporary army camp. Tortured for several hours before being taken to Madhupur Thane Health Complex, he was declared dead the same evening.

After Choesh Richil’s body was handed over to the Garo community church on 19 March, his family observed multiple bruises, nails missing from his fingers and toes, and cuts and scratches consistent with blade wounds. His testicles had been removed. Local government officials have stated that an ‘administrative inquiry’ into the case has been initiated, but none are aware of the terms of reference or the progress of the inquiry.

Continue reading Bangladesh: Faces of Emergency and Human Rights Issues →

Capitalism, Debates, Theory

Peasant Capitalism and The Industrialization ‘Debate’

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A recent report in the Indian Express makes for an interesting reading in the context of the debate on industrialization unleashed by the ‘Nandigram effect’. This is a somewhat novel story: In the village of Avasari Khurd, about 40 kilometres off Pune, about 1500 farmers passed a unanimous resolution seeking a SEZ (Special Economic Zone) status for their village. The resolution, approved by the gram sabha has been sent for further action to both the state and central governments. The peasant/farmers of the village have formed a company by the name of ‘Avasari Khurd Industrial Development Pvt Ltd’, using 3, 500 acres of land, while the remaining will be used for agribusiness and residential purposes. All the 1500 farmers will be shareholders of the company and each of them will contribute Rs 1 lakh as initial investment. The idea of course, is that rather than let the government acquire land from them or they be forced into some highly unequal bargain with corporate sharks like Reliance, the farmers themselves become shareholders of their land and take their destiny in their own hands.

However, because the initiative for this effort has come from the Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture, the vision of this plan goes in a corporate capitalist direction, with land being earmarked for the automobile, the electronic, infotech and pharmaceutical sector. One can however, easily imagine such initiative being taken in such a way that these could become the basis of an interesting new type of common ownership, something akin to an agro-industrial cooperative, which could focus on industries less ecologically destructive than some planned here (e.g. automobiles). But for such a thing to happen, radicals and Leftists of various hues need to intervene in the flow of life that is being transformed every day, every minute, rather than merely issue shrill rhetorical speeches against some far off enemy – safely away in the United States or some such place.

Continue reading Peasant Capitalism and The Industrialization ‘Debate’ →

Everyday Life, Identities

The Fascinating Triumph of Rakesh Belal

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I bet you’ve seen Rakesh Belal. He is ubiquitous. An 18-year-old dropout, the sort found in trackpants and a fake Nike t-shirt outside shantytown video parlours and ramshackle gyms anywhere across the country. But this is not how we found him. It was the summer of 1996, and we were setting off from New Delhi railway station, going to Ghazipur for Muharram. We were in our compartment, when we noticed a boy, scavenging for food. The innocence of his face captured Mom’s heart. She gave him something to eat, and Dad gestured at him to come inside. Once with us, he settled down as if he had always been part of the family. When the train moved, Mom and Dad found it hard to send him away. And soon Rakesh Belal was en route to Ghazipur too.

Belal was not his real name. He was Rakesh Singh from a village in Uttar Pradesh called Hauwwapura. He had no clue where it was, but knew that the nearest city was Agra. His father’s name he gave as “Jungli Singh” — which we later found out to be Jungani Singh — and his mother’s name was Shanti Devi. His father was dead and his mother had left home. He had lived once with an aunt, but she ill-treated him, pushing him to leave home. In Delhi, he found refuge at a constable’s home, but was mistreated there too. Having fled that place as well, he was caught later by the authorities and thrown into a correction facility — an abysmal institution, where the rooms were cramped, the food miserable and the older kids were vicious to the younger ones. Finally he escaped, and that’s when we found him on the platform.

Continue reading The Fascinating Triumph of Rakesh Belal →

Genders

This Is Not A Story About Binayak Sen

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This is not a story of the fifty plus Children’s doctor Binayak Sen from Raipur, Chattisgarh who is at present languishing in jail under draconian provisions of a law which has declared him a ‘terrorist’ because he had the courage to speak truth to power.

This is not meant to be a story of two young daughters of this man who are eagerly waiting for their father who is one of their closest friends and with whom they have shared all secrets of the world. Continue reading This Is Not A Story About Binayak Sen →

Capitalism

PAPs – Project [A] Persons

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guest post by SHVETA SARDA

Cities generate their fresh crop of what are officially named “PAPs”. The two Ps in PAP stand for project and persons. “A” is the relationship between them. The relationship “A” between “Project” and “Persons” can be generic, and there are few words in our dictionary for that. The “A” in “PAP”, the hyphen between “Project” and “Persons” could be anything – PAPs could mean project associative persons, project affective persons, project arranged persons, project augmented persons! There is in fact a world of PAPs around us. The city is a strange landscape of paps…

Now there is also something called the “PAP smear”. It’s a test to detect cancer. When a body and its cells get into an antagonism. The test determines whether this antagonism is bearable or aggressive to the body. And here we have two more PAPs – the project aggressive persons and the project antagonistic persons. However, PAP has its own designated full form in the city – it stands for Project Affected Persons. Persons – working class persons – moved, relocated, removed for new developments. The city gives them share money for new houses, or it builds houses for them which announce – Hiranandani (builders in Mumbai) building 8304 houses for project affected persons.

