From bharatich at hotmail.com Sun Aug 31 07:37:08 2003 From: bharatich at hotmail.com (Bharati) Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2003 07:37:08 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] dell Vs HP Message-ID: here is an intereresting comparison of recycling of computers in the USA: dell's use of prison labour Vs HP. see the url bharati ----- Original Message ----- From: Manny Calonzo To: GAIA Members Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 11:00 AM Subject: [Gaia-members] SVTC Press Release on E-Waste Friends: Here is a press release for our latest report. Sheila Davis is the principle author and did a great job. The New York Times and Associated Press have already said that they will do stories, and we are expecting much wider distribution also. the full report is now available on our web site at www.svtc.org Ted Smith Computer TakeBack Campaign Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition For immediate release: For more information, contact: June 25 , 2003 Sheila Davis: 415-846-6331 Ted Smith: 408-287-6707 ext. 305 New Report Documents Dell's Use of High-tech Chain Gang: Case study contrasts Hewlett Packard's recycling efforts (San Jose) A new report released today documents the vast differences between the two largest U.S. computer makers -- Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell Computer (Dell) -- in their computer recycling strategies. The case study finds that H-P employs state of the art practices in its partnership with Micro Metallics Corporation, while Dell employs low end prison labor in its partnership with UNICOR, the Federal Prison Industry. The report, entitled CORPORATE STRATEGIES FOR ELECTRONIC RECYCLING: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS is a publication of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and the Computer TakeBack Campaign! The report examines three critical areas and finds enormous differences in the models: · Transparency and accountability to the public · General compliance with occupational health and safety standards · Use of best recycling practices and their potential for wide adoption by the private sector "We were appalled to witness the working conditions inside the federal prison at Atwater, California, where inmates were using hammers to smash computer monitors" stated Sheila Davis, Director of the Clean Computer Campaign and principle author of the report. In sharp contrast, the report documents that a "high standards approach to computer recycling is not only possible, it's already being done by Hewlett Packard today at its facility in Roseville, California. We need to support this high-end approach or else it will be dragged down to the lowest common denominator" added Ted Smith, Executive Director of Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and National Coordinator of the Computer TakeBack Campaign. These recycling operations suggest two divergent paths for the future of e-waste recycling in America. One path leads toward efficient, transparent, modern facilities staffed by free labor, possessed of their rights as contemporary employees, able to protect themselves and nearby communities from harm. "The other path descends into a closed, Dickensian world of prisoners condemned to dangerous work for little pay under backward conditions," according to David Wood, Executive Director of Grass Roots Recycling Network. "Depending on the path we choose, e-waste recycling can contribute to community economic development and environmental protection, or can become the equivalent of breaking rocks on a high-tech chain gang." The Computer TakeBack Campaign has urged Dell to agree to use private sector recyclers that employ high standards while it called on EPA to distance itself from prison labor. The Campaign is a national network of dozens of groups throughout the U.S. that are working together to protect America's public health by promoting corporate accountability for electronic waste. For more information, see www.computertakeback.com. #30 Ted Smith Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition/Computer TakeBack Campaign 760 N. First Street,San Jose, CA 95112 408-287-6707-phone; 408-287-6771-fax http://www.svtc.org/ http://www.computertakeback.com ========================================= Food for thought: How Gandhi Defined the Seven Deadly Sins · Wealth without work; · Pleasure without conscience; · Knowledge without character;· Commerce without morality; · Science without humanity;· Worship without sacrifice;· Politics without principle -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030831/a714e743/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Press Release Tale of Two Systems.doc Type: application/msword Size: 82432 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030831/a714e743/attachment.doc From sunil at mahiti.org Fri Aug 1 10:17:46 2003 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: 01 Aug 2003 10:17:46 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] For Economists and Python Programmers Message-ID: <1059713257.1839.21.camel@mahitilaptop.mahitinet> http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/7/29/17659/1721 Do check out the demo at http://216.36.193.92/optimaes/optimaes.cgi Open Project To Investigate Money And Economic Systems (Politics) By interstar Thu Jul 31st, 2003 at 12:06:49 PM EST This article introduces the "Open Project To Investigate Money And Economic Systems" and invites anyone interested to join in. OPTIMAES is a way for people to explore alternative economics through computer simulation. It came from one of the founders' desire to get a better understanding of politically contentious questions about markets, globalization and property. And to explore more exotic ideas like local currencies and interest-free money. It's an amateur effort, run more like an open-source project than a piece of academic research. And the hope is to grow a community of interested and argumentative people to explore these issues; to "fact check" the politicians, mainstream economists and radical protest groups; and to get more discussion and understanding of these issues on the net. When I was young, I was a socialist. It was obvious that there were poor and disadvantaged people in the world. And someone should do something about it! Government seemed the obvious instrument for doing that something. People who told me that there were problems with this, who worried about government inefficiency and the stifling of the entrepreneurial spirit, seemed merely venal. Apologists for selfishness. But I was also a computer geek. I spent my time on the net, reading about technology and it's attendant philosophies. I was a techno-optimist : a believer that innovation and progress came from openness and freedom; from deregulated, "stupid" networks; from decentralization, self-organization and the bazaar rather than the cathedral. Online, I read libertarians who claimed to want a better world too. And that freedom and property rights could take us there. I began to wonder if, given enough freedom, the poor, the third-world, the disenfranchised could escape poverty, using the same mechanisms that the rich had already pioneered. I was being converted. And yet, some of my socialist friends reminded me, things weren't so good. The libertarians promised that free-trade would benefit everyone. But many in the third world were getting poorer. The working class in the first world were getting poorer, working longer hours, and with less security. Studies of scale-free networks showed that the rewards of economic freedom wouldn't be spread evenly, but distributed according to a power-law. If that was true, it was even possible that opening up trade with a previously closed impoverished country, could suck wealth out of it, rather than help it develop. As I looked around, I found many competing political positions. And I started to notice that they were grounded in rival presumptions about economics. Many of the ideas, from libertarian to marxist, conservative to eco-feminist, sounded at least plausible. The more I read, the less certain I became. My intuition and common-sense reasoning weren't enough to make up my mind. I thought of studying economics. But, friends who were economists were disillusioned with the subject. And I didn't have the maths. Nevertheless I'm have enough hacker genes to believe that I can understand something; if I can build it (or at least a scale model) in software. I realized there was only one way I'd really sort things out to my own satisfaction : computer simulation. The Dialogue of Models I could also see that we couldn't expect computer models to give a definitive answer to the questions. All models are simplifications and abstractions. And all models are biased by the preconceptions of the person building them. But models are great ways of sharpening up intuitions and clarifying assumptions. To implement something, you have to make all those prejudices explicit. And that makes it possible for opponents to identify and call attention to them. For example, as a left-wing coder, I could undoubtedly make a simulated economy where communistic redistribution worked better than the free market. And a right wing libertarian would dismiss it as bogus. But the real value would be if the right-winger took the code, identified and pointed out the assumptions that bias the model, and changed them to demonstrate his claims. The option would then be open to another leftist to respond the same way, to refine the model yet further. So I decided my simulation had to be part of an open research project with the models as stages in a critical debate. A "dialogue of models". Ideally, this exploration should be with people who start with different intuitions and political positions. The more diverse the opinions, and the harder people are willing to fight for their corner, the more work can get done. Why not leave it to the experts? There are some economists and social scientists who use agent-based models. There's a long list of them here. I wanted to learn from these people. But I still felt dissatisfied. Papers are written in academic language for other academics. This is a strain to read. I'd rather write and read code than read academic jargon. And my project was intended to make both doing the research, and knowledge of the results, available to a wider community than just the academic one. Having said that, I certainly welcome criticisms and suggestions from academic researchers in the same area. In practice So what does the Optimaes project consist of? At the moment it has two parts : an embryonic computer model of an economy * the optimaes wiki. * The model is a seed. Something that I hope can grow. The idea is, if you want to ask a question or demonstrate or falsify a hypothesis, you can modify the code to embody that hypothesis and watch what happens. We're still at the beginning, but we do have gift giving agents, bartering agents, and a first draft of a money using agent (one that holds local auctions in it's social neighbourhood). Agents live in social networks that can be connected randomly or locally. (And we hope to add small-worlds soon.) With our initial minimal assumptions, the economy of gift giving agents is far more productive than those based on trade. But I'm sure critics will soon discover why, and try to fix that ;-) The code is written in Python; because it's simple, runs on many platforms, and a C++ / Java / Perl / Smalltalk programmer can get into it in a couple of hours. Our first priority is to maximize the inclusiveness of the project and accessibility to the model. The wiki is a place to document and discuss experiments with the code. In general I aim for one page describing a problem, the assumptions and the results and conclusions. If it involves writing new classes of economic agent, these are documented on other pages. We use Use-Mod wiki, so it's possible to break the description into finer detail using the subpage notation. The idea is, that if you want to criticize an existing model, it's possible to create a new page linked from that model's page. In this way, the wiki structure captures the structure of the arguments. What are we investigating? At the moment, the founders are working towards three investigations : an investigation of interest free money and local currencies. See this overview of many of these ideas. * an investigation of gift economies. Can they be as efficient at distributing resources as exchange economies? Can they use reputation management to protect themselves against exploitation by selfish agents? And what is a good simplified model of human psychology, anyway? * questions about globalization and free trade : what happens when you allow free trade between two previously shielded economies? Is it good for everyone, or can the stronger economy end up pulling wealth from the weaker? * But we are interested in other questions that might be suggested. One such, currently, is to look into digital goods and non-scarce resources. Other people might be interested in modeling incentives for innovation, or various kinds of redistributive taxation, or the fine detail of auctioning, bartering or gift giving strategies, or ... How far are we? About four man-weeks in. We have a working first draft. Six people have tried out the code, asked questions and made suggestions. We have some on-wiki discussions about refactoring; our first bug-fix suggested by a non-founder; and interested people in the UK, Italy, Portugal and Brazil (where the project started). Now we are excited ... -- Sunil Abraham, sunil at mahiti.org http://www.mahiti.org MAHITI Infotech Pvt. Ltd.'Reducing the cost and complexity of ICTs' 314/1, 7th Cross, Domlur Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka, INDIA Ph/Fax: +91 80 4150580. Mobile: 98455 12611 "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have one idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas" George B. Shaw From aiindex at mnet.fr Fri Aug 1 17:09:44 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 12:39:44 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Invitation to a panel discussion in New Delhi on Aug 6 Message-ID: Invitation to a panel discussion in New Delhi on August 6 INDIA'S DANGEROUS TRYST WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS A Discussion on Wednesday, August 6, Hiroshima Day PANELISTS: R. Rajaraman, Jawaharlal Nehru University Satyajit Rath, National Institute of Immunology Jean Dreze, Centre for Development Economics C. Rammanohar Reddy, 'The Hindu' VENUE: Conference Room III, India International Centre ANNEXE, New Delhi TIME: 6 pm Organised by ORIENT LONGMAN, publishers of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream (ed by M.V. Ramana and C. Rammanohar Reddy) _________________________________ SOUTH ASIANS AGAINST NUKES (SAAN): An informal information platform for activists and scholars concerned about Nuclearisation in South Asia South Asians Against Nukes Mailing List: archives are available @ two locations May 1998 - March 2002: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sap/messages/1 Feb. 2001 - to date: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SAAN_/messages/1 To subscribe send a blank message to: South Asians Against Nukes Website: http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex/NoNukes.html -- From shuddha at sarai.net Fri Aug 1 18:34:11 2003 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 15:04:11 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] August in India - the censor, documentaries, the internet...and kites? Message-ID: Dear All, The first of August brings interesting news from the Republic of India. Two relatively minor pieces of information tucked away in the corner of the Mumbai city pages of the Times of India website unveil further episodes in the rise of the censor in our lives. The first concerns the innovative requirement for censorship certificates for Indian entries to the next Mumbai International Documentary and Short Film Festival. The second, is about order No. GSR529(E) of the Ministry of Information Technology, (issued on July 7, 2003) which stipulates the exact procedures for the banning of websites deemed offensive by the Indian state. With this order,which extends the already draconian provisions in the existing IT legislation, the Republic of India, enters the exclusive club of free nations like Singapore, the Peoples Republic of China, Cuba, the Islamic Republic of Iran,the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and others (the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth of Australia, and the Republic of Italy are close candidates as well) that monitor and criminalize Internet surfing behaviour. There will be a lots of shrinking freedom to celebrate for Indian citizens on 'Azaadi Diwas' ('Independence Day') a fortnight from now. Perhaps the traditional kite flying excercises of the 15th of August, the only part of the charade that has any redeeming value, should this time be given a new twist - with kites stencilled 'Censored, and Azaad (Free) ' flooding the skies of the cities of New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and wherever else in the territories of the Indian republic that people still feel free. It would then be a challenge to the Government of India to create a new department of the Certification and Censorship of Kites in order to protect the Decency, Morality, Public Order, Sovereignty and Aerial Intergrity of the Skies over the Indian Republic. I highly recommend the two articles below from today's Times of India, by Shabnam Minwalla, my attention was drawn to them by a forward by Sunil Abraham of the second article (on Intenet Censorship) on to the Commons Law List. Incidentally, a campaign against the censorship requirement for MIFF has been initiated by some documentary filmmakers, and statements in support may be sent to An intersesting discussion on the implications of the censorship of the Internet in India is underway at the "Commons Law" list at Sarai.net. The archives are at - http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/ Cheers Shuddha __________________________________________ 1 Film-makers miffed about censorship rule SHABNAM MINWALLA TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, AUGUST 01, 2003 12:58:09 AM ] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=105788 MUMBAI: The announcement for the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) declares that 'happy days are here again'. But behind the bluster lies an unpleasant surprise: For the first time in its 13-year history, the festival is insisting that participating films require censorship clearance. This unexpected clause has generated alarm within the documentary-film fraternity, which sees it as an attempt to stifle freedom of expression. "All over the world, film festivals are outside the purview of censorship," said filmmaker Sanjay Kak,who has started a signature campaign in protest. Added film-maker Rakesh Sharma, "My last film, 'Aftershocks', was entered in 70-odd film festivals around the world, but the question of censorship didn't come up even once." So why, after seven censor-free rounds of MIFF, are the dreaded scissors looming over the festival to be held in February 2004? Many suspect that this is not an isolated instance, but part of an ominous pattern. Earlier this year, the censor board refused to clear'Aakrosh', a documentary on the Gujarat carnage, on the grounds that it "depicts violence, reminds of the riots and shows the government and police in bad light". Similarly, Anand Patwardhan was thrust into a prolonged battle with the censor board last year over "—War and Peace", which addresses issues surrounding nuclear war. "As equipment becomes more accessible and young people join the field, documentaries are becoming a space for independent voices," said Anjali Monteiro of the Unit of Media and Communication at Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Added Bishakha Datta, who has spent a year tangling with the censor board over her documentary on commercial sex workers, "Earlier, if a screening was at some small venue, nobody bothered about the censor certificate. But today the censor board actually writes to the theatre and demands explanations." This is part of a larger attempt to control thinking and clamp down on diverse ideas the same process that has resulted in the revision of school curricula and scrutiny of international scholars visiting India for conferences. Is MIFF is the latest victim of this paranoia? Films Division maintains that a censor certificate merely helps it to establish the date of completion of the film. "Nobody has protested so far, and I see no reason why they should,"said a Films Division official. However, the film-makers view the matter differently and point out that to demand censor certificates from Indian but not international films is both discriminatory and pointed. "The kinds of films being denied censor certificates are invariably those which do not speak highly about the establishment," said Mr Sharma. "We have a ridiculous situation where the VHP is free to distribute horrible propaganda materials, but if I use excerpts from those I am certain to be censored." Moreover, the fear of a sticky censorship situation might well influence upcoming film-makers for whom MIFF is an important forum. "A film festival is a place to be experimental and outrageous, not be governed by the rules of sobriety," said Mr Kak, pointing out that youngsters might shy away from politically explosive and sexually explicit subjects in order to make to MIFF. "My greatest fear is that this will result in unhealthy selfcensorship, and set limits for the way we think." ___________________________________________________________________ 2. Watch what you surf, Net police are here SHABNAM MINWALLA TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, AUGUST 01, 2003 01:10:10 AM ] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=105813 MUMBAI: The thought police is gearing up to storm the virtual world. In what appears to be its first serious attempt to monitor the Internet, the Government of India has outlined an official procedure for blocking websites. An order issued by the department of information technology on July 7 enables a bunch of bureaucrats to decide the websites Indian surfers are allowed to access. ``This is the first formal step towards Internet censorship in Indian law,'' warns Somasekhar Sundaresan, a lawyer who specialises in technology issues. ``The order provides the State with sweeping powers to police Internet content. For example, news breaks such as those in Tehelka.com can simply be blocked by the government using these powers.'' Interestingly, the Information Technology Act, 2000, only provides for the blocking of pornographic websites and the monitoring of websites which endanger public order, the integrity and security of the nation and relations with other countries. But the new diktat goes a few steps further permitting the blacking out of ``websites promoting hate content, slander or defamation of others, promoting gambling, promoting racism, violence and terrorism and other such material, in addition to promoting pornography, including child pornography and violent sex''. The order No. GSR529(E) goes on to add: ``Blocking of such websites may be equated to balanced flow of information and not censorship.'' Critics, however, point out that much can be accommodated under this umbrella clause. According to the order, various agencies including central and state home departments, the courts, CBI, IB, police and the chairman of the National Human Rights Commission can submit a complaint to the director of Cert-In, a new organisation which has been set up by the government to address IT security issues. This will then be examined by a committee comprising bureaucrats from Cert-In, the department of information technology and the law or home ministry. The committee will ``meet and take on the spot decision on whether the website is to be blocked or not''. Neither the producers of the website nor those with a contrary point of view are to be given a hearing. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030801/275675c8/attachment.html From aiindex at mnet.fr Sat Aug 2 02:22:19 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 21:52:19 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Latest on Campaign against Censorship at Miff 2004 Message-ID: [Earlier today Shuddha posted news item about the requirement of censorship certificates at the Mumbai International Film Festival. Posted below is a protest letter from Indian film makers which was sent out earlier today xxx, Harsh] o o o Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 19:35:03 -0000 Latest On Campaign Against Censorship Campaign against Censorship at Miff2004 Dear Friends, Given below is the draft of the letter that was sent out today to Films Division. Besides minor grammatical changes, it is the same draft that was circulated to you. A copy of the letter with signatory list has also been sent to the Minister, Secretary and JS (films) of I&B. We are organizing a press conference in Delhi on Tuesday, 5 August, 2004 (Press Club, 3:00PM) to publicize this protest. We request you to take the initiative with other members in your city on the same day and circulate this letter to the press with your comments. This is the best way of ensuring that the campaign is not only publicized in the largest number of areas possible but also functions in a decentralized manner. We had requested members to send details of their MIFF awards but very few did. As such we had to rely on our collective memory to make a list. We are sorry if there are any errors/omissions. Some members may also object to our including any reference to previous awards but it was done as a matter of strategy. We have also taken the liberty of giving an address and putting the names of six filmmakers in Delhi as contact persons. Again, this is not to violate the democratic spirit of this campaign, but just to provide Films Division/the Ministry an address and some persons who can be contacted at short notice. We will pursue the Films Division and the Ministry on an urgent basis and if no reply if received within ten days, we will have to consider other options. Please also give serious thought to how to proceed from here. But let us be systematic and ensure the success of whatever we do. Do send us all your ideas. We will collate these and circulate the essence of them to others. Several ideas have already been sent to us and circulated on E groups. Our suggestion is that we should draw up a collective action programme so that the campaign is effective. We have received mails, which have called for a boycott, a parallel festival, protests during MIFF, legal action , etc. We should give all these options a serious collective thought after the result of our letter to the Ministry and the Films Division becomes clear. With best wishes. Amar Kanwar Pankaj Butalia Rahul Roy Saba Dewan Sameera Jain Sanjay Kak Campaign against Censorship at Miff2004 B-26 Gulmohar Park New Delhi 110049 August 1, 2003 Re : Discrimination against Indian documentaries at Miff 2004 The Chief Producer, Films Division, Mumbai Dear Sir, We, the following documentary film makers from all over the country, are extremely distressed over the news that for the first time since the inception of MIFF (Mumbai International Film Festival), the possession of a censor certificate has been imposed by the Films Division as a precondition for participation of Indian films at the festival. Assuming this is not an attempt to control the content and intensity of Indian documentaries, two reasons could be behind this measure: 1. The censor certificate helps to mark the completion date of the film 2. That without a valid censor certificate a film cannot be screened at a cinema hall / theatre in India In this context we wish to point out that: All films participating in an Indian International Film Festival (features or documentaries) are given (and have always been given) a specific censorship exemption by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, for the duration of the festival and for all festival related special screenings. This is how all international films, which are not subjected to censorship by the Indian Government, are screened at Indian international film festivals including previous MIFFs and IFFIs. Subjecting Indian films to this requirement amounts to muffling the voice of Indian documentaries and is a discriminatory practice since it puts them at a disadvantage vis a vis international films which do not require any such certification. ( b) International film festivals worldwide take the film director/producer's certification (or self statement ) as sufficient proof for date of completion of a film. It is surprising that MIFF can accept such a certification from international film makers but not from Indian filmmakers. Does this policy suggest that Indian filmmakers are not as trustworthy as foreign filmmakers ? It may also be pointed out that the seven previous MIFF ( BIFF) festivals did not have this discriminatory practice and were conducted without any problem whatsoever. We the undersigned are extremely concerned about this completely arbitrary, unfair and discriminatory condition imposed by you. We request you to please take immediate action on this so that the participation of the largest number of Indian film makers is assured at the festival. We are a mature society and need not display such mistrust nor resort to practices which harm the interests of its own members. We have also shared this anxiety with film making colleagues and festival organisers all over the world and they too have expressed their concern at this development. We hope we will not have to take this further and that the matter will be resolved amicably. An early reply or a meeting with our representatives will be highly appreciated. We are prepared to meet in Delhi or Bombay. Any of the names mentioned below can be contacted for this purpose. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Pankaj Butalia and Saba Dewan 26961065,26854839. 26515161 & 98103 95589 and Amar Kanwar 011- 26513556, 26516088, 98102 16088 Rahul Roy 011-26515161 & 98103 95589 Sameera Jain 011- 26220224 & 98105 25985 Sanjay Kak 011- 26893893 & 98112 29952 on behalf of all the filmmakers listed in the letter. Enclosed : Complete list of signatories Copy : Minister, Information & Broadcasting, Government of India. Secretary, Information & Broadcasting, Government of India Jt. Secretary (films), Information & Broadcasting, Government of India List of Signatories Aditya Seth Ajay Bhardwaj, Delhi Ajay Noronha, Mumbai Amar Kanwar, Delhi. (Golden Conch winner at MIFF) Anand Patwardhan, Mumbai (Golden Conch winner at MIFF) Ananya Chatterjee, Kolkata Anjali Gupta, New Delhi Anjali Monterio, Mumbai (Certificate of Merit at two MIFF's) Anjali Panjabi, Mumbai. (Silver Conch winner at MIFF) Anuradha Chandra, New Delhi Aparna Sanyal, New Delhi Arvind Sinha Ashok Maridas, Bangalore Ashwini Malik, Mumbai. Batul Mukhtiar, Mumbai Bishakha Datta, Mumbai Chandita Mukherjee, Mumbai Charu Gargi, Mumbai. Christopher Rego Daljit Ami Deepu, Bangalore Eddy Singh Gargi Sen, New Delhi Jabeen Merchant, Mumbai Jeebesh Bagchi, Delhi Jyotsna Murthy, Bangalore Kavita Joshi, Delhi Kirtana Kumar, Bangalore Konarak Reddy, Bangalore KP Jayshankar, Mumbai. (Certificates of Merit at MIFF) Kuttyrevathy, Kerala Lalit Vachani, New Delhi Manjira Datta, New Delhi Meghnath, Ranchi Monica Narula, Delhi Nandan Kudhyadi, Pune Pankaj Butalia, New Delhi. (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) Paromita Vohra, Mumbai Parvez Imam, Bangalore Pawan Sony, New Delhi Rahul Roy, New Delhi Rajul Mehta, Mumbai Rakesh S Katarey, Manipal Rakesh Sharma, Mumbai Ranjan De, New Delhi Ranjan Palit, Kolkata. (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) Ranjani Mazumdar, Delhi Reena Mohan, New Delhi (Best First Film Award at MIFF) Ritu Kapur, New Delhi RR Srinivasan, Chennai Ruchir Joshi, London, UK Rupashree Nanda, Jaipur RV Ramani, Chennai Saba Dewan, New Delhi. (Certificate of Merit at MIFF) Sabeena Gadihoke, Delhi (Certificate of Merit at MIFF) Sameera Jain. New Delhi. (Certificate of Merit at MIFF) Samina Mishra, New Delhi Sanjana , Bangalore Sanjay Kak. New Delhi Sanjit Narwekar, Mumbai Sehjo Singh, New Delhi (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) Shabnam Virmani, Bangalore Shashin Tiwari Shohini Ghosh, Delhi Shoma Chatterjee, Kolkata Shriprakash Prakash, Ranchi Shuddhabrata Sengupta., Delhi Simantini Dhuru, Mumbai Sridhar Rangayan Stalin K., Ahmedabad (Silver Conch Winner at MIFF) Sudheer Palsane, Mumbai Sujit Ghosh, Lucknow Sumit Kumar Sunanda Bhat, Bangalore Sunil Bhatia, Mumbai Sunil Shanbag, Mumbai Supavitra Babul, New Delhi Surabhi Sharma, Bangalore Surajit Sarkar, New Delhi Swagat Sen, Delhi Usha , Bangalore Uvraj, Bangalore Vani Subramanian, New Delhi Vasudha Joshi, Kolkata (Golden and Silver Conch Winner at MIFF) Veena Bakshi, Mumbai Vijay , Bangalore Vinod Ganatra Vinod Raja, Bangalore Vipin Vijay, Trivandrum (Jury Award Winner at MIFF) Yousuf Saeed, New Delhi Zaheer A Bagh, Ladakh From aiindex at mnet.fr Sat Aug 2 02:49:13 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 22:19:13 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Big Brother Gets a Brain Message-ID: The Village Voice July 9 - 15, 2003 http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0328/shachtman.php The Pentagon's Plan for Tracking Everything That Moves Big Brother Gets a Brain by Noah Shachtman Illustration by Richard Borge The cameras are already in place. The computer code is being developed at a dozen or more major companies and universities. And the trial runs have already been planned. Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become perhaps the federal government's widest reaching, most invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all under watch. Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and soon. The military is scheduled to issue contracts for Combat Zones That See, or CTS, as early as September. The first demonstration should take place before next summer, according to a spokesperson. Approach a checkpoint at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during the test and CTS will spot you. Turn the wheel on this sprawling, 8,656-acre army encampment, and CTS will record your action. Your face and license plate will likely be matched to those on terrorist watch lists. Make a move considered suspicious, and CTS will instantly report you to the authorities. Fort Belvoir is only the beginning for CTS. Its architects at the Pentagon say it will help protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where for the past few weeks fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in ones and twos. But defense experts believe the surveillance effort has a second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent, unblinking eye. This isn't some science fiction nightmare. Far from it. CTS depends on parts you could get, in a pinch, at Kmart. "There's almost a 100 percent chance that it will work," said Jim Lewis, who heads the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "because it's just connecting things that already exist." As currently configured, the old-line cameras speckled throughout every major city aren't that much of a privacy concern. Yes, there are lenses everywhere-several thousand just in Manhattan. But they see so much, it's almost impossible for snoops to sift through all the footage and find what's important. CTS would coordinate the cameras, gathering their views in a single information storehouse. The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to "track everything that moves." "This gives the U.S. government capabilities Big Brother only pretended to have," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense think tank. "Before, we said Big Brother's watching. But he really wasn't, because there was too much to watch." CTS could help soldiers spot dangers as they navigate perilous urban areas, Pentagon researchers insist. That's not how defense analysts like Pike see it. The program "seems to have more to do with domestic surveillance than a foreign battlefield," he said, "and more to do with the Department of Homeland Security than the Department of Defense." "Right now, this may be a military program," added Lewis. "But when it gets up and running, there's going to be a huge temptation to apply it to policing at home"-to keep tabs on ordinary citizens, whether or not they've done something wrong. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Traditionally, the authorities have collected information only on people who might be connected to a crime. If there was a murder in the East Village, the cops didn't bring in all of St. Mark's Place; they interrogated only the people who might have information about the killer. Even the most extreme abuses of law enforcement power-like J. Edgar Hoover's domestic spying on political activists-homed in on very specific individuals, or groups, that he imagined as threats to the state. He didn't put the whole state under watch. September 11 changed that. Now, the idea is to find out as much as possible about as many people as possible. After all, the logic goes, the country can't afford to sit back and wait to be attacked. Almost anyone could play a part in a terrorist plot. So the government has to keep tabs on almost everyone. CTS, a $12 million, three-year program, is emerging as a potential centerpiece of that initiative. "Before, it was 'let's catch the bad guys and bring them to trial after stuff happens,' " Lewis said. "Now it's 'let's look for patterns and stop [an attack] before it happens.' " That's why Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed for a program to turn a million civilians into citizen-spies, snooping on their neighbors. That's why the USA Patriot Act now allows for wiretaps without warrants. And it's why the Pentagon has begun researching an array of high-tech tools to pry into average people's lives. CTS is the brainchild of DARPA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. That's the group of minds behind the notoriously invasive Total (sorry, "Terrorism") Information Awareness über-database. TIA's backers say the project will be carefully targeted, but privacy advocates say it could compile in a single place an unprecedented amount of information about you-your school transcripts, medical records, credit card bills, e-mail, and so much more. "LifeLog," currently in the early planning stage at DARPA, would twist all these bits into narrative "threads," giving officials a chance to watch events develop. Along the way, LifeLog's developers would like to capture the name of every TV show you watch, every magazine you read. Still, watching your data trail just isn't the same as actually watching your physical tail. You can change your e-mail address, and start paying cash. But you can't run away from yourself. And that's the missing piece CTS could provide-an almost instant ability to track, moment by moment, where you are and what you're doing. "Before, there was a reasonable expectation of privacy when you were walking down the street," Lewis said. "Now that's something that will have to be adjusted." That's not all that will change. As everybody who's ever mugged for the camera knows, people act differently when they're being watched. Sometimes, that's not such a bad thing. Web-surfing habits are monitored on the job, so you wait until you're home to download porn. On the street, you can be a little less skittish, knowing your neighbors, your beat cops, your corner store owners are keeping an eye on you. But being watched by a faceless, inaccessible government minder, that's something altogether different. In 1791, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a jail, circular in shape. The warden would sit in a dark observation booth in the middle; the prisoners would sit in well-lit, inward-facing cells along the circumference. Under the constant threat of being watched, the jailed would change their behavior, Bentham theorized, bending their activities to the warden's rules. Two centuries later, England has 2.5 million security cameras spread throughout the country, by some estimates. Several cities, like the port town of King's Lynn, are covered bythe lenses. "It's exactly what Bentham predicted," said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, a British civil liberties group. "The kids there are giving up going onto the street. They say it's almost like being in a glass-paneled room, with their parents on the other side. They're forced into smaller and smaller areas so they can be kids in private." Putting people under electronic watch induces a kind of split personality, said Bill Brown, who leads tours of Manhattan's spy cams as part of his duties with the Surveillance Camera Players. The authorities want people to obey the law, to behave rationally. But video surveillance does the exact opposite. It makes people feel-correctly-like they're constantly being watched, like they're paranoid. "And that's not a rational state at all," Brown said. "It's a mental condition." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stalin and Saddam did their best. They tried hard to keep under surveillance as many of their citizens as they could. But these efforts could never succeed completely. There was always a "fundamental barrier-the ratio of watchers to the watched," said John Pike of Globalsecurity.org. "You couldn't have everybody working for the secret police," he continued. "The thing that's so singularly seductive about automatic video surveillance is that it breaks that fundamental barrier down." CTS will keep watch by equipping each camera with a processor, like the one in your computer. The chips will have programmed into them "video understanding algorithms" that can distinguish one car from another. At each checkpoint, the car's speed, time of arrival, color, size, license plate, and shape are all instantly passed on to a central server. If the early tests identifying cars go well, software that recognizes a person's face and style of walk could also be added. By sharing only this refined data-instead of the raw video itself-CTS should keep fragile computer networks from becoming overloaded with hours and hours of meaningless footage. Everybody knows how much of a pain it can be to get a video clip in your e-mail inbox, instead of a simple text message. Now imagine how much worse the problem would get if thousands and thousands of such clips were being sent back and forth, all day, every day. CTS would help government networks avoid that burden, with each camera transmitting a mere 8 kilobits per second, instead of the 200 or so kilobits needed for high-resolution video. CTS would also keep the snoops who stare at the monitors from being overwhelmed. "We have enough cameras, but not enough people to watch the video feeds," said Tom Strat, who's heading up CTS for DARPA's Information Exploitation Office. If all's well, CTS cameras might send back to headquarters only basic data or the occasional low-resolution image. But when there's something fishy going down-like a car speeding away unexpectedly, or a briefcase left in a train station-the images could come sharper, and more quickly. Proto-CTS programs from contractors Northrop Grumman and the Sarnoff Corporation would interrupt the gray monotony of surveillance footage, setting red boxes aflash around the suspect person or object. "It focuses your attention right there," said Bruce De Witte of Northrop. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ But CTS would do more than change what investigators see. It would also give them a record of everything that happens in a city's public places, potential evidence for prosecutors and terrorist hunters. In its presentation to industry, DARPA said it wanted CTS to be able to find the common threads between a shooting at a bus stop one month and a bombing at a disco the next. In theory, CTS could take an inventory of all of the cars around the bus stop and near the disco immediately before and after the incidents. Then it could examine where those cars went, to see if there were any vehicles in common-or if a car acted as a sort of messenger between two others. The forensic process could be further enhanced by one of DARPA's analysis programs, like LifeLog or Total Information Awareness. After mining license plate numbers from the footage, investigators could identify the car owners. And then dig into the owners' Web-surfing trails, to see if there were any visits to explosive-making sites. And scan e-mail accounts for virulent language. And plumb credit card receipts for big fertilizer purchases. To the uninitiated, storing and sharing all this information might seem like insurmountably complex tasks. And according to Strat, the CTS manager, the ability to network surveillance cameras over a wide area is "not right around the corner." Defense and technology analysts have a different view. "(CTS) is pretty creepy. And the creepiest part about it is that it's not all that sophisticated," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the privacy-rights proponent Electronic Frontier Foundation. DARPA has mandated that the CTS demonstrations be done only with readily available, "off the shelf" equipment-the kind of stuff you could get at Spyville.com. You could find slightly less diesel versions of the gear at Amazon.com. So getting the cameras will be easy. What may be harder is handing off information-a description of a suspicious vehicle, say-from one camera to the next. These lenses will be separated by hundreds, even thousands, of meters. And "appearances can change dramatically" in those distances, Johns Hopkins University senior research scientist Chris Diehl said. Slight variations in light or in the camera's angle can make a car look very different to a mechanical eye. "If you read the literature, there really isn't a proven method" for solving this problem, he said. Yet this obstacle seems surmountable. In a CTS simulation conducted by software developer Alphatech, a car could be tracked over 10 kilometers with accuracy of 90 percent or better with cameras placed 400 meters apart. The percentage went up, of course, as the cameras moved closer together. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CTS is but one of an array of private and public sector programs to sort through the ever expanding amount of surveillance imagery. University of California at San Diego's Computer Vision and Robotics Research lab just received a $600,000 grant from a Defense Department counterterror group for a CTS-like project. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stephen Brumby is using genetic algorithms-programs that are bred from smaller components of code-to automatically analyze satellite pictures. At the Sarnoff Corporation, a project dubbed Video Flashlight would morph cameras' views into a single three-dimensional model. Using a joystick, a security officer could maneuver through this simulated world as though playing a game of Half Life or Grand Theft Auto. In order for Video Flashlight to work, however, it would have to use stationary cameras. CTS doesn't have that limitation; it's supposed to function with drones and other battlefield sensors. That's one of the reasons Globalsecurity.org's John Pike thinks the program could have a legitimate military function-"to the extent that it is relevant to urban operations, as opposed to the running of a well-oiled police state." Combat in cities "tends to quickly degenerate into small firefights," Pike explained. It's a lot harder to know what's happening in a crowded city than it is in an open desert. Radios cut out quicker; drones and satellites have a harder time peering through the concrete canyons and narrow passageways of urban life. CTS could restore some of that sight, giving U.S. generals a "broader situational awareness." This assumes, of course, that CTS has anything to do with urban combat. If it does, it'd be a surprise to some of the businesses bidding for the CTS contract. "The primary application is for homeland security," said Tom Lento, a spokesman for the Sarnoff Corporation. "The whole theme here is homeland security," added Northrop Grumman's De Witte. Strat disagreed. "DARPA's mission is not to do homeland security," he said. In a presentation to industry, DARPA noted, "CTS technology will be demonstrated only within the observable boundaries of government installations where video surveillance is expressly permitted, and operational deployment areas outside the United States where it is consistent with all local laws." But in an interview, Strat did admit that "there's a chance that some of this technology might work its way" into domestic surveillance programs. In the test at Fort Belvoir this year the aim is to track 90 percent of all of cars within the target area for any given 30-minute period. The paths of 1 million vehicles should be stored and retrievable within three seconds. A year after that, CTS is supposed to move on to testing in an urban combat setting, where it will gather information from 100 mobile sensors, like drone spy planes and "video ropes" containing dozens of tiny cameras. Shortly thereafter, CTS could be keeping tabs on a city near you. "This is coming whether we like it or not," said Jim Lewis, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It's not how do we stop the tidal wave. It's how do we manage it." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Noah Shachtman edits the blog www.defensetech.org. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From aiindex at mnet.fr Sat Aug 2 03:57:10 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 23:27:10 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Film Censorship in Post-Colonial India Message-ID: Economic and Political Weekly July 26, 2003 Commentary From ektenel at hotmail.com Mon Aug 4 21:17:46 2003 From: ektenel at hotmail.com (Ah_Ek Ferrera_Balanquet) Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2003 15:47:46 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] InteractivA'03 Message-ID: Cartodigital.org - Museo de Arte Contempor�o Ateneo de Yucat�(MACAY) Presentan/Present InteractivA�03 (www.cartodigital.org/interactiva) Un encuentro bienal internacional de las Artes Medi�cas y Electr�as An interantional biennale of New Media and Electronic Art En/At MACAY: 11 de Julio-Agosto 30/July 11-August 30 Expsoci�xhibit Virtual: 6 de Agosto-20 de Septiembre/August 6-September 20 Curador Ejecutivo/Executive Curator: Raul Ferrera-Balanquet Curadores Invitados/Guest Curators: Fatima Lasay, Pooja Sood, Agricola de Cologne Ensayos/Essays: Laura Baigorri - Heidi Figueroa- Museograf�Museographer: Jose Luis Rodriguez de Arma Artistas/Artists Arte en Red/Net Art Carlo Zani (Italy)- Ricardo Miranda Zu� (Nicaragua/USA)-Anjali Arora (India)-Juan Devis y OnRamp Arts (Colombia/USA)-Teknokultura (Puerto Rico)-Tina Gonsalves (Australia)-Samuel Bianchini (France)- Gita Hashemi (Iran/Canada)-Antonio Dom�uez/Daniel Lara Ballesteros (Mexico)-Giselle Beiguelman (Brazil)-Marcus Bastos (Brazil)-Raphael Marchetti Renno (Argentina)-Colectivo Pinto mi Raya (Mexico)-Colectivo Transnational Temps (Spain/France/USA)-Eduardo Navas (USA/El Salvador)-Yucef Merhi (Venezuela/USA)- Mauro Ceolin ( Italy)-YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (Korea)-Ricardo B� Duarte (Venezuela)-Regina C�a Pinto (Brazil)-Juan Manuel Pati�Argentina)-Paula C�va (Argentina)-V�or Mart�z D� (Mexico)-Gregorio Rivera-Medellin (Mexico/USA)-Pat Binder (Argentina/Germany)-Agricola de Cologne y Colectivo (Germany)-Ernesto Le�(Venezuela)-Antonio Mendoza (USA/Cuba)-Mario Garc�Torres (Mexico)-Daniel Garc�And�The Technologies To The People Development Team (Spain)-Ellen and Jim Fields (USA/Mexico)-OPTiQ_SYNDiCATE (Spain) CD-Rom Gita Hashemi (Iran/Canada)-Maysa Arabit .(The Philippines )-Catherine Lasam .( The Philippines)-John Enrico Mortel .( The Philippines)-Nalini Malani (India) Fotograf�Photography Eduardo Cervantes (M�co)-Isabel Ivars (Espa�Jenny Fraser (Australia)-Vivan Sundaram (India)-Maria Dybbro (US/Latina)-Jorge Luis Garc�(Mexico) Instalaci�nstallation Kathleen Ruiz (USA)-Santiago Perez Alfaro (Mexico)-Guto Nobrega (Brasil) Juan Jos�� Infante (Mexico)-Raul Ferrera-Balaquet y Colectivo Esquinas Rodantes (Cuba/Mexico/USA)- Regina C�a Pinto (Brazil)-Agustin Chong Amaya (Mexico)-Arcangel Constantini (Mexico)-Carlo Zani (Italia) Performance Active Ingredient (Inglaterra)-Fernando Llanos/Enrique Greiner (Mexico)-Adolfo SchneideWind (Argentina)-Raul Ferrera-Balanquet (Cuba/M�co/USA) Ricardo Loria/Enrique Rej�M�co)-VJ Mud (Ricardo Heredia) (Mexico)-Bandung Center for New Media Arts (Indonesia)-Mircea Turcan (Mexico) Sonido/Sound Brian Mackern/Colectivo Haro (Uruguay/Argentina/Brazil/Mexico)-Fatima Lasay (The Philippines)-Sergio Maltagliati (Italy) Digital Video John Alfred Fillwalk (USA)-Colectivo Re:combo, (Brasil)-Glenda Le�(Cuba)-Tejal Shah (India)-Subodh Gupta, (India)-Kiran Subbiah, (India)-Ranbir Kaleka (India) Pooja Kaul (India) -Laura Carmona Barreda (M�co)-Chris Caines (Australia) Monica Costa Coldwell (M�co)- Subba Ghosh(India) InteractivA�03 http://www.cartodigital.org/interactiva Mueso de Arte Contemporaneo Ateneo de Yucatan (Macay) Pasaje de la Revolucion e/ 58 y 60 Merida, Yucatan, Mexico http://www.macay.org for information write interactiva at cartodigital.org coordinacion at macay.org Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet,MFA Artist/Writer/Curator krosrods at cartodigital.org ektenel at hotmail.com http://www.cartodigital.org/krosrods _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From shuddha at sarai.net Tue Aug 5 21:00:39 2003 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 21:00:39 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Campaign Against Censorship at MIFF Message-ID: <03080521003900.06888@sweety.sarai.kit> Dear All Below is an update on the Campaing against Censorship at MIFF. This is following from earlier postings by me and by Harsh Kapur on the subject. 106 filmmakers from all over India have signed the statement protesting the decision by the government to introduce censorship requirements for Indian entries to MIFF. Shuddha ____________________________________________________________ New Delhi 4, August 2003 Dear Friends, Please find below the latest development on the campaign against censorship at MIFF as also our thoughts in Delhi about future action: The Joint Secretary (films), Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Govt. of India has called for a meeting with representatives of the Campaign. The meeting has been fixed for 7 August, 4:00 PM. We would request you to send in points/issues that should be raised in the meeting. A press conference has been organised at the Press Club, New Delhi on 5, August at 3:00 PM. We plan to release the protest letter signed by 106 documentary film makers from all over the country. Our sincere apologies for the omission of some names in the earlier signatories list. Hopefully all the names have been included in the updated list. At the press conference we also plan to issue a statement, based on responses received by the Campaign, enumerating the possible course of action in case the Ministry does not remove the repugnant clause from the entry form of MIFF. As per our discussions in Delhi we are suggesting the following plan of action – An international signature campaign of film makers and festival organisers protesting against censorship at MIFF. An international campaign of film makers to boycott the festival. A parallel film festival in Mumbai that will screen Indian and foreign documentaries. Legal action. Here we suggest that this should be a collective and considered action because that would provide us with an opportunity to raise several issues regarding censorship besides the immediate goal of changing the MIFF entry rules. We would like to quote from a recent High Court judgement in the Anand Patwardhan case where he went to court against the 21 cuts imposed by the CBFC on his film, War And Peace. The Mumbai High Court had this to say while deciding in favour of Anand’s petition: " That apart, the freedom of speech and expression is important not merely for the consequences that ensue in the absence thereof but since the negation of it runs as an anti-thesis to basic human values, instincts and creativity. It is high time that the persons in authority realize the significance of freedom of speech and expression rather than make and allow such attempts to stifle it." We feel this judgement has important implications for all of us collectively and we should put ourselves in a position where the full potential of the statements of the Mumbai High Court can be utilised to garner support for the independent documentary. We are of the opinion that we should wait for the response from the Ministry before jumping into any legal redressal. This option needs to be well planned and thought out so as to to strengthen the community in the long run vis a vis censorship. The current rise of authoritarianism and conservatism in the country is fairly clear given the extreme intolerance to any criticism. We the documentary film makers might be the new targets of this authoritarian streak but friends from other media including national magazines, newspapers, the regional press as well as people’s movements across the country have been under vicious attack for some time now. The attempt to gag films at MIFF are clearly part of a larger emerging scenario where the documentary is being recognised as a medium that has the potential of revealing ‘truths’ that are uncomfortable to those in power or seeking power. In the coming years we will probably witness many more attacks on documentary film makers and therefore if ever, this is the time for us to respond to these challenges as a community. The Press has fought a bitter and hard battle from the 1950s to the 1960s to free itself of censorship and the time has come for us to defend our right to freedom of expression. As a follow up to the earlier point we propose a major symposium in Mumbai during the festival on documentaries and censorship regardless of our participation or boycott. 3. We request film makers to get together on an urgent basis in their respective cities and form campaign committees on this issue. We will keep you posted about the developments as they emerge at this end. Please find below the updated signatory list of 106 film makers supporting this Campaign across the country. In Solidarity, Amar Kanwar Pankaj Butalia Rahul Roy Saba Dewan Sameera Jain Sanjay Kak List of Signatories Aditya Seth Ajay Bhardwaj, Delhi Ajay Noronha, Mumbai Ajay Raina, New Delhi (Golden Conch winner at MIFF) Amar Kanwar, Delhi. (Golden Conch winner at MIFF) Anand Patwardhan, Mumbai (Golden Conch winner at MIFF) Ananya Chatterjee, Kolkata Anjali Gupta, New Delhi Anjali Monterio, Mumbai (Certificate of Merit at two MIFF’s) Anjali Panjabi, Mumbai. (Silver Conch winner at MIFF) Anuradha Chandra, New Delhi Aparna Sanyal, New Delhi Arvind Sinha, Kolkata Asheesh Pandya, Gurgaon, Haryana Ashok Maridas, Bangalore Ashwini Malik, Mumbai. Batul Mukhtiar, Mumbai Bishakha Datta, Mumbai Chandita Mukherjee, Mumbai Charu Gargi, Mumbai. Christopher Rego Daljit Ami, Chandigarh Deepa Dhanraj, Bangalore Deepu, Bangalore Eddy Singh Gargi Sen, New Delhi I.K. Shukla, Delhi Jabeen Merchant, Mumbai Jeebesh Bagchi, Delhi Jyotsna Murthy, Bangalore Kapil Suravaram, Hyderabad Kavita Joshi, Delhi Kirtana Kumar, Bangalore Konarak Reddy, Bangalore KP Jayshankar, Mumbai. (Certificates of Merit at MIFF) Kuttyrevathy, Kerala Lalit Vachani, New Delhi Manjira Datta, New Delhi Meghnath, Ranchi Monica Narula, Delhi Nandan Kudhyadi, Pune Navroze Contracter, Bangalore Pankaj Butalia, New Delhi. (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) Pankaj Rishi Kumar, Mumbai Paromita Vohra, Mumbai Parvez Imam, Bangalore Pawan Sony, New Delhi Preeti Chandriani, Mumbai Rahul Ranadive, Delhi Rahul Roy, New Delhi Rajashree Rajul Mehta, Mumbai Rakesh S Katarey, Manipal Rakesh Sharma, Mumbai Ranjan De, New Delhi Ranjan Palit, Kolkata. (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) Ranjani Mazumdar, Delhi Rappai Poothokaren Reena Mohan, New Delhi (Best First Film Award at MIFF) Ritu Kapur, New Delhi RR Srinivasan, Chennai Ruchir Joshi, London, UK Rupashree Nanda, Jaipur RV Ramani, Chennai S.K.Das Mollick, Saba Dewan, New Delhi. (Certificate of Merit at MIFF) Sabeena Gadihoke, Delhi (Certificate of Merit at MIFF) Sabina Kidwai Sameera Jain. New Delhi. (Certificate of Merit at MIFF) Samina Mishra, New Delhi Sanjana , Bangalore Sanjay Kak. New Delhi Sanjit Narwekar, Mumbai Sehjo Singh, New Delhi (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) Shabnam Virmani, Bangalore Shashin Tiwari Shohini Ghosh, Delhi Shoma Chatterjee, Kolkata Shriprakash Prakash, Ranchi Shuddhabrata Sengupta., Delhi Simantini Dhuru, Mumbai Sridhar Rangayan Stalin K., Ahmedabad (Silver Conch Winner at MIFF) Sudheer Gupta, New Delhi Sudheer Palsane, Mumbai Sujit Ghosh, Lucknow Sumit Kumar Sunanda Bhat, Bangalore Sunil Bhatia, Mumbai , (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) Sunil Shanbag, Mumbai Supavitra Babul, New Delhi Supriyo Sen , Kolkata Surabhi Sharma, Bangalore Surajit Sarkar, New Delhi Swagat Sen, Delhi Usha , Bangalore Uvraj, Bangalore Vani Subramanian, New Delhi Vasudha Joshi, Kolkata (Golden and Silver Conch Winner at MIFF) Veena Bakshi, Mumbai Vijay , Bangalore Vinod Ganatra Vinod Raja, Bangalore Vipin Vijay, Trivandrum (Jury Award Winner at MIFF) Yousuf Saeed, New Delhi Zaheer A Bagh, Ladakh From gchat at vsnl.net Tue Aug 5 22:29:26 2003 From: gchat at vsnl.net (CHATTERJEE) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 22:29:26 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Campaign Against Censorship at MIFF References: <03080521003900.06888@sweety.sarai.kit> Message-ID: <001301c35b72$ee04d7c0$8b5b41db@vsnl.net.in> Why can't we all sign? A digital film 'Akrosh' has not got clearance from the govt; the British Council B'bay was stopping it from being screened. But ultimately, there was a strong protest from the audience; then they consulted some rule-books, decided their premises do fall outside such Indian rulings and screened it. Going to B'bay tomorrow and will get more information. Gayatri Chatterjee ----- Original Message ----- From: Shuddhabrata Sengupta To: Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 9:00 PM Subject: [Reader-list] Campaign Against Censorship at MIFF > Dear All > > Below is an update on the Campaing against Censorship at MIFF. This is > following from earlier postings by me and by Harsh Kapur on the subject. > 106 filmmakers from all over India have signed the statement protesting the > decision by the government to introduce censorship requirements for Indian > entries to MIFF. > > Shuddha > > ____________________________________________________________ > > > > New Delhi > 4, August 2003 > Dear Friends, > Please find below the latest development on the campaign against censorship > at MIFF as also our thoughts in Delhi about future action: > The Joint Secretary (films), Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Govt. of > India has called for a meeting with representatives of the Campaign. The > meeting has been fixed for 7 August, 4:00 PM. We would request you to send in > points/issues that should be raised in the meeting. > A press conference has been organised at the Press Club, New Delhi on 5, > August at 3:00 PM. We plan to release the protest letter signed by 106 > documentary film makers from all over the country. Our sincere apologies for > the omission of some names in the earlier signatories list. Hopefully all the > names have been included in the updated list. At the press conference we also > plan to issue a statement, based on responses received by the Campaign, > enumerating the possible course of action in case the Ministry does not > remove the repugnant clause from the entry form of MIFF. As per our > discussions in Delhi we are suggesting the following plan of action - > An international signature campaign of film makers and festival organisers > protesting against censorship at MIFF. > An international campaign of film makers to boycott the festival. > A parallel film festival in Mumbai that will screen Indian and foreign > documentaries. > Legal action. Here we suggest that this should be a collective and considered > action because that would provide us with an opportunity to raise several > issues regarding censorship besides the immediate goal of changing the MIFF > entry rules. We would like to quote from a recent High Court judgement in the > Anand Patwardhan case where he went to court against the 21 cuts imposed by > the CBFC on his film, War And Peace. The Mumbai High Court had this to say > while deciding in favour of Anand's petition: ".That apart, the freedom of > speech and expression is important not merely for the consequences that ensue > in the absence thereof but since the negation of it runs as an anti-thesis to > basic human values, instincts and creativity. It is high time that the > persons in authority realize the significance of freedom of speech and > expression rather than make and allow such attempts to stifle it." We feel > this judgement has important implications for all of us collectively and we > should put ourselves in a position where the full potential of the statements > of the Mumbai High Court can be utilised to garner support for the > independent documentary. We are of the opinion that we should wait for the > response from the Ministry before jumping into any legal redressal. This > option needs to be well planned and thought out so as to to strengthen the > community in the long run vis a vis censorship. The current rise of > authoritarianism and conservatism in the country is fairly clear given the > extreme intolerance to any criticism. We the documentary film makers might be > the new targets of this authoritarian streak but friends from other media > including national magazines, newspapers, the regional press as well as > people's movements across the country have been under vicious attack for some > time now. The attempt to gag films at MIFF are clearly part of a larger > emerging scenario where the documentary is being recognised as a medium that > has the potential of revealing 'truths' that are uncomfortable to those in > power or seeking power. In the coming years we will probably witness many > more attacks on documentary film makers and therefore if ever, this is the > time for us to respond to these challenges as a community. The Press has > fought a bitter and hard battle from the 1950s to the 1960s to free itself of > censorship and the time has come for us to defend our right to freedom of > expression. > As a follow up to the earlier point we propose a major symposium in Mumbai > during the festival on documentaries and censorship regardless of our > participation or boycott. > 3. We request film makers to get together on an urgent basis in their > respective cities and form campaign committees on this issue. > We will keep you posted about the developments as they emerge at this end. > Please find below the updated signatory list of 106 film makers supporting > this Campaign across the country. > In Solidarity, > Amar Kanwar > Pankaj Butalia > Rahul Roy > Saba Dewan > Sameera Jain > Sanjay Kak > > > > > List of Signatories > Aditya Seth > Ajay Bhardwaj, Delhi > Ajay Noronha, Mumbai > Ajay Raina, New Delhi (Golden Conch winner at MIFF) > Amar Kanwar, Delhi. (Golden Conch winner at MIFF) > Anand Patwardhan, Mumbai (Golden Conch winner at MIFF) > Ananya Chatterjee, Kolkata > Anjali Gupta, New Delhi > Anjali Monterio, Mumbai (Certificate of Merit at two MIFF's) > Anjali Panjabi, Mumbai. (Silver Conch winner at MIFF) > Anuradha Chandra, New Delhi > Aparna Sanyal, New Delhi > Arvind Sinha, Kolkata > Asheesh Pandya, Gurgaon, Haryana > Ashok Maridas, Bangalore > Ashwini Malik, Mumbai. > Batul Mukhtiar, Mumbai > Bishakha Datta, Mumbai > Chandita Mukherjee, Mumbai > Charu Gargi, Mumbai. > Christopher Rego > Daljit Ami, Chandigarh > Deepa Dhanraj, Bangalore > Deepu, Bangalore > Eddy Singh > Gargi Sen, New Delhi > I.K. Shukla, Delhi > Jabeen Merchant, Mumbai > Jeebesh Bagchi, Delhi > Jyotsna Murthy, Bangalore > Kapil Suravaram, Hyderabad > Kavita Joshi, Delhi > Kirtana Kumar, Bangalore > Konarak Reddy, Bangalore > KP Jayshankar, Mumbai. (Certificates of Merit at MIFF) > Kuttyrevathy, Kerala > Lalit Vachani, New Delhi > Manjira Datta, New Delhi > Meghnath, Ranchi > Monica Narula, Delhi > Nandan Kudhyadi, Pune > Navroze Contracter, Bangalore > Pankaj Butalia, New Delhi. (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) > Pankaj Rishi Kumar, Mumbai > Paromita Vohra, Mumbai > Parvez Imam, Bangalore > Pawan Sony, New Delhi > Preeti Chandriani, Mumbai > Rahul Ranadive, Delhi > Rahul Roy, New Delhi > Rajashree > Rajul Mehta, Mumbai > Rakesh S Katarey, Manipal > Rakesh Sharma, Mumbai > Ranjan De, New Delhi > Ranjan Palit, Kolkata. (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) > Ranjani Mazumdar, Delhi > Rappai Poothokaren > Reena Mohan, New Delhi (Best First Film Award at MIFF) > Ritu Kapur, New Delhi > RR Srinivasan, Chennai > Ruchir Joshi, London, UK > Rupashree Nanda, Jaipur > RV Ramani, Chennai > S.K.Das Mollick, > Saba Dewan, New Delhi. (Certificate of Merit at MIFF) > Sabeena Gadihoke, Delhi (Certificate of Merit at MIFF) > Sabina Kidwai > Sameera Jain. New Delhi. (Certificate of Merit at MIFF) > Samina Mishra, New Delhi > Sanjana , Bangalore > Sanjay Kak. New Delhi > Sanjit Narwekar, Mumbai > Sehjo Singh, New Delhi (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) > Shabnam Virmani, Bangalore > Shashin Tiwari > Shohini Ghosh, Delhi > Shoma Chatterjee, Kolkata > Shriprakash Prakash, Ranchi > Shuddhabrata Sengupta., Delhi > Simantini Dhuru, Mumbai > Sridhar Rangayan > Stalin K., Ahmedabad (Silver Conch Winner at MIFF) > Sudheer Gupta, New Delhi > Sudheer Palsane, Mumbai > Sujit Ghosh, Lucknow > Sumit Kumar > Sunanda Bhat, Bangalore > Sunil Bhatia, Mumbai , (Golden Conch Winner at MIFF) > Sunil Shanbag, Mumbai > Supavitra Babul, New Delhi > Supriyo Sen , Kolkata > Surabhi Sharma, Bangalore > Surajit Sarkar, New Delhi > Swagat Sen, Delhi > Usha , Bangalore > Uvraj, Bangalore > Vani Subramanian, New Delhi > Vasudha Joshi, Kolkata (Golden and Silver Conch Winner at MIFF) > Veena Bakshi, Mumbai > Vijay , Bangalore > Vinod Ganatra > Vinod Raja, Bangalore > Vipin Vijay, Trivandrum (Jury Award Winner at MIFF) > Yousuf Saeed, New Delhi > Zaheer A Bagh, Ladakh > _________________________________________ > 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 ravikant at sarai.net Wed Aug 6 11:33:06 2003 From: ravikant at sarai.net (ravikant) Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 11:33:06 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Hindutva history on the net Message-ID: <200308061133.06932.ravikant@sarai.net> With apologies to those who read The Indian Express. Although the hindutva history of PN Oak brand has been there for a long time, it seems the cyber versions have gone a step or two beyond Oak's absurdities, like when Vivekananda is conjoined with Canada in a re-configured 'Vive Canada' in a world-conquering vision ascribed to him. Of course RSS is seen as the organisation with the mission to accomplish the vision. What is even more interesting is that the author sees cyber space as a natural domain for hinduism which is essentially rhizomatic in character. Of course he slips, for hinduism and hindutva may not be the same thing. Like he slips while telling us that 'Dharmakshetre Kurukshetre' is the opening line from the Gita; in fact it is the from the first shloka of the second of the eighteen chapetrs of the Gita. I have known for a long time that I do not have to read hindutva literature if i wish to understand hinduism, but now i know one more thing: people like the author of