From monica at sarai.net Fri Mar 1 19:50:52 2002 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2002 19:50:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Sarai - first anniversary Message-ID: Dear Readers, As many of you may know, Sarai : The New Media Intiative (www.sarai.net) completed its first anniversary yesterday. It has been an exciting first year for all of us at Sarai, and we thought that we would share with you our reflections on our experience of the first year on this occasion. Below is a text that I spoke yesterday evening at the gathering at Sarai when we released the Sarai Reader 02 (of which more in subsequent postings). I hope that it gives you a good picture of what we have been up to at Sarai. Cheers Monica _______________________________________________________________ Sarai - One Year in the Public Domain As a person who has been involved with Sarai from its inception, I am obviously not a disinterested, objective observer. What I am going to share with you in the next few minutes is not an 'annual report' on our activities. It is rather an attempt at communicating some of the excitement of being here, and I hope that by bringing the reasons for that excitement into what we (ever since the last Sarai Reader) have grown accustomed to calling the 'Public Domain', I can invite you to find your own points of engagement with what we are doing at Sarai. You might as well ask, what do we do at Sarai? Where in all the spectrum of activities and projects is the focus that animates Sarai? I will try and answer this with a series of instances of the kinds of work and the processes that have been at play here. But before I do that, I would like to dwell on two terms - "Collaboration" and "Commons" - that have translated themselves into key concepts for us. Perhaps then you will see how the work we do connects with the City, with Media and with the Public Domain. So what are these two words - 'Collaboration' and 'Commons' - and what do we mean when we deploy them to describe or qualify what we do, and also who we are. For us, Collaboration denotes those encounters and processes that entail a synergy between discrete forms, practices, and cultures. These can be between media practice and media theory, between designers and researchers, between programmers and artists, between people in a basti and people in a digital lab, between practitioners across borders and cultures in an electronic public domain, and between languages. Typically, the city as a cultural form is the arena where such encounters are played out to their fullest potential. A programme such as ours which foregrounds the urban as a category for reflection in this sense mirrors the sensibility of the city. It does so by welcoming a range of collaborations that describe an array of origins including scholarship, activism, media practice, technological innovation, cultural intervention, creativity and play, all of which taken together constitute an ensemble of energies that are animated by each other. All these communicate with each other through a constellation of media practices ranging from print, video, sound, to the internet and digital art. All this contributes to, and takes place within, a notion of the "Commons" - a metaphor taken from the ways in which resources and space have been held together through history, and which is now deployed to suggest an accretion of cultural energies and materials that are openly available and that are built over time, through shared endeavours, in the Public Domain. The "Commons" is the frame within which "Collaborations" take place. This, we would suggest is how the City, Media, and the Public Domain hang together in our frame of things. How then does this translate into actual practice. I would like to offer you a few instances from the last year at Sarai. A residency that Sarai shared with Khoj, an artists network, to host Syeda Farhana, a photographer from Dhaka, Bangladesh led to her creating a hypertextual photographic installation on Bangladeshi migrants in Delhi in collaboration with Joy Chatterjee in the Sarai Media Lab. The work done by her constituted not only a stand alone digital work, but the nucleus of a set of materials in the Sarai archive of the city. There are several levels of interaction here, between Sarai and another institution, Khoj. Between Farhana and us at the Media Lab, between photography and digital media, and between art practice and an archival imperative. This is an example of the ways in which the word collaboration comes to mean what it does at Sarai. One of our print media fellows - Frederick Noronha - is working on a documentary history of the free software movement in India. His research methodology involves an active 'posting' mechanism. He posts his queries on to a series of electronic lists, and the queries and the responses, as well as what he writes in the form of notes, observations and essays are made available online. In this way, an archive of materials is formed out of the growing correspondence between him and his subjects, for all of whom the project that he has embarked on is essentially a collaborative venture to write their history together with him. Ravi has already mentioned the Publics and Practices in the History of the Present, work for which has begun, as a unique set of activities that involve practitioners, theorists and researchers in a repertoire of explorations. While on the one hand it might involve me photographing the lobbies of old cinema halls, or the electronics bazaar at Lala Lajpat Rai Market, and Bhrigu or Parvati taking notes for a detailed ethnography of a media space, it also involves me and my colleagues in the Raqs Media Collective, Jeebesh and Shuddha, working together with Ravi Vasudevan and Ravi Sundaram to arrive at conceptual categories with which to think through the very idea of what Ravi Sundaram likes to call the 'messiness' of the contemporary! Collaboration also informs the making of this Reader - "The Cities of Everyday Life". It has been from the very beginning a collective endeavour, with five of us at Sarai interacting closely with Geert Lovink from the Waag, who is now in Sydney, and then with us at the media lab working in tandem with Pradip Saha, the designer of the book over the last few months. I think that in this case the results of collaboration are very visible. The richness of textual forms, and of approaches, and yet the clear presence of a focus on the city as an object of knowledge, interpretation and reflection of this order is seldom possible to achieve without the coming together, the concert, of many energies, curiosities, and passions. What is even more interesting is that it is clear to us, that this book in its print form is very much a new media work. Of course this can be substantiated by the fact that this is a copyleft work, and with collaborative authorship. But I think that this is true even of the form and argument of the structure of the book. The texts that constitute the book may be arranged sequentially, but they follow a hypertextual logic that is also a result of our online engagements. Also, for instance, the online dialogues culled from the Reader List. The list itself emerged from the publication of the first Sarai Reader and has entered this year's book. A book gives rise to an online community, and the online community gives rise to content for a book. Similarly, an important section in the book emerged out of the workshop on cinema held at Sarai, and Ranjani Mazumdar, Ira Bhaskar and Moinak Bishwas, each of them independent film scholars, have had their insights relayed into the book via the workshop. Even a series of film screenings - Nitin Govil's curation of Science Fiction Films at Sarai - has translated itself into an essay on the city in science fiction for the Reader. This model of creating works and processes that embody an encounter between different communicative practices is something that we have been able to arrive at over the past year, and we have been able to do so because the work we do at Sarai is inter-disciplinary. It is an assemblage of practices and discursive acts as an interweaving of different rhetorics, of different modes of address, of diverse technologies of communication. We will carry this further through the publication of a book from the Cybermohalla project, a sense of which you can already get in this years Reader and a Sarai Reader in Hindi, both of which, are slated to come out early this summer, as well as in all the ways in which we make our work public. In the book itself, "The Cities of Everyday Life", the coming together of forms and practices has pushed open possibilities of what the pleasures of making a book can be. This is why the the term "new media" for us is not so much about the novelty of computers, multimedia and the Internet, as it is about new forms and strategies of practice, about innovative re-combinations between "Old" and "New" media, between and across, print, film, video, television, radio, computers and the internet. We are keen to effect crossovers and transgressions that displace both old and new hierarchies, which privilege neither tradition nor novelty for their own sake, and give rise to a more layered and agile form of media practice that is more reflective of the contemporary in our spaces. This means being as invested in the making of print objects, visual works and soundscapes as in the creation of web content, and looking for ways in which practices and objects can straddle off-line and online trajectories. We are also working on a number of new media projects which examine questions related to claims and contests around issues of space and access in the urban environment and explore the idea of a "digital commons". We hope to realize at least three to four major new media projects around these themes this year on a variety of platforms - on the internet, as installations, and in the form of publications. Significant amongst these is the OPUS project, an online inter-media platform for collaborative digital practice. OPUS will be a space where old and new media can meet online, and create hybrid works through dispersed authorship. It is a translation of the basic principles of openness and collaboration that animates the free software milieu into general cultural practice. This presumes the cultivation of a sensibility of creative and intellectual collaboration and free exchange. The OPUS project has benefited enormously from the contributions of Silvan and Bauke, students of digital media, who have been with us on extended residencies, alongside Pankaj and the rest of us on the project. Their sheer energy and tenacity in terms of coding has been one of the anchors of the OPUS project, and this is one collaboration that we know has an exciting future. A central thread running through our work is the politics of communication itself. Who can access which tools to say what to whom. Hence our engagement with technology as cultural form and as the crucible of a new contest of power. This is certainly a conscious choice on our part. We are interested in Free Software not only because it makes economic sense in an Indian context to not spend a lot of money on expensive proprietary software, but also because we believe there are crucial issues of cultural freedom and creativity that are at stake here. And the insistence that access and control over the technologies of communication and information must be opened out is central to democratic practice of culture. We want to contribute to autonomous, collaborative energies in the field of software, culture and communication technology, which are conducive to conditions of diversity. That some of these energies challenge, or at least are skeptical about the commodification of digital culture across the globe, is something that we would like to see foregrounded in a lot of the work that we do. We are also organizing a workshop on Information and Politics from tomorrow which will include discussions and presentations by activists, media practitioners and researchers on surveillance, censorship, free speech, free software, cyber laws and the right to information campaign in India. This workshop will, we hope, open ground for a serious public debate on the politics of information, as well as the domination of the media and communication technologies by entrenched interests. Sarai is interested especially in those media cultures that lie in the shadow of technological and social elites. We are interested in speaking to critical voices that produce and live the new media, which may exist in the street, the software factory, the worlds of the local videowalla, the neighbourhood Public Call Office/cybercafe, the gray markets in music, computers and other media-ware. This is the electronic everyday, which resides in the shadows of the spectacular media space conjured by the media empires in South Asia, and will be very much an area where Sarai's work is slated to grow in the near future. I hope that all this gives you a sense of who we are and what we have been up to in the last year. It is evident, but I will say it regardless. We are busy, we are public, we are open and we intend to stay that way. Thank you for being such a critical, patient and friendly public. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From electricshadows at vsnl.com Sat Mar 2 00:12:16 2002 From: electricshadows at vsnl.com (electricshadows at vsnl.com) Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2002 00:12:16 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] NYC museum pulls films by Indian filmmaker - please support Message-ID: <20020301184216.A5B657D04@chn3.vsnl.net.in> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020302/6e08def6/attachment.pl From fatimazehrarizvi at hotmail.com Sat Mar 2 06:02:00 2002 From: fatimazehrarizvi at hotmail.com (zehra rizvi) Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2002 19:32:00 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: but are you paranoid enough Message-ID: extensive...looks like a wealth of info...from reliable sources..havent had time to go through all of it, thought i'd share. z.rizvi. ------------------ >On Jan 8, a group of protesters in San Francisco marched to the offices >of Senator Feinstein. A delegation met with Senator Feinstein and >Senator Boxer. > >Below is a summary of the documents presented to Senators Feinstein and >Boxer in support of the protesters' demand for an investigation by >Congress into culpability for the events of September 11 and the >rationale given for the "war on terror" being waged in response to those >incidents. > > 1. Who is Osama Bin Laden? > > http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO110A.html > > 2. Who created and funded the Al Qaeda Network? > > http://www.communitycurrency.org/vital.html > > 3. What is the relationship between Bin Laden, his family, the >Carlyle Group and the Bush family? > > >http://www.copvcia.com/stories/sept_2001/bushbin.html > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/LAZ112A.html > >http://www.guerrillanews.com/counter_intelligence/doc233.html > >http://www.guerrillanews.com/counter_intelligence/235.html > http://www.truthout.com/0662.Bush.Saudi.htm > http://www.bushnews.com/bushmoney.htm > >http://www.americanfreedomnews.com/afn_articles/bushsecrets.htm > http://www.truthout.com/01.11F.Arms.Carlyle.htm > > 4. Why were no fighter planes dispatched to intercept the four >hijacked planes on September 11th? > > http://www.nypress.com/14/50/taki/bunker.cfm > http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-1.htm > http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-2.htm > http://emperor.vwh.net/indict/urgent.htm > http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-3.htm > > 5. Who actually was in control of the "hijacked planes"? > > http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/engt.htm > http://geocities.com/mknemesis/homerun.html > > 6. What role did Pakistani Intelligence play on September 11th? > > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO111A.html > > 7. Did the CIA have foreknowledge of the attack, who tried to profit >with put options on American, United, Merrill Lynch...stock just before >the attack? > > >http://www.copvcia.com/stories/oct_2001/krongard.html > http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=99402 > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/FLO112B.html > > 8. Why were the FBI told to not investigate the Bin Laden family >links in the US? > > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BBC111A.html > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HIN111A.html > http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAR111A.html > > 9. If the CIA met with Bin Laden last July, why didn't they try to >arrest him? > > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/RIC111B.html > > 10. If the US is serious about ridding the world of terrorism, why do >we continue to fund and train terrorists? > > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PAS111A.html > http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAR111A.html > > 11. IF THE CIA AND THE GOVERNMENT WEREN'T INVOLVED IN THE SEPTEMBER >11 ATTACKS, WHAT WERE THEY DOING? > > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/RUP112A.html > > 12. Why are we bombing Afghanistan, when none of the alleged bombers >actually came from there, could there be another reason for our presence >in that region, like oil? > > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/RUP111B.html > >http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2001/cr112901.htm > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PIL111B.html > > 13. Is this war illegal? When will the FBI, the CIA and the National >Security Agency start to turn their new powers (that they have under >the Ashcroft police state bill) against American citizens? > > http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BOY111C.html > > 14. What are Bush's, Cheney's and Rice's connections to the oil >industry? > > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CAV111A.html > > 15. What are Bush's and Cheney's connections to the drug industry? > > >http://www.copvcia.com/stories/previous/bush-cheney-drugs.html > > 16. Has the US government ever thought to mislead the public to >justify a war against another country? > > >http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html > http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/ > > 17. Who was responsible for the Anthrax attacks, and why were >Democrats and the media the targets? > > http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO111D.html > >http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,582222,00.html > > 18. Why is the evidence being destroyed when an investigation of the >World Trade Center collapse is needed? > > >http://fe.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=OnlineArticle >s&Su > > >bSection=Display&PUBLICATION_ID=25&ARTICLE_ID=131225 > > 19. Why seal Presidential records? Why intimidate professors from >speaking > out against this war? > > http://www.tompaine.com/features/2001/11/30/3.html > http://globalresearch.ca/articles//GON112A.html > http://globalresearch.ca/articles//MCM112A.html > http://globalresearch.ca/articles/VIN111A.html > > In addition,the following summary is being faxed and emailed, en >masse, to the US senate and congress. > > 20. What do we know of 9-11 that should be investigated? > > -Ministers of Commerce and Energy, Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham >worked for Tom Brown, another oil giant. [ BBC interview on the above >issue: - >The Bush Administration forced the FBI to back off of the Bin Laden >investigation months before 9-11. Source: BBC transcript BUSH ? BIN >LADEN HIDDEN AGENDA! > >http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/events/newsnight/newsid_1645000/1645527 >.stm] > > > - CIA Station Chief in Dubai met with Bin Laden only 7 weeks before >9-11 > took place, yet they did not try to apprehend him, only met with >him. - The CIA station chief in Dubai met with Bin Laden 7 weeks >before 9-11, and at a >time when Bin Laden was supposedly "wanted" by the CIA. > >http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,584444,00.html� > (English) (German Trans.) >http://www.orf.at/orfon/011031-44569/index.html > > An interview with Michael Springman exposes the CIA's links with the >terrorist attacks on September 11 [Michael Springman worked for the US >government >for 20 years with the foreign service and consulate. He just went >public with the story of his involvement in a large scale CIA operation >that brought hundreds of people from the middle east to the US, issued >them passports and trained them to be terrorists. Hear the CBC > > (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) interview here. > >http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewNote.cfm?REF=1267] > > -[Someone with considerable financial resources, and foreknowledge of >the terrorist event, put stock options "against" the airlines that were >to explode that week of 9-11. - INSIDER TRADING PROFITS from 9-11 were >reported by the US media when they thought it was Arab terrorists . . >. but then the story mysteriously died. Then the UK Independent >revealed that it leads to a firm chaired by the 3rd highest man in the >CIA (and stranger still is that $2.5 million of the "winnings" are >still unclaimed (see below for URL to entire story). > >http://globalresearch.ca/articles/RUP110A.html . > > Info confirmed by Independent Newspaper in UK: > http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=99402] > > [Standard FAA and DOD "intercept and shoot down procedures" were >violated on 9-11 (see FAA and DOD procedures on "intercepts").] It is >a FACT that standard intercept procedures for dealing with these kinds >of situations ARE TOTALLY ESTABLISHED, IN FORCE and ON- LINE in these >United States 365 days a year, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. >Regarding rules governing IFR requirements, see FAA order 7400.2E - >'Procedures for Handling Airspace Matters,' Effective Date: > > December 7, 2000 (Includes Change 1, effective July 7, 2001), >Chapter 14-1-2. Full text posted at: > >http://www.faa.gov/ATpubs/AIR/air1401.html#14-1-2FAA > > - Guide to Basic Flight Information and Air Traffic Control (ATC) >Procedures,' (Includes Change 3 Effective: July 12, 2001) Chapter 5-6-4 >"Interception Signals" Full text posted at: > >http://www.faa.gov/ATpubs/AIM/Chap5/aim0506.html#5-6-4 > > - FAA Order 7110.65M 'Air Traffic Control' (Includes Change 3 >Effective: July 12, 2001), Chapter 10-2-5 "Emergency Situations" Full >text posted at: > >http://www.faa.gov/ATpubs/ATC/Chp10/atc1002.html#10-2-5 > > - FAA Order 7110.65M 'Air Traffic Control' (Includes Change 3 >Effective: July 12, 2001), Chapter 10-1-1 "Emergency Determinations" >Full text posted at: > >http://www.faa.gov/ATpubs/ATC/Chp10/atc1001.html#10-1-1 > > - FAA Order 7610.4J 'Special Military Operations' (Effective Date: > >November 3, 1998; Includes: Change 1, effective July 3, 2000; Change >2, effective July >12, 2001), Chapter 4, Section 5, "Air Defense Liaison Officers >(ADLO's)" >Full text posted at: > > >http://www.faa.gov/ATpubs/MIL/Ch4/mil0405.html#Section%205 > > - FAA Order 7610.4J 'Special Military Operations' (Effective Date: >November 3, 1998; Includes: Change 1, effective July 3, 2000; Change 2, >effective July 12, 2001), Chapter 7, Section 1-2, "Escort of Hijacked >Aircraft: Requests for Service" >Full text posted at: > >http://faa.gov/ATpubs/MIL/Ch7/mil0701.html#7-1-2 > > - Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction 3610.01A,' 1 June >2001, "Aircraft Piracy (Hijacking) and Destruction of Derelict Airborne >Objects," 4. >Policy (page 1) >PDF available at: > > >http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/cjcsd/cjcsi/3610_01a.pdf > >Backup at: > > > >http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/3610_01a.pdf > > For a clear and detailed description of flight plans, fixes, and Air >Traffic Control, see: 'Direct-To Requirements' by Gregory Dennis and >Emina Torlak at: http://sdg.lcs.mit.edu/atc/D2Requirements.htm > > Is it Outrageous to Consider that Elements of a Nations' Government >Could Committ Terror on It's Own People for Political Reasons? - ABC >News.com's >May/2001 story resurfaces about how the US Joint Chiefs of Staff have >in the past ACTUALLY DESIGNED a plan to committ domestic terror on >Americans to whip them into a war hysteria, to support war efforts by >the govt. > >http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html > > [The National Security Archive has a PDF version of the Operation >Northwoods plan, which author James Bamford says "may be the most >corrupt plan >ever created by the U.S. government." It can be found at the following >URL:] > http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/ > > After 9-11 Oddities: > > - San Francisco Chronicle reports, the anthrax strain produced in US >University is destroyed on ok of FBI (they had studied this for years, >some at university question the timing of the destruction of those >anthrax spores . . . >right now of all times (?)) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? > >f=/chronicle/archive/2001/11/09/MN153227.DTL > > Terror Anthrax Linked to Type Made by U.S. The powder used in the >anthrax attacks is virtually indistinguishable from that produced by >the United States military, according to federal scientists. > >http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/national/03POWD.html?todaysheadlines > > After 9-11 Administration Damage Control Efforts: > > Fire Engineering Magazine assails the incredible speed that the >evidence in the WTC collapse is being destroyed. Never in the history >of fire investigations has evidence been destroyed this fast before >exhaustive investigations can be completed. ["We must try to find out >why the twin towers fell" By James Quintiere, Baltimore Sun 1/3/01 > http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal- >op.towers03jan03.story -WTC "INVESTIGATION"?: A CALL TO ACTION from Fire >Engineering Magazine] > > Guilty for 9-11 > > Section 3: Bush in the Open by Illarion Bykov and Jared Israel > http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-3.htm > > "Scrambled messages" by George Szamuely" > > New York press article, based on articles by Illarion Bykov and Jared >Israel http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/szamuely/scrambled.htm > > "Air defences stood down on 9 11" by R.Anderson > >http://chicago.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=7041&group=webcast > > "9-11 Nothing urgent" by Geoge Szamuely (Research and documentation >by Illarion Bykov and Jared Israel) > http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/urgent.htm > > .......................................... > > > > _________________________________________________________________ Join the world�s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com From sopan_joshi at yahoo.com Tue Mar 5 17:59:02 2002 From: sopan_joshi at yahoo.com (=?iso-8859-1?q?Sopan=20Joshi?=) Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 12:29:02 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Victor Ostrovsky: When Israel's Mossad Set Out to "Break" Me Message-ID: <20020305122902.50792.qmail@web9808.mail.yahoo.com> a little dated, but relevant nevertheless from: http://www.codoh.com/newsdesk/970900.HTML ------------------------------------------- Bookburners and Their Victims: First-hand accounts of pro-Israel McCarthyism When Israel's Mossad Set Out to "Break" Me, It Found Its Helpers Here at Home by Victor Ostrovsky [The Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, October/ November 1997, pp 37, 84-85] "We will get to him by other means, we will break him economically," stated the chief of the Mossad, Israel's CIA, to a Knesset committee after the failure of the government of Israel's attempt to ban publication of my first book, *By Way of Deception*, in the U.S. and Canada. This statement made on camera was purposely leaked to an Israeli reporter and printed in the weekend edition of *Ma'ariv*, Israel's leading daily newspaper, with the military censor's approval. Since that day, Israel's foreign intelligence agency has waged a war of attrition against me with the enthusiastic cooperation of its cabal of North American Zionist organizations. For years as a Canadian-born, Israel-raised former Mossad caseworker I was unwilling to accept the possibility of a wide conspiracy against me. After all, my book had finally been published. What more harm could I do to the country I had left in disgust to return to the land of my birth. Only hitting rock bottom has finally jolted me out of this state of innocence--and optimism that a change of luck is just around the corner. I'm now convinced that I am the target of a broad collusion between elements of the Israel government and their gofers, mostly in the American Jewish community. Following publication of my *By Way of Deception* I wrote a spy novel, *Lion of Judah*, using the spycraft I'd learned with the Mossad as background. The book described a fictional Mossad operation aimed at thwarting a secret peace process underway in the Middle East. (The book was written and published before the real-life, year-long secret negotiations that led to the Oslo accord came to light.) In the book I revealed considerably more about Mossad techniques than I had in *By Way of Deception*. But, despite the wide publicity garnered by my first book due to the Israeli government's unsuccessful effort to suppress it, my second book was ignored. Radio and television interviews that were scheduled by my publisher were canceled almost as soon as they were booked. A speaker's bureau in Toronto, which seldom had trouble arranging speaking engagements with student and other groups eager to have me as a speaker, found that the engagements were cancelled before I could appear. In fact, the cancellations occurred each time a loal B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chapter got wind of them, and they always did. But, of course, the less I spoke, the more time I had to write. In 1995, when my third book, *The Other Side of Deception*, another work of non-fiction, was published, the efforts against me were stepped up. So, on Oct. 21, 1995, I was surprised to be invited by Canadian Television (CTV) producer Ron Fine to do a guest appearance on "Canada AM," the widely viewed Canadian version of "Good Morning America." Scheduled to appear on the same program, via satellite from Israel, was Israeli journalist Yosef Lapid, the former head of Israeli television. ---------------------------------------------------- An Appeal To Murder Lapid had earned his 14 minutes of North American media fame by appealing openly on the Israeli television show "Popolitica" for the Mossad to seek me out in Canada and kill me for writing my books. He had followed this with an article making the same appeal in the Tel Aviv daily *Ma'ariv* headlined "By Virtue of Murder" [see accompanying article]. On cue, Lapid repeated, as I listened, his call for my assassination on the Canadian television show, but this time with a twist. He said that, since Israel's Mossad could not kill me in Canada without causing a diplomatic incident, "I hope that there would be a decent Jew in Canada who would do the job for us." My reaction was horror mixed with relief. Now it was going to be hard for media gatekeepers to pretend that there were not "ugly Israelis" every bit as vicious and fanatical as the Iranian ayatollah who had called for the assassination in Britain by a British Muslim of author Salman Rushdie. Along with the producers of the show, a large percentage of the Canadian public had just seen for themselves a former Israeli government official calling upon Canadian Jews to murder me on Canadian soil for the books I had written. But, to my astonishment, there seemed no inclination by the Canadian media to follow up the story when it was an Israeli rather than an Iranian inciting the murder of a published author. I had never felt more alone and isolated in my life. Mt spirits brightened when a reporter from *USA Today* viewed the tape of the "Canada AM" show and was outraged. "I'm going to write a story about this," he declared, and proceeded to interview me for over an hour. Then, while I was still in his office, his editor told him by telephone to kill the article. "It's not a story," the editor said. The silence around me intensified. It was a year later that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing zealot who got his legitimization for murder from an extremist rabbi and his marching orders from the likes of Lapid. If by Lapid's rules I should be killed according to category "D" [see the acompanying article], in the eyes of Yigal Amir, Rabin's assassin, so should Rabin. I have no doubt in my mind that all those like Lapid who make their own rules as to who may live and who must die are partners in Rabin's murder. A radio host named Tim Kern from a station in Denver, Colorado, called me up for an interview. Several days later he sent a file on me he had received from the "Mountain state regional office of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith." The ADL communication suggested that the station drop the interview, claiming that I am an unreliable subject. This sequence was repeated over and over at radio and television stations in the United States and Canada. Ironically, supposedly separate Jewish organizations around the United States kept coming up with the same wording in their efforts to shut me up. The same people who presumably would praise someone from the CIA or the U.S. armed forces who exposed serious wrongdoing in those institutions were now hard at work to smother my criticisms of an intelligence agency for a foreign country that, to put it as charitably as possible, does not have America's best interests at heart. The Americans who call me a traitor to Israel for exposing the Mossad's efforts to kill the peace process hail as a hero Jonathan Pollard, a traitor to the U.S. who spied on the American government for Israel. In an attempt to break the vicious cycle, I decided to sue in a Canadian court Yosef Lapid for inciting my murder and "Canada AM" for airing his incitement to the public. I assumed that bringing the issue to public attention would expose the attempts of organizations in both the U.S. and Canada that in fact are agents of Israel to suppress the truth through intimidation and, if necessary, economic or physical terrorism. After accepting a hefty retainer and completing the preparations for trial, my lawyer, Paul B. Kane of Perley-Robertson, Panet, Hill and McDougall in Ottawa, Canada, informed me that he could not continue with the case. His explanation was that the safety of his staff would clearly be jeopardized if he proceeded. Then HarperCollins, my publisher, informed me it was keeping the last portion of my advance, some $46,000, against advertising. I pointed out that since this was something I had never agreed to, they had no right to do it. "Sue us," was their response. At the same time, my daughter, a television producer, was denied a job she had been offered in a Vancouver television station after its Toronto head office learned of her relationship to me. Then my Canadian publisher, Stoddart, informed me it had decided not to publish my newest spy novel, *Dominion of Treason*, and also that it was holding back all the monies coming to me from *By Way of Deception* and *Lion of Judah*. Meanwhile I had suggested to my agent in Toronto a new (fifth) book on the American militia movement. I proposed to interview supporters of the movement to ascertain their motivations, and then define the movement in terms of its members rather than simply labeling them as the enemy and shutting the door on them. I believe the growth of misunderstanding and mistrust within a nation, and particularly between regions as is the case between America's Eastern seaboard on the hand and its Midwest and Far West on the other, is courting disaster. My agent was enthusiastic about the proposed project . We called it *We the People*. For several months he told me how this proposed book was being received in literary circles of New York. Then he dropped out of sight, and I have not been able to make contact with him to this day. I know he is in his office and doing business, but he will not return my calls. In 1996, a new, New York-based agent struck a light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. Regnery Inc., a Washington-based publisher, signed a contract with me for a tongue-in-cheek guide to espionage called *The Spy Game*. They had some suggestions, however, for making the book more serious on the grounds that readers don't regard spying as a laughing matter. As I was in the final stages of the first draft, however, my house burned to the ground. The fire marshal's report declared it arson. No one was hurt, since we had moved out several weeks earlier and I was using only one room in the house for writing. Luckily, aside from the house itself, very little was lost--only my computer and several boxes of documents. As I was sifting through the ashes of what used to be my bedroom, however, I realized that things were starting to get out of hand. By then, under the Likud government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, both the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and the Israeli ambassador to Canada were former Mossad officers. I couldn't identify the perpetrators of the fire, or blame it on one group or another, but it was clear to me that those who had vowed to break me "economically" were becoming more confrontational and taking greater risks. After several days of soul-searching I realized I could no longer allow my wife, who had stood by me through thick and thin, to remain in the line of fire. This was my battle, my choice. Knowing full well she would not abandon me, as almost everyone else had, I told her I needed to be alone, to sort things out for myself. Our separation lasted several weeks. But we both realized we couldn't remain apart. So I wasted no more time and re-wrote *The Spy Game*, having kept my notes on Regnery's suggested revisions with me. The work on the book was moving along well, and most of the editing had already been completed. The publisher, through his project editor, asked that I add a chapter on espionage and the Internet and also bring in some biographical material on myself. I complied and he expressed his satisfaction in a letter to me. On July 9 of this year the Regnery publicity department faxed me a copy of their catalog page depicting my book, slated to be released in October. One day later, on July 10, 1997, I received a letter from Regnery informing me that the company had decided not to publish my book. I felt as though I had been hit by a freight train. It suddenly occurred to me, for the first time, that the forces of racism, bigotry and apartheid may win, even here in North America. In calling out, finally, for help, I suddenly fear that I may only be shouting into the wind. To all who believe that "it can't happen here," I say beware. It is immensely satisfying to take a stand and speak out against coercion and tyranny. But eventually there may be a price to pay. And when that day comes, and the bill is handed out, you may find that although your friends cherish you, they may choose to do it from a distance. I wonder now if the thousands who have called and written still think of me as a prophet and a hero, or only a fool? [End] ---------------------------------------------------- By Virtue of Murder [The Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, p. 85] (Translation of a 1995 article in the Tel Avib daily *Ma'ariv* by Yosef Lapid, a former head of Israeli television.) Meir Shnitser, in an article elsewhere in this newspaper, defends the dangerous traitor Victor Ostrovsky, the ex-Mossad man, who is publishing, from his refuge in Canada, nine measures of treacherous, hateful lies against Israel and its security arms, mixed with one measure of truth, which makes it even worse. Who knows better than I, having been the executive director of the Israeli Broadcasting Authority, that as Shnitser said, incitement to murder on the television screen is, from the beginning, an improper action? I have told Ostrovsky in a telephone interview on "Popolitika" that I hoped the Mossad would eliminate him. Meir Shnitser, who is always ready to fight, in the name of freedom of speech, for the right of every Palestinian to preach for the destruction of the state of Israel, wants to prevent my right to express my opinion in public. Yes, I think Victor Ostrovsky should be eliminated. Not because of his opinions, but because of his actions. Not because he is the enemy of Israel, but because he is a traitor. And not because this would be a sweet revenge, but because for its own sake Mossad cannot afford to let someone who was its agent of his own free will profit from selling state secrets, even if most of the things he says are lies. It would be preferable, of course, to kidnap Ostrovsky, as Eichman was kidnapped or as Vanunu was. To kidnap him and put him on trial and punish him according to the law. The tables could even be turned. In the early '50s the Israeli security forces found out that a Yugoslav Christian woman who had collaborated with the Nazis had married a Jew and come with him to Israel to escape the "Ozna," which was Tito's secret police. Yugoslavia and Israel didn't have an extradition agreement. So the Israeli security service kidnapped the woman from her home in Israel and smuggled her onto a Yugoslav ship that happened, whether by accident or design, to be anchored in the Israeli port of Haifa. She stood trial in Yugoslavia and was found guilty of committing war crimes. But you cannot always kidnap. Ostrovsky could not be kidnapped today from Ottawa. Even if it could be done, it would not be worthwhile to cause the disruption of relations between Israel and Canada. But there are ways to do away with him. As the German scientists who helped Egypt were eliminated. As the Canadian ballistics expert, Gerald Bull, who tried to build a supergun for Saddam Hussain, was assassinated. As the murderers of our athletes in Munich were assassinated with the authorization of then-Prime Minister Golda Meir. As an Israeli commando unit eliminated, even before the creation of Israel, Nazis who were hiding in Germany and Austria. It is, of course, not permissible to sanction an official institution to carry out assassinations without specific criteria. Without a thorough system and the approval of a ministerial body in charge of security matters. A man who could be brought to justice should not be eliminated. Nor should a man be eliminated unless the security arms have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the man is guilty of one of the following: a) Collaboration in the genocide of the Jewish people. b) A terrorist act against Israelis that has caused many deaths. c) Collaboration with the enemy in creation of weapons that can endanger the existence of the state of Israel. d) Treason that can cause damage to the state of Israel. Ostrovsky belongs in the latter category. In the mid-50s it was learned that Andrea Artukovich was living in Los Angeles. When he was the minister of interior in the Nazi puppet government of Croatia, he was personally responsible for the elimination of Croation Jewry. In the heat of the Cold War the American government was not willing to extradite him into the hands of the communist Yugoslav government. As a Yugoslav expatriate I was deeply offended that such a war criminal was walking about freely. The thought that Artukovich would spend the rest of his life in America, while tens of thousands of Jews were buried in the death camps that he had built, was unbearable to me. As I was a penniless young reporter for the newspaper *Ma'ariv*, I offered the editor to whom I was responsible, Shmuel Shnitser, a deal. If *Ma'ariv* would finance my travel to the United States, and my expenses there until I could kill Artukovich, *Ma'ariv* would have the scoop whether or not I was caught. Shnitser said that he would consult with his friends. Several days later he informed me that my offer was turned down. The reason was that if it became known that a reporter for *Ma'ariv* had been sent on a murder mission, the newspaper would not be able to send another reporter anywhere in the world. I regret that to this day. Meir Shnitser would never understand this. [End] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com From sopan_joshi at yahoo.com Tue Mar 5 18:17:29 2002 From: sopan_joshi at yahoo.com (=?iso-8859-1?q?Sopan=20Joshi?=) Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 12:47:29 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] New York Times bars free-lancer who created composite character Message-ID: <20020305124729.28386.qmail@web9804.mail.yahoo.com> New York Times bars free-lancer who created composite character Friday, February 22, 2002 NEW YORK (AP) — A free-lance writer under contract to The New York Times Magazine was barred from writing articles for the newspaper after he acknowledged creating a composite character in a story last year about child labor in Africa. Michael Finkel conceded Feb. 21 he misrepresented the experiences of the title character in a Nov. 18 magazine piece called "Is Youssouf Male a Slave?" But he maintained his report accurately reflected the lives of thousands of West African youths who sell themselves into service on Ivory Coast cocoa plantations. "Youssouf Male is a real person and I interviewed him, and most of the scenes in that article are based on his experience. But many are based on the experiences of others very much like him," Finkel told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home in Bozeman, Mont. "In order to tell a very complex story in a way that is compelling to read, I made the wrong decision to put together several accounts that were told to me by these young workers and I combined them into one representative voice," he said. In an editor's note in Feb. 21 editions, the Times said notes from Finkel's three weeks of reporting "reveal that contrary to the description of Youssouf Male's year of work at the plantation, he spent less than a month there before running away. ... Many facts were extrapolated from what he learned was typical of boys on such journeys, and did not apply specifically to any single individual." Times editors questioned the veracity of Finkel's story after the author notified the newspaper Feb. 13 that a photograph he had taken of a boy, published without a caption, was not a picture of Male. Save the Children, one of two human rights organizations cited in the story as helping the boy return home, had contacted Finkel, saying it had located the boy in the photo and identified him as Madou Traore, the newspaper said. Further investigation of Finkel's notes showed the article's description of Male's return home was actually Traore's experience, the Times said. Times spokesman Toby Usnik said Finkel, who has written eight other articles for the Sunday magazine, failed to provide a "satisfactory explanation" for what Usnik termed "misrepresentations" and "falsifications." While editors had no evidence of any problems with other stories by Finkel, "we remain open to further investigation if we come upon information to the contrary," Usnik said. Finkel told the AP the problems with the Male story were unique. "I've never used that (technique) before. I have not used it in my articles since, and I never plan to use it again," he said. In its editor's note, the Times noted that when the magazine's fact-checkers are unsuccessful in contacting some of a story's principal sources, as in this case, the magazine "relies heavily on the author's account." Finkel said his other eight articles were "fact-checked scrupulously." Finkel, 33, won a Livingston Award for international reporting for a June 2000 Times Magazine piece, "Desperate Passage," which recounted the story of Haitian emigrants from their perspective. Charles Eisendrath, director of the awards program, said Finkel's entry would now be reviewed, but that "we have no reason to believe there's any problem." Finkel's work for the magazine included a Feb. 17 cover article about a community stranded by war and starvation in Afghanistan. The Times said the magazine was printed before it knew about the problems with the Male story. Finkel has written one book — "Alpine Circus," a compilation of stories about skiing — and has contributed to several magazines over his 12-year career, including National Geographic Adventure, Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone. National Geographic Adventure has published four pieces by Finkel, said Caryn Davidson, a spokeswoman for the magazine. "We have no questions about our pieces," she said. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com From monica at sarai.net Tue Mar 5 16:09:20 2002 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 16:09:20 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Isea deadline extension Message-ID: ISEA2002 NAGOYA deadline extension!!! Please note the deadline extension for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2002 NAGOYA) to be held in Nagoya, Japan, in October 2002. The deadline for entries for papers, panels, roundtables, posters, institutional presentations, workshops, and tutorials by scientists, artistic experts, teachers, students, practicing artists, and other professionals has been extended until March 20 2002. Hard copies of paper abstracts and proposals for panels, roundtables, etc., must arrive on or before March 20 to be considered for the symposium. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, ISEA2002 Nagoya Office Nagoya Urban Institute Bldg., 2-15-16, Kanayama, Naka-ku, Nagoya 460-0022 Japan FAX:+81-52-321-6066 info at isea.jp ----- CALL for Submission DEADLINE EXTENDED!! (MARCH 20 2002) Please send your complete submission by postal mail to: Attn: Yumiko Tatematsu ISEA2002 NAGOYA Office Nagoya Urban Institute Bldg., 2-15-16 Kanayama, Naka-ku, Nagoya 460-0022 Japan Fax +81-52-321-6066 We would also like to ask you to send your application form and checklist by e-mail to: e-mail : apply at isea.jp beside complete submission. (We request that no originals be submitted, as materials will not be returned.) As soon as your material (tapes, etc.) has been received, we will e-mail to confirm our receipt of your submission. ISEA2002 NAGOYA[Orai] (The Eleventh International Symposium on Electronic Art) >From October 27 to October 31, 2002 Nagoya, Japan URL : http//www.isea.jp/ e-mail : info at isea.jp On October 27-31, 2001, the Eleventh International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2002) will take place in the city of Nagoya, Japan. Organizers for this event are the ISEA2002 Steering Committee [MEDIASELECT, City of Nagoya, Nagoya Port Authority,etc] in partnership with the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA), ISEA Japan, artport Executive Committee, local universities, and others. The Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts was founded in 1990 and is currently based in Amersfoort, Netherlands. ISEA is an international non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion and development of the electronic arts. ISEA is committed to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural communication/cooperation between the arts and the fields of technology, science education, and industry. ISEA2002 proves to be a major international event for members of the artistic community involved with electronic arts. ISEA2002 NAGOYA[Orai] the first ISEA symposium in Asia, is expecting about 1500 participants including artists, researchers, engineers, students, and presentations of over 200 papers and works from 30 countries around the world. Many related exhibitions, concerts, performances and other events are also planned to take place in the Nagoya area during the time of ISEA2002. ISEA2002 is committed to hosting an inclusive event, encompassing the many trends in electronic art throughout the world, including those with limited access to the latest technology and those working from a cultural context, which may be unfamiliar to the reviewers. Submissions to ISEA2002 from those who believe that a fuller understanding of the context of their work is needed for proper evaluation may attach supplemental information. Please mark this material clearly as supplemental. Members from communities that traditionally have been under-represented at ISEA are encouraged to identify the new perspectives that they can bring to ISEA2002. TARGET GROUPS This event ISEA2002 NAGOYA[Orai] is oriented toward many groups, ranging from specialists to the general public. ISEA2002 will offer Papers, Panels, Round Tables, Posters, and Institutional Presentations for scientists, artistic experts, and professionals. Workshops and Tutorials hold special interest for teachers, students, and practicing artists. Exhibitions, Performances, Concerts, and Electronic Theater, are also aimed at the cultural exchange program and are open to the public. STATEMENT OF PURPOSE ISEA is committed to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural communication/cooperation between the arts and the fields of new media technology, science, education and industry. The aim of the symposium and the parent organization (also called ISEA) is to systematically investigate the problems and potentials of electronic art and to further inter-disciplinary and inter-organizational cooperation. For the purpose of the symposium, Electronic Arts is defined as 'all art forms that use electronic technology as an essential prerequisite for their production'. The symposium will be held from Sunday, October 27th to Thursday, October 31st in Nagoya, Japan. THEME [Orai] is a Japanese word that has many interpretations. It refers to comings and goings, communication, and contact, as well as streets and traffic. About 200 years ago, a book titled Nagoya Orai was compiled and published in Nagoya, which was used as a kind of textbook for teaching, writing, and development of literacy. Through discussions around art and its inter-disciplinary studies, ISEA2002 NAGOYA [Orai] hopes to provide an opportunity to create a new text and explore new forms of literacy in the electronically networked society. TOPICS Topics include theory, Internet & electronic society, art, design, architecture & urbanism, music, performing arts, programming & software, education & literacy as well as the 2002 special topics, [Orai]. INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE -Fuminori AKIBA (Japan) -Roy ASCOTT (UK) -Jeebesh BAGCHI (India) -Giselle BEIGUELMAN (Brazil) -Peter BEYLS (Belgium) -Iba ndiaye DIADJI (Senegal) -Sara DIAMOND (Canada) -Lily DIAZ (Finland) -Diana DOMINGUES (Brazil) -Masaki FUJIHATA (Japan) -Jean GAGNON (Canada) -Akemi ISHIJIMA (UK/Japan) -Akira IWATA (Japan) -Pamela JENNINGS (USA) -Machiko KUSAHARA (Japan) -Eun Sook KWAN (Korea) -Patrick LICHTY (USA) -Jose-Carlos MARIATEGUI (Peru) -Ryohei NAKATSU (Japan) -Fumihiro NONOMURA (Japan) -Sally Jane NORMAN (France/New Zealand) -Julianne PEARCE (Australia) -Wim van der PLAS (Netherlands) ISEA BOARD -Soh Yeong ROH (KOREA) -Niranjan RAJAH (Malaysia) ISEA BOARD -Masato SASAKI (Japan) -Shuddhabrata SENGUPTA (India) -Rejane SPITZ (Brazil) -STELARC (Australia) -Atau TANAKA (France) ISEA BOARD -Victoria VESNA (USA) -Todd WINKLER (USA) -Kwangyun WOHN (Korea) -Shigeki YOKOI (Japan) -Hiroshi YOSHIOKA (Japan) CALL FOR PAPERS ISEA2002 SYMPOSIUM ISEA2002 invites Papers to be given during the symposium. Proposals for Panels, Round Tables, Poster Sessions and Institutional Presentations are also welcome. All proposals must be directly related to the aforementioned topics. Proposals that relate to the special topics [Orai] are especially encouraged. -Papers can be short (20 minutes) or long (45 minutes). The Papers will be published in the ISEA2002 Proceedings, to be published for the event. All Papers must be original, unpublished and in English. Please note that only an abstract (maximum 500 words, both formats) is required by the deadline (March 20, 2002) After an initial screening, the pre-selected authors will be requested to send their full materials, including illustrations. -Panel proposals should contain a description of the planned panel members. -Round Tables are discussions that any participant can join (sign-up during the symposium), so no description of the planned panel members is required. -Poster Sessions are rather informal presentations of research or art practice, with the aid of audio-visual equipments. They are not meant as performances but as presentations of interesting examples in order to trigger discussion. -Institutional Presentations are meant to introduce institutes, organizations, festivals etc in the field of the electronic arts. In principle, all relevant proposals will be accepted, but it must be noted that presenters in this category have no free admission to the symposium. WORKSHOPS AND TUTORIALS During the ISEA2002 symposium, practitioners and educators will have the opportunities to share information through a series of workshops and tutorial sessions. Workshops involve the guided development of ideas and exploration of specific theoretical and practical topics in arts and technology. Likewise, tutorials offer the chance for students and educators to learn programs and techniques in a classroom setting. Proposals should include which format is desired, a concise description of the given workshop or tutorial class, the number of participants envisioned to participate, as well as a clearly defined listing of resources (technical and physical) required. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From pankaj at sarai.net Wed Mar 6 11:15:26 2002 From: pankaj at sarai.net (Pankaj Kaushal) Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 11:15:26 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Adrian Lamo Media replacement for kevin In-Reply-To: <20020227095408.D22266@xs4all.nl> References: <20020227095408.D22266@xs4all.nl> Message-ID: <200203060542.GAA20553@zelda.intra.waag.org> hii, Meet Adrian Lamo, a soft-spoken 21-year-old snoop from San Francisco who hacks with nothing more than a laptop, a Web browser, and a Net connection at the local coffee shop. LOL ! :) http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/mar2002/nf2002035_9312.htm For a actual account of what happened http://theregister.co.uk/content/55/24240.html From shuddha at sarai.net Wed Mar 6 16:25:48 2002 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 16:25:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Arundhati Roy sent to prison today Message-ID: <02030616254801.01104@sweety.sarai.kit> Dear All, (apologies for cross posting to those on both Nettime and the Reader List) Contempt and Magnanimity - Preliminary Observations on the Conviction of Arundhati Roy This morning the Supreme Court of India sentanced Arundhati Roy to symbolic imprisonment for one day and also asked her to pay a fine, for the offense of criminal contempt of the Supreme Court of India. While delivering the judgement, the bench, comrising of Justice G B Pattanaik and Justice R P Sethi said "Arundhati Roy is found to have committed criminal contempt of court by scandalising and lowering its dignity through her statements made in her affidavit" Justice Sethi, writing the judgement for the Bench, said "the court is magnanimous and hoped that better sense would prevail on Roy to serve the cause of art and literatrue, from which path she has wavered by making these statements against the dignity of the court" Perhaps the path of art and literature that Justice Sethi recommends is one that leads to stage managed literary festivals in medieval fortresses in which geriatric mediocrities hang out their pet Nobel peeves to dry. Truly a case of the "Writers must write, but they must write this much and no more" syndrome, that afflicts, the state, a glassy eyed media circus, and the chattering classes who want their books signed by writers and want them to toe the line while they sign . The Indian state is a past master at masquerading as a cultural octopus, simultaneously cajoling, seducing and pampering writers and cultural practitioners with many tentacles even as it imprisons others with one of its arms - an overblown and arrogant judicial apparatus. Arundhati Roy was whisked straight from the court to the womens prison at Tihar Central Jail, Delhi, without an opportunity to meet the press or members of the public, activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan and others who had assembled outside the court premises. I was present in the court and saw a cordon of police constables and officers take Arundhati down the corridors and steps of the court and into the waiting police vehicle. Incidentally, this is the first and only hearing of the case in which members of the public, and friends and well wishers of Arundhati Roy have been permitted to attend. Uptil now, the proceedings, for want of a better word, have been virtually "in camera". In a statement read out on Arundhati Roy's behalf by Prashant Bhushan, advocate of the Supreme Court, she (Roy) asserted that she "continued to stand by what she had said earlier in her affidavit, and that the dignity of the court lay in the quality of the judgements that it delivered." This verdict represents an important setback for free speech in India. While it is debatable as to whether the 'magnanimity' of the court in delivering a 'symbolic' judgement of one days imprisonment, 'because she is a woman' is anything short of plainly patronising, the verdict, by the severity with which it characterizes the task of drawing connections between several decisions of the supreme court (which is what Roy had done in her affidavit) as a criminal offense, underscores that we are not living in a free society. What is the path of art and literature from which the court, the highest judicial authority in India, asks Roy not to waver from? The verdict is not a warning to Roy alone. In effect it represents a clear signal to all those who write, report, create works with images, sounds, data and text, that some things will not be tolerated in India. Clearly, drawing attention to the class interests represented by the state and its institutions, such as the judiciary is a criminal offense. In delivering this verdict, the court has only exposed the specific class character of the institutions of governance and the judiciary. This clarifies a great deal of issues. It will no longer do to suffer under the illusion that there is such a thing as natural, objective justice that prevails in this Republic, and those who actively engage in struggles for justice must now re-consider the paths that they must take. Some of these paths will clearly have to stray from the straight and narrow of constitutional propriety and the miasma of republican jurisprudence. If anyone should choose not to see the courts any longer as the sources of remedy in instances of gross injustice, they will be justified in their convictions. The whole language of activism is open to re-negotiation and creative renewal. However, there are definitely unfortunate immediate aspects to the judgement and its consequences. Tomorrow, if a person, who is not as well known as Arundhati Roy is critical of the complete lack of accountability of the Supreme Court, they had better be prepared for half a year in prison. Needless to say this path is one down which one walks at the risk of imposing the severest form of self censorship. It is a path that represents the shortest distance between repression and silence, sanctified by the authority of the supreme court. Roy had done what writers should do more often in any society, which is to point out the equations that underwrite the arithmetic of power and powerlessenes, which determine how many millions can be displaced at the whim of the state and corporate interests, and who can profit from their displacement, and also who can say what, to whom, and when abotu the consequences of this displacement. If the supreme court in its wisdom chooses to attend to the criminalisation of free speech, even as it delivers judgements that wreak havoc and bring violence to the lives of millions of ordinary people in this country, then clearly we must understand that the court and the custodians of law and order have a great deal to fear from free speech in India. It requires nothing other than common sense, and the ability to say that "two plus two make four" to see that there is a pattern in the judgements. That there is a relationship between the muzzling of free speech, and the sanctioning of the raising of the height of the narmada dam. The enemies of free speech are clearly those who have a great deal to profit from the displacement of human beings. This is all that Arundhati Roy has done. Interestingly, the "truth" of a statement made by any person in a case of criminal contempt of court is not an 'adequate defence' in law. Which means, that it matters little as to whether or not it can be demonstrated that the 'motives' which Roy has imputed against the court can stand the test of truth. They are criminal, even if, and perhaps, especially if, they are true. In the days to come, as conflicts sharpen, as the nakedness of the violence of the powerful becomes all the more transparent, there will be more verdicts, more real and symbolic punishments, and more opportunities for the powerful to prove how magnanimous they are in their punitive actions. Clearly there needs to be a public campaign to expose all the dangers to free speech in India. We could do, for starters with a campaign to change the repressive measures of the law pertaining to criminal contempt. We could also do with a vigourous public and open debate about censorship, lack of transparency, free speech and the politics of information and expression. The veridct on Arundhati Roy must not be seen in isolation from a general climate of increased repression, of stringent laws like the IT act and the Convergence Bill, and the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance, all of which mandate a situation of 'undeclared' emergency and pervasive censorship by a paranoid state that seems to have a great deal to fear from a free and open cultural climate in India. This morning, standing in the corridors of the Supreme Court, waiting for Roy to come out of the registrars office, after she had been sentanced, I could find nothing else but this contempt when I looked for a reasonable, human response to this petty courtroom drama, this little vendetta of censorship over free speech, that was played out in the chambers of the highest courts of the land. I realised that contempt is the only reasonable response one can make to the magnanimity of power. From joy at www.sarai.net Thu Mar 7 00:03:32 2002 From: joy at www.sarai.net (joy at www.sarai.net) Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 18:33:32 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Arundhati Roy sent to prison today In-Reply-To: <02030616254801.01104@sweety.sarai.kit> Message-ID: <200203061833.TAA24647@zelda.intra.waag.org> Not in the context of Arundhati Roy, but generally, I would like to say that �freedom of speech� is not a holy word that has to be up hailed at every level. Speech is a form of expression supposedly non-violent. But at the same time this freedom is dependent on level of ability of articulation. People take different form of expression when they loose in the ground of speech. It some times take the form of violence as well. Workers quite often get violent on their supervisors and some time even union leaders as they feel that they are cheated but find no language to talk about it. In those cases those people gets advantage that has more control over the speech. Joy From goflyakite at rediffmail.com Wed Mar 6 21:59:58 2002 From: goflyakite at rediffmail.com (Anand Vivek Taneja) Date: 6 Mar 2002 16:29:58 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Parliament Street - on arundhati roy's imprisonment and the spaces of the city Message-ID: <20020306162958.23280.qmail@mailFA10.rediffmail.com> March 6, 2002, Parliament Street - or - Why this country is a basket case. Sansad Zehreelee shahhad ki makkhi ki or ungli na karen Jise aap chhatta samajhte hain Vahan janata ke pratinidhi baste hain Parliament Don’t raise/point/wag your finger at the poisonous honey bee What you think is a hive Is where the Representatives of the People dwell - Paash Parliament Street is the established venue in Delhi for large numbers of people to express their protest in rallies, marches and slogan shouting. The norm is for groups to walk down from the Connaught Place/Jantar Mantar end of Parliament Street till the barricades put up by the police midway between CP and Parliament House. The crowds come, roar at the barricades, and disperse, half a kilometre short of their own elected representatives. Like tired waves breaking on an impregnable cliff – of bright yellow barricades, dull green helmets and khaki riot gear. These protests, symbolically in the heart of the nation’s capital – are in actuality marginalized, largely unheard, and very, very ineffectual. For it is very difficult to actually lead a protest down Parliament Street without formally informing the police, or facing their baton-wielding wrath. So the police organize the protests to the convenience of, well, judge for yourself Office hours with people largely inside offices, Parliament Street and other routes of march cordoned off to traffic, the press generally having more ‘glamorous’ and ‘sensational’ stories to cover – a protest march down Parliament Street becomes an indulgently personal venting of simmering frustrations – ‘Jesus Lives’ scrawled on the walls of the Vatican. Unless, of course, someone like Arundhati Roy joins the march. But Arundhati Roy went to jail today. For Contempt of the Supreme Court of India. For believing in Constitutionally given Freedom of Speech and expression enough to have criticise the court’s judgements in three paragraphs of an affidavit she filed. If she doesn’t pay the fine set by the court, she could be in jail be unjust. Some of them gathered outside the Supreme Court this morning, while the hearing was going on. People from the Narmada Valley, from Kerala, from Andhra Pradesh, from Assam, from Delhi. Narmada Bachao Andolan activists, farmers, home-makers, students, journalists, teachers, lawyers. A lot of them got there with extremely obtrusive policemen (plain-clothes or otherwise) tailing them. The protest still managed to materialise in an extremely spontaneous manner and was lively, spirited, and despite being surrounded by much armed riot-police (or because of it) extremely cheerful. When news came that Arundhati would soon be taken to Tihar – over two hundred people courted arrest by the mere act of crossing the road, and filed into the waiting police trucks and buses in a remarkably orderly fashion. These packed with humanity vehicles went to Parliament Street Police Station, where all the fun starts. If kites of the feathered variety were students of semiotics, they would have had an interesting whirling aerial view of Parliament Street this afternoon. Coming from the CP end, wave after wave of angry red flags broke against the barriers just to the north of the Police Station. It was as if the events in Gujarat had suddenly awakened a whole range of movements and organisations to the enormity of misgovernment. Flags and people changed with rapid succession, marching behind each other with near military precision, but all baffled by the barricades, where all their slogans sounded remarkably similar. The khakhi beach was a beleaguered one by lunchtime, Normandy on D-Day. Then the Arundhati Roy supporters, who had been held in the roomy courtyard of the Police Station, singing protest songs and slogans with remarkable chutzpah, decided that they would rather be imprisoned in Tihar along with her, broke out of the Police Station. Broke out is not an accurate term, for that has hints of violence. This break out was accomplished by a firm, non-violent, and extremely hilarious walk-out that left the police bewi Narmada Bachao Andolan has become adept at after more than fifteen years of non-violent protest. So two hundred people walked out of arrest/ preventive detention in the presence of heavily armed and riot-gear clad police and out onto Parliament Street. Suddenly the beleaugered beach was an even more beleaguered thin spit of khakhi amidst the turbulent seas of people’s protest. The police tried to bully, drag, threaten and when all failed, oilily cajole the supporters to get back into the Police Station. When even that didn’t work, they brought in a Fire Truck with sirens wailing to hose down the crowd. After the Gujarat carnage, it couldn’t be more ridiculous. Police stood aside there as violent mobs went on a rampage, killing, looting and indulging in systematic arson till a lot of Gujarat was literally burning and crores of property and invaluable lives were going up in smoke. And here, after a writer is arrested for believing in Freedom of Speech and Expression, when people gather to express their solidarity in non-violent ways, they bring in the water cannons. What conclusions can one draw from this? Only the slogans of the supporters/protestors make sense – - sarkaar hamse darti hai, police ko aage karti hai. - (the government is afraid of us, it sends the police forward) - Arrest rioters, not writers. But it wasn’t the police who prevailed at Parliament Street today. Medha Patkar, the NBA and other supprters of truth, justice and fair-play managed to fan out into Patel Chowk and wake the sarkari babus out of their card-game playing apathy in the grassy lawn of the traffic circle. They managed to march down Ashoka Road, till Windsor Place, amidt fairly heavily traffic. They were at least seen, if not heard. Then they boarded police buses which took them till outside Tihar, where to my knowledge, the protest still continues So far, apart from Arundhati Roy, no one is in jail, but not for want of trying on the part of the police. Rings of power. The circular parliament building is the symbol for a sta ng concentric rings of defense around itself, the police being the outermost. The state, with all its gross insensitivity, corruption and injustice, needs to be protected from the people it is supposed to represent. And it constantly abstracts these people into the Other, the Enemy, the ISI, Pakistan. And to remove all legitimacy from people’s protest, all democratic means they have are subverted; and non-violent mass protest is completely removed from the public imagination. The signs, the symbols, the spaces of the city are controlled by the police with an iron lathi you won’t see till you wish to protest. Which is why all that happened at Parliament Street becomes so important today. Especially since it was not the first time that the NBA and its supporters have in ways courageous and imaginative reclaimed the city’s spaces, even if temporarily. Small groups of students and activists have joined hands with people from the Valley and used the spaces of the city, the railway stations, the public toilets, Lodi Gardens, Delhi University, Blue Line buses, to stay ahead of the police long enough to organise mass sit- ins at such heavily guarded government areas as the Supreme Court, the CGO Complex, Shastri Bhavan, etc. To mingle with the people hurrying in rush-hour traffic and to make them stop and think. The NBA, and the strange and beautiful alliances it forges, have allowed the public into spaces usually denied to it, including the Rashtrapati Bhavan. And that is perhaps what the NBA is all about. Not about one writer going to jail – but the alliance between writers and dispossesed tribals. Between Assamese students and Nimadi peasants. Between Malayali theologians and Rajasthani labourers. Alliances which in their small ways, fight for the big things. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The things that don’t, somehow, become election issues. But Arundhati’s imprisonment has also seen an attack on these alliances. Students who have actively supported the NBA on a regular basis have been singled ou police intelligence, their movement severely restricted. This hasn’t, of course, stopped them. Let me take the names of these brave individuals now they are already known to the Police. Banajit Hussain, Karuna Dietrich, Alberuni, Priyani Roy Chowdhary, among others. All of them are staking their future here, by most usual ways of looking at things. None of them has done anything for the NBA which is not in agreement with the Constitution of this country. I’d challenge the police to come up with one instance. None of them has burned a shop, killed a human being, or discriminated against anyone on the basis of religion. They work for the causes of the underdog. And which is why, on Parliament Street this afternoon, it was increasingly clear that this country has become a basket case. From sopan_joshi at yahoo.com Thu Mar 7 12:26:30 2002 From: sopan_joshi at yahoo.com (=?iso-8859-1?q?Sopan=20Joshi?=) Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 06:56:30 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Parliament Street In-Reply-To: <20020306162958.23280.qmail@mailFA10.rediffmail.com> Message-ID: <20020307065630.65270.qmail@web9801.mail.yahoo.com> further to Anand Vivek Taneja's posting "Parliament Street...", here's a news story from TOI Delhi. it deals with power structures and a different kind of detention area: delhi roads. from: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_Id=2992861 Proposal to close portion of Talkatora Road SNIGDHA SEN TIMES NEWS NETWORK [WEDNESDAY, MARCH 06, 2002] NEW DELHI: Despite opposition from traffic experts and managers, a proposal to close a portion of the Talkatora Road between the Red Cross Road roundabout and the Gurudwara Rakabganj Road-Talkatora Road rotary may finally take shape. According to traffic experts, the move is likely to create a huge traffic snarl in the area, posing an unwelcome challenge to commuters and the traffic police. Sources in the urban development ministry said the decade-old plan — that has been shelved and raked up on and off — to make the Lok Sabha complex ‘‘one of the biggest in Asia’’ was awaiting completion of the new Parliament library. ‘‘The construction is almost complete. Development work including greening of the area and connecting the three main buildings — the Parliament, the Annexure and library will begin thereafter. Work is expected to be over by this year-end. Once it is complete, the road will be closed,’’ a ministry source said. This idea to create a unified Parliament complex will give rise to huge traffic problems in the area, experts say. But the issue being ‘‘sensitive’’ and orders coming ‘‘right from the top’’, all the agencies involved — including the New Delhi Municipal Council, the traffic police and traffic consultancy agency, CRAPHTS Consultants — refuse to go on record about the closure. According to NDMC spokesperson Madan Thapliyal, the proposal had been put up to the Lieutenant Governor for consideration. ‘‘The plan is yet to be finalised,’’ he said. However, traffic managers are apprehensive of the ramifications of the closure. ‘‘This road is one of the busiest and crucial links between West Delhi, New Delhi and East Delhi areas. The ripple effect will be felt right up to the RML roundabout and Park Street,’’ said a police source. He said the alternative being suggested is to divert the traffic on to Parliament Street, get it to move along the Annexure building, turn left on to Imtiaz Khan Road, again turn left to the Rakabganj Road rotary and then towards Pandit Pant Marg. There is also a plan to widen Imtiaz Khan Road — between Gurudwara Rakabganj Road and Parliament Street — to a six-lane one. ‘‘But that would be of little help as the Irwin statue rotary does not have enough manoeuvring space to handle this load,’’ he said. Agreeing that the closure would mean a lot of structural changes in the road networks in the area, a traffic expert said: ‘‘That stretch carries a load of about 3,000 passenger car units per hour during peak hours. The Parliament Street already has a load of 2,400 pcu per hour. Widening Imtiaz Khan Road will not solve the problem because Parliament Street will anyway have to bear the excess load.’’ A flyover will be a tough job as many buildings in the area will be affected. ‘‘Adding to that is the Metro Rail construction close by. Now, even if we go for restructuring the entire area, it would mean traffic disruptions for almost two to two and a half years,’’ the expert said. The government’s stand, however, is predictably the same: security and integration. ‘‘Once the complex is a complete whole, people can move from Parliament, Annexure and library without security threat. Also, every time there is a VVIP movement between the three buildings, traffic on the road is stopped. That inconvenience will be done away with,’’ a ministry source said. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com From ranita at sarai.net Thu Mar 7 13:07:52 2002 From: ranita at sarai.net (Ranita Chatterjee) Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 13:07:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Arundhati Roy sent to prison today In-Reply-To: <02030616254801.01104@sweety.sarai.kit> References: <02030616254801.01104@sweety.sarai.kit> Message-ID: <02030713075205.00971@saumya.sarai.kit> Dear All, A few relevant points that we all might take note of ...by Arundhati Roy's lawyer.... COURTS, CONTEMPT & A CLIMATE THAT DEMANDS ACCOUNTABILITY Prashant Bhushan In the Constitution of India the Supreme Court and the High Courts were seen as watchdog bodies, independent of the executive, and entrusted with the task of seeing that all institutions function in accordance with the Constitution, and the Rule of Law. They were assigned with powers not only to declare and set aside Executive acts of Government, but also to strike down (even declare unconstitutional) laws made by Parliament and the State Legislatures. Over the years, the judiciary has expanded its own powers by creative interpretations of the Constitution, particularly Article 21 which guarantees the right to life. This has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to include the right to a healthy environment, to health, primary education, livelihood and shelter. Thus the Supreme Court has ordered the removal of ‘polluting’ industries from Delhi, the total removal of industries from the vicinity of the Taj Mahal in Agra, the change of all commercial vehicles to CNG fuel, and the stoppage of all commercial activities in forest areas. All of these orders have had far reaching effects, and have drastically affected the lives and livelihoods of millions of common persons. In recent years, and especially after the implementation of the Structural Adjustment programme (the so called Economic Reforms programme), the jurisdiction of the Superior Courts has also been invoked to challenge the Constitutional validity of some elements of this programme. This includes: the Enron Case, which challenged the manner in which a privatized contract was awarded the Telecom case, which challenged the manner in which privatized telecom contracts were awarded the Balco case, which challenged the manner in which a government company was disinvested the Panna Mukta oilfields case, which challenged the manner of selling and privatizing oilfields owned by the Public sector It is another matter that in none of these cases did the court interfere in the governments decisions. Indeed, in some of these cases, such as the Balco and the Telecom cases, the courts decisions were in fact used by the executive to legitimize and promote its policies and programmes, already under attack by various public campaigns and mass movements. Indeed the courts have often been seen to go beyond the issue brought before it, and have used the occasion to put their seal of approval on the programmes and policies of the government. This is what happened in the Balco disinvestment case where the Court went on to approve and applaud the entire disinvestment policy of the government, and in the Sardar Sarovar Case where the court went on to extol the virtues of large dams, even in the absence of this issue being before it. Constitutionally endowed with enormous powers, the clout of the Indian Courts, has increased even further – they are in fact widely regarded as the most powerful courts in the world. Despite this, the Courts in India are virtually unaccountable. In assuring their independence from the executive, impeachment was made the only method of accountability for judges in the Constitution. This has proved to be illusory as was demonstrated so starkly in the V. Ramaswami case. At the same time, the Courts and judges have been reluctant to evolve even an in-house system of self-monitored accountability. The result is a situation where they have enormous power without any accountability – a situation tailor-made for breeding sloth, arrogance and abuse of power. It is against this background that one has to examine the right - indeed the need - for free discussion and criticism of the role being played by the courts in this country. In a democracy like ours where every institution is exercising power on behalf of the people, are the people not entitled to scrutinize, discuss and comment upon the actions of the judiciary? Obviously every institution, including the judiciary can go wrong. Every institution, including the judiciary has its share of black sheep and corrupt judges. Even the Chief Justice of India said so recently in Kerala. The judiciary is peopled by judges who are human, and being human, they are occasionally motivated by considerations other than an objective view of law and justice. It would be foolhardy to contend that none of them, at least some times, are motivated by considerations of their own personal ideology, affiliations, predilections, biases, and indeed even by nepotistic and corrupt considerations. In this day and age of common and frequent social interaction between politicians and judges, instances of judges being ‘spoken to’ on matters pending before them in court are also not unheard of. In stifling all criticism by the threatened exercise of the power of contempt, the issue in a democratic society is ultimately one of the accountability of the judiciary itself. In order to stifle free speech and comments on the Courts, even an occasional exercise of this power is enough to deter most persons from saying anything that might annoy their Lordships. Perhaps the most important reason for lack of reforms in the judiciary is the reluctance of the Press to write about and discuss the state of affairs within it for fear of contempt. It is for this reason that Arundhati Roy’s case is a test case in which the right of a citizen to criticize the Courts and discuss its motivations is pitted against the power of the Courts to punish for contempt. The decision in this case and the response of the people and the press to the decision will be a decisive moment in this struggle. On Wednesday 06 March 2002 04:25 pm, Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: > Dear All, > > (apologies for cross posting to those on both Nettime and the Reader List) > > Contempt and Magnanimity - Preliminary Observations on the Conviction of > Arundhati Roy > > This morning the Supreme Court of India sentanced Arundhati Roy to symbolic > imprisonment for one day and also asked her to pay a fine, for the offense > of criminal contempt of the Supreme Court of India. > > While delivering the judgement, the bench, comrising of Justice G B > Pattanaik and Justice R P Sethi said "Arundhati Roy is found to have > committed criminal contempt of court by scandalising and lowering its > dignity through her statements made in her affidavit" > > Justice Sethi, writing the judgement for the Bench, said "the court is > magnanimous and hoped that better sense would prevail on Roy to serve the > cause of art and literatrue, from which path she has wavered by making > these statements against the dignity of the court" > > Perhaps the path of art and literature that Justice Sethi recommends is one > that leads to stage managed literary festivals in medieval fortresses in > which geriatric mediocrities hang out their pet Nobel peeves to dry. Truly > a case of the "Writers must write, but they must write this much and no > more" syndrome, that afflicts, the state, a glassy eyed media circus, and > the chattering classes who want their books signed by writers and want them > to toe the line while they sign . The Indian state is a past master at > masquerading as a cultural octopus, simultaneously cajoling, seducing and > pampering writers and cultural practitioners with many tentacles even as it > imprisons others with one of its arms - an overblown and arrogant judicial > apparatus. > > Arundhati Roy was whisked straight from the court to the womens prison at > Tihar Central Jail, Delhi, without an opportunity to meet the press or > members of the public, activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan and others > who had assembled outside the court premises. I was present in the court > and saw a cordon of police constables and officers take Arundhati down the > corridors and steps of the court and into the waiting police vehicle. > > Incidentally, this is the first and only hearing of the case in which > members of the public, and friends and well wishers of Arundhati Roy have > been permitted to attend. Uptil now, the proceedings, for want of a better > word, have been virtually "in camera". > > In a statement read out on Arundhati Roy's behalf by Prashant Bhushan, > advocate of the Supreme Court, she (Roy) asserted that she "continued to > stand by what she had said earlier in her affidavit, and that the dignity > of the court lay in the quality of the judgements that it delivered." > > This verdict represents an important setback for free speech in India. > While it is debatable as to whether the 'magnanimity' of the court in > delivering a 'symbolic' judgement of one days imprisonment, 'because she is > a woman' is anything short of plainly patronising, the verdict, by the > severity with which it characterizes the task of drawing connections > between several decisions of the supreme court (which is what Roy had done > in her affidavit) as a criminal offense, underscores that we are not living > in a free society. > > What is the path of art and literature from which the court, the highest > judicial authority in India, asks Roy not to waver from? The verdict is not > a warning to Roy alone. In effect it represents a clear signal to all those > who write, report, create works with images, sounds, data and text, that > some things will not be tolerated in India. Clearly, drawing attention to > the class interests represented by the state and its institutions, such as > the judiciary is a criminal offense. In delivering this verdict, the court > has only exposed the specific class character of the institutions of > governance and the judiciary. This clarifies a great deal of issues. It > will no longer do to suffer under the illusion that there is such a thing > as natural, objective justice that prevails in this Republic, and those who > actively engage in struggles for justice must now re-consider the paths > that they must take. Some of these paths will clearly have to stray from > the straight and narrow of constitutional propriety and the miasma of > republican > jurisprudence. If anyone should choose not to see the courts any longer as > the sources of remedy in instances of gross injustice, they will be > justified in their convictions. The whole language of activism is open to > re-negotiation and creative renewal. > > However, there are definitely unfortunate immediate aspects to the > judgement and its consequences. Tomorrow, if a person, who is not as well > known as Arundhati Roy is critical of the complete lack of accountability > of the Supreme Court, they had better be prepared for half a year in > prison. Needless to say this path is one down which one walks at the risk > of imposing the severest form of self censorship. It is a path that > represents the shortest distance between repression and silence, sanctified > by the authority of the supreme court. Roy had done what writers should do > more often in any society, which is to point out the equations that > underwrite the arithmetic of power and powerlessenes, which determine how > many millions can be displaced at the whim of the state and corporate > interests, and who can profit from their displacement, and also who can say > what, to whom, and when abotu the consequences of this displacement. If the > supreme court in its wisdom chooses to attend to the criminalisation of > free speech, even as it delivers judgements that wreak havoc and bring > violence to the lives of millions of ordinary people in this country, then > clearly we must understand that the court and the custodians of law and > order have a great deal to fear from free speech in India. It requires > nothing other than common sense, and the ability to say that "two plus two > make four" to see that there is a pattern in the judgements. That there is > a relationship between the muzzling of free speech, and the sanctioning of > the raising of the height of the narmada dam. The enemies of free speech > are clearly those who have a great deal to profit from the displacement of > human beings. This is all that Arundhati Roy has done. > > > Interestingly, the "truth" of a statement made by any person in a case of > criminal contempt of court is not an 'adequate defence' in law. Which > means, that it matters little as to whether or not it can be demonstrated > that the 'motives' which Roy has imputed against the court can stand the > test of truth. They are criminal, even if, and perhaps, especially if, they > are true. > > In the days to come, as conflicts sharpen, as the nakedness of the violence > of the powerful becomes all the more transparent, there will be more > verdicts, more real and symbolic punishments, and more opportunities for > the powerful to prove how magnanimous they are in their punitive actions. > > Clearly there needs to be a public campaign to expose all the dangers to > free speech in India. We could do, for starters with a campaign to change > the repressive measures of the law pertaining to criminal contempt. We > could also do with a vigourous public and open debate about censorship, > lack of transparency, free speech and the politics of information and > expression. The veridct on Arundhati Roy must not be seen in isolation from > a general climate of increased repression, of stringent laws like the IT > act and the Convergence Bill, and the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance, > all of which mandate a situation of 'undeclared' emergency and pervasive > censorship by a paranoid state that seems to have a great deal to fear from > a free and open cultural climate in India. > > This morning, standing in the corridors of the Supreme Court, waiting for > Roy to come out of the registrars office, after she had been sentanced, I > could find nothing else but this contempt when I looked for a reasonable, > human response to this petty courtroom drama, this little vendetta of > censorship over free speech, that was played out in the chambers of the > highest courts of the land. > > I realised that contempt is the only reasonable response one can make to > the magnanimity of power. > > > > > _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion > list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe > in the subject header. List archive: > From jeebesh at sarai.net Thu Mar 7 14:14:00 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 14:14:00 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Arundhati Roy sent to prison today In-Reply-To: <200203061833.TAA24647@zelda.intra.waag.org> References: <200203061833.TAA24647@zelda.intra.waag.org> Message-ID: <02030714140003.00814@pinki.sarai.kit> Amplifying on Joy's comment i would like to add a note on torture under detension. When you are under detention `freedom of speech` do not apply or if it applies i am not sure how. someone is told to give up information, is made to give up information and here freedom of speech should imply `freedom to remain silent`. Protection of silence is in this case an important mode of retaining ones sense of self, community and diginity. And people do endure immense hardship to retain silence. cheers jeebesh From prosaha at hotmail.com Thu Mar 7 15:31:15 2002 From: prosaha at hotmail.com (Pradip Saha) Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2002 10:01:15 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] free flow: water/speech Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020307/6963320b/attachment.html From gchat at vsnl.net Thu Mar 7 20:14:35 2002 From: gchat at vsnl.net (Gayatri Chatterjee) Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 20:14:35 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Sort of a diary after February 28 Message-ID: <002d01c1c5e7$973f2660$1355c5cb@vsnl.net.in> Sort of a diary after February 28 Day 1: I was at home and had not watched the television, so did not know anything of what had happened. In the evening I spoke to a friend, Minnie Srinivasan, and she informed in the midst of our conversation, 'Do you know they have burnt a train full of people returning from Ayodhya? This happened in Gujarat and now riots are breaking out in Ahmedabad and all over. So sickening! Now, there is sure to be more riots - the whole thing will start again!' I put on the television, felt horror and dismay; and then went back to some work that needed pressing attention. Day 2: Woke up in the morning and went straight to the computer to check emails, with a certainty there would be messages in the Sarai Readers-List. Those would help me somehow to deal with the anguish that had been gnawing inside, growing over the rest of the previous day, cutting into a restless night. Nothing! Day 3 Day 4 Day 5: I watched the television - sporadically, listlessly - Star News, Aaj Kaal, BBC. Or reading the newspaper - The Times of India, Indian Express, Sakaal. A day before Day 1: Something happened - something that was indirectly connected with what was taking place in Gujarat and finds place in this narrative. The two incidents would surely have got all mixed up in my diary, had I kept one. The doorbell rang; a Kashmiri youth was at the door, with a story. Five hundred and odd people had to lock up their houses and flee to Jammu, when cross-border firing began in Baramullah. They were given some land and tents for makeshift camps. But it seems the land they were given was adjacent to the one allotted to previously displaced Kashmiri Pundits, who expressed unhappiness at these Muslims crowding around their camp. Were the people from Baramullah eating into their (the early settlers') water and electricity? Had they got some clue that government distributed ration would similarly be eaten into by this second (or third) wave of exodus? I did not ask, but went on listening to Irshad Shah's tale. They had then come down to Delhi, where allegedly, the police hounded and harassed them. They were being helped by a couple of independent volunteers, who suggested it would be a good idea to go down further South - to Pune. In Pune, the Municipality Commissioner, T. C. Benjamin registered them immediately and settled them in an empty plot in Kalebari, Pimpri. They felt happy and safe, Irshad said, they were quite happy to be in Pune; they consider themselves to be Indians. 'Don't you want an independent Kashmir?' I intervened. 'No, too many people have died that way and all we want now is to settle down somewhere.' He continued hurriedly; he would have to visit many other houses and repeat the same story over and over again. They had only one problem, now. They have had to leave suddenly, without any prior notice or arrangement. They had very little money and were facing starvation. Irshad and some others were going around Pune, collecting food, clothes and money. They were ashamed to be begging this way, but they must do this, for the sake of the children and the old. He could start making rugs, but could not procure here the raw material he needed. There are very few young men in the group, the rest are children and women - young and old. And he stopped speaking, indicating we should get what we could - or felt like - donating. If the soldiers are exchanging fires and that is the reason why they have been displaced, why are men missing from this group? Where are the old men? What are the men doing if they are not here, but there? Even if one presumes, the men and women ratio there to be very disparate at this moment, there surely cannot be only a handful of youths in this community? But I asked none of these questions - very unlike me, I observed. I live in a rented apartment in the house of a family, most of who are members of the BJP. My landlord, a bachelor approaching seventy is an active RSS and his brother (also has never married) was a member of the communist party. They live together in the adjoining apartment and I occupy the one that Sharad-dada (the RSS) owns. The other brother, Bhaskar-dada has three sons - they occupy four other apartments in the building. The daughters-in-law brought out clothes and money. After Irshad left, they commented how they had observed the people of Kashmir, particularly in the villages, are poor; all governments have done very little for these people and the problem. Day 1: Irshad's sister Yasmin and cousin Parveen came the next day, not knowing Irshad was already around. They too have taken the initiative - Irshad's family has become sort of leader for a section of these displaced people. There seems to be two groups within them, informed Simrita later, when she visited the camp on behalf of her documentation centre, Aalochana. I was relatively free on this day and could sit down with these girls, give them something to eat and chat. Day 2: Went down to Simrita's house to hand over to Irshad, the clothes and money we had collected. Simrita is born in Baramullah; she had studied there till the age of eight and felt particularly drawn to this event. Irshad was late because of the bandh; he had phoned and Simrita had asked him to come the next day - it might not be safe to travel that long distance in an auto-rickshaw on the day of a bandh of this nature. But he was adamant, for they were going back to Jammu the next day. They were not feeling safe here anymore, because of the incident in Gujarat. The government has built houses in that previously allotted land. They were reluctant to leave Pune, for they had come to enjoy Pune - but now they were unsure. They would be totally lost if any violence broke out in here; it is better to be in a place one is familiar with. They would be able to settle differences with the pundit community, they were sure. There had crept up another problem. They did not know how high the daytime temperature could be in Pune - and the summer is not even here - most of the children had fallen ill. Personally, Irshad would like to stay on a few days more, for Parveen and his youngest sister had met with an accident while crossing the highway (Kalebari is by the side of the Pune-Bombay highway). Parveen had sustained head injury; he would have liked to get some proper advice and treatment here, but the group wants to return. Day 3: Another friend Vani, occasional writer in The Times Of India, had raised some warm clothes and footwear (these were particularly asked for). I had a lunch of drumstick soup and fried okra in Vani's house, after a three-hour session with some students of St. Mira's College, where a state level seminar on terrorism is organised for March 5-6. I showed and discussed Roja. I asked the girls whether they knew the displaced Kashmiris were leaving Pune that same evening. I asked them to visit the station - their essay might acquire greater depth and resonance, after an encounter with people who are experiencing all that directly. Went to the Pune station at 4.45pm and met Parveen, Yasmin (she has touched me so deeply) and Irshad. Met their mother and realised where the strength for such impromptu leadership comes from. But could see only two men in late-fifties in that crowd. ************* Day 5: What is this silence? I am reminded of September 11 and thereafter. Every morning we would wake to receive mails; they kept on pouring in all day long. There was no time to read all of them. My son, working in a molecular laboratory asked whether he should un-subscribe himself from the list, since he could not do justice to all of those messages. Why isn't anyone writing anything now? I know the Sarai Readers' List is not the only 'site' to look for what people are saying and doing - far from it. And yet, here is documented what a sizable number of the intelligentsia - the very established ones, those who are silently operative in their own spheres, those who are beginning to make their marks in public spheres, visible spheres, and so on - thought and wrote after the September event in the US. Why shouldn't the same happen now? A number - any number - writing and sharing, informing and probing; there would be some respite if not solace. This silence must be questioned, investigated, talked about. I had phoned Jeebesh a little while ago, enquiring whether my daughter's friend from Zurich could travel from Delhi to Lucknow on March 5 and then I raised this question. Jeebesh said in that case there was an outside enemy, in this case, it is us. How can that be - if that is how this situation can be analysed? Before I can think of writing anything worth typing out, my thoughts are constantly distracted. I am thinking of my childhood, when a book Deshe Videshe by a Bengali Muslim pundit of Bengali, Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian, and a popular novelist, Sayyed Maztuba Ali, had been some kind of a Bible or Ram Chalisa that we read once a month - if not the entire book, them opened pages at random and read passages. Kabul then had become our intellectual Monte Carlo, a city with many doors leading towards Berlin, Paris and Baghdad. We had come to love Sayyed's servant Abdul Ali (from some Northern Provinces in Afganistan), whose eyes were like 'a gulab jamun served in a white saucer'; of course, we did not know the many shades and degrees of political correctness. Here was a cosmopolitanism or internationalism unlike anything I had seen in the cities I had visited - Calcutta and Delhi. Here was trafficking of intellectual thoughts and opium; here was friendship and adventure. Come to think of it, the Gujarat happenings are also about the other - people, who think and act on feelings of communal hatred, follow mindless and politicised religion and take recourse to constant violence. We are none of that; so how is it that we cannot find voice to analyse, mourn and verbally attack, what we would never ever do - kill? It does not matter who is being killed, in the first place (Godhra incidence) it is people we do not see eye to eye with and in the other cases (the aftermath all over Gujarat) there are the same lot, but mixed up with them are a whole lot of us. Whatever it is, why cannot we condemn this horror? There is another angle to it. When WTC, whether seen as an icon of American Imperialism or of American Dream, is attacked, a lot can be said in a circumstance like that. True. For the sake of argument, let us say, these people here have not attacked any state, nothing so precise. Secondly, religious fanatism is growing by the day and we are constantly aware, anguished and also voicing the same. There is nothing 'new' that we can say (but of course that does not change the fact of our enormous anguish) and that is the reason behind this silence. This too is true. But neither of these is quite sufficient to appease hearts and brains that question 'why aren't we saying something?' **************** In effect, these people have attacked the civil society; shown how helpless that has become. May be we are silent because we cannot explain how such monsters have emerged out of the civil society - that we knew to be better than governments are. May be we have always thought of those religious bigots as 'them' (as we do when we talk of a film audience as 'them' or 'mass'). We are now seeing them amongst 'us'. We are seeing them destroying what we had so lovingly built. I am thinking, may be this silence has a history; may be many silences have begotten this silence. May be we needed to verbalize more about the kind of civil society we desire, need, have or have managed to form. I am thinking, we here in India (or Pakistan or Bangla Desh, etc) do not have words for and cannot give voice to 'our own' sorrows and joys. We have perfected the art of writing obituaries - deaths of leaders. We have not celebrated our births. We neglect our day to day, the quotidian, the vulgiare or the mundane. We are engaged - academically - with extra-ordinaries, both the good and the bad kinds. It is the ordinary that we must get (back) amidst us. (Let us notice the disappearance of the humour genre from novel and cinema, amongst other things). I am thinking, but cannot yet speak. I am thinking but cannot yet write down something that would make a lot of sense. Hey, has the cat got your tongue? No it has turned to ashes. It will fly soon, rising from the ashes like a phoenix. Can the cat get the phoenix? From sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com Thu Mar 7 20:51:06 2002 From: sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com (Sagnik Chakravartty) Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 07:21:06 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Impressions from Pritam B Bhattacharjee, Wordsmith of Syhlleti.org Message-ID: <20020307152106.16576.qmail@web20309.mail.yahoo.com> Dear World, As you cry, plan, wonder and enjoy the events of September 11, I also do all of them with you. I cry because lots of peoples dreams just got evaporated without their knowing what future will definitely half-unveil. I plan because i have to survive and if not, i need to know what remains between me and my survival. I wonder, how wonderfully easy it is to make such turmoil come to pass and I enjoy that it will bring a fresh insight into things that we have taken and living for granted - state, democracy, religion, force and its use. I also have another feeling that all these in some way are a kind of poetic justice and makes us feel that the history's serpent lies coiled, always, in spite of our effort and declaration of not noticing it. THE PAX AMERICANA The empire of Rome offered a kind of an order to the Western world and the Pax Romana or Roman peace was the power cloaked with moderation, force bandaged with consideration. As the peace matured, the architects of the peace, by the very natural process became relaxed, satisfied while looking at their great enterprise and Capitol became not a building, but a symbol. The smell of history wafted from the pillars and the columns of that great empire with little crevices here and there where if you have the ear of sympathy and the faculty of detachment, you will hear sighs and groans of unknown kind, of the slaves, of the people on whom Rome conferred subjecthood but withheld true citizenship, of the rotten beds and tables of the Romans whose ancestors abhorred the same as barbarian low-taste or Eastern excesses. Soon Pax Romana came to an end, leaving a legacy that was taken up by a young nation some five hundred years later - The Pax Americana. The frontier of this young Rome without a Ceasar was " guarded by soldiers of contemporary renown and excellent virtue". The Pax Americana continued and with two wars around the globe, the young nation rose from its trans-atlantic isolation and got interetsted into affairs of the East, Far East and slowly of all parts of the fairy world. THE DECADENCE AND THE DENIAL The young nation, with the passage of time entered and redefined moral, statecraft, governance and technology. Youth was its steam as well as wheel. Fifty years from its first sign of attaining manhood, it handled onto something philosophical - redefining passage of Time. With technology, influence and a sense of noble power, it ushered onto an arena where all became a matador and Time was the rushing animal. In its own making, it ran Time fast forward and since Time does not allow anyone to go away from its orbit, noe even its creator-designer. So Pax Americana ran fast forward compared to anyhthing before and in this pardox of reference, it has grown and almost old, without having any idea of it. The inner interia of a rustic youth pushed a Time straddled old-age. Pax Americana on its own time-zone is a very old inhabitant. THE OTHERS AND THE PAX AMERICANA There were older enterprises also in the world around whose time effect was more slower and hence more understandable. They also watched the march of the young horse and as they themselves understood the heavy weight of ancient civilization upon them, they took the old recourse of an old man - of giving the burden to the young, if a customary respect is shown by the young upstart. Others, by and large were quite comfortable but the time-effect affected all who were close and hence suddenly, to their horror they found that not only they have aged miserably, but the young nation has done more so. It was a no exit, no entry. The time-bargain was struck. The Pax Americana was neither new, nor young and with time, it had learnt all the art of subterfuge to hide age and decay. It was like a old woman putting blushers onto the cheeks, but the shine of the eye betrayed. The last push or the last resort was to create a separate world-order from pulses and spurts of energy but reminders came, where the old age has kept its mark, sometimes in senselessness, sometimes by vanity, sometimes by arrogance and at times, by pure neglect. THE NEXT PAX ? The moment a civilization acheives a critical sense of maturity as well as offers some kind of prosperity to its citizens, it becomes more and more complex, until the very complexity which while in harmony is a symphony slowly becomes chaotic due to the very nature of any equilibrium of sufficiently complex nature. And sooner, in its life cycle it approaches a point where only cultural gravitation can prevent a total collapse or dgeneration of such an extent that except some monuments, for all practical matters it ceases to influence the stream of history. The next Pax will be some human community which will understand the cultural areas more, which will be more rich in mind-scape and it will also have its own vulnerabilities. But we are living on a telescopic history as well with a microscopic memory. Pritam B (wordsmith) **************************************************** Copyright @Silchar.com All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com Fri Mar 8 01:06:14 2002 From: rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com (rehan ansari) Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 11:36:14 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] abr ka tukras from the reader list Message-ID: <20020307193614.5064.qmail@web12904.mail.yahoo.com> Ya khuda ab tu koi abr ka tukra barse bachiyan lai hain guriyoon ko jalane ke liye. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From ranita at sarai.net Fri Mar 8 12:18:54 2002 From: ranita at sarai.net (Ranita Chatterjee) Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 12:18:54 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] PROTECT FREE SPEECH Message-ID: <02030812185400.00960@saumya.sarai.kit> Dear Readers, please consider signing the petition to support screenings of anand patwardhan's films. he has been providing an outstanding critical analysis of fundamentalism and violence for over a decade now, and the importance of his work becomes painfully clear when you read the news of the violence in gujarat. --- PROTECT FREE SPEECH: SUPPORT FILM SCREENINGS BY ANAND PATWARDHAN Please help by signing this petition. It takes 30 seconds and will really help.  Please follow this link: http://www.thePetitionSite.com/takeaction/783684768 The system centralizes signature collection to provide consolidated, useful reports for petition authors and targets. Please forward this email to others you believe share your concern. To view additional petitions, please click here: http://www.thePetitionSite.com Thank you. From announcements-request at sarai.net Thu Mar 7 11:31:43 2002 From: announcements-request at sarai.net (announcements-request at sarai.net) Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 07:01:43 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Announcements digest, Vol 1 #23 - 1 msg Message-ID: <200203070601.HAA18809@zelda.intra.waag.org> Send Announcements mailing list submissions to announcements at sarai.net To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to announcements-request at sarai.net You can reach the person managing the list at announcements-admin at sarai.net When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Announcements digest..." Today's Topics: 1. 9.3.2002: Jari Mari: Of Cloth & Other Stories (Mumbai Study Group) --__--__-- Message: 1 Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 11:58:42 +0530 To: Recipient List Suppressed:; From: Mumbai Study Group Subject: [Announcements] 9.3.2002: Jari Mari: Of Cloth & Other Stories Dear Friends: In our next meeting, we invite you to join a film-screening and discussion with documentary film-maker SURABHI SHARMA, producer and director of "JARI MARI: OF CLOTH and OTHER STORIES" (DV, 75 minutes, 2001) which will be screened in this session. Modern Mumbai was built on the economic foundations laid by its textile mills. Of late the city, or so it seems, is being almost seamlessly transformed from a manufacturing center to being a significant node for finance capital, driven by the service economy. The closure of textile mills and the conversion of their real estate into palatial high-rises or luxurious offices, we are told, heralds the birth of the new global-city. This film seeks to interrogate this public profile of contemporary Mumbai by listening to the experiences of an almost invisible but crucial and expansive labour force. Jari Mari is a sprawling slum colony adjacent to Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji international airport. Its narrow lanes house hundreds of small sweatshops where women and men work, without the right to organise. Their existence is on the edge -- their illegal dwellings could be demolished, at any time, by the airport authorities, and jobs have to be found anew everyday, from workshop to workshop. This film explores the lives of the people of Jari Mari, and records the many changes in the nature and organisation of Mumbai's workforce over the past two decades. The decline of organised labour in the "formal" sectors of the economy forces an acknowledgement of an entire stratum of labour that has always existed but consistently ignored. Workers working in conditions reminiscent of early industrial sweatshops build and sustain today's economic systems, but remain outside the pale of recognition, security and rudimentary benefits. Their labour is integral to our "post-modern","post-industrial" and "globalised" times. The extensive informal economy in Mumbai thrives and reproduces itself by underpaying and overworking its workers, and feeds off the misery and absolute poverty it creates. And yet the real point of the informal economy is not poverty. The labour of the poor, working in dehumanising conditions, is inextricably integrated to global economy, finance capital and the service sector.The deprivation of the working poor is neither a consequence of unemployment nor a reflection of their skills or ability. Contrary to the idea that poverty is a manifestation of economic redundancy, the down and out produce wealth and sustain development without sharing, justly and fairly, in the prosperity and well being they have significantly increased. SURABHI SHARMA studied at St Xavier's College and the Sophia Polytechnic, and graduated in film direction from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, in 1997. She has worked in theatre groups and acted in plays, as an associate director, and "Jari-Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories" is her first independent film. It was recognised as the third best film at the festival Film South Asia 2001 in Kathmandu, Nepal, and was selected for the New Asian Currents section of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2001 in Japan. This session will be on SATURDAY 9 MARCH 2002, at 10.00 A.M., on the SECOND FLOOR, Rachna Sansad, 278, Shankar Ghanekar Marg, Prabhadevi, Mumbai, next to Ravindra Natya Mandir. Phone: 4301024, 4310807, 4229969; Station: Elphinstone Road (Western Railway); BEST Bus: 35, 88, 151, 161, 162, 171, 355, 357, 363, to Ravindra Natya Mandir, 91 Ltd, 305 Ltd, A1 and A4 to Prabhadevi. MUMBAI STUDY GROUP SESSIONS in 2002 23 MARCH 2002 "Girangaon: The Past, Present and Future of Mumbai's Textile Mills and Mill Workers" Participants to be Announced 13 APRIL 2002 "Gender and Space in Mumbai" by Shilpa Phadke, Visiting Lecturer in Sociology, Nirmala Niketan School of Social Work, Mumbai and Neera Adarkar, Architect, Adarkar Associates, Mumbai 27 APRIL 2002 "Food Security in Mumbai and Thane: A Study of the Rationing Kruti Samiti" by Mayank Bhatt, Journalist and Research Associate, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K. ABOUT the MUMBAI STUDY GROUP The MUMBAI STUDY GROUP meets on the second and fourth Saturdays of every month, at the Rachana Sansad, Prabhadevi, Mumbai, at 10.00 A.M. Our conversations continue through the support extended by Shri Pradip Amberkar, Principal of the Academy of Architecture, and Prof S.H. Wandrekar, Trustee of the Rachana Sansad. Conceived as an inclusive and non-partisan forum to foster dialogue on urban issues, we have since September 2000 held conversations about various historical, political, cultural, social and spatial aspects of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Our discussions are open and public, no previous membership or affiliation is required. We encourage the participation of urban researchers and practitioners, experts and non-experts, researchers and students, and all individuals, groups and associations in Mumbai to join our conversations about the the city.The format we have evolved is to host individual presentations or panel discussions in various fields of urban theory and practice, and have a moderated and focussed discussion from our many practical and professional perspectives: whether as architects or planners, lawyers or journalists, artists or film-makers, academics or activists.Through such a forum, we hope to foster an open community of urban citizens, which clearly situates Mumbai in the theories and practices of urbanism globally. Previous sessions have hosted presentations by the following individuals: Kalpana Sharma, Associate Editor of The Hindu; Kedar Ghorpade, Senior Planner at the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority; Dr Marina Pinto, Professor of Public Administration, retired from Mumbai University; Dr K. Sita, Professor of Geography, retired from Mumbai University, and former Garware Chair Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences; Dr Arjun Appadurai, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Director of Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research (PUKAR), Mumbai; Rahul Srivastava, Lecturer in Sociology at Wilson College; Sandeep Yeole, General Secretary of the All-India Pheriwala Vikas Mahasangh; Dr Anjali Monteiro, Professor and Head, and K.P. Jayashankar, Reader, from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences Unit for Media and Communications; Dr Sujata Patel, Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, University of Pune; Dr Mariam Dossal, Head, Department of History, Mumbai University; Sucheta Dalal, business journalist and Consulting Editor, Financial Express; Dr Arvind Rajagopal, Associate Professor of Culture and Communications at New York University; Dr Gyan Prakash, Professor of History at Princeton University, and member of the Subaltern Studies Editorial Collective; Dr Sudha Deshpande, Reader in Demography, retired from the Department of Economics, Mumbai University and former consultant for the World Bank, International Labour Organisation, and Bombay Municipal Corporation; Sulakshana Mahajan, doctoral candidate at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, U.S.A., and former Lecturer, Academy of Architecture, Rachana Sansad; Dr Rohini Hensman, of the Union Research Group, Mumbai; Mrs Jyoti Mhapsekar, Head Librarian, Rachana Sansad and Member, Stree Mukti Sanghatana. Previous panel discussions have comprised of the following individuals: S.S. Tinaikar, former Municipal Commissioner of Bombay, Sheela Patel, Director of the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), and Bhanu Desai of the Citizens' Forum for the Protection of Public Spaces (Citispace) on urban policy making and housing; Shirish Patel, civil engineer and urban planner, Pramod Sahasrabuddhe and Abhay Godbole, structural engineers on earthquakes and the built form of the city; B. Rajaram, Managing Director of Konkan Railway Corporation, and Dr P.G. Patankar, from Tata Consultancy Services, and former Chairman of the Bombay Electric Supply & Transport Undertaking (BEST) on mass public transport alternatives; Ved Segan, Vikas Dilawari, and Pankaj Joshi, conservation architects, on the social relevance of heritage and conservation architecture; Debi Goenka, of the Bombay Environmental Action Group, Professor Sudha Srivastava, Dr Geeta Kewalramani, and Dr Dipti Mukherji, of the University of Mumbai Department of Geography, on the politics of land use, the city's salt pan lands, and the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Act; Nikhil Rao, of the University of Chicago Dept of History, Anirudh Paul and Prasad Shetty of the Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Insitute of Architecture, and members of the various residents associations and citizens groups of the Dadar-Matunga, on the history, architecture, and formation of middle-class communities in these historic neighbourhoods, the first suburbs of Bombay. CONTACT US We invite all urban researchers, practitioners, students, and other interested individuals to join us in our fortnightly conversations, and suggest topics for presentation and discussion. For any more information, kindly contact one of the Joint Convenors of the Mumbai Study Group: ARVIND ADARKAR, Architect, Researcher and Lecturer, Academy of Architecture, Phone 2051834, ; DARRYL D'MONTE, Journalist and Writer, 6427088 ; SHEKHAR KRISHNAN, Coordinator-Associate, Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research (PUKAR), 4142843, ; PANKAJ JOSHI, Conservation Architect, Lecturer, Academy of Architecture, and PUKAR Associate, 8230625, . --__--__-- _______________________________________________ Announcements mailing list Announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements End of Announcements Digest From beurden at nwsbank.nl Thu Mar 7 19:20:11 2002 From: beurden at nwsbank.nl (Jos van Beurden) Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2002 14:50:11 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Re: FW: FOR Jos van Beurden (re: Ranabir Samaddar interview) In-Reply-To: <39643C9C5ADDD311840C00D0B720488501B52DF2@bzms10.hag.minbuz a.nl> Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.20020307145011.0077e7f8@nwsbank.nl> Beste meneer Riemens Ik ga - onder de volgende voorwaarden - akkoord met opname van een Engelse versie van het interview met prof Samaddar: - voor publicatie krijgen prof Samaddar en ik de Engelse tekst ter inzage; lijkt mij veel beter; misschien wil hij wat updaten. - gebruik is eenmalig; bij elk volgende gebruik dient u mij opnieuw te benaderen. Gaarne uw akkoord hiervoor. Jos van Beurden p.s. Binnenkort komt een Engelse tekst van mijn hand uit over de kloof arm-rijk in het tijdperk van globalisering en liberalisering. Met diverse voorbeeldne uit Zuid Azie. Ik schreef de tekst voor een internationale conferentie over Zorgh en Welzijn in juni a.s. Mocht u belangstelling hebben, laat dat dan weten. > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Patrice Riemens [mailto:patrice at xs4all.nl] >Sent: Monday, 04 March 2002 1:46 PM >To: DVL-REDACTIE-2 >Subject: FOR Jos van Beurden (re: Ranabir Samaddar interview) > > >Redactie IS: Bedankt voor het doorgeven/sturen! > >--------------------- > >Beste Jos van Beurden, > >Erg mooi interview met Prof Ranabir Samaddar (IS 3/02). Het zou, denk ik, >de lezers van de Sarai-reader list erg interesseren. Deze mailing lijst >wordt gerund door de Sarai New Media Initiative, onderdeel van het Centre >for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, en is erg populair bij >progressieve intellectuelen in Zuid Azie & beyond. Take a look at >http://www.sarai.net & click bij de 'Reader-list archives' voor een >indruk. > >Maar U hebt daar waarschijnlijk geen uitgeschreven text in het engels. Zo >wel en u zou het ter beschikking willen stellen, fantasties: mailto >. Anders wil ik het misschien wel vertalen. >(Nodeloos te vermelden dat Sarai geen commerciele organisatie is. Sorry) > >met de beste groeten, >patrice > >(onderzoeker UvA/AGIDS-InDRA) > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------- Jos van Beurden / Africa Asia Desk PO Box 13218, 3507 LE Utrecht, The Netherlands / Pays Bas tel +31 30 271 5473 fax +31 30 272 3388 From abirbazaz at rediffmail.com Fri Mar 8 12:54:38 2002 From: abirbazaz at rediffmail.com (abir bazaz) Date: 8 Mar 2002 07:24:38 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: [kashnet] Kashmiri Muslims in Delhi: A Silver Lining & beyond Message-ID: <20020308072438.29892.qmail@mailweb19.rediffmail.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020308/8ea1e2ec/attachment.pl -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Prakhar Prakash Subject: [kashnet] Kashmiri Muslims in Delhi: A Silver Lining & beyond Date: no date Size: 3596 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020308/8ea1e2ec/attachment.mht From bonozyt at yahoo.co.in Fri Mar 8 20:33:14 2002 From: bonozyt at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?bonojit=20hussain?=) Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 15:03:14 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] statement Message-ID: <20020308150314.32512.qmail@web8101.in.yahoo.com> ‘FEELING COMPELLED TO DO THE BEST WE COULD .’ Statement in solidarity with the NBA and Arundhati Roy From student friends, Delhi University March is the month when exam ‘terror’ begins to grip students at Delhi University Despite that some of us have felt compelled to do the best we could to stand by the NBA and Arundhati Roy over the last couple of days. We have done this because (1) we have had a fairly continuous association with the valley, its beauty, its people and their 15 years old struggle (2) we have felt that the NBA, Arundhati Roy, the PUDR and others including all of us have the right to critique and rigorously scrutinise any judgment of the Supreme Court (3) we have felt that nit-picking aside, none of these critiques, including Arundhati’s, can be seriously considered abusive or contemptuous of the Supreme Court. For these reasons we felt that if Arundhati Roy were to be convicted on March 6th for contempt of court--as she indeed was in an unabashedly gendered judgment-- the conviction would be on flimsy grounds, frightening people from speaking out their minds rather than upholding the dignity of the court. Arundhati’s conviction, would try to silence her, the NBA and all those people’s movements fighting for creating a better, more humane tomorrow. Her conviction, in a way, would be ours as well. But there is more that brought us out on to the streets as volunteers and supporters, this time. Over the last few years, but especially since the happenings of September 11th and December 13th,we as students have felt walls coming up all around us, fear driving us into our homes and class rooms. State encouraged paranoia about terrorism and war with Pakistan, the sustained onslaught on the very meaning of education, attempts at enacting new laws such as POTO, and efforts to politically disarm labour in the name of ‘labour reforms’, have all been aimed at creating a submissive, uncritical population which would be too scared to challenge authority and power, making it easier for the state to push through its own economically unfettering and socially irresponsible agenda. The climax came with Godhra and the carnage of Muslims that followed all over Gujarat. This was no riot. It was straightforward Genocide. As human beings we had to say NO now, but we also felt that tomorrow we could be attacked for simply saying NO. The ABVP did, infact, carry out an unprecedented attack on our campus on March 1st last week. Gujarat for us has been the final straw. Exams or no exams we knew we had to stand by Arundhati and the NBA because if we didn’t fight now to protect our right to speak, tomorrow there may not be any dreamers left. And our dreams we hold really close to our hearts. So we came out to be with Arundhati and the NBA and we hope we will continue to have the courage and stamina to carry on in battle. ________________________________________________________________________ Looking for a job? Visit Yahoo! India Careers Visit http://in.careers.yahoo.com From netwurker at hotkey.net.au Sat Mar 9 04:22:08 2002 From: netwurker at hotkey.net.au (self re:ply.cator) Date: Sat, 09 Mar 2002 09:52:08 +1100 Subject: [Reader-list] Yes, but is it art? Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20020309095203.022efec0@pop.hotkey.net.au> http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,3909023%255E7642,00.html Yes, but is it art? Cath Hart 08mar02 IS AUSTRALIA behind the times when it comes to accepting new forms of art on the Net? Cyberpoet Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze) has been banned from the e-mail list, Fibreculture, on the ground that her work is art-spam – postings that clog up the system. According to the list administrator, Chris Chesher, Mez's work doesn't contribute to the themes of the list. Chesher, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, says the themes of Fibreculture are new media policy, education, artistic practice and theory. And posts by Net artist Mez don't fit the bill. Some of the other facilitators had experience of other lists where Mez had been posting and had contributed to what they perceived to be a deterioration of the culture of the list, he says. Mez has been banned from two other e-mail lists in recent years – resistant.media and :::recode::: – for similar reasons. But this so-called art-spam has been Mez's ticket to international recognition. "Overseas I'm a pioneer of Net art," she says. "Most people recognise me and invite me to conferences to speak, but in Australia I've been received, I wouldn't say poorly, but certain institutions (have) gone 'You're annoying, you're not fitting in to how we construct our arts scene'. " Internationally her work has been short-listed for the 2001 Electronic Literature Organisation's Fiction Prize, appeared on the C-Theory website and a conference paper devoted to her, The Internet Poetry of Mez, was delivered to the 2001 Modern Language Association International Conference. She creates fictional texts using a language she calls Mezangelle, which involves inserting syllables, letters and symbols into words to "create different layers of meaning or a different loading (that) will take you to a meaning place that is somewhere else, like a hyperlink would," the 31-year-old says. "I'll create an e-mail text that mimics e-mail conventions themselves, and then I'll send that out on to different mailing lists. "I've kind of hijacked the communications avenues in a way," she says, and that can cause a bit of controversy because a lot of people don't want that in their inbox. For a time, Griffith University academic and poet Komninos Zervos didn't want her posts in his inbox. "They initially appear like a scramble of symbols and text," he says. "She wasn't my cup of tea, but I had the right to hit the delete button so it didn't bother me. "And for a long time I did hit the delete button, until I took the trouble to read them, and now I read them quite easily." Zervos now says she is shaping a new direction for poetry and is one of the few Australian writers who has made an impact overseas. But Chesher thinks Mez's methods of exhibition and distribution are inappropriate. "In my building, on one side of the hall there are tutorial rooms, says Chesher, "on the other side of the hall there are theatre spaces. And it is appropriate to do performance art in the theatre spaces and not in the tutorial rooms. "I guess that part of the role of artists is to subvert some of those spatial categories, but I guess part of the role of facilitators is to say, 'Don't do it'. " © Queensland Newspapers From atthemoment at hotmail.com Sat Mar 9 04:14:49 2002 From: atthemoment at hotmail.com (siddhartha chatterjee) Date: Sat, 09 Mar 2002 04:14:49 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Re: statement; lists, gists, activists Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020309/95ce12b6/attachment.html From aiindex at mnet.fr Sat Mar 9 06:20:15 2002 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sat, 9 Mar 2002 01:50:15 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] India: Slaughter in the Name of God (Salman Rushdie) Message-ID: The Washington Post Friday, March 8, 2002; Page A33 Slaughter in the Name of God By Salman Rushdie The defining image of the week, for me, is of a small child's burned and blackened arm, its tiny fingers curled into a fist, protruding from the remains of a human bonfire in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, in India. The murder of children is something of an Indian specialty. The routine daily killings of unwanted girl babies . . . the massacre of innocents in Nellie, Assam, in the 1980s when village turned against neighboring village . . . the massacre of Sikh children in Delhi during the horrifying reprisal murders that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination: They bear witness to our particular gift, always most dazzlingly in evidence at times of religious unrest, for dousing our children in kerosene and setting them alight, or cutting their throats, or smothering them or just clubbing them to death with a good strong length of wood. I say "our" because I write as an Indian man, born and bred, who loves India deeply and knows that what one of us does today, any of us is potentially capable of doing tomorrow. If I take pride in India's strengths, then India's sins must be mine as well. Do I sound angry? Good. Ashamed and disgusted? I certainly hope so. Because, as India undergoes its worst bout of Hindu-Muslim bloodletting in more than a decade, many people have not been sounding anything like angry, ashamed or disgusted enough. Police chiefs have been excusing their men's unwillingness to defend the citizens of India, without regard to religion, by saying that these men have feelings too and are subject to the same sentiments as the nation in general. Meanwhile, India's political masters have been tut-tutting and offering the usual soothing lies about the situation being brought under control. (It has escaped nobody's notice that the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or Indian People's Party, and the Hindu extremists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Council, are sister organizations and offshoots of the same parent body.) Even some international commentators, such as Britain's Independent newspaper, urge us to "beware excess pessimism." The horrible truth about communal slaughter in India is that we're used to it. It happens every so often; then it dies down. That's how life is, folks. Most of the time India is the world's largest secular democracy; and if, once in a while, it lets off a little crazy religious steam, we mustn't let that distort the picture. Of course, there are political explanations. Ever since December 1992, when a VHP mob demolished a 400-year-old Muslim mosque in Ayodhya, which they claim was built on the sacred birthplace of the god Ram, Hindu fanatics have been looking for this fight. The pity of it is that some Muslims were ready to give it to them. Their murderous attack on the train-load of VHP activists at Godhra (with its awful, atavistic echoes of the killings of Hindus and Muslims by the train-load during the partition riots of 1947) played right into the Hindu extremists' hands. The VHP has evidently tired of what it sees as the equivocations and insufficient radicalism of India's BJP government. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is more moderate than his party; he also heads a coalition government and has been obliged to abandon much of the BJP's more extreme Hindu nationalist rhetoric to hold the coalition together. But it isn't working anymore. In state elections across the country, the BJP is being trounced. This may have been the last straw for the VHP firebrands. Why put up with the government's betrayal of their fascistic agenda when that betrayal doesn't even result in electoral success? The electoral failure of the BJP is thus, in all probability, the spark that lit the fire. The VHP is determined to build a Hindu temple on the site of the demolished Ayodhya mosque -- that's where the Godhra dead were coming from -- and there are, reprehensibly, idiotically, tragically, Muslims in India equally determined to resist them. Vajpayee has insisted that the slow Indian courts must decide the rights and wrongs of the Ayodhya issue. The VHP is no longer prepared to wait. The distinguished Indian writer Mahasveta Devi, in a letter to India's president, K. R. Narayanan, blames the Gujarat government (led by a BJP hard-liner) as well as the central government for doing "too little too late." She pins the blame firmly on the "motivated, well-planned out and provocative actions" of the Hindu nationalists. But another writer, the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, speaking in India just a week before the violence erupted, denounced India's Muslims en masse and praised the nationalist movement. The murderers of Godhra must indeed be denounced, and Mahasveta Devi in her letter demands "stern legal action" against them. But the VHP is determined to destroy that secular democracy in which India takes such public pride and which it does so little to protect; and by supporting them, Naipaul makes himself a fellow traveler of fascism and disgraces the Nobel award. The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But there's something beneath it, something we don't want to look in the face: namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of "respect." What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again. So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God. Salman Rushdie is a novelist and author of the forthcoming essay collection "Step Across This Line." From Neelmoni R. Dikshitar Sat Mar 9 19:12:33 2002 From: Neelmoni R. Dikshitar (Neelmoni R. Dikshitar) Date: 9 Mar 2002 13:42:33 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] (no subject) Message-ID: <20020309134233.28167.qmail@mailweb16.rediffmail.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020309/191bddf5/attachment.pl From aiindex at mnet.fr Sun Mar 10 07:33:36 2002 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 03:03:36 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Former editor of Pakistan's The News Shaheen Sehbai (radio interview ) Message-ID: NPR's OnTheMedia.org Crackdown on Pakistani Press Last week Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf said that murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had been "too intrusive" in his investigation of government corruption. The president has also been threatening the domestic press. Intimidation by government agencies led Shaheen Sebhai to quit his job as editor of Pakistan's News last week. Host Bob Garfield talks to Sebhai about the worsening situation for journalists in Pakistan. You can hear the audio right now worldwide at http://www.onthemedia.org From aiindex at mnet.fr Sun Mar 10 07:36:23 2002 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 03:06:23 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Information & News Updates, citizens initiatives on Gujarat Message-ID: * For daily news updates & citizens initiatives in post riots Gujarat Please Check the web site of Communalism Combat: http://www.sabrang.com ** Also see new information & analysis section on the recent Communal Riots in Gujarat on the South Asia Citizens Web site: http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex/ From reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com Sun Mar 10 18:04:36 2002 From: reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com (Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri) Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 12:34:36 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Parliament Street - on arundhati roy's imprisonment and the spaces of the city Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020310/04c72277/attachment.html From reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com Sun Mar 10 19:01:00 2002 From: reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com (Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri) Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 13:31:00 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Impressions from Pritam B Bhattacharjee, Wordsmith of Syhlleti.org Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020310/63658fc1/attachment.html From rmazumdar at mantraonline.com Sun Mar 10 20:36:52 2002 From: rmazumdar at mantraonline.com (Ranjani Mazumdar) Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 20:36:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Edward Said on being a Muslim today Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20020310203418.029585f0@del1.mantraonline.com> This is Edward said writing in the context of the Middle East, but it does ring a bell here. cheers Ranjani THOUGHTS ABOUT AMERICA by Edward Said AL-AHRAM WEEKLY March 02, 2002 I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. For despite the occasional official statements saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are not enemies of the United States, everything else about the current situation argues the exact opposite. Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too many cases, detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name is usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport security checks. There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behaviour against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic document in public is likely to draw unwelcome attention. And of course, the media have run far too many "experts" and "commentators" on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our history, society and culture that the media itself has become little more than an arm of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as now seems to be the case with the projected attack to "end" Iraq. There are US forces already in several countries with important Muslim populations like the Philippines and Somalia, the buildup against Iraq continues, and Israel prolongs its sadistic collective punishment of the Palestinian people, all with what seems like great public approval in the United States. While true in some respects, this is quite misleading. America is more than what Bush and Rumsfeld and the others say it is. I have come to deeply resent the notion that I must accept the picture of America as being involved in a "just war" against something unilaterally labeled as terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war that has assigned us the role of either silent witnesses or defensive immigrants who should be grateful to be allowed residence in the US. The historical realities are different: America is an immigrant republic and has always been one. It is a nation of laws passed not by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly exterminated native Americans, the original Indians, everyone who now lives here as an American citizen originally came to these shores as an immigrant from somewhere else, even Bush and Rumsfeld. The Constitution does not provide for different levels of Americanness, nor for approved or disapproved forms of "American behaviour," including things that have come to be called "un-" or "anti- American" statements or attitudes. That is the invention of American Taliban who want to regulate speech and behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the unregretted former rulers of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on the importance of religion in America, he is not authorised to enforce such views on the citizenry or to speak for everyone when he makes proclamations in China and elsewhere about God and America and himself. The Constitution expressly separates church and state. There is worse. By passing the Patriot Act last November, Bush and his compliant Congress have suppressed or abrogated or abridged whole sections of the First, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments, instituted legal procedures that give individuals no recourse either to a proper defence or a fair trial, that allow secret searches, eavesdropping, detention without limit, and, given the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, that allow the US executive branch to abduct prisoners, detain them indefinitely, decide unilaterally whether or not they are prisoners of war and whether or not the Geneva Conventions apply to them -- which is not a decision to be taken by individual countries. Moreover, as Congressman Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) said in a magnificent speech given on 17 February, the president and his men were not authorised to declare war (Operation Enduring Freedom) against the world without limit or reason, were not authorised to increase military spending to over $400 billion per year, were not authorised to repeal the Bill of Rights. Furthermore, he added -- the first such statement by a prominent, publicly elected official -- "we did not ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan." I strongly recommend that Rep. Kucinich's speech, which was made with the best of American principles and values in mind, be published in full in Arabic so that people in our part of the world can understand that America is not a monolith for the use of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but in fact contains many voices and currents of opinion which this government is trying to silence or make irrelevant. The problem for the world today is how to deal with the unparalleled and unprecedented power of the United States, which in effect has made no secret of the fact that it does not need coordination with or approval of others in the pursuit of what a small circle of men and women around Bush believe are its interests. So far as the Middle East is concerned, it does seem that since 11 September there has been almost an Israelisation of US policy: and in effect Ariel Sharon and his associates have cynically exploited the single-minded attention to "terrorism" by George Bush and have used that as a cover for their continued failed policy against the Palestinians. The point here is that Israel is not the US and, mercifully, the US is not Israel: thus, even though Israel commands Bush's support for the moment, Israel is a small country whose continued survival as an ethnocentric state in the midst of an Arab-Islamic sea depends not just on an expedient if not infinite dependence on the US, but rather on accommodation with its environment, not the other way round. That is why I think Sharon's policy has finally been revealed to a significant number of Israelis as suicidal, and why more and more Israelis are taking the reserve officers' position against serving the military occupation as a model for their approach and resistance. This is the best thing to have emerged from the Intifada. It proves that Palestinian courage and defiance in resisting occupation have finally brought fruit. What has not changed, however, is the US position, which has been escalating towards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Bush and his people identify themselves (as in the very name of the military campaign, Operation Enduring Freedom) with righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest destiny, its external enemies with an equally absolute evil. Anyone reading the world press in the past few weeks can ascertain that people outside the US are both mystified by and aghast at the vagueness of US policy, which claims for itself the right to imagine and create enemies on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without much regard for accuracy of definition, specificity of aim, concreteness of goal, or, worst of all, the legality of such actions. What does it mean to defeat "evil terrorism" in a world like ours? It cannot mean eradicating everyone who opposes the US, an infinite and strangely pointless task; nor can it mean changing the world map to suit the US, substituting people we think are "good guys" for evil creatures like Saddam Hussein. The radical simplicity of all this is attractive to Washington bureaucrats whose domain is either purely theoretical or who, because they sit behind desks in the Pentagon, tend to see the world as a distant target for the US's very real and virtually unopposed power. For if you live 10,000 miles away from any known evil state and you have at your disposal acres of warplanes, 19 aircraft carriers, and dozens of submarines, plus a million and a half people under arms, all of them willing to serve their country idealistically in the pursuit of what Bush and Condoleezza Rice keep referring to as evil, the chances are that you will be willing to use all that power sometime, somewhere, especially if the administration keeps asking for (and getting) billions of dollars to be added to the already swollen defence budget. From my point of view, the most shocking thing of all is that with few exceptions most prominent intellectuals and commentators in this country have tolerated the Bush programme, tolerated and in some flagrant cases, tried to go beyond it, toward more self- righteous sophistry, more uncritical self-flattery, more specious argument. What they will not accept is that the world we live in, the historical world of nations and peoples, is moved and can be understood by politics, not by huge general absolutes like good and evil, with America always on the side of good, its enemies on the side of evil. When Thomas Friedman tiresomely sermonises to Arabs that they have to be more self-critical, missing in anything he says is the slightest tone of self- criticism. Somehow, he thinks, the atrocities of 11 September entitle him to preach at others, as if only the US had suffered such terrible losses, and as if lives lost elsewhere in the world were not worth lamenting quite as much or drawing as large moral conclusions from. One notices the same discrepancies and blindness when Israeli intellectuals concentrate on their own tragedies and leave out of the equation the much greater suffering of a dispossessed people without a state, or an army, or an air force, or a proper leadership, that is, Palestinians whose suffering at the hands of Israel continues minute by minute, hour by hour. This sort of moral blindness, this inability to evaluate and weigh the comparative evidence of sinner and sinned against (to use a moralistic language that I normally avoid and detest) is very much the order of the day, and it must be the critical intellectual's job not to fall into -- indeed, actively to campaign against falling into -- the trap. It is not enough to say blandly that all human suffering is equal, then to go on basically bewailing one's own miseries: it is far more important to see what the strongest party does, and to question rather than justify that. The intellectual's is a voice in opposition to and critical of great power, which is consistently in need of a restraining and clarifying conscience and a comparative perspective, so that the victim will not, as is often the case, be blamed and real power encouraged to do its will. A week ago I was stunned when a European friend asked me what I thought of a declaration by 60 American intellectuals that was published in all the major French, German, Italian and other continental papers but which did not appear in the US at all, except on the Internet where few people took notice of it. This declaration took the form of a pompous sermon about the American war against evil and terrorism being "just" and in keeping with American values, as defined by these self-appointed interpreters of our country. Paid for and sponsored by something called the Institute for American Values, whose main (and financially well- endowed) aim is to propagate ideas in favour of families, "fathering" and "mothering," and God, the declaration was signed by Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Patrick Moynihan among many others, but basically written by a conservative feminist academic, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Its main arguments about a "just" war were inspired by Professor Michael Walzer, a supposed socialist who is allied with the pro-Israel lobby in this country, and whose role is to justify everything Israel does by recourse to vaguely leftist principles. In signing this declaration, Walzer has given up all pretension to leftism and, like Sharon, allies himself with an interpretation (and a questionable one at that) of America as a righteous warrior against terror and evil, the more to make it appear that Israel and the US are similar countries with similar aims. Nothing could be further from the truth, since Israel is not the state of its citizens but of all the Jewish people, while the US is most assuredly only the state of its citizens. Moreover, Walzer never has the courage to state boldly that in supporting Israel he is supporting a state structured by ethno-religious principles, which (with typical hypocrisy) he would oppose in the United States if this country were declared to be white and Christian. Walzer's inconsistencies and hypocrisies aside, the document is really addressed to "our Muslim brethren" who are supposed to understand that America's war is not against Islam but against those who oppose all sorts of principles, which it would be hard to disagree with. Who could oppose the principle that all human beings are equal, that killing in the name of God is a bad thing, that freedom of conscience is excellent, and that "the basic subject of society is the human person, and the legitimate role of government is to protect and help to foster the conditions for human flourishing"? In what follows, however, America turns out to be the aggrieved party and, even though some of its mistakes in policy are acknowledged very briefly (and without mentioning anything specific in detail), it is depicted as hewing to principles unique to the United States, such as that all people possess inherent moral dignity and status, that universal moral truths exist and are available to everyone, or that civility is important where there is disagreement, and that freedom of conscience and religion are a reflection of basic human dignity and are universally recognised. Fine. For although the authors of this sermon say it is often the case that such great principles are contravened, no sustained attempt is made to say where and when those contraventions actually occur (as they do all the time), or whether they have been more contravened than followed, or anything as concrete as that. Yet in a long footnote, Walzer and his colleagues set forth a list of how many American "murders" have occurred at Muslim and Arab hands, including those of the Marines in Beirut in 1983, as well as other military combatants. Somehow making a list of that kind is worth making for these militant defenders of America, whereas the murder of Arabs and Muslims -- including the hundreds of thousands killed with American weapons by Israel with US support, or the hundreds of thousands killed by US- maintained sanctions against the innocent civilian population of Iraq -- need be neither mentioned nor tabulated. What sort of dignity is there in humiliating Palestinians by Israel, with American complicity and even cooperation, and where is the nobility and moral conscience of saying nothing as Palestinian children are killed, millions besieged, and millions more kept as stateless refugees? Or for that matter, the millions killed in Vietnam, Columbia, Turkey, and Indonesia with American support and acquiescence? All in all, this declaration of principles and complaint addressed by American intellectuals to their Muslim brethren seems like neither a statement of real conscience nor of true intellectual criticism against the arrogant use of power, but rather is the opening salvo in a new cold war declared by the US in full ironic cooperation, it would seem, with those Islamists who have argued that "our" war is with the West and with America. Speaking as someone with a claim on America and the Arabs, I find this sort of hijacking rhetoric profoundly objectionable. While it pretends to the elucidation of principles and the declaration of values, it is in fact exactly the opposite, an exercise in not knowing, in blinding readers with a patriotic rhetoric that encourages ignorance as it overrides real politics, real history, and real moral issues. Despite its vulgar trafficking in great "principles and values," it does none of that, except to wave them around in a bullying way designed to cow foreign readers into submission. I have a feeling that this document wasn't published here for two reasons: one is that it would be so severely criticised by American readers that it would be laughed out of court and two, that it was designed as part of a recently announced, extremely well-funded Pentagon scheme to put out propaganda as part of the war effort, and therefore intended for foreign consumption. Whatever the case, the publication of "What are American Values?" augurs a new and degraded era in the production of intellectual discourse. For when the intellectuals of the most powerful country in the history of the world align themselves so flagrantly with that power, pressing that power's case instead of urging restraint, reflection, genuine communication and understanding, we are back to the bad old days of the intellectual war against communism, which we now know brought far too many compromises, collaborations and fabrications on the part of intellectuals and artists who should have played an altogether different role. Subsidised and underwritten by the government (the CIA especially, which went as far as providing for the subvention of magazines like Encounter, underwrote scholarly research, travel and concerts as well as artistic exhibitions), those militantly unreflective and uncritical intellectuals and artists in the 1950s and 1960s brought to the whole notion of intellectual honesty and complicity a new and disastrous dimension. For along with that effort went also the domestic campaign to stifle debate, intimidate critics, and restrict thought. For many Americans, like myself, this is a shameful episode in our history, and we must be on our guard against and resist its return. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx From yazad_acl at yahoo.com Mon Mar 11 11:27:52 2002 From: yazad_acl at yahoo.com (Yazad Jal) Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 11:27:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Edward Said and the War Against Terrorism References: <5.0.2.1.2.20020310203418.029585f0@del1.mantraonline.com> Message-ID: <00de01c1c8c3$29ffea60$1bf138ca@vsnl.net.in> A different point of view on Edward Said. -yazad ----------------------------------------------- Edward Said and the War Against Terrorism FrontPageMagazine.com | March 8, 2002 by Ronald Radosh A FEW WEEKS AGO, writing about the statement by 60 intellectuals on why the US is at war, I wrote that I found their position "unnecessarily defensive," and that reading their arguments, one had to wonder why it was even necessary for them to spell out in such great lengths why the American response to September 11 met the criterion of a "just war." Now, in this "Thoughts About America," written for Al-Ahram Weekly (March 2), Edward Said has given us good reasons for why such a statement was necessary. We can also be thankful that the ultra-left-wing Z Magazine on line has seen fit to reprint Said's essay, because it reveals for all those who have praised the Columbia University Professor for his brilliance and comprehension to get the full measure of what he really thinks, and what kind of arguments he offers. Reading Said, it is, quite frankly, hard for me to believe that anyone can take him seriously from this point on. Said, for those who are not aware, is one of the most influential of all contemporary radical theorists. One of the founders of what is called post-colonial studies, an offshoot of neo-Marxist French cultural criticism, he devised the theory of "the Orient" as a discourse constructed by Western imperialism. His 1978 book Orientalism perhaps single handedly created the idea that the concept of the Orient became the mechanism by which the West sought to dominate and gain authority over the Arab world. To Said, it was only a concept which never existed, but which was created by Westerners as a tool to subjugate the region. Said's work has been subject to brutal criticism by the distinguished scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, who has argued that Said has oversimplified the dichotomy between East and West, as well as having exaggerated the nature of colonial reality. Most recently, Martin Kramer has argued in Ivory Towers on Sand that the entire field of Middle Eastern studies became ideologically distorted as a result of Said's work. His Orientalism, as Hillel Halkin writes, was nothing but "a crass and politically motivated attack on the entire tradition of Arabic studies in the West," and hence "quickly became...the Bible of Middle Eastern Studies." Said essentially became the person most responsible for creating the idea that a paradigm of development in the Middle East was an evil construct of Western capitalism, and hence had to be resisted. Said, once a member of the Palestinian National Council, broke a few years ago with Yasser Arafat because he found him too moderate. And a few years ago, as readers of this page are aware, Said was exposed as having lied in his own memoir, in which he depicted himself as an Arab who was born and raised in Jerusalem and driven out by the Israelis after the 1948 war. His story, as we learned, was completely false. He and his family lived in Egypt, not Palestine, and Said attended a posh private school in Cairo. And in July 2000, Said was photographed throwing rocks over the Lebanese border into Israel, attempting to hit Israelis on the other side. The Columbia Daily Spectator, his own university's student paper, commented that his "hypocritical violent action" was "alien to this or any other institution of higher learning." Edward Said's damage, however, is far deeper when he uses the pen. There are plenty of thugs available to throw rocks, and undoubtedly, he did so to show his solidarity with those he calls part of the "resistance." A good example is what he has written in his very latest screed. He writes, for example, that he deeply resents having to accept the picture of the US being involved in a just war "against something unilaterally labeled as terrorism by Bush and his advisors." Think a moment about that sentence. Said implies that there is no terrorist war, only a unilateral declaration of such by the Bush administration. Indeed, Said continues to present the preposterous claim that the Bush administration is in effect an "American Taliban," that brands all those who dissent as guilty of anti-American behavior. Said, of course, sees America on a course of future aggression, symbolized by the desire to target Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq. And of course, Said refers to the Taliban and Al Queda prisoners being held at Guantanamo base as an abduction of individuals about whom the US has decided "unilaterally" that the Geneva Convention does not apply to them. To Said, the problem is not that we in the West and in our own country are faced with a major and dangerous terrorist foe, a foe inspired by radical Islam---but rather the problem is "how to deal with the unparalleled and unprecedented power of the United States," whose rulers--a "small circle of men,"--have decided to unleash an unjust war against the entire Muslim world. We have, in clear words, his main point: The enemy of the world is the United States and our democratically elected leaders. Among other crimes, it has carried out what he calls the "Israelisation of US Policy," symbolized by what he sees as a kowtowing to Arial Sharon. And to make his point, he magnifies what is in reality an insignificantly small number of Israeli reservists who signed a statement against serving in the Palestinian areas as proof that Palestinian terror bombings--which he of course calls--"resisting occupation," has "finally brought fruit." To Said, the Bush administration is wearing the mantle of "righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest destinies," while its enemies are "equally absolute evil." Let us pause a moment. The face of evil, is in fact, clear. Contrary to Edward Said, its face is that of our enemies---the Taliban, al Qaeda, and its terrorist allies in nations like Iraq and Iran. What Said attempts to do is to deflect our attention away from this very real threat, and to make it appear that the Bush administration simply views any nation with different views as an enemy, or as he puts it, "eradicating everyone who opposes the US." In his eyes, since there is no actual threat, you have bureaucrats like Condoleezza Rice chomping at the bit to use all the weaponry available to them simply because they see the world "as a distant target" for our "real and virtually unopposed power." What shocks Said is that many intellectuals seem to have woken up, and actually support the war against terrorism, even though many of them consider themselves to be on the Left. Even Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is faulted by Said for supposedly tiresomely sermonizing to the Arabs, without showing any of the "slightest tone of self-criticism." Evidently, Mr. Said has not read the many Friedman columns in which the author regularly argues that Israel has to give up its settlements, or most recently, accept the phony Saudi "peace plan" which was first made known to Friedman---who thrilled at the scoop, has accepted it as a meaningful plan despite its plan deficiencies. To Said, to be an intellectual means that one has to be "critical of great power." But what if great power happens to be correct, and on the right side of the moral, political and military issue? What he thinks intellectuals should do is offer a "restraining and a comparative perspective;" in other words, use their intellectual power to morally disarm the public, so that America's enemies will have the advantage. That is why he is so upset about the rather weak endorsement of the war by the 60 American intellectuals. That these people, so many of them self-defined critics of US policy, have come to their senses---is itself unacceptable to Said. Of course, Said misstates the credentials of the statement's authors. The noted political scientist and author Jean Bethke Elshtain, is called a "conservative feminist academic;" a description so far from accurate it is virtual parody, while Michael Walzer, the editor of Dissent magazine, is called a "supposed socialist." I guess that means that a "real" socialist is one who agrees with Said, that the US is the sole enemy of the world's peoples. Walzer's sin, of course, is that he seeks to "justify everything Israel does" and that he has "vaguely leftist principles," unlike Said---who opposes everything Israel does and whose "leftist principles" are 100 percent redder than the rose. Somehow, all the various criticisms Walzer has made over the years about Israeli policy and his well known opposition to the Israeli political Right is non-existent. Why is Walzer now proclaimed by Said to be one who has "give up all pretension to leftism?" The answer: he sees America "as a righteous warrior against terror and evil." That in and of itself is revealing. What Edward Said means is that to be on the Left means one must define oneself as opposing the US war against terrorism. That means that all those Leftists who now firmly support the war, like Todd Gitlin, are objectively in the enemy camp. The familiar logic, to those of us who know the mindset of the Old Left, is that of Stalinism. You are either a supporter of the Party line, or "objectively" an "enemy of the people." It is most interesting that Said continues to take offense at the concept that the Bush administration seeks to make clear all the time-- that the war is not a war against Islam. Said is offended because he believes that this is just rhetoric, and that in fact, the US is using the phony war against terror as an excuse to depict the United States as the "aggrieved party," when he thinks everyone knows that the principles the US supposedly stands for (human rights, freedom of conscience and religion, etc.) are "more contravened than followed," and moreover, "the murder of Arabs and Muslims" are "neither mentioned nor tabulated." One might wonder when and where the US has moved to slaughter these Arabs and Muslims? To Said it is clear. He uses in making up his tally the "hundreds of thousands killed with American weapons by Israel"--and those "innocent civilians" supposedly killed in Iraq because of US sanctions. And of course, he admonishes us; we cannot forget "the millions killed in Vietnam." Finally Edward Said's conclusions are what are most amazing about his essay. In considering that these intellectuals, however tepidly, now support the US war against terrorism---he sees a replication of the creation of a new generation of Cold War liberal intellectuals. The statement of the 60 academics, he writes, is "the opening salvo in a new cold war declared by the US" that equals that of those extremist Arabs who argue that they are at war with "the West and America." That is strange, since the whole thrust of his entire statement is in fact that the US is at war with Islam, despite the assurances of the Bush administration. One would think that he should save his energy for debating those of the Arab peoples who are proclaiming such a war, instead of opposing the US response to terrorism. Said also engages in a bit of conspiracy theory: he argues that the statement of the 60 "wasn't published here" because "it would be so severely criticized by American readers." Wrong again: the article got wide publicity in the United States, was featured in a Washington Post news article, and was circulated on line with a plea for more signatures and funds for placement of advertisements. Moreover, Said slanders its authors by declaring the statement to be part of an "extremely well-funded Pentagon scheme to put out propaganda as part of the war effort," meant only for "foreign consumption." This is the kind of charge the Left always makes. No evidence is needed. It is enough to plant the seed for his gullible Arab audience, which already believes, as we know, that the Mossad staged the Sept. 11 attack on the United States. In fact, Edward Said's "Thoughts About America" is important for one reason: it is in fact exactly what he writes the statement of the 60 in support of the war is, an essay representative of "a new and degraded era in the production of intellectual discourse." Finally, unlike those British intellectuals who on the eve of World War II argued for pacifism and appeasement of Hitler, some American intellectuals are breaking with their long held left-wing themes, and facing reality. To Edward Said, this means that they have "flagrantly" aligned themselves with power, instead of pressing "restraint" and "understanding." Somehow, believing that Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and the Mullahs of Iran would respond to a plea for "understanding," at this point, rings a little bit hollow. Most significantly Said ends by comparing the intellectual's support of the United States to "the bad old days of the intellectual war against communism," which he sees as having been filled with "too many compromises, collaborations and fabrications" and which he says was "subsidized and underwritten by the government (the CIA especially)" which sponsored magazines like Encounter and also "underwrote scholarly research, travel and concerts as well as artistic exhibitions." (That evil old USA; the KGB spent millions of rubles subsidizing Communist Parties throughout the West, and the US responded by sending our cultural representatives abroad, and by providing the funds for an intellectual response to Communism by independent anti-Communist liberal and socialist intellectuals, who also filled the pages of the subsidized journal with many critical articles about life in the United States.) To Said, the few embattled anti-Communist intellectuals, who unfortunately were far outnumbered by the growing band of anti anti-Communist intellectuals---people who filled the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York for the infamous 1949 Waldorf Peace Conference run by the American Communist Party---were a group of "militantly unreflective and uncritical intellectuals" whose opposition to Communism he calls a case of "complicity" with the CIA and something which brought a "disastrous dimension" to the intellectual's world. They became part, he says, of "the domestic campaign to stifle debate, intimidate critics, and restrict thought." This, of course, is unadulterated left-wing revisionist history---the old now familiar charge that liberal opponents of Communism were all McCarthyites. In fact, those brave intellectuals who dared to break with the stranglehold the Left had on the cultural apparatus since the 1930s were the real intellectual heroes; they risked not getting published, facing opprobrium, and yet they dared to tell the truth about the Communist tyranny so many of their colleagues swallowed hook, line and sinker. Those intellectuals, who have responded as American patriots, even though many of them are critics of aspects of US policy and are opposed to conservative politics, are in fact acting as intellectuals should act. They have carefully assessed the situation facing our country, looked at the real threat now being posed, and have stood with those daring to face up to what is necessary. It is writers like Edward Said-(I hate to use the term intellectual to describe his drivel)---who want those in the intellectual and academic communities to in fact repeat the "shameful" antics of the anti anti-Communist intellectuals of the 40s and 50s, and to apologize for tyrants and to continue to condemn the United States. As Said says, "we must be on our guard against and resist" such advice. -------------------------------------------------------- Ronald Radosh is author of Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, (Encounter Books,2001,) and is a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com. From shuddha at sarai.net Mon Mar 11 18:12:11 2002 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 18:12:11 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Sort of a diary after February 28 In-Reply-To: <002d01c1c5e7$973f2660$1355c5cb@vsnl.net.in> References: <002d01c1c5e7$973f2660$1355c5cb@vsnl.net.in> Message-ID: <02031118121106.01104@sweety.sarai.kit> Dear Gayatri di, Your e mail commenting on the silence in the Reader List on the events in Gujarat is salutary. (And your diary is one of the most moving texts that I have read recently about the events in Gujarat).There can be no excuses for this silence, and I don't consider it necessary to offer any. You wrote - "Day 2: Woke up in the morning and went straight to the computer to check emails, with a certainty there would be messages in the Sarai Readers-List. Those would help me somehow to deal with the anguish that had been gnawing inside, growing over the rest of the previous day, cutting into a restless night. Nothing!" The 'Nothing' in the face of the violence that gripped Gujarat (which many of us - at least those of us who are in India. witnessed on television) is something for this list to be ashamed of. That is my personal opinion, and it bothers me as much as it bothers you. (there have been a few relevant forwards on to the list mainly by Harsh Kapur, and Reyhan Chaudhuri, in her response to the posting by Anand Taneja has drawn the necessary connections between what is permissible in Gujrat (rioting) and what is not permissible in Delhi (free speech) but the dearth of original writing on events of this magnitude is disturbing. You go on to write - "Day 5: What is this silence? I am reminded of September 11 and thereafter. Every morning we would wake to receive mails; they kept on pouring in all day long. There was no time to read all of them. My son, working in a molecular laboratory asked whether he should un-subscribe himself from the list, since he could not do justice to all of those messages. Why isn't anyone writing anything now? I know the Sarai Readers' List is not the only 'site' to look for what people are saying and doing - far from it. And yet, here is documented what a sizable number of the intelligentsia - the very established ones, those who are silently operative in their own spheres, those who are beginning to make their marks in public spheres, visible spheres, and so on - thought and wrote after the September event in the US. Why shouldn't the same happen now? A number - any number - writing and sharing, informing and probing; there would be some respite if not solace. This silence must be questioned, investigated, talked about. I had phoned Jeebesh a little while ago, enquiring whether my daughter's friend from Zurich could travel from Delhi to Lucknow on March 5 and then I raised this question. Jeebesh said in that case there was an outside enemy, in this case, it is us. How can that be - if that is how this situation can be analysed?" Your questions are absolutely straightforward, "the silence, must be questioned, investigated and talked about, and I think any response in to this in terms of "outside enemies" or "inside enemies" is a sidestepping of the issue at stake. We are all outsiders/insiders now. The whole point about being a community of online discourse and reflection means that we are neither neared Gujrat nor nearer New York or Afghanistan. All these spaces are spaces which this list needs to travel to and listen to, whats the point of inhabiting the 'borderlesseness of the internet' otherwise. And if we are 'inside' September 11, then we have to also take responsibility for being 'inside' the fire and now the smouldering remains of the city streets of Gujrat. My only question to you is - why look for solace or respite in the writing of public or private intellectuals, or people at Sarai, on the list. You, have intervened, that is what matters, and we need more such interventions on the list, without anyone of us bothering to think whether or not we are the kind of people to whom the 'priviledge' of speaking out devolves by some unaccounted for virtue. We could for starters, stop being tongue tied in the act of waiting for each other to speak. And if the "sizable intelligentsia" that you refer to in your psoting is silent, so much the worse for them. But in saying this I also take exception to your expectation that some of us ought to be more responsible in terms of writing than others. Do correct me if I am wrong about this. I think everyone is equally responsible for the silence. The list belongs to all those who have subscribed to it. It does not belong more to those who happen to work in the physical space of Sarai, and less to those who are located outside it . It does not belong more to the "sizable intellligentsia - the very established ones, those who are silently operative in their own spheres, those who are beginning to make their marks in public spheres, visible spheres", and less to any of the rest of us who are neither sizable nor particularly established. The whole point of a public (and as yet un filtered) list is that it is a completely free and open platform for any of its subscribers. I as a member of the list am glad that you, as another member of the list have in a sense substantively broken the silence about Gujarat. But we are all equally implicated in the silence until now. I think there is a wider and more important issue at stake here than the question of who condemns which violence and when. And this is the expectation that some of us should be more articulate than others.That some of us (in this case on this list) have more of a responsibility to speak and be heard than others. I have serious reservations about this position. In a recent posting another member of the list (Joy) had in a sense implied that free speech, in another context, ( in the discussion of the judgment on Arundhati Roy) is a privilege and a luxury. That all of us are not in a sense equally equipped or capable to 'practice' free speech. Pradip Saha too had talked about whether in the debate about free speech, we might not risk underplaying the dispute over the dam and about water, which started the whole thing off in the first place. I will respond to these question later, (about whether free speech is a luxury, or whether free speech is more or less important than the struggle for basic necessities) in another posting, but what I want to say right now that I find the implications and corollaries and tacit assumptions that inform these position deeply unsatisfactory. Speech, and the ability to communicate our ideas, whether soberly or passionately, hysterically or eloquently is something we all share. To remain silent oneself, and expect someone else to do the talking, it seems to me is in a sense similar to the 'distaste' that is sometimes expressed, when someone is seen as being a person who 'talks too much'. Their is such a thing as the inverted snobbery of the inadequately articulate. And this is not a valuation of silence, but a rationalization of one's own unwillingness to work on making an intervention in a conversation. And here I will include all symbolizing activity, verbal, textual or non verbal as some form of conversation.This is the smugness of the 'I am not going to try and express myself, but if anyone else does it and does it well, than I am going to sit back and carp about it' In fact when we are saying that someone is 'talking too much', or that their speech act is 'overvalued' we are actually pointing to the fact that no one else is speaking. Perhaps if everyone did a little bit of speaking up now and then, than neither the silence nor the speech act of any particular individuals, ('sizable' or 'established' ) would mean such a big deal. On the one hand we have some people complaining about the way in which the list has drawn attention to someone speaking, and on the other we have you protesting, very rightly, about the fact that no one (and you have pointed a finger at those you consider to be "sizable intellectuals") has spoken. I think this is a fascinating paradox for a list to find itself in. Behind both statements, the twin poles of the paradox, if you like, lies the assumption that Arundhati Roy's speech act,in one instance, or the "sizable intellectuals" non-speech act, in another instance, is somehow a class apart form other speech acts and non speech acts. And that one persons personal silence is heavier than anyone elses on this list. Or, for instance, that Arundhati's speech act is heavier than Joy's. The media, with its penchant for "celebrity speak' would say so. But none of us is under any compulsion to accept this weighing of speech and silence. This list is not the front page of the Times of India. I want to contest this implicit acceptance of the "weightage" of speech acts on this list. Free speech is free only when everyone wants it to be free.A monologue is not an instance of free speech, a conversation is. I agree completely with Jeebesh (in his posting in response to Joy) that a corollary of free speech is the right to remain silent, but a further corollary is also that free speech can only flourish within a discursive community. This list is, or hopes to be, a discursive community. Within it, all speakers have the freedom to speak, and the freedom to remain silent. But one cannot expect the freedom of the most of us to remain silent, as the necessary condition for the freedom of some of us to speak. If anything it must be seen the other way round. The freedom of each of us to speak is the necessary condition for the freedom of all of us to speak. If there is silence on any issue, (like the Gujrat killings) it is because each and all of us were silent, until you broke it. It is possible to measure more and less speech, because some people speak/write more, others, less. But is it possible to measure silence? Can we say, that some of us were more silent about Gujrat than the rest of us in the list? There are hints in your posting that this is so. I need to know how this fluctuating amplitude of silence can be measured, before I can agree with you on this.There was silence, and we are all equally culpable in that silence. If a person standing outside the list were to say - "this list is worthless, because it could not bring itself to discuss the violence at its door" I think they would be perfectly justified in saying so.But all of us on the list are equally implicated in what is said or not said on the list, because the list does not belong more to any of us, and less to any of us. I agree that the silence was a shame, but I think it is even more of a shame that people should have to wait to speak, or to see if others have or have not had their say. What got our collective tongue? What prevented any one of us, regardless of the completely meaningless category of any or our private or public intellectual statures from speaking. And if some of us had spoken, would it then have been all right for some (others) of us to "not write" about Gujrat? I share your anguish, and I am very relieved that you have posed the question as sharply as you have done. But, the question is a mirror in which every silence is reflected. Of course it will not do for any of us to say "we have said that killing is horrible a thousand times and so we can not say it any more". There is no point in saying that one must wait for 'new things to say' when old things, like pogroms, keep happening over and over again.If it needs a thousand repetitions, it still needs to be said. But not more by some of us, and less by some of us. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and the experiences that you have lived with in the last few days. They really made me sit up and think about things. There is a lot to be mined in what you have said, and I hope that especially in a climate such as what we are living through now, others on the list can take up the whole question of alternate cosmopolitanities, that you evoke with your reference to Syed Muztafa Ali. Its high time we realised that there is a time honoured tradition of crossing all sorts of borders in the mind in our milieu. Of learning to say no to the question of whether one is an 'inisder' or an 'outsider' . Thank you for reminding us all about this fact. I learnt to cross my first borders in the pages of Deshe Bideshe as well, and it remains one of my favourite remedies (along with the Comprehensive Persian English Dictionary of Steingass)for insomnia.In fact out of some bizarre co-incidence, Muztafa Ali was precisely whom I waw reading ( a long description of a sarai on the way from Peshawwar to Kabul in 'Deshe Bideshe') when I got up to check my mail in the middle fo the night and found your wake up call. The list was a year old yesterday, and I hope that your wake up call will make its mark on all of us,and help us to remain the discursive community that we have been at times, and which we failed to be in the days when Gujrat was burning. I hope that someone else will now take up the thread of this conversation, and weave other things that are waiting to be said. Cheers Shuddha From alokrai at hss.iitd.ernet.in Tue Mar 12 00:38:21 2002 From: alokrai at hss.iitd.ernet.in (Prof.Alok Rai) Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 00:38:21 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] Re: Reader-list digest, Vol 1 #424 - 5 msgs In-Reply-To: <200203101534.QAA16592@zelda.intra.waag.org> Message-ID: Has someone posted the letter signed by 60 American academics that Said refers to? That, and the names of the signatories. Thanks, Alok Rai From pnanpin at yahoo.co.in Tue Mar 12 02:23:31 2002 From: pnanpin at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?pratap=20pandey?=) Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 20:53:31 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Why put Shuddha in pain? Message-ID: <20020311205331.12107.qmail@web8105.in.yahoo.com> Dear Readers, I respond to Shuddha's painfully-diplomatically nuanced response to the query: "Why has the Reader's list not been ignited over Gujarat"? Let us forget "speech acts". From J L Austin to Foucault to (even) Habermas, that's an abstruse issue. Let us also forget Shuddha's pale apologetics in favour of silence. (Any statement that foregrounds silence must be apologetic.) The Sarai Reader List, as handled by those who run it and those who make it possible, is not responsible for doxa, or popular opinion. It depends, If I am right, on the larger reading-thinking community that writes into it. In other words, it is the larger reader-list community that is responsible for the silence. I fail to understand why Shuddha must be held morally responsible for a "speech-act" he never set into motion, in the first place. To defend Shuddha and the reader-list vis-a-vis Gujarat is also to make clear that the silence on Gujarat is a socio-political silence, and not a moral issue. It is a silence actively invested upon by Global Aeducated Indian everyday-life fascists. Why is the Internet-ting public silent on Gujarat? It is very simple. Most internetting indians (I want to say: Global Eaducated Indians) who think they are emancipated are actually not so. In 1992, they faced a constitutional, and even more importantly I think, a cultural crisis. At that time, the response was: silence. It is my belief that GAIs (GLobal Eaducated Indians) are the bane of secular existence in the current conjuncture. I believe that GAIs are everyday-life fascists. Every day in their lives, these "little" fascists create a social fabric, a web of interaction, in which it becomes difficult to even consider things such as: in North India, the dominant language is not "hindi" or "urdu" but one called "hindustani"; why is it that wife-beaters in Delhi invariably depend on boiled eggs and a pint of rum/whisky? how is it that the image of an emancipated woman in advertisements is one that shows the woman wearing pants, but still doing housework? Nowadays in advertisements related to household consumer products, we see bobbed-hair shirt-and-pant wearing women confirming their daily servitude in even more sophisticated ways. These women, apparently liberated, are liberated only to the extent that they wear branded clothes and "love" branded sanitary napkins, cars, washing machines, and soaps. What I point to is that in a neo-liberal cultural regime, there exists this space for everyday-life fascism to grow and reproduce. Place this general statement in the context of the existence of the "middle class" in post-90s India, in a history of complaints about opportunities that could have been taken, but were not (the corporate argument, but also the larger acquiescence to this argument). What you find is a complete silence about an appropriation of modes of emancipation. Today, you might think you are falsely-spiritual, or understandably-unreligious. If you do, it will raise in you a Great Guilt (GG). This GG will emerge in all those ocassions in which you are required to produce affidavits of belonging to a majoritarian community. We Hindus have this great ability to think that we are beyond cultural (social, historical) divisions. We Hindus want to rule over the entire climate of opinion (as we have always done, apparently) including ruling over the entire spectrum of opinion on current issues. Most trenchantly, we Hindus believe we are superior because we have the moral right to raise questions in the Information Age (that's what makes us GAI). That is what makes (us) GAIs silent about Gujarat. Gujarat is an Aberration. It needn't have happened. It is a needless extension of December 6, 1992. (When our vetan-bhogi minds got so taxed that we stopped watching TV.) We third-generation (at least) educated and so-called liberal and liberated and now liberalised Hindus are always informationally and so morally superior. We don't need Muslims, right? In supporting the presence of a fascist political formation at The Centre, all of us have colluded in the creation of an everyday-life fascism intent upon reproducing the energy of December 6, 1992. Please don't blame Shuddha. ________________________________________________________________________ Looking for a job? Visit Yahoo! India Careers Visit http://in.careers.yahoo.com From pnanpin at yahoo.co.in Tue Mar 12 03:36:53 2002 From: pnanpin at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?pratap=20pandey?=) Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 22:06:53 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] On Gujarat Message-ID: <20020311220653.56215.qmail@web8104.in.yahoo.com> Dear Reader, Are you with me? Gujarat has heightened my sensibilities. Are you with me? I am crying buckets (made of plastic). Are you with me? I had no role to play in the actual killing. I merely watched it on TV, and agreed with all the commentators who said that the media had made too much of it. Are you with me? I deplore the loot that occurred. I regret that I was not part of it. (I need shirts, trousers, TVs, washing machines, CDs, and anything worth stealing) I hated the way the media foccused so closely on the riots that they were able to come to grips with it. They were able to report on the fascist Hindu loose affiliations that made the riots possible. I hate that. Are you with me? The television media, for the first time in its existence, made sure that audiences knew how the riots had been engineered. That it was not a riot, but a planned pogrom. Are you with me? My sensitivities were shattered, my education challenged, my upbringing caricatured. Are you with me? I am a liberal. Are you with me? I stand for a cultural space in which many voices exist. Are you with me? I consistently find myself unable to stop acts of constitutional violence. Are you really with me? Gujarat is Gujarat. Whatever happened happened there. Over there. Are you really with me? Hey, Kashmir is Kashmir. Whatever happens there happens there. Are you really with me? WE global aeducated Indians are so used to violence so long as it touches only our hearts. The violence touches our hearts. It invigorates us; we have one more reason to pronounce our effete judgements. Do you want to be with me? In Kashmir, it is not possible to live any more, except in numbed decadence. So also in Gujarat. So also in the rest of the country where the intelligentsia is simply not willing to take real material questions in hand. Do you want to be with me? The studied silence on Gujarat is frightening. Do you wish to be with me? The studied silence on Gujarat is frightening because it shows the extant to which the so-called informed community is not willing to put words and expressions to this experience. Everybody knows what happened. Nobody who knows wants to talk about it. Such a comfortable consensus. Do you really want to be with me? The studied silence on Gujarat is less deliberate than the studied silence on Kashmir. We can ignore GUjarat, but even more so we can ignore Kashmir. In fact ignoring Kashmir, consistently and in a studied manner, has trained us to ignore Gujarat (And let us not forget, Ayodhya). After Kashmir, everything can be ignored. I am not sure you want to be with me. Numbed decadence is the favoured mode of existence in the rest of the country. At least, among the informed community. Or, should I say: "expert culture"? Do you seriously want to be with me? In order to be with me, you have to to be sensitive, tortured, educated (not aeducated), international (not global), confused, inexpressive, fair, tall, muscular, fat, thin, dark, caste no bar, talented, high-earning, handsome, beautiful, propertied. Ultimately human. Do you want to be with me? ________________________________________________________________________ Looking for a job? Visit Yahoo! India Careers Visit http://in.careers.yahoo.com From goflyakite at rediffmail.com Tue Mar 12 11:52:43 2002 From: goflyakite at rediffmail.com (Anand Vivek Taneja) Date: 12 Mar 2002 06:22:43 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Of Arab ki(and other) Sarai(s)...and on silence Message-ID: <20020312062243.12004.qmail@mailFA9.rediffmail.com> Of Arab ki (and other) Sarai(s) – a lament for much that has gone Jahan-e-Khusrau, the much hyped Sufi extravaganza happened in the ruins of Arab ki Sarai recently. The minimum price for listening to the eclectic blending of voices and rhythms from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Syria, Turkey and Sudan was 200 rupees an evening. The chatterati of Delhi flocked to the location, which does not detract from the value of the event. For despite an American hack Sufi dishing out syrupy platitudes in TV Evangelist style about the nature of ‘love’ in Sufism (and that, less than a quarter mile from the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya – oh, the irony of it!) there was something of great importance happening. When regally white robed Sudanese musicians blended their voices and rhythms with Indian manganiyars and Iranian percussionists in the ruins of a traveller’s sheltering place more than four centuries old, it was an evocation of worlds that have been forgotten by the convenient silence of school history text-books. And the ectoplasm of whose faint ghosts fades a little more every time a Godhra-Ahmedabad-Gujarat happens. In Gujarat a few centuries ago it probably wasn’t so uncommon for Africans and Rajasthanis to make music together in sarais. Or at least, to meet. Around the time Arab ki Sarai was built in Delhi, there was already a well-established trade network linking Gujarat and the Deccan to East Africa and the Middle East and of course, to North India. The Habshis(Abbsynians) formed a substantial chunk of the Deccan nobility. Till today, some trace of the Habshis having been here (in fair numbers) can be found in the Sidd(h)is of Gujarat, a marginalised ‘Scheduled Tribe’ of Indian negros. That the Habshis (and as the term is a loose generic for ‘Black’ as well, probably Sudanese also) came to India (like many other groups) as soldiers, as slaves as merchants, as musicians and often chose to settle here on fairly equal terms is something too easily forgotten. As is the fact that the first great ‘freedom figte Deccan wasn’t Shivaji, but an Ethiopian, a Habshi, a one-time slave who preceded Shivaji by about half a century. Malik Ambar was born in Ethiopia and landed up in the slave markets of Baghdad. From where he eventually reached India, the Deccan Sultanate of Ahmednagar to be precise. His talents saw him rising to great power in the Sultanate, at the time when Ahmednagar, and the rest of the Deccan were under tremendous pressure from the expansionist Mughal empire of Akbar and Jahangir. For twenty five years, from the fall of Ahmednagar Fort to the Mughals till his own death, Malik Ambar led a courageous campaign against the Mughals, preventing them from moving further into the Deccan and saving Ahmednagar from complete dismemberment. The guerilla warfare that everyone attributes to Shivaji was in fact a Malik Ambar speciality. Malik Ambar was the leader of a motley bunch of Afghan And Maratha soldiers and was known as ‘Peshwa’. Malik Ambar also introduced reforms in the revenue collection and local administration of the areas of the Deccan(and they were large) that came under his control. No one tells you about Malik Ambar in Ellora. There’s a road leading up from the Hindu and Buddhist temple caves to the top of the cliffs into which the caves have been carved in. That road also gives you a more spectacular view of the dramatic landscape around Ellora because of its higher elevation. Despite all these advantages, the road is essentially used as a walking shortcut by locals to get from Ellora to the nearby town of Khuldalabad. Zero tourists. On one side of this road, near a precipice with the most spectacular view of the dramatic Maharashtra landscape, is a not-so-small, extremely elegant tomb. Not on the same scale as, say, Humayun’s tomb, it is still magnificently large, and elegant in a style very different from the Mughal aesthetic. The most striking thing about it is that the geometrical carvings of the window lattices and the honey-coloured walls and turrets seems to be inspired by the carving one has ju e ago, though that is largely figurative and this is geometrical. Inside stands a large, neglected cenotaph of polished black granite. This is the tomb of Malik Ambar, one of the most colourful personalities in Deccan history. Unlike in the caves just below, there is no ASI board speaking of the historical significance of the place. No tourist guide or brochure mentions it. No tourist guide or book mentions the first recorded instance of ‘tourists’ visiting Ellora, either. An account written by Muhammad Qasim Ferishta of the political intrigues and happenings surrounding the marriage of Dewal Rani, the daughter of the Rai Karan of Gujarat to Khizr Khan, the son of Ala-ud-Din Khilji, mentions how three to four hundred soldiers of the Khilji army, under the generalship of Alp Khan, took his permission to visit the famous caves of Ellora. (c.1300) They were presumably Muslims. Somehow it all seems to come back to Gujarat. The study of history at times seems to be a constant battle with the conspiracy of silence. A battle fought, and often lost, on the quicksands of public (and personal) memory. A battle that has to be joined, by each one of us, to fight the silence, to reclaim our lost histories. To rehabilitate the sarais of the world, (and of course, to build new ones), to restore them as spaces where all fellow-travellers can find refuge, without necessarily being charged exorbitant entry tickets. Viva le Sarai! From jeebesh at sarai.net Tue Mar 12 15:58:46 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 15:58:46 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Why put Shuddha in pain? In-Reply-To: <20020311205331.12107.qmail@web8105.in.yahoo.com> References: <20020311205331.12107.qmail@web8105.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <02031215584607.00596@pinki.sarai.kit> Seems like `silence` has become a sign emitting radiations of complicity or helpnessness or fear or unease or..... Could be read as profound or empty. But it definitely shows a deep inability to articulate or grieve or mourn. As long as accusations are easy we are able to find a way of saying things, even the uncomfortable or the unpalatable. But when things are closer, whose immediate effects are palpably around us and can engulf us anytime, it is difficult. At least to me it is difficult. Television finds it easy to narrate, it has faces with sound bites, spaces with images and a `distance` that is not available to everyone. And this non-availability makes us silent with bewilderment or guilt or shame. You have to talk about yourself without recourse to another's `bites` or `opinions` is really tough. A list provides us this freedom but also this is the most difficult thing to do in moments such as these. Pratap, why this move into `everyday acts of fascism`. Everyday acts are very complicated and the word `fascism` may just foreclose thinking about it. Lives are more and more ruled by fear. All kinds of fear. And it is difficult to talk `openly about fear`! best Jeebesh From reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com Tue Mar 12 21:58:12 2002 From: reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com (Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri) Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 16:28:12 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] I asked the Nobel Naipaul an ignoble question Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020312/ab615e5f/attachment.html From jskohli at fig.org Tue Mar 12 22:19:01 2002 From: jskohli at fig.org (Jaswinder Singh Kohli) Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 22:19:01 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Something Interesting- SSSCA and EI of America Message-ID: <3C8E317D.E5986C60@fig.org> Something Interesting- SSSCA and Entertainment INdustry of America Quite interesting read Republicans Should Back Recording Artists, Consumers http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,47296,00.html -- Regards Jaswinder Singh Kohli jskohli at fig.org :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: The Uni(multi)verse is a figment of its own imagination. In truth time is but an illusion of 3D frequency grid programs. From anilbhatia at indiatimes.com Wed Mar 13 12:54:29 2002 From: anilbhatia at indiatimes.com (anilbhatia) Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 12:54:29 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] On Gujarat Message-ID: <200203130735.NAA05632@mdns1.indiatimes.com> Modi might soon be the only guy spouting Newton FOLK THEOREM / ABHEEK BARMAN TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 2002 1:44:15 PM ] ANATICAL mobs are taking over the country and the government is asking them, �Is that all you guys want? How �bout a second helping?� Through last fortnight the Ayatollahs of 21st century Hindutva have stomped across the landscape, a little riot here, a little murder there, a whole lotta shaking going on. Who are these Paramhansas, Acharyas, Togadias and Singhals? Who gave them the right to unleash their goons on the nation? What keeps them out of jail after they start a riot? What sort of government just whimpers a little and rolls over when these thugs take to the streets? I�m trying to get over my revulsion to the horrors of this last fortnight and make some sense of what�s happening in India today. This places me in a privileged position. I can sit with a drink and watch other people�s homes going up in flames, their children maimed or killed, their livelihoods destroyed even when their lives are spared. You and me, we�re lucky because none of these things have happened to us yet. Because Narendra Modi is far from where we are. So we imagine that when the fanatics finally come to knock, it�ll always be somewhere else. And from our privileged vantage point, we�ll continue to watch this other bizarre spectacle that�s taking place: a whole government is getting hijacked, live on TV. The BJP-led government has been taken over. The takeover has been engineered by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu fundamentalist holding company of the BJP. The organisation that is taking over is the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), another subsidiary of the RSS created in 1964 to create trouble in the name of religion, staffed by atrociously dressed people who set down deadlines to break the law. Normal governments, faced with takeover attempts, put up a fight. The BJP cannot fight because it is being taken over by a sibling. Lie back and enjoy it, says the RSS, it�ll be over in a minute. So, home minister L K Advani plays three monkeys as Gujarat burns. Law mantri Arun Jaitley is a Rajya Sabha MP from Gujarat. On March 3, five days after the Godhra incident, the society page of this newspaper carried three photos of him � two at a polo match, one playing cricket against a team of judges. He also watched a one day cricket match in New Delhi. On March 10, as riots raged through his state, the number of Jaitley photos on our society page came down to one, but we didn�t miss him � he was on every television channel all the time. And Prime Minister Vajpayee took such a long time to say anything that most people lost track of what he was saying by the time he finished his sentence. Meanwhile, the VHP is telling everybody that it�s going to bash its way into Ayodhya, that faith doesn�t care two hoots about jurisprudence, that the government let it down. The RSS is �mediating� things between the VHP and the government. The Shankaracharya of Kanchi is �mediating� between the VHP and a group of Muslims. And the minister of state in the home ministry, one I D Swami, is saying that VHP lumpens will be allowed to travel to Ayodhya in a �peaceful� manner. Only two things stand out clearly: the tilak on Ashok Singal�s forehead and the holiday mood in the BJP. This is a terrifying thing, for it shows that the line between religion and the state is being wiped out by this regime. Hindutva fanatics can do just what they want, for they know that nobody in power will lift a finger in protest. Suddenly, the entire BJP leadership has started looking like Narendra Modi and the madmen of the VHP look like they run the show around here. This should never have happened. Once you mix up religion with governance and the law, an abyss opens up below. The Romans knew this and Europe learnt this lesson after hundreds of years of war and anarchy. By the 12th century, Germany emerged as the first country to separate Church and state, followed by most of northern Europe. Historians say this is why the Enlightenment and the commercial and industrial revolutions took place in Europe. With religion separate from governance, law, business and learning, there�s room to think and argue things over without getting into trouble with god�s representatives on Earth. The Islamic countries � till the 15th century richer than any Western nation � didn�t get it. So the West came from behind and forged ahead and the Caliphates declined. Nor did pre-Independence India, where rational enquiry, appearing sporadically, was always swamped by superstitious nonsense. That is why Vedic mathematics remains a figment of Murli Manohar Joshi�s imagination. And why despite the RSS� claims of inventing everything from tissue transplants to aircraft before anybody else, India had to wait till the early 19th century for Christian missionaries to import the first printing press from Europe. If the fundamentalist putsch succeeds, then soon the only guy talking about Newton�s third law will be Narendra Modi. "=?iso-8859-1?q?pratap=20pandey?=" wrote: Dear Reader, Are you with me? Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Indiatimes at http://email.indiatimes.com Buy Music, Video, CD-ROM, Audio-Books and Music Accessories from http://www.planetm.co.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020313/a317d230/attachment.html From announcements-request at sarai.net Wed Mar 13 11:31:47 2002 From: announcements-request at sarai.net (announcements-request at sarai.net) Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 07:01:47 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Announcements digest, Vol 1 #24 - 1 msg Message-ID: <200203130601.HAA16027@zelda.intra.waag.org> Send Announcements mailing list submissions to announcements at sarai.net To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to announcements-request at sarai.net You can reach the person managing the list at announcements-admin at sarai.net When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Announcements digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Fwd: Citizens' March 13-3-02 (Ranita Chatterjee) --__--__-- Message: 1 From: Ranita Chatterjee To: announcements at sarai.net Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 12:18:28 +0530 Subject: [Announcements] Fwd: Citizens' March 13-3-02 D.U. FORUM FOR DEMOCRACY Friends On the initiative of a large number of groups, organisations and eminent individuals, representing various walks of life and a spectrum of secular political parties, there will be a CITIZENS' MARCH in defence of democracy and secularism on WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13TH. The March will start at 11 am on the 13th of March, Wednesday, from Mandi House, (JNU City Centre), and move to Parliament. The two common minimum demands are 1. Resignation of the Modi government 2. Prosecution and punishment of VHP leadership and all those who engaged in violence during the carnage in Gujarat. PLEASE ATTEND AND MOBILISE OTHERS TO DO THE SAME. Svati Joshi and Javed Malick __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! http://mail.yahoo.com/ --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.333 / Virus Database: 187 - Release Date: 3/8/02 _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com D.U. FORUM FOR DEMOCRACY Friends On the initiative of a large number of groups, organisations and eminent individuals, representing various walks of life and a spectrum of secular political parties, there will be a CITIZENS' MARCH in defence of democracy and secularism on WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13TH. The March will start at 11 am on the 13th of March, Wednesday, from Mandi House, (JNU City Centre), and move to Parliament. The two common minimum demands are 1. Resignation of the Modi government 2. Prosecution and punishment of VHP leadership and all those who engaged in violence during the carnage in Gujarat. PLEASE ATTEND AND MOBILISE OTHERS TO DO THE SAME. Svati Joshi and Javed Malick __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! http://mail.yahoo.com/ --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.333 / Virus Database: 187 - Release Date: 3/8/02 _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------------- -- --__--__-- _______________________________________________ Announcements mailing list Announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements End of Announcements Digest From patrice at xs4all.nl Wed Mar 13 15:20:59 2002 From: patrice at xs4all.nl (Patrice Riemens) Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 10:50:59 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] San Diego, CA: Police closes in & down on Book Signing gig... (fwd) Message-ID: <20020313105059.B17661@xs4all.nl> From rustam at cseindia.org Wed Mar 13 16:43:42 2002 From: rustam at cseindia.org (rustam) Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 16:43:42 +530 Subject: [Reader-list] CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY Message-ID: <2E74A5EFF@cseindia.org> CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY Reflections on the Gujarat massacre By Harsh Mander Numbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat ten days after the terror and massacre that convulsed the state. My heart is sickened, my soul wearied, my shoulders aching with the burdens of guilt and shame. As you walk through the camps of riot survivors in Ahmadabad, in which an estimated 53,000 women, men, and children are huddled in 29 temporary settlements, displays of overt grief are unusual. People clutch small bundles of relief materials, all that they now own in the world, with dry and glassy eyes. Some talk in low voices, others busy themselves with the tasks of everyday living in these most basic of shelters, looking for food and milk for children, tending the wounds of the injured. But once you sit anywhere in these camps, people begin to speak and their words are like masses of pus released by slitting large festering wounds. The horrors that they speak of are so macabre, that my pen falters in the writing. The pitiless brutality against women and small children by organised bands of armed young men is more savage than anything witnessed in the riots that have shamed this nation from time to time during the past century. I force myself to write a small fraction of all that I heard and saw, because it is important that we all know. Or maybe also because I need to share my own burdens. What can you say about a woman eight months pregnant who begged to be spared. Her assailants instead slit open her stomach, pulled out her foetus and slaughtered it before her eyes. What can you say about a family of nineteen being killed by flooding their house with water and then electrocuting them with high-tension electricity. What can you say? A small boy of six in Juhapara camp described how his mother and six brothers and sisters were battered to death before his eyes. He survived only because he fell unconscious, and was taken for dead. A family escaping from Naroda-Patiya, one of the worst-hit settlements in Ahmedabad, spoke of losing a young woman and her three month old son, because a police constable directed her to ‘safety’ and she found herself instead surrounded by a mob which doused her with kerosene and set her and her baby on fire. I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat. There are reports every where of gang-rape, of young girls and women, often in the presence of members of their families, followed by their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one case with a screw driver. Women in the Aman Chowk shelter told appalling stories about how armed men disrobed themselves in front of a group of terrified women to cower them down further. In Ahmedabad, most people I met - social workers, journalists, survivors – agree that what Gujarat witnessed was not a riot, but a terrorist attack followed by a systematic, planned massacre, a pogrom. Everyone spoke of the pillage and plunder, being organised like a military operation against an external armed enemy. An initial truck would arrive broadcasting inflammatory slogans, soon followed by more trucks which disgorged young men, mostly in khaki shorts and saffron sashes. They were armed with sophisticated explosive materials, country weapons, daggers and trishuls. They also carried water bottles, to sustain them in their exertions. The leaders were seen communicating on mobile telephones from the riot venues, receiving instructions from and reporting back to a co-ordinating centre. Some were seen with documents and computer sheets listing Muslim families and their properties. They had detailed precise knowledge about buildings and businesses held by members of the minority community, such as who were partners say in a restaurant business, or which Muslim homes had Hindu spouses were married who should be spared in the violence. This was not a spontaneous upsurge of mass anger. It was a carefully planned pogrom. The trucks carried quantities of gas cylinders. Rich Muslim homes and business establishments were first systematically looted, stripped down of all their valuables, then cooking gas was released from cylinders into the buildings for several minutes. A trained member of the group then lit the flame which efficiently engulfed the building. In some cases, acetylene gas which is used for welding steel, was employed to explode large concrete buildings. Mosques and dargahs were razed, and were replaced by statues of Hanuman and saffron flags. Some dargahs in Ahmedabad city crossings have overnight been demolished and their sites covered with road building material, and bulldozed so efficiently that these spots are indistinguishable from the rest of the road. Traffic now plies over these former dargahs, as though they never existed. The unconscionable failures and active connivance of the state police and administrative machinery is also now widely acknowledged. The police is known to have misguided people straight into the hands of rioting mobs. They provided protective shields to crowds bent on pillage, arson, rape and murder, and were deaf to the pleas of the desperate Muslim victims, many of them women and children. There have been many reports of police firing directly mostly at the minority community, which was the target of most of the mob violence. The large majority of arrests are also from the same community which was the main victim of the pogrom. As one who has served in the Indian Administrative Service for over two decades, I feel great shame at the abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration. The law did not require any of them to await orders from their political superivisors before they organised the decisive use of force to prevent the brutal escalation of violence, and to protect vulnerable women and children from the organised, murderous mobs. The law instead required them to act independently, fearlessly, impartially, decisively, with courage and compassion. If even one official had so acted in Ahmedabad, she or he could have deployed the police forces and called in the army to halt the violence and protect the people in a matter of hours. No riot can continue beyond a few hours without the active connivance of the local police and magistracy. The blood of hundreds of innocents are on the hands of the police and civil authorities of Gujarat, and by sharing in a conspiracy of silence, on the entire higher bureaucracy of the country. I have heard senior officials blame also the communalism of the police constabulary for their connivance in the violence. This too is a thin and disgraceful alibi. The same forces have been known to act with impartiality and courage when led by officers of professionalism and integrity. The failure is clearly of the leadership of the police and civil services, not of the subordinate men and women in khaki who are trained to obey their orders. Where also, amidst this savagery, injustice, and human suffering is the ‘civil society’, the Gandhians, the development workers, the NGOs, the fabled spontaneous Gujarathi philanthropy which was so much in evidence in the earthquake in Kutch and Ahmedabad? The newspapers reported that at the peak of the pogrom, the gates of Sabarmati Asram were closed to protect its properties, it should instead have been the city’s major sanctuary. Which Gandhian leaders, or NGO managers, staked their lives to halt the death- dealing throngs? It is one more shame that we as citizens of this country must carry on our already burdened backs, that the camps for the Muslim riot victims in Ahmedabad are being run almost exclusively by Muslim organisations. It is as though the monumental pain, loss, betrayal and injustice suffered by the Muslim people is the concern only of other Muslim people, and the rest of us have no share in the responsibility to assuage, to heal and rebuild. The state, which bears the primary responsibility to extend both protection and relief to its vulnerable citizens, was nowhere in evidence in any of the camps, to manage, organise the security, or even to provide the resources that are required to feed the tens of thousands of defenceless women, men and children huddled in these camps for safety. The only passing moments of pride and hope that I experienced in Gujarat, were when I saw men like Mujid Ahmed and women like Roshan Bahen who served in these camps with tireless, dogged humanism amidst the ruins around them. In the Aman Chowk camp, women blessed the young band of volunteers who worked from four in the morning until after midnight to ensure that none of their children went without food or milk, or that their wounds remained untended. Their leader Mujid Ahmed is a graduate, his small chemical dyes factory has been burnt down, but he has had no time to worry about his own loss. Each day he has to find 1600 kilograms of foodgrain to feed some 5000 people who have taken shelter in the camp. The challenge is even greater for Roshan Bahen, almost 60, who wipes her eyes each time she hears the stories of horror by the residents in Juapara camp. But she too has no time for the luxuries of grief or anger. She barely sleeps, as her volunteers, mainly working class Muslim women and men from the humble tenements around the camp, provide temporary toilets, food and solace to the hundreds who have gathered in the grounds of a primary school to escape the ferocity of merciless mobs. As I walked through the camps, I wondered what Gandhiji would have done in these dark hours. I recall the story of the Calcutta riots, when Gandhi was fasting for peace. A Hindu man came to him, to speak of his young boy who had been killed by Muslim mobs, and of the depth of his anger and longing for revenge. And Gandhi is said to have replied: If you really wish to overcome your pain, find a young boy, just as young as your son, a Muslim boy whose parents have been killed by Hindu mobs. Bring up that boy like you would your own son, but bring him up with the Muslim faith to which he was born. Only then will you find that you can heal your pain, your anger, and your longing for retribution. There are no voices like Gandhi ’s that we hear today. Only discourses on Newtonian physics, to justify vengeance on innocents. We need to find these voices within our own hearts, we need to believe enough in