From radiofreealtair at gmail.com Wed Dec 1 10:14:21 2004 From: radiofreealtair at gmail.com (Anand Vivek Taneja) Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:14:21 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] the Act of leisure - a 'loitering' poem. In-Reply-To: <33152.210.7.77.145.1101814500.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> References: <2099.210.7.77.145.1101722353.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> <33152.210.7.77.145.1101814500.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: <8178da99041130204459749490@mail.gmail.com> a poem at least fifty years old, but still telling - '...I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.' Acquainted with the Night I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, O luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night. -- Robert Frost On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:35:00 +0100 (CET), taha at sarai.net wrote: > Dear Aniruddha, Anand, Zainab and all, > > Thankyou for taking this discussion through various trajectories and > giving some food for thought to us all. Hopefully! > > Aniruddha, I do understand the need to have an eclectic approach to > leisure, to complicate it in order to unpack it. > I am completely in agreement to the argument that leisure must be > contextual but I think that that there exist numerous other contexts > beside the corporate context, which I believe are as much important. So > how does then one negotiate with this? Does one completely ignore the > need to have leisure in the context of those who can't 'afford' the > services of a resort in Rajasthan !. What does then constitute leisure? > Should leisure always mean images, which we see on the 'Discovery'/ > National Geographic/ NDTV [Night Out] channel? Where leisure is packaged > as a commodity, which can be bought at a price. Where it becomes an > object that can be fetishized. Where it induces a sense of anxiety in > those who can't meet the expense of its rendering. What then becomes of > leisure and its meaning? What then constitutes leisure? > Doesn't it then embodies into a hotch- potch collages of largely two > dimensional images, of iconography, of depictions, of representations, > of portrayals, Of exotic locales, of beaches, of luxury cruises across > the Carabians, of foreign lands, of meeting different/ 'unknown' people, > of unheard of places, of exquisite dresses, of unique jewellery, of > dinning out, of trendy discotheques, of partying late, of unwinding [MTV > style]. Doesn't then leisure become a cloistered sort of an experience > where ones sees and hears but doesn't smell, taste, or feel? Doesn't > leisure then transmogrify into a sort of a protestant ethic as argued by > Weber, where idleness is regarded as sin; so when viewed from the spirit > of capitalism, loitering/ chatting/ idling/ walking/ sleeping/sitting/ > conversing/ faltugiri etc would then be not but regarded as a > sin/ violation/corruption/impetuous act/ breach/ > contravention/infringement/ transgression? of law/society/ culture/ > resident associations/ management committeess etc. > > But this exactly is the point I am arguing against, that WHY should my act > of chatting or idling be regarded as a misdeed? Does there exist NO other > ethic except the Protestant ethic that drives the spirit of capitalism? > What nomenclatures must then [if it should be] be devised to address these > other existing forms of leisure/ non-formal activities? Will seclusion or > conversely inclusion with the right of entry reserved, be the only > justification to this dilemma? > Anand's insightful account of the Humayum Tomb Complex and Isa Khan tomb's > tell us that yes, it is but is it the only alternative? I don't know. Will > Nariman point go the Isa Khan way in near/distant future? > > Zainab's argument of the necessity of street cultures to the city is, I > think, critical because vibrant streets are an important site to > deconstruct the notion of leisure as a site of consumption and hence > control. For it represents a detour to approach the idea of leisure as > also a non- formal activity without the burden of a corporate context or > regimes of state regulation, surveillance or control. > > Cheers > Taha > > > > > Dear Taha, > > I read Aniruddh's email. One experience which I very clearly remember had > > taken place with my sister, me and a friend. This was three years ago. > > After > > watching a movie in the Excelsior Theater at VT, three of us proceeded > > towards VT station. We stood by a corner of a shop in the subway and were > > chatting. The private security guard came up to us and said this is not a > > place to hang around, get out from here. My friend who was male, was > > irritated and said that since we were not creating any trouble and were > > neither in the way of the people or the shop, he had no right to shoo us > > off. We stood there for some more time and I think the guard kept watching > > over us. I agree with Aniruddh when he says that certain mindsets have to > > change. Normally, in Mumbai, I cannot imagine hanging around in a street > > which has private residences and which is quiet by itself. I imagine this > > is > > how NFC is having been there once. Also, NFC by itself is a very plush > > locality and it is not surprising that you would get shooed off just for > > hanging around there. If I have to wait for somebody outside Regal Cinema > > at > > Colaba, the guard of the cinema will keep a watch over me, wondering what > > I > > am doing - am I soliciting clients i.e. am I a prostitute? If I am dressed > > like a South Mumbai yuppie, then I am okay because it means that I am > > waiting for my bunch of friends to join me for a movie. > > > > When you speak about leisure, a trend which i have noticed in some of > > interviews with people who live around Marine Drive and Nariman Point, > > they > > tell that there is no place in Delhi to hang out for free. At Nariman > > Point, > > you can hang around for free because it is a vast public space. Do what > > you > > like, though of course there are some civil lines to this. Spaces like > > these > > are few in Mumbai, but critical because they provide breathers not just to > > the middle class and below, but also to the rich and famous who may be > > getting suffocated inside the confines of their home. This kind of free, > > levelling and open leisure is somehow coming under the eyes of the > > corporate > > entities. Thus, Nariman Point will now be revamped with an art deco > > precinct, portions of it will be adopted by corporates for maintenance, > > there will be brass street furniture and what not. The architect, Ratan > > Batliboy, who has conceived of these grand ideas says in the latest issue > > of > > Time Out that what was free will continue to remain free, only that the > > quality of people who come to Nariman point will now be improved. And this > > is what concerns me, as Ravi says, 'terms of entry'. 'Terms of entry' into > > particular spaces are being regulated. You have to dress in a certain kind > > of way, behave in a certain way, if you are to feel accepted in a space. > > This is societal norms and conventions and also trends as shaped by the > > media. It concerns me that in attempting to create a Shanghai or an > > aesthetic city, we want to do away with people who we think are rowdy, > > hooligans, etc. We want to clean out the anti-social elements, a recent > > drive against beggars, CSWs and drug peddalars in South Mumbai which is > > atrocious in some ways and very brutal too. All of this because we want to > > create an aesthetic city. What bullshit! > > > > Street culture is critical to the very safety of the city. As I read about > > crimes in the trains and at railway stations, I feel some of it emerges > > from > > the erosion of illegal entities who were always a part of the street - of > > course, this is just speculation and there could be more to this than what > > I > > am saying. > > > > Property by itself is exlcusionary - this belongs to me, you cannot > > tresspass. The inside nooks and corners of private residential roads are > > not > > meant for 'hanging around' as we have known them to be. If you are hanging > > around outside these, you are very likely to be seen as a troublemaker. I > > think this also has to do with the concepts and practices of time in a > > city > > - who has time for faaltugiri in a city? Only faltu people! And faltu > > people > > in our imagination are trouble makers or mischief mongers! > > > > Cheers, > > Zainab > > > > > > > > Zainab Bawa > > Mumbai > > www.xanga.com/CityBytes > > > > > > > > > > From: taha at sarai.net > > To: "Zainab Bawa" > > CC: reader-list at sarai.net > > Subject: RE: [Reader-list] the Act of leisure > > Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 10:59:13 +0100 (CET) > > > > Hi Zainab, > > > > I largely agree with your take on the street as a site of surveillance/ > > contestation/control. But what amuses me the most is the way in which the > > state seeks to manage spaces like public parks/ community centers/ roads > > inside a residential colony etc. There seems to be a method behind > > innocuous measures to gently push the outsider out. The discourse of > > hygine/ crime/ cleanliness/ security is invoked on a routine basis to > > secure land/ pavements/ municipal roads/ public parks and of course > > community centers. Not that crime is mythical in this case but does > > securing public land in the name of crime prevention help??? I don't > > know?? or WHY the fencing of land appears to be the only creative solution > > to crime prevention ? > > > > The public-private partnership of Mumbai is also mirriored here, but its > > more subtle. The chief minister's motherly smile carefully hides the > > sneer as the Bhagidari between the government and the residents shifts > > into higher gear. The Delhi Police accelerates its neighborhood watch > > campaign encouraging neighbors to spy on each other and report any > > 'suspicious' activity to the police. The RWA's tighten the noose around > > the hawkers/ sales person/ vegetable vendors/ scavengers and pedestrians. > > The RWA fences the residential colony area and installs gates around them > > restricting the access and control of 'public' parks/ streets/ roads/ and > > shops. The DP also installs CCTV cameras around jantar mantar complex to > > monitor agitations and also ofcouse keeps a watch on every vehicle/ > > pedestrian that passes by its watchful gaze. > > > > The act of contestation in this haze of assumed/imagined rights [of > > possession/ ownership of land/ area/ property] then becomes interesting. > > The missing iron bar on a road divider which is wide enough to let a > > person pass or a gap in the wire meshing of a colony fence becomes a > > site of relief. > > > > But the arbitrariness through which this kind of power operates makes it > > more dangerous. The question then becomes how does one negotiate with > > a > > quasi legal approach of power. For example, during Christmas last year, > > the Head constable of New Friends Colony thana with eight constables went > > around the community center evicting idlers, who were generally sitting > > and chatting around CC. I was one of them, when I questioned him, he > > waived his Danda angrily at me,saying, ' Agar Aapko Baat Karni Hai To Cafe > > Coffee Day Ya Barista Ja KE Baitho Par Yahan Aise Khali Nahi Baithna'. > > > > When I reiterated my 'right' to sit here and do whatever I so damn well > > please, he just stared at me and said with a heavy accent 'Suna Nahi Kya'. > > That was it. I couldn't do anything about it. > > > > This brings us again to the question of leisure. Why in a place like CC > > sitting idly and chatting around the campus invites the state's wrath but > > Barista and Cafe Coffee Day are a safeguard to its harassment. It isn't > > that CC is always like this, God forbid no,but what drives this manic sort > > of obsession of the state with the street, common grounds where people > > converge/meet/walk. > > > > cheers > > > > Taha > > > > > > > > > > > Hi Iram, > > > Thanks for the insightful email. I draw some analyses from your last > > > email, > > > very quick and brief ones for the time being: > > > > > > 1). Streets and side-ways are increasingly being seen as loose, > > > uncontrolled > > > spaces which need to be controlled. So, we have moves from the > > corporate > > > sphere, the government sphere, to demolish, have private and public > > > security > > > around. At least that is what I see happening in Mumbai. In Delhi in > > any > > > case, streets are largely vacant from whatever bit I have seen. In fact > > I > > > feel unsafe walking on the streets in Delhi, except for Old Delhi. > > > > > > 2). Streets and side-ways are also being seen as spaces of illegality, > > > again > > > a Bombay perspective. Here is precisely one of the sites where the > > > everyday > > > battles between legality and illegality are being fought. And then > > again > > > the > > > issue of controlling loose space. > > > > > > 3). In this discussion on security, there is a very strong need to > > think > > > in > > > terms of the corporate-government perspective. I cannot think of one > > > without > > > the other in these times in Mumbai. Battles of competition, economy are > > > being waged between the corporates and the loose urban spaces. For > > > instance > > > the four 7 star hotels at Nariman Point pooling money and hiring > > private > > > security to evict hawkers. While the public is not involved in this > > > tussle, > > > we are talking of some kind of public when we refer to thge hawkers > > which > > > is > > > being seen as 'outsiders, encroachers'. > > > > > > 4). Then again, the media generates tremendous images of the terrorist, > > > the > > > encroacher, the illegal entity and these condition the public mind very > > > strongly. > > > > > > In debates on security, these three angles are critical. > > > > > > When we talk of public spaces, one of the things I am wrestling with in > > my > > > research on the seafronts and railway stations here is who is the > > public? > > > And the public seems damn dead when you ask me. They are snoring, > > caught > > > up > > > in the humdrum of daily lives. I have often thought of public and > > > community > > > spaces in Mumbai city to be problematic because people tend to use less > > of > > > these owing to tight notions and practices of time and these then > > become > > > dangerous. For instance the Shivaji Park. Then you have surveillance, > > > rules, > > > regulations, laws, policing, etc. And the media contributes to this > > all. > > > > > > For now, I am saying this. But there are several thoughts. Particularly > > > about institutionalizing entertainment and leisure which is what > > happens > > > in > > > malls and now with a spate of festivals in Mumbai City which aim to > > > commecialize and brand street food. There are terms of entry into > > public > > > spaces like malls and multiplexes and you were damn right when you said > > > that > > > if your scout around outside an upmarket place, you are seen > > suspiciously > > > by > > > the guards. What I am wary of is this increasing fuzziness between > > private > > > and public security and the use of private security in public spaces. > > > > > > Cheers, > > > Zainab > > > > > > > > > > > > Zainab Bawa > > > Mumbai > > > www.xanga.com/CityBytes > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > From: iram at sarai.net > > > To: reader-list at sarai.net > > > CC: taha at sarai.net > > > Subject: [Reader-list] the Act of leisure > > > Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 16:44:47 +0100 (CET) > > > > > > > > > Dear Zainab and all, > > > > > > Thanx for sharing your experiences/ observances of Delhi, Bangalore and > > > Bombay. > > > I guess as cities go, there are many similarities in all three except > > that > > > Delhi being the national capital can always cite security as a > > justified/ > > > valid/ legal reason for many things. > > > > > > Taha and I should have been more clear on what we mean when we use > > > categories such as private/ public and non formal spaces. I will take > > > recourse to the space of the New Friends Colony community center to > > clear > > > my understanding of public/private space. > > > > > > Can one really define public and private as clear-cut categories of > > space > > > and behaviour? How does one categorize private or deemed private > > behaviour > > > in public spaces? For example, kissing ones boyfriend in the parking > > lot > > > at CC or for that matter, public or deemed public behaviour in ones > > > private space. For example, a film star giving an interview to a news > > > channel while sitting in her drawing room would elicit a more formal > > > performance of behaviour. > > > I don't think that I am in a position to give conclusive definitions of > > > what is private and public. > > > > > > However, when I talk of public space with reference to the NFC > > Community > > > Centre, I mean the sidewalks, pavements, verandas, parking lots, > > streets, > > > subways, and squares etc. The inside of the shops, restaurants, bars, > > > cinema halls are private spaces because the right of admission is > > reserved > > > by the owner of the property or one is deterred by the presence of a > > > security guard. The public space of the verandas are taken over by the > > > restaurants and shops, the parking lot is leased out to private > > > contractors and all other spaces are meant to be used, to quote Richard > > > Sennet as ` areas to move through and not be in.' So, one will use > > the > > > pavement, sidewalk, veranda, square to move from the general store to > > > the chemist to pizza hut to the cinema hall to the parking lot and > > vise- > > > versa. > > > > > > The idea of sitting in front of Ego Thai [an upmarket restaurant] makes > > a > > > particular kind of individual, a nuisance, a vagabond, a potential > > > terrorist or an anti-social being. > > > To get back to the question of private and public space, I don't know > > what > > > to call the space of the fountain in a small open area in the shape of > > a > > > square typical to many Community Centres in Delhi. It is owned by DDA. > > It > > > is not a private space owned by any of the surrounding shops and > > > restaurants. It is not a public space because a private security guard > > > controls movement of people. He will not allow certain kind of > > individual > > > to sit around and that includes anyone who is not a patron/potential > > > patron of the shop/ restaurant. Public spaces, according to my > > > understanding were supposed to be spaces, that were open to all across > > > class, caste, race, religion and gender, hence the use of the term non- > > > formal space. > > > > > > I agree that a public space such as a restaurant, cinema hall, etc > > needs > > > economic transaction to survive. But, are spaces where one need not > > have > > > coffee and sit or watch a film for free, totally out of `public' > > > imagination? I'm still grappling with this one though. Besides, there > > is > > > Manisha. She is eight years old and lives under the Okhla railway > > station > > > flyover. The NFC Community Centre is work and play space for her. She > > > collects garbage, begs and is a regular sight at CC. > > > > > > Will Mc Donald's- the family restaurant allow her to enter their > > > restaurant space if she wants to buy a seven-rupee ice cream cone? Does > > > the security guard, who I see as a non- State player in this game of > > `cops > > > and robbers', not allow her to play in the veranda? > > > > > > However, this discussion was initiated not because I wanted to solve > > > Manisha's problem but because I was not allowed to sit in certain > > > `sacrosanct' spaces in CC on many occasions. > > > > > > Coming back to the idea of leisure and control, the popularity of games > > > like football, rugby etc in Europe after the passing of the Bank > > Holiday > > > Act 1871 indicates at the institutionalisation of certain kind of > > leisure > > > acts. `Publics' would go out in large numbers, congregate at a space > > full > > > of `strangers', watch/participate in `fun' activities, eat, drink and > > head > > > home. But through all of this entry/exit would be restricted/monitored > > and > > > so would behaviour and announcements/advertisements would ask people to > > be > > > wary of strangers. > > > > > > Appu Ghar, trade fairs, zoological gardens, resorts, parks, stadiums, > > > cinema halls etc. become such public spaces and the spaces of the > > streets, > > > roads, pavements, subways, and railway stations become carriers of > > people > > > though not all publics to these public spaces. > > > > > > Some ideas that we are thinking about- Do we take leisure and the idea > > of > > > leisure as given? What are the normal/ accepted forms of leisure and > > who > > > defines them? Is leisure a performance of sorts? > > > > > > looking forward to more views, > > > > > > Cheers, > > > Iram > > > > > > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > > > Critiques & Collaborations > > > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with > > > subscribe > > > in the subject header. > > > List archive: > > > > > > _________________________________________________________________ > > > Protect your PC! Call in the experts! http://www.msn.co.in/security/ > > Click > > > here now! > > > > > > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > > Critiques & Collaborations > > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with > > subscribe > > in the subject header. > > List archive: > > > > _________________________________________________________________ > > Protect your PC! Call in the experts! http://www.msn.co.in/security/ Click > > here now! > > > > > > _________________________________________ > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header. > List archive: > -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup. http://www.synchroni-cities.blogspot.com/ From jean at piche.com Wed Dec 1 07:44:42 2004 From: jean at piche.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jean_Pich=E9?=) Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 21:14:42 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] By way of introduction In-Reply-To: References: <20041130115050.3465028E58F@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: Friends, I would like to introduce my work to all, specially those from India, where I have spent months and years and only wish to return. http://jeanpiche.com/pani.html http://jeanpiche.com/bharat.htm http://jeanpiche.com/ namaste jp From raviv at sarai.net Wed Dec 1 09:32:51 2004 From: raviv at sarai.net (Ravi S. Vasudevan) Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2004 09:32:51 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Kumar Shahani, Geeta Kapur, Gulammohammed Sheikh at DU Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20041201093116.01f4bbe8@mail.sarai.net> >A TALK ON > >'DOES CINEMA HAVE A LANGUAGE?' >BY KUMAR SHAHANI >AT 2 PM >ON >WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 1, 2004 >AT THE EVS AUDITORIUM, UNIVERSITY OF >DELHI > >& > > >'PERSPECTIVES ON NARRATIVE' >PANEL DISCUSSION: GEETA >KAPUR, KUMAR SHAHANI, GULAMMOHAMMED SHEIKH > >AT 3 PM >ON WEDNESDAY >DECEMBER 8, 2004 >AT THE EVS AUDITORIUM, UNIVERSITY OF DELHI > >ALL ARE >WELCOME >FOR MORE INFORMATION: 9810724217 > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041201/97907b6d/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From coolzanny at hotmail.com Thu Dec 2 11:44:41 2004 From: coolzanny at hotmail.com (Zainab Bawa) Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 11:44:41 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Acts of Leisure Message-ID: Dear All, This is my contribution to the ongoing debate on Acts of Leisure. It is a diary piece of my walks around the city. Just a quick point: as loose spaces are being brought under control, both by corporates and the BMC though this is more of a nexus than a dual activity, it involves creating properties. Property by itself implies fencing, securing it against trespassing, etc. Mumbai City is becoming a conglomeration of various properties! Also, the corporates in the city realize that attempts at creating and defining property in the city cannot take place without the aid of the BMC so the BMC becomes a partner is every effort. For e.g. the upcoming Mumbai Festival. Also check out the advertisement on the back page of the Mumbai edition of TOI - it lauds the TOPS Security Services! The holy trinity - media, corporates, governance = private security! And we citizens are no holier than thou! Cheers, Zainab 1 December 2004 The city is a unique creature. I could even call it a mechanism because it is operative. I can call it a structure because it has its hierarchies and it knows how to intimidate people. But today, as I write my experiences of moving around the city, I imagine and relate to the city as a woman, a woman who reveals herself by and by. She has her charms, her beauties as also her ugly faces and darker sides. But she is a woman ultimately and in all that I understand her, the city is but a feminine metaphor. She is an experience. And experiences are to be experienced, not consumed. I find that as we are engulfed by tight notions and practices of time to the extent that we have become consumptive, I believe the city has also become a process of constant consumption. Leisure, which perhaps in the classic 70�s and 80�s had a connotation of its own in terms of time and space, involved the city in its various facets. Traveling to downtown Mumbai, watching the seas at Nariman Point and Gateway, tasting the sea�s salts just as the salt of this beautiful lady we then knew as Bombay, were all experiences of relating to this city. We loved her, didn�t we? But today, we just use her. We pass through her without noticing her myriad nuances. She is an experience of constant commuting � between home and work and back! On weekends these days, we just sleep, and thus, sleep off the city. Trains are a drug of Mumbai�s masses, particularly in today�s times. I say so because transitions and transformations in the urban are so rapid these days that you wouldn�t even notice them when they come through. And they are surreptitious as well. It�s crazy. I hate to leave the field even for a single day for I know not what new will come up and I may just miss it by. And when you travel by the trains, you are constantly inside the tunnels where worldviews operate differently. You know not what is happening on the roads, the streets, where the life of the city is. You are always inside the tunnel. And therefore, trains are the opium of Mumbai�s masses. So is regularity and discipline! Once in every while, I prefer to take long bus rides because that is what actually helps me connect with the city. I do not want to be pushed underground, because that is the constant endeavor of city planners and developers. The new Churchgate revival plan speaks of building more subways so that the Mumbai masses (read workforce) which constitute half of the population of Australia at Churchgate Railway Station everyday, do not come out of the railway station and move to their businesses from within. Everybody is being pushed underground � the streets are being cleared! And perhaps, as the streets are being cleared, the railway stations are becoming new sites of crime, security, surveillance, and the site of all that�s murky of and in the city! PUBLIC � this is one word which is very popular in the Mumbai parlance. What is Mumbai or Bombay but for public? This is a Public-City! Therefore I theorize that every space in Bombay is a public space � absolutely and why not? Go here, go there, go anywhere, for God�s sake you shall find public, public and more public. This morning, as I travel from VT through the old streets of Gamdevi, Chira Bazaar, Girgaum, Prarthna Samaj, I find the windows of the old buildings and houses are shut. Except for that one lady who was staring into the street from her window, the era of the window as a view to the street and to the city is bygone. There is no time man! What you talking! Somehow, the very sights of these old buildings, raddi shops, side shops, old pharmacies and doctor�s clinics, etc. made me feel very happy. It is the pure experience of diversity, of difference and different. For once, I see something more than the glass and steel structures, the multiplexes and the malls. For once it is about people and not structures. For once it is about the humanity of this city, which is not sacrosanct or sacred, but an experience of colour, vibrancy, life and continuous procreation, generation and evolution. For once, it is not about consumptive time; it is about the pleasure, the flavours and the multiple tastes of a single yet diverse experience � that is my city and that is what I identify with! As I pass through these old and forlorn areas of Bombay City, the downtown, the gallis and the gucchis, I find the city talks to me, reveals itself to me. Maybe it is not yet dead as I have been cynical about it. It is breathing, slowly, but surely. And I can hear the faint breath. I cannot promise to save her, but I promise to save my own soul from corruption, from cynicism, from depravation � and maybe if I save my own soul, I may be able to save a part of this city�s soul. And this bus ride, this time that I spend with the city, is my rebuilding of lost relationships with this city. I believe now that if we can undergo a paradigm shift concerning our notions and practices of time, of space and of money and economy, we may all be able to save our souls. We may be able to live! This morning, as I stood in the area of VT, I recognized that this is an area laced with uniqueness, with wonder of wonders. It is an amazing area, not merely because of the Indo-Saracenic architecture which is known, lauded and applauded and then put under various heritage laws to make them inaccessible to the publics; it is wonderful because it is a moving area, an area where life is constantly being generated. If the publics of this area were to be pushed inside the dark and hot subways and the streets were to be made clear, would this area be what it is today? I have very serious doubts! VT is a spectacular area. It has the bureaucratic BMC on one side. It has the capitalist Times of India Building on another side, Times of India, which is attempting and very successfully at that, to define what Mumbai is. It has the railway station. It has the courts and the other breed of the other men in black i.e. the liars whoops, lawyers! It has people whose homes are the streets i.e. the pavement dwellers. It has people whose businesses are the streets i.e. the hawkers. It has people whose transitions depend on these streets and who in turn define the transitory nature of the various street spaces i.e. the commuters. And it has faltoos too, the vagabonds, the voyeurs, the unemployed, the cheap jacks frequenting the shamed Capitol Cinema, etc. And the faltoos, mind you, are no faltoos. They generate the city. And we have another breed of faltoos i.e. the private security guards and men. I think they do major faltoogiri. And once in a while, they catch hold of some miscreant which puts them in the newspapers of the Times of India (please do the �Father, Son and the Holy Spirit� with your hands on your chests). Aisa bhi hota hai! Kuch samjhe janaab! It is about 3 PM this afternoon. I am moving across the streets of VT Station, Bazaar Gate, and Fort. At times, I am an observer. At times, I am a researcher. And at times, I am a participant. But there are no clear-cut boundaries in all these times and personalities � that is the wonder and marvel of schizophrenia. I say hi to some of my new friends around VT. The illegal global market is alive and kicking. At some points, it is dead. At some points, there is dhanda happening. All of this simultaneously. Can you then define the very practices and boundaries of time in this yet insane and schizophrenic city? Kabhi nahi! (I hope this city never becomes sane, the way Anand Mahindra and Co are visualizing it to be � curse them!) After a while, I stand by the bus stop and watch the proceedings of the market. Since the last three days, they are also selling religion in this market. But I think this is a little legal mamla (affair). It is the Hare Krishna people. They have put up a little cloth stall, hired sound equipment and what not and they are into the business of it all. Earlier, they were a bit civil, but I guess they have learnt the tactics of visibility and survival in this market. Now, I find they have also lowered the prices of the Bhagwad Gita from Rs.120 to Rs.60 and are shouting in the very style and parlance of the street hawkers � �sixty! sixty! sixty!� Everything sells here, in this illegal global market! I watch a T-Shirt seller�s stall and the activities there. People are walking on the streets and while they are walking, they pass through the stall and decide to halt there and have a look. The illegal global market is a street experience. There are no terms of entry or exit for the buyers. It is all about participation in the activities. You can buy or you can leave. You shall not be pried upon or judged. You are the boss even though this market is not customized and made �individual� as the (holy) malls. One of the buyers at this T-Shirt stall is finicky and picky. He is fat, has worn thick glasses, is looking through the various angles and sides of his glasses and examining every T-Shirt he is picking up. The T-Shirts are priced at �khali thirty� i.e. only thirty rupees. And these are strange T-Shirts. Bad quality, perhaps will last a couple of washes. They are T-Shirts which are perhaps factory rejects. There is a Readers� Digest T-Shirt, an EsselWorld T-Shirt (which in EsselWorld would cost a hundred and fifty bucks!), some American car company T-Shirts, etc. From all over the world on this T-Shirt seller�s wooden table � my goodness, it�s like going around the world in eight minutes and eight pence! I am almost beginning to imagine an American junkie�s life at this rate. However, we return to our Mr. T-Shirt seller. He is selling and there is the fat buyer. He is very fastidious and watching him arouses irritations and anxieties in me. Is he doing faltoogiri? Khareedne mein bhi interest hai ki nahi isko? Is he really interested in buying? I am doubtful. Then another macho kind of guy walks along the street and halts at the T-Shirt seller�s. He picks up one, throws and picks another. He is quick in his movements. He acts as a snooty customer. He has muscles, well-built chap, a chap you would call faltoo. This is a city of faltoos. This chap does not buy a single T-Shirt and walks off. But the T-Shirt seller don�t care for him. Aise bhi log hote hai! A Sardar, anther tourist into this city, comes and examines a couple of T-Shirts, buys one and walks off, someone I would call a fatafat customer! Our fat man, who I first described, is still examining the T-Shirts. I don�t think he is going to buy anything. He is just spending time. But, eventually, I see him pick five T-Shirts, pay and walk. My dad, who is a businessman himself, tells me, �Beta, you cannot judge a customer. Someone who looks very unlikely might just be the buyer whereas someone who looks likely may just not buy!� And I think about the very practices of time and shopping � interesting nah! I walk around VT Station. The area is called Bhatia Baug, apparently because of the Bhatia public park which is around. Dunno know the history yet. The park, which is a public park, looks like a dangerous haven to step into. It has druggies, beggars and all kinds of strange people. I am afraid to enter and so I don�t. The park is fenced and you discover it in the midst of all the ruckus and mess if you take some time and walk around carefully. Then, there is another location which is a grand water facility provided out of charity. It has two security guards posted there. Anyone can come and have a glass of cold water for free. I have been frequenting this place since three days now. The rule, as is written, is that you should not waste water, water is meant only for drinking purposes, and that you should wash the glass after you have finished so that it is clean for the next person to use. People can also use the space to sit for a little while. I see some tourists sitting there with luggage and using the space as a waiting room. The other day, a very poor, old man was participating in the activity of drinking water. He was dressed shabbily and looked like a construction labourer. One of the private security watch guards suddenly roared at this man after he had finished drinking water, �You bastard, you are supposed to wash the glass after you have finished.� I don�t know how justified his shouting was. I guess the guard was more prompted to do this because here was a man over whom he could show his superiority. Maybe he couldn�t do the same to me if I hadn�t washed the glass after use. After all, I am well dressed and more likely to roar back at him. I walked back from the Bazaar Gate side towards VT. As I walked, I noticed a security guard sitting at the filth laden place where the BMC garbage truck is usually parked. I have no idea what this private security guard is doing out here. I checked with a friend later in the evening if he knew about this matter. He tells me, �See, the BMC has privatized and contracted out security to these private agencies. The BMC no longer uses a lot of public security in the form of police and the police are such that they may do or not do their work. But the private chap is on contract and he has to perform. The BMC can pull him up if he don�t perform and terminate his contract. So this private security thing is part of the BMC�s privatization initiative and efforts.� My Conclusions for the Day: These days, we have been engaging in a debate about acts of leisure. I think acts of leisure are both private, individual acts, as well as public and community acts. Mumbai is being sold and marketed as a tourist city though historically, whatever is touristy about this place is actually not just its marvelous Indo-Sarcenic structures, but also its spirit, its filth, its dirt, its slums, its people and the various ways in which the peoples operate in this city. Current corporate efforts are aimed at cleaning up this city and making various spaces and places attractive to the tourists. I think Bombay is being made to suffer this inferiority complex with Delhi and Bangalore. Bombay can never be a tourist city in the way in which the corporates and the bureaucrats imagine it to be. It will be a drastic failure and I am waiting for this failure to take place. I don�t think you can expect Gregory David Roberts to write a �Shantaram� or for that matter, an NRI like Suketu to write a �Maximum City� if you are to clean and sweep this city of its public and spirit. We are making an ivory tower here and it is bound to crash and break into pieces. Perhaps everyone needs a major shock before they are to realize anything. Is that so? Zainab Bawa Mumbai www.xanga.com/CityBytes _________________________________________________________________ Choose what you want to read. Protect your mail from spam. http://server1.msn.co.in/sp04/hotmailspamcontrol/ Win the war in 9 steps! From taha at sarai.net Thu Dec 2 13:49:28 2004 From: taha at sarai.net (taha at sarai.net) Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 09:19:28 +0100 (CET) Subject: [Reader-list] the Act of leisure Message-ID: <33587.203.200.122.121.1101975568.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> Some more food for thought...taha A history of video surveillance in England 1913: surreptious photography of imprisoned suffragettes begins. 1949: publication of George Orwell's 1984, which is set in London. 1961: installtion of video surveillance system at a London Transport train station. 1967: Photoscan (business) markets video surveillance systems to retail outlets as a means of deterring and catching shoplifters. 1974: installation of video surveillance systems to monitor traffic on the major arterial roads in and through London. 1975: installation of video surveillance system in four London Underground train stations. 1975: use of video surveillance systems at soccer matches begins. 1984: installation of surveillance cameras at major rallying points for public protest in central London. Picketers surveilled during miners' strike. August 1985: installation of street-based video surveillance system in Bournemouth, a south coast seaside resort. 1987: use of video surveillance systems at parking garages owned by local authorities begins. 1988: installation of video surveillance systems at "council estates" run by local authorities. 1989: civil rights group Liberty publishes Who's watching you? video surveillance in public places. 1992: installation of street-based video surveillance system in Newcastle (a major northern city). The system in Newcastle is closed-circuit television (CCTV) that uses microwaves (an open circuit) to link to the city's main police station. 1992: use of speed cameras and red-light enforcement cameras on the national road network begins. August 1993: bombing of Bishopsgate in London by the IRA leads to the construction of the "Ring of Steel" around the City (London financial district). Measures include street-based surveillance cameras. 1994: central government (the Home Office) publishes CCTV: Looking Out for You. Prime Minister John Major states: "I have no doubt we will hear some protest about a threat to civil liberties. Well, I have no sympathy whatsoever for so-called liberties of that kind." Between 1994 and 1997, the Home Office spends a total of 38 million pounds of CCTV schemes. July 1994: use of covert video surveillance systems at automatic teller machines (ATMs) begins. 1996: government spending on CCTV accounts for more than three-quarters of total crime prevention budget. August 1996: all of England's major cities except Leeds have video surveillance systems in their city centers. 10 May 1997: public demonstration against surveillance cameras in Brighton, organized by South Downs Earth First!. July 1997: London police announce installation of surveillance camera system that automatically reads, recognizes and tracks automobiles by their license plates. October 1998: use of face recognition software in the London Borough of Newham begins. Contact the NY Surveillance Camera Players By e-mail SCP at notbored.org By snail mail: SCP c/o NOT BORED! POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998 NY Surveillance Camera Players NOT BORED! From coolzanny at hotmail.com Fri Dec 3 20:24:55 2004 From: coolzanny at hotmail.com (Zainab Bawa) Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2004 20:24:55 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Bombay Central Railway Station Message-ID: Zainab Bawa Mumbai www.xanga.com/CityBytes 2 December 2004 Bombay Central Station Sudha asked me to come if I was interested in visiting the station with him while he did his photography job. I went along. Sudha is an interesting character. Unlike me who watches everywhere and the puts down emotions, feelings, faces, people, stories, etc. in words, Sudha simply catches the moment with his camera. He is sharp. At times, I don�t understand what he is shooting, but I am sure that like everybody at the station, he too has a strong sense of purpose. He catches people on this camera, their moments and their spontaneous and posed expressions. Sudha is like a cat on the prowl. His gait and style of walking are sharp and alert. He does not talk most of the time. He only walks, shoots, walks, shoots � We are at the outstation railway platform known as the main line station. To me, this space is a process of practicing familiarity with New Delhi because I normally board a train to New Delhi from here. Once I am at the Bombay Central main line station, I already put myself onto the experience of New Delhi railway station. And in the train, I start conditioning my mind and instincts for Delhi through the encounters that I have with the North Indians. The main line platform has changed a lot since I first knew it. It has become a customized railway station. It has the McDonalds on it which is famous for the bomb blast that took place in it some years ago. By the way, Bombay Central main line station is a high alert station because it is very much prone to crime and terrorist attacks. You find the RPF manning it constantly as well as the GRP. The security on the railway station gives me another scent of New Delhi, a high security city! A TV screen is suspended from the ceiling at one point on the station. I don�t think people care too much for this one because it involves craning one�s neck and straining the eyes to obtain any pleasure from viewing it. Thus more pain than pleasure so let�s forget the damn thing! There are coffee machines by Caf�offee Day as well as Coke and Pepsi fountains. The only thing familiar and normally the landmark area on the station is the Wheelers Book Stall. It is part of everybody�s memory who have been used to train travel through India, whether by VT, Bombay Central or some other railway station. The Wheeler�s stall is one of the spaces on this railway station. It is a meeting space, a space to browse books carefully and leisurely, a space to pick up a quick copy of a paper or a magazine before boarding the train, etc. The station has undergone marbling at various spots. There are pillars at some points and a marble seating has been built around each such pillar. The seating spaces are the other spaces on the train station. Sudha tells me that these are high energy spaces. People are sitting there, waiting for their train. Or they are sitting there and chatting with their near and dear ones. People are sleeping at the station. It is a sight you would encounter at VT station as well. They are sleeping on the naked ground or have spread out newspapers and sheets to make themselves comfortable. Announcements are happening about arrivals and departures. One segment of the station has glass panes and windows. A look at those segments makes me feel like I am at an international airport. From outside the windows, I can see a dish antenna and people walking along the bridge overlooking the window. It feels like Frankfurt airport at Bombay Central Station. Whoever said the station is but one entity! It is multiple, simultaneous, several! We walk inside, on the platforms. We are a legal people who have bought platform tickets. Sudha is shooting the kids on the station. These are kids who have run away from their homes in their villages and have now settled at the railway station. The station is now their home. Later when I speak to the kids, one of them tells me that it is both fun and torturous being at the railway station. The fun part is that the station is a place for work as well as play. �It�s like a playground,� one of them tells me. Also, you can get different kinds of foods from inside of the different trains that arrive at the platform. The torturous part is the harassment by the police. At night, when they have to sleep, they find hideouts in order to settle into slumber. The top berth of the various canteen stalls on the station is one of their hideouts. They sleep on it in the nights so as not to be caught by the officials. One of the persons on the team informs me that these children run away from their homes and when they land at the railway station, the existing gangs and groups on the station accept these kids into their little ghettoes and groupings. Thus, the kid finds his/her support. I imagine then that the railway station is also home. It is not simply a transitory space. It is how transitory you and I make it out to be. We start to walk. Sometimes I am on the bridge, sometimes I am on the platform. I am unable to fathom everything happening at the station. As trains like Rajdhani and August Kranti arrive and stay scheduled there, I notice the trends and fashion prevailing among the hi-fi Punjabis and North Indians who travel by these air-conditioned trains. There is a clear contrast existing on the station, the clear sights and pictures of the haves and the have-nots. And everybody is going along with their business. Nobody is overly involved in issue of social justice. Perhaps the very difference between the haves and the have-nots has been accepted, internalized and practiced. No moral qualms or dilemmas here. Perfect! Constantly and at regular intervals, the team is asked to show the permission letter for shooting on the station. I am told that we are being followed by various people who are keeping a watch on us to see whether we adhere to the time restrictions and limitations that have been specified in the permission � basically, permission with �catches� attached to it. I am enjoying this adventure trip actually and am not the least bit perturbed about being watched and followed. Chalta hai! There are two kids with us and they are posing in various forms, formats and against various kinds of landscapes. Sometimes I find these landscapes contradictory. At one point, one of the kids carefully takes out a fifty-rupee note from his pocket and goes somewhere. He arrives with a smile on his face and a little packet of Kurkure Chips manufactured by Pepsi Foods. This is his desire, his want, his cherished flavor. I am amused because I don�t know whether I am supposed to feel something at this sight. Am I supposed to? The kids and me are chatting. These are very clever children. I think about the children of the streets, the children of this city. I suddenly feel like all these are my own children and how can I think of disowning them. And perhaps precisely this is what government and governance is out to do � remove these bastard kids; they are delinquent, have a bad effect on �the children� of our society. But whoever said that going to school means you are a good child? Isn�t the street a live school? Sorry boss, there is no space on the streets these days. We are converting all of them into parking spaces! Kuch samhje bhai? If not, get lost and don�t ask too many questions. I love these children, whole-heartedly. As I walk along the station, I ask myself whether I am a researcher. What am I searching and researching? Maybe I am no longer a researcher; I am a perfect participant. Maybe research and participation are not two different things at all. There is perhaps no dichotomy after a point. You are the means and you are the end � YOU! Isn�t that lovely? Perhaps, research is but a spiritual experience in itself. I am a cool researcher! I come out of my thoughts and look at the various water fountains that have been installed on the platforms. Several of these are out of acts of charity. And mind you, the marbling and the structures are renovated and well take care of. I hope some attention is being paid to the water as well. I notice some children of the railway station who have gathered several empty plastic bottles still in good condition and are filling it with chilled water. I don�t know what they are going to do with these bottles and the water. But they are dedicatedly filling them up and storing them into huge black plastic bags. Maybe this is the water that you and me will drink later when we commute by these trains or buy water at the platform! I think water and the children of railway stations have a very strong and close link between themselves. It is their livelihood. These water fountains are spaces too on the platforms, just as there are other spaces. I notice the steel benches that have been installed on the station. These are not new. I examine the construction of the station. This is a half-half station with cement, concrete and steel. Somehow, steel gives the station a feeling of lightness and the very characteristic of speed. The steel seats on the station are like modern furniture set against a colonial Indian backdrop. They look a bit weird and are yet light in the feelings and sensations they arouse in me. Earlier, Sudha was shooting a little boy who was into the business of boot polish and shining shoes. This boy was lovely. He had this Rajnikant style of polishing shoes, tossing the brush in the air after a point and then moving it in the direction opposite to that which he was first moving it in. I have heard stories of how the boot polish itself is a drug if you intake its odour repeatedly and I wonder whether these little boys are addicted to it. But these are adept kids and they well know how to make decisions. They are jolly, living each day as it comes for to them. There is no future or tomorrow in the dictionary of their lives. Everything is today, now, right now! And that is how they live! They walk around the station with their thailas which contain a little wooden stand and the boot polish samaan. Vagabonds of some order nah? Sudha asks me how is the walk? I am enjoying it. Then he asks me to look over and see how people are waiting between two barricaded gates, waiting for the train to arrive. These are people who will jump into the unreserved compartment even before the train has stopped on the platform. �I would never travel like this,� Sudha tells me, adding, �It is so inhuman nah?� I wish to tell Sudha that I have stopped thinking in terms of humanity and inhumanity. I am into this business of discerning anymore. It�s over an hour since we are here. Sudha manages to somehow get hold of his last few subjects whom he is going to photograph. He goes into a train to shoot and then moves to the other side, the narrower platform. I am able to see him through the windows. Finally, he comes out and shrugs his shoulders, �Permission, permission, permission � everybody wants permission!� Sudha, this is no longer a permissive city � With love, Zainab _________________________________________________________________ Searching for your soulmate? Zero in on the perfect choice. http://www.astroyogi.com/newmsn/astrodate/ Try MSN Astrodate now! From shivamvij at gmail.com Fri Dec 3 22:31:42 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 22:31:42 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Caste and the City Message-ID: Dear all: here is a rejoinder to those who claim there is no caste discrimination in urban India, or that it happened only in the past. To those who think Dalits need 'education' instead of 'reservations', read this. It is upper-caste Indians who need education: education that what you are doing to Dalits is *racism*. Those who are indifferent to the plight of Dalits in urban India, that is Dalits/Tribals around you, you are in effect part of the problem. Merely saying you are progressive is not enough. This report is argument enough in favour of proportional representation of Dalits/Tribals/Middle castes (OBC's) in educational institutions and professions. If urban upper caste Indians refuse to live in an apartment built by Dalits and occupied largely by them, it is proof enough that they would also not like to have Dalits at their workplace. And so Dalits suffer the problem of lack of equality of opportunity in the jobs market. They are not just historically disadvantaged, but also marginalised and thus disadvantaged in contemporary India. If this happens in the national capital, you can imagine what happens in the rest of India. cheers | shivam vij moderator, ZESTCaste: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste the best online resource on caste: www.ambedkar.org o o o o o Caste casts shadow on real estate too: Indo-Asian News Service | New Delhi, 3 October 2004 http://www.newkerala.com/news-daily/news/features.php?action=fullnews&id=34503 Houses in a middle class Delhi neighbourhood with two or three bedrooms, ample living space, running water and a car park - these may sound like dream flats, but they have no takers. Gaurav Apartments, in Patparganj in east Delhi, boasts of houses that a potential buyer would give his right arm for - were it not for the label of "Dalit" in caste-conscious Hindu society. Built by a group of residents belonging to the Scheduled Castes (as Dalits are known officially) and Scheduled Tribes, the apartment complex is an odd one out in a neighbourhood dotted by housing societies of professionals like engineers, journalists, technocrats, doctors and professors. "The lack of demand has plummeted property rates here, yet few people want to buy flats here," said Ramu (name changed), an employee of the Gaurav Apartment Housing Society. "Many clients have declined to buy or even rent a flat soon after looking at the huge portrait of (B.R.) Ambedkar at the entrance," said Lalit, a Dalit property dealer who has an office nearby. Ambedkar, who drafted the Indian constitution, is considered the messiah of Dalits, formerly dubbed "untouchables" by the Hindu high castes. "There are 192 apartments in that society. At least 15 to 20 are vacant. Now you know why," Lalit said, pointing out that a two- bedroom flat was available for around Rs.1.7 million - compared with around Rs.2 million or more for flats in other nearby housing societies. "Except for a few south Indians and some Bengalis, others are reluctant to invest here as 60 to 70 percent of the flats are occupied by Dalits," said Lalit, who converted to Buddhism inspired by Dalit leader Udit Raj. Lalit's real estate office is shorn of portraits of Ambedkar. He admits that the picture would affect his business. Instead, pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses adorn the walls of his small office in Madhu Vihar, close to Gaurav apartments. Most property dealers are frank about the situation and advise buyers to look for a flat elsewhere. "Why Gaurav Apartments? Why not Friends Apartments or Navkunj Apartments?" asked another property dealer when an IANS correspondent approached him pretending to be a prospective buyer. Buying a house in a Dalit locality might not be a wise decision, the man added. All India Confederation of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes chief Udit Raj was bitter in his criticism of people's attitudes. "Indians are suffering from a mental sickness. Even the educated class is not above this disease of caste-based discrimination," Raj told IANS. "Daits do not need sops, they need self-respect," he said. Says Ramu: "When Dalit children are studying in schools with high caste children, why are grown-ups refusing to integrate with the Dalits?" -30- From basvanheur at gmx.net Fri Dec 3 03:20:59 2004 From: basvanheur at gmx.net (Bas van Heur) Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 22:50:59 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] cut.up.magazine is looking for writers and artists Message-ID: <41AF8E43.9020408@gmx.net> Cut.up.magazine is a new online magazine for marginal culture. Every two weeks we publish five new articles and a range of reviews. A selection from our recent past: textual sampling and musical recycling; the bingobus from Utrecht to Amsterdam; cut-up techniques; hallucinating in Las Vegas; soccerplayer cum artist Raymond Cuijpers; and book- and cd-reviews on mediatheory, audio-culture, experimental music and festivals. Text and Image. Cut.up, however, wants more and is looking for textual and visual contributions. In other words: we want people who know how to produce interesting texts and images. Genres do not interest us: interviews, abstract art, academic analyses, landscape-pictures, critical reviews as well as literary experiments are what we want. Take a look at www.cut-up.com and let us know how you can do better. You can submit your stuff in English, German and Dutch. More information: bas van heur, bas at cut-up.com cut.up.media @ www.cut-up.com [the art of living in a medialised landscape] --- cut.up.media po box 313 2000 AH Haarlem The Netherlands --- From carlos.katastrofsky at gmx.net Fri Dec 3 16:23:09 2004 From: carlos.katastrofsky at gmx.net (carlos katastrofsky) Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 11:53:09 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [ann] new project: entropy Message-ID: <200412031153.09964.carlos.katastrofsky@gmx.net> [sorry for x - posting] a new project is now documented online at http://www.entropy.net.tf the focus of the work lies on movement. a computer program designed to trace only the moving parts in film/ videosequences translates scenes into one picture. the physical appearance of objects/ subjects disappears. this results in a representation of concentrated layers of movement. ---------------------------------------------- carlos katastrofsky http://www.error300.net.tf [text: sabine hochrieser] ------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From CoffinCapital at hotmail.com Thu Dec 2 14:46:36 2004 From: CoffinCapital at hotmail.com (Coffin Capital) Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 01:16:36 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] FW: NEWS: Aishwarya Rai To Star In Major Motion Picture About Bhopal Message-ID: FYI -- > ------------------------------------ > > FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE > > > Aishwarya Rai To Star In Major Motion Picture About Bhopal > Fiction Feature Film is Epic Thriller Set Against World’s Largest > Industrial Disaster > > > BHOPAL, INDIA & HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, USA – DECEMBER 2, 2004 – > International star Aishwarya Rai announced today she will executive > produce and star in a major motion picture about the 1984 Union Carbide > disaster in Bhopal. Tentatively titled “WINDFALL,” film will be produced > by Zachary Coffin and is scheduled to begin filming in Fall 2005. > > The fiction feature film, a murder mystery inspired by true events, is set > mostly in present day America, with flashbacks to Bhopal. Movie is the > story of a young woman’s search for her father, a plant manager on duty > the night of the disaster. Ms. Rai plays the lead role, Jasmine Singh, an > Indian-American debutante born in Bhopal but raised in Beverly Hills. > > “The story of the disaster in Bhopal is all too tragic,” said Ms. Rai. > “But this film will be inspiring. The story of a young woman’s search for > her father, the love story with her American fiancé and the issues she > goes through as a survivor of the disaster – I simply had to be involved. > And I hope the films’ success will draw attention to the need of victims > in Bhopal, and to those everywhere who’ve suffered from injustice.” > > “This is a heroic role, like Erin Brockovich, but on an epic scale – THE > INSIDER meets TITANIC,” said producer Zachary Coffin. “Aishwarya was our > first, last and only choice to play the lead, and I truly believe this > will be the most inspiring performance of hers yet.” > > The film was announced auspiciously during the 20th anniversary > commemoration in Bhopal. “Today, twenty years to the day of the tragedy, > this spot may well be the most symbolically significant square mile on the > earth,” said Mr. Coffin, speaking from the statue of Bhopal Mother in > front of the now abandoned Union Carbide factory. “For what happened here > with Union Carbide is directly connected to what happened in the US with > Enron, Tyco and Halliburton, and what is happening in scores of places > around the world. Bhopal has become a metaphor for our times. It is the > story of the most blatant example of corporate injustice, the most glaring > instance of globalization gone awry. It is a story whose time has come.” > > Feature film is to be based on an original, fictional treatment written by > the producer, relying in part on the non-fiction book The Bhopal Tragedy: > What Really Happened and What It Means for American Workers and > Communities at Risk, by Ward Morehouse and Arun Subramaniam. Documents > recently released under the US Freedom of Information Action will > supplement the book with newly revealed information about who knew what > when. > > “At long last,” commented Ward Morehouse, Co-Author of The Bhopal Tragedy > and Co-Founder of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, “this > great tragedy will be told as a gripping story of human hope and the > search for truth.” > > "The truth behind the worst corporate crime in history has remained > inaccessible to the world community for much too long," added Satinath > Sarangi, Managing Trustee of the Sambhavna Trust. "Now, as the disaster > reaches its third decade we are very hopeful that this film can increase > international awareness of the continuing disaster in Bhopal." > > The 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India – the “Hiroshima of the > chemical industry” – is the largest industrial disaster in history. On > the night of December 2, 1984, 40-60 tons of toxic gas escaped the > chemical plant and spread to 25 square miles of the city. Over 20,000 > people died and at least 120,000 remain chronically ill to this day. > > “But if you think this film will be depressing,” commented producer Zack > Coffin, “I dare say you’ll be surprised. This is a dramatic personal > journey set against an historic epic backdrop. It’s true to the spirit of > what happened such that victims and stakeholders feel comfortable, but > accessible to a global audience – an international epic movie that has it > all – murder mystery, romance, grand scale, political manipulation, > corporate abuse, high stakes legal battles, backroom deals and a > passionate personal quest for the truth.” > > Principal photography is expected to begin in Fall 2005, with > approximately two-thirds being filmed in North America and one-third in > India. > > More information about the film can be found at www.BhopalMovie.com. > > > ### > > The names of companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks > of their respective owners. > > > ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS > > AISHWARYA RAI – Recently described by the New York Times as a “a true > megawatt international star on the order of Liz Taylor,” Ms. Rai can be > seen in her first English-language movie BRIDE AND PREJUDICE, releasing in > America in February 11th. The queen of Indian cinema, and former Miss > World, she has been named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the > World” by Time Magazine. Recently signed with Hollywood talent agency > Creative Artists Agency, Ms. Rai already has agreed to star in CHAOS > opposite Meryl Streep and is due to start filming MISTRESS OF SPICES in > 2005. > > ZACHARY COFFIN – CEO of Zachary Coffin Productions, and General Partner of > Coffin Capital, Mr. Coffin combines two diverse careers – art and business > – to produce this movie on Bhopal. As Global XBRL Leader at KPMG LLP, he > was responsible for leading the integration of transparent internet > reporting (XBRL) into the firm’s assurance, audit, tax, corporate finance, > and advisory services for clients of every industry worldwide. A subject > matter expert on corporate transparency, he has spoken at venues ranging > from the Federal Reserve to the World Congress of Accountants. Previous > to his eight years in consulting, Mr. Coffin spent seven years in > media/entertainment, including co-producing radio show Gandhi in the Park > for three years in New York. Mr. Coffin graduated with an MFA in Film > Production from the University of Southern California, and with a BA, > magna cum laude, from Columbia University. > > > CONTACT INFORMATION: > > Zachary Coffin > Preferred Contact: info at BhopalMovie.com > Telephone in India (Dec 2004 only): +91-98189-03420 > Fax: +1-213-330-0270 > (Hindi-speaking Press: Rachna Dhingra, rachna at umich.edu, +91-98261-67369.) > > NOTE TO PRESS: > > Zachary Coffin will be available to answer questions during a press > conference on Sunday, 5 December 2004, at Noon, during the India > International Film Festival in Goa, India. See www.BhopalMovie.com for > updates. > > ### > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041202/dda561e9/attachment.html From kalisaroj at rediffmail.com Thu Dec 2 10:40:14 2004 From: kalisaroj at rediffmail.com (avinash jha) Date: 2 Dec 2004 05:10:14 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Foot march - Delhi to Multan Message-ID: <20041202051014.6880.qmail@webmail27.rediffmail.com> I am forwarding the message from Tenzin Rigzin for those who might be interested. -avinash   Dear friends, I will be going for the Delhi to Multan padyatra (foot march) which will take place from 23rd March 2005 to 11th May 2005. Please join in this march if you can. You can register for the peace march and get more information about it from the following website (Click on 'Indo Pak Peace' on the website): http://www.thesouthasian.org/ If you have a passport, or can get one made soon, you can register easily within the next few days. I look forward to our marching together. Best wishes. -TR **** Tenzin Rigzin Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies Sarnath, Varanasi - 221 007. India. Fax:0542-2585150 Phone (resi): +919839115353 www.smith.edu/cihts -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041202/e8c22cbf/attachment.html From moushumi_gr at yahoo.co.in Wed Dec 1 20:12:17 2004 From: moushumi_gr at yahoo.co.in (Moushumi Ghosh Roy) Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 14:42:17 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] SIGHN TO RECOGNISE THE RIGHTS OF THE WASTE PICKERS Message-ID: <20041201144217.83893.qmail@web8409.mail.in.yahoo.com> Dear friends, Here is a signature campaign for recognition and improved work of the informal sector, such as waste pickers, kabaris etc. These are people who recycle the waste that you and I throw out. The letter is self-explanatory. We request you to please sign up by emailing us your name and contact details at info at chintan-india.org. Please also pass this on to as many people as you think will be interested. The last date for sending in your email is December 15th 2004. Thanks Bharati Chaturvedi Director, Chintan SIGNATURE CAMPAIGN To, Smt. Kumari Selja Minister of State (Independent Charge) Urban Employment & Poverty Alleviation Nirman Bhawan, Maulana Azad Road, New Delhi -110011 1st December 2004 Dear Smt. Kumari Selja, We are all aware that the Delhi government has declared the cut off date for segregation of waste at source as January 1st 2003. As people begin to segregate waste, the recyclables will have to go for recycling. In India, the recycling takes place through the informal sector. This sector includes both wastepickers and kabaris or traders-big and small. In the specific case of Delhi, it has been seen that Almost 1 out of every 100 persons is engaged in some form of recycling at different levels. In all, the efforts of the sector increase the value of a unit of waste plastic from zero to 700% by sheer washing, trading and selling alone. A strong work force of 2 lakh self employed people comprising of men, women, children wastepickers clean up 2,000 tonnes of garbage daily saving the MCD 12 lakhs of rupees picking up between 9-15% of the wastes. They are indispensable to recycling because they pick and sort the waste, bail it according to the types and clean it up. The recyclers of Delhi are our biggest allies in our quest for segregation. In spite of being the backbone of the recycling chain in India, they are a marginalized group · The law doesn’t recognise them and there are no facilities for them to improve their working conditions or upgrade their work. · Wastepickers have very poor access to basic facilities such as sanitation, clean water or medical facilities, despite the cuts and injuries they sustain during their work. · They are exposed to numerous toxins during their work, such as the deadly dioxins that causes cancer and developmental problems. Yet they are often unable to access medical care for ailments due to their status / image. They are not welcomed in government hospitals and are under confident of accessing even the most basic facilities. Urban Master Plans choose to ignore this strong work force without whom the cities would choke on their own filth. As citizens who benefit from the free services of this sector, we demand that: Wastepickers and kabaris are adopted in the proposed list of informal workers in Delhi’s third Master Plan. The government recognize wastepickers as vital service providers Recognise wastepickers’ rights over recyclable waste Include wastepickers and the recycling sector in community and zonal plans related to waste, as well as in any privatisation of waste scheme. The social security schemes for the unorganised sector should be implemented sincerely. It is important to take these measures to help the informal recyclers work in greener and safer environment. Yours sincerely Name: Contact Details Signature Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partneronline. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041201/e7e04155/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: web based sig camp.doc Type: application/msword Size: 24064 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041201/e7e04155/attachment.doc From jo at turbulence.org Thu Dec 2 01:16:52 2004 From: jo at turbulence.org (Jo-Anne Green) Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2004 11:46:52 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Turbulence Commission: "Heat and the Heartbeat of the City" by Andrea Polli Message-ID: <41AE1FAC.8050308@turbulence.org> December 1, 2004 Turbulence Commission: "Heat and the Heartbeat of the City" by Andrea Polli http://turbulence.org/works/heat [Needs Quicktime and Flash plugins, headphones or external speakers] According to the Metropolitan East Coast Assessment maintained by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, New York City will be dramatically impacted by global warming in the near future. Average temperatures in New York could increase by one to four degrees fahrenheit by 2030, and up to ten degrees by 2100. The impacts of these changes on this major metropolitan area will be dramatic. "Heat and the Heartbeat of the City" is a series of sonifications (musical compositions created by directly translating data to sound) that illustrate these changes focusing on the heart of New York City and one of the city's first locations for climate monitoring, Central Park. The data sonified is actual data from summers in the 1990's and projected data for summers in the 2020's, 50's, and 80's using one of the most detailed atmospheric models of any urban area. As you listen to the compositions, you will travel forward in time at an accelerated pace and experience an intensification of heat in sound. "Heat and the Heartbeat of the City" is a 2004 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from The Greenwall Foundation. BIOGRAPHIES ANDREA POLLI is currently an Associate Professor of Media at Hunter College in New York City. She has developed interactive media projects related to perception and cognition, complexity, and human behavior. Her projects feed into multiple areas of research and her work often offers new 'readings' of scientific data and other information produced by natural systems. She currently works in collaboration with meteorological and environmental scientists to develop systems for understanding storms and climate through sound. DR. CYNTHIA ROSENZWEIG is a Senior Research Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where she is the leader of the Climate Impacts Group. She is a Senior Research Scientist at the Columbia University Earth Institute and a Professor of Environmental Sciences at Barnard College. Dr. Rosenzweig is the Co-Leader of the Metropolitan East Coast Regional Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change (MEC), a study of how New York City and environs are likely to be affected by global climate change and how the city can prepare to adapt to changing climate conditions. MORGAN BARNARD is a visual artist living and working in New York. Throughout the years Morgan has worked as a music video director, documentary filmmaker, and video artist. His projects range from video based music instruments to live video mixing and creating custom hardware and software for the video performance. Recent projects include Quadbox, a multi camera video based musical instrument; Float Potion, live video mixing and programming in collaboration with Jared Lamenzo; and Queensbridge Windpower, a video documentary in collaboration with Andrea Polli. KURT RALSKE is a NYC-based video artist, composer, and programmer. His work involves the expressive improvisation of both sound and image, simultaneously and in real-time. He creates his work exclusively with his own custom software, written in C/C++ and Java. He is also the author of Auvi, a software environment for creating custom real-time video programs. For more information about Turbulence, please visit http://turbulence.org -- Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: http://new-radio.org New York: 917.548.7780 . Boston: 617.522.3856 Turbulence: http://turbulence.org New American Radio: http://somewhere.org Networked_Performance Blog and Conference: http://turbulence.org/blog -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041201/9116792f/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From leila at birds-eye-view.co.uk Wed Dec 1 20:10:58 2004 From: leila at birds-eye-view.co.uk (Leila Meera Jordan) Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2004 14:40:58 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] SUBMISSION FOR BIRDS-EYE-VIEW WOMENS FILM FESTIVAL, MARCH 2005 Message-ID: <1101912058.41add7fa786aa@webmail.eclipse.net.uk> Submissions are invited for the 'Birds-Eye-View' international womens film festival, March 2005. We are currently selecting short films for the program 'Tehran to Tokyo' from filmmakers across Asia. Submission is free. The program is selective but we are keen to include fresh, new, filmmakers in the line- up. Films must be directed by women. For further enquiries contact Leila Jordan at leila at birds-eye-view.co.uk Please send your submissions by VHS or DVD to the address below. Please submit your films to the address below: 'Tehran to Tokyo' Program Coordinator Birds Eye View Unit 310A, Aberdeen Centre, 22-24 Highbury Grove, London N5 2EA T: +44 (0)20 7288 7444 _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From sadan at sarai.net Thu Dec 2 11:26:18 2004 From: sadan at sarai.net (sadan at sarai.net) Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 06:56:18 +0100 (CET) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] student stipendship result Message-ID: <32886.210.7.77.145.1101966978.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> List of Selected proposals for Student Stipends For Research on The City 2004-2005 1.Prasad Khanolkar, Architecture, Duplicacy- Robin Hood of the Global City, KRIVIA, Mumbai, p.khanolkar at gmail.com 2.Sebastian Rodrigues, Latin American Studies, The Rise of Critical City Fortnightly newspaper: It's Origin, Relations with the Local Political and Corporate Actors and Its Impact on the City Dwellers: A Case Study of “Vasco Watch” in Goa's Port Town of Vasco da Gama. Goa, Goa University, Goa, sebydesiolim at hotmail.com 3.Abeer Gupta, Design, The transformation of the notion of National Identity within changing urban scenario and its representation in Govind Nihalani's films; An exploration of Dev, NID, Ahmedabad, abeer at nid.edu 4.Prashanti Ajgaonkar, History, Combating Malaria – The experience of panaji City, Goa University, Goa, prashanti.a at rediffmail.com 5.Sushmita Sridhar, Cultural Studies, Visualizing Space and Spatialzing Vision: A study of Public Space in Bangalore, CSCS, Bangalore, sushmita at cscsbang.org 6.Habiba Marya Shakil and Fathima N., Mass communications, Being single and a woman in the city: falling in 'line' to obtain a living space, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi 7.Vinita Verma, History, Urban Development in Delhi 1900-1950, Delhi University, Delhi, vinita004 at hotmail.com 8.Aaquib Shehbaaz Usmani, English Literature, Sunday Ka Sunday: From Books to Everything, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi, aaquib_shehbaz at yahoo.com 9.Ninad Pandit, Architecture, Recoveries, Renewals, and Appropriations: A Study / Story of Public Space Creation in Mumbai, KRIVIA, Mumbai, ninad.pandit at krvia.ac.in 10. Gaurav Dikshit, History, Migration into Dr Mukherjee Nagar: Community, identity, and space in a peculiar urban phenomenon, JNU, Delhi, dikshit_gaurav at hotmail.com 11.Dhananjay Singh, Hindi Literature, Bhikhari Thakur aur Calcutta, Delhi University, Delhi 12. Sanjeev Ranjan Mishra, MBA, Gyan Vinimay ki Nai Taknikain aur Mail Banate Dalit, LNMU, Darbhanga. 13.Nishant, Art History, Mitti Ke Log, National Museum Institute, Delhi, nisp at rediffmail.com 14.Susmita Ghosh, Women's Studies, Reshaping Masculinity, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, ghoshsusmita1 at hotmail.com 15. Sajan Thomas, Political Science, Information Economy And Labour rights: A case of Software Technopark in Thiruvananthpuram, Kerela, University of Kerala, Thiruvananthpuram, contactsajan007 at yahoo.co.in 16.Manasi Kumar, Psychology, Mapping The Agape: Following the Footprints of the Rubble of Riot and Violence of Earthquake, Delhi University, Delhi, manni_3in at hotmail.com 17.Priyasha Kaul, Sociology, Communal Violence and Exclusionary Urbanism, Delhi University, Delhi, priyashakaul at yahoo.com 18.Ashim Khan and Shweta Pandit, Mass Communication and Sociology, A Study of Shani Bazaar (The Saturday Market) at Shahpur Jat, Hauz Kas, Jamia Milia Islamia and JNU, Delhi, aasim27 at yahoo.co.in 19. Justin Mathew, History, Labour in a Colonial Port City: Mistries of Bombay Port 1870-1914, JNU, Delhi, justinm80 at rediffmail.com _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From shaiheredia at hotmail.com Sat Dec 4 18:50:23 2004 From: shaiheredia at hotmail.com (shai heredia) Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2004 18:50:23 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Experimenta 2005 Call for Entries - pls fwd Message-ID: EXPERIMENTA 2005 The 3rd international festival for experimental film in India CALL FOR ENTRIES FILTER is currently seeking experimental films for exhibition at EXPERIMENTA February 2005 to be held in Bombay, India. Medium specific experimentation in documentary, non-fiction, diary and animation genres are welcome for selection to both the Film and Digital Video categories. Innovative, cutting edge and non-traditional work is encouraged. EXPERIMENTA is a curated film festival and is a Filter project in collaboration with no.w.here UK, British Council India UK, and the LUX Centre for Artists film and video UK. Entry Deadline extended to December 15th, 2004. For further information www.filterindia.com Please forward this email _________________________________________________________________ The happening world of BPO! Know all that you need to know! http://www.bpowatchindia.com/msn/ Keep in step with what’s hot! _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From avinash at sarai.net Tue Dec 7 15:03:39 2004 From: avinash at sarai.net (avinash kumar) Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 15:03:39 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Re: caste and the city Message-ID: <41B578F3.7030504@sarai.net> Again its from a friend Aniket Alam who once lived at Gaurav apartments...needs a patient hearing. avinash NOT GAURAV Apartments! while i agree with the fact that there is severe discrimination against dalits in urban india and the real estate picture is merely a component of that.... having lived in Gaurav Apartments for exactly 11 months from June 1999 to May 2000 on rent from a PUnjabi Khatri landlord... i can say that there may also be some other reasons for reluctance from people to buy/rent flats there. for one, gaurav apartment's big bosses dont like non-dalits staying there. when me and manjari saw the flat (a two bedroom one) we liked the location of the complex but were put off by the design.... yet we decided to rent it since we went with locational advantages and lack of time... the fact that it was a dalit society never came up for consideration.... if at all there was a political component to our real estate decision it was for some other societies down the road which seemed openly hindutva... anyhow... our travails began even before we managed to get out furniture inside the flat complex. the secretary and other office bearers refused to open the society gates unless i get some letter from JNU stating that i was a bonafide student of the university... how that was relevant to moving my furniture in was left unsaid.... so on an amazingly hot june afternoon off i went to JNU from patparganj to get this elusive letter... thankfully i managed it before the university closed down but by teh time i got back, the secretary had gone off leaving instructions that the truck with our stuff should not be allowed inside... anyway to cut a long story short it was close to midnight that our truck was "allowed" to get in... this was merely the first instance.. from gettting electricity problems sorted out, to our watertank being vandalised, to the daily unfriendly, unwelcome behaviour of the gaurav apartments big bosses and dalit members, it became clear that they were not keen that some non-dalit should live there.... and i am saying this on the basis of 11 months of living there. in every way they could, life was made difficult for us... now i am sure there would be worthies out there who would say that we experienced for those 11 months what dalits have experienced for 3/4/5000 years... etc etc..... maybe that is what needs to be done.... but i feel that its a bit misplaced to take out one's anger on those very people who, however imperfectly perhaps, try and break out of our societies discriminations. and while i can agree that my forefathers would have been patriarchal, feudal, , heavy handed oppressors of the poor and the marginalised, what can i, aniket alam, do about that other than live my life in a moral and democratic way. and stand up in support of struggles for emancipation. and in the context of the comment made by shivam vij on the news-story... Gaurav apartments are full of precisely those dalits who have got govt jobs through reservations.... and in a area where apartment societies regularly over-work and mistreat the security personnel who guard their middle class dreams, gaurav apartments also takes the cake in that ill behaviour towards its service staff... if you dont believe me go and make friends with Astik Singh at the security gate (if he still has not found a new job) and soon enough he will tell you what it is to work in/for Gaurav Apartments... the long and short of my verbose reply is that the point made in the news-story is correct... there is a severe and, unlike in the rural areas, hidden discrimination against dalits in urban india but there are two caveats.... 1. reservations are needed and must be extended to the private sector too... but we must all, dalits and non-dalits alike, realise that reservations have not served half the purpose they were supposed to ... it has led to the creation of a self-serving, petty minded and politically reactionary upwardly mobile section among the dalits... it has not been the trigger for the community to break its shakles..... 2. it doesn't serve to adopt such a shrill pitch as the writer of the comment preceeding the news-story does.... every particular instance when something bad happens to a dalit is not necessarily due to anti-dalit discrimination... it may be caused by any number of reasons... lumping everything on the dalit identity is bogus and politically short-sighted. let me add some more trivia regarding gaurav apartments... its an apartment society formed by dalit govt. officials who have done reasonably well for themselves... so much so that when plottign and numbers for the plots were being given to the patparganj societies, gaurav apartments was plot no. 1, it still is no. 1, patparganj.... the apartments were also blesed by such luminaries like madan lal khurana, shushma swaraj and others... (now that the congress is ruling delhi i am sure some of their names too have joined this list)... all their building irregularities (and there were many as in most of these apartment blocks) were regularised double quick... etc etec...what i am saying is that these guys were adept at milking the system...... they were regular guys... its not that they were exceptionally evil, nor are they victims like it is beign made out... they were more a part of urban middle class uncouth india rather than part of dalit india (rural or urban)...... sorry for this, perhaps unnecessarily long, reply... but mention of gaurav apartments to illustrate discrimination against dalits touched a raw nerve.... waise agar tu chahta hai to is reply ko bhi 'post' kar de... kya farak padta hai... waise bhi mera purana 'elitist' reputation hai..... uske saath jachega! aniket. From ttsetan at yahoo.com Mon Dec 6 10:57:41 2004 From: ttsetan at yahoo.com (tenzin tsetan) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 05:27:41 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: TIPA Prog in B'bay/ Volunteers Needed Message-ID: <20041206052741.50675.qmail@web50608.mail.yahoo.com> Note: forwarded message attached. --------------------------------- Win a castle for NYE with your mates and Yahoo! Messenger -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041206/496f94c5/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Friends of Tibet (INDIA)" Subject: TIPA Prog in B'bay/ Volunteers Needed Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2004 20:16:15 -0500 (EST) Size: 2905 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041206/496f94c5/attachment.mht From ttsetan at yahoo.com Mon Dec 6 15:31:19 2004 From: ttsetan at yahoo.com (tenzin tsetan) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 10:01:19 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Alliance with India Message-ID: <20041206100119.22180.qmail@web50609.mail.yahoo.com> Note: forwarded message attached. --------------------------------- Win a castle for NYE with your mates and Yahoo! Messenger -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041206/b50f7353/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Tenzin Tsundue" Subject: Alliance with India Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 04:50:14 -0500 (EST) Size: 9139 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041206/b50f7353/attachment.mht From marnoldm at du.edu Sun Dec 5 00:00:33 2004 From: marnoldm at du.edu (Michael Arnold Mages) Date: Sat, 04 Dec 2004 11:30:33 -0700 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] December 2004 on -empyre- Message-ID: COLLISION/SENSES A conversation around the themes of synesthesia and other sense experiences relating to the convergence of vision, sound and pre-aware cognition. Perception, in the context of this discussion, need not be limited to the apprehension of external stimuli, instead extending to the highly subjective territories of the mind perceiving its own process. For the next few weeks we will be exchanging our ideas regarding work and research which explores the intersection of sensory motor modalities and the challenges and mysteries of motor control, perception and representation. Co-moderated by jackbackrack, Nancy Paterson and William Tremblay. GUESTS JACKBACKRACK jackbackrack is an artist and research scientist at the MIT AI Lab. His research is on robotics, sensor networks, and programming languages. He runs an art technology group, called the Collision Collective, and curates art technology shows, called Collisions, along with Dan Paluska and Brian Knep. NANCY PATERSON Nancy Paterson is a Toronto-based new media artist best known for mediaworks such as STOCK MARKET SKIRT. She is currently working on a research project titled MULTI, exploring the relationship between collaboration, creativity and synesthesia. This project also deals with symbol cryptography and next generation information processing. WILLIAM TREMBLAY William Tremblay is an artist and interactive media programmer living in Boston. He creates interactive sculpture guided by emotional and symbolic resonance, but suspects that physical objects posess very diminished relevance in today's world. -- -empyre- facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media by inviting guests -- key new media artists, curators, theorists, producers and others to participate in thematic discussions. To participate, subscribe to -empyre- at: http://www.subtle.net/empyre/ -- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From shivamvij at gmail.com Mon Dec 6 17:51:59 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 17:51:59 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] 19 December: Advance new year's gift to DU from DMRC Message-ID: First underground Metro to open TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, DECEMBER 03, 2004 12:04:28 AM ] NEW DELHI: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/944534.cms Delhi is all set to get its first underground Metro stretch from Kashmiri Gate to Delhi University. It will reportedly be inaugurated on December 19 itself, well before the December 31 deadline. And this time there won't be any fare hike either. The certificate from the commissioner of railway safety will be received after the inspection on December 11. The total length of the section is 4.5 kilometres. There are four stations on the stretch — Delhi University, Vidhan Sabha, Civil Lines and Kashmiri Gate. Each station comprises two levels — concourse with ticket windows and platform at the lower level. The Delhi University station is different where subways over the platforms provide access to the concourse. The fares will be based on the distance between stations. If you travel from Delhi University to the next station (Vidhan Sabha), the fare will be Rs 6 — the minimum on Metro. Beyond this, the fare will be Rs 7. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) spokesperson said: "The fares will depend on the distance. The fares on the Metro range from Rs 6 to Rs 14, but on this stretch they will not exceed Rs 7." In March, when the last elevated section from Inderlok to Rithala was inaugurated, the Metro fares were hiked. At that time, DMRC had given an assurance that there would be no fare hike even when the underground section is opened. Four trains will be introduced on the stretch and one will be kept in reserve. DMRC is trying to work out the frequency of the trains. It is likely to be between 6 and 15 minutes. "It will depend on the passenger rush. We are working out the details of this schedule," said the spokesman. From joy at sarai.net Tue Dec 7 01:36:12 2004 From: joy at sarai.net (joy at sarai.net) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 21:06:12 +0100 (CET) Subject: [Reader-list] the Act of leisure In-Reply-To: <1122.61.11.30.112.1101570076.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> References: <1122.61.11.30.112.1101570076.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: <1515.203.101.5.107.1102363572.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> Dear Iram, I find the topic very interesting. Being a designer myself I see leisure like a negative space against something called positive space. It means our time and acts are divided in work and leisure. I think I have grown up with that. In school between two classes we had roaring moments. It was leisure. But we knew we couldn’t go out in the corridor. We grew up with monitors inside and prefects outside. And there were chamchas, informal surveillance. But still we managed lots of things, stealing books from library, breaking windowpane, crackers in the principal’s room and many more things. We were punished each time. Our batch was extremely notorious. Later a special prefect was deployed outside our class till we passed 10th standard and dispersed. We were given lots of notes to copy during breaks. We thought our leisure was controlled. In the process we forget that so called work time or study time in those days was also controlled and that control is taken for granted. In the colony where I live builders are demolishing old houses and building new flats. When some one builds a house he is supposed to leave few feet empty form front and back. But these builders leave no space they cover the whole area. They don’t want to waste any land. No negative space. Whether the extra space is built as a garden or an extended room hardly matters. In our school we had some thing called ‘games’ class. On Sundays evening we could watch movies on television. Once in a winter we used to go for picnic. We grew up with such given gift of leisure. We learnt to enjoy those moments. A school holiday on a rainy day was always a surprise gift. Those moments are cultivated and then deployed very interestingly. I am told a film on teenage love story called Bobby was shown on TV on the day of Jaiprakash Narayan’s rally in Delhi during emergency. Gifts are offered to us each time we performed. Someone got bicycle, someone got camera, someone got a trip to Shimla. We live with gifts and punishments, we live with work and leisure. Best Joy From berkeleysanjay at planet-save.com Tue Dec 7 12:44:02 2004 From: berkeleysanjay at planet-save.com (berkeleysanjay at planet-save.com) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 23:14:02 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Democracy with a little bit of help from the US (fascinating) Message-ID: <49678.69.175.236.240.1102403642.squirrel@planet-save.com> Analysis ------------------------------------------------------------------------ US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev Ian Traynor Friday November 26, 2004 The Guardian With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev. Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again. But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box. Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko. That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade. But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev. The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections. In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire. They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 - the two words "gotov je", meaning "he's finished", a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing. In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signalling that the Kuchma regime's days are numbered. Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful. Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary - Budapest and Szeged. In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border. The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute. US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy. The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American. In Serbia, US pollsters Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates discovered that the assassinated pro-western opposition leader, Zoran Djindjic, was reviled at home and had no chance of beating Milosevic fairly in an election. He was persuaded to take a back seat to the anti-western Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbian prime minister. In Belarus, US officials ordered opposition parties to unite behind the dour, elderly trade unionist, Vladimir Goncharik, because he appealed to much of the Lukashenko constituency. Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m. Apart from the student movement and the united opposition, the other key element in the democracy template is what is known as the "parallel vote tabulation", a counter to the election-rigging tricks beloved of disreputable regimes. There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups. Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed. The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond. The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost election. In Belarus, President Lukashenko won, so the response was minimal. In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organise mass displays of civil disobedience, which must remain peaceful but risk provoking the regime into violent suppression. If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world. The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of central Asia. _______________________________________________________________ Save rainforest for free with a Planet-Save.com e-mail account: http://www.planet-save.com From avinash at sarai.net Wed Dec 8 15:07:57 2004 From: avinash at sarai.net (avinash kumar) Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 15:07:57 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] re: about wars and checkposts Message-ID: <41B6CB75.8060301@sarai.net> sorry for cross-posting in case its already been read.. two pieces on a violinist's encounter with the check-post in a so-called warzone. One from an Israeli columnist, while the other from a Palestinian. avinash December 3, 2004 The Face Seems Familiar By MEIR SHALEV So, what did we have in the past weeks? We had an officer who "confirmed" the killing of a 13-year old girl. We had soldiers mutilating the dead body of an enemy and posing for photos with a cut-off head and a cigarette placed between the dead lips. We had soldiers at a checkpoint demanding that a passing Palestinian play the violin for them. And we had several members of the naval commandos pose naked for a photo on top of Mount Hermon. This is what our armed forces issue in the course of one or two weeks. About the "confirming kill" of the girl, the army conducted a flawed and lying investigation. The mutilation of bodies is still under investigation, please be patient. About the soldiers before whom the Palestinian had to play his violin, the army spokesman said that they were insensitive. But the commandos who posed naked were cashiered forthwith, for the IDF is a moral army which cuts off abominations from its midst. When it is really necessary, the IDF knows how to to take a swift and decisive action. I look at the photo of the Palestinian playing the violin to our soldiers. The face seems very familiar. It seems very familiar because this deliberately expressionless look on the face, this intentionally unfocused gaze, is very common at thousands of checkpoint encounters, and even at ID checks conducted by our fighters right here in the center of the city. But it is also familiar because we know this sight from the not too distant past, we know it very well from the other side of the violin, and the other side of the checkpoint, and the other side of the gun barrel. "Such severe incidents make clear the imperative need for continuing our efforts to make our troops understand the message" said the army spokesman in response to the checkpoint recital. But the message was already long ago delivered and well understood. It was understood when the army not only allowed the settlers to mistreat Palestinian civilians, but often itself acted on the settlers' behalf. The message was well understood when the commander of the air force said that he feels nothing when dropping a one-ton bomb on a Gaza neighborhood - and was rewarded for that statement by a promotion to deputy chief-of-staff. The message was understood when a division commander was cashiered for leaking information to a journalist, after having been praised for an operation in which civilians were indiscriminately killed and their homes razed to the ground. The message is well understood indeed, the understanding of it and its implementation have long ago spread from the army and into the behavior of drivers on the road, and the violence of pupils at school, and the economic policy which is trampling over the poor. And the army spokesman also said that the soldiers' conduct towards the violinist was "An insensitive conduct by soldiers who are facing a complicated and dangerous situation". This automatic-modular answer clearly shows that the army spokesman does not understand the true complexity and the true danger of the situation. For once, we were the people who played the violin. The Jewish violin played in weddings, and at concert halls, and before the thugs in the camps. We played and joked: the violin is our instrument because it is so small, so easy to carry when you need to run away... Zionism asked of us to lay the violin aside for some time, to pick up the rifle instead "until things get better". The Territories and all that is involved in holding them have made this into a permanent situation. And here is the real danger. For in the end, it is the violin which wins. Meir Shalev is a columnist for the Israeli paper, Yediot Aharonot. ============================================================ ============================================================ Roadblock Concerto at Gunpoint "The Pianist" of Palestine By OMAR BARGHOUTI When I watched Oscar-winning film The Pianist I had three distinct, uneasy reactions. I was not particularly impressed by the film, from a purely artistic angle; I was horrified by the film's depiction of the dehumanization of Polish Jews and the impunity of the German occupiers; and I could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel's much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prisons. In the film, when German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them at a checkpoint, I thought to myself: "that's one thing Israeli soldiers have not yet done to Palestinians." I spoke too soon, it seems. Israel's leading newspaper Ha'aretz reported last week that an Israeli human rights organization monitoring a daunting military roadblock near Nablus was able to videotape Israeli soldiers forcing a Palestinian violinist to play for them. The same organization confirmed that similar abuse had taken place months ago at another checkpoint near Jerusalem. In typical Israeli whitewashing, the incident was dismissed by an army spokesperson as little more that "insensitivity," with no malicious intent to humiliate the Palestinians involved. And of course the usual mantra about soldiers having to "contend with a complex and dangerous reality" was again served as a ready, one-size-fits-all excuse. I wonder whether the same would be said or accepted in describing the original Nazi practice at the Warsaw ghetto gates in the 1940's. Regrettably, the analogy between the two illegal occupations does not stop here. Many of the methods of collective and individual "punishment" meted out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young, racist, often sadistic and ever impervious Israeli soldiers at the hundreds of checkpoints littering the occupied Palestinian territories are reminiscent of common Nazi practices against the Jews. Following a visit to the occupied Palestinian territories in 2003, Oona King, a Jewish member of the British parliament attested to this, writing: "The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto." Even Tommy Lapid, Israel's justice minister and a Holocaust survivor himself, stirred a political storm last year when he told Israel radio that a picture of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the debris for her medication had reminded him of his grandmother who died at Auschwitz. Furthermore, he commented on his army's wanton and indiscriminate destruction of Palestinian homes, businesses and farms in Gaza at the time, saying: "[I]f we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague." Some of the war crimes that concern people like Lapid have been lately revealed in eyewitness accounts given by former soldiers, who could no longer reconcile whatever moral values they held with their complicity in the daily humiliation, abuse and physical harm of innocent civilians. Such crimes have become normalized in their minds as acceptable, even necessary, acts of "disciplining" the untamed natives, as a measure to maintain "security." According to a recent report in the Israeli media, an army commander was accused of gratuitously beating up Palestinians at the notorious Hawwara checkpoint. Ironically, the most damning evidence presented against him was a videotape filmed by the army's education branch. In that particular episode, the senior officer at that roadblock, knowing that an army film crew was located nearby, and without any provocation, beat a Palestinian "flanked by his wife and children," punching him in the face, and "even kicked[him] in the lower part of his body," the report said. A recent exhibit titled "Breaking the Silence," organized in Tel Aviv by a number of conscientious Israeli soldiers who served in occupied Hebron, exposed in photographs and objects more serious belligerence towrds defenseless Palestinians. Inspired by Jewish settlers' graffiti that included: "Arabs to the gas chambers"; "Arabs = an inferior race"; "Spill Arab blood"; and, of course, the ever so popular "Death to the Arabs," soldiers used a myriad of methods to make the lives of average Palestinians intolerable. One photograph showed a bumper sticker on a passing car, perhaps explaining the ultimate goal of such abuse: "Religious penitence provides strength to expel the Arabs." The exhibit's main curator described a particularly shocking policy of randomly spraying crowded Palestinian residential neighborhoods, like Abu Sneina, from heavy machine guns and grenade launchers for hours on end in response to any minor shooting of a few bullets from any house in the neighborhood on the Jewish colonies inside the city. The Hebron horrors pale, however, in comparison to what Israeli army units have done in Gaza. In an unnerving interview with Ha'aretz in November last year, for instance, Liran Ron Furer, a staff sergeant (res.) in the Israeli army and graduate of an arts school, described the gradual transformation of every soldier to an "animal" when staffing a roadblock, irrespective of whatever values he may bring with him from home. From his perspective, those soldiers get infected with what he calls "checkpoint syndrome," a glaring symptom of which is acting violently towards Palestinians in "the most primal and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment ." "At the checkpoint," he explains, "young people have the chance to be masters and using force and violence becomes legitimate ." Furer cites how his colleagues degraded and mercilessly beat a Palestinian dwarf just for fun; how they had a "souvenir picture" taken with bloodied, bound civilians whom they'd thrashed; how one soldier pissed on the head of a Palestinian man because the latter had "the nerve to smile" at a soldier; how another Palestinian was forced to stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how yet another soldier asked Palestinians for cigarettes and when they refused "broke someone's hand" and "slashed their tires." The most chilling of all the incidents was his own personal confession. "I ran toward [a group of Palestinians] and punched an Arab right in the face," he admitted. "Blood was trickling from his lip onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees banged against the trunk and he landed inside." He then goes on to describe in gruesome details how he and his comrades stepped on the tightly handcuffed captive, dubbed "the Arab;" how they hit him until "he was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva;" how he "grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side," until he cried aloud, and how the soldiers then "stepped harder and harder on his back," to make him stop crying. Furer then reveals that the company commander cheered them on: "Good work, tigers." And after they took their prey to their camp, the abuse continued in different forms. "All the other soldiers were waiting there to see what [my emphasis] we'd caught. When we came in with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly." One of the soldiers, Furer said, "went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him really hard in the ass and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They shouted and laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy." As savage as it is, checkpoint abuse is not unique in any sense. It fits perfectly well into the general picture of viewing the Palestinians as relative humans who are not entitled to the dignity and respect that full humans deserve. At the height of Israel's massive reoccupation of Palestinian cities in 2002, for example, soldiers used their knives to engrave the star of David on the arms of a number of detained Palestinian men and teenage boys. The haunting pictures of the victims were first shown on Arab satellite TV channels and eventually exposed on the internet. In the same year, at al-Amari refugee camp, during a mass roundup of Palestinian males, teenagers and elderly included, Israeli troops inscribed identification numbers "on the foreheads and forearms of Palestinian detainees awaiting interrogation." The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat compared the act to well known Nazi practices at concentration camps. Tommy Lapid was incensed, saying: "As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable." Nonetheless, Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, was worried only about Israel's image being tarnished: "clearly it conflicts with the desire to convey a public relations message," he told Israel Army Radio. Parroting that line, the mainstream media in Israel, too, were far too concerned about the "public relations disaster" to express any abhorrence or protestation at the immorality of the act and the irony of it all. Yoram Peri, a professor of politics and media at Tel Aviv University, sees PR as "a fundamental issue in Israeli life." "We do not think we do anything wrong," he clarifies in an interview with the Guardian, "but we think we explain ourselves badly and that the international media is anti-Semitic." Obsessed with how Israel is seen rather than with what it actually does, Israelis, according to Peri, are mostly worried that "we do not explain ourselves well. When we discuss the horrible things that happen in the West Bank, we don't talk about the issue but about how it will be seen." Recognizing this prevailing cynicism, apathy and acquiescence among the majority of Israelis in the criminal oppression of the Palestinians, former Knesset member Shulamit Aloni pronounced in a recent interview with the Irish publication the Handstand that "gross insensitivity" was threatening a moral disintegration of Israeli society. Referring to the Germans during the Nazi rule, she added, "I am beginning to understand why a whole nation was able to say: 'We did not know.'" I wonder when the time will come when a glamorous, award-winning director braves predictable intellectual terror and intimidation tactics to expose the venomous Israeli cocktail of racism and impunity by making a Palestinian version of "The Pianist." Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political analyst. His article "9.11 Putting the Moment on Human Terms" was chosen among the "Best of 2002" by the Guardian. He can be reached at: jenna at palnet.com From avinash at sarai.net Wed Dec 8 15:11:59 2004 From: avinash at sarai.net (avinash kumar) Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 15:11:59 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Subject: An Urgent Appeal- Circulate to friends Message-ID: <41B6CC67.7090202@sarai.net> Dear Friends, ANHAD (Act Now for Harmony and Democracy) is a Delhi based organization, which came into existence in March 2003. We have been working in Kalol, a small town near Godhra for quite sometime. A large number of people who were unable to return to their original villages after the Gujarat carnage of 2002 were rehabilitated near Kalol. For over two years a large section of the students have not been able to resume their studies. Many of them have lost their fathers or other members of the family. Anhad is bringing 25 of these young students to Delhi on December 20, 2004. A good public school in South Delhi has agreed to give them admission from the coming session in April, 2005. We have been able to locate a very cheap place for their stay in Delhi. Anhad has been able to do a large amount of work only because of the support of hundreds of other organizations, supporting its work and thousands of friends who have given us donations regularly to continue our work. Anhad?s share in the work done so far has been mainly the human resources, again a large number of young volunteers who give time on voluntary basis to make things happen. We have got commitment from 25 people to support the actual fee, books, uniform etc. We urgently require to do the following: Convert the place available into a hostel Arrange regular funds for their food and other living expenses Arrange regular tuitions ( Maths, English, Hindi) for four months till they join the school Arrange after school tuitions from April 2005 Arrange funds for paid tutors, for other staff to take care of the children in the hostel We urgently require donations to make this possible. For the hostel we require 30 bunk beds, mattresses, sheets, pillows, blankets, gas cylinders, cooking range, geysers, one refrigerator, plates, utensils etc, study tables, chairs etc., We urgently require volunteers to commit regular time to teach them and organize other activities with them. This is an urgent appeal to all friends to donate immediate funds, long- term donations, time. Those of you who have been associated with Anhad closely know our permanent economic crises but we never shelve an idea because there are no funds, we always presume that there are enough people who would support our work. I am writing to you with this same optimism that together we will be able to make this happen. Donations to Anhad are exempt under section 80 G of the Income Tax Act, 1961. Anhad takes donations from within India only. We do not take foreign funds. Let?s join hands together to give a better future to these young students. Sincerely Shabnam Hashmi anhad_delhi at yahoo.co.in> From avinash at sarai.net Wed Dec 8 18:10:05 2004 From: avinash at sarai.net (avinash kumar) Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 18:10:05 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] re: acts of leisure Message-ID: <41B6F625.3000502@sarai.net> A series of contributions on the theme and they all invoke certain memories, provoke certain reactions. To begin with, Joy's take on our conditioning with the concept of leisure and work and also thr previous rejoinders by Iram and others on the usage of leisure as a means of social control seem to be coalescing for me. From my personal memory of school days, I recall certain teachers who would always ask us to 'read' during our 'leisure period' (that was when a teacher was out of station or indisposed etc). These readings could be anything, from a novel to readings done for mathematics homework (for which I was always tracked skillfully by a certain teacher who had taken a liking for me and who thought I should devote more time to practising sums). It was here that I tended to agree more with the idea of 'leisure' expounded by a certain geography teacher who talked about Bimal Mitra's novels among other things of physical geography and a certain Hindi teacher who kept egging me by asking what was the latest novel I was reading those days. And sure to earn browny points, I would always oblige him with a certain exotic sounding name and actually all my free periods would be spent in reading some or the other novel. It was much later during my university days that I came across Terry Eagleton's text book Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983/1996). Among other things it gave me a very interesting, shall I say, information that with the proliferation of literacy and print culture, idea of reading fiction got institutionalised with its increasing popularity among the literate middle class women of the bourgeoisie as well as the working classes. It was on this premise that literature as a discipline was geared towards 'neutralising' the so-called subversive potential of these sections. Interestingly it was in India that literature, particularly 'high English literature' was initiated as a formal discipline to be introduced in the university system even before it was done so in England. On this front, it was geared more towards instituionalising colonial cultural supremacy on one hand while 'neutralising' the subjects through this 'useless act of leisure'. It was held true for both the societies, Britain and India, that the subjects like sciences, philosophy etc were considered more 'manly', hence useful for the ruling classes (if I am allowed to use this cliche), while reading literature was considered to be worthy for women and working classes at home and colonial subjects in the colonies. Its altogether different story that these very forms of social-political control by a certain inculcation of reading habits got turned into arenas of challenges by all these 'subjects', women, working classes and colonial subjects. I think I have overdone a bit, so I will stop right here for the moment. avinash From basvanheur at gmx.net Wed Dec 8 17:04:15 2004 From: basvanheur at gmx.net (Bas Van Heur) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 12:34:15 +0100 (MET) Subject: [Reader-list] Issue #3 of cut.up.magazine online Message-ID: <20651.1102505655@www52.gmx.net> And we calmly continue: the third edition of cut.up.magazine is alive and well on www.cut-up.com. Five new articles: Xander van Aart still enjoys fantasizing about Las Vegas; sound artist Anna Friz from Montreal reflects on the visibility of gender within the current theories surrounding electronic music; and Jens Petz Kastner from Vienna offers an insight into the preparations for the Austrian Jubilee of Denial 2005. Editor Theo Ploeg interviews the organizers of Oddpop – saviors of quality amid the mediocrity of Maastricht – and presents an extensive article on International Animal Rights Day. And reviews: Multitude, polish hiphop, improvisational sound and noise and post-grime. More information: editors, info at cut-up.com cut.up.media po box 313 2000 AH Haarlem The Netherlands -- NEU +++ DSL Komplett von GMX +++ http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl GMX DSL-Netzanschluss + Tarif zum supergünstigen Komplett-Preis! From basvanheur at gmx.net Wed Dec 8 17:04:50 2004 From: basvanheur at gmx.net (Bas Van Heur) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 12:34:50 +0100 (MET) Subject: [Reader-list] Issue #3 of cut.up.magazine online Message-ID: <23384.1102505690@www52.gmx.net> And we calmly continue: the third edition of cut.up.magazine is alive and well on www.cut-up.com. Five new articles: Xander van Aart still enjoys fantasizing about Las Vegas; sound artist Anna Friz from Montreal reflects on the visibility of gender within the current theories surrounding electronic music; and Jens Petz Kastner from Vienna offers an insight into the preparations for the Austrian Jubilee of Denial 2005. Editor Theo Ploeg interviews the organizers of Oddpop – saviors of quality amid the mediocrity of Maastricht – and presents an extensive article on International Animal Rights Day. And reviews: Multitude, polish hiphop, improvisational sound and noise and post-grime. More information: editors, info at cut-up.com cut.up.media po box 313 2000 AH Haarlem The Netherlands -- GMX ProMail mit bestem Virenschutz http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail +++ Empfehlung der Redaktion +++ Internet Professionell 10/04 +++ From basvanheur at gmx.net Wed Dec 8 17:04:56 2004 From: basvanheur at gmx.net (Bas Van Heur) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 12:34:56 +0100 (MET) Subject: [Reader-list] Issue #3 of cut.up.magazine online Message-ID: <23764.1102505696@www52.gmx.net> And we calmly continue: the third edition of cut.up.magazine is alive and well on www.cut-up.com. Five new articles: Xander van Aart still enjoys fantasizing about Las Vegas; sound artist Anna Friz from Montreal reflects on the visibility of gender within the current theories surrounding electronic music; and Jens Petz Kastner from Vienna offers an insight into the preparations for the Austrian Jubilee of Denial 2005. Editor Theo Ploeg interviews the organizers of Oddpop – saviors of quality amid the mediocrity of Maastricht – and presents an extensive article on International Animal Rights Day. And reviews: Multitude, polish hiphop, improvisational sound and noise and post-grime. More information: editors, info at cut-up.com cut.up.media po box 313 2000 AH Haarlem The Netherlands -- GMX ProMail mit bestem Virenschutz http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail +++ Empfehlung der Redaktion +++ Internet Professionell 10/04 +++ From shivamvij at gmail.com Wed Dec 8 21:43:15 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 21:43:15 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] When will India see Bolivia's dynamic? (Fwd) In-Reply-To: <1a8.2cc38c34.2ee7ec55@cs.com> References: <1a8.2cc38c34.2ee7ec55@cs.com> Message-ID: FYI. Interesting comments from Mayraj Fahim on urban local-self government, though I have my doubts. He thinks democracy in India is flawed whereas I think it is near perfect. He is right when he says the lower castes are in majority, but then lower castes are not a homogenous group. Dalits and OBC's are in conflict with each other in north India, particularly in UP, and at the tehsil level this even extends to violent conflict. This is why Maywati, a Dalit leader, is a sworn enemy of Mulayam Singh Yadav, an OBC leader. (Muslims in UP have found it easier to align with the OBC leader rather than the Dalit leader.) This is nothwithsatnding a short-lived association that Mayawati did have with Mulayam. Anyways, as for local self-government, that is a utopian model. Recently a panchayat in Haryana actually termed an inter-caste marriage illegal and ordered that the couple 'become' 'brother and sister'. They had to retract this after enormous media attention, which was rare, considering that village panchayats all over India are a tool of institutionalising conservatism. They can help with development (but will devour all the money in corruption unless you have the Right to Information!) but certainly not with eradicating casteism. Urban panchayats may behave in a similar manner, but perhaps I am being presumptous. Urban panchayats may turn out to be more complex, reflecting urban complexities. But may be not. Our courts sometimes act as populist panchayats: a court judgement in response to a PIL said that homosexuality cannot be 'legalised' because Indian society was not 'ready' for it, that people didn't want it, and thus the petitioners' arguments about what the West was doing did not stand. So if the people of India thought murder was a done thing, would the honourable court legalise murder? My point is that democracy is not just the rule of the majority, but is also accompanied by a set of institutions, such as the Constitution. The majority is bound by Constitutional values, and it is only in that sense that we can accuse democracy of having 'failed' in India. And this is why we need reservations despite the great anger that India's urban elites have against reservations as a form of affirmative action. Thanks and regards, Shivam Vij ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: fmayraj at cs.com Dear Vij Sahab: We are on the same webforum:AsiaPeace. I want to say that I think your articles on the Dalit condition need to become more widely distributed. A changed dynamic is long overdue;but, India is still crawling a pace when it should be striding forward by now. The articles prodded me to contact you as I thought I should air 2 matters with you. Latin America, like India, has a system gamed by the elite. Now in Latin America we are seeing a dynamic in Bolivia, that should have been seen in India. Dalits are too accomodating of their misery. As democracy means governance by the majority, which they and the OBCs are, India's system should have done much more for them if it really was a "democracy" in substance. But, India is still crawling along to become one. Time perhaps to move things along a little faster? If locals aren't upto it, as seems to be the case;they should perhaps connect with the Bolivian to get inspired. On the isse of urban plight, I would like to suggest you consider and perhaps air the option of urban federated systems. This is long overdue in India. In this respect, India is highly retarded, as once was one of 3 primary regions of methodology's implmentation(i.e. panchayat system framework);yet no evolution in India whereas evolution in other countries that illustrates by the difference how retatrded India is in evolving what it has. India's Panchayat system of local governments, whose most productive reflection is the West Begal system, is a powerful tool for improving life of Dalits and OBC within their environment. Indians are blessed with a local government framework that if applied properly can alleviate their condition to some degree. As expressed in its purest form in the West Bengal example is the methodology that UK unveiled for counties by 1894 (i.e. the county, district and parish council framework). This is the first British expression of a methodology actually first implemented for a city system a hundred years before UK adaption (i.e. the 1790 Paris model). What the British did was to copy Paris model for London;and then graft Paris model (a 2-tiered system) onto pre-existing parish councils (the counterparts to India's gram panchayats) to create the 3-tiered framework they later implemented in stages in some parts of India. For some strange reason, though long overdue, India has no framework for cities. UK is implementing a 3-tier urban model right now for its 2d city:Birmingham. The framework is England's first 3-tier model and is in effect a modernized reflection of the original county systemic framework later exported to the Indian colony. What Birmingham has that is different is that it reflects also a new feature of younger systems-i.e. common leadership between tiers. Birmingham's model is top-down in representational formula;but, I think what India needs is a bottom-up model unveiled in 2-tier formula in Canada's pioneering urban system in 2002:i.e. Montreal and in 3-tier framework in the pioneering international version that the Baghdad systemic framework is first adaption of! So ironically, even though India was pioneering non- western region to experience implementation of this system at all, it is Baghdad that gets ahead of India, not only in having an urban example;but, also a bottom-up 3-tier model to boot!!!! In all the mayhem and terrible news that has come from Iraq, this is the only positive news that I have heard emanating from Iraq. The bottom-up feature enables lower level recipients of policy developed at upper levels to have a say in policymaking. That is why I prefer the bottom-up mode to either the formula that India has (example of earlier approach of separate leaders between tiers;but, also over a top-down formula like Birmingham's. Birmigham's model is actually only partially integrated(i.e. with common leader's between tiers) as only applies to levels 1-2;not to parish council level, where devolution means getting delegated powers--but, no active role in decisionmaking. However, since Birmingham's model is based on a ward system as opposed to by district or areawide basis, local sensitivity is stil there to a degree--though it could be more as I have illustrated. Now why has the world seen an explostion of federated systems since India first experienced it during colonial period;and then was unwise to allow to lie fallow until at least 20 years for West Bengal re-implementation during 1970s and 40 years for nationwide policy implementation after western nation embrace beyond UK-France? The simple matter is that it was realized that this methodology enables more even development across the spectrum of an encompassing region rather than inequitable development. It also enables more integrated regional planning and development. it also provides where it is achieved not by integration via linking up of neighboring units;but, through devolution(i.e. decentralization) a more grass roots oriented govt. So India has a need to evolve this framnework in general;and Dalits and OBCs have an even greater need to see that Indian examples live up to the potential that has been realized elsewhere! Cordially yours, Mayraj Fahim www.counterpunch.org November 12, 2004 The Roots of Rebellion Insurgent Bolivia By FORREST HYLTON and SINCLAIR THOMSON The great anti-colonial indigenous insurrection of 1781 has haunted republican Bolivia since its founding in 1825. From their military encampment in El Alto overlooking the colonial city of La Paz, Aymara leaders Túpaj Katari and Bartolina Sisa laid siege to the ruling Spanish elite from March to October 1781. Lacking urban allies, they were ultimately unable to seize the city, yet the aspirations of that uprising have taken on new life at the beginning of the 21st century. In October 2003, popular classes of Aymara descent living in El Alto spearheaded what became a broad-based movement to overthrow the increasingly repressive and illegitimate regime of then-President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. They too laid siege to the capital and brought it to a virtual standstill. Unlike Katari and Sisa, the latest insurgents successfully overtook the urban center, occupying all but a few blocks around Plaza Murillo where the Presidential Palace is located. Waving the Aymara flag (the wiphala) and the Bolivian flag side by side, the crowds swelled to as many as 500,000 on October 17, the day a heavily guarded Sánchez de Lozada fled to Miami. The stunning turn of events-dubbed by journalists the "gas war"-brought to an end the era of neoliberal domination in the country. It also confirmed that Bolivia has entered a new revolutionary moment in which indigenous actors have acquired the leading role. It is a time of great promise, but one whose outcome remains unforeseeable. A powerful tradition of popular urban mobilization has been evident in earlier historical moments, as when "national-popular" forces overthrew the dictatorship of Col. Alberto Natusch Busch in 1979 or brought the Democratic Popular Unity (UDP) government to power in 1982. Yet the profile and organization of these previous mobilizations were different. In the 1970s and 1980s, workers, students and members of the progressive middle classes organized themselves through left parties and the national Bolivian Workers' Confederation (COB). The politically emergent indigenous peasantry mobilized as well during this period, but almost entirely at the behest of the COB and as a junior partner in the national-popular bloc. However, in October 2003 the progressive middle classes stirred only belatedly and the COB was a relatively minor player. More importantly, these groups were essentially backing demands previously launched by Aymara insurgents, organized mainly through their community, union and neighborhood organizations. Ultimately, though, all sectors converged around the same demands: the resignation of Sánchez de Lozada and his ministers, a trial to punish those responsible for state violence against the unarmed civilian population, a national referendum on how to develop the country's natural gas reserves, the formulation of a new Hydrocarbons Law and the convening of a Constitutional Assembly. In contrast to the proletarian character of the national-popular struggles that ended the phase of military and narco-dictatorships in the early 1980s, the powerful movement in 2003 displayed an indigenous centrality in synch with the current demographic, sociocultural and political realities of Bolivia, where 62% of the population claims indigenous identity, according to the 2001 census. If we are to understand the October insurrection, however, it is not enough to point out Aymaras' currently assertive historical agency. We must first note that the keen sense of Aymara identity is itself a product of recent political struggle, and that the entire context for the revolutionary cycle that opened in 2000 has been shaped by forceful and fluid processes of ethnic formation. The galvanization of indigenous identity is especially striking among the subaltern actors of October's events. Members of mobilized rural communities on the altiplano (highland plateau) have gradually adopted a self-conscious cultural and political identity as "Aymaras" since the late 1970s. The rise of militant peasant unionism and the emergence of radical indigenous leaders criticizing ongoing forms of colonial hierarchy and racism within the country are largely responsible for this ethnic affirmation.[1] The trajectory of Aymara leader Felipe Quispe-known as "El Mallku," an Aymara term meaning both condor and traditional authority-reflects this process. One of the most arresting features of the 2003 uprising was the expression of Aymara ethnic identity and solidarity among the urban residents-especially young protestors-of El Alto, an impoverished yet dynamic city of 900,000 outside La Paz. According to the 2001 census, 82% of alteños, as the city's residents are known, identify as indigenous. In La Paz, laborers from the hillside neighborhoods of Munaypata and Villa Victoria, a proletarian stronghold during the Revolution of 1952, actively supported the insurgent alteños. Although not all these neighborhood residents would overtly identify themselves as Aymaras, they share with alteños a history of multi-generational migration from the Aymara countryside and insertion into the ethnically segmented urban social hierarchy. Bolivian miners have traditionally identified and organized themselves on a class basis. When mineworkers traveled from the mining center of Huanuni to join the protests in El Alto, they revived the memory and symbolic power of earlier proletarian struggle in the national-popular tradition. However, on this occasion they also surprisingly affirmed their own indigenous roots. Cocaleros (coca growers), another important sector in the contemporary popular movement, and agrarian colonizers from the Yungas recognize their own Aymara origins, although their collective identity is more closely tied to grassroots union organizations than to the traditional Andean community, or ayllu. In the Chapare, the country's principal coca-growing region, the majority of residents are from the Quechua-speaking regions of the Cochabamba valleys. Others, like cocalero leader Evo Morales, are Aymara migrants from the highlands or Quechua-speaking former miners. The regantes (small-scale coordinators of regional water distribution) who are best known for their role in the 2000 "water war" in Cochabamba also played their part in the "gas war." They have their roots in the region's Quechua-speaking mestizo peasant culture. Other actors in the uprising, like the peasant communities from Potosí and Chuquisaca, are organized through ayllus and are of mixed Quechua-Aymara background. All of these groups contributed to the insurgent movement that expressed itself so boldly, and with such a strongly indigenous accent, in 2003. The point to emphasize, however, is that the insurrectionary energy of the 2003 uprising stemmed initially from the Aymara heartland of Omasuyos, on the altiplano around Lake Titicaca, and later from the Aymara city of El Alto. Likewise, indigenous communities and neighborhoods were the first to put forth the basic demands around which so many others eventually converged in October. Historically, indigenous movements have sought to build ties with other popular and middle class opposition forces in cities and mining districts. Such tentative efforts took place during the indigenous mobilizations against Spanish rule in 1780-1781, the insurgent federalist movement led by Pablo Zárate Villca in 1899, the regional revolutionary movement led by Manuel Michel in 1927, the uprisings that began in Ayopaya in 1946 and the general strike of 1979. But relations between indigenous movements and their potential national-popular allies have generally been marred by mutual suspicion, misunderstanding or plain racism. Political theorist René Zavaleta Mercado pioneered the idea of "national-popular" forces in Bolivian history. Zavaleta posited that the insurrectionary "multitude" opposing oligarchic elites and their foreign, imperialist allies was formed through the political unification of normally divided subaltern subjects.[2] National-popular struggles of this sort can conceivably be traced back to the wars of independence against Spain. The active consolidation of this mode of struggle on the national political stage, however, began during the Chaco War (1932-1935) and culminated in the Revolution of 1952. National-popular struggles were behind the nationalization of Gulf Oil under Gen. Alfredo Ovando Candia in 1969, the Popular Assembly government of Gen. Juan José Torres in 1971, as well as the overthrow of the Col. Alberto Natusch Busch and Gen. Luis García Meza dictatorships and the rise to power of the center-left UDP between 1979 and 1982. Throughout this period the left and the union movement held, at best, a condescending view of indigenous participation in national political organization. These groups privileged a schematic vision of class consciousness over cultural identity as the basis for political action. They also shared with elites a "whitening" ideology of national progress through mestizaje. More recently, however, this began to change. The political fortunes of the left and the COB went into decline with the onset of neoliberalism in 1985, but indigenous political and cultural organization gained increasing momentum in the 1980s and 1990s. During this same period, coca producers acquired a strategically crucial political importance through their opposition to U.S. militarized drug intervention. Then in 2000, a new revolutionary cycle was ushered in with indigenous protests on the altiplano and the water war in the Cochabamba valley. Finally, the events of October 2003 revived the tradition of Aymara community insurrection in one of Latin America's largest indigenous cities. The latest insurgency constitutes a major challenge to Bolivian society's internal colonialism and may lead to the formation of a new national-popular bloc representing the social majority. The national revolutionary tradition, symbolized by the overthrow of oligarchic rule in 1952, seemed definitively vanquished by neoliberal ideology as structural adjustment reached its apogee during Sánchez de Lozada's first term (1993-1997). The regime set out to privatize state tin mines and to "relocate" mining families to the outskirts of Oruro, Cochabamba, El Alto and the lowland frontiers of the Chapare. The union movement, which the government deemed an outmoded corporatist institution, came under relentless attack. Technocrats, ideologues and mainstream party functionaries-former middle class dissidents prominent among them-recited neoliberal mantras: competitivity, governability, efficiency, deregulation, decentralization, direct foreign investment. Globalization, they argued, afforded unprecedented opportunities for indigenous peoples to reap the benefits of modern capitalist democracy. Though economic growth was sluggish and state revenues plummeted as a result of privatization, the discourse of neoliberalism appeared hegemonic. During Sánchez de Lozada's first administration, international financial institutions signaled Bolivia as a model of "reform" and democratization for other developing countries. Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, an architect of Bolivia's free market "shock treatment" in 1985, hailed Sánchez de Lozada as one of the most creative politicians of the era. The southern Andean nation became a shining star in the neoliberal firmament, and its militant popular movements appeared to have suffered a historic defeat. As part of the wave of privatizations, Sánchez de Lozada drafted a Hydrocarbons Law in 1996 that dismantled YPFB, the state energy firm, setting the stage for the transnational takeover of Bolivia's rich oil and natural gas resources. A year later, just two days before the end of his first term, he signed another decree effectively forfeiting constitutional sovereignty over the reserves. An official report released by the Bolivian government in December 2003 revealed that the Bolivia-based operations of British-owned BP Amoco and Spain's Repsol YPF enjoy the lowest operating costs for oil and gas production and exploration in the world. The sweetheart arrangement for these oil corporations was an eerie-and not unnoticed-repetition of the oligarchy's sell-off of Bolivia's mineral reserves to Anglo-Chilean capital following the War of the Pacific in the late 1800s. Bolivians have had a long and bitter experience with the expropriation of their mineral wealth for the benefit of oligarchs connected to foreign capital. The monetary system in early modern Europe thrived on the export of Bolivian silver from Potosí, now one of the country's poorest, most desolate regions. In the 19th and 20th centuries, tin extracted from the area near Oruro was smelted in the U.S. and Britain. Today, the working conditions and technology in most of Potosí's mines recall those of the colonial era, while Oruro is a landscape of post-industrial devastation where residents make superhuman efforts to survive. The protestors in the gas war were unwilling to see the old pattern repeated with natural gas since, according to many, only sovereign control over Bolivia's gas reserves-the second-largest in Latin America-could underpin a viable political and economic future for later generations. A deal to export gas through a Chilean port to California was negotiated between San Diego-based Sempra Energy and the Spanish-British-U.S. energy consortium Pacific LNG under the watch of one-time dictator and then-President Hugo Bánzer. During his administration (1997-2001), Bolivia ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. With state violence and social protest on the rise, and the legitimacy of neoliberal political parties eroded, Sánchez de Lozada narrowly won the 2002 elections. His attempt to close the gas deal in 2003 sparked massive opposition to which he responded with blunt force. On September 20, the day after some 500,000 people marched throughout the country to defend national economic sovereignty, security forces killed three civilians in Warisata and one in Ilayata as part of an effort to "liberate" a group of tourists stranded by a road blockade. The center of conflict spread to El Alto on October 8 when the Federation of Neighborhood Associations (FEJUVE) and the Regional Workers' Federation (COR-El Alto) declared a general strike. Members of the insurgent communities of Warisata and Achacachi, like their kinfolk in the alteño neighborhood of Villa Ingenio, conceived of themselves as patriots and their rulers as traitors to the Bolivian nation. Once the massacres began, first in the countryside and then in the city, the relatives and friends of the deceased dubbed their dead "martyrs fallen in the defense of gas." The repression intensified and 31 died on October 12, the anniversary of Columbus' incursion into the Caribbean. Simultaneously, urban Aymara insurgents and their allies in the neighborhood of relocated miners known as Santiago II began to develop autonomous institutions for self-government similar to those developed in Warisata after September 20. More than 150,000 people marched from El Alto to downtown La Paz on October 13. After several days of mourning, and once the insurgent communities from Omasuyos arrived, rebels set out to overrun the capital. Prominent middle class personalities and politicians organized hunger strikes on October 15 that spread with remarkable speed to every major city in the republic. But by that point what had once seemed impossible had already become likely: Sánchez de Lozada-also known as "El gringo" because of his heavily accented Spanish (he was raised in the United States)-would have to go. In retrospect, the ideological hegemony of the Washington Consensus, embodied in Bolivia by Sánchez de Lozada, appears to have been a mirage. Contrary to neoliberal common sense, Bolivia's revolutionary past was not obliterated after 1985, but rather reconfigured. Contemporary indigenous radicalism grows out of a long, largely underground history, yet its irradiating effects since 2000 have reanimated aspirations for social and political change, harkening back to earlier moments of interethnic, interregional and cross-class alliance.