But the fact remains, that the contemporary is increasingly about the ingenuity and innovativeness of these PAPs, and a large creative industry can live and thrive off this.

Empire/ Imperialism

Put Away The Flags : Howard Zinn

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On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power. Continue reading Put Away The Flags : Howard Zinn →

Right watch

Can The Real Shekhawat Ever Stand Up ?

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(“There will be a Gujarat-like situation in Rajasthan if the State Government did not stop its ‘appeasement of Muslims’ and ‘anti-Hindu’ policies.”
– Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, former Rajasthan chief minister, Gangapur on 23 April, The Hindu, 30 April 2002)

The elections for the post of the President of India have rather opened up a free for all what is known in colloquial Hindi as Khula Khel Farrukhabadi. The saffron sympathetic journos in the media have rather taken upon themselves the onerous task of excavating the past of the UPA candidate for the post Ms Pratibha Patil. Days in and days out we are being bombarded with stories laced with usual melodrama about alleged acts of omission and commission on part of the presidential nominee of UPA.

Continue reading Can The Real Shekhawat Ever Stand Up ? →

Left watch

Why don’t leftists get agitated over caste?

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It is this silence — ‘indifferentism’ as Ambedkar had prophetically termed the caste Hindu/liberal attitude to anti-caste concerns — that continues to echo for Badhal… When only Dalits are forced to bear the burden of articulating Dalit issues they are dubbed sectarian; the casual betrayal of Dalits by the rest of society passes for secularism.

Navayana publisher S. Anand wonders why the left-liberal set stood up for an art student in Baroda but not for Dalit students at AIIMS.

Right watch

Hardline Hindutva : On The Wane ?

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(…A report prepared by one of the national secretaries of the BJP Mr Prabhat Jha analysing the election results to UP, ( Bhaskar, 12 June 2007) provide enough proof of the pathetic situation in which the party itself finds today. This report would be presented before the national executive meeting of the BJP to be held in last week of June and much fireworks are expected there…) Media personnel bearing sympathy with the Hindutva cause – who are in decisive positions at various levels – have an uncanny ability of deflecting the attention of the public from the pathetic situation in which the Sangh Parivar finds itself today – morally as well as organisationally.May it be the Parivar‘s sermonising on Character building going tatters a la the Babubhai Kataras or the Bangaru Laxmans or the Dileep Judeos, or the Party with a difference tag becoming a joke of the decade or the ‘disciplined’ infighting at various levels becoming a public spectacle, these pen/bytepushers make feverish attempts to maintain the aura intact. Of course there are moments when it is next to impossible for them to push the real issues under the carpet or present a rosy picture of the disorientation in which the parent formation and its affiliated organisation find themselves today. Interestingly recent results to byelections in different states or assembly elections to UP and Goa have helped brought the issue to the fore. And the world at large is finding that the countdown has finally begun for Political Hindutva – the ideology of hatred and exclusion formulated by the Savarkars and Golwalkars. Continue reading Hardline Hindutva : On The Wane ? →

Debates, Identities

The meaning of Maywati for the Dalit movement

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Mayawati and the Meaning of her Victory

By CHITTIBABU PADAVALA

Anand Teltumbde is an eminent Dalit theoretician who is respected and influential. He is among the few intellectuals who is also self-critical; someone who does not necessarily believe in ‘closing ranks’. Compared to Dalit intellectuals who think criticizing Dalit politics and social movements will always necessarily be used for anti-Dalit politics, and that Dalit politics could do without self-critical exercises, he is perhaps an exception in coming up with trenchant criticisms of Dalit politics, movements and perspectives from time to time. Most times, both well-meaning, pro- but non-Dalit intellectuals and Dalit intellectuals think it is dangerous to even air legitimate criticism of anything Dalit. Thus Teltumbde is also a lonely Dalit intellectual. His position is unenviable. Almost everything Dalits do or think is either unfairly dismissed and criticized or not given sufficient credit by the media and the dominant progressive-liberal left. Intellectuals like Chandrabhan Prasad or Kancha Ilaiah focus exclusively on exposing the hypocrisy of so-called progressive intellectuals and highlighting the admirable features of Dalit life and politics. Reading Teltumbde is complementary and sometimes corrective to the work of both Ilaiah and Chandra Bhan Prasad. What is missing in the latters’ intellectual practice is that they don’t entertain any sustained self-critical perspective of Dalit politics and movements and lines of thought.

