From aiindex at mnet.fr Sun Jun 1 08:18:41 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2003 03:48:41 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] India: 'location based' mobile phones and Privacy Message-ID: The Times of India MAY 30, 2003 Editorial Big Brother's Invading Your Privacy The launch of 'location based' mobile telephone services in India will be seen by many as a harmless innovation aimed at providing subscribers on the move with useful information about products they may wish to buy or consume. But set against the backdrop of inadequate privacy protection in our country, the onset of this and indeed other new communications technologies raises concerns about the ability of the state to intrude into the private domain of the citizen. Cellphone service providers have always had the ability to track the movement of subscribers as the signals emitted by an individual phone get passed from one transmission tower to the next. Sophisticated computer technology allows this information to be stored indefinitely and retrieved, perhaps years later, to build a profile of an individual's movements in the city. Officially, this information is only meant to be provided to the police and intelligence agencies. However, most law-abiding citizens will not feel comforted by the ability of the state to keep track of their movements. In India, there is the additional problem of the police being used by private parties to obtain what is otherwise confidential personal data from mobile service providers who are obliged by law to cooperate with the authorities. In the US, after 9/11, the Pentagon is working on an Orwellian project to gather as much information as it can about every aspect of all citizens under its 'total information awareness' programme. In India, the baseline situation is much worse since there is no legislation which deals directly with privacy protection. The problem is compounded by the Vajpayee government's attempts to introduce a compulsory ID card system and build a computerised database of citizens. Databases are most useful when welfare-oriented states use them to develop and target public services. In India, however, the government cannot be accused of having any such motivation. Rather, the impulse to catalogue and classify citizens is being driven by a misplaced sense of 'national security', so that 'terrorists', 'infiltrators' and other undesirables can be weeded out. Such a process will invariably make the state, which already enjoys so much of power over the citizen, even more of a leviathan. From menso at r4k.net Tue Jun 3 13:28:57 2003 From: menso at r4k.net (Menso Heus) Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 09:58:57 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] The alternative cardhouse Message-ID: <20030603075857.GB65359@r4k.net> Next tot he deck of cards aiding US soldiers in recognizing the Iraqi's they needed to arrest, there is now another deck: http://www.warprofiteers.com/ Menso -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Happiness is good health and a bad memory -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From broadcaster at syhlleti.org Tue Jun 3 19:56:27 2003 From: broadcaster at syhlleti.org (broadcaster at syhlleti.org) Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 19:56:27 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] Rail Museum ICF Chennai Message-ID: <1150.219.65.254.45.1054650387.squirrel@smtp.spectrum.in> A posting by A. Hari on www.irsuggestions.org Rail Museum ICF Chennai ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- A peep into the Rail Museum THE National Rail Museum, New Delhi, was opened in 1977. Subsequently, a policy decision was taken by the Railway Board to open Regional Rail Museum at Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. The Minister for Railway, Mr Nitish Kumar inaugurated the first Regional Rail Museum at Chennai on March 31, 2002 and has thrown open its doors to the public from April 16, 2002. Located at the Integral Coach Factory, amid sylvan surroundings, the Regional Rail Museum, Chennai, has two indoor galleries and a large open area. The Museum envisages creating a railway museum that will be informative, educative and entertaining about the evolution and development of railways to the current day. The photo gallery recapitulates the glorious heritage of Indian Railways, the various milestones crossed by ICF and a poster presentation on the National Rail Museum, New Delhi. The other indoor gallery houses models of different coaches made by ICF. The open space will house real life exhibits of coaches and locomotives in due course of time. Some of the current attractions at Regional Rail Museum, Chennai are: The Nilgiri Mountain Railway — Mini-working model Inspection carriage Calcutta Metro coach. Diesel electric tower car. More models and exhibits are to be added in due course of time. A peep in to the future shows plans for: Restaurant in coach. Toy train rides Fun and games for kids Souvenir shop Son et lumiere show. With continuous improvements, additions and enhancements, the Regional Rail Museum, Chennai, will become a "must see", "can't miss" tourist spot in Chennai. http://www.blonnet.com/bline/2002/10/28/stories/2002102800591100.htm ------------------------------------------------------ This is a news report about the Museum and I request our friends to post details about working hours and the charges if any for visiting the museum. From lehar_hind at yahoo.com Wed Jun 4 16:27:27 2003 From: lehar_hind at yahoo.com (Lehar ..) Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 03:57:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] US govt to work with banned terrorists!! Message-ID: <20030604105727.34439.qmail@web20914.mail.yahoo.com> can't the peace movement revive itself before the complete breakdwon of the race?? --- so who's next on Master's List..? The jewel in the Crown?? ie. India..?? doesnt matter- as long as we have our ACs and air lifted food packets with MADE in USA tags. Its cool. The US govt plans to work with an outlawed terroist organisation(!!!), Mujahedeen e Khalq- to over throw the Iranian govt- which has nationalised most industries since the 1979 revolution(and thus doesnt hand over the much desired oil)- the revolution(which took a religious tone under Khomeini)- overthrew the US supported dictatorship/ monarchy of the Shah. The Shah took over with the CIA's support - by ousting the secular democratically elected govt of President Mossadegh. becuse he had nationalised the oil. Who's working with terrorists now..? who's killed the most civilans in terrorist attackes this century?? As and Indian letter in Outlook magazine said this week: http://www.outlookindia.com FROM: Gajendra, New Delhi Arundhati is right�democracy is America�s whore. But why does she forget the pimp, Israel? In the name of the whore, Ariel Sharon rolls into the Gaza Strip�on killing machines imported from the US�shoots, bombs and massacres children, pregnant women and other innocent Palestinians. That�s dubbed a war against terror. But when the Palestinians retaliate and blow themselves up�in rage, revenge, anguish at losing their loved ones and reclaim their occupied land�it is called a terrorist attack! FROM: Gopal Krishna, Durham, US Ms Roy expresses what ordinary people like me feel. But unlike her I don�t expect American civil society to act as an engine of social change. Having been in the US for some time, I can say it is totally eaten up by the consumerist culture. It does not have a spiritualist tradition of its own nor is it open to borrowing ideas from others. This is particularly true of the white sections of the civil society. Of course, there can be hope from the minorities of the country, particularly the blacks. Their community is a case study in itself. They permeate every sport and a lot in arts and entertainment. But when it comes to intellectual workers, they cannot be seen. And the representatives they do have in the government�like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell�well, the less said about them the better. What we need is a leader of the stature of Martin Luther King II. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - Religions are all limited because they concentrate on only one aspect of the Truth. That's why they are always fighting amongst each other. There is no end to the Truth, so you cannot confine it to one scripture. When asked what religion I follow, 'I don't believe in sampradaya-sect. I believe in Sampradaha- incineration.' Burn down everything which gets in way of the Truth. - Aghori Vimalananda; At the Left Hand of God Organised religion is the prop of a man who has not found his Self/ God within. - Shaheed Bhagat Singh >From: Shishir Thadani >Subject: Iran - the new target Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 18:56:19 -0700 (GMT) > >Hi folks > >I dare say many of you would have already seen this SHOCKING news report > >HERE IS a response to this report (of extending the war to Iran) from an >Indian analyst Batuk Vora called: wwhy the U.S. is Zeroing in on Iran after >Iraq?? >The ABC news report comes first. His article follows it. > >Shishir > > > >The Iran Debate >Pentagon Eyes Massive Covert Attack on Iran >ABCNEWS.com > >May 29, 2003 >The Pentagon is advocating a massive covert action program to overthrow >Iran's ruling ayatollahs as the only way to "stop the country's 'nuclear >weapons' ambitions", senior State Department and Pentagon officials told > The proposal, will include covert sponsorship of a group currently deemed terrorist by the U.S. government,the Mujahedeen e Khalq is not new, and has not won favor with enough top officials to be acted upon. > >But sources say it is a viable option that is getting a new look as the >administration ramps up its rhetoric against Iran, and it is likely to be >one of the top items on the agenda as high-level U.S. policymakers meet >today to discuss how to deal with the Islamic republic. > >The Pentagon's proposal includes using all available points of pressure on >the Iranian regime, including backing armed Iranian dissidents and >employing >the services of the Mujahedeen e Khalq, a group currently branded as >terrorist by the United States. > >The MEK, which had been primarily supported by Iraq and was responsible >for >numerous attacks inside Iran, agreed after the Iraq war to a truce >with >U.S. >forces. > >The Pentagon specifically set aside a proposal to reconstitute the MEK >under >a different banner and promote their armed incursions into Iran, >much as >the >MEK had been doing under Saddam. As the State Department insisted, and the >White House concurred, the MEK has been disarmed but their forces are >still >in place and their weapons are in storage. > >The State Department argument was that MEK is on the terrorist list and >any >failure to disarm it would be an act of hypocrisy, which was the same line >taken by the Iranians in confidential meetings that have been ongoing in >Geneva, until the United States recently cut them off. > >The office of Doug Feith, undersecretary for policy at the Department of >Defense, argued that the MEK has not targeted Americans since the 1970s, >which is true, and was only put on the terrorist list by the Clinton >administration as a gesture to improve relations with Iran. > >The Pentagon argues that the MEK is disciplined (!) well-trained, and an >effective lever against the ayatollahs, and could be renamed and placed >under American clandestine guidance. > >For the moment, this proposal is blocked, but will be revisited as part of >the greater proposal to institute massive covert action against the >ayatollahs. > >This covert action program, which has not been approved or even >recommended >by the so-called deputies committee of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, >National Security Council Deputy Steven Hadley and the deputy to the >director of Central Intelligence, would include intelligence collaboration >with Iranian dissidents, as well as lethal aid (i.e., guns and other >military assistance to anti-Iranian government elements, both inside and >outside Iran). > >The objective of the Pentagon proposal to destabilize the Iranian >government >is based on the belief that the religious hard-liners are >opposed by the >majority of the Iranian population and any pressure would make them crack, >a >view that some analysts find dubious. > >The debate over Iran comes after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on >Tuesday warned Iran against meddling in Iraq, and presidential spokesman >Ari >Fleischer described the Islamic republic's efforts to root al Qaeda > >leaders >out of country as insufficient. > >Why the U.S. is Zeroing in on Iran after Iraq >Batuk Vora >06/01/03 > >- While the world is still questioning the Ango-American powers why did >they >lie about the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, neo-cons >(neoconservative lobby of the Bush administration) have already launched >their drive now to 'change the regime' in Iran. > >Following the same method again, they have advanced two reasons for such >an >action: Iran has harboured al-quaeda terrorists and Iran is running its >nuclear weapons programme. But if we dig for real reasons, words of >William >Kristol, editor of the conservative Washington based Weekly Standard, come >as revealing the truth: > >First, Washington did not put up with losing its positions in Iran >following >the 1979 Islamic revolution. In 1977, Washington and Tehran had signed a >$24 >billion-worth contract, which provided for the U.S. constructing 8 nuclear >power plants in Iran within 10 years. Armaments worth $14 billion were to >be >supplied. The U.S. military enjoyed diplomatic immunity in Iran and any >political decisions taken by Iran were agreed on with the U.S. Even now, >with the absence of official contracts, the U.S.-Iranian turnover is >around >$1 billion. By way of comparison, the trade turnover of Russia and Iran, >two >'strategic partners', was $803 million in 2002! > >Thus a war for Iran's market is taking place. Washington is unwilling to >let >Russia or Europe to monopolise it. It was under the U.S. pressure that the >European Union did not sign the programme of trade and economic >co-operation >with Iran. This is basically the background of the current U.S. claims to >Russia with regard to Russo-Iranian co-operation in the nuclear energy >sphere. > >Second, Iran is at crossroads on the strategic ways between Europe and >Asia. >The North-South transport corridor opened last year and connecting India >to >Russia and west Europe via the Caspian basin running across Iran. >Large-scale transit of energy resources is carried out via Iran. Russia >and >Iran have plans of transit of their electric energy to third countries. >They >also plan to unify their electric systems via Armenia and Azerbaijan. At >last, Iran's gas resources are the world's largest (after Russia). Its >geopolitical role in the Caspian region is also an eyesore to >Anglo-American companies. > >It is clear that breaking status quo in Iran will change the entire >situation in the Caspian region, Central Asia and the North Caucasus and >will directly affect Russia's interests. 'We are already in a death >struggle with Iran over the >future of Iraq,' declared a top Bush administration official last week in >Washington DC. > >It may be necessary to mention here that prior to the war on Iraq, >Washington had promised Iran via intermediaries that it would not suffer >the >fate of its neighbour. Tehran observed neutrality and was quite reserved >with regard to the U.S. war on Iraq. However, the Iraq war has officially >ended and Tehran cannot stay aside from the post-war settlement anymore. > >Actually, current controversy among G-8 countries and among the countries >of >Middle East and South Asia, is focused on the future set-up of Iraq and >the >continuing imbroglio over anti-American violence sporadically overturning >the expectations of the Anglo-American occupation forces. Any attempt to >create a political set up in Iraq has to take into consideration Iran's >aspirations also. Shiites are in majority not only in Iran but in Iraq >too. > > >India, which is now pushed by the United States to handle one of the Iraqi >sectors with its armed forces, has expressed grave concern over the >developing situation before it takes final decision to send its troops to >Iraq. Kanwal Sibbal, India's foreign secretary, told the media at St. >Petersburg that 'instead of focus being on the reconstruction and reforms >of >the institutions in Iraq, it has now shifted to Iran which has complicated >the matters.' > >Moscow based General Director of the Centre of Contemporary Iranian >Studies, >Rajab Safarov, said that "new government in Baghdad will anyway be >pro-Iranian," because of Iraq's Shiite majority. The American >administration >realises that it will not achieve stability in Iraq (and also in >Afghanistan, where the Iranian influence is significant) without gaining >control over Tehran. > >Most attention is now focused on Russia which has an ongoing nuclear >reactor >programme to produce atomic power through five reactors to be built in >Iran. >Two of them are already under construction. International Atomic Energy >Agency (IAEA), a Vienna based agency in charge of the verification of the >nuclear non-proliferation treaty of 1968, was given an approval by Russia >& >Iran to go ahead with its inspection. Iran's nuclear program has received >IAEA >approval, clear proof of its non-military nature. > >Nevertheless, Washington has pressured the IAEA to declare Iran in >material >breach of its nuclear obligations in the upcoming IAEA meeting in June, >although the February visit of the IAEA head and his inspector teams to >Iran >did not prove any wrongdoing by the Iranians. In particular, Washington >has >tried to portray Iran's declared plan to establish facilities to have a >complete nuclear fuel cycle as a clear violation of its IAEA obligations >and >a proof for its pursuing a nuclear weapons program. This is >notwithstanding >the fact that having such objective and its required facilities to enable >the Iranians to exploit their own uranium mines and to enrich uranium are >well within Iran's rights under IAEA rules and regulations. > >In the light of these realities, Russia's clear determination to continue >its nuclear relations with Iran reflects not only its attempt to preserve >its economic interests in Iran, but its growing concern about America's >aggressive foreign policy, according to a recent Novotsi press release. >Undoubtedly, such policy has major security implications for Moscow. In >particular, the Russians are concerned about the possibility of Iran's >domination by the US, in one >form or another, which could also lead to a long-term American military >presence in that country. > >Moscow's loss of its Iranian strategic ally, if it happened, would >seriously >endanger its security at a time that it requires a long period of peace >and >security to revitalize its devastated economy. Such loss will complete its >encirclement by hostile or potentially hostile pro-American states hosting >the American military. They are already stationed now in Pakistan, >Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Moreover, the American behavior >since late 2001 has indicated its pursuit of a plan to ensure its >uninterrupted access to energy resources and strategically important >regions, such as the Persian Gulf, its unchallenged power and its >leadership >of a uni-polar international system. That requires eliminating the >potential >"troublemakers", the current and future 'rogue' states. > >Given this reality, Russia should have every reason to believe it to be >one >of the next states, if not the next one, on the American list of targets >if >Washington restores its influence in neighboring Iran. Fear of such a >scenario seems to be a major reason for the Russians to continue their >multi-dimensional ties with Iran, including in the nuclear realm, to >prevent >its weakness and isolation, two tempting prerequisites for any future >American designs on Iran. > >Significantly When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell came to Moscow on >May 13 to press the Russians into supporting an early lifting of sanctions >on Iraq, the talks seemed to begin with the sides wide apart. While >Powell >was in Moscow, several Russian strategic bombers --Tu-95 Bears and Tu-160 >Blackjacks - flew from a base in the Volga region to the Indian Ocean to >simulate an attack by nuclear -tipped long-range cruise missiles on U.S. >Navy ships and the main U.S. air base in the region at Diego Garcia. > >The mission by long-range bombers was coordinated with a naval exercise in >the Indian Ocean by a large task force of Russian surface ships and >nuclear >attack submarines (sent to the region before the fall of Saddam Hussein's >regime), which simulated attacks on U.S. aircraft carrier groups. The >Defense Ministry did not make much of a secret of the purely >anti-American >nature of the Indian Ocean military exercise and leaked the details to >friendly >journalists in an apparent attempt to influence foreign policy >decision-making. > >A Russian defense anlyst Pavel Felgenhauer wrote in Russian Journal that >'In >fact, the Bush administration seems to be moving toward sending the >Kremlin >an ultimatum: End Bushehr (Iranian site of the ongoing nuclear reactor) or >we will bomb it to bits anyway. The St. Pete. summit may still survive the >new controversy, but the strain is growing. Russia is scheduled to supply >enriched uranium to fuel the Bushehr reactor in the coming months, while >the >U.S. >is adamant this should not happen. What role India would play in such a >complicated situation' India's military ties with both Russia and America >make it even more complicated. Iran happens to be India's close friend and >there are ongoing trade, oil and cultural agreements between the two >nations. Iranian leader Khatami was the special guest of honor during the >last January 26 Republic Day celebrations in India. > >It is also interesting to note here that the leaders of China, Russia and >four Central Asian nations warned against unilateral action in the war on >global terror and pledged closer ties as Moscow seeks to counter US >influence in its traditional backyard. > >The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) - which comprises China, >Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan -- agreed to >transform their fledgling six-nation body into a proper international >organisation by 2004. > >The host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, said the six leaders agreed on >the primacy of the United Nations, in a clear reference to the US-led war >in >Iraq. "We have a common stance. There is no alternative to the United >Nations as a universal organisation in the system of international >relations," he told a press conference after the summit. > >On the other hand, Michael Ledeen, a fellow at the conservative American >Enterprise Institute, and a former employee of the Pentagon, the State >Department and the National Security Council, has emerged in Washington as >a >main force who inspired a war on Iran. As a consultant working with NSC >head >Robert McFarlane, he was involved in the transfer of arms to Iran during >the >Iran-Contra affair -- an adventure that he documented in the book >"Perilous >Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair." His most >influential book is last year's "The War Against >the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win." > >Ledeen's ideas are repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, >Donald >Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. His views virtually define the stark >departure >from American foreign policy philosophy that existed before the tragedy of >Sept. 11, 2001. He basically believes that violence in the service of the >spread of democracy is America's manifest destiny. Consequently, he has >become the philosophical legitimator of the American occupation of Iraq. >Now >Michael Ledeen is calling for regime change beyond Iraq. In an address >entitled "Time to Focus on Iran -- The Mother of Modern Terrorism," for >the >policy forum of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) >on >April 30, he declared, "the time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time >for >a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon." THE END > > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com From amitbasu55 at hotmail.com Sat Jun 7 11:17:01 2003 From: amitbasu55 at hotmail.com (Amit R Basu) Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2003 05:47:01 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] KHALASITOLA: STORY OF A COUNTRY SPIRIT BAR IN CALCUTTA Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030607/71f2ce5f/attachment.html From sonnet at crimsonfeet.org Sat Jun 7 13:51:03 2003 From: sonnet at crimsonfeet.org (Prayas) Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2003 13:51:03 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] A Call for Entries << Crimson Feet, Forums for Independent being >> Message-ID: <200306071351.AA84542098@crimsonfeet.org> Crimson Feet (www.crimsonfeet.org) is an organization working for the promotion and development of independent media in India. We publish a literary magazine and host film-festivals in different cities in India. This is a 'call for entries' which elaborates upon our different programs open at present and the spaces for content/media in them. All relevant dates are mentioned. Crimson Feet: Poetry and Story, No. 3 -A bi-monthly journal of independent art and literature Our third issue comes out in July. We are seeing Poetry, Short-fiction, Essays, Visual Art (photographs, paintings, animation) for it. Our third issue is going to be online as well as in print. If you are sending your work for the third issue please send it by June 25th, 2003. We will consider all work received after that for our fourth issue (September 2003). We consider work in all Indian languages besides English. If a translation is made available by the writer/poet it is most convenient. We look forward to hearing from you. Site: http://magazine.crimsonfeet.org OR http://www.crimsonfeet.org/magazine/index.htm Email: sonnet at crimsonfeet.org , submissions at crimsonfeet.org Phone: 9890043871 (Pune, India) Crimson Feet Fireworks - A festival of independent film and video, Pune We are a festival of independent films and videos made by Indian film-makers. Our first screening at Ahmedabad (Natarani Theater, May 25-27, 2003) was received very well by the audience and the media. We had six film-makers participating in the screening. (http://www.crimsonfeet.org/events.htm) In our Pune screening we will be showing at least 25 films. The only criteria is independence. 'an independent film' is defined as "projects made with the total control of the film-maker. affiliated with neither any major 'established (mass-market, market-driven)' studio, or producer or director. The funding for which has been either personal, grant-based, or friendly. Films independent, and original in spirit"...." For participating in the festival, please send a note about your film/video to sonnet at crimsonfeet.org and a preview VCD to: Prayas Abhinav c/o H Y Kulkarni "Seetai" B-17 Manmohan Society Karvenagar Pune 411052 Phone 9890042871 The Pune event is scheduled for two months later. All film-makers are welcome to come to Pune for the festival. We provide accommodations (in Pune) and local conveyance to all participating film-makers. We look forward to seeing your work soon. The Crimson Feet Fireworks-Natarani Children's animation film festival We are organizing a children's animation film festival along with Natarani, Ahmedabad. Natarani is a theater, which along with Darpana Acaademy (www.darpana.com) is also working to promote independent artists and performers. The festival will be in Ahmedabad at Natarani theater in October, 2003. It will be open to films by independent/individual film-makers, films by companies/studios will not be accepted. For participating please please send a short note to sonnet at crimsonfeet.org and a preview VCD to: Prayas Abhinav c/o H Y Kulkarni "Seetai" B-17 Manmohan Society Karvenagar Pune 411052 Phone 9890042871 We provide accommodations (in Ahmedabad) and local conveyance to all participating film-makers. We look forward to seeing your work soon. << Crimson Feet (www.crimsonfeet.org) ; Forums for Independent being >> From sandipan at molbio.unizh.ch Thu Jun 5 19:53:03 2003 From: sandipan at molbio.unizh.ch (Sandipan Chatterjee) Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 16:23:03 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] News from Nature Message-ID: Nature 423, 469 (2003); Experts blast US decision to back nuclear bunker-busters GEOFF BRUMFIEL [WASHINGTON] The US Congress has voted to plough $15 million into developing Earth-penetrating nuclear weapons to destroy underground bunkers. But weapons experts have cast doubt on the scheme, arguing that this is an inappropriate use of nuclear technology. The plan, which was proposed last year (see Nature 415, 945-946; 2002), aims to develop the weapons primarily to target hidden stores of biological or chemical weapons. According to the author of a new study, however, such agents may simply be dispersed by the weapons, and conventional weapons are better suited to the job. President George W. Bush's administration welcomed last week's votes in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that the radiation emitted by nuclear explosions could sterilize biological agents, and that the heat generated will destroy chemical weapons. Conventional weapons, he argues, are unsuitable as they are liable to spread such biological or chemical agents, creating a greater hazard. But Robert Nelson, an astrophysicist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank based in New York, disagrees. In a paper shortly to appear in the journal Science and Global Security, he calculates the impact of an underground detonation of a nuclear device. Nelson finds that rock or concrete surrounding a bomb would absorb heat and radiation, but would transmit the massive shockwave caused by the explosion. A nuclear device equivalent to 10,000 tonnes of TNT, for example, would create a crater 200 metres wide, but only material within 11 metres of the centre would be sterilized. Large amounts of material would be ejected from the centre of the blast, along with radioactive dust created in the explosion. Nelson suggests that it would be better to use conventional weapons to block the entrances and ventilation shafts of such bunkers until they could be secured by friendly forces. Nelson admits that his analysis is basic, but argues that the results are clear-cut. Sidney Drell, deputy director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California and an architect of the US stockpile-stewardship programme, designed to maintain nuclear weapons without testing, agrees that the study is sound. He believes that the crater and sterilization area could be marginally larger than Nelson estimates, but echoes Nelson's argument that such a blast might only act to disperse chemical or biological agents. Drell adds, however, that he is more concerned by the $6 million allocated last week by the Congress for research into another new type of nuclear device - low-yield nuclear weapons known as mini-nukes. The United States has had a self-imposed ban on such weapons since 1993, but last week's vote marks an end to this ruling. Drell is worried that the move blurs the line between nuclear and conventional weapons, ultimately increasing the likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used in anger. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030605/61be40fc/attachment.html From naga at nda.vsnl.net.in Sat Jun 7 00:29:18 2003 From: naga at nda.vsnl.net.in (NAGRAJ ADVE) Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2003 00:29:18 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Lock-out at Hindustan Lever In-Reply-To: <20030603075857.GB65359@r4k.net> Message-ID: Shudda, Jeebesh, Monica, Please put this on the reader-list email network. warmly, naga On 21 March, the management of Hindustan Lever Ltd. (HLL), the Indian subsidiary of Unilever, declared a lock-out at its Garden Reach Factory in Kolkata. About 1,500 workers have been on the streets opposing the lock-out for over two months. For over two years, the HLL management has resisted settling the union's charter of demands. They wish to impose a Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) on 500 permanent workers, dismiss 150 other contract workers, and close down some operations of the Garden Reach factory. This is part of two, much longer processes within Hindustan Lever in India: one, shifting production sites from older, larger factories within metropolises to backward areas where workers are not organized and also availing of tax breaks and government subsidies; and two, subcontracting parts of the production process, or the manufacture of entire products to smaller factories. Production at the Garden Reach factory has halved between 1998 and 2002, even as HLL's India-wide profits have soared to Rs 1,754 crores in 2002. The workers have demanded a settlement of the charter of demands; job security; a peaceful and working atmosphere inside the factory; withdrawal of any forced VRS. Opposition to the management's plans have resulted in workers facing arbitrary pay-cuts, charge-sheets, transfers, and forced idleness in the factory. When workers went on a three-day strike opposing these policies, the management imposed the lock-out. Clearly, the management aims are not just outsourcing or garnering higher profits, but also undermining the capacity of HLL's workers to collectively bargain and struggle. It is part of a larger, widespread assault on workers' political rights in India. The workers and the union, the Hindustan Lever Sramik Karamchari Congress, have urged groups and individuals to extend their solidarity and support to the workers of HLL, in the following, and any other, ways: 1. Write to the Chief Minister, West Bengal, Writers' Building, Kolkata 700001 to prohibit the continuation of the lockout, under section 10(3) of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947. 2. Write to the Chairman of Hindustan Lever, 165-166, Backbay Reclamation Area, Mumbai 400020 to lift the lockout, and preserve the employment of all HLL's workers. 