this book, Vinay Lal, are not the best ones to tell me about hindutva history, leave alone history. enjoy, if you can ravikant BOOK EXTRACT Domain name Hindutva It is perhaps apposite that the North American proponents of Hindutva, as well as revisionist Hindu historians, should have found the Internet an agreeable avenue for the propagation of their world-view. More than any other organised religion, Hinduism is a decentred and deregulated faith, and in this it appears akin to cyberspace. In the language of the cybernetic postmodernists, one could say that Hinduism is rhizomatic, with multiple points of origin, intersection, and dispersal. Hinduism and the Internet, one might conclude, were happily made for each other; even the millions of web sites evoke the ??330 million gods and goddesses?? of Hinduism. Although the subjects on which the most substantial contributions to Hindutva web sites are made vary considerably, the web masters and their associates are united in their resolve to offer radically altered accounts of even the most common verities of India history. Thus, while it is generally agreed that the Mughal Emperor Akbar (reigned 1556-1605) was, especially for his times, a just ruler, that his policies of tolerance were conducive to the expansion of his empire and the good of his subjects, and that he is said to have introduced elements of Hinduism, into his own practices of worship and even the culture of the court, in Hindutva web sites he appears as a ??tyrannical monarch??; not unexpectedly, then, Aurangzeb (reigned 1658-1707), who has always been disliked by Hindu historians as a sworn enemy of the Hindus and breaker of idols, is viewed as entirely beyond the pale. The Taj Mahal, which no serious historian doubts was built at the orders of Shah Jahan (reigned 1628-58), is transformed into a Hindu monument by the name of Tejomahalay, as though its history as one of the finest examples of Mughal architecture was wholly inconsequential, a malicious invention of Muslim-loving Hindus. Lest these revisionisms be considered merely arbitrary and anomalous, the systematic patterning behind these re-writings is also evidenced by the attempt to argue, for example, that the Aryans, far from having migrated to India, originated there. These sites weave their own intricate web of links, conspiracies, and nodal points: at one moment one is in one web site, and at another moment in another. Even Krishna, who by his leela or divine magical play could be among several gopis (lovers) simultaneously, might have found his match in the world wide web; he might have gazed with awe at rhizomatic Hindutvaness at its propagandistic best. Among the most remarkable and most comprehensive of the sites are those created by the VHP and students who have constituted themselves into the Global Hindu Electronic Network (GHEN). Links take the surfer to such sites as hindunet, the Hindu Vivek Kendra, and the various articles culled from the archives of Hinduism Today, a glossy magazine published by a white sadhu who is constructing a lavish temple amidst the rich tropical green of Hawaii?s Kaui island. GHEN is sponsored by the Hindu Students Council, and the astuteness of its creators, no less than their zeal and ardour, can be gauged by the fact that it had developed into the most comprehensive site on Hindutva philosophy and aggressive Hindu nationalism at least eight years ago, when such work in cyberspace was in its infancy. GHEN was the recipient in 1996 of an award from IWAY, then one of the leading Internet magazines, for the ??Best Web Page Award?? in the religious category, and one of GHEN?s members described himself as pleased that the world was finally ??taking cognisance of the most important movement in this century: the Hindutva movement??. If GHEN shares something ominous in common with Hindutva web sites, it is the deliberate attempt to obfuscate the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva. Swami Vivekananda, to take one instance, becomes in their histories an exponent of Hindutva ideology, not an advocate of a mere Hinduism ... Judging from GHEN?s ??Swami Vivekananda Study Center??, which presents the RSS as the fulfilment of Vivekananda?s ideas, the Swami was a militant Hindutvavadi who desired ??the conquest of the whole world by the Hindu race??. If Argentina is nothing other than ??Arjuna town??, where Arjuna ? one of the five Pandava heroes who in the Mahabharata are condemned to spend 13 years in exile ? went for the year that he was enjoined to remain incognito; if Denmark, rich in dairy products, is none other than ??Dhenu Marg??, the abode of cows (which the cowherd Krishna would have recognised as his own home); if the ??Red Indians?? are the signposts for the advance of an Indian civilisation in remote antiquity; and if Vivekananda?s own name, ??Vive! Canada??, is a ringing testimony to his reach over the world, even demonstrable proof of intrepid Indian explorers having used the scientific advances of the ancient Hindus to reach Canada centuries before the European Age of Exploration commenced, then surely it is not too far-fetched to imagine that Vivekananda desired the worldwide supremacy of the Hindu race . Sometimes the expression of Hindu identity is manifested by waging a virulent attack on Islam, as in the web site, located in the United States, that takes its name from the Sanskrit phrase Satyameva Jayate (Truth Alone Triumphs), which is the national motto of sovereign India. Though viewers are invited to send e-mail to a person carrying a Muslim name, ??Zulfikar??, the web site is almost certainly operated by a Hindu. The site is linked to the home page of a ??Vedic astrologer?? and the remarks about Islam and its Prophet are so slanderous that it is nearly inconceivable that any Muslim, howsoever much an unbeliever, would have dared to be so foolishly offensive... I have given a mere inkling of the Hindu histories that dominate on the Internet, and in conclusion it merits reiteration that the very proclivity to argue in the language of the historian shows how far the proponents of Hindutva have abandoned the language of Hinduism for the epistemological imperatives of modernity and the nation-state. Nothing resonates as strongly as their desire to strip Hinduism of myth, of its ahistoricist sensibilities, and to impose on the understanding of Hinduism and the Indian past alike the structures of a purportedly scientific history. Typically, as in the article on ??The Destruction of the Hindu Temples by Muslims, Part IV?, found on the ??Satyameva Jayate?? web site, no page numbers are ever furnished, nor are titles of works enumerated; nonetheless, a tone of authority is sought and injected by the note placed at the end: ??Works of Arun Shourie, Harsh Narain, Jay Dubashi, and Sita Ram Goel have been used in this article.?? The mention of ??references?? imparts a scholarly note to the piece, and the invitation to employ the verifiability hypothesis suggests the detachment of the scientist, the objectivity of the social scientist who has no ambition but the discernment of truth, and the scrupulousness of the investigator. I hasten to add that this is keeping well within the norm of Hindutva history: the unattributed article, ??The Real Akbar, The (not) so Great??, is likewise based on a number of sources, though their worthiness as specimens of authoritative scholarship can be construed from the great affection that Hindutva historians have developed for Will Durant. ??The world famous historian, Will Durant has written in his Story of Civilisation,?? writes Rajiv Varma in his Internet article on Muslim atrocities, ??the Mohammedan conquest of India was probably the bloodiest story in history.?? The West be damned, but when the occasion demands, the authority of even its mediocre historians is construed as incontestable. From marnoldm at du.edu Sat Aug 2 00:05:50 2003 From: marnoldm at du.edu (Michael Arnold Mages) Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 12:35:50 -0600 (MDT) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] August on -empyre- .microsound with Trace Reddell, john hudak, Glenn Bach, John Kannenberg, and tobias c. van Veen Message-ID: Please join us at -empyre- for a month's discussion of .microsound with five practitioners of the art form. Sound at the molecular level - slices of sound that are less than .1 second in length, made accessible by digital sound editing technologies - are the realm of .microsound. Microsound artists stretch and massage these tiny bits of sound into spatially intense, surprisingly expressive works that cover a wide range of styles. ---> Trace Reddell { http://www.du.edu/~treddell/ } has been exploring the intersections of audio and multimedia production, digital networks, media theory, literary criticism, and the history of drug culture for almost fifteen years. He resides in Lafayette, Colorado, where he spends much of his time in Pharmakopolis. Trace's literary sound and multimedia pieces include LITMIXER (2001) { http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr12/litmix/index.htm }, featured in Electronic Book Review's music/sound/noise issue, and "Machinery for Dreaming" { http://llc.du.edu/faculty/treddell/palimpsest/reddell_machinery_for_dreaming.mp3 }, an exercise in .txt-to-.midi conversion exploring the work of Thomas De Quincey. Collaborative projects and affiliations include the pharmakon.t remix { http://www.djrabbi.com/ } work at djrabbi.com with Mark Amerika, Chad Mossholder of Twine, and Rick Silva; and Pharmakopolis Broadcasting Services, an upcoming series of live webcast animations created for Randall Packer's Tel-SPAN network. Publications on networked laptop performances are forthcoming from Leonardo Music Journal and Electronic Almanac and Contemporary Music Review. ---> john hudak { http://www.johnhudak.net/ } bio: I began piano lessons in first grade. I remember the teacher was Japanese, and her home had a feeling of preciseness. The piano I had my lessons on was immaculate... the keys were smooth, cool, ivory, with a definite weight under my little fingers. ---> Glenn Bach { http://www.csulb.edu/~gbach/sound.html } is a sound artist who maps the sonic terrain of the city through detailed sound walks, manipulated field recordings, blind sound drawings, and found poems. His audio works include a recently released four-track EP on the Stasisfield label { http://www.stasisfield.com/ }. With a recent appearance at Sound/Shift Oakland, Bach has upcoming performances at the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival and the CPEACH Summer Series in Eureka, California. He improvises with two other musicians as Luminous Flux, and directs a larger group, The Double Blind Ensemble, for his composed works. His poetry has been published in numerous small press literary journals, and he received three Pushcart Prize nominations for his poetry in print. He currently lives in Long Beach, California, with his future wife. ---> Sound and visual artist John Kannenberg { http://www.whistlingpariah.com } formed the experimental improvisational duo Wireshock with guitarist Scott Kane in 1997 and began exploring electronics and computer-aided composition. In 1999, John began work as a solo sound artist using manipulated field recordings as the foundation for loop-based generative electronic pieces. His major audio and visual works deal with a variety of themes, including atmospherics, transmissions and interference { http://www.stasisfield.com/releases/aero/ }, melancholy and nostalgia { http://www.stasisfield.com/releases_02/2002-miles/ }, and abstracted narrative tales. John has exhibited several sound art installations, alone and as part of a collective known as J3. In April 2002 John created Stasisfield.com { http://www.stasisfield.com/ }, an experimental mp3 record label and digital art gallery. ---> tobias c. van Veen { http://www.quadrantcrossing.org } is a sound & net.artist { http://www.thisistheonlyart.com }, curator, techno-turntablist, and writer. He has been enmeshed with musikal resistance culture since 1993 / working with -- tactical radio { http://www.citr.ca }, TAZ occupations { http://www.shrumtribe.com } / performance & tactical media { http://www.quadrantcrossing.org/blog }. || tobias is currently a researcher on the "Culture of Cities" Project { http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/ahcs/cultureofcities/ } at McGill University in MontrC)al, Canada, where he is completing his MA in Communications on the politics of sonic microcultures { http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0307/msg00035.html } & remixing a book of collaborative sonic writings on electrofied sounds and events. -- Michael Arnold Mages mailto:marnoldm at du.edu -- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at mail.sarai.net http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From info at nmartproject.net Tue Aug 5 11:02:46 2003 From: info at nmartproject.net (NewMediaArtProjectNetwork) Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 07:32:46 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Invitation: Netart from Asian-Pacific area Message-ID: <009001c35b13$00d4d400$0400a8c0@agricola11> Please forward this call to all artists who might be interested. ************************************* Hello, I would like to invite you to submit to the new feature on JavaMuseum focussing on netart from Asian-Pacific area, to be launched in February/March 2004. I am looking forward to hearing from you, Best regards, Wilfried Agricola de Cologne director and curator of JavaMuseum - Forum for Internet Technologies in Contemporary Art www.javamuseum.org info at javamuseum.org ***************** JavaMuseum - Forum for Internet Technologies in Contemporary Art (Java=Joint Advanced Virtual Affairs) www.javamuseum.org Call for entries: Netart from Asian-Pacific area Deadline Monday 5 January 2004 Currently, JavaMuseum is planning new features for the "3rd of Java series" 2003/2004, focussing on netart from particular cultural regions on the globe. For February/March 2004, a feature exhibition will be prepared unter the working title, "Netart from Asian -Pacific area", in order to pay more attention to this globally emerging cultural region, which is related to netart widely unknow in the Western countries. All artists, who work netbased and are born or have their residency in one of the countries of this area are invited to submit and participate. All serious submissions will be included. Deadline Monday, 5 January 2004. Please use following entry form for submitting: 1. firstname/name of artist, email, URL 2. a brief bio/CV (not more than 300 words only in English, please) 3. title and URL of the max 3 projects/works, 4. a short work description for each work (not more than 300 words only in English, please), 5. a screen shot for each submitted work (max 800x600 pixels, .jpg) Please send your submission to asianfeature at javamuseum.org ************************ JavaMuseum - Forum for Internet Technologies in Contemporary Art (Java=Joint Advanced Virtual Affairs) www.javamuseum.org info at javamuseum.org corporate member of [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork] - the experimental platform for netbased art - operating from Cologne/Germany. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030805/a4545daa/attachment.html From aiindex at mnet.fr Wed Aug 6 18:07:40 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 13:37:40 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] N. Delhi Appellate Tribunal (on 11 Aug) hearing 'Aakrosh' Film on Gujarat In-Reply-To: <001301c35b72$ee04d7c0$8b5b41db@vsnl.net.in> References: <03080521003900.06888@sweety.sarai.kit> <001301c35b72$ee04d7c0$8b5b41db@vsnl.net.in> Message-ID: Press Note To, The Editor/Chief Reporter Subject: I& B Ministry , New Delhi Appellate Tribunal to hear 'Aakrosh' Film on Gujarat Carnage issue on 11th August 2003. 'Aakrosh'. a film made by People's Media Initiative for Manima Creations on victims and survivors of Gujarat 2002 communal carnage, a film which has given voice to their suffering and woes, their plight and anguish who are still to come to terms with the meaninglessness of violence and death thrust on them. The Film was rejected by Censor Board- Mumbai for public screening and exhibition on 4-03-03 giving reason that it shows the Government and Police in bad light. We appealed to Revising Committee of Censor Board- Mumbai, and Revising Committee, too, uphold earlier decision of the Censor Board Committee by stating similar reasons. We protested the decision of the Censor Board fearing that Government. wants to black out shameful Gujarat Communal Carnage- Genocide and wants to cover up the issue, we feared that there is direct attack on freedom of expression and to see information the rights guaranteed under Indian Constitution, we felt that political Censorship has slowly begun in India as our second film 'Chords on the Richter Scale' post Kutch Earthquake 2001 situation in Gujarat too got banned by the Censor Board. We made appeal to Film Certification Appellate Tribunal of I&B Ministry New Delhi to review the decision of Censor Board Mumbai and lift the ban imposed on both the Films. Appellate Tribunal will be hearing the matter on 11th August 2003, Monday at 2:00 p.m. at Film Division Auditorium, Mahadev Road, Near Gole Post Office, New Delhi and PMI team will be showing the Film to them and will argue the matter with the Tribunal. 'Aakrosh' has received worldwide appreciation and accolades, it has got selected for special screening at Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland as Human Right Film, it got selected out of hundreds of entries to the South Asian Film Festival, Indo-British Film Festival, Milan Film Festival and so on. Even Sardar Vallabhai University in Anand - Gujarat has kept special screening of this film for their students only to tell that how innocents have suffered in the violence in Gujarat and many Universities, Educational Institutions are considering 'Aakrosh' as an ideal film to preach importance of peace and communal harmony and that ultimately it is the common man who suffers in any kind of violence. Violence only serves the purpose of the ruling class to divert main issue from the public mind. Peopleís Media Initiative will be challenging decision of Film Division, which is hosting Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentaries, short and animation films in February 2004 in High Court that only those films having Censor Board Certificate will be qualified for selection process to enter the Film Festival. There are a number of films today including 'Aakrosh', 'Chords on the Richter Scale' that will not qualify for entry as it is not having Censor Certificate , though they qualify abroad. Peopleís Media Initiative will be fighting the beginning of Political Censorship till the end. Ramesh Pimple, Shyam Ranjankar, Geeta Chawda Ramesh Pimple Mobile: 09821109295 Tel: (022) 26358301/02 Address: 002, Gr. Flr., Parasrampuria Tower No. 6, Lokhandwala, Andheri (W), Mumbai ñ 400 053. From nkarani at hotmail.com Wed Aug 6 17:22:03 2003 From: nkarani at hotmail.com (nkarani at hotmail.com) Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 17:22:03 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Press release--Aanchal Trust & Humsafar Trust Oppose Vatican's Same-Sex Marriage Stand References: <03080521003900.06888@sweety.sarai.kit> <001301c35b72$ee04d7c0$8b5b41db@vsnl.net.in> Message-ID: Press Conference at Press Club Mumbai, Azad Maidan, Mahapalika Marg, on 8th August 2003 between 4.30pm - 6.30pm Aanchal Trust and Humsafar Trust Oppose Vatican's Same - Sex Marriage Stand On July 31 2003, the Vatican released a twelve-page document entitled " Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons." It encourages lawmakers and religious leaders alike to oppose extending marriage rights to same-sex couples. Aanchal and Humsafar, a lesbian and gay support group reject and oppose this stand and urge the Indian public to view our side of the story. By not recognizing homosexuality to be natural, the Vatican is encouraging discrimination into the minds of people. The Vatican is nervous now that Homosexual marriages are being recognized all over the world, and is using its power to propagate homophobia and discrimination all over the world. Homosexuals add life and well-being to heterosexual society and homosexuality is not a cause of concern to anybody, especially not the Vatican. We believe in non-violence, and acceptance of any form of life and believe in the same principles of truth, honesty and love that the Vatican preaches. Marriage is a bond between two people, not necessarily man and woman. As long as the marriage is consensual why should the Vatican impose its conservative views upon such a union? Is the Vatican then stating that homosexuality and homosexuals are not human, and should be rejected? Doesn't the Church preach and encourage love towards all people? Isn't love universal? By denying us our rights, the Church is contradicting its own principles of love towards all and hatred towards none. If by telling the world that the Vatican opposes same-sex Unions, then isn't the Vatican breeding hate in the minds of vulnerable people who blindly follow the values and principles of the Church? It is a known fact that more and more priests are coming out as gay. Now that the Vatican knows about this, do they spurn them? Or do they accept them and treat them as equals, as we homosexuals do to heterosexuals. What gives the Vatican the right to state what kind of marriages should be accepted and should not be accepted? Why doesn't the Church open its eyes and accept the fact that homosexuality is slowly being legalized and accepted all over the world and change its myopic and conservative view of this union? We, Aanchal Trust and Humsafar Trust oppose the stand taken by the Vatican, and as Kursad Kahramanoglu Secretary General of the International Lesbian and Gay Association states "This Vatican document against same-sex marriages may seem like an attack on LGBT people - but it is not. It is an admission if failure. Conservative popes come and go, but the tide of History is unstoppable. When people look at this document years from now, they will be very amused - in the way we are now amused with the debate "How many angels can you fit on the head of a pin?" If you would like any further information, please call Aanchal Trust at: 235 22787 / 235 22886. From monica at sarai.net Wed Aug 6 20:10:20 2003 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 20:10:20 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] A Fight for Free Access To Medical Research Message-ID: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19104-2003Aug4.html Washington Post Tuesday, August 5, 2003; Page A01 A Fight for Free Access To Medical Research Online Plan Challenges Publishers' Dominance By Rick Weiss, Staff Writer The family was poor, living on the Great Plains, and the child had a rare medical condition. "Here's what we can do," the family doctor told them. But it didn't work, recalled Michael Keller, who oversees the libraries at Stanford University. "So the family went to the Internet." Soon they were back at the doctor's office with a report of a new therapy. "They plunked it down and said, 'Hey, can we try this?' And guess what? It worked." Such tales are becoming increasingly common, but the happy endings come at a cost -- literally. That is because the vast majority of the 50,000 to 60,000 research articles published each year as a result of federally funded science ends up in the hands of for-profit publishers -- the largest of them based overseas -- that charge as much as $50 to view the results of a single study online. The child's parents, Keller said, paid for several papers before finding the one that led them to the cure. Why is it, a growing number of people are asking, that anyone can download medical nonsense from the Web for free, but citizens must pay to see the results of carefully conducted biomedical research that was financed by their taxes? The Public Library of Science aims to change that. The organization, founded by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two colleagues, is plotting the overthrow of the system by which scientific results are made known to the world -- a $9 billion publishing juggernaut with subscription charges that range into thousands of dollars per year. In its place the organization is constructing a system that would put scientific findings on the Web -- for free. Scientists and budget-squeezed librarians have long railed against publishers' stranglehold on scientific literature, to little avail. But with surprising political acumen, the Public Library of Science -- or PLoS -- has begun to make "open access" scientific publication an issue for everyday citizens, emphasizing that taxpayers fund the lion's share of biomedical research and deserve access to the results. "It is wrong when a breast cancer patient cannot access federally funded research data paid for by her hard-earned taxes," Rep. Martin O. Sabo (D-Minn.) said recently as he introduced legislation that would give PLoS a boost by loosening copyright restrictions on publicly funded research. "It is wrong when the family whose child has a rare disease must pay again for research data their tax dollars already paid for." It remains to be seen whether the newly bubbling discontent among citizens and politicians will boil over into a full-blown coup, fulfilling scientists' longstanding goal of democratizing the scientific publication enterprise. But whether it succeeds or fails, historians of science say, the effort is a remarkable social experiment in itself. After all, publication is at the heart of the scientific system of rank, respect and power. So the movement to dissect and rewrite the rules of that system is, in effect, a rare opportunity to watch scientists experiment on themselves. Research as Moneymaker Historians peg the birth of scientific publication to 1665, when England's Royal Society began publishing its Philosophical Transactions -- the same journal that would later announce key discoveries by Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and other icons of science. Today the universe of scientific journals includes about 28,000 titles, but they fulfill the same four basic needs: communicating findings; controlling quality by "peer review," in which scientists check one another's work; creating a historical record; and documenting authorship for personal credit and professional recognition. In recent decades, however, journals have found that scientific communication can be not only a service but also a potent moneymaker. Central to their success is that each journal publishes original research that appears nowhere else, so each is necessary for scientists in a given field. "Scientific journals are monopolies in that there's the Journal of Artificial Intelligence, for example, and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and as long as they're both good there's no way a library can just say, 'We'll take the one that's most cost-effective.' They have to have both," said John McCarthy, a Stanford University professor emeritus of computer science and an authority on scientific publication. "And when there's a monopoly there's always the opportunity for extra profit." Indeed, said Stanford's Keller, "over the course of the years several of these companies have become giants. And some of their price increases have been horrendous, sometimes 25 to 35 percent per year. It's been unbelievable." Many commercial publishers -- the biggest include Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer, both of Amsterdam; Blackwell Publishers of England, and BertelsmannSpringer of Germany -- charge between $1,000 and $5,000 for a one-year subscription to their journals. One prestigious collection of journals called Brain Research costs subscribers about $20,000 a year. Publishers defend their prices largely by pointing to the extra services they provide. Not only must they pay for publication and mailing, they say, but they also hire peer reviewers, editors and contributors to write commentaries and review articles. Some, including the premier journals Nature and Science, also have writers who produce news articles and scientific perspectives. "We believe we add value to the research," said Jayne Marks, publishing director for Nature Publishing Group in London, a closely held company that publishes about 50 journals, including Nature. Nature does not reveal financial details, but figures released by the largest publisher of scientific journals -- Amsterdam-based Elsevier -- help explain why many scientists and others are frustrated. Its 1,700 journals, which produce $1.6 billion in revenue, garner a remarkable 30 percent profit margin. "I do realize that the 30 percent sticks out," Elsevier Vice President Pieter Bolman said. "But what we still do feel -- and this is, I think, where the real measure is -- we're still very much in the top of author satisfaction and reader satisfaction." In October, critics say, the real test of that will begin, as PLoS begins the first of a series of journals dedicated to the free sharing of results. The aim is to get the world's best scientists to submit their best work to PLoS -- and force change by starving profit-oriented publishers of their earnings and prestige. "Our goal," said PLoS's executive director Vivian Siegel, "is to transform the landscape completely." Shift to Open Access The PLoS plan is simple in concept: Instead of having readers pay for scientific results through subscriptions or other charges, costs would be borne by the scientists who are having their work published -- or, practically speaking, by the government agencies or other groups that funded the scientists -- through upfront charges of about $1,500 an article. The shift is not as radical as it sounds, the library's founders argue. That is because government agencies and other science funders are already paying for a huge share of the world's journal subscriptions through "indirect cost" grants to university libraries, which are the biggest subscribers. The new system would radically increase the number of people who would have access to published findings, though, because results would be freely available on the Internet. By contrast, people today who do not subscribe to these journals must pay charges, typically $15 to $50, to get a reprint of -- or online access to -- a single article. Those charges can add up quickly. "When my father was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, for example, I must have glanced through 50-100 articles almost immediately" while searching for treatment information, Siegel wrote via e-mail. Physicians, professors, graduate students and others, including science journalists, face the same problem daily. Some journals have already made the leap to open-access publishing. But for the most part they have not attracted the best science -- a key to success. Now, with a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the PLoS hopes to lift open-access publishing into the scientific stratosphere, in part through the personal gravitas of its founders and friends. In terms of scientific stardom, the critical mass is there. PLoS was founded by three highly respected scientists: Harold Varmus, who won a Nobel Prize in 1989 for his work with cancer viruses, headed the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999 and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York; Patrick O. Brown, a renowned genomics expert at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Michael Eisen, a computational and evolutionary biologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley. Having hired a team of hotshot editors and reviewers -- in some instances wooing them away from prestigious journals -- the group will begin its first monthly open-access journal, PLoS Biology, in October. It plans to launch PLoS Medicine in 2004. Others may follow, but the group hopes that the need to keep creating journals will drop off as existing journals see how successful the model is and shift to the open-access system themselves. For scientists, the benefits would extend well beyond being able to read scientific papers for free. Unlike their ink-on-paper counterparts, scientific papers that are maintained in open electronic databases can have their data tables downloaded, massaged and interlinked with databases from other papers, allowing scientists to compare and build more easily on one another's findings. "In epidemiology and public health it would be an enormous leap forward," said Christopher Murray, a World Health Organization epidemiologist and health economist. "You can't imagine how much time researchers spend trying to get access even to old data sets to do new things or make new connections." But pressure from consumers, whose taxes provide about $45 billion in federal research funding each year and who are increasingly asked to take on a larger role in their own care, may be the force that finally tips the balance. "They've paid for the research," Eisen said. "And the fact that the primary results are not available to them is really crazy and grossly unfair and completely unnecessary." Publishers Raise Red Flags The bigger for-profit publishers say advocates of open access exaggerate the benefits. "This is, in general, very esoteric material . . . not written for the public," said Elsevier's Bolman, adding that he doubts the business model will work. "Everybody is getting onto the open-access bandwagon. It reminds me of the enthusiasm and mania of the dot-com explosion, and it will pop, too." But what Bolman and other publishers object to most of all are budding congressional efforts to force publishers to adopt open-access principles. The latest House appropriations report instructs the National Library of Medicine to look into ways to make federally funded research more available to the public. And Sabo's bill would require research "substantially funded" by the federal government to be in the public domain. That is especially worrisome to the smaller, not-for-profit publishers -- most of them affiliated with scientific societies -- that say they are sympathetic to open-access principles but fear that the system will not work for them, with their tighter margins. "Saying you're for free access is like motherhood and apple pie," said Ira Mellman, chairman of Yale's Department of Cell Biology and editor in chief of the highly cited but inexpensive and nonprofit Journal of Cell Biology. "But you have to recognize that this is an experiment in publishing, and the legislation seems to be trying to enforce one model before the conclusion of the experiment." Several journal editors noted that they have moved in recent years to widen access. Many have agreed to make their papers available for free to scientists in developing countries, for example, and some release results freely to anyone six to 12 months after publication. But critics say that is not enough, arguing that even a six-month delay deprives scientists and others of the latest and best information. Ironically, several observers said, the fate of open-access science publication may ultimately depend on something highly unscientific: the enigmatic quality of prestige. With scientists' professional standing still intimately linked to their latest paper in journals such as Science and Nature, will the best of them step up to the plate and start sending their hottest papers to open-access journals such as PLoS? "With scientific journals, competition is not so much on the reader end but on the author's end," Bolman said. "When you get the best authors, then other authors tend to follow, and then you have an exciting journal, which really is your objective." PLoS Biology started accepting its first submissions for its premiere issue last month, and Varmus said he is pleased with the quality of the work the journal is attracting. One thing is certain: Among the countless scientists and others who will read PLoS Biology for free in October will be Bolman and other publishing executives, who will be looking for the first hints of an exodus. Copyright (c) 2003 The Washington Post Company -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From nyvoices at indypress.org Thu Aug 7 05:32:31 2003 From: nyvoices at indypress.org (Rehan Ansari) Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 17:02:31 -0700 Subject: [Reader-list] Voices 77 Message-ID: <018e01c35c77$8076f890$6501a8c0@herman> This Week's Voices That Must Be Heard By IPA-New York, a sponsored project of the Independent Press Association Edition 77: 7 August 2003. NEWS ITEMS: Downtown Manhattan fights for Liberty Jobs by Xiaoqing Rong, Sing Tao Daily, 29 July 2003. Translated from Chinese by Xiaoqing Rong. More than 300,000 New Yorkers are out of work, and half of the job loss is due to the effects of September 11th. In Chinatown, 60 percent of garment workers are unemployed. Liberty Jobs program would help, though its fate hangs in the balance. MORE. Entertainment business employees in deadly danger by Yong-il Sin, Korea Times New York, 26 July 2003. Translated from Korean by Sun Yong Reinish. Employees of New York Korean entertainment businesses are victims of unexplained deaths, disappearances, kidnapping and violence. MORE. The odyssey of temporary workers by Néstor Cristancho, Hoy, 30 July 2003. Translated from Spanish by Hirsh Sawhney. The scarcity of work and demands for identification have made employment agencies popular among Hispanic workers. But at what price? MORE. Gays' rituals swimming mainstream by Debra Nussbaum Cohen, Jewish Week, 1 August 2003. English language. As cultural winds shift, their lifecycle rites gaining new acceptance. MORE. BRIEFS: More than 3,000 children poisoned in the Bushwick Area by Enrique Soria, El Diario / La Prensa, 29 July 2003. Translated from Spanish by Nicole Lisa. Kids don't have an incentive to learn Chinese, those going to work in the Chinese economy do by Yi-Ching Yong, Sing Tao Daily, 28 July 2003. Translated from Chinese by Connie Kong. Brooklyn Imam found guilty of smuggling money, Weekly Darpon, 28 July 2003. Translated from Bangla by Partha Banerjee. EDITORIALS: The need for a military that represents America, CaribNews, 28 July 2003. English language. The sons and daughters of influential conservative commentators who argued for the war with ethnocentric pronouncements and misinformation are not in any danger. MORE. Unemployment is more menacing than Iraq by Eduardo Fraysinett, La Tribuna Hispana USA, 30 July 2003. Translated from Spanish by Jane Corinne Yager . The livelihoods of middle and working class New Yorkers are mortally threatened. MORE. As always we welcome questions, suggestions, corrections and letters to the editor. Rehan Ansari Editor, Voices That Must Be Heard Independent Press Association - New York www.indypressny.org * 212/279-1442 * 143 West 29th St., 901, New York City, 10001 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030806/68e9ef36/attachment.html From anilbhatia at indiatimes.com Thu Aug 7 11:31:54 2003 From: anilbhatia at indiatimes.com (anilbhatia) Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 11:31:54 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] (no subject) Message-ID: <200308070615.LAA27629@WS0005.indiatimes.com> Why the Dipty-PMji is wrong FOLK THEOREM/ ABHEEK BARMAN in Economic Times TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 06, 2003 12:53:11 AM ] Dipty-PM Advaniji says elections every year distract from serious policymaking, so why don�t we lump state and assembly elections together? Is that correct? Do polls really distract governments from policymaking? What policies are affected by elections? What sort of regimes get the jitters before polls? Are elections a bore anyway? First, the facts. Five states � Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Mizoram will go to polls in November this year. Next year, six states � Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Goa and Sikkim � will have elections, followed later in the year by Lok Sabha polls. Diptyji wants to club all these into one mega jamboree. There�s nothing in the Constitution to make that happen and regimes that fancy their chances of reelection can dissolve their assemblies and call elections. It�s been done before and if I were Shiela Dikshit, SM Krishna, Ashok Gehlot, Ajit Jogi or even Digvijay Singh I�d hold polls exactly as scheduled and hope to win one more time. Two, many people gripe about pre-poll �populism� and sometimes they�re right, but I can�t think up a General Theory of Paralysis because I can think of lots of policies that are popular and can be pushed through even before elections. For example, Dikshit has done great work in Delhi, clearing the air by shifting buses to natural gas, privatising power distribution, building flyovers and a metro rail system. The shift to gas and power privatisation were �tough� decisions because they upset public transport and vested interests for a while, but Dikshit timed everything perfectly. She implemented both in her early years: by 2003 Delhi air was clean and buses were running on time. This summer, the second after privatisation, had fewer blackouts than last year. Next summer, power cuts might be history. Dikshit goes into elections with visible signs of progress and lots of work going on without fuss: flyovers, a pipeline to bring water to Delhi and the metro rail system. These upset nobody. Polls haven�t kept Dikshit from work. My intrepid colleague, Shubhrangshu Roy, has recently returned from Rajasthan with tales of what makes Ashok Gehlot a favourite to win the elections. Gehlot has reformed the electricity sector, not a �populist� thing to do, by aligning tariffs to costs, got people to pour investment into technical and higher education, boosted the gems industry, built roads and so on. Ajit Jogi of Chhattisgarh wants to turn his state into a powerhouse capable of generating 50,000 megawatts, about half India�s current capacity. He�s wired up most villages to electricity grids and is exporting power that costs between 70 paise to Rs 1.50 to other states for a reasonable Rs 2.40 per unit. Digvijay Singh has taken time out from spiking his soda with cow-pee to get road-building projects working. It�s wrong to say that all politicians spend time before polls on their hind-ends. But some do and Diptyji should know, because most of them belong to his party, the BJP. Today, the BJP is in power in two states: it rules Gujarat and is part of a BSP-led coalition in UP. Since 1998, when the BJP ruled Gujarat, growth plummeted from 19%, 4% and 14% in the three preceding years to 1% in 1998-99 and 4% next year. It took a communal riot, not development, for Narendra Modi to hang on to power. The BJP has been in power fitfully in UP through the 1990s, so the only issues that seem to matter there are religious fundamentalism and caste. Policymaking? Who�re you kidding Diptyji? The BJP is in power at the Centre since 1998. Since then, average growth is down to about 5% each year from the near-6.5% average of the previous six. The revenue deficit, a measure of wasteful spending, has shot up. Jaswant Singh has backtracked on fertiliser price hikes and implementing VAT. Ram Naik doesn�t want a regulator on his turf, won�t free up oil prices and will soak state-owned oil companies to subsidise well-off users of cooking gas. Selloff minister Arun Shourie, who�s seen his own party block privatisation, now keeps busy looking after telecom and standing in for Arun Jaitley in trade negotiations. And what keeps Jaitley away from his job? He has to protect Diptyji from charges that the CBI, under PMji, watered down a chargesheet to favour mantris, including Diptyji. Finally, think through Diptyji�s argument: if polls imply policy myopia or paralysis, then what�s the prescription to achieve an active, far-sighted policy regime? Abolish elections outright. That way, we might become another Singapore or China. Or, perhaps, Idi Amin�s Uganda, Saddam�s Iraq, Milosevic�s Bosnia, or Liberia under Charles Taylor. The Dipty-PM is wrong. You can�t � and shouldn�t � justify policy failure by pointing a finger at elections. Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Indiatimes at http://email.indiatimes.com Buy The Best In BOOKS at http://www.bestsellers.indiatimes.com Bid for Air Tickets on Air Sahara Flights at Prices Lower Than Before. Just log on to http://airsahara.indiatimes.com and Bid Now ! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030807/8376726a/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Why the Dipty.doc Type: application/msword Size: 30209 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030807/8376726a/attachment.doc From faizan at sarai.net Thu Aug 7 16:48:48 2003 From: faizan at sarai.net (Faizan Ahmed) Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2003 16:48:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: [AMUNetwork] Prime Minister of India Promises to Build Ram Temple where Babri Masjid Once Stood Message-ID: <200308071648.48536.faizan@sarai.net> Dear All- The statement by the Prime Minister of India, in a meeting held in Ayodhya, promised the construction of Ram Temple at the disputed site of Babri Masjid (reported by BBC 8/01/03). This matter is before the court, how can a prime minister speak in such an irresponsible manner? How can he take laws into his own hand? Being the Prime Minister he should be the first one to respect the Judiciary. If the Government of India will not respect the judicial system of the country then who else do they expect to respect it? This irresponsible behavior should be condemned by all the right minded people. Sincerely, R. Khan, MD Washington DC From announcer at pukar.org.in Fri Aug 8 11:53:36 2003 From: announcer at pukar.org.in (PUKAR @ JACIC) Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2003 11:53:36 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] 8.8.03: Radio Beyond Broadcasts Message-ID: Dear Friends: PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) and JACIC (Jindal Arts Creative Interaction Centre) invite you to a discussion on "Radio Beyond Broadcasts". This panel discussion will explore the uses of low-power radio as an inexpensive medium for creative expression in theatre, concert music, heritage walks, street performances, sound installations, and other forms of non-polluting public audio broadcasting. VICKRAM CRISHNA, CEO of Radiophony India (http://www.radiophony.com) will interact with ABHA NARAIN LAMBAH, architect and heritage activist, and SHARMILA SAMANT and TUSHAAR JOG of the Open Circle Arts Trust (http://www.opencirclearts.org/), on the potential uses of non-commercial radio to organise new communities, and promote awareness around urban arts, heritage, and citizenship. The panel discussion will be moderated by SHEKHAR KRISHNAN, Associate Director of PUKAR. Date: FRIDAY 8 AUGUST 2003 Time: 6.30 P.M. At: THE LITTLE THEATRE National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) Dorabji Tata Road, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021 _____ PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) P.O. Box 5627, Dadar, Mumbai 400014, INDIA E-Mail Phone +91 (022) 2207 7779, +91 98200 45529, +91 98204 04010 Web Site http://www.pukar.org.in _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at mail.sarai.net http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From geert at desk.nl Mon Aug 11 02:07:53 2003 From: geert at desk.nl (geert lovink) Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 06:37:53 +1000 Subject: [Reader-list] Call for Texts: Newspaper @ WSIS References: <200308071648.48536.faizan@sarai.net> Message-ID: <00ac01c35f7f$4927b450$f501a8c0@geert> Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 14:32:24 +0200 From: Felix Stalder Public Netbase, Vienna [1] is in the process of putting together a newspaper (in English) to be distributed at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva [2] (including preparatory and follow-up events). The print run will be 20'000 copies. The aim of the newspaper is to alert the delegates and the participating public that current and future regulations and practices concerning intellectual property are among the most fundamental issues shaping the Information Society. At stake is whether the information order will be characterized by centralized control by a few transnational owners of IP claims with the majority of the population relegated to the status of passive consumers or excluded entirely; or by decentralized participation of the widest range of citizens around the world who have access to intellectual resources of production inside and outside the market system. To highlight the issues, the newspaper will frame them as two competing scenarios for the future: control vs. participation. For this project, we are looking for texts -- aimed at a general, interested audience -- that develop the either of the scenarios, be it as a critique of the present or as an introduction of an alternative. The papers can be theoretical or practical, focussing on any of the many dimension and should not be substantially longer than 1000 words. We will accept both original texts and text that have already been published elsewhere. The texts will be published under a CreativeCommons license [3] unless requested otherwise by the author. Please send texts, questions or comments to open at t0.or.at [1] http://www.t0.or.at [2] http://www.itu.int/wsis/ [3] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/ - ----+-------+---------+--- http://felix.openflows.org From sagnik8 at rediffmail.com Mon Aug 11 10:58:54 2003 From: sagnik8 at rediffmail.com (Sagnik Chakravartty) Date: 11 Aug 2003 05:28:54 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] ANNOUNCEMENTS Message-ID: <20030811052854.10637.qmail@webmail17.rediffmail.com> All India Seminar On "Development Gateway- Information and Communication Technology for All" Agartala Organized by: The Institution of Engineers (India) AGARTALA LOCAL CENTRE Jointly With Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering Division of The Institution of Engineers (India) In Association with Department of Science, Technology & Environment, Department of Information Technology, Government of Tripura, & Tripura State Council for Science & Technology Index 1. Announcement 2. The Theme 3. Objective 4. Call for paper a) Plenary Session b) Technical session - I c) Technical session - II 5. Guidelines for papers a) Recommendation b) Communication of acceptance 6. Accommodation 7. Registration 8. Patronage 9.Seminar Dinner cum Get-together 10.Contact Address 11.Tentative Programme 12.About Agartala a) For Air Journey b) Climate 13.Souvenir Announcement Agartala Local centre of the Institution of Engineers (India) is organising an All India Seminar on "Development Gateway- Information and Communication Technology for All" jointly with Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering Division of the Institution of Engineers (India) and in association with Department of Science, Technology & Environment and department of Information Technology, Govt. of Tripura and also State Council for Science, Technology and Environment, Tripura. t The Theme The theme of the seminar is "Development Gateway- Information and Communication technology for all" t Objective Information and Communication Technology (ICT) wave is sweeping through the world with an unprecedented promise for economic and social development. North eastern region and in particular Tripura is no exception to it. A new economic Age is upon us where technology is the most crucial and decisive factor for improving wealth and competitiveness. ICT is a synergy of multiple advanced technologies with enchanting features like-shrinking geographical distances, speeds, universal flexibility and applicability. In fact ICT has emerged as a modern Midas with golden touch. Sustainable development of this potentially resourceful region may take place through systematic and appropriate utilisation of the fruits of ICT revolution. This conference is an attempt to formulate some Techno-economically viable policies and strategies for all-round development of these states in this new context. It is expected that distinguished Scientists, Academicians, Professionals and Technocrats representing various Institutions, Governments will assemble at this high level gathering. t Call for paper Technical papers on the following sub themes are invited for presentation in the seminar. 1. Plenary Session : 1.Nano Technology 2.IT Space & Society in 21st Century 3.GIS for Agriculture Development 4.Advanced space Communication Technology t 2. Technical Session - I : 1.Multipurpose, multilingual, multimedia scalable ICT for state level governance 2.Information Security 3.Connecting rural Tripura in 21st Century 4. Knowledge based Intelligent Engineering t 3. Technical Session - II : 1.Harnessing IT enabled services 2.Remote sensing for resource mapping 3.Bio-informatics t Guidelines for papers The authors are preferably requested to follow the guidelines to facilitate the organisers for publication of the proceedings in time. Single spaced on plain white A-4 size (297mm X 210mm) Drawings in black ink or translucent paper or acetate material Materials to be formatted in MS Word and available in 3.5 inch Floppy Papers and the synopsis can be sent as attachment in e-mail address as given. t Recommendation The paper/discussion shall not be limited only to the above points, but other relevant aspects may also be incorporated by the author, as found deem fit, so that the outcome of the seminar may be sent finally to the concerned authority as a recommendation for consideration. VENUE: Agartala- To be declared later DATE: August 16-17,2003 LANGUAGE: English IMPORTANT DATES: Last date of submission of paper: 25.07.2003 Communication of acceptance: 30.07.2003 * * This is not applicable for the Special Speakers to whom confirmation has already been conveyed by the Organising Committee t Communication of acceptance All accepted papers would be published in the souvenir to be released in the seminar. The authors may take the help of overhead/slide projector for their presentation. The authors interested to use Power Point may inform in advance for LCD Projector. Time allowed for presentation: - 20(Twenty) minutes per paper per speaker t Accommodation Free accommodation & food will be arranged for the delegates from outside Tripura State. However, the registration for the above purpose shall have to be made on or before 10.08.2003. t Registration The registration fee for participation in the seminar is as follows: a) For members of the Institution of Engineers (India) Rs. 175.00 b) For Non members Rs. 200.00 c) For Students of Engineering College / Polytechnic Rs. 100.00 Delegates of outside state: Free The names are to be registered on or before 10.08.2003. Persons without registration may also attend the programme t Patronage The All India Seminar is being organized on self-supporting basis as the Institution of Engineers (India) is a voluntary professional body, the organizers request kind patronage from the various companies, organizations, trading houses-both under private and public sector for successful organization of the event. The contribution thus received would be mainly utilized to conduct the seminar, to bring out the technical proceedings, to arrange hospitality to the participants and the like. The financial supports provided by various organizations would be acknowledged and the Institution would highlight their names. Payments may be made in favour of the "The Institution of Engineers (India), Agartala Local Centre", payable at Agartala. t Seminar Dinner cum Get-together One dinner cum family get-together will be hosted by the center for which Outside delegates need not to pay any charge but their names are to be registered on or before 15th August, 2003. The members and engineers of the state have to pay Rs. 150/- per person but for children accompanying below 12 years need not pay but information should be given in advance. t Contact Address 1. Er. S.Choudhury,FIE Organising Secretary The Institution of Engineers (India) Agartala Local Centre Post Box No. 139, Agartala Tripura West Phone: 0381-2304700 (Institution) (1 PM to 8 PM) 2223641(off) 2323531(Res) Telefax:- 0381-2223641(off) E Mail: iei_agt at engineer.com dsusanta @hotmail.com 2. Er. D.K.Chakrabarty,MIE Chairman, Technical Committee Care: Deputy General Manager Bharat sanchar Nigam Limited(BSNL) Doorsanchar Bhavan Agartala, Tripura West Phone: 0381- 238-3777(off) 222-3666/232-5599(Res) E Mail: dgmtagt at sancharnet.in 3. Er. Abhrajit Das Convener, Technical Committee Care: SDO (Electronics) Power Department, Govt. of Tripura Phone: 0381- 235-6470/235-3603(off) 2300559(Res) Telefax:- 0381- 235-3603(off) E-Mail: abhraagt at rediffmail.com t Tentative Programme 16 th August 4.00 P.M. Inauguration 17th August 9.00 A.M. to 5 P.M. Plenary & Technical Session – I & II 6 P.M. Cultural Programme t About Agartala Agartala is capital of Tripura, a state in North-East India. The city is connected by Air and road. The city is connected by Air with Kolkata, New Delhi and Guwahati. The railway journey can be availed upto Guwahati and than by road which normally takes about 24 hours through National Highway. Tripura is a historical place and placed in the Nobel of famous poet Rabindranath Tagore. Agartala city is full of temples of all communities which mark no distinction of any religion. Tripureswari temple, a Pithasthan, about 50 KM from Agartala is a special attraction to tourists and on the way, there is a sanctuary at Sipahijala. Many tourists take the advantage to see the countryside of Bangladesh since the border is only 2 KM from Agartala City. t For Air Journey The outside delegates are requested to book their Air tickets well in advance due to acute crisis of Air tickets throughout the year. In case of emergency the organizing committee may be informed to extend the cooperation. The outside delegates are also requested to intimate about their arrival in details for their reception. t Climate The atmospheric temperature would vary from 25 to 30 degree Celsius. t Souvenir One souvenir will be released during the programme to commemorate the occasion. Request is made to all concern to come forward for insertion of advertisements in the same as per rates given below. 1) Back cover page Rs.20,000 2) 2nd & 3rd Inside cover page Rs.15,000 3) Special page (Bi-color) Rs.5,000 4) Special page (B/W) Rs.3,000 5) Full page Rs.1,200 6) Half page Rs.7,00 t Home ___________________________________________________ Download the hottest & happening ringtones here! OR SMS: Top tone to 7333 Click here now: http://sms.rediff.com/cgi-bin/ringtone/ringhome.pl From amc at autonomous.org Fri Aug 8 18:19:01 2003 From: amc at autonomous.org (Amanda McDonald Crowley) Date: Fri, 08 Aug 2003 15:49:01 +0300 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] ISEA2004 - deadline for proposals extended Message-ID: ************************************************************ ISEA2004: The 12th International Symposium on Electronic Art ************************************************************ CALL FOR PROPOSALS ************************************************************ +++ Deadline extended to 20 September, 2003 +++ ************************************************************ http://www.isea2004.net - Stockholm - Tallinn - Helsinki - August 14 - 22, 2004 new media art - media culture research - electronic music - art and science - cultural and social applications for new media - New media meets art, science, research, and popular culture at ISEA2004 in Stockholm - Tallinn - Helsinki. For the first time an event of this scale is being organised between three cities and on the ferry travelling between these three Baltic countries. International participants and local audiences attend thematic conferences, exhibitions, live performances, screenings, satellite events, concerts and clubs. Many events are also interfaced via television, radio, broadband Internet, and mobile networks. We are encouraging: Socially, critically and ecologically engaging work; Projects that bring the creative media to the streets; Projects that are worn on or inside people; Context sensitive work in the museums; Projects that float, dock or sail; Screen based media as it appears in 2004; Sea Fair: technological gizmos for ferry travellers and future media archaeologists to discover; Bridges between club scenes and art venues; Most engaging works from performing arts that engage new media, users, and audiences; Networks to network... Key themes for the event include: Networked experience (Stockholm) Wearable experience (Tallinn) Wireless experience (Helsinki) Histories of the new: media arts, media cultures, media technologies - all cities Additional themes include: Open source and software as culture (Helsinki) Critical interaction design (Helsinki) Geopolitics of media (Tallinn) Interfacing sound (Helsinki and on the Ferry - in collaboration with Koneisto - check out http://www.koneisto.com for details of this year's Koneisto Festival 24-26 July 2003) We are currently inviting proposals for projects and papers for the exhibitions, conferences and associated programs during ISEA2004. Projects might include: works for exhibition in a gallery; workshops; installations in public spaces; live performance; interfaced screenings; games or shared environments; projects which encourage remote participation - etc. Proposals for the conference can include papers and panels but we are equally interested in workshops and roundtables: discussion formats that encourage participation and exchange of ideas. We are also working with a range of local organisations who may be able to host short and medium term residencies or workshops for artists who are keen to spend a longer time working with local artists and organisations. Information on these opportunities will be regularly added to the web site, so do register to receive updates. ISEA2004 will be an exciting week long event, but we are also interested in providing a space to build long term, sustainable exchange and collaboration. The time on the Ferry will provide a space for less formal dialogue and social intercourse, so feel free to propose workshops and meetings for the exchange of information and ideas. Our over all aim for ISEA2004 is to create an event which is thematically and critically coherent and provides new insight. Please note that ISEA2004 is a forum for artistic, academic, and culturally or socially relevant work that has not previously been presented in international forums (you may have showed/presented it in your local context). All submissions are done via our website using a web form and stored into a database. This procedure allows us to have the proposals reviewed by International Programme Committee (IPC) members. We very much look forward to hearing your ideas! For further information: http://www.isea2004.net info at isea2004.net Our partners for the event are: MAIN ORGANISER: m-cult, centre for media culture in finland http://www.m-cult.org HELSINKI: Exhibition: The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma http://www.kiasma.fi Conference: Media Centre Lume (University of Art and Design) http://www.lume.fi Electronic music: Koneisto (Festival for electronic music and arts) http://www.koneisto.com STOCKHOLM: Coordinator: CRAC, Creative Room for Art and Computing http://www.crac.org Conference: Moderna Museet http://www.modernamuseet.se and Royal University College of Fine Arts (Stockholm) http://www.kkh.se Exhibition: Färgfabriken http://www.fargfabriken.se Electronic music: Fylkingen http://www.fylkingen.se TALLINN: Coordinator + conference: Estonian Academy of Arts http://artun.ee Exhibition: Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia at The Art Museum of Estonia http://www.cca.ee ISEA2004 is produced in collaboration with ISEA Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts http://www.isea-web.org -- For further information: http://www.isea2004.net info at isea2004.net _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at mail.sarai.net http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From info at nmartproject.net Mon Aug 11 12:55:01 2003 From: info at nmartproject.net (NewMediaArtProjectNetwork) Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 09:25:01 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] 10 August - 1st anniversary - it's time for celebrating Message-ID: <01e701c35fd9$af6f1320$0400a8c0@agricola11> [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork] :||cologne and A Virtual Memorial www.a-virtual-memorial.org announce the launch Version 8.0 of Violence Online Festival www.newmediafest.org/violence/ on occasion of the participation in FILE 2003 - Electonic Language Festival - Sao Paulo (Brazil) 14-20 August 2003 www.file.org.br Nonetart Festival - Arte Digital Rosario 2003 (Argentina) 15-27 August 2003 www.nonetart.com Open Air at Royal Gardens of Copenhagen/Denmark from 10 -31 August 2003 http://www.ORBremote.com Featured on Blogwork/50th venice Biennale www.labiennale.org/blogwork/ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is really time for celebrating!! Join us in mind and celebrate the 1 st anniversary of Violence Online Festival virtually together with more than 300 participating artists!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Violence Online Festival is an ongoing New Media art project in form of an online festival based on participatory and networking components, created, curated and organised by Agricola de Cologne, media artist and New Media curator operating from Cologne (Germany). Meanwhile more than 300 artists from 42 countries reflect the phenomenon of violence from all its aspects. The project was initiated for and formed the online part of Violence Festival 2002 Tabor (Czech Republic) and was launched online on 10 August 2002. Now, one year later Violence Online Festival is proud to launch Version 8.0, including these new artists: Sachiko Hayashi, Brian Judy, Nick Barker, Julian Alvarez, otium (Filip de Haes), Nitin Shroffs, Davida Kidd, Ivonne Martinsson, Vladimir Todorovic, Cesar Lazarescu, Bruce Eves, Ksenija Kovacevic, Michel Cleempoel, Craig Poirier, Paula Miklosevic, Heather.J. Tait, Sarah Savage All new works can be found on Violence Magazin, a department of the virtual media company "Violence Media Incorporated". Find all further information on the administrative and artistic body of Violence Online Festival! Have a fantastic summertime with violence!! ********************************** Violence Online Festival www.newmediafest.org violence at newmediafest.org copyright © 2002-2003 by Agricola de Cologne All rights reserved. All included artworks: copyright © by the artists or owners Violence Online Festival is affiliated with A Virtual Memorial Memorial project against the Forgetting and for Humanity www.a-virtual-memorial.org and represents a corporate member of [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork] :||cologne >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the experimental platform for net based art <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030811/49feca0b/attachment.html From produccion at ciberart-bilbao.net Mon Aug 11 13:47:54 2003 From: produccion at ciberart-bilbao.net (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Producci=F3n_Ciber@RT?=) Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 10:17:54 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Ciber@RT Bilbao 2004 - Call for papers / proposals Message-ID: <005f01c35fe1$171cf580$0200a8c0@GERALDINE> Dear friends, We are pleased to inform you the International Festival of New Technologies, Art and Communication: Ciber at RT Bilbao 2004 has opened its registration period for the Call for entries. Under the theme "Challenges for a Ubiquitous Identity", the festival will take place in Bilbao from the 23rd to the 30th of April, 2004. If you are interested in presenting works to the various sections of the festival (Net-Art, Off-Line Multimedia Projects, International Conference, Computer-generated Animation, "Minimisation" and Interactive Installations) you can find the Call for participation (Rules) on our web page www.ciberart-bilbao.net For more information regarding the International Conference, see http://www.ciberart-bilbao.net/congreso_en.htm The deadline for presenting papers for the congress is the 30th of November 2003 and the deadline for the artwork is the 15th of December 2003. We would be very grateful if you could help us in passing this message on. Best regards from the Ciber at RT Bilbao 2004 team. __________________________ Ciber at RT Av. Reino de Valencia, 58 - 8 46008 Valencia España - Spain Tel.: 00 34 96 373 10 82 Fax: 00 34 96 373 05 45 www.ciberart-bilbao.