justice, love, tolerance. There is much that the murdering mobs in Gujarat have robbed from me. One of them is a song I often sang with pride and conviction. The words of the song are: Sare jahan se achha Hindustan hamara It is a song I will never be able to sing again. (Harsh Mander, the writer, is a serving IAS Officer, who is working on deputation with a development organisation) **************************************************************** * NOTE CHANGE IN OUR EMAIL ADDRESS: PLEASE NOTE IT AS FOLLOWS * **************************************************************** CENTRE FOR SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT ( CSE ) 41, TUGHLAKABAD INSTITUTIONAL AREA, NEW DELHI- 110 062 TELE: 608 1110, 608 1124 608 3394, 608 6399 FAX : 91-11-608 5879 VISIT US AT: http://www.cseindia.org Email: rustam at cseindia.org **************************************************************** From abirbazaz at rediffmail.com Wed Mar 13 19:30:46 2002 From: abirbazaz at rediffmail.com (abir bazaz) Date: 13 Mar 2002 14:00:46 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] from The New Yorker Message-ID: <20020313140046.3381.qmail@mailweb23.rediffmail.com> LETTER FROM KASHMIR BETWEEN THE MOUNTAINS by Isabel Hilton Posted 2002-03-11 When the French doctor François Bernier entered the Kashmir Valley for the first time, in 1665, he was astounded by what he found. "In truth," he wrote, it "surpasses in beauty all that my warm imagination had anticipated. It is not indeed without reason that the Moghuls call Kachemire the terrestrial paradise of the Indies." The valley, which is some ninety miles long and twenty miles across, is sumptuously fertile. Along its floor, there are walnut and almond trees, orchards of apricots and apples, vineyards, rice paddies, hemp and saffron fields. There are woods on the lower slopes of the surrounding mountains—sycamore, oak, pine, and cedar. The southern side is bounded by the Pir Panjal, not the highest mountain range in Asia but one of the most striking, rising abruptly from the valley floor. The northern boundary is formed by the Great Himalayas. At the heart of the valley lie Dal Lake and the graceful capital, Srinagar. For Europeans, Kashmir became a locus of romantic dreams, inspiring writers like the Irish poet Thomas Moore, who didn't even need to visit it to understand its charms. "Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere," he wrote in 1817, "with its roses the brightest that earth ever gave." So seductive was this landlocked valley that, like a beautiful woman surrounded by jealous lovers, Kashmir attracted a succession of invaders, each eager to possess her. The Moghuls established their control in the sixteenth century. Kashmir became the northern limit of their Indian empire as well as their pleasure ground, a place to wait out the summer heat of the plains. They built gardens in Srinagar, along the shores of Dal Lake, with cool and elegantly proportioned terraces—with fountains and roses and jasmine and rows of chinar trees. The Moghul rulers were followed by the Afghans and, later, by the Sikhs from the Punjab, who were driven out in the nineteenth century by the British, who then sold the valley, to the abiding sh r seven and a half million rupees to the maharaja, Gulab Singh. Singh was the notoriously brutal Hindu ruler of Jammu, the region that lay to the south, beyond the Pir Panjal, on the edge of the plains of the Punjab. Under Singh, the Kashmir Valley was conjoined in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. According to one calculation of the purchase, the ruler of the newly formed state had bought the people of Kashmir for approximately three rupees each, a sum he was to recover many times over through taxation. For the maharaja and his descendants and their visitors, the valley was a luxurious paradise; they enjoyed fishing and duck shooting, boating excursions on Dal Lake, picnics in the hills and the saffron fields, moonlit parties in the magnificent gardens. In the penetrating cold of the winters, the visitors, and the maharaja, left the valley to itself and returned to Jammu. Kashmir was also a natural crossroads. The Silk Route, with its great camel trains from China, passed to the north, and the country's mountain passes opened routes to the Punjab, Afghanistan, and Jammu. Through them successive intruders brought different cultures that added layers to Kashmir's own. The Kashmiri language was a mixture of Persian, Sanskrit, and Punjabi; the handicrafts for which the valley was celebrated were Central Asian; and the religious faith was variously Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim. Sufi masters left a legacy of music and tolerance in their Muslim teachings. A Sikh who had lived many years in Srinagar described the culture of the valley as an old cloth so covered in patches that you can't see the original. Today, the valley is predominantly Muslim, but, as part of the maharaja's portmanteau state of Jammu and Kashmir, it still shares its destiny with other faiths and peoples: the Hindus of Jammu, the Buddhists of Ladakh, as well as Gilgits and Baltis, Hunzas and Mirpuris. There had been conflicts between the communities in the past, but by the mid-twentieth century Kashmir was an unusually tolerant culture. that Partition brought to the neighboring Punjab when the British left the subcontinent, in 1947. Kashmir's violence was to occur later, as the two new states of India and Pakistan became the latest of Kashmir's neighbors to fight over it. Today, Kashmir is partitioned—Pakistan controls slightly less than a third, India some sixty per cent, and China the rest. Most of Kashmir's twelve million people are concentrated in Indian-held territories, and the rest are mainly in Pakistan-held ones; relations among its many communities are now marked by mutual mistrust. And since the late eighties a bewildering number of combatants have fought a savage, irregular war that, in a steady daily toll of killing, has cost, depending on whom you believe, between thirty to eighty thousand lives. On the side of the Indian state, the participants include the local police, the Border Security Force, the Central Reserve Police Force, and the Army, supported by various intelligence organizations and a motley group of turncoat former militants who have muddied the public understanding of who, over the years, has done what to whom. Opposing them are a proliferation of Islamic militant groups. At one time, there were more than sixty of them. Several are fundamentalist and deadly—like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which are based in Pakistan (and have been listed as terrorists by the United States) and were recently banned by Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf. The largest group, the Hizbul Mujahideen, is Muslim but not, its supporters insist, fundamentalist, and most of its activists, who number around a thousand, are Kashmiris. Surrounding the insurgency is the wider, implacable hostility between India and Pakistan. But at its core is the story of a people who, for five centuries, have been longing to call their homeland their own. Last October, I was permitted to go into what Pakistan calls Azad ("Free") Kashmir, a territory that Pakistan maintains is truly autonomous but which depends entirely on the country's milit d existence. India calls the territory Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The entity has existed ever since Pakistan wrested this northwest third of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir from Indian control in a war that followed the 1947 Partition. For Pakistan, that war was the first step toward a liberation of Kashmir's Muslims from India. Once liberated, Pakistan hoped, the Kashmiris would join Muslim Pakistan. At the time of Partition, Jammu and Kashmir was still ruled by a Hindu maharaja, Hari Singh, a descendant of Gulab Singh. The maharaja was one of five hundred and sixty-two fabulously rich feudal monarchs whom the British had manipulated in order to maintain their grip on much of India. At Partition, these states were given a choice of joining India or Pakistan. Independence was not on offer. Most joined India. The maharaja dithered for months, unable to decide between two equally unattractive options. As a Hindu, he did not like Pakistan. As an Indian, he did not like the British. As a prince, he cared neither for the antifeudal Mahatma Gandhi nor for the local Muslim leader, Sheikh Abdullah, who favored autonomy for Kashmir but without its maharaja. Then, on October 20, 1947, armed tribesmen and regular troops from Pakistan invaded Kashmir. The maharaja appealed to India for support and hastily agreed to sign the now famous Instrument of Accession to India: the state of Kashmir and Jammu was accepted as part of the new federal union of India; in exchange, it was, exceptionally, granted a semiautonomous status. (India would control only matters of defense, foreign affairs, and communications; everything else was to be run by Jammu and Kashmir's own parliament.) Pakistan, furious, refused to accept the legality of the accession, and Pakistan and India fought their first war over Kashmir. In Pakistan, what is remembered was a promise made by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to hold a plebiscite in which the people of Kashmir could make their preferences clear. That plebiscite was never held. India was agreed to under United Nations supervision, Pakistan failed to withdraw from Azad Kashmir, a betrayal that, India says, vitiated the commitment to the plebiscite. Today, there are few routes that connect Azad Kashmir with Pakistan proper. Some fellow-journalists and I set out from Islamabad at 6:30 A.M. and drove for five hours along vertiginous valleys, through Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir, and on into the mountains to Chakothi, a town on what is now known as the Line of Control—the ceasefire line established in 1949, after that first war over Kashmir. There, we walked to a peaceful clearing and sat sipping fruit juice. An immaculately turned-out brigadier, Mohammed Yaqub, the commander of the sector, briefed us on the Pakistani version of the history of the present conflict. Tensions were unusually high. The United States bombing of Afghanistan had begun, and the military's view was that India might take advantage of the situation—troop movements had been detected. Yaqub's list of the casualties incurred in the last thirteen years of what he saw as Kashmir's freedom struggle against India was startling, even if undoubtedly exaggerated: 74,625 killed, 80,317 wounded, 492 adults burned alive, 875 schoolchildren burned alive, 15,812 raped, 6,572 sexually incapacitated, 37,030 disabled, 96,752 missing. We took a path that led to a bluff overlooking a tributary of the Jhelum River. There was a slender, deserted bridge. On the other side were the Indian Army fortifications. A line of washing flapped in a light breeze above a series of bunkers. I peered through binoculars at men peering through binoculars at me. They waved. I waved back. A Pakistani officer admitted that, in more relaxed times, he met his Indian counterparts on the bridge and shared tea and sweets. "We don't talk about the war," he said. Just as night was falling, we stopped at a refugee camp about an hour's drive away. A camp manager called on the refugees to tell stories of the atrocities that had forced them from their homes mir. The misery, no doubt, was real, but the exercise smelled too much of propaganda to be of any genuine interest. The message, though, was clear: Kashmir was the unspoken subtext of the Afghan war. Under President Musharraf, Pakistan had sided with the United States and backed the bombing of Afghanistan. Nearly twenty years earlier, Pakistan had also sided with the United States in its mission to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, by enlisting Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, the I.S.I., to arm and train Islamic warriors to lead the fight. The I.S.I. had seen the opportunity to foment discontent in Kashmir, and Islamic warriors were armed and trained and sent there as well. Both wars were seen as religious and patriotic causes. But now Musharraf had renounced the Taliban and his country's earlier ambition to dominate Afghanistan through support of its hard-line Islamist government. Would he also be forced to abandon a dream that Pakistan has clung to since 1947—of uniting the Muslims of Kashmir with the state of Pakistan? I met a member of one of the Kashmiri militant groups in Islamabad. He called himself Iqbal, though we both knew that it was not his name. He was a good-looking man in his early forties, with black hair beginning to gray. We had arranged to meet in an outdoor café. He was nervous, and constantly scanned the customers until he insisted that we move to a different location. We drove around the city looking for somewhere to talk. Eventually, he took me to a house in an affluent district of the city, a two-story villa set back from the street by high walls. There, we sat on the floor, and he told me his story. Iqbal had grown up in a Kashmir that preserved the memory—from before the Moghuls—of an independent country. For him, the Instrument of Accession was important because, in granting special autonomy, it implicitly acknowledged the idea of Kashmiri independence. But the Indian government, anxious about Pakistan's ambitions and uncertain of Kashmiri loyalty, regularly encroach shmir's popular Prime Minister, Sheikh Abdullah, was removed and arrested (he was suspected of autonomous leanings)—the first in a series of detentions that continued through the sixties. In 1963, a sacred relic—a hair of the Prophet's beard—disappeared from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar, and demonstrations erupted. The following year, India passed an order that allowed the Indian President to rule directly in Kashmiri affairs. By then, Muslim sentiments in the valley were hardening. The long-established Kashmiri tradition of tolerance—the pluralism that had accommodated so many different faiths and cultures—was breaking down in the frustration generated by India's interference. One friend described to me what the valley was like in the late seventies and early eighties. There were, he recalled, fevered political discussions, stimulated by activist teachers who distributed everything from the works of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to the teachings of Mao Zedong. Kashmiris were impatient for change. Their hopes were focussed on elections that were to take place in 1987. The chief minister was Farooq Abdullah, who had returned to power after having been dismissed by Indira Gandhi, in 1984. He had regained his position by allying himself with the Indian National Congress Party, and many regarded him as a traitor to the cause of Kashmir. The opposition was led by the Muslim United Front, a coalition of ten or so Muslim parties campaigning on a platform of Islamic unity and greater autonomy for Kashmir. Iqbal was a student at the university in Srinagar and was involved in the electoral campaign. "The 1987 elections were our last hope," he told me. Eighty per cent of the population of the valley turned out to vote. When the results were declared, Farooq Abdullah's pro-India Conference-Congress alliance had—to the dismay and disbelief of the voters—won a two-thirds majority. The fraud had been crude and blatant. In one constituency in Srinagar, witnesses told me, the result had been publicly declared, only to b er. After the election, opposition candidates and party members were arrested. There were widespread street protests, which were brutally suppressed. "When the results were declared," Iqbal said, "people decided that we could not free our land through peaceful means." Iqbal joined an underground group and was arrested. "I was in jail for two and a half years without trial," he said. When he was released, he was immediately rearrested and held for another two years. He was released and arrested again. Iqbal returned to the university in Srinagar, but during an Army search an informer identified him as a militant. He was detained again. This time, he said, he was tortured. (According to Amnesty International, in Jammu and Kashmir torture has become so routine in the arrest-and-detention process that it is rarely reported.) But this time, once he was released, Iqbal took up arms. He joined Hizbul Mujahideen and spent three years as an underground militant. He was arrested three more times, before he finally escaped to Pakistan. He had spent, he said, fourteen years in prison, about half his adult life. "If you want to talk about Kashmir," he said, "you must talk about the eighty thousand innocent martyrs. It's a death rate of fifteen innocent civilians to every one Indian soldier." A few weeks after I met with Iqbal, that balance shifted, marginally but dramatically, in the other direction. At eleven-forty on the morning of December 13th, in New Delhi, five men dressed in olive-green fatigues and armed with assault rifles, grenades, and explosives drove a white official car, complete with flashing lights and security passes, through the gates of the Indian Parliament complex. The session had just ended, and the politicians were beginning to disperse. It was only after security guards noticed the car turn the wrong way that they became suspicious. A guard ran after it, calling to the driver to stop. Alarmed, the Vice-President's security guard, waiting by his official vehicle, challenged the white car. Gunfire c he Vice-President's vehicle, and the men inside ran toward the Parliament building. In the ensuing firefight, all five terrorists were killed, along with eight security personnel and a gardener. The car was found to be packed with explosives. The target of the assault was the Parliament building itself. Although the identity of the terrorists was not established, the Pakistan-based groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed were named by the Indian government, and the Indian press published calls to finish this long quarrel with Pakistan once and for all with a full-scale war. In Pakistan, President Musharraf condemned the attack and banned the two groups, closing down their offices and arresting dozens of their members as well as other extremists. But in the following weeks tensions between the subcontinent's hostile neighbors heightened, and India began to lay mines along the border. The future of Kashmir was once again reduced to a poisonous contest between these rival nations. Each claimed to have the loyalty of the Kashmiri people and blamed the other for the conflict. In this deafening exchange, the voice of Kashmir was silent. Ramesh Mahanoori is a Pandit, a Kashmiri Hindu who, like most of the half million people in his community, lived until 1990 in relative prosperity in the Kashmir Valley. The Pandits formed the backbone of the professional class, and filled most of the teaching and government jobs. They had deep roots and high status in the valley, and lived side by side with Muslims, sharing the Kashmiri traditions of song and poetry, eating in each other's houses, sometimes worshipping at common holy sites. The harmony between the communities, so distinct from the tensions and violence elsewhere in India, was part of a general culture—the so-called Kashmiriyat—of which both Hindus and Muslims were proud. Even when Partition unleashed mass murder between Muslims and Hindus elsewhere, in Kashmir neighbors of different faiths preserved their courtesies and communal tolerance. But between Janu at tolerance ended, and a quarter of a million Pandits fled the Kashmir Valley, driven out by murders, riots, and death threats. The Pandits had become early victims of the new Muslim insurgency. Ramesh Mahanoori was once a teacher in the Kashmir Valley. Now in his fifties, he received me in a tiny one-room house in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the city of Jammu. A large bed took up much of the room. There was a sliver of living space where a child sat on the floor, bent over a book; behind a curtain was a crude kitchen where Mr. Mahanoori's wife could be heard preparing tea. A tap outside served as the bathroom. We sat, cross-legged, on the bed, along with two of Mr. Mahanoori's friends. As we talked, his wife appeared and burrowed beneath the bed. "That's where we keep the stores," he explained. For Mr. Mahanoori, the expulsion of the Pandits was a straightforward case of betrayal. It began, he believed, with the Islamist underground, financed by the I.S.I. Its leaders had started organizing in Kashmir in 1986, and after the farce of the 1987 elections their followers increased. In 1989, an orchestrated campaign of executions began. "The first assassination was of a lawyer," Mr. Mahanoori said. "It was followed by other killings—three hundred and ninety highly selective killings of doctors, engineers, educators, judges. All labelled Indian agents. All our intellectuals." The government, he said, gave no protection. "There was a clear message from the majority that they could no longer live with the Pandits. The Muslims were all united under the banner of azad—freedom. Pakistan was their mentor." Warnings were posted that Pandits who remained in the valley would be killed. Muslim activists set businesses on fire as the police stood by. Fear gave way to panic, and families began to leave. There were rumors of death lists in the local mosques. Pandits throughout the valley hastily packed and fled. Many ended up in the Hindu-dominated security of Jammu, in the south, imagining that they would return in a their property was looted. Twelve years later, most of them are still refugees. I heard endless variations of the Pandit story. Some people believed, genuinely, that the assassinated men had been agents of the Indian state. Others believed that the violence had been orchestrated from New Delhi (thus the lack of official interference); this way, the Kashmiri insurgents could be condemned for ethnic cleansing and dealt with accordingly. All versions agreed that the expulsion was brutal, sudden, and comprehensive. Mr. Mahanoori recalled that in the village where he grew up in Kashmir he had been surrounded by members of his extended family. In the flight, they have scattered, and they rarely meet. "We had the same surnames as the Muslims," he said. "We were all related. They just converted to Islam—only three hundred years ago. Our cultures resembled each other. Here, in Jammu, we are aliens. We have nothing in common with these people." Now there is a generation of children growing up in a world bounded by the camps. For them, Kashmir is a name, the source of their parents' sadness, something that marks them as different from the people of Jammu. They no longer speak the Kashmiri language, Mr. Mahanoori said. He longed for war. India, he said, should go to war with Pakistan, to resolve this issue once and for all. As I flew to Srinagar, I had few fellow-passengers—some Indian military personnel, a handful of Kashmiris, and one other foreigner. Even the most intrepid trekkers now prefer to explore other, less dangerous mountains, and the tourist trade that used to sustain the economy has dwindled. The road into the city was an obstacle course made from an eclectic selection of barriers: metal bars set with eight-inch-long spikes, rolls of razor wire, and oil drums filled with concrete, which forced cars to weave a slow slalom path between them. Each barrier was guarded by men with automatic weapons. Beside one, in a bizarre juxtaposition, a poster offered a seductive welcome. "Kashmir—an adventure," it s of forests." The light was fading as I reached the last barrier before my hotel, which had been recommended as a secure place to stay. The driver stopped and switched on the interior light. Beyond my own reflection in the glass, an armed guard was peering suspiciously into the car. In the deserted lobby, Muzak was playing to empty armchairs. Three men looked up from the reception desk in surprise. The lobby was so cold that I could see their breath in the dank atmosphere. India has now fought three direct wars with Pakistan, two of them over Kashmir. For India, the insurgency that began in the late eighties is another war with Pakistan—a proxy war, in which the enemy is Pakistani-trained infiltrators, with weapons and money supplied by the Pakistani intelligence services. This invasion of its territory, India argues, is a straightforward attack on its sovereignty, and demands defending. For India, Kashmir's status is incontrovertible: it is a part of the Indian state, a senior official told me, and there is no negotiation on either sovereignty or territory. India's response, therefore, has been a military one. But the nature of that response has created a conflict with the wider population of the Kashmir Valley. Early in the morning on January 13th, four days before I arrived in Srinagar, two men were shot dead by Indian security forces, on a road near Dal Lake. Their names were Ahmed el Bakiouli and Khalid el Hassnoui, and it was reported that they were foreigners who had attacked a Border Security Force patrol. In the ensuing incident, the two men were fired on by soldiers on watch in a fortified bunker nearby. By the time local photographers arrived, Ahmed and Khalid were dead. The fact that Indian soldiers had shot two men was not in itself newsworthy. Since 1947, India has maintained a heavy security presence in Kashmir, one that is now half a million strong. To the local Kashmiris, these forces look and behave like an occupying army. With the exception of the local police—who are regarded with suspicio ry forces drawn from elsewhere in India—few of these forces speak Kashmiri. They, in turn, are far from home, surrounded by people whose language they cannot understand, and threatened by an enemy they cannot identify. To the Indian security forces, anyone they encounter could be a terrorist infiltrated from Pakistan. "If a dog barks in the market," one trader told me, "the Indians call him a Pakistani." The men the soldiers are looking for belong to any number of dangerous militant groups, many with competing objectives—some wanting independence from India, or an Islamic state, or a union with Pakistan. Several groups began to impose a more severe version of Islam on the tolerant culture of the valley: women were made to wear veils, and bars and beauty parlors were closed down. Foreigners were attacked. In 1995, a Pakistan-based Islamic rebel group kidnapped six Western trekkers: four vanished and one escaped; the sixth was decapitated. There were plane hijackings, which sometimes led to the release of captured terrorist leaders; armed encounters in the mountains and villages; and car bombs and grenade attacks in the cities. Indian security forces responded with repressive tactics. Shopkeepers and university professors, impoverished farmers and well-heeled businessmen continue to complain of routine cruelty exercised by the security forces during cordon searches: entire districts are sealed off, and the inhabitants are turned out of their houses and made to squat in the cold for hours as the troops ransack their homes. Men and boys are beaten; there are shootings; valuables go missing. For the Indian security forces, such operations are a necessary part of a war against an unseen enemy—one who might be disguised as a market trader or as a schoolboy or even, as in the case of Ahmed and Khalid, as a pair of out-of- season travellers. But this time it was not just the people of Srinagar who were skeptical of the official account. Ahmed and Khalid, it emerged, were neither Kashmiri nor Pakistani. They were Dutch had ostensibly come to Srinagar as downmarket tourists. They had valid travel documents, had signed in at the Foreign Registration Office in Srinagar, and had been spotted at the Tourist Reception Center by a rickshaw driver named Amin Bakto, who was there looking for business. Bakto had invited them to stay at his houseboat, and they had been there for a week, when, according to an inspector general of the Border Security Force, they had gravely injured two of his men in an unprovoked terrorist attack. Amin Bakto's houseboat, the Happy New Year, sits in a dirty side canal, greasy green water lapping against the boat's peeling paint. Bakto is a small, spare man, and he talked in nervous bursts, as though he were unable to shake the apprehension that he might somehow be implicated in the events that had led to the deaths of his paying guests. He lives with his family on an adjacent houseboat, and was willing to show me where the two Dutch nationals had slept for the week that they had been his guests. It was a small room that contained little more than a double bed, which they had shared. Gaping holes in the floor were the consequence of the police search that had followed the killing. The room smelled of stagnant canal. Ahmed and Khalid had paid him two hundred rupees a night (about four dollars), Mr. Bakto told me, a sum that included the use of a heater and breakfast, which he had served himself at nine o'clock each morning. The men were pleasant and quiet, he said, and occasionally played with his children. He never saw them pray or visit the local mosque. On the day they died, he had gone to offer them breakfast as usual, but found that they had left. The Happy New Year was empty, the doors and windows open. The men had set out along the towpath to a nearby road. By 7:20 A.M., they were both dead, sprawled some twenty yards apart on a road now spattered with their blood. Later, the police had found on the houseboat the packaging to a pair of large kitchen knives, apparently bought in a local bazaar. The the evidence that connected the two Dutchmen to a network of international terror. No local witnesses came forward to corroborate the security forces' story, and almost nobody I met believed the account. The version favored by the local newspapers was that the patrol had been abusing a local woman, and the two Dutchmen had attempted to intervene. Others believed that they had been challenged by the patrol on their way back from morning prayers. They might not have understood an Indian soldier's command to halt. In either case, they risked being shot. I went to visit Inspector General Gill, who commands the Border Security Force in Srinagar, and whose men had killed the Dutchmen. I had met him on my first evening in town at a rather stiff party attended by the local commanders of the security and intelligence forces in the district. He had seemed cultured and courteous, and it was difficult to connect him with the acts of torture and repression blamed on the men he commanded. He had suggested that we meet at his bungalow in a hilltop compound that houses government servants. At the first barrier, my car was searched, and the driver and I were body-searched. At the second barrier, we were assigned guards to take us through the third barrier, where an armored car was parked, guarding the approach road. The final barrier was beside the compound gate. From there, I walked to the house. We talked in a small, bare sitting room, warmed by a large metal stove that crackled in the corner. Gill is a slim man of fifty-one, a Sikh from the Punjab. For him, there was no doubt that the two Dutchmen were terrorists. Their attack, he said, had been unprovoked. They had inflicted eight stab wounds on his men before they were shot; one of his men lost an eye. For Gill, the Dutchmen reinforced his conviction that the war in Kashmir was sustained from outside—a Pakistani proxy war. He admitted that there was no evidence of a Pakistani connection in the Dutchmen's case. "Do I have to prove that everyone has a past career?" he aske eneral point: If Pakistan, with its connections to international terror, would stop sending militants into Kashmir, the trouble would subside overnight. It was a conviction that was shared by the Indian government and widely reflected in India's national press. Besides, he insisted, his men did not shoot people without cause, and the many allegations of torture and disappearance made against his forces were scrupulously investigated. And almost none, he said, stood up. The local press was unconvinced, even though it had been thoroughly briefed on the incident by Gill himself. The widely held feeling in the valley is that the insurgency is no longer masterminded from Pakistan or anywhere else: the native-born movement is now well established, after years of Indian abuses. And that feeling was reinforced by the killing of the Dutch tourists, regardless of what actually happened. Perhaps the men, armed only with kitchen knives, attacked a military patrol. But the belief is that this army of occupation can shoot anyone it wants to, anytime, with impunity. I tried to explore the region around Srinagar. The roads to the border, where Indian and Pakistani troops continued to exchange mortar fire, were blocked with snow. To travel outside the city was dangerous. The splendid Moghul fort perched on a hill above Srinagar was occupied by the Army. I found myself circling the city, trying not to feel caged. The streets were wet and muddy, with piles of dirty snow. The light was flat and weak, filtered through a morning fog that rarely dispersed during the day. As I drove around, the sense of military occupation was oppressive. On every street, people were being stopped and searched by Indian soldiers, taxi-drivers opening the trunks of their cars for inspection, lines of bus passengers waiting to be frisked. My car was frequently stopped, my documents inspected, and my driver closely questioned. I was harangued by Indian soldiers who considered the stamp on my press pass insufficiently clear. In the evenings, Srinagar w stakable. As night fell, the people I met and talked to often began to fidget, caught between the obligations of hospitality and their anxiety that I leave before the streets became unsafe. Nobody, they told me, goes out after dark. A tremulous sociology professor described to me the social effects of the long war—migration, unemployment, broken families, a startlingly high rate of suicide. "It's the constant fear," he said. "Torture, tension. Even at home, the security forces can arrive at any minute. We used to be a leisured people. Now all our entertainment has gone. It's out of the question to go out." Education had deteriorated in the wake of the Pandits' departure, he told me; young women cannot find husbands, married women are widowed and destitute. He urged me to walk around the old city, a district I had been warned against, to discover how people really felt. It was a hotbed of militancy, I was told, and subject to constant cordon searches. "Talk to people," the professor said. "No one will harm you." After a pause, he seemed to think better of his assurances. "Don't tell anyone in advance. Don't make an appointment, in case, in their innocence, they tell someone you are coming. And don't stay more than half an hour in the same place." It was now dark, and he was agitated. I drove through the rapidly emptying streets, ready for another evening of chilly confinement in my hotel. But that evening I had a visitor. I had called Commander Chauhan, of the Border Security Force, several times, and now he appeared, exuding friendly confidence, eager to show me the sights—at 9 P.M., long past the hour when civilians had abandoned the city. The Commander was a portly, bespectacled man dressed in a camouflage jacket and a black beret, and carrying a polished swagger stick and a walkie-talkie. He bustled jauntily into the hotel's freezing dining room and greeted the waiters by name. The waiters smiled anxiously. The Commander was eager to stress that he had excellent relations with the local people. His job, them from the militants. His unit had adopted a girl who had been attacked with acid by Islamic fundamentalists for failing to wear a veil. There were orphans whom his men took care of. And, he assured me, they were steadily weaning the Kashmiris off Islamic extremism. Normality, he announced, was visibly returning. "You see girls driving cars, boys and girls on motor scooters, going out to the lake, going to hotels, cinemas, and beauty parlors," he said. I had seen none of those things. The security forces, as he described them, were dedicated to social welfare: "If someone's wife goes into labor in the evening, they just ring up. I send a car to take her to hospital. I have had so many calls to say thank you." I didn't doubt it. Anyone moving around the city at night without military protection, pregnant or not, risked being detained as a terrorist. As though reading my thoughts, Commander Chauhan suddenly said, "What have you seen? I wish we had met earlier. I could have taken you on the lake. We have motor launches, you know. I'll take you out now, to see the city." Outside, his jeep backed slowly to the door, as six soldiers armed with automatic weapons walked alongside. I climbed into the front, the Commander took the wheel, and the soldiers jumped into the back. Another vehicle moved up behind us. We then pulled out into the deserted street and embarked on a tour of the city. "This is the polo ground," he said. He waved a hand vaguely at the darkness. "But they don't play much polo these days. And here—this is the golf course. Excellent golf." We drove on in the empty street. "This is the canal." We turned toward the lake. "Have you seen the Nishat Gardens?" he inquired. Before I could reply, I was blinded by the beam of a searchlight which had appeared from inside a bunker. The Commander braked sharply. A man jumped out from the back of our vehicle and explained our presence to a group of nervous soldiers whose guns were trained on him and on us. Satisfied, they allowed us to pass, and the Commander ption of the delights of boating on Dal Lake. I found myself recalling an incident described to me by a lecturer in the English department of the Srinagar university. A group of graduate students doing research on the lake one day were shot dead in their boat. A few hundred yards further on, we found ourselves inching around oil drums and rows of spikes in the road, and came to a stop before a final improvised barrier of rocks—and another checkpoint. At the next bunker, however, we failed to stop in time, and there was a fusillade of hostile shouts. Commander Chauhan braked violently. A soldier in the back climbed out, his hands raised, and stood for several minutes in front, in the glare of the headlights, trying to talk down the guard whose gun was trained on him. I held my breath. Five more guns were pointing at the jeep. Even Commander Chauhan had fallen silent. At last, the soldier gradually lowered his arms. Commander Chauhan had lost a little of his bounce. For the first time, he seemed to feel that he should acknowledge the surreal character of a city tour in which even a senior officer risked being shot by his men. "Actually," he said, "we give them orders that every vehicle must be stopped. You never know which vehicle a terrorist might be driving." As he picked up speed, his faith in his mission returned. "We are keeping them safe," he said. We turned back through the deserted streets of the old city. There was hardly a light showing, but for Commander Chauhan this didn't mean that people were afraid to go out. "Look," he said triumphantly, "they are all in bed with their wives and their blankets, and my men are out here, keeping them safe!" Suddenly, he turned to me. "What did people tell you, by the way?" "They said they wanted independence," I replied bluntly. "That they were afraid of your men and their searches." I stopped short of telling him how many rejoiced when Indian soldiers were killed. "Did you ask them why we search them?" he said. I had not, of course, though I could imagine Chauha risked people, in an exercise in hearts-and-minds didacticism, cheerfully explaining his motives as their humiliation deepened. I asked him how many terrorists he thought there were. "Very few, these days," he replied. Why, then, did the government need to keep half a million men here? "Because," he replied quietly, "you don't know who they are." The conflict over Kashmir has entrenched the worst suspicions that India and Pakistan nurse about each other. For India, the separate Muslim state of Pakistan represents a rejection of the secularism that India believes to be essential to keeping its own rival religious communities at peace. If Kashmir's Muslims were to join Pakistan, what signal would that send to the more than a hundred million Muslims elsewhere in India? For Pakistan, India's refusal to allow Kashmiri Muslims to join the Pakistani state merely confirms its conviction that India never abandoned a long-term ambition to establish Hindu domination on the subcontinent, or that it even accepted Pakistan's existence. But for the people of the Kashmir Valley, with their distant dreams of independence, neither neighbor offers a solution. Pakistan's muscular Islam is at odds with Kashmir's Sufi-inspired traditions. The Muslims and Pandits of the valley speak a different language from the language of India or Pakistan. Neither country is home, and each, in turn, has been a threat: after all, it was the incursion of tribal raiders from Pakistan in 1947 that brought Indian troops in retaliation. Thirteen years into the insurgency, the local politicians in Kashmir, like the competing militant groups, have conflicting objectives. Even members of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, which was formed in 1993 by more than thirty political parties to act as a voice of a people who felt themselves disenfranchised, are quarrelsome and deeply divided. I met many members, and asked them what they wanted for the country. I got many different answers. One wanted union with Pakistan. One wanted independence. Others with real autonomy within the Indian state. Some had links to the militants; others did not. Each claimed to represent a general majority. From shuddha at sarai.net Wed Mar 13 20:53:00 2002 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 20:53:00 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY In-Reply-To: <2E74A5EFF@cseindia.org> References: <2E74A5EFF@cseindia.org> Message-ID: <02031320530000.01354@sweety.sarai.kit> I would like to thank Rustam, for forwarding us this text on the Gujrat massacre by Harsh Mander. While press and television reporting on the issue of Gujrat has named the victims, has said that the majority of people killed were muslims, and has not glossed over the identities of their killers, the same reports have continued to sing the song of a "failure of an administrative machinery" in Gujrat. Harsh Mander's text shows that what we witnessed was not the failure, but the success of the administrative machinery. It is not a question of whether the political leadership were failing to do their job, rather it was the fact that they were doing it only too well, that no journalist could find himself saying. A similar reticence once used to surround the figure of a man called Slobodan Milosevic and the apparatus of the rump of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. We must remember, that there was a long period when the leaders of the western democracies, and the world media which today pillories him as a war criminal, spoke instead of his 'inability' to control the serb militias. And spoke of the killings in Ex-Yugoslavia as if they were an epidemic of unexplainable and irrational violence. What makes such circumstances occur that the names of towns become synonymous with pogroms? Time and again, with a disgusting, monotonous, clockwork regularity? I think that one factor is the amnesia, or the scotoma (the inability to see something in front of your eyes) that is required of us, that we see every instance of violence that we witness as a 'breakdown' of normality, and not as the 'intensification' of normality. To do this would be to ask too fundamental a question about the nature of our polities, and about what we have come to accept as a 'normal state of affairs' . This is a question that the media are not in a position to ask. The media are a part of that reality. they contribute above all, to the framing of what is constructed as 'normality'. Hence the diffidence, hence the gentle hedging of the hard questions that came along with the sincere and heartfelt expressions of grief and outrage on our television screens. Barkha Dutt, in a recently telecast episode of "Reality Bites" for instance, was all sympathy for the bereaved, and referred predictabley, to the tardiness of the state in protecting the lives of the victims of the rioting. Sympathy for victims of violence in times of violence is what one would expect from any human being. And in performatively frontaging that sympathy Barkha (and she is not alone, this is true for the entire media reportage of Gujrat) was doing only what can be reasonabley expected of human beings. I would argue that we should raise questions as to whether or not this is adequate in terms of an ethical practice of journalism. Whether exhibiting a sympathy for the figure of the victim and maintaining a silence about the apparatus that enables a systematic degree of organisation and military precision that underwrote the violence, is ethically tenable? Why can no journalists ever bring themselves to ask this un-equivocally when the facts speak so clearly for themselves? Gujrat only demonstrates what should be common knowledge by now - there is at all times, a readiness to riot, just as there is at all times, a readiness to go to war in our society. The instruments, the routines, the technologies of mass violence have been learnt to perfection and they are part of the way we live. They encompass everything from how electoral registers can reach those who lead mobs to how there can be so effective a deployment of weapons by organisations that are not military. Where are the arsenals, (where are they located in times of peace and who looks after them?) and how do the records of identity, electoral records, registers of property ownership, details of the memberships of housing societies, names of the partners, in a marriage or a buisiness, reach the hands of the arsonist? What are the channels of information and how does the knowledge necessary to start a pogrom move, and move so quickly? The state requires this readiness in order to be able to unleash onto society a violence that can be perceived as catastrophic, which can then lead us on to demand the imposition of military measures to control the situation. This is precisely what has happenned. As used to be the familiar adage of doordarshan news reports the "situation is (always) tense, but under control" - "sthiti tanavpoorn magar niyantran mein hai" (hamesha) Harsh Mander's text clearly demonstrates that violence on the scale that we have witnessed in the recent days cannot be without the active connivance of the state machinery. He knows what the state machinery can and cannot do, he is speaking as he himself says, as someone who has spent twenty years in the Indian Administrative Service. He knows what a district magistrate, or a commissioner of police can and cannot do. He knows what they have not done. In a television interview, the chief minister of Gujrat, proudly stated that this time, Gujrat has the highest record of deaths due to police firing in the entire history of communal violence in India, and that hundreds of people have been arrested already, or taken into preventive custody. That this was an instance of the state machinery acting, and acting decisively. Indeed it was. But did any journalist ask how many of those killed in Police Firing happened to be muslims, or what was the ratio of hindu to muslim detainees. We need only to hear what Harsh Mander has to say - "There have been many reports of police firing directly mostly at the minority community, which was the target of most of the mob violence. The large majority of arrests are also from the same community which was the main victim of the pogrom. " The state was acting, and it was acting decisively. The events in Gujrat immediately brings back memories of the 1984 killings of sikhs in Delhi. And the connivance of the machinery of a 'secular' state in holding our city to ransom, and the killings of thousands of people. Today, while walking in a march through New Delhi demonstrating against the killings, I was saddened most of all by the way in which senior leaders of the political forces that orchestrated the killings of 1984 could be seen excercising their spin on what was obviously ordinary rage and anger at the events of Gujrat Arrayed on the stage, expressing their anguish, where leaders of political forces who have successfully erased the truth of the 1984 sikh killings out of public memory. It was akin to seeing the butchers of some gulag weep at the threshold of some aushcwitz. What is worst in our time is our inability as people to express the singularity of our outrage, to say that one doesnt necessary sit and do the bidding of the spin doctors in times of grief. On the other hand to hear Harsh Mander say that he cannot any longer sing "Sare Jahan Se Accha Hindustan Hamara", can give our refusal to acquiesce to violence a critical edge that is difficult to find at present. I hope that more of us can join the ranks of his silence and his disgust that has the courage to express itself without flying flags, or singing anthems. From shuddha at sarai.net Wed Mar 13 23:06:58 2002 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 23:06:58 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Argentina Today, India Day After Tomorrow ? Message-ID: <02031323065802.01354@sweety.sarai.kit> Dear Readers "In bad times, one must always have one eye looking elsewhere" Old Patagonian Saying I thought that it would be useful to have one eye of this list turned to other places, especially as these are bad times in our neighbourhood. Every four years, Whenever the World Cup Football championships happen, some neighbourhoods in Calcutta discover that they are actually Argentinian. They fly the Argentinian colours and do a Bongo version of the Tango. They forget afterwards and go back to being fish eating Bengalis soon after Argentina either wins or loses the world cup. How fickle. Just as what Bengal thought day before yesterday, India did yesterday, what Argentina is today, India may be day after tomorrow. I just thought that we should be prepared for that when it happens. (like the football fans in calcutta) So here is a posting forwarded by someone called Diana McCarty from someone called Lisa Garrigues on a list called Undercurrents (undercurrents at bbs.thing.net) about what it is like to be living in Argentina today. Cheers(?) Shuddha __________________________________________________________________________________________ ON EVERYDAY LIFE IN BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA From: lisa garrigues Date: Friday, February 15, 2002 4:51 PM To: lisagarrigues at yahoo.com Subject: more cazerolazos Dear Friends, I'm writing this in a public locutorio, surrounded by pre-teen boys who are all playing attack video games and shouting to each other back and forth about "killing terrorists." This for some reason makes me think of my own president Bush, who seems to be finding terrorists all over the place with the same fervor as this kid who shouting next to me. Funny, isn't it? Seems like the more of 'em you kill, the more they just keep popping up all over the place. Yesterday I read that the FBI considers our very own home-grown organization the Earth Liberation Front, who has a history of damaging the equipment of corporations who want to cut down trees, one of the "most dangerous terrorist groups in the country." So now I guess you don't even have to have a foreign accent to be a terrorist. Down here in Argentina, we all read about the CIA naming Argentina as one of the Latin American trouble spots. The U.S. is also now planning a nuclear plant of some kind in Patagonia, in the South of Argentina. That should really help calm things down here, you bet. Meanwhile I continue to watch, listen and participate in the changes occurring here. The citywide cazerolazos, which initially started out as a spontaneous outburst, are becoming a regular Friday evening event, with thousands of people gathering in their barrio with kids and dogs and then marching to the Plaza de Mayo, chanting, singing, dancing, banging on pots and pans. And during the week, there are continuing protests in front of banks and industries, and the private homes of corrupt officials, as well as roads being cut by the unemployed workers called piqueteros. Though people continue to be nervous about marching to the Plaza because of the past violence and deaths there, the last few cazerolazos have occured without incident. In fact, in one of them, a young man who threw a bottle at the police was chased down and surrounded by an angry but nonviolent crowd who prevented him from provoking any further violence. Watching the neighborhood assemblies evolve has been a fascinating observation of direct democracy at work. My own, Colegiales, (web site: colegiales.tripod.com.ar) started about six weeks ago, when a guy named Fede spray painted "Assembly Meeting tonight 10:00PM on the sidewalk. Six people showed up. Now we average about two hundred, everyone spilling out onto the street, into the intersection. Commissions and subgroups and workshops have evolved from that first meeting, and neighbors have been coming together not only to solve immediate situations like how to get food and medicine to people who need it, but also to discuss the overall direction of the assemblies, and their relationship to the existing government. For the moment, the majority consensus on the latter point seems to be "let them come to us if they want to, the sons of bitches." For many, the idea of the assemblies is to build power from the bottom up, and some have compared themselves to existing movements like the zapatistas, who have no intention of "taking over" the state. It's a young movement, with as yet a lot of questions still being asked. As such, people in the assemblies and commission meetings have a tremendous need to talk, which means meetings can sometimes go on for hours without anything at all getting "accomplished", everyone talking and shouting over everyone else. At a recent meeting the "talking stick" was suggested to get everyone to slow down and pay attention to each other. Since we were in a cafe, we used a cappucino spoon. It seemed to work; the atmosphere changed dramatically, and people actually listened to one another, though there were occasional flurries of everyone talking at once, and at one point the cappuccino spoon went flying across the table. My assembly, which is in a small neighborhood bordering on several larger ones, contains people of all ages and classes, from the 74 year old Peronista who identifies himself as "definitely working class" and remembers the speeches of Evita in the Plaza de Mayo (" She was the real freedom fighter, not Peron") to the woman in her forties who insists that the assemblies, as a largely "middle class" movement differentiate themselves from the working class piqueteros and their tactics, to the 21 year old woman who wakes up every Thursday morning thinking "Oh boy, another neighborhood assembly! I wonder what will happen tonight!" Fear continues to be a big topic of conversation. Recently, one friend, Anibal, who lost his brother during the dictatorship, says the older generation is fearful because they remember the deaths and tortures of the proceso and the younger generation is fearful because they were born in an atmosphere of fear. The rumours and overall insecurity of the situation here don't help much to alleviate the fear. Recently someone emailed a picture of a dead body to some members of the assembly along with the words "Up with the Military". And someone else received an email about English mercenaries being sent in to foment civil war. It's difficult to know what to believe in a country where all your money has been taken from you by your own bank, if you are lucky enough to have any money. "The banks used to have signs in them that said, 'Your money is safe with us' one woman said recently. 'I notice they have taken those signs down.' Meanwhile the prices of food and other articles have shot up overnight as a result of devaluation, in some cases doubling, while salaries continue to be cut and often paid a month or two late. Unemployed professionals I know are giving up the apartments they can no longer afford, and moving in with friends. Others have literally run out of food and are having to depend on friends and or families to eat. The long line of people in front of second hand store on Cabildo selling off their vaccuum cleaners, microwave ovens, casseroles, twenty year old cameras, and other belongings gets longer every day. And this is in Buenos Aires, where people generally have it a lot better than in the provinces. Though one man I met from Salta said he was going back there because "here, it's just too hard. At least in salta if you get hungry you can get your gun and kill an animal. " I figured he meant a wild animal, but recently I have heard stories about people killing cats and dogs to eat. Politicians continue to be insulted and spit upon by the regular folk. According to an article in the local paper, La Nacion, the Argentine ambassador Carlos Ruckauf was recognized by fellow passengersas he boarded an airplane, who began to yell at him. As a diplomat, Ruckauf of course responded diplomatically--he showed his middle finger to the crowd and snarled, "If you don?t want to fly with Ruckauf, you can fucking well take another plane!" This is the ambassador, folks. Another target of rage and protest is the Supreme Court, whose members not only have a long history of cronyism and corruption but also are excused by law from paying any taxes. . And banks, many of them international, are not only getting spray painted by angry neighbors, they are also being investigated by government officials like Elisa Carrilo for "running off with all the money", leaving the small time savers to stand in line for hours only to be told at the window that "there are no dollars left." In a recent article in Pagina 12, Citibank was named as one of the many banks who transferred huge amounts of dollars out of their Argentine branches into places like the Cayman Islands, New York, and Chile, emptying the dollar deposits of small time savers, who now, if they receive anything at all, will receive it in devalued pesos. The IMF ("International Misery Fund") and multi-national corporations are also coming under increasing attack by the local populace. Many Argentiens feel taht over the past twenty years the country has basically been "sold off" to international corporations, who have done nothing to help the ARgentine economy. A recent op-ed article in the Buenos Aires Herald suggested good-naturedly that the solution to Argentina's debt was to simply turn the country into a corporation run by "independant advisors" and convert the debt into equity, backed by land and "development potential". I'm sure this did nothing to allay the Argentines fears that their country is a prime example of globalization run amock, a country which is being eaten alive by outside interests. This is probably why you see so many Argentine flags around these days, why so many people are shouting "Argentina Argentina" in the streets. It may be a last ditch effort to save what's left. In a country which has already suffered years of disappearances, it must feel at times like the entire country is disappearing from beneath the ARgentine's feet...public utilities have been sold to multi-national corporations, money is disappearing from the banks, children have grown up and gone away to countries with better prospects, medicine and routine medical equipment is disappearing from hospitals, jobs are vanishing, food is disappearing from the kitchen table. Only the people are left. Even people who had planned to emigrate to other countries can no longer do leave, because, well, "the money just isn't there." An immigrant people who have historically looked to other countries for their identity--Spain, Italy, England, the U.S.,--are being forced to stay and make it work. So, in the barrios, they continue to talk, organize, listen. The barter economy continues to grow, people are buying food together to save money, and now, despite the dire circumstances, people have begun to organize street festivals because as they say, "we won't let them take our happiness away from us too". And me? I have to admit that living through all this with these people, and having what few dollars I own in the corralito along with every one else, is making me feel just a little bit Argentine. The other day at the Plaza de Mayo cazerolazo, an old woman was selling small Argentine lapel flags. I bought one and put it on. At first, I felt a little ridiculous, but then I saw a young Argentine with a t-shirt with the American flag on it, and thought about all the emblems of my culture that I had seen on people's bodies since I've been in Latin America...not just the flag, but Nike and Coke and Visa logos. So far, culture and its emblems have filtered down from the rich countries to the poor, or to put it more bluntly, from the U.S. to just about everyone else. Maybe it's time for a change. Maybe it?s time for those of us in the "rich countries" to learn from the countries where capitalism and neoliberalism has clearly failed, because who knows, we could be next. The other day I ran into my friend Alejandro as he was riding his bicyle across the intersection of Cabildo and LaCroze. He stopped, and we talked for awhile standing on the streetcorner in the warm evening air about anarchism, and Buddhism. We both agreed that the neighborhood assemblies as they are now taking shape are very close to the original Anarchist philosophy, which eschews a national state in favor of local community power which forms and reforms itself according to the dictates of the community. And Buddhism? Well, honestly, I don't really remember what we said, so it was probably something ungraspable and Zen. Except I remember Alejandro,with his young and serious and bespectacled face, did say something about a certain kind of flower, which can only grow in the mud, in the places where everything has become rotten and broken down. And this flower, he said, was very strong, and very beautiful. Regards, Lisa PS. This is the third of three cazerolazo letters I've sent out: cazeralozos, cazerolazos part two, and more cazerolazos. If you didn't receive any of the first two and want a copy, or if you don't want to receive anything at all, please let me know. From dulallie at yahoo.com Thu Mar 14 00:15:03 2002 From: dulallie at yahoo.com (Alice Albinia) Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 10:45:03 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Making conversation Message-ID: <20020313184503.24863.qmail@web12502.mail.yahoo.com> There are news reports, there is the radio, there is the occasional (from London) image on TV. But what one misses is the conversation. Recently, when I logged onto Sarai�s list, looking, like Gayatri, for words about Gujarat, their absence didn�t feel like silence to me � more like the sound on mute. I know you are all talking about it: on the telephone, in your offices, in the street, to the rickshawalla in the morning. I imagine it is difficult to write such things down. On the other hand, �What is it like?� isn�t such a stupid question � after all, it is what we asked friends in New York � and I am grateful for the postings I read about Sept 11th and the emails I got, which attempted to describe the mundane detail of being witness to that calamity. So maybe those of us who wanted to know should have asked the right questions. In London, everybody I met at the beginning of March talked about Gujarat; even I found myself being questioned by people who three days before had never heard of Vajpayee, Godhra or Lord Ram. But in London, clich�s what one finds oneself spouting; and then one reads the same thing in the papers; and sees it again on TV. (For a while, clich�s cathartic.) One of the strangest conversations, for me, was a silent one. Saturday morning, 2nd March, top floor of the School of Oriental and African Studies: my weekly Hindi class (a joyous thing about being in London). We are five students and a teacher. I am the only non-Indian: though only the teacher (he is from Mussorie) and I have actually lived on the Indian subcontinent. There�s a Tamil lawyer, a Punjabi computer engineer, a singer from Karachi, and a journalist from Bangladesh (� whose dad runs a restaurant called Diwali). Second or third generation immigrants, now middle class British citizens, learning Hindi to have freer speech on the way back home? And so on Saturday morning � having read the papers, listened to the news, trawled the internet � I asked about Gujarat. There was a silence. In our class and outside it, we talk about Hindi films old and new, about the Bollywood invasion of London, about how not to eat a �balti� in Diwali. Indian things common to us all. Maybe we avoid the hard stuff? Did it seem, to them, bad taste to discuss Hindu-Muslim atrocities in Gujarat? (For the first time, I felt like an outsider.) Or did they, like other British citizens, simply not know what to say or think? (How to make conversation about Godhra.) But there is no excuse for not talking about Godhra, is there? Nor any reason to retreat into the apathy of being an �outsider�. I have read Harsh Mander�s report, and the other postings about Gujarat sent to this List. And the things he describes remind me of other places I have seen, and read about, and heard of, and no doubt the people who killed in Gujarat had these killing clich�in their minds� eye too. Several Hindus I met in India explained the militancy of the RSS or the VHP to me as the �studied self-defence of an essentially pacifist people�. We learnt it from the Muslims, they said, We had to ... I have never been patriotic. Neither about the country I was born in nor any other. I don�t know who I would fight for if I was sent into battle. I find the idea of battle a bewildering concept, and the concept, say, of dropping bombs on an axis of evil a preposterous idea. So how is it, then, that conflict / battle / war never fail to increase the popularity of the leaders who wage them? How? How? How? Ever since I visited the battlefields of Bosnia as a na� nineteen year old, I have been petrified of war. There was the evidence � civilised affluent country � that it could happen any time, to me, to you. Not just Sarajevo: London. Not just Gujarat ... Maybe mankind is bent on destruction. Maybe it�s the fault of the way we teach history, of the heroes and clich�we choose. If the Balkans are red with the blood of communal tension, so is Northern Ireland, Chechnya and Cyprus; and if only the blood of each Iraqi or Afghani civilian killed by British bombs stained the hands of the nation who dropped them, Britain would be red with it too. So I gave up being surprised that Gujarat had dropped out of the British news so quickly: there was too much other killing to catch up on. Often, when I sit and read the news of Bush�s latest outrage, or Tony Blair�s new foray into push-of-a-button carnage, I feel it is simply a matter of time before I am listening to Iraqi/Serbian bombers droning over my head. Or queuing up to receive Red Cross rations. Opening aid packages put together by sympathetic (but only so-so) Kurds � All empires come to an end. It doesn�t require much imagination to picture the militant Mexican (or Afghani or whoever you choose) raising a hammer (or international trade treaty, or UN sanction) over the head of cowering America, and smiling: We learnt it from you too. My most salient history lesson occurred when I was eleven years old, and studying the Spanish Armada at school. I will never forget the indignation and fury on the face of the visiting Spanish boy who, for eleven Spanish years, had been taught that particular battle the other round. As scientists work to complete the mapping of the human genome, the world awakes to the realisation that genetically there is no such thing as race. That the classic division of racial types is a figment of human imagination � that we humans, ha ha, are all the same. Who played that cosmic trick (race, religion) on us? � I have one last fear. That someday someone will make another startling discovery: that actually God really does exist. And that s/he has known this truth about humanity � and watched us burn for our ignorance � all along. And now for something completely different. A Brighton view of post 9/11: www.drparsons.co.uk __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From vidyashah at hotmail.com Thu Mar 14 03:09:33 2002 From: vidyashah at hotmail.com (vidya shah) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 03:09:33 Subject: [Reader-list] from Ahmedabad Message-ID: here is a first account of what happened in Ahmedabad. Vidya The last 36 hours in Ahmedabad: Yesterday was Gujarat bandh and so most of the shops, business, offices were shut and so was traffic on the road. After Narendra Modi's statement about how the act of burning the Sabarmati express was a "sinful" one and all those who were involved will have to "pay", people in Ahmedabad started burning and looting shops of people from Muslim community. (few other shops were also looted, such as "pantaloon", but this was basically looting exercise). Shops in our area (Paldi, near National Institute of Design) belonging to Muslims such as the Bakery, Laundry, Stationary and of Mechanics were targeted with a plan and burnt down. This went on till late evening. I could see smoke from all directions from my roof top. Our area is basically middle class locality (which is normally suppose to not indulge in such activities!!) Today morning I decided to see from my own eyes as yesterday around 12.30 our cable network broke down (Deliberate!?) Our only source of getting news was from phone calls or word of mouth (lots of rumors). Just a few minutes ago I went on my motorcycle and saw two mosques which has been burnt down. In one of the mosques (Bhattha locality) they have installed photographs and calendars of "Hanuman". There are hand painted boards which announce that this is a temple of "Hulladia Hanuman" (In Gujarati hullad means "Riot "). Another mosque is 50 meters away from police station (Fatehpura area) and still there is smoke coming from it. In one-kilometer radius I saw about 20 shops burnt down and when I am writing this (11.02 am) one residential flat is burning and there is no police or fire fighters either. The minority community is really scared and I am sure has migrated from this area as Hindu's and Jain's are in majority here. Prakash Shah of Movement of Secular Democracy, got many phone calls from this community asking him to do something as police was nowhere in site. On radio or TV only state machinery is being projected, I think the "Other Voices" need to be amplified in such situation. I suggest few names. Prakash Shah of (MSC), Movement of Secular Democracy (Ex. Editor of Jansatta) Tel : (079) 6562806, Indubhai Jani of Gujarat Khet Vikas Parishad tel : 7557772 (0), 6303415 �, Chunibhai Vaidya also from MSC, Navalbhai Shah, Ex. Education Minister, Tel : 7559383, Dr. D.N.Pathak, Gujarat Vidyapith. Parthiv Shah 11.23 am 1 March 2002 Ahmedabad _________________________________________________________________ Join the world�s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com From announcements-request at sarai.net Thu Mar 14 11:14:28 2002 From: announcements-request at sarai.net (announcements-request at sarai.net) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 06:44:28 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Announcements digest, Vol 1 #25 - 2 msgs Message-ID: <200203140544.GAA27832@zelda.intra.waag.org> Send Announcements mailing list submissions to announcements at sarai.net To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to announcements-request at sarai.net You can reach the person managing the list at announcements-admin at sarai.net When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Announcements digest..." Today's Topics: 1. KASHMIR FILM SERIES (The Sarai Programme) 2. Seminar by Vishalakshi Menon (Sagnik Chakravartty) --__--__-- Message: 1 From: The Sarai Programme To: announcements at sarai.net Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 16:55:09 +0530 Organization: Sarai, CSDS Subject: [Announcements] KASHMIR FILM SERIES Dear Friends, Sarai invites you for a special screening of documentaries on Kashmir on Friday, March 15th , 4:00 pm at the Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi - 54 The films are i. � �Pather Chujaeri (The Play is on...) �(52mins) � � � Dir. Pankaj Rishi Kumar How does art survive in a regime of fear? "Pather Chujaeri" follows two theatre groups as they �prepare for public performances of the traditional pather form of �satire, a rare �phenomenon �today. For the bhands, who daily witness the �erosion �of their way of life, each performance represents �both �a change as well as a repetition of the �same brutal fact: that they are not free to share their �revolutionary spirit. Pankaj Rishi Kumar found an illiterate �community that has sustained a centuries-old tradition �in �the face of debilitating social and cultural � changes. �Although perenially intimidated by the �corruption, �violence and intolerance that prevail in Kashmir, �the �bhands continue to affirm a commitment to their �theatre, to the critical potential of its form �and �the �liberating joys of performance. Faith in �Sufism has, however, tempered their enthusiam for satire and they identify �with the collective voices of Kashmir's freedom. ii. �Ku'near �(29 mins) � � Dir. Abir Bazaz The Kashmiri word Ku'near has multiple meanings, particularly Onenesss and Solitude. Ku'near is a film on Kashmiri language as the language of solitude and the language of Kashmir's struggle for 'azaadi'. Nearly 95% Kashmiris cannot read or write Kashmiri. It is hardly surprising that Kashmiri writing - Sufi or Saivite - is inaccessible to most Kashmiris. Ku'near uses the state of the Kashmiri language to encounter the unconscious of the 'azaadi' struggle in Kashmir...And Ku'near discovers the beginning of an ethical solution to what is proclaimed as the Kashmir problem�in the reconciliation of Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims. iii. � �Tell them, the tree they had planted has now grown (58 mins) � � � Dir. Ajay Raina � �"Tell them..." is an account of Raina's return to Kashmir after 12 years - an account that he calls a "journey of fear" - and his association with the people and places in Srinagar, where he spent his childhood. Through the film Raina tries to grapple with the present situation in Kashmir, with how Kashmiris - both "Us" and "Them" - view the situation. It is an inquiry into the state of helplessness, confusion and gloomy uncertainty that Kashmiris feel about the future of their 'cursed' land whose legendary beauty has been fetishised. This film has won the Best Documentary Video Prize (Golden Conch) at the just concluded Mumbai International Festival of Documentary and Short Films. The films will be followed by a discussion with the directors at the Sarai cafe. Cheers Ranita The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi - 110054. Tel: 3960040, 3951190 Fax: 3928391, 3943450 www.sarai.net --__--__-- Message: 2 Date: 13 Mar 2002 14:00:23 -0000 From: "Sagnik Chakravartty" Reply-To: "Sagnik Chakravartty" To: announcements at sarai.net Subject: [Announcements] Seminar by Vishalakshi Menon NEHRU MEMORIAL MUSEUM AND LIBRARY Teen Murti House, New Delhi-110011 Dear Friend, Dr Vishalakshi Menon,Fellow,Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,New Delhi, will give a seminar on "The Nationalist Awakening and Indian Women:The U.P.Story" on Tuesday, March 19, 2002 at 3.00 P.M in the Common Room of the Annexe Building. You are cordially invited to attend the Seminar and participate in the discussion. Yours sincerely, N. Balakrishnan Head Research and Publications Division --__--__-- _______________________________________________ Announcements mailing list Announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements End of Announcements Digest From sopan_joshi at yahoo.com Thu Mar 14 13:03:35 2002 From: sopan_joshi at yahoo.com (=?iso-8859-1?q?Sopan=20Joshi?=) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 07:33:35 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Global Warming [Warming up to Globalisation] Message-ID: <20020314073335.64911.qmail@web9801.mail.yahoo.com> from: http://www.indian-express.com/ie20020313/top2.html To please Bush, MEA turns India’s climate policy around SONU JAIN NEW DELHI, MARCH 12: LAST MONTH, the Ministry of External Affairs executed a quiet policy turnaround which left the officials at the Ministry of Enviornment and Forest fuming. Bending over backwards to please the Bush administration, the MEA welcomed the US policy on climate change though India has been opposing it all along. George W Bush was the only head of state out of 170 nations who called the Kyoto protocol ‘‘fatally and fundamentally flawed’’. After the rejection of the Kyoto protocol, Bush announced a new policy called the ‘Clear Skies and Global Climate Change’ at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on February 14. The MEA statement issued on February 18 says India ‘‘welcomes George Bush’s policy statement on the US government’s approach to environment protection and global climate change.’’ According to sources, the Ministry of Environment and Forest, which is the negotiating body for India, was kept out of the loop. India’s stand has always been that since developed countries are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, they should take the first step. In fact, India is hosting the Conference of Parties meeting in New Delhi later this year. Environmentalists feel this statement will seriously affect India’s negotiating abilities. ‘‘Considering India’s green paper initiated the Kyoto protocol, it is shameful that we have gone this far to please the US,’’ said Sunita Narain, director, Centre for Science and Environment. According to Bush’s new policy, Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions will increase by over 30 per cent over 1990 levels in 2010. Under the Kyoto pact, US was bound to reduce it by emission levels 7 per cent below 1990 levels. Instead of capping emission, Bush’s new policy seems to be reducing its intensity — by 17.5 per cent in the next 10 years. GHG intensity is a measure of GHG emission per unit of economic output, usually expressed in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Though the GHG intensity fell by about 17 per cent between 1990 and 2000, the emissions increased by 14.7 per cent. The same rate of growth is expected for the GDP in the next decade. Global warming — the heating of the atmosphere which threatens to destablise the climate — is primarily caused by burning of fossil fuels, coal and petrol. With the heating of the earth, come climatic imbalances like floods, droughts and cyclones. In his new plan, Bush says he will ask his industry to ‘‘voluntarily’’ cut emissions and set targets for reducing greenhouse gas intensity. The other criticism is that no reductions have been planned for carbon dioxide, one of the main culprits behind the GHG. Bush also said that he does not absolve countries like China and India of their responsibility. Bush has said that he rejects the protocol because it would ‘‘cost us jobs’’. He is in charge of safeguarding the welfare of American people and workers and ‘‘so cannot commit to an unsound international treaty that will throw millions out of work’’. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com From monica at sarai.net Thu Mar 14 12:37:38 2002 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 12:37:38 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] dalit womens statement Message-ID: Below is a posting written and read recently - 8th march , which i have taken from another list (undercurrents at bbs.thing.net) best M University of Hyderabad, 8-March-2002 STATEMENT OF DALIT WOMEN Non-dalit women! Caste Matters! Dear sisters, we wish you happy women's day. There are many reasons for us, dalit women to raise our voice on this particular occasion. Given the class-caste variations of patriarchal practices and their diverse histories, it is important to think about difference and spaces, in order to construct an adequate possibility for traversal politics. We, dalit women want Hindu women and other non-dalit women to recognize that Indian female community is stratified by castiest patriarchal system. Caste system, both as hegemony and political structure works against the unity of Indian women. For centuries this scene is not altered. For instance Human Right's Watch, 1999 observes "Singularly positioned at the bottom of India's caste, class and gender hierarchies, largely uneducated and consistently paid less than their male counterparts, dalit women make up the majority of landless labourers and scavengers, as well as a significant percentage of the women forced into prostitution in rural areas or sold into urban brothels. As such they come into greater contact with landlords and enforcement agencies than their upper caste counterparts. Their subordinate position is exploited by those in power who carry out their attacks with impunity." We, dalit women, therfore request you to recognize that it is not just male domination but castiest patriarchy which is at force in India. We ask you to rethink. We want you to acknowledge the political importance of ‘difference' i.e. heterogenity, that exists among Indian female community. That you are made where as we are mutilated. You are put on a pedestal, whereas we are thrown into fields to work day and night. You were made Satis, we were made harlots. Dear sisters, do not take this as an emotional, parocial supplication made by a few previleged dalit women. Recognition of difference is fundamental to any democratic politics. Our subordinate positions are constituted and represented differently according to our differential locations within castiest patriarchal relations of power. Within this structure we don't exist simply as woman, but as differentiated categories such as scavenger women, peasant women, "professional" women etc. Each description reflects the particularity of social condition. And real lives are forged out of a complex assertion of these dimensions. The objective of any stream of democratic feminism is to change the social relations embedded within all dominant power structures like gender, caste and class to mention only a few. Dalit feminism obviously belongs to this stream of thought. Democratisation of consciousness is necessary to make this world an amicable place to live. We, unhesitatingly claim that dalit feminism has already started its voyage towards this direction. We do heartfully admit that a considerable number of dalit men and non- dalit women and men have been making concrete efforts to talk and rethink about differences and alternatives. We hope that this wonderful occasion of women's day would further bring us closer to initiate a dialogue about both commonalities and also differences. Apart from dalit women, alisamma women's collective welcomes dalit men and non-dalit people, both women and men to come and join its politics. It is premised on dalit feminist centered theory and practice. We have named ourselves in memory of alisamma, the witness and subsequent vitness of Karamchedu dalit massacre, and her glorious struggle. Thank You, For alisamma women's collective Sowjanya Raman, Ratna Velisela, Swathy Margaret Maddela, indira jalli, -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From monica at sarai.net Thu Mar 14 13:50:44 2002 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 13:50:44 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: Violence in Gujarat Message-ID: Dear Readerlist, any more information to give Anjali? best Monica >X-Authentication-Warning: mail.waag.org: Host >IDENT:root at popsmtp.icenet.net [203.88.128.12] claimed to be >popsmtp1.icenet.net >From: "Anjali Arora" >To: >Subject: Violence in Gujarat >Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 13:28:08 +0530 >Organization: Cyber Initiatives I Ltd. >X-Priority: 3 >X-AntiVirus: scanned for viruses by AMaViS 0.2.1 (http://amavis.org/) >Status: > >Hello Monica. >I just came across your post on the undercurrents list. > >As someone living in Gujarat (Ahmedabad) for the last 20 years, I am >really horrified by what happened.I have never before seen goons >taking over the streets, burning and destroying at will.Muslim >establishments were blatantly burnt down before our eyes, and in >full view of the local police station.As the story you forwarded >reveals, this is agonising for the victims. > >But it is even more agonising that we, the intelligentsia, have to >sit helplessly in the face of such utter senseless cruelty. If the >goons of this land can be mobilised to the extent they were, cannot >we, the sane, thinking minds of this country also mobilise ourselves >and public opinion in our favour, so that we are not at the mercy of >administrations that do not work, politicians who use public >emotions as they choose. > >It is time we grouped together, and made our voices heard.Else we'll >be shaking our heads while the forces of destruction move on >unabashedly.I'd like to be made aware of organisations where we >could contribute our skills in order to promote peace. > >Regards. >-Anjali Arora >----------------------------------------------------- >Anjali Arora, >Web Artist/Net Artist >www.artbrush.net/ > -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From yazad_acl at yahoo.com Thu Mar 14 15:36:07 2002 From: yazad_acl at yahoo.com (Yazad Jal) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 15:36:07 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Greenhouse Policy Without Regrets References: <20020314073335.64911.qmail@web9801.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <003b01c1cb40$00f53560$63f138ca@vsnl.net.in> Regardless of Mr. Bush (and his muddled thinking) the Kyoto treaty is a bad idea. I'm sending two articles to sarai on climate change that explain why. -yazad Greenhouse Policy Without Regrets: A Free Market Approach to the Uncertain Risks of Climate Change by Jonathan H. Adler July 14, 2000 full study available in pdf format at http://www.cei.org/pdf/1783.pdf Executive Summary Due to uncertainty about climate change, and human contributions thereto, many policymakers call for "precautionary" measures to reduce the risk of global warming. Such policies are characterized as "insurance." Such insurance against the risks of climate change can be achieved by either lessening the likelihood of change by reducing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases through a combination of emission controls and carbon sequestration strategies, or by enacting mitigation measures to reduce the possible economic and ecological impact of a potential climate change. No insurance policy is worthwhile if the cost of the premiums exceeds the protection purchased. For greenhouse insurance to be worthwhile, it must either reduce the risks of anthropogenic climate change or reduce the costs of emission reductions designed to achieve the same goal, without imposing off-setting risks, such as those which would result from policies that slow economic growth and technological advance. Currently proposed precautionary measures, such as the Kyoto Protocol, call for government interventions to control greenhouse-gas emissions and suppress the use of carbon-based fuels. Such policies would impose substantial costs and yet do little, if anything, to reduce the risks of climate change. Such policies cannot be characterized as cost-effective greenhouse "insurance." Rather than adopt costly regulatory measures that serve to suppress energy use and economic growth, policy makers should seek to eliminate government interventions in the marketplace that obstruct emission reductions and discourage the adoption of lower emission technologies. Such an approach is a "no regrets" strategy, as these policy recommendations will provide economic and environmental benefits by fostering innovation and economic efficiency whether or not climate change is a serious threat. While fear of global warming may prompt the enactment of these reforms, they merit implementation even if we have nothing to fear from climate change. A "no regrets" approach to climate change would incorporate the following policy measures, among others: 1) Remove Regulatory Barriers to Innovation: Existing regulatory programs, and many environmental regulations in particular, create obstacles to the development and deployment of emission-reducing and energy-saving technologies. Such regulations retard market-driven enhancements in efficiency and environmental performance that reduce energy use and emissions per unit of output. 2) Eliminate Energy Subsidies: Government energy subsidies distort energy markets and energy-related investment decisions without producing off-setting returns. The elimination of energy subsidies, in the United States and abroad, would result in a more efficient energy sector. 3) Deregulate Electricity Markets: Local electricity monopolies and government utility regulation are significant barriers to innovation in the energy sector. Electricity deregulation and consumer choice will create market opportunities for alternative energy sources and create further pressure for greater efficiency and innovation in the energy sector. 4) Deregulate Transportation Markets: Airline travel is a rapidly increasing source of greenhouse gas emissions, yet air travel regulations prevent airlines from flying the most cost-effective and energy-efficient routes. Allowing "free flight" could reduce per-flight energy use by as much as 17 percent. Lowering regulatory barriers to improvements in other transportation sectors, such as road construction and management, could also produce substantial emission reductions. The aforementioned policies may not significantly reduce total greenhouse-gas emissions, but they will reduce emissions per unit of output and spur greater technological innovation. Were it ever demonstrated that emission controls were merited, the adoption of "no regrets" strategies today would make it easier to meet those goals without compromising existing standards of living. The broader choice in climate change policy is between measures which constrain economic choices and thereby hamper economic growth and innovation, and those measures which free up society's creative energies to spur innovation and enhance resiliency. The human impact on the global climate system will always be indeterminate to some degree. Unforeseen events, natural and human-induced, will occur. For these reasons, the best insurance policy is one that improves society's generalized ability to cope with disasters, environmental and otherwise. Freeing up key sectors of the economy, particularly those most reliant on energy, provides two forms of insurance: It spurs innovation in the energy sector, increasing energy efficiency and technological innovation, while also enhancing society's overall resiliency. A true "no regrets" approach to climate change is not greater government controls on economic activity, but fewer. Economic growth, market institutions, and technological advance are often the most effective forms of insurance that a civilization can have. Policy efforts aimed at freeing up the energy sector, and those segments of the economy that are most energy intensive, will produce both economic and environmental gains. The economic gains will come from greater productivity and efficiency; the environmental gains from increased production per unit of energy expended or emissions released. Such an approach will reduce whatever threat of human-induced climate change might exist while spurring technological innovation and economic development. This strategy is the only approach to climate change that can be pursued with "no regrets." From yazad_acl at yahoo.com Thu Mar 14 15:37:03 2002 From: yazad_acl at yahoo.com (Yazad Jal) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 15:37:03 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Profits of Doom Message-ID: <003c01c1cb40$0298d340$63f138ca@vsnl.net.in> The last para talks about the costs of Kyoto. -yazad THE PROFITS OF DOOM Matt Ridley celebrates Bjorn Lomborg, the environmentalist brave enough to tell the truth - that the end is not nigh By Matt Ridley At the Christmas cabaret in the politics department of Aarhus University in Denmark last year, the cast members joined together at the end to sing a song about one of the associate professors. 'Bjorn, when will you come back?' went the refrain. 'Don't just get lost out in the world.' (It was better in Danish.) Bjorn Lomborg - young, blond, piano-playing, but basically a statistics nerd - may not be back soon. He has just succeeded Monsanto as the official chief villain of the world environmental movement. In January Scientific American devoted 11 pages to an unattractive attempt to attack his work. He had a pie thrown in his face when he spoke in Oxford last September. The great and the good of greendom are competing to find epithets for him: 'Wilful ignorance, selective quotations, destructive campaigning,' says E.O. Wilson, guru of biodiversity. 'Lacks even a preliminary understanding of the science in question,' says Norman Myers, guru of extinction. His book is 'nothing more than a diatribe', says Lester Brown, serial predictor of imminent global famine. Stephen Schneider, high priest of global warming, even berates Cambridge University Press for publishing it. What can this mild statistician have said to annoy these great men so? In 1996 he published an obscure but brilliant article on game theory, which earned him an invitation to a conference on 'computable economics' in Los Angeles (and an offer of a job at the University of California). While browsing in a bookshop there he came across a profile in Wired magazine of the late Julian Simon, an economist, who claimed, with graphs, that on most measures the environment was improving, not getting worse. Irritated, Lomborg went back to Denmark and set his students the exercise of finding the flaw in Simon's statistics. They could find none. So Lomborg wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, which not only endorses most of Simon's claims, but also goes further, providing an immense compendium of factual evidence that the litany of environmental gloom we hear is mostly either exaggerated (species extinction, global warming) or wrong (population, air and water pollution, natural resources, food and hunger, health and life-expectancy, waste, forest loss). You might think that environmentalists would welcome such news. Having argued that we should find a way to live sustainably on the planet, they ought to be pleased that population growth is falling faster (in percentage and absolute terms) than anybody predicted even ten years ago; that per-capita food production is rising rapidly, even in the developing world; that all measures of air pollution are falling almost everywhere; that oil, gas and minerals are not running out nearly as fast as was predicted in the 1970s; and so on. Instead they are beside themselves with fury. It cannot be Lomborg's politics that annoy them. He is leftish, concerned about world poverty, and no fan of big business. It cannot be his recommendations: in favour of renewable energy and worried about the pollution that is getting worse. Vegetarian, he rides a bicycle and approves of Denmark's punitive car taxes. His sin - his heresy - is to be optimistic. This is very threatening to lots of people's livelihoods. The environmental movement raises most of its funds through direct mail, paid advertising and news coverage. A steady supply of peril is essential fuel for all three. H.L. Mencken said, 'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.' For instance, remember acid rain in the 1980s and sperm counts in the 1990s? 'There is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States or Canada due to acid rain,' concluded the official independent study of the subject. Sperm counts are not falling. If you do not believe me, look up the statistics. Lomborg did. The media, too, prefer pessimism. When the United Nations panel on global warming produced new estimates of the rise in temperature by 2100, they gave a range of 1.4 to 5.8°C. CNN, CBS, Time and the New York Times all quoted only the high figure and omitted the low one. An increasing number of scientists have vested interests in pessimism, too. The study of global warming has brought them fame, funds, speaking fees and room service. Lomborg's crime is to rain on their parade. In the Scientific American critique, four leading environmental scientists lambasted Lomborg. The magazine refused Lomborg the right to reply in the same issue, refused to post his response on its website immediately, and threatened him for infringement of copyright when he tried to reproduce their articles, with his responses, on his own website. Yet the Scientific American articles are devastating not to Lomborg, but to his critics. Again and again, before insulting him, the critics concede, through gritted teeth, that he has got his facts right. In two cases, Stephen Schneider accuses Lomborg of misquoting sources and promptly does so himself. In the first case, Schneider's response 'completely misunderstands what we have done', according to Richard Lindzen, the original author of work on the 'iris effect' and upper-level cirrus clouds. In the second, Eigil Friis-Christensen says that Schneider 'makes three unsubstantiated statements regarding our studies on the effect of cosmic rays on global cloud cover'. Result: there are worse howlers in Schneider's short article than in Lomborg's whole book. By the end of 11 pages, the Scientific American critics have found two certain errors in Lomborg's work. In one he uses the word 'catalyse' instead of 'electrolyse'. In the other he refers to 20 per cent of energy use, when he means 20 per cent of electricity generation. You get the drift. What the affair reveals is how much environmentalists are now the establishment, accustomed to doing the criticising, not being criticised. The editor of Scientific American, apparently without irony, condemns Lomborg for his 'presumption' in challenging 'investigators who have devoted their lives' to the subject, as if seniority defined truth. Lomborg is also criticised for his effrontery in challenging the widely accepted figure that 40,000 species become extinct every year. The number was first used in 1979 by the British scientist Norman Myers. Yet what was the evidence for it? Here is what Myers actually said: 'Let us suppose that, as a consequence of this manhandling of the natural environments, the final one-quarter of this century witnesses the elimination of one million species, a far from unlikely prospect. This would work out, during the course of 25 years, at an average rate of 40,000 species per year.' That's it. No data at all; just a circular assumption: if 40,000 species go extinct a year, then 40,000 species go extinct a year. QED. Now look where this little trick of arithmetic has got Myers. He describes himself thus: 'Norman Myers is an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Oxford University. He has served as visiting professor at universities from Harvard to Stanford, and is a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He works as an independent scientist, undertaking research projects for the US National Research Council, the World Bank and United Nations agencies. He has received the UNEP environment prize, the Volvo environment prize and, most recently, the 2001 Blue Planet prize.' (Myers's share of the Volvo prize was worth $130,000; Lomborg does not own a car.) Lomborg does not deny that species are becoming extinct at an unnaturally high rate, but he cites a far from conservative calculation that this rate may reach about 0.7 per cent in 50 years, not the 25 to 75 per cent implied by Myers, and calls it 'not a catastrophe but a problem - one of many that mankind still needs to solve'. Greens are trying to portray Lomborg as a sort of Pollyanna Pangloss with her head in the sand. But Lomborg does not dispute the need to save the planet, only the assertion that this is impossibly difficult and the particular priorities foisted on us by the big environmental pressure groups. Forty years ago this year, Rachel Carson, in her book Silent Spring, alerted a complacent world to the dangers posed by pesticides. Vilified by the chemical industry, Carson was already dying of cancer when the book was published. In the intervening years the environmental movement has turned from David into Goliath. With huge advertising budgets and ready access to the media, it can dominate the news, terrify multinational companies and expect to be invited to policy discussions at the highest levels. It is the bully now. Consider the treatment meted out to Julian Simon for having the temerity to be right. In 1990 Simon won $576.07 in settlement of a wager from the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. Simon had bet him that the prices of metals would fall during the 1980s and Ehrlich accepted 'Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in'. When, a decade later, Simon won easily, Ehrlich refused a rematch and called Simon an imbecile in a speech. Ehrlich, who, in contrast, won a 'genius award' from the MacArthur Foundation, is the man who argued in 1967 that with the world on the brink of starvation the West 'should no longer send emergency aid to countries such as India where sober analysis shows a hopeless imbalance between food production and population'. Since then India has doubled its population, more than doubled its food production, increased its cultivated land acreage by only 5 per cent and begun to export food. Hopeless? The pessimists argue that Lomborg's good news might lead to complacency. But Ehrlich's counsel of despair is far more dangerous. Many people now work to improve the environment at a local level with optimism that they can make the world a better place. To be constantly told by the big pressure groups that all is doom and gloom is no help. There is something rotten in the state of environmentalism. It lies not just in the petty factual dishonesty that is rife within the movement - Stephen Schneider once said, 'We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have' - but in the very philosophy that lies at the heart of greenery: the belief in constraint and retreat. If six billion people have both more food and more forest than their three billion parents did; if the prices of copper, wheat and natural gas are going down, not up; if there are 20 times more carcinogens in three cups of organic coffee than in daily dietary exposure to the worst pesticide both before and after the DDT ban; if renewable resources such as whales are more easily exhausted than non-renewables such as coal; if lower infant mortality leads to falling populations, not rising ones, then perhaps we need to think differently about what sustainability means. Perhaps the most sustainable thing we can do is develop new technology, increase trade and spread affluence. Nor will it do to claim that these successes have come from green pressure. The reason so many environmental trends are benign is not because of legislation, let alone protest. Apart from the ozone layer and city smogs, where campaigns probably did accelerate change, most improvements have been brought about more by innovation, development and growth than by government action. If six billion people went back to nature, nature would be in desperate trouble. The most arresting statistic that Lomborg produces is this. It is well known that meeting the Kyoto treaty on carbon-dioxide reduction will delay global warming by six years at most by 2100. Yet the annual cost of that treaty, in each year of the century, will be the same as the cost - once - of installing clean drinking water and sanitation for every human being on the planet. Priorities, anyone? (c)2001 The Spectator.co.uk From sabitha_tp at yahoo.co.uk Thu Mar 14 20:06:25 2002 From: sabitha_tp at yahoo.co.uk (sabitha_tp at yahoo.co.uk) Date: 14 Mar 2002 06:36:25 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] Petition Alert from Sabitha T P Message-ID: <20020314143625.37620.qmail@node2-www.care2.com> Dear Friends on the sarai list, There has been a fair amount of soul-searching going on among the readers/contributors of the sarai list about the disturbing silence on gujarat on the sarai site. Could it be possible that some of us were in fact being vocal elesewhere: in classrooms, in newspapers, in our neighbourhoods, trying to mobilise people to think and act against the perpetrators and facilitators of the genocide in gujarat? Here is an appleal to all of you to please follow the link and sign a petition created by some of us against the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat. The agendas of the petition are 1) arrest of the perpetrators of violence in Gujarat 2)ban of VHP, RSS and other such terrorist Hindu organisations (like Bajrang Dal and the Shiv Sena) 3)The goverment should stop negotiations with these arsonists. Appeal Against Communal Terrorism Please help by signing this petition against Hindu fundamentalism. It takes 30 seconds and will really help. Please follow this link:http://www.thePetitionSite.com/takeaction/328228171 The system centralizes signature collection to provide consolidated, useful reports for petition authors and targets. Please forward this email to others you believe share your concern. To view additional petitions, please click here: http://www.thePetitionSite.com Thank you From patrice at xs4all.nl Thu Mar 14 20:22:58 2002 From: patrice at xs4all.nl (Patrice Riemens) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 15:52:58 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Zimbabwe: Beyond the Vote. Message-ID: <20020314155258.A5475@xs4all.nl> Editorial of The Financial Gazette, Harare, March 14, 2002. original: http://www.fingaz.co.zw/fingaz/2002/March/March14/752.shtml (The Financial Gazette, usually lambasted by the Mugabe regime as the mouthpiece of the white business community, is one of the very few independent media left in ZANU-PF ruled Zimbabwe. At the moment it provides the most extensive and immo reliable coverage of events in that wretched country) (http://www.fingaz.co.zw) BEYOND THE VOTE THAT Zimbabwe's presidential election would not be free and fair was not in doubt from the very start. Independent monitors and the international community have now merely confirmed what this newspaper has repeatedly stated in the past. The uneven playing field, marked by the government's abuse of the state media, its use of hastily crafted undemocratic laws which were changed virtually every hour to suit one candidate, its refusal to accept independent monitors and observers and its decision to cut polling stations in urban areas, was bound to produce a pre-determined result. The long-running violence by militant government supporters to cow real and imagined political foes and the dire threats of war should opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai win the ballot were all in line with this grand strategy. Zimbabweans who voted in their millions to try to make a difference to their harrowing lives and to rescue their country from its rapid descent into the abyss were bound to be disappointed and angered, but that is now water under the bridge. They will fight another day. Unfortunately for Zimbabweans, the poll result spells much more pain and suffering because, from now on, the entire international community will treat this country as a pariah which it is. If Zimbabweans felt enraged by repeated shortages of this or that essential product and thought they had been brutalised enough, much worse seems destined to come because the tragedy of Zimbabwe's undoing only begins to unfold from today. For President Robert Mugabe and his backers, this election will be interpreted as a final and heroic vindication of his black nationalist credentials and hardline stance on the unresolved land question which he says he must put to rest once and for all. But let it be said that for all the bitter election rhetoric, Mugabe's moment of decision only starts now. Many in the land and beyond will be searching for clues to see if, in his last presidency if it stands, he will redeem himself and pull his troubled country back from the brink. Mugabe must now begin to chart a new and different vision for Zimbabwe compared to the one he rammed through the nation for two decades, no matter how late. He must work assiduously to heal a nation deeply fractured by bloody conflict, unprecedented economic ruin and mass hunger in one of Africa's richest countries. He must take a long pause over his seizure of private commercial farms and instead launch transparent, legal and fair land reforms which guarantee food security for all in the land, no matter how late. He must re-look the many hurried laws which he authorised just before the ballot which he even knows have no place in any country which claims to be a democracy. Above all, he must move swiftly and decisively to restore law and order and punish without compunction all his followers who became a law unto themselves during and before the election campaign. This, no doubt, will be his single biggest and toughest assignment upon which all his programmes and policies will either succeed or fail. He may also want to seriously consider suggestions that whoever wins the bitterly-contested ballot forms a government of national unity to stave off more but needless bloodshed, particularly given the huge dissenting vote recorded even under the chaos that Zimbabwe called an election. Whether Zimbabweans and the world eventually accept Mugabe's deeply flawed victory will largely depend upon how he tackles these and many other outstanding issues which cry out for more than urgent attention. The immediate outlook for his daunting task is very grim, to put it mildly. One only hopes that Mugabe will read the explosive mood within and outside Zimbabwe correctly and act wisely not just for his sake but for Zimbabwe. From rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com Thu Mar 14 22:20:30 2002 From: rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com (rehan ansari) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 08:50:30 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] a different report on the godhra train incident (fwd) Message-ID: <20020314165030.3660.qmail@web12904.mail.yahoo.com> > Prof. Sachin C. Patwardhan, | | Tel : > (91)-(22) 576 7211 (offc) > Dept. of Chemical Engineering | | 572 > 2545 ext. 8211 (home) > I.I.T. Bombay, | H | Fax : > (91)-(22) 5726895 > Powai, Mumbai 400 076 | V | > 5723480 > India | | Email : > sachinp at che.iitb.ac.in > boss log, > > here is a different report on the godhra incident. > > kr > The tragic incident of Sabarmati Express that > occurred at about 1 km away > from Godhra railway station has thrown a question > mark to those eople who > claim to be secular or liberal. Many aspects & facts > have been ignored & > which I would like to bring to your notice. > Compartment no S-6 two other > compartment of the Sabarmati Express was carrying > the kar sevaks of the > V.H.P. And it was due to these kar kevaks from > Compartment no S-6 that the > incident occurred. The actual story didn't start > from Godhra as being told > >everywhere but it started from a place from Daahod > 75 km before Godhra > >railway station. At about 5:30 to 6:00 am the train > reached Daahod railway > >station. These kar sevaks, after having tea & > snacks at the railway stall, > >broke down the stall after having some argument > with the stall owner and > >they processed back to the departing train. The > stall owner then filed an N > >C against kar sevaks at the local police station > about the above incident. > > > > > >Then about 7:00 to 7:15 am the train reached Godhra > railway station. All > >the > >kar sevaks came out from their reserved > compartments and started to have > >tea > >and snacks, at the small tea stall on the platform, > which was being run by > >an old bearded man from the minority community. > There was a servant helping > >this old man in the stall. The kar sevaks on > purpose argued with this old > >man and then bate him up & pulled his beard. This > was all planned to > >humiliate the old man since he was from the > minority community. These kar > >sevaks kept repeating the slogan, "Mandir ka > nirmaan karo, Babar ki aulad > >ko > >bahar karo". (Start building the Mandir and throw > the sons of Babar i.e. > >the > >Muslims out of the country.) > > > > > >Hearing the chaos, the daughter (16) of the old man > who was also present at > >the station came forward and tried to save her > father from kar kevaks. > >She > >kept pleading and begging to them to stop beating > her father and leave him > >alone. But instead of listening to her woes, the > kar kevaks lifted the > >young > >girl and took her inside their compartment (S-6) > and closed the compartment > >door shut. The train started to move out of the > platform of Godhra railway > >station. The old man kept banging on the > compartment doors and pleaded to > >leave his daughter. Just before the train could > move out completely from > >the > >platform, two stall vendors jumped into the last > bogey that comes after the > >guard cabin. And with the intention of saving the > girl they pulled the > >chain > >and stopped the train. By the time the train halted > completely, it was 1 > >km away from the railway station. These two men > then came to the bogey in > >which the girl was and started to bang at the > door and requested the kar > >sevaks to leave the girl alone. Hearing all these > chaos, people in the > >vicinity near to the tracks started to gather > towards the train. The boys > >and the mob (that also included women) that had now > gathered near the > >compartment requested the kar sevaks to return the > girl back. But instead > >of > >returning the girl, they started closing their > windows. This infuriated the > >mob and they retaliated by pelting stones at the > compartment. > > > > > > > >The compartment-adjoining compartment S-6 on both > sides contained kar > >sevaks > >of the V.H.P. these kar sevaks were carrying > banners that had long bamboo > >stick attached to them. These kar sevaks got down > and started attacking > >with > >bamboo sticks on the bob gathered to save the girl. > These was like adding > >insult to injury for the crowd gathered and their > anger was now > >uncontrollable. The crowd started to bring diesel > and petrol from trucks > >and > >rickshaws standing at the garages Signal Fadia (a > place in Godhra) and > >burnt > >down the compartment. They didn't bring the fuel > from any petrol pump as > >being reported everywhere nor was this act of > burning pre-planned as being > >mentioned by many people but it happened all of a > sudden out of sheer > >frustration and anger. > > > > > >After hearing about this incident, member of V.H.P. > living in that area > >started burning down the garages in Signal Fadia, > they also burnt down > >Baddshah Masjid, at Shehra Bhagaad (small area in > Godhra). > > > >Reliable resources have reported all these > information and facts to their > >information and me can't be doubted. I would also > mention my sources > >namely > >Mr. Anil Soni and Neelam Soni (reporters of Gujarat > Samachar newspaper and > >also member of P.T.I. & A.N.I.) have worked hard to > dig the true facts and > >they duly deserve words of appraisal for their hard > work. > > > >Mr. Soni's mobile number is 009825038152. Res. Tel. > no. 02672-43153 & Off. > >Tel no. 02672-43152 Fax no. 02672-45999. > > > >Due to no proper substantial and circumstantial > evidence and the late > >arrival of the Police at the scene of crime > frustrated the Police. Which > >resulted in harassment and arrests of innocent > local people living in > >Godhra. Furthermore the police started blaming the > Mayor of Godhra, Mr. > >Ahmed Hussain Kalota for this incident. Mr. Kalota > who is the member of the > >Indian National Congress is also a lawyer. This > blaming on Congressmen was > >also done to humiliate, defame and demoralize the > Congress. The V.H.P.'s > >plan is to weaken the country by planning internal > conflicts between > >communities and bring a backwardness of 100 years > in the country. Sorry to > >say but they are carrying out their plans > successfully without the fear of > >being stopped by anyone. No one but only the > innocents will have to bear > >the > >consequences of their plans. It is our humble > request and prayers to all > >the > >members of Parliament along with the Prime > Minister, and the entire media > >circle to try and stop the sparks of a fire to gulp > down the whole county > >in > >flames to take some action against the kar sevaks > of the V.H.P. before they > >get out of hand and stop harassing the innocents > and catch the real > >miscreants and culprits. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage http://sports.yahoo.com/ From boud1 at wp.pl Thu Mar 14 22:50:02 2002 From: boud1 at wp.pl (boud) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 18:20:02 +0100 (CET) Subject: [Reader-list] Zimbabwe: Beyond the Vote. In-Reply-To: <20020314155258.A5475@xs4all.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, Patrice Riemens wrote: > Editorial of The Financial Gazette, Harare, March 14, 2002. > original: http://www.fingaz.co.zw/fingaz/2002/March/March14/752.shtml > > (The Financial Gazette, usually lambasted by the Mugabe regime as the > mouthpiece of the white business community, is one of the very few > independent media left in ZANU-PF ruled Zimbabwe. At the moment it > provides the most extensive and immo reliable coverage of events in that > wretched country) (http://www.fingaz.co.zw) According to many reports on http://zimbabwe.indymedia.org the difference between ZANU-PF and MDC is between fascism and neoliberalism. So even better than a media source independent of government, how about one that's independent of both government *and* of corporations/IMF/WB/WTO...? Here's the Zim Indymedia central column feature: > What is to be done? Despite the fact that the state media repeats > the election results every hour no one is celebrating (apart from > Mugabe - see picture). Morgan Tsvangirai annouced yesterday that he > doesn't accept the result and that he was going away away to > 'consult' with the leadership of the MDC on the way > froward. zimbabwe.indymedia have recently heard that the Zimbabwe > Congress of Trade Unions are planning to call a stayaway. Are these > the answers? How do Zimbabweans build the resistance?Zimbabwe now > faces a major decision: accept the results that are widely regarded > as a joke or find another way to get rid of the ruling party. The > army has been deployed in city centres and high density areas, > waiting for the opposition. In this situation there is only one > certainty today: Zimbabweans will not accept another six years of > Mugabe. From rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com Thu Mar 14 22:52:44 2002 From: rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com (rehan ansari) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 09:22:44 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Folding the national upon the local Message-ID: <20020314172244.10814.qmail@web12907.mail.yahoo.com> IT is stunning to read historian Gyan Pandey�s book Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, which was published in 2001 and has just come out in paperback, and find it relevant for reading Gujarat 2002. For Pandey, the Delhi riots of 1947 fall under a concept he terms �folding the national upon the local�. Under the Partition logic everything was divided into Pakistan and India, which means Muslims and where they lived in Delhi, taking Delhi as an example of the local, became Pakistan where they stood. Pandey also has a concept of the local folding upon the national. Gujarat is an example of that. A massacre occurs in Godhra and we hear Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee claiming that the hand of the Inter-Services Intelligence, that is Pakistan, is behind it. �The �local� is also an index of power; and the way it is folded into the �national� has much to tell us about the particularities of a state or nation, and the course of its history.� Fit into this scheme of Pandey the relationship of the Modi administration with the anti Muslim pogroms in villages and cities in Gujarat, the election platform of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Uttar Pradesh elections (the threat of Pakistan) and the demands of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in Ayodhya. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage http://sports.yahoo.com/ From reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com Fri Mar 15 00:31:36 2002 From: reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com (Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 19:01:36 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Re:Jeebesh Bagchi on the Semantics of Silence Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020314/71874d7b/attachment.html From pnanpin at yahoo.co.in Fri Mar 15 01:12:43 2002 From: pnanpin at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?pratap=20pandey?=) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 19:42:43 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] March on, March on, Dear Poetry Message-ID: <20020314194243.36216.qmail@web8104.in.yahoo.com> Dear Readers, I present to you some poems. The first of them have been written today. The others that follow have been written over a period of time, the same period in which civil society has been quite, and quite competently, taken over by fascists who today (March 14, 2001) have become bold enough, once more, to actually challenge civil society in India. The first time these fascists challenged civil society was in 1992. All of civil society was aware of this challenge. Civil society remained inactive. [Can't blame civil society. For the first time, salaries were linked to the market and were rocketing sky-high. Vetan-bhogis (as the govt. of India, and credit card forms, put it) were experiencing a release] The same fascists -- more organised today, more penetrative of institutions, encouraged by a decadal civil-social inactivity, spurred by NRIs realising their second-class status in places other than India, planned and paid for by government -- are challenging civil society again. They are confident they will win. I am a vetan-bhogi (that is to say, in case you don't understand, a salary-bearer). At this moment, I feel like writing poems (since I am an educated vetan-bhogi salary-baggaged in India, and not a Global aeducated Indian). Therefore in all humility and in absolute abjection to "heretofore", "hereunto", "wheretofore" and "forthwith", I should like to request you to: forget this painful politics, enjoy some gainful rhetorics. yours, pp But this is... But this is March. And I'm Brahmin. Stone of Hindu Arch. Prologue Can there be poetry after Atom Bomb? There can be, post shoved-in Tomb. In hindustani aesthetic tradition, poetry's a sublime expression of Beauty. Nowadays, they mean: Duty. Opem 1: The News, March 14, 2001, in rough couplets (A) It seems Paramhans Ramchandra Das is -- thankfully -- going to kick his ass. This Dude Hindu says: I am committing suicide. hindustani tradition says: Hey! Why hide? (B) On Aaj Tak News Sri Griraj Kishore has said: (Implicitly) Now all Muslims are dead. He said: Just as Muslims have their Mecca, Hindus must have their Ayodhya. Shakespeare said: comparisons are odious. This guy thinks they are melodious! Opem 2: Tension The Budget has reduced my pension, The government, increased my tension. Now goons, just holding sway, take my good-night sleep away. These belligerent religious fuckers -- Oops! -- my salaried forehead puckers: What have I said, or, even worse, thought? Am I a hindu, or have I been bought? The Budget has cut my pension, These guys, they increase tension. These apparently religious [blip,blip], Have given me the slip,slip. Or could it be, that, [clip, clip], I didn't contest, sip, sip? Whatever be my pension: This government likes the tension. Opem 3: No Title [Blip] religion [Blip] Astitva [Blip] religion [Blip] Hindutva Tract 1: I should like to know I should like to know if there does exist a civil society in India. Currently, I am confused. Political scientists, and sociologists, who have thought about this matter, seem to present no consensus. For instance, Andre Beteille says that that does exist a "civil society" in India. He gives, as examples, the presence of hospitals and universities. But aren't universities part of what Althusser calls Ideological State Apparatus? Certainly in India the university system, centralised and controlled by the University Grants Commission, seems to be an ISA. So how can it belong to "civil society"? As far as hospitals are concerned, there exists a clear (and triumphant) distinction between "government" and "private" hospitals. What happens to " public" health in this distinction? The one belongs to the state. The other, to the free market (and in Delhi, the grey market). Where is "civil society" in all this? Rajni Kothari, who is the only political scientist that Independent India has produced (the rest are in the UK, like Sunil Khilnani, or in the US, probably writing papers on terrorism), is also convinced that there exists a "civil society" in India. As any political scientist would do, he separates the "state" from "civil society". But then, he is unable to define any, institution, association, or even "interest group" that qualifies within this (political-scientific, in his terms) of existence. Andre beteille rejects NGOs as belonging to "civil society". His argument is a simple: they are externally funded. Therefore, does there exist a "civil society" in India? Can we talk of a "public sphere" (if you want to shange the terms of the argument) in India. Certainly, Nancy Armstrong's critique of Haberbas' concept of the public sphere, for one, makes sense. But I am confused. I ask you, Sarai Readers, does there exist a "civil society" in India? I should like to know. Opems:Contemporarily Reminiscing 1. With a jhatka broke the matka, as Sareen in lust goodwife ko patka. Though she is bhaari petnamed pyaari, Sareen pouncing spreads her saari. Neither a hauaa nor a kauaa, Sareen has had egg-boiled and pauaa. On the bister fucker and sister, Sareen proves who is the mister. 2. Hello pritty laddy can I call you Billo? I am rich and Joginder, gaet inside my Cillo. Gaet inside, Laet us go foray ride. I love the river. I love the sea. I am raising plantation, I am eco-friendlee. Gaet inside, Laet us to go foray ride. We will go to drinking We will go to disco, Bhabi is at home lekin jaraa near khisko. Gaet insiide, Then we will go foray ride. I am working harder Everyday in Office, Billo you are very lovely, Now you give me kiss. O gaet insiiide, Late us go foray ride. I want to love you. I am stopping heear. But Billo you are educated: Than why this feear? You gaet insiiide, Laet us go forayride. Goodbye pritty laddy, Tata dear Billo, Don’t remaember Joginder But reemaember the Cillo. Gaet insiiide, Laet us go for a ride. 3. Now imagine Dilli, Next – millenium billi: People call it city, Freshly turd of shitty. People say it’s metropole, Only place you score a gole. Then imagine Dilli, Next – millenium khilli: Supposedly civil. Here you must be divil. TV, stereo, car, andscent, Here you reap the divlipment. Persist to think of Dilli, Next – millenium billi: Crudely engine scooter. Economy is looter. Standing scratching Sharma Crash into a Verma. Forcibly the Dilli, Ind – millenium silli: Buy the ethnic cloth, Here you learn to loathe. Buy the ethnic furniture, Hindu is the deathfuture. 4. Whenever the chance is got, the official is bought. The system is being blamed, In a tone that is inflamed. Life is being described, as the clerk is being bribed; The system is being blamed, in a tone that is inflamed. Societal ills are counted, survival is being flounted. Has a problem been known in which life is not thrown? The system is being blamed, in a tone that is inflamed. 5. Why are things swelling in anabolic fashion? Have you brought ration? 6. BillGates, I want to come to you. Four years are pass I leave my class-12 class; I got forty-seven marks. BillGates, I want to come to you. But head is hanging low. Last year I pass 3-year computer class I got ninety-seven marks. BillGates I want to come to you. But head is hanging low, My life is very slow. This year I tried, I did everything, I cried! No visa, I was fried. BillGates I want to come to you. But head is hanging low; My life is very slow; I will hang, just go. Postscript to this piece: I read in the newspaper one day of a boy who had hanged himself because he was unable to go off to the US. According to the newspaper, he had been trying for a long time to go off to the US. To that purpose, he had even done a computer course. According to the newspaper, his suicide note had especially mentioned how proficient he was in computers. It didn't hit me immediately, but a few days later after I had read this bit of news it came to me that the so-called IT revolution had really gone deep, like any other revolution anywhere else. The boy's suicide came to my mind, a little more vividly than it had done when I had read it. It struck me that this was a boy who had believed completely in the efficacy of information technology. Asshole that I am, I began to imagine a voice that would elegiacally address itself to Bill Gates, who in India is not so much a living human being as a metaphor of success and money, someone who had "come good" on the basis of hard work and pure brains. I realised the amount of investment in "pure brains" that middle-class Indians make. I understood that the belief that IT was the escape route through which a middle-class could completely transform its anxiety-ridden existence had become a deep-structure belief. The IT revolution in India was here to stay, because millions of middle-class Indians were ready to invest their energies in it. Every revolution takes its toll, banishes its enemies. This boy –– as his name and the location of the house where he had hanged himself signified to me –– was not middle class. He was petty-bourgeosie, as was clear to me from the newspaper report. He had hanged himself in a house in a house in what was once a slum but had now become a so-called "colony", that is had been upgraded officially by the compulsion politicians in the area faced. Such upgradations signify no social change in the lifeworld. What it signifies is that the entitlements have to be fought for, even more militantly. He was one of the upcoming ones, who wanted to break out. Sad, I told myself. Even the IT revolution is stratified. Naïve, I then told myself. How could I think otherwise? How dared this boy? I have chosen to make him the vehicle of what I think is a satire. That is cruel. I acknowledge that. But this poem is, I think, less cruel than the IT revolution, which promises actually only slavery, of a very sophisticated kind. If you look at the history of slavery, then in the IT revolution and in the response of educated Indians to this revolution, you will find for the first time an eager willingness to become software slaves. Strange, this new kind of slavery where the slave-driver does not have to come over and take you. You go yourself, willingly you go and become a 21st century slave. The question I want to ask is how did your education allow you to do this? Or, is it that that your education allowed you to do precisely this? I don't want to think on this at all. Is that clear?] 7. Focus on the First Letters Internal Perfectibility Invigorates Spiritual Soul. Ossifications Nervily Freely Aggressively Superimpose Casually Impregnated Sophistications Terroristically Exclusivist. Demanding Unequivocal Calumnious Angst, Trauma Etherises Dutifully. Invigorated, Newly Demonical, Instantly Appears Now Self. 8 Off Calcutta Airport [A young, healthy, 24-something youth steps off the plane in Calcutta airport at 9:30 in the morning. His after-shave is still fresh. His suit –– it is clear it is an Armani suit –– is uncrushed. He breathes in the morning air already a little dull, and strides towards the bus waiting to take him to the terminus. He travels lightly; an overnight expensive leather bag is all that he carries. Thus while his fellow passengers wait for the luggage, he strides out towards the exit. A few people accost him; does he want a place to stay? Does he want a taxi? A dark man wearing some kind of a uniform promises him a good girl. He stares the man down, the man trails off. Leaving behind these hangers-on, he strides towards the exit. He knows the city. It is his city. Outside the glare of the morning makes him blink. He walks past the aluminium-metal railing festooned with people –– eager relatives, young, and old; uniformed drivers holding placards; onlookers –– and is immediately swamped by taxi drivers. They circle around him, asking, cajoling, demanding. Suddenly he loses it. He loses his composure; he is destabilised. Destabilised, he loses himself in a conversation with one of the men –– completely nondescript –– in that crowd of minnows. He is no longer a shark.] Sexy neck-tie And the world is a pie O-o. You can believe But you don’t want to see No-no. So you’re living it up. Come to this corner I’ll show you your power O-o. I’ll bash your head in You’ll see a red flower No-no Just when you’re living it up. 9 Love Song of J. Alfred Bhadralok Upon drinking MIT jol Holo proactive aamar ball. Aar shukobe na bichi; Aaye, toke ektu khichi. Upon drinking MIT jol Holo proactive aamar ball, I feel I am one of a kind, Bokachoda, why're you in a bind? Chole aai, come over; Forget Arnold and the cliffs of Dover! All that is colonialist hyperbole, Come; you can make machher jhole. Chole aai, come over; I'm telling you, forget Dover; Here there is freedom and soul, Here play football, score a goal! Aami toke bolchi, phata-phati place, Do you remember singing Amazing Grace? A [Music: Led Zeppelin –– "ooh, need to love; oh, oh, need to love" etc. Voice breaks in] Kya aap chut ke dhakkan hain? Ho sakta hai aap lund ke makkhhan hai. Either ways, today, right now, Apna Jeevan Bima karvaiye. Aapka apna Bhondsi Insurance Co aapko waelcome karti hai. Apna Jeevan Bima karvaiye; Meet your local agent Pappu Walia Jo aapko global advice deinge. Ride the world, completely insured. Yeh aapke mardangi ka sawaal hai. B Chee-chee. Have you heard your neighbour talking about you? Mrs Gulati yeh kehti hain: Haw, unke house mein to kuchh bhi nahin hai. No consumer appliances at all. H-h-aw-aw. Chee-chee. Now is your chance, people, Yeh mauka aapko phir nahin milay gaa. Fill up your house with the latest. Don't think about money; Sab kuchh easy instalment mein avalaible hai. Easy instalment; very, very. So very very. Sale lagi hai; come and order. Sale lagi hai; order and take home. Sale lagi hai: shut Mrs Gulati up. Bhar dijiye apne ghar ko. Fill up your sweet home So that as soon as you move You touch something electronic. In your chhota sa ghar Itna goods bhar dijiye ki Ganr hilane se Washing machine pe jaake aap takraiye. Now is your chance, people. Bhool jaaiye chee-chee. Buy. Buy and fly –– ganr hilaa ke. C lonesense train lonesense train chaff on away lonesense train pfaff all I say nutt-licking hooman butt-licking pay mr born fucked her where is the brain now mr horn sucked her hair is the brain now is it shredded up? is it bedded down? plucky for me got to get doubt side mucky for me thought bout in ride got to get my hooman got to get my tide pyaun pyaunwa wa wa pyaunwa wa wa pyaunwa tyaun tyaun tyaun tyaunwa wa wa tyaunwa tiwi iwi iwi aeynwi aeynwi naeynwi riwi siwi diwi gaeynwi taeynwi haeynwi got to wet my hooman got to get my wide chiaonk chiaonk chiaonk cha ika chiaonwa ika chiaonk chiaonk chiaonk cha ika chiaonwa ika chiaonk chiaonk chiaonk cha ika chiaonwa ika chiaonk chiaonk chiaonk cha ika chiaonwa ika chiaonk chiaonk chiaonk cha ika chiaonwa ika chiaonk chiaonk chiaonk cha ika lonesense train pfaff on away i got my hooman i got my day Based in its non-entirety upon the J J Cale song Lonesome Train. Which once got distributed from the United States of America, easily the gratest nation on Earth, totally erringly. That then surprisingly pleasurably reached me, reached for me at me and got hold of me upon an evening when, for the first time in my life, I heard and saw the twelve-string guitar being masterfully played in love and arrogant homage by a teacher of mine who's written some sings and done some "Hootenany" concerts in Calcutta (today, called Kolkata). Neither MTV nor VTV would air his songs, the songs of Bertie, my teacher. All deviations aforedung are mine. — end — Maaggie-o-graphy maaggie-o-graphy rhymes with hagiography. they mean the same. at various junctions they perform the same functions. Maiyya meri naiyyaa Maiyyaa meri naiyyaa dagmagaaoes on the brink Maiyya I can never sever ever go to shrink. I will lose my face-um, I will lose my pose; everybody grace-um come and give you dose. Maiyyaa meri naiyyaa it is shaky on the brink Maiyya I can never sever ever go to sink. They will try and catch me, but i want to pass them by. They will try and latch me, but i want to make them sigh. Maiyya meri naiyya may it quiiver on the brink? Maiyya why you never sever ever go me think? He has qualms. But give it to him. He seems to like being mad. He chooses — does he? — to be mad. In this country, it is very, very difficult for an average person to explain the rationality of not being rational. People do go off the rocker. Which is to say that they do try and jump off whatever they are trained to understand is fated for them. A life is planned for them, even while they are learning what it means to live. So they try and squirm around. They turn compulsive, they turn obsessive, they begin to live out their fantasies. Then, at a point of time, they find without trying to find that they are still required to be sane. That is to say, economically productive. Socially reproductive. They find that all their madnesses are eminently explainable. Their madnesses at one point in their lives are explained to them as indulged-upon indulgences. Their madnesses, they begin to suspect, have been heavily indulged in. They come to that point in their lives when they horrifically discover that their madnesses were nothing but aberrations socially and programmatically socially allowed. They find that they have to be responsible, and that there are only certain fixed ways in which they can be considered responsible. Essentially, they find that in India being responsible means making lots of money. Making money, they find, is the sanest thing to do. It is the only thing to do. They find that if they don't make money, they are not only considered mad, but also and especially useless for all time to come. The pressure of being sane pushes such people into actual mindlessness. The tragedy is, that the people who find themselves pushed into this position begin to doubt their becoming, their unfolding. Their doubt is a negative doubt. It is a socially imposed questioning. It is a daily lacerating. All madness has its method. But when the methodically mad find that even they are being counted in the ranks of the hopefuls, when the rationally athwart person finds that even s/he has certain so-called survival tasks to perform, then s/he tries to turns away for all time. Impossible, in India. They must be responsible, or be shunned. The pressure to perform a survival responsibility — pseudo-academia for making pots of money — is a stupendous choke. Even the so-called mad in India find, at some point in their lives, that they have been guilty of the act of shunning. Nobody in India can shun. They can do anything, but they cannot shun. That is simply unacceptable. The greatest burden such a person carries is that s/he is genetically a shunner. Simply because, somewhere, s/he chooses to shun money-making. And decides madness is better than upholding the laws of political correctness, social stratification, and economic well-being, and the code of dutiful reproduction. Loss is madness. Good. Madness is a loss. Better. Get lost, you best. Will you leave open door? You are leaving open door? I will become bore. I will talk into your ear Till you become sore. ________________________________________________________________________ Looking for a job? Visit Yahoo! India Careers Visit http://in.careers.yahoo.com From gchat at vsnl.net Fri Mar 15 18:36:05 2002 From: gchat at vsnl.net (Gayatri Chatterjee) Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 18:36:05 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] I HAVE CAMPED HERE Message-ID: <001901c1cc22$3e88ed80$8455c5cb@vsnl.net.in> I HAVE CAMPED AT THIS SARAI AND WILL BE STAYING ON FOR A WHILE Dear Shuddha, You had written: "My only question to you is - why look for solace or respite in the writing of public or private intellectuals, or people at Sarai, on the list." It definitely is a sign of weakness on my part to look for solace. Instead, I should have said, "I will not accept any solace, I will be inconsolable." In a certain way, that is what has happened; there is no solace in anything. Nothing is quenching that dry burning in the region of my throat and heart. You had written: "You, have intervened, that is what matters, and we need more such interventions on the list, without anyone of us bothering to think whether or not we are the kind of people to whom the 'privilege' of speaking out devolves by some unaccounted for virtue." I was not thinking of 'speaking' in this list as a 'privilege', since all of us in the list automatically are entitled to do so. We, members of this e-mail list speak, hear and think 'through it'. Of course, we are engaged in such activities in other 'sites' as well - as someone pointed out. But, when I am speaking within Sarai, I am a Sarai-member - for the moment. As far as the use of the term 'sizable intelligentsia' - I term such things 'raw material', something one 'works' with. At that moment, I started with that 'raw material', wanting to ask what more we could do with it, with that particular 'situated-ness'. In another site, I would say other things - not say 'those' things at all! I will return to this a little later. 'Intelligentsia' is a category; and so is 'principals-and-teachers' - who decides what kind of announcement the morning meet should have (referring to Reyhan's mail today) - another category (teachers of course is a sub-set). Intelligentsia was a bad word in China and belonging to the six low categories. Just learnt from a talk by G. P. Deshpande the other day that China has now included that category (intelligentsia) in the high top tens. They are doing this, in order to be better heard in the world and engage with globalisation - their fashion. I thought, all of us here, all the activists, writers, filmmakers, doctors, social workers, social scientists, etc (should I have said middle-class - No, we are part and not whole of it - or we are something else) as forming this group, who are sharing talks and silences. Why name a category? Because I do want to, like the Chinese leaders :-), not ignore any category that history throws up; but want to use it to our advantage. Perhaps there were more reasons, but I need more time to think why I used labels. And I cannot think of a category-less civil society. You have written: "But in saying this I also take exception to your expectation that some of us ought to be more responsible in terms of writing than others. Do correct me if I am wrong about this. I think everyone is equally responsible for the silence. The list belongs to all those who have subscribed to it [.]. And this is the expectation that some of us should be more articulate than others. That some of us (in this case on this list) have more of a responsibility to speak and be heard than others. I have serious reservations about this position." I re-read my mail to Sarai and tried to see whether it singles out those in the physical space of Sarai. But, all the while, I have only addressed the Sarai-List! No, I did not have any face in front of me when I wrote that. At the end, I ask why I cannot think and write something that will make a lot of sense, but the 'you' thereafter is a collective, which also means 'me' or 'us' in sentences that are interrogative or imperative. I was playing with these categories: I/We, You/You, S/he/Them. If we are to think of the kind of civil society we want, we need to work with them, with categories like insider/outsider. Yes, you have been wrong there - but this is a wrong I would like to latch on to for a while. This has happened before, when people running the Sarai machines have been held responsible I don't remember what but I was reminded of that occasion. Let us ask why we should do that - hold as responsible those who run an organisation, when it is convenient to us, when we benefit from it otherwise (we would un-subscribe ourselves, if it did not give us pleasure or brought us no benefits by the way of information and solidarity). Now, notwithstanding the fact that it gave you the impression you were singled out, let us assume that, this letter from Gayatri Chatterjee was in fact written to the Sarai Reader-List. If I did not do that, then it is a bhayankar mistake and there is nothing I can say or do, but sit and mend myself quietly. If I have done that, then we should also ask why you took it in that manner. Let us henceforth, once and for all, take this as a given that we are a group. Those who 'run' Sarai need not ever tell the rest of the group they too are 'equally' responsible, and so on. Let us not create anymore 'insiders' and 'outsider'. That must be the a priori - that sense of functioning. Hey you Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who are you to tell Gayatri Chatterjee, that she is also a responsible insider of the group? I am that. Of course, when I physically travel to Delhi, and then take a bus or an auto from Mayur Vihar or wherever and visit Sarai-premises, I will continue to feel pleased as punch when you guys welcome me, give me a hug, show me around, chat - brèf, when I am treated like a guest. I do not want to lose that privilege. Silence. Yes, once I saw all of you, imagined you sprawled everywhere, on chairs, steps, those stools at the colourful coffee-bar, seated before the computers or standing listlessly, silently. Silence in a real space is very comforting; but what is it in a virtual space? And then, I was only comparing the situation with that after 11 September. The question simply had been, why we talked so much then? And then again, in this virtual space I am no guest! I have camped here - as much as I continue eternally to be an itinerant writer/singer, a pathik continuously camping at this sarai. No, I am not trying to describe my life as a romantic cliché. This is merely a metaphorical way of describing (even if partly) it. As a free-lancer, I have been associated with many organisations and institutes and have experienced just the opposite. I have seen people who run them getting upset if we outsiders thought of the organisation as our very own, wanted to behave as a group. Once, I was asked, 'How long will you continue with this kind of prostitution (meaning my freelance activity)?' I had replied to that man, 'Yes, I know I am not as married (to an institution) as you are.' Today, the man is 'divorced' from that institution - well! But woh kissa phir kabhi - that story another time. There are metaphors and metaphors J In early phases, some lack of formulation, immaturity in thought and gesture is all right, No? But on the other hand, some grown-up-ness must become the raw material we start with. Otherwise, the impression will be that some are speaking more, being heard more. Even after September 11, there was a call for the members to speak (and not post so many forwards). I had responded with some garbled thoughts. And after that - this! Speaking and keeping silent - we engage in/with both - while inhabiting this virtual space. You have written: "In fact when we are saying that someone is 'talking too much', or that their speech act is 'overvalued' we are actually pointing to the fact that no one else is speaking. Perhaps if everyone did a little bit of speaking up now and then, than neither the silence nor the speech act of any particular individuals ('sizable' or 'established') would mean such a big deal." Absolutely. It is not a big deal that I wrote something at that moment. May be, I should make a more concerted effort to formulate what kind of civil society we have created, desire, deserve. What we have gained, what is getting lost, etc. Pratap, to speak is not being moral. Heavens, No! You have said: "On the one hand we have some people complaining about the way in which the list has drawn attention to someone speaking, and on the other we have you protesting, very rightly, about the fact that no one has spoken. I think this is a fascinating paradox for a list to find itself in." It is normal common enough paradox. But, soon those who speak 'too much' will wait and step aside, when others speak; those who had been silent will find their words, tongues, and intonations. Speaking is gestural. And I was making a gesture - as a member of a group, as an individual, as a friend, as a stranger - to you, to you, to us, to them, to all of us. Free speech and free silence are both - you are right - signs of a discursive community. I was at that point showing (not showing off, but demonstrating) the paradoxes of discourse at a time like that, paradoxes that show up in sharper light the paradoxes that exist at peacetimes (speaking relatively, again). You ask: "I need to know how this fluctuating amplitude of silence can be measured." I think neither speech nor silence can be measured. But, either can make one uncomfortable or happy; and then we might note that, muse on that, comment on that. This has gotten long and I promise to make more sense once Mother India goes to press. But let me say, this was no big deal. I spoke the only way I could at that moment. I made the only gesture I could make and reach out to the group. 'It' belonged to that moment. Another time, I might say other things. Or remain quiet for a very long time, when some one says something that gets my tongue. I might keep silent in shame, in fear or if that someone makes me introspective. Silence and speech - both mean so many things. It is for us to understand the import, the nuance, the underlined message - the said and the unsaid. Because, it is 'us' speaking - to ourselves. From pnanpin at yahoo.co.in Sat Mar 16 01:42:15 2002 From: pnanpin at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?pratap=20pandey?=) Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 20:12:15 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Yeh dil maange more -- bad poetry/prose Message-ID: <20020315201215.88386.qmail@web8102.in.yahoo.com> Dear Readers, Neither have you read my poetry nor have you commented on it. I love your silence. Your silence gives me license. To write more bad poetry, or poetry/prose, as somebody put it. I know you are bizzy, you vetan-bhogis. Are you in a tizzy, you vetan-bhogis? The shilanyas puja did get done Under the chutball sun In full view of the district administration. Do you still belong to this nation? You are so tied up, you vetan-bhogis. Are you fried-up, you fuck v-bhogis? Do you think you could come down from your pedestals where your mothers have placed you and think about what it means to dialogue? This dhamaaka this masti this lehrein no 1. I put a finger up your ass, you aurat and son. Lo and behold! There is no bleeding. My finger's broken, I feel like pleading. How do you think, do, and be? Do you think you could explain it to me? yours, with tender notice love, pp ________________________________________________________________________ Looking for a job? Visit Yahoo! India Careers Visit http://in.careers.yahoo.com From menso at r4k.net Sat Mar 16 03:56:58 2002 From: menso at r4k.net (Menso Heus) Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 23:26:58 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Hunt the boeing! Message-ID: <20020315222658.GB60909@r4k.net> For all you conspiracy theorists: http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Anyway, the :// part is an 'emoticon' representing a man with a strip of sticky tape across his mouth. -R. Douglas, alt.sysadmin.recovery --------------------------------------------------------------------- From menso at r4k.net Sat Mar 16 05:15:39 2002 From: menso at r4k.net (Menso Heus) Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 00:45:39 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Yeh dil maange more -- bad poetry/prose In-Reply-To: <20020315201215.88386.qmail@web8102.in.yahoo.com> References: <20020315201215.88386.qmail@web8102.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20020315234539.GC60909@r4k.net> Dear pratap, Your conclusions are quite fast. Today I have read your poetry, some of it, problem being I was in the office at the time and didn't have time to write a reply yet. I quite enjoyed some parts, some parts I didn't quite follow because of the Indian words that you choose to use. I was particulary quite fond of the "Gaet inside, Laet us to go foray ride." part but am not sure how to interpret it. Perhaps people didn't respond yet because they are still reading, perhaps they didn't get it because half of it was in a language they don't understand. Maybe it just didn't do anything for them. Be patient pratap, 'if you build it they will come' :) Menso On Fri, Mar 15, 2002 at 08:12:15PM +0000, pratap pandey wrote: > Dear Readers, > > Neither have you read my poetry nor have you commented > on it. I love your silence. Your silence gives me > license. To write more bad poetry, or poetry/prose, as > somebody put it. > > I know you are bizzy, you vetan-bhogis. > Are you in a tizzy, you vetan-bhogis? > > The shilanyas puja did get done > Under the chutball sun > In full view of the district administration. > Do you still belong to this nation? > > You are so tied up, you vetan-bhogis. > Are you fried-up, you fuck v-bhogis? > > Do you think you could come down from your pedestals > where your mothers have placed you and think about > what it means to dialogue? > > This dhamaaka this masti this lehrein no 1. > I put a finger up your ass, you aurat and son. > > Lo and behold! There is no bleeding. > My finger's broken, I feel like pleading. > > How do you think, do, and be? > Do you think you could explain it to me? > > yours, with tender notice love, > pp > > > > > > ________________________________________________________________________ > Looking for a job? Visit Yahoo! India Careers > Visit http://in.careers.yahoo.com > _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header. > List archive: -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Anyway, the :// part is an 'emoticon' representing a man with a strip of sticky tape across his mouth. -R. Douglas, alt.sysadmin.recovery --------------------------------------------------------------------- From announcements-request at sarai.net Sat Mar 16 11:31:48 2002 From: announcements-request at sarai.net (announcements-request at sarai.net) Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 07:01:48 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Announcements digest, Vol 1 #26 - 1 msg Message-ID: <200203160601.HAA32551@zelda.intra.waag.org> Send Announcements mailing list submissions to announcements at sarai.net To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to announcements-request at sarai.net You can reach the person managing the list at announcements-admin at sarai.net When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Announcements digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Talk by RICHARD STALLMAN (The Sarai Programme) --__--__-- Message: 1 From: The Sarai Programme To: announcements at sarai.net Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 15:00:08 +0530 Organization: Sarai, CSDS Subject: [Announcements] Talk by RICHARD STALLMAN Dear Friends, Sarai is happy to invite you to a talk on " Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks" by RICHARD STALLMAN, Founder, Free Software Foundation on 20 March, 2002, 3:30 pm at the Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 54. "COPYRIGHT developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. � But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. �But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright--to promote progress, for the benefit of the public--then what must be done is either to reduce copyright powers or effectively eliminate them, depending on the kind of work. �Governments must now protect the public's right to copy." RICHARD STALLMAN is "the founder of the GNU Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for "GNU's Not Unix''), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small." Stallman has also founded the related Free Software Foundation (FSF) and is outspoken about his belief that all software should be free. In his view � proprietary software, for which corporations charge a fee, is wrong from a moral or ethical standpoint. Warm Regards, Ranita The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi - 110054. Tel: 3960040, 3951190 Fax: 3928391, 3943450 www.sarai.net Landmarks: Near The Old Transport Authority. Near �ISBT Directions: http://www.mapsofindia.com/maps/delhi/roadcompanion/index.html --__--__-- _______________________________________________ Announcements mailing list Announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements End of Announcements Digest From reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com Sat Mar 16 20:23:37 2002 From: reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com (Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri) Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 14:53:37 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Yeh dil maange more -- bad poetry/prose Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020316/aa6f3037/attachment.html From pnanpin at yahoo.co.in Sat Mar 16 23:55:24 2002 From: pnanpin at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?pratap=20pandey?=) Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 18:25:24 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Chadwick Kumar, Acharya Message-ID: <20020316182524.23470.qmail@web8101.in.yahoo.com> Dear Readers, This is a pale imitation of "Herr Korbes", a Grimm's Fairy Tale. I hope you enjoy it. For absolute satisfaction, please read the original. pratap Chadwick Kumar, Acharya. An abandoned cellphone and a lapsed deodorant bottle, having met at the bottom of a scrap-heap, decided to go on a journey. They put together a four-stroke autorickshaw, with great difficulty, from various obsolete engine and body parts thrown into the same scrap-heap. The abandoned cellphone, cranking up the lever that sent the auto sputtering and then purringly puttering, said to the lapsed deodorant bottle: "Here we go!" After an hour on the way, they were stopped by a weather-beaten constabulary lathi (retd.). "Where are you going?" asked the constabulary lathi (retd.), leaning into the driver's cabin. "To the house of Sri Chadwick Kumar, Acharya," said the abandoned cellphone, wiping its grimy screen. "Can I go, too?" the constabulary lathi (retd.) asked. "Of course. Hop in," the lapsed deodorant bottle said from the passenger's seat. The four-stroke autorickshaw trundled, burbling merrily, towards the house of Sri Chadwick Kumar, Acharya. From time to time, it also juddered to a stop, picking up, on the way, a towel, two brown country-chicken eggs priced at Rs 3 per egg, a roll of duct tape, a mill-stone, carbolic soap disguised as a 10% discount up-market muchscent-and-manybubbles-morefroth-making bar, a needle, a meat-chopper, and a stinking broadsheet. The motley company reached the house of Sri Chadwick Kumar, Acharya, at 4:00 p.m. The house was empty. The motley company let themselves in through a gap in a window, where a ghetto-climate-changing air-conditioner had been fixed askew. The towel hung itself beside the downstairs sink. The eggs hid themselves inside the towel. The needle jumped onto the sofa in the downstairs living room, and the meat-chopper ran under the pillow in the upstairs bedroom. The mill-stone hung itself above the upstairs bedroom door, and the carbolic soap placed itself in the soap-dish beside the sink downstairs. The cellphone placed itself on the table beside the stinking broadsheet downstairs, and the deodorant bottle and duct-tape made themselves comfortable in the medicine cupboard in the attached bathroom upstairs. Sir Chadwick Kumar, Acharya, energetically strode into his house at 7:30 p.m. He went straight to the table, and rifled through the broadsheet. The stink brought a frown to his face. Thereupon he picked up the cellphone and, punching some buttons, put it to his ear. The cellphone irradiated him, singeing his brain-cells and making him sweat. Sri Chadwick Kumar, Acharya, then went to the sink to wash his sweating face. The soap-bar jumped out of his hands into his mouth, and when he hurriedly reached for the towel, the eggs broke on his face. Sri Chadwick Kumar, Acharya, staggered half-blind into the sofa, and the needle pricked him. That made Sri Chadwick Kumar, Acharya run up upstairs. As he opened the medicine cupboard, the deodorant bottle spurted its non-contents into his eyes, making them burn. Sri Chadwick Kumar, Acharya, then reached for the duct-tape, which stuck onto his face, blinding and axysphiating him. Sri Chadwick Kumar, Acharya threw himself onto the bed and reached for his pillow. The meatchopper swathed through his groping hands. Srceaming, Sri Chadwick Kumar, Acharya ran for the bedroom door. At the door, the mill-stone fell on his head, killing him. Sri Chadwick Kumar, Acharya, must have been a very wicked man. ________________________________________________________________________ For live cricket scores download Yahoo! Score Tracker at: http://in.sports.yahoo.com/cricket/tracker.html From yukihiko at sfc.keio.ac.jp Sun Mar 17 23:45:47 2002 From: yukihiko at sfc.keio.ac.jp (Yukihiko Yoshida) Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 03:15:47 +0900 Subject: [Reader-list] Xanadu Artists Society released webpage. Message-ID: <200203171815.DAA19951@ccz03.sfc.keio.ac.jp> Dear lists, Takuji Tokiwa,sound artist and I started the project,"Xanadu Artists Society". Xanadu Artisits Society released webpage. The url is in the following: http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~yukihiko/XaS/ Our page have related link as Xanadu Related Project from Xanadu Australia (http://www.xanadu.com.au/). Here is brief profile from our webpage : (Please check out our webpage.) XaS was born in June/2001 XaS have started as little but long project with mission. (As you know, GNU Project began as little but long project in 20th Century) [Our Vision] equality / no hierarchy universal / not like "OTAKU" new imagination of (art) world TrasCopyright and MicroPayment No copy / Original rights/property/technology respect for each others General / not sub-culture.It is not high culture,too. Be general The world has already been full-digital.Be full xanalogical. "Xas - Xanadu Shared Xas is for share the art work for other artist as data, and getting new knowledge between community members. Basic role of XaS: The artist who join the Xas, could use each other's work with respect for his work, but the work must be opened on the XaS list with some data."