[3] The October insurrection thus represents an exceptionally deep and powerful, though not unprecedented, convergence between two traditions of struggle-indigenous and national-popular. Earlier mobilizations, and some of their gains-notably the nationalization of mines in 1952 or petroleum in 1969-left a more enduring legacy than had been supposed. Self-consciously building on earlier revolutionary cycles, especially those of 1780-1781, 1899 and 1952, the current cycle of 2000-2003 will leave its own legacy. The upcoming Constitutional Assembly, demanded by indigenous peoples since 2000 and secured by the revolutionary intervention of popular forces, offers the most immediate possibility for social reform, or even national transformation. The Assembly could help redraw state-society relations to reflect Bolivia's new historical conditions. It could recognize the enduring non-liberal forms of collective political, economic and territorial association by which most rural and urban Bolivians organize their lives. It could democratize the political relations that throughout the republican era have limited the participation of indigenous peoples in national political life, forcing them to resort to costly insurrectionary struggles. It could also redirect the future exploitation of the country's coveted resources in a way that benefits most Bolivians. Political and economic elites will undoubtedly attempt to divert the current process. However, as long as they have no alternative agenda to offer, their attempts to stonewall the process are likely to only further radicalize the opposition. These elites may try to construct a more visionary new hegemonic project but there are no signs of this as yet. Meanwhile, popular sectors are engaged in effervescent debate and are formulating their own visions of the future. What would Bolivia look like with sovereign control over its territory and natural resources, with forms of regional and ethnic self-determination, with meaningful national political representation for popular movements or with true majority rule? Whatever the future brings, there will be no going backwards. The current conjuncture in Bolivia is marked by seasoned political skepticism, yet also measured hope, and it may well carry implications for other struggles in the Andes and Latin America more broadly. As indigenous insurgents of previous centuries proclaimed in moments of anti-colonial and autonomist insurrection: "Ya es otro tiempo el presente" ("The present is a new time"). Forrest Hylton is conducting doctoral research in history in Bolivia. He can be reached at forresthylton at hotmail.com. Sinclair Thomson teaches Latin American history at NYU and is author of We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (University of Wisconsin, 2003). They are coeditors of Ya es otro tiempo el presente: Cuatro momentos de insurgencia indígena (La Paz, 2003). NOTES 1. See Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, "Aymara Past, Aymara Future," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 25, No. 3, December 1991, pp. 18-23; and Rivera's article in this issue. 2. See René Zavaleta Mercado, Las masas en noviembre (La Paz: Juventud, 1983, Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1986); and Luis Tapia's, La producción del conocimiento local: historia y política en la obra de René Zavaleta (La Paz: Muela del Diablo, 2002). 3. See Rivera, this volume; Forrest Hylton, Felix Patzi, Sergio Serulnikov, and Sinclair Thomson, Ya es otro tiempo el presente. Cuatro momentos de insurgencia indígena (La Paz: Muela del Diablo, 2003). This article was originally published by the North American Congress on Latin America. The Guardian Indian, Peasant Groups Win Bolivia Races Monday December 6, 2004 4:31 AM AP Photo LPZ102 By ALVARO ZUAZO Associated Press Writer LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) - Indian and peasant organizations promising better access to health care and education won every major Bolivian city in local elections Sunday, trouncing long-dominant parties in a reshuffling of the political map in South America's poorest country, unofficial results showed. The Electoral Court did not issue official results, saying it has until Dec. 31 to do so, but unofficial results by Equipos Mori, a respected opinion poll company, said traditional parties failed to win a single large city. The results were based on an estimated 80 percent of the votes cast. ``These results are tantamount to the sinking of the traditional political parties,'' political analyst Jorge Lazarte said. While voting at a La Paz school, President Carolos Mesa said: ``We will probably see a reshuffle of our political map.'' The elections were for mayors and councilors in 327 cities and towns. Voting is mandatory for the country's 4 million eligible voters. In La Paz, the small Fearless Movement was a clear winner. In neighboring El Alto, Bolivia's fastest-growing city, a group called Progress Plan had a clear lead, the poll showed. The new groups, including United Citizens, campaigned for cleaner streets, better access to education and health care and improved public transportation. They also oppose globalization and the trade policies of the United States. The campaigns attracted voters frustrated with traditional parties, especially after last year's dispute over a government plan to export natural gas ended in bloody street demonstrations that killed 56 people and toppled President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. The gas issue is highly sensitive because tension between the poor Indian majority and the ruling elite runs high. The October uprising was set off by Sanchez de Lozada's plan to export gas to Mexico and California. Opponents said the financial benefits would not reach the poor, while proponents say the money was needed to help South America's poorest country develop. Sanchez de Lozada fled to the United States and his party, the Nationalist Revolutionary Party, was among those predicted to lose political strength. - -- -30- From sim285 at lycos.com Wed Dec 8 23:02:51 2004 From: sim285 at lycos.com (sim m) Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 12:32:51 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] acts of leisure Message-ID: <20041208173251.280FDCA08B@ws7-4.us4.outblaze.com> hi.. just some thoughts on the definition of leisure... Leisure is simply the space that you have to do what you want. It necessarily has to be defined in very loose terms, since leisure is something that has a different meaning for every single person. The only restriction that is put on leisure should logically be when you encroach upon the space of another. According to the law, such a restriction has to be reasonable, as in enshrined in the fundamental rights given to each citizen of the country, immutable by judicial interpretations by the Supreme Court. The fundamental freedoms are guarantees on our being able to enjoy our leisure without interference by the state. Of course, these freedoms are not absolute. They are subject to ‘reasonable restrictions’, one of which in case of certain freedoms is ‘security of the state’. So the state can restrict everyone’s freedom reasonably in the interest of security. I think this definition of freedom being subject to reasonable restrictions by the state is relevant in all contexts, only the extent of the restriction being reasonable varies. In school, it might be reasonable restriction on ones leisure to impose a text book, or force attention in a lecture, while at a later stage in life such a restriction wouldn’t be reasonable. A freedom always has a duty attached to exercise the freedom responsibly, and thus in that sense no freedom can be absolute. Another universal restriction which forms part of enjoying freedom responsibly is to stay off another’s space of leisure, and not obstruct it in any way. all the best, sim. -- _______________________________________________ Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10 From surekha at servelots.com Thu Dec 9 10:36:54 2004 From: surekha at servelots.com (surekha at servelots.com) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 00:06:54 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] Indic IME toolbar Message-ID: <114230-2200412495654498@M2W027.mail2web.com> Hi all, Raghavan & myself have come up with a Indic IME toolbar which can be added to Mozilla or Netscape browsers. Using this Indic IME toolbar, one can * type in Indian Languages in web pages * send emails in Indian Languages * edit documents in composer's HTML source mode, save to file system and/or take a hard copy of the same. The IME functionality is implemented using Javascript event handling. This toolbar can be directly installed from "http://mail.sarai.net:8080/indic/servlet/ViewPosting?di_p=723&urlid=indic" ( or Visit Indicart, this Indic work reposiotry at http://mail.sarai.net:8080/indic and search for toolbar ) Though there are localized linux operating systems available with IME support at the OS level, this toolbar will be helpful for those who do not want (or wait for the) the entire application/os in local languages but just want the facility to type in Indian Languages in web pages. Please send your comments/suggestions/feedback to Surekha [ surekha AT servelots DOT com ] and/or Srinivasa Raghavan Kandala [ raghavan AT servelots DOT com ] Surekha. -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From isast at leonardo.info Wed Dec 8 05:56:01 2004 From: isast at leonardo.info (Leonardo/ISAST) Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 16:26:01 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] 2004 Leonardo Award for Excellence Given to Steve Mann Message-ID: <200412080026.CVD18130@ms2.netsolmail.com> Press release Contact: isast at leonardo.info for more information 2004 Leonardo Award for Excellence Given to Steve Mann Honorable Mention Awarded to David First Steve Mann has been named the recipient of the 2004 Leonardo Award for Excellence for his article "Existential Technology," published in Leonardo 36:1. This annual award recognizes excellence in articles published in Leonardo, Leonardo Music Journal (LMJ) and Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA). Excellence is defined as originality, rigor of thought, clarity of expression and effective presentation. Receiving Honorable Mention is David First, for his article "The Music of the Sphere: An Investigation into Asymptotic Harmonics, Brainwave Entrainment, and the Earth as a Giant Bell" (Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 13). The winning article and all of the articles nominated for the award are available at: http://leonardo.info/isast/awards.html. In Mann’s winning article, the author presents "Existential Technology" as a new category of in(ter)ventions and as a new theoretical framework for understanding privacy and identity. His thesis is twofold: (1) The unprotected individual has lost ground to invasive surveillance technologies and complex global organizations that undermine the humanistic property of the individual; and (2) A way for the individual to be free and collegially assertive in such a world is to be "bound to freedom" by an articulably external force. To that end, the author explores empowerment via self-demotion. He founded a federally incorporated company and appointed himself to a low enough position to be bound to freedom within that company. His performances and in(ter)ventions over the last 30 years have led him to an understanding of such concepts as individual self-corporatization and submissivity reciprocity for the creation of a balance of bureaucracy. Steve Mann has written more than 200 research publications and has been the keynote speaker at numerous industry symposia and conferences. His work has been shown in museums around the world, including the Smithsonian Institute, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Triennale di Milano and the San Francisco Art Institute. Mann is known for his work with WearComp (a wearable computer) and WearCam (an eyetap camera and reality mediator), and for keeping a web log of his visual experiences (inventing the Cyborglog, also known as a "glog"). He received a Ph.D. from MIT in 1997 and is now a faculty member at the University of Toronto. Honorable mention David First discusses in his article the conceptual framework for the organization and performance of music that has its basis in the frequency relationships of the Schumann Resonances and in the principle of binaural beats. Describing the steps he took in conceiving the project, the technical issues involved in realizing the goal of live data transmissions from a remote location and the creation of his three-dimensional overtone series, he also lays out his philosophy of improvisation and treads lightly into the curious grey areas where science mutates into leaps of faith. The Leonardo Award for Excellence was originally established by chemist and inventor Myron Coler and Leonardo publisher Robert Maxwell. Past recipients of the award include Rudolf Arnheim, Otto Piene, Charles Ames, Frieda Stahl, Donna Cox, George Gessert, Janet Saad-Cook, Alvin Curran, Karen O'Rourke, Eduardo Kac, Hubert Duprat with Christian Besson, José Carlos Casado and Harkaitz Cano, Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha. The 2004 Excellence Award Committee comprised: Lynn Hershman, chair; jury members Mark Beam, Neora Berger, Luc Courchesne and Machiko Kusahara. In addition to the winning article and the honorable mention, a number of other articles were nominated: Hisham Bizri, "City of Brass" (Leonardo 36:1); Iba Ndiaye Diadji, "From 'Life-Water' to 'Death-Water' or On the Foundations of African Artistic Creation from Yesterday to Tomorrow" (Leonardo 36:4); Manfred Friedrich, "Polarization Microscopy as an Art Tool" (Leonardo 36:3); Stefan Gec, "The Celestial Vault" (LEA 11:9); Michael John Gorman, "Art, Optics and History" (Leonardo 36:4); Graham Harwood, "Uncomfortable Proximity: The Tate Invites Mongrel to Hack the Tate's Own Web Site" (Leonardo 36:5); Amy Ione, collected reviews (Leonardo and LEA); William Magee, "Materialism and the Immaterial Mind in the Ge-luk Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism" (LEA 11:2); Gunalan Nadarajan, "Phytodynamics and Plant Difference" (LEA 11:10); Nancy Paterson, "Stock Market Skirt and New Directions" (LEA 11:12); Robert Pepperell, collected reviews (Leonardo and LEA); Dennis Summers, "The Crying Post Project: A Multi-Part, Multi-Media Artwork to Memorialize Global Sites of Pain" (Leonardo 36:5); Eugene Thacker, "Genetic Difference in the Global Genome" (LEA 11:11); Yasunao Tone, "John Cage and Recording" (LMJ 13); Ruth Wallen, "Of Story and Place: Communicating Ecological Principles through Art" (Leonardo 36:3). The 2004 Leonardo Award for Excellence is co-sponsored by the Program in Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis, where an award ceremony and lecture are planned. For further information about this program, visit http://technoculture.ucdavis.edu. For more information about the Leonardo Awards Program, contact Leonardo/ISAST, 211 Sutter Street, Suite 800, San Francisco, CA 94108, U.S.A. E-mail: isast at leonardo.info. Web: http://leonardo.info. _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From shivamvij at gmail.com Wed Dec 8 23:08:14 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 23:08:14 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] And why Gandhi lost and Ambedkar won... Message-ID: Dear all: I have developed the mail 'Caste and the City' into a full-length article with my personal experience with caste in an urban environment, where many of us deny its existence. Also note the comments on the article appended below it. Your comments, especially critical ones, are welcome. http://www.chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00004450&channel=civic%20center The article is copyleft. Thanks and regards, Shivam Vij -- -30- From sayamindu at clai.net Thu Dec 9 11:06:21 2004 From: sayamindu at clai.net (Sayamindu Dasgupta) Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 11:06:21 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Re: [Indic-computing-users] Indic IME toolbar In-Reply-To: <114230-2200412495654498@M2W027.mail2web.com> References: <114230-2200412495654498@M2W027.mail2web.com> Message-ID: <1102570581.10765.17.camel@localhost> On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 00:06 -0500, surekha at servelots.com wrote: > Hi all, > > Raghavan & myself have come up with a Indic IME toolbar which can be added > to Mozilla or Netscape browsers. > > Using this Indic IME toolbar, one can > > * type in Indian Languages in web pages > > * send emails in Indian Languages > > * edit documents in composer's HTML source mode, > save to file system and/or take a hard copy of the same. Any way in which this can be implemented as a firefox extension ?? -sdg- From tellsachin at yahoo.com Thu Dec 9 00:18:42 2004 From: tellsachin at yahoo.com (Sachin Agarwal) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 10:48:42 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Supreme court orders cola companies to disclose pesticides contents. Message-ID: <20041208184842.54305.qmail@web41504.mail.yahoo.com> Dear all: Here is the press clipping of an important Supreme Court order asking cola companies to print the contents on the pack. It also requires them to print the level of pesticides. I am trying to locate the full order. In the mean time hope this will be useful. sachin agarwal o o o o o o o Disclose pesticide content in colas: SC to Coke, Pepsi Press Trust f India December 06, 2004 17:41 IST http://www.livejournal.com/community/stolngeneration/5105.html Saying that the consumer has the right to know what he consumes, the Supreme Court of India on Monday dismissed two petitions filed by soft drink giants, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, challenging a Rajasthan high court order asking them to print on containers the extent of pesticide residues in their products. While dismissing the special leave petitions filed by Pepsi Foods Ltd and Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages (P) Ltd, a Bench comprising Chief Justice R C Lahoti, Justice D M Dharmadhikari and Justice G P Mathur allowed them to approach the high court with a plea as to what extent they could comply with its directive. The apex court also suspended implementation of the high court order by two weeks, as the counsels for the two companies -- senior advocates Arun Jaitley and Harish Salve -- said that the print on the containers would read as "the contents may have traces of pesticide which is well below the prescribed standard." By the November 3 order, the high court had directed Pepsi and Coca-Cola, which account for 99 per cent of the soft drink sales, and all other carbonated beverage manufacturers to disclose the composition and contents of the products, including the presence of pesticides and chemicals, on the bottle, package or container. The apex court said the entire anxiety of the high court stemmed from public interest and "we do not see anything unreasonable or unconstitutional in the high court order." The Bench, while asking the two soft drink giants to approach the Rajasthan high court, noted in its order that if their applications regarding the manner in which the pesticide contents were to be displayed on container were not entertained, the manufacturers could approach the Apex Court again. Right at the beginning of the hearing, Salve contended that no pesticide was added to the soft drink in the manufacturing process. The pesticide content of the raw material -- water and sugar -- would be reflected in the soft drink, he said and added that extensive use of pesticides in agriculture has resulted in high degree of their presence in sugar. But the Bench asked, "Why would the consumer not know as to what he is consuming. You can declare in you printline that the sugar used by the soft drink manufacturer contained pesticide." Jaitley focussed on the aspect of the powers of the high court to pass such an order, saying if the government had passed such an order only against the soft drink industry, it would have been quashed by the courts on the ground of discrimination. Moreover, directing the manufacturers to disclose the composition would amount to infringement of the right to maintain trade secret, he said.Salve pitched in by saying that "agriculture in our country is a holy cow and no government would make a law against them even if it is in public knowledge that coffee and tea and even fruit juice contained more pesticide than the soft drinks." o o o o o o o See background of the issue at http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=Supreme+Court+rejects+Coke+plea+India&meta= --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041208/2dbe076b/attachment.html From surekha at servelots.com Thu Dec 9 16:09:15 2004 From: surekha at servelots.com (surekha at servelots.com) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 05:39:15 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] Re: [Indic-computing-users] Indic IME toolbar Message-ID: <98960-220041249103915379@M2W034.mail2web.com> >Any way in which this can be implemented as a firefox extension ?? We are working on that and will let you know soon. Surekha. -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From ysaeed7 at yahoo.com Thu Dec 9 16:15:43 2004 From: ysaeed7 at yahoo.com (Yousuf) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 02:45:43 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] =?iso-8859-1?q?Watching_=93Khamosh_Pani=94_in_Indi?= =?iso-8859-1?q?a?= Message-ID: <20041209104543.4562.qmail@web51404.mail.yahoo.com> Watching �Khamosh Pani� in India (And why I cannot use it for peace activism) Yousuf Saeed While Pakistani director Sabiha Sumer�s 2003 film Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters) is getting rave reviews and highly emotional applause in many Indian theatres, here are some personal thoughts, if anyone�s interested. For those who haven�t seen it (and are being reminded by the �must-watch� reports), Khamosh Pani, the first Pakistani film ever released in Indian theatres, is about an idyllic Pakistani village called Charkhi which sees the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in 1979�s Ziaul Haq regime, and how it affects the ordinary villagers such as Ayesha, her son Saleem, and many others, including the visiting Sikh pilgrims from India. I shouldn�t reveal the full story to spoil the fun for those who haven�t seen it � it�s great cinema to watch. I only want to express a chilling uneasiness I had while watching it at PVR cinema surrounded by many Punjabi families, a number of them sobbing through the film. Much has already been written, produced, staged and sung about the subject of India�s Partition (on both sides of the border), and would continue to, since its horrible memories still haunt a large number of affected people. But the question we must ask today: is this memory going to help us resolve any of the present day crisis, or is it only adding further fuel to the fire. These days, when I watch a movie (or a documentary or TV show) on the subject of communalism, India-Pakistan and so on, (especially after 9/11 and the Gujarat carnage), I am often looking to see if the product can be used as a tool for the campaign of peace and cultural harmony at the ordinary lay-person�s level. Since I (and my friends) have been showing films for this purpose to a wide-range of audiences, mostly youngsters, our experience shows that (through these films) when you reveal the darker side of only one community to a lay audience (not intellectual/activists), it could have a very damaging impact. For instance when we showed Gopal Menon�s �Hey Ram� to primarily Hindu school children in Delhi (8 months after the incident), even the little children became defensive, and started asking questions like �but what about Godhra? and what about Kashmir� and so on. We also knew that the same film could be extremely provocative for the Muslim audience. But does it mean that we should not criticize or �expose� the fundamentalists of either sides through media. Of course we should, but in what manner and context? In my personal view (open to debate), we probably need a language that heals the already bruised feelings, rather than romanticize the horrible events. Khamosh Pani certainly does not heal. I don�t know about the audience in other places, but watching it in Delhi with the sobbing Punjabis around, I could sense a clear message reaching the new generation: �see, this is how these Muslims/Pakistanis treated us Sikhs�. When the film showed the marauding Muslim youth on the streets of Sarkhi, shouting Allaho-Akbar, and the Muslim clerics making provocative speeches, I felt, maybe there would be some resolve towards the end of the film, some kind of politically correct, sweet ending to the story. But, it kept going the way it was, and ended, quite predictably, with a stereotypical image of the fundamentalist Pakistan. There is of course nothing inaccurate in what the film portrayed. And one must commend Sabiha, the director, for daring to produce such a film in Pakistan. She told a newspaper recently, �In my film, I try to portray extremism in a bad light�if people in India decide to misuse it I cannot do anything.� And this is where the problem lies. If someone in India produces a film exposing RSS and Bajrang Dal�s nefarious activities, it would be considered a highly acclaimed worked in India and abroad, but the same film in Pakistan would work as hot material � used to incite hatred and prejudices against Hindus, even though the filmmaker may have never imagined it that way. Hence, the new generation of Indian Punjabis/Sikhs/Hindus, who are not fully aware of the horrors of Partition, would see only one side of the story in Khamosh Pani, and get more aggravated towards Pakistanis/Muslims. Worse still, the victim of fanaticism in the film has been portrayed by an Indian actress (Kiron Kher), whom the Indian audience is bound to relate to and sympathize with, against the rest of the fanatic-looking actors. Of course the film�s sentimentality may also make the audience forget that there were similar harrowing Partition stories on this side of the border as well. This is probably a dilemma that the south Asian filmmakers and media practitioners have not even begun to address, even though our cultural borders have started cracking. One should not doubt Sabiha Sumer�s sincerity in exposing/criticizing the fanatics of her country, just as one cannot doubt the intentions of Gopal Menon or Rakesh Sharma in India. But if it has been so easy for Sabiha�s European funders/ distributors to sell/release this film in India, they must also be aware of its far-reaching impact. Sentimentality on this issue can sell very well but may not bridge our gaps. For that we need popular cinema that can make people think rather than sob. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From sam at media.com.au Fri Dec 10 11:49:22 2004 From: sam at media.com.au (sam) Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 22:19:22 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] Assistance with 'extremism' research... Message-ID: <41B93FEA.8000006@media.com.au> Dear Sarai-list members, I wonder if anyone can assist me. I am carrying out some research in the 'Muslim extremism' in South Asia - specifically in Sri Lanka. Is there anyone out there researching in to 'emerging terrorists'? If anyone can inform me of any specialists or commentators (especially from credible institutions) who I could contact, that would be fantastic.Please contact me directly via sam at media.com.au Best wishes, Sam From ravikant at sarai.net Thu Dec 9 10:54:45 2004 From: ravikant at sarai.net (Ravikant) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 10:54:45 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] autobiography of an alien Message-ID: <200412091054.45895.ravikant@sarai.net> Interesting stuff from The Dawn via writers forum. Apologies for x-posting. Enjoy. Ravikant [Writers Forum] Autobiography of a national alien द्वारा: Munir Saami References: <20041209104543.4562.qmail@web51404.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <8178da99041209044360f66107@mail.gmail.com> Dear Yousuf, This is not a reply to your mail, directly, but off on a tangent. Khamosh Pani is not, as you write (and as the media has widely reported) the first Pakistani film to be released in India. There were a few Pakistani Punjabi films released in India in the mid nineteen fifties, the most prominent of them beig 'Dulla Bhatti', released in 1956. I am absolutely definite about Dulla Bhatti because of fieldwork/interviews at Imperial Cinema, PaharGanj - where the film was screened, and was a hit, catering to a large refugee population. Dulla Bhatti, the character on who the film is based, is a fairly important character in Punjabi folklore - a bandit, and RobinHood type chivalrous rebel, who opposes the tyranny of Mughal tax collection in Akbar's time. Apparently, songs sung during the annual 'Lohri' celebrations allude to Dulla Bhatti. Dulla Bhatti has, perhaps retrospectively, been identified as 'Musli'm, a category which might have been fariy fluid back in sixteenth century Punjab. Coming back to the points you have raised - Last year, as part of my graduation from MCRC, along with two other people, Akshay Singh and Sakina Ali, I made a film on the twentieth century histories of the Purana Qila, 'The Past is a Foreign Country...' (which you have seen being edited on FCP) The film, among other things, focuses on the Muslim refugee camp which came up inside the Purana Qila after the Delhi riots of September '47. It is not a pleasant dwelling - at all. Along with this, there are fairly obvious and un-nuanced fulminations against anti-Muslim prejudice in the preservation of monuments and the presentation of history.... It is not a great film, by any standards - but in India, in Delhi, it has gone down well with audiences - generating awareness of the marginalised hsitories of the city, and debates about the politics of heritage conservation. it also gets a few laughs at the digs at our right-wingers. In April this year, I took the film to Lahore, and screened it for an audience of about eighty students at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. It turned out that some of them had grandparents who had come to Pakistan via the Purana Qila camps. and during the discusssion that followed, we moved away from issues of conservation, and i somehow ended up defending India in general, and the Indian state in particular - 'we're not that bad' - something I never thought I'd have to do. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we,as film-makers,or writers, try and make sense of the specific time and place we live in - and present them for People Like Us - by which I don't people who necessarily agree with one, but who inhabit the same media-scape, so to speak, and have inherited similar recieved histories. In that sense, of course, Paksitanis are not People Like Us, and vice versa. we do not inhabit the same media scape, we have not recieved/inherited the same histories. And which is why you don't need to go out of your way to make a Gadar, to cause discomfort or raise anger against the 'Other'. Last week, I saw a beautifuly made film called 'The Rock Star and the Mullahs' which has a liberal Pakistani Muslim (Salman Ahmed of the rock group 'Junoon') confronting fundamentalists about the ban on the public performance of music in the North West Frontier Province. And yet, doubts were raised as to whether the film, instead of demonstrating that not all Muslims are jehadis, was in fact reinforcing stereotypes about Pakistan... As long as we make films for 'Indians' and 'Pakistanis' there is no way we can escape creating stereotypes and 'othering' on the Other Side, as long as we're dealing with Kashmir, or the Partition, or communal violence, or religious fundamentalism... ...is it possible to make a film which deals, however tangentially, with Partition, Communal Violence, Kashmir or religious fundamentalism... without someone in the audience getting very bitter? ... unless, of course, it's something like 'Veer-Zaara' ;-) ? Cheers, Anand On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 02:45:43 -0800 (PST), Yousuf wrote: > Watching "Khamosh Pani" in India > (And why I cannot use it for peace activism) > > Yousuf Saeed > > While Pakistani director Sabiha Sumer's 2003 film > Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters) is getting rave reviews > and highly emotional applause in many Indian theatres, > here are some personal thoughts, if anyone's > interested. For those who haven't seen it (and are > being reminded by the "must-watch" reports), Khamosh > Pani, the first Pakistani film ever released in Indian > theatres, is about an idyllic Pakistani village called > Charkhi which sees the rise of Islamic fundamentalism > in 1979's Ziaul Haq regime, and how it affects the > ordinary villagers such as Ayesha, her son Saleem, and > many others, including the visiting Sikh pilgrims from > India. I shouldn't reveal the full story to spoil the > fun for those who haven't seen it – it's great cinema > to watch. I only want to express a chilling uneasiness > I had while watching it at PVR cinema surrounded by > many Punjabi families, a number of them sobbing > through the film. > > Much has already been written, produced, staged and > sung about the subject of India's Partition (on both > sides of the border), and would continue to, since its > horrible memories still haunt a large number of > affected people. But the question we must ask today: > is this memory going to help us resolve any of the > present day crisis, or is it only adding further fuel > to the fire. These days, when I watch a movie (or a > documentary or TV show) on the subject of communalism, > India-Pakistan and so on, (especially after 9/11 and > the Gujarat carnage), I am often looking to see if the > product can be used as a tool for the campaign of > peace and cultural harmony at the ordinary > lay-person's level. Since I (and my friends) have been > showing films for this purpose to a wide-range of > audiences, mostly youngsters, our experience shows > that (through these films) when you reveal the darker > side of only one community to a lay audience (not > intellectual/activists), it could have a very damaging > impact. For instance when we showed Gopal Menon's 'Hey > Ram' to primarily Hindu school children in Delhi (8 > months after the incident), even the little children > became defensive, and started asking questions like > "but what about Godhra? and what about Kashmir" and so > on. We also knew that the same film could be extremely > provocative for the Muslim audience. > > But does it mean that we should not criticize or > 'expose' the fundamentalists of either sides through > media. Of course we should, but in what manner and > context? In my personal view (open to debate), we > probably need a language that heals the already > bruised feelings, rather than romanticize the horrible > events. Khamosh Pani certainly does not heal. I don't > know about the audience in other places, but watching > it in Delhi with the sobbing Punjabis around, I could > sense a clear message reaching the new generation: > "see, this is how these Muslims/Pakistanis treated us > Sikhs". When the film showed the marauding Muslim > youth on the streets of Sarkhi, shouting Allaho-Akbar, > and the Muslim clerics making provocative speeches, I > felt, maybe there would be some resolve towards the > end of the film, some kind of politically correct, > sweet ending to the story. But, it kept going the way > it was, and ended, quite predictably, with a > stereotypical image of the fundamentalist Pakistan. > > There is of course nothing inaccurate in what the film > portrayed. And one must commend Sabiha, the director, > for daring to produce such a film in Pakistan. She > told a newspaper recently, "In my film, I try to > portray extremism in a bad light…if people in India > decide to misuse it I cannot do anything." And this is > where the problem lies. If someone in India produces a > film exposing RSS and Bajrang Dal's nefarious > activities, it would be considered a highly acclaimed > worked in India and abroad, but the same film in > Pakistan would work as hot material – used to incite > hatred and prejudices against Hindus, even though the > filmmaker may have never imagined it that way. Hence, > the new generation of Indian Punjabis/Sikhs/Hindus, > who are not fully aware of the horrors of Partition, > would see only one side of the story in Khamosh Pani, > and get more aggravated towards Pakistanis/Muslims. > Worse still, the victim of fanaticism in the film has > been portrayed by an Indian actress (Kiron Kher), whom > the Indian audience is bound to relate to and > sympathize with, against the rest of the > fanatic-looking actors. Of course the film's > sentimentality may also make the audience forget that > there were similar harrowing Partition stories on this > side of the border as well. > > This is probably a dilemma that the south Asian > filmmakers and media practitioners have not even begun > to address, even though our cultural borders have > started cracking. One should not doubt Sabiha Sumer's > sincerity in exposing/criticizing the fanatics of her > country, just as one cannot doubt the intentions of > Gopal Menon or Rakesh Sharma in India. But if it has > been so easy for Sabiha's European funders/ > distributors to sell/release this film in India, they > must also be aware of its far-reaching impact. > Sentimentality on this issue can sell very well but > may not bridge our gaps. For that we need popular > cinema that can make people think rather than sob. > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. > http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail > _________________________________________ > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header. > List archive: > -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup. http://www.synchroni-cities.blogspot.com/ From iram at sarai.net Fri Dec 10 00:02:29 2004 From: iram at sarai.net (iram at sarai.net) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 19:32:29 +0100 (CET) Subject: [Reader-list] the Act of leisure Message-ID: <49415.210.7.77.145.1102617149.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> Dear all, The last couple of postings throw an interesting insight on monitoring at school. Regimentation and control in the name of discipline in educational institutions are much discussed/ debated issues. And each one of us would have a story of to share. Stories of being late/ not having done the home work/ of copying and cheating/ and also of retribution/ punishment/ control and discipline. All of us go through a process of internalising concepts of discipline/ rules/ regulation. The figure of the ‘monitor’ for me, in school emerges as an important player in this dialogue between the school establishment and the student community. I went to an all boys’ school in Udaipur, where confrontation between the teaching staff and rowdy teenage boys was the norm. For every class there would be ‘monitor’ who would ‘mind’ the students/peers in the absence of the teacher/ authority. Anyone breaking the rule/ talking/ whispering/ reading anything that was not assigned, would be liable for punishment. I remember standing outside the classroom with my face to the wall many times for reading comics in the math class. It is not surprising that the colloquial hindi term `class lagna’ is synonymous with punishment. It was prestigious to be a monitor/ prefect. And it was usually the class topper who was assigned the `responsibility’. We often called these people teacher’s pets/ poodles etc. In the senior classes, emerged the figure of the `class representative’, whose duties were essentially the same as those of the monitor but the term representative had more democratic implications. Then of course, there was the figure of the class rebel, some times also the hero- who everyone would look up to. I am still trying to figure out the place of this figure in adult life if we take the school as a `representation’ of society. In my school- going experience, two things acquired importance, time and space. The monitoring was done for a particular period/ time and in a particular class/ playground/ library etc. The ‘monitor’ became the control through which access to mobility/ site /space was restricted and regulated. The figure of the class monitor haunted my childhood and teenage experience. And strangely it was my first encounter with Chandrabhan, * a security guard who brought back similar feelings of anger/ frustration/ and helplessness. He is a security guard in Ishwar Nagar, a gated colony off Mathura Road in New Delhi. I first met him when I had gone to meet the president of the Residents’ Welfare Association of Ishwar Nagar. Chandrabhan was brusque- to the point of being rude. He stands outside the inner gate of Ishwar nagar and his job is to verify every visitor/ guest who enters the colony, with the resident concerned. He also allows the dhobi/ presswala/ sabziwala inside the premises of the colony at fixed times. I was a `problem case’ because I had come without an appointment/ by a cycle-rickshaw, with no identity card/ nor a cell phone. The similarity between the class monitor and the security guard struck me then, as I waited for my verification to be complete. The monitor/ security guard/ watchman/ attendant/ gatekeeper is of the same socio- economic class, which he surveils. So, he is also required to keep a check on the sabziwala, dhobi, salesman etc. Thus, regulating the control and access to a space. Here, the ‘terms of entry’, become an important filter to maintain control especially in the case of gated colonies and sites of leisure like malls, cinema halls, parks, community centres etc. The element of time also plays a significant role in supervising access. Going back to the school, here, time becomes an intensely contested element. Failure to arrive in time for the school assembly result in punishments. Similarly penalties are awarded to those who are not able to complete their assignments on time, the students are not evaluated on their understanding of the subject but on their ability to answer questions correctly within a time frame. And all discussions on the issue are shut because young people must have `self discipline’ and it is the future of the nation/ world/ humanity that is at stake. Similarly, there is a time for shops/ colonies/ residential areas to be open for public interface and again ‘time’ is invoked to restrict access. It would be quite interesting to explore the relationship of control, access and surveillance through the concept of time. How time is mapped in the sociology of spaces like school/ community centre? What is the relationship between time and power? Why time becomes an important tool in regulating access? Who determines the limits of timings of access and why? And how the language of law is invoked through this complex interweaving of time, regulation, access and control? Looking forward to more responses. Cheers, Taha From menso at r4k.net Fri Dec 10 06:45:01 2004 From: menso at r4k.net (Menso Heus) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 02:15:01 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] the Act of leisure In-Reply-To: <1122.61.11.30.112.1101570076.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> References: <1122.61.11.30.112.1101570076.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: <20041210011501.GZ18096@r4k.net> Dear Iram et al, Between my 7th and 14th I've lived in a small town in the south of The Netherlands. In front of our house was a playfield the size of a soccer field where many children would come to play, and occasionally their parents would join too. There were many such spaces in the town, maintained by the city council. Control on the space was done through the parents that lived around the space who would occasionally watch what was going on from their houses. If things they deemed unsuitable were happening, they would either go out to intervene, or phone other parents that their kid was misbehaving. As I grew older and wondered more through the town, I soon discovered that this control network stretched out not only to the playground in front of our house, but through the entire town. For example, when I would secretly smoke a cigarette in a place far from my home,, my mom would know about it before I got home. It was a strict surveillance network with spies and agents everywhere in the form of parents, neighbours and kids betraying other kids, intelligence reports arriving in the form of fresh gossip. For the last couple of years I've been living in Amsterdam, which like my town has many public spaces. They don't come in the form of huge playgrounds, but there are many public benches, parks and other places one can go and sit down. Especially along the canals, streets seem more than just a space that people are allowed to travel through. There are no issues of private security guards or police officers telling people to move along that I know of, which is quite different from what I read is happening in Delhi and other Indian cities. The big parks we have, the Vondelpark being the most famous, are a huge mash of people in the summer, from joggers to squatters juggling, people playing frisbee or soccer, others practicing tai chi and other martial arts, people having lunch and dinners in the grass, playing music, making music, dancing. Street artists play on squares where people come to sit down and watch them, terraces are put out in the summer but no one will tell you to leave if you sit not on them but 5 meters in front of them. In the summer, people in my street will carry their chairs outside so they can sit in front of their appartments in the sun, sometimes they eat there too. It makes the street a lot more vibrant than it is now, -1 Celsius and dead. Perhaps that's one of the reasons we cherish our public spaces so much, because it is only a few rare months a year that we get to use them. When the sun comes out, so do the people. Menso -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- All extremists should be taken out and shot -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From monica at sarai.net Fri Dec 10 11:14:12 2004 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 11:14:12 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] X Notes on Practice Message-ID: Dear all Here is an essay we wrote a few months ago, meant to be published in: Immaterial Labour: Work, Research & Art, ed. Marina Vishmidt, Melanie Gilligan, Black Dog Publishing, London/New York, 2004. This is our day for sending in our essays, so there is another one next which extends some of the ideas raised in this . best Monica/Shuddha/Jeebesh ---------------------- X notes on Practice Stubborn Structures and Insistent Seepage in a Networked World Raqs Media Collective I The Figure of the Artisan The artisan stands at the outer threshold of early modernity, fashioning a new age, ushering in a new spirit with movable type, plumb line, chisel, paper, new inks, dyes and lenses, and a sensibility that has room for curiosity, exploration, co-operation, elegance, economy, utility and a respect for the labour of the hand, the eye and the mind. The artisan is the typesetter, seamstress, block-maker, carpenter, weaver, computer, oculist, scribe, baker, dyer, pharmacist, mason, midwife, mechanic and cook - the ancestor of every modern trade. The artisan gestures towards a new age but is not quite sure of a place in it. The figure of the artisan anticipates both the worker and the artist, in that it lays the foundations of the transformation of occupations (things that occupy us) into professions (institutionalized, structural locations within an economy). It mediates the transfiguration of people into skills, of lives into working lives, into variable capital. The artisan is the vehicle that carried us all into the contemporary world. She is the patient midwife of our notion of an autonomous creative and reflective self, waiting out the still births, nursing the prematurely born, weighing the infant and cutting the cords that tie it to an older patrimony. The artisan makes us who we are. Yet, the artisan has neither the anonymity of the worker drone, not the hyper-individuated solipsism of the artist genius. The artisan is neither faceless, nor a celebrity; she belongs neither in the factory, nor in the salon, but functions best in the atelier, the workshop and the street, with apprentices and other artisans, making and trading things and knowledge. The artisan fashions neither the mass produced inventories of warehouses, nor the precious, unique objects that must only be seen in galleries, museums and auction houses. The objects and services that pass through her hands into the world are neither ubiquitous nor rare, nor do they seek value in ubiquity or rarity. They trade on the basis of their usage, within densely networked communities that the artisan is party to, not on the impetus of rival global speculations based on the volumes and volatility of stocks, or the price of a signature. As warehouses and auction houses proliferate, squeezing out the atelier and the workshop, the artisan loses her way. At the margins of an early industrial capitalism, the artisan seemingly transacts herself out of history, making way for the drone and the genius, for the polarities of drudgery and creativity, work and art. II. Immaterial Labour Due to the emergence of a new economy of intellectual property based on the fruits of immaterial labour, the distinction between the roles of the worker and the artist in strictly functional terms is once again becoming difficult to sustain. To understand why this is so we need to take a cursory look at the new ways in which value is increasingly being produced in the world today. The combination of widespread cybernetic processes, increased economies of scale, agile management practices that adjust production to demand, and inventory status reports in a dispersed global assembly line, has made the mere manufacture of things a truly global fact. Cars, shoes, clothes, and medicines, or any commodity for that matter, are produced by more or less the same processes, anywhere. The manufacture of components, the research and design process, the final assembly and the marketing infrastructure no longer need to be circumscribed within one factory, or even one nation state or regional economic entity. The networked nature of contemporary industrial production frees the finished good from a fidelity to any one location. This also results in a corollary condition - a multiplication of renditions, or editions, (both authorized as well as counterfeit) of any product line at a global scale. Often, originals and their imitations are made in the same out-sourced sweatshop. The more things multiply, the more they tend towards similarity, in form and appearance, if not in function. Thus, when capital becomes more successful than ever before at fashioning the material surface of the world after its own image, it also has more need than ever before for a sense of variety, a classificatory engine that could help order the mass that it generates, so that things do not cancel each other out by their generative equivalence. Hence the more things become the same the more need there is for distinguishing signs, to enable their purchase. The importance given to the notions of 'brand equity' from which we get derivatives from which we get derivatives like 'brand velocity', 'brand loyalty' and a host of other usages are prefixed by the term 'brand' indicative of this reality. Today, the value of a good lies not only in what makes it a thing desirable enough to consume as a perishable capsule of (deferred) satisfaction. The value of a good lies especially in that aspect of it which makes it imperishable, eternally reproducible, and ubiquitously available. Information, which distils the imperishable, the reproducible, the ubiquitous in a condensed set of signs, is the true capital of this age. A commodity is no longer only an object that can be bought and sold; it is also that thing in it which can be read, interpreted and deciphered in such a way that every instance of decryption or encryption can also be bought and sold. Money lies in the meaning that lies hidden in a good. A good to eat must also be a good to think with, or to experiment with in a laboratory. This encryption of value, the codification and concentration of capital to its densest and most agile form is what we understand to be intellectual property. How valuable is intellectual property? How valuable is intellectual property? In attempting to find an answer to a question such as this, it is always instructive to look at the knowledge base that capitalism produces to assess and understand itself. In a recent paper titled "Evaluating IP Rights: In Search of Brand Value in the New Economy" a brand management consultant, Tony Samuel of PricewaterhouseCoopers' Intellectual Asset Management Group says: "This change in the nature of competition and the dynamics of the new world economy have resulted in a change in the key value drivers for a company from tangible assets (such as plant and machinery) to intangible assets (such as brands, patents, copyright and know how). In particular, companies have taken advantage of more open trade opportunities by using the competitive advantage provided by brands and technology to access distant markets. This is reflected in the growth in the ratio of market-capitalised value to book value of listed companies. In the US, this ratio has increased from 1:1 to 5:1 over the last twenty years. In the UK, the ratio is similar, with less than 30% of the capitalised value of FTSE 350 companies appearing on the balance sheet. We would argue that the remaining 70% of unallocated value resides largely in intellectual property and certainly in intellectual assets. Noticeably, the sectors with the highest ratio of market capitalisation to book value are heavily reliant on copyright (such as the media sector), patents (such as technology and pharmaceutical) and brands (such as pharmaceutical, food and drink, media and financial services)."1 The paper goes on to quote Alan Shepard, sometime chairman of Grand Metropolitan plc, an international group specializing in branded food, drinks and retailing which merged with Guinness in 1997 to form Diageo, a corporation which today controls brands as diverse as Smirnoff and Burger King. "Brands are the core of our business. We could, if we so wished, subcontract all of the production, distribution, sales and service functions and, provided that we retained ownership of our brands, we would continue to be successful and profitable. It is our brands that provide the profits of today and guarantee the profits of the future." We have considered brands here at some length, because of the way in which brands populate our visual landscape. Were a born again landscape painter to try and represent a stretch of urban landscape, it would be advisable for him or her to have privileged access to a smart intellectual property lawyer. But what is true of brands is equally true of other forms of intangible assets, or intellectual property, ranging from music, to images to software. The legal regime of intellectual property is in the process of encompassing as much as possible of all cultural transactions and production processes. All efforts to create or even understand art will have to come to terms, sooner or later, with the implications of this pervasive control, and intellectual property attorneys will no doubt exert considerable 'curatorial' influence as art events, museums and galleries clear artists projects, proposals and acquisitions as a matter of routine. These 'attorney-curators' will no doubt ensure that art institutions and events do not become liable for possible and potential 'intellectual property violations' that the artist, curator, theorist, writer or practitioner may or may not be aware of as being inscribed into their work. III The Worker as Artist What are the implications of this scenario? The worker of the twenty first century, who has to survive in a marker that places the utmost value on the making of signs, finds that her tools, her labour, her skills are all to do with varying degrees of creative, interpretative and performative agency. She makes brands shine, she sculpts data, she mines meaning, she hews code. The real global factory is a network of neural processes, no less material than the blast furnaces and chimneys of manufacturing and industrial capitalism. The worker of the twenty first century is also a performer, a creator of value from meaning. She creates, researches and interprets, in the ordinary course of a working day to the order that would merit her being considered an artist or a researcher, if by 'artist' or 'researcher' we understand a person to be a figure who creates meaning or produces knowledge. Nothing illustrates this better than the condition of workers in Information technology enabled industries like Call Centre and Remote Data Outsourcing, which have paved the way for a new international matrix of labour, and a given a sudden performative twist to the realities of what is called Globalization. In a recent installation, called A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location)2, we looked at the performative dimension in the lives of call centre workers. The Call Centre Worker and her world3 A call centre worker in the suburb of Delhi, the city where we live, performs a Californian accent as she pursues a loan defaulter in a poor Los Angeles neighbourhood on the telephone. She threatens and cajoles him. She scares him, gets underneath his skin, because she is scared that he won't agree to pay, and that this will translate as a cut in her salary. Latitudes away from him, she has a window open on her computer telling her about the weather in his backyard, his credit history, his employment record, his prison record. Her skin is darker than his, but her voice is trained to be whiter on the phone. Her night is his day. She is a remote agent with a talent for impersonation in the IT enabled industry in India. She never gets paid extra for the long hours she puts in. He was laid off a few months ago, and hasn't been able to sort himself out. Which is why she is calling him for the company she works for. He lives in a third world neighbourhood in a first world city, she works in a free trade zone in a third world country. Neither knows the other as anything other than as 'case' and 'agent'. The conversation between them is a denial of their realities and an assertion of many identities, each with their truths, all at once. Central to this kind of work is a process of imagining, understanding and invoking a world, mimesis, projection and verisimilitude as well as the skilful deployment of a combination of reality and representation. Elsewhere, we have written of the critical necessity of this artifice to work, (in terms of creating an impression of proximity that elides the actuality of distance) in order for a networked global capitalism to sustain itself on an everyday basis, but here, what we would like to emphasize is the crucial role that a certain amount of 'imaginative' skill, and a combination of knowledge, command over language, articulateness, technological dexterity and performativity plays in making this form of labour productive and efficient on a global scale. IV. Marginalia Sometimes, the most significant heuristic openings are hidden away on the margins of the contemporary world. While the meta-narratives of war, globalization, disasters, pandemics and technological spectacles grab headlines, the world may be changing in significant but unrecognized directions at the margins, like an incipient glacier inching its way across a forsaken moraine. These realities may have to with the simple facts of people being on the move, of the improvised mechanisms of survival that suddenly open out new possibilities, and the ways in which a few basic facts and conceptions to do with the everyday acts of coping with the world pass between continents. Here, margin is not so much a fact of location (as in something peripheral to an assumed centre) as it is a figure denoting a specific kind or degree of attentiveness. In this sense, a figure may be located at the very core of the reality that we are talking about, and still be marginal, because it does not cross a certain low-visibility, low-attention threshold, or because it is seen as being residual to the primary processes of reality. The call centre worker may be at the heart of the present global economy, but she is barely visible as an actor or an agent. In this sense, to be marginal is not necessary to be 'far from the action' or to be 'remote' or in any way distant from the very hub of the world as we find it today. The Margin has its own image-field. And it is to this image-field that we turn to excavate or improvise a few resources for practice. A minor artisanal specialization pertaining to medieval manuscript illumination was the drawing and inscription of what has been called "marginalia"4. "Marginalists" (generally apprentices to scribes) would inscribe figures, often illustrating profane wisdom, popular proverbs, burlesque figures and fantastical or allegorical allusions that occasionally constructed a counter-narrative to the main body of the master text, while often acting as what was known as "exempla": aids to conception and thought (and sometimes as inadvertent provocations for heretic meditations). It is here, in these marginal illuminations, that ordinary people - ploughmen, peasants, beggars, prostitutes and thieves would often make their appearances, constructing a parallel universe to that populated by kings, aristocrats, heroes, monsters, angels, prophets and divines. Much of our knowledge of what people looked like in the medieval world comes from the details that we find in manuscript marginalia. They index the real, even as they inscribe the nominally invisible. It would be interesting to think for instance of the incredible wealth of details of dress, attitude, social types and behaviours that we find in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, or Pierre Breughel as marginalia writ large. It is with some fidelity to this artisanal ideal of using marginalia as exemplars that we would like to offer a small gallery of contemporary marginal figures. V. Five Figures to Consider As significant annotations to the text of present realities, and as ways out for the dilemmas that we have faced in our own apprehensions of the world, we find ourselves coming back repeatedly to them in our practice - as images, as datums and as figures of thought, as somewhat profane icons for meditation. We feel that these figures, each in their own way, speak to the predicament of the contemporary practitioner. Figure One: The Alien Navigates a Boat at Sea A boat changes course at sea, dipping temporarily out of the radar of a nearby coast guard vessel. A cargo of contraband people in the hold, fleeing war, or the aftermath of war, or the fifth bad harvest in a row, or a dam that flooded their valley, or the absence of social security in the face of unemployment, or a government that suddenly took offence at the way they spelt their names - study the contours of an unknown coastline in their minds, experiment with the pronunciations of harbour names unfamiliar to their tongues. Their map of the world is contoured with safe havens and dangerous border posts, places for landing, transit and refuge, anywhere and everywhere, encircled and annotated in blue ink. A geography lesson learnt in the International University of Exile. Figure Two: The Squatter builds a Tarpaulin Shelter Tarpaulin, rope, a few large plastic drums, crates, long poles of seasoned bamboo, and quick eyes and skilled hands, create a new home. A migrant claims a patch of fallow land, marked "property of the state" in the city. Then comes the tough part: the search for papers, the guerrilla war with the Master Plan for a little bit of electricity, a little bit of water, a delay in the date of demolition, for a few scraps of legality, a few loose threads of citizenship. The learning of a new accent, the taking on of a new name, the invention of one or several new histories that might get one a ration card, or a postponed eviction notice. The squat grows incrementally, in Rio de Janeiro, in Delhi, in Baghdad, creating a shadow global republic of not-quite citizens, with not-yet passports, and not-there addresses. Figure Three: The Electronic Pirate burns a CD A fifteen square-yard shack in a working-class suburb of northeast Delhi is a hub of the global entertainment industry. Here, a few assembled computers, a knock-down Korean CD writer, and some Chinese pirated software in the hands of a few formerly unemployed, or unemployable young people turned media entrepreneurs, transform the latest Hollywood, or Bollywood blockbuster into the stuff that you can watch in a tea shop on your way to work. Here, the media meets its extended public. It dies a quick death as one high-end commodity form, and is resurrected as another. And then, like the Holy Spirit, does not charge an exorbitant fee to deliver a little grace unto those who seek its fleeting favours. Electronic piracy is the flow of energy between chained product and liberated pixel that makes for a new communion, a samizdat of the song and dance spectacular. Figure Four: The Hacker Network liberates Software A community of programmers dispersed across the globe sustains a growing body of software and knowledge - a digital commons that is not fenced in by proprietary controls. A network of hackers, armed with nothing other than their phone lines, modems, internet accounts and personal computers inaugurate a quiet global insubordination by refusing to let code, music, texts, math and images be anything but freely available for download, transformation and distribution. The freedom is nurtured through the sharing of time, computing resources and knowledge in a way that works out to the advantage of those working to create the software, as well as to a larger public, that begins swapping music and sharing media files to an extent that makes large infotainment corporations look nervously at their balance sheets. The corporations throw their lawyers at the hackers, and the Intellectual Property Shock Troops are out on parade, but nothing can turn the steady erosion of the copyright. Figure Five: Workers Protect Machines in an Occupied Factory Seamstresses at the Brukman Garment Factory in Buenos Aires5 shield their machines against a crowd of policemen intent on smashing them. The power of the Argentine state provokes a perverse neo Luddite incident, in which the workers are attacked while they try to defend their machines from destruction. The Brukman Factory is a "fabrica ocupada", a factory occupied by its workers, one of many that have sustained a new parallel social and economic structure based on self regulation and the free exchange of goods and services outside or tangential to the failed money economy - a regular feature of the way in which working people in Argentina cope with the ongoing economic crisis. Turning the rhetoric and tactics of working class protest on its head, the seamstresses of the Brukman factory fight not to withdraw their labour from the circuit of production, but to protect what they produce, and to defend their capacity to be producers, albeit outside the circuit desired by capital. VI. Significant Transgressions These five transgressors, a pentacle of marginalia, can help us to think about what the practitioner might need to understand if she wants to recuperate a sense of agency. In very simple terms, she would need to take a lesson in breaking borders and moving on from the migrant, in standing her ground and staying located from the squatter, in placing herself as a link in an agile network of reproduction, distribution and exchange from the pirate, in sharing knowledge and enlarging a commons of ideas from the hacker, and in continuing to be autonomously productive from the workers occupying the factory. The first imperative, that of crossing borders, translates as scepticism of the rhetoric of bounded identities, and relates to the role of the practitioner as a 'journeyman', as the peripatetic who maps an alternative world by her journey through it. The second, of building a shelter against the odds of the law, insists however on a practice that is located in space, and rooted in experience, that houses itself in a concrete 'somewhere' on its own terms, not of the powers that govern spaces. It is this fragile insistence on provisional stability, which allows for journeys to be made to and from destinations, and for the mapping of routes with resting places in between. The third imperative, that of creating a fertile network of reproduction of cultural materials, is a recognition of the strength of ubiquity, or spreading ideas and information like a virus through a system. The fourth imperative, of insisting on the freedom of knowledge from proprietary control, is a statement about the purpose of production - to ensure greater pleasure and understanding without creating divisions based on property, and is tied in to the fifth imperative - a commitment to keep producing with autonomy and dignity. Taken together, these five exempla constitute an ethic of radical alterity to prevailing norms without being burdened by the rhetorical overload that a term like 'resistance' invariably seems to carry. They also map a different reality of 'globalization' - not the incessant, rapacious, expansion of capitalism, but the equally incessant imperative that makes people move across the lines that they are supposed to be circumscribed by, and enact the everyday acts of insubordination that have become necessary for their survival. It is important to look at this subaltern globalization from below, which is taking place everywhere, and which is perhaps far less understood than the age-old expansionist drive of capitalism, which is what the term 'globalization' is now generally used to refer to. It embodies different wills to globality and a plethora of global imaginaries that are often at cross-purposes with the dominant rhetoric of corporate globalization. The illegal emigrant, the urban encroacher, electronic pirate, the hacker and the seamstresses of the Brukman Factory of Buenos Aires are not really the most glamorous images of embodied resistance. They act, if anything, out of a calculus of survival and self-interest that has little to do with a desire to 'resist' or transform the world. And yet, in their own way, they unsettle, undermine and destabilize the established structures of borders and boundaries, metropolitan master plans and the apparatus of intellectual property relations and a mechanism of production that robs the producer of agency. If we examine the architecture of the contemporary moment, and the figures that we have described, it does not take long to see five giant, important pillars: (5)The consolidation, redrawing and protection of boundaries (6)The grand projects of urban planning and renewal and (7)The desire to protect information as the last great resource left for capitalism to mine - which is what Intellectual Property is all about, (8)Control over the production of knowledge and culture and (9)The denial of agency to the producer. Illegal emigration, urban encroachment, the assault on intellectual property regimes by any means, hacking and the occupation of sites of production by producers, each of which involve the accumulation of the acts of millions of people across the world on a daily, unorganized and voluntary basis, often at great risk to themselves, are the underbelly of this present reality. But how might we begin to consider and understand the global figures of the alien, the encroacher, the pirate, the hacker and the worker defending her machine? VII. Capital and its Residue The first thing to consider is the fact that most of these acts of transgression are inscribed into the very heart of established structures by people located at the extreme margins. The marginality of some of these figures is a function of their status as the 'residue' of the global capitalist juggernaut. By 'residue', we mean those elements of the world that are engulfed by the processes of Capital, turned into 'waste' or 'leftovers', left behind, even thrown away. Capital transforms older forms of labour and ways of life into those that are either useful for it at present, or those that have no function and so must be made redundant. Thus you have the paradox of a new factory, which instead of creating new jobs often renders the people who live around 'unemployable'; A new dam, that instead of providing irrigation, renders a million displaced, a new highway that destroys common paths, making movement more, not less difficult for the people and the communities it cuts through. On the other hand sometimes, like a sportsman with an injury who no longer has a place on the team, a factory that closes down ensures that the place it was located in ceases to be a destination. And so, the workers have to ensure that it stays open, and working in order for them to have a place under the sun. What happens to the people in the places that fall off the map? Where do they go? They are forced, of course, to go in search of the map that has abandoned them. But when they leave everything behind and venture into a new life they do not do so entirely alone. They go with the networked histories of other voyages and transgressions, and are able at any point to deploy the insistent, ubiquitous insider knowledge of today's networked world. Seepage in the Network How does this network act, and how does it make itself known in our consciousness? We like to think about this in terms of Seepage. By seepage, we mean the action of many currents of fluid material leaching on to a stable structure, entering and spreading through it by way of pores. Until, it becomes a part of the structure, both in terms of its surface, and at the same time continues to act on its core, to gradually disaggregate its solidity. To crumble it over time with moisture. In a wider sense, seepage can be conceived as those acts that ooze through the pores of the outer surfaces of structures into available pores within the structure, and result in a weakening of the structure itself. Initially the process is invisible, and then it slowly starts causing mould and settles into a disfiguration - and this produces an anxiety about the strength and durability of the structure. By itself seepage is not an alternative form; it even needs the structure to become what it is - but it creates new conditions in which structures become fragile and are rendered difficult to sustain. It enables the play of an alternative imagination, and so we begin seeing faces and patterns on the wall that change as the seepage ebbs and flows. In a networked world, there are many acts of seepage, some of which we have already described. They destabilize the structure, without making any claims. So the encroacher redefines the city, even as she needs the city to survive. The trespasser alters the border by crossing it, rendering it meaningless and yet making it present everywhere - even in the heart of the capital city - so that every citizen becomes a suspect alien and the compact of citizenship that sustains the state is quietly eroded. The pirate renders impossible the difference between the authorised and the unauthorised copy, spreading information and culture, and devaluing intellectual property at the same time. Seepage complicates the norm by inducing invisible structural changes that accumulate over time. It is crucial to the concept of seepage that individual acts of insubordination not be uprooted from the original experience. They have to remain embedded in the wider context to make any sense. And this wider context is a networked context, a context in which incessant movement between nodes is critical. VIII. A Problem for the History of the Network But how is this network's history to be understood? To a large measure, this is made difficult by the fact of an "asymmetry of ignorance" about the world. We are all ignorant of the world in different ways and to different degrees. And that is one of the reasons why the "Network" often shades off into darkness, at some or the other point. This is what leads to global networks that nevertheless ignore the realities of large parts of the world, because no one has the means to speak of those parts, and no one knows, whether people exist in those parts that can even speak to the world in the language of the network. Thus the language of the network often remains at best only a mobile local dialect. A media practitioner or cultural worker from India, e.g., is in all likelihood more knowledgeable about the history of Europe than could be the case for the European vis-a-vis India. This is a fact engendered by colonialism that has left some societies impoverished in all but an apprehension of reality that is necessarily global. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has reminded us, "Insofar as the academic discourse of history is concerned, 'Europe' remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call 'Indian', 'Chinese', 'Kenyan', and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called 'the history of Europe'."6 But this very same fact, when looked at from a European standpoint, may lead to a myopia, an inability to see anything other than the representational master narrative of European history moulding the world. The rest of the world is thus often a copy seeking to approximate this original. All this to say: not merely that we have incomplete perspectives, but that this asymmetry induces an inability to see the face in the wall, the interesting pattern, produced by the seepage. We may inhabit the anxiety, even be the source and locus of the destabilization and recognize the disfiguration, but the envisioning of possible alternative imaginaries may still continue to elude us. IX. Towards an Enactive Model of Practice Recently in a book on neuropolitics7, we came across an experiment which is now considered classic in studies of perception, (The Held and Heims Experiment) which might give us an interesting direction to follow now. Two litters of kittens are raised in the dark for some time and then exposed to light under two different sets of conditions. The first group is allowed to move around in the visual field and interact with it as kittens do - smelling things, touching them, trying out what can be climbed and where the best places to sleep are. The kittens in the second group, (though they are placed in the same environment) are carried around in baskets rather than allowed to explore the space themselves, and thus are unable to interact with it with all their senses and of their own volition. The two groups of kittens develop in very different ways. When the animals are released after a few weeks of this treatment, the first group of kittens behaves normally, but those who have been carried around behave as if they were blind; they bump into objects and fell over edges. It is clear that the first group's freedom to experience the environment in a holistic way is fundamental to its ability to perceive it at all. What is the significance of this? Within neuroscience, such experiments have served to draw neuroscientists and cognitive scientists away from representational models of mind towards an "enactive" model of perception in which objects are not perceived simply as visual abstractions but rather through an experiential process in which information received from this one sense is "networked" with that from every other. Vision, in other words, is deeply embedded in the processes of life, and it is crucial to our ability to see that we offset the representations that we process, with the results of the experiences that we enter into. We need to know what happens when we take a step, bump into someone, be startled by a loud noise, come across a stranger, an angry or a friendly face, a gun or a jar of milk. In a sense this implies a three-stage encounter that we are ascribing between the practitioner and her world. First, a recognition of the fact that instances of art practices can be seen as contiguous to a 'neighbourhood' of marginal practices embodied by the figures of the five transgressors. Secondly, that 'seeing' oneself as a practitioner, and understanding the latent potentialities of one's practice, might also involve listening to the ways in which each of the five transgressive figures encounters the world. Finally, that what one gleans from each instance of transgression can then be integrated into a practice which constitutes itself as an ensemble of attitudes, ways of thinking, doing and embodying (or recuperating) creative agency in a networked world. For us here, this helps in thinking about the importance of recognizing the particularity of each encounter that the practitioner witnesses or enters into, without losing sight of the extended network, of the 'neighbourhood' of practices. It is only when we see particularities that we are also able to see how two or more particular instances connect to each other. As residues, that search for meaning in other residual experiences; or as acts of seepage, in which the flow of materials from one pore to another ends up connecting two nodes in the network, by sheer force of gravity. Here it is the gradients of the flow, the surface tension that the flow encounters and the distance that the flow traverses, that become important, not the intention to flow itself. Intentions, resistances, may be imputed, but in the end they have little to do with the actual movements that transpire within the network. X. Art practice and protocols of networked conversation What does art and artistic practice have to do with all this? What can the practitioner take from an understanding of interactive embeddedness in a networked world? We would argue that the diverse practices that now inhabit art spaces need to be able to recognize the patterns in the seepage, to see connections between different aspects of a networked reality. To do this, the practitioner probably has to invent, or discover, protocols of conversation across sites, across different histories of locatedness in the network; to invent protocols of resource building and sharing, create structures within structures and networks within networks. Mechanisms of flexible agreements about how different instances of enactment can share a contiguous semantic space will have to be arrived at. And as we discover these 'protocols', their different ethical, affective and cognitive resonances will immediately enter the equation. We can then also begin to think of art practice as enactment, as process, as elements in an interaction or conversation within a network. For the acts of seepage to connect to form new patterns, many new conversations will have to be opened, and mobile dialects will have to rub shoulders with each other to create new, networked Creoles. Perhaps art practice in a networked reality can itself aspire to create the disfigurations on the wall, to induce some anxieties in the structure, even while making possible the reading of the face in the spreading stain, the serendipitous discovery of an interesting pattern or cluster of patterns, and possible alterities. This text draws from a presentation by Monica Narula (Raqs Media Collective) at Globalica - a symposium on "conceptual and artistic tensions in the new global disorder", held at the WRO Center for Media Art, Wroclaw, Poland in May 2003. The images are from A/S/L, an installation by Raqs Media Collective. A/S/L support: Editing: Parvati Sharma, Sound Design: Vipin Bhati, Production Assistance: Ashish Mahajan, T.Meyarivan, Produced at Sarai Media Lab, Sarai/CSDS, Delhi. Notes: 1. Tony Samuel, PricewaterhouseCoopers' Intellectual Asset Management Group, Evaluating IP Rights: In Search of Brand Value in the New Economy http://www.pwcglobal.com/Extweb/service.nsf/docid/210123EF9AEBAC1885256B96003428C6 2. A/S/L: A video, text and sound installation by Raqs Media Collective that juxtaposes the protocols of interpersonal communication, online labour, data outsourcing, and the making/unmaking of remote agency in the 'new' economy. Presented at the Geography and the Politics of Mobility exhibition, curated by Ursula Biemann for the Generali Foundation, Vienna, (January - April 2003). http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2003/01/17/30667.html http://foundation.generali.at/exhibit/2003_1_geo_indexe.htm 3. Raqs Media Collective, "Call Centre Calling: Technology, Network and Location", Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies, February 2003. http://www.sarai.net/journal/03pdf/177_183_raqsmediac.pdf for more on the call center industry in India, see - Mark Landler, "Hi I'm in Bangalore (But I Dare Not Tell)", New York Times (Technology Section) March 21, 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/21/technology/21CALL.html?ex=1054353600&en=7576033f99208ca6&ei=5070 India Calling - A Report on the Call Centre Industry in India http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/2387/ 4. Andrew Otwell, Medieval Manuscript Marginalia and Proverbs, 1995. http://www.heyotwell.com/work/arthistory/marginalia.html 5. Naomi Klein, Argentina's Luddite Rulers: Workers in the Occupied Factories Have a Different Vision: Smash the Logic, Not the Machines, Dissident Voice, April 25, 2003 http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles4/Klein_Argentina.htm 6. Dipesh Chakravarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts", Representations, 37 (Winter, 1992) 7. William E. Connolly, "Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed", Theory Out of Bounds, Number 23, Univ. of Minnesota, 2002 -- Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective] Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.raqsmediacollective.net www.sarai.net -- Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective] Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.raqsmediacollective.net www.sarai.net From monica at sarai.net Fri Dec 10 11:16:06 2004 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 11:16:06 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Dreams and Disguises, As Usual Message-ID: (This is an essay that we - Raqs - wrote recently to accompany the installation "The Impostor in the Waiting Room", presently still on at the BosePacia Gallery, Chelsea, New York. Hopefully those of you in that city can take the time out and see it :-)) Dreams and Disguises, As Usual. Raqs Media Collective "Fantômas" "What did you say?" "I said: Fantômas." "And what does that mean?" "Nothing Š Everything" "But what is it?" "No one Š And yet, yes, it is someone!" "And what does this someone do?" "Spread Terror!!" (Opening lines of Fantômas, the first novel in the Fantômas series by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, popular in early twentieth century Paris) In a painting titled Le Barbare (The Barbarian) (1928), René Magritte showed what seemed to be the shadow of a masked man in a hat. The shadow is seen against a brick wall, and it is unclear whether it is appearing or fading away. Magritte, always particular about the eccentric rhetoric of his practice of representation, was careful enough to have a photograph of himself (in a hat) taken next to this image. His face, quizzical, makes us wonder as if he is keeping secrets from us. There are two particularly interesting things about this image: the first that it should be called Le Barbare, and the second, that it is not in fact the first or even the last appearance of a hat, or a man in a hat, in the work of Magritte. Men in hats, and hats, crowd the images made by Magritte. They refuse to go away. (1) What does a man in a hat have to do with impostors and waiting rooms? Perhaps, like the narrator in the first novel of the Fantômas series of fantastic crime novels, we could say, "Nothing ... and Everything". Perhaps one of the secrets that Magritte keeps in this image - paraphrasing the title of another of his paintings - could be that just as the image of a pipe is not a pipe, so too, the image that suggests a suave, urbane man in a hat is actually of someone else. The shadowy visage in a hat in Le Barbare belongs to the figure of Fantômas (2), the archetypal and perhaps primal urban delinquent, the 'lord of terror', the master of disguises who appears and disappears, takes on many personae, and refuses ever to be identified. In The Impostor in the Waiting Room and this text we seek to continue the dialogue that Magritte began with the shadow of Fantômas, and to investigate what it means to conduct a dalliance with the imperative of identification. The imperative of identification, and its counterpoint, the dream of disguise, are impulses we find as central to the story of our times as a threatened assassin, or a murderous corpse, or a missing person who leaves no trace, are to an obstinately intractable pulp fiction pot boiler. In L'Assassin Menacé (The Threatened Assassin), another of his paintings from the same period, Magritte shows Fantômas attentively listening to a gramophone beside the corpse of his female victim, unaware that two detectives in bowler-hats are hovering outside the door with a net and cudgel, even as similarly attired voyeurs peer through the window. It takes a while to figure out that that all of them - murderer, corpse, police and spectators are the same person. The question as to which one is the 'real' Fantômas refuses, like a recalcitrant cadaver, to lie low. Magritte's fascination with a tableau in Louis Feuillade's third Fantômas film Le Mort qui Tue (The Murderous Corpse) is evident in the composition of this picture. This dialogue with the figure of Fantômas that Magritte initiated was a thread that ran through much of his work. In one of his occasional fragments of writing, titled A Theatrical Event, Magritte outlines the following arresting scenario: Fantômas the quarry, and Juve, the detective in pursuit, mesh into each other as disguises, reveries, pursuit, the loss of identity, and the impossibility of capture (except through self-disclosure) are woven together. "ŠJuve has been on the trail of Fantômas for quite some time. He crawls along the broken cobblestones of a mysterious passage. To guide himself he gropes along the walls with his fingers. Suddenly, a whiff of hot air hits him in the face. He comes nearer Š His eyes adjust to the darkness. Juve distinguishes a door with loose boards a few feet in front of him. He undoes his overcoat in order to wrap it around his left arm, and gets his revolver ready. As soon as he has cleared the door, Juve realizes that his precautions were unnecessary: Fantômas is close by, sleeping deeply. In a matter of seconds Juve has tied up the sleeper. Fantômas continues to dream - of his disguises, perhaps, as usual. Juve, in the highest of spirits, pronounces some regrettable words. They cause the prisoner to start. He wakes up, and once awake, Fantômas is no longer Juve's captive. Juve has failed again this time. One means remains for him to achieve his end: Juve will have to get into one of Fantômas's dreams - he will try to take part as one of its characters." (3) Fantômas continues to dream of his disguises, perhaps, as usual, and the pursuer will have to get into the dreams of the pursued, he will have to participate as one of its characters Š the disguise may blur the line between Fantômas and Juve. In the original Fantômas novels, Fantômas was at the very centre of a gang of 'barbarians' who lurked in Paris, called 'The Apaches'. It is as if his wearing the accoutrements of bourgeois civility, the hat, the coat, the occasional umbrella, or walking stick was a careful disguise, a combat camouflage cloaking a raging, rampant otherness. While it throbbed closer than the jugular vein of the modern metropolis of advanced capitalism, it was at the same time at its farthest remove. Fantômas is a barbarian in a hat, or an impostor waiting to be recognized. Looked at in another way, the disguise of the man in the hat and the overcoat is the only effective passport that the 'barbarian' can have into the world enclosed by the modern citadel. The disguise is a means to travel from a world apparently in shadow, to a world where the sharp glare that brings visibility in its iridescent wake is not without the threat of capture and confinement. The liminal zone where roles can be rehearsed, different patois perfected, the various grades of personhood that lead up to the man in the hat and the coat tried on for size, the turban or the loincloth discarded is a waiting room. One awaits one's turn to go into the arc lights. The figure of a person biding time in a waiting room helps us to imagine the predicament of people living in societies often considered to be inhabiting an antechamber to modernity. In such spaces, one waits to be called upon to step onto the stage of history. Most of the world lives in spaces that could be designated as 'waiting rooms', biding its time. These 'waiting rooms' exist in transmetropolitan cities, and in the small enclaves that subsist in the shadow of the edifices of legality. There are waiting rooms in New York just are there are waiting rooms in New Delhi, and there are trapdoors and hidden passages connecting a waiting room in one space with a waiting room in another. Fantômas is a denizen of these spaces. Which is why he appears in Mexico City, in Calcutta, in Caracas, and why he, before Superman or Batman, found his way into short stories, comics, novellas and films in languages spoken in places as far away from Paris as possible. If the 'Apaches' brought Fantômas with them to Paris from some forsaken wilderness, then Fantômas travelled right back to the places where he came from to the urban nether lands of places that had not yet made it in the map of arc-lights. The passage from 'waiting rooms' to the 'stage' often requires a person to go through intense scrutiny. This happens at airports and borders. It also happens in streets, homes and workplaces. The art of the impostor becomes a guide to survival for people negotiating this rough passage. Waiting Rooms everywhere are full of Impostors waiting to be auditioned, waiting to be verified, waiting to know and to see whether or not their 'act' passes muster. The Impostor is an exemplar for a kind of performative agency that renders a person capable of expressing more than one kind of truth of the self to the scrutiny of power. The figure of the impostor offers a method of survival that meets the growing intensification of scrutiny with a strategy based on the multiplication of guises and the amplification of guile. At the same time, the term Impostor is also an accusation. One that power can fling at anyone it chooses to place under scrutiny. It is this double edged-ness, of being a way out as well as a trap, that lends it the capacity it has to be a heuristic device uniquely suited for a nuanced understanding of a time in which criteria such as authenticity, veracity and appropriateness take on intense, almost paranoiac dimensions in the conduct and governance of life's most basic functions. As concepts, the 'impostor', like the 'waiting room', can signify both thresholds meant for quick, sportive and easy crossing, portals into unpredictable futures, that come laden with the thrill that only unintended consequences can bring, and, for some, a bleak and eternal purgatory tinged with its own peculiar anxiety, distrust and fear. The Impostor figure also comes to us by way of another lineage, one closer to home than the bleak sky of Magritte's Brussels and its drizzle of bowler-hatted men. We speak here of the tradition in northern and eastern India known as 'Bahurupiya'. A 'bahurupi' is a person of many forms and guises, a polymorph, a shape-shifter, a fantastic masquerader and pantomime, a primal 'Fantômas'. 'Bahurupis' make their living by masquerade, by the performance of different roles by itinerant practitioners, for the entertainment, edification and occasionally, defrauding of the general public. They might dress up one day as a god, another day in drag; one day as a holy mendicant, another day as a monkey, and a third day as a somewhat comical police constable - and expect to earn money by merely turning up at doorsteps, or hanging around in public spaces, and being offered money or food or shelter in exchange for nothing more than a glance, or a brief stare. Here, disguise, and a degree of necessary ambiguity about the self is a way of life, a calling, a means of subsistence and ordering in a world otherwise deeply invested in certitude. * * * What lies at the origin of the distinction between the 'citizen' (and here we mean also the 'world citizen' who feels at ease and has a sense of entitlement everywhere) and the person who neither belongs nor feels entitled to belong to a city, or state, or the world at large, a person who is in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, everywhere? When does a class of people begin to think about the distinction between themselves and others in terms that require barriers to the circulation of presences? What makes them arrogate to themselves the status of being the exclusive subjects of history? What is it about the spaces of vanguard capitalism that produces the peculiar anxiety of the contamination of its sanity, or its sanitariness, by the uncomfortable proximity of that which lies outside it or perforates it with an insisting presence? Why is that which itself is so invasive so afraid of contagion? Or, as Magritte might have it: Why is Juve so afraid, and of what? Of Fantômas - his quarry - or of his own reflection or shadow? This inchoate fear is underpinned by a furiously-held telos of manifest historical development, which both demands, and provides the wherewithal for, the construction and enforcement of hierarchical taxonomies of people, space and ways of living and being - of those who have 'arrived' onto a notional centre stage of human achievement, and others that have been made to leave the stage, or are yet to make an appearance. Those who have left the stage, or who are yet to make an appearance, are consigned to the waiting room of history, a notional antechamber in relation to the notional centre stage. And as the figure of the 'citizen' tests his paces, he also becomes confident that he cannot be upstaged so long as the motley restless crew in the waiting room is deemed 'alien'. As long as the denizens of the waiting room are seen as unconvincing in their claim to a place in the arc lights, the figure of the citizen can stay on stage. (4) But citizenship too is a template and a score, much more than it is an actual human condition. And an exacting template at that; the successful performance of which is always a matter of an ongoing test. One achieves citizenship, one loses it, one's performance is either applauded or it fails to live up to the demands, requirements and standards that accrue to it. To live with these conditions is to be always on trial, to know that in the eyes of the examining authority one is always, and necessarily, an impostor, unless proved otherwise. It is to know that one has to carry one's credentials at all times and that identities must be produced when they are asked for. The bargain that is struck at the very heart of our times is the understanding that for the citizen, for the legal, for the authorized version and the eloquent oxymoron of the 'true copy' to be understood as such, the apparatus of authentication requires the lengthening shadow of the implied 'offstage' presence, or menace, of the 'alien' being, the unlawful act, the fake item, the impostor, as someone or something that anyone or anything can be shown up to be. This is why the chase never comes to an end. The eye of the state always stays open lest the impostor slip by and disappear into the night and fog of the city and its shadows. (5) Juve must enter the dream of Fantômas to learn to distinguish himself and the part that he has to play. * * * A girl and her brother enter a deserted military airstrip - an overgrown concrete and tarmac ruin of a recent but already forgotten war, where rusting fighter planes lie scattered and waiting as if for the return of their dead pilots. The girl traces the path that the cracks in the tarmac make with her steps into the wind that suddenly blows in a terrifying vision of Kali, the goddess of destruction, who towers over the small child on the desolate airstrip. The girl stands frozen, struck dumb with fear. Her brother rushes in, discovers that the goddess is only a bahurupi, a thin itinerant impostor with a scowl, a set of wooden goddess arms, tinsel weapons and a garland of papier mâché skulls. He asks the impostor angrily who he is and why he must scare children so. The bahurupi-impostor-goddess replies, "I did nothing; she came in the way". This fragment of film, the 'bahurupi in the airstrip' sequence in Ritwik Ghatak's Bengali film Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread, 1965), is laden with strange encounters. A terrifying yet banal masquerade interrupts a child's exploration, a girl crosses the path of a goddess, a military airstrip built in the second world war invades a remote corner of Bengal, rust, time and the obstinate fertility of vegetal undergrowth encroaches upon and encircles the abandoned airstrip and its forgotten fighter aircraft. Everything comes in the way of everything else. Collisions bring collisions in their wake. The girl, her brother, the goddess, the impostor, the airfield, the aircraft, the undergrowth - all seem to be saying, at once, "I did nothing, she came in the way". (6) When two worlds collide, one asks the other, "Who are you and what are you doing in my space?" Usually, the question brings with it an assumption that the questioner has the authority to ask it in the first place, and the confidence or the knowledge that space, and the means of circulation, can also be property. That the 'space' is his to enable the asking of the question to the person immediately categorized as the interloper, the encroacher, the not-quite-the-right-thing or right-person-in-the-right-place. Usually, what is being asked for is an explanation for what is seen as a trespass. When two worlds, or spaces, or beings or things collide in the course of their trajectories, and one is cast as the trespasser, there is a clear understanding that only one of them can have the right of way. The itinerant bahurupi-goddess-impostor and the military airstrip. Which is the trespasser? Why is the sudden apparition of the goddess of destruction in an abandoned theatre of war so strange and so natural at the same time? Is she encroaching, or is she staking out her own territory? Is she in the way, or is everything else in her way? Who must give way? The building of a military airstrip or a highway or a dam or a resort or a housing estate sanctioned by a masterplan can suddenly turn people into trespassers, and their way of life into a culture of trespassing. The masterplan has the right of way, as well as the means, to translate that fact into real control over space and circulation. Sometimes this means that the inhabitants-turned-trespassers make themselves invisible, that they disappear into the cracks and folds of the plan; that they pretend that they are not there. They become impostors of absence, actors of vanishing acts. Sometimes it may mean that the trespassers may be present and visible and pretend to be what they are not, and that it is they who have the right of way. This makes them impostors of presence, pretenders in place. * * * Many contemporary methods of spatial intervention necessitate the hollowing out of ways of life, ecologies and habitation practices from a space, and then filling it in with a one-size-fits-all imagination. Architectural plans, interior design catalogues and real estate brochures determine the 'value' of a location. To have a design on space is half the battle won in terms of the possession and control over that space. Everything that is in the way - people, settled practices, older inner cities, nomadic routes, and the commons of land and water - disappears into the emptiness of the un-inked portions between the rectilinear inscriptions on the surface of the masterplan. As masterplans cordon off greater and yet greater swathes of space, they begin to come up against each other, leading to meta-masterplans that stitch different masterplans together, until more and more stretches of territory end up looking and feeling like clones of each other. The suburb, the gas station, the condominium, the supermarket, the highway, the underpass, the airport, the parking lot, the leisure centre, the school, the factory, the mall, the barbed wire fencing that protects and controls a plot of land from trespass, are the alphabets of a urban language that end up making the same statement everywhere, as the masterplan considers what it sees as waste land, or that which in its view is an urban terra nullis - "It was in the way". What is it that disappears when the ink on the plans has dried? Millions of people fade from history, and often the memory of their disappearance also fades with time. With the disappearance of ways of life, entire practices and the lived experiences and memories that constituted them vanish, or are forced to become something other than what they were accustomed to have been. When they make the effort to embrace this transformation, typically what stands questioned is their credibility. They are never what they seem to be, or what they try to say they are. The annals of every nation are full of adjectives that accrue to displaced communities and individuals that begin to be seen as cheats, forgers, tricksters, frauds, thieves, liars and impostors, as members of 'criminal castes, tribes and clans' or as deviant anomalies who habitually attempt to erode stable foundations with their 'treacherous' ambiguities and their evasive refusal to be confined, enumerated, or identified. These 'missing persons' who disappear, or appear with great reluctance, with their names, provenances, identities and histories deliberately or accidentally obscured in the narratives of 'progress' and the histories of nation states, are to the processes of governance what the figure of the 'unknown soldier' is to the reality of war. The only difference is: there are no memorials to those who fade from view in the ordinary course of 'progress'. The missing person is a blur against a wall, a throw-away scrap of newspaper with a fading, out-of-focus image of a face, a peeling poster announcing rewards for wanted or lost people in a police post or railway station waiting room, a decimal point in a statistic, an announcement that some people have been disowned or abandoned or evicted or deported or otherwise cast away, as residues of history. No flags flutter, no trumpets sound, nothing burns eternal in the memory of a blur. The blur is not even an image that can lay a claim to original veracity, but a hand-me-down version of a reality that is so injured by attempts at effacement that only a copy can have the energy necessary to enable its contents to circulate. The patchwork of faded fakes, interrupted signals, and unrealized possibilities, which does not read well and which does not offer substantive and meaningfully rounded off conclusions, is sometimes the only kind of manuscript available to us. Our engagement with the Impostor is an attempt at coming face-to-face with this world. We would like to do so in a manner that makes anxieties about 'who comes in the way of the reading' appear, at the very least, superfluous, and at best, attenuated, by a desire to listen to stories (and histories) that some might consider incomplete. We are beginning to recognize that we ourselves might appear, occasionally in them, occasionally against them. * * * The collision of worlds (that happens, for instance, when an empire-building sensibility suddenly stumbles upon its grand object, the colony-to-be) is fraught with the trauma of the dispersal of the assumed monadic unity of the self, even of the one we presume to be the victor. The impostor always lurks in the shadow of the unknown to claim the territory of the unsuspecting self, even if that self comes attired as a world conqueror. Sometimes, it is the notion of the unitary, monadic self, with its unique unassailable identity (its 'it-ness', which it witnesses solemnly to itself), that constitutes the biggest obstacle: the fundamental scotoma that makes the image in the mirror so opaque and so elusive at the same time. The early epoch of the ascendancy of the English East India Company (when it was still a minor 'Indian' power jostling with the Marathas, the Sikhs, the Hyderabad Nizamate and Mysore Sultanate, and the French and Dutch East India Company for slices of the crumbling Mughal imperial cake) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century India is full of English, Scottish and Irish adventurers turning their backs on Albion and embracing, to the horror of their superior officers, what were called 'native ways': converting to Islam, renouncing the world and becoming itinerant holy men, or thugs, cohabiting with Indian women (and on occasion with Indian men), siring 'half-caste' children, endowing temples and mosques, wearing turbans and tunics after the prevailing Mughal fashion. Sometimes they even forget the English language. Their counterparts within the 'native' populations of the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras make moves in the other direction. Young men full with the heady intoxication of strangeness learn to wear hats and clothes that make little sense in humid weather, break dietary taboos, cross the seas, become fervent Christians, learn to write sonnets, fall in love with English women (and occasionally men), becoming in every way possible, 'sahibs'. The word 'sahib' in Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi, meant 'master', or 'lord', but also began shading off at about this time into standing for the white man. In the long torrid summer that stretched over decades while the Mughal Empire dissolved under its own weight, until the conflict of 1857 finished the careers of both the last Mughal emperor and the East India Company, white Mughals met brown sahibs, while xenophobic Englishmen and new, nervously nationalist elites denounced them both as impostors. (7) The edifice of Empire, which relied so heavily on the adventures of impostors to lay its foundations, also required their marginalization. The normalization of the state of power requires new garbs, even a new dress code; a new script and new persona that can help better distinguish the rulers from the ruled. It required new impostors, broken from a different mould. George Orwell speaks of "well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm" who, sitting in Whitehall, could rule the world with their mastery of the global network created by the telegraph. They had made the earlier phase of empire building, the adventurous career of going east of Suez to discover a new self, redundant, ridding the world forever of the confusing 'White Mughals', and situating in their place, clones of themselves whenever it became necessary to impose "their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay". (8) With the ascent of the man in the hat, the Empire may have lost something by way of its shine, its élan and its energy, but it gained a great deal in staying power. And the apparatus of mature Empire stayed intact far beyond the accidents of changes in the pigmentation of those who grew to rule. Over time, the shape of headgear may have changed to that of a white cap that looks like a lopsided, upended boat. The cut and the cloth of the coat may have undergone transformations, Colonial cuts may have given way to Nationalist styles, even as the dull Khaki of the blunt edge of power retained the hue of the dust of hot places. What remains constant is that something is marked as the costume of rule, the dress suit or uniform of the master, the leader, the office, the 'sahib', the 'neta' (leader). This too is an imposture. But it is a guise marked by the verifying authority of power. An attested true copy. In modern, republican nation states, power is a function of representation. This is as true of states normally thought of as democratic as it is in states where a single centre of power (an individual, a family, a party, a military elite) holds power, metaphorically, 'in the name of the people'. The legislator, the tribune, the one who makes law, represents the populace. We can think of this as an aesthetic problem. More specifically, as a visual, even an ocular problem. Whenever the question of representation appears, we know we are speaking of a likeness, a 'fit' between an object and its image, its referent. The representative of the people is also a likeness of the abstract generality of the people. This likeness between the citizenry and its representatives is always a question plagued by provisionality. Features alter: power gains adipose, loses hair; the citizen sometimes grows pale and thin. How then does the figure of the citizen acquire a semblance of stability? How do the various ambiguities and inconsistencies, the combination of historical and biographical accidents that make up a life, cohere to form a uniform, monovalent image and narrative? How does the person moult into the citizen? How do the various performative stances and experiential realities that add shades and depth to personhood lose rough edges and find points of equilibria that can yield the regularity and predictability necessary to the figure of the citizen? How does a person become a political entity capable of being represented? What garb, which guise, which face, is required for the ruled? * * * The production of the citizen is, among other things, an exercise in the making of a face. Just as the skilful operation of a forensic identikit system can help reconstruct the face of an unidentified, missing or wanted person that can then be printed on 'Hue and Cry' notices and stuck on all the messy surfaces of a city, so too, the apparatus of identification that is necessary for the maintenance of governmentality must register, record and reconstruct the figure of the citizen from a mass of inconsistents. The tension, however, between the image and its shadowy referent, between the identikit photo and the missing person, remains. This tension between citizens and denizens, subjects and aliens, is historically resolved through the approximation of a person's visage to an administrable image of the citizen. The passport, the identification card, the police record, the census datum and the portraits that these instruments build of personhood, are key to this. The frontal portrait makes a claim to be the distillate of truth. This reduction is all that is necessary for him or her to be known as a person with a valid claim to be in a place; all else is superfluous. The man in a bowler hat is a man in a bowler hat. Correspondingly, the barbarian, the alien, the pretender, must be unmasked. (9) This necessarily involves an operation on and with images. These images may be photographic likenesses or biometric codes or iris scans or fingerprints, but in essence they are the condensations of personhood in a manner that lends them to being distilled by the apparatus of power. Consider the formal compositional and aesthetic requirements of portraiture as laid down by a United States passport or visa application form. A passport photograph, in duplicate, must be as follows: - 2x2 inches in size - Identical - Taken within the past 6 months and showing current appearance - Full face, frontal view with a plain white or off-white background showing all facial features - Brightness and contrast should be adjusted to present the subject and background accurately - Photos without proper contrast or color may obscure unique facial features - Color should reproduce natural skin tones - Fluorescent or other lighting with unbalanced color may cause unwanted color cast in the photo - Appropriate filters can eliminate improper color balance - Between 1 inch and 1 3/8 inches from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head - Taken in normal street attire (10) The rigour of this aesthetic stems from the subjective methods that uninformed citizens would generally employ in the earlier half of the twentieth century while sending in photographs of themselves for passports and other identification documents. Cut-outs from family albums or reframed tourist snapshots, in which people smiled or otherwise expressed emotion, made it difficult to affix the face in the stable configuration of features so critical for quick and easy identification. The formal style of the 'passport photo', which then becomes a generic template for all images made for the purposes of identification, emerges from the dissatisfaction that identification apparatuses had with thousands of instances of incidental and unintentionally ambiguous self-portraiture. In a statement to the London Times in the year 1957, Miss Frances G. Knight, Director of the United States Passport Office, said that "people looked thug-like and abnormal when sitting for their passport photographs". (11) Ironically, this 'thug-like and abnormal appearance' stemmed from the effort to stabilize the visage in passport photographs. The very subject produced through a system geared towards the generation of greater credibility appeared, at best, suspect. Fantômas rears his head again. The man in a hat is actually a barbarian, and the more he tries to hold on to his hat, the more savage he appears. More recently, another newspaper report on the introduction of new biometric passports in the UK says: "Under new security measures all mugshots must in future "show the full face, with a neutral expression and the mouth closed". The advice is being sent to all applicants before the introduction next year of "ePassports", which make it harder for terrorists and criminals to get hold of fake passports. The facial image on the photograph will be incorporated in a chip, which will be read by border control equipment. But the high-tech machines need to match key points on the face - a biometric - and this only works if the lips are closedŠ. "An open-mouthed smile will throw the scanner off." Eyes must be open and clearly visible, with no sunglasses or heavily-tinted glasses and no hair flopping down the face. There should be no reflection on spectacles and the frames should not cover the eyes. Head coverings will only be allowed for religious reasons. Photo booth companies, which supply most of the pictures for passports, have been required to update their equipment to ensure they are acceptable. Existing passports are not affected but the new rules will have to be followed when they are renewedŠ Most people already think they look miserable enough on their passports. There is an old joke that if you look anything like your photograph then you need the holiday. A survey of 5,000 Europeans last year suggested the British were among the most embarrassed by passport photos. It found that a fifth of Britons were so uncomfortable with their images that they hid them from their families." (12) The passport, the ID document, is a script, the border is an audition, a screen test, an identification parade, a drill that you practice and never quite get right. Like the random slippage between a North Indian and a North American accent in the voice of a call centre worker in New Delhi talking to New York, the slippage reveals more about a person than the desperate attempts to maintain a flawless performance. That slip, between who you are and 'more' of who you are, accompanies you as a possibility in all your waking and dreaming moments. Fantômas too inhabits Juve's worst nightmares. That slip in the accent, that gust of wind that blows the hat away, that blows your cover, is the give-away that won't let you go through. The spectator who is the policeman who is the assassin who is the corpse who is the god who is the prisoner who is the animal who is the man in a hat with a stick and an overcoat and the transposed head of a donkey... You move between one and the other. Your moves takes you back into the waiting room. Where can you, and your terror, of being everyone and no one, of being everywhere and nowhere, of being the bahurupi and the mug shot, Fantômas and Juve, belong? René Magritte keeps his secrets. So must we. Notes (1) The figure of a man in a hat first appears in an image called "The Menaced Assassin" in 1926, and re-appears several times, including in "The Usage of Speech" (1928), where two men in bowler hats speak the words 'violette' and 'piano', in "Les Chausseurs de la Nuit" (1928) where a man in a hat with a rifle slung across him is seen as if leaning against a wall with his companion, another gunman, both with their backs turned towards the viewer, in "The Therapist" (1939) and "The Liberator" (1947) where he appears with a cloak and a walking stick, in "The Return of the Flame" (1943) where the man in a hat looms across a burning city, in "The Man in a Bowler Hat" (1964), with a dove flying across his face, in "The Time of Harvest" (1950) , and its variant "The Month of the Grape Harvest" (1959) where the man in a bowler hat is an assembly line prototype, an edition made in multiples, in "The Song of the Violet" (1951) where two men in hats, one with his back to us, and the other profiled, stand petrified, in "Golconda" (1953), where it rains bowler hatted men from the sky, and in "The Schoolmaster", and its triune variant "Les Chef d'Oeuvres" (1954-55) where the man/three men appears with his/their back(s) to us against a sea, under a crescent moon, in "The Presence of Mind" (1960), framed between a falcon and a fish, and finally, in "The Son of Man" (1964), which Magritte did tag as a self portrait, where the hat-wearing man's face is obscured by a green apple. The hat appears independently in "The Reckless Sleeper" (1927) and "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1930), along with motley other objects, and it appears as if the man has momentarily lost his hat while looking at a mirror (where he sees himself as an frontally inverted reflection) in "Reproduction Prohibited: Portrait of Edward James" (1937). (2) For more information on Fantômas, his career as a character, and his remarkable influence on twentieth century avant garde literature, art and cinema, see the website dedicated to the Fantômas phenomenon http://www.fantomas-lives.com (3) Translation by Suzi Gablik, from "Magritte", Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976 (4) The 'waiting room' of history is a metaphor used most eloquently by Dipesh Chakrabarty, who in "Provinicializing Europe" discusses the importance for people outside Europe, and the metropolitan West, of stepping outside the trap of considering themselves forever to be 'waiting' for the arrival of the contemporary moment, even of modernity itself. See "Provincializing Europe: Post Colonial Thought and Historical Difference", Dipesh Chakrabarty, Princeton University Press, 2000, also, "Alternative Histories: A View from India", Shahid Amin, SEPHIS - CSSSC Occasional Papers, 2002 (5) The 'Impostor' figure, particularly the notion of the state treating its subjects as impostors unless proved otherwise, was suggested to us by a reading of Partha Chatterjee's usage of the trope in his recent book "The Princely Impostor". See, "The Princely Impostor: The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhowal", Partha Chatterjee, Princeton University Press, 2002 (6) 'Subarnarekha', direction Ritwik Ghatak, produced by J.J. Films Corporation, 1965. For more about 'Subarnarekha', see http://www.upperstall.com/films/subarnarekha.html (7) William Dalrymple in "White Mughals" looks at the phenomenon of cultural and physical miscegenation in eighteenth century India. See "White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India", William Dalrymple, Harper Collins, 2003 (8) To read the full text of "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius", see - http://www.george-orwell.org/ (9) For an exhaustive history of the Bowler Hat, see "The Man in a Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography", by Fred Miller Robinson, University of North Carolina Press, 1993 For an interesting online profile of the Bowler Hat, and a very arresting image of a crowd of bowler hat-wearing men, see http://www.villagehatshop.com/product1687.html (10) For guidelines on the specifications for correct composition, lighting, exposure and printing of photographs of US Passport and Visa applications see the website of the US State Department Passport and Visa Photography Guide http://travel.state.gov/visa/pptphotos/index.html (11) Quoted in "The Passport: A History of Man's Best Travelled Document", Martin Lloyd, Stroud, Sutton, 2003. (12) "Look Miserable to Help the War on Terrorism", Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor, The Telegraph, London, 06/08/2004 -- Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective] Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.raqsmediacollective.net www.sarai.net -- Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective] Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.raqsmediacollective.net www.sarai.net From ysaeed7 at yahoo.com Fri Dec 10 12:35:37 2004 From: ysaeed7 at yahoo.com (Yousuf) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 23:05:37 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Watching Khamosh Pani in India In-Reply-To: <8178da99041209044360f66107@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20041210070537.63443.qmail@web51405.mail.yahoo.com> Dear Anand I believe that it is possible to make a film/media product that can entertain as well as make us think - its a challange that few filmmakers take. It is probably taken for granted that the populace who goes to see veer-zaara or any other sentimental (un-thinking) film will remain where they are, and cannot 'mature'. But I am sure the average audience is ready for an alternative. I remember one effort of this kind of film was Zakhm (from the Mahesh Bhatt family) which used sentimentality but also made people think - it didn't offend only one community (though some thought that it was more pro-Muslim). It wasn't a box-office hit but its a tool that we use in our campaigns. Actually such films could become problematic only when they depend too much on real historical events, and romaticize them. They do not try any alternative histories or alternative futures. I am sure if someone makes a film on "What if Partition hadn't happend?" or What if the British never colonized us? the average audience would be curious. One could even make a futuristic film on exploring tactics of mutual survival/co-existance by Hindus and Muslims, of course by keeping all the history and sentimentality and song-and-dance in it. Its a challange that filmmakers need to take if they are genuinely interested in using popular cinema for social change. Yousuf --- Anand Vivek Taneja wrote: > Dear Yousuf, > > This is not a reply to your mail, directly, but off > on a tangent. > > Khamosh Pani is not, as you write (and as the media > has widely > reported) the first Pakistani film to be released in > India. > > There were a few Pakistani Punjabi films released in > India in the mid > nineteen fifties, the most prominent of them beig > 'Dulla Bhatti', > released in 1956. > I am absolutely definite about Dulla Bhatti because > of > fieldwork/interviews at Imperial Cinema, PaharGanj - > where the film > was screened, and was a hit, catering to a large > refugee population. > > Dulla Bhatti, the character on who the film is > based, is a fairly > important character in Punjabi folklore - a bandit, > and RobinHood type > chivalrous rebel, who opposes the tyranny of Mughal > tax collection in > Akbar's time. > > Apparently, songs sung during the annual 'Lohri' > celebrations allude > to Dulla Bhatti. Dulla Bhatti has, perhaps > retrospectively, been > identified as 'Musli'm, a category which might have > been fariy fluid > back in sixteenth century Punjab. > > Coming back to the points you have raised - > > Last year, as part of my graduation from MCRC, along > with two other > people, Akshay Singh and Sakina Ali, I made a film > on the twentieth > century histories of the Purana Qila, 'The Past is a > Foreign > Country...' > (which you have seen being edited on FCP) > > The film, among other things, focuses on the Muslim > refugee camp which > came up inside the Purana Qila after the Delhi riots > of September '47. > It is not a pleasant dwelling - at all. Along with > this, there are > fairly obvious and un-nuanced fulminations against > anti-Muslim > prejudice in the preservation of monuments and the > presentation of > history.... > > It is not a great film, by any standards - but in > India, in Delhi, it > has gone down well with audiences - generating > awareness of the > marginalised hsitories of the city, and debates > about the politics of > heritage conservation. it also gets a few laughs at > the digs at our > right-wingers. > > In April this year, I took the film to Lahore, and > screened it for an > audience of about eighty students at the Lahore > University of > Management Sciences. > It turned out that some of them had grandparents who > had come to > Pakistan via the Purana Qila camps. and during the > discusssion that > followed, we moved away from issues of conservation, > and i somehow > ended up defending India in general, and the Indian > state in > particular - 'we're not that bad' - something I > never thought I'd have > to do. > > I guess what I'm trying to say is that we,as > film-makers,or writers, > try and make sense of the specific time and place we > live in - and > present them for People Like Us - by which I don't > people who > necessarily agree with one, but who inhabit the same > media-scape, so > to speak, and have inherited similar recieved > histories. > > In that sense, of course, Paksitanis are not People > Like Us, and vice > versa. we do not inhabit the same media scape, we > have not > recieved/inherited the same histories. And which is > why you don't need > to go out of your way to make a Gadar, to cause > discomfort or raise > anger against the 'Other'. > > Last week, I saw a beautifuly made film called 'The > Rock Star and the > Mullahs' which has a liberal Pakistani Muslim > (Salman Ahmed of the > rock group 'Junoon') confronting fundamentalists > about the ban on the > public performance of music in the North West > Frontier Province. And > yet, doubts were raised as to whether the film, > instead of > demonstrating that not all Muslims are jehadis, was > in fact > reinforcing stereotypes about Pakistan... > > As long as we make films for 'Indians' and > 'Pakistanis' there is no > way we can escape creating stereotypes and > 'othering' on the Other > Side, as long as we're dealing with Kashmir, or the > Partition, or > communal violence, or religious fundamentalism... > > ...is it possible to make a film which deals, > however tangentially, > with Partition, Communal Violence, Kashmir or > religious > fundamentalism... without someone in the audience > getting very bitter? > > ... unless, of course, it's something like > 'Veer-Zaara' ;-) ? > > Cheers, > Anand > > > On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 02:45:43 -0800 (PST), Yousuf > wrote: > > Watching "Khamosh Pani" in India > > (And why I cannot use it for peace activism) > > > > Yousuf Saeed > > > > While Pakistani director Sabiha Sumer's 2003 film > > Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters) is getting rave > reviews > > and highly emotional applause in many Indian > theatres, > > here are some personal thoughts, if anyone's > > interested. For those who haven't seen it (and are > > being reminded by the "must-watch" reports), > Khamosh > > Pani, the first Pakistani film ever released in > Indian > > theatres, is about an idyllic Pakistani village > called > > Charkhi which sees the rise of Islamic > fundamentalism > > in 1979's Ziaul Haq regime, and how it affects the > > ordinary villagers such as Ayesha, her son Saleem, > and > > many others, including the visiting Sikh pilgrims > from > > India. I shouldn't reveal the full story to spoil > the > > fun for those who haven't seen it – it's great > cinema > > to watch. I only want to express a chilling > uneasiness > > I had while watching it at PVR cinema surrounded > by > > many Punjabi families, a number of them sobbing > > through the film. > > > > Much has already been written, produced, staged > and > > sung about the subject of India's Partition (on > both > > sides of the border), and would continue to, since > its > > horrible memories still haunt a large number of > > affected people. But the question we must ask > today: > > is this memory going to help us resolve any of the > > present day crisis, or is it only adding further > fuel > > to the fire. These days, when I watch a movie (or > a > > documentary or TV show) on the subject of > communalism, > > India-Pakistan and so on, (especially after 9/11 > and > === message truncated === __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From lawrence at altlawforum.org Sat Dec 11 12:05:05 2004 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 12:05:05 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Collaborative Cultural Production and Open Licenses Message-ID: Hi all A number of people in this list are already familiar with the ideas of Free software, open source and in recent times, there has been a great deal of excitement about what it means to translate some of the terms of the FLOSS movement into the domain of cultural collaboration and production. The plethora of initiatives have also given rise to a multiplicity of licenses, and sometimes it is still a little confusing. I was in a residency at the Piet Zwart Institute earlier this year, and have written two pieces, one is a longish article on Open Content Licenses and Cultural production, and the other is a small book / guide on open content licenses. (If any one wants a gratis copy of the booklet, do write to Piet Zwart). Both are now available online, and on a Creative Commmons non commercial sharealike license (for more on the license have a look at the guide :) so do feel free to use, create version, rescensions, and any feedback / criticism would be appreciated Lawrence https://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/liangessay https://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/opencontent/view From coolzanny at hotmail.com Sun Dec 12 14:28:04 2004 From: coolzanny at hotmail.com (Zainab Bawa) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 14:28:04 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Acts of Leisure - reporting from Mumbai! Message-ID: Dear All, I am sharing some of my recent field visits' and interview experiences on the idea of 'Acts of Leisure'. A lot of my detailed writings are on my blog www.xanga.com/CityBytes and so, I am going to run thru some of the things here. In the week gone by, I had interesting interviews with people concerning the space of Marine Drive and Nariman Point. One of the residents, Mr. Lalchandani, spoke with a great deal of contempt against people who come from all over the city to use the promenade space. He felt that the sense of belongingness which he had felt at Marine Drive / Nariman Point (MD/NP) is lost. He in fact even wanted 'quality control' for the crowds i.e. people should be restricted from coming to the promenade because they pollute the area, not just in terms of littering, but even in terms of polluting the idea of NP/MD as an 'elite, upper middle class area'. His daughter was of the view that had the Marine Drive Residents' Association been formed way back in '70s and rules strictly enforced, there would have been better quality crowd now! I was both amused and angry on hearing all these views. Mr. Lalchandani went on to tell me how private security had been employed to protect and guard the streets and lanes between the art deco buildings at MD. He felt that this was needed because the guards were successful in keeping away hawkers and drug peddlars from the lanes. From his tone and opinions, I could make out that he is quite pro-private security. On the other hand, the same evening, I spoke to Mr. Daswani and he told me that there is no right for the residents of NP/MD to decide who should come here and who should not. He felt that his residents' association had done nothing to claim greater stakes to the promenade. One of the questions therefore, which I have been exploring through my own work at NP/MD concerns the dyanmics between residents, resident associations and public space. Who is the insider, who is the outsider? What are the limits to public space? I do not have conclusive answers myself. And I find it very intriguing that though we may talk about squatters and slum dwellers as outsiders, a lot of people residing in NP/MD in their flats there have been migrants and refugees themselves. People I have spoken to are Sindhis from Pakistan who came to this city after the partition. I have spoken with Gujaratis who bought flats in this area just as a matter of keeping some property. Then, by what right do we talk of excluding some from accessing space and include some? The next day, I had another interview with a person uses the NP promenade. Later, while we were sitting and chatting, a guy from the crowd got up and pissed into the sea following which the security guard patrolling the area warned him. After this incident took place, two days later, I spoke with Karan Grover, an architect and a resident of the oval area who told me while is for 'security to maintain the space', he is against security which 'restricts enjoyment of the space'. He spoke to me how security comes in as a result of population growth and crowding. While he said this, I realized that actually, in a city, we operate by signs. The security guard has certain ideas. stereotypes and heuristics if I may say so, about 'who' is a 'miscreant', what he looks like, his mannerisms, etc. I think we operate by the same images and heuristics of a migrant, of hawkers, etc. And I guess the media plays its prominent role in perpetuating these. The last dynamic that I have now become conscious of is the act of 'privatizing' essential services. In Mumbai, water supply and distribution is likely to be privatized soon enough. At quite a few public spaces, we have water fountains for people in the city. And I am remotely thinking of the implications of these acts of privatization on acts of leisure. Cheers, Zainab Zainab Bawa Mumbai www.xanga.com/CityBytes _________________________________________________________________ Cool ringtones, snazzy logos! Funny cards, addictive games! http://www.msn.co.in/Mobile/ Get them all at one place! From shivamvij at gmail.com Sun Dec 12 15:44:01 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 15:44:01 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Volunteer Message-ID: http://www.ivolunteer.org.in/ If you mean it, do it! From oli at zeromail.org Mon Dec 13 18:44:21 2004 From: oli at zeromail.org (Oli) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 14:14:21 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Re: X Notes on Practice Message-ID: Dear Raqs Collective, thank you for your nice text. I want make a short comment on it, concerning the history of the seepage and the ideology of networks. Your metaphor of the Seepage beautifully describes what I would call the dialectic of transgression and identity. Only that you do not describe it as a dialectical process, but a mere erosion of the stable. You imply a trajectory into the networking-ideology, which raises doubts, that I would love to get clarified: The Seepage is not ahistoric. It did not suddenly emerge. It is even not bound to change of capital. The tactics of Seepage are nothing more or less than the (un)concious efforts of any historical time to withstand its abolitions, no matter the forces of abolition are political, religious, economical or what-you-have in character or a mixture of some of them (most reasonably). The difference between past fluids and today's is the growing awarness in the literate world of finding concepts or metaphors of what has in earlier times simply been neglected by the discourse. This is a fruit of e.g. philosophical concepts that came up (again?) in the second half of the 20th century, namely of studies that all carry the prefix "post" in their name, to mark a development or change of thinking and attitude towards their objects. The most advanced implementations of those concepts are sometimes found in management theories. So, despite your sympathic view of accumulation of change by the Seepage, inherent lies a trajectory of disempowering the structure by weak structured operations, as I understand you. And I cannot agree on that. The embbeding surroundings of the Seepage are as well highly flexible and moving. Who bodycounts capitalism? As a description of the search for a life with some dignity, I am content with your description of the Seepage. But see: the network has always been there, digital technologies are just the latest incarnations of it (now beaten to death almost by capital). The quality of 'an ethic of radical alterity to prevailing norms' is expressed through its manifestations, not through a description, even less through a metadiscourse about it. The "Marginalias" are insights into contemporary life. The danger is to pick and collect them as the latest bouquet of material gorged by cultural workers, what is not your intention, but still worth to point at. cheers, oli From oli at zeromail.org Mon Dec 13 18:56:49 2004 From: oli at zeromail.org (Oli) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 14:26:49 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] re: acts of leisure Message-ID: <229B002545C5B2AD2282D512@142F8154BC2F2AF7DF65AA7D> dear nice leisure threat, the experts in leisure are animals -think about dogs and cats performing unbeatable acts of leisure all the way through their life. they can teach us a lot about leisure, us poor capitalbeaten humans, who always have in mind what the time is already and who live from deadline to deadline. leisure is not a privilege and is nothing one can live without. leisure is independent of surveillance and also of the binary work/non-work. the moaning of the loss of public leisure areas through surveillance -at least in the form of videocameras- does not see the senseless effort of control that is done through these means. data gets collected and badly paid security stuff slinks around. but why care about it? leisure is, if not being confused with consumption, an unexploitable form of existence per se. you can't stop people from leisure, as long as they have a culture of leasure. leisure also accepts consumption as long as consumption is not the aim of leisureship. leisure has a manifold of expressions, which vary from person to person and leisure can't be caught in the word coming from the plagiarism of the commodified world called 'spare time'. leisure can happen at home, at work, in the 'public'. leisure often goes against authorities, cause they stand for unleisuredom. sleep is not pure leisure, but it might be sometimes. leisure is a performed quality, that is not to be confused with lazyness. in other times, leisure was much better known than today and leisure gets sought after more and more as a reliable source of exploitation if the belief in leisure is not anymore grounded in the queendom of leisure but in commodifiable plagiats of it. leisure sets itself its surroundings. leisure is sceptic about predefined settings. as for one washing his car is leisure, for the other, watching one washing his car is leisure. leisure is a modus vivendi, and also a part-time issue. sport can be undertaken as leisure, when not being sought after as strengthening the machine in you. thinking goes into leisuredom, when it is unstressful and circulating. leisure can have a long duration, but also one so short that one hardly recognises that it has happened. leisure is not bound to a certain number of participants. a collective leisure is as much a good leisure as a solitary one. leisureing around with the ones one loves is maybe a perfect leisure. life as a leisure is totally nonsense, nobody is a 24h-leisurable person. leisure works together with other intensities. after work, there can be leisure. but also during work (well, not during every work). leisure: when the social outside has lost its imperative on the inside and when the inside is listening to itself. this doesn't mean it is a kind of meditation. the inside can become very expressive and looking for tension with the outside. -oli From avinash at sarai.net Tue Dec 14 14:22:54 2004 From: avinash at sarai.net (avinash kumar) Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 14:22:54 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] ARGENTINA: Factories Without Bosses - and Without State Support Message-ID: <41BEA9E6.3060205@sarai.net> ARGENTINA: Factories Without Bosses - and Without State Support Marcela Valente "We have gas masks, slingshots and stones to defend ourselves," said an employee at a worker-run tile factory in Argentina that is facing the threat of being shut down, because local authorities want the machinery seized to collect on a debt left unpaid by the former owners. BUENOS AIRES, Nov 29 (IPS) - The case of Fasinpat (Fábrica Sin Patrones or Factory Without Bosses) illustrates the total lack of state support for workers who have refused to sit back and watch the factories where they worked for decades deteriorate into huge rundown warehouses with broken windows and rusty machinery peering out from the weeds of a ghost town. The phenomenon of bankrupt companies being taken over and reopened by their employees began to emerge in Argentina in the second half of the 1990s, but really took off in the wake of the late 2001 economic meltdown. "We represent 170 companies that maintain jobs for more than 10,000 people," Eduardo Murúa, the president of the National Movement of Recuperated Companies, told IPS. In late 2001, the financial system collapsed after capital flight left Argentina, Latin America's number three economy, with virtually no foreign currency. Factories stopped producing due to the lack of imported components and parts and the severe contraction of the domestic market. Over the next two years, more than half of the population of 37 million slid into poverty, and unemployment climbed above the 20 percent mark. A large number of companies filed for bankruptcy in 2002. But according to Veraz, a private national credit-rating agency, the number of businesses that went under was 75 percent higher in 2003 than in 2002. In the first 11 months of 2003, 2,680 