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030811/37777e8d/attachment.html From monica at sarai.net Mon Aug 11 16:09:13 2003 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 16:09:13 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media Message-ID: Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 04 : Crisis/Media (apologies for cross posting to subscribers of Sarai Reader List, Nettime, FibreCulture, BytesforAll & Commons-Law) I. Introducing the Sarai Reader Sarai, (www.sarai.net) an interdisciplinary research and practice programme on the city and the media, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies invites contributions (texts and images) to Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media We also invite proposals to initiate and moderate discussions on the themes of the Sarai Reader 04 on the Reader List (http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list) with a view to the moderator(s) editing the transcripts of these discussions for publication in the Sarai Reader 04. For an outline of the themes and concerns of Sarai Reader 04, see concept outline below. To know about the format of the articles that we invite, see 'Guidelines for Submissions' below. The Sarai Reader is an annual publication produced by Sarai/CSDS(Delhi). The contents of the Sarai Readers are available for free download from the Sarai website (see urls below) Previous Readers have included: 'The Public Domain': Sarai Reader 01, 2001 (http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader1.html) 'The Cities of Everyday Life': Sarai Reader 02, 2002, (http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader2.html). And 'Shaping Technologies': Sarai Reader 03, 2003 (http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader3.html) The Sarai Reader series aims at bringing together original, thoughtful, critical, reflective, well researched and provocative texts and essays by theorists, practitioners and activists, grouped under a core theme that expresses the interests of the Sarai in issues that relate media, information and society in the contemporary world. The Sarai Readers have a wide international readership. Sarai Reader 04 will be partly based on the presentations made at a workshop jointly organized by Sarai - CSDS and the Waag Society - "Crisis/Media: The Uncertain States of Reportage". The workshop was held at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi in March 2003. For more details of the contents of this workshop, see http://www.sarai.net/events/crisis_media/crisis_media.htm Editorial Collective for Sarai Reader 04: Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Sarai, Delhi) and Geert Lovink (Media Theorist & Internet Critic, Brisbane) II. Crisis/Media: Concepts & Themes From the very beginning of this century we have hurtled on as if from crisis to crisis. As if all the ghosts of the 19th and the 20th centuries, decades of war, colonial plunder, totalitarian repression and the hardening of sectarian animosity had suddenly decided to come home to roost in a frenzied attempt at revisiting on the present all the accumulated tragedies of the past that we had thought we had left behind us as we gingerly made our way into our times. The images of planes crashing into skyscrapers, of entire cities being bombed into submission from the air, of occupying armies and fleeing civilians, of suicide bombers, ethnic cleansing and riot police assaulting unarmed demonstrators have branded themselves on to our consciousness with mounting frequency. These are the substance of the meditations of all our mornings, as we pick up the day's newspaper, switch on the radio in the kitchen, or the television in the living room, or log on to the internet, We have witnessed flash floods, epidemics, economic collapse, mass migrations and an intensification of the regimes of surveillance and control on a near global scale. Our newspapers, our television sets, our radios, our websites and our minds have become prisoners of war, and there seems to be no sign of a ceasefire in sight, at least as of now. The world we live in has also witnessed an enormous increase in the scale and complexity of communicative possibilities. An explosion of the means of delivering news, comment and images at rapid speed over diverse media has meant dispersal as well as amplification of the dynamics of any event or process, anywhere in the world. Satellite communications, a new telecom revolution, cheap electronic devices, computers and the Internet ensure that no moment goes un-reported. There is no moment that is not potentially global anymore. These are times for sober reflection, and that, precisely, is what we often find missing, as we open the newspaper, listen to the radio, or television. Yet, a variety of different, dissident, passionate and sane voices are also making themselves heard, through combinations of new and old media, as never before. The 'Paid For' news of the mainstream media is often exposed for what it is, even before it appears, by an increasingly vigilant network of independent local-global media initiatives. The numbers that turn out on the streets of the world's major capitals to protest against war seem to suggest that despite huge propaganda efforts, 'the spin' isn't working, at least not all of the time. We live, as the Chinese curse has it, in 'interesting times'. This accumulation of situations of crisis in the first three years of our century, and their rapid, almost real time dissemination in the media, have no doubt precipitated new opportunities for communicative action and global reflection, just as they have signalled an onset of a severe crisis within the media - a crisis of over-stimulation and under-statement, of exaggeration and exhaustion, of censorship and spin-doctoring, of fear and favour. More than at any other time before, the power and reach of the media, the potential of the usage of technologies of information and communication for control or for freedom, and the several intertwined professional, cognitive and ethical dilemmas that media practitioners face on a daily basis. All these require us to pause and take stock of the fact that the crises reported in the media have a bearing on the crisis of reporting in the media - That the media and the crisis that media require to be themselves today can no longer be seen as distinct categories, hence - CRISIS/MEDIA. We are interested in recognizing the fact that media today are located precisely along the intersections and fault lines that connect and divide representations (media events and processes) and structural problems. The Reader aims to excavate the relationships between these structures and the representations that accompany them. Crisis Media respond as much to wars and ongoing ethnic conflicts as they do to environmental crises or the AIDS epidemic and the SARS panic. Given this situation, how can Crisis/Media go beyond their historically framed task of 'correcting' mainstream opinions and actually experiment with other narratives? How can the global rise of mobile devices be utilized to 'receive, transmit and broadcast' peoples' stories as they occur, and by doing so, break the separation between reporters and the reported? Further, is it possible for us to begin to debate and problematize the whole notion of 'representation' itself, positing more immediate forms of testimony that resist mediatization? These are open questions, with no satisfactory and coherent answers, but Sarai Reader 04 would like to take them on, so as to map new territories of thought about media practice. A Preliminary List of Themes (these are not chapter or section headings, but point to areas of interest) could include: The Political Economy of Contemporary Media Forms Media Wars and Media in times of War: Weapons of Mass Distraction? Taking Sides and Speaking Truth: The Reportage of Ethnic Conflict and Civil Unrest Surveillance, Intelligence, Reportage: The Journalist and the Informer Brand Disloyalty: Critiques and Analyses of Immaterial Capital in the Information Age Aliens and Others: Media and Migration Reporting the Crises of Everyday Life Re imagining Tactical Media Evaluating Independent Media Strategies in the time of Globalization Mobile Maverick Media: the Technology and Politics of Dispersed and Mobile Media Forms Viral Media Communicable Diseases: Epidemics as Information The Body as Data Crises of Representation: Ethics, Epistemics, Aesthetics The Space for Free Speech Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media, seeks to engage with this situation by inviting a series of reflections by media practitioners (journalists, independent media activists, filmmakers, photographers, artists, commentators and editors) and thinkers, writers, scholars, activists and critics. We are looking for incisive analysis, as well as passionate writing, for scholarly and theoretical rigour as well as for critical and imaginative depth. We invite essays, reportage, diaries and memoirs, entries from weblogs, edited compilations of online discussions, photo essays, image-text collages and interpretations of found visual material. We are interested in testimonies from all theatres of global conflict - be they New York, London, Baghdad or Kabul, in reports from continuing crisis situations - in Kinshasa, Ahmedabad, Ramallah, and in essays and reflections that address the world from Delhi, Belgrade, Karachi, Beijing, Buenos Aires and Tehran. We are interested in anything from anywhere at all that makes for intelligent, provocative and critical encounters with the world we all live in. Contributors can also consider the structural, technological, rhetorical and aesthetic dimensions of understanding, interpreting and expressing aspects of what they see as situations of crisis. They can reflect on ecological crises, crisis within social institutions and the many unreported and unexamined crises of everyday life that be-devil the contemporary moment. Hate speech and unreflective testimonies of victim-hood, however, are not welcome. The Sarai Reader 4, like the previous Sarai Readers, will be international in scope and content, while retaining a special emphasis on reflection about and from areas that normally lie outside the domain of mainstream discourses. We are particularly interested in cutting edge writing and contributions from South Asia, South and Central America, South East Asia, China, Tibet and Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Australia. This is not an expression of a 'regional' or 'third world' bias; rather it is an affirmation of the fact that some of the most exciting emergent voices are located in these regions. We of course welcome innovative and critical contributions from Europe, North America and Japan. We are especially keen to shape the Reader in response to events such as the Next Five Minutes 4 Conference, and hope that some of the ideas that get generated in such events can find their way into the debates that the Reader hopes to embody. If you feel these issues and questions are of interest to you. If your practice, thought, curiosities, research or creative activity has impelled you to think about some of these issues, we invite you to contribute to Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media. III. Guidelines for Submissions Word Limit: 1500 - 4000 words 1.Submissions may be scholarly, journalistic, or literary - or a mix of these, in the form of essays, papers, interviews, online discussions ordinary entries. All submission, unless specifically solicited, must be in English only. 2.Submissions must be sent by email in as text, or as rtf, or as word document or star office/open office attachments. Articles may be accompanied by black and white photographs or drawings submitted in the tiff format. 3.We urge all writers, to follow the Chicago Manual of Style, (CMS) in terms of footnotes, annotations and references. For more details about the CMS and an updated list of Frequently Asked Questions, see http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html For a 'Quick Reference Guide to the Chicago Manual of Style' - especially relevant for citation style, see - http://www.library.wwu.edu/ref/Refhome/chicago.html 4.All contributions should be accompanied by a three/four line text introducing the author. 5.All submissions will be read by the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader 04 before the final selection is made. The editorial collective reserves the right not to publish any material sent to it for publication in the Sarai Reader on stylistic or editorial grounds. All contributors will be informed of the final decisions of the editorial collective vis a vis their contribution. 6.Copyright for all accepted contributions will remain with the authors, but Sarai reserves indefinitely the right to place any of the material accepted for publication on the public domain in print or electronic forms, and on the Internet. 7.Accepted submissions will not be paid for, but authors are guaranteed a wide international readership. The Reader will be published in print, distributed in India and internationally, and will also be uploaded in a pdf form on to the Sarai website. All contributors whose work has been accepted for publication will receive two copies of the Reader. IV. Where and When to send your Contributions Last date for submission - December 1st 2003. (But please write as soon as possible to the editorial collective with a brief outline/abstract, not more than one page, of what you want to write about - this helps in designing the content of the reader). We expect to have the reader published by mid-February 2004. Please send in your outlines and abstracts, and images/graphic material to - 1. For articles, to Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Co Ordinator, Sarai Reader 04 Editorial Collective (shuddha at sarai.net) 2. For proposals to moderate online discussions on the Reader List, to Monica Narula, List Administrator, the Reader List (monica at sarai.net) 3. For images and/or graphic material, to Monica Narula, Co Ordinator, Media Lab (monica at sarai.net) -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From rmazumdar at vsnl.net Wed Aug 13 07:46:42 2003 From: rmazumdar at vsnl.net (Ranjani Mazumdar) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 07:46:42 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] film appreciation Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20030813073656.01c83190@mail.vsnl.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030813/5852fec6/attachment.html From aiindex at mnet.fr Wed Aug 13 15:35:55 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 11:05:55 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Martha C. Nussbaum on the Genocide in Gujarat Message-ID: DISSENT MAGAZINE Summer 2003 http://www.dissentmagazine.org/ Genocide in Gujarat The International Community Looks Away by Martha C. Nussbaum Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in the station of Godhra, in the state of Gujarat, bearing a large group of Hindu pilgrims who were returning from the alleged birthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya (where some years earlier, angry Hindu mobs had destroyed the Babri mosque, which they claim is on top of the remains of Rama's birthplace). The pilgrimage, like many others in recent times, aimed at forcibly constructing a temple over the disputed site, and the mood of the returning passengers, frustrated in their aims by the government and the courts, was angrily emotional. When the train stopped at the station, passengers got into arguments with Muslim vendors and passengers. At least one Muslim vendor was beaten up when he refused to say "Jai Sri Ram" ("Hail Ram"), and a young Muslim girl narrowly escaped forcible abduction. As the train left the station, stones were thrown at it, apparently by Muslims. Fifteen minutes later, one car of the train erupted in flames. Fifty-eight men, women, and children died in the fire. Most were Hindus. Attempts to determine what really happened by reconstructing the event have shown only that a large amount of a flammable substance must have been thrown from inside the train. We will never know who threw it. Because the area adjacent to the tracks contained Muslim dwellings, and because a Muslim mob had gathered in the region to protest the treatment of Muslims on the train platform, blame was immediately put on Muslims. (One former chief minister of Gujarat, Amarsinh Chaudhary, argued that the blaze was set by Hindu nationalists. Many others agree, especially in light of later evidence that the subsequent rioting had been elaborately prepared.) No evidence has been found linking alleged Muslim perpetrators to any organized movement or group. In the days that followed, wave upon wave of violence swept through the state. The attackers were Hindus, many of them highly politicized, shouting Hindu-right slogans, such as "Jai Sri Ram" and "Jai Hanuman" (an aggressive monkey god), along with "Kill!" "Destroy!" "Slaughter!" There is copious evidence that the violence was planned before the precipitating event. The victims were almost all Muslims (with an occasional Christian or Parsi thrown in). There was no connection between victims and the alleged perpetrators; attacks took place, for the most part, far from the original site. Many families of the original dead implored the mobs to stop the violence. Nonetheless, more than two thousand Muslims were killed in a few days, many by being burned alive in or near their homes. Nobody was spared: young children were immolated along with their families. Particularly striking were the mass rapes and mutilations of women. Typically, a woman would be raped or gang-raped, often with gruesome tortures, and then set on fire and killed. Historian Tanika Sarkar, who played a leading role in investigating the events, has argued that the evident preoccupation with destroying women's sexual organs reveals "a dark sexual obsession about allegedly ultra-virile Muslim male bodies and overfertile Muslim female ones, that inspire[s] and sustain[s] the figures of paranoia and revenge." This sexual obsession is evident in the hate literature circulated during the carnage, of which the following "poem" is a typical example: Narendra Modi [chief minister of Gujarat] you have fucked the mother of [Muslims] The volcano which was inactive for years has erupted It has burnt the arse of [Muslims] and made them dance nude We have untied the penises which were tied till now Without castor oil in the arse we have made them cry . . . . Wake up Hindus, there are still [Muslims] alive around you Learn from Panvad village where their mother was fucked She was fucked standing while she kept shouting She enjoyed the uncircumcised penis With a Hindu government the Hindus have the power to annihilate [Muslims] Kick them in the arse to drive them out of not only villages and Cities but also the country. [The word rendered "Muslims" (miyas) is a word meaning "mister" that is standardly used to refer to Muslims.] As Sarkar says, the incitement to violence is suffused with anxiety about virility, and the treatment of women seems to enact a fantasy of sexual sadism far darker than mere revenge. During the violence, many Muslim cities and villages were burned to the ground. Muslims of all social classes fled for their lives. One former chief justice of the Rajasthani High Court, living in retirement in Gujarat, fled, later commenting to an investigative tribunal that there was "a deliberate conspiracy to stifle criminal law." What this witness meant was that the carnage was aided and abetted both by the police and by local politicians. Police egged on the inciters, either passively, by failing to respond to calls for help or, in some cases, more actively. It is now clear that police received orders not to intervene in the carnage, and that those who disobeyed these orders were punished by demotions and transfers. After the fact, police made it virtually impossible to register criminal complaints. Meetings were held between police and local government leaders, at which Hindus were called "we" and Muslims "them," and pleas of some officers to take action against rioters were rejected. Meanwhile, local leaders of the Hindu-right were seen shouting slogans and inciting the mob to further violence. Particularly upsetting was the active participation of tribal and lower caste Hindus, adivasis and dalits, in the violence against equally poor Muslims. The Hindu nationalist party, Bharatiya Janata (BJP), has succeeded all too well in its strategy of getting many lower caste Hindus to put religion ahead of caste and class and to fear as their enemies not the wealthy and upper caste Hindus who have long oppressed them, but the Muslims who in most cases share their economic misery. Ideological Background of Hindu Nationalism The events of March 2002 emerged from a long history of deliberate construction of hate. For some time, a lot of money (whose sources I shall discuss later) has been poured into the creation of camps for young Hindu men, where they are taught hatred and fear of Muslims and partisan fervor is cultivated. For older folks, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the cultural wing of the Hindu nationalist movement, organizes pilgrimages to Ayodyha, which invariably stir up sectarian emotion. But the history of the episode goes back much further. We need to consider the origins of the BJP (the political arm of Hindu nationalism) and its allied organizations, the umbrella Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Bajrang Dal (paramilitary), and the VHP (cultural). When we examine this history, we see that the tensions between Hindus and Muslims expressed here are not "ancient" or even indigenous hatreds. They result from a borrowed fascist ideology of purity, which has gradually been imposed, transforming a Hinduism that in its origins is plural, diverse, and tolerant. The ideologue whose views were central in the formation of the RSS and BJP, M. Golwalkar, derived many of his views from German romantic nationalism, and especially from its National Socialist formation. In his 1939 tract We, or Our Nationhood Defined, Golwalkar argues that only Hindus are true Indians, and that Muslims, Christians, Parsis, and Jews are all foreigners, who should stay in the territory only on terms set by the Hindus. [T]he foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e. of the Hindu nation, and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or [they] may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment-not even citizen's rights. Golwalkar portrays the Muslims, particularly, as outsiders and "despoilers" who must now finally be "shake[n] off." Expressing his sympathy with the Nazi program, he writes: To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races-the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by. As late as 1966, Golwalkar repeated the same views, calling Jews and Parsis "guests," and Muslims and Christians "invaders." And he explicitly attacked the Indian Constitution (drafted in 1950) for its pluralism and secularism: "Unfortunately in our country our Constitution has equated the children of the soil with the aggressor, and given equal rights to everybody." Such attitudes have nothing to do with the history of the Hindu religion or with any religious doctrines dating from before the 1930s. Hinduism, rather like ancient Greek religion, has traditionally been plural, loosely organized, regional, and highly varied. The very idea that Rama is the one central god in the Hindu pantheon is itself a BJP political construct. In some regions Rama was important, in others not, and in some he was not even thought of as an admirable deity. Hindus and Muslims have traditionally borrowed a lot from one another, and it is futile to inquire into the origins of a given practice. Most salient differences that studies of human well-being measure (for example, differences regarding the status of women) are regional rather than religious; that is, Hindus and Muslims in a given region have similar practices in many important matters. Over the years, however, the BJP has worked very successfully to create the public perception that Hinduism really is what the BJP says it is, and that Islam is very different, dedicated to violence and subversion and to the oppression of women. Through highly effective use of mass media, and, lately, through linking its propaganda to international anxieties about Islam, it has achieved a wide success. BJP leaders sometimes try to distance themselves from Golwalkar and his somewhat more polite fellow ideologue V. D. Savarkar, but there should be no doubt what the program really is. The recent rewriting of textbooks under the auspices of M. Joshi, current minister for education, has led to systematic falsification of the history of Hindu-Muslim interactions, with Hindus portrayed as virtuous victims and Muslims as bloodthirsty aggressors. (A part of this effort has been a vicious campaign, in both India and the United States, to smear the reputation of Romila Thapar, a distinguished historian of ancient India, now holding a prestigious chair at our Library of Congress, who has courageously insisted on the truth about past events.) The pluralism and syncretism that have always characterized Hinduism is also effaced, and the absolutely clear fact (clear from the Vedas themselves) that Hindus once ate beef may not be mentioned. The new literature textbook contains sentences such as, "Kabir is a nice boy, even though he is a Muslim." In history texts the Nazi regime is described admiringly. The official Gujarat high school textbook on social studies for Class IX makes the blatantly false claim that in most states Hindus are in a minority and that Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs are in the majority-even though Hindus are approximately 85 percent of the population and Muslims less than 10 percent. In short, the agenda of the BJP, clean it up as they may for electoral purposes, would deny to minorities, especially Muslims and Christians, full equality under the Constitution. In the service of this agenda, appeals to fear of minorities and incitement to threatening and sometimes violent actions against them are absolutely central. Violence from the RSS is a daily threat in many parts of the nation. In Lucknow, a city with a history of warm cooperation and syncretism between Hindus and Muslims, saffron-clad youth brigades now parade around the university campus and threaten young women who wear blue jeans or celebrate Valentine's Day, practices that they deem Western and Christian. Five years ago, the female acting vice chancellor of the University, Roop Rekha Verma, a philosopher and a courageous activist for women's rights and minority rights, found her office occupied by three hundred such youths. She managed to get them to disperse peacefully. This is the way things are in areas where the BJP is strong: a general atmosphere of threat prevails, and essential civil liberties are fragile. In many regions, economic boycotts directed at Muslim businesses have had a major impact. Gujarat has been unusually prone to outbreaks of both anti-Christian and anti-Muslim violence, and its elected BJP officials ran on a strong Hinduization platform. Why should tensions run high in Gujarat, the state that gave birth to Gandhi's campaign of nonviolence, the state that saw the birth of Ela Bhatt's now world-famous movement to organize female workers? One plausible conjecture is that the Muslims of Gujarat play a somewhat different role in society than Muslims elsewhere in India. Elsewhere, Muslims are on average poor, ill-educated, downtrodden. In Gujarat, although most Muslims are very poor, a significant number have been a merchant class, well off and socially prominent. They can thus be compared to the Jews in Europe: as successful people they more easily arouse fear and resentment. Still, before the advent of the BJP and RSS, Hindus and Muslims for the most part lived side by side in amity. Reactions and Aftermath As I have said, the mass killings and rapes of innocent Muslims were aided and abetted by the police and leading politicians. Let us look more closely at the reactions of people higher up. The main response of BJP officials was to deploy a logic of action and reaction: yes, these things are tragic, but what do you expect? Once someone starts it, events take their inevitable course. In other words, once a small number of Hindus are allegedly killed by a small number of Muslims, it is inevitable that Hindus will riot and murder lots of innocent Muslims and nothing will be done about that. BJP chief minister Narendra Modi during the events, stated, "What is happening is a chain of action and reaction." Shortly after that, he said, "It is natural that what happened in Godhra the day before yesterday, where forty women and children were burnt alive, has shocked the country and the world. The people in that part of Godhra have had criminal tendencies. . . .And now they have done this terrible crime for which a reaction is going on." Modi's statements not only justified the violence as a response to an alleged long history of "criminal tendencies," they also portrayed it as unstoppable, more like a natural cataclysm than a set of blameworthy human acts. Local VHP leader Ashok Singhal took this "Newtonian logic," as it was called in the press, one step further: the rioting was "a matter of pride," "a befitting reply to what has been perpetrated on the Hindus in the last 1000 years. Gujarat has shown the way and our journey of victory will begin and end on the same path." At the national level, the government followed a similar rhetorical strategy, a little more deviously. Although some BJP leaders, as well as the opposition, called for Modi's resignation (which the national party could require), other influential leaders defended his conduct. Among his most ardent defenders was Arun Jaitley, minister of law. (Jaitley, a smooth Westernized man who goes down well with the Indian American community, was briefly shifted to a party post, but now he is back in the Law Ministry.) Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who is usually considered a moderate, the "decent" face of the Hindu right, showed his true colors in a speech given to a party congress at Goa, on March 3, 2002, in which he said: What happened in Gujarat? If a conspiracy had not been hatched to burn alive the innocent passengers of the Sabarmati Express, then the subsequent tragedy in Gujarat could have been averted. But this did not happen. People were torched alive. Who were those culprits? The government is investigating into this. Intelligence agencies are collecting all the information. But we should not forget how the tragedy of Gujarat started. The subsequent developments were no doubt condemnable, but who lit the fire? How did the fire spread? . . . .Wherever Muslims live, they don't like to live in co-existence with others, they don't like to mingle with others; and instead of propagating their ideas in a peaceful manner, they want to spread their faith by resorting to terror and threats. The world has become alert to this danger. Although other parts of Vajpayee's speech appear to defend the concept of a pluralistic, tolerant India, here he adopts Modi's logic of action and reaction and fails to condemn either the actions of the Hindu perpetrators or the inaction of the police. The government's official inquiry into the events is plodding on, and is unlikely to deliver or to act on the truth. The opposition Congress Party did condemn the events but not very strongly. In contesting the subsequent election in Gujarat, it chose a course of moderate Hinduization, trying to capture votes by moving to the center (a familiar tactic!), rather than rejecting the Hindu-nationalist program and defending pluralism and equal rights. It thus lost all moral credibility, as well as the election. Who behaved well? Although the Gujarati press systematically concealed the real nature of the events (apart from the one Muslim newspaper), the national press on the whole covered events admirably and dissected the statements of leading politicians with suitable skepticism. The national Electoral Commission also played a good role, postponing new elections until the rule of law could be reestablished and at least some Muslim refugees were able to return home. (Of course, in many cases they had neither homes nor jobs to return to. The government was quick to build roads and temples over the ruins of Muslim homes. Relief and reconstruction are still virtually nonexistent.) Several investigative groups did heroic work, going to the refugee camps to collect data. Most important was the independent Concerned Citizens' Tribunal, chaired by former chief justice Krishna Iyer, one of the most distinguished jurists in India's history. This commission, which included lawyers, judges, and academics, produced as complete a record of the events as we are ever likely to get, collecting 2,094 oral and written testimonials, interviewing hundreds of witnesses, gathering pamphlets and other texts, and identifying culpable individuals. Now we know who should be charged with various offenses, even if it is unlikely that charges will ever be brought. In the course of its work, the commission found chinks in the BJP's armor. One leading minister testified at length under condition of anonymity. And there were numerous prominent Hindus from Gujarat who came forward to deplore the events and to give what information they could. A particular favorite of mine is Piyush Desai, CEO of the Gujarat Tea Processors and Packers Limited, which produces the popular Wagh Bakri brand of tea. Mentioning that his business was started a hundred and ten years ago through the help of a Muslim who gave his grandfather a large loan, he spoke eloquently of the history of cooperation between the religions in Gujarat, deplored the crimes, and said of the help he had received from Muslims, "However can we repay such a debt?" The commissioners comment, "This witness was a fresh and welcome ray of hope for the Tribunal." They mention that he paid for tea for all the refugee camps out of his own pocket, "along with paper cups that are hygienic." In December 2002, Modi won reelection by a landslide, playing the cards of hate and fear. Muslim businesses in many areas of Gujarat have been taken over by Hindus, as their owners have fled, and so the condition of Muslims in the state is worse than ever. The continuing economic boycott deprives even those who remain of much of their livelihood. Indiscriminate arrests of Muslims continue, often under the screen of the national Prevention of Terrorism Act, a favorite BJP piece of legislation. There is one ray of hope: the BJP, trying to use this same hate politics in other recent state elections, has not prevailed. In particular, in Himachal Pradesh, the party went down to a solid defeat last winter. So the implications of the carnage for national politics are as yet unclear, and one may still hope for a multireligious democracy in India. Genocide and Law How should concerned citizens of the world think about these terrible events? I suggest that six features are especially relevant. 1. Genocide. It is an undisputed fact about Gujarat that there were mass killings and rapes on grounds of religion. Muslims were sought out not because of any even imagined complicity in the precipitating event at Godhra, but simply because they were Muslims. Slogans shouted by the mob indicate that their intent was to assert Hindu superiority, to exterminate Muslims, and to destroy Muslim society: for example, "Kill them all, destroy their society." "Finish off all Muslims; our people were not spared by them, don't have mercy." In light of these facts, it seems beyond dispute that the violence in Gujarat meets the definition of genocide offered in the UN Convention on Genocide: Article 2. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Indeed, given the centrality of rape in the events that took place, usually rape followed by murder, we can say that the intent to destroy the group is enacted in all the ways the Convention specifies-with the exception of the removal of children to another group, since children were murdered here along with their parents. Moreover, the evidence of long and deliberate construction of hatred undermines any claim that these events were just the acts of a mob that got out of control. 2. Abrogation of the Rule of Law. To most commentators on the events, the most disturbing feature was the complicity of officers of the law at all levels. Modi and other government officials actively egged on the violence. The prime minister failed to show concern for the violation of the fundamental rights of Indian citizens. The national BJP government has made no effort to conduct a serious investigation into the crimes and has repeatedly refused calls for Modi's resignation. In all these ways, Gujarat signals a fundamental breakdown of the rule of law. This was not simply mob violence but rather the infiltration and cooption of the law itself by the engines of hate and fear. The very existence and meaning of India's pluralistic democracy are deeply compromised by these events, which show that some citizens can count on the law's coming to their aid and others cannot. The Concerned Citizens' Tribunal presented a series of recommendations for trial and punishment of the main offenders, but there is no sign that these recommendations are being taken seriously by law enforcement officials. Sarkar argues compellingly that these events highlight a difficulty for some fashionable versions of the politics of difference. Insofar as proponents of identity politics neglect the importance of traditional notions of citizenship, equality, and rights, they undercut "the only ground on which cultural difference can be sustained and asserted. We reject this truth . . . as an old and therefore unusable brand in the marketplace of ideas at our peril. The only opposite term to equal citizenship rights is unequal citizenship or the denial of citizenship. That is precisely what happened in Gujarat." 3. No Genuine Security Issue. Repeatedly, Vajpayee and other Hindu fundamentalist leaders tried to link the Muslims who allegedly attacked the train to both Pakistan and international terrorism. The current world atmosphere, especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States, has made it easier for them to get away with this. There is no evidence that either of these links has any reality. Muslims in India are a highly diverse group, but it is obvious that one thing they have in common is that they did not go to Pakistan. One cannot always infer choice from such facts, but one certainly cannot infer Pakistani sympathies either, far less complicity in alleged Pakistani plots against India. As the political philosopher Pratap Mehta has written, Indian Muslims are perhaps the largest Muslim community in the world that has never produced either a massive fundamentalist movement or a rush to join terrorists. Moreover, because Indian Muslims are mostly poor (in good part because of the persistent discrimination they have encountered), the attempt to portray them as a dangerous social force sowing dissent from within is unrealistic-even though in Gujarat such threats derive more surface credibility from the relative prosperity of Gujarati Muslims. As for al-Qaeda, all one can say is that Vajpayee, like others we know, is only too ready to use this name as a scare tactic, in the absence of any evidence at all making the connection. We don't even know how the train was set on fire, much less who did it, so a fortiori we don't know if any of these people is connected to al-Qaeda. Given that the background to the train incident involved violence against Muslims on the platform at Godhra station, retaliation is a far more likely motive, if indeed the perpetrators of the torching were Muslims. In short, the Indian nation faces no serious security threat from within that might have explained, even if it would not have justified, restrictive measures against Muslims and a climate of fear and hostility toward them. Insofar as India does face a serious security threat from Pakistan, the Gujarat victims are far more distant from the Muslims of Pakistan than most Japanese Americans were from the Japanese regime at the time of World War II. For one thing,, fifty-five years had passed since Partition; for another, the vast majority of Indian Muslims are not immigrants at all, but native-born Indians. 4. Massive Funding from U.S. Sources. A very important issue to ponder, and one that Americans may be able to alter, is funding. The Indian community in America has strong ties to Hindu nationalism. The VHP is highly organized here and is often regarded as the legitimate voice of the Indian community-as, for example, when it succeeded in stopping the screening of a film by Anand Patwardhan at the Museum of Natural History in New York on the grounds that its (socially radical) portrayal of caste tensions was offensive to Hindu sensibilities. Americans should be very clear about what this organization is and what it supports. It does not speak for India or for Hinduism; it speaks for the politics of Hindu nationalism, including its hate politics. Highly significant in the funding of the Gujarat violence were private donations organized through the American VHP and various charities that it has organized. The connection of these charities to the funding of hatred has now been amply documented in a report entitled The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva that may be accessed online (IDRF being the acronym of the India Development and Relief Fund, the chief charity in question). What this report shows (and other sources have confirmed) is that almost no money from this allegedly charitable organization goes to fund welfare or general poverty relief. Funds are targeted, first, at organizations for Hindus only. Second, the money is largely used for cultural activities that are highly inflammatory in character, in particular for the camps of the Bajrang Dal, where young Hindu boys are taught the ideology of Hindutva and where hatred and fear of Muslims are openly advocated. Some Americans of Indian descent probably give to this charity in ignorance, truly believing that it funds general charitable activities. (One cannot get a tax deduction for contributing directly to a charity in India, so one must seek out these U.S. conduits.) Some, and these days the larger number, give to the IDRF because they know exactly what the money will be used for, and they think these purposes are good. Widespread opposition to congressional investigation of the funding issue shows fear that the links may be cut. The American VHP has also taken the lead in the recent attacks on historian Romila Thapar. 5. The Importance of the Truth. It is sometimes still fashionable to denigrate the pursuit of historical truth. No doubt postmodernism has alerted us to important questions about any attempt to construct a historical narrative. And yet the events of Gujarat vividly demonstrate the great importance of historical truth for any state that thinks of itself as democratic and committed to human freedom and equality. Both the general attempt to rewrite history in textbooks for the young and the very specific attempts (through legal delay, failure to investigate, and false reporting) to conceal the truth about Gujarat, substituting a narrative of terrorism foiled, show us exactly why the search for truth is so important for us all. The attempts of members of the Indian American community to conceal the nature of their "charitable" activities tell the same tale. In all these cases, however difficult it is to give a philosophically adequate account of historical truth, we can all see what the truth is not, and we can also see that the efforts of the tribunal to document what happened have a profound political importance, the same importance history has in George Orwell's 1984, as an essential bulwark against tyranny. As Sarkar eloquently writes: There can be no political implication, no resource for struggle, if we deny the truth claims of these histories of sadism, if we . . . denigrate the search for true facts as mere positivism, a spurious scientism. For the life and death of our political agenda depend on holding on to the truth claim, to that difference with VHP histories, to that absolute opposition to their proclamation that they will make and unmake facts and histories according to the dictates of conviction . . . 6. The Silence of the World. The events of Gujarat have led to few large-scale public statements. The government of Finland did protest at the time-and was denounced by the Vajpayee government for foreign interference. Our State Department has included an accurate summary of the events in its 2002 International Religious Freedom Report, but the U.S. government has not foregrounded these events in its foreign policy; indeed I cannot locate any major statement made by a member of the current administration condemning the attacks. The Democrats have also been silent-with the exception of former president Bill Clinton, who in March 2003 issued a long statement for a conference sponsored by the journal India Today, in which he condemned the atrocities and criticized the national government for its failure to stand against the politics of hate: "To identify and categorize people based on faith will keep India from becoming the right kind of giant in the 21st century." He added that efforts to rebuild Gujarat after the 2000 earthquake, for which he helped raise funds, showed him that Hindus and Muslims can work together in the state. Clinton always took a particular interest in India, and he knows a great deal about it, so this does not surprise me. What does surprise me is the silence of everyone else. Here is a clear case for heavy diplomatic pressure, and possibly economic sanctions, given the complicity of the government in the terrible events. But nothing like this has even been suggested. As for the academy, there is naturally a lot of writing about Gujarat by academics in India; some were members of the Concerned Citizens' Tribunal, along with judges and lawyers, thus continuing India's honorable tradition of continuity between scholarship and social activism. Americans who work on India have no doubt contributed to this literature, although not very prominently so far as I can see. But I know of no organized efforts by American academics to express moral outrage: for example, publishing petitions or advertisements condemning the carnage or organizing movements to seek economic sanctions against the state of Gujarat, or even divestiture of university stockholdings in businesses that operate heavily in the state. Whether these actions would be correct is unclear to me; but we should be asking what actions are correct and debating the alternatives. At the very least, concerned citizens of the world, academic and nonacademic, should be educating themselves about the situation and expressing their views. One way of doing so, for those of us who have a close relationship with the Indian American community in the United States, is to work on producing the facts for, and trying to persuade, those in that community who are ready to listen. For those who don't have this sort of relationship, there are many other things that can be done: teach about these events; invite speakers who talk about them to organizations both academic and nonacademic; write about them in the course of whatever writing you do on human rights issues. This educational effort needs to include getting to know the work of important scholars in India, such as Thapar and Sarkar, who are not household names in America, but who have put themselves on the line for justice. And there are actions that we can all take as citizens (actions that many more U.S. citizens take with regard to the Middle East). We can write to our representatives in Congress to urge the full investigation of the alleged charities that fund hatred. We can write expressing overall concern with a U.S. policy that is basically silent about this genocide. In short, we can try to promote knowledge, debate, and the circulation of the truth, knowing that silence and indifference are the allies of tyranny. Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School. She is an Affiliate of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies and a Board member of the Human Rights Program. Most of the information in this article can be found in the "Report of the Concerned Citizens' Tribunal," which is online at www.sabrang.com. See also Siddarth Varadajan, ed., Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (Penguin Books, 2002), an excellent collection of documents and articles to which I am also indebted. On the funding issue, see "The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva," also at www.sabrang.com. Tanika Sarkar's statements are cited from her article "Semiotics of Terror," in Economic and Political Weekly, July 13, 2002; Pratap Mehta's from his article "Facing Intolerance," in the Hindu, December 20, 2002. I am grateful to Zoya Hasan for comments and discussion. From aiindex at mnet.fr Wed Aug 13 15:38:42 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 11:08:42 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Chief Minister linked to Gujarat massacres to visit UK . . . Message-ID: PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 12/08/03 Name of organisation: Women Living Under Muslim Laws-international coordination office Email: wluml at wluml.org Website: www.wluml.org Chief Minister linked to Gujarat massacres to visit UK To: Home news editors, foreign editors, The Chief Minister of the Indian State of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, will visit the UK for an engagement at London's Wembley Conference Centre on Sunday 17th August, 2003. Modi is a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) propagator and leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political wing of the Hindu nationalist movement. As Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi is at the top of the chain of the command of the State legislative, administrative and enforcement institutions and is also a key member of the Hindu right wing network implicated in the Gujarat pogrom in February-March 2002, in which thousands of Muslims throughout the state were brutally murdered, raped or driven out of their homes. Modi's visit is ostensibly to attract British-based business to invest in Gujarat-there will be a 'global investors meeting' at the end of September in Ahmedabad. But a number of South Asian organisations in Britain point to the earlier massive misappropriation of funds collected for earthquake relief in Gujarat by the network of the Hindu right; they, as well as international human rights organisations, fear that Modi will also be using his current visit to gather support and funds from far-right Hindu organisations in Britain which will be used to promote further communal violence. These organisations also fear that Modi's visit and the activities of his supporters will increase religious tensions among Britain's South Asian communities. Organisations representing a range of South Asian communities and groups will be demonstrating outside the meeting on 17 August. Many of the alleged perpetrators of the 2002 Gujarat massacres were acquitted in the State's courts for `lack of evidence', and impunity is still enjoyed by state of Gujarat cabinet ministers and officials who were involved in planning and committing human rights violations. The same impunity also extends to the lower level officials that implemented the plan and to the mob and its leaders that perpetrated the crimes. In Gujarat, the members of the Hindu supremacist groups Rashtriya Swayam Sevaks (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal (Hindu right wing youth group) that formed the mob are still at large and many have not been investigated by the state of Gujarat courts. Muslim victims of the Gujarat massacres continue to face an economic boycott and are deprived of their sources of livelihood. Women from the Muslim community continue to face threats of sexual violence andgirls are being married off in unsuitable alliances for fear of being sexually violated in future pogroms. The police complicit in the pogrom continue to intimidate Muslims in regular 'combing' operations. The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party-the political formation of the Hindu right) government in power in the state acquitted alleged perpetrators in serious cases of human rights violations. The Commissioner of the Enquiry Commission exonerated Chief Minister Narendra Modi of any involvement in the pogrom even before completing the hearings. Gujarat state institutions investigate crimes in which they are themselves heavily implicated. Modi's engagement in London is as a guest of the Friends of the BJP Abroad. Applying international law to India is problematic because of its image as the home of Gandhi and non-violence. Few realize that India has been politically taken over by Hindu right, which uses the respectability gained by post-independence India to successfully disguise its Hindu supremacist agenda and genocidal intent. (ends) Article available We welcome the publication of the article below, 'Gujarat experience explodes the myth of a strong and an independent Indian judiciary' by Vahida Nainar, Researcher/Consultant, International Law, Bombay, India. Extracts can be taken from this article or it can be used in its entirety without copyright restriction. Please inform us of its use. The author can be contacted at 07949 550526 (also the out of hours number). Web links for background information: Human Rights Watch-1st July 2003 "Compounding Injustice-The Government's failure to Redress Massacres in Gujarat" http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/india0703/ Human Rights Watch-April 2002 " 'We Have No Order to Save You'-State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat" http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/ Amnesty International-28 March 2002 "The State Must Ensure Redress for the Victims-A Memorandum to the State of Gujarat on its duties in the Aftermath of Violence" http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex/amnestysGujaratreport.pdf Indian National Human Rights Commission-31st May 2002 "Final Order on Gujarat" http://nhrc.nic.in/guj_finalorder.htm Specifically for women focused information: The International Initiative for Justice in Gujarat-19th December 2003 "An Interim Report" http://www.onlinevolunteers.org/gujarat/reports/iijg/ The Concerned Citizens Tribunal, 22nd November 2002 "Crime Against Humanity: Gujarat 2002" http://www.sabrang.com/tribunal/index.html For information about the protest on 17th August 2003 contact South Asia Solidarity Group: Phone: 0207 267 0923 Email: southasia at hotmail.com For further information and interviews relating to this press release, please contact: Vahida Nainar Tel: 07949 550526 (also the out of hours number) ------------------------------ Gujarat experience explodes the myth of a strong and an independent Indian judiciary Vahida Nainar Researcher/Consultant, International Law Bombay, India The level and extent of infiltration of individuals from the Hindu right wing network in positions of power in different institutions of governance in the state of Gujarat in India and their complicity in the pogrom in February-March 2002, left victims and survivors with very little hope that those responsible will be brought to justice. Yet, there were incidences of violence with such compelling testimonies that if investigated and law allowed to take its normal course, may have resulted in convictions. The acquittal of alleged perpetrators for 'lack of evidence', in one such case of the Best Bakery in Baroda, firmly sealed off any expectations of justice from the state judiciary. Often after violence of a scale as witnessed in Gujarat in 2002 in which state officials was involved, there is a tendency to bury the past and move on. An impartial investigation would likely go against the government in power and expose its involvement. Political deal-making prevents action when the government changes and the opposition takes over thereby generally encouraging a culture of impunity to prevail. Impunity to the state officials in positions of power that were involved in planning, ordering and abetting serious crimes and human rights violations, impunity to the lower level officials that implemented the plan and finally impunity to the mob and its leaders that actually perpetrates the crimes, with each group having an inescapably 'guilty-mind’ hold over the other. In Gujarat, the members of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevaks (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal (Hindu right wing youth group) that formed the mob, its leaders, some of the local elected representatives, some officers of local police stations, some of the cabinet ministers and finally the chief minister, Mr. Narendra Modi represents the chain that enjoys impunity. The persecuted Muslim minority against whom the pogrom in 2002 was targeted however finds it extremely difficult to bury the past and move on. During the pogrom, they were often left with no identifiable bodies to bury and now, the ever-present threats, intimidations and humiliation makes even memories difficult to bury. The violence continues-the withdrawal of statements by victims accompanied by local legislative members of the state government and sympathizers of the Hindu right agenda at the Court in the Best Bakery Case speaks volumes of the extent of pressure put on the victims not to pursue investigation and prosecution. At many places, withdrawal of complaints and statements at the police stations is a condition upon which the victims are allowed to return to their own, often destroyed homes. Life for Muslims in Gujarat is allowed but as promised by the leaders of the Hindu right groups only upon the 'goodwill' of the majority Hindus. Muslims face an economic boycott and are deprived of their sources of livelihood. If they are grocers, their shops have either been destroyed or people are discouraged to buy from them. If they are plying cabs they are prevented from taking fares from regular stands. Muslims masons and carpenters are not finding work. Licenses for Muslim owners of meat shops are not being renewed. Those with 20 years of service in factories, shops and educational institutions have been summarily discharged. Indeed, those who survived the pogrom are alive but for how long under these conditions is the question. Muslim community as a whole face severe persecution but there are specific ways in which women are targeted for continued violence, abuse and humiliation. The memories of rape, sexual abuse and violence remain fresh in their minds as they watch perpetrators roaming freely with impunity in the neighborhoods openly taunting and threatening women with similar violence. Women's mobility is severely restricted and those who did not don veil as their Muslim identity are now taking to it for the sense of relative security and obscurity it affords. Young girls are married off to unsuitable alliances for fear of being sexually violated in future pogroms and education of the girl child is severely affected. The police complicit in the pogrom continue to intimidate Muslims in their regular 'combing' operations picking up Muslim males and harassing women in their absence. The language used by the law enforcers in such operations is replete with sexual innuendos directed at Muslim women. In the post 9/11 global politics, existing biases against Muslim populations everywhere but particularly where they are in minority has got legitimacy and sanction. Language demonizing Muslims is 'believable'. The Gujarat pogrom itself draws its strength from what seems to be an international mood to go after 'Muslims' in the name of 'war on terror.’ The slogans used in the elections in the state of Gujarat in December 2002 harped on security issues security to people from the 'terrorist Muslims'. The network of Hindu right groups in India has always considered non-Hindu minorities as 'foreigners'. After 9/11, they project Indian Muslims as terrorist, saboteurs, spies working for the 'enemy Pakistan' and anti-social elements that Indian society need to be purged of. This has helped the Hindu right gain popular support and manufacture consent to their anti-Muslim bias and genocidal intent. Muslims in Gujarat have no expectations of justice with the BJP (the political formation of the Hindu right network) government in power in the state. The lack of confidence stems from the acquittals of alleged perpetrators in most serious cases of violations, the Commissioner of the Enquiry Commission exonerating Chief Minister Narendra Modi of any involvement in the pogrom even before completing the hearings and the general anti-Muslim biases and attitudes of police, prosecutors and judges in the state. The Supreme Court of India ordered a re-trial of the Best Bakery case which inspires confidence that the judiciary of the highest order in the country would step in and uphold the constitutional guarantees of right to life, freedoms and protection of minorities. The problem with the order however is the faith the Supreme Court shows in the Gujarat state institution’s ability and willingness to investigate and prosecute crimes in which they are themselves so heavily implicated. Twenty months into the pogrom, a number of public interest litigations filed at the Supreme Court of India by concerned citizens requesting that investigations of major cases of violations be moved to the relatively neutral Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) are yet to be heard. Nor did the Supreme Court add that in its recent order that investigations for the re-trial of the Best Bakery case be done by the CBI. Such show of confidence by the Supreme Court would only result in sham trials with the most vulnerable of the alleged accused made the 'fall guy.' With lack of avenues of justice nationally, the question of applicability of international law to the Gujarat situation arises. The problem however with even beginning to think of the practicalities of applying international law is India’ image in the international community. India, to many, is still Gandhi’s India with commitment to policies of non-alignment, democracy, non-violence and respect for rule of law. That over the last decade or so, India has been politically taken over by Hindu right network is not widely known. There is also tremendous difficulty in the international community to imagine contemporary India as fascist, nationalist and genocidal. The Hindu right government in power has essentially used the clout, respect and credibility gained as a result of India's post-independence policies of non-alignment to successfully disguise its fascist and nationalist agenda. Those responsible for the Gujarat pogrom must be held accountable. If national systems fail the victims and survivors, international mechanisms must be invoked. For when crimes as serious as genocide is in the making, no matter where, it ought to be the concern of humanity as a whole. -ends- Women Living Under Muslim Laws international solidarity network Email: wluml at wluml.org Website: http://www.wluml.org o o o o [RELATED NEWS MATERIAL ON MODI's UK TRIP] The Times of India , August 13, 2003 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/xml/uncomp/articleshow?msid=127617 Modi's UK trip enthuses none RASHMEE Z AHMED Times News Network [Tuesday, August 12, 2003 10:53:14 PM ] LONDON: Whisper it softly, but Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi is soon to begin a potentially high-value, high-profile European roadshow to sell his state to overseas investors, even as the British government officially cold-shoulders him and Indian officials try and pretend he isn't coming at all. Modi, whose UK visa was issued only on Friday, just a week before his scheduled arrival, appears to have become one of the most sensitive bilateral issues in a long while. The issue is so sensitive that till late on Tuesday, Indian officials were refused to confirm Modi's very arrival in London on the grounds that there was "no official confirmation from Delhi". And a British foreign office spokesman stressed, "Modi's arrival is not at the invitation of Her Majesty's Government nor does the government plan to have any contact with him while he is here". Just days before Modi is scheduled to address a huge meeting at London'sWembley Arena, a venue often used by pop stars, the Indian High Commission was unable to specify its plans to felicitate him. Meanwhile, a snowballing campaign is already battling to lobby British prime minister Blair and foreign secretary Straw to prevent Modi's Wembley show-stopper. But to put that in context, Blair receives some 8,000 similar petitions a week and his aides confess they haven't "found" the Modi letter just yet. The letter to Blair, compares the case for a British government "ban on Modi's UK visit" to that of the controversial American Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who was unusually prevented in 2002 from setting foot on British soil. But British officials insisted "there were no appropriate grounds to refuse Modi a visa", even as they pointed out the UK's continuing concern "raised to the Government of India at the highest level .over reports that the government of Gujarat did not do as much as it could to prevent and end the violence". The letter to Blair is written by Leicester's Indian Muslim Association, which apparently has close and comradely links with the Swaminarayan sect. But unusually, it appears to have the endorsement of a British priest who worked in India and claims some knowledge of Modi's words and deeds. Another letter to Straw by the Council of Indian Muslims is supposed to be supplemented by further letters from several British MPs, who believe "the UK should not allow Modi to raise more money here to fund violence in Gujarat". o o o The Telegraph, August 13, 2003 http://www.telegraphindia.com/1030813/asp/nation/story_2260231.asp Modi protest New Delhi, Aug. 12: South Asian secular groups are planning to picket Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi when he visits Britain later this week, reports our special correspondent. The South Asian Solidarity Group, the Indian Council of Muslims and other outfits are planning the protest against Modi for being the alleged architect of the Gujarat carnage that occurred after the Godhra train burning last February. Modi will tour Britain to attract investment for Gujarat. He may deliver a lecture, organised by the Overseas Friends of the BJP, at the Wembley Conference Centre in London on August 17. o o o The Hindu, August 13, 2003 Opposition to Modi's visit to UK http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/holnus/01122208.htm London, Aug 12. (PTI): A UK-based Indian Muslim organisation has asked the British Government not to grant visa to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, for his proposed visit this month. The Council of Indian Muslims, in a letter to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, said Modi's visit poses a "great danger to race relations" and as such he should not be granted visa. Modi is scheduled to pay a four-day visit to the UK from August 16 to attract NRI investment. From benjamin_lists at typedown.com Wed Aug 13 20:26:36 2003 From: benjamin_lists at typedown.com (Benjamin Fischer) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 16:56:36 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] Call for Entries: TARGET BLANK: 17. STUTTGARTER FILMWINTER - FESTIVAL FOR EXPANDED MEDIA Message-ID: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ENGLISH VERSION SEE BELOW! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- TARGET BLANK: 17. STUTTGARTER FILMWINTER - FESTIVAL FOR EXPANDED MEDIA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Film Video Neue Medien Installation Performance Vortraege Festival 15.-18. Januar 2004 Warm Up 9.-14. Januar 2004 http://www.filmwinter.de Target Blank - der Stuttgarter Filmwinter geht in die 17. Runde - stets auf der Suche nach Innovativem, Kritischem und Unbekanntem in der Medienkunst und Filmkultur, nach den Zwischenzonen und Freiraeumen im Medienbetrieb. Nach dem Rekord von ueber 1300 Einreichungen beim letzten Festival sind alle Film-, Medien- und Kunstschaffende herzlich eingeladen, ihre Arbeiten in den Bereichen Film, Video, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, Internet, Installation und Performance fuer den kommenden Filmwinter einzusenden. Einreichung Online-Projekte koennen direkt ueber die Festival Website http://www.filmwinter.de eingereicht werden. Anmeldeformulare fuer Film, Video, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, Installation und Performance koennen im PDF-Format heruntergeladen werden. Deadline fuer Einreichungen: 15. September 2003 Preise In den Sektionen Film/Video und Neue Medien werden Preise in Hoehe von ueber 11.500 EUR vom Publikum und unterschiedlichen Jurykommissionen vergeben. Team-Work-Award Die Hoppe-Ritter Kunstfoerderung stiftet EUR 2.000,- fuer eine Film- oder Videoproduktion, die von einem Team realisiert wurde. Norman 2004 Preis der Jury fuer Film und Video in Hoehe von EUR 1.500,- Preis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart fuer Neue Medien Zwei Preise in Hoehe von insg. EUR 4.000,- gehen an Arbeiten aus dem Bereich CD-ROM/DVD-ROM oder an Projekte im Internet. Milla & Partner Preis Preis fuer Medien im Raum (Installationen) in Hoehe von EUR 2000,- DASDING-Publikumspreis Publikumspreise in den Bereichen Film/Video und Internet in Hoehe von jeweils EUR 1.000,- Sowie weitere Preise und die heissbegehrte Wand 5-Ehrenauszeichnung Neben den beiden Wettbewerben fuer Film/Video und Neue Medien wird das Festivalprogramm mit Spezialreihen, Panels, Praesentationen und Musikevents ergaenzt. Weitere Informationen: Wand 5 e.V. im Filmhaus Friedrichstr. 23 A D - 70174 Stuttgart Germany Tel: +49-711-226 91 60 Fax: +49-711-226 91 61 Mail: wanda at wand5.de http://www.filmwinter.de http://www.wand5.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- TARGET BLANK: 17TH STUTTGART FILMWINTER - FESTIVAL FOR EXPANDED MEDIA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Film Video New Media Installation Performance Lectures Festival, January 15-18, 2004 Warm Up, January 9-14, 2004 http://www.filmwinter.de Target Blank - the 17th edition of the Stuttgart Filmwinter is looking for innovative, critical, and unknown posititions in media art and film culture. After the record of 1300 submissions at the last festival the organizer Wand 5 cordially invites filmmakers, media producers, and artists to submit their work. Productions in the field of film, video, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, installation, and performance are very welcome. Submission Internet-projects may be submitted online on the festival's website http://www.filmwinter.de. Entry forms and regulations for submissions in the field of film, video, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, installation, and performance can be downloaded as PDF-file. Deadline for submission: September 15, 2003 Awards In the sections film/video and new media prizes amounting more than 11.500 EUR will be awarded by the audience and various jury commissions. Team-Work-Award The Hoppe-Ritter Art Sponsorship endows an award of EUR 2.000 for a team production in the field of film and video. Award of the Jury Award of the Jury for film and video of EUR 1.500 State Capital Stuttgart Awards for New Media These awards of EUR 4.000 go to an independently produced work on CD-ROM/DVD-ROM or to a project published on the internet/www. Milla & Partner Award Award for media in space (installations) of EUR 2.500 DASDING-Audience Award Audience award for film/video and internet of respectively EUR 1.000 as well as further prizes and the popular honourable mention by Wand 5 Besides the competitions for film/video and new media a wide range of special programmes, panels, presentations and music events will be offered. Further information: Wand 5 e.V./Filmhaus Friedrichstr. 