3. Any other programmes of solidarity. Nagraj Adve Workers' Solidarity Delhi From twsherma at mailbox.syr.edu Sun Jun 8 05:42:20 2003 From: twsherma at mailbox.syr.edu (twsherma at mailbox.syr.edu) Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2003 20:12:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Reader-list] Molyneaux review of Sherman's I-Bomb book In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: "Before and After the I-Bomb: an artist in the information environment" by Tom Sherman, edited by Peggy Gale, Banff Centre Press 2002, ISBN 0-920159-94-X; 6.5 x 8.25, 384 pages, paper: $29.95 CDN / $20.50 US A review by Dr. Brian Leigh Molyneaux Tom Sherman's "Before and After the I-Bomb", a collection of more than twenty-five years of public and private muses, performance texts and internet pieces, represents a lifetime's seduction by technology. Sherman makes his passion clear at the outset. He likes to "negotiate reality with instruments". This is not a surprise for someone born immediately after World War II. Sherman's earliest childhood was a time when the masses were encouraged not only to fear the A-Bomb and its technology but to love it as a protector. Many kids born in the aftermath of World War II were like Tom and me. Deep in blue collar/middle class North America and wary of protection, we pressed our ears against the speakers of vast old radios, moving through fantastic jungles of noise in search of distant, dangerous new worlds. We grew up, of course, and lost our naivety during the VietNam war era, but we remained faithful to technology as a vehicle for exploration and enchantment. Sherman's first public act of techno-seduction was a subversive reverie for a British communications journal that he published in 1974. His modest proposal was to process Western art history into a "concise history of painting" and create an Art-Style Computer-Processing System so that television viewers could translate broadcasts in the "period vision" of their choice ('let's watch the State of the Union address as Surrealism tonight, dear'). Between this early bravura - 1974 was also the year of the first personal computer - and his twenty-first century Epilogue, a somber reflection on our current "techno-existentialism", he provides an artist's perspective on the I-bomb. The I-bomb stands for the "thunderous explosion of advertising, entertainment, voice and data" that heralded the late twentieth century information age. What makes this book essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary art and society is that Sherman saw the bomb develop, got caught in the blast, and has a strong vision of the world in its wake. Sherman's narratives begin in a 1970s Toronto still resonating from Marshall McLuhan's radical ideas about mass media. McLuhan's notion that electronic media extended the central nervous system outside the body into "a global embrace" had an especially strong impact on people already mulling over Norbert Weiner's cybernetic theory. Weiner held that the dynamics of communication and control were similar for humans, other living things, and machines. Unconventional artists like Sherman saw this new way of thinking as a challenge not only to contemporary art, but also to traditional ideas of human nature. While realtime communication devices eliminated the distance between people and vastly increased their web of relationships, it did so at the sacrifice of a body-centered mind. In various places in the I-bomb we read his complaint: "I worry about losing my sense of self"; "my nervous system is not so central anymore". By 2002, the courtship is over: "we are embracing technology itself as the significant other in our lives". The vision of a new bionic nature emerging out of the disembodiments of the information age is not simply an intellectual conceit. The integration of human and machine through multimedia extensions poses a threat to the balance of nature. The problem is that this new adaptation is largely untested. Nature had millions of years to sort out primate development and create human animals well adapted to their natural environments. Since the new information age has developed so quickly, it has become a cybernetic problem, a world out of control. So, while the internet seems to be moving us ever closer to McLuhan's ideal of the global village, we are not only being "overrun by our own technological inventions", as Sherman writes, but running ahead of our own evolution! The result is a chaos of choices, like the fantastic array of experimental creatures produced millions of years ago in early Cambrian seas near the origins of life. In Sherman's words "There is no collective idea of where we are headed. The future is multidirectional. With no collective vision, the individual is at the center of the universe again". Such obvious disquiet at social fragmentation may seem odd coming from an artist. Sherman knows, however, that the freedom that technology gives to individual expression comes at a price: the architectures of software, hardware and delivery systems are logical, highly structured and under corporate control. No wonder videocams and computers are "the preferred tools of authoritative organizations". In the techno-environment, we are reduced to the level of our primate ancestors, feeding an information economy, and "harvested like trees or minerals or fish". The effect of this expanding multimedia world on creativity is clear, as anyone thinking about the pathetically narrow window of their monitor must surely realize: "Industrially produced architectures of thought generate imaginative uniformity", making change, over time, "the same as endless uniformity". We cannot escape our memes any more than we can our genes. Sherman is always concerned with his own engagement with a world where nature and culture, animal and machine, are all part of integrated information systems. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that he devotes the last part of the book to our problematic relationship with the natural world - symbolized, in the last sentence in the closing text, by the disturbing image of a manicured cedar tree in a Burger King entrance - Nature firmly under capitalist technological control. While some readers might assume that his clear love for the vicissitudes of nature is simply nostalgia for a living system that worked, he clarifies his view in the Epilogue. We are stuck with what we helped create; Nature is now our responsibility. Sherman's resolution is elusive, even evasive: cracks of light, hope, memory, novelty. There is clearly no easy way out of our dystopia. In my reading, however, there is refuge and inspiration in a subtle bit of text that may reveal Sherman's personal approach. In "Nothing Worse" (2000), we find his persona in his artistic hermitage, the man who does not want to move. "If you want to go with the flow, you've got to be streamlined; you've got to be smooth. I don't fit in. The world spins around me. Everything I touch seems to stop in its tracks. I get ideas. I move on these ideas. I make things.... Somewhere, out there, there are other people who sit still and watch the world spin around. They are like me. They, too, make information that doesn't move." Franz Kafka wrote: "the fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite" (Third Notebook, January 19, 1918). Sherman's best writing - simple, lucid description, contrived and yet free, paced at the rhythm of an ordinary conversation - conveys the simple beauty and dreadful wonder that are the contraries of life in a technological maelstrom. If we are to survive the effects of the I-bomb, perhaps we too need to stop, take a few breaths, look away from our monitors and listen. ----- Dr. Brian Leigh Molyneaux is an archaeologist, writer and photographer. He is a specialist in art and ideology, the human use of the landscape, and environmental approaches to technology. At the University of South Dakota, he is Director of the Archaeology Laboratory, and Co-Director of the Missouri River Institute. He is also a Research Associate of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada. He received his MA in Art and Archaeology from Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, in 1977 and his PhD in Archaeology at the University of Southampton, England in 1991. ----- Tom Sherman's book, "Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment," is available through Printed Matter, Inc.; or directly from the Banff Centre Press. Individuals can order via the WWW from Printed Matter, Inc.: http://www.printedmatter.org/ To order directly from the Banff Centre Press, send an e-mail to: press at banffcentre.ca -- or call 403-762-7532 This book is also available on-line at: www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, www.barnesandnoble.com, www.borders.com, www.artmetropole.com, www.chapters.ca/ Bookstores or libraries should contact: LPG Distribution c/o 100 Armstrong Ave Georgetown, ON L7G 5S4 Tel: 905-877-4411 toll-free 800-591-6250 Fax: 905-877-4410 toll-free 800-591-6251 Email: orders at lpg.ca [note: bookstores in the U.S. can order through Ingram and Baker & Taylor] From GenerateMoreVisitors060603 at excite.com Mon Jun 9 05:25:51 2003 From: GenerateMoreVisitors060603 at excite.com (GenerateMoreVisitors060603 at excite.com) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2003 23:55:51 GMT Subject: [Reader-list] *****SPAM***** ***Last Chance...15.7 MILLION EMAIL ADDRESSES... Message-ID: An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030608/9aff7921/attachment.pl -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: GenerateMoreVisitors060603 at excite.com Subject: ***Last Chance...15.7 MILLION EMAIL ADDRESSES... Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2003 23:55:51 GMT Size: 3888 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030608/9aff7921/attachment.mht From hari_roka at hotmail.com Mon Jun 9 22:39:30 2003 From: hari_roka at hotmail.com (Hari Roka) Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 17:09:30 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] third posting-They protect society but Message-ID: Dear friends Due to my various personal reasons I became late for third and fourth posting. For this I express apology. I will be continuing posting in coming weeks. Please I have needed your valuable suggestions, comment and remarks. They protect society; but who protect them? One man was moving on the road very slowly and gradually, he had holding one stick (Lathi) on his righ hand. When he moved on the road then sound comes from the Lathi like twak�twak�..twak very strangely. And after three to five minutes interval he whistled and that sound of whistle was also heard very pathetic and strange. I asked my friend Deepak Bhatta, �who he is?� He replied �a watchman�. Then I imagine that he should be a Nepali, although I asked Deepak to confirm myself �is he Nepali?� Then he immediately questioned me who care such job beyond Nepali? We met him, exchange our name and address. He was a watch man, a employed of Laxmi Nagar �society�. He befrom Bajura District, far-western Nepal. His name was Khadga Bahadur Rawal. It was around eleven pm when we met him in Jamuna- par Laxmi Nagar he was on duty. I told my friend of my desire to meet him and sharing the experience of life, then Deepak converse my feeling. But Khadga denied talking on duty. And then we request for his time schedule for next morning and request call for his entire nearest friends have a same occupation. But he gave us time for afternoon. My friend Deepak notes his address. --------- ��� �����.. There were ten people including Khadga Bahadur. It was a small room behind the main Bazaar of Laxmi Nagar. All gathering people were smoking �bidi� (tobacco covered by leaf) and gossiping that is why room was full of smoke and smelled very sharp. There was one thin bed on the floor; some clothes were hanging on the wall�s nail. In one corner there were cooking vessel and one plastic bucket, it was looking that just they finished their day meal but still left over to wash. A small bulb was hanging and lightening the room. I beg one �bidi� and started to smoke; my friend Deepak (he was with me) introduced me as a people�s writer and want to write their story. Then we started converse. I have had various readymade questions. But the time and theme was already changed after the ceasefire in the country. Maoists are sitting on the negotiation table with Government to resolve the conflict; most of the flows of young boys, girls and adults were back to their home. And the environment was really hopeful. When we started to talk about the �MAOIST MOVEMENT� in Nepal, their face became bright. One of them said �now peace will be settled down�. He was Prem Ballav Joshi. He is a 27 years old SLC passed degree holder, well educated among them. He argued, �both Government�s army and Maoist guerillas became tired. Now negotiation is possible, for everything time should be ripe�. But Daulat thapa- 41 suspicion on his belief. He said nobody can take guarantee of Maoist as well as government. They were also in negotiation table in last year but that failed. How you can say that it would not repeated again? But other people were very much hopeful for settlement, they refused his argument. They said people of Nepal can not be sustaining in war again. Maoists are also human being and Government army too. It is too much to kill own people. That should be stopped. Then I asked them, if Government denied fulfilling Maoist demand then? Again joshi said there should be implement �give and take formula. I read Maoist�s forty point demand; some of them are very genuine. That should be fulfilled.� I asked again if not fulfilled by the Government then? He argued that government should fulfill some genuine demand for the restoration of peace. �And I hope so�. Again I argued �they won�t back to the Jungle?� They had a strong confidence on the peaceful resolution. Then I asked then you people started to send your earnings at home? At first they laughed on my question then reversely asked me when we stopped then. Most of them had sent their earning currently at their home. �������.. ��������� We turn round in India. All gathering people were matured fellows. Ramesh Saud was twenty years old; among them he was the youngest. He came here in Delhi in 1999. And Raghubir Chand-43 was the oldest one he arrived here 13 years before. They were working in different places of Delhi like Sakkatpur, Yemuna Nagar, Krishna Nagar, Anand Bihar, Baljit Nagar, and Sadipur. They have not exact idea about the number people are working as a watchman in Delhi as a whole. But in their rough estimate around twenty thousands people are working here as a watchman and Gate pale (Gate keeper). A small number of people are organized in �All Nepali Ekata Samaj� (affiliated with Nepal communist Party Ekata Kendra), Nepal- Bharat Pravashi Sangh (affiliated with Nepal communist Party UML). The nature of job is not permanent type and very much difficult work and insufficient salary. Therefore, �come and go� process is common in this field of job, but employ replaced themselves keeping another friend from the same village or relative on their response when society believe them. The experienced old men earned four thousand five hundred it is the peak amount on this profession, otherwise the average earnings amount is only Rs.2500 per month. Most of them earned a little bit amounts from the extra work, such as early in the morning they clean vehicles of their area. Instead of it they got extra money at the last of the month. But generally it would not be fixed, it depend on the pity of owner. The watchmen usually came here from far western part of Nepal and northern Karnali zone especially from Humla, kalikot, Mugu, Dalekh, Bajura, Dadeldhura, Kanchanpur, Baitedi,Bajhang and Darchula. Usually poor people has two choice one is to go to Uttarakhand to carryout people in Ulinkath(planqueen) from Badarinath to Kedarnath, or to come to be a watchmen in Delhi and other cities. Daulat Thapa explined me that in Badri Nath there are more than 20 thousand Nepali people who carryout religious people those who could not climb the stiff of Kedarnath. Most of the Nepali people speak broken Hindi. Some experienced old men speak fluently and correctly , but young speaks slowly and gradually, They usually answered that they learned after capable to speak fluently within six month but it depend on how much you mix-up with local people. Usually when they start to perceive sound of Hindi music, Hindi film then there is no problem on communication in Hindi. The watchmen pass moving whole night within the limited area assigned by local society. They should responsible for any kind of trouble, like, robbery, or any kind of losses by thrives. Thus whole night they open their eyes, walking, and whistling. Then member of the society can sleep without fear. Therefore the longevity of their job or security of their job will be protected till nothing will be happen in the society. When some complain appeared by any member of the society then there is a maximum chance to lose of his occupation. There is no other place for hearing. ��. ��.. ���� Ranjan Bahadur Nepali was in Ganga Ram Hospital. He was admitted there since three months. He had a big wound on his stomach. It was because of bullet. When he was on his duty on Dilsabeg Garden area at night, a group of thieves came driving their vehicle at night. It was near about 12 to 1 am. When Ranjan saw them and imagine that they are not belonging from that locality then he whistled and cried out. Of course they were not ordinary thieves and wanted to steal the houses. Then when people started to cry �choor- choor � pakdo- pakdo (thieves �thieves, catch them) then one of the thieves shoot him. Luckily the bullet goes on beneath the chest so he saved. Police came and admitted him in to the hospital. Operation became successful but loses his entire saved amount in to the medicine. The society did not care him. When his nearest friends went to the office and asked for some co-operation to the society but executive of the society denied to help saying, �it was Bahadur�s (usually Nepali people are called �Bahadur� by Indian Merchants and officials) duty, he fulfilled, for taking risk we are paying money as salary on monthly basis, the extra money is not possible to give. If he will return back from the hospital then we can offer again at that job only�. After huge cry, then society gave them only one thousand rupees. When I met Ranjan�s brother Raman at the hospital ward (he is also working in the same place as a watchman) he said the total expenditure was about more than 50 thousands. They finished the entire saving amount whatever they have had (it was eight thousands only). Then later he went with his friends at the office of Nepali Ekata Samaj for help. The officials collected subscription from different areas, from different people and paid the hospital bill. Now he is living with his brother� rented room and getting recovery and after some time again he is going to join in the same job. I asked him why again you are going to join there? He replied after long breath and with tearful eyes in sorrowful voice �what to do sir? How I can go without money at home? My children are waiting there for new cloth; landlords are wating for their payments of principal amount with interest. Now I have nothing except my empty hand�. �����.. �������.. Like Dhaba�s boys they also shared narrow rented room. Usually rooms are very dark, narrow, suffocative and lacking fresh air neither there was fan. When four to five people shares one room then there is easy to bought one common fan. Usually they sleep in the morning it will be cool than afternoon. In the afternoon some of them work in Dhaba too for extra earnings. Prem Ballav Joshi remarks, �Most our men blemish their own fate, not country�s rulers, not their exploiters. When they got salary usually spent a small part of their earnings for drink once a month and enjoyed, shared their uncomfortable life and sorrow and anexities. But still we are unorganized that is why we are not safe wherever." _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus From hari_roka at hotmail.com Mon Jun 9 22:38:35 2003 From: hari_roka at hotmail.com (Hari Roka) Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 17:08:35 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] third posting-They protect society but Message-ID: Dear friends Due to my various personal reasons I became late for third and fourth posting. For this I express apology. I will be continuing posting in coming weeks. Please I have needed your valuable suggestions, comment and remarks. They protect society; but who protect them? One man was moving on the road very slowly and gradually, he had holding one stick (Lathi) on his righ hand. When he moved on the road then sound comes from the Lathi like twak�twak�..twak very strangely. And after three to five minutes interval he whistled and that sound of whistle was also heard very pathetic and strange. I asked my friend Deepak Bhatta, �who he is?� He replied �a watchman�. Then I imagine that he should be a Nepali, although I asked Deepak to confirm myself �is he Nepali?� Then he immediately questioned me who care such job beyond Nepali? We met him, exchange our name and address. He was a watch man, a employed of Laxmi Nagar �society�. He befrom Bajura District, far-western Nepal. His name was Khadga Bahadur Rawal. It was around eleven pm when we met him in Jamuna- par Laxmi Nagar he was on duty. I told my friend of my desire to meet him and sharing the experience of life, then Deepak converse my feeling. But Khadga denied talking on duty. And then we request for his time schedule for next morning and request call for his entire nearest friends have a same occupation. But he gave us time for afternoon. My friend Deepak notes his address. --------- ��� �����.. There were ten people including Khadga Bahadur. It was a small room behind the main Bazaar of Laxmi Nagar. All gathering people were smoking �bidi� (tobacco covered by leaf) and gossiping that is why room was full of smoke and smelled very sharp. There was one thin bed on the floor; some clothes were hanging on the wall�s nail. In one corner there were cooking vessel and one plastic bucket, it was looking that just they finished their day meal but still left over to wash. A small bulb was hanging and lightening the room. I beg one �bidi� and started to smoke; my friend Deepak (he was with me) introduced me as a people�s writer and want to write their story. Then we started converse. I have had various readymade questions. But the time and theme was already changed after the ceasefire in the country. Maoists are sitting on the negotiation table with Government to resolve the conflict; most of the flows of young boys, girls and adults were back to their home. And the environment was really hopeful. When we started to talk about the �MAOIST MOVEMENT� in Nepal, their face became bright. One of them said �now peace will be settled down�. He was Prem Ballav Joshi. He is a 27 years old SLC passed degree holder, well educated among them. He argued, �both Government�s army and Maoist guerillas became tired. Now negotiation is possible, for everything time should be ripe�. But Daulat thapa- 41 suspicion on his belief. He said nobody can take guarantee of Maoist as well as government. They were also in negotiation table in last year but that failed. How you can say that it would not repeated again? But other people were very much hopeful for settlement, they refused his argument. They said people of Nepal can not be sustaining in war again. Maoists are also human being and Government army too. It is too much to kill own people. That should be stopped. Then I asked them, if Government denied fulfilling Maoist demand then? Again joshi said there should be implement �give and take formula. I read Maoist�s forty point demand; some of them are very genuine. That should be fulfilled.� I asked again if not fulfilled by the Government then? He argued that government should fulfill some genuine demand for the restoration of peace. �And I hope so�. Again I argued �they won�t back to the Jungle?� They had a strong confidence on the peaceful resolution. Then I asked then you people started to send your earnings at home? At first they laughed on my question then reversely asked me when we stopped then. Most of them had sent their earning currently at their home. �������.. ��������� We turn round in India. All gathering people were matured fellows. Ramesh Saud was twenty years old; among them he was the youngest. He came here in Delhi in 1999. And Raghubir Chand-43 was the oldest one he arrived here 13 years before. They were working in different places of Delhi like Sakkatpur, Yemuna Nagar, Krishna Nagar, Anand Bihar, Baljit Nagar, and Sadipur. They have not exact idea about the number people are working as a watchman in Delhi as a whole. But in their rough estimate around twenty thousands people are working here as a watchman and Gate pale (Gate keeper). A small number of people are organized in �All Nepali Ekata Samaj� (affiliated with Nepal communist Party Ekata Kendra), Nepal- Bharat Pravashi Sangh (affiliated with Nepal communist Party UML). The nature of job is not permanent type and very much difficult work and insufficient salary. Therefore, �come and go� process is common in this field of job, but employ replaced themselves keeping another friend from the same village or relative on their response when society believe them. The experienced old men earned four thousand five hundred it is the peak amount on this profession, otherwise the average earnings amount is only Rs.2500 per month. Most of them earned a little bit amounts from the extra work, such as early in the morning they clean vehicles of their area. Instead of it they got extra money at the last of the month. But generally it would not be fixed, it depend on the pity of owner. The watchmen usually came here from far western part of Nepal and northern Karnali zone especially from Humla, kalikot, Mugu, Dalekh, Bajura, Dadeldhura, Kanchanpur, Baitedi,Bajhang and Darchula. Usually poor people has two choice one is to go to Uttarakhand to carryout people in Ulinkath(planqueen) from Badarinath to Kedarnath, or to come to be a watchmen in Delhi and other cities. Daulat Thapa explined me that in Badri Nath there are more than 20 thousand Nepali people who carryout religious people those who could not climb the stiff of Kedarnath. Most of the Nepali people speak broken Hindi. Some experienced old men speak fluently and correctly , but young speaks slowly and gradually, They usually answered that they learned after capable to speak fluently within six month but it depend on how much you mix-up with local people. Usually when they start to perceive sound of Hindi music, Hindi film then there is no problem on communication in Hindi. The watchmen pass moving whole night within the limited area assigned by local society. They should responsible for any kind of trouble, like, robbery, or any kind of losses by thrives. Thus whole night they open their eyes, walking, and whistling. Then member of the society can sleep without fear. Therefore the longevity of their job or security of their job will be protected till nothing will be happen in the society. When some complain appeared by any member of the society then there is a maximum chance to lose of his occupation. There is no other place for hearing. ��. ��.. ���� Ranjan Bahadur Nepali was in Ganga Ram Hospital. He was admitted there since three months. He had a big wound on his stomach. It was because of bullet. When he was on his duty on Dilsabeg Garden area at night, a group of thieves came driving their vehicle at night. It was near about 12 to 1 am. When Ranjan saw them and imagine that they are not belonging from that locality then he whistled and cried out. Of course they were not ordinary thieves and wanted to steal the houses. Then when people started to cry �choor- choor � pakdo- pakdo (thieves �thieves, catch them) then one of the thieves shoot him. Luckily the bullet goes on beneath the chest so he saved. Police came and admitted him in to the hospital. Operation became successful but loses his entire saved amount in to the medicine. The society did not care him. When his nearest friends went to the office and asked for some co-operation to the society but executive of the society denied to help saying, �it was Bahadur�s (usually Nepali people are called �Bahadur� by Indian Merchants and officials) duty, he fulfilled, for taking risk we are paying money as salary on monthly basis, the extra money is not possible to give. If he will return back from the hospital then we can offer again at that job only�. After huge cry, then society gave them only one thousand rupees. When I met Ranjan�s brother Raman at the hospital ward (he is also working in the same place as a watchman) he said the total expenditure was about more than 50 thousands. They finished the entire saving amount whatever they have had (it was eight thousands only). Then later he went with his friends at the office of Nepali Ekata Samaj for help. The officials collected subscription from different areas, from different people and paid the hospital bill. Now he is living with his brother� rented room and getting recovery and after some time again he is going to join in the same job. I asked him why again you are going to join there? He replied after long breath and with tearful eyes in sorrowful voice �what to do sir? How I can go without money at home? My children are waiting there for new cloth; landlords are wating for their payments of principal amount with interest. Now I have nothing except my empty hand�. �����.. �������.. Like Dhaba�s boys they also shared narrow rented room. Usually rooms are very dark, narrow, suffocative and lacking fresh air neither there was fan. When four to five people shares one room then there is easy to bought one common fan. Usually they sleep in the morning it will be cool than afternoon. In the afternoon some of them work in Dhaba too for extra earnings. Prem Ballav Joshi remarks, �Most our men blemish their own fate, not country�s rulers, not their exploiters. When they got salary usually spent a small part of their earnings for drink once a month and enjoyed, shared their uncomfortable life and sorrow and anexities. But still we are unorganized that is why we are not safe wherever." _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus From aiindex at mnet.fr Wed Jun 11 03:46:15 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 23:16:15 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Damming Afghanistan Message-ID: ***** Nick Cullather , "Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State," Journal of American History, 89 (Sept. 2002), 512-37. The article as it appeared in the print journal (2.27 MB; PDF format): ...A TVA for the Hindu Kush Nothing becomes antiquated faster than symbols of the future, and it is difficult, at only fifty years remove, to envision the hold concrete dams once had on the global imagination. In the mid-twentieth century, the austere lines of the Hoover Dam and its radiating spans of high-tension wire inscribed federal power on the American landscape. Vladimir Lenin famously remarked that Communism was Soviet power plus electrification, an equation captured by the David Lean film _Dr. Zhivago_ (1965) in the image of water surging, as a kind of redemption, from the spillway of an immense Soviet dam. In 1954, standing at the Bhakra-Nangal canal, Nehru described dams as the temples of modern India. "Which place can be greater than this," he declared, "this Bhakra-Nangal, where thousands of men have worked, have shed their blood and sweat, and laid down their lives as well? . . . When we see big works, our stature grows with them, and our minds open out a little."26 For Nehru, for Zahir Shah, for China today, the great blank wall of a dam was a screen on which they would project the future. Dams also symbolized the sacrifice of the individual to the greater good of the state. A dam project allows, even requires, a state to appropriate and redistribute land, plan factories and economies, tell people what to make and grow, design and build new housing, roads, schools, and centers of commerce. Tour guides are fond of telling about the worker (or workers) accidentally entombed in dams, and construction of these vast works customarily requires huge, unnamed sacrifices. To displace thousands from ancestral homes and farms, bulldoze graveyards and mosques, and erase all trace of memory and history from the land is a process familiar to us today as ethnic cleansing. But when done in conjunction with dam construction, it is called land reclamation and can be justified even in democratic systems by the calculus of development. India's interior minister, Morarji Desai, told a public gathering at the unfinished Pong Dam in 1961 that "we will request you to move from your houses after the dam comes up. If you move, it will be good. Otherwise we shall release the waters and drown you all."27 A dam-building project would vastly expand and intensify the authority that could be exercised by the central government at Kabul. Remaking and regulating the physical environment of an entire region would, for the first time, translate Afghanistan into the legible inventories of material and human resources in the manner of modern states. In 1946, using its karakul revenue, the Afghan government hired the largest American heavy engineering firm, Morrison Knudsen, Inc., of Boise, Idaho, to build a dam. Morrison Knudsen, builder of the Hoover Dam, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and later the launch complex at Cape Canaveral, specialized in symbols of the future. The firm operated all over the world, boring tunnels through the Andes in Peru, laying airfields in Turkey. Its engineers, who called themselves Emkayans, would be drawing up specifications for a complex of dams in the gorges of the Yangtze River in 1949 when Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army drove them out.28 The firm set up shop in an old Moghul palace outside Kandahar and began surveying the Helmand Valley. The Helmand and Arghandab rivers constitute Afghanistan's largest river system, draining a watershed covering half the country. Originating in the Hindu Kush a few miles from Kabul, the