by Takuji TOKIWA [Short Term Mission] We will relaese codes with simple HTML as fist step,little by little. [Long Term Mission] We build up the concept and art work under Xanalogical Paradigm.
Can this project be origin of staring local branches on Project Xanadu,for example Xanadu Austlaria (already exists),Xanadu France,Xanadu China, Xanadu Japan and etc, in every countries and languages ? [Exhibitions/Concerts/Performances etc] We express ourselves under Xanalogical Paradigm. very Best Wishes from TOKYO Yukihiko Yukihiko YOSHIDA Petition:Martha Graham is still in danger/ http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~yukihiko/graham.html 3 Elements of the world: Joy / Fun / Love --Yuk;-)iko YOSHIDA Yukihiko YOSHIDA Artist/Systems Humanist/Generalist <.org> Keio University,Graduate School for Media and Governance Japanese Society for Dance Research World Dance Alliance Asia Pacific /WDA-AP --Research and Documentation Network Electoric Frontier Foundation:a member Project Xanadu : working as an assistant The moderator of Dance Mailing List: Xanalogical Artists Society -- We Fight on ! -- e-mail address : yukihiko at sfc.keio.ac.jp yukihiko at xanadu.net webpage: http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~yukihiko/ closest fax number: <:none> current BGM: Travel Path: currnet physical location: current physical status: < happy sad > current GPS Coordinates:<.> Citizen of World PGP Key trans(c) Yukihiko Yoshida 2002 From treborscholz at earthlink.net Sun Mar 17 22:30:44 2002 From: treborscholz at earthlink.net (Trebor Scholz) Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 01:00:44 +0800 Subject: [Reader-list] One day/ All day: April 27 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > >>>>> (apologies for cross-posting) >>>>> >>>>> Right2Fight >>>>> >>>>> A cross-disciplinary initiative on the theme of police violence. >>>>> >>>>> One day, all day. >>>>> >>>>> Sarah Lawrence College, New York >>>>> >>>>> 27 April 2002 >>>>> >>>>> http://www.molodiez.org/right2fight/slc.html >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> BROOKLYN, NY: A Haitian New Yorker named Abner Louima is tortured by >>>>> members of the NYPD. >>>>> A broken broomstick is shoved into his rectum and mouth while his >>>>> attackers scream racist epithets. The crime takes place on August 9, 1997. >>>>> Four officers are convicted. On February 28, 2002, three of the four >>>>> convictions are overturned. One officer is granted a new trial; two others >>>>> are set free outright. >>>>> >>>>> As weapons and methods of surveillance become more sophisticated and grass >>>>> roots dissatisfaction with political and economic systems grows, in many >>>>> parts of the world policing is becoming increasingly brutal and intrusive. >>>>> From 80s video surveillance, alarming in its own right, we have moved on >>>>> to far more invasive forms of policing: automated face recognition >>>>> technologies in use on the streets of London; iris scans imposed on Hadj >>>>> pilgrims arriving in Mecca; techniques elaborated to spy on the most >>>>> private exchanges online and off; ³Echelon,² an espionage system devised >>>>> to scan vast quantities of e.mails and telephone calls worldwide, in real >>>>> timeŠ >>>>> >>>>> From a world best described as an analog panopticon, we have moved into >>>>> what independent curator Inke Arns calls a pancodicon* : a world of >>>>> digital surveillance and electronic space in which our most intimate >>>>> thoughts can be charted. In this world, what few protections were afforded >>>>> those who stand in opposition to the status quo are lost, snatched back by >>>>> systems of policing -- local, national and global -- bent on breaking all >>>>> but the tamest forms of resistance. >>>>> >>>>> Such attacks on liberty are, needless to say, not new. Entire systems of >>>>> economic and political domination have been built upon policing at once >>>>> extraordinarily violent and intrusive. Among these, one might cite the >>>>> very system on which the country we live in was founded. From the arrival >>>>> of the first slave ship at Jamestown Harbor in 1619 to the contemporary >>>>> streets of our largest cities, from the era of Jim Crow lynchings to the >>>>> beating of Rodney King and the killing of Amadou Diallo, the United States >>>>> has been a place of violence meted out at the hands of a few bent on >>>>> controlling and silencing the many. >>>>> >>>>> Once, men and women of African descent, in this land, were deemed 3/5th of >>>>> a human being; today, so many men of African heritage -- one in every ten >>>>> -- are behind bars or otherwise ensnared in the criminal justice >>>>> juggernaut** that one can legitimately speak of a genocide under way. In >>>>> Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, women and men of Native American, Latino >>>>> and, increasingly, Asian heritage are questioned, arrested, incarcerated >>>>> at rates in no way commensurate with their representation in the >>>>> population at large. Post 9/11, over a thousand Arab men are in US jails, >>>>> still waiting to be charged with a crime; in many cases, their own >>>>> families have not been told where they are. >>>>> >>>>> Elsewhere too, state violence has broken and continues to break lives, >>>>> spirits, entire peoples. Violent repression was the cornerstone of the >>>>> colonial project, in Africa and Asia alike. Patrice Lumumba of Congo, >>>>> murdered by Belgian-trained gunmen mere months after his country gained >>>>> independence; Ruben Um Nyobe, heartbeat of Cameroon¹s struggle for >>>>> self-determination, killed in a French ambush in 1958; Steve Biko, beaten >>>>> to death by South African police in 1977... Theirs are but the best known >>>>> names -- a paltry few ³history² deigns to recall among those of hundreds >>>>> upon hundreds of thousands who died, many resisting, killed by authorities >>>>> in power only because they had the means to destroy. >>>>> >>>>> In Europe, as the industrial age emerged, workers died by the thousands. >>>>> In Napoleonic Paris, boulevards were cut through the city in wide swaths >>>>> to make the task of shooting discontented factory hands easier, should >>>>> they take to the streets en masse. As the 19th century drew to a close, in >>>>> the UK and US, strikers seeking better wages were clubbed and shot. In the >>>>> wake of a May Day protest that brought 80,000 workers to Chicago¹s >>>>> Michigan Avenue, police violence exploded. Within days, eight men were >>>>> arrested. A trial was held, centering on a bomb all agreed none of those >>>>> indicted had planted. Five of the men were sentenced to death; the three >>>>> others were remanded to prison for life. >>>>> >>>>> One would like to think that such excesses are a thing of the past. They >>>>> are not: >>>>> >>>>> ABNER LOUIMA >>>>> >>>>> AMADOU DIALLO (1) >>>>> >>>>> LUC BENOIT BASILEKIN (2) >>>>> >>>>> SUSANA GOMEZ, RONALD RAUL RAMOS (3) >>>>> >>>>> SEATTLE, QUEBEC CITY, GENOA (4) >>>>> >>>>> SEOUL, JAKARTA, BRISBANE (5) >>>>> >>>>> JOHANNESBURG, PARIS (6) >>>>> >>>>> BULGARIA, ALGERIA (7) >>>>> >>>>> VIRGINIA (8) >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> (1) THREE YEARS AGO, A GUINEAN IMMIGRANT NAMED AMADOU DIALLO WAS STRUCK >>>>> DOWN IN A HAIL OF BULLETS FIRED BY NEW YORK CITY POLICE. HE WAS REACHING >>>>> FOR IDENTIFICATION; THE OFFICERS ASSUMED HE WAS REACHING FOR A GUN. THEY >>>>> FIRED FORTY-ONE BULLETS. NINETEEN HIT THE TARGET. >>>>> >>>>> (2) IN FEBRUARY 2001, THE GOVERNMENT OF CAMEROON INSTITUTED THE >>>>> OPERATIONAL COMMAND, A PARAMILITARY TASK FORCE BRINGING TOGETHER MEMBERS >>>>> OF THE LOCAL AND NATIONAL POLICE AND THE ARMY. THE C.O.¹S OFFICIAL PURPOSE >>>>> WAS TO END A CRIME WAVE IN THE CITY OF DOUALA; IT WAS MEANT IN FACT TO >>>>> BRING TO HEEL SECTORS OF THE POPULATION OPPOSED TO THE REPRESSIVE RULE OF >>>>> THE GOVERNING PARTY. IN ITS FIRST SIX MONTHS, THE C.O. PERPETRATED 500 >>>>> EXTRA-JUDICIAL EXECUTIONS; BY YEAR¹S END, 1000 PEOPLE HAD DIED. ONE OF >>>>> THE FIRST WAS LUC BENOIT BASILEKIN. >>>>> >>>>> (3) IN APRIL 1996 IN GUATEMALA CITY, SUSANA GOMEZ WAS RAPED BY TWO >>>>> NATIONAL POLICE OFFICERS; SHE WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD. IN SEPTEMBER 1996, >>>>> RONALD RAUL RAMOS WAS SHOT AND KILLED BY A TREASURY POLICE OFFICER; HE TOO >>>>> WAS SIXTEEN. MORE THAN TEN OTHER STREET CHILDREN WERE MURDERED THAT YEAR, >>>>> LIKELY BY POLICE. TWELVE MONTHS LATER, NONE OF THE PERPETRATORS IN THESE >>>>> CASES HAD BEEN APPREHENDED. >>>>> >>>>> (4) IN SEATTLE, QUEBEC CITY AND GENOA, OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, UNARMED >>>>> WOMEN, MEN AND CHILDREN CALLING FOR A MORE MEASURED APPROACH TO >>>>> GLOBALIZATION THAN HAS BEEN PROPOSED BY SUCH BODIES AS THE WTO AND WORLD >>>>> BANK WERE ATTACKED BY POLICE WIELDING BATONS, RUBBER BULLETS, WATER CANONS >>>>> AND TEAR GAS. SIMILAR VIOLENCE GREETED UNARMED PROTESTERS AT MAY DAY >>>>> RALLIES THROUGHOUT ASIA AND THE PACIFIC IN 2001, FROM SIDNEY AND BRISBANE >>>>> TO KARACHI, SEOUL AND JAKARTA. >>>>> >>>>> (5) IN FEBRUARY 2002, A COLONY OF SQUATTERS WAS VIOLENTLY DISPERSED IN >>>>> CENTRAL JOHANNESBURG. THE POLICE LEVELED THE INHABITANTS¹ MAKESHIFT HOMES >>>>> AND DESTROYED THEIR BELONGINGS. THE SQUATTERS WERE MADE TO BOARD BUSES AND >>>>> WERE DRIVEN OUT OF THE CITY, WHERE THEY WERE UNCEREMONIOUSLY DUMPED, MILES >>>>> FROM FRIENDS AND FAMILY. THE METHODS EMPLOYED IN THIS DISPERSAL WERE >>>>> SIMILAR TO THOSE USED IN FORCED REMOVALS OF THE APARTHEID ERA. >>>>> >>>>> (6) ON SUNDAY OCTOBER 17, 1961, ALGERIANS LIVING IN PARIS ORGANIZED A >>>>> PEACEFUL MARCH TO PROTEST A CURFEW ON PERSONS OF ARAB DESCENT. THE POLICE >>>>> MOVED IN. THEIR COMMANDER WAS MAURICE PAPON, WHO DURING WWII HAD OVERSEEN >>>>> THE REMOVAL OF 1560 FRENCH JEWS TO GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS. TWO HUNDRED >>>>> UNARMED ALGERIANS WERE SHOT, BLUDGEONED AND DROWNED. PAPON REMAINS FREE. >>>>> DAILY, FOR NO REASON BUT THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN, PERSONS OF NORTH AFRICAN >>>>> DESCENT ARE DETAINED, ARRESTED, BEATEN AND SHOT ON FRENCH STREETS. >>>>> >>>>> (7) SINCE 1994, RACIALLY MOTIVATED VIOLENCE AGAINST ROMA GYPSIES IN >>>>> BULGARIA HAS INCREASED DRAMATICALLY. MUCH OF THIS VIOLENCE IS PERPETRATED >>>>> BY POLICE AND PRIVATE SECURITY FIRMS. IN THE COURSE OF ONE WEEK, IN APRIL >>>>> 2001, EIGHTY YOUNG PEOPLE WERE KILLED BY THE POLICE IN KABYLIA, IN >>>>> NORTH-EASTERN ALGERIA. ALL WERE MEMBERS OF THE MINORITY BERBER ETHNIC >>>>> GROUP. >>>>> >>>>> (8) ON MARCH 1, 1999, A SEVERED HEAD WAS FOUND IN A RICHMOND, VA PARK. >>>>> THE VICTIM WAS A GAY MAN. THE PARK HAD BEEN THE SITE FOR SEVERAL MONTHS OF >>>>> A POLICE ³STING²: UNDERCOVER OFFICERS HAD BEEN APPROACHING GAY MEN, >>>>> PROPOSING SEX, THEN PROMPTLY ARRESTING THOSE WHO SHOWED INTEREST. THE >>>>> ARRESTS WERE WIDELY REPORTED. THE PUBLICITY GIVEN THEM MAY WELL HAVE >>>>> ENCOURAGED THE MURDERER. WHY THE MANY PLAINCLOTHES OFFICERS PRESENT IN >>>>> THE PARK ON THE NIGHT OF THE MURDER FAILED TO SEE ANYTHING IS ANYONE¹S >>>>> GUESS. >>>>> >>>>> IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA, IN NORTH AFRICA AND EUROPE, AMNESTY >>>>> INTERNATIONAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN HUMAN RIGHTS >>>>> COMMISSION REPORT CASE AFTER CASE OF RAPE, TORTURE AND MURDER INVOLVING >>>>> TRANSGENDER AND BISEXUAL, LESBIAN AND GAY PERSONS, ALL TOO OFTEN BY >>>>> POLICE. >>>>> >>>>> From Cape Town to Ramallah and Queens, this state of affairs is drawing >>>>> the attention of artists. In an age of mass media and cleavage to the >>>>> status quo, voices, images, sounds are emerging that speak of this >>>>> violence with power and outrage. Right2Fight showcases an important >>>>> international group of cultural producers whose work stands at the >>>>> forefront of this movement. >>>>> >>>>> Right2Fight is an emphatically cross-disciplinary undertaking: from >>>>> web-based projects to graffiti, from sculpture to video, installations to >>>>> street wear, Hip Hop to posters, experimental music and photography to >>>>> performance poetry. The event's contributors speak as few can to the >>>>> social and ethical costs of police violence, to the dangers inherent in >>>>> allowing such violence to proliferate, and to the responsibility we share, >>>>> as individuals and communities, to denounce and battle it in all its >>>>> manifestations. >>>>> >>>>> Right2Fight is not a symposium. It is a constellation of spoken word >>>>> interventions, performances, film and video screenings, installations, >>>>> showings of net art and web-based pieces intended to prompt dialogue and >>>>> questions. >>>>> >>>>> This day-long collision of ideas, technologies and images seeks to >>>>> transcend mere catharsis. The goal is not to satisfy neo-liberal guilt but >>>>> to engage in concrete action. Activists and representatives of human >>>>> rights organizations dedicated to ending police violence will be present >>>>> to explain their work. Those who wish will learn, here, how they can >>>>> become actively involved in the fight, channeling their emotions into >>>>> actions, their words into deeds. >>>>> >>>>> Right2Fight is not an indictment of all police officers. It does, however, >>>>> condemn the brutality to which more than a few law enforcement communities >>>>> resort. In light of recent events, the organizers hold, it is more >>>>> important than ever to address issues of intolerance, prejudice and >>>>> violence. >>>>> >>>>> In the US and abroad, these have a disproportionate impact on the poor and >>>>> marginalized. Millions suffer, die, are broken daily. Against this, its >>>>> dehumanizing effects and causes, Right2Fight takes aim. >>>>> >>>>> Contributors include: >>>>> >>>>> Pam Africa (Philadelphia) >>>>> >>>>> Chris Bratton (Chicago) >>>>> >>>>> Camerata New York >>>>> >>>>> Robbie Conal (San Francisco) >>>>> >>>>> Adam de Croix (Brooklyn) >>>>> >>>>> Dee Curry (NewYork) >>>>> >>>>> Graff (New York) >>>>> >>>>> Ashley Hunt (Brooklyn) >>>>> >>>>> Emily Jacir (Bethlehem/Brooklyn) >>>>> >>>>> Carol Jacobsen (Ann Arbor) >>>>> >>>>> Richard Kamler (San Francisco) >>>>> >>>>> Jared Katsiane (Boston) >>>>> >>>>> Deborah Kelly (Sydney) >>>>> >>>>> Goddy Leye (Amsterdam/Yaounde) >>>>> >>>>> Mr. Lif (Boston) >>>>> >>>>> Malam (Douala) >>>>> >>>>> Brad McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry (Brooklyn) >>>>> >>>>> Julia Melzer and Liz Canner (Los Angeles/Boston) >>>>> >>>>> No One Is Illegal (Germany) >>>>> >>>>> Sally O¹Brien (New York City) >>>>> >>>>> Pass-Fix (Munich) >>>>> >>>>> Horit Peled (Tel Aviv) >>>>> >>>>> Jenny Perlin (Brooklyn) >>>>> >>>>> Picture Projects (New York City) >>>>> >>>>> Lesego Rampolokeng (Soweto) >>>>> >>>>> Oliver Ressler (Vienna) >>>>> >>>>> Martha Rosler (Brooklyn) >>>>> >>>>> Jayce Salloum (Vancouver) >>>>> >>>>> Dread Scott (Brooklyn) >>>>> >>>>> Sara Scully and Jessica Rockstar (New York City) >>>>> >>>>> Trebor Scholz (Berlin/Brooklyn) >>>>> >>>>> Gregory Sholette (Chicago) >>>>> >>>>> Merian Soto and Pepon Osorio (Bronx) >>>>> >>>>> DJ SKI HI (Bronx) >>>>> >>>>> Stolen Lives Project (USA) >>>>> >>>>> Herve Yamguen (Douala) >>>>> >>>>> Herve Youmbi (Douala) >>>>> >>>>> The event's organizers are an urban historian who works in Central Africa >>>>> and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College (Dominique Malaquais) and a Brooklyn >>>>> based, East Berlin-born interdisciplinary artist whose work has been >>>>> extensively shown in Europe and the Americas (Trebor Scholz). The two >>>>> share a commitment to tactical media, street activism and visual culture. >>>>> Both curate, speak and publish widely, focusing on issues of social >>>>> concern and the everyday. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> * Inke Arns, posting to the ³Spectre² online mailing list, 3/9/02. >>>>> >>>>> ** Neil Websdale, Policing the Poor. Boston: Northeastern University >>>>> Press, 2001. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Contact: Dominique Malaquais >>>>> >>>>> Trebor Scholz >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020318/675f06e5/attachment.html From announcements-request at sarai.net Mon Mar 18 11:57:29 2002 From: announcements-request at sarai.net (announcements-request at sarai.net) Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 07:27:29 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Announcements digest, Vol 1 #28 - 1 msg Message-ID: <200203180627.HAA30748@zelda.intra.waag.org> Send Announcements mailing list submissions to announcements at sarai.net To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to announcements-request at sarai.net You can reach the person managing the list at announcements-admin at sarai.net When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Announcements digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Mr.Jinnah-The Making of Pakistan (Sagnik Chakravartty) --__--__-- Message: 1 Date: 17 Mar 2002 06:54:58 -0000 From: "Sagnik Chakravartty" Reply-To: "Sagnik Chakravartty" To: announcements at sarai.net Subject: [Announcements] Mr.Jinnah-The Making of Pakistan NEHRU MEMORIAL MUSEUM AND LIBRARY IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE FEDERATION OF FILM SOCIETIES OF INDIA WILL BE SCREENING A FILM MR.JINNAH-THE MAKING OF PAKISTAN DIRECTED BY CHRIS MITCHELL ON THURSDAY,14 MARCH 2002 AT 5.00 P.M. IN THE AUDITORIUM OF THE NEHRU LIBRARY TEEN MURTI HOUSE, NEW DELHI ALL ARE CORDIALLY INVITED. --__--__-- _______________________________________________ Announcements mailing list Announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements End of Announcements Digest From monica at sarai.net Mon Mar 18 18:31:15 2002 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 18:31:15 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Threat on distributed radio on the net Message-ID: Conversations: The Promise of Radio Paradise: An Open-Source Challenge to Commercial Radio Posted on Tuesday, January 15, 2002 by Doc Searls Open-source radio pioneer Bill Goldsmith (of Radio Paradise and KPIG) joins Doc and other regulars on tonight's The Linux Show at 9 PM EST. Remember when "commercial broadcasting" didn't ridicule the archaic concept that broadcast bands were a public space where stations and their owners operated by the grace of public trust? That idea started falling out the window somewhere in the Nixon administration. By the Reagan administration it was hanging by its toes. The Clinton administration gave it the heave-ho by deregulating station ownership to the extent that one company, Clear Channel Communications, owns large hunks of the radio dial in nearly all the major markets, including 5 FMs in New York, 5 FMs and 2 AMs in San Francisco, and 5FMs and 3 AMs in Los Angeles, to name a few. In Santa Barbara, the small city where I live, Clear Channel owns 4 FMs and 3 AMs. The total number of local stations isn't much more than that. As Brad Kava of the San Jose Mercury News points out in his current column, the company's influence extends much farther: To comply with the legal limit of eight stations in any market, the company sold off three signals in the San Francisco market: KXJO-FM to Spanish Broadcasting, and KCNL-FM and KFJO-FM to Chase Radio Properties, both minority-owned broadcasters. But Clear Channel continues to program the stations. For a sale to be legal, the new owner must program at least 85 percent of the station's content, according to federal regulations. Clear Channel is simulcasting all of KSJO's content on KFJO and KXJO. No wonder the commercial radio dial is wall-to-wall generica. Nobody protests, for two big reasons: 1) If the last administration didn't care much, the current one cares even less. This administration clearly loves Big Business, as its toothless proposed settlement with Microsoft amply demonstrates, and Clear Channel is bent on becoming the Microsoft of radio. 2) Clear Channel controls much of the local cross-promotional entertainment advertising flow as well. Here's Brad again: Clear Channel is also the country's largest promoter of concerts and theater events. Locally, it owns Shoreline Amphitheater and books the biggest shows into San Jose's and Oakland's arenas and Saratoga's Mountain Winery. It advertises these events heavily on its competitors and works deals with those stations so they can sponsor events at its facilities. The competitors can't afford to risk losing those ad dollars. Not that anybody is up for a fight with the company that Eric Boehlert calls Radio's Big Bully and a Tough Company on Salon.com. Nor is anybody raising a stink about the role played by the record companies in all of this, which Eric wrote about in his article, "Pay for Play": "Listeners may not realize it, but radio today is largely bought by the record companies. Most rock and Top 40 stations get paid to play the songs they spin by the companies that manufacture the records." Back when I was a kid, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, "payola" made front-page headlines when it was learned that disc jockeys took money and favors for playing certain songs. In those days radio mattered. So did the concept of public trust. Today it's a rare jock that gets to choose his or her own music. That's essentially a corporate decision. It gets worse, but we've explored the darkness far enough. Rather, let's look at the alternatives. On the Demand side, there's music sharing, which Napster pioneered and for which it got destroyed by the music industry. In the open-source world their work survives in the form of Limewire and other systems that take advantage of the Gnutella network protocol. Whatever else one might call music sharing over the Net, it serves as the listeners' workaround of the commercial radio's failure to care. In the old days, radio was a system whereby professional connoisseurs shared their music collections with listeners. Yes, there was commercial involvement but not of the massive and cynical industrial sort we see today, where radio acts as a sampler tray for goods pumped from Production to Consumption through thoroughly integrated manufacturing, promotion, distribution and retailing pipes, whose unseen powers bear a creepy resemblance to those of The Matrix. On the Supply side, we have on-line radio stations created and run by the same kind of connoisseurs that once thrived on commercial radio (and persist on some noncommercial stations). You'll find a few of these on Yahoo's and Real.com's radio listings, which are dominated by licensed commercial and noncommercial stations that employ those companies' server software. You'll find a lot more on places like Live365, which lists on-line stations streaming MP3 audio. Apple's iTunes tuner also lists hundreds of streaming MP3 stations (maintained, I am told, by a Kerbango veteran). Ogg Vorbis is out there too. Taking the lead at making on-line radio an actual business is "Wild" Bill Goldsmith, who is responsible for the lovably anachronistic KPIG, a highly successful commercial FM station that serves the Santa Cruz-Salinas-Monterey Bay area of California over the air on 107-oink-5 (from, no kidding, the town of Freedom), and the rest of the world over a sparkling 128Kb MP3 stream (plus others of lower fi). Bill's other labor of love is Radio Paradise, which he runs out of his place in (no kidding) Paradise, CA. Bill has built both KPIG's and Radio Paradise's on-line broadcast systems on Linux and other open-source hacks, which he is eager to share with the rest of the world. There's even money in it, Bill says. I'm bringing this up today because Bill will join us on "The Linux Show" this evening, and because I've written about Bill twice already for Linux Journal, and the links are still fresh. Here they are: 1) the January 2002 "Linux For Suits" editorial , and 2) the November 1, 2001 SuitWatch newsletter. And yes, I have an ax to grind. I love good radio, and I miss hearing more of it on the air. I believe Open Source Radio is the best hope--not only for on-line broadcasting but for over-the-air commercial broadcasting as well, mostly because it not only saves money but gives commercial broadcasters a cornucopia of connoisseurs that might well serve as sources for over-the-air "content". For that we'll need the Open Source community to start pushing the ball Bill started rolling. Are we up for it? I'd like to hear what you think. Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From monica at sarai.net Mon Mar 18 18:30:08 2002 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 18:30:08 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Threat on distributed radio on the net Message-ID: I think that anyone interested in keeping the net as a place for open conversations will find the following very interesting. I will also post another piece on the same idea next. best Monica From tkr at del6.vsnl.net.in Sun Mar 17 19:22:28 2002 From: tkr at del6.vsnl.net.in (Rajlakshmi) Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002 19:22:28 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] on relief etc Message-ID: <3C949F9B.4D0AC5F5@ndf.vsnl.net.in> From jeebesh at sarai.net Tue Mar 19 15:48:37 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 15:48:37 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shared expereince - unpredictable encounters Message-ID: <0203191548370B.00594@pinki.sarai.kit> I am enclosing a book review from nybooks.com. The recent discusssion in the list around speech and silence initiated by Gayatri Chatterjee and following other postings, we can initiate a new thread reflecting about the nature of the `list based communication` itself along with issues that was raised during the discussion. This review raises a very interesting point around `formation of shared expereinces` and `unpredictable encounters` and it's relation to the Net. A discussion on this will be helpful in understanding the nature of interactions that we are all in. Pratap, Gayatridi and Shuddha lets give it a try. best jeebesh ----------------------- The New York Review of Books March 14, 2002 ReviewHe's Got Mail http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180 republic.com by Cass Sunstein Princeton University Press By James Fallows Is the Internet Good for Democracy? the Boston Review a discussion of republic.com in the Boston Review, Summer 2001, and on line at bostonreview.mit.edu/ndf.html1. The story of technology is largely the story of people who guess wrong about which problems will be easy to solve and which will be hard. For example, less than a decade before the Wright Brothers' flight, Lord Kelvin announced that "heavier than air flying machines are impossible." The Scientific American of 1909 concluded that "the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development," on evidence "that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced." Thomas Watson of IBM famously said in the 1940s that "there is a world market for maybe five computers."[1] In The Road Ahead, published in 1996, Bill Gates of Microsoft said that his?or anyone's? predictive writings about technology were bound to be judged harshly ten years after publication. "What I've said that turned out to be right will be considered obvious, and what was wrong will be humorous." People in the computer industry have already criticized Gates for one such "humorous" error. In the early 1980s, Microsoft made its historic deal to be the sole supplier of operating-system software for the first IBM Personal Computer. This was like being the sole engine supplier for the first mass-produced automobiles, and it was the foundation of Microsoft's later dominance. But the software that Microsoft provided, known as MS-DOS, had various limitations that frustrated its early users. One quote from Gates became infamous as a symbol of the company's arrogant attitude about such limits. It concerned how much memory, measured in kilobytes or "K," should be built into a personal computer. Gates is supposed to have said, "640K should be enough for anyone." The remark became the industry's equivalent of "Let them eat cake" because it seemed to combine lordly condescension with a lack of interest in operational details. After all, today's ordinary home computers have one hundred times as much memory as the industry's leader was calling "enough." It appears that it was Marie Thérèse, not Marie Antoinette, who greeted news that the people lacked bread with qu'ils mangent de la brioche. (The phrase was cited in Rousseau's Confessions, published when Marie Antoinette was thirteen years old and still living in Austria.) And it now appears that Bill Gates never said anything about getting along with 640K. One Sunday afternoon I asked a friend in Seattle who knows Gates whether the quote was accurate or apocryphal. Late that night, to my amazement, I found a long e-mail from Gates in my inbox, laying out painstakingly the reasons why he had always believed the opposite of what the notorious quote implied. His main point was that the 640K limit in early PCs was imposed by the design of processing chips, not Gates's software, and he'd been pushing to raise the limit as hard and as often as he could. Yet despite Gates's convincing denial, the quote is unlikely to die. It's too convenient an expression of the computer industry's sense that no one can be sure what will happen next. There are many examples showing how hard it is to predict the speed of technological advance or its effect on social or commercial life. Space travel. Cloning. Cures for cancer. The search for clean or renewable energy sources. The sense of apprehension in the last days of 1999 arose from the fact that while most experts believed the "Y2K bug" would not shut down computer systems, no one really could be sure. The most dramatic recent demonstration of this problem involves the Internet. As a matter of pure technology, the Internet has worked far better than almost anyone dared hope. A respected engineer and entrepreneur, Robert Metcalfe, who invented the networking standard called Ethernet, predicted in 1995 that as more and more people tried to connect, the Internet would "go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." (Metcalfe later had the grace to literally eat his words, pureeing a copy of the column containing his prediction and choking it down before an amused audience.) In fact, the Internet has become both faster and less crash-prone the larger it has grown. This is partly because of improved hardware but mainly because of the brilliance of the "distributed processing" model by which it operates, which automatically steers traffic away from any broken or congested part of the network. The financial assumptions surrounding the Internet have of course changed radically in a very short time. It was only three years ago that Lawrence Summers, then secretary of the treasury, joked that Brazil could solve its debt problems by changing its name to Brazil.com, since venture capital would then be sure to flow in. Until the summer of that year, any dot-com was assumed (by financiers) to be a winner, whether or not it had a plan for making profits. Since the spring of last year, any dot-com is assumed to be a loser, even if it in fact is becoming profitable. On-line sales continue to grow, despite the general recession and the depression among dot-com companies. In 2001, sales at "normal" retail stores were flat, but sales by on-line merchants rose by 20 percent. The two most celebrated dot-com bankruptcies in 2001 were DrKoop.com, a medical advice site and on-line drugstore, and WebVan, a grocery-delivery service that in 2000 had a market value of $1.2 billion. There was nothing preposterous about either of their business concepts, only about the lavishness with which they were carried out. Sooner or later some company will make money letting customers fill prescriptions or order staple groceries on line. The successful companies will probably be branches of established drugstore or grocery chains. The hit film Startup.com, released a year ago, told the story of the rise and embarrassing fall of GovWorks.com, which was intended to let state and local governments do part of their business on line. This, too, is a sound concept, one that seems destined to spread. Few people who have the choice to register a car on line will want to trudge downtown to do it the normal way. But for now, the overcorrection and rush from dot-com investments leaves good ideas as underfunded as bad ideas were overfunded before. While assessments of the Internet's economic prospects have gone through manic swings, interpretations of its political and social effects have displayed a kind of stable schizophrenia. That is, through the last half-dozen years of the Internet's explosive rise, observers have agreed that it would do something significant to society, but have disagreed about whether the effect would be good or bad. The utopian view, strongest in the Internet's early days but still heard now, boils down to the idea that the truth will make people free. Elections will become more about "issues," as voters can more easily investigate each candidate's position. Government will become more honest, as the role of money is exposed. People in different cultures will become more tolerant, as they build electronic contacts across traditional borders. Tyrants will lose their grip, as the people they oppress gain allies in the outside world and use the Internet to circumvent censorship. Liberal democracies will govern with a lighter hand, as information technology makes them more efficient and responsive. The recent struggles of dot-com companies have dampened the enthusiasm of some of the strongest exponents of these views, and have postponed estimates of when the desired effects might occur. But the concepts have not gone away. The opposing, dystopian view shares the assumption that the Internet will weaken traditional power structures, but it emphasizes all the ways in which that will be bad. Families and communities will be weakened, as each member spends more time with "virtual" friends and associates. Childhood may be destroyed, because of the lure of pornography?of which a huge supply is available on the Internet?and of addictive on-line games and the threat of sexual predators. If the Internet ultimately erodes the barriers among people and parts of the world, then any culture, community, or institution that requires a sense of separate identity to survive is threatened. A variant of this concern has been the strongest international complaint about the Internet: that it would be another means of promoting American values and the English language. The Internet's effect on language already seems to be evolving in an unexpected way. Initially nearly all the Internet's users were native English speakers, and nearly all Web pages were in English. Now well under half of all users are native English speakers, and the proportion can only fall. But the proportion of English-language pages is falling more slowly. It was 85 percent five years ago and about 60 percent now, as pages in Japanese, German, Chinese, Spanish, French, and other languages have been added rapidly. But in many parts of the non-Anglophone world, users are posting pages in English along with their national language, or instead of their own language, to make the sites comprehensible to the broadest-possible group of readers. One recent academic study of this trend, called Internet? Flagship of Global English?, concludes that the Internet will cement the role of English as universal lingua franca. The study was carried out at the University of Lecce, in Italy, and the results were posted in English.[2] Previous big, modern innovations have made a significant difference in family, community, and national life. Antibiotics and immunization dramatically cut childhood mortality in the developed countries, which in turn altered family patterns and the place of women. So too for electricity, the telephone, automobiles, air travel, radio and television, and modern techniques of farming. The Internet could have effects as profound as any of these? but they won't be clear all at once.2. The discussion that has surrounded Cass Sunstein's republic.com is a useful way to begin considering these long-term effects. I emphasize the discussion as much as the book, for it highlights some of the issues in the book in an unusual way. republic.com was published last spring. In it Sunstein, a highly regarded law professor and First Amendment specialist at the University of Chicago, addressed two different subjects with different degrees of authority and success. One of his subjects was the connection between information flow and democratic government. His argument was that in a democracy "free expression" must mean something more than mere absence of censorship. Instead, a "well-functioning system of free expression," one adequate to equip citizens for self-government, had additional tests to meet:First, people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself.... I do not suggest that government should force people to see things that they wish to avoid. But I do contend that in a democracy deserving the name, people often come across views and topics that they have not specifically selected. Second, many or most citizens should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time in addressing social problems.... Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by the media, provide a form of social glue. Roughly half the book is a constitutional and political analysis supporting this view of free expression, and it is convincing and clear. The first kind of exposure, to information one has not chosen in advance, is important because otherwise one's views would never change. The second kind of exposure, to common experiences, is especially important in a big, racially and economically diverse nation in which citizens may have very few assumptions in common. America's "shared experiences" of the last generation have largely been spectacles: entertainment (the Oscars, Survivor); sports (the Super Bowl); "public" events that attracted more attention for their melodramatic rather than their political meaning: the O.J. Simpson trial, the death of Princess Diana, the Gary Condit affair, even the sex drama that became the occasion for a presidential impeachment. The reaction to the September 11 attacks was the most truly consequential shared experience in at least a generation. There was another half to republic .com, and a less convincing one. Having defined the kind of free expression that was necessary for democracy, Sunstein went on to identify a major threat to it: namely, the Internet. In particular, he was concerned about the "filtering" and the personalizing technology of the Internet, which would in principle allow people to define in advance exactly the information they did ?and did not?want to see. The more efficient the filter, the less chance that a citizen would be exposed to healthy surprise?or share experiences with the rest of society. As technology evolved, democracy would deteriorate. The "Daily Me" was Sunstein's name for the news publication of the future. It would destroy the underpinnings of the "us" that is democracy. His book began with a "thought experiment" about the nature of this new world:It is some time in the future. Technology has greatly increased people's ability to "filter" what they want to read, see, and hear.... With the aid of a television or computer screen, and the Internet, you are able to design your own newspapers and magazines.... You need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less. "In reality, we are not so very far from complete personalization of the system of communications," he concludes. "The changes now being produced by new communications technologies are understated, not overstated, by the thought experiment with which I began." This line of reasoning, which warns against the Internet as an impediment to democracy, has two problems: one involves the Internet, and the other involves the nonelectronic ways in which citizens interact. Sunstein's warnings last spring about the ominously perfect info-filtering technology did not, to put it mildly, have the easy authority shown in his discussions of the First Amendment. They were more like suburban fretting about the bad things that must be happening on the other side of town. After his opening "thought experiment," Sunstein proceeded with a list of Internet companies whose advanced filtering technologies were leading to the "Daily Me." Several of these companies had gone out of business by the time Sunstein's book appeared, and several more have since. Sunstein can't have spent much time using any of these sites if he thinks their filtering is effective enough to pose a threat. To see for yourself, go to one of the main news sites that offers a personalized compendium of information, such as CNN.com, MSNBC.com, or Go.com, and see how "me"-like you can make it. You can set it to display your city's weather, and the stock quotes you care about, and the movie listings in your neighborhood, and the scores for the local teams. But the rest of the information you see has a high chance of being "unexpected." The filtering available on Internet sites is primitive compared to the filters, cushions, and blinders that surround us the rest of the time. The patterns Sunstein warns about?a lack of shared experience and the balkanization of Americans according to class, region, religion, and ethnicity?are real and worrisome enough. But the Internet is a trivial source of the problem? let's say one thousandth as important as the educational system, from school districts with their unequal funding to the faulty system of college admissions. Or residential patterns. Or who marries whom. Or tax policy. Or the existing broadcast media, which let you drive coast to coast listening to nothing but right-wing talk radio or NPR. Or cable TV, with one channel showing only bass fishermen and another showing only success-motivation seminars. Or patterns of commuting, which have evolved from buses to cars, and remove people from accidental contact with others. You could un-invent the Internet and still have every problem Sunstein fears. The discussion of Sunstein's book since it was published has itself been telling. In its summer issue last year, the Boston Review printed comments on republic.com from seven scholars and writers. All sympathized with Sunstein's concern about ensuring healthy, democratic discussion. Most were skeptical about the Internet as a source of the problem.[3] Michael Schudson, of the University of California?San Diego, said, "The Internet may very well reduce our common media fare, as Sunstein fears, but even in our mass-mediated era we do not live very much of our lives through the media." He mentioned the evidence that the Internet may actually encourage more civic engagement?through means as simple as e-mailed community newsletters?rather than less. Ronald Jacobs, of SUNY?Albany, argued persuasively that major portals like yahoo.com and aol.com, with their search engines, links to news stories, chat and message board services, and advertising, "function precisely like the general interest intermediaries that Sunstein thinks are so important. That is, they provide unanticipated encounters as well as common experiences." Shanto Iyengar, of Stanford, said there was no "serious ground for concern that online sources will only attract users who already share their points of view. The available evidence suggests the contrary." Henry Jenkins, of MIT, offered a sarcastic "thought experiment" of his own:Some years ago, a local bank announced plans to discontinue its "Time and Temperature" service, prompting me to whimsical speculation about how this decision could lead to total anarchy. Without a means of synchronization, our clocks would gain or lose time until we drifted out of sync with each other. Workers would arrive late or leave early; teachers wouldn't know when to end classes; participants in social and professional gatherings would stomp off impatiently when the expected party failed to arrive. Some groups of friends might create their own time zones and ignore everyone else. Running through all these comments is an appreciation of something that Sunstein may not have wasted enough time in front of a computer to share. Compared with most other indoor activities, time with the Internet is less filtered, more open-ended, more likely to lead to surprises. If you read a book or magazine, you usually keep reading. If you watch a video, you watch. But if you start looking up information on Web sites, you almost never end up where you expected. There's a link to something you'd never heard of before, some news you hadn't known was interesting. It's not the same as walking to a new part of town, but it's a lot more surprising than listening to the radio. The feeling is similar to that of going through library stacks?if there were no dust and you could instantly zoom from floor to floor. In a forthcoming book, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined,[4] David Weinberger, who runs the Web site "Journal of the Hyperelinked Organization" at www .hyperorg.com, elaborates this theme of the chaotic, always surprising nature of the Internet. Without mentioning Sunstein's book, he refutes its central claim that the Internet has a narrowing effect on people's minds. With the World Wide Web's ceaseless growth, he says,there is more and more to distract us?more sites to visit, more arguments to jump into, more dirty pictures to download, more pure wastes of time. The fact that the Web is distracting is not an accident. It is the Web's hyperlinked nature to pull our attention here and there. But it is not clear that this represents a weakening of our culture's intellectual powers, a lack of focus.... Maybe set free in a field of abundance, our hunger moves us from three meals a day to day-long grazing.... Perhaps the Web isn't shortening our attention span. Perhaps the world is just getting more interesting. I suppose I shouldn't say that the Boston Review exchange illustrates the give-and-take of the Internet, since it originally appeared in the printed magazine. But the seven responses, and Sunstein's reply, are now available on line along with two dozen other Boston Review exchanges.[5] The very ease of reading through them that way, and comparing them with comments in other exchanges on other topics posted months or years earlier, creates a kind of discovery and linkage that would be harder to equal in any other way. What it could lead to politically is as unpredictable as ever. Sunstein responded to the Boston Review replies with an intriguing shift of position. He began his response, which also serves as an afterword to the forthcoming paperback edition of his book, with this restatement of his two main contentions:1. A democracy requires both a range of common experiences and unanticipated, unchosen exposures to diverse topics and ideas. For those who accept this claim, democracy might well be jeopardized by a system in which each person decides, in advance, what to see and what not to see....2. The Internet is bad for democracy, because it is reducing common experiences and producing a situation in which people live in echo chambers of their own design. For those who accept this second claim, the current communications system is inferior to one in which general interest intermediaries dominated the scene.I endorse the first claim.... But I do not endorse the second claim. I believe that the second claim is basically wrong, because the Internet is allowing millions of people to expand their horizons and to encounter new worlds of topics and ideas. You have to admire the panache of this statement. Apparently the Boston Review panel was lulled, as I was, into misunderstanding Sunstein's true intent, by sentences in the book such as "For countless people, the Internet is producing a substantial decrease in unanticipated, unchosen encounters," or "There can be no assurance of freedom in a system committed to the 'Daily Me.'" But I also take his revised view as a sign of the collective effort underway to improve and revise our understanding of this new technology? and the likelihood that whatever we think now may soon prove wrong.An E-mail from Bill Gates Denying he ever said "640K should be enough for anyone," Bill Gates wrote me recently as follows. Some technical expressions are explained in brackets: This is one of those "quotes" that won't seem to go away. I've explained that it's wrong when it's come up every few years, including in a newspaper column and in interviews. There is a lot of irony to this one. Lou Eggebrecht (who really designed the IBM PC original hardware) and I wanted to convince IBM to have a 32-bit address space, but the 68000 [a Motorola-designed processing chip, eventually used in the Apple Macintosh] just wasn't ready. Lew had an early prototype but it would have delayed things at least a year. The 8086/8088 [the Intel-designed chip used in early personal computers] architecture has a 20-bit address bus [the mechanism used by the microprocessor to access memory; each additional "bit" in the address bus doubles the amount of memory that can be used], and the instruction set [the basic set of commands that the microprocessor understands] only generates 20-bit addresses. I and many others have said the industry "uses" an extra address bit every two years, as hardware and software become more powerful, so going from 16-bit to 20-bit was clearly not going to last us very long. The extra silicon to do 32-bit addressing is trivial, but it wasn't there. The VAX was around and all the 68000 people did was look at the VAX! 2 to the 20th is 1 megabyte (1024K), so you might ask why the difference between 640K and 1024K?where did the last 384K go? The answer is that in that 1M of address space we had to accommodate RAM [random access memory], ROM [read-only memory], and I/O addresses [Input/Output addresses used for "peripherals" like keyboards, disk drives, and hard drives], and IBM laid it out so those other things started at 640K and used all the memory space up to 1M. If they had been a bit more careful we could have had 800K instead of 640K available. In fact, we had 800K on the Sirius machine, which I got to have a lot of input on (designed by Chuck Peddle, who did the Commodore Pet and the 6502, too). The key problem though is not getting to use only 640K of the 1M of address space that was available. It's the 1M limit, which comes from having only 20 bits of address space, which is all that chip can handle! So, this limit has nothing to do with any Microsoft software. Although people talk about previous computing as 8-bit, it was 16-bit addressing in the 8080/Z80/6800/6502 [all early processing chips]. So we had only 64K of addressability. Amazingly people like Bob Harp (Vector Graphics?remember them?) went around the industry saying we should stick with that and just use bank switching techniques. Bank switching comes up whenever an address space is at the end of its life. It's a hack where you have more physical memory than logical memory. Fortunately we got enough applications moved to the 8086/8 machines to get the industry off of 16-bit addressing, but it was clear from the start the extra 4 bits wouldn't be sufficient for long. Now you MIGHT think that the next time around the chip guys would get it right. But NO, instead of going from 20 bits to 32 bits, we got the 286 chip next. Intel had its A team working on the 432 (remember that? Fortune had a silly article about how it was so far ahead of everyone, but it was a dead end even though its address space was fine). The 286's address space wasn't fine. It only had 24 bits. It used segments instead of pages and the segments were limited to 24 bits. When Intel produced the 32-bit 386 chip, IBM delayed doing a 386 machine because they had a special version of the 286 that only they could get, and they ordered way too many of them. It's hard to remember, but companies were chicken to do a 386 machine before IBM. I went down to Compaq five times and they decided to be brave and do it. They came out with a 386 machine! So finally the PC industry had a 32-bit address space. We have just recently passed through the 32-bit limit and are going to 64-bit. This is another complex story. Itanium is 64-bit. Meanwhile, AMD on its own has extended the x86 to 64-bit. Even 64-bit architecture won't last forever, but it will last for quite a while since only servers and scientific stuff have run out of 32-bit space right now. In three or four years the industry will have moved over to 64-bit architecture, and it looks like it will suffice for more than a decade. Apollo actually did 128-bit architecture really early, as did some IBM architectures. But there are tradeoffs that made those not ever become mainstream. A long answer to just say "no." I don't want anyone thinking that the address limits of the PC had something to do with software or me or a lack of understanding of the history of address spaces. My first address space was the PDP-8. That was a 12-bit address space! Even the 8008, at 14 bits, was a step up from that.Notes [1]The Experts Speak, by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky (Villard, 1998), is a collection of "authoritative" predictions that were quickly disproved.[2]"Tesi di Lucio Fabio Baccassino," www.tesionline.it/default/tesi.asp?idt=5236. [3]I also wrote an article questioning some of Sunstein's claims about the Internet when the book first came out. It was published in the Industry Standard, a magazine covering the Internet economy, which in the year 2000 sold 7,558 advertising pages, more than any other magazine in history, and in 2001 went out of business. See www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,23229,00.html. [4] David Weinberger, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web (Perseus, May 2002). [5]See bostonreview.mit.edu/ndf.html. Home · Your account · Current issue · Archives · Subscriptions · Calendar · Newsletters · Gallery · Books Copyright © 1963-2002 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher. Illustrations copyright © David Levine unless otherwise noted; unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Please contact web at nybooks.com with any questions about this site. The cover date of the next issue will be April 11, 2002. From Neel Mon Mar 18 23:19:16 2002 From: Neel (Neel) Date: 18 Mar 2002 17:49:16 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Amitav Ghosh on Agha Shahid Ali Message-ID: <20020318174916.8940.qmail@mailweb26.rediffmail.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020318/1f06cf83/attachment.pl -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Obit Type: application/rtf Size: 51965 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020318/1f06cf83/attachment.rtf From pnanpin at yahoo.co.in Wed Mar 20 01:58:28 2002 From: pnanpin at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?pratap=20pandey?=) Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 20:28:28 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] shared expereince - unpredictable encounters In-Reply-To: <0203191548370B.00594@pinki.sarai.kit> Message-ID: <20020319202828.9096.qmail@web8104.in.yahoo.com> Dear all, This is quite an immediate response to a line of thought Jeebesh has posted, namely a "reflection on the nature of list-based coomunication". (I wish to comment on the book review, but will do after I close-read it. For me, that means printing it out and "conning" the text) In terms of reflecting on the "nature" of list-based communication, I wish to say: let us begin by thinking about (a) the notion of "enlistment" and (b) a form of communicative action that could be given the name "Outer-textuality". In this posting, I wish to dwell only upon (b), that is, on "Outer-textuality". This is a neo-logism that came to mind while reading Jeebesh's posting. It excites me. Immediately, I propose this notion in opposition to "inter-textuality". The notion of "inter-textuality" serves to represent the way in which texts("readerly"or "writerly")"talk" to each other, or can be made to "connect" to each other (both these ways possess their own "determinations": either texts make refernce to each other, or texts are brought together in a kind of "critical fit/filiation"). In other words, it serves as a name for a kind of communicative action that takes place between texts, that immanently possesses a rationality in so far as there always exists a limit, a discursive, historical limit, to the way -- the what, the how, and the why -- texts "talk" to each other, or can be made to "connect" to each other. (I want to "con" Kristeva again. Then I will be able to state more clearly, what "inter-textuality" means, and so be able to formulate "outer-textuality" in less probabilistic fashion, as follows). "Outer-textuality" begins with the need to formulate a name for the way in which E-ecriture (an e-text, whatever that means) is always already up for grabs. Is it inherent in the nature of any word that that is floated over the internet to become, by virtue of being floated over the internet, to become available for "absolute" borrowing? Can the meaning of a word existing on the internet (once it has floated into it) ne turned around any which way it can be? Can the truth of a word be absolutely relativised, so that the truth of that word e-depends (whatever that means) in the e-context in which it is e-used? Is the entire activity, signified by words appearing on the internet, completely anarchic, or is the use of words on the internet also rule bound (by e-rules, whatever that means)? I ask these questions to "firewall" the obvious understanding that e-signifiers -- reference, truth, meaning -- are "differant", that e-signifiers so exist by virtue of being a priori non-essentialist (transcendental). Such a Derridean understanding of the way syntax "acts" on the internet really begs the question of intentionality, of the ethical responsibility to act that language use -- understood here as a capacity to coordinate action -- possesses. This should make clear that I ask these questions to also point to the "other" side: to the positive flexibility and reachability, of and to language-use, that the Internet -- as a form of textuality-cum-worlding that completely threatens all existent, dominant, hegemonic (I am drooling to say, here: "american", "americanised" "american academia-fied) form/s of textuality-worlding -- makes available despite itself, despite what it "means" to its users. "Outer-textuality" is therefore a term for the kind of communicative rationality that the Internet has brought into being. It is the name of a new chronotope. In the beginning, there was epic. Then came the novel. Today, the internet. List-based communication is "outer-textualised" communication. It is a form of communication that forces the communicator to use language in exteriority, to use language in a way where "will" always invents itself via speech-acts. It is a form of communication that is mind-blowingly intersubjective. It is a form of communication that cannot be anything other than intersubjective. That is what makes list-based communication so "civil-social". In list-based communication, impersonality dialectically interacts with intimacy. So, as a form of "over-textuality", list-based communication can be equally oplite and abusive. I will take up the notion of "enlistment" in a subsequent posting. For the time being, could we indulge in an activity? Could all of us, who feel piqued by this word, dwell on exactly what "enlistment" means? Could we think on this? Share answers to questions like: What does it mean to "enlist"? Are you already "enlisted"? What form of social organisation (the distribution of interests, the flow of micro-power, the proliferation of propriety, the {im}positioning of the body, the regulation of pleasure/s, the institutional requirement, the attitudinal investment, the socialisation of self) is germane to "enlistment"? Are the words "enlistment" and en-list-ment different? yours talkatively, pratap --- Jeebesh Bagchi wrote: > I am enclosing a book review from nybooks.com. > > The recent discusssion in the list around speech and > silence initiated by > Gayatri Chatterjee and following other postings, we > can initiate a new thread > reflecting about the nature of the `list based > communication` itself along > with issues that was raised during the discussion. > > This review raises a very interesting point around > `formation of shared > expereinces` and `unpredictable encounters` and it's > relation to the Net. A > discussion on this will be helpful in understanding > the nature of > interactions that we are all in. > > Pratap, Gayatridi and Shuddha lets give it a try. > > best > jeebesh > > ----------------------- > The New York Review of Books > March 14, 2002 ReviewHe's Got Mail > http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180 > > republic.com > by Cass Sunstein > Princeton University Press > > By James Fallows > > Is the Internet Good for Democracy? > the Boston Review > a discussion of republic.com in the Boston Review, > Summer 2001, and on line > at bostonreview.mit.edu/ndf.html1. > > The story of technology is largely the story of > people who guess wrong about > which problems will be easy to solve and which will > be hard. For example, > less than a decade before the Wright Brothers' > flight, Lord Kelvin announced > that "heavier than air flying machines are > impossible." The Scientific > American of 1909 concluded that "the automobile has > practically reached the > limit of its development," on evidence "that during > the past year no > improvements of a radical nature have been > introduced." Thomas Watson of IBM > famously said in the 1940s that "there is a world > market for maybe five > computers."