23 A D - 70174 Stuttgart Germany Tel: +49-711-226 91 60 Fax: +49-711-226 91 61 Mail: wanda at wand5.de http://www.filmwinter.de http://www.wand5.de From vidyashah at hotmail.com Wed Aug 13 22:23:42 2003 From: vidyashah at hotmail.com (vidya shah) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 16:53:42 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Invitation to a felicitation Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030813/cf378211/attachment.html From aiindex at mnet.fr Thu Aug 14 02:31:50 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 22:01:50 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Awkward Scissorhands Message-ID: The Hindustan Times Thursday, August 14, 2003 Awkward Scissorhands Ruchir Joshi Imagine if every item in this newspaper, whether report, opinion, photograph or cartoon, were to be preceded by a stamp, 'This piece of writing/image has been approved for publication by the Board of Newspaper Censors'. Imagine if these censors thought they had the right to excise actual quotes from public figures, say, something the prime minister has said publicly because they didn't like the way the quotes were used in a story. Assume, also, that this 'Board' had several unwritten, internal guidelines such as: no item shall discuss defence issues, religious bigotry or damage to the environment; no item shall identify any politician by name; corruption and other misdemeanours by public figures and important businessmen are not fit subjects for printed journalism. Extremely fanciful? In the case of the print media, perhaps, but in the case of documentary film-making in this country, this happens to be the absurd reality. Sometimes the shifting of a small pebble can trigger off a huge landslide. In this case, the pebble comes in the shape of a tiny change in the application form for the Mumbai International Film Festival 2004. Unlike the previous MIFF festivals, the government organisers have now asked that all Indian entries be accompanied by a censor's certificate. Unsurprisingly, this is not required of the foreign entries. Where, someone could ask, is the problem? If Mera Dil Dhak Dhak Dhadke from Bombay and Assassinator 16 from Hollywood need censor certificates before public showings then why should an Indian documentary be exempt? The problem occurs on two levels. First, there is the question of whether film festivals should exclude any film on the grounds that it hasn't received a censor certificate. Second, there is the larger issue of film censorship in general. Taking the first one first, traditionally, film festivals in this country have been pretty flexible about Indian entries not having censor certificates, especially in the case of documentaries. The idea having been that clear access to a director's ideas was more important than bureaucratic procedure. Where the certificate has mattered is in competitive fiction festivals, as proof of a feature film's completion date. But in non-competition screenings, (besides the classic, uncensored, foreign sex sequences that cause riots outside theatres), there are many examples of the latest offering by some maestro or other being finished and the first OK print being rushed straight from the lab to the projection room in time to open or star at a festival. So why has the MIFF suddenly changed its rules? One obvious answer is that the number of 'political' documentaries being made has grown exponentially over the last decade. Each new atrocity has spurred documentary work, as should happen. Now, after the Babri masjid, Narmada, Pokhran II and the Gujarat killings, there is a whole body of fresh films which directly expose and challenge the powers that be. These range from Sanjay Kak's film on the Narmada Andolan, Words on Water, Amar Kanwar's searing Night of Prophecy and Anand Patwardhan's War and Peace on the issue of India's nuclearisation. Patwardhan is from Mumbai and he has recently won an epic battle with the Censor Board against the cuts the board demanded for War and Peace (at least one cut being a clip of Vajpayee speaking, taken from a television broadcast!). The judgment of the Bombay High Court handed down is potentially a landmark one, one that means that film-makers now have a robust precedent to back them against government-appointed censors eager to carry out the muzzling on behalf of their masters. Does this defeat mean that the censorwallas give up their project? Not in the least. They know that not every film-maker will have Patwardhan's tenacity or international stature. The more obstacles they put up the harder it gets for a film-maker, especially someone less established, to show their work. Wherefore, one suspects, this new rule in the MIFF form - before an informed international audience is allowed to see an Indian film, it will have to pass through the small-eyed filter of a censor committee growing like a fungus out of the legislative cesspool of the last century. Why bring up the last century? Because the whole censorship apparatus is based on the Indian Cinematograph Act of 1952 which is about as relevant today as the law that forced a man with a red flag to walk in front of the first motor cars. While this cannot be the place to discuss the offensively obsolete film certification system as a whole, it certainly seems to be the moment to state the glaringly obvious: it is time to remove the yolk of censorship from non-fiction films. Just as print and TV have the leeway to exercise self-control, so should documentary film have the right to self-govern. If there are fears that people will 'misuse' (that favourite word of conservatives on both the Right and the Left) this 'freedom', then laws pertaining to incitement to violence can be strengthened. If this is done and enforced, you will soon find the many communalist rags - the ones that spout their hatred unfettered by any legislation - in trouble far quicker than any documentary. In any case, the pebble loosened by the organisers at MIFF suddenly threatens a full-scale rockfall. Within the last few days, I have witnessed a massive proliferation of e-mails from independent film-makers from all over India. Different kinds of documentarists, with diverse styles and differing politics, including some who could previously barely bring themselves to speak to each other, are all suddenly, vociferously, united in opposition to the censor certificate clause. Discussion of boycotts and other action has now moved from mere talk to a far more serious level. The replying sneer sits up in large neon: what would happen if all 321 (just a random number here) independent documentary film-makers in India go on strike? Well, it wouldn't have anywhere near the effect of, say, certain 11 cricketers downing tools, nor, say, the top 30 film-stars from Mumbai and Madras walking off the sets at the same time, nor that of a strike by hospital nurses or postal workers. But, on the other hand, we have here a government with its hench-committees trying to police moving pictures in a time of video-downstreaming, in a time where there are VCRs in every nook and cranny of the country, where broadcast-quality filming can be done with a palm-sized camera, editing take place on a laptop, and where copying VHS tapes and DVDs is easier than contracting malaria. While not wanting to see any unseemly confrontation, there is a part of me that says: just you try it. Go ahead. It will only sharpen people's resolve, their energies and their resourcefulness. Given the dreadful challenges that we face today, it may sound hopelessly marginal to be talking about documentary film-making and censorship certificates. But the fact is the issue is tightly entwined with the main problems that confront us: competing versions of 'truth' and of 'history'; different notions of justice, human rights and the right to free expression; how this society digests new technology, including, centrally, technology that has to do with news and moving images that carry information and opinion. In order to reach a truly free currency of ideas and images we need to throw out a lot of the old rubbish that entraps us. I come from a childhood where films began with a dirty, endlessly unmoving, censor's certificate and ended with the national anthem playing over a tricolour fluttering as if it was on speed. We've got rid of the flag. Now it's time to divest ourselves of that nonsense in front. From abh1232 at netscape.net Thu Aug 14 12:03:04 2003 From: abh1232 at netscape.net (Abhijit Bhattacharya) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 12:03:04 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] The new website of teh Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Message-ID: <3F3B2D20.5090801@netscape.net> Dear Colleagues at SARAI.net, This is to keep you updated that the website of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta has been changed to http://www.cssscal.org Your comments and suggestions about the content and design of the site is highly solicited. Also as part of ongoing effort of building South Asia Research Network and dissemination of information I think it would be beneficial if the institutional members of the sarai.net suggest a link of the site to their relevant webpage. We are also keen to incorporate such links of South Asia Research Activities within institutional frame work from our site... so please send your site information and permission of incorporation of the link at the Centre's site. Regards, abhijit Abhijit Bhattacharya Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta R-1, Baishnabghata-Patuli Township Calcutta 700094 INDIA Tel# +91 (33) 2462-7252/5794/5795 Fax# +91 (33) 2462-6183 E-mails: abh1232 at netscape.net; abhijit at cssscal.org URL: http://www.cssscal.org From nyvoices at indypress.org Thu Aug 14 03:23:25 2003 From: nyvoices at indypress.org (Rehan Ansari) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 17:53:25 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Voices 78: 14 August 2003 Message-ID: <009401c361e5$9ed35180$6501a8c0@herman> This Week's Voices That Must Be Heard By IPA-New York, a sponsored project of the Independent Press Association Edition 78: 14 August 2003. NEWS ITEMS: Will a bubble burst in Bronx real estate? by Jordan Moss, Norwood News, 27 August 2003. English language. On June 25, the University Neighborhood Housing Program in North Fordham, celebrated its 20th anniversary in helping community groups purchase residential apartment buildings. But the mood wasn't all celebratory, as the nonprofit took the occasion to issue a warning about a serious vulnerability in the borough's housing market. MORE. Open a road for Chinatown's economy: Residents protest Park Row's closure since Sept. 11 by Wing-hong Yip, China Press, 1 August 2003. Translated from Chinese by Connie Kong. The aftermath of September 11 forced the city to close many streets in Chinatown. Since then, all but one street-which links Chinatown to City Hall-have reopened. Now, a group of residents are fighting to have this street, which is vital to Chinatown's fragile economy, reopened. MORE. I refuse to be a mouthpiece for anti-Pakistani dialogue, India Weekly - USA, 10 August 2003. English language. Indian filmmakers have produced dozens of war and terrorism films in which Pakistan is always the enemy. But in an uncharacteristically aggressive move, one of the biggest Bollywood stars has taken a stance against this practice. "I told Sharma to clean out the anti-Pakistani dialogues or else I'd quit," he said. MORE. Squatting in a basement: Population boom in the '90s led to an explosion in illegal rentals, Nowy Dziennik / Polish Daily News, 7 August 2003. Translated from Polish by Ania Milewska. From subhajitc at rediffmail.com Thu Aug 14 16:10:24 2003 From: subhajitc at rediffmail.com (Subhajit Chatterjee) Date: 14 Aug 2003 10:40:24 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Independent Research Posting 5 Message-ID: <20030814104024.4425.qmail@webmail9.rediffmail.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030814/c3f223ce/attachment.pl From subhajitc at rediffmail.com Thu Aug 14 16:20:12 2003 From: subhajitc at rediffmail.com (Subhajit Chatterjee) Date: 14 Aug 2003 10:50:12 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Sarai Independent posting 6 Message-ID: <20030814105012.15607.qmail@webmail9.rediffmail.com> . Sarai posting 6 I argue that space in so far as it comprises a part of everyday urban life is essentially contested and that one should look beyond political or ideological biases that come to play a huge role in community or identity politics. Urban space is produces a symbolic anxiety in the middle class who are battling to settle down precisely because it lacks a social regimentation that is characteristic of towns or villages, I'm not claiming for any innocence or superiority of those spaces for they too are politicized in their own ways , I'm rather pointing to the underlying dynamics in the psychic life of a historical community that is perhaps still attempting to come to terms with the city as a contested area. Here their toil in everyday official life to approximate the upwardly mobile and gain material and social legitimacy parallels their attempt to claim public spaces. In other words it's not only about certain empirical communities and their rights but rather about a symbolic requirement to coherence and identity that leads to persecute one or the other of minority as an obstacle to their enjoyment. Here I intentionally sound Lacanian or Zizekian because I think identity politics and its discursive domain fails to catch the ideological problem at stake. To defend myself against possible objections from progressive activists I must also say that this statement is not to criticize any such politics for all such movements have intense relevance of urban history. But I would like to maintain that when such political discourses disguise themselves as theoretical explanations they might not always do justice to the more deeper problem. I shall conclude with a short journey into a film and a literary text from Bengal which serve to exemplify my point further. It has often been suggested in studies in Bengali Cinema that the city came forefront in a major way on the screen due to the Naxalite outbursts in late sixties and early seventies. There have been vivid discussions about a range of films which anticipates the urban violence in late 60's and attempts to deal with the social unrest that generally prevailed in Kolkata and beyond at that time. In fact that particular period in Indian film history is also significant due to the open contest between realism and other sorts of avant-garde over articulating a film form that was more sensitive to the urban postcolonial sensibility. One can argue that the city or urban space with it's innumerable concrete struggles became a privileged domain over which the formal issues were played upon. One can take examples of Satyajit Ray's and Mrinal Sen's city films as two alternative political strategies of approaching the subject. There could be innumerable ways of describing their specific ways of representing the city along with the presumption that urban space has become entwined with danger, darkness and gloom due to concrete socio-historical conditions of unrest. If we then go on to make a structural divide between political realism in cinema and melodrama as condition that privileges the home, family, and internality as opposed to the external, public and political. Much has already been said about the political aspects of the melodramatic form and it is not my intention to to reargue the case. I would like to argue that the explosion of explicit and symbolic violence that is attributed to later films have a deeper history and can be traced back in films which do not ostensibly deal with such issues. Tapan Sinha's Jatugriha (1964) is hardly a film that can be read as having any bearing upon city-cinema that came later. Still if one looks closely it is nothing but the most classical and sophisticated representation of the symbolic theme of the city. It can articulate the difference between an explicit politics of urban space and a deeper anxiety underlying all such specific manifestations that I was formulating in the earlier paragraph. The film is primarily the narrative of a broken family, a melodramatic narrative tracing the history of a marriage that has broken off. But seen in that senses the film however fails to give us a convincing account of the breakup itself. Not only is the reason of infertility of the wife a seemingly problematic issue in the otherwise harmonic relationship between the modern couple. Moreover the narrative does not try to develop the history of their advancing excommunication with each other. On the other hand paralelly the film while underplaying the psychological aspect develops more symbolic ways of representing it's theme of settling down in the city. The fascinating opening sequence itself is telling because the parallelism between the architect and the junior clerk's point of view of the city establishes the broader theme of familiarization process with the cuty itself. A psychological reading of the film will presumably fail to account for such an elaborately obscure opening sequence when the focus is only Satadal's family history. In fact one can argue that it's not about psychological estrangement within a family but rather about more structural estrangement with the City itself. That is is precisely why the fim proliferates and reduplicates the theme of the couple and their different ways of attempting be in the city. It is about a certain painful history of 'becoming a citizen' and therfore obliquely hints at the issue of displacement, which haunts any such 'process of becoming'. There is a intermingling of 3 distinct units : Satadal and Madhuri's seemingly polished, respectable domesticity which is withering away from inside, Nikhilesh's crude , quarrelsome domesticity apparently on the verge of breakdown but tied more intimately by the couple's perverse attachment to their mutual irritation with each other; and Supriyo's humble, sweet small domesticity; small house in a small lane ( 'where cars cannot enter'), that tries to be in tune with the process of upward mobility What unites and separate the 3 couples are their common struggle to be together as legal and social unit. It is not an accident that the main protagonist is an architect here whose mind is systematically preoccupied with construction,, reconstruction of buildings. What is lacking is a the construction of a proper historical narrative that can situate his identity as a citizen subject. There is a sarcastic interplay here between the terms 'bari banano'( building a house) and 'ghar bosano' (settling in a home). In Bengali the terms 'bari' and ghar (house and home) are often interchangeably used although the latter term is more loaded with symbolic meanings associated with the constitution of legitimate family as a social unit. Satadal's failure in setting up a home is paralleled by his obsessive attempts to build and rebuild houses. In fact the finished dream home of the couple happen to be a trope in the film. The two terms are further linked in a flashback sequence where the wife exclaims " I never expected that I'll meet u one day , that we'll have a house in Kolkata." The amorous meeting is almost unconsciously related to the issue of landed property and here there is a connotation of the concept of 'home' as well in the dialogue thereby revealing a telling desire of the middle class. It is clear enough that the wife and probably also the husband have been displaced from moffussil towns in Bengal but this displacement is intimately connected to a discourse of upward mobility and identity formation that is more complex than the old 'city/ village ' trope in feudal family melodrama. Here belonging to a city is a struggle to remain psychologically intact and hence brings forth the issue of identification and identify. These thematic problems are not only locatable at the level of narrative content but also figure majorly in the formal, stylistic aspect as well. The lack of proper psychological coherence at the narrative level is compensated by the narratorial process through mis-en-scene. The classical depiction is in the sequence where Satadal comes to his empty house at the beginning and is engaged in deep thought in the darkness. What highlights his anxiety at a formal level is the heavy light and shadow play on his silhouette which emanates from the outside lights. The whole atmosphere is permeated by the neon signs and groovy music from the nearby bars or restaurants presumably in Park Street , Kolkata's quintessentially urban centre. These signifiers of disruption are almost always visible in the sequences where the major oral exhanges take place between the couple. The city literally haunts their space; leading to a final collapse of their domesticity. Hence the rather unexplainable ritual of opening and closing of windows that punctuates certain sequences also becomes more comprehensible whn read in this manner . In a certain way Jatugriha anticipates and thus locates the anxiety which historically manifests itself in particular movements and specific concerns. Toget a more explicit and clear picture however Sunil Ganguly's short story 'Kokil o Lorrywallah ( The Cuckoo and a Lorry Driver) is more helpful. It's a sarcastic and absurd narrative of a protagonist who accidentally gets his shirt sleeve torn by a hook hanging from a lorry in Central Kolkata ,on his way to work. The narrative is wholly constituted of an interior monologue of the protagonist who while comprehending the contingency of his situation actually absorbs the the absurdity to the core of his being causing in performance of a radical act of tearing off all symbolic identifications including clothes and lying naked in the midst of the busiest part of the city at Curzon Park. The narrative starts off with attempts to ascribe contingencies and thereby the drudgery of everyday urban life to various agencies. The lorry driver cuckoo who distracted his attention leading to the mishap being the first couple of accused. : " Two minutes of standing holding Curzon Park's railing. There is a mild vapour of hurt feelings in my heart. But offended by whom? Lorry wallah? Who does not know me. Can there be any relation of offence with one whom I don't know and who does not know me?" Gradually as he accidentally and then intentionally starts tearing off bits and parts of his shirt the monologue lapses into a discourse on the city and his relationship to it. : " I have lots of work, I 'm supposed to go to a lot of places. That person who, ten years ago , could idly stand by the railing of Curzon Park as along as he wished , is not me. He was with torn shirt, unsahven face , anywhere , anytime he wished. The world had changed him." Then he resorts to judge his social situation and the logic of his own functioning within the social machinary: "I have lots of work, I 'm supposed to go to a lot of places. I have my own woman, I have friends and relatives. Specific space of adda , a specific family in a specif house. Apart from this I have unbounded dissatisfaction. Lust." later he continues : " first to the film company office , then to the newspaper house, then to attend the regular invitation at German Consulate. There is a rat race and I'm intricately involved in that." The invocations of the process of belonging and its history comes when he refers to his own logical status in historical terms : " Perhaps people without sleeved shirts are more happy/comfortable than people with formal, sleeved ones. My grandfather used to wear. There is no reason to doubt that he was more happy than my father was." What he's invoking are the very codes that constitutes 'settling down in an urban space as a citizen. In a while he exclaims to himself : " You cannot even tear your own shirt as you wish standing on a road. You cannot burn away all of a box of matchsticks one after the other just like that, standing on a road. You cannot stand alone and laugh to yourself. You can at the most kneel down to tie up your shoelace . These are rules of the road." He has now identified the cause that constitutes his irritation, the city itself with its various codes and claims that he does not identify with thoroughly. The final performance is therefore directed at the city itself . It's not merely an action or performance but a sort of 'act' in a Lacanian sense , that which radically destabilizes our relation to the Symbolic Order. He attempts to do something almost impossible, to approximate that which excludes itself from the Order and thereby constitutes it. and renders it coherent. : " Now it's my turn. In the middle of this busiest area of this busy town one person has to necessarily lie down without any sort of worry. Otherwise there will be a grave problem. Suddenlly in with a monstrous sound everything could just explode." What is revealed is a history that lied dormant under many manifestations of unrest in urban life. " I will lie here. I am a seven lakh year old man, in this way I used to lie down in some field. Under trees and sky . Surrounding me has come up so many walls made of wood and bricks, so many tram l tracks, so many cars and trucks , hooks hanging behind them. So many clothes to hide my lust and desire. I have become free and independent today." He has now become the primeval incomprehensible 'Thing' , for only in that guise could he have responded to the city as such. No wonder the protagonist has other means to describe the act other than calling it as akin to being psychotic : " To be more free and independent I opened my belt , trousers , underwear and poked them away with my feet. If anyone sees me they'll think I'm some stray madman. No one comes near mad man. Seven lakh years ago we were after all mad." This is the moment when the subject abstains from specific struggles that characterize urban life to and speaks back to the city itself on contrary. To be in a dialogical with that which constitutes your being and identity is of course a difficult task, only a pure act of Theory, or the final gesture of psychoanalysis can approximate it. The Lacanian reading of Freud's fundamental dictum " where id was , ego shall be". These are rare narrative moments when the narratorial agency attempts to confront the very problematic of the narratorial act itself instead of pondering over the proper form of narration. It is with the same logic way that the problem of Urbanity has to be dealt with to understand the varieties of political manifestations that it produces. References Kokil o Lorrywallah (Cuckoo and Lorry Driver) by Sunil Gangopadhyay in Swati Gangopadhyay (ed.) Bachai Golpo, Mandal Book House, Kolkata 2000. Jatugrhiha (Tapan Sinha,1964) ___________________________________________________ Meet your old school or college friends from 1 Million + database... Click here to reunite www.batchmates.com/rediff.asp From diya at sarai.net Thu Aug 14 13:23:51 2003 From: diya at sarai.net (diya) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 13:23:51 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Fwd: An Invitation to the Seminar Series on World Social Forum at University of Delhi Message-ID: <200308141323.51765.diya@sarai.net> August 12 2003 Are Other Worlds Possible ? Cultures of Politics and the World Social Forum Dear friends We are very pleased to invite you to THE OPEN SPACE Seminar Series on the above theme, at the University of Delhi, starting this coming August 19 and continuing through more or less every ten days till December. The World Social Forum, initiated in Brazil in January 2001 as a challenge to the World Economic Forum, is now widely seen as being a highly significant initiative towards democratising economics and politics on a world scale. The motto the WSF has coined for itself is, 'Another World Is Possible'. The next world meeting of the Forum-protest, celebration, the positing of alternative ways of living and being-is scheduled to be held in Mumbai between January 16-21, 2004. The Forum is as yet hardly known in India, especially the interesting culture of politics it promises to offer, the culture of 'open space'. THE OPEN SPACE SERIES is being organised in two inter-weaving streams, one 'Exploring the Forum and its politics' and the other 'Confronting Empires : The World Social Forum'. The first stream, alternating with the second will attempt to explore the relationship of the Forum with the Empires that attempt to bind us, the Empires that the Forum has decided to confront, while grappling simultaneously with the evolving culture of politics and the 'other worlds' that the WSF promises to offer. The second stream will deal with the structural issues the WSF has been concerned with-economic globalisation and militarisation and war-as also with new themes that are being added to this vocabulary-religious fundamentalism and communalism, caste, race and patriarchy. This SERIES is being organised by The History Society Ramjas College. The effort will be to hold each seminar in the series in different colleges of Delhi University and begin each discussion around 12 noon. Plays, music, book displays and poetry may be woven into the 'Open Space' once the 'Series' is on the roll. A reader on the issues concerning the Forum is planned and towards the end a booklet may emerge. Lets see. We give below the proposed programme for the series. The dates are fixed, the locations for the first two seminars are now finalised, and the list of panellists for all the sessions is being finalised. We hope you will definitely make it a point to join us. Please feel free to circulate this message widely and to encourage your associates and friends to also come. With warm greetings in welcome, Mukul Mangalik Jai Sen Madhuresh Kumar For further information on the World Social Forum: World Social Forum http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/home.asp World Social Forum India www.wsfindia.org WSF India Secretariat wsfindia at vsnl.net European Social Forum (Paris, November 12-16 2003) www.fse-esf.org _____________________________________________________________________________ OPEN SPACE SERIES : PROPOSED SCHEDULE August 19, Tuesday : Cultures of Politics : The Idea of the World Social Forum Venue : Seminar Room, Ramjas College, University of Delhi (North Campus), Delhi 110 007 panellists : Veena Das, Professor, University of Delhi and The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA Nivedita Menon, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi Jai Sen, independent researcher and civil actor, New Delhi August 29, Friday : Empire 1 : Globalisation - Questions of Capital, Labour, and Sustainability Venue : Seminar Room, Ramjas College, University of Delhi (North Campus), Delhi 110 007 Expected panellists : Praful Bidwai, journalist and commentator, New Delhi Jean Drèze, Delhi School of Economics Jayati Ghosh, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University Mahesh Rangarajan, Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru Museum and Library September 9, Tuesday : The WSF and Old vs New Politics : Parties, social movements, and civil groups September 19, Friday : Empire 2 : Authoritarianism, Militarisation, & Nuclearisation : Questions of War, Peace, and Terror September 26 or 30, Friday/Tuesday : Contested Space ? The Forum as Space, the Forum as Movement [DUSSEHRA BREAK] October 21, Tuesday : Empire 3 : Caste and Race : Questions of Identity and Exclusion October 31, Friday : The Politics of Boundary : The Question of the WSF and (Non)Violence November 11, Tuesday : Empire 4 : Fundamentalism, Communalism, and Nationalism November 25, Tuesday : The WSF and New Internationalisms : The Culture and politics of Cyberspace December 2, Tuesday : Empire 5 : Patriarchy, Sexuality, and Questions of Openness December 12, Friday : How Open ? Is Socialism the Only Possible Other World ? December 19, Friday : Cultures of Politics : The University as Open Space ------------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/defanged-1236 Size: 26398 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030814/cbe9513e/attachment.bin From raviv at sarai.net Thu Aug 14 07:30:09 2003 From: raviv at sarai.net (Ravi Vasudevan) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 07:30:09 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Fwd: Academic posts in NZ Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20030814072750.00acba40@mail.sarai.net> >From: Sean Cubitt >Department of Screen and Media Studies >Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences > >CRITICISM AND CREATIVITY IN 21ST CENTURY MEDIA > >To account for staff changes and continuing growth in Screen and Media >Studies, the Department seeks three innovative teacher-researchers to join >a dynamic and growing team. Successful applicants will be expected to >contribute to the range of the department's undergraduate and graduate >teaching. We are especially interested in candidates with expertise in >one or more of the following fields: digital media (including games and >mobile telecoms), Aotearoa New Zealand and indigenous media, mass >communication perspectives, globalisation, audience and reception studies, >creative industries, media theory, media education and children's >media. An ability to contribute to teaching video and digital skills >would be an advantage. > >230355 ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR >A PhD in a relevant discipline and equivalent accreditation and >professional standing will be required as will an international research >reputation and the proven ability to attract research >funding. Demonstrated success in attracting external research funding and >in completing grant applications is preferred. >230356 SENIOR LECTURER (Fixed-term for 3 years) >A PhD or masters qualification in a relevant discipline area and/or >equivalent accreditation and professional standing is >required. Demonstrated success in attracting external research funding >and in completing grant applications is preferred. >230357 LECTURER >Preferably you will have a Masters degree or PhD qualification in a >relevant discipline area and/or equivalent accreditation and professional >standing although an appointment may be made subject to completion of a >Masters/Doctoral degree within a period of probation or other defined time >frame. > >Further information regarding the University is available at >http://www.waikato.ac.nz and additional information about the Deparment at >http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film Enquiries of an academic nature may be >directed to Professor Sean Cubitt, email seanc at waikato.ac.nz > >Applications for all positions close on Monday, 1 September 2003. >-- >Sean Cubitt * Screen and Media Studies * University of Waikato * Private >Bag 3105 * Hamilton * New Zealand * seanc at waikato.ac.nz * T: +64 (0)7 838 >4543 * F: +64 (0)7 838 4767 > >http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030814/279b8ea3/attachment.html From aiindex at mnet.fr Sat Aug 16 04:53:01 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2003 00:23:01 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] US Power black out | Heat wave in France and Nuclear grid stories Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030816/545bcf9f/attachment.html From majlis at vsnl.com Thu Aug 14 17:25:24 2003 From: majlis at vsnl.com (majlis) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 17:25:24 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Announcing a video archive Message-ID: <01ef01c3625a$f3e42620$3cc1c0cb@comp5> The Cultural Centre, of Majlis, Bombay, announces the beginnings of Godaam- a video archive of 'political' footage, and a viewing library where the images that surround us and seek to make our politics, can be interrogated, and contextualised. We are beginning with collections of footage around these themes- 1.Kashmir- looking at the mainstream images ( often news) that are often the source of our ideas of Kashmir. We are also collecting other material- alternative representations, and also amateur videos, and institutional footage shot by people who have lived or are still living there, holiday footage, government of militant propaganda footage... What could add to layering our understanding of the situation there and to suggest to us, what the everyday of people who are living with that situation might be like. 2.Mapping Bombay starting with- -Mapping the 1992 as a defining moment in the city's history. How were they represented, as news, as fiction film, as alternative documentary? What led to the riots, how has it remade peoples' lives since? What of these aspects is recorded, as memory, as Sena propaganda, as documentary film, as police propaganda? -Mapping the mill area, once the nerve centre of this metropolis. How has the story of its decline and takeover by commercial establishments been recorded as image? How has the struggle of the workers been preserved as visual or audio memory? How might the 'other side'- the owners, the government, the new establishments that have taken over, have represented the same area. We also plan to start a film club showing films from the world over which have sought to remake existing images- to make propaganda footage from Nazi Germany reveal the truths of its times, or home videos from Russia speak up for the conditions the people were living with. We hope to get the library started by October. Meanwhile, we hope to hear from you at Majlis.com Suggestions, critiques, criticisms,and very importantly, leads to locate footage, or films you think could be relevant Hoping to hear from you, Hansa On behalf of Godaam, Majlis -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030814/3ff067bb/attachment.html From prav_goa at sancharnet.in Sun Aug 17 17:28:04 2003 From: prav_goa at sancharnet.in (prav) Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2003 17:28:04 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fw: Images of Asia 2003 Message-ID: <002501c364b6$dc1fc180$c849013d@prava> ----- Original Message ----- From: Shahjahan Siraj To: Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2003 1:41 PM Subject: Images of Asia 2003 Images of Asia 2003 http://www.images.org More than 450 Asian artists and intellectuals will participate in some 600 different events in eight Danish cities. The Images of Asia festival of arts and culture takes place 8 August - 26 September 2003 in Copenhagen, Århus, Odense, Randers, Skive, Vordingborg, Roskilde, Esbjerg, the County of Ribe, and a number of other cities in Denmark. The festival's aim is to nuance the Danish conceptions of contemporary Asia and to strengthen collaboration between Denmark and Asia. Danish Center for Culture and Development (DCCD) has the overall responsibility for the nationwide Images of Asia festival. It is organized and produced in broad partnership between governmental bodies, NGOs, cultural and educational institutions, associations, municipalities, counties, media, and individuals in Denmark and internationally. _______________ Shahjahan Siraj Team Leader, Drik - Multimedia Online editor, Banglarights.net House 58, Road 15A (New) Dhanmondi R/A, Dhaka 1209, Bangladesh Tel: (880-2) 9120125, 8123412, 8112954, Office Fax: (880-2) 9115044 http://www.drik.net http://www.banglarights.net http://www.chobimela.org ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for Your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark Printer at Myinks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US & Canada. http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511 http://us.click.yahoo.com/l.m7sD/LIdGAA/qnsNAA/1dTolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Post message: unnayan-news at yahoogroups.com Subscribe: unnayan-news-subscribe at yahoogroups.com Initiator's URL : http://www.drik.net/siraj Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From ohm at zedat.fu-berlin.de Mon Aug 18 20:04:42 2003 From: ohm at zedat.fu-berlin.de (Britta Ohm) Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 15:34:42 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] FW: [EUROGRAD] IAS-STS: fellowship programme 2004-2005 Message-ID: Von: Ragna Zeiss An: EUROGRAD at LISTS.UTWENTE.NL Betreff: [EUROGRAD] IAS-STS: fellowship programme 2004-2005 Datum: Mit, 13. Aug 2003 12:19 Uhr INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES on Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS), Graz - Austria Appologies for crossposting! We ask you to forward this information to persons, who could be interested! Dear Madam or Sir, we would like to announce the FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMME 2004/2005 (deadline for applications: 15 January 2004) The Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS) offers five grants (EUR 1,000.- per month) for fellowships at the IAS- STS in Graz starting 1 October 2004, ending 30 June 2005. The IAS-STS promotes the interdisciplinary investigation of the links and interactions between science, technology and society as well as research on the development and implementation of socially and environmentally sound technologies. The IAS-STS provides the necessary research infrastructure, while a number of guest lecturers and workshops foster an atmosphere of creativity and scholarly discussion. The grants of the fellowship programme 2004/2005 are dedicated to projects investigating the following issues: 1. Gender - Technology - Environment Women with their various interests, competencies and potentials play important parts in the process of shaping socially sound and environmentally friendly, sustainable technologies - be it as users and consumers, or as experts. Applications should focus on research in the field of women in traditionally male fields of engineering, on ways of creating cultures of success for women engineers (students, graduates), and on masculinity and the culture of engineering. 2. Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of Genome Research and Biotechnology A main focus of the grant scheme lies on the analysis of ethical, legal and social aspects of genome research. Research projects are expected to provide a better understanding of life sciences in concrete socio-cultural contexts of their fabrication, application and regulation. Researchers investigating risk issues are especially encouraged to apply. 3. Technology Studies and Sustainability Grants will be awarded for research projects contributing to the issue of sustainable development from the perspective of social studies or the history of science and technology. Projects should aim at socio- economic aspects of environmental technologies or at strategies of environmental technology policy, such as user participation, strategic niche management or ecological product policy. We encourage both theoretical analysis and practically oriented case studies. The grant application must be submitted together with an application for a fellowship to the IAS-STS. Prof. Arno Bamme, Director of the IAS-STS, decides on the awarding of fellowships and grants in consultation with the Scientific Advisory Board. Please note that it is also possible to apply for a fellowship without a grant or to apply for a short- term fellowship without grant (not longer than one month: Visiting Fellows). We also encourage senior scientists to apply as guest lecturers. Closing date for applications is 15 January 2004. For application forms and further information: Please visit our website: www.sts.tu-graz.ac.at Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS) Attn. Guenter Getzinger Kopernikusgasse 9 A-8010 Graz - Austria E-mail: info at sts.tu-graz.ac.at **************************************************** Harald Rohracher - IFF/IFZ Interuniversitaeres Forschungszentrum fuer Technik, Arbeit und Kultur Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture Schloegelgasse 2, A-8010 Graz, AUSTRIA Tel: +43(0)316/813909-24, Fax: +43(0)316/810274 E-mail: rohracher at ifz.tu-graz.ac.at, http://www.ifz.tu-graz.ac.at/ **************************************************** From aiindex at mnet.fr Tue Aug 19 05:40:36 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 01:10:36 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Bhupen Khakhar, 69, Painter, Dies; Influenced a Generation in India Message-ID: The New York Times August 18, 2003 Obituaries Bhupen Khakhar, 69, Painter, Dies; Influenced a Generation in India By HOLLAND COTTER Bhupen Khakhar, a painter of social and personal narratives who was one of the most influential artists of his generation in India, died on Aug. 8 in Baroda, India. He was 69. The cause was prostate cancer, said a spokesman at Bose Pacia Modern, a Manhattan gallery that has shown his work. Mr. Khakhar studied accounting and explored art in his spare time. After meeting the painter Gulammohammed Sheikh in 1958, he decided to attend art school in Baroda, where he joined a circle of contemporaries who were shaping a new Indian art, among them Mr. Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Nalina Malani, Vivan Sundaran and the critic Geeta Kapur. In 1962 Mr. Khakhar was introduced to Pop Art. It, as well as the work of Henri Rousseau, David Hockney and early Italian Renaissance painting, had a lasting effect on him, as did earlier Indian modernism, Rajput miniature painting, popular religious art and his own observation of urban street life. Largely self-taught, Mr. Khakhar developed a cleanly executed, richly colored style in oil, watercolor and gouache. His focus on narratives, which combined daily life and fantasy, stood in contrast to the abstraction and expressive figuration that prevailed among progressive artists of an older generation. He set himself further apart from the earlier generation in the 1980's when he made his homosexuality a chief subject of his art. This move, which was particularly audacious in a conservative South Asian context, coincided with the rise of identity politics as a defining feature of a multicultural art world. His work began to be included in big international exhibitions. In 1986 he had a solo show at the Pompidou Center in Paris. A career retrospective was organized by the Reina Sofía National Art Center in Madrid last summer and traveled to Britain. Mr. Khakhar, who published short stories and a play, was the subject of a book by the British artist Timothy Hyman and a film by Judy Marle. Among his friends he was known for his self-deprecating attitude toward his art. He had so little confidence in its value that he maintained a full-time job as an accountant until he was well into his 50's. His companion, Vallarbhai Shah, died on July 30. Mr. Khakhar has no immediate survivors. From fred at bytesforall.org Tue Aug 19 15:40:30 2003 From: fred at bytesforall.org (Frederick Noronha (FN)) Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 15:40:30 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] UPDATE: Network of Women in Media, India (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Network of Women in Media, India NWMI newsletter August 19, 2003 Join us | Register | Contact us | www.nwmindia.org Status of Women in Media in Nepal "Rarely does the [Nepalese] media present women as contributors to the development process or as professionals in their own field. They are still predominantly portrayed as being victim, subservient, dependent, nurturing, selfless, sacrificing mother and wife or as a commodity." Bandana Rana reports on the status of women within Nepalese media institutions and on the portrayal of women onscreen. read the report Asha Krishnakumar of Frontline wins Kurt Schork award for her "thorough, compassionate and determined reporting" Amulya Gopalakrishnan of Frontline has received one of the three Prem Bhatia scholarships this year Madiba's EQ legacy-Mandela through a gender lens by Colleen Lowe Morna BBC's "The BBC News Styleguide". It is packed with practical suggestions on journalism style, reported speech and "how to avoid irritating your editor", among other aspects of journalism. It's free and ready to download. * New topic in the discussion forum: women and ageing in media * Soul search...situation 5 * Looking for story ideas? Check out the Bulletin board * NWMI coordinators, don't forget to post this newsletter on your list servs * Calling all media women... The website needs regular contributions to our various sections to keep the site vibrant and dynamic. News, experiences, articles, interviews, links, everything is welcome. Contributions can be sent to NWMI editor ******************************************************************** This newsletter is sent to those who have become members with the NWMI online, those who have registered with the website and opted to receive it or to those who have shown an interest in receiving it. ******************************************************************** If you want to receive this newsletter, subscribe to this mailing list. If you do not want to receive this newsletter, unsubscribe from this mailing list. Designed, developed and maintained by The Information Company Pvt Ltd. Best viewed in 800 x 600 resolution. Copyright � 2003 The Network of Women in Media, India From aiindex at mnet.fr Wed Aug 20 05:45:46 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 01:15:46 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Public service broadcasting in India: Which master's voice? Message-ID: The Indian Express August 20, 2003 Which master's voice? Prasar Bharati must serve us all, not just the government of the day B. G. Verghese Prasar Bharati celebrated a proud moment in its history earlier this month, the 60th anniversary of Broadcasting House in Delhi. Many referred to Gandhiji's inspiring words in praise of openness and pluralism inscribed over its portal and hoped for a new beginning of creativity, excellence, credibility and autonomy as the nation's public service broadcaster. Only days later, the axe fell. Without reference to the board that appointed him, or even Prasar Bharati's chairman or chief executive officer, or anything in writing, the government surreptitiously informed the director general of Doordarshan that he was being removed mid-term as he no longer enjoyed the confidence of the minister of information and broadcasting/ government. No reason was assigned nor any grounds cited even later in communications with the chairman and CEO. The action was arbitrary and mala fide and inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the Prasar Bharati Act. Whether the prime minister or deputy prime minister were previously or subsequently consulted is immaterial. The DG, an honourable, upright and competent official, enjoyed the confidence of the PB Board to whom he is responsible. He will now go as soon as formal orders are passed - which could well await the adjournment of Parliament so as to minimise the stink. Prasar Bharati has suffered a gratuitous body blow as a national public service institution for collateral reasons that may have more to do with ego or petty political or electoral gain through trying to ensure a pliant trumpet. Its credibility and autonomy - such as it is - will be grievously undermined both within the organisation and in the public eye. There is already no DG AIR and now there will be no DG DD. The CEO will be required to man all these posts as also that of director (personnel), whose selection has not been made for six years. Virtually all personnel and finances still remain under government control. Ex post facto justification may now be offered. This would be dishonest and is unlikely to convince anybody. It is a specious argument that the outgoing DG DD is an IAS officer on deputation who did not resign from his cadre and that his services are therefore at the disposal of the government. The PB rules framed by the government under the act stipulate that the two DGs, who are ex officio members of the board, shall be selected from among civil servants. Only in the event of no suitable incumbent being found may the board go outside that circle, with prior official permission. In this case, the outgoing DG DD was sounded out by the government and persuaded to give up a prestigious posting and offer his candidature on a three-year deputation. He did so, and was selected by the PB board from a large field of candidates. It cannot now be argued that he can be plucked out of his selected appointment capriciously, at the whim and fancy of his cadre controlling authority - and that too without grounds or for some larger, stated national purpose. The act vests the government with reserve powers to issue directions to Prasar Bharati in writing but only in the interests of sovereignty, public order, etc, none of which apply here. It has no innate power to transfer personnel. If it did so on earlier occasion, it was because each of these incumbents was appointed ad interim on an emergency basis because of the inability to make a statutory appointment through prescribed procedures. To plead that the DG and other PB employees are paid by the "government" and therefore remain government servants and subject to its will is frivolous. The salaries of all public (and civil) servants, including ministers and judges, are defrayed from the national exchequer through established parliamentary processes. Governance cannot be a matter of whim and fancy. We take pride in and must uphold the fact that ours is a government of laws and not of men. The issue raised by this episode is more institutional than individual. That focus must not be lost. Over and beyond that, it is the freedom of speech and expression of the common citizen that is at stake. This is not a proprietorial right that goes with any imagined official ownership of PB. The Supreme Court's airwaves judgement of 1995 spelt out the law in the broadcast domain and while private channels were permitted to go on air, AIR and DD were later brought together under PB as a public service broadcaster. PB is accountable to Parliament through its budget and annual report through the I&B Ministry. The Central government is only one part of the many diverse and plural "publics" that PB serves and cannot statutorily or morally seek to reduce PB to His Master's Voice. At the same time, Prasar Bharti needs to put its own house in order. Autonomy is not given as much as grasped. It has to get its priorities right in accordance with its charter as laid down in section 12 of the act. Its programming, including news and current affairs, must uphold plurality and diversity and air contrasting voices, certainly giving the government its due. It must devolve more autonomy on its regional and local kendras, emphasise local, community and instructional broadcasting as a means of grassroots articulation and empowerment of the voiceless and underprivileged. It has to cater to the citizen and not merely the consumer or those in power. The PB board is cast as a trustee of the freedom of speech and expression of the national collective and the conscience of public service broadcasting. It must build a close interface with its listeners and viewers including all levels of government - its many "publics". Such traditions are not established in a day. There have been the inevitable ups and downs. The latest government diktat marks a slide down a snake. But the game is not over and there are ladders to climb. Good sense and wisdom must be encouraged to prevail. The ideal of public service broadcasting in the Indian context is too valuable a prize to be abandoned to the whims of small men and the idiosyncrasies of the moment. But wake up to the challenge. It is your freedom that is at stake. Let none take it away. From abroeck at transmediale.de Wed Aug 20 18:41:08 2003 From: abroeck at transmediale.de (Andreas Broeckmann) Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 15:11:08 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] fwd: petiton demanding equal Flash rights for Right-To-Left languages Message-ID: Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 17:59:06 +0200 From: Mushon Zer-Aviv The Right to Flash - A petiton demanding equal Flash rights for Right-To-Left languages ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Right to Flash is the initiative of Amir Dotan (London, UK), Mushon Zer-Aviv (Tel-Aviv, Israel) and Naim Kamel (Ramallah, Palestine). It was launched in July 2003 in order to make sure the middle east, doesn't get left behind the development of the internet, believing it to be a powerful tool for overcoming differences and for new methods of communication. In the case of Flash both Palestinian users and Israeli users are united by the similarity of our languages, both unfortunately left behind by Macromedia's Flash MX technology. Exerpt from the petition: "...Macromedia Flash does not support Right-to-left languages. It is broken and needs to be fixed. It currently doesn't meet the standards we've come to expect from a company, which constantly expresses a commitment to show the world 'what the web can be'..." We believe The Right to Flash is universal and shouldn't be restricted by cultures or languages. We look forward to start speaking Flash in our own languages and to fully use its potential to make the web all that it can be. PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION ON: http://www.the-right-to-flash.com The Right to Flash A petiton demanding equal Flash rights for Right-To-Left languages Macromedia Flash does not support Right-to-left languages. It is broken and needs to be fixed. It currently doesn't meet the standards we've come to expect from a company, which constantly expresses a commitment to show the world 'what the web can be'. The following is a formal consumer's complaint addressed at Macromedia and the Macromedia Flash product manager. We, Flash users from the Middle East, were very disappointed to find that despite numerous complaints, Macromedia has failed to offer any support for RTL (Right To Left) languages and by doing so continue to exclude an entire community of developers from using its product successfully. While Flash MX revolutionizes the Web, the Middle East is left behind due to Flash's fundamental defects. The current state creates a reality where Flash is utilized mostly for design oriented projects and isn't being used to develop the sort of Rich applications Macromedia is rigorously promoting. It is not that we don't want to - we simply can't. Flash sites and applications which do make use of RTL require innovative programming solutions which are not cost effective and are time consuming to develop. The end result is never sufficient and can't offer a satisfactory solution, especially when large scale projects are involved. The fact of the matter is that Flash remains a costly technology which appears to be irrelevant in the Middle East and parts of Asia. We would like to change that. We are all deeply inspired by Macromedia's commitment to make the Web all that it can be and simply ask "Shouldn't we, as people who use RTL languages, have the right to use Flash in order to express our voice in our own language?". The solution we are after is quite simple. We expect Macromedia to declare its willingness and commitment to deal with the RTL problem and offer a workable solution. Such a solution will probably involve implementing the bidirectional algorithm into the Flash player, an algorithm which is implemented in numerous other computing environments. We call on everyone who feels that the Middle East, especially at times like these, is a part of what the Web should be to join our campaign and sign this petition. looking forward to your mail, (and your vote :)) Mushon. Mushon Zer-Aviv Digital Art Lab's In-lab designer <>www.mushon.com <>mushon at zeraviv.co.il Cell: 052-337637 Fax: 03-5580003 From geert at desk.nl Thu Aug 21 04:48:32 2003 From: geert at desk.nl (geert lovink) Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 09:18:32 +1000 Subject: [Reader-list] for those interested in attending wsis References: Message-ID: <02e001c3677d$e25d8ae0$1cbc6682@geert> Terms of Reference: CRIS/EED South Participation fund EED (The Church Development Service, Germany) has generously granted funds for the facilitation of participants to CRIS related activities. The CRIS campaign is glad to inform you that it will be able to sponsor active CRIS members and supporters to events that we feel are key to the campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society. Criteria: 1. support available is primarily for participation in CRIS campaign meetings, including working groups, the coordinating committee and regional events 2. the event which the beneficiary attends should be an important one for the development of CRIS, and the beneficiaries presence should contribute to this 3. beneficiaries should be from countries/organisations who could not afford to take part in CRIS meetings if such assistance was not available 4. beneficiaries should be (or become) active members of one or more CRIS working groups and should bring relevant expertise to the meeting Overall requirement: Please provide a short statement showing how your application fits within the above criteria together with a budget estimate. Additionally, specific activities and requirements will be asked of the grantee, based on the specifics of the event (please see below). Process: The applications will be sent to a grant allocation panel constituted of 3 CRIS participants. The decision will be made by the panel and the candidate will be advised of the allocation in due course. All grants will be allocated only on the basis of receipts sent to the administrator of the grant. CRIS is currently looking to support participants to attend the following event: WSIS Preparatory Meeting 3 Geneva, Switzerland: 15-27 September 2003 The Prepcom 3 meetings will be dedicated to refining the working documents for the Draft Declaration of Principles and Draft Action Plan. The CRIS campaign recognises the importance of its participation in the WSIS preparatory committee and will therefore contribute up to Euro 2000 per person for two delegates to attend the session. We will normally also expect the delegates sponsoring organisation to make some contribution towards the costs and this should be shown in the budget proposal. Activities:The delegate may be asked to report regularly to the CRIS International Secretariat and to support the campaign in various activities that will be agreed in advance. The delegate will be asked to participate in any planned CRIS meetings during the period. Specific requirements: In addition to the Overall Requirement as mentioned above, delegates will be required to have the support of an NGO which is accredited to participate in the Prepcom 3 meetings and will need to register as a delegate of an accredited NGO. All information related to prepcom 3 is available on: Deadline: 25th August 2003 All applications should be sent to mh at wacc.org.uk as soon as possible and at the latest by the above deadline. The application statement should highlight how the applicant fulfils the overall criteria, the requirements for activities and the specific requirements. Applications that do not clearly cover the stated criteria will not be considered. Decision on allocation of the grants will be done by 29th August 2003. _______________________________________________ Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) For more information see http://www.crisinfo.org/ act at crisinfo.org CRIS Info is a public list for information and questions about the campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS). CRIS also has a Latin American regional list at: http://comunica.org/mailman/listinfo/crisal_comunica.org ________________________________________ From bfs at bgl.vsnl.net.in Thu Aug 21 13:48:30 2003 From: bfs at bgl.vsnl.net.in (bfs) Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 13:48:30 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] for posting on the reader's list Message-ID: Deep Focus invites papers on the cinematic representation of war. We live in violent times: times in which our community and collective memories are dying; times in which the instruments of justice are hardly able to redress the violence that's escalating, and intensifying; times in which progress presupposes the genocide of many; times in which the political space for being the other is diminishing, even closing.