However, having read Teltumbde’s recent attack on Mayawati—circulated on e-mail, posted on ZEST-Caste, and copied below—I feel the need to critically engage with his ideas, which in this case are far from acceptable. Continue reading The meaning of Maywati for the Dalit movement →

Everyday Life, Images

Jantar Mantar

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JantarMantar

In the strange, caged, and bound space of “protest” that Jantar Mantar in Delhi has now become [been reduced to?], there are moments when some voices still rise wrechingly above the din.

Language

The ‘virtual’ confronts the ‘real’

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Internet is a young albeit furiously expanding medium and given the notoriously qualmish and unenterprising relationship Hindi as a language has had with technology in general and mass media in particular, it is not surprising that it is mainly the youth in their twenties and thirties who have taken to the still younger practice of blogging in a big way. Although the Hindi blogsphere running into something like 500 today is reminiscent of the early formative years of the language itself – chronologically coinciding with the differential construction of public power of languages, which in turn was in part determined by how forthcoming they were in executing the switchover from the oral or written mode to the print – the similarity between the two eras and two technologies ends pretty much here. Continue reading The ‘virtual’ confronts the ‘real’ →

Countryside, Ecology/Environment

Welcome to Ore-issa

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Forest Degradation -Orissa

As the shadows lengthen along Keonjhar’s main street, the tube-lit sign above Hotel Arjun flickers to life, illuminating both – the front entrance of the hotel and the cigarette seller adjacent to it. A solitary traffic policeman walks up to the junction right outside the hotel, and assumes his position on at the most significant crossing in town.

Fifteen kilometers down the road the ground shivers as a queue, over a kilometer long, shudders to life. Engine after engine revs up as a convoy, several hundred trucks strong, begins the next stage of the 325 kilometer journey from the iron rich district of Keonjhar in North Orissa to the port of Paradip on the coast. Continue reading Welcome to Ore-issa →

Law

J’accuse : A Children’s Doctor and A Mighty State

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It has been more than ten days that Dr Binayak Sen, a paediatrician by training and profession and a human rights activist by choice has received a new identity. – A menace to public safety – The Chattisgarh police whose own record of human rights violations would shame even the KPS Gills, has used the provisions of the draconian Public Safety Act and Unlawful Activities Prevention Act ( a substitute for POTA ) to detain Dr Binayak Sen in the wee hours of 14 th May.

Question naturally arises how does a graduate from the prestigious Christian Medical College, Vellore who has been associated with several community health programmes for the last three decades, who even contributed to the state government’s conceptualisation of community health programme ‘Mitanin’ and who played a significant role in the evolution of ‘Shaheed Hospital’ – a hospital started by workers for the workers under the leadership of legendary Shankar Guha Niyogi, has suddenly metamorphosed into a menace to public safety ?

Continue reading J’accuse : A Children’s Doctor and A Mighty State →

Genders, Images, Sex

Queer Images

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Sunil Gupta is a renowned photographer whose work over the last three decades has spanned images of the body, migration, exile, HIV and sexuality. He also has a lot to say about the need for an art history centred on sexuality. See his work on www.sunilgupta.net. Also, see his jointly curated exhibit, autoportraits, as part of The Nigah QueerFest ’07. Details at www.thequeerfest.com.

Sunil’s work will come out in a book by Yoda Press in 2008. I had a chance to speak to Sunil recently for an interview that was published in Time Out Delhi. Excerpts:

G: Today, Sunil, you are known as a photographer who has a significant body of work on sexuality, and especially on gay and lesbian lives. How did sexuality first enter your work?

S: I moved to Canada from Delhi when I was 15. I arrived in September, 1969, literally a month after the Stonewall uprising in New York, so you could feel the effects of gay liberation everywhere. I went to a very liberal junior college. Everyone came out then. So being gay was very cool, unlike being Indian which was not cool at all. There were no Indians around me at the time. I started shooting gay news items for a fledgling campus newsletter. Those were my first photographs on sexuality. We were trying to find positive images in those early days. It was about taking happy picture of people happily being gay to counter all the negative imagery around us. Continue reading Queer Images →

Debates, Frontiers, Identities, Politics

Why Hindol Sengupta needn’t fear Mayawati

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hindol-senguptamayawati

Baba Hindol and Behen Maya

Please read this very important post on the CNN IBN website’s otherwise dull blog section. It has been written by Hindol Sengupta who covers fashion and suchlike for them. His point is that he can’t relate to Mayawati, and finds it ironic that the “backbone of the knowledge, entreneurial [sic] economy” should be a “non-vote bank”. He says that his class of people, his ‘type’ – People Like Us, to use a cliche – “rejoice every time Manmohan Singh takes stage” but alas, even he couldn’t win a Lok Sabha election from South Delhi.