Helmand travels through upland dells thick with orchards and vineyards before merging with the Arghandab twenty-five miles from Kandahar, turning west across the arid plain of Registan and emptying into the Sistan marshes of Iran. The valley was reputedly the site of a vast irrigation works destroyed by Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. The entire area is dry, catching two to three inches of rain a year. Consequently, river flows fluctuate unpredictably within a wide range, varying from 2,000 to 60,000 cubic feet per second.29 Before beginning, Morrison Knudsen had to create an infrastructure of roads and bridges to allow the movement of equipment. Typically, they would also conduct extensive studies on soils and drainage, but the company and the Afghan government convinced themselves that in this case it was not necessary, that "even a 20 percent margin of error . . . could not detract from the project's intrinsic value."30 The promise of dams is that they are a renewable resource, furnishing power and water indefinitely and with little effort once the project is complete, but dam projects are subject to ecological constraints that are often more severe outside of the temperate zone. Siltation, which now threatens many New Deal-era dams, advances more quickly in arid and tropical climates. Canal irrigation involves a special set of hazards. Arundhati Roy, the voice of India's antidam movement, explains that "perennial irrigation does to soil roughly what anabolic steroids do to the human body," stimulating ordinary earth to produce multiple crops in the first years while slowly rendering the soil infertile.31 Large reservoirs raise the water table in the surrounding area, a problem worsened by extensive irrigation. Waterlogging itself can destroy harvests, but it produces more permanent damage, too. In waterlogged soils, capillary action pulls soluble salts and alkalies to the surface, leading to desertification. Early reports warned that the Helmand Valley was vulnerable, that it had gravelly subsoils and salt deposits. The Emkayans knew Middle Eastern rivers were often unsuited to extensive irrigation schemes. But these apprehensions' "impact was minimized by one or both parties."32 From the start, the Helmand project was primarily about national prestige and only secondarily about the social benefits of increasing agricultural productivity. Signs of trouble appeared almost immediately. Even when only half completed, the first dam, a small diversion dam at the mouth of the Boghra canal, raised the water table to within a few inches of the surface of the ground. A snowy crust of salt could be seen in areas around the reservoir. In 1949, the engineers and the government faced a decision. Tearing down the dam would have resulted in a loss of face for the monarchy and Morrison Knudsen, but from an engineering standpoint the project could no longer be justified. The necessary reconsideration never took place, however, because it was at this moment that the unlucky Boghra works was enfolded into the global project of development. Truman's Point IV address reconfigured the relationship between the United States and newly independent nations. The confrontation between colonizer and colonized, rich and poor, was with a rhetorical gesture replaced by a world order in which all nations were either developed or developing. The president explicitly linked development to American strategic and economic objectives. Poverty was a threat not just to the poor but to their richer neighbors, he argued, and alleviating misery would assure a general prosperity, lessening the chances of war.33 But the "triumphant action" of development superseded the merely ideological conflict of the Cold War: Communism and capitalism were competing carriers bound for the same destination. Development justified interventions on a grand scale and made obedience to foreign technicians the duty of every responsible government. Afghanistan -- solvent, untouched by the recent war, and able to hire technicians when it needed them -- suddenly became "underdeveloped" and, owing to its position bordering the Soviet Union, the likely recipient of substantial assistance. Point IV's technical aid could take many forms - -clinics, schools, new livestock breeds, assays for minerals and petroleum -- but the uncompleted Boghra works was an invitation to something grander, a reproduction of an American developmental triumph. When Truman thought of aid, he thought of dams, specifically of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the complex of dams on the Tennessee River that transformed the economy of the upper South. "A TVA in the Yangtze Valley and the Danube," he proposed to the TVA's director, David Lilienthal; "These things can be done and don't let anybody tell you different. When they happen, when millions and millions of people are no longer hungry and pushed and harassed, then the causes of war will be less by that much." Truman's internationalization of the TVA repositioned the New Deal for a McCarthyite age. Dams were the American alternative to Communist land reform, Arthur M. Schlesinger argued in The Vital Center. Instead of a "crude redistribution" of land, American engineers could create "wonderlands of vegetation and power" from the desert. The TVA was "a weapon which, if properly employed, might outbid all the social ruthlessness of the Communists for the support of the peoples of Asia."34 The TVA had totemic significance for American liberals, but in the diplomatic setting it had the additional function of redefining political conflict as a technical problem. Britain's solution to Afghanistan's tribal wars had been to script feuds of blood, honor, and faith within the linear logic of boundary commissions, containing conflict within two-dimensional space. The United States set aside the maps and replotted tribal enmities on hydrologic charts. Resolution became a matter of apportioning cubic yards of water and kilowatt-hours of energy. Assurances of inevitable progress further displaced conflict into the future; if all sides could be convinced that resource flows would increase, problems would vanish, in bureaucratic parlance, downstream. Over the next two decades the United States would propose river authority schemes as solutions to the most intractable international conflicts: Palestine ("Water for Peace") and the Kashmir dispute. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson famously suggested a Mekong River Authority as an alternative to the Vietnam War.35 Afghanistan applied for and received a $12 million Export-Import Bank loan for the Helmand Valley in 1950, the first of over $80 million over the next fifteen years. Afghanistan's loan request contained a line for soil surveys, but the bank refused it as an unnecessary expense. Point IV supplied technical support.36 In 1952, the national government created the Helmand Valley Authority -- later the Helmand and Arghandab Valley Authority (HAVA) -- removing 1,800 square miles of river valley from local control and placing it under the jurisdiction of expert commissions in Kabul. The monarchy poured money into the project; a fifth of the central government's total expenditures went into HAVA in the 1950s and early 1960s. From 1946 on, the salaries of Morrison Knudsen's advisers and technicians absorbed an amount equivalent to Afghanistan's total exports. Without adequate mechanisms for tax collection, the royal treasury passed costs on to agricultural producers through inflation and the diversion of export revenue, offsetting any gains irrigation produced.37 Although it pulled in millions in international funding, HAVA soaked up the small reserves of individual farmers and may well have reduced the total national investment in agriculture. HAVA supplemented the initial dam with a vast complex of dams. Two large dams -- the 200-foot-high Arghandab Dam and the 320-foot-high Kajakai Dam -- for storage and hydropower were supplemented by diversion dams, drainage works, and irrigation canals. Reaching out from the reservoirs were three hundred miles of concrete-lined canals. Three of the longer canals, the Tarnak, Darweshan, and Shamalan, fed riparian lands already intensively cultivated and irrigated by an elaborate system of tunnels, flumes, and canals known as juis. The new, wider canals furnished an ampler and purportedly more reliable water source. The Zahir Shah Canal supplied Kandahar with water from the Arghandab reservoir, and two canals stretched out into the desert to polders of reclaimed desert: Marja and Nad-i-Ali. Each extension of the project required more land acquisition and displaced more people. To remain flexible, the royal government and Morrison Knudsen kept the question of who actually owned the land in abeyance. No system of titles was instituted, and the bulk of the reclaimed land was farmed by tenants of Morrison Knudsen, the government, or contractors hired by the government.38 The new systems magnified the problems encountered at the Boghra works and added new ones. Waterlogging created a persistent weed problem. The storage dams removed silt that once rejuvenated fields downstream. Deposits of salt or gypsum would erupt into long-distance canals and be carried off to deaden the soil of distant fields. The Emkayans had to contend with unpredictable flows triggered by snowmelt in the Hindu Kush. In 1957, floods nearly breached dams in two places, and water tables rose, salinating soils throughout the region. The reservoirs and large canals also lowered the water temperature, making plots that once held vineyards and orchards suitable only for growing grain.39 After a decade of work, HAVA could not set a schedule or a plan for completion. As its engineering failures mounted, HAVA's symbolic weight in the Cold War and in Afghanistan's ethnic politics steadily grew. Like the TVA, HAVA was a multipurpose river authority. U.S. officials described it as "a major social engineering project," responsible for river development but also for education, housing, health care, roads, communications, agricultural research and extension, and industrial development in the valley. The U.S. ambassador in Kabul in 1962 noted that, if successful, HAVA would boost Afghanistan's "earnings of foreign exchange and, if properly devised, could foster the growth of a strata of small holders which would give the country more stability." This billiard-ball alignment of capital accumulation, class formation, and political evolution was a core proposition of the social science approach to modernization that was just making the leap from university think tanks to centers of policy making. An uneasiness about the massive, barely understood forces impelling two-thirds of the world in simultaneous and irreversible social movement -- surging population growth, urbanization, the collapse of traditional authority -- overshadowed policy toward "underdeveloped" areas. Modernization theory offered reassurance that the techniques of Point IV could discipline these processes and turn them to the advantage of the United States. Development, the economists Walt W. Rostow and Max Millikan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology assured the cia (Central Intelligence Agency) in 1954, could create "an environment in which societies which directly or indirectly menace ours will not evolve."40 ...The Helmand project offered a way to counter Soviet influence by giving Daoud what he wanted, a Pashtun homeland. As originally envisioned, HAVA would irrigate enough new fertile land to settle eighteen to twenty thousand families on fifteen-acre farms. Working with Afghan officials, U.S. advisers launched a program to immobilize the nomadic Pashtuns, whose migrations were a source of friction with Pakistan.46 To American and royal government officials, this floating population and its disregard for laws, taxes, and borders symbolized the country's backwardness. Settling Pashtun nomads in a belt from Kabul to Kandahar would create a secure political base for the government and bring them within reach of modernization programs. Diminishing the transborder flows would reduce smuggling and the periodic incidents that inflamed the Pushtunistan issue. A complementary dam development project in the Indus Valley, also funded by the United States, settled Pashtun nomads on the other side of the Durand Line.47... Evidence for the efficiency of American techniques was scarce in the Helmand Valley. The burden of American loans for the project and the absence of tangible returns was creating, according to the New York Times, "a dangerous strain on both the Afghan economy and the nation's morale" which "may have unwittingly and indirectly contributed to driving Afghanistan into Russian arms."57 Waterlogging had advanced in the Shamalan area to the point that structural foundations were giving way; mosques and houses were crumbling into the growing bog. In the artificial oases, the problem was worse. An impermeable crust of conglomerate underlay the Marja and Nad-i-Ali tracts, intensifying both waterlogging and salinization. The remedy - -a system of discharge channels leading to deep-bore drains -- would remove 10 percent of the reclaimed land from cultivation. A 1965 study revealed that crop yields per acre had actually dropped since the dams were built, sharply in areas already cultivated but evident even in areas reclaimed from the desert. Withdrawing support from HAVA was impossible. "With this project," the U.S. ambassador noted, "the American reputation in Afghanistan is completely linked."58 For reasons of credibility alone the United States kept pouring money in, even though by 1965 it was clear the project was failing. Diplomats complained that the reputation of the United States hung on "a strip of concrete," but there was no going back. Afghanistan was an economic Korea, but Helmand was an economic Vietnam, a quagmire that consumed money and resources without the possibility of success, all to avoid making failure obvious.... The Kennedy and Johnson administrations renewed the U.S. commitment to HAVA with a fresh infusion of funds and initiatives, raising the annual aid disbursement from $16 million to $40 million annually. The "green revolution" approach pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation would bring a new organizational system into play around the farmer. In 1967, USAID and the royal government imported 170 tons of the experimental dwarf wheat developed by Norman Borlaug in Mexico. The high-yield seed, together with chemical fertilizers and tightly controlled irrigation, were expected to produce grain surpluses that would be distributed through new marketing and credit arrangements. Resettlement subsidies had paid off by the mid-1960s, and the Helmand Valley was beginning to have a lived-in look. The large corporate and state farms had vanished, and nearly all of the land that could successfully be farmed was privately held, much of it by smallholders. Legal titles were still clouded by HAVA's inattention to land surveys, but the settlers had nonetheless sculpted wide tracts of empty land into irregular fifteen-acre parcels divided by meandering juis, the tree-lined canals that served as boundary, water source, and orchard for each farm.60 Unfortunately, the juis system proved incompatible with the new plans. The small, hilly, picturesquely misshapen fields contributed to runoff and drainage problems and prevented the regular, measured applications of water, chemicals, and machine cultivation necessary for modern agriculture. A green revolution would require, in effect, a land reform in reverse: merging small holdings into large level fields divided at regular intervals by laterals running from control gates on the main canals. As the wheat improvement program got underway, a team of U.S. Department of Agriculture advisers proposed that HAVA remove all of the resettled families, "level the whole area with bulldozers," and then redistribute property "in large, uniform, smooth land plots."61 HAVA adopted the land preparation scheme, but implementation proved difficult. Farmers objected to the removal of trees, which had economic value and prevented wind erosion, but they objected chiefly to the vagueness of HAVA's assurances. HAVA itself acknowledged, as bulldozing proceeded, that questions of what to do with the population while the land was being prepared, how to redistribute the land after completion, and whether to charge landowners for improvements were "yet to be worked out." When farmers "met the bulldozers with rifles," according to a usaid report, it presented a "very real constraint" that "consumed most of the time of the American and Afghan staffs in the Valley throughout the 1960s."62... By 1969, the new grains had spread to a modest 300,000 acres, leading to expectations of an approaching "yield takeoff," but the 1971 El Niño drought destroyed much of the crop. Monsoon rains failed through 1973, reducing the Helmand to a rivulet. In 1971, the Arghandab reservoir dried up completely, a possibility not foreseen by planners. With the coming of détente in 1970, levels of aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union dropped sharply. The vision of prosperous, irrigation-fed farms luring nomads into their green embrace proved beyond HAVA's grasp. Wheat yields were among the lowest in the world, four bushels an acre (Iowa farms produced 180); farm incomes in the valley were below average for Afghanistan and declining. State Department officials found it difficult to measure the magnitude of the economic crisis "in Afghanistan where there are no statistics," but student strikes and the suspension of parliament pointed to a "creeping crisis" in mid-1972. "The food crisis," the embassy reported, "seems to have been the real clincher for which neither the King nor his government were prepared."64 In July 1973, military units loyal to Mohammed Daoud deposed the king, who was vacationing in Europe, and terminated both the monarchy and the constitution. U.S. involvement in HAVA was scheduled to end in July 1974, and USAID officials strenuously opposed suggestions that it be renewed. Nonetheless, when Henry Kissinger visited Kabul in February, Daoud described the Helmand Valley as an "unfinished symphony" and urged the United States not to abandon it.65 Kissinger relented. Land reclamation officers remained with the project, while making little progress against its persistent problems, until the pro-Soviet Khalq party seized power in 1978. Soviet economic development also failed to create a stable, modernizing social class. The Khalq was not broadly enough based to hold onto authority unaided. Against the threat of takeover by an Islamic party, the Soviet Union launched the invasion of 1979. During the Soviet war, both sides found ways to make use of the Helmand Valley's infrastructure. In early 1980, according to M. Hassan Kakar, "about a hundred prisoners" of the Khalq "were thrown out of airplanes into the Arghandab reservoir." The project's concrete water channels provided cover for the anti-Soviet Mujaheddin fighters, and its broken terrain was the site of intense fighting between the resistance and Soviet forces and among ethnic factions after the Soviets withdrew in 1988. The warriors felled trees, smashed irrigation canals, and planted mines throughout the fields and orchards, driving the population into refugee camps in Pakistan.66 The Taliban movement began here in 1994 as an alliance of Pashtun clans supported with arms and money from across the Durand Line. Even after the capture of Kabul in 1996, Kandahar remained the Taliban capital. The Helmand Valley provided the new regime's chief source of revenue. The opium poppy grows well in dry climates and in alkaline and saline soils. In 2000, according to the United Nations Drug Control Programme, the Helmand Valley produced 39 percent of the world's heroin.67 During its five years in power, the Taliban government invested in the dams and finished one project begun but not completed by the Americans: linking the Kajakai Dam's hydroelectric plant to the city of Kandahar. Work was finished in early 2001, just a few months before American bombers destroyed the plant.68... Nick Cullather is associate professor of history at Indiana University.... From faizan at sarai.net Thu Jun 12 15:03:30 2003 From: faizan at sarai.net (Faizan Ahmed) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 15:03:30 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: prdomain articles_general Life in the time of a carnage Message-ID: <200306121503.30310.faizan@sarai.net> Hello Pls go through the mail, its for a very important and for a noble cause. Please forward it to your friends also. Warm Regards faizan Subject: Undre School at Raigad Dear Friends, It is very pleasing to receive messages from enthusiastic people eager help children who are victims of man-made disasters. Thanks to Mr. Wajahat Habibullah and Mr. Shiv Shankar (sshankar at cmi.ac.in), your messages and inquiries have been forwarded to Mr. Undre, Ms. Monica Wahi (monicawahi at rediffmail.com), Hajeebhoy Zia (hajeebhoyzia at yahoo.com), Mr. Jogesh Motwani (jogesh at bom8.vsnl.net.in), and others involved in the project. The postal address for sending your contributions is given at the end in Mr. Shakar’s letter. With regards to all, Zafar Iqbal Copies to: Mr. Isteyaq Ahmad, Star TV, Mumbai Mr. Rizwanullah (Riyadh) Mr. Wajahat Habibullah (Delhi) Ambassador Ghori, Toronto. Yes, Begum Rehana Undre is the same person you thought. Mr. Shafi Refai, IMRC Dr. A.R.. Nakadar, AFMI And IndianMuslim at yahoogroups.com, Muslimindians at yahoogroups.com, and AligarhNetwork at yahoogroups.com for general information. ---------------------------------------------------------------- PS: I am also posting below an appeal from Mr. Shiv Shankar. Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 17:44:07 +0530 (IST) From: "Shiva Shankar" To: "Zafar Iqbal" Subject: Request for help for the Raigad School that has adopted Gujarat genocide affected children Dear Zafar Iqbal, I am again sending you my appeal that Wajahat forwarded to you. Please forward it to your friends. Please remind them that a dollar is Rs.50 and goes a long way here. I am sending you the address to which contributions can be sent in another mail, as well as a "report" on the children by a friend of mine who visited the school recently. Many thanks. Shiva Shankar. Dear Friends, I am writing to you again about the Undre School (run by Dr. and Mrs. Undre) at Raigad, which has adopted 130 children affected by the genocide in Gujarat last year. These children come from very humble families, and arrived at the school with just the clothes they were wearing. The school has provided them with a complete kit as it were (clothes, bedding, books etc), hostel accomodation, wholesome food and education. Most important is that the school is a haven and a refuge for these children (some of them as young as 5 years old) who have seen their parents/siblings brutalised and murdered, and whose families have been rendered homeless and unemployed. The Undres with uncommon generosity have committed themselves to helping these children right through their school years. I therefore request your sustained help for many years. I was to visit the Undre School in the last week of May, but by the time I got to Bombay, the children had been sent to Ahmedabad to visit their families for a brief vacation before the start of the next term. Many of my friends did go to Raigad (Professor M. G. Nadkarni, former head of the mathematics dept, Bombay university, Professor V. R. Sule of IIT, Bombay, Jogesh Motwani, Lakshmi Rangaraj, ...). I also met Zia Hajeebhoy and Amit Upadhyay, who together with Monica Wahi and Charu Kasturi initiated this effort (more about them below). Talking to these people it is clear that the Undres have initiated a great and heroic effort. As I see it, it is our duty now to help sustain it, and to broaden its scope. Thus not only do we solicit your support for these 130 children over many years, but also your help to locate other schools willing to provide similar support (there are over 50,000 children who suffered in the genocide). The idea to relocate these children seems to have been the brainchild of four remarkable people, Monica Wahi, Amit Upadhyay, Charu Kasturi and Zia Hajeebhoy. Monica is a Delhi based film maker (she has collaborated with Anand Patwardhan in the making of "War and Peace"), Amit a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, and Charu a 2nd year BSc physics student at St. Stephen's. When the genocide began unfolding they simply dropped everything they were doing to rush down to Gujarat to help! They have been in Ahmedabad ever since, living and working in the relief camps till their forced closure by the state govt. They got in touch with Zia who lives in Bombay and who in turn talked to the Undres. Extraordinary times throws up extraordinary people, but it is now our duty to step in and help so that these young people can go back to their work and studies. For too long have we relied on corrupt and self-serving governments. Our only hope is civil society, i.e. the citizens of this country, if we are to arrest this descent into the heart of darkness that Gujarat has so starkly come to symbolise. Monica, Amit, Charu, Zia, The Undres, and many others have shown us the way. We only have to follow them. I would be eternally grateful to you if you could pass on this appeal to your friends. Please contact me, Zia Hajeebhoy, or Monica Wahi (whose e-mail addresses appear above) for any other information or clarifications that you might need. Thanking you, Yours sincerely, Shiva Shankar. (Chennai Mathematical Institute) Please send your contribution to: Cheque in the name of ROYAL EDUCATION SOCIETY Address: C/o S R Kudrolli 2J Calcot House, 2nd Floor 8 M P Shetty Marg Fort, Mumbai-400 023 Ph: :91 22 22046911 Draft Details Name: Royal Educational Society Kokan Mercantile Co-op. Bank Ltd Shriwardhan Branch, Dist. Raigad Account No: 2819 (Your contributions are eligible for tax exemption under section 80G) _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail ------------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030612/d162de9d/attachment.htm From junu78in at yahoo.com Thu Jun 12 20:31:12 2003 From: junu78in at yahoo.com (taha mehmood) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 08:01:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] who's afraid of c raja mohan??? Message-ID: <20030612150112.33969.qmail@web11403.mail.yahoo.com> Who�s Afraid of C.Raja Mohan??? After Saddam who?, reads the headline. The date is March the 18th, 2003; the Bush administration is still contemplating its first move. The war clouds are far and distant. But in the world of diplomacy Saddam�s obituary has already been written and the epitaph on the cenotaph says, �After Saddam, Who?� Welcome to the world of diplomatic journalism and its reigning steward C.Raja Mohan. Over the last few months I have been keenly observing the developments across the Atlantic and as they are interpreted to us in India by the battery of journalists one of whom is redoubtable C.Raja Mohan, Strategic Affairs editor, The Hindu. Although international relations is nowwhere close to rocket science but nonetheless I find it a little difficult to understand. For, after all the talk and blabber that I hear and see on egalitarianism, cosmopolitan world order, level playing field and basic human rights to all, etc, I see a consistent dissimilarity of its representation in the diplomatic journalese. I think, here the binding principle is to pay obeisance to the powers that be. Powers structures tend to completely jostle out alternative viewpoints of dissent, dissatisfaction and disagreement which are anything but similar to the dominant paradigm. It not only seeks to reinforce the ideology of the hegemon but offers justifications when contradicted with non-interventionist views. So... it sought of caught my attention, when having grown up with a steady diet of anti imperialism I was confronted with a world view which didn�t question imperialism and in the era of the post colonial, geo strategic designs of the neo conservative hegemons but offered reasons seeking to make it acceptable. It is with this objective in mind that I seek to explore C.Raja Mohan�s writings on his take on the war in gulf which administered a regime change in Iraq. Before the war Even before the war started, when the world was still uncertain about the occurrence of the conflict, seemingly rapid developments were taking place by the hour in the diplomatic circles, mammoth peace marches were being organised all over the planet, C.Raja Mohan in an unambiguous manner gave his verdict, �The Bush Administration will now be compelled to justify its attack against Iraq in the name of liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein�, adding to underscore, �what better example is there for Washington than Afghanistan that has been freed from the Taliban?�. Well... to be very candid I didn�t get it at all. Bush Administration will be compelled to do what?? Illegally invade a sovereign state and murder, torture, kill and maim innocent civilians because they are suffering under an oppressive tyrant. And who compelled the Bush Administration to take such a harsh step.... unarmed demonstrators across the world who believed in the right to live and let live. Or was it the UN, who�s Security Council, gave America the nod a decade ago thus maintaining its legitimacy as a world body which it sadly failed to do so this time. And he justifies the impending war by pointing us to Afghanistan. Of course, if �freedom� means one is free to cut one�s beard, listen to Hindi songs and watch Bollywood movies, then I admit, I have no other option but to agree with him. But if it means, right to life, food, health and education then I have a problem with Taliban-Afghanistan--- Saddam-Iraq model offered. But then I guess, in the larger scheme of things, of the geo-strategic aspirations of a hegemon, discrepancy in the reasons presented simply doesn�t matter. Turkey�s rise to importance Raja Mohan substantiated this argument further with the pronouncement that, �the Bush Administration is making it clear now that regime change is the goal in Iraq and not merely disarmament�. While the necessity of a till now haloed UNSC resolution suddenly became irrelevant, it was the green signal from a small but a crucial ally Turkey which occupied the centerstage which was elucidated by, �Washington has been waiting for weeks for a decision in Ankara. Despite the offer of many inducements (read bribe)including billions of dollars in grants and the consideration of its interests(read share in War Booty) in the post Saddam political arrangements in Iraq, Washington has not been able to sway the opinion in turkey in its favour�. It is the small phrase in the last sentence; �sway the opinion�, which merits special attention. Turkey eventually gave the green signal but only after the initial rejection of the parliament which, constitutes the representatives of the people, declined to give its assent, which the powerful and at times acquiring Trans constitutional authority, the helm of the Turkish armed forces intervened. What is interesting here is, that the massive public opposition and unrest didn�t even merit a mention; instead a hegemon�s apparent inability to coerce a distant government to comply to its agenda compelled a few diplomatic eyebrows to be raised. With the UN deemed redundant and getting the nod from where it mattered the most, the focus of the US and that of diplomatic journalese shifted from whys and whens to how. The Gulf War II It was christened as, �A very different war�, with �Power, precision and speed� to be the main features of the invasion. Raja Mohan further writes that, �Nine out of ten bombs used this time will be precision guided weapons�, and that, �The overwhelming use of airpower to produce �shock and awe� would be the first instrument of the US military�. Apart from the technological advancement, which incidentally means greater destruction, can any war be �different�, say from the ones which Alexander the Great had fought in his life time prior to his death in 327BC. Don�t all wars in its aftermath tell a tale of widows, of orphans, of rapes, of murders, of arsons, of butchering, of widespread destruction of life and property, of loot and of mockery of everything considered decent, human and civilised? I don�t think that the war itself, or Iraq after it was �different�. Instead there was a sullen, sad, silent and a humbling realisation to the world that, might is always right. Return of the trio An unjust war which was illegally fought was unashamedly won. May be in some other sphere of influence these words might carry some weight but they don�t even exist in the undeviating world of international relations. As Raja Mohan unravels further, �winning is not the only thing; it is every thing. Even the perception of victory makes nations scramble on to the bandwagon of the side seen as winning�. Emphatically referring to the, �Europe�s about-turn�, stating that, �Even before Baghdad, or any other city in Iraq has come under the full control of the Anglo-American forces, Europeans are rushing out to make amends for their wrong call on the Anglo-American war in Iraq�. While the Franco-Russo-German audacity to challenge the status quo was browbeaten upon their propitiatory rituals were given an all condescending smile. No questions were sought and no explanations given even as the hegemon�s court were being restored to its pre war attendance. Conclusion Largely, I don�t disagree with Raja Mohan�s writings. He writes like a seer foretelling an event, may be the fact that unlike the universal laws of gravity where force is inversely proportional to square of distance, here one�s propinquity to the power centre or one�s distance from it, does not alter the status quo, which makes the system infallible and gives its observers innumerable derivations, permutations and plausibly complex situations in labyrinthine world of International Relations, the results of which are more often that not determined a priori. But what disconcerts me more is the unquestioning faith with which these dictums of power, or whatever it is, are followed by its observers. Had these dictums been sacrosanct, Roma still would have been the capital of the world. Is Power in all is nakedness that ugly, that bad or does a notion as just power, which may be an oxymoron, exists. When history is replete with figures like Moses Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Gandhi, and Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan etc, who sought to engage with power in their own inimitable way, while dealing with it in a language not particularly favoured by the practitioners of power, but nonetheless proving victorious in the end. Reinstating in the process long cherished notions of humanity, truth, justice and coexistence. Or may be I am wrong, may be these figures belong to the bygone era more suited for some old worn out and torn pages of class sixth history book. For unlike the near mythological characters which I have just referred, Power reserves highest reverence and gratitude to the lone individual atop its pyramid. So whenever power converses it does so while constantly referring to Bush, Blair, Putin, Saddam etc. but I think it would be a perceptional fallacy to ignore the existence of hundreds of thousands of such individuals who make up the pyramid. Because when the brewing unrest of these individuals cannot contain itself it explodes churning in the process the wheels of history. What people like C Raja Mohan and his ilk in the field of international relations omit is the presence of the individual at the bottom of the power pyramid. I would never remember the recent �Regime change� in Iraq for its, �Shock and Awe�, strategy, �Precision Bombing�, �Collateral Damage�, �Decapitation of a city�, �Embedded Journalists�, reporting live, containing �Horizontal escalation� or even �Operation Iraqi Freedom�...for entrenched deep inside my conscience is the enduring image of twelve year old Ismail Abbas with stumps and ghost arms, his body covered with burned out skin, lips pursed, eyes staring out with agony, frustration and questioning the powers that be about the change in status quo of his tiny but equally essential world order. Taha Mehmood. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com From aiindex at mnet.fr Fri Jun 13 06:31:50 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 02:01:50 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] War and the commodification of women as 'booty'. Message-ID: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2961288.stm BBC News, 4 June, 2003 Free sex offer for US troops The first 50 soldiers to arrive will receive a free sex pack A US brothel is offering free sex to US troops who took part in the war against Iraq to thank them for their endeavours abroad. The Moonlight Bunnyranch in Carson City, Nevada, where brothels are legal, has produced a more erotic version of the standard TA-50 army kits issued to troops headed into battle. Instead of a compass, toothbrush and soap, the pack handed to soldiers who turn up at the brothel includes condoms, lubricant and a free sex session - with a value of up to $1,000. "We wanted to show our appreciation for everything they've done," Dennis Hof, the proprietor, told BBC News Online. "We wanted to give these guys some special care and attention." Mr Hof said the idea had been put to him by one of his female employees, who had served in the war. The TA-50 offer is open to the first 50 soldiers who turn up at the brothel. But all is not lost for those who arrive late. The Moonlight Bunnyranch is offering a 50% discount on all its services to servicemen and women for 50 days after the first offer expires. Mr Hof said he was also considering a special offer for British troops who took part in the war against Iraq. "It would be really great to get those guys to come over to the Bunnyranch," he said. From sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com Mon Jun 16 00:01:07 2003 From: sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com (=?iso-8859-1?q?Sagnik=20Chakravartty?=) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 19:31:07 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Need notes on New Trends in Media Message-ID: <20030615183107.95940.qmail@web20308.mail.yahoo.com> Dear Sarai Reader-list members, Can anyone help? I urgently require notes on New Trends in Media. Kindly email them to me at broadcaster at syhlleti.org or sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com Please do help. I am hopeful that all the Sarai Reader-list members will help. My fax number is 91-011-26569382 Bye Cheers Sagnik Chakravartty M A student of Broadcast Journalism MCRPV, Noida Campus ________________________________________________________________________ Send free SMS using the Yahoo! Messenger. Go to http://in.mobile.yahoo.com/new/pc/ From abirbazaz at rediffmail.com Tue Jun 17 15:03:11 2003 From: abirbazaz at rediffmail.com (abir bazaz) Date: 17 Jun 2003 09:33:11 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Kashmiri students in India... Message-ID: <20030617093311.28823.qmail@webmail6.rediffmail.com> Kashmiri Students in India Face Discrimination By Rama Lakshmi Special to The Washington Post Tuesday, June 17, 2003; Page A12 MUZAFFARNAGAR, India -- Three months ago, Ejaz Husain Jaan was just another Kashmiri student living away from home, nervously studying for his finals and taking short breaks to catch the World Cup cricket scores on television. Now, he is in jail, facing terrorism charges for allegedly aiding a plan to blow up important government buildings, an accusation he vehemently denies. "I came out of Kashmir to study, not to be a terrorist," said Jaan, 23, looking tired and bewildered as he stepped out of a crowded courtroom in Uttar Pradesh state recently. "In Kashmir, there is always a threat of the gun -- the army's or the militants'. I wanted to escape the climate of fear and violence. "But now all my career hopes are destroyed. I could not even finish my tests," he said, starting to cry. According to human rights groups in New Delhi, scores of Muslim students, traders and professionals who quit violence-wracked Kashmir for other parts of India in search of education and job opportunities have faced increased harassment and discrimination in the past three years. A report by the People's Union for Democratic Rights said Kashmiri Muslims in New Delhi suffer from "a deep sense of insecurity and vulnerability" and are victims of police harassment, humiliating searches, intimidation, arbitrary detentions and demands for bribes by local policemen under the pretext of fighting terrorism. The climate of suspicion, many said, has sharpened since December 2001, when gunmen suspected of being Islamic rebels fighting for Kashmir's secession from India attacked the Parliament complex in New Delhi. Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, has been ravaged since 1989 by a separatist revolt that has claimed more than 35,000 lives, according to official estimates. "The last 14 years have been a dark period for the people of Kashmir. Many people have tried to escape the violence and come out to study and work, but they face suspicion wherever they go," said Mehbooba Mufti, the chief of Kashmir's ruling People's Democratic Party. "The stereotype is that every Kashmiri holds a gun. Do Kashmiris have to rip open their hearts each time to prove they are not militants?" Indian officials said there is no campaign to harass Kashmiris because of their religion or their roots. "We have to be vigilant," said a senior police officer who asked not to be named. "We don't pick up Kashmiris at random, we follow our intelligence inputs and phone tapping. We cannot always wait for the attack to take place; we have to prevent it also." But human rights activists argued that the police often act on the basis of flimsy evidence and that the process lacks accountability. "We are not saying India should be soft on terrorism, but the state's coercive powers must act like a surgeon's scalpel rather than come down like a hammer," said Ravi Nair, who heads the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center. "With every case of harassment of an innocent, the gulf between Kashmiris and the rest of India widens." Discrimination and harassment are a simple fact of daily life for many Kashmiris living outside their home state, said Afshan Gul, 23, a film student in New Delhi, who complained of innumerable searches and questioning by police. "The searches and questions do not stop when you show your identity card," she said. "For a Kashmiri Muslim, it usually begins after you show it. They don't just search you, they rip off your dignity, too." More than a decade of violence by Islamic militants has hardened perceptions about Kashmiri Muslims among some Indians as well as the police. The bias, Kashmiris said, permeates everyday activities from finding an apartment to finding a job. "The moment the landlords got to know I was a Kashmiri Muslim, they would make excuses to say no," said Khursheed Ahmed Qazi, 38, a businessman who spent several months looking for an apartment in the capital last year. "The bias against us was clear." Abrar Ahmad Dewani, 24, a computer student from Kashmir, said that when he interviewed two years ago for a job as a Web site designer for a New Delhi company that makes bathroom fixtures, the questions had nothing to do with his skills. "The man looked at my [résumé] and said, 'Are you a Kashmiri? Kashmiris are terrorists,' " recalled Dewani. "I said . . . 'I don't want to work for you.' I felt humiliated." At another job interview, a prospective employer told him he was "very scared of Kashmiris." The circumstances surrounding the arrest of Jaan and three other students in March shook the small group of Kashmiri undergraduates studying in Uttar Pradesh, who said they came under increased surveillance from the police and became the target of public suspicion and scorn. "The police searched all the rooms of the students. My professor told me not to call him or visit him. Everybody in college looked at us with suspicion," said Abdul Rashid, 26, a graduate student who lived in the room next to Jaan's. "The neighbors would look at us and say, 'Look, the terrorists are coming' or 'What are you bombing next?' " Jaan said he was interrogated in dark rooms for nine days without a lawyer. He said the police forced him to sign several blank pages that he feared could be used as confessions. Police said they found maps of India's "vital installations" in Jaan's possession and that phone records show he received calls from a leader of the banned militant group Jaish-i-Muhammad. Despite the perils, young Kashmiris say they will continue to leave home because of the lack of jobs in their state. "I have no choice but to leave Kashmir," said Tanweer Sadiq, 25, a recent computer science graduate who is applying for jobs in New Delhi. "There are no jobs in Kashmir. I knew I would have to battle a stereotype when I [went] there, but it is still worth taking a chance. It's a question of my career." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030617/303b75ec/attachment.html From sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com Thu Jun 19 20:35:30 2003 From: sagnik_chakravartty at yahoo.com (=?iso-8859-1?q?Sagnik=20Chakravartty?=) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 16:05:30 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] An Intimate History of Greater Bengal in www.syhlleti.org Message-ID: <20030619150530.11547.qmail@web20310.mail.yahoo.com> An Intimate history of Greater Bengal in www.syhlleti.org. "wordsmith of syhlleti.org has started writing an Intimate History of Bengal with first three releases, starting at http://personal.vsnl.com/calcutta/bengal.html. His idea is to make it somewhat like a Global Contributory Project where different contributors contribute on it. The "intimate" history has to be intimate in theme, presentation and ideas. The contemporary relevance of such Project is novel and new, but its consolidated effect is always old and the same lession of history - those who tend to forget history are condemned to relive it" ________________________________________________________________________ Send free SMS using the Yahoo! Messenger. Go to http://in.mobile.yahoo.com/new/pc/ From ustadv at yahoo.com Thu Jun 19 22:56:02 2003 From: ustadv at yahoo.com (ustadv at yahoo.com) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 10:26:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] typocity update Message-ID: <20030619172602.98955.qmail@web41810.mail.yahoo.com> TYPOCITY UPDATE Sorry for a much delayed posting, but much happened in the meantime. Here is a report: [TYPOCITY is a project that aims to document and analyze interesting and rare instances of typography throughout the city of Bombay from the point of view of graphic design, production technique and social significance.] Excursions and Observations: In the last few months we have been making excursions into different parts of the city and photographing interesting typographic instances. These journeys have made us tourists in the city we know well. We are like alien observers in a city of typefaces. In the topography of typography some texts occupy lofty hoardings while others exist on lowly mud flaps, some texts never move out of their con-text, while some letters litter everyplace. Texts occupy all parts of the ecosystem, they can be found on rice grains to road markings, from tall buildings to manhole covers� On the city is superimposed a Typocity. We have uncovered an entire society of text with its own class and caste systems - font families with different tastes, habits, customs and aspirations. There is the working class font and the high society type face, the conservative types and the flamboyant sorts, the left aligned, the right aligned and some with no justification. What significantly demarks these communities from one another is their dress sense, the stance they pose in, the status symbols they are adorned with� In the different styles and attitudes of these calligraphies we see the different facets of Mumbai proclaimed. Although most excursions are planned and the area and route pre-determined, we are often led away into bylanes of fresh discovery. As we encountered expressive calligraphy and indigenous typefaces we were also struck by the knowledge that how rapidly these might disappear. The ominous sign-age: We were looking for a single image which could define the purpose of this project. We found this: A hoarding carrying a message from the Traffic Police, sponsored by an advertising agency. It has two vehicle license plates stuck on it. One license plate has the alpha-numerals written in a simple, clear, straightforward font. Next to this a comment says �Fine� - implying that this is the way a proper license plate ought to be. Next to this is another license plate which has a decorative font and a border design with hearts and arrows. The comment next to this says �Fine (Rs 500/-)�. The traffic department which has already outlawed whimsical number plates on vehicles and introduced a standardized format is going to begin implementing this law very soon. The writing is on the wall. However the day we went to photograph this hoarding we found that the overnight squall had damaged it. The proper number plate had come unstuck and fallen on the footpath while the faulty number plate was intact. Research and Documentation: To focus our research we have demarked areas for detailed study. This classification system has been devised to study specific things in detail, discover themes within them and follow their evolutionary paths. The material to be documented and reinterpreted within each category will be chosen based on factors such as production technique, unique design, location, time period, social significance, danger of extinction etc. These categories have been chosen based on our initial research: Transport sticker art on taxis number plate design Food hawkers and vendors - signage on thelas and vans restaurants - menu cards and wall menus Shop Signage art deco shops hairdressers tailors jewelers Posters hand painted - film posters and political posters cheaply printed - posters of circuses, nautankis, C-grade movies Hand Bills and Stickers lottery tickets bills and stickers of - sexologists, astrologers, political activists Street street signs street shops graffiti collages streets with a typographic character Architectural signage on old textile mills and buildings typographic forms on places of worship typographic forms on monuments and heritage structures Technology old technology - lettraset, block printing, typewriters, dot matrix printouts archaic electronic displays - at railway stations, old elevators, hotel lobbies Iconography the �dubbawalla� city code markings on rail fare charts, tickets, lamp posts, benches Personal signage name plates and door plates letterheads and visiting cards of magicians, quacks and performers Festival text in rangoli, thermocol cutouts, hand embroidered on cloth These categories are fluid and evolving and may be reorganized as needed to better express the intent of the project. See images on typocity.com. Launching shortly Production: For the purpose of documentation we are using two 35mm SLR manual cameras. We shoot an average of three rolls in a single excursion thus collecting more than a hundred typographic instances in a day. We process the negatives and directly scan them at a high resolution. The most interesting photographs are then chosen and sorted into different folders in the computer according to our classification system. Archiving and Interpretation: We are currently in the process of building a website for the project where the photographs shall be uploaded for public access. We are also evolving ideas to present the collected material in ways which elucidate its importance interestingly. The website shall grow to include interactive essays, design layouts and games using the collected material. Rare and interesting typefaces shall be converted to digital fonts which shall be freely downloadable form the website. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com From goswamin1 at rediffmail.com Fri Jun 20 14:51:38 2003 From: goswamin1 at rediffmail.com (Naresh Goswami) Date: 20 Jun 2003 09:21:38 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] (no subject) Message-ID: <20030620092138.27694.qmail@webmail16.rediffmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030620/b54bd28e/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- Dear all Here are a few interesting observations about the weekly bazaars in east Delhi. These are preliminary notings. Pl. have a critical look and let me know of your valuable inputs and comments. Regards Naresh Goswami A day at Gokul Puri Bazaar Gokul puri is an urban village situated on the northeast boundary of Delhi and counts Gurjar, as it’s the original inhabitants. But like other such villages that have lost their way into the entrails of urbanisation Gokulpuri is also a vast zigzag expanse of human cluster where migrants have out numbered the natives. My three visits to the village colony were no less than a revelation to me, because at the stage of writing the proposal, Gokulpuri had appeared to be a small point in the larger context of this demographic zone. But as I made progressive investigation into the field, the notion had to be substantially revised. It turned to be far bigger an area than i had expected. The fact that Gokul puri is a sort of frontline settlement to a vast area, which progressively merges with the territory of UttarPradesh, enhances the importance of this market. The Gokul puri bazaar is perhaps largest in the entire zone of the proposed area of our study. With a three km long trunk line and three branch lines this bazaar is spatially more extensive than any other market in our proposed area of study. In terms of variety of goods, size of shops, number of both vendors and buyers and total collection of money at the end of the day, no other market comes any near to it. Pravin Jain, who is famous for his quality petticoats, says that Gokul puri is a dream deal for most of the shopkeepers. So much so that even after paying ‘Hafta’ to the police and local bigwigs you still feel satisfied and happy at the end of the day. What makes this bazaar different from its counterparts in the whole area is the variety and a certain tinge of contemporary fashion. And so here you find quite a good number of shops selling Jeans and T-shirts. The presence of a large shoe market within the Mangle Bazaar of GokulPuri gives a distinct character to it.To have two three shops selling the same stuff is quite a common sight in any weekly bazaar, but here the scenario is all too different. Though apparently a part of Tuesday market the shoe wing sends out a sense of being something complete and independent on its own rather than being a subsidiary part of the weekly market. Later I found that this was not a matter of impreesion alone, in fact, it has had an independent status. It was merged with the mangal(tuesday) bazaar only four years ago. Actually the two haats were held on the same day but their venues were away from each other; the shoe bazaar for instance had a separate venue on the other side of the trunk road.Three years back a fly over was commissioned on the Gokul puri crossing and so with the construction work getting underway this bazaar had to be shifted to the inner circle of Gokul puri. This was how the shoe bazar lost its separate identity and ended up being just one more section in the Mangal Bazaar. The sheer size and length of it, however, invites you to go deeper into its constitution. So, last time I found myself taking a round of the shoe market in search of such a vendor who could give me more information about it. With their trendy assortment of shoes —often local remakes of famous brand names, the young shop keepers were busy with buyers. Poonam chand chauhan is a middle aged person with a rugged and tough looking face. He was sitting on ground with his shoes carefully lined up on a black polythene sheet. poonam chand has been in this profession for fifteen years. When I asked him about the organisation of weekly markets and time of his entry into this bazaar, he refused to be specific and rather took me on a short tour of contemporary history of weekly haats. Before he came over to this area, Poonam chand had a regular ‘Thiya’ at the famed chor bazaar. The latter, it may be recalled here was a huge market of everyday articles that was closed down about four years ago and the space thus reclaimed was turned into a park. The vendors, shopkeeper, thus dislocated were given an alternative space near Jama Masjid. But the place was too small to accommodate all the shopkeepers. This whole exercise of offering an alternative site was an eyewash, said Poonam Chand. According to him the bazaar could never pick in a new setting. The disorganisation of the market network and the resulting dislocation meant an irreparable fall in income for most of the vendors and shopkeepers. As a consequence, many people closed down their business and moved out to other places; Poonam Chand is but one victim of the tragic closure of chor bazar. He is angry with the way labourers and daily wage earners have been evicted in the name of keeping the city ‘clean and Green’, the man has not been able to recover from that loss now he has limited his business largely to selling second hand shoes, that he buys in bulk from Raghubir Nagar. From bfs at bgl.vsnl.net.in Fri Jun 20 15:13:05 2003 From: bfs at bgl.vsnl.net.in (bfs) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 15:13:05 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Call for papers Deep Focus Message-ID: <005301c33710$5a053140$968041db@vsnl.net.in> Call for papers Deep Focus "I think of theory as a practice that changes your life entirely because it acts on your conscience. Of course, theory becomes a mere accessory to practice when it speaks from a safe place, while practice merely illustrates theory when the relationship between the two remains one of domination-submission and of totalization. I see theory as a constant questioning of the framing of consciousness-a practice capable of informing another practice, such as film production, in a reciprocal challenge. " -Trinh T. Minh-Ha in an interview with Scott Mc Donald in November 1989. * Deep Focus a film quarterly, has evolved over the past 20 years as a serious film journal that recognizes cinema as the most potent form of expression to emerge in our times. The effort has been to understand as well as critique our immediate reality, the experience of the everyday, the existing structures and values by a reading, an interpretation and an understanding of popular films and films by cinema's masters. We invite papers for our 2003 general issue, which we would like to publish before the International Film Festival of India (October 2003) where it will be displayed and where we meet one another. Our next issue (slated for Jan-Feb 2004) however, would be a thematic issue focusing on war crimes, representation of war in cinema in postmodern times and its re-coloniality. For the general issue we would like to invite papers: i. Articles: ranging from 3,000-10,000 words ii. Film reviews: 1,000 words + iii. Interviews with film directors, film makers iv. Reports on film festivals, or seminars on films v. Book Reviews Language: Deep Focus hopes to employ a language of cinema that is humanistic in its critique. The mixing of different modes of writing; the mutual challenge of theoretical and poetical, discursive and "non-discursive" languages, the strategic use of archetypal imageries in exposing stereotypical thinking. Deadline: 15th August 2003. Perhaps it is evident why we choose Sarai Readers List to issue our call for papers. We are looking for a space that speaks a language of cinema that is familiar to our lives. So please send us your papers to the following: No. 33/1-9 and 1-10, Thyagaraj Layout, Jai Bharathi Nagar, Maruthi Sevanagar P.O., Bangalore - 560 033. Ph: 5492774, 549277 E-mail: bfs at bgl.vsnl.net.in *Framer Framed (1992) Trinh T. Minh-Ha; Routledge:New York and London Regards Shireen Deep Focus/Bangalore Film Society -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030620/6ee6b356/attachment.html From geert at desk.nl Sat Jun 21 04:57:09 2003 From: geert at desk.nl (geert lovink) Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 09:27:09 +1000 Subject: [Reader-list] invitation to join discordia weblog References: <005301c33710$5a053140$968041db@vsnl.net.in> Message-ID: <026901c33783$7b42e190$f501a8c0@geert> Announcing the launch of DISCORDIA: --a collaborative weblog working at the intersections of art, dissent, theory, tech culture and politics. http://discordia.us Discordia is an online discussion forum where YOU post and moderate and filter the content. Non-English threads are encouraged. Discordia is not a replacement for mailing lists and is pronounced "Discordia 'R Us." Discordia has been developed by a diverse group of people distributed across six time zones working together exclusively online. Discordia is now ready to welcome participation from people in any time zone writing in any language. Read our Why text and FAQ before you start: http://www.discordia.us/scoop/special/whydiscordia/ http://www.discordia.us/scoop/special/faq From menso at r4k.net Sun Jun 22 16:59:46 2003 From: menso at r4k.net (Menso Heus) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 13:29:46 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] Weapons of Mass Destruction Found Message-ID: <20030622112945.GU44756@r4k.net> http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s885280.htm "They came into the theatre, searched the place and found 300 weapons, which have been used as props in several films and plays." Menso -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know. -- Louis Armstrong -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From eye at ranadasgupta.com Tue Jun 24 09:41:37 2003 From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 09:41:37 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Flesh and political assassinations Message-ID: You will have seen the story of how the US bombarded with "Hellfire" missiles a convoy of SUVs heading to the Syrian border in the belief that it carried Saddam's sons, and perhaps Saddam himself. They are now taking bits of flesh from the wreckage to test it for presidential DNA. Given the fact that the US is supposedly occupying Iraq, this strikes one as a particularly messy and - is the word appropriate? - distasteful way of going about a political assassination. Can't the "overwhelming force" of the US army be used to stop a few Mercedes and their desperate inmates - even if they are heavily armed? There was something very intimate about 20th century assassinations, from Franz Ferdinand onwards. You got close, you suddenly brandished your gun in the crowd, people screamed... Even the assassination attempts launched by the US government on leaders they didn't like were conducted by proxies operating in this way. Of course this is a war situation where killing is legitimised and where it is therefore better to unleash greater force at less risk. But it is also a quintessentially 21st century assassination, whose form is determined from beginning to end by technology. It begins with the tapping of a satellite phone conversation "involving either Saddam or his sons" - the US is currently flying U-2 spy planes and RC-135 electronic eavesdropping aircraft over Iraq on a regular basis in order to, as the lingo has it, "scoop up" electronic emissions and define targets. On this basis the army launches a Predator "drone" aircraft, an unmanned aeroplane (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV) operated remotely. The remote operators fire from the Predator "an undisclosed number" of Hellfire missiles, laser-guided missiles designed for air-to-surface "anti-armour" use (there's an interesting article about it in Armor magazine, entitled, along the lines of "Get the most from your washing powder/life insurance etc", "Getting the most from a lethal weapon system"). Presumably these ordinary street cars were completely destroyed by the missiles. Then comes the verification stage. Of course there are no actual people at the scene - except the dead ones in the burning yuppy cars. reconnaissance satellites deliver clear photographs to the military which cannot, however, show who has been killed. then DNA experts are dispatched to collect the fragments of charred flesh and bone that have been dispersed all around the site, bag them and take them to a lab for DNA testing. Obviously at some point the US military has gathered DNA from close relatives of Saddam. a man is a fragile thing. why does it require such a gargantuan operation to kill one? it is all about that faceless "resistance" that the US is facing, the bunch of fanatics who "resist" - not only the US, but history. "Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said on the same program that any confirmation of the death of Mr. Hussein would serve to undercut the morale of fighters who are staging hit-and-run attacks on American soldiers and at the same time instill confidence among the broader Iraqi public." Since everyone, from the military itself to the aid workers trying to fix water pipes, is waiting for this "resistance" to come to its (inevitable) end, the death of Saddam - if you believe that he is in some way behind all of it - is a crucial military objective. But there is something deeply disgusting about this whole operation. I'm not talking about the "shoot first identify later" ethos where terrifying force is used on the basis of a mere suspicion (although I've just read a more recent report from the BBC which said that this attack may have taken place not in Iraq but over the border in Syria; and though no one knows who else was among the dead it certainly killed 5 Syrian border guards). I'm talking about the depersonalisation of everything which finds its culmination in the gloved and masked collection of DNA. DNA identification means that you can destroy a body entirely and still know who it was. people are not confronted with a human form when they go to identify, just with matter. As the NYT delicately puts it: "The official said a team was moving in to try to recover the DNA of those in the convoy, but it was unclear if they had yet arrived at the scene." "Recover the DNA"! Do they leave the body parts and take *only* the DNA? No: what it means by "DNA" is not beautiful double helices but bits of leg and face and intestine. "DNA" is an almost comic abstraction. But somewhere there is a similarity in structure between the reduction of individuals - enemies, human beings, political leaders - to genetic material, and the entire "viral" model according to which the US represents its enemy. The US imagines an enemy that can have no true picture of the world, that does not act according to "analysis" or "opinion", but who is "infected" with fanatical anti-American feeling by other "carriers" - a chain of contagion that leads back, ultimately, to the superhuman originators of evil such as Saddam or Osama bin Laden. This is exactly the context of the US' self-serving arguments that Iraqi resistance *can only* be kept alive by a weakened but still living Saddam, who must therefore, in a Lord of the Rings-style scenario, be finally destroyed in order for his evil influence to end. In destroying Saddam's person, then, it is not that the US military is deprived of a final image of the person who designed an evil regime, because this is a struggle not against people but against Evil. The laboratories who process his DNA, then, are looking not at fragments of the enemy but at *precisely* the enemy itself. R ::::::::::::::::::::: Rana Dasgupta www.ranadasgupta.com ::::::::::::::::::::: From sarang_shidore at yahoo.com Tue Jun 24 16:28:28 2003 From: sarang_shidore at yahoo.com (Sarang Shidore) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:28:28 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Letter from Istanbul Message-ID: "From Pakistan?" asked the storekeeper. No, I said, India. `Ahh....Hindistan!