[1] In The Road Ahead, published in 1996, > Bill Gates of Microsoft > said that his?or anyone's? predictive writings about > technology were bound to > be judged harshly ten years after publication. "What > I've said that turned > out to be right will be considered obvious, and what > was wrong will be > humorous." > > People in the computer industry have already > criticized Gates for one such > "humorous" error. In the early 1980s, Microsoft made > its historic deal to be > the sole supplier of operating-system software for > the first IBM Personal > Computer. This was like being the sole engine > supplier for the first > mass-produced automobiles, and it was the foundation > of Microsoft's later > dominance. But the software that Microsoft provided, > known as MS-DOS, had > various limitations that frustrated its early users. > One quote from Gates > became infamous as a symbol of the company's > arrogant attitude about such > limits. It concerned how much memory, measured in > kilobytes or "K," should be > built into a personal computer. Gates is supposed to > have said, "640K should > be enough for anyone." The remark became the > industry's equivalent of "Let > them eat cake" because it seemed to combine lordly > condescension with a lack > of interest in operational details. After all, > today's ordinary home > computers have one hundred times as much memory as > the industry's leader was > calling "enough." > > It appears that it was Marie Thérèse, not Marie > Antoinette, who greeted news > that the people lacked bread with qu'ils mangent de > la brioche. (The phrase > was cited in Rousseau's Confessions, published when > Marie Antoinette was > thirteen years old and still living in Austria.) And > it now appears that Bill > Gates never said anything about getting along with > 640K. One Sunday afternoon > I asked a friend in Seattle who knows Gates whether > the quote was accurate or > apocryphal. Late that night, to my amazement, I > found a long e-mail from > Gates in my inbox, laying out painstakingly the > reasons why he had always > believed the opposite of what the notorious quote > implied. His main point was > that the 640K limit in early PCs was imposed by the > design of processing > chips, not Gates's software, and he'd been pushing > to raise the limit as hard > and as often as he could. Yet despite Gates's > convincing denial, the quote is > unlikely to die. It's too convenient an expression > of the computer industry's > sense that no one can be sure what will happen next. > > There are many examples showing how hard it is to > predict the speed of > technological advance or its effect on social or > commercial life. Space > travel. Cloning. Cures for cancer. The search for > clean or renewable energy > sources. The sense of apprehension in the last days > of 1999 arose from the > fact that while most experts believed the "Y2K bug" > would not shut down > computer systems, no one really could be sure. > > The most dramatic recent demonstration of this > problem involves the Internet. > As a matter of pure technology, the Internet has > worked far better than > almost anyone dared hope. A respected engineer and > entrepreneur, Robert > Metcalfe, who invented the networking standard > called Ethernet, predicted in > 1995 that as more and more people tried to connect, > the Internet would "go > spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically > collapse." (Metcalfe > later had the grace to literally eat his words, > pureeing a copy of the column > containing his prediction and choking it down before > an amused audience.) In > fact, the Internet has become both faster and less > crash-prone the larger it > has grown. This is partly because of improved > hardware but mainly because of > the brilliance of the "distributed processing" model > by which it operates, > which automatically steers traffic away from any > broken or congested part of > the network. > > The financial assumptions surrounding the Internet > have of course changed > radically in a very short time. It was only three > years ago that Lawrence > Summers, then secretary of the treasury, joked that > Brazil could solve its > debt problems by changing its name to Brazil.com, > since venture capital would > then be sure to flow in. Until the summer of that > year, any dot-com was > assumed (by financiers) to be a winner, whether or > not it had a plan for > making profits. Since the spring of last year, any > dot-com is assumed to be a > loser, even if it in fact is becoming profitable. > > On-line sales continue to grow, despite the general > recession and the > depression among dot-com companies. In 2001, sales > at "normal" retail stores > were flat, but sales by on-line merchants rose by 20 > percent. The two most > celebrated dot-com bankruptcies in 2001 were > DrKoop.com, a medical advice > site and on-line drugstore, and WebVan, a > grocery-delivery service that in > 2000 had a market value of $1.2 billion. There was > nothing preposterous about > either of their business concepts, only about the > lavishness with which they > were carried out. Sooner or later some company will > make money letting > customers fill prescriptions or order staple > groceries on line. The > successful companies will probably be branches of > established drugstore or > grocery chains. The hit film Startup.com, released a > year ago, told the story > of the rise and embarrassing fall of GovWorks.com, > which === message truncated === ________________________________________________________________________ For live cricket scores download Yahoo! Score Tracker at: http://in.sports.yahoo.com/cricket/tracker.html From electricshadows at vsnl.com Wed Mar 20 08:01:23 2002 From: electricshadows at vsnl.com (electricshadows at vsnl.com) Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 08:01:23 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] Israel's War Message-ID: <20020320023123.23CA27E0D@chn3.vsnl.net.in> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020320/ad014092/attachment.pl From geert at desk.nl Wed Mar 20 11:18:43 2002 From: geert at desk.nl (geert lovink) Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 16:48:43 +1100 Subject: [Reader-list] From: "Madanmohan Rao" Message-ID: <018001c1cfd2$e9232180$9cde3dca@geert> From: "Madanmohan Rao" Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 12:08 PM > A warm hello from Bangalore! Trust all is well with you.... > I just got back from a couple of months of conferencing/consulting in > the US and east Asia. Some of the articles written on these trips have been > recently published: > 1. Internet governance (Internet and Public Policy conference; Atlanta) > http://www.indiainfoline.com/nevi/inwi/index.html > 2. Wireless Internet trends in the US (Internet World Wireless conference, > New York) > http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=3306960 > http://www.electronicmarkets.org/ (under the EM Wire section) > 3. Knowledge and content management systems (Asia Intranet Content Summit, > Singapore) > http://www.economictimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=2597284 > 4. Knowledge Management: A State Of The Art Guide (review of book by Paul > Gamble) > http://www.inomy.com (under the book review section) > Happy reading, and do stay in touch - > > - madan > > [Madanmohan Rao, Editor, INOMY; Director, 4Cplus; Co-author, "The Internet > Economy of India 2001," "The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook" (McGraw-Hill); > Bangalore, INDIA] From geert at xs4all.nl Thu Mar 21 03:36:40 2002 From: geert at xs4all.nl (geert) Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 09:06:40 +1100 Subject: [Reader-list] IT in regional areas Message-ID: <022201c1d05b$84075940$a1de3dca@geert> The Faculty of Informatics and Communication at Central Queensland University is pleased to call for case studies for its ITiRA 2002 Conference at CQU Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia, 27 - 29 August 2002. The overall purpose of the ITiRA 2002 Conference is to examine strategies, research and applications for the introduction and use of Information Technology in Regional Areas (details can be found at: http://itira.cqu.edu.au ). "Expressions of Interest" (abstracts) for the presentation of Case Studies or Posters will be accepted until 10 May 2002, accepted case studies will be notified by 24 May and completed case study papers due 5 July. ITiRA Tracks: ITiRA will include a mixture of refereed papers as well as non- refereed case studies and applications, structured around the following eight major track themes: 1 - Community Informatics; 2 - IT for Regional Health; 3 - IT for Regional Media and Communication; 4 - IT for Regional Industry and e-Economy; 5 - IT for Regional EduIcation and Training; 6 - IT for Developing Countries and Indigenous Peoples; 7 - IT for Regional Culture and the Arts; 8 - e-Democracy. There are a few spaces for papers in some of the tracks. Please contact the Conference Secretary at ITiRA2002 at cqu.edu.au for details. Publication of papers: Please note: We have signed a contract with an international publisher to edit a book on "Using Community Informatics to Transform Regions". We will be selecting the best papers from the ITiRA 2002 Conference to form the basis of this book. For general information on the conference or to submit expression of interest (usually in the form of an abstract), contact the Conference Secretary at ITiRA2002 at cqu.edu.au. Regards Stewart _____________________________ Professor Stewart Marshall Acting Pro Vice Chancellor Central Queensland University Rockhampton QLD 4702 Phone: 07 4930 9515 Fax: 07 4936 1691 email: pvc-cqu at cqu.edu.au ITiRA2002: http://itira.cqu.edu.au From sreejata at yahoo.com Fri Mar 22 18:25:55 2002 From: sreejata at yahoo.com (sreejata roy) Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 04:55:55 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] The Image Matrix Message-ID: <20020322125555.45891.qmail@web11501.mail.yahoo.com> For all of you Cheers! Sreejata .................................................... Subject: [CSL]: Article 105- The Image Matrix Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 12:52:06 -0000 From: John Armitage Reply-To: The Cyber-Society-Live mailing list is a moderated discussion list for those interested To: CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE at JISCMAIL.AC.UK _____________________________________________________________________ CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 25, NOS 1-2 *** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net *** Article 105 20/03/02 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker _____________________________________________________________________ Dear CTHEORY Readers, We are pleased to announce that Paul Virilio, one of the world's leading theorists of technology, culture and politics, has joined the editorial board of CTHEORY. Virilio's writings include, among other books, _War and Cinema_, _The Vision Machine_, _Speed and Politics_, _The Information Bomb_, _The Art of the Motor_, _The Aesthetics of Disappearance_, and _Open Sky_. Arthur & Marilouise Kroker Editors, CTHEORY _____________________________________________________________________ The Image Matrix "Analog is having a burial and digital is dancing on its grave" =============================================================== ~Arthur Kroker~ Burying the Image for the Future -------------------------------- Today the image is so powerful that it has to be buried alive. Consider the following story: It will be a surreal burial. The Bettmann archive, the quirky cache of pictures that Otto Bettmann sneaked out of Nazi Germany in two steamer trunks in 1935 and then built into an enormous collection of historical importance, will be sunk 220 feet down in a limestone mine situated 60 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, where it will be far from the reach of historians. The archive, which is estimated to have as many as 17 million photographs, is a visual record of the 20th century. Since 1995 it has belonged to Corbis, the private company of Microsoft's chairman, William H. Gates. The Bettmann archive is moving from New York City to a strange underworld. Corbis plans to rent 10,000 square feet in a mine that once belonged to U.S. Steel and now holds a vast underground city run by Iron Mountain/National Underground Storage. There Corbis will create a modern, subzero, low-humidity storage areas safe from earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, vandals, nuclear blasts and the ravages of time. But preservation by deep freeze presents a problem. The new address is strikingly inaccessible. Historians, researchers and editors accustomed to browsing through photo files will have to use Corbis's digital archive, which has only 225.000 images, less than 2 percent of the whole collection. Some worry that the collection is being locked away in a tomb; others believe that Mr. Gates is saving a pictorial legacy that is in mortal danger... When the move is done, Corbis's New York office will contain nothing but people and their computers, plugged into a digital archive. No photographic prints, no negatives, no rotting mess. Analog is having a burial and digital is dancing on its grave. --Sarah Boxer, New York Times, April 15, 2001 The Death of Analog/The Power of Analog --------------------------------------- The 20th century may have been dominated by the spectacle of the image, but the 21st century will witness the disappearance of the image into digitality moving at the speed of light. Not simply the death of analog with its extended burial rights for the traditional apparatus of photography-prints, negatives, and the framing gaze of the photographer's eye--but the disappearance of the image itself. Because that is what is really at stake in this strange story of Corbis's necropolis of the photographic archive. Certainly there are serious issues of cultural politics here: issues of monopoly capitalism in digital form creating a short market in the photographic archive of the future; issues of shutting down the eye of photographic history itself; issues of substitute culture-- replacing an actual worked photographic archive with its coded, and dramatically abbreviated, digital substitutes. All of this is almost self-evidently true, almost palpable in this eerie spectacle of the cryogenic deep-freezing of photography, this entombment of the reproductive rites of photography in an abandoned mine shaft in Pennsylvania. No more (photographic) images, no more decomposing smells of negatives, no more "thumbing through" stacks of refrigerated images, no more immediacy. Now, we are suddenly living in the culture of the retrieval of digitally archived images by remote control: images safely kept at a distance from human contact, uncontaminated by the passage of time. The image archive is reduced to the steady flicker of the cybernetic code. Hygienic, sterilized, catalogued on the computer screen, untouched by the human hand, unseen by the human eye, uncontaminated by the ephemeral imagination. But what does this really mean? Is this simply another story of the triumph of digitality over analog--the sovereignty of the light-image over that curious mixture of light and time and chemicals that is photography? Or is this assignation of the photographic archive to the coffin of a cold underground storage vault a haunting presentiment of something more monumental, more striking for the artificiality, perhaps even naivety, of its digital illusions? Certainly on the surface this may be a quick-time fable of "analog having a burial and digital dancing on its grave," but in the strange reversals that mark the passage of life itself through the spectacle of the image, exactly the opposite may also be the case. The secret of this fable of the buried image lies in the question of the code. Because the code is what this story is really about, and it is just when we disentangle the double helix of the digital code, that twisting spiral of analog and digital logic as they intersect and implode that we can begin to understand the serious cultural implications of this story for the future of the image in the new century. It is in the nature of all codes, digital or otherwise, to immediately repress all signs of their opposites, to cancel from view and certainly from verbal optical articulation the repressed energies of the anti-codes that work to make possible the violence of the positive code itself. As in life so in the story of the digital code. The digital code speaks the sanitary language of culture cleansing, of photography itself at a distance, of the archive by remote control, of the deep-freeze preservation of the image from the 'contamination' of time and history and memory and skin and smells and touch. Photography in a bubble. Memory in cold storage. Images fast-frozen. Perfectly preserved, perfectly coded. Always retrievable, always inaccessible. A psychoanalytics of digital repression. But what if with the history of mythology as our guide, we were also to note concerning the future of the image that that which is most deeply repressed, most feared and most preserved even to the point of its death, never fully absents itself from culture, never can be removed at a safe preserve from the future anxieties and future boredom of the enigma of life itself. In this case, it is not so much the "burial of analog with digital dancing on its grave," but analog as the repressed memory the absence of which haunts the once and future spectacle of the digital. More than is perhaps recognizable in the orthodox media scriptures of the digital age, we are no longer living in a culture dominated by the image because we are the pure image. Ours is a culture signified by the triumph of virtuality, by the disappearance of the spectacle of the graven image into code. It is as if those torrents of words spilled in the decade leading up to the end of the 20th century, those anti-words that stormed the icons of representationality, that spoke of the hyperreality of a coming structuralist reality, finally found their moment of historical truth, not in the echoes of written language but in the language of the disappearance of the image. Hypering the image. Coding the spectacle. A hygienic of (ocular) memory. A necropolis for the photographic memory. When a culture at some deep informing cultural level finally loses faith in representationality, when it shifts its register of acceptable meanings to embrace the language of virtuality, then that culture also effaces its ability to filter memory through the apparatus of the image. The death of representationality then is also about the burial of the image, and the virtual flight from the tomb of the analog of the new story of the cynical image. Indeed, if the history of 20th century photography can be buried alive, chilled to such a degree of zero-intensity that it cannot be easily disturbed, this is simply an indicator that the image has taken flight from the medium of analog photography to electronic imaging, from the image as a light-based product of the photographic apparatus to the vanishing of the image into the digital simulacrum. Or maybe something else. Perhaps the burial of the history of 20th century photography also announces in the absolutism of this gesture that the photographic image can be superfluous today because we are finally living out that age predicted by ancient prophecy--a time in which the image is made flesh. Disappearing into Images ------------------------ ~It was always intended to be this way.~ Discontented with the radical separation of flesh and image, the body has perhaps always yearned to disappear into its own simulacrum, to become the image of itself that it thought it was only dreaming. This is why the story of the simulacra of images has nothing essential to do with the languages of domination, with the purely social stories of alienation or reification. Escaping from the coils of earthy mortality, the history of the image has been most seductive because of its obsessive hint of pure ocularity, because of its trance-like status as a virtual vector in an increasingly electro-optic apparatus of power. A born pervert, the image is the outlaw region of the human imagination. A natural charlatan, the image maintains the pretence that it has something to do with the history of the eye precisely because its real electro-optical history focuses on the shutting down of the eye of the flesh and the opening up of the cynical eye of dead code. An enigma, a sky-tracer, a going beyond, a falling back: the image is the residual trace of the human challenge to a universe that knows only the game of reversibility and seduction as responses to challenges to the power of its silence. Consequently, it is our future to disappear into images. Not only into those external image-screens-cinema, TV, video, digital photography--but also into those image-matrices that harvest human flesh: MRI, CT scans, and thermography. The future of the media? That's the unseen cameras of automatic bank machines, the unhearing machines of automatic eye scans, the unknowing machines of planetary satellite photography. Sliced through and diced, combined and recombined, the body is an image matrix. The body desperately needs images to know itself, to measure itself, to reassure itself, to stimulate its attention, to feed its memory channels, to chart its beauty lines, to recognize its gravity flaws, age marks and flaring eyes. In a special case of the media preceding science, the image matrix is how biotechnology will penetrate the imagination. No need to wait for the sequencing machines of recombinant technology. The image matrix is already recombinant. No need to anticipate the results of gene sequencing: the results of the human genome image are already known. The image matrix inhabits the body. It is the air breathed by its photographic lungs. It is the sky surrounding its digital eyes. The image matrix quick-jumps the eye and seduces the imagination. A static line. A conspiracy line. An entertaining line. The image matrix is always there. There is no longer any difference between the body and the image matrix, except perhaps in the default sense that the body is still in the way of a falling away from the intensity of the image matrix, a gravitational pull like a dark unseen star in a distant galaxy that can only be detected by its negative gravitational presence. Do images warp when in the presence of bodies? Like galactic star systems, do images flare outwards in the act of seducing passing bodies? Conversely, do images retract into cold sterility when animating empty spaces. And what of light? Why is the image matrix washed out by sunlight? Is it simply a matter of physics, or something else. Is the disappearance of images when exposed to the light of the sun certain evidence that images are also possessed of the spirit of the vampire. And what of the future of the image in the age of biotechnology? The image is a gene machine, recombining, splicing, mutating, sequencing. No need to wait for the genetic engineering of the body because the image is already a gene sequencer, mutating and mixing culture patches. That the history of the photographic archive of the 20th century has now been safely interred in cold monument to the dead image only means that the final assimilation of human flesh and the image matrix is about to occur. In a culture of death, only that which has been buried is finally freed to live out the enigmatic seduction of its destiny. A Recombinant Postscript ------------------------ ~Saving the Future for the Image~ So then, a final question: What is the fate of the image in the age of the digital? Saving the image for the future? or just the reverse: "Saving the future for the image?" Consequently, the urgent political question: In the digital age--Saving the image for whom?" Saving the Image, therefore, for whom? and for what? The real question is not necessarily ensuring the survivability of the image, but of maintaining a cultural free and democratically accessibility to the images of the future. In effect, ensuring the survivability of an open future for the image. A digital future under the global control of the masters of the digital universe means a future of the image under the control of an acquisitive and accumulative mentality driven on by a strange, restless but nonetheless relentless desire to possess the future of the Image. Who will be the guardians of the images of the future? A Ted Turner color-your-world future where questions of accessibility to the electronic heritage will be under the control of all the (Bill) gatesways of the world. A closed digital future? Or an open digital future? Digitally archiving images of the future in which to access those images we will have to pass through a global networked multimedia market centralized primarily in the United States, or an open future free for creative imaging. Not just a technical question, then, of the challenge of archiving and curating the images of the digital future, but now there is a very real cultural struggle over saving the future for creative images. In essence, the technical question introduced by the move from electronic to digital reality might well be the implications of digital technology for the electronic heritage. For example, Curating the Image in a thin/client future where networked computer systems make easily possible centralized storage of the image-bank of the world's entire film history: every film, every image coded for easy retrievability, and also, of course, coded for instant digital manipulation. A digital film bank, where if the masters of the digital universe have their way, will be much like Blockbuster Video, where a lot of independent, definitely not mainstream films will be quickly and silently exorcised from the electronic future. A closed digital future, shut down in advance by the subordination of the Image to a digital future acting at the behest of private accumulation. Not then so much saving the Image for the future. In the digital age, that's increasingly a transparent question. But saving the future for the Image, asking the question of Images For Whom? and Images for What? is a political question. But it's a question which speaks of the life-and-death cultural struggle that will take place over democratic accessibility versus private intellectual property rights to the Images of the electronic future. What's at stake is nothing less than our cultural heritage in the 21st century. Perhaps that is what is really at stake in these stories about the death of the image: first of the photographic image through its entombment in a new reenactment of an Egyptian cult of the dead; and then of the electronic image as it vanishes into the specter of virtuality. The Despotic Image or The Bored Eye? ------------------------------------ The digital age unleashes deeply paradoxical tendencies in the unfolding history of the image, moving simultaneously between the violent repression of the material memory of the photographic image and its recombinant recreation in the culture of the digitized imaginaire. Out of the ashes of photography under the sign of analog suddenly appears the phoenix of the digitized image-machine. A doubled story of repression and creation? Or something else? If today the image proliferates with such velocity and intensity that human flesh literally struggles to become the image of its own impossible perfection--witness the psycho-ontology of cosmetic surgery--then this might also mean that we are now fully possessed by the power of the image. Not possessed by the power of the image as something somehow ulterior, and possibly alien, to human agency, but possessed by the image as a fulfillment of human desire, and perhaps desperation. In a Copernican flip, we ourselves are images to the world surrounding us: designer bodies, rip-tide abs, faces as gestures, attitudes as probes, lips like invitations, pouts like refusals, eyes like a going under. Possessed by the images once thought as somehow safely alienated as representations, we ourselves have become founding referents to the simulacrum that invades us. A story of body invasion? Not really. Contemporary society is no longer the culture of the disembodied eye. Today, we play out the drama of our private existence along and within the iris of the image-machine that we once dismissed as somehow external to human ambitions. Our fate, our most singular fate, is to experience the fatal destiny of the image as both goal and precondition of human culture. As goal, the power of the image inheres in the fact that contemporary culture is driven forward by the will to image as its most pervasive form of nihilism. As precondition, we are possessed individuals because we are fully possessed by the enigmatic dreams of impossible images. That we are possessed by the power of the image with such finality has the curious repercussion of driving the image-machine mad. The matrix of image-creation as its evolves from analog to digital and now to the biogenetic struggles to keep pace with the capricious tastes and fast-bored appetites of human flesh as an image-machine. It is the age of the bored eye: the eye which flits from situation to situation, from scene to scene, from image to image, from ad to ad, with a restlessness and high-pitched consumptive appetite that can never really ever be fully satisfied. The bored eye is a natural nihilist. It knows only the pleasure of the boredom of creation as well as the boredom of abandonment. It never remains still. It is in perpetual motion. It demands novelty. It loves junk images. It turns recombinant when fed straight narratives. It has ocular appetites that demand satisfaction. But it can never be fully sated because the bored eye is the empty eye. That is its secret passion, and the source of its endless seduction. The bored eye is the real power of the image. It takes full possession of the housing of the body. It is the nerve center of flesh made image. It is the connective tissue between the planetary ocular strategies of the image-matrix and the solitude of the human body. The bored eye is bored with its (bodily) self. That is why it is always dissatisfied. It needs to blast out of the solitude of its birth-place in the human cranium in order to ride the electronic currents of the global eye. No longer satisfied with simply observing the power of the image, the bored eye now demands to be the power of the image. Which is why, of course, the archival history of twentieth-century photography can now be safely interned. At dusk, the eye of the image takes flight in the restless form of the bored eye forever revolving and twisting and circulating in an image-matrix of which it is both the petulant consumer and unsatisfied author. Ironically, the bored eye has itself now become both precondition and goal for the despotic image. Which is why images can now be so powerful precisely because they are caught in a fatal miasma of powerlessness before the ocular deficit disorder of the bored eye. The despotic image may demand attention as its precondition for existence, but the bored eye is seductive because of its refusal to provide any sign of lasting interest. A love affair turned sour. With this predictable result--the increasing ressentiment of the digital image: "Analog is having a burial and digital is dancing on its grave." _____________________________________________________________________ * CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology * and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews * in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as * theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape. * * Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker * * Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Paul Virilio (Paris), * Bruce Sterling (Austin), R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Siegfried * Zielinski (Koeln), Stelarc (Melbourne), Richard Kadrey (San * Francisco), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (NYC), David Therrien * (Phoenix), Timothy Murray (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson * (San Francisco), Stephen Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross (NYC), * David Cook (Toronto), Ralph Melcher (Santa Fe), Shannon Bell * (Toronto), Gad Horowitz (Toronto), Deena & Michael Weinstein * (Chicago), Andrew Wernick (Peterborough). * * In Memory: Kathy Acker * * Editorial Correspondents: Ken Hollings (UK), * Maurice Charland (Canada), Steve Gibson (Canada/Sweden). * * Editorial & Technical Assistant: Adam Wygodny * WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET) * WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman ____________________________________________________________________ To view CTHEORY online please visit: http://www.ctheory.net/ To view CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA online please visit: http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/ ____________________________________________________________________ * CTHEORY includes: * * 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory. * * 2. Electronic articles on theory, technology and culture. * * 3. Event-scenes in politics, culture and the mediascape. * * 4. Interviews with significant theorists, artists, and writers. * * 5. Multimedia theme issues and projects. * * Special thanks to Concordia University for CTHEORY office space. * * No commercial use of CTHEORY articles without permission. * * Mailing address: CTHEORY, Concordia University, 1455 * de Maisonneuve, O., Montreal, Canada, H3G 1M8. * * Full text and microform versions are available from UMI, * Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Canadian Periodical Index/Gale * Canada, Toronto. * * Indexed in: International Political Science Abstracts/ * Documentation politique international; Sociological * Abstract Inc.; Advance Bibliography of Contents: Political * Science and Government; Canadian Periodical Index; * Film and Literature Index. _____________________________________________________________________ ************************************************************************************ Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards� http://movies.yahoo.com/ From fatimazehrarizvi at hotmail.com Fri Mar 22 21:47:19 2002 From: fatimazehrarizvi at hotmail.com (zehra rizvi) Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 11:17:19 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] Empire & the New Loyalists Message-ID: >excellent article by Tariq Ali taken from Counterpunch. Apologies if you've >already read it. i realize its a couple of days stale. > >z.rizvi >--------------------- >"They laugh in Washington when they hear European politicians talk of >revitalising the UN. There are 189 member states of the UN. In 100 of these >states there is a US military presence. For UN, read US?" >--------------------- > > >March 16, 2002 > > >The New Empire Loyalists > >Former Leftists Turned US military Cheerleaders are Helping Snuff Out Its >Traditions of Dissent >By Tariq Ali > > >Exactly one year before the hijackers hit the Pentagon, Chalmers Johnson, a >distinguished American academic, staunch supporter of the US during the >wars >in Korea and Vietnam, and one-time senior analyst for the CIA, tried to >alert his fellow-citizens to the dangers that lay ahead. He offered a >trenchant critique of his country's post-cold war imperial policies: >"Blowback," he prophesied, "is shorthand for saying that a nation reaps >what >it sows, even if it does not fully know or understand what it has sown. > >"Given its wealth and power, the United States will be a prime recipient in >the foreseeable future of all of the more expectable forms of blowback, >particularly terrorist attacks against Americans in and out of the armed >forces anywhere on earth, including within the United States." > >But whereas Johnson drew on his past, as a senior state-intellectual within >the heart of the American establishment, to warn us of the dangers inherent >in the imperial pursuit of economic and military domination, former critics >of imperialism found themselves trapped by the debris of September 11. Many >have now become its most vociferous loyalists. I am not, in this instance, >referring to the belligerati - Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and friends - >ever-present in the liberal press on both sides of the Atlantic. They might >well shift again. Rushdie's decision to pose for the cover of a French >magazine draped in the stars and stripes could be a temporary aberration. >His new-found love for the empire might even turn out to be as short-lived >as his conversion to Islam. > >What concerns me more is another group: men and women who were once >intensely involved in leftwing activities. It has been a short march for >some of them: from the outer fringes of radical politics to the >antechambers >of the state department. Like many converts, they display an aggressive >self-confidence. Having honed their polemical and ideological skills within >the left, they now deploy them against their old friends. This is why they >have become the useful idiots of the empire. They will be used and dumped. >A >few, no doubt, hope to travel further and occupy the space vacated by >Chalmers Johnson, but they should be warned: there is already a very long >queue. > >Others still dream of becoming the Somali, Pakistani, Iraqi or Iranian >equivalents of the Afghan puppet, Hamid Karzai. They, too, might be >disappointed. Only tried and tested agents can be put in power. Most >one-time Marxists or Maoists do not yet pass muster. To do so they have to >rewrite their entire past and admit they were wrong in ever backing the old >enemies of the empire - in Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan or the Arab >East. They have, in other words, to pass the David Horowitz test. Horowitz, >the son of communists and biographer of the late Isaac Deutscher, underwent >the most amazing self-cleansing in post-1970s America. Today he is a >leading >polemicist of the right, constantly denouncing liberals as a bridge to the >more sinister figures of the left. > >Compared to him, former Trotskyists Christopher Hitchens and Kanaan Makiya >must still appear as marginal and slightly frivolous figures. They would >certainly fail the Horowitz test, but if the stakes are raised and Baghdad >is bombed yet again, this time as a prelude to a land invasion, how will >our >musketeers react? Makiya, recently outed in this paper as "Iraq's most >eminent dissident thinker", declared that: "September 11 set a whole new >standard... if you're in the terrorism business you're going to start >thinking big, and you're going to need allies. And if you need allies in >the >terrorism business, you're going to ask Iraq." > >Makiya's capacity to spin extraordinary spirals of assertion, one above >another, based on no empirical facts and without any sense of proportion, >becomes - through sheer giddiness of fantastical levitation - completely >absurd. Not a single US intelligence agency has managed to prove any Iraqi >link with September 11. For that reason, in order to justify a war, they >have moved on to other issues, such as possession of "dangerous weapons". >Not even Saddam's old foes in the Arab world believe this nonsense. > >Hitchens reacted more thoughtfully at first to the New York and Washington >attacks. He insisted that the "analytical moment" had to be "indefinitely >postponed", but none the less linked the hits to past policies of the US >and >criticised George Bush for confusing an act of terrorism with an act of >war. >He soon moved on to denounce those who made similar, but much sharper >criticisms, and began to talk of the supposed "fascist sympathies of the >soft left" - Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Edward >Said et al. In recent television appearances he has sounded more like a >saloon-bar bore than the fine, critical mind which blew away the haloes >surrounding Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa. > >What unites the new empire loyalists is an underlying belief that, despite >certain flaws, the military and economic power of the US represents the >only >emancipatory project and, for that reason, has to be supported against all >those who challenge its power. A few prefer Clinton-as-Caesar rather than >Bush, but recognise this as a self-indulgence. Deep down they know the >empire stands above its leaders. > >What they forget is that empires always act in their own self-interests. >The >British empire cleverly exploited the anti-slavery campaigns to colonise >Africa, just as Washington uses the humanitarian handwringing of NGOs and >the bien pensants to fight its new wars today. September 11 has been used >by >the American empire to re-map the world. European continental pieties are >beginning to irritate Cheney and Rumsfeld. They laugh in Washington when >they hear European politicians talk of revitalising the UN. There are 189 >member states of the UN. In 100 of these states there is a US military >presence. For UN, read US? > >Neo-liberal economics, imposed by the IMF mullahs, has reduced countries in >every continent to penury and brought their populations to the edge of >despair. The social democracy that appeared an attractive option during the >cold war no longer exists. The powerlessness of democratic parliaments and >the politicians who inhabit them to change anything has discredited >democracy. Crony capitalism can survive without it. > >At a time when much of the world is beginning to tire of being >"emancipated" >by the US, many liberals have been numbed into silence. One of the most >attractive aspects of the US has always been the layers of dissent that >have >flourished beneath the surface. The generals in the Pentagon suffered a far >greater blow than September 11 in the 1970s, when tens of thousands of >serving and former GIs demonstrated in front of it in their uniforms and >medals and declared their hope that the Vietnamese would win. The new >empire >loyalists, currently helping to snuff out this tradition, are creating the >conditions for more blowbacks. > >Tariq Ali is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. His most recent book >is >The Clash of Fundamentalism, published by Verso. _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com From reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com Fri Mar 22 23:19:19 2002 From: reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com (Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri) Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 17:49:19 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Re:P.Pandey:Gujarat / Are you with me? Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020322/4e3b0bc0/attachment.html From reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com Sat Mar 23 07:51:24 2002 From: reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com (Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri) Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2002 02:21:24 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Re:P.Pandey:Gujarat / Did you say? Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020323/05ca9644/attachment.html From sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com Sun Mar 24 11:20:35 2002 From: sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com (sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com) Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 00:50:35 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] Topic: ram mandir or babri masjid (From Sagnik Chakravartty) Message-ID: Dear Sarai Reader-list, I want you to check out the following topic: ram mandir or babri masjid, on The MahaAdda . To view it, please click the link below: http://www.silchar.com/cgi-bin/adda/MahaAdda.pl?board=0011&action=display&num=1015878143 Thanks, Sagnik Chakravartty From cyberravisri at yahoo.co.in Sun Mar 24 15:06:28 2002 From: cyberravisri at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?ravi=20sri?=) Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 09:36:28 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Rajni Kant-IPR-popular culture Message-ID: <20020324093628.65487.qmail@web8104.in.yahoo.com> Please have a look at the notice issued on behalf of filmstar RajniKant in todays The Hindu regardig his forthcoming film Baba and other matters relating use of his name, imitating him etc. Can any one claim such rights legally. What is the idea of fair use. Can one sue another person for imitating or making a parody of one's acting style etc however popular one is. ravi srinivas ________________________________________________________________________ For live cricket scores download Yahoo! Score Tracker at: http://in.sports.yahoo.com/cricket/tracker.html From sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com Sun Mar 24 19:54:56 2002 From: sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com (Sagnik Chakravartty) Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 06:24:56 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Case Study of Self-Help Group from Tripura Message-ID: <20020324142457.27959.qmail@web20309.mail.yahoo.com> The following is a success story from Tripura. This information is taken from SIPARD (STATE INSTITUTE OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT,TRIPURA's website- www.sipard.nic.in -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Successful Initiatives ----------------------------------------------------Together We Stand (Case-Study Of Self Help Group) - Ms.R.Mangathai, Asst.Professor (Gender studies), SIPARD In the interiors of the hillocks of green Tripura stands the village Dhariathal. Mandara Debbarma is from an agricultural family and she dropped out of school after the madhyamik exam. That was a sufficient qualification for her to get married. She was married to a higher secondary pass unemployed youth. As time passed by three children and Bekar (unemployed) husband were additions in her life. Her father in law was a DRW in one of the offices in Bishalgarh. Because of this her husband had never felt the pinch though she was dreaded about the future. The day she feared had come with the sudden death of her Father-in-Law. Her husband started doing petty jobs here and there. She was taking tuitions for small class children of the neighborhood. Since all of them were very poor she could earn only Rs 60/- per month. But this was a scanty amount. She had overheard the panchayat members talking about Self help group then she found out from the block level functionaries that women can help themselves out with the help of Swanirbhar Dal (SHG) .She with 15 like minded persons formed in to Dhariathal Mahila Self-Help Group. This group is of mixed nature in the sense that there were eleven tribals and four Non tribal women. Mandara was a bit alarmed about the composition because of the sensitive ethnic situation in Tripura. Mandara was the only educated girl so she was chosen by all the members to be their leader. Some six of the members were field labourers, three of them were selling puffed rice and the others are not specially employed. In the group they used to save Rs 20/- month. They met on the 15th of every month. Mandara used to maintain group account, passbook and related matters and her group members were of not much help as they could only sign and read with great difficulty. In the meetings at least 35%-40% were always absent. But they were sending the savings through other members. Saving of Rs 20/- was a difficult task to be done for them. The common ways of savings are by selling one or two eggs, sell vegetables from their home garden, by selling daily saved rice and savings of 50 paisa like that whenever they do marketing for the house. After they had completed six months the group savings was 1800.This had received a boost with Rs 25000/- revolving fund. After getting the revolving fund assistance fourteen of the members have taken the loan from the group savings. Each one of them borrowed Rs 1500/- for goatery. Only Sandhya an SC widow with 3 children did not taken any loan. She was not sure if she takes such a big amount she might not be able to pay back. Managing such a vast credit account was a problem for Mandara. She used to feel that there was not even a single woman in the group who could help her. She had to explain the same issues again and again. Some times she herself used to get confused. The members continued with repayment but not in uniform installments. This created problem in the accounts maintenance for Mandara. In case they wanted to know how much each one has saved, Mandara could not answer, as they are not maintaining individual passbooks. Many of the group members used to bring their near and dear with applications for loans. Mandara had to explain that the money is only for the group members. In spite of all this the members were glad that they are having a source of saving and earning with the credit. At this juncture Dhariathal Mahila Self Help Group was invited to participate in the training programme on Self-Help Groups at SIPARD, Agartala. Mandara has come to the town (Agartala) for the first time in her life. Her husband who got assistance to set up a carpentry unit an year back told that he will take care of the children and she may go. On reaching SIPARD she was so relived of tension to see that many other SHG leaders are getting registered at the reception. A sense of confidence bloomed in her. The training programme included Concept of SHG, need and scope, prerequisites, identification of future economic activities, capacity building and bookkeeping. The discussions and lectures were held with the help of transparencies, slides and PowerPoint presentations. The group leaders were shown the experiences and activities, problems and possible solutions worked out by the SHGs in other parts of the country. Videos were shown about the technical training centers. Elaborate session on bookkeeping was held till 7.30 in the night on one-day .A half-day demonstration and an expert in pot painting took teaching on the pot painting and decoration from AndhraPradesh. A detailed course manual in the form of a Bengali book was given to Mandara along with the other group leaders. Transparencies on SHGs-formation and sustenance were photocopied and given to them. At the end of the training she was really delighted with the material in her hand and the experience and knowledge in her mind. She carried with her one of the pots painted and the flowers she has made with ceramic powder during the process of the pot painting learning. As soon she reached in the evening she found her group members waiting for her, as she is the only woman in her neigh hood to go to Agartala. They have decided to meet the next day. Mandara has become a trainer herself for her group members. She has pasted all the slides in the panchayat office where they hold their meetings. She took the book and explained to all of them page by page. Especially clauses on how to lend loans and loan applications, maintenance of group records and passbooks were clearly explained to them .It is made clear that the monthly meeting is not for pooling of savings only rather it should be the locus of group discussions and activities in different directions. During her deliberation with the group members there were many questions and Mandara found them not so easy to explain though she could do it. She also told them that attendance in the groups is indispensable and there will be a fine in future for being absent. She told them how important it is that a group and collective conscience so that they can do so many things as a group. She had given them the examples she had heard and seen during her training at SIPARD. All of them had gone back home with a new enthusiasm and determination. Mandara with the help of the book given to her and the help of her class viii daughter has made the book/ledger for loan giving and repayment. She has made a loan application. She along with three other members went to Panchayat samity and collected the individual passbook for everyone. She with the help of her group members did a survey of the viability of plastic mat making and pot making to take-up as a key activity. By the time the second meeting took place Mandara and some of her group members were with new ideas and new books. The members were taken aback when she had given them individual passbook and began saying that "we have trust in you Mandara". She told them that these books have to be maintained for one�s own clarity and that will reduce burden on the group leader and involve the group members. On that day during the half daylong meeting they had decided about their future course of action. They had decided to go for plastic basket making and mat making as they already have the skill. The raw material is easily available cheaply and market is readily there. This activity they have decided to do it together in the panchayat office everyday at a fixed time. Regarding the pot decoration they planned to make it themselves in small number of 1 or 2 per member and sell in the market during the "Puja" (Dussera) time. Now Mandara and the members themselves are experiencing a gradual change in their group with the adoption of few new rules, practices and decisions. Absence in the meeting has tremendously reduced. Now all the members know that there are prescribed forms to be filled up for borrowing loans and they are aware that production loans by the members is positive for the group. Sandhya was interested to take the loan now with this confidence. In the meetings they are discussing each other�s experiences and are planning for better. In their village they wanted to be a model group. They ensured that all the children of the group members are immunized and going to school. Previously they had the desire to put their children in the school, but they could not afford not. But now they have the backup support from the group. The group had taken part in two village melas. Together all of them had made Achar (pickle),Chanachur (dry snacks) and Pitha (sweet).Participation in the Melas was a morale boost to the group. It has instilled a new sense of togetherness, which was not there before, and they had accelerated on their savings also. They were very glad to see SIPARD "Didimani" (Sister) when she visited them and eagerly told that seeing their good experience two more self help groups have formed in their village. There is now inter group communication in the village. Mandara had brought with her the leaders of the other two groups in her village and she was hoping that training will provide guidance to them. She said " Taravu pore Shakthishali hoibo" (Like us even they will become strong later). __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards� http://movies.yahoo.com/ From sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com Sun Mar 24 20:04:06 2002 From: sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com (Sagnik Chakravartty) Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 06:34:06 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Successful Initiatives of Environmental Conservation from Tripura Message-ID: <20020324143406.34969.qmail@web20306.mail.yahoo.com> (This information has been taken from SIPARD,Tripura's website- www.sipard.nic.in)Courtesy:SIPARD,Agartala,Tripura ---------------------------------------- Successful Initiatives One Man's Mission (Environmental Conservation) �It was a hard task to motivate the rural poor to the relation between plant life and human life. But everywhere I succeeded� proudly declares Sri Apurba Kumar Dutta of Gandhigram, Agartala. He is working in the Tripura Forest Department as a forester. He used to utilise his leisure time to motivate creating forest plantations in the fallow lands of Tripura. He started his activities as early as 1982 by raising a few beds of orange nurseries at the premises of his own house in Gandhigram. These seedlings were sold at cheaper price to Govt. Departments and others. The money collected from this was again used up in raising nurseries of Teak, Mehagony, and Sandal etc. Sri Apurba Kumar Dutta of Gandhigram Agartala founded Tripura Samajik Ban Unnayan Sanghsta. At the same time showing his own example he was involved in motivating the rural people holding uncultivated and fallow lands create forest plantations. The need to control environmental pollution and maintain ecological balance was stressed. They were successful in drawing the attention to the relevance of environmental preservation fro sustainable development. The stumps and seedlings of the forest species were sold to them at a very cheap rate and to the poor, Saplings were distributed free of cost. Wherever stumps were distributed he held awareness campaigns. This endeavor to raise nurseries and encouragement to the tilla landowners to create forest plantations is still going on with great success. He is being consulted by public not only for stumps and seedlings but also for technical guidance with the modern technique of forest plantations. Sri. Apurba Dutta has received the prestigious �Indira Priyadarshni vrikshamitra award 1996� for his valuable services towards envioronmental preservation/sustainability One Sri Prabal Das, 53 says that he is proud of himself seeing the well grown plantations and happy at the prospect of the forth coming financial returns from the plantations. The revenue returns from these plantations are also substantial. For example, in case of Gamair plantation, the total cost of plantation, in one Kani (0.16 hectare) in 10 - 12 years is about Rs.34000/- - Rs.38000/- and after 10 - 12 years from this same land the income will be 2 - 2 � lakhs. The forest plantations created under the initiative of Sri. Apurba Dutta supervision in different regions of Tripura during the period from 1994 to 1998 are as follows: - Under Mohanpur R.D. Block - 19 villages such as Gandhigram, Patonagar, Nutannagar, Bhubanban, Lankamura, Barjala, Nasingarh, Usha Bazar, Bhagalpur, North Ramnagar, Tebaria, Chhanmuru, Laxmilunga, Bamutia, Rangutia, Kalkalia, Satdubia and Hatipara - have been richly afforested with Gamar Teak, Mehagony, Sandal, Agar, etc. Under Panisagar R.D. Block - 3 villages namely Agnibasa, Panitilla and Bilthai have been afforested with Gamar & Teak. Under Bishalgarh R.D. Block - Two villages namely Sutanmura and Kashbakalibari area and the village named Dukli under Dukli R.D. Block have many forest plantations under his demonstration and assistance. Under Satchand R.D block East Harina,West harina and Guachand have got 0.5 hectare of Guava plantations and 12 hectares hectare of coffee plantations under the financial help of Tripura Coffee Board have been raised. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards� http://movies.yahoo.com/ From treborscholz at earthlink.net Sun Mar 24 12:00:00 2002 From: treborscholz at earthlink.net (Trebor Scholz) Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 14:30:00 +0800 Subject: [Reader-list] One Day/ All Day April 27 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > (apologies for cross-posting) > > Right2Fight > > A cross-disciplinary initiative on the theme of police violence. > > One day, all day. > > Sarah Lawrence College, New York > > 27 April 2002 > > http://www.molodiez.org/right2fight/slc.html > > > BROOKLYN, NY: A Haitian New Yorker named Abner Louima is tortured by members > of the NYPD. > A broken broomstick is shoved into his rectum and mouth while his attackers > scream racist epithets. The crime takes place on August 9, 1997. Four officers > are convicted. On February 28, 2002, three of the four convictions are > overturned. One officer is granted a new trial; two others are set free > outright. > > As weapons and methods of surveillance become more sophisticated and grass > roots dissatisfaction with political and economic systems grows, in many parts > of the world policing is becoming increasingly brutal and intrusive. From 80s > video surveillance, alarming in its own right, we have moved on to far more > invasive forms of policing: automated face recognition technologies in use on > the streets of London; iris scans imposed on Hadj pilgrims arriving in Mecca; > techniques elaborated to spy on the most private exchanges online and off; > ³Echelon,² an espionage system devised to scan vast quantities of e.mails and > telephone calls worldwide, in real timeŠ > > From a world best described as an analog panopticon, we have moved into what > independent curator Inke Arns calls a pancodicon* : a world of digital > surveillance and electronic space in which our most intimate thoughts can be > charted. In this world, what few protections were afforded those who stand in > opposition to the status quo are lost, snatched back by systems of policing -- > local, national and global -- bent on breaking all but the tamest forms of > resistance. > > Such attacks on liberty are, needless to say, not new. Entire systems of > economic and political domination have been built upon policing at once > extraordinarily violent and intrusive. Among these, one might cite the very > system on which the country we live in was founded. From the arrival of the > first slave ship at Jamestown Harbor in 1619 to the contemporary streets of > our largest cities, from the era of Jim Crow lynchings to the beating of > Rodney King and the killing of Amadou Diallo, the United States has been a > place of violence meted out at the hands of a few bent on controlling and > silencing the many. > > Once, men and women of African descent, in this land, were deemed 3/5th of a > human being; today, so many men of African heritage -- one in every ten -- are > behind bars or otherwise ensnared in the criminal justice juggernaut** that > one can legitimately speak of a genocide under way. In Atlanta, Detroit, Los > Angeles, women and men of Native American, Latino and, increasingly, Asian > heritage are questioned, arrested, incarcerated at rates in no way > commensurate with their representation in the population at large. Post 9/11, > over a thousand Arab men are in US jails, still waiting to be charged with a > crime; in many cases, their own families have not been told where they are. > > Elsewhere too, state violence has broken and continues to break lives, > spirits, entire peoples. Violent repression was the cornerstone of the > colonial project, in Africa and Asia alike. Patrice Lumumba of Congo, > murdered by Belgian-trained gunmen mere months after his country gained > independence; Ruben Um Nyobe, heartbeat of Cameroon¹s struggle for > self-determination, killed in a French ambush in 1958; Steve Biko, beaten to > death by South African police in 1977... Theirs are but the best known names > -- a paltry few ³history² deigns to recall among those of hundreds upon > hundreds of thousands who died, many resisting, killed by authorities in power > only because they had the means to destroy. > > In Europe, as the industrial age emerged, workers died by the thousands. In > Napoleonic Paris, boulevards were cut through the city in wide swaths to make > the task of shooting discontented factory hands easier, should they take to > the streets en masse. As the 19th century drew to a close, in the UK and US, > strikers seeking better wages were clubbed and shot. In the wake of a May Day > protest that brought 80,000 workers to Chicago¹s Michigan Avenue, police > violence exploded. Within days, eight men were arrested. A trial was held, > centering on a bomb all agreed none of those indicted had planted. Five of the > men were sentenced to death; the three others were remanded to prison for > life. > > One would like to think that such excesses are a thing of the past. They are > not: > > ABNER LOUIMA > > AMADOU DIALLO (1) > > LUC BENOIT BASILEKIN (2) > > SUSANA GOMEZ, RONALD RAUL RAMOS (3) > > SEATTLE, QUEBEC CITY, GENOA (4) > > SEOUL, JAKARTA, BRISBANE (5) > > JOHANNESBURG, PARIS (6) > > BULGARIA, ALGERIA (7) > > VIRGINIA (8) > > > (1) THREE YEARS AGO, A GUINEAN IMMIGRANT NAMED AMADOU DIALLO WAS STRUCK DOWN > IN A HAIL OF BULLETS FIRED BY NEW YORK CITY POLICE. HE WAS REACHING FOR > IDENTIFICATION; THE OFFICERS ASSUMED HE WAS REACHING FOR A GUN. THEY FIRED > FORTY-ONE BULLETS. NINETEEN HIT THE TARGET. > > (2) IN FEBRUARY 2001, THE GOVERNMENT OF CAMEROON INSTITUTED THE OPERATIONAL > COMMAND, A PARAMILITARY TASK FORCE BRINGING TOGETHER MEMBERS OF THE LOCAL AND > NATIONAL POLICE AND THE ARMY. THE C.O.¹S OFFICIAL PURPOSE WAS TO END A CRIME > WAVE IN THE CITY OF DOUALA; IT WAS MEANT IN FACT TO BRING TO HEEL SECTORS OF > THE POPULATION OPPOSED TO THE REPRESSIVE RULE OF THE GOVERNING PARTY. IN ITS > FIRST SIX MONTHS, THE C.O. PERPETRATED 500 EXTRA-JUDICIAL EXECUTIONS; BY > YEAR¹S END, 1000 PEOPLE HAD DIED. ONE OF THE FIRST WAS LUC BENOIT BASILEKIN. > > (3) IN APRIL 1996 IN GUATEMALA CITY, SUSANA GOMEZ WAS RAPED BY TWO NATIONAL > POLICE OFFICERS; SHE WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD. IN SEPTEMBER 1996, RONALD RAUL > RAMOS WAS SHOT AND KILLED BY A TREASURY POLICE OFFICER; HE TOO WAS SIXTEEN. > MORE THAN TEN OTHER STREET CHILDREN WERE MURDERED THAT YEAR, LIKELY BY POLICE. > TWELVE MONTHS LATER, NONE OF THE PERPETRATORS IN THESE CASES HAD BEEN > APPREHENDED. > > (4) IN SEATTLE, QUEBEC CITY AND GENOA, OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, UNARMED WOMEN, > MEN AND CHILDREN CALLING FOR A MORE MEASURED APPROACH TO GLOBALIZATION THAN > HAS BEEN PROPOSED BY SUCH BODIES AS THE WTO AND WORLD BANK WERE ATTACKED BY > POLICE WIELDING BATONS, RUBBER BULLETS, WATER CANONS AND TEAR GAS. SIMILAR > VIOLENCE GREETED UNARMED PROTESTERS AT MAY DAY RALLIES THROUGHOUT ASIA AND THE > PACIFIC IN 2001, FROM SIDNEY AND BRISBANE TO KARACHI, SEOUL AND JAKARTA. > > (5) IN FEBRUARY 2002, A COLONY OF SQUATTERS WAS VIOLENTLY DISPERSED IN CENTRAL > JOHANNESBURG. THE POLICE LEVELED THE INHABITANTS¹ MAKESHIFT HOMES AND > DESTROYED THEIR BELONGINGS. THE SQUATTERS WERE MADE TO BOARD BUSES AND WERE > DRIVEN OUT OF THE CITY, WHERE THEY WERE UNCEREMONIOUSLY DUMPED, MILES FROM > FRIENDS AND FAMILY. THE METHODS EMPLOYED IN THIS DISPERSAL WERE SIMILAR TO > THOSE USED IN FORCED REMOVALS OF THE APARTHEID ERA. > > (6) ON SUNDAY OCTOBER 17, 1961, ALGERIANS LIVING IN PARIS ORGANIZED A PEACEFUL > MARCH TO PROTEST A CURFEW ON PERSONS OF ARAB DESCENT. THE POLICE MOVED IN. > THEIR COMMANDER WAS MAURICE PAPON, WHO DURING WWII HAD OVERSEEN THE REMOVAL OF > 1560 FRENCH JEWS TO GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS. TWO HUNDRED UNARMED ALGERIANS > WERE SHOT, BLUDGEONED AND DROWNED. PAPON REMAINS FREE. DAILY, FOR NO REASON > BUT THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN, PERSONS OF NORTH AFRICAN DESCENT ARE DETAINED, > ARRESTED, BEATEN AND SHOT ON FRENCH STREETS. > > (7) SINCE 1994, RACIALLY MOTIVATED VIOLENCE AGAINST ROMA GYPSIES IN BULGARIA > HAS INCREASED DRAMATICALLY. MUCH OF THIS VIOLENCE IS PERPETRATED BY POLICE AND > PRIVATE SECURITY FIRMS. IN THE COURSE OF ONE WEEK, IN APRIL 2001, EIGHTY YOUNG > PEOPLE WERE KILLED BY THE POLICE IN KABYLIA, IN NORTH-EASTERN ALGERIA. ALL > WERE MEMBERS OF THE MINORITY BERBER ETHNIC GROUP. > > (8) ON MARCH 1, 1999, A SEVERED HEAD WAS FOUND IN A RICHMOND, VA PARK. THE > VICTIM WAS A GAY MAN. THE PARK HAD BEEN THE SITE FOR SEVERAL MONTHS OF A > POLICE ³STING²: UNDERCOVER OFFICERS HAD BEEN APPROACHING GAY MEN, PROPOSING > SEX, THEN PROMPTLY ARRESTING THOSE WHO SHOWED INTEREST. THE ARRESTS WERE > WIDELY REPORTED. THE PUBLICITY GIVEN THEM MAY WELL HAVE ENCOURAGED THE > MURDERER. WHY THE MANY PLAINCLOTHES OFFICERS PRESENT IN THE PARK ON THE NIGHT > OF THE MURDER FAILED TO SEE ANYTHING IS ANYONE¹S GUESS. > > IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA, IN NORTH AFRICA AND EUROPE, AMNESTY > INTERNATIONAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION > REPORT CASE AFTER CASE OF RAPE, TORTURE AND MURDER INVOLVING TRANSGENDER AND > BISEXUAL, LESBIAN AND GAY PERSONS, ALL TOO OFTEN BY POLICE. > > From Cape Town to Ramallah and Queens, this state of affairs is drawing the > attention of artists. In an age of mass media and cleavage to the status quo, > voices, images, sounds are emerging that speak of this violence with power and > outrage. Right2Fight showcases an important international group of cultural > producers whose work stands at the forefront of this movement. > > Right2Fight is an emphatically cross-disciplinary undertaking: from web-based > projects to graffiti, from sculpture to video, installations to street wear, > Hip Hop to posters, experimental music and photography to performance poetry. > The event's contributors speak as few can to the social and ethical costs of > police violence, to the dangers inherent in allowing such violence to > proliferate, and to the responsibility we share, as individuals and > communities, to denounce and battle it in all its manifestations. > > Right2Fight is not a symposium. It is a constellation of spoken word > interventions, performances, film and video screenings, installations, > showings of net art and web-based pieces intended to prompt dialogue and > questions. > > This day-long collision of ideas, technologies and images seeks to transcend > mere catharsis. The goal is not to satisfy neo-liberal guilt but to engage in > concrete action. Activists and representatives of human rights organizations > dedicated to ending police violence will be present to explain their work. > Those who wish will learn, here, how they can become actively involved in the > fight, channeling their emotions into actions, their words into deeds. > > Right2Fight is not an indictment of all police officers. It does, however, > condemn the brutality to which more than a few law enforcement communities > resort. In light of recent events, the organizers hold, it is more important > than ever to address issues of intolerance, prejudice and violence. > > In the US and abroad, these have a disproportionate impact on the poor and > marginalized. Millions suffer, die, are broken daily. Against this, its > dehumanizing effects and causes, Right2Fight takes aim. > > Contributors include: > > Pam Africa (Philadelphia) > > Chris Bratton (Chicago) > > Robbie Conal (Los Angeles) > > Adam de Croix (Brooklyn) > > Dee Curry (NewYork) > > Graff (New York) > > Ashley Hunt (Brooklyn) > > Emily Jacir (Bethlehem/Brooklyn) > > Carol Jacobsen (Ann Arbor) > > Richard Kamler (San Francisco) > > Jared Katsiane (Boston) > > Deborah Kelly (Sydney) > > Goddy Leye (Amsterdam/Yaounde) > > Mr. Lif (Boston) > > Malam (Douala) > > Brad McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry (Brooklyn) > > Julia Meltzer and Liz Canner (Los Angeles/Boston) > > No One Is Illegal (Germany) > > Sally O¹Brien (New York City) > > Pass-Fix (Munich) > > Horit Herman Peled (Tel Aviv) > > Jenny Perlin (Brooklyn) > > Picture Projects (New York City) > > Lesego Rampolokeng (Soweto) > > Oliver Ressler (Vienna) > > Martha Rosler (Brooklyn) > > Jayce Salloum (Vancouver) > > Dread Scott (Brooklyn) > > Trebor Scholz (Berlin/Brooklyn) > > Sara Scully and Jessica Rockstar (New York City) > > Gregory Sholette (Chicago) > > Merian Soto and Pepon Osorio (Bronx) > > DJ SKI HI (Bronx) > > Stolen Lives Project/ October 22 Coalition (USA) > > Herve Yamguen (Douala) > > Herve Youmbi (Douala) > > The event's organizers are an urban historian who works in Central Africa and > teaches at Sarah Lawrence College (Dominique Malaquais) and a Brooklyn based, > East Berlin-born interdisciplinary artist whose work has been extensively > shown in Europe and the Americas (Trebor Scholz). The two share a commitment > to tactical media, street activism and visual culture. Both curate, speak and > publish widely, focusing on issues of social concern and the everyday. > > > * Inke Arns, posting to the ³Spectre² online mailing list, 3/9/02. > > ** Neil Websdale, Policing the Poor. Boston: Northeastern University Press, > 2001. > > > Contact: Dominique Malaquais > > Trebor Scholz > > > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020324/00b0c48d/attachment.html From zamrooda at sarai.net Mon Mar 25 12:02:47 2002 From: zamrooda at sarai.net (zamrooda) Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 12:02:47 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Is your cell operator fleecing you? Message-ID: <02032512024701.00721@legal.sarai.kit> Is your cell operator fleecing you? G. Rambabu NEW DELHI, March 10 HAVE you ever wondered at the inverse relationship between the falling cellular tariffs and your monthly bill? No, it has nothing to do with the airtime that your mobile number clocks. Check out your mobile bills (starting with the first) and the answer is there in black and white. Cellular operators, especially in the high growth metros and cities, have devised an ingenious way of compensating their loss due to the falling tariff rates by extracting that much more from the unsuspecting subscriber. With a view to putting an end to this clandestine fleecing of the unsuspecting subscriber, a consumer organisation, Telecom Watchdog, has filed a petition with the Telecom Dispute Settlement Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT), asking the cellular operators to refund all the ``overcharged amounts'' to the subscribers and also to push the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to enforce the Telecom Tariff Order (TTO) and the licence agreement. The cellular operators, when contacted for their reaction, declined to comment stating that they were yet to go through the petition filed against them. The petition notes that among the charges that are being illegally collected by the cellular operators are the SIM card or activation charges, detailed bill charges, WPC charges and charges for various supplementary services. None of these is allowed as per the TTO 1999 and the licence agreement. What is more, the ceiling fixed by the authority for installation charges and security deposits have more often than not been violated. The average charges levied by the cellular operators for SIM card or activation are in the range of Rs 1,260 and installation charges about Rs 2,200. While the TTO/licence agreement states that no charges have to be collected for SIM Card, a ceiling of Rs 1,200 has been fixed for ``installation charges''. The average security deposit collected by the cellular operators is about Rs 13,000, while the authority has put a ceiling of Rs 3,000. What is more, the operators collect up to Rs 300 per month per service as supplementary charges and Rs 200 per annum as WP charges - both in violation of the tariff order. Meanwhile, according to industry analysts, a couple of facts that have not been highlighted in the petition are also worth noting here. While the cellular operators are clearly going overboard in their effort to woo the customer with value-added freebies to their subscribers, they often tend to ignore the basic services that they are mandated to provide. The licence agreements, for example, state that they have to meet the minimum standards of service, failing which their licences can be terminated by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). These include emergency call services, call success rate of 99 per cent, timing to release calls of two seconds, group 3 fax, conference call, free phone, reverse charging, scratch pad memory, etc. Add to it the fact that the operators have to, as per their licence agreement, publish a directory of all their subscribers. Then again, as per their licence agreements, the operators are not expected to charge for the caller line identification (CLI) and itemised billing charges. Practically no one adheres to this rule. From jeebesh at sarai.net Mon Mar 25 14:41:38 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 14:41:38 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fw: It's war, folks --- SSSCA formally introduced Message-ID: <02032514413809.00594@pinki.sarai.kit> After the "Domination Millenium Copyright Act" a new act is on the way. "Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Act of 2002" (News Corporation and Disney are the main lobby for this act. This is getting really weird. COPYing is such a threat. Why? best Jeebesh >--- begin forwarded text >From: ietf at ka9q.net >To: ietf at ietf.org >Subject: It's war, folks --- SSSCA formally introduced >Reply-to: karn at ka9q.net >Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 17:33:36 -0800 > >The story just hit Slashdot -- Senators Hollings, Stevens, Inouye, >Breaux, Nelson, and Feinstein have introduced the so-called "Consumer >Broadband and Digital Television Act of 2002", formerly known to most >of us as the SSSCA. The text of Hollings' comments are available here: > >http://www.politechbot.com/docs/cbdtpa/hollings.cbdtpa.release.032102.html > >The Slashdot article (with links to other coverage) is here: > >http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/21/2344228&mode=thread&tid=103 > >I cannot overstress the awful implications of this bill if it becomes >law. The personal computer, as we know it, will be destroyed. The >Internet, as we know it, will be destroyed. > >Hollings doesn't say that, of course. But all through his statement he >claims that there exist technological solutions to the piracy >problem. These apparently consist entirely of "do not copy" bits added >to copyrighted materials. > >The fact that any "do-not-copy-bit" can be trivially cleared on any >personal computer that can be programmed by its user does not seem to >have registered yet with the authors of this bill. And when it does, >the logical next step will then become obvious to them: the licensing >of programmers and/or the prohibition of open source software as too >easily modified by end users. And when *that* fails, a total ban on >any personal computer that can be programmed by its user. > >It's time for the IETF, its members and the IAB to react, and react >quickly and forcefully. We need to say clearly that there is simply >no such thing as an "Internet copy prevention technology" that can >actually work in a world with programmable personal computers. > >We need to steer policy makers in a different direction, toward >watermarking technologies that do not block copies from being made but >allows them to be traced after the fact. Yes, effective watermarking >is technically difficult, and several have already been broken. But at >least it's *possible* to build an effective watermarking scheme >without utterly destroying both the personal computer and the Internet. > >Phil > >--- end forwarded text From jeebesh at sarai.net Mon Mar 25 15:15:26 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 15:15:26 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: Dan Gillmor: Bleak future looms if you don't take a stand Message-ID: <0203251515260A.00594@pinki.sarai.kit> Law is on it's course. It is arriving at our doorsteps to tell us that PC's are actually a cross between a typewriter, a dvd player and a television set. The contents for all this is obviously be provided by the `people in business` and protected by `people in suits`. The enclosed posting should be read in continium with earlier postings by monica on enclosures around net radio. cheers Jeebesh ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/2922052.htm>http://www.silico nvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/2922052.htm Dan Gillmor: Bleak future looms if you don't take a stand By Dan Gillmor Mercury News Technology Columnist This is a quiz about your future. It's about how you view some basic elements of the emerging Digital Age. 1. Do you care if a few giant companies control virtually all entertainment and information? 2. Do you care if they decide what kinds of technological innovations will reach the marketplace? 