* In these times we look for a language that describes the culture of absence, the politics which silences and invisiblizes, we look for a language that reads the gaps between images and words, gestures and ideas. We propose to study how cinema enunciates/articulates-war, historical events, ideas of nations, nationalism and patriotism. Almost all war films not so much represented war as something near and present, but more as distant and absent, obscuring atrocities or images which were too brutal-a sanitised view of war. We intend to look at how representations of war were utilised for political purposes, as well as the ways in which they were entrenched in the contemporary social and historiographical discourse. Somewhere we'd like to uncover contemporary political spaces and the wars of the 20th/21st century, which with the emergence of the techno-militarization and transnational corporations have displaced politics (democracy, freedom and civil society) and its implication for diverse cultural expressions; by focusing on films apart from the holocaust films, maybe lesser known films on countries and communities that have been the other or some how do not receive much attention in the context of representation. We invite well researched articles for our January 2004 issue on the theme of war, of the fundamental feelings of human suffering and sacrifice, of war crimes and punishments, of representation of war in cinema in postmodern times and its re-coloniality. Deadline: 15th November 2003. Range: 3,000 to 10,000 words Deep Focus also invites articles on film criticism, interviews, film and book reviews and responses to articles published, which we would like to publish in our future editions. Please mail your articles to: No. 33/1-9 and 1-10, Thyagaraj Layout, Jai Bharathi Nagar, Maruthi Sevanagar P.O., Bangalore - 560 033. E-mail: bfs at bgl.vsnl.net.in From shuddha at sarai.net Thu Aug 21 21:56:53 2003 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 21:56:53 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Smart ID Cards in China Message-ID: <03082121565302.01805@sweety.sarai.kit> Dear All, We have sometimes discussed the question of electronic 'smart' Identity cards and surveillance technologies on this list. Here is an article I came across on ZDNet Australia recently on the Chinese government's plans to implement electronic 'smart' identity cards for all its 960 million citizens. When similar things have been mooted in the Indian context, people have often dismissed their feasability on the grounds of the scale of the exercise. Here is at lease another instance of something that is actually even larger than the excercise planned by the Indian government. Shuddha ____________________________________________________________ China reveals massive smart ID card plan By Staff, Special to ZDNet www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/computers/storage/story/0,2000023527,20277217,00.htm - 43k - 20 Aug 2003 14 August 2003 China's 960 million citizens will be issued with digital smart ID cards, starting from next year. China will replace paper national identification (ID) cards with electronic identity cards starting in 2004, according to wire agency Dow Jones. The new digital ID card, which uses smart ID technology, will be carried by 960 million Chinese citizens. The embedded microchip in the plastic card stores an individual's personal information, which can be read and checked against databases kept by China's security authorities. This massive transformation has proceeded largely under a veil of secrecy, with little public debate. China's government-run media has also remained silent on the issue, said the report. Chinese officials say the new smart ID cards will stamp out counterfeit paper IDs, which are used in white-collar crime. According to a Chinese industry executive, trial runs for the smart ID card will begin in 2004, and most Chinese citizens can expect to receive the new cards by 2005. As many as 800 million of the cards could be in use by 2006, according to the Dow Jones report. Malaysia launched a smart ID card, MyKad, in April 2001. MyKad is government-issued all-in-one smartcard that performs a wide range of functions such as data processing, storage and file management. It stores citizen data, such as identity card numbers, passport information, driving licences and health information, in a single embedded 64K microchip. The card also promises secure access to applications such as automated teller machines (ATM) and government-related online services. Elsewhere, countries such as the US, UK, and the Philippines are reportedly mulling the adoption of a national ID system in the wake of terrorism threats after the 11 September, 2001, attacks. Thailand will launch its smart national ID card later this year. However, such plans have been met with fierce resistance from pro-privacy bodies, which believe identity cards infringe human rights and individual privacy. "In recent years, attempts to create national ID cards in the US, Korea and Taiwan have all failed because of public opposition," the group said on its Web site. ------------------------------------------------------- From aiindex at mnet.fr Thu Aug 21 23:23:54 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 18:53:54 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] (no subject) Message-ID: Business Line [India] July 30, 2003 Opinion - Security Beware, Big Brother is watching Jayanthi Iyengar THERE was a furore some years ago when it became public that the Internet had the capabilities to track the movement of Web-surfers and that Web site owners, including employers, could store a lot of personal information regarding the surfing habits of the people. September 11 and the consequent homeland security concerns in the US and elsewhere have today made the presence of the Big Brother even more pervading. Starting 2004, the US government proposes to introduce the ubiquitously named US Visit - United States visitor and immigrant status indicator technology. US Visit would identify and track immigrants and non-immigrants who came to work, visit or live in the country. The US government proposes to use a combination of biometrics and smart card to create this immigrant and non-immigrant tracking system. It will fingerprint, photograph and scan the passport of legitimate entrants to the US. The new system will replace the existing national security entry exit system programme and integrate the student and exchange visitor information system programme to meet the congressional requirement of automated entry exit system. At the core of such tracking systems are of course the smart cards and radio frequency tracking systems. The smart card is a card with a chip that stores and transacts data between users. The data is associated with either a value or information or both. It is stored and processed within the card's chip, through a memory or microprocessor. The card data is transacted via a reader that is part of a computing system. Smart card-enhanced systems are in use today throughout industry, including healthcare, banking, entertainment and transportation. With the e-commerce estimated to cross $320 billion worldwide at the end of 2003, the smart cards, which offer security and portability, are expected to find greater use. Already, global smart card use has grown five times within six years and is now estimated to be in the range of 2 billion. In Asia, India is considered to hold maximum potential for smart card adoption, after China and Japan. Radio frequency tracking systems track the movement of people and vehicles over a large area, such as a geographical territory or within well-defined locations, such as a building. Thus, you could have an employer tracking the movement of an employee the second he enters the official premises till he leaves it. Manufacturers of such systems hawk them as being immensely useful for tracking the movement of employees (and the unauthorised) after office hours, but they could be as useful to track employee and outsider movements during the work hours. Radio frequency tracking systems combined with the capabilities of the chip today have the ability to document a huge amount of personal information about an individual, including their personal details, fingerprints, photographs - which could be reduced to a barcode and read off the card like the price of sardines off a packet - financial details and buying habits. Individual movements within a defined geographical area on foot and within vehicles can also be tracked. Interestingly, the US is not alone in creating such people-tracking networks. After the attack on Parliament two years ago, the Indian government set aside Rs 100 crore for reinforcing security of the building. This project is being handled by the Cabinet Secretariat and the Government is looking for the right vendor to commission this project. The Home ministry is working on a national ID card programme, which would arm every citizen with a unique ID card. The Election Commission is proposing to introduce smart cards for voters. It has already issued voters ID cards to about 60 per cent of the 640 million people on the electoral rolls. These are ordinary cards, but it is planning to issue smart cards with biometric features - these would store fingerprints of the voter - to the rest of voters, starting 2004. That is, roughly 350-odd million people over 18 years of age who would be going around with their unique personal identification details stored on a chip and available to tap on the government database. The government is not alone in creating tracking systems for the public. Organisations across the country are installing such systems within offices. The security agencies, including IB, RAW, NSG, BSF, CRPF and the police are at the helm in equipping their premises with security tracking systems, but private organisations are not far behind. Several residential colonies are adopting private systems, while the police track citizens within their jurisdiction using vehicle tracking systems and through the issue of smart card-based driving licences. Service providers such as telecom companies too are equally active. With the GSM SIM card users estimated to double within two years, that is a lot of smart cards going around tracking the movement of users round the clock. The Employees Provident Fund is proposing to issue smart cards to its 40 million users, with capabilities to store financial and identification information on them. The credit card companies are following suit, gradually replacing the credit card with debit cards, which have chips imbedded in them. All this brings to the fore the issue of privacy of citizens. Most of the security systems are being put into place to protect the life and property of people, but in the end the potential for abuse is as high. This is one issue that policy-makers need to address when they work out systems for betterment of the life of the people. Otherwise, we could well be reliving an Orwellian nightmare. (The author is a freelance writer and can be contacted at jayanthiiyengar1 at yahoo.com) From abirbazaz at rediffmail.com Thu Aug 21 23:58:18 2003 From: abirbazaz at rediffmail.com (abir bazaz) Date: 21 Aug 2003 18:28:18 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Question Time India in Srinagar... Message-ID: <20030821182818.9928.qmail@webmail7.rediffmail.com> from GK By Shafa'at Rasool Srinagar, Aug 20: The sher-i-Kashmir international conference center in Srinagar Wednesday witnessed something which it is not accustomed to. Being otherwise a favourite spot for mainstream politicians, it was time for some blunt plain-speak as the center reverberated with demands for right to self determination. The occasion was the recording of BBC’s talk show Question Time India and those on the panel were chief minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, National Conference president and member of Parliament Umar Abdullah, separatist leader Sajjad Lone, state president of BJP Nirmal Singh and vice chancellor Jammu university, Amitabh Mattoo. A military bunker and shikaras hovering in Dal waters provided a fitting background to the occasion where Kashmir problem, its causes, the present situation and possible solutions were discussed. But what reminded one and all of what is referred to as the basic reality of Kashmir was the unanimous assertion of the right of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to decide their future by the 250 strong audience comprising of educated Kashmiri youth. While the politicians were, true to their creed, largely ambiguous in identifying the genesis of the problem and suggesting a solution, the audience had no hesitation to hold the central government responsible for the mess and self determination being a viable democratic solution. As the show was conducted by an international media organisation and not by some official agency, Mufti Muhammad Sayeed and Umar Abdullah were in for some surprise for the participants felt uninhibited to speak their heart out. Mufti and Umar were told that they didn’t represent the people of Kashmir and their aspirations. "What does your `healing touch’ and `peace with dignity’ mean to a common Kashmiri other than a mere deceptive slogan to fool the world?" A youth asked the chief minister. Taking everyone by surprise, the chief minister said the local elements were still the backbone of militancy in the state. "Though the majority of militants active in the state at present are outsiders but it is a fact that local youth still form the backbone that sustains militancy here," Mufti said adding the internal dimension of the Kashmir problem needed to be addressed. "You have sensitized a 10 kilometer area to deceive the international community. Go to the countryside and you will find no change in the situation. People are being victimized by security forces as before," Sajjad Lone told the chief minister when the latter said the situation was changing for better and the people should bury the past to look towards future. "Do you want us to forget our 80 thousand dead? ...There is still an overwhelmimg passion for freedom and the dust won’t settle untill the political aspirations of Kashmiris are taken into account," Lone said. Tail piece: All through the programme numerous shikaras moving in Dal waters filled the background. But there was much more than met the eye. A keen observation revealed that there were only two shikaras that had been assigned the job to move to and fro to decorate the scene, God knows by whom. The programme is scheduled to be telecast on BBC World on 22nd August, Friday, at 10 pm. ___________________________________________________ Meet your old school or college friends from 1 Million + database... Click here to reunite www.batchmates.com/rediff.asp From aiindex at mnet.fr Fri Aug 22 02:01:59 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 21:31:59 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Legal Action To Arrest Narendra Modi For Torture Message-ID: PRESS RELEASE Date: 21 August 2003, 17.30PM From: Awaaz - South Asia Watch (www.awaazsaw.org) LEGAL ACTION TO ARREST NARENDRA MODI FOR TORTURE Lawyers pursing a warrant for the arrest of Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narenda Modi under Article 1 of the International Convention Against Torture and Section 134 of the UK Criminal Justice Act of 1988 have been allowed a period of two weeks to collect relevant information and evidence that relates to direct complicity between Modi and the killings of Muslim citizens of India which took place after February 27 2002. Yesterday, the complainant in the case was informed that Narendra Modi would be represented by lawyers appointed by the Government of India, though the latter is not party to the action. Representatives of the Indian High Commission in the UK also attended the hearings yesterday. Awaaz is supporting an action in which the complainant is Suresh Grover, represented by civil rights lawyer Imran Khan. The process of laying down criminal charges against Narendra Modi has begun. It is intended to show that the Chief Minister, members of his cabinet, and those under his authority by act or omission were instrumental in the pogroms that engulfed the state of Gujarat and in which 2,000 Muslims were killed and 200,000 displaced. This is the start of an important attempt outside India to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Gujarat pogroms in 2002. Similar opportunities will arise if Narendra Modi is travelling in other European cities, the US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. The action started by supporters of Awaaz will not prevent others to take, nor will it affect, similar or related actions in other parts of the world. Awaaz strongly encourages others to begin to collect information and evidence in preparation for the possibility that Modi comes to their part of the world. Awaaz will continue supporting this legal action and strongly encourages other organisations to take action regarding the complicity of the State of Gujarat in the 2002 pogroms. If you have any directly relevant information or evidence, please send, in strictest confidence, to: contact at awaazsaw.org or imrank at imrankhanandpartners.co.uk tel: +44 (0)207 636 6314 fax: +44 (0)207 636 6315 Updates will be posted regularly at www.awaazsaw.org From m.bacchini at artist-tutorial.net Thu Aug 21 19:38:18 2003 From: m.bacchini at artist-tutorial.net (Morena Bacchini) Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 16:08:18 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] artist-tutorial.net / First issue / August 2003 Message-ID: <00a201c367ed$ad719cc0$f7a81a97@saa> ARTIST-TUTORIAL.NET / FIRST ISSUE / AUGUST 2003 "Four Events That Have Led to Large Discoveries" (19 September 1994) by Merce Cunningham Artist-tutorial.net is a monthly online periodical that intends to offer a collection of art tutorials writed by artists themselves as technical guide to the process of artistic creation. In order to know how artistic creativity is expressed through the matter and technical practices coming from computer or scientific disciplines. [Tutorial and artwork] Whichever location in space and time the artwork may assume, the analysis of tutorial is based on the initial creation, the set of executed signs and sounds or the set of instructions to execute that generate the set of copies, of performances, the set of data transmissions or executions. The artwork belonging to digital arts of reproduction and to digital performing arts or belonging to the arts of communication and software cannot in fact be identified in an object but in the initial creation. What the philosopher Richard Wollheim calls "type", that is, the piece of human invention from which the particulars or "tokens" are generated. [Tutorial and artistic techniques] The technical narration of tutorial describes the art mediated by the material process of informatic techniques recognized as artistic practices. It provides the possibility to read how the matter acquires the aesthetic properties or itself becomes an aesthetically relevant property. Moreover, the opportunity to investigate the initial creation discovers new forms of digital matter notation, new writings of digital material processes. However, according to the artistic genre and author's intentions, the artist tutorial can appear as an essay or a pure tutorial, as a diagram, a sketch by hand, as an exposition of code fragments with or without descriptive comment or else as a photo or screenshot documentation. The first issue relates the form of new dance notation. A digital dance in the initial creation, explained in the use by a revolutionary Maestro of the choreography: Merce Cunningham. http://www.artist-tutorial.net From nyvoices at indypress.org Thu Aug 21 21:23:04 2003 From: nyvoices at indypress.org (Rehan Ansari) Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 11:53:04 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Voices 79 Message-ID: <010d01c367fc$9a5b9aa0$6501a8c0@herman> This Week's Voices That Must Be Heard By IPA-New York, a sponsored project of the Independent Press Association Edition 79: 21 August 2003. NEWS ITEMS: City contractor doing bad things to workers by Enrique Soria, El Diario / La Prensa, 14 August 2003. Translated from Spanish by Hirsh Sawhney. The labor practices of the construction company SSN General Construction Corp. are fraudulent say the company's workers. MORE. Undocumented Filipino workers speak out against exploitation by Filipino employers by Anthony D. Advincula, Filipino Express, 17 August 2003. English language. "If I file a discrimination suit or any work-related charges with a government agency, and I'm undocumented, can Bloomberg's Executive Order 34 be applied to me?" asked a Filipino waiter in Queens, who works in a restaurant for $2 an hour. MORE. The ugliness of domestic violence in the Haitian community by Macollvie Jean-Francois, Haitian Times, 19 August 2003. English language. The highest rate of Brooklyn domestic violence incidents occurred in Flatbush's 67th Precinct in Flatbush, where the majority of New York's Haitians live. MORE. Korean kids get along with other kids, not other "Koreans" by Hui-kyung Kim, Korea Times New York, 15 August 2003. Translated from Korean by Sunyong Reinish. Increasing numbers of Korean middle and high school students are joining other minority students in peer groups or cliques. MORE. BRIEFS: Undocumented, therefore unable to attend school by Ruth Hernandez Beltran, Hoy, 13 August 2003. Translated from Spanish by Nicole Lisa. How poisoned is poisoned? by Gabriel Thompson, Our Time Press, 1 August 2003. English language. A Muslim family in hell because of INS special registration by Partha Banerjee, Akhon Samoy, 19 August 2003. Translated from Bangla by Partha Banerjee. Queens' street named after Bangladeshi slain in hate crime, Akhon Samoy, 19 August 2003. Translated from Bangla by Partha Banerjee. EDITORIALS: When will Dr. Laura convert to moderation?, Forward, 15 August 2003. English language. Top-rated radio host Laura Schlessinger shocked both supporters and critics last week by telling her 12 million listeners that she was no longer observing Orthodox Jewish rites and rituals. MORE. As always we welcome questions, suggestions, corrections and letters to the editor. Rehan Ansari Editor, Voices That Must Be Heard Independent Press Association - New York www.indypressny.org * 212/279-1442 * 143 West 29th St., 901, New York City, 10001 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030821/cebfa4f8/attachment.html From faizan at sarai.net Fri Aug 22 15:25:15 2003 From: faizan at sarai.net (Faizan Ahmed) Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 15:25:15 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Campaign against Air Tel Message-ID: <200308221525.15985.faizan@sarai.net> ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Campaign against Air Tel Date: 22 Aug 2003 09:07:00 -0000 From: "Md sajjad" To: faizan at sarai.net, august_king at indiatimes.com, faizandse at rediffmail.com, khalidwasim at journalist.com, tajaman2001 at yahoo.com Please launch a campaign against the AirTel. it is a great fraud. It activated the voicemail box which costs not only to the caller but to the recipient also.It also usually takes two payments for a single SMS.It is the greatest plunderer of al the pvt. phone networks. Sajjad ___________________________________________________ Meet your old school or college friends from 1 Million + database... Click here to reunite www.batchmates.com/rediff.asp - ------------------------------------------------------- From benjamin_lists at typedown.com Fri Aug 22 18:17:13 2003 From: benjamin_lists at typedown.com (Benjamin Fischer) Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 14:47:13 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] Call for Entries: TARGET BLANK: 17. STUTTGARTER FILMWINTER - FESTIVAL FOR EXPANDED MEDIA Message-ID: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ENGLISH VERSION SEE BELOW! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- TARGET BLANK: 17. STUTTGARTER FILMWINTER - FESTIVAL FOR EXPANDED MEDIA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Film Video Neue Medien Installation Performance Vortraege Festival 15.-18. Januar 2004 Warm Up 9.-14. Januar 2004 http://www.filmwinter.de Target Blank - der Stuttgarter Filmwinter geht in die 17. Runde - stets auf der Suche nach Innovativem, Kritischem und Unbekanntem in der Medienkunst und Filmkultur, nach den Zwischenzonen und Freiraeumen im Medienbetrieb. Nach dem Rekord von ueber 1300 Einreichungen beim letzten Festival sind alle Film-, Medien- und Kunstschaffende herzlich eingeladen, ihre Arbeiten in den Bereichen Film, Video, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, Internet, Installation und Performance fuer den kommenden Filmwinter einzusenden. Einreichung Online-Projekte koennen direkt ueber die Festival Website http://www.filmwinter.de eingereicht werden. Anmeldeformulare fuer Film, Video, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, Installation und Performance koennen im PDF-Format heruntergeladen werden. Deadline fuer Einreichungen: 15. September 2003 Preise In den Sektionen Film/Video und Neue Medien werden Preise in Hoehe von ueber 11.500 EUR vom Publikum und unterschiedlichen Jurykommissionen vergeben. Team-Work-Award Die Hoppe-Ritter Kunststiftung stiftet EUR 2.000,- fuer eine Film- oder Videoproduktion, die von einem Team realisiert wurde. Norman 2004 Preis der Jury fuer Film und Video in Hoehe von EUR 1.500,- Preis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart fuer Neue Medien Zwei Preise in Hoehe von insg. EUR 4.000,- gehen an Arbeiten aus dem Bereich CD-ROM/DVD-ROM oder an Projekte im Internet. Milla & Partner Preis Preis fuer Medien im Raum (Installationen) in Hoehe von EUR 2000,- DASDING-Publikumspreis Publikumspreise in den Bereichen Film/Video und Internet in Hoehe von jeweils EUR 1.000,- Sowie weitere Preise und die heissbegehrte Wand 5-Ehrenauszeichnung Neben den beiden Wettbewerben fuer Film/Video und Neue Medien wird das Festivalprogramm mit Spezialreihen, Panels, Praesentationen und Musikevents ergaenzt. Weitere Informationen: Wand 5 e.V. im Filmhaus Friedrichstr. 23 A D - 70174 Stuttgart Germany Tel: +49-711-226 91 60 Fax: +49-711-226 91 61 Mail: wanda at wand5.de http://www.filmwinter.de http://www.wand5.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- TARGET BLANK: 17TH STUTTGART FILMWINTER - FESTIVAL FOR EXPANDED MEDIA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Film Video New Media Installation Performance Lectures Festival, January 15-18, 2004 Warm Up, January 9-14, 2004 http://www.filmwinter.de Target Blank - the 17th edition of the Stuttgart Filmwinter is looking for innovative, critical, and unknown posititions in media art and film culture. After the record of 1300 submissions at the last festival the organizer Wand 5 cordially invites filmmakers, media producers, and artists to submit their work. Productions in the field of film, video, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, installation, and performance are very welcome. Submission Internet-projects may be submitted online on the festival's website http://www.filmwinter.de. Entry forms and regulations for submissions in the field of film, video, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, installation, and performance can be downloaded as PDF-file. Deadline for submission: September 15, 2003 Awards In the sections film/video and new media prizes amounting more than 11.500 EUR will be awarded by the audience and various jury commissions. Team-Work-Award The Hoppe-Ritter Art Foundation endows an award of EUR 2.000 for a team production in the field of film and video. Award of the Jury Award of the Jury for film and video of EUR 1.500 State Capital Stuttgart Awards for New Media These awards of EUR 4.000 go to an independently produced work on CD-ROM/DVD-ROM or to a project published on the internet/www. Milla & Partner Award Award for media in space (installations) of EUR 2.500 DASDING-Audience Award Audience award for film/video and internet of respectively EUR 1.000 as well as further prizes and the popular honourable mention by Wand 5 Besides the competitions for film/video and new media a wide range of special programmes, panels, presentations and music events will be offered. Further information: Wand 5 e.V./Filmhaus Friedrichstr. 23 A D - 70174 Stuttgart Germany Tel: +49-711-226 91 60 Fax: +49-711-226 91 61 Mail: wanda at wand5.de http://www.filmwinter.de http://www.wand5.de From aiindex at mnet.fr Sat Aug 23 05:53:43 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 01:23:43 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] India: Censorship and Misplaced Priorities (Pankaj Butalia) Message-ID: The Times of India AUGUST 23, 2003 Op.Ed. Hocus Focus: Censorship and Misplaced Priorities PANKAJ BUTALIA This may be an imaginary sequence or it may be true but a rather strange thing supposedly happened last year. A review committee of the Mumbai documentary festival met to discuss routine affairs. During the course of this, a senior bureaucrat revealed that some women's groups had complained of the increasing trend towards obscenity in the media and the urgent need to do something about it. It was thus decided that, in future, documentaries submitted for the festival would have to possess censor certificates. Much like the famed sleight of hand, one hand did the distracting while the other did the trick. Nobody bothered to ask whether the so-called complaint made any reference to any film screened at the Mumbai festival or what censoring a documentary could do to remove obscenity in the media or in people's minds. A problem was pointed out and some action had to be taken. End of matter. For almost a century, there has been a phobia about what is loosely termed the mass media. It is almost as if cinema, and by extension television, video and now the Internet, are objects of fear and hatred, which are experienced as dangerous and malevolent and, there-fore, necessary to put away. Society's inability to understand why violence takes place or what underlies the bestiality in man makes it imperative to have a scapegoat. What better scapegoat than the mirror, the medium? Ironically, even the most scissor-happy activist is completely ignorant about the way in which cinema works or impacts the human psyche. Is the content the medium or the message? Is there a seditious possibility in cinema (et al) and if so, does it lie in the overt text or in some subliminal space? In the absence of any clarity on this, who can possibly know what to censor and what to let be? Does the evidence of censorship over the last century make us any wiser? How many examples are there of films and videos which have inflamed passions or led to outbreaks of anarchic violence? What possible harm could films like The Last Temptation of Christ, Hair, The Tin Drum, Gone With the Wind, Birth of a Nation, Clockwork Orange, Pink Flamingos, Midnight Cowboy, The Exorcist or Woodstock do to society? In any case, if one looks over time, one finds today's banned films become tomorrow's mainstream ones. Violence does not originate in cinema. Most incidents of mass violence, of oppression against weaker sections of society, of annihilation of different tribes and communities have either been done directly by the state (Soviet Union in the '30s, Nazi Germany, China during the Cultural Revolution, Idi Amin's Uganda, Chile, Argentina, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the list is endless) or by powerful sections of society with active support or connivance of the state. This does not include the millions of pointless deaths that have been caused throughout the century by legitimised violence called war. Nor are rape, moles-tation, attitudes towards women a product of the media. That would allow patriarchy to escape responsibility for all its ills. Interestingly, none of those who constantly point fingers at the media for society's ills, ever speak out strongly enough against those very ills. No proponent of censorship openly acknowledges that there are problems in our society which need to be addressed. There is no criticism of the regularity with which rapes occur, no criticism of the lynchings of couples that seek to marry against the wishes of the village, of oppressions against Dalits, of sati, dowry deaths or female infanticide. Neither is there criticism of the systematic harassment of women in schools, colleges, work places. The list is endless. Yet it is believed that the mere screening of a film or television programme has the potential to send society hurtling down a moral abyss. Does that imply that a society must not have any control over the images, ideas and messages that circulate in its midst? Ideas which could, at some stage, interact with the violence present in our own personas and exacerbate inherent tendencies? Not at all. Nor is it suggested that gratuitous violence, child pornography, secessionist provocations, terrorist ideology or certain kinds of hate speeches need to be tolerated, though it must be pointed out that a society which encourages violence in the form of war, oppression of women in the form of patriarchy, child abuse and familial sexual abuse, state terrorism and violence against its weaker sections can hardly pretend that the mere use of a censor's scissors will promote harmonious development. This is not the place to detail how this can be done but there are countless examples of other societies where such controls have been implemented reasonably successfully. The use of a society's criminal laws against any such act ought to be enough where there is a genuine desire to curb anti-social activities and where there is a consensus on what constitutes such an activity. The censor's scissors are not necessary for this purpose. After all, censorship is strict in India but no one could succeed in stopping the circulation of the VHP's hate tapes. Strangely, this has not been considered secessionist, seditious, inflammatory or provocative. However, a documentary reporting this could be considered secessionist and would be censored. Strange logic this and a strange sleight of hand. (The author is a Delhi-based film-maker) From sarang at flomerics.com Fri Aug 22 15:31:18 2003 From: sarang at flomerics.com (Sarang Shidore) Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 15:31:18 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] * Request for info on traditional water management techniques in India * Message-ID: We at AID Austin have a group that is trying to learn more about water issues in India. Ultimately we want to understand how water as a precious national resource can be sourced, purified, distributed, and recycled in a way that is both efficient and fair. For example, we are trying to understand the recent moves in India to privatize water sources themselves, such as rivers and lakes, typically to major corporations. A small river in Maharashtra has already been sold to the private sector. The claim is that this will result in a more efficient use of water, and lead to more investment in better quality water supply. The critiques range from a total opposition to entry of private sector into basic necessities ("free goods") like water, to a mixed public-private approach with strong regulatory oversight. I want to better understand how water was tapped and used in ancient and medieval India. I believe this is an important piece that is often under-emphasized. Evolution can teach us many lessons useful for designing modern solutions. There appears to have been reasonable self-sufficiency in water in much of Indian history until the late colonial era. Traditional India apparently used small, localized but highly effective water harvesting techniques. But the economics of this is especially unclear to me. If anyone has sources/articles/papers etc providing info about such traditional approaches (both technology and economics), please let me know. Sarang From tie at experimentalcinema.com Sat Aug 23 12:12:58 2003 From: tie at experimentalcinema.com (TIE) Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 12:12:58 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Last Call (Deadline: Mon. - 9/1): The International Experimental Cinema Expo Message-ID: <200308231212.58645.tie@experimentalcinema.com> Entries Due Monday, September 1 The International Experimental Cinema Exposition announces its final call for entries. TIE seeks films that challenge popular and conventional modes of cinema. From difficult and hand-made films to extraordinarily radical and obscure compositions, TIE selects outstanding celluloid work from the outerspaces of international screen culture. Preview copies must be submitted in VHS format (NTSC or PAL) for consideration. Additionally, the exhibition format must be a film print (8mm, Super8, 16mm, 35mm) if the entry is selected. All lengths of film are accepted for consideration. The postmark deadline is September 1, 2003. A nominal entry fee is required. Printable Submission Form and Guidelines: http://www.experimentalcinema.com/subform.htm __ The International Experimental Cinema Exposition (TIE) 2 North Cascade, Suite 1100 Colorado Springs, Colorado 80903 USA __ Phone: 719.277.6657 E-mail: tie at experimentalcinema.com Web: http://www.experimentalcinema.com __ _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at mail.sarai.net http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From aiindex at mnet.fr Sun Aug 24 03:49:38 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 23:19:38 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Poverty-Chic: Diesel's New Line Message-ID: Poverty-Chic: Diesel's New Line Kimi Eisele, Pacific News Service August 20, 2003 Viewed on August 22, 2003 TUCSON, Ariz.--As the number of undocumented, would-be migrant workers found dead in the deserts of the Southwest since last October climbs into the hundreds, why does a multi-million dollar European clothing company want me to dress like a Spanish-speaking laborer? Earlier this summer, as I read news reports of deadly crossings along the U.S.-Mexican border, I caught a preview for the new fall line from Diesel, the Italian clothing company, on display at one of its New York flagship stores. Mannequins dressed in gray-blue and green uniform-like garments stood with shovels and pickaxes at their sides and stacks of burlap sacks at their feet. Spelled out in the lower left-hand corner of the window was the line's title: "Trabajadores," Spanish for "workers." I tried to piece it all together. Though Diesel's jeans are made solely in Italy, many of its other garments are manufactured overseas, where offshore production zones (in Mexico, Guatemala and Taiwan, for example) provide the benefits of low taxes, low wage standards, lax regulations and limited unionization. That meant that some of the workers who had stitched and sewn the clothing in the window had probably labored in countries where they really would be called "trabajadores." And then there were the hundreds of thousands who have left such jobs in Latin America and migrated to cities like Chicago, Omaha, New York, Rome, and Madrid, where chances are they're still called "trabajadores." Borrowing (or co-opting) real-life "looks" and marketing them to the masses is standard fashion fare. Remember the ripped-jeans heroin addict and the baggy-pants gangster looks from the 1990s? It's been hip to look poor for a few years now. But why the toiling attire? I went inside the Diesel store to dig up more. "Personally, I think it's about Communism," the Diesel sales rep whispered to me. "The shovels, the drab colors, the similar styles for men and women. It's all very equal. It's, like, celebrating the worker." Possibly. After all, Diesel clothes, as the company's subhead proclaims, are "For Successful Living." But the last time I checked, washing dishes, digging ditches, and sewing garments -- the jobs that trabajadores often do -- weren't considered glamorous. More important, the illegal status of many immigrants means they are easily exploited and grossly underpaid. If we really want to celebrate the trabajadores, we'll have to do a lot more than dress like them. So maybe this was some new utopian vision. According to the downloadable press pack available on its Web site, Diesel views the world as "a single, borderless macro-culture." Maybe the sales rep was right. Maybe we are all equal. Or maybe, as advertisers know so well, we just want to pretend we are. A few years ago Diesel put out a series of advertisements that aimed to turn everyday media representations of Africa (poverty, AIDS, civil war) upside down. The ads showed black models (hence, Africans) in Diesel clothing frolicking at luxurious parties a la bella gente. Superimposed on the images were faux newspaper headlines reporting strife and financial collapse in America and Europe. The point? I'm not sure, but in 2001 the campaign won the Grand Prix for Press and Poster Award in Cannes. It's the kind of advertising that tricks consumers who have a certain dose of social consciousness. It banks on the fact that some of us will eventually relax our commitments to justice in exchange for hip-ness. That we'll see the drab worker clothing and fall for it: "Sweatshops are sooo passé. Workers unite!" The UHC Collective, an organization based in Manchester, England, that makes political art and propaganda, doesn't agree. They've run "subvertisements" mocking Diesel ("Die Sell," they call it) and hope that the advertising strategies of companies like Diesel will eventually backfire. As one UHC member wrote in an e-mail message, "They sell 'anarcho-styled' clothes, so why not take them at their word and organize a mass shop lift? If companies are going to dabble in these kinds of politics they'll get what's coming to them." Perhaps. More likely, people will simply buy the "Trabajadores" clothing without much thought. Even if the ads do create a stir, in the end, the success of such campaigns comes from the fact that eventually shoppers forget the controversy and simply remember the brand name. After a few weeks the fall preview display came down, leaving me to wait until September to see what comes of the "Trabajadores" line. In the meantime, I wonder if we're truly moving toward Diesel's borderless world of cultural equality. Or, to paraphrase a character in George Orwell's "Animal Farm," we're all equal -- but some of us are more equal than others. Kimi Eisele lives in Tucson, Ariz., where she mentors teenagers in writing and interviewing for 110 Degrees, a magazine about urban culture. From aiindex at mnet.fr Sun Aug 24 03:50:21 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 23:20:21 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Arundhati Roy: The loneliness of Noam Chomsky Message-ID: www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/stories/2003082400020100.htm Magazine | The Hindu Sunday August 24, 2003 The loneliness of Noam Chomsky After September 11, the mainstream media's blatant performance as the U.S Government's propaganda machine has only served to highlight the business of `managing' public opinion. The resultant `mistrust of the mass media' would at best be a political hunch or at worst a loose accusation, if it were not for the relentless and unswerving media analysis of one of the world's greatest minds. And this is only one of the ways in which Noam Chomsky has radically altered our understanding of the society in which we live. Rationally and empirically, he has unmasked the ugly, manipulative, ruthless American universe that exists behind the word `freedom', says ARUNDHATI ROY, in an essay written as an introduction for the new edition of Noam Chomsky "I will never apologise for the United States of America - I don't care what the facts are." President George Bush Sr. SITTING in my home in New Delhi, watching an American TV news channel promote itself ("We report. You decide."), I imagine Noam Chomsky's amused, chipped-tooth smile. Everybody knows that authoritarian regimes, regardless of their ideology, use the mass media for propaganda. But what about democratically elected regimes in the "free world"? Today, thanks to Noam Chomsky and his fellow media analysts, it is almost axiomatic for thousands, possibly millions, of us that public opinion in "free market" democracies is manufactured just like any other mass market product - soap, switches, or sliced bread. We know that while, legally and constitutionally, speech may be free, the space in which that freedom can be exercised has been snatched from us and auctioned to the highest bidders. Neoliberal capitalism isn't just about the accumulation of capital (for some). It's also about the accumulation of power (for some), the accumulation of freedom (for some). Conversely, for the rest of the world, the people who are excluded from neoliberalism's governing body, it's about the erosion of capital, the erosion of power, the erosion of freedom. In the "free" market, free speech has become a commodity like everything else - - justice, human rights, drinking water, clean air. It's available only to those who can afford it. And naturally, those who can afford it use free speech to manufacture the kind of product, confect the kind of public opinion, that best suits their purpose. (News they can use.) Exactly how they do this has been the subject of much of Noam Chomsky's political writing. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. "[T]he prime minister in effect controls about 90 per cent of Italian TV viewership," reports the Financial Times. What price free speech? Free speech for whom? Admittedly, Berlusconi is an extreme example. In other democracies - the United States in particular - media barons, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in a more elaborate, but less obvious, manner. (George Bush Jr.'s connections to the oil lobby, to the arms industry, and to Enron, and Enron's infiltration of U.S. government institutions and the mass media - all this is public knowledge now.) After the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in New York and Washington, the mainstream media's blatant performance as the U.S. government's mouthpiece, its display of vengeful patriotism, its willingness to publish Pentagon press handouts as news, and its explicit censorship of dissenting opinion became the butt of some pretty black humour in the rest of the world. Then the New York Stock Exchange crashed, bankrupt airline companies appealed to the government for financial bailouts, and there was talk of circumventing patent laws in order to manufacture generic drugs to fight the anthrax scare (much more important, and urgent of course, than the production of generics to fight AIDS in Africa). Suddenly, it began to seem as though the twin myths of Free Speech and the Free Market might come crashing down alongside the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. But of course that never happened. The myths live on. There is however, a brighter side to the amount of energy and money that the establishment pours into the business of "managing" public opinion. It suggests a very real fear of public opinion. It suggests a persistent and valid worry that if people were to discover (and fully comprehend) the real nature of the things that are done in their name, they might act upon that knowledge. Powerful people know that ordinary people are not always reflexively ruthless and selfish. (When ordinary people weigh costs and benefits, something like an uneasy conscience could easily tip the scales.) For this reason, they must be guarded against reality, reared in a controlled climate, in an altered reality, like broiler chickens or pigs in a pen. Those of us who have managed to escape this fate and are scratching about in the backyard, no longer believe everything we read in the papers and watch on TV. We put our ears to the ground and look for other ways of making sense of the world. We search for the untold story, the mentioned-in-passing military coup, the unreported genocide, the civil war in an African country written up in a one-column-inch story next to a full-page advertisement for lace underwear. We don't always remember, and many don't even know, that this way of thinking, this easy acuity, this instinctive mistrust of the mass media, would at best be a political hunch and at worst a loose accusation, if it were not for the relentless and unswerving media analysis of one of the world's greatest minds. And this is only one of the ways in which Noam Chomsky has radically altered our understanding of the society in which we live. Or should I say, our understanding of the elaborate rules of the lunatic asylum in which we are all voluntary inmates? Speaking about the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, President George W. Bush called the enemies of the United States "enemies of freedom". "Americans are asking why do they hate us?" he said. "They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." If people in the United States want a real answer to that question (as opposed to the ones in the Idiot's Guide to Anti-Americanism, that is: "Because they're jealous of us," "Because they hate freedom," "Because they're losers," "Because we're good and they're evil"), I'd say, read Chomsky. Read Chomsky on U.S. military interventions in Indochina, Latin America, Iraq, Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. If ordinary people in the United States read Chomsky, perhaps their questions would be framed a little differently. Perhaps it would be: "Why don't they hate us more than they do?" or "Isn't it surprising that September 11 didn't happen earlier?" Unfortunately, in these nationalistic times, words like "us" and "them" are used loosely. The line between citizens and the state is being deliberately and successfully blurred, not just by governments, but also by terrorists. The underlying logic of terrorist attacks, as well as "retaliatory" wars against governments that "support terrorism", is the same: both punish citizens for the actions of their governments. (A brief digression: I realise that for Noam Chomsky, a U.S. citizen, to criticise his own government is better manners than for someone like myself, an Indian citizen, to criticise the U.S. government. I'm no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that I speak as a subject of the U.S. empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticise her king.) If I were asked to choose one of Noam Chomsky's major contributions to the world, it would be the fact that he has unmasked the ugly, manipulative, ruthless universe that exists behind that beautiful, sunny word "freedom". He has done this rationally and empirically. The mass of evidence he has marshalled to construct his case is formidable. Terrifying, actually. The starting premise of Chomsky's method is not ideological, but it is intensely political. He embarks on his course of inquiry with an anarchist's instinctive mistrust of power. He takes us on a tour through the bog of the U.S. establishment, and leads us through the dizzying maze of corridors that connects the government, big business, and the business of managing public opinion. Chomsky shows us how phrases like "free speech", the "free market", and the "free world" have little, if anything, to do with freedom. He shows us that, among the myriad freedoms claimed by the U.S. government are the freedom to murder, annihilate, and dominate other people. The freedom to finance and sponsor despots and dictators across the world. The freedom to train, arm, and shelter terrorists. The freedom to topple democratically elected governments. The freedom to amass and use weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological, and nuclear. The freedom to go to war against any country whose government it disagrees with. And, most terrible of all, the freedom to commit these crimes against humanity in the name of "justice", in the name of "righteousness", in the name of "freedom". Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared that U.S. freedoms are "not the grant of any government or document, but... our endowment from God". So, basically, we're confronted with a country armed with a mandate from heaven. Perhaps this explains why the U.S. government refuses to judge itself by the same moral standards by which it judges others. (Any attempt to do this is shouted down as "moral equivalence".) Its technique is to position itself as the well-intentioned giant whose good deeds are confounded in strange countries by their scheming natives, whose markets it's trying to free, whose societies it's trying to modernise, whose women it's trying to liberate, whose souls it's trying to save. Perhaps this belief in its own divinity also explains why the U.S. government has conferred upon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people "for their own good". When he announced the U.S. air strikes against Afghanistan, President Bush Jr. said, "We're a peaceful nation." He went on to say, "This is the calling of the United States of America, the most free nation in the world, a nation built on fundamental values, that rejects hate, rejects violence, rejects murderers, rejects evil. And we will not tire." The U.S. empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands, and following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle between continents. "Stolen from Africa, brought to America" - Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier" contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadness. It tells of the loss of dignity, the loss of wilderness, the loss of freedom, the shattered pride of a people. Genocide and slavery provide the social and economic underpinning of the nation whose fundamental values reject hate, murderers, and evil. Here is Chomsky, writing in the essay "The Manufacture of Consent," on the founding of the United States of America: During the Thanksgiving holiday a few weeks ago, I took a walk with some friends and family in a national park. We came across a gravestone, which had on it the following inscription: "Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves and their land that this great nation might be born and grow." Of course, it is not quite accurate to say that the indigenous population gave of themselves and their land for that noble purpose. Rather, they were slaughtered, decimated, and dispersed in the course of one of the greatest exercises in genocide in human history... which we celebrate each October when we honour Columbus - a notable mass murderer himself - on Columbus Day. Hundreds of American citizens, well-meaning and decent people, troop by that gravestone regularly and read it, apparently without reaction; except, perhaps, a feeling of satisfaction that at last we are giving some due recognition to the sacrifices of the native peoples.... They might react differently if they were to visit Auschwitz or Dachau and find a gravestone reading: "Here lies a woman, a Jew, whose family and people gave of themselves and their possessions that this great nation might grow and prosper." How has the United States survived its terrible past and emerged smelling so sweet? Not by owning up to it, not by making reparations, not by apologising to black Americans or native Americans, and certainly not by changing its ways (it exports its cruelties now). Like most other countries, the United States has rewritten its history. But what sets the United States apart from other countries, and puts it way ahead in the race, is that it has enlisted the services of the most powerful, most successful publicity firm in the world: Hollywood. In the best-selling version of popular myth as history, U.S. "goodness" peaked during World War II (aka America's War Against Fascism). Lost in the din of trumpet sound and angel song is the fact that when fascism was in full stride in Europe, the U.S. government actually looked away. When Hitler was carrying out his genocidal pogrom against Jews, U.S. officials refused entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. The United States entered the war only after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. Drowned out by the noisy hosannas is its most barbaric act, in fact the single most savage act the world has ever witnessed: the dropping of the atomic bomb on civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was nearly over. The hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who were killed, the countless others who were crippled by cancers for generations to come, were not a threat to world peace. They were civilians. Just as the victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were civilians. Just as the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Iraq because of the U.S.-led sanctions were civilians. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a cold, calculated experiment carried out to demonstrate America's power. At the time, President Truman described it as "the greatest thing in history". The Second World War, we're told, was a "war for peace". The atomic bomb was a "weapon of peace". We're invited to believe that nuclear deterrence prevented World War III. (That was before President George Bush Jr. came up with the "pre-emptive strike doctrine". Was there an outbreak of peace after the Second World War? Certainly there was (relative) peace in Europe and America - but does that count as world peace? Not unless savage, proxy wars fought in lands where the coloured races live (chinks, niggers, dinks, wogs, gooks) don't count as wars at all. Since the Second World War, the United States has been at war with or has attacked, among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. This list should also include the U.S. government's covert operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the coups it has engineered, and the dictators it has armed and supported. It should include Israel's U.S.-backed war on Lebanon, in which thousands were killed. It should include the key role America has played in the conflict in the Middle East, in which thousands have died fighting Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. It should include America's role in the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which more than one million people were killed. It should include the embargos and sanctions that have led directly, and indirectly, to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, most visibly in Iraq. Put it all together, and it sounds very much as though there has been a World War III, and that the U.S. government was (or is) one of its chief protagonists. Most of the essays in Chomsky's For Reasons of State are about U.S. aggression in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was a war that lasted more than 12 years. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and approximately two million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives. The U.S. deployed half a million ground troops, dropped more than six million tons of bombs. And yet, though you wouldn't believe it if you watched most Hollywood movies, America lost the war. The war began in South Vietnam and then spread to North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. After putting in place a client regime in Saigon, the U.S. government invited itself in to fight a communist insurgency - Vietcong guerillas who had infiltrated rural regions of South Vietnam where villagers were sheltering them. This was exactly the model that Russia replicated when, in 1979, it invited itself into Afghanistan. Nobody in the "free world" is in any doubt about the fact that Russia invaded Afghanistan. After glasnost, even a Soviet foreign minister called the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan "illegal and immoral". But there has been no such introspection in the United States. In 1984, in a stunning revelation, Chomsky wrote: For the past 22 years, I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina - without success. There is no such event in history. Rather, there is an American defence of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from the outside (namely from Vietnam). There is no such event in history! In 1962, the U.S. Air Force began to bomb rural South Vietnam, where 80 per cent of the population lived. The bombing lasted for more than a decade. Thousands of people were killed. The idea was to bomb on a scale colossal enough to induce panic migration from villages into cities, where people could be held in refugee camps. Samuel Huntington referred to this as a process of "urbanisation". (I learned about urbanisation when I was in architecture school in India. Somehow I don't remember aerial bombing being part of the syllabus.) Huntington - famous today for his essay "The Clash of Civilizations?"- was at the time Chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group. Chomsky quotes him describing the Vietcong as "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist". Huntington went on to advise "direct application of mechanical and conventional power"- in other words, to crush a people's war, eliminate the people. (Or, perhaps, to update the thesis - in order to prevent a clash of civilizations, annihilate a civilisation.) Here's one observer from the time on the limitations of America's mechanical power: "The problem is that American machines are not equal to the task of killing communist soldiers except as part of a scorched-earth policy that destroys everything else as well." That problem has been solved now. Not with less destructive bombs, but with more imaginative language. There's a more elegant way of saying "that destroys everything else as well". The phrase is "collateral damage". And here's a firsthand account of what America's "machines" (Huntington called them "modernising instruments" and staff officers in the Pentagon called them "bomb-o-grams") can do. This is T.D. Allman flying over the Plain of Jars in Laos. Even if the war in Laos ended tomorrow, the restoration of its ecological balance might take several years. The reconstruction of the Plain's totally destroyed towns and villages might take just as long. Even if this was done, the Plain might long prove perilous to human habitation because of the hundreds of thousands of unexploded bombs, mines and booby traps. A recent flight around the Plain of Jars revealed what less than three years of intensive American bombing can do to a rural area, even after its civilian population has been evacuated. In large areas, the primary tropical colour - bright green - has been replaced by an abstract pattern of black, and bright metallic colours. Much of the remaining foliage is stunted, dulled by defoliants. Today, black is the dominant colour of the northern and eastern reaches of the Plain. Napalm is dropped regularly to burn off the grass and undergrowth that covers the Plains and fills its many narrow ravines. The fires seem to burn constantly, creating rectangles of black. During the flight, plumes of smoke could be seen rising from freshly bombed areas. The main routes, coming into the Plain from communist-held territory, are bombed mercilessly, apparently on a non-stop basis. There, and along the rim of the Plain, the dominant colour is yellow. All vegetation has been destroyed. The craters are countless.... [T]he area has been bombed so repeatedly that the land resembles the pocked, churned desert in storm-hit areas of the North African desert. Further to the southeast, Xieng Khouangville - once the most populous town in communist Laos - lies empty, destroyed. To the north of the Plain, the little resort of Khang Khay also has been destroyed. Around the landing field at the base of King Kong, the main colours are yellow (from upturned soil) and black (from napalm), relieved by patches of bright red and blue: parachutes used to drop supplies. [T]he last local inhabitants were being carted into air transports. Abandoned vegetable gardens that would never be harvested grew near abandoned houses with plates still on the tables and calendars on the walls. (Never counted in the "costs" of war are the dead birds, the charred animals, the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race towards other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies. This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.) The centrepiece of For Reasons of State is an essay called "The Mentality of the Backroom Boys", in which Chomsky offers an extraordinarily supple, exhaustive analysis of the Pentagon Papers, which he says "provide documentary evidence of a conspiracy to use force in international affairs in violation of law". Here, too, Chomsky makes note of the fact that while the bombing of North Vietnam is discussed at some length in the Pentagon Papers, the invasion of South Vietnam barely merits a mention. The Pentagon Papers are mesmerising, not as documentation of the history of the U.S. war in Indochina, but as insight into the minds of the men who planned and executed it. It's fascinating to be privy to the ideas that were being tossed around, the suggestions that were made, the proposals that were put forward. In a section called "The Asian Mind - the American Mind", Chomsky examines the discussion of the mentality of the enemy that "stoically accept[s] the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives", whereas "We want life, happiness, wealth, power", and, for us, "death and suffering are irrational choices when alternatives exist". So, we learn that the Asian poor, presumably because they cannot comprehend the meaning of happiness, wealth, and power, invite America to carry this "strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide". But, then "we" balk because "genocide is a terrible burden to bear". (Eventually, of course, "we" went ahead and committed genocide any way, and then pretended that it never really happened.) Of course, the Pentagon Papers contain some moderate proposals, as well. Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however - if handled right - might... offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided - which we could offer to do "at the conference table". Layer by layer, Chomsky strips down the process of decision-making by U.S. government officials, to reveal at its core the pitiless heart of the American war machine, completely insulated from the realities of war, blinded by ideology, and willing to annihilate millions of human beings, civilians, soldiers, women, children, villages, whole cities, whole ecosystems - with scientifically honed methods of brutality. Here's an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm: We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn't so hot - if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene - now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so's to make it burn better. It'll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it'll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning. So the lucky gooks were annihilated for their own good. Better Dead than Red. Thanks to the seductive charms of Hollywood and the irresistible appeal of America's mass media, all these years later, the world views the war as an American story. Indochina provided the lush, tropical backdrop against which the United States played out its fantasies of violence, tested its latest technology, furthered its ideology, examined its conscience, agonised over its moral dilemmas, and dealt with its guilt (or pretended to). The Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and Laotians were only script props. Nameless, faceless, slit-eyed humanoids. They were just the people who died. Gooks. The only real lesson the U.S. government learned from its invasion of Indochina is how to go to war without committing American troops and risking American lives. So now we have wars waged with long-range cruise missiles, Black Hawks, "bunker busters". Wars in which the "Allies" lose more journalists than soldiers. As a child growing up in the state of Kerala, in South India - where the first democratically elected Communist government in the world came to power in 1959, the year I was born - I worried terribly about being a gook. Kerala was only a few thousand miles west of Vietnam. We had jungles and rivers and rice-fields, and communists, too. I kept imagining my mother, my brother, and myself being blown out of the bushes by a grenade, or mowed down, like the gooks in the movies, by an American marine with muscled arms and chewing gum and a loud background score. In my dreams, I was the burning girl in the famous photograph taken on the road from Trang Bang. As someone who grew up on the cusp of both American and Soviet propaganda (which more or less neutralised each other), when I first read Noam Chomsky, it occurred to me that his marshalling of evidence, the volume of it, the relentlessness of it, was a little - how shall I put it? - insane. Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough to convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much work. But now I understand that the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky's work is a barometer of the magnitude, scope, and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that he's up against. He's like the wood-borer who lives inside the third rack of my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunching through the wood, grinding it to a fine dust. It's as though he disagrees with the literature and wants to destroy the very structure on which it rests. I call him Chompsky. Being an American working in America, writing to convince Americans of his point of view must really be like having to tunnel through hard wood. Chomsky is one of a small band of individuals fighting a whole industry. And that makes him not only brilliant, but heroic. Some years ago, in a poignant interview with James Peck, Chomsky spoke about his memory of the day Hiroshima was bombed. He was 16 years old: I remember that I literally couldn't talk to anybody. There was nobody. I just walked off by myself. I was at a summer camp at the time, and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of hours when I heard about it. I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone's reaction. I felt completely isolated. That isolation produced one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time. When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive. It will point a cool, incriminating finger at a merciless, Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous, and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The only difference is that it is armed with technology that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that history has never known and the human race cannot begin to imagine.) As a could've been gook, and who knows, perhaps a potential gook, hardly a day goes by when I don't find myself thinking - for one reason or another - "Chomsky Zindabad". Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things. From abirbazaz at rediffmail.com Sun Aug 24 13:17:15 2003 From: abirbazaz at rediffmail.com (abir bazaz) Date: 24 Aug 2003 07:47:15 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Biased, who? Message-ID: <20030824074715.25380.qmail@webmail10.rediffmail.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030824/8755815b/attachment.pl From vipinvijay at yahoo.com Sat Aug 23 23:47:10 2003 From: vipinvijay at yahoo.com (vipin vijay) Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 11:17:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] HAWAMAHAL / Screening Invitation Message-ID: <20030823181710.74814.qmail@web10508.mail.yahoo.com> Dear friends, I invite one and all for the screening of the film "HAWAMAHAL", 58 minutes, at the India Habitat Centre, NewDelhi, on 24.08.2003, at 7.00P.M as part of the PSBT- UNESCO film festival. I am really sorry for such a short notice. With Love, Vipin. Vipin Vijay 24/273, TRA: 105,Sasthamkovil St, Thycadu, TVM- 695 014, Kerala, INDIA --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030823/af8f60aa/attachment.html From announcer at pukar.org.in Sun Aug 24 14:28:15 2003 From: announcer at pukar.org.in (PUKAR @ Kitab Mahal) Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2003 14:28:15 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] 29.8.03: Music and the Public Sphere in Trinidad Message-ID: Dear Friends: PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) and Aragon Services invite you to a presentation and playback session on "Mobilising India: Music And The Public Sphere In Trinidad" by TEJASWINI NIRANJANA. The presentation will focus on Trinidadian music of the twentieth century, exploring in particular the genres of calypso and chutney-soca. Both genres represent interventions in the musical public sphere of the predominantly bi-racial Caribbean island, populated by "Africans", "Indians" and other ethnicities. How and why in calypso music the question of the "Indian" sometimes occupies centrestage, and how chutney-soca emerges as a challenge to the Creole imaginary, are issues with implications for how we think about "Indian" modernities. TEJASWINI NIRANJANA is Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore. She is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (1992), and the co-editor of Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (1993). Her forthcoming book is on women, music and race in Trinidad. For more information about her work, see http://www.cscsban.org/html/tejaswini.htm. Date: FRIDAY 29 AUGUST 2003 6.00 P.M. to 8.00 P.M. At: PUKAR c/o Aragon Services 4th Floor, Kitab Mahal Dr Dadabhai Naoroji Road Mumbai 400001 Kitab Mahal is next to New Excelsior Cinema, and is near VT Station. Entrance to Kitab Mahal is from the New Book Company on Dadabhai Naoroji Road. Lift is available to the third floor. _____ PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) P.O. Box 5627, Dadar, Mumbai 400014, INDIA E-Mail Phone +91 (022) 2207 7779, +91 98200 45529, +91 98204 04010 Web Site http://www.pukar.org.in _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at mail.sarai.net http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From mir_taqi_mir at hotmail.com Tue Aug 26 00:15:06 2003 From: mir_taqi_mir at hotmail.com (Mir Taqi Mir) Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 18:45:06 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Re:Biased, who? Message-ID: keep at it abir, ----- Original Message ----- From: Kashmir Media Service To: "Undisclosed-Recipient: ;"@mtabulk5.sc5.mail.yahoo.com Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2003 4:53 AM Subject: [KF] News from KMS AI CONCERNED OVER CUSTODIAL DISAPPEARANCES IN IHK * 12 KASHMIRIS KILLED, 4 INDIAN SOLDIERS KILLED Srinagar, August 23(KMS): The Amnesty International has expressed serious concern over custodial disappearances in occupied Kashmir and conveyed its active support to the families whose loved ones have disappeared. According to Kashmir Media Service, Amnesty's Canada Group in a statement announced to undertake three day fast starting on August 28 to express solidarity with the relatives of disappeared persons in occupied Kashmir. It said, "the Amnesty supports the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Jammu and Kashmir. The statement further said, "it has noted that since 1989 there have been thousands of reported disappearances in the state. While the authorities estimate the figure at 3744, we believe the accurate figure to be probably higher, since many disappearances go unreported or unrecorded". The Amnesty expressed grave concern over the thousands of people who disappeared in custody of security agencies that include, the local police and its counter-insurgency wing, the Special Operations Group, Indian army's Rashtriya Rifles and smaller para-military units. Meanwhile, Indian troops killed 12 more Kashmiris in continuing siege and search operations. The troops claimed to have killed six Guerrillas in a clash at Mendhar in Poonch district. Four Indian troops including three officers were also killed in the encounter, which lasted several hours. Two persons each were shot dead in Doda and Poonch districts while one each in Bijbehara and Shopian areas. In an interview with Kashmir Media Service, former APHC Chairman, Syed Ali Gilani said that India cannot intimidate Kashmiris into submission by continuing its state terrorism. He emphasised that liberation struggle will continue till it reaches its logical end. Addressing party workers in Surankot, Chairman of Peoples Movement, Ghulam Ahmad Mir said, Kashmiris started the ongoing liberation struggle after India refused to fulfill its pledge made to them for exercising their right to self-determination. Chairman, Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Front, Pandit Bhushan Bazaz speaking at a seminar in New Delhi called upon India to stop human rights abuses, catch and kill policy and rescind all black laws on Kashmir. (KMS) INDIA SHOULD FULFILL PLEDGES MADE WITH KASHMIRIS IN SECURITY COUNCIL--- PANDIT BHUSHAN BAZAZ New Delhi, August 23(KMS): India must recognise the 15 year old Kashmiris' uprising, fulfill her pledges with Kashmiris in the UN Security Council, withdraw all black laws on Kashmir and stop human rights abuses and catch and kill policy in occupied Jammu and Kashmir. According to Kashmir Media Service, this has been stated by the Chairman, Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Front (JKDF) Pandit Bhushan Bazaz while participating in discussion during a seminar held here under the title, 'Towards a Peaceful Settlement of the Kashmir Issue'. He reiterated that Kashmir is a disputed territory and there could be no peace in south Asia until its just, dignified and permanent solution is secured. For this the UN resolutions on Kashmir or tripartite talks are the two alternatives, he said. The Jammu and Kashmir dispute is inextricably linked with peace and security in the region and there is greater urgency to address the Kashmir issue, which is passing through a flashpoint period, Pandit Bhushan Bazaz added. Pandit Bazaz lambasted Indian government for stepping up custodial killings besides arresting and disappearances of Kashmiri youth. (KMS-) APHC CHAIRMAN FOR TALKS ON KASHMIR Srinagar, August 23(KMS): In occupied Kashmir, APHC Chairman, Maulana Abbas Ansari has said that dialogue can only end the Kashmir issue which has been cause of tension in the region for the last over 5 decades. According to Kashmir Media Service, in a media interview Maulana Ansari said talks between India, Pakistan and true representatives of Kashmiri people could solve the Kashmir dispute. Referring to Vohra peace mission, Maulana Ansari said he will not hold talks with N. N. Vohra because "his initiative does not take us anywhere". He said, Hurriyat Conference would welcome initiative coming from the Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee. He said we can find such a decision that people of the region can live in peace. (KMS-) INDIA MUST COME TO NEGOTIATION TABLE TO PROVE ITS SINCERITY - JKPM Srinagar, August 23(KMS): Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Movement said that Kashmiris started the ongoing freedom struggle after India's refusal to fulfil her pledge made with them for exercising their right of self determination. According to Kashmir Media Service, this was stated by Peoples Movement's Chairman, Ghulam Ahmad Mir while addressing a meeting of party workers and office bearers at Surankot in Poonch district. More than two hundred party workers attended the meeting. Peoples Movement Chairman said India has been engaged in genocide of Kashmiri Muslims for the last 56 years in order to perpetuate her stranglehold over occupied Kashmir. India he said has been operating terrorist bases across occupied Kashmir particularly in the districts of Rajouri and Poonch close to Line of Control but blaming Pakistan of terrorism to cover up its own crime. Lauding Pakistan's just stand on Kashmir, Ghulam Ahmad Mir said that Pakistan has been extending moral, diplomatic and political support to Kashmiris. On the other hand, India talked of negotiations on Kashmir but instead martyrs dozens of Kashmiri youth daily through custodial killings. Arsoning and vandalizing of Muslims' property, arrest of innocent youth and forced disappearance by Indian army has become order of the day. Peoples Movement Chief said if India is sincere about resolving the Kashmir issue it must come to the negotiation table. Some other prominent party leaders including Secretary General, Mirza Zafar Khurshid and Ejaz Ahmad Advocate also addressed the meeting. They reiterated the resolve to continue their struggle till freedom from India's occupation of Kashmir. (KMS) THIS 3 YR OLD BOY CANNOT FORGET HIS DEAD FATHER Wagoora, Pattan, August 23(KMS): In occupied Kashmir, more than two months have passed, but three year old Imtiaz cannot forget his father. Everyday, this tender boy runs bare footed to his father's grave and embraces it till he falls asleep. According to Kashmir Media Service, Imtiaz's father Peer Abdul Qayoom and brother Masood Ahmad Shah were killed by the Indian troops of 49 GR Simurulen in the intervening night of 15th June. Both of them were returning from evening prayers when they were shot at in village Daro in Kreeri Pattan. "How can he forget his father, he was most close to his father. His father loved Imtiaz more than his life", says Touseefa, the wife of Abdul Qayyum adding that after his father had been killed, young Imtiaz never smiles and always cries for his father. Imtiaz's four brothers and two sisters have the same tale to render. Grief stricken by their father and brother's death, the young ones of the family are still coming to grips with the reality "Tell me should I cry for my father or my brother or curse the Indian troops for killing my family members" says Farooq Ahmad, the younger son of Abdul Qayyum. Though army claimed that the father son duo was killed accidentally that fateful night, Touseefa argues that the army men knew that her husband always came to the home after offering Isha prayers." The army personnel knew that my husband was an Imam in a local mosque and used to come home only after 10 in the evening so, they fired at him without ascertaining his identity, Why did they kill him, only the concerned commanding must know " argues Touseefa. (KMS-) IMAM OF MOSQUE ARRESTED, DISAPPEARED BY INDIAN TROOPS Srinagar, August 23(KMS): An Imam of a mosque in Bandipora arrested by Indian troops on August 17 has been missing ever since and there was no trace of his whereabouts. According to Kashmir Media Service, Imam, Noor Muhammad resident of Bankot was taken into