` he exclaimed. I was relaxing at a roadside CD store in Sultanahmet, the heart of old Istanbul. It is a beautiful, breezy evening outside as I am writing this. and the street is bustling - but not overcrowded - with Turks and some tourists strolling by. Earlier, I spent almost an hour at the music store, browsing through the latest Turkish music. Being a worldbeat fan, I was already familiar with the biggest stars here - Tarkan, Mustafa Sandal, Sezen Aksu. But the young, hip Turkish guy at the counter (who sported a cream-coloured beret) had been playing CD`s for me cheerfully from some really good artists I had never heard of before - Gokhan Ozen, Izel, Kaan Gokman - all sorts of latest Turkish techno-fusion and rock. His boss showed up halfway thru and offered me "chai". So there I was sitting back in a comfy chair watching the road pass by with feet tapping fusion music belting out from the store`s speakers, and sipping tea served Turkish style (without milk but with sugar, served in a small distinctively-shaped glass) It is difficult for me to descibe my feelings at arriving in this magnificent city . All I can say is that I am simply overwhelmed by its beauty and dynamism. From 350 C.E. to the early 20th century Istanbul was one of the worlds largest and most international cities - every inch a London or New York of its time. 1100 years as the capital of Western civilization, and then 500 years the focal point of the Islamic world has an impact, and it hits you everywhere you go here. If you want to really see where East meets West, come to Istanbul. Kipling probably would have had a heart attack in seeing how effortlessly - on the surface at least - do the two shimmy together, sometimes blending, otherwise apart, but always in harmony. Thoroughly Westernized as well as modern, Istanbul can be easily mistaken for any European city. The stores are arty, European-style, the fashions daring, the infrastructure (highways, telecommunications, public sanitation) excellent. But look closer and the East is always there, from the haunting call to prayer heard in almost any part of the city five times a day, to the multi-colored hijabs that some of the young women don to the inviting smells of Doner Kebap that fill the air from roadside kiosks. Men walking with arms around each others` shoulders mingle easily with grandmas in sunglasses. Minarets rub shoulders with multi-storeyed concrete, and tea-stalls and kiosks selling nuts and roasted corn cobs jostle with fast food joints. There is always plenty of time to do anything, and bargaining is always possible, as long as you know the ropes. The politics is a mess, inflation high, the people happy, families mostly intact. No guns, little crime, hardly any drugs, and the easy informality of the people here is a welcome change from the strictly rules-based, disinfectant culture of the USA. Talking about hijabs (and no I don`t wish to fixate on them as the Western press routinely seems to) I have never seen women as Western and simultaneously as Islamic as I have here. An amazing diversity of attittudes to traditional islamic dress seem to co-exist here. A majority of the middle and upper classes are dressed in the latest Western (specially European) fashions, and Turkey has a large middle class. But a chunk of women - some of them apparently highly educated - choose to don the headscarf. It is a trend that has accelerated over the last 10 years, I am told. I have seen couples holding hands and being quite lovy-dovy - the man in a Gap outfit and the woman in an elegant (ankle-length) skirt, jacket and hijab. Yesterday, I spotted a young woman smoking away to glory, but not a single strand of hair managed to show itself through her headscarf! Only in Turkey.... I have been here for only 48 hours, but I have seen a lot already. It helps that I have two good friends in Turkey. Serra teaches at Istanbul University, and my old friend from my UT days, Derek, recently moved with his Turkish wife to Ankara (they drove up to Istanbul over the weekend). So I am getting very much an insiders view of this country. So far, I have seen the Aya Sofya, the Blue Mosque, and the immense Topkapi Palace. I have been driven along the Bosphorus coast and watched the ships sail through its beautiful blue, blue waters. I have crossed the Bosphorus bridge between Europe and Asia and taken in a superb long walk along the Asian shore at at Kalamisi. I have eaten some excellent Turkish food and drunk countless cups - or rather glasses - of "chai". The Aya Sofya or Sancta Sophia was Christendom"s greatest church till 1453, when Mehmet the conqueror captured Constantinopole and made it Istanbul. Its dome is an amazing achievement - thin like a gossamer and massive it just seems to float there with apparently no major support. The effect has to be seen to be believed. The Blue Mosque is a little less ambitious from the inside, but it has the same effect from the outside that the Aya Sofya manages to achieve from within. The Topkapi palace was the seat of the Ottoman (the European corruption of the word Osman) sultans till the 1850s. It is so massive and has so many fascinating things to see that it took me most of today to go through it. The harem, the imperial treasury, the stunning Bosphorus views, and the pavilions are some of its highlights. I want to write much much more, but thanks to the my frustrations with the Turkish keyboard I can`t type as effortlessly as I usually do. So I will leave many of the details to my next letter. My week has only just begun and much still lies ahead. Sarang in Istanbul Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! From epk at xs4all.nl Wed Jun 25 19:25:20 2003 From: epk at xs4all.nl (Next 5 Minutes) Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 15:55:20 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] Next 5 Minutes 4: Preliminar Program Message-ID: A N N O U N C E M E N T NEXT 5 MINUTES 4 International Festival of Tactical Media PRELIMINARY PROGRAM Amsterdam 11 - 14 September 2003 De Balie / Paradiso / Melkweg / Waag Society NIM Montevideo / Imagine IC / SALTO http://www.n5m.org What is Next 5 Minutes? Next 5 Minutes is a festival that brings together art, campaigns, experiments in media technology, and transcultural politics. Next 5 Minutes revolves around the notion of tactical media, the fusion of art, politics and media. The festival is organised irregularly, when the urgency is felt to bring a new edition of the festival together. How did this particular edition of the festival come about? The fourth edition of the Next 5 Minutes festival is the result of a collaborative effort of a variety of organisations, initiatives and individuals dispersed world-wide. The program and content of the festival is prepared through a series of Tactical Media Labs (TMLs) organised locally in different cities around the globe. This series of Tactical Media Labs started on September 11, 2002 in Amsterdam and they continue internationally right up to the festival in September. TMLs have been organised in: Amsterdam, Sydney, Cluj, Barcelona, Delhi, New York, Singapore, Birmingham, Nova Scotia, Berlin, Chicago, Portsmouth, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Dubrovnik, and Zanzibar. The results of the various TMLs are published in a web journal, at: http://www.n5m4.org What are the main themes of N5M4? The program of Next 5 Minutes 4 is structured along four core thematic threads, bringing together a host of projects and debates. These four thematic threads are: "Deep Local", which explores the ambiguities of connecting essentially translocal media cultures with local contexts. "The Disappearing of the Public" deals with the elusiveness of the public that tactical media necessarily needs to interface with, and considers new strategies for engaging with or redefining 'the public'. "The Tactics of Appropriation" questions who is appropriating whom? Corporate, state, or terrorist actors all seem to have become effective media tacticians, is the battle for the screen therefore lost? "The Tactical and the Technical" finally questions the deeply political nature of (media-)technology, and the role that the development of new media tools plays in defining, enabling and constraining its tactical use. The festival explores a variety of forms and formats, from low-tech to high-tech, from seminars and debates to performances and urban interventions, screenings, installations as well as sound projects and live media, a pitching session, a tool builders fair and open unmoderated spaces. Defining for tactical media is not the medium itself, but the attitude towards media. ___________________________________ MORE INFORMATION: How can I find out more about the festival? By reading on in this document, but also by consulting the website of the festival at: http://www.n5m.org The site also contains a Frequently Asked Questions section that addresses many practical questions you may have. Further information can be obtained from the festival office: info at n5m.org ___________________________________ TICKETS: How can I reserve tickets? You can only reserve day tickets and passe-partouts, which give access to all programs of the festival. You can reserve tickets at: tickets at n5m.org Ticket prices: Day Ticket: 20 Euro Passe-Partout: 35 Euro These tickets offer access to all venues and events, including the evening programs. Tickets for single programs are not sold, except for the evening performance programs. ___________________________________ How to get accommodation? In the beginning of August we will publish details on how to find cheap and affordable accommodation close to the festival venues. Follow the link "Accommodation" on the front page of our web site http://www.n5m.org ANNOUNCEMENTS LIST: Receive our announcements via e-mail!! More information at: http://www.n5m.org/mailman/listinfo/n5m4-announce ___________________________________ NEXT 5 MINUTES 4 - OVERVIEW OF THREADS & THEMES: * THE DISAPPEARINGPUBLIC Full Info: http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7#dis-public Introduction: Interfacing with the public ? There is no public, but where are our publics ? In more than one sense, the practices and promises of tactical media are tied up with the idea that in the last decades we have witnessed the disappearance of The Public. One big reason for this is the explosion of heterogeneous media and heterogeneous media practices, and the fact boundaries between media spaces have become increasingly porous (i.e. between media domains that are nationally and culturally distinct). Another reason is that the idea of " normal people ", on which the concept of The Public relied, has been thoroughly undermined, not in the least part because these people increasingly came and put themselves in the picture, aided by media. (Thus, the differences among various not so normal people can these days no longer be easily airbrushed out.) Funnily enough, also for those media practitioners, artists and activists, who feel enthusiastic about the disappearance of The Public, the question of the public is no less acute ! In situated media interventions, the particularity of context tend to take the foreground, and precisely not a disembodied generality such as " The Public ". Here margins count as a resource rather than as constraint, and they can and should be celebrated as such. But when it comes to these kind of projects, the question of who exactly one is interfacing with often comes up as a pressing concern. A totally eclipsed public, that is, an empty hall, an empty street, or empty chairs, many have found out, is not an ideal situation either. And when the public " just doesn't get it ", we can't just dismiss the possibility that there may be a problem with the performance itself. And what if one ends up " not liking " one's public ? More importantly, a constructive picture of who or what one is trying to prompt with a given media intervention, remains totally crucial. While The Public has disappeared, we thus keep and should keep asking where/who/what is the public? In working with that question, the issue of the " erosion " of the public domain, especially with the rise to dominance of commercial mass media, and, it should be added, after the disappearance of The Public, inevitably comes up. In this way, it is easy to get caught between excitement about the disappearance of The Public, puzzlement about appropriate publics, and resistance to the " erosion of the public domain ". But, that last diagnosis might also prompt us to go and look for the missing public, and try to conjure one up. The question thus is, what are the techniques and tactics available, and which should be developed, to make a public appear ? Sections: - Testimony and Witness - Tactical Cartography: Diagrams of Power (Visualising for the Public Eye) - Archives of Resistance - Critical Games - Urban Interventions Urban Interventions http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7#urban-int Where else to find the public than in the streets? The move of alternative and resistant media cultures out of the ghetto of the internet into the streets is a rather obvious one. The tactic is comparable to that of art moving beyond the museum and gallery space. Invariably, as soon as such media-interventions leave the relatively unfettered space of the net, or the sanctioned art spaces, and enter public urban space, they encounter an entirely new set of conflicts and constraints. Despite all these restrictions public urban space remains one of the ultimate social interfaces that we want to question and investigate at Next 5 Minutes 4. - "Packing Geldershoofd" by Archeopteryx (Izhevsk) The art group Archeopteryx from Izhevsk (Russia) proposes to execute their project PACKING on the blind façade of one of the large High-rises of the Bijlmer district (Amsterdam South East), called "Geldershoofd". The high-rise will disappear within a few years as part of an urban restructuring plan. The original idea of the Package action was to mark 9-storey housing blocks (the traditional Russian standardised housing "boxes") in various Russian cities with giant painted protection labels, normally used on transport boxes. The traditional meaning of these labels is apparently projected onto the residents inside these "boxes", urging to protect the people inside: DO NOT WET, DO NOT BREAK, HANDLE WITH CARE. http://www.n5m4.org/journal.shtml?118+575+1638 - "Escaping Oblivion" (Bus trip) / Tactical Tourism A bus trip to sites of contestation in and around Amsterdam During its entire history the city of Amsterdam has been a place where lots of social, political, religious and cultural issues have been contested. Primarily aimed at our international guests, but also with the intention of informing a wider audience about the historical and cultural context in which the Next 5 Minutes originated, this bus trip takes you to a number off unusual or unexpected sites where the sometimes invisible past of Amsterdam will be resurrected. - Mobile Transgenic Fast-Food Test Lab Critical Art Ensemble and Beatirz da Costa http://www.critical-art.net/biotech/index.html - Aar Paar Project Collaborative Public Art Project by Artists in India and Pakistan http://www.members.tripod.com/aarpaar2/02.htm ___________________________________ * DEEP LOCAL Full info: http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7#deep-loc Introduction: Globalisation is renowned for its de-localising effects, as trans-national business and policies erode local cultures and harness them for their own ends. But, far from extinguishing locality, globalisation as a process also invites the creation of new kinds of localness. "In this process of producing new localities the global is constantly being reformulated as a summary of singular new localities." The spread of telecenters, and urban digital culture projects are forceful examples of recent experiments in trans-locality. On the one hand, the adaptation of digital and other media to local contexts serve urgent needs : here it is decided among others who will and will not participate in digital cultures and in what ways. But these projects also provide opportunities to unearth fixed assumptions, and propose forms of situated activism and embedded innovation, as opposed to lab-based forms of "research and development". Sections: - New Landscapes for New Media - Language - Enduring Post Communism: Networks of Patronage - Laboratory Italy - Bodies of Globalisation (Global AIDS activism and the multitudes) - Freedom of movement == Freedom of information? ___________________________________ * THE TACTICS OF APPROPRIATION! Full info: http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7#approp Introduction: From its earliest articulations, tactical media practitioners have always recognised "appropriation" as one of the prime constitutive elements of the tactical. From the re-purposing of the fruits of the consumer electronics industry,(exploiting video's forensic immediacy to institute a subject centred realism) through to later phases of new media tactics, as evinced by the work of groups like RTMark, and the practices of logo tinkering, and imposturing, blossoming on the Net. Thus rather than complaining about the speed with which our tactics are stolen it is time to recognise that tactical media has been in the appropriation game all along. Indeed it is in the precise moment of appropriation that power becomes momentarily visible. And here lies the opportunity for the balance of power to be re-defined, for the weak once again to turn the tables on the strong. Appropriation is the name of the game. The important question is who appropriates whom? There are some who would rather seek solace in the belief that a new social movement is emerging from the formation of alliances between a multitude of heterogeneous critical groups and micro-movements. But those who believe that mass movements are immune from appropriation should observer the ease with which Chirac together with a coalition of EU member states have appropriated the mass peace demonstrations to legitimise their geo-political stance visa a vie America. The scope and logic of appropriation are infinite. Here as elsewhere power exists both where it is enacted and where it is being challenged If appropriation is indeed one of the crucial operators of media politics, the question how that condition can be effectively addressed (rather than escaped from), is especially important. So we can ask questions like: in what ways are opposition politics these days constrained by logics of appropriation? and how can we conceive of appropriation as something that enables instead of threatens antagonistic politics? Sections: - Tactical Media in Crisis (Strategies for Tactical Media) - The Indymedia Debate - Uses and Abuses of the Language of Human Rights - Contestational Science (Reconfiguring Scientific Networks of Power) - Tactical Media from the "Dark Side" ___________________________________ * THE TACTICAL AND THE TECHNICAL Full info: http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7#tactec Introduction: Increasingly the new right wing political movements in Europe and elsewhere have created their own tactical media. Adopting the same principles of resistant comments to main-stream politics, and as in the case of altermedia.info even the (web-)styling of indymedia and other open publication platforms, to involve the audience in their narrative and promote reactionary politics. In Amsterdam some conservative Muslim groups have been using the open public channels on the local cable system to distribute fundamentalist satellite television programs originating from the Middle East, camouflaged within the highly multi-cultural programming of the open channels on Amsterdam cable-TV. Is the "dark side" learning the tricks of the trade from the benevolent media tacticians? Are these tactics inherent to a specific form of politics? Sections: - Radio Space "wireless in your psyche" - Paper tactics and the Revenge of Print - Recuperating Video's Meaning - The Tactical Media Tool Builders Fair The Tactical Media Tool Builders Fair Next 5 Minutes 4 will host a mini-fair of tools developed by artists and activists, running continuously during the entire festival. At any time three or four projects will be presented simultaneously in the fair-space by the makers themselves who will be up for questions and discussion. The emphasis of the fair space will be focused primarily on streaming media, wireless media, open source publication tools and tactical gizmo's. However, also artists' devices that can be used by others and conceptual tools can be presented in the space. Presentations rotate every few hours. An exact schedule of projects and presentation blocks will be published at the festival. Some of the areas covered by the fair include: - Updates on Streaming Cultures A meeting ground for tactical streaming media, artists, activist, net.audio, hybrid media experiments. The streaming media mini-fair is a follow-up to and update of the successful net.congestion festival, held in Amsterdam in October 2000 - What has changed since, where has the field moved after the commercial streaming industry collapsed and virtually disappeared? See also the archive of net.congestion: http://net.congestion.org - The Desire to be Wireless A special focus area will be the domain of wireless media and the cultural forms that spawn from it. The technology of wireless networks has become democratised in many ways, nit just via cell phones. There are a number of projects that experiment with the possibility of using wireless networks to provide free access to the internet in public space (the so-called wireless commons). We wish to explore this terrain via a series of performances and experimental projects. Besides offering interesting avenues for artistic experimentation the wireless technologies also offer opportunities for new forms of low-cost mobile reporting, as well as to set up local networks in places where a 'wired' infrastructure is not available. - Open Source Publication Tools: A host of open source publication tools have hit the gift-market, content management systems, on-line databases, weblogging software, schedulers, reporting tools, web zine tools, and even complete on-line video editing systems. A selection of some of the most noteworthy publication tools will be presented in this section. - Tactical Gizmology Beside software tools some activist have also focused on creating machines for tactical intervention work. IAA's pamphleteering robot and graffiti writer are famous examples of such tactical gizmo's, but also repurposed consumer electronics and robotics appliances allow for all kinds of unforeseen uses.... ___________________________________ WORKSHOPS Next 5 Minutes 4 will host an extensive series of workshops that will focus in a more concentrated setting on various aspects of the overall festival program. The workshops will have a more practical and 'hands-on' character. The workshops will feed on the availability of a unique group of highly experienced practitioners and specialist brought together for the festival in Amsterdam from many different countries. The main workshop locations will be the Waag Society, Imagine IC (Amsterdam South East), the Artlab of Montevideo and a dedicated and fully equipped workshop space at the Melkweg. The workshops will start in the days prior to the festival and will extend for two days beyond the three main festival days, thus making available a full week for the workshop program. The registration for workshops will be open for festival participants and audience, but is limited to a maximum number of participants. Where possible audience facilities will be made available for people who want to follow the workshops as listeners. At the 2000 net.congestion festival we discovered that the interest for this possibility was surprisingly large. The exact scheme of workshops including dates, themes and locations will be published well in advance of the festival. Themes will include: - Open Source Streaming Tools - Multimedia Archiving & Databases - Open Source Publication Platforms - Digital Story Telling - IPL for the Digital Domain and Censorship - Hybridising Media (tactical combinations of radio, TV, internet & satellite technology) - Wireless Media - Satellite Technology - Tactical Gizmology - Contestational Robotics - IAA & Hakctivist http://www.hactivist.com/cdl_mission.html http://www.appliedautonomy.com/ - TV Hacking - prepared with Kees Stad ___________________________________ PITCHING SESSION Find people to work with!!!! The pitching session is an attempt to create a place were media tacticians can find collaborators for whatever project they happen to be working on. A meeting ground where people can pitch conceptual, practical, technical, artistic or activist projects to find the expertise they are missing - the expertise that YOU are missing!! Contact the production office in time for the pitching session. This will provide a unique opportunity for finding the collaborator you dearly missed, or the project you would love to work on, but you didn't know existed. Create your own solutions! Pitch at Next 5 Minutes 4 and find your unknown other..... ___________________________________ THEORY SLAMS At a few key-points in the program we will invite some of our most articulate guest to compete in making their urgent message heard in the frame of a three-minute each theory slam contest. Every contestant has to convey the urgency of whatever she / he has to say within the next three minutes after receiving the go: verbal gymnastics for tactical media theorists! ___________________________________ PERFORMANCE PROGRAMS Next 5 Minutes 4 wishes to continue the tradition of bringing together extensive performance programs with radical art and media experiments that transcend the traditional contours of regular art and media production. In the spirit of the infamous Low-Tech Show of the previous edition and the very successful performance programs of the net.congestion festival, we want to invite performers from around the world that challenge the traditional frameworks of art and media production. Besides the four evening programs that are planned in the main festival locations (Paradiso, Melkweg, Balie), we are also looking for unconventional interventions into the public city space of Amsterdam (Urban Interventions). The TML process has so far delivered a long list of performers from many different countries and regions even beyond the sites where the various TMLs were organised. - A completely safe environment.... A completely safe environment is a co-production of De Balie and Paradiso, which is produced independently, but will be presented in the frame of the Next 5 Minutes festival. The evening program is an ironic challenge to the current security mania that has seized public discourse not only in the United States but also increasingly in horrifically safe countries such as The Netherlands. For the evening a barrage of security equipment and procedures will be installed at the entrance of the Paradiso venue to ensure a perfectly tranquil environment inside. This completely safe environment will, however, be continuously scrutinised by various advanced surveillance and tracking technologies that are aimed at ensuring a perfect safety for such an environment. The project is an attempt to find out what is required to create such a perfectly safe space and turn this into a visceral experience for the visitor. - Voicing Resistance: Hip Hop as Political Culture A performance night devoted to Hip Hop as a site of resistance that has long left its roots in the North American urbania. The performance night will bring together musicians and collectives from the USA (Code Red), the Beta Bodega Coalition ý Latin America, Brazil, as well as from urban France, Amsterdam South East, and other contested environments. - fem snd Due to the heavy under-representation of women in electronic music and dj culture, the fem snd party will focus on the aspect of giving female artists the opportunity to perform their work. Male artists are also most welcome if their work contributes to the gender discourse. Another aspect of the party will be not to try to attract attention by big names but more by extraordinary quality. Particularly emphasis is placed on artists who besides doing their own artistic work, are also active in political contexts, and in building networks and platforms for other artists. The focus is on experimental electronic club music looking for ground-breaking conceptual and technical innovations. Wherever possible we will take into consideration the role that electronic music played in triggering the economic aspects of the Net, and questions of copyright. Further details of the program will be released on the web site in the coming weeks. ___________________________________ SCREENINGS All three main festival locations (Balie, Melkweg, Paradiso) are equipped with superb screening facilities and spaces for film and video in various formats. For the festival special cinema programs will be compiled that will bring together experimental artistic productions, do-it-yourself documentaries, local media productions from around the globe, and political cinema. These thematic programs seek in part a connection with some of the thematic threads in the festival programs. We will also search for hybrid combinations of cinema and video screenings with some of the performance programs that will be part of the festival, including combinations of screened materials and live performance. Such hybrid combinations will be a special focus of the screening programs. Show & Tell: More important even than the formal screening programs of Next 5 Minutes are the possibilities created for festival participants to show and exchange materials amongst themselves during the festival. Special informal screening spaces will be installed where impromptu one to one or one to few screenings can be arranged. Furthermore the TAZ spaces will all be equipped with screening facilities to enable impromptu group screenings. ___________________________________ MEDIA LIBRARY The Media Library will be a permanent space in the festival that hosts a collection of media productions with a specific social, cultural or political agenda. Media of crisis, criticism and opposition. Media that provide an antidote to the world as we see it represented in mainstream media and current geopolitics. The Media Library can be accessed by any festival participant during the festival. Next 5 Minutes has been putting out calls for such media productions widely, but the submission is still open. The productions that you will send to us will become part of the so-called media-library. After conclusion of the festival they will become part of the Next 5 Minutes Visual Archive, which is kept at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. Contributions can be selected for special screenings at the festival, for broadcasting on local cable TV and for broadband internet distribution, in which case specific permission will be asked from the maker. We will accept contributions on all carriers (SVHS, Betacam, cd-rom, miniDV, dvd, pal/ntsc/secam, 16mm, 35mm, etc.) (VHS welcome but not preferred). Any length, any language. More information is available via the production office (info at n5m.org) ___________________________________ NEXT 5 MINUTES TV Starting 3 weeks before the festival Next 5 Minutes TV will air twice per week a live studio program co-produced with SALTO the local Amsterdam TV organisation, with studio guest and hosted by Erik van der Schaft, director of SALTO. During this period media productions from the Media Library will be aired every night between 00.00 and 02.00 hours on Amsterdam Cable TV. During the festival itself Next 5 Minutes will generate an intensive program of live broadcasts from the Hybrid Media Studio, interviews with festival guests, live broadcast from festival programs, and edited festival reports. ___________________________________ HYBRID MEDIA STUDIO As in previous editions, Next 5 Minutes is more than an event for presentation and debate about media, it is also an event where a lot of media-output is produced on site. The nerve centre of the media production during N5M4 will be the Hybrid Media Studio. The concept takes the fusion of different media-forms within a hybridised digital media network as its starting point. Radio, television, internet, wireless transmission, satellite and other forms of electronic media production continue to exist in their own right, but they are also more and more often combined into expanded media formats that involve two or more media at once. The Hybrid Media Studio brings these different media-forms together in one space, and connects them to all available media-infrastructures. Amsterdam offers unique possibilities for non-commercial free media programming on local TV and radio, as well as various web-casting facilities. From the Hybrid Media Studio continuous live programming will be fed to local media outlets, to international (satellite-) outlets, to national broadcasting organisations, and to local media partners in other cities in the world. What makes the studio hybrid is its trans-genre approach, and its trans-local distribution. ___________________________________ OPEN SPACE / TACTICAL AUTONOMOUS ZONES (TAZ) An element first introduced in the third edition of Next 5 Minutes in 1999 that we wish to foreground more are the Tactical Autonomous Zones. These are un-programmed but fully equipped presentation spaces where participants can sign up themselves for a presentation. The idea is to create open zones in the festival for impromptu presentations and gatherings, spaces for contestation and difference. Registration for the TAZ is open to all festival participants and works on a first come first serve basis. Proposals for the TAZ can be sent to the production office as of Monday July 21st, via: taz at n5m.org ___________________________________ N5M4 - EXTENDED A friendly post-festival networking environment Next 5 Minutes is always over-programmed because of the urgency of a multitude of concerns that characterise a world in permanent crisis. What is lost is the space for informal encounter and exchange of ideas, and the time to create new coalitions for the future. Since for logistical budgetary and many other reasons it is impossible to resolve the desire for such a less pressured environment within the festival, we have created a post-festival meeting place and work environment, ideally suited for working sessions and networking meetings. The location of this meeting is the artist-run imitative "Het Buitenland" just outside the city of Amsterdam, which includes a small camping site. The site of Het Buitenland will be equipped with basic networking facilities as well as meeting rooms and other requirements. The main function of this post-festival meeting is to set-up new co-operative projects, start longer term working relations and develop new collaborative networks between festival participants. Further information on the meeting will be posted on the announcement list of Next 5 Minutes, the web site and are available through the production office. Buitenland: http://www.buitenland.org ___________________________________ Next 5 Minutes 4 Production Office: c/o De Balie Kleine Gartmanplantsoen 10 1017 RR Amsterdam The Netherlands Tel. +31.20.55 35 171 Fax. +31.20.55 35 155 http://www.n5m.org e-mail: info at n5m.org From sadan at sarai.net Fri Jun 27 01:02:19 2003 From: sadan at sarai.net (sadan) Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 15:32:19 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] on black marketing of cinema tickets Message-ID: <200306261532.19201.sadan@sarai.net> Dear friends I came across this interesting and insightful newspaper column and thought to share it with you. cheers, sadan. 