companies went under in the city of Buenos Aires alone, compared to 1,299 in 2002, reported another credit risk rating agency, Fidelitas. Against that dismal backdrop, and despite the growing magnitude of the movement through which workers have been salvaging companies and jobs, state support has only been seen in isolated measures, and there is no comprehensive public policy towards the sector, said Murúa. Since 2003, economic activity has recovered significantly. But many companies continue to face difficulties. In some districts, the workers running factories that were abandoned by their owners have successfully pressed for statutes and laws, passed by city councils and provincial legislatures, that have enabled them to run the companies legally. There are also municipal governments that have entered into partnerships with the workers, as in the case of the Zanello factory, which is now Argentina's main exporter of tractors. In other areas, worker-run factories remain in a sort of legal limbo as court decisions or new legislation have been delayed, making it impossible to formulate long-term plans and projects. And in some cases, like Fasinpat in the southern Argentine province of Neuquén, authorities have even taken action against the workers. Up to 2001, the factory was known as Zanón, a leader in the tile industry. But due to poor management, the firm's debt piled up to more than 100 million dollars owed to the provincial government, state-owned banks, and the World Bank, and in 2001 the owners decided to close the factory down. But 260 of the employees refused to let the company collapse, and continued producing tiles, at 20 percent of the factory's capacity. Shortly afterwards, when the volume of tiles produced had doubled and exporting part of the output began to look like a possibility, the workers called in another 220 former employees. However, the right-wing provincial government of Governor Jorge Sobisch launched an offensive against the factory, taking legal action to demand repayment of more than three million dollars in debt contracted by Zanón with the provincial government. According to the latest legal ruling, the debt is to be covered by selling off the machinery with which the workers are manufacturing tiles. The legal battle has led to five attempts to evict the workers from the plant. But the 480 workers and their families, with the support of several thousand local residents, have blocked every eviction attempt. In a telephone conversation with IPS, Alejandro López, the secretary of the Fasinpat workers union, said that for three years the workers have been asking the judge handling the case to expropriate the factory on behalf of the state. Unlike other "recuperated" companies that turn into cooperatives, Fasinpat wants the factory to be nationalised, and run by the workers. But because the workers realise that a solution of this kind could take time, they would agree to become a cooperative temporarily. "We have discussed it in assembly," said López. "We are prepared to defend the factory any way we can. We have purchased gas masks, and have slingshots and stones. We have also reinforced the number of guards posted round-the-clock at the edges of the factory grounds, and we have organised a phone network." Murúa, meanwhile, told IPS about his meeting with President Néstor Kirchner a month ago. In the meeting, he pressed for the passage of a law that would allow the state to expropriate and nationalise firms that had gone under, in order to give the employees the option of keeping the companies open. Murúa also asked the centre-left Kirchner for a one-time subsidy payment equivalent to 5,000 dollars per job, which would give the workers access to financing, since the legal vacuum in which companies like Fasinpat are caught up makes it impossible to secure bank loans. "If we had that capital, we could bring in more employees, and begin to export products," said Murúa, who pointed out that all of the worker-managed companies have prospered. "Sixty percent (of the firms) have taken on more personnel, and in many cases the employees earn more than they did before," he added. According to Murúa, Kirchner regarded the creation of such a fund as feasible, and ordered the Ministry of Social Action to study the idea. However, the president saw the proposal for new legislation on state expropriation of factories as a much more complicated issue. "We met 26 days ago. I am counting the days, to see if the government comes through," said the head of the National Movement of Recuperated Companies. In December 2003, Kirchner had stated that two million dollars would be earmarked for a line of soft credit to be made available to worker-run companies. The "recuperated" businesses include small and medium-sized metallurgical, textile, food industry, paper, tile and farm machinery factories, bakeries, sugar and rice mills, as well as a growing number of service companies like transport firms, restaurants, schools, hospitals and hotels. The cases tend to follow the same pattern: the owners of the company stop paying wages and bills, and eventually abandon the heavily indebted firm. But alerted by the abundant number of similar cases, employees now make preparations to prevent the owners from making off with the machinery and raw materials, and simply wait for the owners to leave before beginning to run the company themselves. Most of the companies operate as cooperatives, but in some cases they become corporations in which private investors or the state own shares. At times, the owners who have disappeared show up again, drawn by the resurgence of what was once their company, and try to win it back by invoking their property rights in the courts. "This is not a passing phenomenon or merely a consequence of the crisis," said Murúa. "The movement of worker-managed businesses will continue to expand and become stronger, even if the economy grows, because unfortunately there are many small companies in trouble that will continue to go under." (END/2004) http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=26463 check out the following link too... http://workerswithoutbosses.net/ From vivek at sarai.net Mon Dec 13 16:51:34 2004 From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 16:51:34 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Independent Fellows Output 2003-2004 Message-ID: <41BD7B3E.5050100@sarai.net> Dear all, Please note that the list of selected 2004-2005 fellows will be published on the Sarai website on December 15. We were not able to acknowledge of receipt of applications because of time and staff constraints-- sincere apologies for this. What follows is a detailed report on last year's fellowship process and final workshop. Warmly, Vivek. *The 2003-2004 Independent Fellowship Program: Overview of Achievements and Challenges* By all accounts—those of participants and coordinators, internal and external observers—the 2003-2004 Independent Fellows programme was a success. While the fellowship term ended in July this year, the process found its most kaleidoscopic expression in an intensive three-day workshop at the end of August, which all fellows attended. This year, the bringing together of the fellows in time and place for three days of concentrated presentations allowed for a more dynamic and collective conversation among them. Many of the fellows were excited to attend panels addressing research domains other than their own; they read each others' papers closely and asked probing and useful questions. The organising of thematically unified panels made discussions more resonant, as fellows and attendees were nudged to present their work in the light of other work, from other locations within India, which was similar in subject, approach or attitude. After their presentations, the fellows deposited materials that they had collected (photographs, videos, complete interview transcripts, etc.) into Sarai's now burgeoning archive, paving the way for those various projects to have a lively afterlife in the hands of future researchers. This year, the fellows were also required to make monthly posts to the Sarai reader list (an email list with several international participants, linked to Sarai's publications) as part of their duties to Sarai, and the (phased) disbursal of the grant amounts was linked to this requirement. While this made it easier to monitor their progress, the purpose of this requirement was also to make it possible for mentors to engage and enter into dialogue with their work more consistently, to allow responses from the many talented, widely distributed and far-flung subscribers to the list, and to generate more documents from the research which could be placed in a Google-searchable archive. This process did not work in a fail-safe manner, and will still need further fine-tuning (see below). However, it did enable many fellows to receive more support from Sarai and to better converse with each other and with a wider network, especially when run in tandem with a blog. At the same time, the variety of research topics, which ranged from new approaches to 'work', 'the city' and other disciplinary themes, to the re-imagination of mundane spaces, to innovative strategies of looking at image, text and sound, in addition to the variety of /complementary/ modes of investigation used by this year's fellows (systematic analysis, lyrical evocation, performance, painstaking ennumeration and collection), is in part merely the reflection of various developments outside of Sarai, inside and outside the academy, that are making a place like Sarai possible. On one hand, in the context of a globalising, post-Fordist India, more and more among the 'general public' are seeing that their personal research passions are worthy of a concerted engagement and of dissemination; and this, even in a few out-of-the-way places, far from the major metropolitan cities. On the other hand, the thinking behind the Independent Fellows programme has absorbed the many turns and transformations of the social sciences and the humanities in the past three decades — the cultural, writing-focused turn in anthropology, the non-positivist turn in history, the shift in film and literary studies away from traditional objects and also to the contexts and means of their production — in such a way that the mentors at Sarai are better able to offer pertinent support. /Challenges for the Years to Come/ Despite all this, however, what has also emerged in the long discussions of the research done by each research fellow, and of the fellowship process in general (before, during and after the end of the fellowship) is an ongoing anxiety that the work done for the programme could be pushed even further, and that the excitement we have generated for ourselves and others should not settle into a stale or repetitive pattern. First of all, Sarai is deeply interested in an exploration and combination of forms of presentation, whether they be the 'traditional' footnoted research paper, or the performance, or the literary narrative, or the film, and so on. While this year's fellows did gamely choose to present their material in a variety of forms, we found that they were not always as willing to reflect on their choices, and to fully understand both the costs and advantages of moving away from pre-assigned forms. To address this, more discussion and more clarity about the possibilities and dangers inherent in forms will have to ensue within our organisation, and the fellows will have to be encouraged to be reflective about the question of form from the very beginning of the fellowship period. Second, Sarai found it difficult to consistently enforce the public posting requirement without taking on an over-assertive role and, also, given the various other commitments of those at Sarai, did not always respond to fellows' postings in a very detailed manner. For many fellows, this freedom seems to have been enabling; others, perhaps, could have used more guidance; and two of our forty-six fellows, given this degree of freedom, did not fulfill their obligations to the fellowship programme. Since the fellows are already carefully preselected to be those most likely to complete their obligations, and since at least a portion of the grant is disbursed only on completion of the requirements, Sarai would not like to devote too much time to enforcement next year. Nevertheless, the hiring of a coordinator specifically in charge of the fellowship process should go a long way towards both keeping track of fellows /and/ responding to their various needs and capacities. In addition, the possibility of helping to form city- or town-based communities of fellows, by which they will be able to better dialogue with each other, is being considered. Third, while many past fellows have gone on to publish and present in various venues, the question of “What next?” did emerge for some of this year's fellows. To address this further, we are in the midst of discussion with publishers to find places and put together opportunities where the best of what emerges from our programme can find a wider audience. The fellows' final conference/workshop, held at Sarai from 26-28 August 2004, was documented in detail. The following report on the proceedings offers a thorough account of the Independent Fellows Programme this year. ************************************************************** This year the fellowships programme completed its third year with a workshop in which 38 projects were presented over three days. The presentations were arranged in 12 panels according to the following themes: 'Transformations in Space and Time'; 'Locating 'Indian' Cinema'; 'Forming, Re-forming Locations; Designing Interventions'; 'Ethnographic Spaces'; 'Plotting Urban Struggles'; 'In Search of the Image'; 'The Hidden History of Sound'; 'Tracing Texts'; 'Regulating the Laws of Regulation'; and 'The Past, Present and Future of Work'. The programme ended with a performance based on the research project 'Socialist Wives', enacted in the Sarai Interface Zone on the evening of the third day. *Day 1: Thursday, 26 August 2004* Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Fellow, Sarai, initiated the proceedings by remarking that Sarai had always wanted to break new ground with regard to research; in particular, Sarai was keen to facilitate the opening of the field to the researcher as practitioner; and to support the mode where the practice itself and its methodologies became a form of research; where research is not restricted to the conventional parameters of 'findings'. From the inception of the fellowships programme, Sarai has supported the public rendering of research and efforts to create a discursive community, expanding from the metropolitan cities to smaller towns and other areas. “Pushing the envelope” in this manner has allowed new energies to enter, along with a “certain amount of hit and miss”. In his opening comments, Vivek Narayanan, coordinator of the Independent Fellowships Programme, stated that the fellowships, as the Sarai-CSDS initiative itself, means to privilege the value of process over completion, innovation of form and content over easy stability. He suggested that for the duration of the workshop, the participants hold on the state of “ambiguity” and “vulnerability”, states of mind when “everything is at stake and no end is in sight”, and understand that the workshop is a place where it is more important to collaborate than to impress. Similarly, the historical moment in India is at a point where pure adversarial criticism no longer has to be the most necessary mode, and complacency is the greatest danger. Globally too, our post-colonial anxieties are fading, and permitting us to engage with our own “post-postmodernist present” in the most creative ways possible. Vivek suggested that the fellowships walk the line “between thrill and puzzlement”, “dream and anxiety”. The research themes engaged with the contemporary, with history, with the future, and also, in one or two instances, “with eternity”. All the fellowships spoke to the urban, but emphasized that faith, cultural rituals, underdevelopment, are not tropes antithetical to the urban. The research tried to carry socialism and politics into new spheres, and explore new styles and forms, “creative” writing, the image and the realm of sound. The fellowships also asked what “happens” to research when processed through these alternative forms, understanding that it was important to allow for and engage with “perilous methodologies”. What happens to knowledge when it is presented in a synthetic, as opposed to an analytic, form? Was it possible to blur the line between these? What was the purpose of style, and what did it communicate? If we altered the boundary between art and analysis, for example, between prose and poetry, are we altering “the very way our civilization has been organized”? Vivek added that we need to “hold all of history together and not get caught up in progress narratives”; we need to encourage the “cohabitation of old and new forms”, even as we underscore the value of old forms and of the written word. Another question to consider was how practice converted to research, and vice versa: was it possible for the two to speak to each other? The current lack of dialogue was one of the “fundamental disillusionments of the post-development era”. Vivek concluded that Sarai was a place where academics, activists and artists should come together, “yet very often they avoid each other . . . Activists are suspicious of academic language, academics are suspicious of activist lack of complacency, and artists are suspicious of everyone, including themselves.” The challenge for the duration of the workshop was to “hold back our suspicions while being ourselves and not anybody else, and somehow find a common, or, at least, an intersecting language : to make a Zeitgeist that mediates between dream and anxiety, puzzlement and thrill.” *Panel 1/ Transformations in Space and Time* 1./ Shireen Mirza /“The Everydays of Eternity: A Study of Muhurrum Processions” This research project analyses Muhurrum processions, popularly called Taziya, the ritual commemoration of the “holy tragedy of Karbala (680 AD)”, by the Shia community worldwide. The project aims at understanding the “filtering residue” from the battle of Karbala in the Shia cultural imaginary. It asks “what ghosts need to be kept alive”, and how and why, within the spectacle of Taziya. It examines Shia notions of suffering, pain and sacrifice, and how Karbala becomes a central trope for acting out the political/historical oppression faced by Shias for centuries, with Shias seen as alienated from the larger Islamic world, their desire for validation generally articulated in the rhetoric of “deep pessimism” and a “sense of fatalism”. The research studies the ways in which Shia identity is mapped on the body of the flagellant, and how ritual mourning serves as a metaphor as well as a catalyst for a collective purging of emotions. It also analyses the kinds of literature generated by the central event of the martyrdom, claiming that the battle of Karbala in Sufi philosophy and poetry is devoid of its politica/historical connotations, and instead represents an inner conflict of the higher and lower selves, where the higher self emerges victorious. The paper discusses the supplicant's anguish at separation from the Beloved, a predominant theme that also allows for intensely personal expression, “the eye that weeps”, within the frame of the theological narrative: “. . . in the act of weeping, the relational self gets appropriated, as it reaffirms its place within the familial space and within the larger community.” It also includes a discussion of the role of the women of the prophet's family, who in the Shia tradition represent particular virtues and communitarian ideals. Shuddha began the question-and-answer session following the presentation by asking the speaker to clarify the distinction between “religio” and “traditio”. Conservative Islam says Shia practices have a traditio component, which amounts to idolatry. The purpose of modern Islam is to pare down the traditio. He asked if there was a tension between general Shia observance in India and the observance of Indian pilgrims who had been to Najaf and other sacred sites: does their intervention influence the observance of Islam here? Another interjector remarked that if the Muhurrum procession is located in the practice of community, how do differential practices function? What kind of community is created? He also asked the speaker to explain the difference between “faith to action” and “intention to action”. Ravikant asked how Muhurrum was situated historically in India, what the social stakes were, since Dalits and lower castes were taking up Muhurrum practice to reclaim a space and assert power against social hierarchy. Shireen replied that conservative Islam would say traditio was idolatry, this is a prescribed and prescriptive response. But Islam is also pluralistic, the focus is on one's concrete individual practice, as well as on the visible umma which is not abstract. There are different sects, traditions, interpretations, and a very strong mystical side. The speaker said she was intuitively inclined towards the ritualistic aspect. Shuddha commented that Muhurrum rituals become instances and motifs of repetition, and thus transform into a self-conscious event, through rhythmic reenactment. This marks the continuation of the reasons for the martyrdom. Shireen replied that Muhurrum's ritual flagellation, with men collectively weeping and grieving, was counter to the normal construction of masculinity, the “power thing”. Jeebesh added that the spectator's resistance to the act and sight of men crying in public was basically a foreign response, because Europeans interpret this as a lack of control, whereas in India such tears are seen, accepted, as an expression of “karuna” (compassion). He pointed out that rituals can become separated from their original source, there may be a rupture, yet the practice persists. How does it endure, how is it absorbed into a different context? How does one enter the world of the “pagan”, what are the conceptual tools by which this space is entered? Is the pagan anyone who does not belong to a Semitic religion? This might become a dangerous civilisational divide, the separation of the Semitic from the non-Semitic. Shireen replied that there is no special reason that the existence of the pagan should be noted; it has always existed, and its existence as a truth is not that important. Its value is in the fact of it being a ritual. Ritual mournings, martyrdoms, celebrations, have a function. The Karbala paradigm illustrates the applicability of the ritual over time. 2./ Aparijita De /“Imagined Geographies: Geographical Knowledge of Self and Others in Everyday Life, the Case of Ahmedabad” This study attempts to link spatial and social processes in terms of social positioning and social claims to space in Ahmedabad. It explores how community use of space functions as a principle of social organization and differentiation, and as a distancing mechanism. How is space created and defined socially? How does the spatial imaginary of a group reflect its social constitution? How do spatial concepts such as “centre”, “core” and “heartland” translate into the “sacred” self (self-perception, self-construction, identity), setting up and negotiating literal boundaries accordingly? How do concepts such as “margin”, “periphery”, “border”, become analogous with the “profane”, unknown, alien other? Following Aparajita's presentation on communities and spaces in Ahmedabad, Yasmin remarked that any kind of cognitive mapping could have an “autosuggestive component”, and that the method hinges on a static narrative; the audience does not get a sense of how the space is used, the movement of people within the space, how each group negotiates the space of the “other”. The paper needed to include a historical explanation of why these places are the way they are. Clearly there was violence; the narratives of the subjects are interlocuted through events. Aparajita said she had deliberately avoided the debate between “space” and “place”. Sanjay Joshi argued that the paper did not explain space and place at all; it left out the genocidal component, the history of the 2002 riots; this was “a huge oversight”. Ravi Sundaram said that the most interesting aspect of the paper was its stressing that the history of violence was spatially embedded and conflictual; the “other” will always have a spatial implication. It is natural to define the “other” in this way, by hypostatizing a certain object. Perhaps different questions needed to be asked. Aparajita replied that she had not been able to break the stereotypes and access the “grey areas” in terms of the relationship between communities: she only got “an occasional glimpse” of it. The low-caste areas formed a buffer zone between the Hindu and the Muslim areas. Rohini brought up the issue of the speaker's “self-confessed Hindu bias”, and asked Aparajita what conditions she had set for herself to counter this prejudice; no doubt, the respondents' answers were also conditioned not only by religion but also caste and class. Aparajita acknowledged that the bias did emerge at every step of the research; she was “not able to intellectualise it away”. 3./ Rupali Gupte /“Tactical City: Tenali Rama and Other Stories of Mumbai's Urbanism” This audiovisual/flash presentation described itself as “a fictitious history of Mumbai's urbanism”, articulated through the figure of Tenali Rama, a popular character from Indian folklore, as well as through various cultural and urban theorists who emerge throughout the narrative. The research claims that conditions in most third world cities have now gone beyond the means of any rationalist positivist planning, and now require new eyes to see the present conditions, and new tools and perhaps a new imagination to intervene in them. The work frames itself on the three established shifts in the development of Mumbai: the colonial city, the socialist city, the global city, categories pertinent to many third world countries. “Tactical City” is an imagined city made of a set of tactics of different interests that manifest themselves in different forms in the city; an envisioning that creatively subverts the dominant imagination. It derives its name from Michel de Certeau's thesis of 'tactics' versus 'strategies': strategies are the tools of the dominant elite, while tactics work in the shadow of strategies and are 'an art of the weak', forming mute processes that organize differently within the socioeconomic order. “Tactical City” is a means of linking these mute processes to mainstream discourse. It is a metaphor to conceptualize the urban context, as well as a critical tool to formulate interventions. It formulates an “opportunistic” manifesto of practice for architects, planners and urbanists. Ravi Sundaram opened the discussion on Rupali Gupte's presentation by remarking that a kind of ironic distancing is manifested in this form of engagement with the city. The earlier tradition involved investing in experience. This ironic cartography was dependent on the presence of binaries in the form, not in the text. It was tactical in relationship to the real, for instance, to 1992 when the communal riots in Mumbai functioned as a rupture in the city's history and memory. But there is a limit to “avant-garde positioning”. Rupali said that the tactical position was a real position, which she had explored in the “global city” section of her project. She said she was suspicious of the “relativism of post-structuralist theory”. Ravi commented that the term “tactical” became everything; there is an “efflorescence of the tactical”, and the tactical becomes “every effort to deal with the urban”. Rupali said that ironic distance was also a tool of the practitioner, and it was used in a particular way, important to her. An interjector asked if she had visited or studied Dharavi, as it is the tactical city par excellence. Rupali said she had not done so thus far, but it might be added as a new “folder” in her novel. Kalpagam requested that Rupali put her project on the Internet, if possible; Ravi said this was possible with technical help from Sarai; the research could be made into a CD. *Panel 2/ Locating 'Indian' Cinema* 1. / Biren Das Sharma, /“The Forgotten Empire: Madan Theatres Pvt. Limited” This research examined the rise and fall of an entertainment business established in 1902-03 by J.F. Madan in Calcutta. Originally called the Elphinstone Bioscope Company, it developed from a tent show to an empire named Madan Theatres, spreading all over the subcontinent. J.F. Madan was also interested in theatre, and was the founder of the Parsee Theatre in Bengal (the Corinthian company for Hindi/Urdu plays and the Bengali Theatrical Company for Bengali drama); he considered cinema a logical extension of theatre itself. His initiatives set conventions and production standards for an emerging industry. However, almost all aesthetic and historical studies of the 1980s and 1990s neglect to analyse the significant role of Madan Theatres in the evolution of Indian cinema. There is barely any primary source material available on the company, and all the film it produced has disappeared. Secondary source material is also minimal, as existent film criticism dates to the 1930s, when the company was on the verge of collapse. The National Library in Kolkata considers these magazine as “low culture” and hence it is difficult to locate and access them. Very little material is available at the National Film Archive, which holds some personal collections. The researcher had to rely on personal reminiscences of actors, directors and other professionals who had started their career under the Madan banner. These provided significant insight about the functioning of the company in its day-to-day activities. The written and oral evidence given by J.J. Madan, managing director of Madan Theatres, to the Film Enquiry Committee, is a major source of information covering many areas, including production, distribution and screening of films. The National Archive in Delhi has some documents articulating the company's relationship with the colonial government. A recently-discovered, unpublished, 1000-page autobiography of a Bengali actor is also an important source of information, needing to be translated. 2. / Lal Bahadur Ojha /“Bhojpuri Cinema ka Vikas: Ek Partal” (The Development of Bhojpuri Cinema: An Exploration) This research, which included some audiovisual clips, traced the journey of Bhojpuri cinema from its inception five decades ago, beginning with /Ganga Maiya Tore Pyari/ /Chadhaibo/, the first movie to have popular impact. The study examines the dynamic between these films and the socio-cultural milieu in which they are located. It also examines their relationship to mainstream Hindi cinema. Dr Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, was a connoisseur and keen supporter of Bhojpuri cinema. Initially, Banaras was the centre of Bhojpuri film production, as the movies drew rural crowds visiting the city as pilgrims; but the entire eastern belt of UP and Bihar soon became a massive hub. The research also studied the contribution of these films to the culture of the Bhojpuri-speaking diaspora, established today in Mauritius, Malaysia, Surinam, Trinidad and other areas. *Panel 3/ Forming, Re-forming Locations* 1./ Kalyan Kumar /“The City of Configuring Labour: Shaping the Worker through Architecture in Jamshedpur” Kalyan Kumar's paper examined the history of Jamshedpur, a town developed almost entirely by the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) and named after Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata, in the first half of the 20^th century. Kumar's research explored how “[company towns] are excellent examples of rational attempts by planners and architects to mould workers and manipulate social and economic interactions for the primary purpose of improving industrial production”, how “planning mechanisms became a tool . . . to make regulation of space serve [the] need of controlling and disciplining labour.” At the same time, Kumar showed how this plan, in its actual execution, was not a straightforward or one-way process. / / In the early history of the company plant, development proceeded in a haphazard way with the influx of rural migrant labour; “coolie settlements . . . enveloped the outskirts of the Company (sic.) and land degenerated into slums. In the aftermath of the First World War and the consequent increase in demand for steel, the number of workers increased to 10,000, and slums grew wherever vacant land was available.” Thus the company decided to establish a separate unit for the administration of the town, and various town planners were engaged. In the coming years, the company was the “de facto ruler of the township and . . . it resisted attempts to share this responsibility”. It “regulated land use, leased areas of the city to subisidiary industries and was the primary patron of the city's cultural organisations . . . [trying to] shape modern attitudes of discipline, achievement, punctuality, sobriety, [etc].” However, the company never managed to place more than 30-40% of its workers in company housing, and the majority of lower-echelon workers continued to live in informal settlements. In addition, planners modelled the town with Eurocentric assumptions and the company showed an apathy towards “the type of housing that could suit the Indian worker”. At the same time, the very cohesiveness of the town around the company fostered an equally cohesive worker's union that organised five major strikes between 1920 and 1958, and did manage to influence policy. Commenting on Kalyan's paper, Dhiraj suggested it might be useful to further analyze the paternalism of the Tata group's mediated welfare policy that determined the existential parameters of the workers' lives. This had been in operation from the 1920s onwards, while the evidence cited by the paper restricted itself to the '60s, '70s and '80s. Jeebesh wanted to know if Kalyan had looked at patterns of land acquisition, how the Tata company enforced plans, how they prevented illegal constructions, and the nature of the regimes of enforcement. Another point raised was in connection of the housing plans, which were designed so that it would be easier to control the workers, but this spatial arrangement had ironically made it easier for the workers to organize flash strikes, sustain long lockouts—how did the management deal with this realization, had they evolved a dispersal mechanism so that unified protest was less feasible? Kalyan responded with the statement that there was indeed a change in perceptions: in the 1920s and 1930s, when resources were scarce and everything had to be built from scratch, expectations were high and reactions were volatile. Resistance to the management was overt and strikes were common. After the 1950s, there was a greater stability and resources stabilized. Resistance took on more covert expression. The Tata company had initially acquired large tracts of land from the government of Bihar, and in the 193os, when the company needed further terrain for expansion purposes, the government obliged with legislation allowing huge areas to be demarcated for “development”. This trend continued after Independence; a special “zone” was set up and under this mechanism, a lot of land was transferred to the company. Tata had its own security forces, and took advantage of clout within the local administration. Kalyan felt that the workers initially accepted the structures under which they were being controlled, but in later decades they became less cooperative and malleable, and an active tradition of resistance was definitely in place. 2. / Md. Pasha and Seemi Pasha /“A Study of the Nizamuddin Basti” This audiovisual presentation traces the history of the Nizamuddin dargah in Delhi, and explores what it represents to the community that lives around it today, examining the site from contemporary sociological, economic, architectural and civic perspectives. The research begins with the genealogy of the shrine. The dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, known as “Garib Nawaz” (Comfort of the Poor) is considered, after Mecca and Medina, to be shrine most sacred to Muslims from the Indian subcontinent. The hospice of the great saint and founder of the Chistiya /silsilah/ (tradition) of Sufism in India goes back several hundred years, almost to the earliest period of the Muslim conquest of India. It serves as an interesting parallel, if not contrast, to the “official” Islam of the imperial court. Through the centuries, this dargah has been open to everyone, regardless of caste, creed, faith, age and gender, twenty-four hours a day. It posed a powerful challenge to Hindu orthodoxy, as well as to Muslim orthodoxy represented by the ulema (clerics). The Chistis, unlike many other Sufi traditions or orders, always distanced themselves from the power politics of the court. They practiced extreme poverty and simplicity, and incorporated music as part of their rituals. Sufi dargahs are centres not only of veneration of/rendering service to the pir or guru, but also a place of healing, refuge and supplication. After Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, his disciple Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki continued the Sufi legacy, followed by his disciple Baba Farid. After him, the Sufi teachings were carried forward by Hazrat Nizamuddin. Born in Badayun in Uttar Pradesh, Hazrat Nizamuddin was brought to Delhi to study, after the death of his father. In Delhi he became a disciple of Baba Farid. He lived in old Delhi for almost eleven years before shifting to a small, quiet village called Gyaspur, outside the main city, on the banks of the Sitari, a tributary of the river Yamuna. He started living there in a hut with a thatched roof. After some time a nobleman from the king's court built a “khanqah” for him, which still exists. The saint constructed a baoli (stepped well) and extended the existing gateway to connect with the baoli. When he died he was buried on the site, according to his wishes. Opening the discussion session, Kalpagam said she was confused about Md. and Seemi Pasha's presentation on the Nizamuddin basti: what set of central questions would be most useful as an entry point into the complex narrative? The speakers' response was that they were trying to look at the history of Nizamuddin; it was initially a village of fishermen next to a river. After Hazrat Nizamuddin's death, his sisters took over the land. In this century, the settlement became a slum following a massive refugee influx into Delhi after Partition. 3. / Rutul Joshi /“The Composition of Surat: A Study in Urban Cultural Confluence and Conflicts” This paper focuses on urban development processes in the city of Surat, over the past four decades. It examines the emergence of peripheral industrial-cum-residential “ghetto” areas occupied by the migrant population, and its relationship with the core of the city, the mainly commercial (tertiary sector) and residential areas, dominated by the middle and upper-middle class. The role of urban governance and planning is analysed in terms of the impact of its policies on demographics and equity, social and psychological segregation and disparity in terms of service provision. It analyses the exclusion of underprivileged sectors from any participation in administrative decisions regarding “development”, and the transformation of Surat, known for its “prosperity, pomp and glitter”, into a “zero slum city”. With regard to Rutul's paper, Monica commented that she was intrigued by the fact that even those who had settled in Surat 300 years ago were still referred to as “migrants”. Was there a time frame within which a migrant could claim the status of “native”? Rutul said that his interviews with local residents in this context indicated that the time frame seemed to be two generations. If a person had settled in Surat prior to the city's industrialization, he/she was deemed an indigenous “Surati”. Those who had settled in the city following its industrialization were deemed “migrants”. The perception of who a migrant was differed from group to group. People from Orissa who had lived in Surat for generations still seemed to consider Surat a temporary residence and not home. Shuddha asked if the city's administration had improved after the plague of the mid-nineties. Rutul said that there had been a massive clean-up, but somewhat unequally. The eastern side of the city was still quite neglected in terms of urban planning. 4./ Basharat Peer /“Srinagar: Shrinking Public Spaces in a City of Bunkers” Basharat Peer presented his research on public spaces in Srinagar in moody, evocative, impressionistic prose. Peer began by explaining that his use of “public space” addressed its more “non-figurative meaning”: “spaces for collective use, where particular forms of exchange between individuals and groups are possible . . . public space is theoretically open to everyone . . . the space of everybody and nobody . . . a space of sociability and freedom, the space of the state, and of the relationship between the state and the population. That connects public spaces with the idea of democracy.” In the context of Srinagar, virtually under military occupation, tourists are allowed more access to many more spaces than residents, and “bunkers and armoured military vehicles have become a part of the landscape like the willows and the chinars”. A double movement seems to have taken place: on one hand, public space has become restricted to the point where there is no meaningful venue at all for democratic intervention, and on the other, the state's entry into all arenas has expanded the scope of what public space could be. Peer was born and brought up in Srinagar; yet he confessed that in his years as a journalist he had been more attuned to “news” than to the actual texture of lived life in the city's shrunk and regulated public spaces. The narrator in his essay takes a walk through a historic Kashmiri temple, a marketplace, a graveyard, a cybercafe and regular cafe and elsewhere, in search of what kind of life there is to live in the open, what kinds of memories linger. He hunts for the octroi post that was once a rather innocuous tax-border into the city, listens to old men reminisce bitterly about the rule of Hari Singh, and eventually casts “a parting glance at the Jhelum leaving Srinagar on its way to Pakistan”, envying “the river's independence from the human regime of passports and visas, entry tickets and permits”. Dipu initiated the discussion session by noting that we are constantly required to constantly negotiate between our own disciplining of our everyday lives and the attempts at regulation by various agencies. Karim asked Basharat if the changes in the city of Srinagar that had taken place through the last decade of political/military/terrorist strife were also reflected in the language and local idiom, especially slang. Basharat stated that this was indeed the case; new codes had evolved, and there was a fusion of civil and military signifiers. For instance, the word “cylinder” referred to a militant who surrenders, and is despised for doing so, and is seen as both “hollow and dangerous”, both characteristics of a gas cylinder. Shuddha wanted to know whether the names of places had also been similarly invested. Basharat said that all neighbourhoods had specific kinds of referential practices. For instance, the collective term used to describe the house of a Kashmiri pandit was “battmakan”. This term had now come to mean all* *abandoned structures because it alluded to the enforced migration and exile of the pandit community. Dhiraj added that Basharat's research focus could be enriched with some discussion of the shrinking of public spaces not just in terms of the omniscience of literal bunkers, but also the mental/emotional landscape of seige, the oppressive constructions of fear, suspicion, insecurity, pervasive anxiety, paranoia. Basharat replied that he was indeed referring to the reorganisation of inner and outer space dictated by terror, and symbolized by bunkers. The bunker was not just a physical entity. Having to daily negotiate these presences, and the soldiers associated with them, had changed the civilian population and also had an effect on the army personnel there. Bunkers, literal and metaphorical, had transformed the existential fabric and affected social relations. The bunker was a perfect symbol of where Kashmir and its inhabitants were situated today, in terms of selfhood: guarded, hostile, shuttered, beleaguered. Iram asked how young people in Kashmir bypassed and subverted rules and regulations that governed life and space. Basharat said that libraries, cybercafes and parks were two areas where some interaction was possible, but the hourly charges in the cafes were steep, and the public gardens were patrolled by squads of “morals police”. Overall, it was extremely restricted. *Panel 4/ Designing Interventions* 1. /Nilanjan Bhattacharya /“Community Ecological Mapping” Nilanjan Bhattacharya's project set out to explore and document, in a participatory fashion, an area that he has lived adjacent to for seventeen years: Kalikapur, a semi-urban area on the eastern edge of Kolkata. Although Kalikapur is a densely-populated, mostly low-income area, it nevertheless plays host to “a unique ecosystem with a very rich mosaic of original vegetation, with groves of indigenous trees and bushes, swamps with reeds, and a number of water bodies”, which has “strangely survived the onslaught [of] the fast approaching urban expansion”. From a few encounters with some local children between ten to fourteen years old, many of whom were school dropouts or “vagabonds”, Bhattacharya discovered that they possessed a very detailed understanding of the local ecosystem and its various species, knowledge picked up both from older mentors (including one child's grandfather) and from their own exploration. Bhattacharya paired them with two girls (from an adjoining middle-class area) with a knowledge of computer applications, thus bringing their knowledge to computers and bringing computer skills to the children. Bhattacharya's background is as a media specialist; he teamed up with an ecologist to guide the children on documenting expeditions into the fields, striving to put together a comprehensive ecological map of Kalikapur, generated by the community itself. According to Bhattacharya, his team has thus far identified at least twenty varieties of plants and annotated them according to their traditional medicinal usage; the team has also collected information on twenty-four species of birds, as well as on the varieties of fish still swimming in the area's disappearing wetlands. The team has showed the importance of documenting and preserving the ecology of such fascinating, liminal semi-urban areas, especially against the hungry tide of land development. The project also underscores the fact that these areas allow marginalised urban populations a chance of subsistence even as they continue, with mixed results, to participate in the city's market economy. The project has been documented using various media forms: photographs, audio, video, GPS, hand-drawn sketches and computer graphics programmes. The question-and-answer session opened with Nirmal suggesting that questions of social hierarchy needed to be addressed during ecological research. Nilanjan remarked that this was too wide an issue for his research to incorporate at the moment. His emphasis was on getting the children to engage with various new media forms, within their contexts. He clarified that the children undertook their quests out of “desperation”. Sharada asked about how the city is viewed through interaction. Nilanjan replied that there was a need for a picture-based desktop on which the children could draw as they wanted to; the children's source of knowledge was practice, and in some cases, inheritance. 2. / Avinash Kumar and Surya Sen /“Livelihood through Play, Play by Design” Avinash Kumar, Surya Sen and their design studio presented their project in the form of a slickly-made, often playful video documentary. In fact, the idea of play could be used to subsume both the team's chosen subject and its approach, though the questions it investigates are serious. The /jhoolewalas/, who travelled through neighbourhoods in Delhi, charging for rides on portable swings for children, were once a very common sight on the streets of Indian cities, and are still remembered with fond nostalgia by many adults. The travelling /jhoola/ provided an important site of community-centered outdoor play for urban children, and is still an important means of livelihood for its owners, but is fast getting outmoded. Kumar and his team began their project with the aim of simply “designing a better /jhoola/”, of giving the traditional /jhoola/ a new look, but soon learned that they would have to understand and address complex social networks, negotiating between the desires and agency of several different “forces”: the /jhoolewala/, children, parents and “the city itself”. On one hand, Kumar and Sen involved these various stakeholders in design-led participative workshops, brainstorming various ideas and tapping different imaginations. On the other hand, the design and media team used a series of different techniques to visualize and prototype their own ideas. Charting design directions based on the outcomes of both these tracks of work, the team felt the pull of three different sets of concerns: sustainability (including cost), identity (including historical identity) and “respectability”. In Kumar's words, “the resultant directions have been mapped into a conceptual framework that can be applied to design work with the context of the Jhoola [sic.] today . . .[but] the question that arises really is that even if we do design newer, better Jhoolas . . . then what? Can the Jhoolewalas find in themselves the capability to do it on their own, when times and situations demand it?” The project will continue after the fellowship period, and will continue to be concerned as much with preserving history and memory as with producing innovation. Nirmal asked Avinash if he had taken his play equipment designs to the children's parents, and if so, what their reactions were. Vivek commented on Avinash's usage of certain forms in his film, a mix of 1940s jazz, upmarket advertising, a combination of different kinds of nostalgias, a “universal global one” and also the nostalgia of parents. Rupali asked Avinash about the future of this kind of work, where making new modes of jhoolas would involve getting funding. Avinash answered that he had not consciously incorporated the various forms evoked; he accepted it as part of the social milieu he came from and as something natural to his generation. This kind of research had to be a “sustainable venture”, and as yet was a work in progress. 3. /Miriam Chandy /“A Childhood beyond the Red Light: A Scrapbook Project” The project began as a quest for the story behind the story of a newspaper clipping. Miriam and her collaborator Kalyani first began by searching for Sapna, a “rescued” child prostitute who had made a historic deposition on her experience to the Child Welfare Commission. Sapna had acquired “her fifteen minutes of fame” by breaking her silence and, among other things, identifying and thus helping to convict a woman constable who had been collaborating with pimps and brothel owners. Sapna had been “rescued”, but by whom, and taken where? The search took the two researchers to a series of child welfare homes where former child prostitutes were now being held; the researchers looked into both the compassion and the dysfunction of such spaces. As part of their effort, Miriam and Kalyani also held art and theatre workshops as a way to help the children open themselves up to expression. By contrasting these materials with a collection of newspaper articles that often skimmed or obscured the real conditions of the childrens' lives, and framing the contrast with an interwoven and detailed personal narrative by the researchers themselves, a “scrapbook” was built up. With regard to the “scrapbook” presentation made by Miriam and Kalyani, Sharada commented that it was perhaps not fruitful to demonize parents in the context of children's exploitation, especially when a fair amount of recent social science research showed evidence against it. Citing cases from Karnataka, Miriam acknowledged that it was not a question of demonizing the parents, but more a question of socioeconomic conditions that compelled people to push their children into circuits of exploitation. Shuddha referred to the context of rehabilitation, the idea of making “someone” into “something else”. Also, how did concepts such as “mazaa” (pleasure) emerge through interactions? Jeebesh suggested that the dynamics of rehabilitation needed further analysis, as did the notion of “misfit”, a problematic category. The speakers emphasized that they were using the term “misfit” relative to categories created and applied by mainstream society. They acknowledged that there were dichotomies between the “rehabilitated” and the “rehabilitators”, which was very apparent in the Kamathipura case. As far as the “mazaa” was concerned, the girls were very comfortable with their sexuality. Yet the three different centres of rehabilitation provided a clue to three different “stages” of rehabilitation, as it were. 4./ Srishti School of Design /“ECOSOURCE” The Eco-sourcebook proposal, spearheaded by Poonam Bir Kasturi and other faculty and students at the Srishti School of Design in Bangalore, was meant, like Kumar and Sen's studios, to be a pilot project to apply design ideas to community concerns not yet fully articulated. In this case, the design school set out construct a site and a one-stop sourcebook that would help “people in Bangalore to build an eco-friendly home”. At the same time, while the proposal seems to have begun from the perspective of the middle-class homeowner, they also found that they could not address the space of the home without attending to the “landscape that surrounds the home”. Given the potential vastness of the subjects, students under the aegis of the program followed their own interests in various sub-projects: tracking the progress of garbage through the city, for instance. According to the presentation, “the job of bringing the strands of research, analysis and ideation was not sequential for us. We flipped from gathering information to doing some ideation, going back to analysis and so forth.” The point of the source book was not only to provide “information” but also to “reveal assumptions”, and to not allow the socio-cultural aspects of urban ecology to be obscured by a “generous 'greening' of the discourse”. >From a design perspective, the idea was to organise, order, and index the sourcebook in such a way that it could be entered and explored in at least two distinct ways. One, from the practical, problem-solving, query-driven perspective of someone who, for instance, wanted to make the best use of rainwater harvesting, given the particular contingencies of the Bangalore setting. Two, from the perspective of someone who wanted to get a more general sense of the various ecological issues faced in Bangalore and learn how they could be linked through a process of storytelling and argument, allowing for the incorporation of the new research of the Srishti school and others, and addresses of further contacts. The idea was also allow for ratings of different services, reliability and ease of cross-reference. With regard to the Srishti presentation, Dipu pointed out that the “question of power” seemed to be missing from their analysis. The project would not be an effective intervention without this component; there needed to be more focus on the politics of environment. Sharada suggested there be more analysis on the phenomenon of “guilt-free consumption” by the middle classes. According to Shuddha, it might be useful to go beyond the print form of the sourcebook, which did not provide the facility of creating links that would open the project out in related areas. Jeebesh raised questions about “design principles”, where notions like “waste” had to be redefined through lines, texts, other design aspects. On behalf of Srishti, Poonam replied that there was a need to bridge the “gap” between theory and practice, especially as there was a lot of misgiving about “theoreticians”. She also invited suggestions, feedback on socio-political issues, so that the project would become more nuanced. Jeebesh replied that it was not a question of theory versus practice, but an ability to question one's own set of assumptions, the assumptions one worked with, see them from a different vantage point as it were, “as there is a politics to everything”. Kanika from Srishti replied that the group has attempted question various trends, such as that of making the term “ecology” synomyous with “green”. *Day 2: Friday, 27 August 2004* *Panel 1/ Ethnographic Spaces (1)* 1. / Zainab Bawa /“Women in Trains: An Examination of a Nuance of Physical Space in City Life” This project was an ethnographic study of the division of space in Mumbai's local trains, which constitute a public as well as private space. The research focuses on the Ladies' Compartment, “a private space within a niche”. It is “a breathing space”, “a scrutinising space”, “a community space”; a space for particular modes of relating, a means of “otherising” and “demonising”, stereotyping fellow travellers. The presentation analyses how “compartmentalisation”/segregation has affected male and female commuters in the city. Is there a need to reserve spaces exclusively for women? How does such reservation influence women's ability to negotiate for further space in other public spaces? If local people can create their own rules for usage of a public space and its effective maintenance and management, do we then need control, policing, legal intervention? How do we create more spaces which enable people to live together as an urban community? The research finds that “human beings are an emergent species with a great capacity to self-organise”; and that the laws of nature have repeatedly shown that collective living enables the community to evolve in harmony with the habitat/environment. The paper concludes with “a little duffer's guide to train lingo”. 2./ U. Kalpagam /“Urban Mentalities: Chennai's Roadside Temples” This presentation states that a place is distinctive not because of its spatial architecture or even its culture, but due to the mentalities that both constitute and are constituted by daily life in that site. Cultural constructions are produced by, and in turn reproduce, certain mentalities, or what may be called “structures of feeling”. The sociocultural phenomenon of roadside temples in Chennai is studied through ethnographic methodologies, which interpret these structures as a feature of particular urban mentalities: those of the temple authorities and management, the faithful and the public at large. The research explores how the association of roadside temples with deities favoured by the backward castes function to counter, and in various ways subvert, the liturgical tradition of the brahminical elite, as well as encourage a spirit of tolerance in the public domain. 3. / Salahuddin and Shahabuddin /“Dilli ke Madarson ki Ek Jhalak” (A Glimpse of Delhi's madrasas) This research claims that madrasas in India “are moving in a disastrous direction”, because any system that does not reform itself or assimilate progressive trends from other systems is bound to stagnate and die. It asserts that madrasas today are disconnected from their original pedagogical function; they do not serve the community, nor address contemporary needs. Post-9/11, madrasas have been categorized as “breeding grounds” of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. The research was conducted under difficult conditions, as madrasas are difficult to access; nonetheless, the researchers managed to enter 75 madrasas in and around Delhi and talk to the students. The paper analyses the history, curricula, rigid teaching methods, ferocious disciplinary regimes, ideologies, economic base, culture and ethos of madrasas, including those for girls. Most students were from deprived families; they lived in fear of corporal punishment at the hands of their (often untrained) teachers; they showed few interpersonal, language or communication skills. The research concludes that a system which commenced with a lofty objective of moulding personnel for administrative and civil institutions during the height of the Islamic conquest, “is now dying a sorry death”, with the amount and quality of education having degenerated to a point where “reform would be an improbability, though not an impossibility”. Rohini opened the discussion by asking Zainab how the space within the train functioned as an economic site, e.g., where women could sell home-made food to commuters, etc. She commented that Salahuddin's findings were too generalised and put forth “sweeping statements” on oppression and corruption within madrasas. Disciplinary regimes characterized many educational institutions, not only madrasas. She also criticized the presenter's index of “ignorance”, ie, madrasa students not knowing the difference between 26 January and 15 August, as this was a common fact in many rural areas and illiterate communities. An interjector asked Kalpagam whether the number of temples had increased after 1992; whether temples other than the “amman” and Ganesh type are found in public spaces; and whether the fact that autoricksha drivers and people from the informal sector were building temples as a religious practice was a reflection of “some insecurity in their psyche”. Ravi Sundaram wanted the speaker to articulate the difference between ethnography and theoretical framing. While the paper was rich and provided a number of entry points, the social networks needed to be clarified, as these would acquire a certain scale and have wide implications. The paper needed to be strengthened analytically, as it was displacing belief structures; at the moment it consisted more of social description than anthropological findings. The larger questions of what deities were mobilised, the political ramifications, needed further exploration. According to Kalpagam, after 1992 there developed a trend for Ganesh temples to be constructed along with each apartment block, in Chennai localities. She had also observed that Tamil weekly/monthly popular magazines, which contained a little bit of all kinds of subject matter, had almost disappeared; these had been replaced by spiritual-themed magazines, supported by big publishers. This seemed peculiar to Tamil Nadu, and was not noticeable in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh or Karnataka. She noted “a new definition of cultural literacy”, as these magazines are not only read by middle-class Brahmin wives in their homes. The autoricksha drivers who were connecting to social classes above them through the activity of temple building, were actually “building social capital”, as these temples are mentioned in the engagements column of the local paper. As for the tension between ethnography and theoretical frameworks, “all anthropologists will suffer from this till their project is complete”. Abhay asked Kalpagam what happens when an aetheist political party performs a “religious” act, for instance in 1965, when the DMK local leaders in Chennai built a major temple. Rakesh asked if the researcher saw any nexus between temple builders and property agents. Shuddha wanted to know if roadside temples were part of a “creative religiosity”, and a new phenomenon, or whether they were “a minor version of established religiosity”. Kalpagam cited an instance when the followers of the Dravidian movement took out a procession in the temple town of Madurai and garlanded deities with shoes, etc. It was very offensive. This ambivalence towards public expression of faith has always existed in Tamil Nadu, and “the irrational should be distinguished from cultural practice and from belief in the divine.” Street religiosity was an expression of a sharp divide between the Dalit gods and goddesses and non-brahminical deities, and the traditional brahminical adherence to the shivalinga. The puja rituals in the big temples were replicated on a minor scale in the roadside temples. There are aspects of “creative” or “invented” religiosity. For instance, Chennai believers feel that the shakti of Ganesh is greater if the idol is a stolen one. The idol taken from somewhere is supposed to be soaked in water, flowers and grain for 40 days. The people cannot afford this so they put the idol in a local well for those prescribed days, then surreptitiously take it out and install it. The speaker asserted that there was no Hindutva or BJP influence in this cultural scheme. The research aimed to juxtapose narratives of modernity/post-modernity with tradition, subvert the linear narratives of modernism, interrogate the construction of the self in relation to regional/religious identity. Nancy suggested that Zainab could do some focused analysis on particular groups of women commuters, for instance Gujarati women, burqa-clad women, and how they use the space of the train, what kind of solidarities they create. She asked Salahuddin how he would frame his argument if he had to write an essay on his theme: how would he counter the mainstream media's depiction of madrasas as conflicted and malignant spaces? Salahuddin replied that he had stressed on the media's representation of madrasas post 9/11 in the report he was submitting to Sarai. He had critiqued madrasas as a business, as a disciplinary culture, as a pedagogical instrument. There is no permission for cultural texts—film, radio, television, Urdu literature—to be used as proselytizing tools. The students are officially deprived of these, yet they manage at great risk to access these. The muftis refuse these to the students, call these forms “haraam”. Changes are not taking place in Delhi madrasas. In other regions, madrasas are teaching Hindi, even in Andhra Pradesh were Hindi is barely spoken. But Delhi madrasas do not support anything modern; no English, no computers. Most madrasas have suffocating and dingy, dirty premises; even the primary instructions of the Quran, “wuzu”, to stay clean, is not obeyed in practice. Madrasas close at 2 p.m. but students are not given a chance to learn anything new after this time. Nor are they taught anything traditional, like calligraphy. It is rare that a madrasa student goes on to higher studies in any outside institute. Zainab answered that Nancy's concerns had been addressed in the research documents she was submitting to Sarai; and that in general, she had observed the the central line in Mumbai was dominated by Maharashtrian commuters who were more placid, whereas the western line was dominated by Gujaratis, who were more aggressive. She said she wanted to translated her sociological observations into these two languages. In trains, people constantly expanded their networks of affinity and also their world-views, which also at times narrowed down to particular prejudices: for instance, local commuters immediately categorized people from Uttar Pradesh as homosexuals, and alleged that they used the train for soliciting. Salahuddin remarked that madrasas were characterized by a particular funding system and a particular disciplinary regime. Madrasas were “part of something at least 800 years old”. Muslims give donations as zakat, 10 % of their salary; most of this goes to support madrasas. He stressed that he was not suggesting that the madrasas should not be funded, but that the funds should not be misused. The critique of madrasas should also extend to syllabi and teaching methods, and the harsh treatment of the students; there were also other aspects of madrasa life that he could not touch upon, such as homosexuality. The speaker added that the debate around madrasas continued along three strands: one, to abolish madrasas as oppressive, anachronistic and irrelevant; second, to reform madrasas, modernize them, treat the students humanely, revise the syllabus, and connect to the contemporary; and third, to adopt a policy of complete non-interference and allow the madrasas to function as they were currently doing, as rigid and severe domains. Abhay remarked that he agreed the word “taliban” (students) had a strong negative connotation, particularly associated with the barbarity and repression of the regime in Afghanistan. He asked why Salahuddin was worrying about the RSS, when he should be worrying about the impact of his reseach on “liberal Muslim society” in general. Ravi Sundaram asked Salahuddin if it was possible that “the narrative has not changed in 800 years”. Surely there is some change*, *the Saudis donate a lot of money, the source of the funding has widened—this itself is an indication of change, pressure, turmoil. “This is a positive and optimistic chapter in the narrative, while the ongoing oppression and sadistic treatment of the students is a traumatic one.” There was tremendous scope for the research to expand its focus toward the positive and concentrate on the narrative of the students' lives, how they persistently subvert the system, despite the difficulties and obstacles. Nancy pointed out that the Markaz-e-Maarif in Mumbai teaches the students English, and also brings out a newsletter that critiques stereotypes of Islam. This is a sign of progressive thinking within the traditional system. Jeebesh pointed out that all research was based on the vantage point of the researcher, and that any history of enclosed spaces was very difficult to narrate. It would be interesting if Zainab could enter the space of the train in the (tentative) manner of Salahuddin, and Salahuddin enter the space of the madrasa in the (confident) manner of Zainab. A different kind of social experience/sociality would emerge if there was a change in the way the space was entered. There was an entire politics around the disciplining of the body within these different enclosed spaces; this needed to be calibrated and analysed. *Panel 2/ Plotting Urban Struggles* 1. / Lalit Batra /“Pani ki Kahani” (The Story of Water) This research focused on the relationship the urban poor had with water; how they negotiate access to it, and the politics of supply, distribution and storage. Most subjects studied were first-generation, middle-class migrants from UP and Bihar who had come to Delhi from their village almost twenty years earlier. They were either upper caste, OBC or Muslim. Almost all respondents stated that village water, accessed from wells and ponds, was superior to city water (there were separate wells for various castes in the village, while the village pond was common to all castes). “/Gaon ke pani se sehat banta hai, jabki shahar ke pani se sehat bigadta hai /(village water is good for health, but city water destroys one's health).” The main sources of water in the city were municipal taps and Delhi Jal Board tankers. The respondents felt that tanker water was of better quality than tap water. The migrants experienced a sense of loss of control with regard to water, not just in terms of supply and having to totally depend on the government, but also because migration had compelled them to slowly give up traditional rituals associated with water, which was a sacred element to them and seen as the source of life. Water access was also used to maintain caste, community and religious identity, and thus became intensely politicised, with Dalits becoming even further marginalised by the upper castes in the general struggle for essential water supply. 2./ Inderjeet Sharma /“Anadhikrit Shahar mein Andolan” (Protest in an Unauthorised City) This research documents the struggle against the privatisation of power at locality level, undertaken by residents in the following unauthorised colonies in Delhi: Bhagwan Park, Burari, Mithila Vihar, Prem Nagar, Nangloi, Pratap Vihar and Baljeet Nagar. It analyses the nexus between colony residents, political activists, electricity board employees and other involved in the supply network. It also focuses on the tactical means by which residents ensure power supply when it breaks down, through tapping lines, introducing their own wiring and cables, etc. The protest movement started spontaneously in Pratap Vihar when residents gathered together and formed a residents' welfare association, managing to stop a particular contractor from imposing his supply scheme on them. The protest was then organized in different phases, including the mobilisation of residents, fund collection and court testimonies. In the later phase of the anti-privatisation movement, some defection took place and the struggle was “sabotaged”. 3/. Rohini Patkar /“Rozmarra ke Kaamon ke Badalte Daam”(The Changing Values of Day-to-Day Work) This was a study/power point presentation of migrant domestic workers in Delhi homes. It explored the emerging feminisation of migration and the changing dimensions of female labour. The process of migration, the memories of the journey, the group process among those who migrated together, the resources carried over from the village, the initial feelings of anticipation and apprehension, survival mechanisms, networks and support systems, daily schedules, various kinds of oppressions and compromises, and relationships with employment agents and employers were some aspects foregrounded in the research. It also examined the nostalgia for village life, economic aspirations, identity shifts and the changing sense of self that was initiated by the change in location. 