3. Would you be concerned if they used their power to compile detailed dossiers on everything you read, listen to, view and buy? 4. Would you find it acceptable if they could decide whether what you write and say could be seen and heard by others? Those are no longer theoretical questions. They are the direction in which America is hurtling. Media conglomerates are in a merger frenzy. Telecommunications monopolies are creating a cozy cartel, dividing up access to the online world. The entertainment industry is pushing for Draconian controls on the use and dissemination of digital information. If you're not infuriated by these related trends, you should at least be worried. If you're neither, stop reading this column. You're a sheep, content to be herded wherever these giants wish. But if you want to retain some fundamental rights over the information you use and create, please take a stand. Do it soon, because a great deal is at stake. The offenses against the public interest have been piling up, one after the other, but we've been acting like the proverbial frog that just sits there in a pot of water slowly brought to a boil. The frog gets cooked because it doesn't realize what's happening until too late. The most recent outrage, detailed elsewhere on this page by my colleague, Mercury News Staff Writer Dawn Chmielewski, is the music companies' scheme to control Internet radio or murder it if they can't. Net radio provides the variety and value that broadcast radio, so dominated today by a few behemoths, has almost utterly lost. Now it's going to disappear, if the greedy souls who dominate commercial music have their way -- just one more whack at the public interest to preserve the untenable business models of well-connected corporations. What can we do about all this? I'd been hoping that Congress would come to its senses one of these days, and mitigate the damage it has done with laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As prescient critics warned, the law has been abused by the entertainment crowd and its craven allies in the technology business to threaten scholars, curb free speech and even incite outrageous prosecutions. I'd been hoping that lawmakers would see the danger of market concentration in telecommunications and media. No luck there, either. I'd been hoping that the courts might intervene. But courts are more political than we learn in our third-grade civics classes. Federal judges are nominated and confirmed by politicians who only occasionally peek out of the pockets of the special interests. Again and again, with few exceptions, judges are upholding laws that trample on tradition and rights. There's no simple, all-encompassing solution to this dismal situation. Fighting for the public interest will involve work on a variety of fronts. It's essential, for example, that we put pressure on Congress and keep it there. Tell your U.S. House representative and U.S. senators that you want real competition, not cozy oligopolies or worse, when it comes to telecommunications and media -- and that further industry concentration is unacceptable. Tell them you don't want to wake up in five years and discover no more than two or three ways onto the Net -- at least the truly high-speed connections we'll find essential once they're actually available -- in your community. Tell them you don't think it's right that one company should be able to own all or most of the major media outlets in your community. And insist that they reject anything resembling legislation introduced last week by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C. This favor to the entertainment moguls would lead us down a control-freak path of putting copy protection in every digital device. Tell them you don't want your PC to be neutered into an expensive DVD player. And tell them you don't want the Internet, the greatest enabler of free speech in history, to be reduced to online television. You can find your member's office in your local phone book, or on the Web (www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html), or by calling the main number at the Capitol ( (202) 224-3121). Maybe Congress will listen, though the record so far is bleak. It's still worth your effort to try. I'd also like to hear your ideas on what we can do, individually and collectively. There is a place where we can all make a difference, right now. Let's send a message to a key member of the entertainment cartel -- the music industry -- and send it in a language the industry can grasp. So, here's my line in the sand. I've bought my last CD from any major label or independent label that puts copy protection on any of its music. I have a fine collection of older music, some on CDs and most on now-ancient vinyl LPs, which I'm moving gradually to digital formats so I can play them back on various devices including a CD player that can understand MP3s. I'm looking for online music from new artists who aren't afraid of this medium, people who will give me value for my money. Here's my message to the record industry and its allies: I'm not a thief. I'm a customer. When you treat me like a thief, I won't be your customer. Enough is enough. Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. E-mail dgillmor at sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo at bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime at bbs.thing.net ------------------------------------------------------- From joy at www.sarai.net Tue Mar 26 08:46:07 2002 From: joy at www.sarai.net (joy at www.sarai.net) Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 03:16:07 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] database Message-ID: <200203260316.EAA21608@zelda.intra.waag.org> In the light of present communal situation in India, I would like to question the usefulness of local histories and databases of communities. It is often found that these kinds of information become instrumental in identifying the rival community. Voter identity cards or ration cards are used to identify the community and attack them. Even during normal situation large section of population who are often referred as �illegal habitants� wants to hide themselves from police and state. In such situation also these databases can become useful for the state. In fact most of them are living in the city because of ability to maintain the transparency of identity. At one end if we talk about surveillance and at the other end create academic archive and databases of such information; I wonder whom we are actually helping. Who needs the ordered information in the present control freak social relation? Joy From monica at sarai.net Wed Mar 27 16:51:19 2002 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 16:51:19 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Amin Maalouf Message-ID: The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15100 The New York Review of Books. April 11, 2002 Review The Blood Lust of Identity By Ian Buruma In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong by Amin Maalouf, translated from the French by Barbara Bray Arcade, 164 pp., $22.95 Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America by Tom Hayden Verso, 312 pp., $25.00 1. Identity is a bloody business. Religion, nationality, or race may not be the primary causes of war and mass murder. These are more likely to be tyranny, or greed for territory, wealth, and power. But "identity" is what gets the blood boiling, what makes people do unspeakable things to their neighbors. It is the fuel used by agitators to set whole countries on fire. When the world is reduced to a battle between "us and them," Germans and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, Hutus and Tutsis, only mass murder will do, for "we" can only survive if "they" are slaughtered. Before we kill them, "they" must be stripped of our common humanity, by humiliating them, degrading them, and giving them numbers instead of names. The novelist Amin Maalouf begins his humane and eloquent essay[1] with the question of "why so many people commit crimes nowadays in the name of religious, ethnic, national or some other kind of identity." Was it always so? Or is there something new going on? What is new, I think, is not the phenomenon itself so much as the scale of the damage. There is no easy or single answer to Maalouf's question. He mentions various reasons why people fear for their sense of belonging: globalization, the erosion of national sovereignty, Western domination over the last three hundred years, the collapse of failed secular regimes. All these reasons deserve consideration, but none explains the extraordinary bloodlust of identity warriors. Sadism must play a part. Once their basest instincts are given the official nod, some people feel a sense of pleasure, even liberation. The degradation of one's victims, stripped of their identity, is a way to sooth one's conscience. This results in a ghastly paradox: the more brutal the method of slaughter, the easier it is on the killers, for the victims are no longer regarded as fully human. But sadism cannot explain everything. Maalouf observes that mass murder can seem entirely legitimate to people who feel that their community is under threat. He writes: "Even when they commit massacres they are convinced they are merely doing what is necessary to save the lives of their nearest and dearest." It is difficult to imagine an SS man thinking this while feeding Zyklon-B into the gas chambers of Treblinka, but it was indeed an essential part of Nazi propaganda, and some Germans may have actually believed it, including possibly Hitler himself-but then, from what we know, he didn't really have any nearest and dearest. It is perhaps no coincidence that the great demagogues of national identity are themselves not always sure where they belong. Slobodan Milosevic's family is from Montenegro. Hitler was an Austrian. This suggests that Maalouf may be too optimistic when he claims that people with multiple identities will never be "on the side of the fanatics." On the contrary, purity is often the compulsive aim of those who feel they have to make up for their complexity. But he is right that we are all made up of a mixture of loyalties and identifications, regional, linguistic, religious, ethnic, national, social, or professional. The ingredients in these mixes can shift with time. Sometimes they disappear altogether, or reappear in grotesque forms. At a literary gathering in San Francisco, I met a distinguished writer from Yugoslavia. In an attempt to break the ice, I asked her whether she was Serb or Croat. She answered me courteously, but with a hint of impatience at my crass ignorance: "I am a Yugoslav. In Yugoslavia, we don't think in those categories anymore." This was in 1990. Circumstances can make the ingredients of individual identities conflict, or click in unexpected ways. A grand lady in the former Portuguese colony of Goa, who grew up speaking Portuguese, Goan, Hindi, and English, described herself to me as a Roman Catholic Brahmin. It struck me as curious that a Christian would still be so conscious of her Hindu caste. Then she explained that in the colonial past Christians had a special need to protect their Indian identity from Portuguese encroachment, and so caste consciousness grew even stronger. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Amin Maalouf is himself a good example of cultural, national and religious complication. He was born in Lebanon, as a Greek Orthodox Christian among Muslims, his mother tongue is Arabic, but he lives in Paris and writes in French. All these elements of his identity are shared by many, but the particular mix is what makes him an individual. His may be an especially rich brew. But the same principle applies to everyone. It is when we take one single element and make it absolute that the trouble begins. This tends to happen, as Maalouf writes, when we feel that our identity, or part of it, is under attack. My own experience confirms this. I am part British, part Dutch; Dutch Anglophobia makes me feel British; British disdain of Holland makes me feel Dutch. This is a low-intensity issue, however; murder, as yet, has not entered my mind. Some British-born Muslims, on the other hand, felt strongly enough about their Islamic identity to go and kill infidels in Afghanistan, even if they were fellow British citizens. These holy warriors were no longer able to do as Maalouf advocates, and give the various parts of their mix equal weight. For them, Islam became absolute. To draw general conclusions from such cases is risky. Young people, especially in marginal communities, can be swayed by agitators for highly personal reasons: a never-forgotten childhood slight, a sexual rejection, a yearning for significance, or just the adolescent blend of confusion and ennui. Again, Maalouf is less concerned with such personal matters than with the bigger historical picture. He points out that the superior might of the West has put great strains on non-Westerners. Scientific discovery, political freedoms, economic enterprise, and imperial aggression combined to make much of the non-Western world feel peripheral to the European metropole. To match the Western powers, others had no choice but to take up Western ways. Even those who did so with success, such as the Japanese, felt a sense of humiliation. The break with the past was too abrupt. The foreign graft did not always take. Nerves are still raw even now. Those who did not succeed feel as if they live, as Maalouf puts it, "in a world which belongs to others and obeys rules made by others, a world where they are orphans, strangers, intruders or pariahs.... What can be done to prevent some of them feeling they have been bereft of everything and have nothing more to lose, so that they come, like Samson, to pray to God for the temple to collapse on top of them and their enemies alike?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Another word, today, for Western domination is "globalization," and globalization is often used as another word for "US imperialism." Maalouf takes the fears of globalization seriously. After all, as he says, the French are almost as defensive about their identity in the face of Hollywood, Microsoft, and Big Macs as non-Europeans. What is needed, then, is "a new concept of identity." Perhaps so, but Maalouf is a little vague about what that concept might be. It should be mixed, and never absolute. We should feel part of our countries, and of "Europe," or even the world. Religion must be personal and "kept apart from what has to do with identity." I'm not sure all this is possible. One can feel British or French and "European," but not quite in the same way, since Europe is not a sovereign entity; neither, of course, is the world. And religion is hard to detach from identity, since identification with a community of believers is part of the religious appeal. I also wonder whether the symbols of Coca-Colonization matter as much as some people think. For the places with the greatest troubles-Afghanistan, Chechnya, Algeria-are the least affected by American commerce. The Thais in Bangkok or the Chinese in Hong Kong are not up in arms against the West. Poor Pakistanis are, but they may never have gone near a Big Mac. Maalouf states that many people see globalization as a threat to their "culture, identity and values." This is certainly true of disaffected intellectuals, not just in the old colonial peripheries, but especially in the West itself. Yet I wonder how many ordinary Chinese, Indians, Zambians, or even French really fret about their identity and values because of global trade. It seems more likely that the wellsprings of religious or ethnic fanaticism are political more than cultural. Fanaticism has to do with a lack of representation or free speech. Either can lead to an impotent rage. Maalouf sounds a bit absolutist himself in his stress on the right to speak one's native language. This is indeed an important right. More important, however, is the right to speak freely at all, never mind in which language. Modernization in the non-Western world has come to mean Westernization. True enough. But there are different roads to the West. The liberal democratic option is a threat to old or new elites who wish to wield absolute power. This is why variations of fascism or communism have been more alluring to power-holders or power-grabbers in the developing world. Much of the religious fanaticism we see today comes from the failure of autocratic secular states such as Egypt. Maalouf recognizes this: "Secularism without democracy is a disaster for democracy and secularism alike." Islamism in Egypt or Algeria came in the wake of failed state socialism. This has nothing to do with globalization, US imperialism, or Coca-Cola. To be sure, US governments have supported religious fundamentalists against the Soviet Empire, and continue to support some authoritarian regimes. But the failure of democracy in Arab countries, or indeed Asian ones, cannot primarily be blamed on Washington or global trade. In fact, pro-Western countries in the non-Western world which are most exposed to global trade are often-not always-the most democratic too. Religious fanaticism comes when politics break down. The same is true of racial or nationalist fanaticism and revolutionary millenarianism, which are all variations of religious zeal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The furnace of antiglobalism is actually not in the so-called third world, but in Europe. This, too, has something to do with the lack of representation. We live in democracies. But to many citizens, European institutions and multinational corporations appear to be wielding more power than elected national governments. The problem can be overstated, by British Euro-skeptics as much as by anticapitalist agitators, but it cannot be dismissed. Whatever it is, or will be, the EU is not a democratic federation; multinational corporations are both indisputably powerful and undemocratic. But here we are in a tricky bind, for one of the justifications for closer European integration is precisely the capacity to check the power of big business. Another reason for a European sense of impotence is the utter dependency for its security on the US. This, and the huge success of US commercial enterprise, makes Europeans feel more and more peripheral. As is true in the non-West, this doesn't affect the average consumer of Coca-Colonization so much as artists and intellectuals, who see it as their role to define, guard, and express "identity," be it regional, national, or spiritual. This is why Hollywood is seen as such a threat, especially in France; it has swamped our markets and invaded our histories. It has, in the words of a character in an early Wim Wenders film, "colonized our minds." In a way, non-Americans are in the position of Germans at the time of Napoleon's greatest victories. France was dominant not only in arts and culture, but in military affairs. What was most annoying to German poets and thinkers was France's claim to universality. French values were universal values. Similar claims are being made for America today. There are several ways outsiders can react. They can follow alternative forms of universalism, such as communism or Islamism. They can retreat into romantic nativism, celebrating the national soul, and so on. Or they can boost their confidence by expanding their political freedoms, and taking more responsibility for themselves. There are instances of all three in recent history. But the last decade has shown how often believers can switch their creeds without losing any of their zeal. Some revolutionary socialists began as fervent Catholics, only to become rabid nativists. Amin Maalouf may not have all the answers to such dangers, but he is a rare voice of sanity in this murderous discord. 2. Maalouf does not go into this, but some of the worst instances of romantic nativism and identity chatter occur in the heart of the metropole itself. Tom Hayden was born in Wisconsin. His great-grandparents were immigrants from Ireland. His parents craved and achieved conventional, midwestern, middle-class American respectability. They attended the Catholic Church but only because it was what they were expected to do. Hayden reacted in the manner of some other sons of respectable American folks: he became a 1960s rebel, was a founder of SDS, led protests against the Vietnam War, marched for civil rights, was one of the Chicago Seven, became a California legislator, and married a movie star. He was far more prominent than most, but, apart from marrying Jane Fonda, his life path was not all that unconventional for a man of his generation. Then, in 1968, roughly twenty years before the Soviet Empire collapsed and former Communists, such as Slobodan Milosevic, became nationalists, Hayden, in his own phrase, had "an epiphany," and "discovered that [he] was Irish on the inside." The moment of revelation came in Northern Ireland, while he was watching marchers sing "We Shall Overcome." Epiphany developed into a case of full-blown blood-and-soil nationalism, precisely the kind of thing German poets and thinkers adopted to resist the preeminence of France. All the clichés of the genre are there in Hayden's account. He quotes various Irish sages to the effect that Irish culture is very ancient, older in fact "than the English or even imperial Roman cultures." The Irish soul, filled with mysticism and "otherworldliness that challenge modernity," is "like an ancient forest." (Such woody imagery is always a giveaway for neo-Wagnerian passions.) Hayden's inner Irishman is particularly stirred ("my blood still heats involuntarily") by the poets of national soul who celebrate violent rebellions. One such, Patrick Pearse, wrote a famous funeral ode to O'Donovan Rossa, leader of an armed campaign against the British in the 1880s. Hayden writes: "I was touched by Pearse's summoning of a mystical courage, rooted in an ancient heroic tradition, so lacking in the world I inhabited."[2] The subject of Hayden's admiration, Pearse, was a religious fanatic, who saw Ireland's fate in messianic terms: ancestral ghosts had to be appeased with bloody sacrifice.[3] As it happens, Pearse was the son of an English father and Irish mother; so much for Maalouf's confidence in the natural tolerance fostered by multiple identities. The unheroic boredom of American affluence drives the reborn Irishman to the old sod once more, where, haunted by ancestral traumas, Hayden sits at the feet of hard men from the IRA, whose every appearance in his book is a cue for haloes to glow in the dark. There, in the glass-strewn streets of Derry or Belfast with the smell of cordite in his florid Irish nose, Hayden feels he can finally live up to his name. Hayden, we learn, is from Ó hAodain, which means "the person of the flame." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Now, why would a successful American wish to become an Irish fanatic? Or, put in another way, why would an activist of the New Left adopt all the romantic clichés of the Old Right? Perhaps there is a parallel here with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Socialist communitarianism, never a winner in the US, was an utterly lost cause by the 1980s. After 1989 the dream was dead. Identity politics, which began with Black Power in the 1960s, began more and more to replace it. Assimilation was the enemy now, the domestic version of US imperialism. Hayden claims that non-WASPs who aspire to become mainstream Americans are self-hating and in deep denial about their "stolen identities," like colonial subjects trying to be like their white masters. Much of the book is about his own efforts to shed the "trauma" of assimilation, and to convince himself and his readers that to be Irish is to be nonwhite. Already by page twelve, Hayden has yoked the fate of the Irish to those of the Jews and African-Americans. They had the Holocaust and slavery. The Irish had the Famine. Hayden lobbied to get the Famine included in Californian social science textbooks, for then "our trauma would be recognized alongside those of African Americans, the Jews, the Armenians, and others who had demanded a place in classroom texts." The history of the Famine should be among the subjects taught in school, but this jockeying for a place in the charts of victimhood is not only unseemly but also deeply narcissistic. It is really all about "me," the Person of the Flame, drinking alcohol "to fill a void in my soul that assimilation had caused," and "me" recovering my "Irish (or racial) identity" from "forced amnesia through the experience of suffering." Hayden, in his vulgar Freudian angst, actually sounds more like a bored Californian than a poor, suffering Irishman. He also does precisely what Maalouf deplores, which is to give absolute priority to just one aspect of his personal identity. When Hayden applies it to others, this tendency is even more extreme. He claims that Che Guevara had an "Irish soul" because of his Irish great-grandfather. As Conor Cruise O'Brien said: "Irish cultural nationalism is a rum business: probably the rummest form of cul-tural nationalism that has ever existed anywhere."[4] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ What does Irishness mean in this peculiar fantasyland? This is where things get seriously muddled. Not only does Hayden reduce complex identities to an Irish soul, but he jams his Irishness into a very narrow box. He becomes "painfully aware that all my innermost thoughts and verbal communications were in the language of my colonizer." So he has a stab at Gaelic: "How could one fight for 'Irish identity' without including the ancient language...?" Well, indeed. Alas, however, this was a battle already fought and lost more than a hundred years ago. And Gaelic was in any case too much of a bother for Hayden to learn. So thank goodness that the greatest Irish writers of the twentieth century all wrote in the tongue of the oppressor. Hayden's Irish soul really comes down to two things: the trauma of the Famine, and the conflict in Northern Ireland, which, in his view, is simply a continuation of the heroic war against the ancient English foe. The historic Irish sages and rebels who fired Hayden's imagination are reincarnated in the likes of Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams. Irishmen such as Conor Cruise O'Brien, who hold more skeptical views of the sectarian battles, are dismissed as "self-hating" patsies of the colonial power. Irish-Americans who have similar doubts are also deemed to have trampled on their Irish souls. Hayden, then, is like those Jewish Americans who denounce every Jew with reservations about Ariel Sharon as a self-hater. Or, conversely, like those bigots everywhere who believe that Jews cannot be patriots, since their only loyalty is to God's chosen tribe. I wonder, also, where this leaves the rest of us, especially in the US? If our true selves are shaped by ancestral traumas and ancient feuds, what about a person whose veins contain Scottish, English, and Polish blood? Should he or she mourn the dead of Culloden one day, curse the Russians on the next, and toast the Queen on Sunday? Is a Roosevelt only true to himself if he remembers the Spanish oppressing the Dutch? Should Donald Rumsfeld be celebrating his German soul, with Fichte and the Meistersinger providing a chorus against the French? And I had always thought the main reason so many people flocked to America was to be rid of such nonsense. To reduce a nationality (for what else can Irishness be, except to a racist?) to a sectarian political cause is grotesque. But it is Hayden's use of Northern Ireland as the playground for his own psychodrama that is truly revolting. Much of the book is devoted to several trips to the windy battlefronts of the North. One of his aims is to show his young son, Troy O'Donovan Garity, his "roots." Troy, named after an Irish rebel and a Vietnamese who plotted to kill Robert MacNamara, is taught to fear the British enemy as part of his education. Approaching an army checkpoint, he cries out: "Dad, don't call me Irish because the soldiers will shoot me." His proud dad notes: "He was learning that his roots could get him killed." And consider, for a moment, the following sentences from Hayden's account of his identity tourism. It is 1976. Hayden and Troy are in Belfast: There were 180 shooting incidents that month in Belfast, according to the Republican News.... At the same time, my own personal war with assimilation was going well. West Belfast was where Irish identity was being contested and reclaimed. Troy was face to face with his heritage. "My own personal war...," Troy's "heritage"...Adams and McGuiness may be hard men with a violent past, but they deserve better than this. There is more at stake in Northern Ireland than "identity." If it were only about identity, the conflict really would be insoluble, for if the republicans should be true to their Irish roots, why should the Loyalists not be equally true to their British roots? Or is Hayden suggesting that they go back to the land of their ancestors, which for many of them would be Scotland? In fact, the conflict is as much about social discrimination as it is about religion or political rights. How to find a political solution which safeguards the interests of the Catholic minority as well as the Protestants is extremely difficult. To see it as a colonial war, as Hayden does, which would be solved as soon as the hated enemy goes home, is naive at best, and dangerous at worst. But one doesn't have to be a Sinn Fein sympathizer to regard the treatment of their battles as a form of personal therapy for American visitors as an insult. If the main problems with Hayden's brand of romanticism were bad history and woolly politics (he contrives to enlist his battles over the Irish soul in today's fashionable struggles with multinationals and globalization), this would make the author look foolish, but that would be that. In fact, his thinking, or rather, his feeling, is more lethal. It is exactly what justifies violence in the name of identity. Like his hero, Patrick Pearse, Hayden is haunted by bloodthirsty ghosts. He is not alone. There are Sikhs in Toronto, Muslims in Britain and France, Jews in Brooklyn, and many others in far-flung places who seek to sooth ancestral voices by encouraging barbarism far from home. Some are prepared to die for their causes. Most are content to let others do the dying, while they work on their identities at home. Notes [1] This is also a tribute to the translator, Barbara Bray. [2]All this talk of soul, mystical heroism, and higher causes smacks of what Avishai Margalit and I termed "Occidentalism" in an earlier article in these pages; see The New York Review, January 17, 2002. It is one more indication that Occidentalism has no geographical boundaries. [3] Before an anti-British rebellion in 1916, Pearse wrote that Irish suffering reminded him of King David's aspiration: "That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and that the tongue of thy dogs may be red through the same." [4] Conor Cruise O'Brien, Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1994), p. 87. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From jeebesh at sarai.net Wed Mar 27 17:17:38 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 17:17:38 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE DIGITAL LIBRARY Message-ID: <0203271717380B.00603@pinki.sarai.kit> Business and Public Domain. http://www.ciionline.org/news/pressrel/2001/March/15March01.htm CII NEWS Press Releases : 2001 : MARCH TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE DIGITAL LIBRARY TO BE SET UP FOR INDIAN SYSTEMS OF MEDICINE "With the setting up of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library for Indian Systems of Medicine, India could explore opportunities existing in the western market", stated Ms Shailaja Chandra, Secretary, India System of Medicine & Homeopathy at a session on 'Indian System of Medicine & Homeopathy : Export Opportunities' organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here today. She added that this initiative was the first in the world where chapter and verse on traditional knowledge of medicines would be put up digitally on a website and would certainly generate enthusiasm in the developed countries. Innovative marketing of the ISM products and services should be the primary focus at this stage for the industry, she said. While India has resources, it needs to enhance its marketing skills and improve labeling and packaging. She invited Indian companies to partner for setting up yoga and ayurveda centres in the country and also explore opportunities overseas. Ms Chandra also stressed for developing a customised exhibition package for the sector. She added that in December, a five-day, Indian System Expo would be organised where in innovative ISM services and products would be on display as well as for sale. According to her, for developing India's competitiveness in the ISM, it should identify about 15 areas of strength that could be of interest to the western population. Secondly, companies should be encouraged to take up clinical trials. To facilitate and encourage this, she added that private testing houses would be soon recognised by the Government as public testing houses. Mr T K Bhaumik, Senior Adviser, CII, in his keynote address stated that while the current Ayurvedic drugs market was about Rs. 50,000 crore in the global herbal market, it is expected to be worth Rs. 250,000 crore by 2010. He added that given its rich heritage in traditional knowledge, India could make a successful entry and have a good share in the world market. Currently India's share in the Ayurveda market is only 5% and there exists immense scope for expanding its share in the world marketfrom the present level of Rs. 4000 crore, he added. He stated that the world would look to India as a source of supply and for India, global market can be almost given. But, it is a sad reflection that while it had the knowledge, skill and resource, India neglected the opportunities in the global market. Taking the opportunity of the presence of Ms Shailaja Chandra, Secretary, Indian System of Medicine and Homeopathy, Mr Bhaumik recommended that during the second round of negotiations on trade and services in April, India should offer to negotiate for the ISM services. A concerted effort, he added could help in creating a market for itself. Talking on the current state of the industry, Mr Bhaumik stated that ISM has survived the onslaught of competition and neglect, but languishing due to lack of adequate care. It exists in large unorganised networks and a survival strategy for the languishing sector could be to focus more on over the counter products, diversification into new products such as healthcare and beauty products. Yoga and naturopathy is an upcoming service industry having good growth potential, but is lacking attention, he added. Among major issues hampering the growth in the industry, he said that though institutional support, especially educational and R&D facilities and hospitals exist, the quality needs upgradation. Mr Bhaumik stated that CII sees an imperative need to consolidate, mobilise and organise the sector. With the global market growing at a much faster rate than the domestic market, the ISM market needs to orient itself to cater to the export needs, he added. For the sector to thrive, CII has underlined setting up of a specialised agency for export promotion that will give an impetus to exports. The industry needs a massive drive for organised development and modernisation for the mainstream market, he added. Stating that while India's traditional knowledge is not confined to just India, several countries such as USA, Europe, China, Korea and Japan have already captured the market, he added. Outlining an approach for export strategy, Mr Bhaumik called for organising the structure of the Ayurveda industry and developing it as a parallel pharmaceutical industry and medical practice through modernisation and upgradation. He also urged for strengthening of the core strength, that is ayurveda and yoga and strengthening of education, training, R&D and infrastructure. To develop the export market, Mr Bhaumik also suggested to create a few clusters - ISM cooperatives / ISM perks. Given the support for global competitiveness by the government, India could explore setting up Ayurvedic hospitals and yoga centres abroad. He urged the industry to focus on development of exportable package and services and project ISM as a healthcare package. New Delhi 15 March, 2001 From jeebesh at sarai.net Wed Mar 27 17:25:47 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 17:25:47 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] IPR/ Biotech and Superpower ambition Message-ID: <0203271725470C.00603@pinki.sarai.kit> Interesting interview : http://www.rediff.com/money/2000/nov/10inter.htm Interview / Dr R A Mashelkar - 'India can be a biotech superpower in the 21st century' A report: http://www.rediff.com/money/2002/jan/05mash.htm Intellectual property on top of century's agenda: Mashelkar Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow "The grant of patents on non-origin innovations (particularly those linked to traditional medicines) which were based on what was already a part of the traditional knowledge of the developing world was of great concern to the affected countries." These views were expressed by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research chief Prof R A Mashelkar, while speaking on 'Intellectual Property Rights and Wrongs: A Developing World Perspective' at the 89th Indian Science Congress. "Our goal should be to link our traditional knowledge to the globally acceptable international patent classification system, in order to build the bridge between knowledge contained in our ancient scriptures and today's computer screen of a patent examiner in Washington," Mashelkar stressed. The man who shot into the spotlight for winning the haldi' (turmeric) patent war against the US, said, "traditional knowledge in developing countries was facing a piquant situation as it was passed on from one generation to other, but the world never knew about it." Citing the case of 'haldi' (turmeric), he went on to add, "see how 'haldi' has been a victim of this ; Indians were fully aware of its medicinal worth, but the world was ignorant." He was glad at the government's move to now create a traditional knowledge digital library on traditional medicinal plants, which he felt, will lead to creation of traditional knowledge resource classification as well. "This would eradicate the existing problem of wrongful grant of patents since the examiner would be aware of the Indian rights to that knowledge," he pointed out. "Intellectual property will be relevant to a wide range of socio-economic, technological and political concerns," he said. "An ideal regime of intellectual property rights strikes a balance between private incentives for innovators and public interest of maximising access to the fruits of innovation," he added. Referring to the impact of TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Systems) agreement, he said, "It will vary in developing countries. While middle income nations like Brazil and Malaysia are likely to benefit from the spur to local innovation, countries like India and China, that are better endowed, can gain in the long run by stronger IPR protection." He, however, cautioned the poor nations which have little to boast of in the name of formal innovation. "They are bound to face higher costs without any benefits in return," he said. The CSIR chief seemed to sum up his entire philosophy in these words, "a nation's future will be determined by its ability to convert knowledge into wealth and social good through the process of innovation. From monica at sarai.net Wed Mar 27 18:12:06 2002 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 18:12:06 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life Message-ID: 'Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life' http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader2.html (available online) This year's Sarai Reader brings together a range of critical thinking on urban life and the contemporary, marked by spreading media cultures, new social conflict and globalisation. Scholars, media practitioners, critics and activists use a flow of images, memories and hidden realities to create a fascinating array of original interventions in thinking about cities today. In the context of India, where a large part of this reader has been edited, this is significant, given the frugality of writing on city life in this part of the world. With essays, images, analyses, and manifestoes The Cities of Everyday Life reflects on the contemporary urban condition, detours into the back alleys of the global city, takes on media representations of terror and war, examines the politics of information, anticipates the futures of digital urbanism, registers the details of media flows, explores representations of the city, and looks at globalisation from below. Editors : Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Geert Lovink, Shuddhabrata Sengupta Published by Sarai, CSDS+ The Society for Old & New Media 2002 For orders, email: reader at sarai.net or write to Sarai, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India Hardback: Rs. 395, US$25, ¤29 Paperback: Rs.250, US$15, ¤17 376 pages, 14.5cm X 21cm ISBN 81-901429-0-9 Distributed by Rainbow Publishers Ltd. [India] email: rainbow_p at vsnl.net International sales: Autonomedia, New York Order online from: www.autonomedia.org ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents Introduction - vi URBAN MORPHOLOGIES - 1 The Urban Turn - Gyan Prakash - 2 Urban Physiognomies - Radhika Subramaniam - 8 The Death Of An Empire - Ashis Nandy - 14 Theatre Of The Urban: The strange case of the Monkeyman - Aditya Nigam - 22 Claims On Cleanliness: Environment and justice in contemporary Delhi - Awadhendra Sharan - 31 THE CITY AS SPECTACLE and PERFORMANCE - 39 Parsi Theatre And The City: Locations, patrons, audiences - Kathryn Hansen - 40 Citybeats: Urban folk music in late-modern Calcutta - Avishek Ganguly - 51 The Exhilaration Of Dread: Genre, narrative form and film style in contemporary urban action films - Ravi S. Vasudevan - 59 Ruin And The Uncanny City: Memory, despair and death in Parinda - Ranjani Mazumdar - 68 The Metropolis And Mental Strife: The city in science fiction cinema - Nitin Govil - 79 Screening Injustice: Race, violence and media flows - Bhrigupati Singh - 85 THE STREET IS THE CARRIER AND THE SIGN - 93 Raqs Media Collective FOR THOSE WHO LIVE IN CITIES - 107 Seeing + Believing - Lisa Haskel - 108 Shops on the Move (Extract) - Uday Prakash - 112 Spaced Out: A personal geography to México City - Fran Ilich - 114 Past Places/Future Spaces: Reconstructing post-war Beirut - Yasmeen Arif - 117 Imagining Srinagar-Sarajevo - Abir Bazaz - 127 Sleepless in Delhi (Extract) - Gagan Gill - 130 Slow Shutter/Full Open - Monica Narula - 131 Lagos: Love It or Love It - Niji Akanni - 136 Walls - Monica Narula - 142 World Made Flesh - Matthew Fuller - 144 Mechanicalcutta: Industrialisation, new media in the 19th century - Debjani Sengupta - 149 decoded+delhi+denuded=Google+Search - Parvati Sharma - 159 Office Days (Extract) - Shrinath - 154 Long Bus Rides - Joy Chatterjee - 165 Cancer Wards - Sopan Joshi - 171 CYBERMOHALLA DIARIES - 177 Azra Tabassum, Shamsher Ali, Suraj Rai, Neelofer, Ayesha, Shahjehan, Bobby, Yashodha, Mehrunissa 9/11- MEDIA CITY - 191 A Day That Will Live In...? - Patrick Deer + Toby Miller - 192 Responses To 9/11: Individual and collective dimensions - Rajeev Bhargava - 200 Violence And Translation - Veena Das - 205 Branding The War: Terror and the commodity image - William Mazzarella - 211 "The One Who Really Scares Me" - Paul Virilio interviewed by Dorothea Hahn - 216 Selections: Discussion thread post 9/11 - reader-list at sarai.net - 222 Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Rehan Hasan Ansari, Shammi Nanda, William Mazzarella, Kali Tal, Ravi Sundaram, Zamrooda Khanday, Frederic Madre, Ravikant, Jeebesh Bagchi The obliqueWTC: Lars Spuybroek - 234 VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE + DIGITAL URBANISM - 237 Hyper-Architecture - Ole Bouman - 238 Diagramming - Lars Spuybroek interviewed by Cho Im Sik - 243 Seeing Cyberspace: The electrical infrastructure as architecture - Brian Caroll - 249 Archifesto: Towards a digital urbanism of radical difference - Archimedia - 269 THE POLITICS OF INFORMATION - 275 Banking (on) Biologicals: Commodifying the global circulations of human genetic material - Kaushik Sunder Rajan - 277 The Face Of The Future: Biometric surveillance and progress - Rana Dasgupta - 290 Everyday Surveillance: ID cards, cameras and a database of ditties - Shuddhabrata Sengupta - 297 Blind Intelligence - Sam de Silva - 302 Surveillance: After September 11, 2001 - David Lyon - 306 New Rules, New Actonomy - Geert Lovink + Florian Schneider - 314 Random Thoughts: About the Indymedia network, tactical mediaŠ - Evan Henshaw-Plath - 320 The Case for Biolinuxes: And other pro-commons innovations - K. Ravi Srinivas - 321 Open Publishing - Mathew Arnison - 329 Openlaw - http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/ - 334 - 337 Panic, War & Semio-Kapital - Franco Berardi Bifo - 338 Globalisation From Below: Migration, sovereignty, communication - McKenzie Wark - 342 THIS YEAR/THIS CITY - 350 internal at sarai.net Notes on contributors - 364 Acknowledgments - 364 -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From lawrenceliang99 at yahoo.com Thu Mar 28 10:54:47 2002 From: lawrenceliang99 at yahoo.com (Lawrence Liang) Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 21:24:47 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Very interesting case Message-ID: <20020328052447.41225.qmail@web13601.mail.yahoo.com> I have just been asked to help out with a case which is very fascinating in terms of the kind of questions that it throws up about the art in the public domain. There is a government body in Karnataka called the Lalit Kala Acdemy, which is supposed to act as the custodian of art in Karnataka. These people have a massive archive, a large part of which has been created through contributions by various artists or artists who have sold their works to the academy at ridiculously low rates to be a part of the permanent collection in the archive for public display. These artists range form completely unknown artists to the modern masters like Yusuff Arrakal. In an astonishing move the academy decided a few weeks ago to sell of a large number of the works ( 800 or so) to the "general public" (which term of course includes art dealers) for two reasons. 1. That they did not have space 2. That they wanted art to be popularly available in the homes of ordinary people This act has erupted in a huge controversy in the art scene in Karnataka, with the artists community taking umbrage over the fact that they were not informed about this decision of the government and more importantly that what was supposed to be a contribution to the public domain is effectively being taken outside it. What is interesting is that it is not a case of economic incentive for the government because the works were being sold for as less as Rs. 150 and the entire amount that they have got out it is approximately 8 lakhs or so. A number of the artists reported that even art students had a party buying the painting because it was cheaper for them to buy a painting and reuse the canvass than to buy a new canvass altogether. The artists in Bangalore see it as an continuing act on the part of the government to withdraw form the realms of art and culture and increasing privatization of the field itself. I have been asked to provide a legal opinion and present a paper on the same on the 6th where the artists have called for a open conference of the public community, artists and representatives of the government. The legal issues involved range from issues of contract to bailment to copyright. The line of argument that I am planning to take is to make a distinction between the idea of commons or public domain with that of the "common person" . That is to say an act beneficial to a common man may still very much be within the larger politics of enclosures which is against the idea of the common or public good. Also trying to see if the moral rights of the author in the Indian context would include the right of the artists to challenge an act which takes away form the public domain a work which he has contributes specifically to the public domain. There is an interesting case called Milpurrurru v. Indofurn from Australia which is a landmark case on intellectual property ands cultural heritage. In that case an individual artists belonging to an indigenous community had attempted to sell his works. The community claimed that the works were a part of the cultural heritage of the community and hence the artists did not have a right to sell it without the prior permission of the community. The question for us would be whether it is possible to make an argument for a community of artists in the present context. It would be great if I can get some ideas from the reader list and also if you are aware of any similar cases from any other jurisdictions. Lawrence __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards� http://movies.yahoo.com/ From announcements-request at sarai.net Thu Mar 28 11:24:51 2002 From: announcements-request at sarai.net (announcements-request at sarai.net) Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 06:54:51 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Announcements digest, Vol 1 #29 - 1 msg Message-ID: <200203280554.GAA16546@zelda.intra.waag.org> Send Announcements mailing list submissions to announcements at sarai.net To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to announcements-request at sarai.net You can reach the person managing the list at announcements-admin at sarai.net When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Announcements digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Retrospective of Andrei Tarkovsky's Films (Sagnik Chakravartty) --__--__-- Message: 1 Date: 27 Mar 2002 13:36:18 -0000 From: "Sagnik Chakravartty" Reply-To: "Sagnik Chakravartty" To: announcements at sarai.net Subject: [Announcements] Retrospective of Andrei Tarkovsky's Films FILM CLUB India International Centre Programmes for April 2002 at 6.30 p.m. On the occasion of the 70th birth anniversary of Andrei Tarkovsky, noted Russian film - maker, India International Centre Film Club in collaboration with the Russian Centre of Science & Culture, New Delhi is organising a festival of films. Entry for these screenings will be open to IIC Film Club members and to invitees of the collaborating organisation ANDREI TARKOVSKY Andrei Tarkovsky, the genius of modern Russian cinema, hailed by Ingmar Bergman as "the most important director of our time. the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream" died an exile in Paris in December 1986. Born on April 4, 1932, the son of a prominent Russian poet, Tarkovsky studied film making at the All Union State Cinematography Institute from where he graduated in 1960. His diploma work The Steamroller and the Violin (Katok I Skripka, 1960), won a prize at the New York Film Festival, but it was with his first full- length feature film Ivan's Childhood, which won the Golden Lion at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, that he achieved international recognition. His next film Andrei Rublev (1965), loosely based on the life of a famous medieval Russian icon painter was acclaimed as a masterpiece for its vivid evocation of the Middle Ages. His subsequent films included Solaris (1971); The Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975) and Stalker (1979).After being allowed to film the Soviet-Italian co-production Nostaligia (Nostalghia, 1983) in Italy, Tarkovsky announced his intention to continue living abroad. His last film The Sacrifice (1986) was completed in Sweden. Tarkovsky's films are distinguished by an intense moral seriousness and as his book Sculpting in Time makes clear, he wanted film to be an art, not of entertainment, but of moral and spiritual examination, and was prepared to make extreme demands, both of himself and his audience. Despite the move from Russia to the west, his films display a continuity and development of theme and style that transcend differing political systems. They explore what he saw as eternal, themes of faith, love responsibility, loyalty, and personal and artistic integrity. In his last three films in particular this is combined with an increasingly strident attack on the soulless materialism of both 'east' and 'west', their reliance on technology as a solution to human problems. Tarkovsky always insisted that audiences should 'experience' his films before attempting to 'understand' them. His increasing reliance on the long take, with several shots lasting six minutes, is intended to fuse the experience of both character and spectator. The most characteristic element of Tarkovsky's films, however, is the creation of a filmic world that has the power, mystery, ambiguity, and essential reality of a dream FESTIVAL OF FILMS BY ANDREI TARKOVSKY On 3rd April at 6.30 pm Inauguration Dr. Ravi Vasudevan, Director, SARAI New Media Centre will give a brief introduction Followed by ANDREI RUBLEV (111 min; 1966; 111 min; b/w; English sub-titles) Tarkovsky's monumental second feature film is considered by many to be the finest Soviet film of the postwar era. Andrei Rublev presents eight imaginary episodes in the life of its title character, a 15th century Russian orthodox monk who won renown as an icon painter. Little is known about the historical Rublev; Tarkovsky renders him as a man clinging desperately to his faith in God and art in a world of overwhelming cruelty and barbarism. On 4th April at 6.30 pm IVAN'S CHILDHOOD (Ivanovo Detstvo) (90 min; 1962; 35 mm; b/w; English sub-titles) Winner of the Golden Lion, Venice International Film Festival, 1962 Enthusiastically praised by Jean - Paul Satre as a work of "Socialist surrealism", Tarkovsky's lyrical debut feature film, suggested that the most important Soviet filmmaker since Eisenstein may have emerged - a judgement resoundingly confirmed by Tarkovsky's subsequent work. The eponymous protagonist of Ivan's Childhood is a young orphan whose zealous desire to avenge the death of his parents spurs him on to increasingly dangerous espionage missions behind German lines. Most critics agree that Ivan's Childhood is, for Tarkovsky, a relatively simpler and more conventional work, but one in which the director's celebrated aesthetics, although perhaps in germinal form, is still very much in evidence. On 8th April at 6.30 pm SOLARIS (167 min; 1972; 35 mm; English sub-titles) Winner of the Special Jury Prize, Cannes 1972 Based on a novel by the noted Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, Tarkovsky's Solaris is often described as the Soviet 2001 - "Star Trek as written by Dostoevsky". The film concerns a troubled, guilt-ridden scientist sent to investigate strange occurences on a space station orbiting Solaris, a mysterious planet with an intelligent ocean capable of penetrating the deepest recesses of the subconscious. Confronted on his arrival by the incarnation of a long-dead lover, the protagonist is forced to relive the greatest moral failures if his past. The film is magnificently mounted in widescreen and colour and offers a fascinating, felicitous marriage between Tarkovsky's characteristic moral/metaphysical concerns and the popular format of science fiction, a genre for which the director expressed no particular affection, but to which he would return again, more obliquely, just as cerebrally in Stalker and The Sacrifice On 10th APril at 6.30 pm THE MIRROR (Zerkalo) (106 min; 1974; 35 mm; English sub-titles) Tarkovsky's visually sumptuous fourth feature offers an idiosyncratic history of twentieth-century Russia, in the form of a poet's fragmented reflections on three generations of his family. The poems used in the film were written and read by Tarkovsky's own father; Tarkovsky's mother appears in a small role as the protagonist's elderly mother. In a dual role, the actress Margarita Terekhova is both the protagonist's wife and his mother as a younger woman. "The Mirror is Tarkovsky's central film, and his most personal one, although it might be better described as a transpersonal autobiography. Dreams and memories of an individual protagonist (who is never seen on screen) blend with the dreams and memories of the culture. The Mirror achieves something which is uniquely possible in cinema but which no other film has even attempted: it expresses the continuity of consciousness across time, in a flow of images of the most profound beauty" (Anton Buchbinder) On 11th April at 6.30 pm THE SACRIFICE (Offret) (115 min; 1986; 35 mm; English sub-titles) Tarkovsky's devastating final film ."a Faust for the nuclear age" (David Parkinson). was made in Sweden with several regular members of Ingmar Bergman's team. Described by Tarkovsky as a meditation on "the absence in our culture of room for spiritual experience," the film is set on an isolated island, where Alexander, a distinguished man of letters, lives in seemingly idyllic semi-retirement. The apple of his eye is his young son Little Man, who represents for him the great hope of the future. The future is abruptly shattered by the outbreak of the unthinkable: global nuclear war. In desperation, Alexander makes a private vow to God: he will renounce everything . family, possessions, even speech. if somehow the world can be put right again. The Sacrifice is a masterful, elegant film of great formal rigour and intensity. Tarkovsky supervised its editing from his hospital bed Film Club members are requested to please show their membership cards at the gates. Entry for these screenings is restricted to members of the IIC Film Club Please note: Single Membership - Entry valid for 1 person Double Membership - Entry valid for 2 persons Associate Membership - Entry valid for 2 persons RENEWAL OF MEMBERSHIP Circular to all IIC Film Club members Film Club members are requested to renew their membership subscription for the period 1st April 2002 to 31st March 2003. The membership fees are as follows: Double(applicable to IIC Members) = Rs.200/- Single(applicable to IIC Members) = Rs.125/- Associate (applicable to non-members)= Rs.350/- Membership fees are payable by cash or cheque (drawn in favour of INDIA INTERNATIONAL CENTRE). Membership cards maybe collected from the Programme Office. *IIC MEMBERS WHO HAVE ALREADY CLEARED THEIR FILM CLUB RENEWAL FEES ALONG WITH THE MAIN IIC MEMBERSHIP RENEWALS ARE REQUESTED TO COLLECT THEIR FILM CLUB MEMBERSHIP CARDS FROM THE PROGRAMME OFFICE L.S.Tochhawng Assistant Programme Officer 40, Max Mueller Marg, New Delhi 110003 Telephone: 461 9431 Fax: 462 7751 --__--__-- _______________________________________________ Announcements mailing list Announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements End of Announcements Digest From shuddha at sarai.net Thu Mar 28 13:22:00 2002 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 13:22:00 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Everyday Violence Message-ID: <02032813220000.01104@sweety.sarai.kit> Dear all at the Reader List, I am enclosing below an e mail from Bharati Chaturvedi, (bharatich at hotmail.com) who works with an NGO that is involved with recycling and rag pickers in Delhi. The e mail precedes a letter of complaint written by three rag pickers against an instance of an arbitrary police attack on their persons. Do read this to see how everyday violence operates on the streets of this city. Shuddha ____________________________________________________ dear friends, recycling is now a fashionable word, being promoted far and wide, in schools and in policy. It helps us to get rid of our guilt of over-consumption, perhaps. so, how is recycling really happening? obviously, in india, through the ragpickers and kabaris we see all over, and whom have been praised time and again for their contribution towards society and cleaning up the city. here is an account of how recycling often works at the ground level, at a brutal level. this email takes the form of a complaint by a ragpicker, and 2 kabaris, to the police,regarding incidents which took place today. It is in english, which was written because it was the easiest and quickest.but they have hindi versions.since the compalint was made, we have met various police officials and an enquiry has begun. As a result of this, we have been been inundated with calls from the most unexpected quarters to "stop feeling so bad" about the incidents described below. We have been asked to show some sympathy for the police because they are also human beings. most of this is becoz the persons involved have gone to everyone who knows us in Connaught Place and demanded that we should be " controlled". so much, then, for the comfort levels we feel when we say : msot waste in india is recycled. AND HOW!!! bharati chaturvedi To ACP (Vigilance) Sri. P.C. Gopichand PS. Parliament Street. New Delhi. 110011 March 25 2002 Dear Sir, We are writing to you to lodge a complaint against the incidents that took place yesterday/early morning today regarding ourselves. We have noted below the occurances , followed by each of our experiences and finally, our request and appeal to you. Stage I : A group of police men (appx 7 persons, in uniform and without) approached Ram, a kabari in Raja Bazar and asked him to produce a battery stolen /lost from the PS Beat Box in Barakhamba Road. Ram requested them to search his shop as he had not bought any battery. This was done at the instance of a Asami, whom none of us have had any dealings with, but who had named us as the buyers of the battery. However, they picked Ram up and took him away in an auto-rickshaw. They then reached Connaught Place, where they picked up Santu, also a kabari, who works at the Garbage Station situated there. They also picked up Ajay Rai, who was present there, because he had come to inform Santu that Ram had been taken away and to rush to the Police Station. The policemen appeared to be in an inebriated state, which was surprising since it was a dry day. Stage II : All of us (Ram, Santu and Ajit Rai) were taken to the Fire Brigade Beat box, where we were severely beaten with belts, lathis, and other items. We are able to identify at least two of the personnel by name : Mukesh and Manoj. Several other policemen were also present at that time. Given below are our individual versions : Ram : I was beaten with lathis, one of which also broke on my back. One of the policemen in uniform also sat on my chest , kneeling and pressing his knee onto my chest and causing me great pain. I was also hit with a tube like material, which is found in vehicles. They also tied up my mouth when I screamed to prevent me from being heard. Two policemen caught my forearms and held me tightly , leaning against a pillar like tree and two others whipped us, and ordered us to confess to having bought the stolen battery. Apart from my back, I was also beaten severely on the soles of my feet. I have severe beating marks on my back, great pain in my eyes and feet, muscle pain and body ache. I am unable to walk and have to lie down as one of my legs is also injured. ************************ Santu : I was also beaten similarly with lathis, a belt and other items. They told me that the battery cost them Rs. 7500 and they were not going to leave me to compensate them either through cash or by producing a battery. I told them I had no battery , where upon they began to beat me further. In fact, after being beaten and in pain, I believed it was better for me to agree to anything that the police asked me to confess, rather than allow them to maim or kill me. Then they asked the identified person how much he had sold the battery to me for. He named the price of Rs. 500. By this time, I had fallen down due to excessive beatings and I agreed that I had bought the battery for Rs. 400 and sold it for Rs. 500, as I did not wish to be killed. Then they asked me for a battery for Rs. 7500 : paid for in cash or a new battery. Finally, they searched me and found Rs. 2000 on my person, which was entrusted to me as part of my work as a waste manager with Chintan. This they kept, but returned later, when I asked for it while leaving, after noting down my address and name. They asked me to produce a battery by 10 am. I have great pain on both my legs, marks of the beatings and am in great pain. ************************ Ajit Rai : I was beaten, like the others severely and also suffered from profusely bleeding injuries on my left leg. They forced me to say that I was also with Osami while he was supposed to have stolen their battery. ************************ All three of us were beaten after being held by our arms across a tree and all of us were beaten on our soles very badly. Meanwhile, Mr. Asami, the accused, was also constantly given dozes of smack, to which he is addicted, while we were being beaten. None of us work with Asami and hardly know him. We are entirely unaware as to whether or not he stole the battery and if it was stolen. However, we wish to point out some of our observations : 1.. All of us have Identify Cards, which show that our work and presence in the NDMC Connaught Place Area is acknowledged clearly. The Police Station has knows about these clearly, as we have had several interactions with them and other Police Stations and laso given them copies of these. Santu is part of the Chintan Staff and works as a waste manager on field projects. Chintan, an NGO working with the NDMC on waste -related issues, has also facilitated interactions with the Police. Waste collected from some projects is often sold to Ram directly. However, all this information, apart from proper procedures, were brushed aside in favour of picking us up late at night and beating us up mercilessly. 2.. We have been picking up and selling waste generated in this city , and we make our ends meet on the waste that is thrown out, albeit with difficulties. However, the police repeatedly told us that every ragpicker and kabari was essentially a thief. 3. We tried to have a medical examination done at 4 :30 am, after being released, at RML Hospital, but were denied this as we did not have a letter from the Police Station. We would like to request for the following : 1.. A through medical examination and treatment. 2.. An enquiry into the entire incident and appropriate punishment to those who have tortured us. 3.. Prevention of such incidents in the future, through an identified official whom we can approach for these and also, minor problems. 4.. A monthly meeting to evaluate the progress and events of the last month and to move ahead. We have tried many times to co-operate with the police, often successfully. It is very sad that we still are called thieves and that a citizen can be picked up for interrogation at any hour, in this irresponsible manner and treated without any regard to his rights. We wish to launch this as our complaint. Santu Ajit Rai Ram From hansathap1 at hotmail.com Fri Mar 29 05:06:49 2002 From: hansathap1 at hotmail.com (hansa thapliyal) Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 05:06:49 Subject: [Reader-list] (no subject) Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020329/a46a3cf5/attachment.html From hansathap1 at hotmail.com Fri Mar 29 05:12:21 2002 From: hansathap1 at hotmail.com (hansa thapliyal) Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 05:12:21 Subject: [Reader-list] (no subject) Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020329/63b141f4/attachment.html From rustam at cseindia.org Sat Mar 30 14:32:22 2002 From: rustam at cseindia.org (rustam) Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 14:32:22 +530 Subject: [Reader-list] (Fwd) Corpwatch India Message-ID: <58AC808E9@cseindia.org> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 5766 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020330/74b1e815/attachment.bin From reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com Sat Mar 30 23:38:51 2002 From: reyhanchaudhuri at hotmail.com (Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri) Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 18:08:51 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Unsubscribe due to changed e-mail add. Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20020330/b3ee3c86/attachment.html From dfontaine at fondation-langlois.org Fri Mar 29 00:57:40 2002 From: dfontaine at fondation-langlois.org (Dominique Fontaine) Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 14:27:40 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] Press Release Message-ID: Pour la version française : http://www.fondation-langlois.org/f/informations/nouvelles/index.html [ Veuillez excuser les envois multiples / apologies for cross-posting ] **Press Release** THE DANIEL LANGLOIS FOUNDATION AND ÉPOXY COMMUNICATIONS ANNOUNCE THE PRODUCTION OF **ANARCHIVE 2 - MICHAEL SNOW** http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/collection/snow/index.html Montreal, March 28, 2002 - The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology and Époxy Communications are proud to announce they are teaming up for the DVD-ROM **anarchive 2 - Michael Snow**, which will be launched this fall. This co-production has been made possible thanks to financial support from Telefilm Canada and assistance from Canadian Heritage (the Museums Assistance Program) and the Canada Council for the Arts. In collaboration with the artist Michael Snow, the Foundation has chosen a selection of about 80 works to be illustrated and documented with images, audio and video clips, and 2-D and 3-D animation along with documents from the artist's archives. Époxy is handling the design, production and artistic direction of the DVD-ROM whose interface is being partly designed by Michael Snow. The DVD-ROM will include a comprehensive database of all works by the artist, lists of exhibitions as well as an exhaustive bibliography. For further details on this project, consult the Foundation's site: http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/collection/snow/index.html Michael Snow is among Canada's leading artists. In March 2000, his film work earned him one of the country's highest distinctions, the Governor General's Award for visual and media arts. A multidisciplinary talent, Snow works as a painter, photographer, filmmaker and musician. His 1967 film Wavelength revealed him as one of North America's foremost avant-garde filmmakers. In the past decade, Snow has taken part in all the major exhibitions focusing on images in the contemporary world. Among these exhibits: Passage de l'image (mounted by the Centre Georges Pompidou), Projections, les transports de l'image (first presented at the Centre Le Fresnoy) and the Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon (which in 1995 celebrated a century of cinema). In addition, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Power Plant at Harbour Front put on a joint retrospective called The Michael Snow Project. Recently, a major retrospective on Snow, Panoramique : oeuvres photographiques et films = Photographic Works and Films : 1962-1999, was held in Europe. Last year, the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, England, presented Michael Snow: almost Cover to Cover, an exhibition that is now touring England. For the past two years, the Daniel Langlois Foundation has been involved in developing and prototyping a bilingual DVD-ROM dedicated to Snow's work. The disc will target the education market, particularly universities and art and film schools. It is being produced in partnership with Anne-Marie Duguet of the Université de Paris 1 (Sorbonne-Panthéon) and is part of anarchive, a collection of CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs exploring contemporary artists and created with their assistance. This series began with anarchive 1 - Muntadas: Media Architecture Installations. Two other DVD-ROMs are now in the works. The first, which Anne-Marie Duguet is also putting together, looks at the work of Nam June Paik. The second, for which the Foundation and Époxy have joined forces, investigates Snow's work. ABOUT THE DANIEL LANGLOIS FOUNDATION FOR ART, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY The Daniel Langlois Foundation's purpose is to further artistic and scientific knowledge by fostering the meeting of art and science in the field of technologies. The Foundation seeks to nurture a critical awareness of technology's implications for human beings and their natural and cultural environments, and to promote the exploration of aesthetics suited to evolving human environments. The Center for Research and Documentation (CR+D) seeks to document history, artworks and practices associated with electronic and digital media arts and to make this information available to researchers in an innovative manner through data communications. ABOUT ÉPOXY COMMUNICATIONS Époxy, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, is a development studio working in technology, culture and branding. Based in Montreal and Paris, Époxy offers such services as branding, 2-D and 3-D graphic design, graphic animation for new media and cinema, and interactive communications (mobile telephony, Internet, CD-ROM and DVD-ROM). Its creative talent has garnered Époxy many national and international awards. Époxy's diverse client list includes Softimage, Avid Technologies, Getty images, Domtar, Labatt Breweries, Orage, MindAvenue, Lightworks, Liberty, Interbrew, Papiers Rolland and Dharma Resorts. - 30 - SOURCES Jean Gagnon, Director of Programs, Daniel Langlois Foundation Audrey Navarre, Assistant of the Director of Programs (514) 987-7177, anavarre at fondation-langlois.org www.fondation-langlois.org Jean-Sébastien Ouellet, General Manager Époxy Communications (514) 866-6900, Ext. 222, jsouellet at epoxy.ca www.epoxy.ca INFORMATION Valérie Gonzalo (514) 626-6976, gonzalo at videotron.ca Marie & June inc. (514) 270-5005, marierouthier at vl.videotron.ca _____________________________________________________________________ We've sent you this press release to keep you abreast of activities at the Daniel Langlois Foundation. If you wish to be taken off our mailing list, simply reply to this message with the words REMOVE FROM MAILING LIST in the subject line. Thank you. From dfontaine at fondation-langlois.org Sat Mar 30 01:17:05 2002 From: dfontaine at fondation-langlois.org (Dominique Fontaine) Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 14:47:05 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] The 2002 Call for Projects for Organizations Message-ID: Pour la version française : http://www.fondation-langlois.org/f/nouvelles/index.html [ Veuillez excuser les envois multiples / apologies for cross-posting ] ____________________________________________________________________________ ________ **Press Release** The 2002 Call for Projects for Organizations The Daniel Langlois Foundation Montreal, March 29, 2002 - The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology is pleased to launch its 2002 call for projects for organizations. The Foundation now has two calls for projects a year: one for individual artists and scientists (the deadline is *January 31 annually*) and one for organizations (the next deadline is *June 30, 2002*). The program for organizations has two components: the Exhibition, Distribution and Performance Program for Organizations and the Program for Organizations from Emerging Regions. There is one specific program guide and application form for these programs, which can be found at http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/programmes/index.html. Finally, application information is now available in French, English and Spanish. Applicants in the Program for Organizations from Emerging Regions may submit their proposal in Spanish provided it includes a one-page summary in French or English. Note that although the Foundation accepts proposals in Spanish, all correspondence will be in English or French. Established in the spring of 1997 through an endowment provided by Daniel Langlois, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology is a private non-profit organization whose scope of activity is international. The Foundation's purpose is to further artistic and scientific knowledge by fostering the meeting of art and science in the field of technologies. The Foundation would also like to take this opportunity to remind you that its Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D) is open to researchers interested in multimedia and new technologies in the arts. For more information, feel free to call us at (514) 987-7177 or e-mail us at info at fondation-langlois.org. - 30 - SOURCE: Dominique Fontaine, dfontaine at fondation-langlois.org Program Officer for organizations Jacques Perron, jperron at fondation-langlois.org Program Officer for individual artists or scientists T: (514) 987-7177 F: (514) 987-7492 E: info at fondation-langlois.org W: www.fondation-langlois.org _____________________________________________________________________ We've sent you this press release to keep you abreast of activities at the Daniel Langlois Foundation. If you wish to be taken off our mailing list, simply reply to this message with the words remove from mailing list in the subject line. Thank you. _____________________________________________________________________