29 May, 1970, The Hindustan Times. "The Shady side of show business" Hindustan Times correspondent, New Delhi May 28. The man who realizes best (that) there is is big money in show business is the black marketeer. He feels no qualms at all. As a theater attendant who is in the ...(?) said, "why should I be sorry if people want to throw money away?" The black market price of the picture varies with the picture. Normally money is not risked on ordinary English movies. Many Hindi films and those English ones featuring actresses like Gina Lelliebridge or Raquel Welch are the ones that bring good money. A movie goer who sees a film every week said (that) tickets were sold at a profit of 30 paise to a rupee. Sometimes the profit made was cent percent. Who are the blackmarketeers? A good many are professionals. The others include members of cinema staff, students out to "earn" the pocket money, owners of cycle and motor parts and street urchins. Police says that they have conducted number of raids and often caught people red handed. They are , however, restricted by the fact that offense is non cognizable. According to a high court ruling, a black marketeer can not be arrested unless a magistrate passes an order. " If a magistrate is not present, we can not do a thing," said a crime branch officer. He felt (that) the cinema staff had a hand in the whole affairs," unless the management does something, the blackmarketeer will flourish", he said. Many Techniques As it is the whole thing has been honed down to an art (sic.). The seller usually has complete faith in the buyer. He retains one ticket for himself and sells the rest. The money is collected unobtrusively. Members of cinema staff have the advantage of not keeping any tickets for themselves. Sometimes money changes hands in a strange manner. This reporter saw a buyer hand the money to a man. The latter, making a casual sign to his accomplice, sauntered away. The accomplice cautiously deposited the tickets in the buyer's hands and then mixed with the crowd. Yet another technique is the " W.C system". With a whispered" Teen bees ke char" ( the Rs. 3.20 ticket for Rs.4) the seller enters the bathroom when it is crowded for empty ( sic.). The buyer follows and completes the transaction. Of course there are some bold people who sell the tickets openly near the cinema. The worst offenders are undoubtedly members of the cinema staff. The gate keeper of a connaught Place cinema sells tickets at a premium with the full knowledge of the management. There seems to be an organized racket, especially at the theaters around Connaught Place, the masterminds of which are , beyond doubt, the cinema staff. A cinema mananger admitted that members of his staff, especially two gate keepers and the booking clerks were involved in the business. He, however, blamed those who bought the tickets. "these persons", he said, " encourage black marketeers." He claimed to have suspended members of the staff. "the worst thing is that the buyers often defend these persons. Without the help of the clients I am powerless", he said. The managers were divided on the question of police help to apprehend the culprits. Far from helping the management the policemen are often in league with black marketeer", said one. Another, however, said the police had been very helpful and had often caught the men red handed." p.s. the responsibility of all grammatical errors is mine. From abirbazaz at rediffmail.com Sat Jun 28 09:59:01 2003 From: abirbazaz at rediffmail.com (abir bazaz) Date: 28 Jun 2003 04:29:01 -0000 Subject: Fwd: Re: [Reader-list] Kashmiri students in India... Message-ID: <20030628042901.4766.qmail@webmail7.rediffmail.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030628/b8d70d53/attachment.pl -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Mir Taqi Mir" Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Kashmiri students in India... Date: no date Size: 8597 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030628/b8d70d53/attachment.mht From eye at ranadasgupta.com Sat Jun 28 12:22:31 2003 From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 12:22:31 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Bush's Vietnam Message-ID: Important to circulate these insights into the highly manufactured language of official accounts of the war. R Published in the June 23, 2003 issue of the New Statesman Bush's Vietnam Once More, We Hear That America is Being "Sucked Into a Quagmire". The Rapacious Adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are Going Badly Wrong. http://commondreams.org/views03/0625-04.htm by John Pilger America's two "great victories" since 11 September 2001 are unraveling. In Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually no authority and no money, and would collapse without American guns. Al-Qaeda has not been defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging. Regardless of showcase improvements, the situation of women and children remains desperate. The token woman in Karzai's cabinet, the courageous physician Sima Samar, has been forced out of government and is now in constant fear of her life, with an armed guard outside her office door and another at her gate. Murder, rape and child abuse are committed with impunity by the private armies of America's "friends", the warlords whom Washington has bribed with millions of dollars, cash in hand, to give the pretence of stability. "We are in a combat zone the moment we leave this base," an American colonel told me at Bagram airbase, near Kabul. "We are shot at every day, several times a day." When I said that surely he had come to liberate and protect the people, he belly-laughed. American troops are rarely seen in Afghanistan's towns. They escort US officials at high speed in armored vans with blackened windows and military vehicles, mounted with machine-guns, in front and behind. Even the vast Bagram base was considered too insecure for the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, during his recent, fleeting visit. So nervous are the Americans that a few weeks ago they "accidentally" shot dead four government soldiers in the center of Kabul, igniting the second major street protest against their presence in a week. On the day I left Kabul, a car bomb exploded on the road to the airport, killing four German soldiers, members of the international security force Isaf. The Germans' bus was lifted into the air; human flesh lay on the roadside. When British soldiers arrived to "seal off" the area, they were watched by a silent crowd, squinting into the heat and dust, across a divide as wide as that which separated British troops from Afghans in the 19th century, and the French from Algerians and Americans from Vietnamese. In Iraq, scene of the second "great victory", there are two open secrets. The first is that the "terrorists" now besieging the American occupation force represent an armed resistance that is almost certainly supported by the majority of Iraqis who, contrary to pre-war propaganda, opposed their enforced "liberation" (see Jonathan Steele's investigation, 19 March 2003, www.guardian.co.uk). The second secret is that there is emerging evidence of the true scale of the Anglo-American killing, pointing to the bloodbath Bush and Blair have always denied. Comparisons with Vietnam have been made so often over the years that I hesitate to draw another. However, the similarities are striking: for example, the return of expressions such as "sucked into a quagmire". This suggests, once again, that the Americans are victims, not invaders: the approved Hollywood version when a rapacious adventure goes wrong. Since Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled almost three months ago, more Americans have been killed than during the war. Ten have been killed and 25 wounded in classic guerrilla attacks on roadblocks and checkpoints which may number as many as a dozen a day. The Americans call the guerrillas "Saddam loyalists" and "Ba'athist fighters", in the same way they used to dismiss the Vietnamese as "communists". Recently, in Falluja, in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, it was clearly not the presence of Ba'athists or Saddamists, but the brutal behavior of the occupiers, who fired point-blank at a crowd, that inspired the resistance. The American tanks gunning down a family of shepherds is reminiscent of the gunning down of a shepherd, his family and sheep by "coalition" aircraft in a "no-fly zone" four years ago, whose aftermath I filmed and which evoked, for me, the murderous games American aircraft used to play in Vietnam, gunning down farmers in their fields, children on their buffaloes. On 12 June, a large American force attacked a "terrorist base" north of Baghdad and left more than 100 dead, according to a US spokesman. The term "terrorist" is important, because it implies that the likes of al-Qaeda are attacking the liberators, and so the connection between Iraq and 11 September is made, which in pre-war propaganda was never made. More than 400 prisoners were taken in this operation. The majority have reportedly joined thousands of Iraqis in a "holding facility" at Baghdad airport: a concentration camp along the lines of Bagram, from where people are shipped to Guantanamo Bay. In Afghanistan, the Americans pick up taxi drivers and send them into oblivion, via Bagram. Like Pinochet's boys in Chile, they are making their perceived enemies "disappear". "Search and destroy", the scorched-earth tactic from Vietnam, is back. In the arid south-eastern plains of Afghanistan, the village of Niazi Qala no longer stands. American airborne troops swept down before dawn on 30 December 2001 and slaughtered, among others, a wedding party. Villagers said that women and children ran towards a dried pond, seeking protection from the gunfire, and were shot as they ran. After two hours, the aircraft and the attackers left. According to a United Nations investigation, 52 people were killed, including 25 children. "We identified it as a military target," says the Pentagon, echoing its initial response to the My Lai massacre 35 years ago. The targeting of civilians has long been a journalistic taboo in the west. Accredited monsters did that, never "us". The civilian death toll of the 1991 Gulf war was wildly underestimated. Almost a year later, a comprehensive study by the Medical Education Trust in London estimated that more than 200,000 Iraqis had died during and immediately after the war, as a direct or indirect consequence of attacks on civilian infrastructure. The report was all but ignored. This month, Iraq Body Count, a group of American and British academics and researchers, estimated that up to 10,000 civilians may have been killed in Iraq, including 2,356 civilians in the attack on Baghdad alone. And this is likely to be an extremely conservative figure. In Afghanistan, there has been similar carnage. In May last year, Jonathan Steele extrapolated all the available field evidence of the human cost of the US bombing and concluded that as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the bombing, many of them drought victims denied relief. This "hidden" effect is hardly new. A recent study at Columbia University in New York has found that the spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides on Vietnam was up to four times as great as previously estimated. Agent Orange contained dioxin, one of the deadliest poisons known. In what they first called Operation Hades, then changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, the Americans in Vietnam destroyed, in some 10,000 "missions" to spray Agent Orange, almost half the forests of southern Vietnam, and countless human lives. It was the most insidious and perhaps the most devastating use of a chemical weapon of mass destruction ever. Today, Vietnamese children continue to be born with a range of deformities, or they are stillborn, or the fetuses are aborted. The use of uranium-tipped munitions evokes the catastrophe of Agent Orange. In the first Gulf war in 1991, the Americans and British used 350 tonnes of depleted uranium. According to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, quoting an international study, 50 tonnes of DU, if inhaled or ingested, would cause 500,000 deaths. Most of the victims are civilians in southern Iraq. It is estimated that 2,000 tonnes were used during the latest attack. In a remarkable series of reports for the Christian Science Monitor, the investigative reporter Scott Peterson has described radiated bullets in the streets of Baghdad and radiation-contaminated tanks, where children play without warning. Belatedly, a few signs in Arabic have appeared: "Danger - Get away from this area". At the same time, in Afghanistan, the Uranium Medical Research Center, based in Canada, has made two field studies, with the results described as "shocking". "Without exception," it reported, "at every bomb site investigated, people are ill. A significant portion of the civilian population presents symptoms consistent with internal contamination by uranium." An official map distributed to non-government agencies in Iraq shows that the American and British military have plastered urban areas with cluster bombs, many of which will have failed to detonate on impact. These usually lie unnoticed until children pick them up, then they explode. In the center of Kabul, I found two ragged notices warning people that the rubble of their homes, and streets, contained unexploded cluster bombs "made in USA". Who reads them? Small children? The day I watched children skipping through what might have been an urban minefield, I saw Tony Blair on CNN in the lobby of my hotel. He was in Iraq, in Basra, lifting a child into his arms, in a school that had been painted for his visit, and where lunch had been prepared in his honor, in a city where basic services such as education, food and water remain a shambles under the British occupation. It was in Basra three years ago that I filmed hundreds of children ill and dying because they had been denied cancer treatment equipment and drugs under an embargo enforced with enthusiasm by Tony Blair. Now here he was - shirt open, with that fixed grin, a man of the troops if not of the people - lifting a toddler into his arms for the cameras. When I returned to London, I read "After Lunch", by Harold Pinter, from a new collection of his called 'War' (Faber & Faber). And after noon the well-dressed creatures come To sniff among the dead And have their lunch And all the many well-dressed creatures pluck The swollen avocados from the dust And stir the minestrone with stray bones And after lunch They loll and lounge about Decanting claret in convenient skulls ::::::::::::::::::::: Rana Dasgupta www.ranadasgupta.com ::::::::::::::::::::: From eye at ranadasgupta.com Sat Jun 28 12:48:32 2003 From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 12:48:32 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] The Little Talked-About Pleasures of Smoking Message-ID: A recent essay. Gift economy, human/industrial time, smoking. R THE LITTLE TALKED-ABOUT PLEASURES OF SMOKING Prospects for smokers are definitely getting worse. In the UK, Alan Milburn has promised to put diagrams of tar-infested lungs and choking hearts on cigarette packets, a spiteful gesture which will almost certainly adversely affect the pleasures of smoking. He’s one of a number of health ministers who are currently conspiring in Brussels to stalk poor, defenceless tobacco lovers all across the continent and turn them into paranoid, hollow-eyed outcasts. Mayor Bloomberg has banned smoking in public places in New York City, and raised the cost of smokes so high that many formerly valiant fumeurs are having to admit defeat – or (ignoble fate!) slink away to the hazy ghettos of expat Manhattanite smokers in New Jersey. When the history of the clan is written, these will be the Dark Ages. Let's face it: opposing smoking makes good political sense. To take a stand against smoking is to take a stand against Death – for a third of the people dying in the UK today would of course not die if there were no cigarettes – and that can only be a popular political platform. If your health service happens to be falling apart at the seams it is also useful to be able to share the blame with an army of anti-social addicts who asphyxiate themselves and everyone around them into a range of disgusting and very expensive diseases – and to get them to help you pay for the mess. Moreover, this morality play is unusual in our complex society for having very few ambiguities – large and irredeemably evil corporations are pitted against innocent children – and at a time when people are so cynical of the moral credentials of public figures, a politician would be a fool to turn down the part of dragon slayer. It is possibly as a result of such political exigencies that public discussion about smoking is so narrow. It is, we all know, an indisputable evil of modern society: a conspiracy of the cigarette giants, who trick people into their pharmacological trap with large-scale propaganda; and an addiction of insufficiently informed people, who smoke and spend themselves into early graves at great cost to society. Such an evil can invite only elimination, and if this is a complete description of its working then it is clear what has to be done: close down the propaganda machine and wake the people up from the deceptions into which they have been thrown by telling them the true nature of their habit. When the right cocktail of such measures is hit upon it should be possible to enlighten every sector of the population, and the epidemic should disappear in a puff of nicotine-free smoke, leaving behind a clean society. Actually, it hasn’t happened like that. The number of smokers in the UK has remained more or less constant for the last decade, hovering just under 30%. Since this period has seen a significant rise in the prominence of health warnings, particularly in schools and colleges, we might suspect that there is a large core of people who will not be deterred from smoking by the knowledge that their hearts might seize up or their lungs turn into a useless tumorous mess. There is of course a simple explanation for this: any attempt to discredit or repress a sensual phenomenon in society gives that phenomenon still greater libidinal charge, thereby creating its clientele. Attempts to eliminate smoking by telling people about its dangers are thus inherently flawed, for while many will thereby be deterred from their habit, others will be reinforced in it. Much as government might like it to be, the whole truth of human life is not a search for cleanliness, health and rationality. But perhaps it's also worth taking the whole phenomenon more seriously (as well as light-heartedly!) and refusing to see smokers merely as brainless victims, smoking because they are ravaged by addiction and do not know any better. Maybe smokerdom is a lifestyle choice that has a completely separate logic from the familiar one touted by health ministers, a logic that is active and self-conscious rather than passive and coerced, a logic that inhabits a different space from that of health warnings and "Pop stars say no!" campaigns. Smoking presents at least two kinds of counterpoint to modern society that guarantee, I think, that it will always find adherents. This is the terrain into which the discussion never seems to go. The first has to do with the gift economy of the smoker community. Though the rising prices of cigarettes might still put an end to this, they are in general subject to a completely different set of rules to pretty much any other commodity. We can easily imagine a banker approaching a truck driver in a railway station for a cigarette, imagine the driver obliging with no expectation of anything in return, imagine them talking together over the microritual, before stubbing out and going their separate ways. But it is difficult to think of anything else that one of those two people could ask the other for without inviting suspicion ("Would you mind terribly if I had a few bites of your sandwich...?"). The community of smokers is one in which cigarettes and lights are freely, even warmly, given ("Take one for the road"), and in which perfect strangers are willing to share a moment of bodily experience and a few words. This is actually rather strange. Our society might be a better one if such bonhomie were not wasted on a practice so unnecessary to life as smoking, and extended to more essential things such as money and food and lodging, but in such areas most of us are strictly observant of the principle of self-sufficiency. The image of the traveller who arrives late at night in a town and avails himself of the rules of hospitality to procure dinner and a bed at some stranger's expense is only, to us, a fairytale – or perhaps an exotic travel story from some endearingly backward foreign place. As far as such basics are concerned, other people's needs place us under no obligation – or, at least, these obligations have been successfully subcontracted to the state through taxation. The smoking community, however, is quick to take care of the needs of anybody who is caught without, and cigarettes circulate between people freely and across social lines. Insofar as it is pleasurable to relate to other human beings in the simplicity of being human, independently of any other qualification, insofar as it is meaningful to congregate around rituals of sensuality, it is easy to see why smokers might wish to retain their links to this social network, since all other such networks seem to have been destroyed. Of course, one obvious reason why it might have been possible to sustain such rules among the smoking community is that a cigarette is a minimal currency that can be given with almost no sacrifice of time or money, and without any breach to the ramparts of personal space that are so important to modern people. In every sense, it costs little to give a cigarette, so the gift economy of smoking can sit fairly comfortably alongside the much more closed-handed system of the rest of life. But there is another reason why smoking can remain separate from such a system, and this is the second point I want to make: the possibility that it offers of holding onto a different kind of time. When we discount all the millions of cigarettes that are smoked over a laptop, all the ones smoked to cope with the pressure of tomorrow's deadline, we are still left with millions more that are smoked in a sidestep from the rush of time. The timeline of contemporary lives is often unforgiving, and many people smoke in order to create moments of reflection and stasis: when somebody takes a break from reading to reflect on the knowledge that has entered them, and to smoke a cigarette, which allows them a physical sense of "taking in"; when a smoker comes out of an airport and tries to ascertain her feelings in this new place with the aid of a ritual that focuses her on inner sensations... Smoking, like various kinds of meditation, concentrates the mind on breathing and thus on a personal rhythm of time, separate from the hurry of the world. There are other ways of doing this, you might say. But what is interesting is that cigarettes have come to enjoy a certain institutional approval for this "grounding" role that they play in people’s lives: for in these days of smoke-free offices has the "cigarette break" not become a staple of corporate culture? It is difficult to imagine a group of people leaving the office several times a day saying that they wanted to share a packet of M&Ms, or do five minutes' yoga. But cigarettes seem to be a legitimate vehicle for people to retreat from the intensity of workplace time and gather themselves up for a moment, to speak to colleagues as fellow human beings rather than as bosses or subordinates – so much so that often these little outings are accompanied by non-smokers who do not themselves have any such legitimate way of creating mindspace outside the office. Of course, once again, cigarettes can play this role partly because they represent such a minimal interruption to everything else – infrequent five-minute breaks that make people happier and possibly more productive, and that can exist more or less invisibly within the otherwise ordered and onward logic of the workplace. But this is not to say that the oases of personal time that they represent are insignificant within the economy of individuals' days. None of this is supposed to be a defence of cigarette smoking. It's just an illustration of how crude the logic of the Health Minister is in comparison to the phenomenon it is supposed to manage. This is one of the serious problems we face today: the ubiquity of a language of management which fails to capture most of the human dimensions of things, and relates only obliquely to the way in which they are actually lived. At the present moment in time it's not difficult to see what extremes such a tendency can take us to. ::::::::::::::::::::: Rana Dasgupta www.ranadasgupta.com ::::::::::::::::::::: From sarang_shidore at yahoo.com Sat Jun 28 14:29:52 2003 From: sarang_shidore at yahoo.com (Sarang Shidore) Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 14:29:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] More from Istanbul Message-ID: Merhaba, I am writing this on a pleasant sunny afternoon in the heart of old Istanbul (Sultanahmet). Today is my last day in this wonderful city. The last three days have been very exciting. I have seen and done a lot and it would be difficult to capture everything in this letter. But I will try. After spending most of Monday at the fabulous Topkapi Palace, I paid a visit to the Yerebetan Cistern the next morning. But first a few words about Topkapi and Turkish history. This was the seat of the Ottoman (Osmanli) dynasty from the time of Suleyman the Magnificent who is roughly a contemporary of Emperor Akbar. It was his gorgeous and ambitious wife Hurrem, or Roxelana, who persuaded the Sultan to move the family and the harem to the Topkapi. Before this it was strictly a seat for administration. The story of Hurrem is insteresting - she was a Russian slave girl captured in a Tatar raid and sold in Istanbul to the Sultan's harem. Suleyman was so captivated by her laughter that he decided to eventually marry her and make her the chief queen. This cause consternation in the empire, but who could challenge the sultan.... To understand the Turkish nation one has to go back to the 11th century when the Seljuk Turks, a nomadic warrior band from Central Asia swept into Anatolia. (Central Asia seems to have been the source of many conquering warrior tribes throughout history. The Scythians (Sakas), Mongols, Huns, Turks, Tatars, and others terrified the more settled urban civilizations south of the steppe with their raids. Iran's destrcution by the Mongols in the 13th century was so traumatic, the holocaust so terribly brutal that it took more than a hundred years for the society to recover.) The Seljuk advance was less damaging to Anatolia, apparently just 40,000 troops grabbed the arid central plain with little resistance from the Christian subjects of the Byzantine empire. However, somehow Constantinopole survived for another 350 years. Each time the Turks were close, the Byzantine emperor managed to put up a heroic fight and saved the city. However during this period the city suffered its worst man-made disaster - the armies of the Fourth Crusade, sent to "liberate" Jerusalem turned on their fellow Christians in Constantinopole instead and days and days of looting, pillage, and rape almost completely destroyed the beautiful city. The Sancta Sophia was desecrated and a prostitute apparently paraded through its stately halls. A truly bizarre episode, but apparently not unknown in the annals of the supposedly spiritual armies of the Western Crusades! Inspite of this disaster in the early 13th century, the city managed to magically sprung back to life. A great program of rebuilding by later Byzantine emperors restored most of the homes and gardens. Luckily for us all the Fourth crusade did not manage to destroy Sancta Sophia's main structure and some of the art inside, as well as a few of the ancient churches which can still be seen today (such as the Chora Church in Western Istanbul). Incidentally, the language used by the early Byzantines was Latin but as time passed, Old Greek (spoken by most of the subjects) became the official language of the state. The schism between Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity and Catholic Rome is largely due to the Byzantine episode in history. After the Seljuk empire disintegrated, another Turkish clan called the Osmanli seized power. Under 21-year old Mehmet the Conqueror Constantinopole finally fell to the Osmanl›s. Large-scale looting and v›olence followed the conquest, as Mehmet's troops were as covetous as any conquerors before. However, when Turk›sh soldiers started hacking away at the marble columns of the Sancta Sophia, Mehmet stopped them, declaring "there is no God but God and Mohammed is His Prophet". Sancta Sophia became the Aya Sofya Mosque. OK, enough of history. The Yerebatan Cistern is a beautiful underground reservoir of water built by the Byzantines in the 5th century to store water for the city. It has a few hundred pillars, some of them carved in traditional Greek styles. I had a really interest›ng conversation with a young guide there who was working part time and also going to college at Bosphorus University. He invited me for tea at an art gallery the next day and we chatted quite a bit about Turkey. Among other things he also had some choice words to say about George W. Bush and American foreign policy! In general in Turkey I have noticed (not surprisingly) a strong dislike of US policies in the region. One shopkeeper went as far as to tell me "We know our government is with the Americans, but we also know what are their real intentions. We in the Middle East are patient people and say OK to everything but one day there will be a surprise." In Turkey everyone is a millionaire. 