custody by Indian soldiers on August 17 and sice then there has been no information where he is. The local people however, recovered his clothes form a nearby jungle which has created doubts about safety of his life. (KMS) APHC CONCERNED OVER GROWING HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN IHK * 2 STUDENTS, 1 TRADER ARRESTED Srinagar, August 23(KMS): All Parties Hurriyat Conference expressing grave concern over human rights violations by Indian army and its armed agents has urged international organisations to pressurise India to stop the brutalities being committed against the people of Kashmir. According to Kashmir Media Service, the Indian troops launched savage crackdowns twice during last week at Wachchi and Bandua besides other areas of district Pulwama. During the crackdown, the residents were stripped of their clothes, beaten up and tortured. Vandalism of the highest order was committed by the troops during search operation. The whole area is extremely tense, APHC spokesman said. Citing some of the recent atrocities by the occupation army, the spokesman said that Border Security Force (BSF) arrested a young trader, Riaz Ahmad Wattoo from his residence at Budshah Mohalla, Lal Bazar in Srinagar on August 14, 2003 and since then his whereabouts were not known by his relatives. Traders and shopkeepers demonstrated and observed strike on Thursday last to protest Riaz Ahmad's illegal arrest. A delegation also called upon the police and civil authorities but of no avail. In another violence related incident, unknown gunmen arrested young student Irashad Ahmad Shah, 17 and Riaz Ahmad Shah, 20 the previous day and took them to some unspecified place. People of the area held forceful demonstration against the incident. (KMS) BSF, ARMY AT LOGGER HEADS OVER KARAL GUND INCIDENT Srinagar, August 23(KMS): In occupied Kashmir, Border Security Force waged a virtual war of words with Army over Kral Gund Bridge incident alleging that one of its officers was humiliated, roughed up, detained and tortured in custody by Indian Army. According to Kashmir Media Service, in a statement here, BSF said the army severely beat its sub inspector Ram Mehar Singh and detained him as his vehicle attempted to cross Karal Gund bridge while an army convoy was coming from the other side. However, a defence spokesman denied the charges saying this was being done to malign the finest force of the country. He said army convoy waited for the BSF vehicles to pass and then crossed the bridge. However, when the army vehicle was about to pass the bridge, a BSF vehicle, that had lagged behind arrived at the spot. Despite repeated reminders by the army personnel to move backwards, the BSF Sub Inspector refused while pointing his gun at army officer, the spokesman said adding the BSF man was later overpowered and taken to army headquarters. (KMS-) AMNESTY GROUP CONCERNED OVER CUSTODIAL DISAPPEARANCE IN OCCUPIED KASHMIR Srinagar, August 23(KMS): Amnesty International has expressed serious concern over custodial disappearances in occupied Kashmir and conveyed its active support to the families whose loved ones have disappeared. According to Kashmir Media Service, a Vancouver-based Amnesty Group in a statement issued at Canada said, "we support the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Jammu and Kashmir. We are gravely concerned with the thousands of people who disappeared in custody of security agencies". These security agencies the statement added, include the local police and its counter-insurgency wing, the Special Operations Group, Indian army's Rashtriya Rifles and smaller para-military units. The statement further said, "we have noted that since 1989 there have been thousands of reported disappearances in the state. While the authorities estimate the figure at 3744, we believe the accurate figure to be probably higher, since many disappearances go unreported or unrecorded". The Canada-based Amnesty Group has conveyed its concern, hope, comfort and active support to the families whose loved ones have disappeared. (KMS-) IHK CABINET MEMBERS DEMAND TALKS WITH HURRIYAT Srinagar, August 23(KMS): In occupied Kashmir, members from within the cabinet are now demanding that the puppet administration begin talks with liberation leaders from the Hurriyat Conference. It's the pressure within the cabinet that forced puppet Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Saeed to publicly call for talks with the Hurriyat, reports Kashmir Media Service. Now in what could increase the pressure on both the puppet Mufti government and New Delhi to reach out to the Hurriyat, 11 legislators have come together to formalise their alliance under the banner of the People's Democratic Forum. This political party will be headed by Ghulam Mohammad Din Sofi and has four state ministers. Their first demand is to hold talks with the Hurriyat. Hakeem Muhammad Yaseen, one of the members, said, "The forum wants a peaceful and honourable solution of Kashmir issue which is acceptable to all parties. We want meaningful dialogue in which Hurriyat Conference and other like minded groups are involved". The decision to formally create a political party came a day after two of the puppet ministers threatened to resign from the troubled state government. They have been demanding more representation in the state cabinet and a sign of how tense things have become was on public display when some of these ministers walked out of the ceremonial fun KASHMIR MEDIA SERVICE [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT InformationTimes.com - Kashmir Forum http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KashmirForum Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. >From: "abir bazaz" >Reply-To: "abir bazaz" >To: reader-list at sarai.net >Subject: [Reader-list] Biased, who? >Date: 24 Aug 2003 07:47:15 -0000 > >After Newstrack & The Srinagar Conspiracy, Vikram Chandra is at it again. >Here is an editorial from Greater Kashmir. > > >Srinagar 24 August > >BIASED, WHO? > >The remarks of a media man associated with a premier television channel, >who conducted Question Time India a few days at the Hotel Centaur merits a >mention. The media man accused the audience of bias. Till date they used to >accused the Kashmir media of bias. But, today the audience which comprised >people from all walks of life has also been accused of bias. Why? Because >the audience did not subscribe to the view point of the channel. How did >the channel want the audience to behave any way? The audience held the >government of India responsible, and rightly so, for the mess Kashmir finds >itself in today. All hands went up when the audience was asked. The >audience never knew that the channel will pose such a question to them. >And, when the question was asked, the audience reacted. For the information >of the media man and his channel, the reaction was spontaneous. It was not >planned. And, what the channel had planed did not work for them, >fortunately or unfortunately. The persons occupying the front row were >there to safeguard the broader interests of the government of India and >also the interests of the channel. But the audience proved once again which >way the wind blows in contemporary Kashmir notwithstanding the planted >questions from the front row. If telling the truth makes one biased, then >every Kashmiri is biased. But can the channel boast of cent percent >objectivity? No, it cannot. Although it was making the programme for a >foreign channel yet it tried its best to project a clean picture of the a >dispensation which is responsible for the wrongs committed in Kashmir. This >stands proved by the statement of some of the persons occupying the front >row. According to them, the channel had requested them to pose questions on >mobile phones, favourable change in the situation, unemployment and >tourism. Agreed all Kashmiris are biased. But, can the channel expect the >people to forget what they have experienced during the past thirteen years. >Can they forget the custodial killings and enforced disappearances? How can >they forget rape and molestation of Kashmiri women? The Kashmiris will >react in a similar fashion whenever they are invited to seminars, debates >or a programme like the one conducted at Hotel Centaur recently. Instead of >accusing Kashmiris of bias, the channel, nay, the government of India >better amend its ways and rectify its previous mistakes by accepting the >genuine demand of the people of Jammu Kashmir. The people have witnessed >the worst ever period in their history and a television channel cannot bail >out its government by hiring some unscrupulous elements, or by accusing the >sufferers of bias. The channel must bear in mind that Kashmiris do not need >lessons on objectivity. The channel better preach objectivity to its own >people. > > > >___________________________________________________ >Meet your old school or college friends from >1 Million + database... >Click here to reunite www.batchmates.com/rediff.asp > > >_________________________________________ >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: _________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From faizan at sarai.net Tue Aug 26 12:58:56 2003 From: faizan at sarai.net (Faizan Ahmed) Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 12:58:56 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Multiple bomb blasts in Mumbai condemned by many organizations Message-ID: <200308261258.56616.faizan@sarai.net> ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: [AMUNetwork] Multiple bomb blasts in Mumbai condemned by many organizations Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 22:43:41 -0000 From: AMUNetwork at yahoogroups.com To: AMUNetwork at yahoogroups.com http://www.imc-usa.org/cgi-bin/cfm/PressRelease.cfm?PRID=61 For immediate release August 25th, 2003 Contact: Rasheed Ahmed Telephone: (708) 466-0244 Indian Muslim Council-USA, a Washington based advocacy group working toward safeguarding Indian society's pluralist and tolerant ethos, condemned the multiple bomb blasts in Mumbai, India on August 25, 2003. According to news reports received on August 25, 2003, more than 45 innocent lives were lost when multiple bomb explosions rocked India's financial capital, Mumbai. Rasheed Ahmed, Vice-President of IMC-USA said, "We are always deeply pained by such senseless acts of violence. We call on the Indian government to arrest the perpetrators of this heinous act and swiftly bring them to justice and seek maximum penalty under the law. We are confident that Indian government will not let the violence escalate to avoid further loss of life and civility. We stand in sympathy with the families and friends of those who lost their lives and call on all Indians to join together and condemn all violence against innocent civilians." Since it was founded on the independence day, August 15th, 2002, IMC- USA has been actively promoting values of pluralism and tolernce amongst the Indian Diaspora in the United States. Indian Muslim Council-USA 265 Sunrise Highway, 1-355 Rockville Center, NY 11570 E mail:info at imc-usa.org web:www.imc-usa.org ============================== From: AFMI Press Release The latest bomb blasts in Mumbai speak of the inability of the Central Government to control law and order forces to combat terrorism effectively in various parts of the country. The bomb blast in Mumbai is the cowardly act, is reprehensible and must be condemned by all those who believe in the sanctity of human life. The American Federation of Muslims of Indian Origin (AFMI) demand a high level probe to bring the terrorists to justice. The occurrence of the blast at a time when the country is going to polls in four major states clearly indicates that special interest groups are keen to turn the electoral fight into a religious or ethnic war. AFMI urges Muslims and all others who believe in secular ideals of peaceful pluralism to take a stand on the issue and ensure that those who perpetuate terrorism and those who benefit from it are not allowed to succeed. Among the victims were people belonging to different religious communities. We pray to God to heal the wounds of those who survived and give them perseverance to overcome the grief caused by the act. AFMI offers its condolences to all the survivors of the victims and urges the Muslim community in Bombay and other places to remain vigilant of those elements who might use the opportunity to promote hatred against it. AFMI11 at aol.com - ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for Your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark Printer at Myinks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US & Canada. http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511 http://us.click.yahoo.com/l.m7sD/LIdGAA/qnsNAA/sUXolB/TM - ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> When posting a message please include the Subject heading and your full name, highest degree from Aligarh, year of graduation, and present location. Messages without this information will not be approved and no further reminders will be sent. Visit us at: http://www.aligs.org Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ - ------------------------------------------------------- From anilbhatia at indiatimes.com Tue Aug 26 11:06:48 2003 From: anilbhatia at indiatimes.com (anilbhatia) Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 11:06:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] TV fuels speculation, sparks off panic Message-ID: <200308260550.LAA00666@WS0005.indiatimes.com> TV fuels speculation, sparks off panic Team ET. Tuesday, August 26, 2003 How much does media reporting contribute to panic in situations of grave emergency like the Mumbai blasts on Monday? And what is the extent of damage caused by reports using unconfirmed and unverified information, which later turn out to be incorrect? Facts took a backseat on Monday afternoon, as television news channels went into a frenzy fuelled by rumour and conjecture. Television anchors and reporters outdid each other in dramatising facts and fuelling rumours. For starters, the news channels kept announcing that there had been at least four to five blasts in the city for a good three hours after the event. Locations such as Marine Lines, the municipal headquarters and even Hill Road in suburban Bandra were mentioned. This was despite the fact that these channels were simultaneously beaming live interviews of top Mumbai policemen stating there had only been two blasts at the Gateway of India and Kalbadevi. One anchor even confidently mentioned Marine Drive as the location of one such blast! This kind of coverage added to the anxiety of thousands of families waiting for news of their loved ones. Another news channel reported that offices in the Nariman Point business district were asked to shut down and send their employees home. This turned out to be incorrect. Police spokespersons had said they had only beefed up security of multi-storeyed buildings; no appeal to shut down offices had ever been made. The channels then turned their attention to the hospitals, focusing on close-ups of charred bodies lined up in the wards. In more than one case, anchors thrust microphones at wailing relatives of the deceased asking for their comments on the situation. They also invaded the hospital wards capturing stunned blast victims, many of whom were dazed and some even undressed. The voice-over accompanying the footage made a feeble apology, saying the pictures were live and could be disturbing for viewers. A senior corporate official severely criticised the media for fuelling panic and dramatising events. Conjecture and veiled suggestions on possible motives of the perpetrators of the crime run the risk of fuelling a communal situation. Voice-overs in one channel suggested that terrorists had chosen to strike between the Janmasthami and Ganesh Chaturthi festivals to create panic and to take advantage of the lax police bandobust, unmindful of the reaction this kind of a message might fan. Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Indiatimes at http://email.indiatimes.com Buy The Best In BOOKS at http://www.bestsellers.indiatimes.com Bid for Air Tickets on Air Sahara Flights at Prices Lower Than Before. Just log on to http://airsahara.indiatimes.com and Bid Now ! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030826/1415b901/attachment.html From sttwn at earthlink.net Tue Aug 26 17:51:51 2003 From: sttwn at earthlink.net (Scott Townsend) Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:51:51 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Borderline Stories- call for your participation Message-ID: This is to ask for your online participation in the project 'Borderline Stories', an online and site-specific installation in English and Spanish (Milwaukee Wisconsin, USA, Walker's Point Center for the Arts). These interactive pieces solicit stories, anecdotes and prejudices from the audience about stereotypes and immigration groups. The interactive work collates and shows the responses over the exhibition time-frame within the local community and the world-wide web. While some individual sections are more related to the Americas and specific immigrant stories, other sections are more generalized about the subject and are more relevant to a world- wide audience. A fast internet connection helps to access the online work. Please pass this on to anyone that you think would be interested in sending data and observing the accumulation of information online. The online address is: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~sttwn/border.html thanks for your interest Scott Townsend for Walker's Point Center for the Arts and the Center for Twenty-First Century Studies, USA From lassi at provisual.fi Tue Aug 26 18:18:25 2003 From: lassi at provisual.fi (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Lassi_Tasaj=E4rvi?=) Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 15:48:25 +0300 Subject: [Reader-list] Pixoff.net Message-ID: <007401c36bd0$5c406700$c83040c1@provisualskanni> Hi We're running a web site and community for young Finnish film and media artists. The site offers communication and feedback tools and a variety of short movies sent by the members of the community. We stream them in all three major formats. The main site is currently in Finnish only, but future plans include turning it into an international project. This in mind we're now looking for similar projects/sites/plans in other countries, to learn and share information and practises. Please visit http://www.pixoff.net to get a better picture what I'm talking about. If you know any similar cases in your area or network, please forward this mail to them. We know that Atomfilms and iFilm etc. exist, but we're looking for more underground, new, local or smaller etc. projects. Here's also a brief English info text: http://www.pixoff.net/fi/info/index.asp You can contact us at: lassi at provisual.fi Thank you for your help! Best, Lassi Tasajärvi Project Manager Pixoff.net lassi at provisual.fi -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030826/1165a270/attachment.html From aiindex at mnet.fr Wed Aug 27 05:56:01 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 01:26:01 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Detecting underground temples a la WMD search in Iraq Message-ID: India: Digging for Secularism ? South Asia Citizens Wire Special August 27, 2003 "Searching for a temple under the mosque at Ayodhya is like finding WMD in Iraq." - Gail Omvedt [One of India's well known insurgent Anthropologists] o o o Sify [India] 'Mumbai blast-Ayodhya connection speculative' By E Jayakrishnan in New Delhi Monday, 25 August , 2003, 15:42 http://sify.com/news/othernews/fullstory.php?id=13233314 o o o The Ottawa Citizen [Canada] August 26, 2003 Canadian scientist's work may have sparked deadly blast in Mumbai Randy Boswell http://canada.com/national/story.asp?id=E7CB0EB5-BB34-45BE-985C-0971FA6F7C1F o o o Sify, India August 26, 2003 Ayodhya to be key issue in UP polls http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=13233744 o o o The Times of India, August 26, 2003 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=148027 Archaeologists dig holes into ASI report AKSHAYA MUKUL NEW DELHI: The Archaeological Survey of India's excavation report on Ayodhya, suggesting ''a huge structure indicative of remains, which are distinctive features associated with the temples of north India'', has been found wanting at many levels by archaeologists and historians. Archaeologist Suraj Bhan, who visited the site during the excavation, says the report has not ''taken into account'' certain features of the western wall of the pre-Babri Masjid chamber. * According to him, the burnt brick wall of the pre-Babri Masjid structure had a carved stone laid in the foundation. ''This has not been taken into account. If it was, this could have precluded the possibility of the structure being associated with Hindus, since they never used carved stone in foundation,'' he says. * The pillar bases are not of the same type. ''Fifty pillar bases are not of the same type, which means they were used in different structures,'' he says. R C Thakran of Delhi University, who also spent a long time in Ayodhya during excavation, concurs. ''I have seen the material in the pillar bases. Pieces of early mediaeval bricks, thinner, smaller and less wide were found. Can it take a massive structure?'' he asks. Supriya Varma of Panjab University, who spent months in Ayodhya as an expert of Sunni Waqf Board, has also pointed out glaring omissions in the report. * Though ASI suggests that from 10th century onwards, the site had a shrine followed by a temple with different structural phases, its report also talks of ''animal bones recovered from various levels of different periods''. ''If there was a shrine and temple at this site, how do we account for the presence of animal bones?'' she asks. * She also says stone and decorated bricks could have been used in any building, not necessarily only in a temple. Further, the carved architectural members have come from the debris and not from a stratified context. According to Bhan, the ASI report has also not taken into account the intrusive nature of pillar bases and the Ramchabutra. He says in June, when he visited the site, the ASI had dug into the Babri Masjid floor. ''It means that there was a structure later than the Masjid itself''. He says that the water reservoir in the south-eastern corner made of lime and calcrete was later filled and the chabutra made, now known as Ramchabutra. ''Excavation showed that even the chabutra was dug into the Babri Masjid. This proves that the chabutra was a later construction,'' he explains. On the ASI's claim of continuity in structure from 10th century onwards, Thakran says if there is any continuity, it is of ''lime surkhi floor'', associated with Islamic architecture. He says there is also continuity between the floor of the Masjid and walls of massive structure. The most glaring mistake is that despite admitting that during and after period IV (Gupta level) up to period IX (late and post-Mughal), regular habitation deposits disappear, resulting in mixing of earlier material with the contemporary - creating problems of dating - it has selectively used some of the artifacts for dating and excluded others. o o o The Hindu, August 27, 2003 http://www.thehindu.com/2003/08/27/stories/2003082704801200.htm ASI report raises more questions By Anjali Mody New Delhi AUG. 26. The report of the Archaeological Survey of India on its excavation at Ayodhya is unlikely to settle the academic debate, and will prolong the legal dispute on what lay beneath the disputed site. While proponents of the theory that a 12th Century Hindu temple preceded the Babri Masjid say that they have been vindicated, the opposing side is readying to question the basis of the ASI's claim. A great deal of the heat will focus on the ASI's conclusion that it has found material at the site "indicative of remains which are distinctive features found associated with the temples of North India". To sustain this claim, the report states that some architectural remains found on the site bear stylistic comparison to another building from the 12th Century. Describing the "massive structure below the disputed site", the ASI report states that one of the architectural fragments, which belongs to the 12th Century, is "similar to those found in Dharmachakrajina Vihara of Kumaradevi at Sarnath which belongs to the early 12th Century''. An ASI report from 1921 talks of this Vihara as having been built by Kumaradevi, the Buddhist wife of Govindachandra, King of Kannauj. It says that the archaeological find was first designated as the remains of a Buddhist monastery. However, Dayaram Sahni, who beame the ASI's first Indian Director-General in the 1930s, reinterpreted the findings as those belonging to a temple. Mr. Sahni based his interpretation on the grandeur of the structure that, he said, was unlike any monastery. He said the absence of images of deities was not sufficient reason to say that this was not a temple. Far from settling the issue, this comparison is only likely to keep the academic debate on the interpretation of artefacts from the Ayodhya site alive. The ASI report, however, contains more than discoveries of "remains which are distinctive features found associated with the temples of North India". The most significant finding, from an archaeological point of view, is that the evidence of the first human settlement of the site has been put at 1300 BC. This is several centuries earlier than findings at similar settlements (classified by archaeologists as Northern Black Polished Ware period) in the Gangetic plain. The earliest dates for NBPW cultures is around 700 BC with the majority being nearer 400-300 BC. If proven, this would make a significant contribution to the understanding of history of the period. The ASI's claim rests on Carbon14 dating of two samples found on the site. Other findings at the site will also interest those who have traced the site's connection with the Ramayana story. The report records finding terracotta images of the mother goddess, female figurines and remains of votive tanks, as late as the third century AD. Archaeologists say that these are evidence of folk worship, and "are not associated with Vaishnav worship", to which the Ramayana tradition belongs. There are other places in India where evidence of structures associated with Vaishnav worship has been found from the early centuries of the first millennium AD. o o o The Hindustan Times [ India] August 27, 2003 http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/printedition/270803/detIDE01.shtml Underground movement Vinay Lal Excavations in Ayodhya go back to 1969-70, when an archaeological team from the Benaras Hindu University began digging in three separate localities. Their results were first announced in the pages of Indian Archaeology - A Review, the principal organ of the ASI. The history of Ayodhya was described as going back to the NBP (Northern Black Polished Ware) Period, "which is generally accepted as covering the sixth to perhaps the first centuries BC". This is of more than incidental significance, for Rama is described in the Valmiki Ramayana as having been born in the Treta Yuga, or thousands of years before the present-day Kali Yuga, which itself began in 3102 BC. Yet there is no archaeological evidence to support the view that Ayodhya was inhabited at that time; and it is much less likely then that the Ayodhya of today could have been the large urban settlement, replete with palaces and buildings on a grand scale, that the Ayodhya of the Valmiki Ramayana purports to be. As Sarvepalli Gopal and others would have it, and as I have previously stated, the Ayodhya of the epic poem is 'fictional', and what is later taken to be Ayodhya is none other than Saketa, which the king Skanda Gupta (aka Vikramaditya) renamed Ayodhya, no doubt because "he was trying to gain prestige for himself by drawing on the tradition of the Suryavanshi kings, a line to which Rama is said to have belonged". It is agreed that habitation in Ayodhya continued after the NBP period into the end of the Gupta period; between the 6th and the 11th centuries, Ayodhya appears to have been abandoned. Following the first round of excavations, in 1975, B.B. Lal, who had just retired as Director-General of the ASI, initiated a project on the archaeology of the 'Ramayana sites'. In the reports that he submitted to the ASI in 1976-77 and 1979-80, he acknowledged this "break in occupation", and the rehabilitation of the disputed site "around the 11th century AD". Lal not only made no mention of any pillar-bases, he went so far as to say that though "several later-medieval brick-and-kankar lime floors [had] been met with", "the entire late period was devoid of any special interest". Is not the 'late period' the very time when the temple is supposed to have been demolished? Notwithstanding these reports, Lal was much later, towards the end of 1990, to submit that certain brick bases he had excavated in the Seventies were meant to support pillars and thus suggested "the existence of a temple-like structure in the south of the Babri masjid". B.B. Lal's extraordinary delay in making known his 'findings', particularly when they contradict the earlier published results, has, of course, been questioned, but that is the least of the objections that have been raised by historians and archaeologists opposed to the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. Turning first to the carvings on the pillars, it has been argued that they are far from offering any irrefutable association with Vaishnavism: they lack the emblems through which Vishnu is known - the shankha (conch shell), chakra (wheel), gada (mace) and padma (lotus). The motifs on the pillars suggest varying dates between the 9th and the 11th centuries; to be more precise, "eight of them are dissimilar, the pattern of carvings or decorative sculptures being quite different from each other", while the remaining four, though carrying similar motifs, "do not necessarily occur in a particular grouping". The predominant motifs are floral, conventionalised or stylised lotuses, and the female figure. All these motifs, while common to much 'Hindu' art, are also found in early Buddhist art originating from places like Sanchi and Bharhut, as well as in Jain and Shaivite architecture. As one scholar has argued, "The only pillar (doorjamb?) which has anything that may be called a religious motif is the one found in the 'Sita-ki-Rasoi' (Sita's Kitchen), a structure that stood apart from the Babri masjid though in the same complex. "On its lower part, it has a figure with a trishula in its left hand", but the trishula most emphatically suggests a Shaivite association, "for no Vaishnava dvarapala [door keeper] can be and has ever been shown with the trishula as an attribute". The pillars themselves, Lal and his supporters have claimed, were sustained by pillar bases that he is said to have excavated. R.S. Sharma and his colleagues observe that the site notebook that Lal as a professional archaeologist would have had to keep, as well as the register of antiquities connected with the Ayodhya excavations, have not been made available to other archaeologists. Nor has a full report of Lal's supposed findings, which should have followed the preliminary report, been published.... ....But let us suppose that Lal did excavate some pillar bases, and let us hear the voice of his supporters first. Is there agreement that the black pillars and the bases said to support them are structurally akin, and that both can be dated to the 11th century? This is certainly not the considered opinion of many professional archaeologists. Thus D. Mandal, in his monograph Ayodhya: Archaeology After Demolition, argues in considerable detail that it is "highly probable that the so-called pillar bases are actually the remnant portions of walls of different structural phases". He concurs with Sharma et al that the so-called pillar bases would have been unable to sustain the "vertical load of large-sized stone pillars", which must be construed as being decorative rather than load-bearing pillars. In short, in Mandal's view, "the contention that a 'pillared building' was raised in the 11th century AD is absolutely baseless". Similarly, Mandal makes short shrift of alleged "new archaeological discoveries" at the Babri masjid site of a 'hoard' of sculptures and other stone fragments bearing figures of Vishnu's incarnations, on the basis of which a team of eight archaeologists and historians were able to claim that their finds "prove that there did exist at this very site a magnificent temple, from at least the 11th century, which was destroyed to build a mosque-like structure over the debris of the temple in the 16th century". A panel depicting incarnations of Vishnu did not, as Mandal notes, appear in the 'dig photo'; other objects, such as an image of Shiva-Parvati, "were found some distance away", and in general the "stratigraphic position and locus of discovery" of various 'finds' have not been specified. From the point of view of an archaeologist with professional training, "archaeological finds acquire the status of evidence when situated in their context", and 'context' in archaeology is "the concerned stratigraphy, the sequence of soil deposits and the cultural material that is found in the various deposits". Mandal made then the pointed observation that "not a single photograph showing the sequential stages of the unearthing of the pieces of the 'hoard' has so far been published", and this neglect of stratigraphy marred the entire digging operation. The haphazard manner in which the digging was conducted did not merely ignore the stratigraphy of the site, in relation to which both the structural remains and the objects found there must be assessed, but in fact destroyed the stratigraphic evidence.... ....In the case of Ayodhya, it has been noted by more than one archaeologist and historian that excavations at Ayodhya have yielded Islamic glazed ware pottery pieces; all these pieces 'are securely dated', in the words ironically of one of the protagonists of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, to a period between the 13th and 15th centuries, and on stylistic and comparative grounds, that is in relation to West Asian pieces, they are determined to be Islamic in origin. The archaeological evidence, in other words, indicates not a temple but rather the distinct possibility "of a Muslim settlement" at or in the proximity of the mosque "from the 13th century onwards". It is the contention, then, of credentialled critics that the entire archaeological enterprise to demonstrate the existence of a temple, more particularly an 11th century Vaishnava shrine dedicated to Rama, at the Babri masjid site has been marked by scholarly incompetence and ignorance, exceedingly questionable motives, violation of professional ethical codes, and even downright dishonesty. Such work cannot withstand professional scrutiny. This is an edited extract from The History of History (OUP). The writer is Associate Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles. This article was written before the latest ASI report was submitted to the Allahabad High Court on August 25. -- From john at doorsofperception.com Wed Aug 27 18:07:20 2003 From: john at doorsofperception.com (John Thackara) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 14:37:20 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] DoP Bangalore: Local knowledge: design & innovation Message-ID: 26 August 2003 For immediate release: Doors of Perception in Bangalore Doors of Perception announces a "working party" in Bangalore, India, on 11 and 12 December, to celebrate its tenth birthday. DoorsEast 2003 is a cluster of events on the theme: "Local knowledge: design and innovation of tomorrow's services". The main event is a two-day international encounter - part conference, part open space workshop - on 11 and 12 December. It will address the question: "how do we design new services, enabled by ICT, that are based on local knowledge, and use local content?" DoorsEast features case studiesof location based information (GIS / GPS), WiFi networks, tools and methodologies for mapping local knowledge, and other new ways to design for mobility, geography, and access. Doors' partners in the event are the Centre for Knowledge Societies (CKS) and the National Institute of Design, in India; and Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, and Nokia, in Europe. Presenters and participants include: grassroots innovators from India and South Asia; designers of future service scenarios from MediaLab, Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, and others; Jussi Angesleva, the winner of Open Doors in 2002; Webby Award winner Marcel van der Drift; Derrick de Kerckhove, McCluhan Program director; Darlie O Koshy, Director, National Institute of Design in India; Open Doors peoples' choice Live|Work, from London; Ezio Manzini, Milan Polytechnic University; philosopher Patricia de Maertelare; e-democracy expert Bert Mulder; future services designers from Nokia; Jogi Panghaal, DoorsEast; Aditya Dev Sood, Center for Knowledge Societies, Bangalore; Marco Susani, Motorola; and symposiarch John Thackara, Doors of Perception. John Thackara commented: "The first major industry, textiles, owed a great deal to the transfer of knowledge from India. Our focus in design is now shifting its focus from things, to systems, and there are many new ways we can learn from South Asian thought". http://www.doorseast.org/ http://www.doorsofperception.com/ From nyvoices at indypress.org Thu Aug 28 02:33:02 2003 From: nyvoices at indypress.org (Rehan Ansari) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 17:03:02 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Voices 80 Message-ID: <006901c36cde$e9b66490$6501a8c0@herman> This Week's Voices That Must Be Heard By IPA-New York, a sponsored project of the Independent Press Association Edition 80: 28 August 2003. NEWS ITEMS: Greenpoint is oily by Marek Tomaszewski, Nowy Dziennik / Polish Daily News, 17 August 2003. Translated from Polish by Anna Milewska . A big oil leak from 19th and 20th century refineries covers 44 acres in Northern Brooklyn. Two oil companies-ExxonMobil and Amoco-are involved in the clean up program, which started in 1979. MORE. Martínez protecting landlords, Hoy, 21 August 2003. Translated from Spanish by Hannah Emmerich. Activist Ydanis Rodríguez accuses Washington Heights Councilman Martínez of accepting campaign contributions from owners of buildings with housing code violations. MORE. The rights of Dirty Pretty Things, New York Trend, 25 August 2003. English language. Councilmembers, and film director Stephen Frears, push immigrant rights. MORE. Bodegas and councilman know who to blame for the blackout by Fernando Aquino, El Diario / La Prensa, 22 August 2003. Translated from Spanish by Hirsh Sawhney. Group demands compensation from electric companies. MORE. BRIEFS: Hundreds at Queens peace vigil demand end to hate by Partha Banerjee, Akhon Samoy, 26 August 2003. Translated from Bangla by Partha Banerjee. Carnage in the food business, Korea Daily News, 18 August 2003. Translated from Korean by Sun-yong Reinish. 12,000 Jamaicans deported by Brigitte E. Williams, Caribnews, 26 August 2003. English language. EDITORIALS: Civil rights violations are nothing new by Elaine Cassel, Daily Challenge, 24 August 2003. English language. The Justice Department's Office of Civil Rights documented 34 "credible" civil rights complaints arising from the implementation of the USA Patriot Act. Only 34? MORE. As always we welcome questions, suggestions, corrections and letters to the editor. Rehan Ansari Editor, Independent Press Association - New York www.indypressny.org * 212/279-1442 * 143 West 29th St., 901, New York City, 10001 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030827/ac7cb175/attachment.html From dorowiese at gmx.de Thu Aug 28 13:42:31 2003 From: dorowiese at gmx.de (Doro Wiese) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 13:42:31 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Unlikely] Invitation to participate in a women videoletter Message-ID: Hi there! If you define yourself as a women, please take notice of the following invation to participate in the second edition of a 'women videoletter' which is going to be screened at the World Social Forum in Bombay/Mumbai, India, in January 2004. Greetings, Doro We’d like to invite you to participate in the second edition of ‘women videoletters’. The idea of the project is to make a compilation of short videofilms by women, which will bring together different local perspectives concerning social hierarchies, militarization and war. We want to make visible the effects that war produces. And our interest is to give a view on the global connections between sustained poverty, gender hierarchies and normative heterosexuality by collecting differing regional perspectives. What point of views do women, straight, lesbian and transgender women, have on the daily life of war or on the ‘normality’ of war? How do we define what war is? the project started during the war in afghanistan The idea for this project came up at a meeting around video activism in Berlin in October 2001, where there were about ten women from different video initiatives from India, Germany, Mexico and Switzerland who felt the need to react to the follow ups of September 11th: this was first of all the war in Afghanistan but also measures like for example the installation of the racist security laws in Germany. A great need was felt for the exchange of critical feminist perspectives from women of different descents and contexts. In 2002 the first edition of videoletters by women was produced by women activists and filmmakers from India, Chiapas/Mexico, Berlin/Germany, USA and France. This first compilation was shown at demonstrations, political events, university seminars and filmfestivals. “this is not war” – film work on the issue of war & the ‘normality’ of war We have discussed films like “Who hangs the laundry, washing, war and electricity in Beirut” (by Tina Naccache and Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdottir), "Asurot“ (“detained" by Anat Aven and Ada Ushpiz), “News Time” (by Azza El Hassan) or “Queer Documentary in Wartime: A New View of the Israeli Palestinian Crisis” (by Ellen Flanders) as rare examples which show the everyday life or the ‘normality’ of war from a personal point of view of women. In “Who hangs the laundry, washing, war and electricity in Beirut” Tina Naccache is tells us about war while she is washing her clothes – a series of actions which is influenced by the shortage of water and electricity as an effect of the war in Beirut: “People who haven’t gone through a war think that war is when shells are falling on people’s heads and people are being killed. This is not war, this is just the beginning of war. War is when the canons have stopped, where there is no more violence against individuals, when there are no more buildings being destroyed, where there is no more fear and one looks around and sees what’s left over from the war. This is war, the leftover of what we think is war.” In “Asurot” three Palestinian women live in a house in Hebron: the front part of the house belongs to Israel, the back part to the Palestinian autonomous territory. The Israelian soldiers force their way into the house whenever they like to and the women have to deal with the permanent presence of the soldiers. In “News Time” Azza El Hassan talks about Ramallah being a point of media interest. She shows the presence of lots of different tv-teams and -cameras. Her film describes how this effects her work as a filmmaker, the conflict itself and the construction of masculinity of the young Palestinian participants of the fights against Israel. In “Queer Documentary in Wartime: A New View of the Israeli Palestinian Crisis” (a documentary-in-progress) we hear how the ways queer Palestinians and Israelis live their lesbian and gay identities collide with the situation of occupation. Through these conflicts is thematized, what ‘war’ means. And Ellen Flanders connects the reflection of her own family story with her critique on the current situation in Israel and Palestine. Videoletters can provide a means to document projects or political actions, to make statements or to analyse daily life. Questions that we’re asking ourselves In consideration of the urgency of war, what happens to the feminist and lesbian structures, projects and networks we rely on? What happens to the desires to create different practices and ways of living? "In a moment of global crisis people don't know why they should care about queer politics, about transgenderism and so on and it makes our concerns seem as if they are petty. They are not and they need to be folded into these anti-war-agendas. But we have to make explicit the ways in which queer politics and anti-war politics and anti-capitalist politics work together. And i think in many ways that’s sort of a big task." Judith Halberstam, San Diego, USA, videoletter-videoclip The videoletters could connect the ‚normality’ of war and globalization with the agendas of feminist or queer politics. They offer an opportunity to develop a network where we can exchange our differing standpoints. In the places where the videos are shown they could also function as a feminist statement against war. In our group we have different ideas of “feminism”, “women’s perspectives”, “queer or lesbian/gay/transgender issues”. Some of us understand videoletters as a project, where women from different parts of the world exchange their differing experiences, analysis or ideas of resistance. Others understand a feminist analysis as one, which makes visible experiences or standpoints systematically concealed in the media and political representation. Or there is an interest in the question how war and globalization produce and construct special kinds of gender- or sexual positions and relations. Some want to find out, how a genderspecific division of labour and sexualised violence are related to war, the military and nationalism. Anne from Berlin is especially interested to hear from Tejal and Natasha from Bombay about their experiences with these issues, related to the religious-fundamentalistic motivated genocid in Gujarat. And Nadja would like to hear from Ana and the women from Mexico how this may be related to Chiapas with its ongoing low intensity war. When we speak about “queer” perspectives we want to address a common critique of sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, transphobia and racism, which for some of us is covered by this term. We would like to begin an exchange of interests and questions between the participants of the videoletters project. How can you participate? The videoletters should be between 1 and 15 minutes in length. The character of a video as a “letter” may be a starting point to think about the format of your videos which could be addressed to women in all regions of the world or addressed to women in a specific region. We think it would be also a nice idea if we all showed ourselves in our videoletters – as it is interesting for all of us to get to know the makers, the “senders” of the videoletters. We copy all the videoletters, put them together in one compilation and then send them back to the original senders (which means that you get all videoletters made). Each author of a videoletter decides in what context she wants to show the videoletters (at political events, festivals, exhibitions, feminist meetings, cinemas ). All videoletters belong to all the women who contribute their work! The first screening date is the World Social Forum in Bombay/Mumbai, India on January 16 – 21, 2004. We could either meet there or/and organize local screenings during the time of the forum. Women who are part in the organization of the upcoming world social forum want to discuss more feminist issues than it has been the case in the last forums in Porto Alegre. Therefore we think it would be a good idea to support this wish to change the focus of this critique on globalization in a way which includes gender- and sexual politics. In advance of the forum some women in Mumbai will organize a 2-3 days long international queer & feminist meeting and during the forum they will provide a queer space and a film festival on gender and sexual plurality. A non-funded project The project ‘women videoletters’ hasn’t received any funding yet. Some of us think that it is better to work on this project without official money and be independent in a political and artistic sense. After consideration however, we are in the process of trying to get at least some money for those who can’t do a videoletter without financial support and for costs of material. But since it is difficult here to get money for a feminist film-project and for a project quite open in form and content, we can’t promise that we will succeed in this. If some of you have access to funding please get in touch with us. If you want to participate in the project, here’s some further information: Write a note to telling you want to participate. And send your comments and ideas concerning the project and the issues mentioned. Please send your tapes (preferably: miniDV, DV-Cam, Beta SP, otherwise VHS) before November 15th, 2003 so we can manage to send the sample of videoletters back to you by the end of December 2003. Please send one original version plus the transcript and the written English translation – and, if possible, also a version with English subtitles. If you cannot produce a videoletter this time but you are interested in the project, please write us a note anyway! Send your videoletters to the following address: (please mark the package: no commercial value!) Videoletters c/o Frisius, Lausitzer Str. 9, 10999 Berlin, Germany This invitation comes together with a videoclip (if you haven’t got it yet, please send us a mail and we will send you the clip as CD or VHS-copy). All our best, from Berlin, Renate Lorenz, Malou Bülow, Nadja Damm, Karin Kasböck, Christine Lamberty, Tania Eichler, Karin Michalski and Anne Frisius the project is open to all interested women/groups. but we will start by sending this letter to: Black Laundry/LGBT-group against occupation/Claudia Levin, video activist/filmmaker, Israel Tina Naccache, urban planer, video activist / ngo which supports migrant women, Beirut Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdottir, Filmmaker, Island Gayten-LGBT, Center for Promotion of LGBT Human Rights, Belgrad Simin Farkhondeh, filmmaker, video activist, New York Azza El Hassan, filmmaker, Ramallah/Palastine Gülsün Karamustafa, visual artist, Istanbul Alejandra Riera, visual artist, filmmaker, Paris Carole Roussopoulos, feminist activist, filmmaker, Switzerland Judith Halberstam, queer/transgender theorist, San Diego/USA Sabiha Sumar, filmmaker, Pakistan/India Osnat Bar-Or, video activist, filmmaker, works with a media group in Palastine, Israel Anja, women in black, Belgrad Sunccica Vaccai, filmmaker, Belgrad Deepa Dhanraj, filmmaker, video activist, India Hanna Smitmans, video activist, Amsterdam Ana Hernández, videoactivist and filmmaker, Chiapas, Mexico Women video collective of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico Tejal Shah, Natasha Mendonca, political activists, visual artists, Bombay, India Madhusree Dutta, political activst, filmmaker, Bombay, India Liz Miller, filmmaker, USA Ellen Flanders, filmmaker, Canada Mai Masri, filmmaker, Lebanon Shahla Asad, RAWA-activist, Pakistan Lorie and Les Penéelopes, Paris, France _______________________________________________ Unlikely mailing list Unlikely at lists.nadir.org https://lists.nadir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unlikely From faizan at sarai.net Thu Aug 28 17:15:31 2003 From: faizan at sarai.net (Faizan Ahmed) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 17:15:31 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] kashmiri tragedy... Message-ID: <200308281715.31679.faizan@sarai.net> ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: [sada_amu] kashmiri tragedy... Date: 28 Aug 2003 03:28:58 -0000 From: "mohamad junaid rather" To: ishfaq4 at rediffmail.com, khalid_waseem at rediffmail.com, sada_amu at yahoogroups.com, forevershells2002 at yahoo.co.in, aalishazia at yahoo.co.in, shwetagupta25 at yahoo.co.in Renegade Militants in Kashmir by Akhila Raman December 21, 2002 Print-Friendly Version Email This Article To A Friend KASHMIR: A TALE OF TERROR On July 16, the DNA test by the Central Forensic Laboratory, Kolkata, has established[1] that the five persons killed by Indian security forces in an "encounter" in Panchalthan following the massacre of 35 Sikhs in Chattisinghpora in Kashmir Valley in March 2000, were in fact civilians and not "foreign militants" as claimed by the forces. In the light of the latest findings, it is worthwhile to re-examine the mystery of the Chattisinghpora massacre and the possible reasons behind the subterfuge by the Indian forces and the related phenomenon of renegade militants used by India as the secret army in Kashmir, thus placing in perspective the almost daily killings in Kashmir including communal killings which tend to generate paranoia. It will be argued that the series of unexplained killings by unidentified gunmen where no militant outfit has claimed responsibility, could very well have been engineered by India using renegades and that only an impartial inquiry into these killings can shed light on the true identity of the killers. The set of events following the Sikh massacre[2] highlight the ruthlessness and possible subterfuge by the Indian forces. In March 2000, around the time of US President Bill Clinton's visit to India, 35 Sikh men were murdered in Chattisinghpora village in Kashmir by unidentified gunmen. India blamed Pakistan sponsored "foreign" militants, while many Kashmiris blamed Indian sponsored renegades. Renegades are former militants who have surrendered and changed sides to the Indian forces. Subsequently, five "terrorists" were liquidated by the Indian forces and identified as "foreign militants" responsible for the massacre; The bodies were quickly buried without a post-mortem; Clothes and personal items were left burning near the burial site. Curiously, around the same time, seventeen Muslims had strangely gone missing from the villages around Chattisinghpora, some of them kidnapped by armed men before witnesses; Soon, the relatives of the missing men identified the half-burnt personal items at Panchalthan as belonging to their relatives. The relatives of the five murdered villagers held a series of demonstrations for public exhuming of the bodies; A crowd of five thousand unarmed civilians at Brakpora was fired upon by the police; Nine more men died; When the bodies were finally exhumed, they were discovered to have been burnt and defaced, but curiously dressed in brand new army fatigues. They were identified by the relatives as the local villagers who went missing. Initial attempts in DNA testing of the exhumed bodies were compromised by fudging of the DNA samples in a cover-up attempt by the authorities; The latest results indicate that the five persons killed by the Indian forces were indeed civilians and that Indian forces engaged in a deliberate subterfuge to portray them as "foreign" militants responsible for the Sikh massacre. The Pandian Commission investigated the firing at Brakpora and pronounced that three police officers be tried for murder, however no action has been taken against them till date; No judicial inquiry into the Sikh massacre itself has been conducted till date despite repeated announcements. Based on the above information, there is good reason to suspect that Indian forces may have had something to hide about the Chattisinghpora massacre and hence killed innocent villagers at Panchalthan and made them scapegoats; Chattisinghpora may very well have been engineered by the Indian forces using renegade militants for political gains during Clinton's visit. The phenomenon of renegade militants has been extensively documented by Human Rights Watch[3]. Since the 1989 insurgency in Kashmir, renegades have been used for extrajudicial executions of militants (besides human right activists, journalists and other civilians) and later conveniently dismissed as "intergroup rivalries". In 1997, the Director General of Police Gurbachan Jagat acknowledged[4] that the continued services of the renegades had become counter-productive in view of their excesses; an estimated 5000 renegades were reportedly 'rehabilitated' as Special Police Officers (SPO) in the State police and many others were absorbed in the security forces. The present number of renegade militants continues to be significant and the estimates vary; In 1999, Gurbachan Jagat admitted that there were 1200 renegades in the payroll of the government[25]; According to a renegade representative Javed Shah, the number of renegades exceeded 2000; The 2001 US State Department Report on Human Rights in India estimates that there are about 3000 such renegades operating in Kashmir[5] who remain the most dreaded group and continue to engage in excesses. The 1989 insurgency in the Valley arose as a result of genuine grievances among the people due to the denial of the promised plebiscite, erosion of autonomy promised under Article 370, consistently rigged elections since 1951 and unemployment; this insurgency started off as a popular one with hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris marching on the streets of Srinagar between January and May 1990. Following brutal repression by India, this popular insurgency turned massively militant with Pakistan providing arms and training to both indigenous and foreign militants in Kashmir, thus adding fuel to the smouldering fire of discontent in the Valley.[6] It is well known that militants engage in human right violations- an officially estimated 6673 civilians killed by the militants as of 1998. However, human rights record of the Indian security forces has been equally appalling- grave violations such as arbitrary arrests, torture, rape and extrajudicial killings have been extensively documented by human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and PUCL(People's Union for Civil Liberties). Let us take a snapshot of this record. 2477 civilians had been killed by the Indian forces in the period 1990-1998[4][ PTI release, 13 September 1998 ], according to conservative estimates by official sources which mostly exclude thousands of custodial killings. In April 1997, the Minister of State for Home Affairs admitted that 454 persons were missing since 1990. In 1995, Amnesty International documented 706 cases of custodial killings in the period 1990-1994, nearly all after gruesome torture[7]; In its response to Amnesty, the Government of India(GOI) responded to 519 out of 706 cases[8] in an evasive manner, dismissing half of them as "encounter killings" without supporting evidence despite eye-witness reports to the contrary; The government indicated that there was prima facie evidence of human rights violations in 85 other cases which were said to be under investigation, however no one has been brought to justice till date. On 26 April 1993, The Kashmir Times run by Ved Bhasin carried a report of police records listing 132 persons to have been killed in custody in the preceding 33 days alone. Estimate of the number of custodial killings since 1990 by human rights organizations runs in several thousands, many of them are innocent civilians. Hundreds of women have been raped with impunity and most of them go unreported given the social stigma and fear of retribution by the State; The government has been quick to deny and cover-up most of those cases which do get reported; The reported gang-rape of nine women at Shopian in October 1992 by an army unit was dismissed off-handedly after investigation by army and police, the very units charged with the crime, despite solid medical evidence to the contrary[9]; no independent investigation by an impartial agency was carried out. The reported mass rape of over 20 women at Konan Poshpura in February 1991 was also handled in a similar evasive manner; the complaint was not investigated in a timely manner by an impartial agency and the medical evidence was dismissed without good cause and Amnesty's request for medical records were ignored; the women still remain unmarried or have been deserted by their husbands and one of the victims who was nine months pregnant during the incident delivered a baby with a fractured left arm[7]; Governor Girish Saxena who denied the incident admitted to mass rapes in the past by the indian forces however[10]. Rapes continue to be reported, an example being the April 17 gang-rape of a 17-year old girl in Pahalgam[11]. While the Government did take certain positive steps by taking action against a fraction of the human right violations and instituted a National Human Rights Commission(NHRC) to look into such violations, such actions have not been effective in improving the human rights record; For instance, the NHRC lacks the jurisdiction to investigate complaints of violations by the army and paramilitary forces. The Government continues to deny permission for various human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and UN Special Rapporteur of Torture, to visit Jammu and Kashmir and investigate the violations. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958 and the Disturbed Areas Act of 1976 give police extraordinary powers of search and arrest without warrants and detention[12]. According to one NGO, there were 1,300 writs of habeas corpus pending in the Jammu and Kashmir High Court in 1999 in such detention cases. The government is also known to abuse such powers, an example being the case of Yasin Malik, chairman of JKLF(political group since 1994). He was arrested under POTA on 23 March on charges of accepting illegal money, a charge which he refuted as a frame-up; Intriguingly the prosecution failed to present the mandatory challan within ninety days of his detention under POTA despite repeated directions by the court and the judge ordered his release on bail[13]; subsequently he was rearrested under the Public Safety Act(PSA). The events clearly show that the POTA case was indeed a frame-up. According to Amnesty, the number of complaints of human right violations filed against the security forces is only a fraction of the actual number, since the government has issued secret and illegal orders to the police not to register complaints of human rights violations against the security forces in First Information Reports, a charge which the government did not deny in its response to Amnesty[8]. According to 2000 US State Department Report, between January 1990 and September 1998, only 295 members of security forces have been prosecuted and punished for any of these crimes, though they have committed thousands of human right violations[12]; the exact details of trials and punishments have not been made public. In addition the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act provides that unless approval is obtained from the central Government, no "prosecution, suit, or other legal proceeding shall be instituted...against any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers of the act." According to human rights groups, such provisions allow security forces to operate with virtual impunity. The army-renegade nexus has been suspected in many other prominent killings before. Jalil Andrabi, the human rights activist was abducted by the paramilitary and renegades in March 1996 in the presence of eye-witnesses and tortured to death in custody. Despite the Government's initial denials of the army's involvement, the Special Investigation Team identified Major Avtar Singh in April 1997 as the person responsible for the death; however the accused major was released with no punishment[12]. H.N. Wanchoo, the noted human rights activist had documented and filed writ petitions for hundreds of custodial deaths in 1992; Being a Pandit, his petitions were an embarrassment to the government. He was assassinated by unidentified gunmen in December 1992; Although the government claimed that the persons responsible belonged to the militant outfit Jamiat-ul Mujahidin, human rights activists who investigated the case have alleged that the militants of that group were released from jail on condition that they kill Wanchoo[14]. Following his death, none of the cases were heard in the court and lawyers attempting to get the cases listed have reportedly found that many of the files of these cases were now missing from the High Court premises. Zafar Mehraj, a veteran Kashmiri journalist was shot and critically injured as he returned from an interview with Koko Parray, the head of the state-sponsored paramilitary group Ikhwan-ul Muslimoon. The evidence strongly suggests the involvement of state-sponsored militia forces. Dr. Farooq Ahmad Ashai, chief of orthopaedics and a human rights activist who had spoken against the government was killed by gunshots from a CRPF bunker. The government stated that he had been killed in 'crossfire', despite evidence to the contrary. Dr. Abdul Ahad Guru, a surgeon who had treated torture victims was killed by unidentified gunmen.[15] Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq and Abdul Ghani Lone, two Kashmiri activists were killed by unidentified gunmen on 21 May 1990 and 2002 respectively. In both cases, the government blamed militants while Kashmiris blamed Indian sponsored renegades. Communal killings: Though militancy is mainly concentrated in the Valley and is largely non-communal, some militant outfits operate in the Jammu region and wage a communal campaign. Since 1990, an officially estimated 19,866 people have been killed in J&K, half of them civilians, including 982 Hindus and Sikhs as of 1999[16]. In the communal killings in the Jammu region, 307 Hindus and 377 Muslims have been killed in the Doda and Rajouri districts as of 1998, according to official reports[17]; Hindu fundamentalism by the local armed Village Defence Committee (VDC) backed by the Army and terrorism by Muslim insurgents in defense of the Muslim community, have fed each other. While many of the communal killings have been perpetrated by the militants, the hand of the renegades cannot be ruled out in some of them. There is compelling reason to suspect the Indian sponsored renegades in the Chattisinghpora massacre, as we have already seen. In August 2000 killing of 35 civilians including 23 Amarnath pilgrims in Pahalgam, it has come to light that most of the people were killed in fact by the panic-stricken CRPF jawans who continued firing for another 20 minutes after the two suspected militants were killed[18]; a commission under Lt.Gen. Mukherjee found 17 police officers responsible. The hand of the renegades cannot be ruled out in the massacre of 23 Kashmiri Pandits in 1998 at Wandhama by unidentified gunmen; The All Party Hurriyat Conference condemned the massacre, called for investigation by Amnesty and observed a protest strike; subsequently Amnesty's request for investigation was refused by the government. In early 1990, a few prominent Kashmiri Pandits were killed by the JKLF for political reasons; Though the JKLF tried to explain that the killings of Pandits were not communal, the murders caused a scare among the minority Hindu community. The rise of new militant groups, some warnings in anonymous posters and some unexplained killings of innocent members of the community contributed to an atmosphere of insecurity for the Kashmiri Pandits, which led to the exodus of most of the 162,500 Hindus in the Valley, including the entire Kashmiri Pandit community in March. Some of the unexplained killings could very well have been due to renegades. Joint reconciliation efforts by members from both Muslim and Pandit communities were actively discouraged by Jagmohan[19]. There have been charges that this exodus was encouraged by Jagmohan[20], who has a reputation for having anti-Muslim sentiments[21], to enable India to have a "free hand" in dealing with the Muslims in the Valley, a charge which Jagmohan has denied. A thorough, independent enquiry alone can show if this exodus was entirely unavoidable. An estimated 36,000 Hindu families and 20,000 Muslim families (as of 1993) have fled the Valley and many of them still languish in the refugee camps in Jammu and Azad Kashmir, being displayed by India and Pakistan respectively for propaganda. Given the well documented phenomenon of Indian sponsored renegades and given the subterfuge of the Indian forces in incidents such as Panchalthan and the killing of Andrabi, one can see a pattern of impunity on the part of Indian forces - extrajudicial executions, denial and dismissal of the killings as "encounter killings" or conveniently placing the blame on "foreign militants". Only an impartial investigation by an independent agency can find the truth in such attacks by unidentified gunmen, where no militant outfit has claimed responsibility - whether separatist militants or renegades were involved. Pakistan's support for the insurgency has been well documented by Human Rights Watch[6]; The JKLF admitted in a press release in 1990 that ISI had financed the operations of the JKLF and the Hizb. In November 1995, a BBC documentary programme showed evidence of camps in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan, supported by the Jamaat-i-Islami (political wing of the Hizb), where fighters were trained and openly professed their intention of fighting in Kashmir[22]. Pakistan favours the pro-Pakistan militant group Hizbul Mujahedin and has played a role in decimating the JKLF, an indigenous and secular pro-independence group. However, there have also been instances when Indian accusations have proved false; For instance, in the Indian Defence Review of July 1989, one of India's top defence specialists, K.Subrahmanyam, cited the existence of a secret Pakistani plan to start a Kashmiri uprising, code-named 'Operation Topac', that the late General Zia-ul-Haq reportedly set in motion. However, this plan was later shown to be false and concocted by Indian analysts as a hypothetical exercise, a fact Subrahmanyam later acknowledged[23]. Curiously, Operation Topac continues to be quoted by Indian officials including the Indian Embassy. Kashmiris are alienated from both countries given brutal repression by India and violence by pro-Pakistan militants. In a recent poll by MORI [BBC News, 31 May], only 9% and 13% of people of Kashmir Valley, where the discontent and insurgency is concentrated, have preferred to join India and Pakistan respectively[24]. Caught in the crossfire between militants and Indian security forces, Kashmir continues to bleed. If the sorry plight of the Kashmiris were not reason enough, the threat of a devastating nuclear war between India and Pakistan over this region offers an additional reason to start the process of solving the dispute through diplomatic and political means. It is imperative that India and Pakistan pull back their dangerous military buildup, put an end to all violence in Kashmir including Pakistan sponsored violence and militancy and Indian State sponsored violence and repression and engage in unconditional dialogues to resolve the Kashmir dispute, including Kashmiris in the process. References: [1]The Hindu, `Security forces killed civilians', 17 July 2002. [2] Pankaj Mishra, Death in Kashmir [3]Human Rights Watch,INDIA'S SECRET ARMY IN KASHMIR [4]Amnesty International, Disappearances in Jammu and Kashmir, 1999. [5]US State Department Report , March 4, 2002. [6] Human Rights Watch, India: Arms and Abuses in Indian Punjab and Kashmir, 1994. [7]Amnesty International, Torture and Deaths in Custody in Jammu and Kashmir, 1995. [8]Amnesty International, Analysis of the Government of India's response to Amnesty International's report on torture and deaths in custody in Jammu and Kashmir , 1995. [9]Asia Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, The Human Rights Crisis in Kashmir: A Pattern of Impunity, 1993, pp.98-107. [10]Tavleen Singh, Kashmir: A Tragedy of Errors, New Delhi 1995, p.177 [11]BBC News, Kashmir troops held after rape, april 19, 2002. [12]US State Department Report , February 23, 2001. [13] Kashmir Times Editorial, Ugly Face of Democracy, July 21, 2002. [14]Human Rights Watch, Behind the Kashmir Conflict, 1999. [15]Human Rights Watch, VIOLATIONS BY INDIAN GOVERNMENT FORCES: STATE-SPONSORED "RENEGADE" MILITIAS, 1996. [16]Indian Ministry of Home Affairs,Attacks on Minorities - Migration from the Valley. [17]Praveen Swami, The Kargil War, New Delhi 1999, pp.71-2. [18] Kamal Mitra Chenoy, Report On human rights violations in Kashmir. [19]Balraj Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency, New Delhi 1993, pp.64-67. [20]Kuldip Nayar, Kashmiri Pandits: Political games worsen their plight , Times of India, 18 April 97 [21] Jagmohan, Current. 