4./ Sappho for Equality /“Fire that Evoked Warmth: The Emergence of Lesbian Activism in Kolkata” This paper documents the emergence and growth of lesbian rights through group-based activism in Kolkata. The presentation describes the activities of Sappho for Equality as a group and also in association with other groups, organisations and individuals. It describes Sappho's participation in a sustained campaign for equal rights for sexual minorities, as well as work in the field of women's rights, human rights and AIDS awareness. The research claims that while the city did not lack radical feminists, activists and intellectuals, the subject of lesbian rights was dismissed by these segments and either reduced to the status of “gossip”, or seen as constituting an “alien” problem. The specific demand for lesbian rights was an “inherent challenge to the prevailing norms of heterosexual, monogamist and patriarchal culture”, and was even further marginalised than other marginalised discourses. The research described the formation of community-based networks and support systems, intervention strategies and attempts to sensitise the media and general public to lesbian issues; and efforts to press for social, legal and political space for women with same-sex preferences, entitled to equal rights, benefits, privileges and protections within the larger discourses of the women's movement, gay rights and human rights. *Panel 3/ In Search of the Image* 1. / Yousuf Saeed /“Syncretism in the Popular Art of Muslim Religious Posters in North India: Iconic Devotion in an Iconoclastic Religion” This research project, along with an exhibition of posters, was an exploration of “the tip of the iceberg” of Indian Muslim iconography. It analyses how the images of this vibrant popular art form depicting Muslim themes (collected from Delhi, Ajmer and Lucknow) are inspired by contemporary urban popular culture. Who conceives, commissions, renders, approves and legitimates the products? What is the (non-Muslim) artist's relationship to this subject matter? How do the orthodox/purists respond to these images that derive from other aesthetic traditions as well as Islam? If Islam categorically prohibits iconic devotion, why is the Kaaba ritualistically adored almost in the manner of a tangible deity, by pilgrims on Haj? The paper also explores the market factors/devices, consumer demands, local and regional sources, and the adapting and imitating of “Hindu” mythological scenes and personages, in terms of composition and figural detail, as well as derivations from Persian and Turkish sources. Shuddha opened the discussion by asking Yousuf about his tracing of the lineage of the posters, how they traveled into the network of the present; and also how they traveled beyond the Indian market. For instance, did one see images of the burqa in Mecca? What other networks of information were involved in the spread of this popular art form? Lalit inquired about the historicity of the posters: for instance, in the time and context of Hindutva, do the images of Ram undergo a transformation? And post 9/11, had Islamic images undergone a similar change? He also pointed out that the posters had a rural market, as well as a market in the urban slums. Yousuf agreed with Lalit's comment about working-class consumption of these posters, as these could be seen in tea stalls, barber shops, etc. But on the whole the images retained their basic structure, though political events did feature in an oblique way. During the 1990 Gulf War the posters had featured Saddam Hussein; and during the Afghan crisis, Osama bin Laden appeared for a brief while. However, the traditional images remained entrenched. One could see images of the burqa in religious posters in Iran, but not in Saudi Arabia. Political images came, went, changed, but somehow the sacred iconography remained constant. Madhuja pointed out that many Kalighat painters are Muslims, just as many of the artists who created these Islamic posters were Hindus. Nancy asked Yousuf what he meant by the term “folk artists”, to which he replied that he had used it as a general term to connote borrowings from prevalent and traditional cultural material. 2. /Madhuja Mukherjee /“Looking at the Glasses Darkly: Revisiting Calcutta Film Studios” This presentation, supported by audiovisual material, described the technical nature and usage of glass negatives in relation to the publicity materials for cinema. Between 1930 and 1950, glass plate cameras were used for several kinds of photographs: marriages, office groups, family photos, etc. These functioned to consolidate the self-image of the middle classes, including a development in the 19^th century trend of depicting only the deceased through portraiture. After World War II, easy access to the film negatives led to large-scale production, and the shift from glass to plastic. These technical innovations eroded the boundaries between popular cinema and the more fastidious cinema of the “bhadralok” (well-born). Ravi Sundaram asked Madhuja to clarify when the production of glass plates came to an end. 3. /Nancy Adajania/ “Self, Re-fashioned and Re-formatted: Digital Manipulation and the Transmutation of the Private Image in Urban India” This paper, supported by an audiovisual presentation, examines a “new urban sociology of self-representation, a new visual reality”, articulated by means of digital manipulation. Original materials such as photographic portraits are either colorised, restored or retouched, or otherwise combined with extraneous pictorial elements, including stock landscapes, architectural detail, props, costumes, body parts, deities or symbols extracted from the print media and the Internet. Such stock is normally pirated. The outcomes of these digital manipulation procedures are hybrid/composite images that preserve a nominal trace of their original aesthetic scheme but actually relocate them within an imaginary determined by conceptions of economic and cultural mobility. This facilitates the encoding and formation of “a coalition of desires” that express particular individual and community aspirations, trajectories of technological “progress” and social change. These images constitute a circuit in which event, memory and representation are intimately connected. They are also an encounter with globalism, and describe how the “alien” is assimilated within the “honeycomb” structure of “Indic collective life”. Ravi Sundaram commented that the idea of consumption had been there since “modernity”, hence a focus on contexts of production might be more interesting than a value judgement on production. Iram wanted to know if non-digital images, such as the cardboard cutouts found in melas, also had undergone a change in terms of what was imaged. Nancy agreed that the digitisation of images was arising in the context of globalization. She said she would prefer to call it “a coalition of desires”, since different publics and their aspirations were articulated through the creation and technological manipulation of these images. Preeti remarked that as a viewer she felt “discomfort” at the way the audience in the room had laughed at the digital images shown in the presentation. She agreed it had an “ironic” component, but the social and educational disparities that became obvious through the medium were not intrinsically “funny”. Jeebesh referred to the term “rotigraphy”, which implied the production of images for purposes of livelihood---this involved a different set of concerns, where aesthetic subtleties and the representation of social truths were not a priority. There was a need to explore the subjective component, the nuances of private desires expressed through the digital mode. Nancy commented that images derived from the “negotiations of desires” and there is a question of agency to be considered. With more choices available in the age of globalisation, the idea of the self and its relation to “other” was also changing. *Panel 4/ The Hidden History of Sound * 1. /Indira Biswas /“Mediation through Radio: The Calcutta Radio Station and the Changing Life of the City (1927-1957)” Indira Biswas's research excavated different aspects of the Calcutta All India Radio station in the first decades of its existence, through archival documents, programme journals and anecdotal memoirs. In its meticulous narrative, it tracked the evolution of programming which steered between mass appeal and elite/ /taste, and also looked into the process by which “amateur” voices began to come to the fore. Smriti asked Indira what influence her own practice as a musician, playing the sitar, had upon her research experience, and how she, as an artiste, responded to the alleged erosion of the tradition of classical music. Indira was also asked how much time was allotted to classical music and to programmes by amateur artistes at the Calcutta radio station, as well as how much the artistes were paid. Vivek asked for a clarification regarding the distinction between the amateur and the professional, how this evolved, what happens to it. Dipu wanted to know how much broadcast in India is live, and how the anxieties around this were articulated. Indira replied that she preferred not to comment on the relationship of her practice to her research. She stated that in the context of “disappearing” classical music, it is also a fact that the time allotted to this genre on the radio was increasing. From 1947 onwards, the presence of Patel and Keshalkar in the Information and Broadcasting Ministry helped to promote classical music. In 1957, All India Radio began broadcasting film music, and a major shift in policy followed, with the time allotted to classical music getting significantly reduced. Amateurs were so called because they did not take money for performing. Many amateurs took this stand as a matter of principle and honour. There was a lot of live broadcasting initially: live church services, football and cricket matches, Tagore birthday celebrations, the content of festivals like Durga Puja, etc. 2./ Sanjoy Ghosh /“Preserving Early Indian Recordings” Sanjoy Ghosh, a long-time music collector, pursued a project to digitalise early Hindustani music. Ghosh interviewed and negotiated with public and private collectors and archivists of Hindustani classical music, including the Society of Indian Record Collectors (SIRC) and the North Indian Classical Music Project. Although many of these recordings are still technically in the public domain, recording companies frequently tap these collections for new releases, and it is possible that they may enjoy a renewed commercial potential. So part of Ghosh's project was also to explore the use of peer-to-peer networks to keep these recordings in the public domain. However, according to him there were many difficulties. To quote his somewhat cryptic remarks: “In the absence of publicity 'user friendly' distribution doesn't seem to pick up. Maybe a centralised server has to jumpstart the proceedings before P2P networks can pick up the material. The fashionable trend today is to promote one's kin.” Preserving and revisiting such early recordings can also help to make shifts in the culture and style of Hindustani classical music more transparent. According to Ghosh, we can hear from these recordings that “the emphasis has broadly shifted away from the dhrupad-dhamar based presentation” and that there has been a “hardening of religious demarcation on the musical content.” Shuddha began the question-and-answer session by remarking that while he appreciated the potential of Sanjoy's “remarkable project”, it also needed to underline the economics of the classical music industry in India. This is a very profitable sector, and market leaders HMV consider this its most valuable area because sales continue all year round, and the fickleness of remixes is not present. But there is also a huge amount of piracy in this sector—piracy in the sense what it involves the circulation of mostly unofficial recordings by music enthusiasts, violating existing contracts between artists and companies. The crisis of this economy is that there are no new upcoming artistes, hence there is a huge potential for, as well as substantial movement within the industry to excavate old recordings. This “retro value” has to be kept in mind when one examines the value of peer-to-peer networks. A reassessment is necessary, and one has to “protect” these from the market through peer-to-peer networks. Aarti asked for Sanjoy's response to the fact that in the West, there was a deference to an older form and to the existence of cover forms, whereas in Hindustani classical forms the older artistes maintained a deference to ragas and gharanas, but there was no sense of such acknowledgement among the current generation of younger artistes. She also wanted to know why khayal was given prominence by the recording industry, as compared with other forms, like dhrupad. Sanjoy replied that he was not “trashing” peer-to-peer networks, merely stating that they could be problematic. In the West, companies specialized in producing covers, but here the problem is of “traffic”: there are no decent delivery/distribution networks for covers. Shuddha concluded that there were two important questions to examine: the relationship between music today and music yesterday; and why we hesitated to acknowledge tradition as well as any other sources. He said that there was the need to develop “a new musicology”, based on history, rather than continue to derive everything from “Vedic musicology”, which was based on myth. We have to move away from the fetishization of gharana performance, which implied fixity and a single location, and focus on actual music performance, which was involved relocation and movement. For instance, the Patiala gharana developed because artistes used to stop in that town on their way to Jalandhar. Jeebesh added that unlike the study of visual culture, the study of sound had to deal with the problem of the “dying out of sound”. One could describe this metaphorically as “the tension between amplitude and reverberation”. *Day 3: Saturday, 29 August 2004* *Panel 1/ Tracing Texts* 1. / Sandipan Chakrabarty /“Relocating /Krittibas/ (1953-2003): A Critical Study of the History of a Little Magazine in Urban Bengal” Sandipan Chakrabarty's presentation provided a rich narrative of the context and evolution of a legendary “little magazine” in Kolkata, devoted to poetry. Chakrabarty identified three broad “phases” of the magazine: between 1953-68, 1968-74, and from 1999 onward. Between 1974 and 1981, the magazine changed character and became more of a mainstream cultural magazine, and between 1982 and 1998 no issue of the magazine was published; the magazine is currently enjoying a revival. For a variety of reasons, Chakrabarty chose to concentrate on the magazine's most febrile first phase, in the years that slowly, increasingly, began to feel the force of both radical and “soft” countercultural politics, in the years leading up to 1968. Chakrabarty began by tracing the evolution of two opposing camps in Bengali poetry prior to 1953: one, clustered around Buddhadeb Basu, insisted on the primacy of aesthetic “purity” in poetry; the other, following from Bishnu Dey, insisted on the political and public role of literature. “Mainly edited” by Sunil Ganguli through its many phases, /Krittibas/ broke new ground by attempting to unite both aesthetic and political concerns, publishing poets regardless of their allegiance. Chakrabarty thus traced the exciting and provocative cultural history of the magazine in the early phase, signposting various pivotal debates, touching on the galvanising influence of Allen Ginsberg's visit to Kolkata in 1962, the magazine's involvement in an obscenity trial, its various spinoffs into weekly, daily, and even (on one frenzied day in 1966) hourly poetry magazines, and its fresh and provocative response to the values of the city: “Now I want a Pontiac for my poetry”, or “I've written poems, now I want White Horse Scotch / Chicken legs – no worse meat – cooked in pure ghee” or “Calcutta is like a heavy stone astride my chest / I must destroy her before leaving / Entice her away to Haldia port / And feed her coconut-shred sweets mixed with arsenic . . .” (quotes from Sunil Ganguli's poems). In the discussion following the presentation, Kalpagam asked Sandipan about the contemporary situation regarding poetry in Calcutta. Ravi Vasudevan noted that while we generally assumed that the Internet had a decentralised economy of production, we could perhaps assume the same thing with regard to /Krittibas/. Perhaps these ancillary processes could be mapped as an archival project beyond the magazine. /Krittibas/ needed to assert its presence in the mainstream, needed publicity to acquire extend its iconic status beyond just the literary. Another interjector asked Sandipan about the changes in Bengali literary production mapped along a general axis of socio-political change. For instance, 1947 to 1949 was a period of relative tranquility: did this influence Bengali literature? Post-1967, there was intense political turmoil: did this have an impact? Madhuja asked Sandipan why he spoke only of the “iconic status” of little magazines; she felt one needed to engage with them as vehicles of literary innovation, and wanted to know if examples of this could be found in /Krittibas. / Sandipan responded that from the early 1960s /Krittibas /had been “appropriated” by the establishment and was now a status symbol. Its 50^th anniversary celebration had been a big affair, presided over by the Chief Minister of Bengal. It would be difficult to archive the production, as suggested by Ravi, because the relevant documents were scattered and disorganized, very difficult to collect. Most publications like /Krittibas/ had perished and would be impossible to trace. He agreed that the events from 1947-1950 had an impact on literary production; they reflected a naïve and simplistic optimism. But by the tenth issue, almost all writers expressed a deep anger. In 1963 the publishers were hauled up and put on trial on charges of obscenity. In defence, they read poems out in court. /Krittibas/ also had a deep empathy for the Naxalite movement. He confirmed that the magazine had a sustained focus on literary innovation: the writers wished to transform the language structure of earlier Bengali poetry. They used a tight metrical structure and experimented within it, and also had a distinct group identity, different from the dominant aesthetic and literary styles. 1. /Nirmal Kanti Saha /“Economy of Meaning and Meaning of Economy: A Re-invocation of the Calcutta-based Journal /Annya Artha/ “ Nirmal Kanti Saha provided a spirited account of a Bengali journal of the social sciences /Annya Artha/, which might be seen as an important precursor of the work done by the Subaltern Studies collective: it featured early work by Partha Chatterjee (who was vice-president of the /Annya Artha/ organisation), Gautam Bhadra and Dipesh Chakrabarty; it provided a context for an infuential meeting with Ranajit Guha when he came to Kolkata with his idea of the “subaltern”; and it prefigured, by the mid-1970's, the cultural turn in social sciences around the world. Saha began by contextualising the incipience of the journal in the early 1970s in the midst of Naxalite activism and student assertion, when economics taught at the university was mostly mathematical modelling and “there was hardly any relationship between phenomena [in the] outer world and the social sciences that sought to explain such phenomena”. Soon the journal, which was edited, proofread and printed by the same collective of varied voices – including Ajit Chaudhury, Anjan Ghosh, Pranabkanti Basu, Arup Mallick, Subhendu Dasgupta and Chatterjee himself, many of whom where interviewed by Saha for this project – began to feel itself at odds with both neo-classical positions and mainstream, doctrinarian Marxism, airing a wider set of views, including articles by Gandhians and liberals. The “/Artha/” in /Anya Artha/ is a kind of pun, which can suggest both “economy” and “meaning”. Part of the purpose of producing the journal in Bengali was that it should bring a discussion of economics to a much wider audience; but “the step primary to that was the bringing down of... 'economics' from the high tower of mathematical jargons [sic.] and represent it instead in a lucid style in the vernacular”. Thus the journal began with an idea of “social economics” but soon moved even further towards meaning, challenging the very idea of the economic sphere as a “base”. The journal, which lasted from 1973 to 1985, disbanded partly (so Saha seemed to suggest) because the various research interests of its editorial collective became too divergent. Returning to the current political context of Kolkata today, Saha ended by arguing for the need for a new journal to pick up where /Annya Artha/ left off. Kalpagam asked Nirmal about the “certain redefinition of social science” generated by the conditions of the 1960s and 1970s: did he see this process of intellectual redefinition today? What contemporary tensions would push such a redefinition? Could the NGO movement be a factor? Had the pre-eminent position of economics within the social sciences been displaced by cultural studies? Nirmal replied that the journal had not initially clubbed economy and society together. The group began with the non-negotiable premise that the economy was the base of society. They were not completely satisfied with this formulation themselves, and in critiquing earlier formulations they realized that they could not describe the economy without describing social and political processes as well. The journal's commitment to dissent and the creation of knowledge through disputation was evident in that it allowed an avowed Gandhian to write for it. Nirmal felt he could not define the journal's “success”: if the criterion was that people remembered it, then it certainly was successful. At the height of its “success” it had a circulation of 11,000; many of its founding members eventually formed the subaltern studies collective in the 1980s, thus realizing its activist purpose on some level. 3./ Preeti Sampat /“In Search of the Uncommon Woman” This research project, supported by a slide presentation, focused on the image of women in cartoon genres, discussing the cultural, community, caste and professional signifiers used by cartoonists in their depiction of women in political and public spaces. Cartoon strips were first published almost a hundred years ago. At first they commented on social practices, and critiqued “social evils”, and did not engage with formal political spaces or with colonial rule. By the turn of the century, this trend changed and cartoons began to interrogate the structures of governance. The /Hindustan Times/ had the first formal space designated for cartoons, and post-Independence, almost all the English dailies did the same. The researcher discussed cartoons during the 1990s, when images of women were influenced by the ideologies of liberalisation, globalisation, Hindutva, and the women's movement. Ravi Sundaram suggested to Preeti that it might be useful to move her research focus from questions of representation to conditions of reading. Most newspapers were read in conditions of domesticity; this factor too needed to be taken into account. There was a dialogic relationship between representation and actual conditions of reading. He wondered why Preeti did not examine Hindi newspapers; and added that the Indian political landscape was “replete with images of powerful women”; these images were also brought into play in cartoons. This complexity did not fit into the “empowerment/disempowerment binary”. The construction of images needed further interrogation. There was a series of women's empowerment movements all over the third world, and the relationship between these movements and representation was an interesting area for further research. Kalpagam felt that there could be multiple interpretations of cartoons, and that she could not understand why Preeti was so doubtful with regard to questions of empowerment and agency. Dipu asked Preeti to clarify her perspective on the relationship between domestic space and feminism. The cartoon is particularly interesting because it is an art form with embedded political commentary. Miriam wanted to know about the development of particular characters, like cartoonist Manjula Padmanabhan's Suki: what were the processes that accompanied this? Preeti agreed that images were open to diverse and multiple interpretation, and that she was interested in revisiting them in the light of Kalpagam's comment. She said she had not been expressing doubt, as much as reflexive practice, how one responded to certain situations. It was important to always keep one's mind on the actual conditions that enabled empowerment. The figures of women were missing not only from the representation of domestic spaces, but were also almost completely absent from many public areas, or confined to certain professional domains, such as journalism. Priti stated that cartoons did not erupt from nowhere, they had a specific location: “sexist media in a patriarchal society”. The creation of the character Suki was enabled by the conditions/ideology of 1980s women's movement. Jeebesh commented that the creation of Suki also had to do with publishing history. Preeti clarified that she was analyzing the diversity of figures in an attempt to “locate the particularities” of oppression. Ravi Sundaram added that if one was looking for sources of the self, perhaps the cartoon was not the best place. The link between representation and empowerment was “serially depressing”. This framework needed to be problematised in order to enable the asking of an interesting question. *Panel 2/ Regulating the Laws of Regulation* 1. /Ketan Tanna /“Internet Censorship in India: Is It Necessary and Does It Work?” This research project traces the history of Internet censorship in India, its implementation, as well as the ethical and technological implications. It compares India's situation with other countries, and describes the “international Internet scenario”. The paper also outlined laws that govern Internet censorship in India, and asks if Internet censorship is necessary, and whether it is effectively applied. It also examines the Indian government's attempt to block Yahoo groups that deal with a variety of subjects, and discusses the “fear psychosis and anxiety” that underscores the politics of banning. It points out that well-known banned sites are “accessible by proxy servers for those who want to access them” but in reality, “in the rapidly growing technological world”, those who want to and have a little bit of enterprise “normally circumvent restrictions”. The paper states that it is “natural” for governments the world over to want to monitor, if not control, the flow of messages and exchange of information. The question of whether the government should decide what its citizens to have access to in terms of reading and viewing “cannot be equated with restrictions put on pedophiles or sites that advocate crime or death or murder”. 2. /Promod Nair, /“Freedom of Expression and the Limits of the Law of Contempt” This paper seeks to critically analyze and evaluate the law of contempt of court in India and the constitutional tension that this principle exerts on freedom of speech and expression, which includes the right of the media to freely air its views. It explains the “distinct and cumulative” conditions under which this freedom can be restricted, claiming that the courts and the press in India “enjoy a love-hate relationship”; and that the courts and the press are natural allies since they perform, in their own way, the functions of checking and controlling abuse of governmental authority. The Supreme Court decisions on the whole reveal a “judicial soft corner” for the freedom of the press; but these “natural allies” appear like “natural adversaries” when the court punishes journalists by exercising its contempt jurisdiction. The paper also explores the concepts of an “activist judiciary, judicial misconduct and “related legal ambiguities”. The question-and-answer session opened with an interjector asking if contempt was invoked when the judge was personally offended by a statement, or whether something else could also constitute a reason. Madhu Kishwar commented that the editors' guild endlessly debated the issue, and that the law of contempt remained a threat because editors and journalists “are terrified of jail”. She said she had been accused of contempt three times, and on all three occasions she challenged the judge and tore up the contempt order. Her lawyer grovelled at the judge's feet, but she told the judge she would not comply: “Sentencing me to six months' jail is all you can do to me.” If one adheres to one's stand, the judge usually compromises. It was a question of “how soon you buckle under . . . This happens too often, too fast and too haplessly.” Jeebesh pointed out that the judge who instructed Arundhati Roy to focus on her writing, and stay out of confrontations with the law, was an example of the general thinking that the legal domain was protected turf. He also described the politics of banning as “diabolical”, and stated that the practice of banning ensured that the media would turn the situation into an event. So there were actually two kinds of censorship in operation here: the “real” banning and the “media event” banning. If a website is banned, it automatically attracts a huge number of hits through hacking, people always go to banned sites, nothing will keep them out. Karim asked about the rationale of sub judice, i.e, proscribing certain arguments from being accessed, and discussed/published. Dipu asked for clarifications regarding the difference between surveillance and the ban on free speech, adding that one learns to live with certain forms of surveillance, which are accepted and tolerated, but the ban on speech is “more drastic”. Ravi Sundaram pointed out that critiques of censorship were integral to libertarianism, and that we should differentiate between censorship regimes and state prohibition on certain acts, including media. Post 9/11, surveillance had been taken to a different level. Maybe we need a new language to talk about this issue, develop a critique not derived from the classic rhetoric of libertarian discourse, or the political utterance of constitutional freedoms. Ketan stated that sub judice was a strategy to ensure that there was no trial by media. He added that surveillance was going to be used by the state to manipulate citizens, it was going to increase; “we are in for a series of bans, we need to be vigilant . . . We need a broad outlook and we need to fight.” Dipu remarked that the government surveillance of citizens was not like the protective surveillance of children by parents: government forms were much more pervasive and subtle, cameras were everywhere; this aroused much more resentment. Promod stated that the courts punish for contempt not only when the judges are personally offended but also for larger reasons; but contempt orders became controversial when personal affront to the judge is at the core of things. During the colonial regime the state gave institutions power to punish for contempt, so that the courts could maintain their dignity. Large areas of the law of contempt have always been controversial. Now it has become a tradition that in cases of civil contempt, people infringe the order, then when they obey or defer to the order, the charges are dropped. Similarly, when judges are under scrutiny, as was the case in the Karnataka high court, the truth would have come out if the trial was prolonged, so the judges decided to accede to the lawyers' demands. The proceedings were dropped and the matter was quietly closed. Promod clarified that laws made by Parliament could be repealed if there was enough protest by civil society, as in the case of POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act). But a judge-made law cannot be repealed. Ketan concluded with a question: since his research project contained a lot of “banned” material, could the government haul up Sarai? *Panel 3/ Ethnographic Spaces (2)* 1./ Vikas Singh /“Children of Bhopal Railway Station” This paper, in Hindi and English, weaves together the richly-textured narratives of children—orphaned, abandoned, cast out, runaways---at the Bhopal railway station. It describes their struggles to survive; the transience that shapes their changing self-constructions, their fraught existential relationship with shelter homes, the institutionalized terrain of “generosity” and “mediated love”. The research is based on Heidegger's postulate: “To dwell, is to be set at peace with the free, the preserve, the free sphere that guards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of “dwelling” is this sparing and preserving.” To shelter is to protect the being from the world; it is also to provide the being with the world. The speaker claims that “to shelter is impossible, it carries in it the moment of betrayal”; and that in the promise of home “is the promise of Being”. The lives of the children at the railway station are characterized by a “diaphanous” realism, madness, incredible courage; they are waste, they are supplicants, they are “dizzy, drugged, hopeless”, and beyond redemption. Yet they are also an abounding display of the human spirit, its audacity and danger, enacting its malevolent “play without grace” in “monstrous fields”. In the discussion that followed, Sharada commented that while she appreciated the aesthetics of Vikas's paper, she found its argument confusing and contradictory, and based on a “wrong use” of Heidegger's concept of “dwelling”. In terms of the common understanding of the empirical realities of the childrens' lives, their struggle with disease, dirt, hunger and struggle, she felt Vikas had not managed to transcend these stereotypes. She felt the children's self-constructions were critical to any understanding of them, and that they did not see themselves as neglected, or their life as deprivation. The research focus should be on their incredible survival and grit, and their ability to function completely in the present. According to Sharada, the children had a complex understanding of temporality and transience, strong family relationships, and a place as esteemed members of their families. Vikas agreed that the presentation was full of contradictions, but clarified that he had addressed some of the issues in the larger research document. He said he was sensitive towards all the arguments Sharada had raised, adding that he believed in what he had written. Nirmal felt that Vikas was contradicting his theoretical framework, and that there was an “ontological separation” between being in a home and “being in the abyss”. Vikas replied that relations of generosity differed from relations of law and justice, and that justice sometimes reduced generosity into “missionary acts”. 2. /Md. Abdul Khaliq /“Dilli ke Qabristanon evam Shamshanon ka Vishleshatmak Rekhankan” (An Analytical Study of Delhi's Graveyards and Cremation Grounds) This presentation was an ethnographic study of the management and ecology of Muslim graveyards and Hindu cremation grounds, exploring the lives of those whose survival depends on the activities within these sites. The researcher visited a number of such locations and interviewed the various people associated with the management and maintenance of such spaces, and analysed the economic aspects of the disposal of remains. The general findings of the research state that the cremation grounds are under municipal control. The municipality has appointed about 300 pundits to perform last rites in its various crematoria. Several other functions are carried out by private contractors and other individuals. A massive economy is associated with cremation grounds: the materials required for final rituals, wood, etc. Boatmen who ferry mourners to immerse remains in the river after the cremation earn money by selling nails from their boats/ /(these sell for up to Rs 100) because the nails are considered auspicious, and effective in warding off evil spirits. The research also examined the ecological/environmental damage caused by the cutting of trees for wood, and the heavy smoke in and around cremation grounds that affected the health of local residents. The researcher stated that while the electric crematorium is clean and easy to manage, and burns bodies in less than three hours, most people still choose traditional cremation. The municipal corporation is trying to hand over the cremation grounds to private agencies, societies and trusts. Some are now being administered by the Arya Samaj. The rate of fuel wood is Rs 949 per quintal, and all negotiation with regard to the required money and offerings for each cremation is done by the pundit. Women are traditionally excluded from both graveyards and cremation grounds, but among Punjabis, for instance, there is no ban on women being present at cremations. Regarding graveyards, the research claimed that barring a few, all (about 412) are under direct control of the Waqf Board. This has assigned the responsibility of maintenance to different committees comprising of “senior” and “respectable” citizens. The process of burial is very simple as compared with the process of cremation, and involves fewer administrative formalities. But the labourers working in the graveyards are paid less for digging and filling of graves than cremation ground attendants are paid for supervising pyres. The digging of one “qabr” takes 2-3 hours; there are “pakka” graves with headstones, and “kaccha” graves that are unmarked. The actual wage of a gravedigger is as low as Rs 25 per qabr, but they normally get a baksheesh from the relatives/mourners who bring the body for burial. Private graveyards do exist, though these are very few in number. There is a trend among families to reserve graves for their members, in the same or adjacent plots. The number of graveyards has declined over the last fifty years, and some are in disuse; it might be profitable and an efficient use of resources to convert this land into a venture through which money could be earned. 3. / Chander Nigam /“Ek hi Patri par Daurti Nyay aur Anyay ki Gadi: Tees Hazari” (Justice and Injustice on a Single Track: Tees Hazari) This research was an ethnographic, richly textured and anecdotal study of Tees Hazari, the oldest District and Sessions Court in Delhi. It described the day-to-day functioning of the court, the activities on the court premises, and the relationship between advocates, magistrates, court staff and lawyers of the Delhi Bar Association (DBA). The researcher started her presentation with excerpts of an interview with a “mulaqati” named Rajjo, whose brother-in-law had been jailed several months earlier. The interview was an entry point into an analysis of court functioning and the attitude of the main actors in this space. Rajjo alleged that the judicial system was full of injustice and corruption; the police and lower level staff only work after they receive bribes; judges do not think independently but depend entirely on the advocates to lead them through each case, statement by statement. Lawyers who have been practicing for 15 years are called “seniors”; their work consists of giving dictation to their stenos and presenting the final argument in court. Their minimum charges are Rs 11,000 per case. The younger lawyers working for the seniors are known as “juniors”. Some seniors prefer female juniors because they feel women tend to use time efficiently and work sincerely. Others want to hire female juniors because it makes the chambers (the advocates' offices in the courts) “pleasant”. There are also those who employ female juniors as “time pass”. The researcher stated that though the seniors call their juniors “associates”, they extract work from them without mercy. The situation of the juniors is worse than that of daily wage labourers, in some senses. After working from 9.30 to 5.30 at the courts, most juniors have to go to the offices of their seniors in different corners of Delhi. They are also asked to go to courts in nearby cities such as Faridabad, Bahadurgarh, Gurgaon, Ghaziabad and Sonepat. Their salaries, ranging from Rs 5000 to Rs 8000, are disbursed in installments. There is also one category of advocates that, according to the researcher, “start following the client from the gate”, swearing that they will take the responsibility of solving the client's problem even without knowing the specifics of the case. One respondent claimed that all such advocates were “Bihari” and had defamed the profession. There were also dozens of touts swarming around, offering every possible service and looking for easy victims among the hundreds of harassed clients wandering around, lost and burdened. The research also described the “formal and informal market” being simultaneously conducted in the court premises. According to some respondents, everyone has full knowledge of the activities, including prostitution, that take place in Tees Hazari; this is the safest place for “flesh traders” because the police cannot raid the chambers or arrest people there. The paper also talked about the history of the chambers and the encroachments that are taking place; the chambers were demolished during the Emergency and rebuilt later. The number of chambers has increased over a period of time and illegally built chambers have been authorised. Another aspect discussed in the paper was the “militancy” of the Delhi Bar Association, which arbitrarily goes on strike to express solidarity with issues unrelated to law, such as when the power companies cut off supply to penalise people stealing electricity. The speaker asked why the court could not “behave properly” with office bearers/members of the bar, which was also responsible for maintaining canteens, libraries, etc. She described her experience of unsuccessfully trying to access the documents of the DBA; and her findings that over the last few years, the number of divorce cases have increased tremendously, with more than half of these being filed by women. At the same time, women working in the courts have to negotiate the traditional prejudice held by male colleagues, that women who stay behind on the premises after 5 p.m. are disreputable. She also noted that women lawyers are hesitant in asking clients for their fees, in contrast to their male counterparts; and the female court staff are hesitant in asking clients for “kharcha pani” (bribes) while the male staff have no such qualms. *Panel 4/ The Past, Present and Future of Work* 1./ Dhiraj K. Nite /“Colliery Mazdoors in the Jharia Coalfield: Family, Time, Work and Mining Capitalism (1920-1970)” Dhiraj K. Nite's research focused on the struggles of “family /mazdoors/” (families of labourers with gender-specific tasks) in the Jharia coalfields of present-day Jharkhand, from 1920 to 1970. Nite emphasized that his definition of family was not a traditional one, necessarily underwritten by biological or legal ties, but one “where a group of people . . . feel a sense of ties and attachment”. Nevertheless, he shows how this system of “family gangs” evolved a relationship with modern mining capitalism, with a “socio-familial relation [which was] manifest even at the workplace”. Nite sketched out how these “family gangs” might have “apprehended” socio-familial time”, and how the labour/time regime might have affected the social organisation of a /mazdoor'/s family. The system finally began to disintegrate after a series of shocks and a new paradigm for work: the employers' need for efficiency overriding the necessary breaks women needed during periods of childbirth, and other constraints placed on work by the family system, after economic slumps. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the /mazdoors/ witnessed “the reorganisation of the production process and work force and the gradual removal of women and child workers”. Despite a series of protests, the workers faced “adamant and adverse” employers and the state, and were forced to weather a “consequent subsistence crisis”. 2./ Balvinder Singh and Sanjay Sharma /“Vaidya Avedh: Tambu mein Dawakhana” (Illegal Healers: Dispensary in a Tent) This research describes the informal medical practices, based on traditional remedies derived from herbal sources, that are dispensed in roadside 'tent' clinics in cities and are a feature of urban life. The Chittori tribal community involved in these practices was reluctant to be interviewed and showed extreme distrust of the researchers' camera and tape recorder, so the methodological strategies had to be reshaped, and other ethnographic modes adopted for purposes of the study. The remedies are “secret” and closely guarded within family lineages, passed on from generation to generation. They are not revealed to outsiders, nor even to other members of the community. The project attempted to articulate the complex and mostly inimical relationship the practitioners negotiate with the world outside their tent clinics. Society looks upon the healers as quacks, yet turns to them despite cheap/free medical attention (often of doubtful quality, however) being available in government hospitals; the healers choose to segregate themselves socially, yet are dependent upon their clients for economic survival. The research included a critique of the mainstream medical establishment in which the general population has little faith; a description of the domestic life of the practitioners and the arduous conditions in which they live, and which they refuse to change; and a collection of popular advertisments and posters depicting well known, historically and commercially established traditional healers, who continue to serve a large and trusting urban population despite ongoing public scrutiny and scepticism. 3. /Sanjay Joshi /“Hashiye par Padhare Nagrik” (Citizens on the Margins) This ethnographic study examined the lives of security guards working in housing societies in a particular East Delhi locality. It described the relationship between the guards and the inhabitants of those societies, the working conditions, pay, hardships and oppressions that these “citizens on the margins” have to negotiate. The paper also critiques the concepts of property/ownership that create a particular mode of sociality, enforce the need for protection and legitimate/institutionalize the related need for protectors, in the form of security guards, and also the gates which, in combination with the guards, restrict outside entry into the material settlement as well as into community life. 4. /Iram Gufran and Taha Mehmood /“Call Centre Workers in Delhi” This project was a study of the work culture in call centres, a booming industry in Delhi and other metropolitan cities in India, and examines how this influences the lives of the workforce, known as “agents”. A consequence of globalisation, call centres are transforming the lives of the contemporary generation, which is suddenly being able to experience economic freedom, changed and “freer” lifestyles, the breakdown of established patterns of socialisation, and an overall mobility which has inculcated different perspectives. The research describes the inner and outer changes, the complex impact on identity, subjectivity, persona, that takes place through the rigorous training and conditioning enforced by the call centres and their parent companies. The study focuses on issues of identity, language, the particular scripts, cadences, inflections that direct the agent's performance, and are an index of professional value, competence and worth even while they inevitably foster alienation, discontent, dissent. The research explores the daily routine, texture of life, psychological imperatives, exhilaration and aspiration, as well as the exhaustion and disillusion in agents' lives, mandated by the industry's commitment to the “moment of truth”: this is defined in a customer service training manual as “that precise instant when the customers come into contact with any aspect of your business, and on the basis of that contact, form an opinion about the quality of your service and potentially the quality of your product”. Ravi Sundaram chaired the final session. He noted that as work became second nature, its processes became “shrouded in silence” and it was difficult to analyse its mechanisms. In terms of the development of the contemporary imagination, the changing forms of work had a significant role to play. Marx had spoken of wage work as “encompassing”. But the question arose as to whether the category of “wage” continued to effectively describe the myriad forms work assumed. How many of us today drew a “wage” in the classical sense? Could we map the changing forms of work historically? What categories could we use to mark these changes? Did people mobilize conditions of work in different ways? Karim opened the discussion session by asking Dhiraj to clarify some of the terminology he had used in his description of social and sexual relations among the workers. Besides heteronormative practices, had he in the course of his research come across instances of a subversion or breaking of heteronormativity? Jeebesh suggested that Dhiraj look at Geerson's (nineteenth-century) glossary, which has a list of 30 terms for “woman”. Dheeraj replied that there were some indications of homosexual behaviour in the population, but he had not included this in his presentation, which was a limited analysis. He had examined the man/woman/child relationship because he was researching the negotiations involved in fulfilling household responsibilities. In general, his own questions regarding the issue of homosexuality/gay rights focused on whether homosexual practices supported the social function of reproduction. The feminist demand for equality was valid, but his research interests were confined to production and its relationship to reproduction. The categories he had used referred to the sexual relationship between two people, based on mutuality and not coercion of any kind, as well as the general societal perceptions surrounding unions of this or that nature. When both parties were equally involved, it was “mutual sex love”; “chivalrous sex love” was a medieval term for valid ties between two people, authorized by the Church. In his research, the term was used to refer to cases where moral discourse legitimized sex ties. He had come across new archival material that subverted the patriarchal family. But this did not help him to understand the other forms of familial relationship in which the female and male partners depended on each other equally. Rohini raised two issues with regard to the “dawakhana” research. She noted that the researchers had continually referred to this indigenous system as an “alternative” system which people continued to use despite free care being available in government hospitals. We need to be alert to the “politics of validation”, that determined which system was valued, which negated, and who profited/who suffered loss, within these parameters. Khaled commented that whenever he had spoken to security guards, they complained about their low pay and long working hours, but even more vociferously declared that those they protected “were not worth the protection”. Sharada asked Dhiraj if he had asked the guards about their own perceptions of what constituted “security”. Jeebesh asked Sanjay to clarify the intellectual problem he was trying to address in his research. We wanted a society that was secure and did not need any security guards. Yet we are also pushing the guards to unionise and demand better wages, working conditions, etc. Through activism of this kind, we ended up reproducing the conditions of the initial oppression. Sanjay replied that he had spent many years as a political activist and this influenced his research to some degree. The guards he had interviewed came mostly from the western belt of UP, and despite the terrible conditions of employment they worked twelve-hour shifts without any day off in the week. Perhaps this kind of endurance was seen as manly, and tied into notions of honour that prevailed in their feudal backgrounds. These guards were “on the margins of the margin”, and the question of how secure they felt themselves, did not even arise. Even when they were sick or had some crisis, they were not entitled to leave. Iram and Taha responded to several questions on perceptions of self and changing forms of work. They suggested that the fluidity in the call centre industry was perhaps reflective of the nebulous nature of the work regime itself. Employees did not look on this work as being permanent or stable in any way. The relationship to time and the relationship to money was fluid and constantly changing, as well. On a good day you earned about $10, on the average. On a bad day, you earned nothing. There was no craving for hierarchy/power, in the classical sense. In general, employees did not wish to be team leaders or supervisors, or get a promotion. The incentive was money. If you earned Rs 25,000 per month and were still an “agent”, the lowest rung in the company, it was all right. The employees had a practical and flexible approach to their work and did not see themselves as “cyber coolies” or as objects of pity; they felt empowered through good pay that enabled them to live a particular lifestyle. They did not object to having to assume an identity, it was just part of the work, and not a big issue. Preeti commented that the service sector model was a direct outcome of globalisation and was “here to stay”. The logic of the new global economy where the movement of capital was free and the movement of labour restricted, the service sector was a logical turn for production to take. Ravi Sundaram recalled a recent issue of /The Economic/ /Times/ which reported a decline in the shift to the services sector. Clearly, “not everyone was queuing up to join call centres”. Even within these new work spaces there were deep hierarchies. What exactly did we mean by services sector work? The sharp division between production and service continued to be problematic. The categories of “wage labour” and “working class” had traditionally formed the foundation of a moral critique and had played an important role in mobilising new values around these categories. The last segment of the session was a summing up of the workshop. Ravi Sundaram commented that this year, the third year of the independent fellowships programme, had been particularly memorable, in terms of the quality as well as the range of projects. Shuddha said that he too was delighted by the diversity of work that had been presented over a very intense three days. He suggested that when we think about the criteria of knowledge production, we need to focus on the plural forms that this process assumed, and speak of “qualities” of research rather than a “quality” of research. It was incorrect, in his view, to construct a hierarchy between the kinds and forms of research. The generosity reflected in the process of sharing of opinions had been heartwarming. This process needed to be extended to the Reader-list in order to ensure that this climate of conversation and conviviality had a stability and duration. Shuddha then briefly clarified the protocols of posting on the Reader-list. Each posting was archived, and therefore should have a specific subject heading, to make it easier to access. He urged the independent fellows to continue writing on the Reader-list, since this continuous sharing of ideas was a valuable process. In the feedback session, Yousuf pointed out that it would be helpful if guidelines were initially provided for the research and writing process. Rupali asked if a format that accommodated visuals could be included in the Reader-list. Rutul asserted that since Sarai expected researchers to post regularly, posters would similarly benefit from regular feedback from Sarai on the postings. Preeti added that future fellows might benefit if they corresponded regularly with specific people at Sarai. *Performance* /Taran Khan /“Socialist Wives” The independent fellowships workshop concluded with an evocative dramatisation of Taran Khan's project “Socialist Wives”, enacted in the Sarai interface area. The hour-long play, supported by audiovisual material, described the experiment in community living of three legends of the Urdu renaissance and their wives, all members of the Communist party, in 1950's Bombay: Ali Sardar Jafri, married to Sultana; S.M. Mehdi, married to Zehra; and Kaifi Azmi, married to Shaukat. The closely bonded, bohemian couples shared a unique friendship, enduring poverty and precarious employment, but always sustaining a passionate commitment to activist theatre and journalism, literature, socialism and ideologies of protest. These well-born, conservatively-reared Muslim women made a radical entry into domains such as theatre, performance and broadcasting, generally taboo for women in that era. The script, in the form of various first-person accounts and interlinked dialogue, articulated the experience of being a particular kind of emancipated woman in a particular milieu, documenting anecdotes and observations that provide a view of a critical but neglected period of social/cultural transformation. From kalisaroj at rediffmail.com Mon Dec 13 17:49:38 2004 From: kalisaroj at rediffmail.com (avinash jha) Date: 13 Dec 2004 12:19:38 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Derrida through Newspapers Message-ID: <20041213121938.18755.qmail@webmail18.rediffmail.com>   Derrida through Newspapers Meaning: “He insisted that the act of reading extends from literary texts to films, to works of art, to popular culture, to political scenarios, and to philosophy itself. The practice of "reading" insists that our ability to understand relies on our capacity to interpret signs. It also presupposes that signs come to signify in ways that no particular author or speaker can constrain in advance through intention. This does not mean that our language always confounds our intentions, but only that our intentions do not fully govern everything we end up meaning by what we say and write. [Butler] “ Derrida’s groundbreaking approach to conventional theories of textuality deserve a special mention. This applies to our understanding of the very nature of ‘meaning’ itself. Usually ‘discourse’ or knowledge refers to a ‘centre’ because a) it provides a focus for knowledge to be organized and b) it thereby allows that particular truth or revelation to be presented as absolute. This delimits the meaning(s), restricting its proliferation or free-play. The process of logocentrism allows meanings to exist prior to language and therefore beyond a text. Derrida overthrows this belief by his landmark statement – “ there is nothing outside the text.” [Paul] “Derrida's starting point was his rejection of a common model of knowledge and language, according to which understanding something requires acquaintance with its meaning, ideally a kind of acquaintance in which this meaning is directly present to consciousness. For him, this model involved "the myth of presence", the supposition that we gain our best understanding of something when it - and it alone - is present to consciousness. He argued that understanding something requires a grasp of the ways in which it relates to other things, and a capacity to recognise it on other occasions and in different contexts - which can never be exhaustively predicted. He coined the term "differance" ( différance in French, combining the meanings of difference and deferral) to characterise these aspects of understanding, and proposed that differance is the ur-phenomenon lying at the heart of language and thought, at work in all meaningful activities in a necessarily elusive and provisional way. Deconstruction and Differance: The demonstration that this is so largely constituted the work of deconstruction, in which writers who laid claim to purity or transparency or universality - and this would include most of the significant figures in the philosophical tradition - could be shown, by close and careful reading, to be undoing those very claims in the act of making them by their implicit recognition of the ongoing work of differance. it was De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) that created the greatest stir. After an introductory discussion in which he argued that "grammatology", the theory of written signs, can point the way to an understanding of language freed from the myth of presence and open to the work of differance, he entered upon a brilliant deconstruction of the accounts of language given by Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Rousseau and others. Derrida gives most attention to Rousseau, and connects the priority Rousseau gives to speech over writing with the priority he gives to nature over culture, to melody over harmony, and to coitus over masturbation. Derrida noted that, in each case, Rousseau uses the word "supplement" to designate the relationship between the second term and the first. The word suggests that the second term is inessential, merely adding to the first term, which is primary, full, self-sufficient. Yet a secondary meaning of the word "supplement" seemed to Derrida to be playing around all Rousseau's uses of it: as the supplement to a dictionary supplies its missing terms, so writing, culture, harmony and masturbation all make up for deficiencies in what was supposed to be the perfect and complete entity to which they are in an ancillary relation. The second entity, not quite under the author's control, comes to set the terms which make possible the first entity. "Supplementarity", thus understood, is a manifestation of differance; and other manifestations are explored in Derrida's discussions of the Greek terms pharmakon (both medicine and poison) and hymen (both separation and marriage) in his next major work La Dissémination (Dissemination, 1972). [Attridge and Baldwin] “To conceptualise the way meaning works, Derrida coined the term “differance”. Linguistically speaking we know that a word has a particular reference because it is that thing and not something else (viz. a dog is a dog because it is not a cat). Derrida exposed this belief by propounding the problematic view that meaning, instead of being stable, is rather always in a state of contention and flux. Hence when we think of a dog we also think of what it is not, viz. a cat, a mouse, or a hog! We either negate or silence those different and opposing meanings. This kind of fracture (“aporia”) reveals the otherness of meaning that we may sideline but can never deny. Further, Derrida showed that meaning is never completely defined because it is endlessly “deferred”. Institutions like interpretive schools constantly try to limit the ways in which a text can be read to facilitate their own convenience. However, as Derrida points out, the more they attempt at a particular closure, the more other meanings which are excluded demand to be heard.” [Paul] “When responsibly understood, the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading clichés often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things apart. The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure – be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious – that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out. These exclusive structures can become repressive – and that repression comes with consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems. .” [Taylor] Mourning: “Over the years, he delivered a series of moving eulogies, a collection of which was published in 2001 as The Work Of Mourning, but whose French title is even more apt: Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Each time unique, the end of the world).” [Attridge and Baldwin] “He writes, "There come moments when, as mourning demands (deuil oblige), one feels obligated to declare one's debts. We feel it our duty to say what we owe to the friend." He cautions against "saying" the debt and imagining that one might then be done with the debt that way. He acknowledges instead the "incalculable debt" that one that he does not want to pay: "I am conscious of this and want it thus." He ends his essay on Lyotard with a direct address: "there it is, Jean Francois, this is what, I tell myself, I today would have wanted to try and tell you." There is in that attempt, that essai, a longing that cannot reach the one to whom it is addressed, but does not for that reason forfeit itself as longing. The act of mourning thus becomes a continued way of "speaking to" the other who is gone, even though the other is gone, in spite of the fact that the other is gone, precisely because that other is gone.” [Butler] “Post-modernism in its renunciation of reason, power and truth identifies itself as a process of endless mourning, lamenting the loss of securities which, on its own argument, were none such. Yet this everlasting melancholia accurately monitors the refusal to let go, which I express in the phrase describing post-modernism as ‘despairing rationalism without reason’. One recent ironic aphorism for this static condition between desire for presence and acceptance of absence occurs in an interview by Derrida: ‘I mourn therefore I am.” [Rose} “``With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time,'' resident Jacques Chirac said in a statement, calling Derrida a ``citizen of the world.'' French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres called Derrida ``profoundly humanist,'' saying the philosopher spent his final years working for the ``values of hospitality,'' particularly between Europe and the Mediterranean ``He wanted to build an open idea of Europe,'' a ministry statement said. {Ganley] Butler: Judith Butler’s obituary Paul: Subhadeep Paul in Statesman [Resisting Closure] October 17 2004 Attridge and Baldwin: Guardian 11th October Taylor: Mark C. Taylor in Asian Age 16 October 2004 [NYT article] Rose: Mourning Becomes the Law, Cambridge University Press. Ganley: Associated Press, Saturday October 9, 2004 9:01 PM -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041213/eb4e154c/attachment.html From jeebesh at sarai.net Mon Dec 13 18:02:52 2004 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:02:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] "The Contested Commons/ Trespassing Publics" - Public Lecture Series Message-ID: <41BD8BF4.5000009@sarai.net> "The Contested Commons/ Trespassing Publics" - *Public Lecture Series* The Public Service Broadcasting Trust, the Sarai Programme of the CSDS, Delhi and Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore present a series of three public lectures by world renowned scholars, which examine the fate of the commons after new conflicts over the public domain, and intellectual property. I. 6th January, 2005 Thursday, 7 pm, Auditorium, India Habitat Center, Lodi Road, Delhi * "Between Anarchy and Oligarchy: The Prospects for Sovereignty and Democracy in a Connected World "* Prof. Siva Vaidyanathan, New York University Information communication technologies have collapsed distances and lowered the price of connections and transactions around the world. We have only just begun making sense of the changes wrought by the new methods and habits fostered by these technologies. But we have no shortage of grand, totalizing visions that aim to capture the changes we are experiencing. In the 1990s we went through a phase dominated by naive visions of globalized monoculture and consensus, with the "end of history" considered to be the apex of "cultural evolution." Since 2001 the world has been viewed by some (Bush and Bin Laden, chiefly) as torn among "Civilizations." Now we hear explicit calls for a new Western imperialism, based on assumptions of universal benevolence. In opposition to such panicked or triumphal calls for a New World Order, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have issued a description of a new global anarchistic state of mind ("Empire" and "Multitude") based on the emerging forms of opposition to the mainstream forms of globalized corporate centralization. This paper finds fault with both Bush and Negri. It argues that efforts to create a world polarized on models of oligarchy and anarchy do not enrich most lives in meaningful ways. Instead, this paper argues for a careful consideration of the democratic potential of the new information ecosystems, and points out specific points of hope and models of optimism that can guide our global future toward a more just state, opening possibilities without sacrificing the granularity of the local, the specific, and the experimental. Siva Vaidyanathan is a well-known cultural historian, media scholar and public intellectual. . He is the author of the classic Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) II. 7th January, 2005 Friday, 7 pm, Auditorium, India Habitat Center, Lodi Road, Delhi * "U.S Path to Wealth and Power: Intellectual Piracy and the making of America" * Prof. Doron Ben-Atar Fordham University During the first decades of America's existence as a nation, private citizens, voluntary associations, and government officials encouraged the smuggling of European inventions and artisans to the New World. These actions openly violated the intellectual property regimes of European nations. At the same time, the young republic was developing policies that set new standards for protecting industrial innovations. The American patent law of 1790 restricted patents exclusively to original inventors and established the principle that prior use anywhere in the world was grounds for invalidating a patent. But the story behind the story is a little more complicated - and leaders of the developing world would be wise to look more closely at how the American system operated in its first 50 years. In theory the United States pioneered a new standard of intellectual property that set the highest possible requirements for patent protection-worldwide originality and novelty. In practice, the country encouraged widespread intellectual piracy and industrial espionage. Piracy took place with the full knowledge and sometimes even aggressive encouragement of government officials. Congress never protected the intellectual property of European authors and inventors, and Americans did not pay for the reprinting of literary works and unlicensed use of patented inventions. What fueled 19th century American boom was a dual system of principled commitment to an intellectual property regime combined with absence of commitment to enforce these laws. This ambiguous order generated innovation by promising patent monopolies. At the same time, by declining to crack down on technology pirates, it allowed for rapid dissemination of innovation that made American products better and cheaper. Doron Ben-Atar is professor of history at Fordham University and co-director of Crossroads of Revolution to Cradle of Reform: Litchfield Connecticut 1751-1833. He has won numerous grants and awards, including most recently from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York public library. He is the author of numerous articles and a guest speaker on radio and television stations in the New York area. Ben-Atar's books include The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy (Macmillan 1993), Federalists Reconsidered (University Press of Virginia, 1998) and Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (Yale University Press, 2004). III. 8th January, 2005 Saturday, 7 pm, Auditorium, India Habitat Center, Lodi Road, Delhi *"Magna Carta and the Commons"* Peter Linebaugh University of Toledo Magna Carta has been ignored as a medieval document of little relevance to the modern world at best, or at worst it has been derided as a false facade of liberal intention by Anglo imperialism. Partly as a result of this neglect, fundamental protections against tyranny and aggression have been eroded, such as habeas corpus, trial by jury, prohibition of torture, and due process of law. These cannot be restored without the root and branch recovery of the entire Charter of Liberty which includes the Charter of the Forest. This lost but extraordinary document holds a constitutional key to the future of humanity insofar as it provides protections for the whole earth's commons, particularly its hydrocarbon energy resources, whether these take the form of wood, coal, or petroleum. The key is turned by the women of the planet in Chiapas, Nigeria, India (to name a few places) who have taken the lead in the process of re-commoning what has been privatized and profiteered. Hence, the significance of "widow's estovers" in the Magna Carta as revised after 9/11! Peter Linebaugh is Professor of History at the University of Toledo in Ohio. He is the author of The London Hanged, co-author of The Many Headed Hydra, an editor of Albion's Fatal Tree, and forthcoming studies of the Irish insurrectionist, Edward Despard, as well as Magna Carta. He was raised and educated between two empires, British and American. Schooled in London in the 1940s, tested in Cattaraugus (New York) and Muskogee (Oklahoma) during the 1950s, he finished secondary school at the Karachi Grammar School, before matriculating at Swarthmore College, the liberal, Quaker, college in Pennsylvania. Active there in the civil rights struggle, he then removed to Columbia Univesity in New York until anti-war upheavals of May 1968 when, shaking the dust from his feet, he joined E.P. Thompson at the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick. An educator who respects the organizer and the agitator, he has published in the Nation, Viet-Report, New Left Review, Times Literary Supplement, Midnight Notes, and his occasional essays may be read on www.CounterPunch. org. - ALL ARE INVITED - _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From surekha at servelots.com Tue Dec 14 17:37:46 2004 From: surekha at servelots.com (surekha at servelots.com) Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 07:07:46 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] Indic IME extension for Firefox1.0 Message-ID: <308830-220041221412746657@M2W068.mail2web.com> Hi all, Indic IME extension for Firefox is ready and has been uploaded at "http://mail.sarai.net:8080/indic/servlet/WMSearch?di_p=725&urlid=indic&keyw ordid=GENIN9953&viewall=viewall". The extension has been tested on Firefox 1.0 on both Windows 98 and Redhat Linux. We (Raghavan and myself) also have requested for a project page on "http://www.mozdev.org/" and will soon upload the extensions on this site. Looking forward to your feedback. Thanks, Surekha. -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From definetime at rediffmail.com Wed Dec 15 12:55:13 2004 From: definetime at rediffmail.com (sanjay ghosh) Date: 15 Dec 2004 07:25:13 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] (fwd) Balance in the service of falsehood Message-ID: <20041215072513.10861.qmail@webmail47.rediffmail.com> Balance in the service of falsehood The media's failure to challenge official deception over Iraq was the product of a journalism with built-in bias David Edwards and David Cromwell Wednesday December 15, 2004 The Guardian The British and US governments stand accused of lying their way to war on Iraq, both at home and abroad. But while a series of what were widely regarded as nobbled inquiries have at least gone through the motions of holding them to account, there has been no attempt to hold the media to account for its role in making war possible. To his credit, George Monbiot argued on these pages earlier this year that "the falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job." But an examination of this failure, and its roots in a mass media with a long history of protecting and promoting the powerful, is conspicuous by its absence. And yet it is only by exploring these issues that we can answer the question of how it is possible that a free press could fail to challenge even the most transparent govern ment deceptions in the run-up to the attack. The crucial arguments of the vindicated former chief Unscom weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, for example, were largely ignored. In his 2002 book, Ritter - who was at the heart of the inspections process for seven years - argued that the Iraqi regime had cooperated with his team in dismantling "90-95%" of its WMD by December 1998, leaving the country "fundamentally disarmed". Subsequent rearmament would have been impossible, Ritter insisted, and any retained chemical or biological material would long since have become "harmless sludge". But evidence of the success of the 1991-98 inspections - which fundamentally undermined government claims that war was required to enforce disarmament - was given the scantest coverage, even in the liberal press. Of 12,447 Guardian and Observer articles mentioning Iraq in 2003 on the Guardian Unlimited website, Ritter was mentioned in only 17, mostly in passing. Denis Halliday, who set up the UN's oil-for-food programme in Iraq, and who blamed the US and British governments for the huge death toll of Iraqi civilians under sanctions, was mentioned in two articles. His successor, Hans von Sponeck, who also resigned in protest at sanctions, received five mentions. The Independent mentioned Ritter only eight times in 5,648 articles on Iraq in 2003. Ritter's disarmament claim received fewer than a dozen brief mentions in the Guardian the year before. The failure of the liberal media, including the Guardian and Independent, is vital to this debate because, while they are consistently more open than their conservative counterparts, they set the boundaries of permissible dissent. In the case of Iraq, those boundaries helped create a disaster. Thus, while whistleblowers were effectively ignored, one prominent in-house Guardian commentator declared in January 2003 that it was "a given" that Saddam was hiding WMD. Despite the fact that while in 1999 and 2000 the Guardian and the Independent both reported that Unscom inspections had been infiltrated by the CIA, this almost never featured in the saturation 2002-2003 coverage of resumed inspections and Iraqi attitudes to them. In January 1999, a Guardian article described how US officials "acknowledged that American spies participated in the work of United Nations weapons inspectors". In March 2002, the same reporter wrote that "Iraq has stoked war fever" by "rejecting a return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq and calling them 'western spies' for extra measure". We would argue that the media's failure on Iraq was not really a failure at all, but rather a classic product of "balanced" professional journalism. The modern conception of objective reporting is little more than a century old. There was little concern that newspapers were partisan so long as the public was free to choose from a wide range of opinions. Newspapers dependent on advertisers for 75% of their revenues, such as the Guardian and Independent, would have been regarded as independent by few radicals and progressives in, say, the 1940s. Balance was instead provided by a thriving working class-based press. Early last century, however, the industrialisation of the press, and the associated high cost of newspaper production, meant that wealthy private industrialists backed by advertisers achieved dominance in the mass media. Unable to compete on price and outreach, the previously flourishing radical press was brushed to the margins. And just as corporations achieved this unprecedented stranglehold, the notion of professional journalism appeared. The US media analyst Robert McChesney argues: "Savvy publishers understood that they needed to have their journalism appear neutral and unbiased, notions entirely foreign to the journalism of the era of the Founding Fathers." By promoting schools of journalism, media owners could claim that trained editors and reporters were granted autonomy to make decisions based on professional judgment, rather than on the needs of proprietors and advertisers. As a result, owners could present their media monopoly as a service to the community. In Britain, similar developments resulted in "a progressive transfer of [media] power from the working class to wealthy businessmen", in the words of media historians James Curran and Jean Seaton, while dependence on advertising "encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press". Built in to the new concept of neutral, professional journalism were two major biases. First, the actions and opinions of official sources were understood to form the basis of legitimate news. As a result, news came to be dominated by mainstream political and business sources representing establishment interests. As the ITV News political editor, Nick Robinson, commented in relation to the Iraq war controversy: "It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking... That is all someone in my sort of job can do." Second, carrot-and-stick pressures from advertisers, business interests and political parties had the effect of steering journalists in the corporate media away from some issues and towards others. It is inherently implausible that newspapers or broadcasters which are dependent on corporate advertisers for revenue will focus too hard on the destructive impact of these same businesses, whether on public health, the developing world or the environment. The result is that what is regarded as neutral journalism today consistently promotes the views and interests of the powerful. Many journalists reject the idea that a corporate free press is a contradiction in terms. Yet if even the government's most obviously fraudulent pre-war propaganda claims were not seriously challenged, the implications are hardly academic for the next likely targets of US and British military force, be they in Iran, Syria or North Korea. · David Edwards and David Cromwell are the editors of Media Lens editor at medialens.