The reason why I think it is an important post is that unlike most other PLUs, Sengupta makes no claim to ‘objectivity’. When Youth for Equality / United Students / other ‘anti-reservationists’ oppose reservations, and speak about Dalits/OBCs, they claim to be doing so with a claim to ‘objectivity’, that is, they do not admit that the viewpoint(s) they are putting forward are of a certain section of society that is influential in shaping public opinion despite being in a minority.

Sengupta admits not only his discomfiture with a democratically elected Mayawati but also that his discomfiture stems from his background, from who he is. He describes himself and his ilk as “middle-class, educated, metro-bred, Christian-education raised, young.” That would abbreviate into MEMCRY, but let’s just use the word ‘yuppie’.

It is quite extraordinary and laudatory for a yuppie to admit his distance from the political rise of the ‘low-class, neo-literate, village-bred, government school-raised, middle aged’. Such an admission is a rarity, and it is exactly what the ‘anti-anti-reservationists’ want the ‘anti-reservationists’ to admit. Continue reading Why Hindol Sengupta needn’t fear Mayawati →

Debates, Right watch

Art, Creativity and the Flow of Life – Radha R

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[Radha R is an alumnus 1990 B.(Fine) Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts , MSU, Baroda. In the piece below, she reflects on important issues of art and life in the wake of the recent happenings in Baroda. AN]

When I last left the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda where I was a painting student between 1985 and 1990 my heart was already heavy with the image of the saffron neo -Hindutva flag fluttering over what was to be my last Navrathri Garbha in a long time to come…

Post Godhra , I once stayed awake in a train that passed by Baroda station at 2a.m just to see how it felt to see once more the platforms upon which I had spent many a day sketching …There was a gloom to the light, an eeriness in the pools of shadows that were insomniac people squatting there perhaps holding in zones of impenetrably dark memories …Beneath the clock, those huddled up and sleeping resembled the dead…

In the same trip just a couple of months since the killings I walked restlessly through the crowds in the Old City around the Ahmedabad railway station … The roads were crowded …the markets were crowded…people of communities that were the murdering and the murdered thronged the centres where goods were exchanged with a briskness that bewildered the imagination …

In the midst of all this, where was history?

…Tucked out of sight under which fold of skin?

Where were the wounds that hemorrhaged their ways into our hearts?

Who was the expert plastic surgeon? Who wielded the Airbrush of erasure to such frightening perfection?

The skin before the TV was after all always correctly fair, almost, blemishless and perfect …save for a small blue vein that dammed up and spilt over the edges within which it was sought to be held and that stubbornly showed itself up from within the layers of the skin… History now calls it the Narmada Bachao Andolan…

… I have never ever felt like going back to a landscape where the scars of personal trauma now mingled inextricably with the suppurating welts of collective suffering…

FOR THE STUDENTS OF FACULTY OF FINE ARTS AND THEIR ACTING DEAN-

Continue reading Art, Creativity and the Flow of Life – Radha R →

Bad ideas, Debates, Everyday Life, Images, Media politics, Right watch, Sex, Violence/Conflict

A Modest Proposal to End All Controversies on Freedom of Expression in India

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(apologies for cross posting on Commons Law and Reader List)

As we know well by now from the freedom loving sentiments (that are expressed loudly and frequently) by all sections of the guardians of social order in India, (that is Bharat, that is Hindustan), the real reason why certain insignificant documentary independent and student films, contemporary art exhibitions in university campuses and performances are banned, and their heinous perpetrators arrested has to do with the general populations right to sleep undisturbed each night and not to see anything other than cricket matches, news about cricket matches, election analyses, kaun banega crorepati, Abhishek Bacchan’s wedding, and yoga on TV.

Why should anyone in their right mind want to see, read, listen to or even think about anything else?

Consider the folly that some students in Kottayam have recently contemplated, making a film on of all things ‘Homosexuality’ .

Or, of the students in the Fine Arts Department of M.S.University in Baroda who went ahead and organized an exhibition of student work that contained offensive erotic imagery.

Both of these moves have been met with swift and timely responses. The offending students in Kerala have been expelled by the Christian educational institutition where they were enrolled, and the offending art student in Vadodara, one Chandramohanm has been arrested by the local police at the urging of Hindutva minded citizens.

There are only two things we need to learn from incidents of this nature. The first is as follows –

Actually, all that people need to do is to insist that only the self appointed guardians of public morality (of all stripes and shades) have the right to appear in any broadcast, exhibition, film or other forms of mediated communication. We need every channel to broadcast morally cleansed reality TV all the time. How else will this nation boldly venture where none other has gone before – into that heaven of bliss and freedom known as ennui for the billions.

Continue reading A Modest Proposal to End All Controversies on Freedom of Expression in India →

DISSENT, DEBATE, CREATE