26 May - 1 June 1990, as quoted in PHRO Report, 1990.: "Every Muslim in Kashmir is a militant today. All of them are for secession from India. I am scuttling Srinagar Doordarshan's programmes because every one there is a militant.....The bullet is the only solution for Kashmir. Unless the militants are fully wiped out, normalcy can't return to the Valley." [22] Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, New York 2000, p.177. [23] Kargil Review Committee Report , 2000. [24]BBC News, Kashmiris speak out for peace,31 May, 2002. [25]Indian Express, J&K's friendly ultras say pay more, or else...,4 May, 1999. ___________________________________________________ Art meets Army ; Swapna Weds Capt. Rajsekhar. Find interesting matches on Rediff Matchmaker ! Visit http://matchmaker.rediff.com?1 - ------------------------ Yahoo! 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Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ - ------------------------------------------------------- From aiindex at mnet.fr Thu Aug 28 18:54:19 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 14:24:19 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Press Release : A Progressive Discussion Forum on Kashmir Message-ID: South Asia Citizens Wire | 28 August, 2003 [3.] Press Release : A Progressive Discussion Forum on Kashmir (People for Peace in Kashmir) o o o Press Release : A Progressive Discussion Forum on Kashmir By People for Peace in Kashmir August 22, 2003 http://www.mindspring.com/~akhila_raman/ciis_forum_pr.htm About 100 people attended a dynamic discussion forum on Kashmir in Friday, organized by People for Peace in Kashmir and Social and Cultural Anthropology Program at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. The speakers were Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy - well known physicist and anti-nuclear activist from Pakistan, Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai from Kashmiri American Council and Akhila Raman - a researcher on the Kashmir Conflict. The audience included people from various diverse groups- Indians, Pakistanis, Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims, Americans. This Forum was conceived as a balanced and liberal one, striving to avoid common features present in many other forums: Indian speakers bashing Pakistan, Pakistani speakers bashing India and Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims presenting the Kashmir tragedy as a tragedy to their group alone. Instead, the speakers turned it around and did a critical introspection of their respective sides, presenting the tragedy to various communities as a whole. The Forum was introduced by Dr. Angana Chatterji, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology Program at CIIS, as one which seeks to address the concerns of Kashmiris, India and Pakistan. She illuminated the fact that there is one soldier for every 10 Kashmiris in the Kashmir Valley which is seen as oppressive by the local population. Mr. Zulfiqar Ahmad - Peace and Security Program Officer for South Asia from Nautilus Institute at Berkeley introduced the speakers and outlined the principles for the discussion forum and the fact that ultimate arbiters of the dispute should be the Kashmiri people and that any solution should respect the syncretic Kashmiri culture. Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai began his speech highlighting the fact that the long-standing Kashmir dispute had become a nuclear flashpoint which needed an urgent solution, putting an end to the pain and suffering of not only the majority Kashmiri Muslim community but also the minority Kashmiri Pandit community. He stated that a lasting solution could only be arrived if all the three concerned parties ñ Kashmiris, India and Pakistan ñ make sacrifices and compromises from their respective hardline positions. He further went on to argue as follows: (1) Kashmiri movement was not secessionist because Kashmir did not belong to any member nation of the UN and hence Kashmiris cannot secede from a nation to which they had not acceded to in the first place. (2) Kashmiri movement was not fundamentalist given their rich tradition of Kashmiriyat- a composite cultural identity of tolerance and communal amity (3) The movement was not a terrorist movement but a popular freedom struggle because hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians marched on the streets of Srinagar between January and May 1990 (4) The issue was not bilateral between India and Pakistan but that Kashmiris were a legitimate third party which needed to be included in unconditional dialogues to resolve the dispute. He highlighted the need for UN/US mediation given the fact that all previous bilateral talks had failed. Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, who spoke next, began his speech highlighting the role of evolutionary biology in war and also war as a means of socialization; He highlighted the subversive role played by Pakistan since a popular insurgency began in the Kashmir Valley in 1989 against the repressive Indian Rule. He recalled an interview he had with General Musharraf in Pakistan regarding Kashmir in which he had advised the General that it was high time Pakistan stopped the covert war in Kashmir and stuck to its stated position namely- providing merely ìmoral and diplomaticî support for the freedom struggle in Kashmir. He illuminated the role played by India as an occupation force, with half a million soldiers brutally repressing an estimated 5 million Kashmiris in the Valley. He closed his speech stating that (1) India must end its permanent occupation of Kashmir. (2) Pakistan must put an end to cross-border terrorism (3) The media in India and Pakistan must turn down the volume of official rhetoric and play a constructive role in dispute resolution. Akhila Raman, the next speaker made a presentation of the history of the Kashmir conflict and highlighted the fact that both India and Pakistan were fighting over Kashmir like two pugnacious landlords, trampling over the dead bodies of tens of thousands of Kashmiris ñ half of them civilians. She highlighted the fact that India had promised self-determination (the will of the people shall be ascertained in a plebiscite about the future of Kashmir) to the Kashmiris in 1947 and many times later, which had been long denied. She also highlighted the fact that the 1989 insurgency arose as a result of long-denied historical grievances - denial of promised plebiscite, consistently rigged elections and erosion of autonomy ñ and that the popular alienation and discontent continues. She illuminated the fact that the Kashmiri movement was not communal, given that Kashmiri Muslims had always demonstrated in support of the slain minorities as in the recent Nadimarg massacre in March and that Kashmiriyat continues to flourish. She closed the speech highlighting an ìAndorran solutionî which could potentially work - Kashmir Valley and Azad Kashmir made as autonomous entities with external defence and foreign affairs controlled jointly by India and Pakistan. The speeches were followed by a Q&A session with the audience. Some Pandits discussed their concerns about safe return to their ancestral homeland of the Valley, which they had been forced to flee in a massive exodus in 1990. Another person in the audience reiterated the fact that there were no communal riots in Kashmir and that communal amity still flourishes and hoped for a lasting solution. Snehal Shingavi, a Berkeley student activist, highlighted the need for unity among the people of Kashmir in their struggle for self-determination. The two and a half hour program ended on a positive note with many in the audience feeling that the discussion forum was informative and productive. Dr. Angana Chatterji and Zulfiqar Ahmad conducted and moderated the Forum very effectively in a very admirable manner. Friends of South Asia and ISO, Berkeley expressed their support for this Forum. From sayantoni at rediffmail.com Fri Aug 29 19:13:33 2003 From: sayantoni at rediffmail.com (sayantoni datta) Date: 29 Aug 2003 13:43:33 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Gender Identity Workshop Message-ID: <20030829134333.24517.qmail@webmail30.rediffmail.com> Forwarding details on a "process lab" being conducted by Sumedhas, The Academy for Human Context.Interested people kindly write to Ms.Anjali Tolani, with a note on why you would want to particpate.Please find details hereunder: Gender Identity Workshop – Working with intimacy 7th to 12th November, 2003 Raigad Resorts – Panvel " sugar and spice and everything nice, that's what little girls are made of. Frogs, Snips and snails and puppy dog tails, that's what little boys are made of." The Program The two chromosomes that determine an animal's sex evolved from an identical pair of ordinary chromosomes about 240 to 320 million years ago. It is an event, called a genetic hijacking by some scientists, that has profound ramifications today. Of the 46 human chromosomes, 44 are identical pairs. But two - the X and the Y - are different because they have no perfect match. Embryos with two X chromosomes develop into females, while embryos with an X and a Y chromosome develop into males. And, from this event are born male and female species of the human race. From the moment we are born, we have our bio-sexual identity in terms of who we are i.e. a boy or a girl. As we grow up, we have more and more roles added to that identity, like a son, a daughter, brother or sister, grand child, student, friend, husband, wife, partner, etc, as we continue to live our lives. In this process, more often, most of these roles revolve around our bio-sexual identity of either being born as a "man" or as a "woman". These roles evolve and develop by the way we define our ways of relating in intimate relationships both with ourselves and with significant others, the way we look at our bodies and create images for ourselves, the ways of forming our beliefs and codes of conduct about being a "man" or being a "woman" both in our personal context and in the larger context called the society. In many ways one may say that our "bio-sexual identity" or being born as a "man" or a "woman" is given or determined by the genetic coding with which we are born. However, how we shape that "man" or "woman" to be in relation to ourselves and in relation to others are fashioned by the social norms - both set by ourselves and by others, our context, history, culture, community, race, etc in short by our "gender identity". It is important to distinguish between sex and gender, where sex, male or female, is about physical differences between the sexes, while gender, masculine or feminine, is about characteristics of behavior, demeanor, or psychology. Or we can say, in the words of Judith Butler, "Gender, then, as the identification with one sex or one object (like the mother) is a fantasy, a set of internalized images, and not a set of properties governed by the body and its organ configuration. Rather, gender is a set of signs internalized, psychically imposed on the body and on one's psychic sense of identity. Gender, is thus not a primary category, but an attribute, a set of secondary narrative effects." One of the objectives of this workshop is to explore therefore what it means to be born as a "man" or as a "woman". The exploration is focused on our gender identity; especially on our internlised images of our relatedness to our selves and our bodies; ways in which we related to significant others in our intimate relationships, meanings and rules that we develop around them; our codes of communication, expression; evocation, inhibition, rigidity, issues of morality, aggression, intimacy, guilt, joy and shame; and to create the possibility of a new perspective and a new anchoring in our gender identity as a "man" or a "woman" for self; and a new understanding about the macro context. For whom This programme invites people who are willing to engage into exploration into what is means to be a "man" or a "woman", i.e. explorations into gender identity, the meanings and the coding around on which the image of our selves as a 'man' or a 'woman' and our bodies have been built, frames with which we form and manage our intimacy both with ourselves and significant others and are willing to create the possibility of a new and holistic perspective about the kind of "man" and "woman" they wish to be in their personal context. Eligibility Participants must have experience of attending at least one process lab. The programme is not meant for persons with a previous history of heart and psychological illnesses Program Design The design of the program is around working simultaneously with our bodies and our psyche. Usage of open space, yoga, performing art forms along with process work philosophies and techniques will be the currency of the workshop. The program is meant to be explorative and interactive in nature and is not intended to be a discourse on gender identity. All the work will happen in a floor seating arrangement and will have a lot of physical action. Participants are required to come prepared with appropriate clothing. Administrative Information Programme 7th to 12th November, 2003 Venue Raigad Resorts, Village Khanavale, Opp Balaji Petrol Pump, Mumbai-Pune Highway, Panvel.Telephone: (to call from Mumbai dial 952143): (02143)- 239343/44/45)website: www.raigadresorts.com Fees: Rs. 17.500/- for corporate nominations, and Rs. 11,500/- for self sponsored participants Payable by cheque in favour of “Sumedhas Academy for Human Context” payable at Delhi. Nomination:Please send the information regarding the participants along with the fees to:Ms. Anjali Tolani130/4606, Tribhuvan Society, New Tilak Nagar,Chembur, Mumbai - 400089Numbers: (R) (022) 2522 4660 (O) (022) 2653 6528 (M) 09821320293Email : anjalitolani at hotmail.com : bankclerk at indiatimes.com Fax: 26531377 Transportation: Transportation will be arranged to the venue from Mumbai. Details will be communicated to participants separately. Programme Begins:10.00 a.m. on 7th November, 2003 Programme Ends:2.30 p.m. on 12th November, 2003 All accommodation will be on a twin-sharing basis only. Faculty Programme Director : Sarbari Gomes Anchor Person : Ahalya Ananth ___________________________________________________ Meet your old school or college friends from 1 Million + database... Click here to reunite www.batchmates.com/rediff.asp From aiindex at mnet.fr Sat Aug 30 01:29:26 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 20:59:26 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Book review: History in the New NCERT Textbooks Irfan Habib et al Message-ID: Frontline Volume 20 - Issue 18, August 30 - September 12, 2003 http://www.flonnet.com/fl2018/stories/20030912000807400.htm BOOKS Books of bias and errors PARVATHI MENON History in the New NCERT Textbooks: A Report and an Index of Errors by Irfan Habib, Suvira Jaiswal, and Aditya Mukherjee; Indian History Congress, Kolkata, 2003; pages 129 Rs.50. TOWNS and cities in our Neolithic past? Cloth woven on wheels in ancient India? 4,600 B.C. as the date when the Indus Civilisation took birth? The Mughal emperor Babur deliberately selecting a site for a mosque in a place where the "tenth and last avatar of Vishnu was to appear at the end of the yuga"? The English East India Company established in 1600 in India? India, "a land of free looters"? Lenin leading merely a coup in Russia in 1917? These and many more historical howlers contained in a clutch of history books brought out by the National Council of Education Training and Research (NCERT) in 2002 could have served simply to provide us a hilarious foray into nonsensical history, were it not for the fact that they form the stuff of school textbooks that will give lakhs of Indian children their only insight into nearly 5,000 years of their country's past. Carrying the stamp of approval of the powerful NCERT, which has a pervasive reach into the school system, the new history textbooks of 2002, written in conformity with the NCERT's own saffronised National Curriculum Framework of School Education, 2000, are shot through with factual errors, falsehoods, unreason and bias. They are surely a disgrace to the discipline of history writing, and draw nothing from the scholarship and analytical sophistication attained by this branch of the social sciences in India. Although there was an outcry against these textbooks from several quarters after their appearance, it is the Indian History Congress (IHC), through the publication of the book under review, that has given the most serious rebuff to this official exercise in the falsification of history. The credentials of the IHC to do so are impeccable. With a membership of over 7,000, it is a forum that is representative of professional historians in the country today. Founded in 1935, the IHC has over the years set benchmarks in scientific and secular history writing; it has provided a valuable forum for peer interaction and review amongst historians; it has helped historians from small colleges and less advantaged departments of history to publish their work; and it has maintained its independence by putting in place a tradition of resistance to establishment pressures of one kind or the other. Thus, just as it once boldly opposed the Emergency as an attack on democratic and intellectual freedoms, it is today fighting another assault on scholarship and reason by a communal and divisive state-supported ideology. When the NCERT published its policy statement on school education in 2000, the IHC responded almost at once at its session in Kolkata in January 2001. A detailed resolution was passed expressing concern at the way history was being treated in the school curriculum. In the following year at its Amritsar session, the IHC Executive Committee set up a committee to scrutinise the history textbooks that had been published by the NCERT in 2002. The committee, comprising Professor Irfan Habib (Aligarh), Professor Suvira Jaiswal (Hyderabad) and Professor Aditya Mukherjee (New Delhi), produced a report along with an Index of Errors, which was released as a publication of the IHC in June 2003. Four textbooks published in 2002 were reviewed. These were Makhan Lal, et al: India and World, for Class VI (Historical Portion: Unit II); Hari Om, et al: Contemporary India, for Class IX (Historical Portion: Unit 1); Makhan Lal: Ancient India, for Class XI; and Meenakshi Jain: Medieval India, for Class XI. In the published Index, each error in the textbook is quoted in full under the relevant page number. A concise analysis or comment follows the error. Note has been taken of the corrections made in the reprinted edition. The authors state that the Index is not complete and that "... many slips and misstatements of varying degrees of seriousness have had to be overlooked to keep our Index within manageable limits". The Index lists 99 errors in Makhan Lal's India and World for Class VI, 112 mistakes and 22 spelling errors (of proper nouns) in Ancient India for Class XI by the same author, 127 mistakes in Meenakshi Jain's Medieval India for Class XI, and 141 errors in Hari Om, et al, Contemporary India for Class IX. A quick categorisation of the errors listed in the Index in just one of the four books reviewed, namely, Meenakshi Jain's Medieval India, shows their range and incidence. A few errors find place under more than one category. 1. Errors of commission. Careless and inexcusable errors of historical fact. These account for the largest number in all the books. In Medieval India, 79 such errors out of 127 are listed. The corrections for these are provided by the compilers of the Index. Examples: On page 194, the author says that Aurangazeb died at Aurangabad. (He died at Ahmadnagar). On page 132 the author says that Rana Sanga died in the Battle of Khanua. (In fact, he was not killed in battle at all; he fled from the battlefield). 2. Errors of omission. Important facts left out of the narrative, conveying thereby an incomplete understanding of the particular topic. Twenty-three of the errors listed in the Index in Medieval India come under this category. Examples: In the description of Shivaji's administration (page 190-91) the author does not mention Shivaji's levy of chauth (one-fourth of revenue) and sardeshmukhi (an additional one tenth), which he exacted from areas not under his control with the threat of sacking those regions that did not pay up. In levying these exactions and in the punishment for non-payment, he did not differentiate between Hindus and Muslims. Or, the author's total omission of Akbar's views and actions on social matters, like his prohibition of slave trade, disapproval of sati and prohibition of involuntary sati. Or, when the author lists the appalling record of the number of Bahmani kings murdered, deposed, and blinded, she fails to mention that other ruling dynasties of that period had blood on their hands too. For example, the practice amongst the Rajputs and the Vijaynagar ruling classes of killing hundreds of wives, concubines and slave girls of a ruler when he died. The logic of exclusion suggests that the author would like to associate violence and cruelty with Muslims rather than with the conventions and practices that were common to all medieval ruling classes. 3. Errors deriving from communal bias. There are 14 such examples of communally biased assertions of historical fact. These also include attempts to Sanskritise names or terminology in a wholly inappropriate fashion. Examples: On page 10, the author has separately classified modern historians of medieval India by their religions, that is, as Muslim or Hindu. On page 92, she states that Bukka I of the Vijaynagar period "freed practically the whole of the south from foreign domination". From this the reader must surmise that Muslims are equated with foreigners, as the compilers of the Index point out. The heading for Chapter 2 is "Struggle for Chakravartitva", an inappropriate phrase used obviously to make a point of Sanskritising what could, as the authors point out, have simply been titled "Political Supremacy". 4. Errors of spelling. There are seven such errors. Examples: "Fawadul Fawaid" for "Fawaidul Fawad", Bahamani for Bahmani, Guru Arjun for Guru Arjan, Suleh-kul for sulh-i kul, and so on. 5. Errors of language. Poor English, along with displays of ignorance and obfuscation add up to nine examples listed in the Index For example, on page 162 the author writes of Nur Jahan: "The new queen soon became the favourite of the Emperors' wives". What she obviously meant was that the new queen became the favourite wife of the emperor. On page 26 and page 27, the author writes about "Muhammad Ghur" and "Mahmud Ghazni", instead of Muhammad of Ghur, and Mahmud of Ghazni. The compilers refer to these errors as "pieces of illiteracy". On page 160, there is an illustration titled "Meeting of Jahangir with the Persian king Shah Abbas". The reader is not informed that it is an imaginary representation and that in reality the two never met. According to the report, all four books reveal a shocking lack of awareness of basic historical facts. Secondly, the language is riddled with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and inappropriate expressions. Finally, they all present History with a strong chauvinist and communal bias. Thus, in respect of the Ancient India textbook, the familiar myths abound - India is the original homeland of the Aryans; "Vedic civilisation" embraced the Indus civilisation; Hinduism is held to be the most advanced of all religions; the caste system was fine until some "rigidities" crept in later; women in ancient India were held in high esteem and had equal inheritance rights as men. A "neutral or even admiring stance", according to the authors of the report, accompanies the accounts of sati and jauhar. The Medieval India textbook is imbued with anti-Muslim prejudice. Muslims, or "foreigners", brought nothing to India but bloodshed, violence and the practice of temple destruction. The substantial evidence of the rise of a composite culture in this period is firmly stamped out. Thus, there is barely a sentence on Kabir and his teachings, the report reveals. The Contemporary India textbook appears to be in a class by itself in respect of the distortions mentioned. According to the authors of the report and the Index, this book portrays "Muslim separatism" as the beast, while Hindu communalism is ignored and Hindu Mahasabha leaders are idolised as patriots. The great Indian social reform movement is ignored; the modern values of democracy and secularism that the freedom movement stood for are passed over; Jawaharlal Nehru is either ignored or presented in an unfavourable light; and the Communists are vilified. The prejudice and distortion has, as its foundation, a singular ignorance of colonialism and its economic and political impact on India. Indeed, the sheer range and variation of errors, 141 in all, as listed by the authors of the Index from Hari Om's Contemporary India, qualifies this single textbook as perhaps the most damaging of all. Here is an authorial pen that is untroubled by the rules of English grammar and usage, that constructs a history of modern India from which all modernity has been purposefully cut away, and that oftentimes projects Indian history as a theatre of the absurd. For example, on page 22, he tells us: "Lord Curzon even went to the extent of saying that the people of India were `the peasants, whose life was not one of political aspiration'. This had a tremendous impact on the Indian Freedom Struggle". Or again, on page 23: "Both of them (Tilak and Aurobindo Ghose) believed in and advocated cultural nationalism... They also held the view that the Moderates were only playing with "bubbles" like the legislative councils and not taking up the issues capable of protecting and promoting the Indian culture." "Bubbles" is Hari Om-speak for "baubles", but on a more serious note he has conjured cultural nationalists out of Extremists, as the index compilers point out. The NCERT appears to be undaunted by the criticism and by the potential damage such textbooks might cause to young minds. Some minor changes have been made in the reprint editions, but more textbooks containing material on history for other classes have been published this year. For this once prestigious organisation, which brought out several splendid History textbooks from the 1970s onwards, the rewriting of history commissioned by it now surely represents a great leap backwards. To conclude with this reviewer's favourite error, from Hari Om's Contemporary India, pages 59-60, picked out from the Index: "... leaders and think-tanks like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and V.P. Menon." The Index authors' tired response: "One has not heard of single persons as "think-tanks". But one lives and learns"! From aiindex at mnet.fr Sat Aug 30 05:05:16 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 00:35:16 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Another Obit. on Bhupen Khakhar Message-ID: The Independent [UK] August 27, 2003 Obituaries Bhupen Khakhar Artist celebrated for his startling, visionary images of homosexual love 27 August 2003 Bhupen Khakhar, painter: born Bombay 10 March 1934; died Baroda, India 8 August 2003. A man of exceptional courage and generosity, of radiant charm and mischievous humour, the Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar became celebrated for his startling, visionary images of homosexual love. His art is founded on two interwoven themes: his concern for "ordinary" people and objects; and his quest for a visual language by which the experience of the partly westernised middle-class Indian, the "Insignificant Man", might find expression. Khakhar grew up in a crowded Gujarati market neighbourhood in central Bombay. His father, a heavy drinker, kept a small clothshop, but died when Khakhar was four; his mother vested her ambitions in her youngest son who dutifully pursued, through years of university and articleship, a career as chartered accountant. Khakhar was already in his late twenties when he took up the suggestion of a friend, the painter-poet G.M. Sheikh, that he should attend India's leading art school. At Baroda, unable to afford the five-year fine art course, he enrolled for two years' art criticism; he never received much formal training as a painter. He shared a flat with a student fresh from the RCA in London preaching the gospel of Pop; and he became part of a ferment of painters and writers, co-editing with Sheikh the magazine Vrischik ("Scorpion"), in which Geeta Kapur first published her call for a new "indigenous" art. Khakhar was awakened to the beauty and vitality of contemporary Indian street imagery. The lurid oleographs associated with those urban shrines he had roamed through since boyhood became the basis of his first collages, exhibited in Bombay in 1965 at Gallery Chemould, his dealers throughout his career. In Baroda, Khakhar worked each morning as an accountant; he would scoot over to the same factory for almost 30 years. "Going to the office for two or three hours gives me the feeling that I have done my duty to society and I feel, now I can go and paint." When at last, in the early 1970s, all the hybrid constituents of his art fell into place - 19th-century company paintings and modern "uplift" posters integrated with Léger and Rousseau - it was as though a door suddenly opened. He entered upon a vista no painter had ever penetrated before, the vast terrain of half-urbanised modern India. A sequence of beautiful signboard-like canvases resulted, including such early masterpieces as Janata Watch Repairing (1972), View from a Teashop (1972), and the larger and more complex Man with Bouquet of Plastic Flowers (1976). Ceiling fans and fluorescent light-bars take on a crystalline formal clarity. The bleakness of these lives is, through an act of identification, made tender and vulnerable. These pictures caught the attention of the English painter Howard Hodgkin, whose friendship was instrumental in bringing Khakhar onto the international stage. One-man exhibitions with Kasmin and other London dealers were followed by museum shows at the Tate, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and elsewhere. In 1992 Khakhar would become the first Indian artist to be represented in the international show "Documenta"; last year Enrique Juncosa mounted a Khakhar retrospective at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, which came in a cut-down version to the Lowry in Salford last October. But the centre of Khakhar's existence remained always the studio-house in Baroda, where he would struggle for months on end with one picture at a time. Often he would paint surrounded by intimate friends: a poet, a bootlegger, a businesswoman, all sitting side by side, served tea and snacks by his ever-faithful servant Pandoo. This relaxed, sociable atmosphere I found inspiring when I first visited Khakhar in 1981. He had just completed an eight-foot townscape and was preparing the equally ambitious You Can't Please All, now in the Tate. Khakhar's deepest devotion was reserved for elderly men; Vallavbhai, a retired building contractor, was his partner for over 20 years, dying a few days before him. Khakhar had come out as a homosexual, the first public figure to do so in India, after his mother's death in 1980. In You Can't Please All, he represents himself naked above the cityscape; the ostensible narrative, an ancient fable, conceals a deeper one. (Juncosa interprets it as "the story of someone who buries a burden when revealing his sexuality.") Over the next two decades, Khakhar would create the most challenging gay iconography of our time, in which the sexual and the sacred are often conjoined. His colour, always bold, becomes intensified. The six-foot swooning pink sky of Yayati (1987) discloses an astonishing drama: the self glides winged and erect into his elderly partner, conferring upon him a new lease of life. Lighter sexual frolics may occur in a crowded boat, or beside some idyllic shore, as in the fellatio of Intimacy, one of a sequence of superb aquatints completed in 1993. The floating washes of watercolour released some of his freest fantasy, most memorably the Old Man from Vasad Who Had Five Penises Suffered from Runny Nose (1995, exhibited at Tate Modern in 2001). He also experimented in other media: ceramics, installations, glass-paintings, as well as writing and designing a comedy. When I wrote a monograph on Khakhar in 1998, it was the homage of a younger to an elder, an English to an Indian painter. Across 20 years I had felt a convergence, a shared territory, which bridged our differences of cultural background. Khakhar's work has continued to be of interest to a new western generation. Among his works in British public collections are his portrait Salman Rushdie: the Moor (1995) at the National Portrait Gallery, Death in the Family (1978) at the V&A, and You Can't Please All, to be shown at Tate Britain in late September. Timothy Hyman From abirbazaz at rediffmail.com Sat Aug 30 13:00:24 2003 From: abirbazaz at rediffmail.com (abir bazaz) Date: 30 Aug 2003 07:30:24 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Biased, who? Message-ID: <20030830073024.5419.qmail@webmail8.rediffmail.com> Dear Subba, The author in question here is the editor of Greater Kashmir. You can reach him at editor at greaterkashmir.com...I believe he would invoke other editorials where Greater Kashmir has been "unbiased".But Greater Kashmir has indeed itself been silent about atrocities against ethnic and religious minorities in J&K by the militants. I couldn't also agree more with you about the patterns of rights violations from 'Burma to Kashmir'. My sole intention in making this posting was to somehow draw attention to the intellectual dishonesty of Vikram Chandra's reportage on Kashmir from his days with Newstrack in early 1990s. Abir Bazaz On Sat, 30 Aug 2003 subba ghosh wrote : >It is unfortunate that Kashmiris including all communities should >be facing agression and repression from various agencies state >owned and otherwise. But the writer would be more believable if >his condemnation included the repression unleashed by the so >called "jehadis" "freedom fighters" "militants" "terrorists" as >one would like to call them. This added dimension of misery on >top of one already suffering at the hands of the state agencies. >The  regime of extortion, rape, assassinations and drug running >by these outfits all across the state ranging  from burma till >Kashmir is well known and documented. Yet the author is mostly >silent on these aspects. I would guess the condemnation is >against the agression on innocent people no matter which agency >it emanates from. The author's silence on this puts a question >mark on his own call for being unbiased and objective >subba ghosh >Design your own holidays. Make memories that last a lifetime. >Enjoy! ___________________________________________________ Meet your old school or college friends from 1 Million + database... Click here to reunite www.batchmates.com/rediff.asp From monica at sarai.net Sat Aug 30 11:57:44 2003 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 11:57:44 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Rewriting labour laws in the US Message-ID: THE GRINCH THAT STOLE LABOR DAY by Greg Palast Friday, 29 August, 2003 In celebration of the working person's holiday, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao has announced the Bush Administration's plan to end the 60-year-old law which requires employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime. I'm sure you already knew that -- if you happened to have run across page 15,576 of the Federal Register. According to the Register, where the Bush Administration likes to place it's little gifts to major campaign donors, 2.7 million workers will lose their overtime pay -- for a "benefit" of $1.53 billion. I put "benefit" in quotes because, in the official cost-benefit analysis issued by Bush's Labor Department, the amount employers will now be able to slice out of workers' pockets is tallied on the plus side of the rules change. Nevertheless, workers getting their pay snipped shouldn't complain, because they will all be receiving promotions. These employees will be re-classified as managers exempt from the law. The change is promoted by the National Council of Chain Restaurants. You've met these 'managers' - they're the ones in the beanies and aprons whose management decisions are, "Hold the lettuce on that." My favorite of Chao's little amendments would re-classify as "exempt professionals" anyone who learned their skill in the military. In other words, thousands of veterans will now lose overtime pay. I just can't understand why Bush didn't announce that one when he landed on the aircraft carrier. CHOICE NUMBER FOUR: BREAK THE LAW Now I should say that, according to Chao's press office, the changes will actually extend overtime benefits to 1.3 million burger flippin' managers. How does that square with the billion dollar "benefit" to business owners? Simple: The Chao hounds at the Labor Department suggest that employers CUT WAGES so that, with the new "overtime" pay, the employees won't actually take home a dime more. I can hear the moaners and bleeding hearts saying, this sounds like the Labor Department is telling Big Business how to evade the law. Yep, that's what the Department is doing. Right there on page 15,576 of the Federal Register it says, "Affected employers would have four choices concerning potential payroll costs: (4) converting salaried employees' basis of pay to an hourly rate that result in virtually no changes to the total compensation paid those workers." And in case some employer is dense as a president and doesn't get the hint, Madame Chao repeats, " The fourth choice above results in virtually no (or only a minimal) increase in labor costs." For decades, the courts have thrown the book at cheapskate bosses who chisel workers out of legal overtime by cutting base pay this way but now they'll have a new defense: Bush made me do it. But then, there won't be any cases against employers, because Chao is the labor cop that is supposed to stop paycheck theft. She's well qualified for the job. Her resume reads, "Married to Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky." I called her press office to ask if she qualifies for overtime, but they'd left the office early. And good news for our sporting President. Word from the White House is he'll be golfing on the Labor Day weekend. Under Chao's rules, he need not worry if he wants to replay that hole. "Exempt professionals" who cannot earn overtime - once defined as doctors, lawyers and those with specialized college degrees - will now include anyone who provides skilled advice like caddies ("You might try the other end of the club, Mr. President"). THE ACORN FALLS ONLY SO FAR Finally, on this Labor Day weekend, it's time this nation took a cold look at the issue of hard-core unemployment. Neo-conservatives have warned us about families that pass on joblessness from generation to generation. Take, for example, the sad case of the Bush family. When Poppy Bush was president, unemployment hit a generational high of over 9 million Americans. Bill Clinton, through education and hard work, put more than 3 million of those citizens back on the job. Now Bush Junior, repeating his family pattern of joblessness, has presided over the return of unemployment for 9 million Americans. This was not unexpected, sociologists warn us. Hard core unemployment, through failed schooling and a don't-care attitude, takes on a nearly genetic character. The acorn falls only so far from the tree. Especially when the nut falls on its head. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From treborscholz at earthlink.net Sat Aug 30 20:06:08 2003 From: treborscholz at earthlink.net (Media Study) Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 10:36:08 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] MFA in Media Study Message-ID: Announcing ------------------------------------------ GRADUATE STUDIES @ ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ THE_DEPARTMENT_OF_MEDIA_STUDY ------------------------------------------ UNIVERSITY_AT_BUFFALO ------------------------------------------ STATE_UNIVERSITY_OF_NEW_YORK ------------------------------------------ ///// INVITATION FOR APPLICATIONS ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ http://mediastudy.buffalo.edu ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ ///// TO APPLY FOR A TWO YEAR MFA or MAH, STARTING IN FALL 2004: Applications must be received by January 15, 2003 ------------------------------------------ http://mediastudy.buffalo.edu/s/grad_application.shtml ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ The Department of Media Study offers you a context to explore the moving image, networked and programmable media and critical theory in its social context. ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ /////KEYWORDS ------------------------------------------ < art activism __ audio art __ avant-garde in various media__body criticism __ collective web logging__ contemplative robotics __ critical theory__critical web-based art __ documentary__embodied theory__ experimental performance__fiction/ dramatic virtual reality __ filmmaking__ film studies __ graphics programming__ history of sound __interactive environments__ interdisciplinary practice __media analysis__narrative theory__ networked and low-cost virtual reality__ poetics postmodernism in film, art, music, and theory__ semiotics__ soft human computer interaction__ video art> ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ The Department of Media Study was founded in the late 1960¹s by Gerald O'Grady. We have a long tradition of support for innovative, independent media production and criticism - our digital arts program, for example, is among the first in the United States. DMS enables students the rare opportunity of truly inter-disciplinary work. We are linked to resources in artistic practices and theory in the departments of Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Art History, Comparative Literature, Communications, Computer Science, Education, Engineering, English, Music, Theatre and Dance; and the Center for the Americas. ------------------------------------------ The department's approach acknowledges the inextricable link between theory and practice, and the possibility of their fruitful convergence. Media production, in our sense, is a theoretically informed and socially contextualized cultural activity. ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ ///// THE FOLLOWING ARTISTS AND SCHOLARS ARE ACTIVE AT DMS ------------------------------------------ ////Josephine Anstey ////Marc Böhlen ////Chris Borkowski ////Tony Conrad ////Vanessa Dennen ////Sarah Elder ////Jesse Fabian ////Loss Pequeño Glazier ////Brian Henderson ////Meg Knowles ////Caroline Koebel ////Vincenzo Mistrett ////David Pape ////Linda Reisman ////Roy Roussel ////Trebor Scholz ////Bernadette Wegenstein ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ The Department of Media Study is linked to resources in artistic practices and theory at the departments Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Art History, Comparative Literature, Communications, Computer Science, Education, Engineering, English, Music, Theatre and Dance; and the Center for the Americas. ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ /////Information on the DEPARTMENT OF MEDIA STUDY as well as registration can be found at http://mediastudy.buffalo.edu ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ /////SOME RECENT GUESTS ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ Craig Baldwin, Geoffrey Batchen, Beige Records, Zoe Beloff, Simon Biggs, Lisa Cartwright, Abigail Child, Douglas Crimp , Fakeshop, Mary Flanagan, Michael Freund, Alex Galloway, Guerilla Girls, Lisa Jevbratt, Miranda July, Lev Manovich, John Menick, Judd Morrissey, Laurie Palmer, Keith Piper, Walid Ra¹ad, Abbe Raven, David Rokeby, Dan Sandin, Carolee Schneeman, DJ Spooky, Mark Street, Mark Stricklin, STELARC, Lori Talley, Allan Wexler, Norman White ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ /////CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS AND PRODUCTIONS CAN BE FOUND AT http://mediastudy.buffalo.edu/s/faculty.shtml ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ /////COURSES FALL 2004 ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ Analysis of Interactive Environments in Art & Entertainment///////Film Workshop 1///////Survey of Independent Film from 1990///////The Advertising Media//////Programming Graphics/////// Machine Vision in the Arts/////// Production in Media///////Critical Netcultures///////Sound Design///////Film & Develpment of Contemporary Art: Art Practicing the Body///////Principles in Media Production///////Poetics of Programmable Literature ///////Ethnographic Film///////Novels to Film: Contemporary Authors ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ http://mediastudy.buffalo.edu/s/courses_grad.shtml ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ /////FACILITIES ------------------------------------------ Part of what makes Media Study at UB unique are our numerous resources within the university itself and the city of Buffalo. Students not only have access to our labs and equipment, but also benefit vocationally and artistically from our strong ties to professional organizations within Buffalo (a list follows). Resources include access to equipment, labs, suites, screening rooms, and internships at area organizations. Students will also gain from supervision of the Director of Graduate Studies, benefit from university services and resources, and have access to all university libraries, including Lockwood library for research materials and VCRs. The Media Library in 24 Capen is another excellent resource for students. The Department of Media Study also features its own collection of more than 1.000 videos, films, and DVDs for students to view and study. ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------ From aiindex at mnet.fr Sat Aug 30 23:57:26 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 19:27:26 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] India: Information Technology Act: Danger of Violation of Civil Rights Message-ID: The Economic and Political Weekly [Bombay, India] August 23, 2003 Special Article Information Technology Act: Danger of Violation of Civil Rights The Information Technology Act raises very real concerns. It demonstrates a legislature deeply sceptical of the internet, rooted in the conventions of the past, yet battling with the need for an information technology law in the present-day circumstances. This straddling of the known and the unknown has strange results. In its desperate need to bring in some security for activity on the net, it relies heavily on the executive, little realising that it can result in violation of civil rights particularly, in the light of India's infamous emergency. The absolute control it attempts to achieve over certifying authorities is worrying for the same reason. The act lacks balance. Sruti Chaganti I Introduction When I say the brain is a machine, it is meant not as an insult to the mind but as an acknowledgment of the potential of a machine. I do not believe that a human mind is less than what we imagine it to be, but rather that a machine can be much, much more.1 - W Daniel Hillis The Pattern on the Stone >From Charles Babbage's first computer far back in the 1800s to the military network of 40 computers in the US connected by links and lines in 1969 called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) to the internet as we know it today, a world wide web that links the globe through 50 million nodes, a network of 233.3 million computers and a user group of 163 million individuals/entities,2 technology and therefore life has progressed into a world which seeks to obliterate barriers of economy, polity, society and administration. When Prannoy Roy gaped at Sabeer Bhatia's description of his life on the net3 from business through entertainment to shopping for fresh vegetables, I agreed with Roy. But today the net has indeed overtaken conventional living. Business on the net is easy and with the variety of services offered it is of little wonder that people are increasingly turning to the net for everyday living. The future lies there - in a network of computers spanning the globe. It becomes imperative then that government services are also delivered online. This could prove to be a blessing for the net entails transparency and accessibility of information: the lifeblood of any democracy. Corruption and red tapism, the greatest evils of modern governments can be thwarted fairly successfully. And for ordinary users - if they can buy vegetables and pay their bank dues on the net shouldn't they also be able to pay their electricity bills and apply for is licences online? If e-governance and e-commerce are to be viable options, electronic records and digital signatures must gain legal validity. If the courts of law refuse to enforce a contract or validate a licence, entered into or obtained on the net, the growth potential of the internet will be severely retarded. And yet the internet is not all goodness and opportunity. The World Wide Web is the playground of a new sort of criminal - one who revels in the anonymity offered by a network of millions of computers and whose apprehension legal systems across the world are battling with rather unsuccessfully. The internet challenges every single convention and belief that traditional legal systems are based upon. Benjamin Wittes is said to have remarked: Suppose you wanted to witness the birth and development of a legal system. You would need a large complex system that lies outside of all other legal authorities. Moreover, you would need that system somehow to accelerate the seemingly millennial progress of legal development, so you would witness more than a moment of progress. The hypothetical system might seem like a social scientist's fantasy, but it actually exists. It's called the Internet.4 It is to enable online governance and to grant legal recognition to electronic records and digital signatures that the Information Technology Act was passed. The act attempts to regulate life on the net and counteract known dangers to security and privacy of information. In doing so, it has set up a regulatory mechanism that is distinguished by the stranglehold the central government has been granted on all matters pertaining. The act has been the subject of severe criticism for the extent of executive discretion, immunity for executive actions, disproportionate penalties and the introduction of a system so tedious and complex that it is bound to hamper the progress of life on the net for Indians. Worse still is the extensive power granted to the state to impinge on the privacy of netizens. This paper examines the feasibility of e-governance in light of the provisions of the act and the very real dangers in following through with it. An analysis is made in light of the UNCITRAL model provisions, the insecurity of the net and the existing legal system. The emphasis is on administrative functioning or malfunctioning and its impact on the fulfilment of the intentions of the act. II E-Governance The Preamble of the Information Technology Act, in one of its clauses, reads: and WHEREAS it is considered necessary to give effect to the said resolution and to promote efficient delivery of governance services by means of reliable electronic records; be it enacted by the Parliament in the fifty-first year of the Republic of India as follows... The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law adopted the model law on electronic commerce which was then adopted by the General Assembly in a resolution5 that requires the states to give favourable consideration to the model law when enacting or revising their laws of similar import. India accordingly enacted the ITA 2000 keeping in view the provisions of the UNCITRAL model law. Section 4 of the Information Technology Act titled 'Legal Recognition of Electronic Records' lays down that where any law requires that any information/matter shall be in writing/ type-written/printed form, then notwithstanding anything contained in such law, such requirement shall be deemed to have been satisfied if such information or matter is (a) Rendered or made available in electronic form; and (b) Accessible so as to be usable for subsequent reference. The one section combines the import of both articles 5 and 6 of the UNCITRAL Model Law.6 There is no provision in the ITA however which corresponds to paragraph 3 of article 6 of the said Model which allows an enacting state to exclude certain specified situations from the application of the functional equivalence doctrine where an enacting state does not wish to establish such a complete equivalence as in the case of cheques, wills, negotiable instruments, etc.7 However if such a provision might have been redundant in the light of section 9 which lays down that nothing contained in sections 6,7 and 8 confer any right upon any person to insist that any ministry or department of the central government or state government or any other authority/body established by/under law or controlled/funded by the central/state government should accept/issue/create/retain/preserve any document in the form of electronic records or effect any monetary transaction in the electronic form. Section 5:8'Legal Recognition of Digital Signatures' lays down that where any law requires that information/other matter should be authenticated by signature, then notwithstanding anything contained in such law, the requirement will be deemed to have been fulfilled if authenticated by means of a digital signature affixed in the manner prescribed by the central government. Section 16 lays down that the central government prescribed the security procedure having regard to commercial circumstances prevailing at the time when the procedure was used including: (a) the nature of the transaction; (b) the level of sophistication of the parties with reference to their technological capacity; (c) the volume of similar transactions engaged in by other parties; (d) the availability of alternatives offered to but rejected by any other party; (e) the cost of alternative procedures; and (f) the procedures in general used for similar types of transactions or communications. However section 15 lays down that if by application of a security procedure agreed to by the parties concerned it can be verified that a digital signature, at the time it was affixed, was: (a) unique to the subscriber affixing it; (b) capable of identifying such subscriber; and (c) created in a manner or using a means under the exclusive control of the subscribed and is linked to the electronic record to which it relates in such a manner that if the electronic record was altered, the digital signature would be invalidated, then such signature shall be deemed to be a secure digital signature. While the tenor of section 16 is that the security requirements of a signature will be determined by central government rules, the inference of section 15 is that private parties also can work out their own security procedures. Yet the tone and tenor of the entire act and the rules does not bear out the latter inference. Is this a contradiction in terms? Or, is there a plausible interpretation? Section 6 of the ITA lays down the foundation of electronic governance. By sub-section (1) it allows for the filing of any form, application or other documents, creation, retention or preservation of records issue a grant of any licence or permit or receipt or payment in government offices and its agencies may be done through the means of electronic form. Sub-section (2) provides for the making of rules by the appropriate government to prescribe: (a) the manner and format in which such electronic records shall be filed, created or issued; (b) the manner or method payment of any fee or charges for filing, creation or issue any electronic record under clause (a). This legislation is particularly useful because it allows for such online filing without piecemeal amendments having to be made to different acts. Section 9, which has already been discussed, allows for this to happen on an "opt-in" basis so that those agencies which are not yet ready to go "paperless" are not compelled to do so. But whether such a blanket exemption should have been granted instead of an adequate timeframe is debatable. Section 79 deals with the 'Retention of Electronic Records'. Sub-section (1) lays down that where the law requires certain documents, records or information be retained, that requirement is met by retaining data messages, providing certain conditions are satisfied: (a) the information contained therein is accessible so as to be usable for subsequent reference; (b) the data message is retained in the format in which it was generated sent or received, in a format which can be demonstrated to represent accurately the information generated, sent or received; and (c) such information, if any, is retained as enables the identification of the original and destination of data message and the date and time when it was sent or received. The proviso to the sub-section reads: An obligation to retain documents, records or information in accordance with sub-section (1) does not extend to any information the sole purpose of which is to enable the message to be sent or received. Sub-section (2) lays down that nothing in the section shall apply to any law that expressly provides for the retention of documents, records or information in the form of electronic records. Section 8 of the ITA provides for the publication of an Electronic Gazette with a proviso which states that where any rule/regulation/order/by-law/notification/any other matter is published in the official Gazette or in the Electronic Gazette, the date of publication shall be deemed to be the date of that official Gazette which was first published in any form. Section 10 gives the central government the power to make rules so as to prescribe (a) the type of digital signature; (b) the manner and format in which the digital signature shall be affixed; (c) the manner or procedure which facilitates identification of the person affixing the digital signature; (d) control processes and procedures to ensure adequate integrity, security and confidentiality of electronic records or payments, and (e) any other matter which is necessary to give legal effect to digital signatures. While the ITA 2000 has gone along with the UNCITRAL model provisions a good distance, it has made subtle but significant changes which leads one to question whether the act succeeds in what it sets out to do. Section 9 is a major drawback as it leaves a large amount of discretion in the hands of the government as to whether or not to go online. While it is a fact that the government needs time to break conventions over a hundred years old and to train employees to catch up with modern technology, the absence of any kind of time frame can seriously hamper e-governance becoming a feasible option in the near future. III Electronic Records and Digital Signatures Section 3(18) of the General Clauses Act, 1879 defines document as "any matter written, expressed or described upon any substance by means of letter, figure or marks, or by more than one of these means which is intended to be used, or which may be used for the purpose of recording that matter".10 Information on the computer is stored as bits and bytes, the electronic equivalent of zeros and ones. It is thus argued that these zeros and ones are expressions on the computer disc in the form of a figure or mark thereby classifying electronic records as documents under Indian law.11 Section 11 of the ITA lays down that an electronic record shall be attributed to the originator if it was sent (a) by the originator himself; (b) by a person who had the authority to act on behalf of the originator in respect of that electronic record; or (c) by an information system programmed by or on behalf of the originator to operate automatically. The General Clauses Act does not define signature anywhere but explains 'sign' with its grammatical variations and cognate expressions, with reference to person, to mean affixing of his handwritten signature or any mark on any document. It is argued that if a person can introduce such information to any document so as to authenticate authorship, it will be construed as a signature whether written or printed and so digital signatures are also covered.12 Section 4 of the ITA provides for a subscriber to authenticate an electronic record by affixing his digital signature by the use of "asymmetric crypto system which envelop and transform the initial electronic record into another electronic record". While the UNCITRAL model provisions have chosen to be technology neutral when it comes to methods of digital signatures, the ITA has made it clear that a digital signature has to be using the asymmetric crypto system. 'Cryptography' is derived from Greek words that mean "secret writing" and involves the process of encryption and decryption. Encryption is the process of transforming plain text into unintelligible form and decryption is the process of converting the unintelligible data back into the original plain text.13 Encryption can be used for two purposes: (1) Maintaining the confidentiality of the message; and (2) Affixing a digital signature. In the former case the text itself is converted using an algorithm into cipher text so as to ensure that those who are not intended to read the message do not read it. The process used is called symmetric cryptography, or secret key cryptography. In this process the same key or algorithm that is used to encrypt also has to be used to decrypt. Owing to the disadvantages of symmetric cryptography,14 the asymmetric crypto system came into place. The system envisages the use of two keys - a public key and a private key. The explanation to sub-section (2) to section 3 reads "For the purpose of this sub-section, 'hash function' means an algorithm mapping or translation of one sequence of bit into another, generally smaller set known as 'hash result' such that an electronic record yields the same hash result every time the algorithm is executed with the same electronic record as its input making it computationally infeasible (a) to derive or reconstitute the original record from the hash result produced by the algorithm; (b) that two electronic records can produce the same result using the algorithm."15 Thus to create a digital signature, the following would be involved: (1) Section 2 (1) (zc) of the ITA defines a 'private key' as the key pair used to create a digital signature. (2) Section 2(1) (zd) of the ITA defines a 'public key' as the key of a key pair used to verify a digital signature and which is listed in the digital signature. (3) The information that has to be signed is delimited and is popularly known as the 'message'. (4) On this message the hash function is applied which compresses the information in a digital form known as the 'hash result' or the 'message digest'. The hash function computes a result of standard length which is unique to the electronic record and in such a way that it is impossible to reconstruct the original data from the hash results and for two electronic records to produce the same result using the same function. (5) The signatory uses his private key to encrypt the data and this is his digital signature. (6) He appends the original message to the digital signature and sends it electronically to the addressee. (7) The addressee decrypts the signature using his public key and recovers the message digest. (8) He then applies the hash function on the plain text message attached and derives its hash result. (9) He ompares the two message digests to ensure that there has been no tampering. The public key and private key are large numbers of a string of data produced by using a series of formulae and are mathematically related to each other.16 The security and confidentiality of the private key are imperative for the system to be successful. Its major advantage lies in the fact that the public key can be made freely available by publication in a directory, online repository and even visiting cards without compromising the security of the private key provided the system is designed well enough to prevent hacking. Yet critics of this system find its security a severely debatable point. IV Insecurity of the Net The UNCITRAL model law concentrates upon two basic functions of a signature to identify the author of a document and to confirm that the author approved the content of the document. An electronic signature means any letters, characters, numbers or other symbols in digital form or attached to or logically associated with an electronic record, and executed or adopted with the intention of authenticating or approving the electronic record and is fundamentally different from a digital signature. A digital signature is an "electronic identifier that utilises an information security measure, most commonly cryptography, to ensure the integrity, authenticity and non-repudiation of the information to which it corresponds". 