1 dollar buys you 1/4 million Turkish Liras! So, a short cab ride from Sultanahmet to Beyoglu costs 6 million Turkish Liras. A newspaper costs 1 million. The train fare to Ankara by a fast express train came out to 85 million Liras. By now, I have finally managed to distinguish between the 500000 Lira bill and the 5000000 Lira bill without counting the zeroes! I consider this as one of my greater achievements in recent months :-). There are many common words between Turkish and Hindi/Urdu. Not surprising as both languages were influenced by Farsi and Arabic. So, sabzi is vegetable, sharap is wine, misafir is traveller, duniya is world, asik is lover, and chai is, of course tea! There were many more such words but Mustafa Kemal (the Turkish nationalist founder of modern Turkey) abolished many of them under his Turkification program of the 1920's. The Arabic alphabet was replaced by a Latinate one, the Caliphate was abolished, Turks were forced to adopt last names - these had to be Turkish last names even if you were a Kurdish or Armenian speaker - the Ottoman legal system was replaced by a Western code based on the Swiss model, women were given the right to vote and participate in government, classical Turkish music was de-emphasized and Western classical music promoted and Turkey was redefined as a state of the Turks. Strict separation of mosque and state was enforced, the fez cap banned, the hijab forbidden in government buildings, and the Caliphate abolished. Turkey firmly set its eyes Westward rather than Eastward. (More on this later.) To understand the geography of Istanbul imagine the Bosphorus strait which connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, and forms the barrier between Asia and Europe. The European side of Istanbul is further bisected by a body of water known as the Golden Horn. Ottoman Istanbul is south of the Golden Horn. This is what I have mainly described so far. But north of the golden horn are the areas of Karakoy, Beyoglu, Taksim and Levent which are the heart of modern Istanbul. Beyoglyu was the residence of European ambassadors in the 19th century and the architecture is very European influenced. Stately buildings line Istikilala Caddesi, its main thoroughfare which is now Istanbul's trendiest shopping and clubbing district. If you are ever in Beyoglu don't miss the Haci Abdullah restaurant which is a fantastic place to get some great ottoamn era food. My friend Serra took me there and we had a blast. Of course I love food (who doesn't) and am always game for trying out new cuisines. But Haci Abdullah was mind-blowing. I started with a delicious creamy lentil soup followed by an eggplant dish called Imam Bayildi (the Imam fainted) which is a whole eggplant spiced and roasted - a little bit like Baingan Bharta! Then I had a dish of lamb cooked in a sort of a crepe with spices and garnishing. This was followed by a Turkish fruit salad. Turkish coffee would normally have ended the meal but I have discovered that its incredible strength does some interesting things to my system so I decided to skip it! Walking along Istikilal Caddesi is an experience. It was Tue evening but there were thousands of Turkish youth there shopping, hanging out, strolling. There are lots of interesting stores for the shopping minded, but selling mostly modern items clothes jewellery, footwear etc. The clubs are all in the side streets off the main avenue. Unlike the US where seeing couples and individuals is common, in Turkey it is quite normal to see large groups of friends going out together. Often I have seen people hanging out rather aimlessly at street corners, a lot like in India. Spending an hour, just lounging around after finishing coffee at a cafe is normal. The stress that I feel in the air in the United States is almost entirely missing here. Of course it could be because I am on vacation but I don't think so! I have written this letter in a rather meandering fashion and ended up writing more about history than I originally intended. There is much more I have to say - about the 5 hour Bosphorus cruise I took, my visit to the working class areas of Fener and Balat, the day I spent in Ankara after taking the overnight train there, and other things - but it is nearly 2 p.m here and I shall be soon be meeting Serra for a trip to the ancient Grand Bazaar! So it is time to sign off. Perhaps I will get a chance to write again from London tomorrow. Till then stay well! Sarang in Isanbul Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! From eye at ranadasgupta.com Sat Jun 28 18:24:52 2003 From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 18:24:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Pianos, torpedos and mobile phones Message-ID: Came across this in the Economist recently. It's a fascinating story of how music (specifically, player pianos) provided a technology that was used to solve a military problem and that went on to be a part of modern telecommunications. All thought up by a Hollywood femme fatale. R PLAYER-PIANO PIONEER Profile of Hedy Lamarr, The Economist, June 21 2003 She is chiefly remembered as a femme fatale and a pioneer of the nude scene. But Hedy Lamarr, a Hollywood actress who died in 2000 also played an unlikely off-screen role as a technological pioneer, co-inventing in the 1940s an early incarnation of spread-spectrum wireless technology. Lamarr accompanied her husband, Fritz Mandl, an Austrian arms dealer, to numerous meetings and dinners, and became familiar with the problem of sending control signals to a torpedo after it was launched from a ship. Using wire several miles long was impractical, so the obvious alternative was to use radio instead. But that would alert the enemy that a torpedo was on its way, allowing its signal to be jammed. After divorcing her husband, Lamarr ran away to America in 1937. She found success in Hollywood, where she met George Antheil, an experimental composer, at a dinner party in 1940. He was knows for composing music for "player pianos", mechanical instruments that play back music encoded as holes punched in a role of paper. Lamarr realised that Antheil, who shared her opposition to the Nazis, could help her develop an idea to make radio transmissions extremely difficult to jam or intercept. The pair were jointly awarded a patent in 1942 for a "secret communication system". The idea at its heart was that of "frequency-hopping". By changing the frequency of a radio transmission many times a second, causing it to leap around in an apparently random fashion, a radio signal could be made almost impossible to intercept. Only a receiver programmed with the same random sequence would be able to follow the signal as it hopped from one frequency to another. Both sending and receiving stations would, however, need some mechanism to encode and control the frequency-hopping pattern. Lamarr and Antheil proposed using a punched paper roll - like that of a player piano. Their system would hop between 88 different frequencies, the number of keys on a modern piano. The player-piano rolls in the transmitter (aboard the ship) and receiver (in the torpedo) would be started at exactly the same moment and would stay synchronised after lunch, providing a secure radio link from the ship to the torpedo. This idea is known today as "frequency-hopping spread spectrum" (FHSS) since the signal, as it hops, is thus spread across a range of the radio spectrum, rather than remaining on a single frequency. Lamarr and Antheil offered their idea to America's armed forces, but it was not taken seriously. It was nearly 20 years before a radio based on FHSS was eventually constructed, using electronic components rather than mechanical components and paper rolls. It was used to secure communications during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Code-division multiple access (CMDA) is based on another approach, called "direct-sequence spread spectrum" (DSSS), so it is not directly descended from Lamarr's work. But FHSS lives on in today's mobile phones: it is the basis of Bluetooth, a short-range wireless protocol that is used to connect handsets to other nearby devices. ::::::::::::::::::::: Rana Dasgupta www.ranadasgupta.com ::::::::::::::::::::: From aiindex at mnet.fr Sun Jun 29 02:54:03 2003 From: aiindex at mnet.fr (Harsh Kapoor) Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 22:24:03 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Chowkidar to the Empire? Message-ID: The Hindu | Magazine Section Jun 29, 2003 Chowkidar to the Empire? Should India send troops to Iraq? Support for such a move fills the media. Terms like "rent-an-army" and "lucrative contracts" pop up time and again. But sacrificing our troops to serve American interests and the greed of Indian elite will not be just morally reprehensible. It will be the most dangerous and provocative act of folly, writes P. SAINATH. AT least 55 U.S. soldiers have so far died in "peacekeeping" in Iraq since May 1. And the United States says "Iraq is not ready for democracy." If the Iraqis don't like it, they can lump it. As it stands, the Americans can't lump it. Their rising death toll alarms them. (Well, each time one U.S. soldier dies, so do many Iraqis. But that's another story.) And more and more people in that country are confronting the occupying power. Listen to the New York Times: "American forces are carrying out their largest single military operation in Iraq since the end of major fighting..." The Associated Press puts it this way: "an amalgam of shadowy resistance forces, including unknown numbers of non-Iraqi fighters, are carrying out almost daily hit-and-run attacks against the American occupation forces." The Guardian, U.K., says: "Attacks occur daily - more than a dozen every day in the past week, according to some accounts." The paper had this to say of the British Minister in charge of "reconstruction" in Iraq. "Baroness Amos had to admit... that she is unable to visit that country." Why? Because "of the risk of guerrilla attack." It's in this mess that India is being called up to act as chowkidar to the empire. The lives of Indian soldiers are more expendable - in American eyes. But should the eyes of an Indian government see it the same way? That's frightening. We are being hired to patrol the empire's latest outpost. To be the fall guys for its folly. We're being asked to do this just when Bush might for the first time face questions in the U.S. Congress on the Iraq war. On the fake "intelligence" that helped him deceive his own people. When Labour MPs are calling Tony Blair a liar in Britain. This is when we're being asked to carry the can in Iraq. To legitimise a war always viewed as unlawful across the world. And now increasingly seen that way in the U.S. and Britain - the main warriors - themselves. We'd be magnets for popular anger in one of the world's most volatile spots -- at a time when the Americans are contemplating a war on neighbouring Iran. What happens if Indian troops are stuck in Iraq when the U.S. moves for "regime change" in Iran? The possible consequences are mind-blowing. Indian jawans would then be at extreme risk. As always, we'll re-learn that it is far easier to get into such holes than out of them. Until next time. And, as always, the decisions will be taken by those whose children will never fight on any front. That too, on a war Indians hated in the first place. One that our parliament, alone in the world, condemned in a resolution. Suddenly it's, "hey guys, let's be real! It's only the lives of our poorer classes. There's many more where those came from. Think of the gains to be made from carrying the White Man's Burden." Might give us crumbs from the White Man's Contracts. It's odd that Vajpayee and Advani should seek a "national consensus" on sending troops to Iraq. The rest of us thought we had one. The Indian parliament's resolution in April, condemning America's war against that country, is the clearest consensus that exists in this nation on that issue. But now we're being invited to make our jawans the targets of explosive resentment. The anger directed at American troops will then come our way. That, in a nation, which has had nothing but goodwill for our own. Sending Indian troops there is an idea that could - and most likely will - go awfully wrong. For one thing, the people of Iraq have suffered enough, without our adding to it. For another, in the growing challenge to the occupation, those seen as front men of the empire will attract deadly fire. As innocents inevitably die, things will get much worse. Meanwhile the U.S. has bullied the Security Council (June 12) into giving its troops a year's exemption from the new International War Crimes Tribunal. Only the American "peace keeping forces" have got that. The U.S. sees trouble ahead and will not have its military brought before the tribunal. So much better to have Indians face that music. As they will, when hell breaks loose. Note that Indian troops are not even being spoken of as peacekeepers. They will be a "stabilisation force". Words that imply an active, and if need be, aggressive role. The journey to Iraq will have little in common with the over 30 UN peacekeeping missions that Indian troops have been part of in the past. This time our soldiers will be seen as front men for the occupiers. And will face an increasingly hostile Iraqi public. Indian security personnel haven't had the best of times right here at home. In the past decade or so, we've had 15, 000 of them killed or wounded in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and the North East. More than 3,500 killed in Kashmir alone since 1991. (Not to mention 11,000 dead civilians.) Here's the new step. Troop exports. Now the government might pledge even more of these lives to the U.S. In Iraq, we will be on clearly defined foreign territory. Once again, we're looking at the readiness of India's ruling classes to risk the lives of poor Indians - which is what our jawans are. This time to align and ingratiate ourselves with U.S. power. And take our place in America's New World Odour. (The permission given this week to two U.S. warships to dock in Kochi is one more step in that direction. Both ships are involved in the war in Iraq.) Plus, by sending our troops, we get to earn a quick buck on the side. So Indian companies will gain what lusting newspapers call "lucrative contracts". And we can sacrifice a few hundred jawans, maybe many more, so that our CEOs can do even better in the next Forbes and Fortune lists. Never mind that these lucrative contracts could place us morally in the ranks of contract killers. No wonder the Americans are seeking our help. They are body shopping in a literal sense. This is one outsourcing of jobs their unions won't protest. The job of dying for U.S. imperialism. There is, of course, another reason why some in government are so keen to get into this chowkidari. Election year draws near. And the cynical "Back us. Our boys are dying", which we heard in Kargil could make the rounds again. Kargil saw the most incompetent Defence Minister in our history cover up a colossal failure. And succeed because the media wouldn't call his bluff. Our soldiers died in hundreds. The minister, many scandals later - including one about over-priced coffins for dead soldiers - is still there. A Government with its back to the wall on every issue was able to make that cynical "Stand united behind the NDA" appeal. Stoking Iraqi hatred in a new and unwarranted direction doesn't count. Elections do. And a diversion from the serious political and economic issues of the day is crucial. If you have an Indian force in Iraq, daily losing lives to snipers and other local attacks, that's the sort of mess an Advani revels in. Maybe he'll take out a rath yatra to rally support for the troops. Men whose lives could in the first place be jeopardised by his colleagues and himself. Arguably, India should have done well as peacekeeper in Sri Lanka. Didn't both sides accept us, at least to begin with? Instead, our stint there provided Colombo with a diversion. It gave the LTTE a focus for their hatred. Over 1100 men of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) laid down their lives in Sri Lanka. That's more than double the number who died at Kargil. There will be no one happy to see us in Baghdad. There will, of course, be the usual bunch of regime PROs (some still call themselves journalists) filing those first few stories of a euphoric welcome. Pictures of someone garlanding an Indian soldier. Maybe one of our guys kissing a baby. Then reality sets in. With all the experience of Sri Lanka behind them. With all the evidence of Iraq before them. Still, quite a few experts, analysts and editors argue it's a good idea. Take a look at the editorials in some of our leading newspapers. One says it "makes sense to send a stabilisation force to that country". Indeed the situation "demand(s)" that we do so. Another says that Russia, Germany and France have now dropped their "principled" stand against the war for "a real time share in the lucrative Iraqi reconstruction pie. The moral: New Delhi cannot stand on principle in thinking out its foreign policy options in post-war Iraq." It's time to start planning, boys, for the "Baghdad Bandobast". One newspaper is thrilled by the team from Washington that came to Delhi seeking a rent-an-army deal. Our soldiers may be handed a United Nations fig leaf. Their expenses could be borne nominally by that body. But the Americans will pay us a few dollars more. That didn't excite the paper. What did was that the team "...highlighted New Delhi's impeccable record in peacekeeping abroad." Well, we withdrew battered from Sri Lanka. And scrambled out of Somalia in chaos. That's an impeccable record? Think, too, of the fallout at home of our troops getting bogged down in Iraq. When every militant Islamic group there (and perhaps from Iran and elsewhere) targets the jawans as an occupation force. How will that tell on communal tensions here? What a tonic it would be for Togadia and Thackeray, amongst so many others. But that shouldn't upset a bunch whose careers were built on ideologies of hatred. Maybe as the Americans withdraw, we'll send Modi in as Governor of occupied Iraq. He'd be impartial in hating all the Muslims there, Shia and Sunni alike. Christians, too. At the base, are crude motives of electoral and financial gain for a few. Pointing to post-facto UN resolutions okaying U.S. actions just makes it worse. Do the people of the nations voting for these resolutions see it that way? The Spanish government supported a war 85 per cent of its public opposed. Far more importantly, will the people of Iraq view it that way? Do our own people see it that way? Historically, the British used Indian troops as cannon fodder for their conquests across the globe. Close to 90, 000 Indian troops died for the Raj in just World War I. That's more soldiers than India has lost in all our wars and insurgencies since independence. In 1915-16 alone, thousands of Indian soldiers died in Iraq, the then Mesopotamia. Then too, a western power was attempting a "regime change". Our men were sacrificed by the British in their war against Turkey. The year had been disastrous for the Brits. The debacle at Gallipoli meant the war ministry in London needed a propaganda success. So they threw away the lives of over 22,000 soldiers - thousands of them Indians. That, in a bid to take Baghdad, as the Guardian, U.K. pointed out last year. Even today in the region, wrote Ross Davies in that paper, "...there are 22,400 graves (more than two-thirds of the troops who fought in Mesopotamia were Indians whose faith required cremation rather than burial)." Then they died for the British empire. Now, they're being asked to die for the American empire. Then, it could be argued, we were a colony - and had no choice. Today, in the era of globalised markets, we'll be doing it for "lucrative contracts". An independent nation driven by the greed and delusions of a few to seek what might well be a quisling's reward. P. Sainath is one of the two recipients of the A.H. Boerma Award, 2001, granted for his contribution in changing the nature of the development debate on food, hunger and rural development in the Indian media. From eye at ranadasgupta.com Sun Jun 29 18:50:25 2003 From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2003 18:50:25 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Immigrants die at borders Message-ID: The last few weeks have seen a number of high-profile stories of immigrants dying in the attempt to get into the US or Europe. The way that the mainstream media frame these stories is to present the moneygrabbing smugglers as the vilains, the unfortunate dead migrants as the victims of illegal schemes and false promises. The attached article, from today's NYT is such an article, albeit a more human one than most. This is a more sympathetic kind of narrative than the more usual one in which immigrants are simple faceless criminals. All of these stories remain trapped, however, in the basic nationalist, welfare-statist logic; in fact the fierce desire of people to get into America, Britain etc leads to all sorts of sickening self-congratulation in which everyone understands anew why the system is so important to protect. They do not choose to see it, instead, as a fundamental challenge to the smugness of a welfare state in which fairness and mutual responsibility are only limited, local values from which most people must be violently excluded. Just think how much work the concept of "nation" is doing in that argument. See No Border's valuable compilation of such stories for more: http://www.noborder.org/dead.php R June 29, 2003 Deaths of Immigrants Uncover Makeshift World of Smuggling By KATE ZERNIKE with GINGER THOMPSON http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/national/29SMUG.html?hp HARLINGEN, Tex., June 26 — Karla Patricia Chávez left her home in Honduras when she was only 15, guided across the Mexican border by immigrant smugglers to seek a more prosperous life in the United States. Now, a decade later, federal prosecutors say that Ms. Chávez has become a smuggler herself, the ringleader of an operation that went disastrously wrong when 19 illegal immigrants died from the oppressive heat in a truck ferrying them through South Texas — the nation's deadliest smuggling incident. Prosecutors portray Ms. Chávez's group as a sophisticated enterprise that stretched across the United States and six Latin American countries. Here in the border region where she lived, and where the fatal journey began, a different image emerges, of a small-time, often disorganized crime ring in which Ms. Chávez was barely a novice. Law enforcement officials say that Ms. Chávez's group was typical of those that bring more than a million immigrants across the Mexican border into the United States each year. Unlike narcotics organizations, which are tightly centralized and controlled by powerful dons, immigrant smuggling networks rely on constantly shifting configurations of guides and safe houses from Honduras to Houston and beyond. Illicit rings of coyotes, as the smugglers are known, are so common in the border area that immigrants often regard them as services rather than criminal syndicates. It is precisely their informality that makes them especially difficult for United States authorities to track, and potentially very dangerous for those who put themselves in the smugglers' hands. Immigration officials say that women often play leading roles in smuggling rings, because the illicit business rarely sees the kind of gangland violence connected with drug dealing. Ms. Chávez and her accused associates used technology no more advanced than their cellular telephones and sport utility vehicles, court documents show. They brought immigrants across border rivers on inner tubes, stowed them in their own apartments in low-income housing projects and met each other at welfare offices and truck stops, the documents show. According to her indictment, Ms. Chávez packed far too many immigrants — at least 77 — into a tractor-trailer that had neither water nor ventilation, for a 325-mile journey in scorching desert heat. Some immigrants who survived the journey had body temperatures of 105 degrees when they were discovered. When the trip turned to tragedy the crime ring quickly fell apart. The driver, Tyrone Williams, abandoned the trailer full of bodies, then fled to a Houston emergency room overcome with panic. One smuggler immediately turned on Ms. Chávez, blaming her to the victims' families, who alerted immigration agents. Ms. Chávez fled to her family home in Honduras, a refuge where American agents tracked her until her arrest on June 14, after she had left Honduras for Guatemala. She has been charged with recklessly causing the deaths of 17 of the immigrants who were immediately identified. Prosecutors have said they may seek the death penalty. "You do not know what awaits me," Ms. Chávez wept to a relative who tried to reassure her when she called Honduras from a Houston detention center a few days after her capture. "I think they are going to kill me." In interviews in Honduras, Ms. Chávez's relatives recalled a time when she was a sixth-grade beauty queen and devoted Sunday school student. She left home when she was a teenager, with only a sixth-grade education. But she was already a veteran on assembly lines in blue-jeans factories in Honduras. Making Neighbors Aware In Combes, Tex., a run-down suburb north of Harlingen, Ms. Chávez announced her presence in a neighborhood of plain-colored homes by painting her own bright pink, prompting neighbors to call it "the Barbie house." Neighbors said they noticed a steady stream of vans and pickup trucks at the house, which Ms. Chávez had shared with Heriberto Flores Rebollar, the Mexican man she called her husband. He was the father of her three children, although law enforcement officials said they believed the couple never married. In a neighborhood where people commonly gather out front after sunset, Ms. Chávez and Mr. Flores kept to themselves, and put up a six-foot wooden fence around their house about a year ago. "We knew something was going on — this town is too small," said the Combes chief of police, James B. Parker, "but we didn't know what." Still, the neighbors' suspicions were softened by their view of Ms. Chávez as a working mother, watching over her young sons as they rode tricycles in the street. She sewed blue jeans at a nearby Levi's plant until it closed last August, according to neighbors and a statement she gave to her lawyers. Neighbors recalled that on Mother's Day — three days before the deadly incident — a group of men gathered in front of Ms. Chávez's house to serenade her in Spanish, the only language she spoke. "I figured if anybody was doing anything, it's the men," said Sandra Vela, who lives across the street. "She was too nice." The authorities say it remains unclear how Ms. Chávez got into smuggling. But court documents show that Mr. Flores had been on law enforcement radar as a smuggler even before Ms. Chávez arrived in this country. Mr. Flores had left his home village, in remote mountains in the Mexican State of Guerrero, when he was 13, dropping out of school after second grade, his sister and mother said in interviews there. After he settled in the United States, Mr. Flores was deported to Mexico three times — in 1989, 1995, and 2001 — after he was convicted or pleaded guilty to smuggling charges under a long list of aliases. He kept coming back. The couple bought the house in Combes, paying $49,500, shortly after he returned from his third deportation. Apparently he felt so little concern about being caught at the border that he and Ms. Chávez made a vacation trip to visit his family in Mexico last summer. But last October, Mr. Flores turned up in the Cameron County Jail in Brownsville, Tex., where he was caught by Border Patrol agents in a raid for illegal immigrants. He pleaded guilty in federal court to violating his deportation, and in April was sentenced to 70 months in prison. Ms. Chávez has told relatives in Honduras and her lawyer, Jeffrey Sasser, that she and Mr. Flores had split up before he was incarcerated. Mr. Sasser said she claimed that she did not know where he was in prison. No Criminal Record Found So far, her lawyers have not found that she has any criminal record. Law enforcement officials said the fatal operation appeared to have been her first major smuggling run. "It seems to me that this might have been her first big job since her boyfriend's arrest, and it went terribly wrong," one immigration official said. "Rookie hour turned deadly, and now she's facing big-time punishment." Officials compare the smuggling rings that ply their trade across the Mexican border to drug cartels in terms of their proliferation and international reach. But a law enforcement official in Mexico said immigrant smuggling, in contrast to narcotics, was "ant's work." The rings are loose-knit, ad hoc collaborations, with one group moving immigrants into Mexico, another taking them north towards the United States, a third taking them on the often perilous trip across the border, and no one in overall command. The profits are big. In Mexico alone, law enforcement officials estimate that smuggling nets about $1 billion a year. But because there are so many smugglers involved in each journey, each one gets just a small piece of the pie. The indictment against Ms. Chávez charges that she relied on a loose network of other smugglers to connect with immigrants and bring them to South Texas. Several of the 13 people who are accused of collaborating with her had been convicted or pleaded guilty to smuggling charges. According to court papers, the Rodriguez family — Víctor, his wife, Emma, and son Víctor Jesús — brought immigrants across the border and held them in their two homes on a busy Brownsville street. Claudia Carrizales, a cook at a tiny taco restaurant that Ms. Chávez had rented a few weeks earlier, is said to have taken food to the safe houses. Abelardo Flores and Alfredo García are accused of recruiting Mr. Williams, whose truck was normally used to transport milk and melons. In most cases the deals were as simple as this: in a Fiesta Mart in Houston, a shopper, Josefina González, overheard two strangers talking about relatives who were going to be smuggled, and asked them how she might do the same for her granddaughter in Mexico. They gave her the name of Norma Sánchez, part owner of a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall in North Houston. Ms. Sánchez, according to court documents, offered the woman what she said was a discount price for a first-time customer: $1,900. She told Ms. Gonzalez to direct her granddaughter to a hotel in the Mexican border city of Reynosa. Death Near Destination The trailer truck was to be the final leg of the journey for the young woman and other immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, who had reached Harlingen by a variety of routes and means. Many of the Mexicans told investigators they took buses to the border and crossed without the aid of a coyote. A guide from Ms. Chávez's hometown led a group of 10 Hondurans on buses through Guatemala and trains across Mexico, then helped them wade across the Rio Grande at night. With heightened patrols since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the smugglers' work no longer ends once immigrants cross the border. Now they want to move clandestinely at least as far as Houston. That was Ms. Chávez's work. Prosecutors said she made the decision that enough immigrants were assembled in at least three safe houses to proceed with the truck trip north. She is accused of working directly with the two men who recruited Mr. Williams, who said in sworn testimony that he had been offered $5,000 to transport the immigrants from Harlingen to Houston. On the evening of May 13, at least two men loaded the immigrants — who may have numbered as many as 100 — onto Mr. Williams's truck in an open field and closed the door from the outside, while the driver remained in the cab. In telephone interviews, two of the Honduran immigrants said they protested and asked for smaller vehicles. But they said the smugglers told them that the trailer was a better way to avoid detection by the border patrol. Only three hours later, 17 of the people in the truck, including a 5-year-old Mexican boy, were dead of heat stroke and dehydration. Mr. Willia ms opened the rear door at a gas station just south of Victoria, Tex., the court documents show. An unknown number of immigrants fled into fields around the station. Immigration officials took 55 survivors into custody, including Ms. Gonzalez's granddaughter. Another two immigrants died later in hospitals. Ms. Chávez turned up days later at the adobe home of her eldest brother, Carlos Alberto Chávez, in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula. He and his wife, Sonia, said in interviews that Ms. Chávez's homecoming was marred by sleepless nights and outbursts of weeping. For 23 days, she almost never left the house, they said. Her father, Vicente Chávez, said his daughter spoke very little about her new life in Texas, but mostly seemed content with small talk about old times. Sonia Chávez lamented that Karla seemed to have developed a strong taste for material things. "The more you have, the more you want," she said."And it was not important to her how she got it." Ms. Chávez left her children in her brother's care, and was arrested when she crossed from Honduras into Guatemala by car. After they learned of her arrest, her relatives struggled to understand why she had come home to them. "I think Karla came back to see who she was," said her father sadly, "because she did not like the person she had become." When she was arrested, Ms. Chávez was carrying the United States birth certificates of her three sons. Her lawyer and her mother say she still wants them to finish her dream, to grow up in this country, as Americans. From raviv at sarai.net Sat Jun 28 11:10:42 2003 From: raviv at sarai.net (Ravi Vasudevan) Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 11:10:42 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] advertisement of posts in the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20030628110943.00a904c0@mail.sarai.net> Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, is one of India's premier postgraduate universities. It is currently in the process of setting up a new School of Arts and Aesthetics which will offer MA, M Phil and PhD programmes in the history and theory of Indian visual and performing arts. The School will admit its very first batch of MA students in July 2003 and is currently recruiting new faculty in both areas of focus. We would be grateful if you could list or publicize our advertisement for faculty recruitment through your website and/or bulletin boards or word of mouth. Full details of the advertisement, essential qualifications, and a downloadable application form are available from the JNU website, www.jnu.ac.in Only Indian citizens are eligible to apply. The current advertisement is for senior level positions - Professor and Associate Professor - but candidates with good qualifications at the Assistant Professor level could also apply as the University reserves the right to offer positions at a lower level than the one applied for. Positions advertised are: Two Professors/Associate Professors in Musicology/Dance Studies/Cultural Studies/Performance studies Candidates should have research and post graduate teaching experience in the theoretical, historical and historiographical study of these subjects. Awareness of contemporary advances in performance studies and contemporary theory as well as grounding in traditional (Indian) forms is important. In addition to teaching the post will involve curriculum development, gathering resources for teaching archives and creating an interface between theory and practice. Two Professors/Associate Professors in Comparative Aesthetics/Ancient Indian Sculpture and Architecture/Islamic Art Candidates should have evidence of scholarship of high level in any of the above areas with experience of postgraduate teaching or research as evidenced by publications, contribution to educational innovation and wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach to research. Knowledge of historiography and research methodology is essential. Details and forms available at www.jnu.ac.in. The advertisement is at http://www.jnu.ac.in/Etcetera/advt.pdf and the application form is at http://www.jnu.ac.in/Etcetera/faculty_form.pdf Applications should reach JNU by 7 July 2003 Ravi Vasudevan The Sarai Progamme: City/Media/Public Domain Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi-110054 Tel. 2394-21190 extension 330 Fax. 2394-3450 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20030628/26c7f5c7/attachment.html From kritidpc at vsnl.com Sat Jun 28 16:23:17 2003 From: kritidpc at vsnl.com (Kriti Team) Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 16:23:17 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] KRITI InfoPlace : visit and discover a world of development information Message-ID: Dear Friends, Greetings from the KRITI team! We announce the launch of the KRITI Information Place to access, refer to & use information, communication & organizational resources on a range of social & development issues from all over India and the world. Please find below some details for your reference. We look forward to hearing from you and would be happy to fulfill your information & capacity building needs. Warm regards KRITI team Note : Please circulate this information and put it on your board.s ----------------------------------------------------------- KRITI Information Place a new world of development information in New Delhi (open from 1 June 2003 in New Delhi) a warm welcome! We at KRITI: a development praxis and communication team, believe that information is a source of