17 The information security measure mandated by the act is the asymmetric crypto system and hash function. Thus a digital signature serves three essential functions: Data Integrity - indicates whether a file or message has been tampered with. Data Authentication - makes it possible to digitally (mathematically) verify the name of the person who signed the message. Non-repudiation - makes it impossible for the originator of the message to deny that it was either not sent or signed by another person.18 Despite this digital signature have run into problems and have been the subject of severe criticism by sceptics. Digital signatures have raised issues on the fronts of security, privacy and authenticity. Section 3 of the ITA Act is categorical when it comes to ensuring that only public key cryptography and hash function can be used to digitally sign documents. It is argued in favour of the provision that states can develop detailed regulatory schemes which in theory should provide for certainty and allow for infrastructure development. The fact that all of known systems, the asymmetric crypto system is hardest to crack made it the logical choice. However, the argument against being technology specific is steadily building up. Limiting transactions to the said system can be harmful and self-destructive as it is in the process of being replaced by a more secure system. Further infant technology will either not be developed or gain a foothold in the market. The more horrifying possibility is that the legal system will be tied to an insecure system. The most ignored disadvantage however is that adopting an exclusive technology opens the door wide to more successful breaches of that technology.19 Cryptography is based on algorithms which are complex mathematical puzzles and it can be broken simply by solving the puzzle. While a simple one takes very little time, a more complex one just takes longer. The safety of cryptography is based on the complexity of the mathematical puzzle. When there is only one technology, efforts to break it can be that much more dedicated and concentrated. The use of computers makes it easier. The computer is simply allowed to test each mathematical possibility until the algorithm or mathematical solution is found. This method is called a 'brute force attack'. The strength of the algorithm, it can be then said, depends on the time taken to test each mathematical possibility - greater the number of possibilities, greater the time taken. The law of averages then dictates that the solution can be found after only 50 per cent of the possibilities have been tested.20 Thus an argument is mooted in favour of a technology neutral approach on the grounds that it offers more flexibility and security. Further considering that legislators are not in a position to predict the future with cryptographic advancements or legal developments, they should just keep away from prescribing any one technology. And yet is this approach without its problems? A critique of the American law finds exactly this neutrality problematic. "The new law says nothing about technology. Any number of companies will say their digital signature technology is the safest and the best. We'll likely discover who is right through trial and error. In the meantime, the details of e-signatures and electronic contracts will almost certainly end up back in court."21 Digital signatures are prone to 'spoofing' where a bogus public key is created that purports to be that of a particular person when it really is not. It is to address this risk that certification authorities are envisaged to certify that the public key is that of a particular person. In the creation of these certification authorities, the act has run the severe risk of compromising the privacy for individuals online. Alan F Westen defines privacy as: "the desire of people to choose freely under what circumstances and to what extent they will expose themselves, their attitude and their behaviour to others".22 The ITA has made it clear that a digital signature will be valid only if it is obtained under the provisions of the act. This means that they will be forced to establish their identities with one or more certification authorities under the act. This is intrusive because it requires people to expose data about themselves that they may wish to keep private particularly when it is not necessary that they reveal such information. Three pressures have been identified that make the necessity felt for collecting identification information: (1) the Technological imperative - "it can be done, so it should be done" (2) the Marketing imperative - "the more the marketers know about consumers, the more efficient marketing communications will be, and the better informed the consumer is" (3) the Social Control imperative - "the public is not to be trusted, and data about their behaviour is essential in order to deter non-compliance and detect and prosecute offenders".23 The approach that establishing standards will counteract the evils of taking personal information, as in the case of Australia, for instance,24 does not remove the main issue. Rule 33 of the Certifying Authorities rules, for instance, states that such information as is not revealed on the digital signature certificate shall be kept confidential. But the fact is that the chances of that information indeed remaining private are slim when one takes into account the functioning of our bureaucracy. One might wonder what the hue and cry about privacy is. Just as one fills in thousands of documents in government offices, this is just another one of those. Further our constitution does not expressly grant us the right to privacy - it has been impliedly read in. But the essential fact is that we are dealing with here is the internet. The positive resource that one creates for secondary use though such information being revealed to all and sundry is mind-boggling. The digital signature certificate is a public document - it would defeat the purpose otherwise. They can be published in online repositories. With dotcom sites stealing information and selling it unauthorisedly, the risks of impersonation become manifold.25 "A digital signature stands for a human in cyberspace Š yet it can be used by others."26 Section 39 of the ITA makes it mandatory to publish a notice of suspension or revocation of a certificate in an online repository. Section 38 allows for the revocation of a certificate on request of the subscriber or any person authorised by him. This creates its own set of problems. What if the repository is manipulated by someone? What if an impersonator makes a request? A digital signature is likened to a passport.27 If once a person's details appear in the online repository without any fault of his, his credibility is lost. And if someone impersonating the subscriber has the certificate revoked and the new one issued, the consequences are too horrifying to think of. Generating a key pair is not inexpensive. How then is the ordinary user of governmental services supposed to procure one? Expense apart, for the success of the system of digital signatures it is essential to maintain confidentiality of the private key and its safety. The key generation should be undertaken entirely under the control of the individual concerned. The fact that the government lay down the security procedure is itself a bone of contention for it is believed that the government would have a vested interest that a private key be not too secure.28 Even if one were to agree that a basic standard has to be set for otherwise the key pair might not be secure, the requirement of rule 3 (1) (b) that the procedure for generation of the public and private key be specified in the application for the grant of licence and rule 19 (vi ) that the encryption technique has to be approved by the controller have no justification.29 It is argued that "this will defeat the very purpose of having a secure encryption technique or else any one can break into the public key or private key using the technique set out for encryption". The private key is usually a large number quite impossible to memorise. Storing it in the hard disk of a computer leaves it wide open to theft by a number of methods, each of which is quite undetectable. Storing in a floppy or CD in such a way that it does not enter into the memory of the computer increases its chances of being lost and falling into the wrong hands.30 Again there is the issue of back up. "Escrow" is an arrangement whereby something is placed on deposit with a trusted third party. This is a potentially dangerous proposition. An alternative to this can be worked out where the algorithm is broken up into several parts and stored with several organisations/individuals such that it is impossible for them to collude and yet to determine what the private key is with their bit of algorithm.31 While the theory is that when A wants to sign a document she performs a mathematical calculation using the document and a private key; then she appends the result of that calculation which is a signature to the document and sends it off. The truth is that more often that not, her computer does it for her for which reason, she stores the private key on her hard disk.32 Now there are three well known ways in which a system can be penetrated: Monitoring of electronic emissions33: Most electronic communication devices emit electro magnetic radiation that is highly correlated with the information carried or displayed on them and can be read off the terminal in principle from a distance by equipment specially designed to do so. Device penetration34: A software controlled device can be penetrated in a number of ways. For example, a virus may infect it, making a clandestine change. A message or a file can be sent to an unwary recipient who activates a hidden programme when the message is read or the file is opened; such a programme, once active, can record the keystrokes of the person at the keyboard, scan the mass storage media for sensitive data and transmit it, or make clandestine alterations to stored data. The virus could display one message on the screen and sign another by penetrating the signing software. Infrastructure penetration35: The infrastructure used to carry communication is based on software controlled devices called routers through which information travels in data packets. Router software can be modified to copy and forward all or selected traffic to an unauthorised computer. There are myriad ways in which data can be lifted off a person's computer. A digital signature authenticates the document up to the point of the signing computer but does not authenticate the link between that computer and the signatory.36 Even where the private key is not stolen, an honest mistake can result in a costly mistake. As Jessi Berst said, "there will be some volatile disasters in the early days when somebody's seven-year old clicks and sells the house or buys a car. When that happens, a pen and paper will seem like pretty nifty technology".37 It is in this context where it is not easy to detect that the private key has been compromised that the explanation to section 42 creates an unbreakable onus on the subscriber. In an attempt to cap the liability on the CA and the addressee, the explanation declares that the subscriber shall be liable till he has informed the certifying authority that the private key has been compromised. V Administrative Control In an attempt to counteract the known dangers to digital signatures and transactions on the net, the ITA has set up a regulatory mechanism in such a way that it almost defeats the dual purpose of facilitating e-transactions and securing them. Strangulating Administrative Control Section 17: Appointment of Controller and Other Officers (1) The central government may by notification in the official Gazette, appoint a controller of certifying authorities for the purposes of this Act and may also by the same or subsequent notification, appoint such numbers of deputy controllers and assistant controllers as it deems fit. (2) The Controller shall discharge his functions under this Act subject to the general control and directions of the central government This section has thus made it clear that the Controller will be an officer of the central government and thus a part of the executive arm of the state. Section 18 lays down the functions of which the Controller may perform all or some thereby granting the Controller excessive control over the certifying authorities. Just to mention too: clause (a) in exercising supervision over the activities of certifying authorities (there is nothing per se wrong with the supervision except that a perusal of the act and guidelines leads one to understand that such supervision can be terribly intrusive) specifying the contents of different printed or visual materials and advertisements that may be distributed or used in respect of a digital signature, certificate and the public key. The act puts in place a complex system of licensing certifying authorities giving the Controller and therefore the government in demanding absolutely any kind of information before an application can be granted. Too short a period has been granted between the grant of a licence and the requirement for setting up a shop. Section 19 allows for the recognition of foreign certifying authorities by the Controller if he chooses with the approval of the central government.38 But section 32 requires the foreign authority to have a place of business in India which can prove to be a sure dissuasive factor to foreign authorities. Many Indians have obtained digital signature certificates from the international (non-Indian) certifying authorities like Verisign and Globalsign.39 The rules do not provide for the verification of these signature certificates and therefore invalidate almost all of them. And yet to date, no CA has become fully functional under the act. Penalties and Offences Section 42: Penalty for damage to computer, computer system, etc. If any person without permission of the owner or any other person who is in charge of a computer system or computer network - (a) accesses or secures access to it (b) downloads, copies or extracts any data, computer data base or information from it (c) introduces or causes to be introduced any computer containment or computer virus into it (d) damages or causes to damaged any computer, computer system or computer network, data, computer database or any other programmes residing in it (e) disputes or causes disruption of any computer, computer system or computer network (f) denies or causes by denial of access to any person authorised to access it (g) provides any assistance to any person to facilitate access in contravention of provisions of this act (h) changes the services availed of by a person to the account of another person by tampering or manipulation he shall be liable to pay damages by way of compensation not exceeding one crore rupees to the person so affected. Section 65: Tampering With Computer Source Documents Whoever knowingly or intentionally conceals, destroys or alters, or intentionally or knowingly causes another to conceal destroy or alter any computer source code used for a computer, computer programme, computer system or computer network where the computer source is required to be kept or maintained by law for the time being in force, shall be punishable with imprisonment up to three years or with a fine which may extend up to 2 lakh rupees, or both. Section 66: Hacking With Computer System (1) Whoever with intent to cause or knowingly that he is likely to cause wrongful loss or damage to the public or any person destroys or deletes or alters any information residing in a computer resource or diminishes its value or utility or affects it injuriously by any means commits hacking. (2) Whoever commits hacking shall be punished with imprisonment up to three years or with fine which may extend up to 2 lakh rupees or both. As is fairly obvious, the penalties that have been imposed are monstrously large. These sections are much needed in view of the absolute insecurity of the Net and the argument is that such heavy penalties will have a deterrent effect. While that point is debatable, there are a few basic flaws in the drafting of these sections. Section 66 in the first instance is redundant thanks to section 43. But most importantly, the definition of hacking itself is per se wrong. It is not necessary that a hacker will destroy/delete/alter data. He may just enter, read the private key and leave the system again without having touched anything inside. Section 44: Penalty for Failure to Furnish Information, Return, etc. If any person was required under this act or any rules or regulations made thereunder to - (a) furnish any document, return or report to the Controller or the certifying authority fails to furnish the same, he shall be liable to a penalty not exceeding one lakh and fifty thousand rupees for each such failure. (b) file any return or furnish such information, books or other documents written in the time specified therefore in the regulations fails to file return or furnish the same within the time specified therefore in the regulations, he shall be liable to a penalty not exceeding 5,000 rupees for every day during which such failure continues. (c) Maintain books of account or record fails to maintain the same, he shall be liable to pay a penalty not exceeding 10,000 rupees for every day during when such failure continues. Section 45 puts in place residuary penalty - there is no express penalty provision, compensation amount of Rs 2,000 shall be paid. These sections go a little overboard in the imposition of penalties. Notwithstanding the all intrusive control, the CAs are extensively liable in the above mentioned ways. There is no exception for the bona fide mistakes. The certification authorities are obligated to disclose anything which materially and adversely effect either the reliability of a certificate or the authority's ability to perform its services. If a contravention under this act for reasons outside the control of the CA occurs, does it mean that the CA stands to lose its credibility? Governmental Access It is this part of the act that creates the most problems and results in creating a system of regulation that leaves far too much discretion and power in the hands of the government. Section 29: Access to Computer and Data (1) Without prejudice to the provisions of section 68, the Controller or any person authorised by him shall, if he has reasonable cause to suspect that any contravention of the provisions of this Act, rules or regulations made thereunder has been committed, have access to any computer system, any apparatus, data, or any other material connected with such system, for the purpose of searching or causing a search to be made for obtaining any information or data contained in are available to such computer system. (2) For the purpose of sub-section (1) the Controller or any person authorised who may by order direct any person in charge of or otherwise concerned with the operation of the computer system, data apparatus or material, to provide him with such reasonable technical or other assistantŠ as he may consider necessary. The section empowers the controller to access any information or data from any computer system if he has a reasonable cause to suspect that any contravention of the provisions of this act has occurred. The controller is an aim of the executive branch of the state and is under the absolute control of the central government and there is absolutely no reason why the controller will not oblige executive whims. Neither the section nor the general context of the act imposes any kind of accountability on the controller - if anything is a subtle (?) attempt at excluding judicial review of actions on the ground that the controller had reasonable cause to suspect a contravention. Section 28 (1) empowers the controller or any officer authorised by him to investigate any contravention of the provisions of this act. In doing so sub-section (2) has granted him the powers conferred on Income Tax authorities under chapter XIII of the Income Tax Act 1961. It is argued with some fervour that it shows poor appreciation of the nature of the internet- cyber space. The provisions of the Income Tax Act have been expressly designed with the view to curtail financial irregularities. Even if section 29 had been tempared with judicial authority, the effect would not have been so bad. But the section as it stands in conjunction with grant of powers under the Income Tax Act indicate a definite favour to the state of arbitrariness. Section 80 gives any police officer not below the rank of DSP or any other officer of central/state government authorised by central government to enter any place and search and arrest without a warrant. And notwithstanding the provisions of the CrPC, any person who is suspected of having committed or committing any offence under the act. Though the provisions of CrPC come into play once the arrest is made, the conferral of powers under this section may lead to very real misuse. Section 69: Directions of Controller to a Subscriber to Extend Facilities to Decrypt Information (1) If the Controller is satisfied that it is necessary or expedient so as to do in the interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states or public order or for preventing incitement to the Commissioner of any cognisable offence, for reasons to be recorded in writing by order, direct any agency of the Government to intercept any information transmitted through any computer source. (2) The subscriber or any person in charge of the computer resource shall when called upon by any computer agency which has been directed by sub-section (1) extend all facilities and technical assistance to decrypt the information (3) The subscriber or any person who fails assists the agency referred to in sub-section (2) shall be punished with an imprisonment for a term which may extend to 7 years. In a few words, the controller has been empowered to 'intercept' any communication on the net. The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English defines the word intercept as 'stop or catch (somebody travelling or something in motion) before he or it can reach a destination.'40 This section therefore could be facilitating surveillance over a period of time without the knowledge of the person concerned. This is a grave infringement of the civil rights of citizens, particularly where the subjective satisfaction of the controller that such surveillance is required is all that it takes. The controller has been granted very wide discretionary powers and absolutely no guidelines, checks or balances have been provided to determine the 'satisfaction' of the Controller. A paltry attempt has been made in section 72 to bring some responsibility into the system. The section deals save as otherwise provided in this Act or any other law for the time being in force, if any person who in pursuance of any of the powers conferred under this Act, rules or regulations made thereunder, has secured access to any electronic record, book, registers correspondence, information, document or other material without the consent of the person concerned discloses such electronic record, book, register, correspondence, information, document or other material to any other person shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to 2 years or with fine which may extend to 1 lakh rupees or with both. This measure has been dismissed as paltry because under this section, misconduct has to be proved whereas suspicion is enough for sub-sections (2) and (3) of section 69 to apply. Further while sub-section (3) of section 69 punishes a subscriber with seven years imprisonment, this section imposes a mere two-year imprisonment on an official of the state who owes a greater responsibility to both the state and the people. Further, various provisions in the act will make it next to impossible to prove anything under this section and they are dealt with as under. Immunity to Officials Under this Act Section 82: Controller, Deputy Controller and Assistant Controllers to be public servants. The presiding officer and other officers and employees of a cyber appellate tribunal, the Controller, The Deputy Controller and the Assistant Controllers shall be deemed to be public servants within the meaning of section 21 of the IPC. It has been argued that it is not clear whether this is sufficient to bring it within the ambit of The Prevention of Corruption Act. What is far more worrying is section 84 which reads thus: No suit, prosecution or other legal proceedings shall be against the central government, the state government, the controller or any person acting on behalf of him, the presiding officer, adjudicating officers and the staff of the cyber-appellate tribunal for anything which is in good faith done or intended to be done in pursuance of this Act or any rule, regulation made thereunder. This blanket exemption successfully thwarts any attempt at making these officials accountable. Absolutely anything done can be passed off under the 'good faith' clause. A meagre effort is made by requiring reasons to be recorded for most actions to be taken under this act. But apart from the fact that the courts are going to be flooded with cases requiring that actions of controllers be struck down. Adjudication Section 46 provides for an adjudicating officer to be appointed by the central government from the executive for "holding an inquiry in the manner prescribed by the central government". The adjudicative mechanism envisaged has two major problems. One it is an extension of the executive and two there is nothing to suggest that any ordinary citizen can invoke it. Section 48 provides for the establishment of a cyber-appellate tribunal by the central government and Section 49 makes it clear that such tribunals shall consist of one member only. A member from the Indian Legal Service, a sitting or retired high court judge or any member qualified to be a judge of the high court will be named presiding officer. This can create severe problems as the member may not be a technical man. Matters under this act are essentially technical and such expertise needs to be represented on the tribunal. Section 62 provides for appeal from the CRAT to the high court. Litigation explosion is going to be a definite feature under the provisions of the Act when more and more people who feel they have been wronged by the arbitrary use of the executive's powers throng the corridors of the court for redressal of their grievances. The fact that the ordinary courts are absolutely not equipped to deal with technical issues is only going to complicate matters. VI Conclusion The Information Technology Act raises very real concerns. It demonstrates a legislature deeply sceptical of the internet, rooted in the conventions of the past, yet battling with the need for an information technology law in the present-day circumstances. This straddling of the known and the unknown has strange results. In its desperate need to bring in some security for activity on the net, it relies heavily on the executive, little realising that it can result in violation of civil rights particularly in light of India's infamous emergency. The absolute control it attempts to achieve over certifying authorities is worrying for the same reason. The act lacks balance. While it is stated in the preamble that the act has been passed "to facilitate electronic filing of documents with government agencies", reading the act makes one question whether the government has thought through on what it attempts to do with the act. The World Bank and UNCITRAL are pushing through e-governance and e-commerce laws with great enthusiasm and India has with equal alacrity jumped onto the bandwagon. But the fact remains that though Indians are spearheading the IT revolution around the world, the internet in India is in its nascent stage. If India is attempting to put in a regulatory framework while going online, it is a commendable move, only the execution has worked out all wrong. Section 5 recognises digital signatures and Section 6 allows digitally signed dealings with the government. But for the ordinary middle class taxpayers, getting a digital signature under the act involves far too much hassle, too little security and the threat that they could be under government surveillance without their knowledge. The line between the real world and the mechanical world is becoming more and more blurred every day. But it is not that humans are turning into automatons or becoming slaves to machines. No, we are simply growing towards each other. In the Blue Nowhere machines are taking our personalities and culture - our language, myths, metaphors, philosophy and spirit.41 It becomes important, in this context, for any law-making body to think through on what the consequences of its actions will be. The issue of privacy is a serious one which the Act impacts on very unfavourably as the appendix reveals. The Information Technology Act 2000 needs some serious reworking. The government needs to ask itself whether the answer to the insecurity to the net lies in the brute force of the executive. If e-governance is about facilitation, the ITA seems to be about complication. Address for correspondence: sruti_c at yahoo.com Notes 1 Deaver, Jeffrey; The Blue Nowhere; Pocket Star Books 2 "Digital and Electronic Signatures" http://members.aol.com/Winchel3/Links/Legal/Signatures/SignaturesLegalLinks.htm 3 Prannoy Roy hosted a talk show on BBC about the Y2K issue in which Sabeer Bhatia participated. Sabeer Bhatia is CEO Arzoo.com. 4 Dhar, Ravi Kumar "State Surveillance, Citizens' Civil Rights and Cyber Crime: Indian Information Technology Act-2000 in Retrospect"; http:/jcmc.huji.ac.il/vol2/Issue1/intro.html 5 A/RES/51/162 dt 30th January 1997. 6 Article 5: Legal Recognition of Data Messages Information shall not be denied legal effect, validity or enforceability solely on the grounds that it is a data message. This principle is intended to be of general application and therefore does not establish the effectiveness, validity or enforceability of a data message. It embodies the doctrine of 'functional equivalence - that there should be no disparity of treatment between data messages and paper documents. "The form in which certain information is presented or retained cannot be used as the only reason for which that information is denied legal effectiveness validity or enforceability." Article 6: Writing (1) Where the law requires information to be in writing, that requirement is met by a data message if the information contained therein is accessible so as to be usable for subsequent reference. (2) Paragraph 1 applies whether the requirement therein is in the form of an obligation or whether the law simply provides consequences for the information not being in writing. (3) The provisions of this article do not apply to the following [Š] Article 6 concentrates upon the notion of information being reproduced and read. The advantages stated in favour of written documents are that they can be accessed in the original at any time for subsequent reference. The use of the word 'accessible' in Article 6 is intended to mean that information in the form of computer data should be readable and able to be interpreted, and that the software that might be necessary in order to satisfy those requirements may need to be retained. The word 'usable' is intended to cover not only human use but also computer processing. The requirement of 'subsequent reference' was preferred to 'durability' or 'non-alterability' both of which were understood to have limited application with regard to paper, and 'readability' and 'intelligibility' which were passed over as too subjective as standards. 7 Ryder, Rodney D.; Guide To Cyber Laws (Information Technology Act, 2000, E-Commerce, Data protection and the Internet); Wadhwa; p 364. 8 This section corresponds to Article 7 of the UNCITRAL Model Law: Signature (1) Where the law requires the signature of a person, that requirement is met in relation to a data message if a) A method is used to identify that person and to indicate that a person's approval of the information contained in the data message; and (b) that method is as reliable as was appropriate for which the data message was generated or communicated, in light of all the circumstances, including any relevant agreement. (2) Paragraph 1 applies whether the requirement therein is in the form of an obligation or whether the law simply provides consequences in the absence of a signature. (3) The provisions in this article do not apply to the following [Š] Paragraph 1(a) establishes the principle, that in an el ectronic environment, the basic legal functions of a signature are performed by way of a method that identifies the originator of a data message and confirms that the originator approved the content of that message. Paragraph 1(b) establishes a flexible approach to the level of security to be achieved by the method of identification used under Paragraph 1(a). In determining whether the method used under paragraph 1 is appropriate legal, technical and commercial factors should be taken into account. The examples listed are: (I) The sophistication of the equipment used by each of the parties (II) The nature of their trading activity (III) The frequency at which the commercial transactions take place between the parties (IV) The kind and size of the transaction (V) The function of signature requirements in a given statutory and regulatory environment (VI) The capability of communication systems (VII) Compliance with authentication procedures set forth by intermediaries VIII) The range of authentication made available by the intermediary (IX) Compliance with trade customs and practices (X) Existence of insurance coverage mechanisms against unauthorised messages (XI) The importance and value of the information contained in the data message (XII) The availability of alternative methods of authentication and the cost of implementation (XIII) The degree of acceptance or non-acceptance of the method of identification in the relevant industry or field both at the time the method was agreed upon and the time that the data message was communicated; and (XIV) Any other relevant factor This article establishes a basic standard of authentication both in circumstances where national laws leave issues of authentication entirely up to contracting parties to decide and where requirements for signature are set by mandatory provisions of national law which are not subject to alteration by agreement of the parties. Article 7(3) is similar to article 6(3) in that it allows national legislatures to exempt specific instances from the operation of these provisions for the model law recognises that there may be good reasons for specifying instances where it is not appropriate for an electronically signed document to have the same effect as one with a hand written signature as in the case of wills and negotiable instruments. 9 This section corresponds with Article 10 of the UNCITRAL model law titled 'Retention of Data Messages: (1) Where the law requires certain documents, records or information be retained, that requirement is met by retaining data messages, providing certain conditions are satisfied: (a) the information contained therein is accessible so as to be usable for subsequent reference (b) the data message is retained in the format in which it was generated sent or received, in a format which can be demonstrated to represent accurately the information generated, sent or received; and (c) such information, if any, is retained as enables the identification of the original and destination of data message and the date and time when it was sent or received. (2) An obligation to retain documents, records or information in accordance with Paragraph (1) does not extend to any information the sole purpose of which is to enable the message to be sent or received. (3) A person may satisfy the requirements referred to in Paragraph (1) by using the services of any other person, provided that the conditions set forth in sub-paragraphs (a) (b) (c) of Paragraph (1) are met. This Article establishes a set of alternative rules for existing requirements regarding the storage of information. Paragraph (1) sets out conditions under which data messages can be stored. Sub-paragraph (a) reproduces conditions established under article 6 for a data message to satisfy the requirement of 'writing'. Sub-paragraph (b) emphasises that the message need not be retained unaltered as long as the information stored accurately reflects the data message as it was sent thus recognising that messages may have to be decoded or compressed or converted in order to be stored. Sub-paragraph (c) insists that transmittal information which may be necessary for the identification of the message be stored. Sub-paragraph (c) establishes a distinction between those elements of transmittal information that are important for the identification of the message and those covered by paragraph (2) which are of no value with regard to the data message and which will automatically be stripped out of an incoming data message by the receiving computer before it actually enters the information system of the addressee. 10 Kamath, Nandan; Law Relating to Computers, Internet and E-Commerce- A Guide to Cyberlaws; Universal Law Publishers; p 109. 11 Ibid; p 109. 12 Basu, Subhajit and Jones, Richard "Legal Issues Affecting E-Commerce: A Review of the Indian Information Technology Act, 2000"; http://www.bileta.ac.uk/02papers/basu.html 13 supra n 10, p 118. 14 Therefore the key has to be securely transmitted to the addressee in order to enable him to be able to read the message. Here lies the primary disadvantage of the system - if the key can be securely transmitted, so can the message! Further, there has to be some method of ensuring that encrypted messages can be recovered if the private key is lost - retaining the technology to do so makes it easy for hackers. Further where there are a large number of users who will have to access the system, secret key cryptography is potentially unsafe because the risk of the key falling into the wrong hands is greater; ibid, pp. 118-119 15 Sood, Vivek; Cyber law Simplified; Tata McGraw Hill Publishing Co, p 443. 16 supra n 12. 17 Vishwanathan, Suresh T; The Indian Cyber law; 2nd Edition; Bharat Publishing House, New Delhi, 2001; p 42. 18 Mittal, D P; Law of Information Technology (Cyber law), Taxmann, p 52. 19 supra n 12. 20 Greenleaf, Graham "Privacy Implications of Digital Signatures"; http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/DigSig.html 21 Lemos, Robert "Digital signatures a threat to privacy?"; http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-519795.html?legacy=zdnn 22 supra n 4. 23 supra n 21. 24 Ibid. 25 supra n 22. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 supra n 21. 29 supra n 4. 30 Kaner, Cem "The Insecurity of the Digital Signature"; http://www.badsoftware.com/digsig.htm 31 supra n 21. 32 schneier, Bruce "Why Digital Signatures Are Not Signatures"; http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0011.html 33 supra n 10, p 119. 34 Ibid, p 119. 35 Ibid, p 120. 36 supra n 33. 37 Berst, Jesse "Sign of Trouble: The Problem With E-Signatures"; http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2604099,00.html 38 supra n 4. 39 supra n 12. 40 supra n 12. 41 supra n 1, p 75. From aiindex at mnet.fr Sun Aug 31 03:02:01 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 22:32:01 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Arundhati Roy: When the saints go marching out Message-ID: Magazine / The Hindu August 31, 2003 When the saints go marching out In an age when everything's up for sale, why not icons? Can they stage a getaway? In an essay for radio, ARUNDHATI ROY examines how the elites of the very societies and peoples in whose name the battles for freedom were waged use Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. as mascots to entice new masters. August 28, 1963 ... forty years later, Martin Luther King Jr.'s words remembered: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: `We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal....'" THIS is the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington, when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I have a dream" speech. Perhaps it's time to reflect - again - on what has become of that dream. It's interesting how icons, when their time has passed, are commodified and appropriated (some voluntarily, others involuntarily) to promote the prejudice, bigotry and inequity they battled against. But then in an age when everything's up for sale, why not icons? In an era when all of humanity, when every creature on God's earth, is trapped between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cheque book and the American cruise missile, can icons stage a getaway? Martin Luther King Jr. is part of a trinity. So it's hard to think of him without two others elbowing their way into the picture: Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. The three high priests of non-violent resistance. Together they represent (to a greater or lesser extent) the 20th Century's non-violent liberation struggles (or should we say "negotiated settlements"?): Of the colonised against coloniser, former slave against slave owner. Today the elites of the very societies and peoples in whose name the battles for freedom were waged use them as mascots to entice new masters. Mohandas, Mandela, Martin. India, South Africa, the United States. Broken dreams, betrayal, nightmares. A quick snapshot of the supposedly "Free World" today. Last March in India, in Gujarat - Gandhi's Gujarat - right-wing Hindu mobs murdered 2,000 Muslims in a chillingly efficient orgy of violence. Women were gang-raped and burned alive. Muslim tombs and shrines were razed to the ground. More than a hundred and fifty thousand Muslims have been driven from their homes. The economic base of the community has been destroyed. Eye-witness accounts and several fact-finding commissions have accused the State Government and the police of collusion in the violence. I was present at a meeting where a group of victims kept wailing, "Please save us from the police! That's all we ask... " In December 2002, the same State Government was voted back to office. Narendra Modi, who was widely accused of having orchestrated the riots, has embarked on his second term as Chief Minister of Gujarat. On August 15, Independence Day, he hoisted the Indian flag before thousands of cheering people. In a gesture of menacing symbolism he wore the black Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) cap - which proclaims him as a member of the Hindu nationalist guild that has not been shy of admiring Hitler and his methods. One hundred and thirty million Muslims - not to mention the other minorities, Dalits, Christians, Sikhs, Adivasis - live in India under the shadow of Hindu nationalism. As his confidence in his political future brims over, Narendra Modi, master of seizing the political moment, invited Nelson Mandela to Gujarat to be the Chief Guest at the celebration of Gandhi's birth anniversary on October 2. Fortunately the invitation was turned down. And what of Mandela's South Africa? Otherwise known as the Small Miracle, the Rainbow Nation of God? South Africans say that the only miracle they know of is how quickly the rainbow has been privatised, sectioned off and auctioned to the highest bidders. Within two years of taking office in 1994, the African National Congress genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. In its rush to replace Argentina as neo-liberalism's poster boy, it has instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment. The government's promise to re-distribute agricultural land to 26 million landless people has remained in the realm of dark humour. While 60 per cent of the population remains landless, almost all agricultural land is owned by 60,000 white farmers. (Small wonder that George Bush on his recent visit to South Africa referred to Thabo Mbeki as his "point man" on the Zimbabwe issue.) Post-apartheid, the income of 40 per cent of the poorest black families has diminished by about 20 per cent. Two million have been evicted from their homes. Six hundred die of AIDS every day. Forty per cent of the population is unemployed and that number is rising sharply. The corporatisation of basic services has meant that millions have been disconnected from water and electricity. A fortnight ago, I visited the home of Teresa Naidoo in Chatsworth, Durban. Her husband had died the previous day of AIDS. She had no money for a coffin. She and her two small children are HIV-positive. The Government disconnected her water supply because she was unable to pay her water bills and her rent arrears for her tiny council flat. The Government dismisses her troubles and those of millions like her as a "culture of non-payment". In what ought to be an international scandal, this same government has officially asked the judge in a U.S court case to rule against forcing companies to pay reparations for the role they played during apartheid. It's reasoning is that reparations - in other words justice - will discourage foreign investment. So South Africa's poorest must pay apartheid's debts, so that those who amassed profit by exploiting black people during apartheid can profit even more from the goodwill generated by Nelson Mandela's Rainbow Nation of God. President Thabo Mbeki is still called "comrade" by his colleagues in government. In South Africa, Orwellian parody goes under the genre of Real Life. What's left to say about Martin Luther King Jr.'s America? Perhaps it's worth asking a simple question: Had he been alive today, would he have chosen to stay warm in his undisputed place in the pantheon of Great Americans? Or would he have stepped off his pedestal, shrugged off the empty hosannas and walked out onto the streets to rally his people once more? On April 4, 1967, one year before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the Riverside Church in New York City. That evening he said (I can only paraphrase him because his public speeches are now private property) that he could never again speak out against the violence of those living in the ghettos without first speaking out against his own government, which he called the greatest purveyor of violence in the modern world. Has anything happened in the 36 years between 1967 and 2003 that would have made him change his mind? Or would he be doubly confirmed in his opinion after the overt and covert wars and acts of mass killing that successive governments of his country, both Republican and Democrat, have engaged in since then? Let's not forget that Martin Luther King Jr. didn't start out as a militant. He began as a Persuader, a Believer. In 1964 he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was held up by the media as an exemplary black leader, unlike, say, the more militant Malcolm X. It was only three years later that Martin Luther King Jr. publicly connected the U.S. government's racist war in Vietnam with its racist policies at home. In 1967, in an uncompromising, militant speech, he denounced the American invasion of Vietnam. He spoke with heart-rending eloquence about the cruel irony of the TV images of black and white boys burning the huts of a poor village in brutal solidarity, killing and dying together for a nation that wouldn't even seat them together at the same tables. His denunciation of the war in Vietnam was treated as an act of perfidy. He was condemned by his former allies and attacked viciously by the American press. The Washington Post wrote, "He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people." The New York Times had some wonderful counter-logic to offer the growing anti-war sentiment among black Americans: "In Vietnam," it said, "the Negro, for the first time, has been given the chance to do his share of fighting for his country." It omitted to mention Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation that there were twice as many blacks as whites dying in Vietnam in proportion to their number in the population. It omitted to mention that when the body bags came home, some of the black soldiers were buried in segregated graveyards in the South. What would Martin Luther King Jr. say today about the fact that federal statistics show that African Americans, who count for 12 per cent of America's population, make up 21 per cent of the total armed forces and 29 per cent of the U.S. army? Perhaps he would take a positive view and look at this as affirmative action at its most effective? What would he say about the fact that having fought so hard to win the right to vote, today 1.4 million African Americans, which means 13 per cent of all voting age black people, have been disenfranchised because of felony convictions? But the most pertinent question of all is: What would Martin Luther King Jr. say to those black men and women who make up a fifth of America's armed forces and close to a third of the U.S. army? To black soldiers fighting in Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr. said they ought to understand America's role in Vietnam and consider the option of conscientious objection. In April 1967 at a massive anti-war demonstration in Manhattan, Stokely Carmichael described the draft as "white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend land they stole from red people." What's changed? Except of course the compulsory draft has become a poverty draft - a different kind of compulsion. Would Martin Luther King Jr. say today that the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are in any way morally different from the U.S. government's invasion of Vietnam? Would he say that it was just and moral to participate in these wars? Would he say that it was right for the U.S. government to have supported a dictator like Saddam Hussein politically and financially for years while he committed his worst excesses against Kurds, Iranians and Iraqis in the 1980s, when he was an ally against Iran? And that when that dictator began to chafe at the bit, as Saddam Hussein did, would he say it was right to go to war against Iraq, to fire several hundred tonnes of depleted uranium into its fields, to degrade its water supply systems, to institute a regime of economic sanctions that results in the death of half a million children, to use United Nations weapons inspectors to force it to disarm, to mislead the public about an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed in a matter of minutes, and then, when the country was on its knees, to send in an invading army to conquer it, occupy it, humiliate its people, take control of its natural resources and infrastructure, and award contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to American corporations like Bechtel? When he spoke out against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. drew some connections that many these days shy away from making. He explicitly described the interconnections between racism, economic exploitation and war. Would he tell people today that it is right for the U.S. government to export its cruelties - its racism, its economic bullying and its war machine to poorer countries? Would he say that black Americans must fight for their fair share of the American pie and the bigger the pie, the better their share - never mind the terrible price that the people of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America are paying for the American Way of Life? Would he support the grafting of the Great American Dream onto his own dream, which was a very different, very beautiful sort of dream? Or would he see that as a desecration of his memory and everything that he stood for? The black American struggle for civil rights gave us some of the most magnificent political fighters, thinkers, public speakers and writers of our times. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, James Baldwin, and of course the marvellous, magical, mythical Muhammad Ali. Who has inherited their mantle? Could it be the likes of Colin Powell? Condoleeza Rice? Michael Powell? They're the exact opposite of icons or role models. They appear to be the embodiment of black peoples' dreams of material success, but in actual fact they represent the Great Betrayal. They are the liveried doormen guarding the portals of the glittering ballroom against the press and swirl of the darker races. Their role and purpose is to be trotted out by the Bush administration looking for brownie points in its racist wars and African safaris. If these are black America's new icons, then the old ones must be dispensed with because they do not belong in the same pantheon. If these are black America's new icons, then perhaps the haunting image that Mike Marqusee describes in his beautiful book Redemption Song - an old Muhammad Ali afflicted with Parkinson's disease, advertising a retirement pension - symbolises what has happened to black Power, not just in the United States but the world over. If black America genuinely wishes to pay homage to its real heroes, and to all those unsung people who fought by their side - if the world wishes to pay homage, then it's time to march on Washington. Again. Keeping hope alive - for all of us. This is the text for a 15-minute radio essay broadcast by Radio 4, BBC. Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things. From sarang at flomerics.com Sun Aug 31 15:17:58 2003 From: sarang at flomerics.com (Sarang Shidore) Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2003 15:17:58 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Old articles of mine I dug up Message-ID: While sorting out an old box this relaxed labor day weekend, guess what I found? An old floppy with a few of my random musings and other stuff dating between 1996 and 1998. I thought I had lost these forever, but here are three written between 1996 and 1998 that I would like to share with all of you. In those days, India had not seen a BJP prime minister yet. The stock market collapse on Wall Street, the full flowering of the Indian IT industry, the formation of the NDA, Vajpayee's victory in March 1998, the Indo-Pak nuclear tests, the Lahore summit, the Kargil war, the ignition of the second Intifadah in Palestine, the ascendancy of George W. Bush, the tragedy of 9/11, the attack on the Indian parliament, two Indo-Pak near-wars, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq etc. were all in the future. Boy, was it a long time ago! Here goesŠ Sarang ----- The Last Cosmopolitan (A very personal tribute to Mexican literary giant Octavio Paz who died last week) Sarang Shidore, May 1998 I first came across Octavio Paz almost by accident. A friend lent me a book of his. Curious, I began reading. Before long I was in a different reality. The story of a nation unfolded before me - its birth and growth, the paroxysms of its defeats and triumphs, its impenetrable masks and its brilliant fiestas, its hidden soul sublime and the open sores on its body. The book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, is probably Paz's greatest work of prose. It played a major role in winning him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1990. The Labyrinth of Solitude attempted the impossible - a meditation on the character and complexity of the large, diverse nation known to the outside world as Mexico. A monumental enterprise, but for Paz - a poet, philosopher, and political analyst - it seems almost effortless. The reader is taken on a journey from a world of Mexican masks to the enigma of the Conquest, then the Revolution; followed by a scathing analysis of the state of post-revolutionary Mexico, and finally a dizzying commentary on the dialectic of solitude. In between, Paz treats us to a feast of interludes - a commentary on the 17th century Mexican nun, the visionary Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, a contemplation of Death, a lamentation on the brief flicker of hope provided by the revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata, and what surely must be the most in depth exposition of a swear word (chingar) a writer has ever attempted! While The Labyrinth of Solitude established him as an enormous force in the literary world, Octavio Paz is remembered as much for his poetry as his prose. In fact, he always insisted that he was first and foremost a poet. His poetry was interwoven with his razor sharp understanding of cultures around the world. From his epic poem Sunstone to his poems written in India, the range of Paz's poems demonstrated the power poetry can reach to craft a plethora of fascinating images. It was not for nothing that he once called poetry "the eroticism of language". The Labyrinth of Solitude was followed by a series of other works on topics as diverse as Mexican-American relations, Buddhist logic, Japanese poetry, contemporary international politics, and eroticism. He also continued his reflections on Mexican-ness with the essay "The Other Mexico", written immediately after the terrible massacre of peaceful student demonstrators by the Mexican army at Tlatelolco Square, Mexico City in 1968. The incident so shocked Paz, that he immediately resigned his post in the diplomatic service as ambassador to India, returning to his native land to campaign against the government. The Other Mexico is a trenchant and sophisticated analysis of the Mexican political psyche with its provocative search for the long shadow of the living, breathing other; as Paz puts it, the "....gaseous reality formed by the beliefs, fragments of beliefs, images, and concepts which history deposits in the subsoil of the social psyche.....the existence in each civilization of certain complexes, presuppositions, and mental structures that are generally unconscious, and that stubbornly resist the erosions of history". As with most Latin American literary figures, Octavio Paz was an intensely political individual. In his youth, he went to Spain to aid the Republican effort of the 1930's against the fascist forces of General Franco, a cause that was the romantic ideal of leftists of the time in every part of the world. A self-confessed Marxist then, Paz however quickly grew disillusioned with Stalinism, and critical of the Latin American intelligentsia's idolatry of Soviet totalitarianism. These ideas may seem obvious to us today, but 50 years ago Paz's opinions were considered heresy among the intellectuals of his country - his flaying of the "soulless" Soviet state, a stubborn insistence that man was more than a means of production, and a passionate belief in the idea of democracy; a belief that Paz repeated time and time again throughout the decades since then, always claiming that he was criticizing socialism "from a socialist viewpoint", as he once put it. In his later years, Octavio Paz enraged many Mexican intellectuals by first voicing his suspicions of the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and then harshly criticizing the leftist rebellion in the state of Chiapas that grabbed international headlines on New Year's day in 1994. Some felt that Paz had gone too far, and had ignored the root causes - poverty and repression of the indigenous population - that they claimed had sparked the rebellion. It was especially ironic, considering Paz's long-held admiration for the turn of the century revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata - who the rebels claimed as their inspiration. Many observers also condemned what they saw as Paz's naive faith in Mexican president Carlos Salinas, who later fled into exile when evidence emerged of massive corruption and influence peddling during his tenure. Paz was no less sparing of the vagaries of liberal capitalism. In recent times, as the United States emerged as the unqualified victor in the Cold War and as the newly liberated countries blindly embraced free markets, Paz warned of the excesses of our ideas of progress, a failure "by us moderns (to undertake) a critique of time and of its senseless and ultimately illusory acceleration". In his recent work on love titled "The Double Flame", Paz mourns that "capitalism has turned Eros to an employee of Mammon...the power of money and the profit motive have turned freedom to love into slavery." For myself, Paz's connection with India was a special bonus. His six year stay there as Mexican ambassador led to a lifelong study of Indian civilization, expressed in his many poems and a book (published in 1995) titled "Vislumbres de la India". Although Paz declares with a great deal of humility in the preface that the book is "a child not of knowledge....but of love", nothing could be further from the truth. Paz begins by commenting on the contradiction that had overwhelmed him on his first visit to India, "the coexistence of Hinduism and Islam....one the strictest and most extreme form of monotheisms .....(and the other) the richest and most varied polytheism. In one, the ideology is rigid and simple; in the other the variety of doctrines and sects induces a kind of vertigo". After a series of commentaries on Indian history, including Gandhi (whom Paz called a "saint....not to be judged, but venerated") Paz concludes with an ominous view of the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, which coupled with the strain of Islamic fundamentalism present in Pakistan, makes the critique of the two "....an enormous enterprise (which) must be undertaken in historical circumstances that are particularly unfavorable". But Paz is at his delightful best when he turns his poetic imagination to celebrating the joy of classical Sanskrit poetry. Few contemporary writers have shown a greater command over the subject. With a sumptuous selection of excerpts from poems written between the 3rd and the 12th centuries by several great poets (Kalidasa, Bilhana, Dharmakirti, Jayadeva, Bhojyadeva), Paz reminds us that classical Sanskrit poetry "....is a composition that expresses the drama of being human; its sensations, its sentiments, its ideas....erotic, satirical, philosophical; a song and meditation on song....". Its neglect in the West he adds, "is inexplicable, and certainly unjust". Vislumbres de la India concludes with an essay titled "A critique of liberation", a somewhat skeptical view of the path to liberation expounded by Krishna to Arjuna. Paz's own viewpoint is a more or less qualified rejection of Krishna's message. Here we see the Octavio Paz true to the roots of his own Catholic-based civilization; an observer who is unswerving in his belief in the cause of activism to save another's soul, while discarding the idea of detachment to save one's own. The most striking thing about Octavio Paz is not that he is always right, but rather in his ability to encompass the enormous breadth of the various civilizations of humankind, far beyond his own Mexican roots. Few thinkers knew so much about the human enterprise; even fewer could place themselves away and above the plane of earthly existence and grasp the essence of the character of this experience. And fewer yet could blend poetry with politics, metaphysics with literature, analysis with imagination, the way Paz did. In our age of modernity, programmed with the mantra of bigger, faster and better; enchanted with the notion of linear progress - an age in which pop culture is in danger of reducing us to a set of trivialities - the concept of a classical cosmopolitan mind seems rather old-fashioned. Our last great cosmopolitan voice, Octavio Paz - unorthodox, irreverent, full of surprises - has departed, leaving us in a labyrinth of solitude. Adios, amigo! -------------------- The BJP's Triumphant March Sarang Shidore August 25, 1996 The Indian election results are in, and the once mighty Congress party has been decimated. And the biggest gains have been made by the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). To any mind wedded to the concept of a tolerant, multi-ethnic nation, this cannot but invoke a sense of trepidation. After all, the BJP, the political arm of the avowedly Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), rose to prominence in the late 80's through a strident campaign that espoused Hindu cultural nationalism. This campaign culminated in the destruction by angry mobs in December 1992 of an ancient mosque in the town of Ayodhya, that some Hindus believe was built by Muslim invaders by destroying a shrine to the Hindu God Ram. In the riots that followed, more than 2000 people were killed. It would be a mistake, however, to characterize the BJP as a "Hindu fundamentalist" party, although it is in alliance with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) - a fringe group of religious leaders, some of whom want to enshrine the hierarchical caste system in India's constitution. Much of the BJP leadership neither wants nor can hope to change India's egalitarian constitution in such a radical manner. Nevertheless, the BJP does stand for an oblique "Hinduism first" policy. Time and again, its party's leaders including their relatively moderate Prime Ministerial candidate, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, have stated that India is fundamentally a Hindu nation with a historical identity that has scope only for Hindu heroes and Hindu myths. The most visible sign of the BJP's "Hinduism first" stance can be seen in its support for a policy that would turn away Muslim illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, while unconditionally accepting all such Hindu migrants. In fact, Mr. Advani one of the party's top leaders, claims that just as Israel is a Jewish state in the sense that it is the natural homeland for all Jews, India too must assertively identify itself as a Hindu homeland. The reality that the BJP has clearly won the largest number of seats of any bloc makes it imperative that President Sharma call upon Mr. Vajpayee to form a government. However the real question for millions of Indians today is - what will the legacy of the BJP's triumphant march be? Of course, to leave a legacy a party must dominate the national government for more than just one term, and we don't even know yet if Mr. Vajpayee will be India's next Prime Minister. However, even if the Centre-Left manages to cobble together a coalition this time around, it is very likely that such a government will not last long. The long term trends in India's socio-economic structure such as accelerating urbanization, a growing middle class, and an increasing sense of being Indian rather than belonging to a particular caste or a clan, indicate a natural BJP mandate, if not now then in a few years. How will the BJP respond to such a mandate? To put the election results in perspective, we must note the continuing strength of regional, socialist and backward caste based parties across the length and breadth of India. With a number of strong regional leaders, this so called left continues to exert considerable influence at the state level. In a likely scenario, the Congress party (if it survives as a united grouping) will be reduced to one such player, influential but by no means dominant. The roots of Indian political diversity are deep, and it is difficult to imagine the BJP maintaining a monopoly of power in the centre as well as in the states. Also, to ensure its re-election , the BJP must woo the backward castes and cannot afford to alienate completely even India's sizable Muslim, Christian, and Sikh minorities. A BJP government is then likely to keep "Ram under wraps"; support Hindu nationalism in rhetoric, but not much in action, and maintain to a large degree the current system of laws. This will happen not by the RSS core of the party becoming suddenly more tolerant, but by the imperatives of governing an incredibly diverse country such as India. Economic reform policies initiated by the previous Prime Minister Mr. Rao will be more or less maintained, with occasional bouts of anti-foreign sentiment. The greatest danger of a BJP legacy is not likely to be in domestic politics, but in foreign affairs. Since independence, India has by and large been at peace, having fought four wars in the period. The wars, chiefly with arch-enemy Pakistan, were brief. The country suffered none of the devastation Europe did during World War II, or the Middle East has throughout this century. The Indian people do not have a recent searing experience with military conflict. Although many middle class Hindu moderates frown upon the crude communalism provoked by the BJP, they eagerly embrace the idea of Indian nationalism, where a resurgent, prosperous India aggressively protects its interests, if necessary by hurting others'. This feeling is most obvious, among other things, in the support for a military solution to the armed insurgency in Kashmir, a sudden perception that illegal immigration from Bangladesh somehow significantly affects India's interests, and India's stance that justifies its own nuclear program, while branding Pakistan's as "illicit". This sense of strident nationalism resides most strongly, not in India's villages, but among the small and large cities - and even there among the enormous, fast growing middle class. Will a newly prosperous, urbanized, awakening Indian giant, with eight times the population of Pakistan and Bangladesh, fifty times that of Sri Lanka, pursue a policy of mutual respect with its neighbours? The answer, I believe, is sadly no. What the BJP's core leadership cannot and will not do within the nation, it will do beyond. An increasingly aggressive India is almost certain to pursue a policy of progressive militarization of the Kashmiri conflict, deployment of advanced weapons systems on its borders, a recourse to the "fence mentality" of anti-immigrant (especially Muslim) paranoia, and in an extreme scenario the instigation of internal conflict in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The consistently irresponsible policy pursued by Pakistan's military dominated government of providing arms to Kashmiri terrorist groups cannot but add fuel to the fire. But in the end, India's superpower status in the region makes it responsible for going a little more than halfway to achieve peace. Mr. Rao has tried to do just that. But the BJP can turn the clock backwards. A basically tolerant nation such as India is in danger of stooping to a level that is not compatible with the ethos of international brotherhood. Democracy cannot avert this impending situation, as historically the foreign policy of a nation is one that is the least open, the least scrutinized by its people, and the most open to manipulation by its leaders. After all, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis do not vote in Indian elections, and the suffering caused across the border is unseen and invisible. Nevertheless, in an increasingly globalized world, it is about time that we Indians came to our senses and realized that in the long term our neighbors' problems are our problems and vica versa. We cannot solve all the problems that may arise between us and them, but we can indeed behave responsibly and minimize the potential of conflict. And that is why, when all is said and done, we must reject with a passion and wholeheartedness the BJP and all that it stands for. For their thinking represents a form of national tribalism , where the strong dominate the weak, and loyalty to the tribe is the supreme test of morality. Will we Indians have the moral courage to desist from that path? (Sarang Shidore is an engineer working in the Bay area) ----------------------------------------- A NEW FAULT LINE IN INDIA By Sarang Shidore, Nov 27, 1997 (This article was written 24 hours before the collapse of the I.K. Gujral government) With the latest threat from the Congress party to withdraw support from the United Front government, the 14 party ruling coalition appears closer to the brink of collapse than ever before. If an election were to be held in India tomorrow, almost every political party would lose ground. One of the notable exceptions would probably be the BJP, which has been on a steady, surefooted march to power since 1989. The battle between the BJP - a conservative, nationalist party that has brilliantly created a coalition of the urban middle class on one hand and many upper caste segments of the rural vote (in the north) on the other, and the heterogenous parties that comprise the United Front, is often portrayed as a left-right contest. This is certainly true, in the sense that these terms were defined in Europe a few centuries ago; the policies of the "right" contain elements of irredentist religious nationalism, whereas at least some of the member parties of the left are home-grown socialist or communist parties. However, to fully understand India's political future, we must see this emerging contest as also a contest between regionalism and what could be termed as "centralism". Naturally, the continuing presence of the Congress party - a national party - makes it a genuine three way contest. However, if one is to believe that politics that lasts is almost always a politics that results from a contest of ideas, the Congress party has little to contribute in this area. In fact, it can be argued that the continuing demise of the Congress (the potential Sonia factor notwithstanding), is precisely because the party is no longer a party of ideas. The dominance within the United Front (UF) by parties mainly based in their regional constituencies is obvious. A little less obvious has been the corresponding asymmetry on the right. The BJP, although possessing many seasoned, politically adept leaders at the national level, is remarkable for its paucity of the same in the states. Many of the state governments led by the BJP have foundered in either a display of weak leadership leading to dissidence, or as a result of political scandals. The absence of a lucid regional vision in the BJP is also obvious on many other fronts. Although vocal on many a national issue (as well as some non-issues) ranging from illegal immigration and Article 370 to the entry of foreign multinationals, the BJP tends to be silent on the issues that matter to India's villages - caste, land, literacy, and general rural development. It claims to have an economic policy for the entire nation, and does indeed boast of the presence of many a noted economist within its ranks. Yet, its core constituency on economic issues is primarily made up of two groups - the traditional small and medium traders (banias) of the north, and the upwardly mobile, educated, professional middle class of the large cities - neither of which is rural. The party of eloquent men of letters such as A.B. Vajpayee has little to say to India's villagers. But to capture power in India, a party must win the rural vote. This the BJP has attempted to do by opening up another front - the highly emotional issue of the Ram temple. Designed to exploit the dark side of rural superstition, the recourse to the naked manipulation of faith for political purposes has indeed worked. It has however, also cost the party a lot of goodwill among many tolerant Hindus, not to mention the loss of some potential coalition partners. There are exceptions to this exclusively centralist orientation of the BJP, those being its two main political allies - the Akali Dal in Punjab and the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, both regional parties. The alliance with the Akali Dal though, is really an alliance that was formed in line with the old dictum "my enemy's enemy is my friend", the enemy of course being the Congress party. In terms of ideology the parties couldn't be further apart. It must be admitted that the alliance with the other regional party, the Shiv Sena, is based on both ideology as well as convenience for the BJP. However, this is more of an exception. If the BJP finds other regional allies in the years ahead, it is likely that the Shiv Sena model will be the exception, and the Akali Dal model the rule. The UF is made up of three primary components - the Communists, the regional parties,and the caste based groupings. The Telugu Desam in the state of Andhra Pradesh., the AGP in Assam,and the DMK in Tamil Nadu (which is also allied to the TMC) fall into the second category. The so-called national parties - the Janata Dal and the Samajwadi party - are really a collection of discrete groups drawing strength from a particular state, or a certain caste. In fact it can be argued that the communists are effectively regional blocs themselves; mainly from the states of Kerala and West Bengal. The cleavage of the Indian political scene into two broad fronts of centralism and regionalism is only an extension of the historical nature of Indian civilization, which has always resisted extreme concentration of power through its centrifugal tendencies. These tendencies ultimately have at their roots India's vast diversity of religion, caste, language, economy, and culture. Emperor Akbar, the great Mughal, knew this only too well, and created a strong, stable, and just empire by building coalitions with regional chieftains in the spirit of devolution. The age of empires is long gone, but in our era of democratic politics, we still need the vision of that ancient sovereign. A spirited debate on the Centre-State issue is in order. The need for this debate grows stronger as states formulate independent economic policies in order to attract investment and jobs on one hand, and increasingly fail to resolve the contentious resource-sharing issues between them on the other. The result - a widening disparity between states that follow sound policies and do well, and those that don't - will be one of India's greatest challenges in the 21st century. Will we as a people have the vision of the wise old emperor to find a way? -------