power, which needs to be shared in order to create an equal world. Join us in this process of sharing information and power. We invite you to: * access, refer to, and use information, communication and organisational resources on a range of social and development issues * order and buy printed and audio-visual resources on development issues from across the country/world * a space open for students, academics, activists, people's movement groups, NGOs, international organisations, research institutions, government agencies, media, private and other civil society organisations. References Information Resources: * Books * Journals/ Newsletters * Reports * Training materials/ IEC kits/ Manuals * Articles/ Info files * Newsclippings * Catalogues Communication Resources: * Posters * Postcards * Bookmarks * Brochures/ Leaflets * CD Roms/ Audio Cassettes * Films Organisational Resources: (references for action): A database of development organisations with - * contact details * brochures * current annual reports * posters/ other materials Subject classifications The above references are classified under 13 broad subject heads with 78 classifications (we can send you the list if requested) : 1. Law 2. Labour 3. Women 4. Environment 5. Health 6. Children 7. Development 8. Education 9. Media 10. Government 11. Culture 12. Religion 13. Politics Access, Use and Membership (Please ask for details on membership, as required) As a user you could: * become an Annual/ Life Reference Member * make a reference contribution for each visit/ request * order and buy print and audio-visual resources on development issues of 10 Indian NGOs from across India. You can access the Info Place by: * visiting us * sending requests through post / courier / email (request through email charges will be different) Index cards and computer database is available for referencing through keyword search. Photocopy/ Binding and Lamination facilities are provided at a contribution. Special contributions are charged for secondary research assistance and for accessing materials produced before 1993. Special features We also offer special features like KRITI InfoSeries, Movement features, Our Diary, Gujarat Carnage dossiers, Development dossiers Other KRITI programmes include: · KRITI Film Club · Rethink, Reuse, Recycle Paper: the KRITI way · Professional services in Research, documentation and training · Development communication (design and print services) Timings 10.00 am to 5.30 pm Mondays-Saturdays Closed on second and fourth Saturdays and gazetted holidays Contact KRITI team member: Davinder Kaur KRITI InfoPlace S-35 Tara Apartments, Alaknanda New Delhi 110 019 Telefax: +91-11-26477845 Tele: +91-11-26213088 KRITI: a development praxis and communication team Workplace: S-35, Tara Apartments, Alaknanda, New Delhi-19 Telefax: 011-26477845 Tele: 26213088 Email: kritidpc at ndf.venl.net.in _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at mail.sarai.net http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From eye at ranadasgupta.com Mon Jun 30 16:21:10 2003 From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 16:21:10 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Pianos, torpedos and mobile phones (from Gayatri Chatterjee) In-Reply-To: <000401c33ef3$e02b1240$455f41db@vsnl.net.in> Message-ID: Gayatri Chatterjee just sent me this interesting response to my earlier posting on Hedy Lamarr which I thought should go on the list. The intensely masculine way by which history is thought to advance in a corporate art form such as film - and the inability to narrate female curiosity and creativity except with distancing terms like "unlikely"... R The report should have read: Hedy Lamarr did this and this and incidentally she was also a 'femme fatale'. Of course, The Economist person is just doing his/her (most probably his) job of attracting readers to read. Incidentally, the Czech film 'Ecstasy', where she had appeared nude is there in the Archive. The film isn't much, but that can hardly be her fault. But she was stamped for life after that -- as a great body no brains/no skill beauty. Readers today perhaps do not know who Lamarr was -- which is ok. But I question such re-writings of history. As I write , I have taken out an Encyclopaedia to check entry on her. She was 'discovered' by Max Reinhardt...Imagine... No, it isn't difficult to imagine. Did you see Reinhardt's version of Bertolt Brecht's 'Arturo Ui' in Delhi. It can very well be the best 'modern play' I have ever seen. But I can also imagine women from such groups going out -- leaving the group and going crazy. The way the main actor is worshipped is simply amazing! Granted, that got to be, if he has to act the way he did....Imagine being able to explain fully through acting the phenomenon of a Hitler and his rise to power. What that does to the audience is you hate the character and at the same time you're filled with admiration for the actor before you as Brilliant. No one can match such a 'brilliant' female-creations on stage; and women actresses are so often on the brink of being 'redundant' and dispensable. Equally fantastic is the Lamarr story of her marrying a man who wanted to buy up and destroy all copies of 'Ecstasy'. She divorced her before he could accomplish her mission and so the film was released over and over again all across the world. Imagine a man wanting to take from her that first -- and the only real -- claim to fame. She had married six husbands and was in later life charged twice for shoplifting. Why couldn't she go on discovering things? The reporter writes 'she was a femme fatale but she also played an "unlikely" role' -- why unlikely? Why couldn't she become famous in that or other ways -- this is what we should be thinking. I am reacting this way for I speak against the backdrop of erasures of women from Film History. Have you read Guillianan Bruno's book 'Streetwalking on a Ruined Map' on the Italian silent filmmaker Elvira Notari? Brilliant! It is amazing how even now, many do not bother to mention Alice Guy when teaching film history . Just turn Guy into a man...can you imagine the excitement, the efforts to give 'him' THE legitimate place in the pages of History. What will happen to the history of Realism, if Notari's films are found? Why did the Nazi suppress only her and why are only her films are 'lost' so damnably? I dare not say anything about the contribution of women in Indian film industry. There was a mother who had helped the Father in the kitchen, after her cooking and feeding was done (I speak of Mrs Phalke) and thereafter, no woman did anything. They only 'acted'. They cannot 'be'; they can only act -- or react! Gayatri Chatterjee From alokrai at hss.iitd.ernet.in Mon Jun 30 22:35:23 2003 From: alokrai at hss.iitd.ernet.in (Prof.Alok Rai) Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 22:35:23 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] God's little Bush Message-ID: <47958.62.254.128.7.1056992723.squirrel@10.116.2.103> The Abbas article referred to at the bottom of the page is accessible at the Haaretz site - but here it is anyway. Enjoy - then tremble. Alok Rai ***** Road map is a life saver for us,' PM Abbas tells Hamas By Arnon Regular Selected minutes acquired by Haaretz from one of last week's cease-fire negotiations between Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and faction leaders from the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular and Democratic Fronts, reveal some of the factors at play behind the scenes in the effort to achieve a hudna. Abbas opened the session after hearing scathing criticism from faction leaders for his Aqaba speech in which he defined their activities as "terrorism." He began with a broad review of his two meetings with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Aqaba summit. "After seven days we did not reach agreement in Cairo on either the hudna or the united leadership. These points were later discussed in contacts in Gaza and in my view, the two points are the ones that should be on the table." Abbas said: "The descriptions of what happened at Sharm el Sheikh and in Aqaba are vague in parts and in some parts are inventions, so this is an opportunity to talk about what happened since the PA accepted the road map on December 20," he said. "Despite our reservations we decided not to make them an obstacle, believing that the road map was a life saver for a tiger whose head was caught in the neck of the bottle." Abbas said "we were told that [President George ] Bush is committed to the establishment of a viable Palestinian state beside the state of Israel, so based on our saying that we are ready to try that experiment, that is what was determined." He explained to the faction leaders that with regard to the first phase of the road map, there was an agreement with the Americans that "the Palestinians would speak publicly about their commitments according to the map and then the Israelis would do the same thing." From there, he moved on to describe what happened at the summits. He said that Bush told the Arab leaders that he is fully committed to a solution based on his vision speech from June 24, 2002 and is ready to move forward "if there is help on your part." "The Arabs supported him and I said we are ready to fulfill our commitments as they appear in the map," said Abbas. He said the discussion of the start of the implementation of the map dealt with Gaza, where he said that Palestinian Authority institutions "are 75 percent destroyed, while in the West Bank they are 100 percent destroyed." He emphasized that at that stage he made clear to the participants at the Sharm summit that "we need time and capabilities to stand on our feet. And I explained that I had already spoken with Ariel Sharon about reaching a hudna between all the Palestinian factions." According to Abbas, "Bush exploded with anger and said `there can be no deals with terror groups.' We told him that they are part of our people and we cannot deal with them in any other way. We cannot begin with repression, under no circumstances, and I made clear to Bush that Sharon already agreed with that." He said that he presented Bush with the deliberations about the hudna that he had with Sharon in Jerusalem after he was appointed prime minister. He explained to Bush that the dialogue between the Palestinian factions that began in Cairo and continued in Gaza were on the verge of completion. He said that Bush said "a case-fire is not the whole story" - Bush meant that a hudna is only the start of the process of disarming the groups. Abbas outlined the political contacts during the Aqaba summit and said he added the prisoner issue at the three-way session with Bush and Sharon. "I told them the prisons are the election district for a campaign of calm in the Palestinian territories." He said Bush then turned to Sharon "with the following words, `look what you can profit from this, that holding onto the prisoners only creates tension.'" Abbas said: "We were asked what we need if Israel withdraws and we said `that there not be raids, chases, assassinations or house demolitions, because that kind of activity will destroy everything.'" Abbas tried to placate the faction leaders by telling them that Palestinian Security Minister Mohammed Dahlan had raised the exact same issues with John Wolf, the American monitor of the road map. He tried to explain that in the wake of the failed attempt on Abdel Aziz Rantisi's life, the PA was now insisting on an end to the assassinations. He went on to explain his speech in Aqaba. "We did not speak of our rights but only of our commitments. Bush was impressed by that and mentioned the prisoners and settlements in his speech." On the matter of the right of return, Abbas said "that right appears in all the previous initiatives, and is not under discussion now. Bush asked, if that's the case, why mention the settlements now, and I told him the settlements are happening now. The Israelis use the excuse of natural growth and I told them that according to U.S. statistics, 33 percent of settlements are empty. We said the growth should happen westward, and not on our territory." Abbas said that at Aqaba, Bush promised to speak with Sharon about the siege on Arafat. He said nobody can speak to or pressure Sharon except the Americans. According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." ***** Global Eye -- Errand Boy By Chris Floyd So now we know. After all the mountains of commentary and speculation, all the earnest debates over motives and goals, all the detailed analyses of global strategy and political ideology, it all comes to down to this: George W. Bush waged war on Iraq because, in his own words, God "instructed me to strike at Saddam." This gospel was revealed, appropriately enough, in the Holy Land this week, through an unusual partnership between the fractious children of Abraham. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz was given transcripts of a negotiating session between Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and faction leaders from Hamas and other militant groups. Abbas, who was trying to persuade the groups to call a cease-fire in their uprising against Israeli forces, described for them his recent summit with Ariel Sharon and Bush. During the tense talks at the summit, Bush sought to underscore the kind of authority he could bring to efforts at achieving peace in the Middle East. While thundering that there could be "no deals with terror groups," Bush sought to assure the rattled Palestinians that he also had the ability to wring concessions from Sharon. And what was the source of this wonder-working power? It was not, as you might think, the ungodly size of the U.S. military or the gargantuan amount of money and arms the United States pours into Israel year after year. To Our Readers Has something you've read here startled you? Are you angry, excited, puzzled or pleased? Do you have ideas to improve our coverage? Then please write to us. All we ask is that you include your full name, the name of the city from which you are writing and a contact telephone number in case we need to get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you. Email the Opinion Page Editor No, Bush said he derived his moral heft from the Almighty Himself. What's more, the Lord had proven his devotion to the Crawford Crusader by crowning his military efforts with success. In fact, he told Abbas, God was holding the door open for Middle East peace right now -- but they would have to move fast, because soon the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe would have to give His attention to something far more important: the election of His little sunbeam, Georgie, in 2004. Here are Bush's exact words, quoted by Haaretz: "God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me, I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." You can't put it plainer than that. The whole chaotic rigmarole of Security Council votes and UN inspections and congressional approval and Colin Powell's whizbang Powerpoint displays of "proof" and Bush's own tearful prayers for "peace" -- it was all a sham, a meaningless exercise. No votes, no inspections, no proof or lack of proof -- in fact, no earthly reason whatsoever -- could have stopped Bush's aggressive war on Iraq. It was God's unalterable will: the Lord of Hosts gave a direct order for George W. Bush to "strike at Saddam." And strike he did, with an awesome fury that rained death and destruction on the mustachioed whore of Babylon, with a firestorm of Godly wrath that consumed the enemy armies like so much chaff put to the flame -- and with an arsenal of cruise missiles, cluster bombs, dive bombers and assault helicopters that killed up to 10,000 innocent civilians: blasted to pieces in their beds, shot down in their fields and streets, crushed beneath the walls of their own houses, boiled alive in factories, ditches and cars, gutted, mutilated, beheaded, murdered, women, children, elders, some praying, some wailing, some cursing, some mute with fear as metal death ripped their lives away and left rotting hulks behind. This was the work of the Lord and His faithful servant, whom He hath raised high up to have dominion over men. And this is the mindset -- or rather, the primitive fever-dream -- that is now directing the actions of the greatest military power in the history of the world. There can be no doubt that Bush believes literally in the divine character of his mission. He honestly and sincerely believes that whatever "decision" forms in his brain -- out of the flux and flow of his own emotional impulses and biochemical reactions, the flattery and cajolements of his sinister advisers, the random scraps of fact, myth and fabrication that dribble into his proudly undeveloped and incurious consciousness -- has been planted there, whole and perfected, by God Almighty. And that's why Bush acts with such serenity and ruthlessness. Nothing he does can be challenged on moral grounds, however unethical or evil it might appear, because all of his actions are directed by God. He can twist the truth, oppress the poor, exalt the rich, despoil the Earth, ignore the law -- and murder children -- without the slightest compunction, the briefest moment of doubt or self-reflection, because he believes, he truly believes, that God squats in his brainpan and tells him what to do. And just as God countenanced deception on the part of Abraham, just as God forgave David for the murders he ordered, just as God blessed the armies of Saul as they obliterated the Amalekites, man, woman and child, so will He overlook any crime committed by Bush and his minions as they carry out His will. That's why Bush can always "do whatever it takes" to achieve his goals. And by his own words to Abbas, we see that he places his election in 2004 above all other concerns, even the endless bloodshed in the Middle East. So what new crimes will the Lord have to countenance to keep His appointed servant in power? 'Road Map a Lifesaver for Us,' PM Abbas Tells Hamas Haaretz, Thursday June 26, 2003 From sarang_shidore at yahoo.com Mon Jun 30 18:09:03 2003 From: sarang_shidore at yahoo.com (Sarang Shidore) Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 18:09:03 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Turkey Travelogue - Part III Message-ID: Merhaba friends, I am writing this at the wee hours of dawn from my home in Austin. Yes, I finally got back last night. But although I am in Austin physically, my soul still lingers on in that majestic city on the Bosphorus Strait. As I have said before, New York and Berlin awed me, London excited me, Tokyo, Amsterdam and Budapest charmed me, Singapore and Taipei impressed me, Rome and Florence enchanted me...but Bombay, Istanbul and Mexico City are the only cities that have inspired me. Perhaps because I remain (and will always remain) in my heart a citizen of the so-called "third world", the 4/5ths of the planet often derisively dismissed in the corridors of power for its supposed backwardness. But if we wish to see life in all its colliding contradictions we Moderns must step outside the cool comforts of our homes in Cupertino, CA and Austin, TX, even if it is a moment in the otherwise blissful existence of our gated soap operas. We, having accepted Modernity as our new ideology, are now determined to wage a new crusade to convert the heathen. The advent of some sort of Modernity is inevitable in our time. But by transforming what is essentially a complex historical wave (with its own diverse timescales and forms) into a single overarching dogma of Progress we are sowing the seeds of immense pain. We Moderns believe it is our obligation, indeed a duty to rapidly bring the vast yonder into our fold. It is our new Manifest Destiny, our call to arms. We believe we hold in our hands the keys to universal happiness. We believe that we have little to learn from those who came before us, or those who live in alternative realities in our age. How blindly and how blithely do we accept the need - no the desirability - to use and re-use the most destructive weapons humankind has ever known as tools to achieve our grandiose dreams? Our various gigantic ideologies - Marxism, Positivism, Fascism, Capitalism, Nationalism, Conservatism, Neo-Liberalism and all the other (mainly Western) isms that follow in their wake - have reduced the human community to a set of social security numbers. We have taken the individuality out of the individual, the beauty out of the beautiful. Our mass produced, brand-name culture of glittering commodities in gigantic superstores and antiseptic feel-good messages overwhelms us and sedates us every single day. We Moderns may have tranformed Convenience into a fine art form, but the reality is that we are increasingly marooned in a automated web of action and reaction. We have lost the art of contemplation, which the ancients recognized and practised. We live in a dream-like stupor chasing our insignificant dreams of More and Bigger in our narcissistic self-centered existence. We have many lessons to learn before we are truly Awake. OK, back to Istanbul. I have written to some degree of the Turkish language in my earlier letter. Let me expand on this. Turkish belongs to a language family known as the Altaic family which includes Kazakh, Uzbek, Mongolian, Azerbaijani, and Tatar mainly. Some linguists have proposed that the Altaic family and the Finno-Ugric family (Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish) for a part of a bigger supra-family known as the Ural-Altaic family. This is yet to be conclusively proven but there are apparently many similarities between these two families. Having been to Hungary and being somewhat of a language buff myself, it was very striking to me how similar they sound. The sorts of "feel" one gets from hearing Hungarian and Turkish is similar and vastly different from say Arabic or Russian. There are no guttural sounds (like in Arabic) and Turkish is spoken mostly from the front of the mouth. It sounds sweet to me (of course this is a matter of personal and subjective taste) unlike the harsh sounds of Arabic or Hebrew. Turks, like the Magyars who conquered Hungary in the 10th century, are an Asian (actually Siberian) people. Of course modern Turkey is a global tossed salad of the many ethnic groups that have criss-crossed Anatolia through the centuries. But many Turks do display a tendency towards higher cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes that is very pronounced in East Asia. (Of course there are many other Turks who look much more "Teutonic".) Dark hair is generally predominant, although various shades of brown are also common. Blonde is much less common, and some of the blonde women I saw probably used hair highlighters. If you are in Turkey the first word you should learn is "Teshekkurler" which means Thank You. (Here and later I shall be rendering Turkish words into their phonetic equivalents in English, i.e. as they are pronounced; which may or may not be the same as they are written). Some other words I picked up - "Merhaba" is hello. "Kahve" is coffee, "Kanun" is law, "Jawap" is answer, "Injir" is fig, "Tamam" is OK, "Tuvalet" is restroom, "Su" is water, and "Turkiye Jumhuriyet" is Turkish Republic, "Jaddesi" is street, "Sokak" is lane, "Taksi" is - well that's obvious! My trip to Ankara was quite interesting. Ankara was a dusty city of 30,000 when Ataturk declared it to be Turkey's new capital. It was a conscious effort of moving the centre of power to Anatolia, as Ataturk's ideology of Turkish nationalism was centered in that region. In fact, for the first seven years of his presidency Ataturk never even set foot in Istanbul to ensure that the new capital gained the credibility he wanted it to. To get to Ankara, take a taxi to Karakoy north of the Golden Horn right across the Galata bridge. From Karakoy ferries run every half an hour across to the Asian side. Take the ferry for Haydarpasha. The Ankara Ekspresi departs Haydarpasha station at 10:30 p.m. to arrive in Ankara at 8:00 a.m. the next morning. I had booked a "Yakatla Vagon" or sleeping car with berths. The ferry ride was beautiful - late at night Istanbul is cool and wonderful in June with a genlt breeze blowing across the Bosphorus. The ferry was moderately full with a mix of working class and professionals from the city center heading to their homes on the Asian side. The ticket was 1.1 million liras which works out to about 80 cents (US) or Rs. 38. Smoking is very common in Turkey and this is one of the few things that bothered me here, of course used to the smoking-free environment in the United States. That is one disadvantage of taking the deck seat on the ferry because many people around you including many women, light up almost immediately. However it was a small price to pay for the fantastic ambience. Chai sellers were making the rounds as the ferry pulled out. The ride across takes about 20 minutes. The Haydarpasha railiway station is right behind the ferry dock literally 50 meters away. Both are beautiful, very distinctive buildings, quite old. The station is spacious clean and well equipped with amenities. Because most people in Turkey take buses rather than trains, the traffic on the rail system is always light. In general, I am told trains are much slower than buses in Turkey, the exception being the Istanbul-Ankara line. Being a major train fanatic, I couldn't care less anyway - nothing beats the rythmic excitement of rail travel! Looking at the departure display at Haydarpasha sent a thrill down my spine - here there were trains listed for destinations such as Tehran, Iran and Aleppo, Syria. I was sorely tempted to jump into the train headed for Tehran, but....oh well, perhaps next year! In Turkey you present your ticket to the train conductor who is standing at the bogie entrance. He keeps the ticket during the journey and returns it just before the journey is over. At leats this was the way it worked on the Ankara Ekspresi. The sleeping berth was excellent - very comfortable with a washbasin of its own and more than adequate storage space. There was also a restaurant car open all night with food and drink, but I was tired and slept through most of the journey. All the guidebooks will tell you that Ankara is not worth visiting if you have limited time in Turkey. This is largely true - it is mainly a city of government offices and universities - but there are two major attractions there. One is the Anat Kabir or Ataturk's mausoleum. The other is the excellent Museum of Anatolian Civilizations which is the best museum in Turkey about the ancient history of Turkey right from the Neolithic era to the pre-Byzantine period. My friend Derek met me at Ankara station and we headed to Anat Kabir. It is an imposing structure very much intended to strike an amotion of awe and reverence. It is interesting how the architecture is very European - indicating Ataturk's strong belief that the West was the center of current civilization, and Turkey had to Westernize in order to modernize, or as he put it "to raise Turkey above the level of contemprary civilization". There is definite military air to the mausoleum as well. After all, Ataturk was a distinguished military general who seized power as the Ottoman empire was falling apart right after WW-I and the Allied powers had invaded Turkey. The plan by the redoubtable European powers and Woodrow Wilson, president of you-know-who, was to carve up Turkey into several statelets ("mandates"), each under the control of an allied power. Thus all the prize territories - Istanbul, the Aegean coast, the Mediterranean coast, etc. were to go to the Allies leaving only a small arid core in Anatolia for the Turks. It was Kemal Ataturk that foiled these plans by defeating the allies (mainly the Greek army but also the French and the British) in the three year war of liberation. Finally, in 1922, Turkish forces recaptured Izmir and the war of liberation was over. One by one, the allies agreed to pull their troops out of Turkey, and the modern Turkish state was born. Much as I am impressed with Ataturk's achievements, the fact remains that he was an authoritarian ruler who ruled by decree throughout his presidency. That by itself is not the end of the world (after all Lee Kuan Yew the dictator of Singapore made it what it is today), but there is no question that the reverence for Ataturk approaches that of a personality cult. His photos are everywhere, a bit like Mao's China, and criticizing Ataturk is a national offense in Turkey. So whatever you, do do not make negative comments about him in public anywhere in Turkey - foreigners are known to have been carted to jail because of this. Kemalism, as Ataturk's ideology is known, is very much a dogma of the urban elite and middle class in Turkey. In fact, politically Turkey is a polarized nation - paranoid Kemalism rules the roost among the military (which controls Turkish foreign an defense policies), business elite and much of the professional classes. However the interior and the working class have over the past years increasingly embraced the idea of a vaguely Islamic counter-movement to Kemalism. This first became a major issue in 1995 when the Refah Partisi (Welfare Party) under the Islamist leader Necmettin Erbakan formed Turkey's first Islamist government since the Ottoman period. Refah was very much a moderate party (roughly like Vajpayee camp of the BJP) that was peaceful and opposed any sort of a violent revolution to achieve its goals. However, it was an Islamist party and wanted Turkey to assert its Islamic, rather than Turkic, identity. It spoke of a "look East" foreign policy, wanted Turkey to leave NATO, withdraw its plication to join the EU, and cut off its (close) ties to Israel. This of course the military could not tolerate. in 1997, the generals engineered an ouster of the government (essentially a soft coup, with the tacit support of the United States and NATO) and Refah was outlawed. Its top leaders were barred from politics for several years. Turkey's Islamist experiment seemed to be over. Not quite. Refah soon re-emerged as the Fazilet Partisi (Virtue Party). Fazilet later split into a more hardline faction under Erbakan's successor and the so-called "Islamist Lite" Party of Justice and Development (AK Partisi) under the charismatic Recep Teyyep Erdogan, the hugely popular former mayor of Istanbul. The AKP jettisoned the opposition to NATO and EU which was a strong Islamist demand, and spoke of a Westward looking Turkey with an islamic culture. In the 2002 elections for parliment, the AKP won a huge landslide victory. Of the 10+ political parties in the fractious Turkish parliament, all but two were entirely wiped out. 500 of the existing 550 lawmakers lost their seats. It was a political earthquake. Today the AKP runs Turkey and all seems calm on the surface. But the deep fissure in Turkish politics remains and worries many analysts. Samuel Huntington writes of "Turkey doing a South Africa" i.e shedding its "cleft state" dilemma, rejecting large elements of Kemalism in favor of a new, more Eastward-looking paradigm. Has The rejection by the Turkish parliament of the American demand of military staging areas during the recent Iraq crisis - an astounding and unprecedented act of defiance in US-Turkish relations - signalled a gradual shift away from the pro-NATO policy that the Turkish elite has embraced since WW-II? Perhaps Turkey will assert itself and strike a more balanced posture as a true bridge between the Middle East and the West. It will take a leader of Ataturk's vision to achive such a mounumental task, and no such figure is in sight today. The most interesting part of Anat Kabir is the museum, which is essentially the official version of 20th century Turkish history. Some might term it state propaganda. Nevertheless it is very educational as it gives an insight into the ideology of Kemalism like nothing else in all of Turkey. There is a definite emphasis on the military side of Turkish history in the museum. In fact, in general, it will not be an exaggration to term Turkey as basically a military state with large areas of civilian autonomy. No wonder Pervez Musharraf looks up to Kemal Ataturk! A striking part of the museum is the large oil painting depicting Greek atrocities against the Turks in the war of liberation. Greek soldiers are shown murdering women and children and Orthodox priests are shown in the background egging them on. Quite interesting. Ataturk's view of women's role in society is worth mentioning. In one of his long quotes he talks about how women among the pre-Islamic nomadic Turks were equal to men, and how Islam subjugated them. This had to be reversed, according to him. (Talking of women's roles among the steppe warrior groups, the great Arabic traveller Ibn Battuta chronicles how shocked he was when he visited the Mongol territories by the way women and men interacted with each other. Ibn Battuta was a citizen of the settled Arab civilization that largely practised gender segregation. Ataturk's view seems to be consistent with this - after all the Mongols were close cousins of the Turks.In today's times, another warrior nation where gender equality reigns comes to mind - I am talking of the United States, of course!) Ataturk gave full political and economic rights to women in 1934 (10 years before France did) and there is a section in the museum highlighting the achievements of Turkish women during the early years. My own view of Kemalism is that it is a remarkable ideology, and essentially the response of a pre-moderm society (I have defined modernity here in a narrow sense - the attempt to put science and technology and individual material progress at the center of a society's endeavors.) to modern ideologies that were born out of the European Enlightenment. Thus it accepts the Enlightenment as the last word in civilization, but at the same time attempts to strengthen the Turkish identity by taking recourse to nationalism. A curious admixture of nationalism, Euro-centrism, and positivism is the result. No matter what one may think of Kemalism, it deserves to be studied by world historians and should form a part of the syllabus of every "developing" country curriculum. I have been writing for more than two hours and it is time for me to awake to the realities and get ready to go to work! Thus I leave you for now, but I hope to write the concluding portion of my travelogue soon. Till then stay well! Sarang Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!