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041215/8872b419/attachment.html From kristoferpaetau at WEB.DE Tue Dec 14 14:52:45 2004 From: kristoferpaetau at WEB.DE (Kristofer Paetau) Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 10:22:45 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] VILLA MAGICA - exhibition documentation Message-ID: <983855996@web.de> VILLA MAGICA was an exhibition featuring a real magician: Tony Price (de Gentleman Magicus...), with a live performance and an outdoor installation of paintings representing magicians in action. You are very welcome to have a look at the documentation featuring poetry by Ruediger Heinze. A web documentation to view at: http://www.paetau.com/downloads/Villa_Magica/Villa_Magica.html A PDF documentation (2,3 MB) to download at: http://www.paetau.com/downloads/Villa_Magica/Villa_Magica.pdf Merry Christmas and a Magic New Year, Kristofer Paetau -- If you do not want mails anymore, you can unsubscribe automatically by sending an empty e-mail from your e-mail account to: ARTINFO-L-unsubscribe-request at listserv.dfn.de If this doesn't work, you probably got this e-mail re-routed through another address: Please reply to this mail and write UNSUBSCRIBE in the mail subject and please indicate some old or alternative e-mail addresses in order to help us unsubscribe you. Thank you and apologizes for the trouble! -- . __________________________________________________________ Mit WEB.DE FreePhone mit hoechster Qualitaet ab 0 Ct./Min. weltweit telefonieren! http://freephone.web.de/?mc=021201 From shivamvij at gmail.com Wed Dec 15 13:30:33 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 13:30:33 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] New Delhi Solidarity Network Message-ID: From: "Neil Sardana" A new forum has been created to help connect activists, social justice organizations, NGO's, and other concerned citizens who work and live in Delhi and surrounding areas. Members are encouraged to post information about upcoming events, meetings, speakers, film screenings, conferences, urgent issues, petitions, and other information related to social justice issues in Delhi. Join the group at www.yahoogroups.com/group/delhisolidarity/ All you do is send an email to delhisolidarity at yahoogroups.com to send what ever information you like. Email delhisolidarity at yahoo.com if you have any questions. Delhi Solidarity Network Email:: delhisolidarity at yahoo.com URL:: http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/delhisolidarity -- -30- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From sunil at mahiti.org Thu Dec 16 01:36:26 2004 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 20:06:26 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Request for Public Review - Free/Open Source Software: Network Infrastructure and Security Message-ID: <1103141185.647.50.camel@box> Dear Friends, The Primer on Free / Open Source Software: Network Infrastructure and Security is being authored by Gaurab Raj Upadhaya of Nepal. Contents Include: Introduction to FOSS and GNU/Linux, Introduction to Network concepts and architectures. Important Network functions, security functions and planning using FOSS. Further references both in terms of books and online resources. Please download a draft from here: http://www.iosn.net/network/foss-network-primer/foss-network-primer-v-03.sxw http://www.iosn.net/network/foss-network-primer/foss-network-primer-v-03.pdf http://www.iosn.net/network/foss-network-primer/foss-network-primer-v-03.doc We would be very grateful if you could send in your comments and feedback by 28 December 2004. ್ ್ ್ ್ Thanks, ಸುನೀಲ್ -- Sunil Abraham, sunil at mahiti.org http://www.mahiti.org 314/1, 7th Cross, Domlur Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka, INDIA Ph/Fax: +91 80 51150580. Mob: (60) 1-2205-3895 Currently on sabbatical with APDIP/UNDP Manager - International Open Source Network Wisma UN, Block C Komplex Pejabat Damansara. Jalan Dungun, Damansara Heights. 50490 Kuala Lumpur. P. O. Box 12544, 50782, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Tel: (60) 3-2091-5167, Fax: (60) 3-2095-2087 sunil at apdip.net http://www.iosn.net http://www.apdip.net "A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property" - Gilberto Gil, Minister of Culture, Brazil From radiofreealtair at gmail.com Wed Dec 15 20:18:23 2004 From: radiofreealtair at gmail.com (Anand Vivek Taneja) Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 20:18:23 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Watching Khamosh Pani in India In-Reply-To: <20041210070537.63443.qmail@web51405.mail.yahoo.com> References: <8178da99041209044360f66107@mail.gmail.com> <20041210070537.63443.qmail@web51405.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <8178da99041215064847ebc581@mail.gmail.com> Dear Yousuf, Sorry for getting back to this email conversation a bit late, but I finally saw Khamosh Pani today... Let me qualify - you mentioned being chilled, sitting surrounding by Punjabis who wept while watching the film. I am someone who is easily identified as a Punjabi, and find myself increasingly easy to identify with being a Punjabi, even with all my problems with easy labelling and simplified identities... And yes, true to form, I wept during the film. And I don't think I can agree with you as to the dichotomy of films that make you think, versus films that make you weep. This is probably a fallacious construction, but here goes - Imagine I am ten years younger, fourteen years old... i have grown up with an increasingly crowded media scape, which since i have been eleven years old, has bombarded me, at least since i was eleven years old (9/11) with images of Islam, Musilms and Pakistan which make me think of them all as mad, bearded fundos, and burkha clad women who are far less desirable and far less cool than, well, Jennifer Lopez... Imagine also that I am the second or third generation since those who moved during partition. i've probably heard stories of the barbarity and the cruelty of the muslims, and of how everything was lost in the violence they perpetrated. maybe i've also heard stories of how muslims actually gave shelter and helped those who were fleeing... (and i have heard such stories from relatives, and well, they're not necessarily either 'secular' or particularly tolerant... ) maybe the post 9/11 media scape has reinforced what i think about Muslims and Pakistan from the more brutal partition stories that have come to me throgh oral, family tradition.... What happens when i bring that baggage into the movie hall? what am i likely to leave with? i don't know. i'm not fourteen any longer, i have studied Partition in some detail, I have fairly liberal, 'progressive', 'secular' tolerant ideals when it comes to matters communal, and nationalistic. but i have the feeling that even if i was a fourteen year old, inclined to believe the worst of Islam, Muslims and Pakistan... this movie would have shaken me to the core, and my prejudices along with that. And it works precisely becuase it is emotionally evocative, without ever missing out on complexity of characterisation, or of historical detail... as filmmakers, i don't know how we can mark the dichotomy between 'thinking' films and 'sentimental' films... films aren't likely to start thinking unless they enage you emotionally - unless you empathize with the characters on the screen, whether 'real' or 'imaginary', and are interested in the trajectories of their lives, and the larger histories their lives are involved in/affected by.... khamosh pani does that, even with the minor characters who give true character to the film - the characters of the 'mast' village barber who defies the fundamentalists with a combination of humour and steel, the village postman and his wife, whose daughter went missing on the Indian side of the border, the 'hero's friend', who tries to reconcile his friend's illicit love-life with their new found Islamic belief... If, at age fourteen I saw this film, i would probablyfeel an empathy for Pkaistanis as 'people like us', at the simplest, crudest level... also, there is no evading the complexity of the history of Partition, and the fact that women bore the violence of both their own men, and of the Other. (If i was fourteen and saw the scenes of Ayesha/Veero/Kirron Kher refusing to jump into the well and running - i would ask questions of every story about Partition that I was ever told...) my sense of perpetrator/victim, good/bad, hero/villain, us/them would go into a major tailspin... or so can only hope... and which brings me to the question raised in your second posting... what if we made a film that was based on the premise, 'what if partition never happened... '(isn't that, in a way, the question veer zara asks, if we are to go by anupam kher's closing speech?) now, i'm quite the fan of alternate history as a sci-fi sub genre, but the best alternate history works with an awareness of the complexity of the history we have inherited, and of the fraught times that we bear witness to... the best alternative history is also, often, fairly depressing... but as film-makers, or writers, or historians, I don't think we can make refernece to the future without looking back at the past... and were i to look back at the past, and Partition, and acknowledge that the past happened, and that it was violent, but it was a violence and a guilt that cannot be blamed on anyone group of people - i don't think i could choose a better film than Khamosh Pani - becuase it never evades the past, or simplifies it, but dwells on how we can live on, even perhaps accept, the memory of the fraught past, util people try to simplify their worldview, and their world once again... i don't know how lucid or sensible this sounds, but I'd like to quote Walter Benjamin, whose Theses on The Philosophy of History were written after the Nazi takeover of Germany, German history, and Germman memory... '... nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments...' the mark of redemption, for India and Pakistan, is perhaps when we can cite all the horrors of Partition - without silencing voices, without flinching from discomfort, without the urge to simplify and fit into a more acceptable view of 'what really happened'... I's like to think of Khamosh Pani as a citation of the past of that order... cheers, Anand On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 23:05:37 -0800 (PST), Yousuf wrote: > Dear Anand > I believe that it is possible to make a film/media > product that can entertain as well as make us think - > its a challange that few filmmakers take. It is > probably taken for granted that the populace who goes > to see veer-zaara or any other sentimental > (un-thinking) film will remain where they are, and > cannot 'mature'. But I am sure the average audience is > ready for an alternative. > > I remember one effort of this kind of film was Zakhm > (from the Mahesh Bhatt family) which used > sentimentality but also made people think - it didn't > offend only one community (though some thought that it > was more pro-Muslim). It wasn't a box-office hit but > its a tool that we use in our campaigns. > > Actually such films could become problematic only when > they depend too much on real historical events, and > romaticize them. They do not try any alternative > histories or alternative futures. I am sure if someone > makes a film on "What if Partition hadn't happend?" or > What if the British never colonized us? the average > audience would be curious. One could even make a > futuristic film on exploring tactics of mutual > survival/co-existance by Hindus and Muslims, of course > by keeping all the history and sentimentality and > song-and-dance in it. Its a challange that filmmakers > need to take if they are genuinely interested in using > popular cinema for social change. > > Yousuf > > --- Anand Vivek Taneja > wrote: > > > Dear Yousuf, > > > > This is not a reply to your mail, directly, but off > > on a tangent. > > > > Khamosh Pani is not, as you write (and as the media > > has widely > > reported) the first Pakistani film to be released in > > India. > > > > There were a few Pakistani Punjabi films released in > > India in the mid > > nineteen fifties, the most prominent of them beig > > 'Dulla Bhatti', > > released in 1956. > > I am absolutely definite about Dulla Bhatti because > > of > > fieldwork/interviews at Imperial Cinema, PaharGanj - > > where the film > > was screened, and was a hit, catering to a large > > refugee population. > > > > Dulla Bhatti, the character on who the film is > > based, is a fairly > > important character in Punjabi folklore - a bandit, > > and RobinHood type > > chivalrous rebel, who opposes the tyranny of Mughal > > tax collection in > > Akbar's time. > > > > Apparently, songs sung during the annual 'Lohri' > > celebrations allude > > to Dulla Bhatti. Dulla Bhatti has, perhaps > > retrospectively, been > > identified as 'Musli'm, a category which might have > > been fariy fluid > > back in sixteenth century Punjab. > > > > Coming back to the points you have raised - > > > > Last year, as part of my graduation from MCRC, along > > with two other > > people, Akshay Singh and Sakina Ali, I made a film > > on the twentieth > > century histories of the Purana Qila, 'The Past is a > > Foreign > > Country...' > > (which you have seen being edited on FCP) > > > > The film, among other things, focuses on the Muslim > > refugee camp which > > came up inside the Purana Qila after the Delhi riots > > of September '47. > > It is not a pleasant dwelling - at all. Along with > > this, there are > > fairly obvious and un-nuanced fulminations against > > anti-Muslim > > prejudice in the preservation of monuments and the > > presentation of > > history.... > > > > It is not a great film, by any standards - but in > > India, in Delhi, it > > has gone down well with audiences - generating > > awareness of the > > marginalised hsitories of the city, and debates > > about the politics of > > heritage conservation. it also gets a few laughs at > > the digs at our > > right-wingers. > > > > In April this year, I took the film to Lahore, and > > screened it for an > > audience of about eighty students at the Lahore > > University of > > Management Sciences. > > It turned out that some of them had grandparents who > > had come to > > Pakistan via the Purana Qila camps. and during the > > discusssion that > > followed, we moved away from issues of conservation, > > and i somehow > > ended up defending India in general, and the Indian > > state in > > particular - 'we're not that bad' - something I > > never thought I'd have > > to do. > > > > I guess what I'm trying to say is that we,as > > film-makers,or writers, > > try and make sense of the specific time and place we > > live in - and > > present them for People Like Us - by which I don't > > people who > > necessarily agree with one, but who inhabit the same > > media-scape, so > > to speak, and have inherited similar recieved > > histories. > > > > In that sense, of course, Paksitanis are not People > > Like Us, and vice > > versa. we do not inhabit the same media scape, we > > have not > > recieved/inherited the same histories. And which is > > why you don't need > > to go out of your way to make a Gadar, to cause > > discomfort or raise > > anger against the 'Other'. > > > > Last week, I saw a beautifuly made film called 'The > > Rock Star and the > > Mullahs' which has a liberal Pakistani Muslim > > (Salman Ahmed of the > > rock group 'Junoon') confronting fundamentalists > > about the ban on the > > public performance of music in the North West > > Frontier Province. And > > yet, doubts were raised as to whether the film, > > instead of > > demonstrating that not all Muslims are jehadis, was > > in fact > > reinforcing stereotypes about Pakistan... > > > > As long as we make films for 'Indians' and > > 'Pakistanis' there is no > > way we can escape creating stereotypes and > > 'othering' on the Other > > Side, as long as we're dealing with Kashmir, or the > > Partition, or > > communal violence, or religious fundamentalism... > > > > ...is it possible to make a film which deals, > > however tangentially, > > with Partition, Communal Violence, Kashmir or > > religious > > fundamentalism... without someone in the audience > > getting very bitter? > > > > ... unless, of course, it's something like > > 'Veer-Zaara' ;-) ? > > > > Cheers, > > Anand > > > > > > On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 02:45:43 -0800 (PST), Yousuf > > wrote: > > > Watching "Khamosh Pani" in India > > > (And why I cannot use it for peace activism) > > > > > > Yousuf Saeed > > > > > > While Pakistani director Sabiha Sumer's 2003 film > > > Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters) is getting rave > > reviews > > > and highly emotional applause in many Indian > > theatres, > > > here are some personal thoughts, if anyone's > > > interested. For those who haven't seen it (and are > > > being reminded by the "must-watch" reports), > > Khamosh > > > Pani, the first Pakistani film ever released in > > Indian > > > theatres, is about an idyllic Pakistani village > > called > > > Charkhi which sees the rise of Islamic > > fundamentalism > > > in 1979's Ziaul Haq regime, and how it affects the > > > ordinary villagers such as Ayesha, her son Saleem, > > and > > > many others, including the visiting Sikh pilgrims > > from > > > India. I shouldn't reveal the full story to spoil > > the > > > fun for those who haven't seen it â€" it's great > > cinema > > > to watch. I only want to express a chilling > > uneasiness > > > I had while watching it at PVR cinema surrounded > > by > > > many Punjabi families, a number of them sobbing > > > through the film. > > > > > > Much has already been written, produced, staged > > and > > > sung about the subject of India's Partition (on > > both > > > sides of the border), and would continue to, since > > its > > > horrible memories still haunt a large number of > > > affected people. But the question we must ask > > today: > > > is this memory going to help us resolve any of the > > > present day crisis, or is it only adding further > > fuel > > > to the fire. These days, when I watch a movie (or > > a > > > documentary or TV show) on the subject of > > communalism, > > > India-Pakistan and so on, (especially after 9/11 > > and > > > === message truncated === > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. > http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail > -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup. http://www.synchroni-cities.blogspot.com/ From vivek at sarai.net Thu Dec 16 11:54:07 2004 From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan) Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 11:54:07 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] selected Independent Fellows 2004-2005 Message-ID: <41C12A07.3030700@sarai.net> Dear all, Because we seem to be having some problem uploading this list to our website, I post below the list of selected independent fellows this year. Thanks, Vivek. FINAL LIST OF SARAI INDEPENDENT FELLOWSHIPS 2004-2005 /Selected Hindi I-Fellows/ /(Alphabetical by last name)/ Anurag Laghu Patrika Andolan: Abhivyakti ke Naye Aayam: Ek Padtal/Little Magazine Movement: New Dimensions of Expression Vijender Singh Chauhan Beeti Vibhavari Jaag ri: Dilli ke City-scape mein Dik wa Kaal / Time and Space in the Cityscape of Delhi S.M. Irfan Awazein FM Radio kee/Voices of FM Radio Archana Jha Nautunki Shahar mein: Audyogik nagri Kanpur mein lok manch kala ke vikas wa patan ka anveshan / Nautanki in the Industrial City of Kanpur: A Historical Study Sunil Kumar Aa Mata Tujhe Dil ne Pukara: Khani Dilli ki Jagaran Partiyon ki / Jagaran Tales in Delhi Himanshu Ranjan Hindi-Urdu kshetra ke ek sanskritik kendra ke roop mein Ilahabad ka Vikas aur Hastakshep / The Rise and Fall of Allahabad as the Intellectual-cultural capital of the Hindi-Urdu belt Gurminder Singh Samaj par Langar ka Arthik wa Samajik Prabhav: ek adhyayan / A Study of the Langar and its Social and Economic Impact Jitendra Shrivastav Ek Shahar ke Roop mein Gorakhpur ki Pehchan mein Gita Press aur Kalyan ki Bhoomika / Role of Gita Press and Kalyan in the making of Gorakhpur's identity Prem Kumar Tiwari Dilli ka ek Pravasi Gaon: Sahipur, Shalimarbagh / Sahipur: A Migrant Village in Delhi /Selected English I- Fellows/ /(Alphabetical by Last Name)/ Prayas Abhinav Ahmedabad Publicity Promises in the Public Space in Ahmedabad S.Ananth Vijaywada The Culture of Business : The Informal Sector and Finance Buisness in Vijaywada Hilal Bhat Srianagar Shrine as an Anodyne in Strife Torn Kashmir Urmila Bhirdikar Pune The Relationship Between the Production and Consumption of Thumri and Allied Forms : The Female Impersonator - Bal Gandharva Moyukh Chatterjee and Swara Bhaskar Delhi Of Riots and Ruins : Space and Violence in Vatva, Gujarat Sudeshna Chatterjee Delhi Children's Friendship with Place : A Framework for Evaluating the Environmental Childfriendliness in Indian Cities Karen Coelho Chennai Tapping In : Urban Water Conflicts as Citizenship Claims in Chennai Sumangala Damodaran Delhi Protest Through Music : A Documentation and Analysis of the Structure, Content and Context of the Musical Tradition of the IPTA Nitoo Das Delhi Hypertextual Poetry : the Poetry of MSN Poetry Communities Uddipan Datta Tezpur The Growth of Print Nationalism and Assamese Identity in the Early Colonial Period Reading Through Two Early Assamese Magazines Madhavi Desai Ahmedabad Women and their Spatial Narratives in the City of Ahmedabad Mahmood U R Farooqui Delhi Tale Tellers : Dastangoyee - The Culture of Story Telling in Urdu Dev Kamal Ganguly Hyderabad The Culture and Sociological Significance of the Genre of Crime Pulp Fiction in Bengal Syed Bismillah Gilani Delhi The Kashmiri Encounter in Delhi Shai Heredia Mumbai Indian Experimental Fillm Excavating A Lost Indian Film Form Syed Khalid Jamal and Amit Ghosh Delhi Work Culture in Fast Food Chains Kiran Jonnalagadda Bangalore An Investigation of how Form Affects Discussion and Community in Online Discussion Spaces Vasudha Joshi Kolkata History and Storytelling about Kolkata and Howrah Integrating Narratives and Database Boddhisattva Kar and Subhalakshmi Roy Delhi Messing with the Bhadraloks : Towards a Social History of the Mess Houses in Calcutta 1890s-1990s Kuldeep Kaur Chandigarh The Hospital Labour Room as a Space for Unheard Voices Maninder Jit Kaur Delhi Spoke/d Vision: Cyclists in Delhi Pankaj Rishi Kumar Mumbai Ponytails-Rings-Punches : Female Boxers in India Lakshmi Kutty Mumbai High Rise Hygiene : Narrativising Mumbai's New Urban Culture Faraaz Mahmood Udaipur A Study of Changing Banking Practices in Udaipur Anannya Mehta Delhi The Viewership of Non Commercial and Independent Film in Delhi Kaiwan Mehta Mumbai Reading Histories - Migration and Culture : The Politics of Mapping and Representation of Urban Communities (Purba Kolkata) Nagarik Mancha Kolkata Factory Closures, Plight of Workers and Urban Space Veena Naregal Delhi Informal Economies and Distribution Practices : Studying Bollywood Leela Rani Narzary, Nidhi Bal Singh, Sabir Haque Delhi Developments of the Eastern Yamuna River in Delhi and the Displacement of Peasants Prashant Pandey Delhi Documenting the Contemporary History of the Making of the Hindi FIlm Song Jasmeen Patheja Bangalore Blank Noise : Building Testimonies in Public Space Meera Pillai Bangalore Foodcourts and Footbridges : Conceptualizing Space in Vijaywada Railway Station Rochelle Pinto Mumbai Manuel in the City : A Semi Fictionalized Illustrated Book on the Arrival and Absorption of Goan Migrants to Mumbai Muthatha Ramanathan Bangalore Tracing Spatial Technology in the Rural Development Landscape of South India Mario Rodrigues Mumbai The Political Sociology of Golf in South Asia Biswajit Roy and Nilanjan Datta Kolkata Media Coverage of the Execution of Dhananjay Chatterjee, a rape and murder accused and its impact on the Children of West Bengal Ruhani Delhi The Masking of Images : Photography and Puppetry T P Sabitha Delhi Early Womens Magazines in Kerala and the Construction of Femininity Abdus Salam Delhi Strangers in the City : the Lives and Longings of Bangladeshi Immigrants in Guwahati Abhishek Sharma Mumbai The Colorization of Mughal E Azam B . Mahesh Sarma Delhi Contesting Techno Paradigms of Contested Public Space (The Politics of CNG) Nitin Sethi Delhi Mapping the Urban : GIS and Master Plans in Delhi and Bangalore Prasad Shetty Mumbai Stories of New Entrepreneurship Soudhamini Chennai Madurai : Mythical City - Representations Old and New Vandana Swami An Allegorical, Historical Journey into the Archives of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway Madhavi Tangella Mumbai Sagar Cinema : An Illegal 'Poor Man's Multiplex' in a Malad Slum Sovan Tarafdar Kolkata A Brief History of New Urban Leisure in Kolkata Tasneem, Fatima and Marya Delhi Death and the Bazaar : A Look at the Death Care Industry T Vishnu Vardan Bangalore The Impact of Mythologicals in Telugu Cinema Shivam Vij Delhi The Nature of Ragging in Hostels From shveta at sarai.net Thu Dec 16 13:09:23 2004 From: shveta at sarai.net (Shveta Sarda) Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 13:09:23 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] A Dialogue with Doctors Message-ID: <41C13BAB.1090507@sarai.net> Dear All, Last week my mother, who is a doctor, asked me if someone from the Cybermohalla labs can make a presentation in a seminar with an interactive session between doctors and health workers/lay people etc. Not so sure about the nature and dynamics of such encounters, I tentatively posed this invitation to Azra at the LNJP CM lab. She thought about it and wrote a short text for the doctors in dialogue. While translating the text I was challenged by the difficult terrain of imagination she so gently alludes to. Enclosed is the translation and I hope we will be able to take up this challenge and open a fresh way of thinking about bodies and social spaces. best shveta ------------------------------------------------ What is that which is looked at, but not uttered? by Azra Tabassum azra at cm.sarai.net There are some spaces in our lives which are brought into discussion only by emptying them of the social relations which they are built of, around. They should always be something different from what they are! And therefore, when we think, it is only through removing these spaces from our imagination. Let me describe one such space for you. I live in LNJP colony. In this colony is a yellow coloured building. On the first floor of this building is the Ankur Centre, and in it the Compughar - a room where we, a group of 15 young people, imagine, talk, explore. Below it, on the ground floor, is a room where residents and interns from the LN Hospital come on a weekly basis. Among them there is also usually a full fledged doctor, who oversees how her students are performing. This dispensary has become an important support for the residents of the colony. People come here with the smallest to the most complicated of their ailments. They know medicines will be provided for free, and will not be spurious. And most importantly, this saves them the time it would take to travel to another place, away from the colony. Just outside the Health Centre, as you enter the building, is a foyer. This is a foyer where the bodies of people who die in the colony, are brought. The bodies are bathed here, and then wrapped in a white shroud, and prepared for burial. The body is carried out of this building, through the long street that leads out of the colony. This is the street where goats sit, chew and brood about life! And then, it is this same place which is used as a venue for marriages of the girls of this colony. Parents approach the people who live around this building a few days before they need the place. And on the day of the marriage, this small place takes on a celebrative look. Right above it, the corridor outside the Compughar also becomes a convivial, friendly meeting space for everyone every once in a while when diferent people from the locality come in to spend a day talking and sharing stories. Different kinds of people come here - from the elderly, to young children, teachers, and more. Why, is this not a strange place? People come here in search of health, after death to get made up, in old age to share stories, in adolescence to experiment and to try out new things. I was invited here to pose some questions about health arising from the place where I live. And now that I have described the place, here is my question - Is it possible to have an imagination of health in this space, without emptying the space of its relations? Where life and death, relationships and health, humans and animals are not separated from each other? If yes, then what is this imagination? And I was also invited to pose this question here because there would be doctors to address the questions. I understand that doctors have a place in society where they are never allowed to say, "I didn't understand", or "I will try to understand". Afterall, which patient will want to go to a doctor who shows ambivalence! But now that you have expressed this desire to listen, to be vulnerable to questions, all of which you may not have answers to, I am glad to be leaving you with this question, an answer to which may not be immediately available. Thankyou. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Cybermohalla http://www.sarai.net/cybermohalla/cybermohalla.htm From shveta at sarai.net Thu Dec 16 16:51:07 2004 From: shveta at sarai.net (Shveta Sarda) Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 16:51:07 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience Message-ID: <41C16FA3.4080304@sarai.net> Dear All, Below is a paper I wrote a while back from my experiences in Cybermohalla. The paper is soon to be published in a reader on Utopian Pedagogy (ed Marc Cote et al). Comments and feedback is most welcome! best shveta ********** Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like This? Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience [1] --------------------------------------------------------------- The formal definition of a pedagogue in a working class locality could be of a figure who, through interactions, will bring into the consciousness of students a reality beyond their immediate reach; a figure who will bring into their life world skills from other locations that will put them in a more advantageous position in society. The frame of the life world of the pedagogue is visible, articulate. It is in a position to propose a vision for the other world - one of empowering it through intervention. The inner world of the "student" is of anticipation, anger, restlessness. It lives with different intensities of indignity and humiliation born of the derision felt at the perception that it needs to, and can be, 'transformed'. It lives in the troubled terrain of entitlement to, and gratitude for, as well as suspicion of intervention. Reverberations of the question, 'Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like This?' offset the stability of this figure [2]. The idea of young people in working class settlements as tabula rasa is displaced. What replaces it? The question calls for a realignment of positions, redrawing of assumptions and protocols of interactions. What emerges? "The Edges of Thought" Raju Malyal, 18 years, lives in Dakshinpuri Resettlement Colony in South Delhi [3]. A student of class tenth, he attends afternoon school on weekdays, and during the weekend he helps out at the small eating joint run by his father in the neighbourhood. Raju, in a public reading before two hundred and fifty friends, aquaintances and strangers, reads: "I wanted to think about what Shamsher Ali had written in his text, 'The Edges of Thought'. I read the text thrice, and in doing that, felt as if Shamsher Ali was sitting in front of me all this while, talking to me about it" [4]. Shamsher, 18 years, dropped out of school before completing his tenth class. "No one cares what you do in afternoon school. I wasn't learning anything, anyway". Shamsher lives in Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Colony in Central Delhi [5]. The intimacy, desire and searching quality of Raju's narration betray that the dominant co-ordinates through which the lives of young people are mapped - the home, the school and the workspace - far from fill all existing spaces to engage with subjectivity. Lately, Shamsher has started spending his early mornings at a workshop in the colony that produces cardboard boxes. Reflecting on his routines, he writes, "I like to hang around there and chat. The time I spend there are the only moments of respite I get from thinking. Thought is my enemy" [6]. There is a rawness to this recognition of living with the incomprehensibility of certain conditions of social realities, and a capacity to live with that vulnerability. Inside the stubborn structures of institutions, frameworks and discourses, is a search for the edges of thought - the whispering, agile peripheries of the mind that imagine, flow, combat, seek, assert and create. This needs a space that can support and allow for this search [7]. It craves and ferrets out challenging friendships that nurture thought in a manner that does not read the rawness and vulnerability of a stutter as defeat or helplessness, but as pregnant with possibilities of new discoveries [8]. Raju reads on, "...sometimes, we create boundaries in our thoughts, stopping ourselves from thinking, stopping ourselves from finding the edges of our thoughts, from where we can plunge into newer depths. Why do we do that? Why do we create shores of the ocean of thinking, or disallow ourselves from moving towards horizons by being swept away by waves?" "A Thought Full Stop" Reading her text to her peers at the lab about a visit to the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, not far from the neighbourhood, Azra described how she drifted through the city, first on foot, and then on a cycle-rickshaw [9]. Her brief, passing description of the rickshaw driver caught the attention of a practitioner from Sarai who was also present at the lab. The description was shy, as if Azra had found something disturbing about the rickshaw driver. She had written, "He was a young man. He was wearing pants and shirt and looked like he had been through some years of formal schooling. Fair and handsome, he seemed to be a Kashmiri. I thought, 'Bechara (Poor thing)! Surely he can get himself a better job than driving a cycle rickshaw'." Sensing that Azra had perhaps unconsciously adopted a popular critical stand considered necessary in talking about education and unemployment among city youth, the practitioner probed further than the description carried him. He asked, "Azra, can you tell me a little more about the rickshaw driver? Why did you call him 'bechara'?" Surprised at how little she remembered about him, and that 'bechara' was a conjunction she had used in her text to move on to a description of the street by shifting her gaze from him, Azra, her eyes on the text, reflected, "By calling him 'bechara', I created a distance between him and my thought. 'Bechara' is not a conjunction for different thoughts here. It's a thought full stop!" Bechara is the singular, the figure pushed out of our imagination by our meta-narratives. A voice muffled, a story silenced, a trajectory of thought left unmapped and unexplored, save as an evidence for, an affirmation of our ways of thinking - another statistic. These full stops are like barricades, creating boundaries around our thought, a closed community of ideas. Helping out to conduct a survey to guage perceptions about caste and religion among children in his colony, Lakhmi found the methodology evolved very troubling. Each time the child being asked the objective-type questions was reticent, the interviewer was expected to guess the child's response and fill in the answers. "I simply couldn't understand," he said, "How am I supposed to decide whether the child's silence means 'yes' or 'no'?" It is perhaps on the silencing of many that knowledge is created. A pedagogue working within realities marked by inequality, conflict and contestation cannot be innocent of the intimate relationship between knowledge and the politics of silence. A couple with a newborn child refuses to discuss with the family their acute desire to move out of the close-knit, protective neighbourhood they have lived in for years. A student drops out of school for the fear of the indignity of being called a failure. A young man labouring at the construction site quietly daydreams through the spray of invectives from the supervisor during the cycles of carrying bricks to the eleventh floor. These absences in life - the inadequacies of biographies - are the inadequacies of speech. Silences reside in the recognition of the politics of these lingering inadequacies. Crowds carry silences with them. The singular, distanced figure devoid of its biography, multiplies to become a mass, indistinguishable in its features, so remote. Azra says, "Sometimes it seems like a bee hive, sometimes like insects crawling on the ground... There are many sounds, but none reach our ears properly" [10]. In the smarting relations of full stops and silences, silencing and knowledge, what can be a knowledge producer's methods of engagement? "The Gaps" On a dark winter evening in early January in 2002, during the LNJP Compughar's trip to Bombay, we reached the Dadar metro station bustling with the hurrying commuters moving into and pouring out of the local trains. Falling into step with a stream of commuters heading for the exit, we reached the foot-over bridge to the vegetable market. Swinging batons of policemen attempted to control and bring to order the hotch-potch of the bodies - some halting for breath, others finding their own rhythms and directions. Underneath, the market was bright with halogen lamps lit in different stalls. Crowds thronged the stalls, the market was flooded, bodies packed together- a sea of heads that could allow no one admittance. Still, the crowd seemed to be swelling by the minute. We decided to walk through the crowd in pairs. Reaching the other side, we were surprised at the ease with which we had moved through the crowd. Someone from the group said, "There were gaps in the crowd which we could not see from above. Once we entered the crowd, we could walk through these intervening spaces." Later, in a text from the experience, Azra wrote: "The crowd from in front - You see faces, different features and appearances that could not be seen from above, expressions on faces. Some faces seem to be searching something. Sometimes, the search seems to be for a glimpse of the unknown, and on other occassions, it is a somewhat intimate search." Standing on the footover bridge presented a distanced view from afar. The frame of the visual field, removed from the experience of the market and created from a height, produced anxiety, fear. This was a particular vantage point. But knowledge, as the movement towards and into the crowd suggested to us, is a question of different perspectives, not specific positions. The tensions between differences of perspective were productive. A crowd demands to be entered, experienced. The gaps - ruptures, disjunctions, joints - present themselves as possibilities, points of entry. It is in bringing near, in moving through the gaps that an engagement is sought. "Speech without Fear and Fearless Listening" Knowledge is about the bold and simultaneous existence of a multiplicity of voices that fragment our conception of reality, decenter the act of production of knowledge, the translation of life worlds; where the edges of our worlds are in conversation with one another, not muted and silenced. Speech of millions is of essence in this. What witholds and prevents speech is the fear of listening to too many voices, a fear that a cacophony of sounds will result. But there is a richness in the the multiplicity of a band when it plays with myriad instruments, when there is improvisation, and more than one sound can be heard. The twenty two year-old Azra says, "The simultaneous existence of multiple, diverse voices means there is speech without fear, with freedom and dignity. And that, in turn, implies that there be responsible and fearless listening". Being in the network of knowledge production is as much about being a server, as a host or a client. Speech is imbricated in the politics of space, and played out in our everyday lives. When the young people at the LNJP lab decided to circulate their writings in the colony through the public form of a wall magazine, they were faced with a peculiar problem [11]. As youngsters, they had till now been addressed by (elders in) the colony. The question they were now confronted by was of finding a way of addressing the colony. The fear was that even as they could, in the beginning, skirt topics which they knew would earn them the disapproval of their elders, what about issues for which norms were not specified? Three issues of the wall magazine, named Ibarat (Inscription), were brought out in quick succession. But following these, questions of what terrain to chose, what topics to select, what issues to discuss, what mode of writing to adopt, superceded and there has been a long pause before the fourth Inscription. Narration is halted because it does not find a context. Narration is a function of desire. Desire is not person-centric, but for a constellation -of people, settings, memories, preferences - in relation with one another which originate and extend beyond an individual. Narration flows between these elements, and this flow is made possible by a curiosity to hear. To narrate is to relive an experience through the act of telling, through speech. This reliving requires a nurturing context of friendship, a challenging and compassionate listening, which evokes and is receptive of a narration. And to listen, then, is to tussle with your desire, to be vulnerable in a search for a means to look at yourself anew, to question how another has been imagined. There must be so many narrations that are never made because they do not find gradients they can flow towards. Narrations seek this terrain of hospitality, this context created by thirst and difference, this desire. A pedagogue is not a library of known and catalogued books that can be issued out. And a naraation is not a requisition for a title or an author. What is the desire that the pedagogue - the guest the young people of the locality host - imbricated in? "To think you are alone would be gross injustice" The formidable discourse of labouring rides over social inequality. Here, the question of earning a livelihood, to enter the labour market, is a very important one. This livelihood discourse is one of computer literacy, of speed - it requires skills in typing, preparing excel sheets, making database entries, writing letters, designing pamphlets, cards etc: i.e., computer-based economic activities requiring low skill levels. The emphasis is on efficency, dexterity, micro-software training. This vocational training is offered by a number of IT institutes mushrooming in and around working class settlements [12]. It presents the familiar and troubling disjunction between two imaginaries - the discourse on livelihood for the working class, and knowledge production. The tussle between the two imaginaries once showed in a dialogue at the labs around the meaning of working with computers implying the necessity to learn to type at a good speed [13]. The question that arose was of the relation between the flow of the keyboard and the flow of thought. The overpowering labouring discourse, because it blocks off the possibility to think of people outside the language of productivity, as cultural producers, makes it extremely difficult for the young people to suggest to themselves that technology can be entered through creativity in the technological space [14]. The dialogue at the lab continued by drawing out the difference between a "hobby" and a "line" (career choice). "Hobby" is the sphere of the creative, of playfulness and inventiveness. A "line" is what one pursues in life to earn a living, to secure an income, and this is at the cost of the creative instincts. With a rejection of folk forms and public cultures of story telling, or other modes that are associated with a rich tradition of creative resources, and which erupt sporadically on the urban scape during religious festivals and events organised to showcase them, the sphere of everyday expressions of creativity searches outlets and forms. In this loss of language around creativity, training to work in beauty parlours (learning bridal make-up, applying mehandi etc.) is the most popular career choice for girls in working class settlements. Men may become part of local dancing or theatre troupes, or painting billboards, signs, etc. These become modes for bringing the "hobby" and the "line" together. These micro-practices are an assertion by the young people of their creative urges. 'Unlikely encounters' [15] with Free Software programmers has opened up another dimension: the most interesting conversations happen when programmers visiting the labs talk about their experiences of sharing skills in a creative community which has participants from different backgrounds, and in different geographical locations [16]. This creates a fascinating context, in which you imagine yourself, and also the locality, in the larger matrix of other spaces. It shows the possibility of a conversational and practice-based universe where there are people who will find excitement in your quirkiness, play, interests, ideas. Yashoda, who came to the lab two years ago with a turbulent personal background, and so a mistrust for all forms of determinate aggregates, writes, "To think you are alone would be gross injustice". She is a prolific writer, and one of the strongest votaries of ensembles formed on the relationship of thought and creativity. What these interactions and dialogues gesture towards is the reality that one can have a tranformative relationship with technology - and not just be addressed by it. This is a critical shift in register. This is a universe where your thought is of consequence in a larger framework of production of knowledge. "What do words contain?" Word is a memory: which gives the word its recognition. a story: an incident that keeps the memory of the word alive. time: every word carries with it the shadow of time. image: an image is associated with every word. thought: different people think differently of the same word. sound: a sound follows every word [17]. This textural world of the word lies beyond the realm of judgements. It is not bound by the binaries of ordinary & special, valuable & useless, good & bad, ugly & beautiful. Fertile and mutable, it evokes and invites more narrations, linking with other experiences. Nisha Kaushal from Dakshinpuri says, "Utterances are suggestions for others to open up. You don't define a boundary of the conversation and it flows through suggestion upon suggestion". In this mode of excavation of perspectives and meanings in an ensemble of producers, a universe of hyperlinked experiences emerges, rhizomic in its growth, inclusive in its spread and open in its propensity to encounters. This accretive relay of experiences as texts and conversations creates an interdependence and densification of ideas - ideas collide and mingle, open out and jostle. This is practice-based, and it flows from everyday experiences. When Nasreen at LNJP narrated her experience of witnessing an accident, her peers Neelofar and Shamsher responded - [Nasreen] Because the bus was crowded, the driver was speeding, halting at the stops very briefly. One man, who was trying to get on, was clutching on to the handle on the door. He was trying to put one foot on the steps of the bus. But unfortunately, he slipped, and along with that, his hand also lost its grip on the handle. He fell. The driver drove on. [Neelofar] When I was listening to Nasreen's story I was remembering scenes when people, specially boys, run to get on moving buses. Some do this because the bus doesn't stop long eneough, while others get off the bus and then get on again when the bus starts to move. Bus conductors do this often... I like it when people first let the woman, or family members they are travelling with, board the bus, and then get on. [Shamsher] Listening to the story, I feel like I am the driver and am driving the vehicle, looking at either side. I am glancing at the rear view mirror, and looking at the road as well, which will take the travellers in the bus to their destination. But my attention is not on the passengers at all. I am waiting for the destination [18]. Unstable and mobile links between experiences, thoughts, ideas emerge. Conceptual connections between ideas and of different producers makes possible a networked thickening of the emergent concepts. The diversity and richness of experiences and ways of thinking creates the possibility of the emergence of a relational knowledge field. Yashoda Singh, at the LNJP lab, writes about her body, and how she perceives her room through it: "The wind has entered with such force from the chinks in our walls, that a shiver has run down my whole body. The upper part of my body is outside the quilt, and wind is entering from the sides as well. The wind comes and makes me aware of its coldness... My back is really hurting now. So I should lie down. But what's this? The whitewash on the walls of our house is just like the pair of lips of a woman who has put lipstick on one of the lips, but not on the other. Because the walls are whitewashed, but not the roof..." [19] The intimacy of the narration, its searching quality and metaphorical evocations is striking. Yashoda thinks through the lived experience of space through claims and withdrawals, through her own body. The body is inscribed in different ways in different narratives. Lakhmi writes about Ashoki, who cleans sewers in his colony by going inside them. He has written the text in an autobiogrpahical mode, imagining himself to be Ashoki, and his encounter with Lakhmi Chand's gaze in the crowd of bystanders (residents of the colony) as he enters a sewer: "The boy who had come to file the complaint was also there. He was looking at me with surprised eyes. Maybe he was thinking that when he had come ot the office, I was wearing clean clothes and talking to him like an officer. But today he was surprised at seeing me in dirty clothes. I was laughing within. In his eyes, I was first an officer, a sahib. He had called me sir. But what would he call me now? Maybe he was also thinking of the same thing" [20]. The text raises the question of how the body is socially perceived, problematising the fixedness of the representational frame around filth, cleanliness, and notions of waste and disposal. What emerges through these is a complex narrative of the body - the body is imagined, narrated, socialised. The complex - rich, layered, contradictory - terrain of experience and body & social dignity allows for a networked thickening of ideas. This practice-based universe produces a contingent, unstable and relational knowledge field. The 'pedagogue' is a node in this network, searching the emergent with producers/practitioners. "What is it that flows between us?" This practice of producing and building in a network resonates with and draws from other practices and philosophies - for instance, the Free Software modes of production. Virtual technological practices inform, further complicate and deepen the imagination and everyday at the labs. Sharing of resources through peer-to-peer networks, a class of applications that takes advantages of resources - storage, cycles, human presence - available along the links between routers of packages of data, presents an actual and realisable technological juncture as well as a metaphorical resonance with the peer-based practice at the labs. The agility and improvisation of tactical media provide a larger context of multi-authored production and a network to link with as producers and creators. Practices like hyperlinking, lists and weblogs provide tools and practices for cultural producers. All of these have made possible the creation of and search for new forms of knowledge, communities and practices at Cybermohalla [21]. Ambivalent Pedagogy Ambivalence is an affirmation of contradictory perspectives, vatage points, positionings and feelings at the same time. Ambivalent pedagogic processes gesture towards the porosity of the boundaries between the nodes of a server and a learner, realised through thinking about and practicing in networked relations of production of knowledge. Different nodes produce knowledge, and through the contingent and specific relations formed between ideas, experiences and practices, together search the emergent. Critical to the engagement is an acute consciousness of and constant reflection on the relations between friendship and knowledge, knowledge and conditionalities of speech, knowledge and silences, knowledge and sharing. It is from these that an ethics of the interaction in each site-specific unlikely encounter evolve. The encounters multiply over time. Seeking unlikely encounters, as guests in another locality, Yashoda, Azra, Lakhmi, Neelofar, Raju, Nasreen, Suraj will carry with them and receive anew the reverberations of the question, 'Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like This?' The question would be differently inflected, every time, in each site, layering and thickening its experience and meanings. ---------------------------------------------- ENDNOTES [1] Mohalla in hindi and urdu means neighbourhood. Ankur-Sarai's Cybermohalla project takes on the meaning of the word mohalla, its sense of alleys and corners, its sense of relatedness and concreteness, as a means of talking about ones place in the city, and in cyberspace. In its broadest imagination, it is a desire for a wide and horizontal network (both real and virtual) of voices, sounds and images in dialogue and debate. A step towards the realisation of this desire is through engendering self-regulated media labs in working class settlements in Delhi, which can facilitate the becoming of researcher-practitioners from the locality. The young people who come to the labs are between 15 and 24. [2] This question is often asked to visitors by the practioners at the labs. Is it a question of suspicion of a stranger? Or an assiduous search for a relationship of dignity? There is a strong realisation at the labs that their life world is perceived as curios in a 'waiting room'. To Yashoda, a practitioner at the LNJP lab, a khaas nazar, a special look cast at her, is a gaze that produces a feeling of suffocation. She writes, "What can be said of the looks that are not from strangers, but well-wishers? They seem unfamiliar sometimes. What are these looks? They leave a trace of suffocation in my life, which otherwise seems to be going on just fine. Even if I want to tell others about these looks, I can't. Because I don't understand them myself. Because in the courthouse of glances, there are no eyewitnesses". [3] Between 1975 and 1979, during the state of Emergency, Delhi saw the violent clearing away of irregular settlements under the aegis of Jagmohan, vice-chairman of the Delhi Development Authority. The dislocated inhabitants were sought to be resettled in undeveloped plots in the fringes of the city earmarked as resettlement colonies. Now bustling with life and not as weak infrastructurally, this is the beginning of the official history of Dakshinpuri. [4] The public reading was at the launch of the Cybermohalla publication, 2003 - a Book Box with ten booklets of texts from the labs, five postcards, and a CD with animations, a sound & text film and Free Software for Windows. For the Book Box, and the full text of Raju's reading, see - http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/booklets.htm [5] LNJP is officially a slum settlement. The irregular dwelling started appearing in the early 60s, when people began settling in the unoccupied land beside the LNJP hospital. Over the years, many more people made homes here and the density of the colony grew. LNJP lives with an everyday threat of demolition. In its neighbourhood is Turkhman Gate - a settlement with a predominantly muslim population, which became a site of massive demolition during 1975-77. After demolition, the residents were sent to different resettlement colonies. [6] For Shamsher's full text, see http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/questionsbetray.pdf [7] Compughar, or the Abode of Computers - as the Cybermohalla media labs are called by the young practitioners - is one such liminal space. The young adults practicing at the labs meet on a daily basis, grappling with ideas and stuttering into concepts through a sustained practice of sharing through conversation. The LNJP Compughar was set up in May 2001, and the Compughar at Dakshinpuri in August 2002. [8] It is critical for the pedagogue to have a deeper understanding of the peripheral realities of any such space. Individuals are not discrete, separate units, but are experientially imbricated in a social network that extends beyond them. An understanding of the implications of this vis-a-vis an institution like the school, which disects the experiential and the network from which a student emerges, is extremely significant for an experiment like Cybermohalla. Prabhat Jha, one of the co-ordinators of the Cybermohalla Project writes, "The question we must constantly ask ourselves is whether we see ourselves working among the 30 or 40 young people immediately in front of us, or among the locality which they have emerged from and are a part of. As soon as we bring this into view, the entire scene changes. If we see ourselves as working in a community, it is not possible for us to forget that along with the practitioners are their families, and along with the families, the neighbourhood. That is, the sense that your work has reverberations in spaces outside of the immediately visible context of the labs, and is constantly a receiver of reverberations from other spaces, is a very important one". These ideas will be elaborated in a forthcoming article by Prabhat K. Jha. [9] Over the last two years at the labs, a sustained and regular practice of writing has emerged. Everyone writes in diaries - small notebooks with ruled sheets. These writings, some of which are in the biographical register, some in the register of space, others through engagement with another biography, are a rich database of narrative, comment, word-play and reflection. [10] For the full text of 'Crowds from Afar, from in Front and from Within', see http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/eyescrowd.pdf [11] The wall magazine is a primary "public form" of the labs. Texts are written and selected for a twelve page wall magazine designed and produced at the lab. It is then photocopied and circulated in the locality by being put up on public walls. The first three wall magazines were on names of the lanes in the colony, on work, and about the trip to Bombay. Translated versions of these issues can be found on the Sarai website - http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/ibarat01/english01.htm http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/ibarat02/pages/english02.htm http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/ibarat03/PAGES/english03.htm [12] Since the mid-1950s, the post-colonial state in India concentrated substantial resources into the production of engineers, providing well-formulated courses and educational infrastructure. This, coupled with proficiency in English and mathematics in the middle-classes, engendered a huge labour force that entered the IT industry from the early 1980s. This labour force is integrated into the global production of software and services, synchronising well with the provision of infrastructure for research and development by western economies. At the second level, the state-run industrial training institutes showed a great inertia in moving away from training their students for the manufacturing industries. The IT expansion at the popular level happened through a massive proliferation of small and mid-scale privately funded software usage training institutes. This is the local labour force that does the desk-top operations which run media production, print design, graphics and popular web interfacing. [13] The labs are equipped with three computers each, a scanner, a printer, a sound booth, portable sound recording units, and digital and analogue cameras. The computers run on Free Software. Image Manipulation software, GIMP and text editor, Open Office are the applications used for making animations and typing in and formatting texts. The practice of taking photographs, recording sounds, creating animations seems to have an archival impetus, rather than being object oriented, or with an output in mind. They are constantly worked with, and also catalogued and logged. This archive then, will create a centrifugal force, where instead of being worked with to be presented to a public, it may create a pull -the "public" must come to see it. [14] An interesting phenomenon is that while there is such a pressure from the labour market for a familiarity with the regime of propreitary software, a brilliantly dynamic and productive culture of copying - eg. MP3s - is part of this very environment. It is in the alleys and small rooms right here, that the nodes of production that sustain the grey market economies, thrive. These nodes, through which the locality enters the larger politics of economic transactions as a producer, are part of the everyday reality of these practitioners. And it is in this context that the cassettes with the assorted favourite tracks and the CDs with the latest film, burned before its release, are freely circulated among, and copied for peers. [15] I would like to thank Park Fiction (www.parkfiction.org) for their rich concept of Unlikely Encounters: Groups that develop tools, attitudes, courage, practices, programmes, that make unlikely encounters, meetings and connections more likely, search for them, jump over cultural or class barriers, go where no one goes, look where no one's looking. They do not let their activities be reduced to symbolic action, mirroring, critique, negation, or analysis of their powerlessness nor do they muddle along in their assigned corner. http://www.parkfiction.org/unlikelyencounters/begriffe.php [16] Among many other programmers, Arish Zaini of the GNU/Linux Users' Group in Iran visited Delhi in early 2002. He has been working with a small group to develop a Persian language KDE desktop. During his visit, he spent a day at the Compughar in LNJP, sharing his work with young women proficient in Urdu and in working with the English language desktop. In the convivial atmosphere of a mutual exchange of personal stories and interests in technology and language, a small promise of CD to install the Persian desktop at the lab was made and sealed. Now, from the Persian desktop, an Urdu language desktop can be developed and shared at the lab. [17] For the full text of 'A Word', written by Suraj Rai after a discussion among the practitioners at the LNJP Lab, see http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/wordscontain.pdf [18] For texts from Nasreen's other peers at LNJP, see http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/eyescrowd.pdf [19] For Yashoda's full text, see http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/beforecoming.pdf [20] For Lakhmi's full text, see http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/inversion.pdf [21] From the Technological Imagination of Cybermohalla, version 01 -"Is there a significance in interaction and collaboration with peers? What does it mean when edges, margins and in-between spaces become alive, pulsating, interacting? When clients are also servers? When users are also producers; browsers are also editors? When centers are dislocated and resources are dispersed? When diversity and multiplicity thrive? When ideas are not static or owned, but shared and developed collaboratively? When unpredictable addresses and routes with unstable connectivity are generators of knowledge, sites of narration, and nodes and zones of comunication?" For the full text, see - http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book01/pages/194-215.pdf From animas999 at yahoo.com Fri Dec 17 02:21:30 2004 From: animas999 at yahoo.com (coco fusco) Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 12:51:30 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Questioning the Frame Message-ID: <20041216205130.47634.qmail@web41404.mail.yahoo.com> IN THESE TIMES http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1750/ Questioning the Frame Thoughts about maps and spatial logic in the global present By Coco Fusco December 16, 2004 Terms such as " mapping," "borders," "hacking," "trans-nationalism," "identity as spatial," and so on have been popularized in recent years by new media theories' celebration of "the networks"-a catch-all phrase for the modes of communication and exchange facilitated by the Internet. We should proceed with caution in using this terminology because it accords strategic primacy to space and simultaneously downplays time-i.e., history. It also evades categories of embodied difference such as race, gender and class, and in doing so prevents us from understanding how the historical development of those differences has shaped our contemporary worldview. Technocentric fantasy The rhetoric of mapping and networks conflates the way technological systems operate with modern human communication. According to this mode of thought we are to believe that we live inside the world of William Gibson's Neuromancer and that salvation is only attainable via very specific technological expertise unleashed against the system-i.e., hacking. Consider the heroes of Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters such as The Matrix whose power lies in their knowledge of "the code." It is implied that we operate in networks because computers and the Internet have restructured "our" lives and because global economic systems have turned us into global citizens. Hacking then comes to stand for all forms of critical engagement with preexistent power structures. I'm just a little too old to believe these new media mantras unquestioningly. This rhetoric implies two possible explanations for the difference between the networked present and the non-networked past. The first explanation suggests that no one on the left before the age of the Internet practiced subversive manipulation of existent media, tactical intervention, investigative reporting and infiltration of power structures. It also would seem that before the dawning of the networks, no one knew what being an organic intellectual was about, no one elaborated alternative communication systems and no one was aware of or sensed a connection to geographic regions other than Europe. The second explanation would be that electronic communication has produced a form of networking that is so radically different as to imply a neat break with the past. In either case, these arguments conveniently situate their advocates outside history, since either way tactical media practitioners have nothing of value to inherit from the past. While I can understand that there might be a dearth of knowledge about tactical interventions of previous centuries, I am perplexed by the apparent loss of short-term memory of many cultural theorists now in vogue, who were alive and active in the '70s. Can we forget Daniel Ellsberg's publishing of the Pentagon Papers, the uncovering of the Watergate scandal, the break-in to an FBI office by an anonymous group that led to revelations of COINTELPRO and the Freedom of Information Act, the many Senate investigations of FBI corruption, the widespread solidarity with Third World independence movements, the plethora of underground and alternative presses and global mail art networks-all operated by radical activists, artists and intellectuals? Those of us who can at least recall the ways that these strategic interventions transformed political and cultural life in that decade necessarily cast a skeptical glance at the messianic claims of technocentrists. The shift from Eurocentric internationalism to a more globally inclusive worldview came long before the age of the Internet. It was launched outside Europe and America, and emanated from the geopolitical margins. The process took place across a range of fields of knowledge, culture and politics. This revision of the world picture was catalyzed by postwar decolonization; the Non-Aligned Movement launched in 1961; and civil rights struggles in the developed world, including the Black Power and Chicano movements-all of which invariably affirmed their alliances with Third World revolutions. This political process was expanded upon by a postcolonial understanding that various diasporas shared transnational connections and that these diasporas were produced by the economics and politics of colonialism and imperialism. The historical bases of these movements are consistently obfuscated by the technocentric rhetoric of networks and mapping that emanate from Europe, North America and Australia. Instead of dealing with these histories, contemporary discourses on globalism and new technology tend to dismiss postcolonial discourse as "mere identity politics." They tend to confuse bureaucratic efforts to institutionally separate the concerns of ethnic minorities with what always have been the much broader agendas of anti-racist political struggles and postcolonial cultural endeavors. I am a great admirer of the practice of electronic civil disobedience and have used "hacktivist" software such as Floodnet to engage in online protest actions myself. But I find the willed historical amnesia of new media theory to be quite suspect, and even dangerous. One of the reasons I chose to make a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert, a video art piece about the Angela Davis case, was because I wanted to reexamine crucial histories that are now being forgotten within the contemporary conversations on globalization. The alienation caused by multinational corporate domination (otherwise known as Empire) that many middle-class young adults in the Global North feel is just the last chapter in a long history of reactions against imperial projects. Mapping mistakes Another issue of concern is the new media culture's fascination with mapping-a fascination that it shares with the military strategists. The news of the Iraq war frequently involves men in uniform pointing to or better yet walking across maps of various Middle Eastern countries-so when I then walk into galleries and cultural conferences in Europe and find more men (without uniforms) playing with maps, I start to wonder about the politics of those representations. In the American media, maps dominate representations of warfare. While realistic depictions of the violence of war via photographs and film have been banned from American television news, maps are acceptable to those in power because they dehumanize the targets. Similarly, in the context of the art world, maps have come to abstract and thereby silence individual and group testimony. New media culture uses maps to read the world in terms of extremes. Contemporary cultural theory is rife with renderings that celebrate macro views and micro views of the workings of the world, both social and biological-which is to say, maps of vast spaces and physical phenomena and maps of the most minuscule thing. We hear over and over again about global systems and panoptic vision on the one hand and genome chains and nano-entities on the other. When I first noticed this phenomenon I was struck by how it complements the resurgence of formalist art criticism's love affair with the grid. By this I am referring to the return in the '90s to the definition of art as a search for "perfect forms," and a celebration of the formal characteristics of objects and surfaces. What I have become more concerned about as time goes on, however, is how this fetishizing of spatial extremes enables the resurgence of Descartes' idea that humans are rational, autonomous individuals and that the human mind and mathematical principles are the source for all real knowledge. However objective they may appear, maps do have a point of view, and that is one of privileged super-human sight, of safe distance and of omniscience. The mapmaker charts an entire field of vision, an entire world, and in doing so he (yes he) plays God. Whether you are beholding the map as a viewer or charting it as the cartographer, you rule the world before you, you control it, and, in putting everything in its place, you substitute a global whole established through pictorial arrangement for an actual dynamic engagement with individual elements and entities. The psychological motive behind assuming that position of power is not questioned, nor is the predominance of white male techno-elites in that discourse seen as anything more than incidental. It is as if more than four decades of postmodern critique of the Cartesian subject had suddenly evaporated. Those critical discourses that unmasked the way universals suppress difference, which gave voice to the personal experience of women, the poor and disenfranchised minorities, are treated as inherently flawed by both the progressive and conservative discourses of globalism. Progressive media advocates dismiss these discourses of difference as "essentialist" while Republicans decry them as "the tyranny of special interests." But both provide ideological justification for the dismantling of legislation protecting civil rights. Viewing the world as a map eliminates time, focuses disproportionately on space and dehumanizes life. In the name of a politics of global connectedness, artists and activists too often substitute an abstract "connectedness" for any real engagement with people in other places or even in their own locale. What gets lost in this focus on mapping is the view of the world from the ground: lived experience. What is ignored is the pervasiveness of the well-orchestrated and highly selective visual culture that the majority of Americans consume during most of their waking hours. Most people are not looking through microscopes and telescopes and digital mapping systems to find truth about the world. They are watching reality TV, sitcoms, the Super Bowl, MTV and Fox News, all of which also offer maps of a completely different kind: conspiracy theories that pit innocent Americans against the Axis of Evil, embedded journalists' hallucinatory misreadings of foreign conflicts, allegories of empowerment through consumption and endlessly recycled, biblically inspired narratives of sin and redemption. Going off-grid Finally we should consider what is being left off the maps and why? What has happened, for example, to institutional self-critique in the art world? Why has such examination become taboo in exhibitions or unpopular with artists who gravitate to political subjects? Why in the midst of myriad investigations of corporate control of politics and culture is there little or no attention paid to corporate control of the museums and of corporate influence in art collecting? Why is it acceptable to the art world for an artist to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but not to address the pressure put on the organizers of global art exhibitions to showcase a disproportionate number of Israeli artists? Why is it fine for black artists to celebrate the construction of black style but not to make visible the virtual absence of black people as arbiters in the power structures of the art institutions, galleries, magazines and auction houses where black art is given economic and aesthetic value? We live in a very dangerous time in which the right to express dissent and to raise questions about the workings of power is seriously imperiled by fundamentalisms of many kinds. Now more than ever we need to keep the lessons of history foremost in our minds and to defend the critical discourses and practices that enable differing experiences and perspectives to be heard and understood. There are just too many important parallels to be drawn between COINTELPRO and the excesses of law enforcement brought about by the Patriot Act to be dismissive of history. Socially conscious artists and activists, rather than embracing tactics that rely on dreams of omniscience, would do well to examine the history of globalism, networks, dissent and collective actions in order to understand that they are rooted in the geopolitical and cultural margins. Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and an associate professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Her most recent publication is Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (Abrams, 2003). __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From pukar at pukar.org.in Wed Dec 15 15:59:56 2004 From: pukar at pukar.org.in (PUKAR) Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 15:59:56 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [announcements] PUKAR Winter Institute: Schedule Message-ID: <001d01c4e291$08ea61d0$1cd0c0cb@freeda> PUKAR Winter Institute - 2005 Schedule Theme: Urban Knowledge, Language and the Research Process Date: January 6-9, 2005 Partners: Department of Communications and Journalism, University of Mumbai and KATHA, Delhi. Venue: Room 144, Department of Communications and Journalism University of Mumbai, Fort Campus, Mumbai - 400 001 Dear Friends, The PUKAR Winter Institute 2005 is envisioned as the second in a series of three such annual Institutes, designed as opportunities to bring together research scholars from various Mumbai based research centers (across disciplines and sectors) to engage in a dialogue with scholars, writers, translators and practitioners. The Theme this year is 'Urban Knowledge, Language and the Research Process' The sessions are as follows: Day 1 Thursday 6 January 2005 10 30 Introduction by Rahul Srivastava - Co-Director, PUKAR and Vyjayanthi Rao - Co-Director PUKAR and Assistant Professor of Anthropology, New School University, New York. 10 45 Language and Urban Knowledge; Notes from the PUKAR Project: 'Mumbai's Cosmopolitan Archive' by Project Director Abhay Sardesai - PUKAR Associate and Editor, Art India, Mumbai. 11 30 Tea 11 45 The KATHA-PUKAR collaboration: 'The Literary City' Discussion with acclaimed writers on their work set in Mumbai: Telugu - Mohammad Khadeer Babu (Hyderabad) English - Ashok Srinivasan (Delhi) Malayalam - N S Madhavan (Patna) 13 00 Lunch 14 00 The KATHA-PUKAR collaboration: 'The Literary City', Session II: Marathi - Dilip Chitre (Pune) Urdu - Sajid Rashid (Mumbai) 15 15 Tea 15 30 Panel Discussion 'Language, Cinema and the City' Participants: Javed Akhtar - poet, lyricist and script writer Shabana Azmi - actress, activist Rachel Dwyer - Chair of the Centre of South Asian Studies at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 16 45 Conclusion Day 2 Friday 7 January 2005 10 30 Review and Discussion on 'Language, Media and the Research Process' With students of the Post-Graduate Department of Communications and Journalism. 11 15 Tea 11: 30 Talk 'Masculinity and Linguistic Nationalism in Bangalore/Karnataka' by Tejaswani Niranjana - Senior Fellow, Centre for Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore Discussion moderated by Shilpa Phadke, PUKAR Associate and Doctoral Candidate at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. 12: 45 Lunch 14 00 Presentation 'Typocity: On Signs and Urban Landscapes' by Vishal Rawlley and Kurnal Rawat - A SARAI Fellowship Project 15 00 Tea 15 15 Presentation 'Kannada Theatre in Mumbai: A Historical Perspective' by Suma Dwarkanath - Doctoral Candidate, University of Mumbai 16 00 Two Presentations: 'Konkani Print and the Ways of the City', by Rochelle Pinto - Senior Fellow, KATHA Centre, SNDT University, Mumbai 'The Female Body and Voice in Performance' by Deepa Punjani - Senior Fellow, KATHA Centre, SNDT University, Mumbai Discussison Moderated by Mitra Parekh, Head, Department of English, SNDT University,Mumbai 17 15 Conclusion Day 3 Saturday 8 January 2005 10 30 Update from PUKAR's Documentation Project: 'Gujarathi, Tamil and Sindhi in Mumbai' by Aditya Pant, Project Co-ordinator PUKAR 11 00 Panel Discussion 'The City Reported: Representations of Mumbai in Media' Facilitated by Sameera Khan, Journalist and PUKAR Associate Panelists: Shishir Joshi - Bureau Chief, AAJ TAK Kumar Ketkar - Editor, LOK SATTA and PUKAR Advisor Sajid Rashid - Editor, HINDI MAHANAGAR Kalpana Sharma - Deputy Editor and Bureau Chief,THE HINDU and PUKAR Advisor 13 00 Lunch 14 00 Panel Discussion: 'The Death of Language?: Technology, Language and Globalisation Space' Coordinated and moderated by Vyjayanthi Rao Participants: Prathibha Maria - Executive in a BPO in Mumbai Yashoda Singh and Lakhmi - SARAI Cybermohalla Project, Delhi 1500 Presentation: 'Antagonisms and Abstract machines' by Angad Singh Choudhry - PhD student, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 15 45 Tea 16 00 Concluding Discussion Language, Urban Knowledge and the Research Process by Rahul Srivastava 16 30 Conclusion Day 4 Sunday 9 January 2005 Please Note Change of Venue: PUKAR Office, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001 10 00 Participant Presentations 11 00 Tea 11 15 Presentations on PUKAR Projects 13 00 Conclusion PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research) Mumbai Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001 Telephone:: +91 (022) 5574 8152 / +91 (0) 98204 04010 Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in Website:: www.pukar.org.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041215/8023a674/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From registration at sarai.net Fri Dec 17 12:58:49 2004 From: registration at sarai.net (registration at sarai.net) Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 08:28:49 +0100 (CET) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Call for Registration Message-ID: <51529.210.7.77.145.1103268529.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> Call for Registration Contested Commons/Trespassing Publics: A Conference on Inequalities, Conflicts and Intellectual Property, 6- 8 January 2005, India Habitat Center, New Delhi, India. The past few years have seen conflicts over the regulation of information; knowledge and cultural materials increase in intensity and scope covering new geographical spaces, particularly China, India, South Africa and Brazil. A range of new problems, including the expansion of intellectual property protection to almost all spheres of our social life, has intensified the nature of the conflict. It is important to recognize that the nature of the conflict gets configured differently as we move from the United States and Europe to social landscapes marked by sharp inequalities in Asia, Latin America and Africa. In the light of these transformations, we would like to revisit earlier discussions on creativity, innovation, authorship, and the making of property. Is it possible to draw comparative registers between earlier histories of violence and dispossession that accompanied the making of property, and the current turbulence around intellectual property on world scale? We would also like to build a dialogue between different moments in media history: print, film, music and the new media, so as to prise open questions around culture, circulation and property. Speakers include John Frow, Peter Jaszi, Moinak Biswas, Peter Linebaugh, Doron Ben-Atar, Siva Vaidyanathan, Jane Anderson, Jane Gaines, Sibaji Bandopadhya, Rosemary Coombe, Nitin Govil, Cori Hayden, Sharon Daniel, Daya Shanker, Sophea Lerner, Swapan Chakravorty, Brian Larkin, N.Gopakumar, Laikwan Pang, Hou Hanru, and many others. Registration is now open for the Conference. To register yourself, email us your name, professional affiliation and your complete postal address to , with the subject line "registration". _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From aarti at sarai.net Fri Dec 17 16:46:20 2004 From: aarti at sarai.net (Aarti) Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 16:46:20 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Blitz needed Message-ID: <41C2C004.9010904@sarai.net> Dear All, I am currently trying to do some research on the Kawas Nanavati case, 1959. In this regard I need to acess back issues of the Blitz, a bombay tabloid run in those days by Rusi Karanjia. I was wondering if anyone has any information on where I could get these issues. I basically need issues from 1959, 61 and 62. It would be a great help. many thanks Aarti From shivamvij at gmail.com Fri Dec 17 18:48:50 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 18:48:50 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Blitz needed In-Reply-To: <41C2C004.9010904@sarai.net> References: <41C2C004.9010904@sarai.net> Message-ID: Mot me Aarti, may be the Sahitya Akademi library [in Delhi]. If you can find out, do let me know, because I'm interested in researching, some day, the rise and fall of some of these magazines, 'Blitz', the 'Illustrated Weekly', and 'Sunday'. These are important signposts of Indian journalism that need to be recorded. Thanks and regards, Shivam From kalisaroj at rediffmail.com Fri Dec 17 18:50:35 2004 From: kalisaroj at rediffmail.com (avinash jha) Date: 17 Dec 2004 13:20:35 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Re: X Notes on Practice Message-ID: <20041217132035.953.qmail@webmail32.rediffmail.com>   Dear Monica/Shuddha/Jeebesh An initial response: I found the account of the transformation of capital and emergence of intellectual property very interesting. Rest of the essay is also very suggestive. I was dismayed by evocation of the figure of the artisan as a category of the past, or history, with some contemporary resonance in the emerging forms of work in the network society. I mean, the artisan is seen by you to be a figure of early modernity. This may be true of Europe, but elsewhere, and especially in India, it does not make sense. There may be a million artisans living in the city of Delhi itself. One does not know how many millions will be there in the whole of India or in South Asia. These artisans are living as our contemporaries, still practicing their trade to varying extents, against all odds. They carry numerous traditions of knowledge and live, I guess, with a certain degree of freedom, with little state support and windows of opening in the national and global market, operating mostly in the local forms of markets that still continue. Only an 'image-field' limited to Europe can push artisans into history. The question that takes shape here is: Can there be a form of imagination and politics which can carry the two together: these millions of artisans, and the new artisans and practitioners in the economy of the virtual (or a part of it)? (You have referred to the latter in some detail, in some fascinating passages.) Let me try to pose the question from an entirely different angle. While the open and collaborative model in software and content production is making a headway (even globally), are such models being 'killed' or becoming forcibly obsolete in other areas of life? Let us look at scientific research systems. I am not sure, but it seems to me that the organisation and dynamic of scientific research is increasingly moving away from open models. Is scientific research increasingly coming under the sway of a 'knowledge management' model where powerful actors organise and use research. Major part of cooperation is a management necessity for actual competitive or qustionable ends. Sciences as open research traditions is under serious threat, in my reading. Apart from science, I suspect that open and collaborative models are getting destroyed routinely in agriculture, medicine, destruction of forests. What does such a scenario portend? What function will open and collaborative models of ICT related innovation play in such contexts? Can it ever be inclusive beyond a point? A theme can perhaps be addressed in this context: Is there a fundamental opposition between 'knowledge management model' and 'open and collaborative model? Is the only future open to the artisan in India and elsewhere is to forget their traditions of knowledge, become literate, then computer literate, and maybe over three,four, or ten generations hope to become 'new artisans' in the burgeoning immaterial economy? And thus become subject to the new regime as 'workers'? Such questions will perhaps be raised in your framework in discussions of intellectual property. But it is too limited a framework, I believe, to deal with them. Your metaphor of 'seepage' is excellent. But again, it seems to me, applying to the European situation. The marginal figures that you describe may form those 'ugly' patterns of seepage in the European House. From India, and perhaps, from a majority of places on the earth, the picture is quite different. I do not have a comparable metaphor to offer. On second thought, the reason for limiting of the horizon may be the centrality of 'capital' in your story. Capital seems to be the air we breathe in and there is an 'aandhi of capital' which blows everything else away. Or, will blow it away. So what matters is the promise of transcendence that lies in the womb of capital. More advanced the capital, maturer the working class that grows within it. tentatively, avinash -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041217/6c5a24c4/attachment.html From sastry at cs.wisc.edu Sat Dec 18 12:57:00 2004 From: sastry at cs.wisc.edu (Subramanya Sastry) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 01:27:00 -0600 (CST) Subject: [Reader-list] on e-worlds Message-ID: hello everyone, here is something i wrote to my circle of friends a couple of days back -- part wordplay, part critique, part farce, part serious, ... but overall, a ramble, but perhaps something that some might find interesting ... albeit in bits ... subbu. e-worlds -------- The e seems to have taken the centre stage these days. We have e-verything today: from e-mail, e-governance, e-commerce, e-business, e-communities, e-forums, e-medicine, e-teaching, e-learning ... and the list only continues to grow. We are in the midst of e-worlds. The seduction of the e is evident -- but, whether we will get a relief from the I that usually dominates this world is unclear. Or maybe they will battle for dominance, or maybe they will be married together to produce something else altogether? What will the marriage of I and the e produce? Will it be e-I, i.e. will all of this cultimate in the electronic I, which will be the super-ego to make up Freud's third corner after the I(d) and the e(go)? I, e, and e-I -- seems appropriate to recast Freud's psychology to give birth to e-Freud's e-psychology -- well, we have always had an e-psychiatrist with us in the form of Eliza, haven't we? Too bad people misrepresented the attempt as AI. Perhaps Eliza didn't realize that she really was an example of electronic Intelligence. Wonder if Eliza's I, its ego, (or should it be liza's e? wonder who liza is ... ) was bruised by terming its intelligence artificial. How anthropocentric of us? But, in some ways, AI is a misplaced endeavour. It should really have been called eI - electronic Intelligence. As an attempt to be human, as human as can be, AI is doomed. How can you be human if you are artificial, and not human? If you want to have human intelligence and replicate it, reproduce! It can be enjoyable too, unless you happen to be one of those repressed types .. hmm .. well, maybe Eliza can help you there? But, we are digressing. Let us get back to AI and eI. As a complement to human intelligence, eI perhaps seems more appropriate. Not only does eI as a term respect the I of the e, it also fits in so well with the latest fashion doing the rounds -- e-Intelligence. We are far more likely to accept eI than AI ... the e is less of a threat to the I that we humans have! But, more seriously, the shift from the A to the e is also more likely a shift in outlook and not just a cosmetic change in nomenclature. But, I wonder if the e has gone too far. Has the e become the refuge of those who have "failed conventionally"? The e needs to be put back in its place where it belongs .. back in the atom, unless you happen to be the nucelar types, in which case .. forget putting the e back there .. you are much more interested in smashing the atom to bits (pun unintended) .. and god save the world. *** Statutory Warning: Too much e is harmful to your I, and your I's too! *** The process of deconstructing e-worlds has to take place. We need to reclaim the humanist aspects of our lives -- teaching, learning, commerce, business, communication, governance, medicine, intelligence... The e is but another tool that can participate in these endeavours. But, we seem to have lost track of this in venturing too far away from our anthropocentrism. Tagging the e before these can only serve to focus too much on the technology, and less on the endeavour. All of this is not to discount the power and politics of the e-medium, and possibilities the e-technologies engender. Yet, one should recognize that one cannot lose track of the primacy of the endeavours within which the technologies are situated. In some senses, all over the world, the public commons, public resources, and public goods are being given up, and we are now left with the e-commons that the Internet, I-net, seems to show signs of. But, how long, before the I-net transitions from being an e-common, e-public space to an e-private space? In some ways, another way to look at the increasing focus on the e is as a manifestation of the culture of dichotomies, in this case, the dichotomy between the real and the illusionary (or in today's e-worlds, the real and the electronic). If the dichotomy did not exist, we would be perhaps focused on governance itself, and not boost the e's ego by talking of e-governance. Similarly, we would talk of learning, not e-learning. But, somehow the e seems to have gotten better of all of our I's, perhaps e-intelligence is superior to human intellgence, after all! Alas, we are all caught in dichotomies, aren't we? The entire field of AI is one that can be said to find its place in the gap created by the mind-body divide. If one looked at intelligence outside that framework, the fallacy would be perhaps more apparent. One might then focus on e-intelligence and give e's I its due, its place in the sun, and then also subsume it within the larger Intelligence of humanity, there would be nothing artificial about it. Then, maybe then, the marriage of e and the I will produce something beautiful. From rajarambhadu at yahoo.co.in Sat Dec 18 13:34:03 2004 From: rajarambhadu at yahoo.co.in (rajaram bhadu) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 13:34:03 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Jaipur - from memories to spectrum of virtual world Message-ID: >From memories to spectrum of virtual world Study of cultural transition in urban slums of Jaipur city Rajaram Bhadu Introduction Rapid economic growth and industrialization in the country has caused the emergence of 'slums' in the cities/town. A part from this, very high rates for residential plots in the cities/towns which are beyond the reach of the poor, lack of developed residential land and the influx of population to urban areas in search of employment are the root causes for the growth of slums. The houses are either in dilapidated condition or kutcha in slum areas, which totally lack basic civic amenities such as light, drinking water, toilets, fresh air, roads etc. The paths in the slums are narrow and filthy. There is likelihood of occurrence of air and water bone diseases in such areas. Though is vary difficult to define slums, the Census Organization classified the following areas as slums : 1. All such areas, which have been notified by state/local government, or central administered areas by any act as slums. 2. All such areas, which have recognised as slums by state/local govt. and central administered areas but not notified by any act. 3. All such congested areas which have a minimum population of 300 or 60-70 households with unplanned residential clusters which totally lack basic civic amenities of light, drinking water, sanitation, unpolluted air etc, Slums in Rajasthan For the first time in the history of Indian Census, population statistics has been gathered for 'slum areas' from all the cities/towns having population of 50,000 or more as per 1991 Census in the state of Rajasthan in Census 2001. There are 34 such areas in the state. To collect the population statistics for slum areas a total number of 2,422 enumeration blocks were carved out in the state. Out of the total urban population of Rajasthan i.e. 13,205,444 as per provisional figures of 2001 Census, 1,206,123 persons are living in slum areas of the state. This constitutes 9.13 percent of the total urban population. Only 25 cities/towns including UAs have identified slums in their jurisdiction. Municipal authorities of Jhunjhunun, Churu, Bhilwara, Bundi, Dhaulpur, Ganganagar, Gangapur City, Hindaun and Tonk have reported nil slum population. In absolute terms the highest number of slum dwellers i.e. 350,535 are living in the limits of Jaipur Municipal Corporation, which alone constitutes 29.50% of slum population of the state and 15.07% of total population (2,324,913) of city. It is followed by Jodhpur, Kota and Ajmer with 18.31, 21.56 and 24.57 percentage of slum population to their total population respectively. The highest percentage of slum dwellers to total population has been recorded at 35.12 for Kishangarh city of Ajmer district. Kishangarh is notable for its fast growing marble industry in the country. The literacy rates for persons, males and females of the slum population of the state have been recorded as 66.19, 78.77 and 52.23% respectively, which are lower than that of the total urban population of the state. On the other hand, the sex ratios of the total slum population and its population in 0-6 age group have been recorded as 900 and 901 respectively, which are significantly higher than that of corresponding sex ratios of the urban population of the state. Slums in Jaipur Department of education Rajasthan, Unicef (Rajasthan) and Bodh Shiksha Samiti conducted a baseline survey of slums in Jaipur 1998 for govt. of India and United Nation's education programme. This study reveals the facts that the total population of Jaipur i.e. 22,02,645 consists of those 30% population i.e. 6,60943 who lived invariably in slums. Where the urban population growth rate is in between 4 to 6 %, the population of slums is growing at the rate of 30 percent. According to the survey there are 279 slums at present in Jaipur city. The survey indicates lack of essential civil amenities in these slums. The existence of Govt. Schools only in 74 slums out of 279 clearly shows their poor civil conditions. An over all exodus of rural population towards the city in search of livelihood seems to be the only authentic cause behind this speedily expansion of slums. Apparently they come from different socio-cultural and religious backgrounds. They have struggle hard here to work and earn livelihood. Cultural issues of slums During past few years several studies and surveys on Jaipur city's urban slums have been conducted. Most of them focused on educational requirements and to have up-to-date knowledge of health programmes by Govt. and Non-govt. agencies. Thus these have limited to the extent of preparing a base line. Apart from these, there are some notable studies also. One of them is of Shail Mayaram which unveils the increasing tension of communal bias and ghettoization between Hindu and Muslim habitation. (Communal violence in Jaipur, IDS 1993). Recently a study done by Jean Drais gives authentic description of the challenges and hardships faced by the poor who are rushing towards cities from drought hit rural areas. One of the heart-hurting facts that essentially needs to be underlined is that the trend of family suicide among them is on increase in these days. But no such study of these slums is available up to this endeavor, which gives a vivid picture of continuing marginalisation and displacement of these communities/families. A study, which explains slum as a disjointed group, totally cut off from social control and value structure, in which their cultural memories of past life are collected and the crisis of present identity as well as the struggle for recognition has been documented. No such study exists which analyses the process of deculturization and acculturazation of these people. Nor we in any way know how and what type of role religion, regionality, language and caste play in the cultural interactions of these composite communities. What sort of change takes place in the sexual behavior of their women after the erosion of social control and value structure? How far this cultural vacuum is responsible for their addiction to gambling and having drugs? What type of power structures and gangsterings are developing in them? How far education, media and NGO's have been able to decrease their mentality of parasite living? Are some new cultural procedures or cultural forms emerging in these slums? These and other such questions necessitate to explore and to have a profound study of this cultural phenomena. Objectives of the Study 1. To identify the original cultural forms of the communities residing in the slums. 2. To investigate the cultural interactions and impacts among the different communities. 3. To analyze the elements responsible for and the processes of deculturization, acculturization and lapse of memory of the residents. 4. To identify new culture forms and cultural innovations generated by the interactions within the community and among the communities. 5. To search out alternative cultural strategies and programmes for active intervention among various communities. Basis of Selection of the Slums for Study Dividing them in four types according to the stages of development can see these slums. 1. First type of such slums basically, consists of depressed casts such as - Harijan bastis, Kathputali or Kalakar basti marginalised from the city and families, which have also settled in them. These are comparatively older habitations. 2. Second type of slums has acquired stability after a specific period of time. They have got themselves regularized by forming a pressure group and then putting a hard pressure on the government. A particular type of social order has begun to gain a ground here. 3. Third type of slums is those, which are passing through a temporary phase and have no clear communitarian image. 4. This type has come into existence after the declaration of Jaipur as a Heritage City. Some of the slums under this scheme have been displaced from their original site and established at a new place for the sake of beautifying the city. Later three types of slums have taken up for study. Second type of regular slums has mainly one community in majority such as Nepalis, Muslims, Paharis or Bengalis etc. But Manoharpura is a composite typed basti, which is selected. Like is, one each from third and fourth type of slums has taken up which have mixed character of community. One of the reasons of leaving aside the first type of colony is that here generally the process of saskritization taking place which is familiar. Methodology For framing socio-economic perspective of the three slums selected for study the secondary data and material available have studied and analysed. Structured and open ended (both) interviews have conducted with group discussion among men - women and adolescents in different groups. To capture the detailed history of cultural practices case studies have done some selected families. I have tried to analysis and evaluate the narratives and content of cultural forms. I used to participatory observation of cultural activities, actions and practices of communities. The nature of the study is interdisciplinary and qualitative. The study is supported by approach of subaltern-studies, gender studies and methodology of anthropological studies as well as other knowledge bases. Profile of the selected slums 1. Monoharpura Monoharpura established in 1989, 280 families were shifted over here from Jalebli Chock, which is the heart of the old city. At that place Janata market a posh market space exists at present. When families shifted here, it was a pastureland beside a drain (Ganda Nala), only three- four huts of Kalbelia (snake charmers) families were here before new comer families. Now Kalbelia families have increased. Raisa (60), a dai by profession told me that they did fight long time to get settled here. Some dominating people of nearby village try to throw him from this place. Then they called City Corporation and JAD for help and filed a case in Supreme Court. Raisa told that in those days Gundas and Police persons were harassed their bahu-batis. They contacted a women organization and seek help in this matter. After normalizing the situation, some other families also came here to reside. Monoharpura basti situated between the Gandhinagar railway station and Sanganer airport. It is surrounded by planned colonies. Circular road alongside with this basti. In this basti, the residents are Balmiki, Bairwa, Raiger, Kalbelia, Banjara and Balai families. A few newly immigrant families from Bengal and Madras also reside here. Govt. school located at some distance from basti, there are also two private schools, one Janshala and Anganwadi centre. In Bairwa community some people are Govt. servants, most of them fourth class and others are labourers. Raigers engaged in their traditional work of leather processing. But young generation of Raiger community engaged in different manual jobs. Young group of Kalbelias formed a band and playing it in marriage ceremonies for at learning. Muslim community engaged in iron works and kabada karobar. Some people from Balmikis are working in corporation as sweeper other engaged different occupation. Many persons of the basti are riksapullar. Most houses are actually thatch-roofed exclude some brick-houses. 2. Nagtalai Nagtalai is the second site of this study. This is inhabited along the Jaipur-Delhi national highway and now is a part of metropolitan city. The Jhuggis are spread over in the U shaped valley and on the stairs of aravali hills beside the four lane road. People believe that there was a talai (pond) in the valley and snake-charmers used it to set their snakes free on the auspicious day of the nagpanchmi. So basti called as Nagtalai. Earlier there had been more than 50 bhattas (lime kilns) and the labour engaged in this work settled down here. Simultaneously the mining work at nearby hills also began and the labour involved in the mining work also settled down here. At present Government banned the mining work. Bhattas also closed due to the lack of demand of Chuna (lime). Only two bhattas are in working order. The families working at bhattas emigrated from Bihar who now live here. More than 300 families are residing here, in which number of muslims is larger than hindus. The mulsim population was not in majority before one decade. During these years, many muslim families shifted here from UP. They purchased jhuggis that belonged to hindus on high prices. Among hindus, mostly are kumhars (potters) and balais (SC), in other castes; meena, brahmin and bania families are living here together. Earlier kumhars worked transporting lime and stones using their donkeys. After the declining in the bhatta work, they began to send their younger generation to learn automobile work with mechanics. Now, most of the kumhar families have adopted this trade. Many muslim families are also engaged in this trade from long time. Some people from this basti are working in Government services. A large number of the people from Nagtalai work at transport nagar and anajmandi. Anajmandi located opposite side of the basti after crossing the highway. Some people are engaged in different types of works in the city. 3. Paldi meena Paldi meena is an erstwhile state period village situated at Jaipur-Agra national highway no. 11 at a distance of two km from the old rampart of Jaipur. The village has now become a part of Jaipur Municipal Corporation and the agricultural land lying behind the village has been converted into the residential scheme. The Jaipur Development Authority (JDA) has erected housing colonies for the families of low-income groups and families of below poverty line (BPL). Alongside these colonies, JDA resettled about half a dozen urban slums, which are shifted from the city under operation pink. This is my third research site, where two slums - OTS and university slums - are relocated here under rehabilitation scheme of JDA. It is interesting to note that people still called here these habitations as OTS and university basti. Both are located beside a common road. One side of this new colony, low-income scheme stands and one the other side a big colony established for resettlement of some small-unplanned colonies, which were existed before around the airport and now shifted here due to the extension plan of airport premises. JDA allotted big size of plots for these families as the compensation. The plots have allotted to the slum dwellers are small in size i.e. 80 sqr yds, and as loan 50 thousand per family also provided in advance to construct house. Yet many families are living elsewhere and some of them intend to sell out there allotted plots. Scenario of old basti here lies in memories along while a difference between rehabilitated slums scheme and colony of shifted families from airport is obvious. Hence in the area various signboards of properties dealers appear for the purpose. There is a high spacious community hall for the slums rehabilitation colony but till now it is not open for public use. A board is also stands here of kachhi basit punarvas vikas samiti whereon the names of its office-bearers are mentioned. 70% families of OTS and university slums have resettled here but out of these families people who already were in confirmed services of doing any regular business, even now are continuing there as usual. The rest have become jobless. If these people go to city while living here, will have to bear three times fare in conveyance and time too. Construction work in this area is the only scope in which both man and women of basti try to seek work. Families who shifted from OTS basti are mostly dalits (SC & STs) while in OTS basti included dhobis (washer man) also some savarn (general) castes are common in both bastis. Families coming from OTS were already familiar with each other. Now families of both bastis are intermingling. Social structure At present many slums situated within the city, which seem like dirty spots on the beautiful skirt of the Gulabi (pink) city according to citizen's perception. Many slums situated on the periphery of the city, which are concrete example of the marginalization of these people. One upon a time, many families of these slums were the part of the mainstream population of the city, which came here due to some critical situations. Other type of people is migrated here from other cities/states to get job opportunities in this city. In both case people are derooted from their native place. Rajasthan faces famine frequently and this is fourth famine year. In this year problem is more acute. Naturally the number of immigrate people have increased. The footpaths and rain baseras (night-shelters) are overcrowded by the famine-ridden people, who used to gather early in the morning on the chokhaties (a type of labour-mandi) to get the job. The population of slums has increased due to the new comers and the problem of unemployment became more complex in these days for slum-dwellers. I have mentioned earlier my general observation that the social structure of the slums is quite different from urban and rural societies. For example social hierchy and specific roles of the people are defined in rural social structure. The rural social structure has mechanism of social control and provides remedial measures to regulate deviations from social norms. My observations of these slums confirmed above conception. The people who reside in these slums came from various areas and belong different casts, dialects and religions. They have not any common socio-cultural background. So they have their different customs, beliefs and values. The social interaction in these slums is motivated by certain factors. It is not governed by established social norms, which are accepted by the majority of the people. So there is not any social discrimination exists here on the basis of the role of power and individual. But a particular type of relationship emerged here among the people because they are living at same place in common situations. When they face any unfavorable situation or risk position in which they can loose their occupied land, they fight collectively and in united manner. Last year, after declaration of Jaipur as 'heritage city', local administration started to remove some slums on the name of the beautification under operation pink. At that time effected slum-dweller raised their voice collectively. Then they resettled outside city by the administration under rehabilitation scheme. Some slums are relocated at Paldi meena, people who rehabilitated here, and are still struggling for civic amenities. Otherwise, after a time period, stability takes place in slums and any type of social system starts to emerging. My first research site Manoharpura is an example of this type. Process of Inclusion: two episodes q Khemraj used to live in a village of Bikaner (western Rajasthan). He was a worker in an NGO where from the honorarium he was getting, was not enough for support to his family including 5 children. Frequently prevailing drought and famine conditions increased his troubles to face hardship. He came to Jaipur where he began to work in an NGO. Even after working round - the - clock what he got as salary was far less than the minimum wage of a labour. In spite of he had to send his wife to work in the house of Secretary almost free of any remuneration. At last he left the service of NGO and shifted himself to live in the slum-Manoharpura. Khemraj belongs to Jat caste (savarn), now he is living here in a house of bairwa (SC) as his tenant. He has no discrimination with this bairwa family. Now he has engaged a thhela (trolley) of vegetables in subjimandi of this basti. His wife also sells vegetable at the same place in front of the thhela of her husband. Children also seem playing and supporting around their parents. The eldest daughter is attending a cheep private school. After school time, she give help her mother at the shop and in the kitchen. Khemraj was a member of the bhajan mandali in his village. Here he attends Jagrans celebrated usually is shiv mandir of the basti. Here bairwas used to sing nirgun while Khemraj recites sagun bhajans. Khemraj also hammered a nal (horse-shoe) in his thhela on the advice of a shanichar follower. Both husband and wife here stand in an queue and are living to win over the mountain of miseries and misfortunes. q Kanchan valmiki (25) studies up to VII standard and belonged to a village in Dausa district. She came in old OTS basti at her sister, family (sasural) before her marriage took place. After shifting in Paldi Meena, Kanchan seems overjoyed while living and enjoying the facilities available here. She told us, things here are all right and good. Everything is pleasing, basic amenities like electricity and water are available, houses are open and spacious. Environment of the new colony is quite different from the slum. But only problem that every one facing is lack of work or job. Besides this medical facility and transportation also are big problems. To pick up a bus, one has to walk on foot far about more than one km. up to Paldi meena village. Here children attended a private school here. None of other any caste considers her as untouchable. She attends marriage and other ceremonies of other castes. Social mobilization and citizen's perception Several families of Nagtalai have shifted in the city after selling their houses. They felt well-being status economically. Some people rented their houses or shops to another residents at the basti and shifted himself in the planned colonies of the city. Economically improved condition supported their social mobalizaton. Citizen keeps distance with basti communities and consider then inferior. One Graduate girl of balai family was engaged with a teacher of Jodhpur city. But after some time boy's family have broken the engagement at the ground that it was not possible that bridegroom can reach at the door of the bride on horse-back. Actually the house of the girl is situated at the up hill and path is very narrow and zigzag. But another side, people who came here after migration from village and other town/cities are replacing previous families. Radheshyam who came here from a village of chakshu block rented a jhuggi in the basti. His family is living in a part of jhuggi and in outer part he is running a shop. This shop is running continuously as before but now ownership has changed. Poverty, liquor and anger The children and adolescents of Manoharpura basit used to scrap-picking. The woman Maina told Jindgi bhar pinni bini, shadi ho gayi, bachehe ho gaye. A large number of basti women are working in nearby colonies as Kamwalis (house worker). The use of liquor is very common in this basti. One english and one deshi wine shop situated at the basti bus stand. Some groups of the people may be seen involved in gambling. The husband of Sharifan (48, muslim women) divorced her and did second marriage. Now Sharifan lived with her five children - three girls and two boys. Whole family is depend on scrap Pickering. On the schooling her children, Sharifan argues, paisa nahin hai, school jayenge to khayenge kya ? The use of liquor is very common among the people of Nagtali. The liquor also did not lag behind and has made its appearance as before in Paldi meena. Earlier when the bhattas (furnace of limestone) were running in Nagtalai, at that time on total family was engaged in a particular work place. After closing of these bhattas, people were pressurized to search the jobs from other place for their livelihood. In changed situation, it was not possible that whole family could found the work at the same place. Then wherever on found work, he/she joined it. This new condition weakened the family institution. This affected the intense family relationship and broken the joint family system. Now nuclear family trend hare increased. In recent years, we find the crime rate have risen in the slums, simultaneously indulgence of police thana also increased. In crimes, the illegal distribution of liquor, gambling, theft and inter conflicts are included mostly. The status of women is not better in the slums. The majority of women earn livelihood like their male partners. They have to work for earning as well as at the home. Due to the common use of liquor in the community; women are the sufferer of the consequences of liquor. Some women also victimized by domestic violence. In spite of it, women fully participated in the activities of the slums. They are also articulated. As the recent development, a feeling of independence is also growing the slum's women toward sexual relationships. The people of the slums assumed that the moral values are decayed in these days. The collective spirit has reduced and individualism is increasing rapidly. The family and marriage institution have weakened. The feeling of respect for elders has also reduced in younger generation. People are not caring toward social accountability. The slum people, especially younger considered inferior their life conditions in the comparison with urban life style. Unemployment is an acute problem for the people of Paldi meena sight. In old university slum, they are engaged in their particular occupations. Most of them were involved in handicraft, gardening and labour work. Women were engaged in agarbatti work, tailoring, weaving and working as housemaids. But now all routine have disturbed. One person have to spent 25 rupees daily for conveyance if he want to find a job in city and there is not certainty to get the job. Sitaram Sisodia (30) who was a screen painter, is now unemployed. The unemployed youth and group of women either play cards or pass their time in gossiping and watching TV at home. The use of liquor is also catching the younger generation because it is so cheap in this area that a bottle is available here in only 30 rupees. After drinking, people used to criticize the incidence of shifting the basti at this place. Moolchand Bunkar was the leader of the slum. When the matter of shifting was raised in university slum, he leaded the people and fought a long struggle to rehabilitate properly. People won in the struggle but Moolchand lost his daily service in this fight. Now he also faced the bitter anger of unemployed youth everyday who charged him for shifting and present misfortune. Communal situation Babulal Sharma, who resided Nagtalai since 1969, told us that communal riots of 90s affected the basti but any incident of violence was not occurred at that time. Whenever nearby Rishigalab nagar affected seriously with the violence of the riots and several families suffered with the consequences of it. In Nagtalai, on the initiative of the both communities, they controlled the communal tension in the basti. Since than there has been no communal incident took place in the basti. If any conflict seemed to arise people of both communities came forward and solved the matter with common understanding. Babulal quoted one case, which happened before some years, one cyclist came here to demonstrate his performance in the basti. He got police permission for it with the help of local people. A large number of audiences gathered at the place of the show. During the show, a muslim boy dared to tease a hindu girl. This action provoked the hindus and they began to beat the mulsim boy. Some person tried to stop this practice and suggested to hand over the case to thana police. Before the situation worsened, the family member of the mulsim boy came there. They understood the matter reasonably and not favorued the boy. Ultamately the matter resolved peacefully. Most of muslim families of Nagatalai are engaged in the gem-polishing work at their own residence, Hindu people also share this work. Habitation of this basti is ideal one in which the jhuggis of hindus and muslims stand adjoining to each other. They exchange the things. There are two hindu temples in the basti. Muslims also contribute donation in jagaran and jammastami puja celebrations organised at mandirs. Likewise mulsims distributed purchased sweets from market on the auspicious day of Id, domestic sweets does not acceptable by hindus. Families of both communities, which have more intimate relationship, share food and participate specific occasions collectively. On end of Nagtalai, an old temple of lord shiva is situated. Some hindu residents participated in this temple at the time of puja-archana. The hindu community of basti established one another temple of lord shiva and hanuman collectively. The preparation and distribution of posh bada (a type of prasad prepared in the holy month of posh-January) is an annual collective activity of local people. Every body participated in this procession without any discrimination of cast and religion. In the muslim community, wedding ceremony generally arranged outside of the slum. Women played major role in the rituals and cultural processions of marriage. In the Id (festival) of mulsim community, hindu families also shared their greetings. Recently muslim community of this slum prepared Tazia in a collective manner. But it is ironical that intra discrimination exists in muslim community of Nagtalai. Local muslim community promulgated the aggressive image of immigrants up muslims. But their behavior not approved this conception. They are considered inferior by local Muslims and called as muchliwale (fishermen). But all muslim attend namaj together in the same masque situated in adjoin colony. According to a recent survey, there are 2657 families in Manoharpura slum in which 250 families are muslim. But most of these are from backward mulsim communities i.e. Fakir, Darvesh and Shakkas etc. In this slum more than 20 such persons are living who use tantras to cure their patients. They claimed that they have some supernatural power that helps him in the treatment. In these persons there are three mulsim pirs. Every pir, Ojha and Tantrik used his particular way and style for treatment of their patient. One of such tantrik, tried to attempt rape a women patient during so-called treatment. R. Rehman is a pir. His main occupation is make utensile of alloy in old city. Since the morning, lots of sufferers gathered in front of his door. Most of them are children and women. Every sufferer came there with a stem of neem tree in his hand and sit in the queue. Rehman sit on their knees and starts to attend them one by one, take the stem from the sufferer and whisper some mysterious word while during the Jhada with neem branch. One can see a pile of neem stems in front of Rehman's house. Earlier Rehman was the resident of old city at Ajmeri Gate. He studied till secondary. In 1986 his family shifted in this slum. Rehman's parents were died in his childhood. After leaving the school, Rehman started to sale the ice crème candy. Then he worked as driver. In job of driving he used to drink alcohol and gambling. In 1997 he met an ustad who taught the Koran to him. In the influence of the ustad and teaching of the Koran he gave up alcohol. Subsequently he met a hajji and visited Muradabad. He did not found himself satisfied there and came back at Jaipur. Then he started to work at a shop of alloy utensils and still working the same job. In 1976 Rehman got marred and in 1979 he opt the silsila community (a commune of sufi followers). With the effect of new following, he left the gambling practice. During this time, Bengali women told his wife about Manoharpura kachchi basti, where both husband and wife make their hut. After shifting here, his wife started the embroidery work. Now they have a pakka house. In 1989 Rehman got knilaphat from his pir. Then he started to treat the sufferers. He is having fame in and outside of the slum. According to Rehman, two types of powers exist in the universe - one is physical and second spiritual. He helps to the people in spiritual matters. In patients, mostly ill children harassed and tensed person and the people having sexual problems, especially young girls came to consult with him. People pay him for his dua (treatment) willingly. He utilizes the money in the maintenance of pir baba's majar (tomb) and on organization the urse (a religious programme). Silsia organized three urses in a year in which kabbalis and mahfils are the major activities. What is the mystery behind his miracle? Rehman replies that he attended five times namaj regularly and used to jikra (discussion) of malik (Allah) and regards the raza and sufi-sijra as holy rituals. Cast status Bairwas, Raigars and Balais are equal (in assumed category) according to the cast-hierarchy, like this Banjaras and kalbelias are have same status whenever valmikis (sweeper, traditionally called 'bhangis') are at the lowest level in the cast system. These all casts are avarn according to the hindu cast system. In contemporary discourse, we used the category 'dalits' for all these casts. Cast is still the primary social unit at some extend in these slums. A valmiki women of Manoharpura basti dropped out their three children form Govt. school, bachon se chhuachut karte the, pani nahin peene dete the, bachche pyase rahte they, (the teacher and children of the Govt. school discriminated her children as untouchable, forbidden drinking water, children suffered thirst in the school so she dropped out their children from the school.) In Nagtalai, though cast factor do not in dominating position but it effects the relationship. Untouchability is not visible or outwardly. Families of different castes assemble together at the various occasions i.e. marriage feasts etc. on the basis of close relationships. Nobody objects on this type of case. If any person from dalit community wants to organize a feast for higher caste people, there is a condition that any higher caste family should arrange preparation of food and then all savarn castes people may attend this feast. In Paldi meena slums rehabilitation scheme 148 families of university kachchi basti are shifted and settled in D-block of the scheme called Ashok vihar. These families belong to Koli, Dhobi, Rana, Kharawat, Thakur, Balai and Harizan castes. The most interesting case is that two harizen (sweepers) families told to the people, that they can allot him two houses at the corner of the colony but the people prefer him and allotted the houses of center place of the colony. The practice of untouchability of cast discrimination is not accepted by anybody in this habitation. These families have passed two years after resettlement. In this period more than 10 marriages have took place in this habitation. Every family participated in the rituals and bhoj etc. mean while at one marriage time, the father of groom have died, people manage the death ceremony as well as wedding process simultaneously in cooperative manner. Three is a triangle sized park in the block in which a temple of lord shiva have constructed by a sikh factory owner. Actually factory owner contributed for his affection toward the residents in which some people are labour in his factory. Now people of all castes use to pray and pooja in this temple without any discrimation. Children used to park as ground for playing. One voluntary agency is operating a Janshala for children. One NGO's intervention Bodh Shikha Samiti (an NGO) has been running a Bodhshala for more than a decade in Nagtalai basti. Bodhshala (school) is providing alternative primary education for children. But admission for a certain number of children is a limitation of Bodhshala. So rest of the children use to go another school running on the opposite side of the road, for upper primary and higher education children attend other school outside from the basti. Two girls have studied up to graduation, some bahus (housewives) are educated secondary and above level. New educated generation does not believes in discrimination on the basis of religion and caste. Prahlad, a resident of Nagtalai is a clerk in Govt. school. Before this service he was a teacher in bodhshala of the basti. Bodhshala is an innovative school in which teachers used to provide lots of books other than prescribed textbooks to the children as reading material. In bodhshala, teachers motivated children for creative writing, painting, singing, dance and handicrafts. But after the schooling, children would not be able to continue these things. The factor behind this is lack of continuity in their further education after the completion of primary education given by bodhshala. Another factor is that, there are not any opportunity and space available to enhance their aptitudes and such type of creative interests. In this condition they also become a part of slum's ordinary youth or develop as a peculiar type of character who would not adjust themselves with others. If this young generation got the proper guidance and encouragement for creative direction, they could be change agents in the cultural scenario of the slum. Cultural support for children and youth should be a continuous process. Here early marriages a prevailing practices in the slum, although in these days it is declining. Prahlad told about a case. One student of bodhshala has engaged for marriage. He opposed it in family and community with the support of his colleagues and teachers. Now the boy is a lecturer and got married after getting the job. In reduction of the cast discrimination, children taught from bodhshala have played a major role in the slum. The cultural forms in practice The cultural forms, patterns and processes are not visible on the surface of social life in the slums. Many of these manifests in some special occasions and in the particular situations. Manoharpura basti constituted a development committee in which local councilor is very interested as wall writings informed. It also informed that last days Chief Minister allocated land patta's to the basti residents. Two temples are shining in the basti between the dirty jhuggis. There are so many cassette shops in the basti, cassette recording facilities are also available at these shops. Everybody can hire a VCR from these shops. Film posters are displayed on a particular hording at bus stand. As the same, there are many shops in the right side at the main road of Nagtalai. Among these shops women are also working in bakery works. A group of people can be seen playing with cards in the verandas of some shops, which remain closed. TV sets are common asset in the basti. According to one shopkeeper Agarwal the readership of newspaper is 30 percent in this basti. There is also a video parlor where a group of children may be seen involved in the video games. Cultural forms and practices are not commonly visible in urban slums as we started earlier. We can see these processes on some special occasions only. Whereas the assumptions, beliefs and values of slums dwellers are manifest in their routine behavior. In Nagtalai basti wedding ceremony of kumhar and balai community still having a traditional pattern. Most of these families followed the traditional customs, women used to sing songs, make rituals and perform dance in groups. The residents of the slums belong to the various villages but common cast-based linked them primarily as community. Secondly, in which villages these people have came here, that area has same lingual and cultural background so it was quite natural to acquire as a cultural community in a place like slum. Kumhar, Balai and other hindu residents of the basti celebrate Holy, Deewali, Gangour and other festivals in a same manner and modes. Balai and Kumhar community have some particular festivals. Balai celebrate navaratra as a special festival. In navaratra they pray the god bharoonji, they give bali of he-goat and distribute pieces of the meat as prasad bhog and eat it collectively. During the nine days of navratra, they did jagran. In jagran, they did whole night pray with a team with singing bhajans in the praise of bharoonji. They called it bhagtai. The bhagan madli (a particular group of singers) used different musical folk instruments such as duffs, chung, manjire, ghanti and thal etc. At the climax point of the jagaran some bhagats (preachers) feel bhar (incarnation) of bharoonji, then other people request him to solve their problems. Kumhar celebrate sheetalastami in a different way. Kumhars are worshiper of sheetlamata (a goddess). A fair is organized yearly in Chaksu on the occasion of sheetalastami in the temple of sheetlamata. Kumhar families of the slum attended this fair respectively. There are not such cultural forms, which generally in practice in the slums in which there are any scope or space will be available for self-expression and collective interactions. Exclude the singing and dancing programme performed in marriage ceremonies and festivals. TV programmes and films are the only medium of entertainment. The visual media is not interactive in it's nature, so audience have only passive role as viewer. Last year a group of youth have played some street dramas in Nagtalai. The residents of the slum enjoyed the performance, but they were not able to understand the inherent message of the plays because they were not familiar with this cultural form. Impact of media When TV serial i.e. ramayan and mahabharat telecasted first time, number of TV sets in Nagtalai was very few at that time. People used to see these serial at some certain places collectively and during this period they discussed the episodes. At present 90 percent families have their own TV sets. Now the world of entertainment has personalized, but number of colored TV sets and VCRs is not more, so people almost see the new feature films on VCR collectively. In film viewers, youth have in a majority. From this slums 20 percent young people attended film shows at cinema halls in the city. More than 100 newspapers have circulated in the slum. It is obvious that the number of newspaper readers will be multiplied. As media is a powerful medium to provide informations and depiction of popular (modern?) cultural forms in urban slums, therefore, it become imperative to explore how far media are affecting these sections. The exposure and impact of media was measured by modifying the schedule. The media included in this exercise were films, radio, television and print media (including newspapers and magazines). The numbers of respondent were 50, (23 females and 27 males). Selected three urban slums i.e. Manoharpura, Nagtalai and Paldimeena. The range of the age of respondents was between 18 to 35 years. The age group is quite curious to know the things and also in confronting position against prevalent value structure. If we go through the educational levels of these respondents, we find that out of 50 respondents 62% are literate, 14% just literate, simply able to read and write and use the arithmetic in their daily routine life and 24% are illiterate. Illiterate respondents felt hurdle in the interaction with media, they are on the wavelength with the communication on the basis of the language of sings and symbols. The larger group of respondents belongs with scheduled castes as lower strata of the society. Majority of the respondents come from nuclear family. This phenomenon is similar with the urban social structure. Once upon a time radio was in fashion in these communities. Till first round of the TV extension, radio and tape recorder were the only entertainment channels in slums, but at this time radios are merely remnants of the old fashion, i.e. only 10 %. TV took a major place in the every house of the respondents. There are few persons (16%) who are interested in the newspapers/magazines. There are exceptional cases in these sites that does not watch small screen regularly. So the whole sensitive part of these slums is within the range of this visual equipment. Only 10% of our respondents are the listeners of radio. The readership of newspaper and magazines is growing slowly, although these magazines may be focused on films or popular kind of subject. On TV screen, the majority of our respondents are almost regular audience of the social melodramas (56%) and comic episode (74%). Although entertainment is the prior concern of the viewers but they watch keenly the reflection and behaviors presented by these episode. Films and religions episodes have a tight grip on the mental world in these communities. In spite of, to use the modern manner in the life, religious faith and attitudes have not loosened its roots. Secondly, the religious stories and sagas are familiar and well known among the people. The picturization of the miracles and strange incidents are also factors behind the popularity of these episodes. Action and suspense in movies and serials are also popular form on the screen. In reference of sources of information, it was found that nearly 62% of the respondents considered television as an important source of information which 12% consider that it occur through conversation with peer groups, 14% agreed that radio also provide information and only 12% favored newspapers and magazines. In these communities verbal interaction is predominate. So the impact of print media is not limited to particular reader, through verbal interaction it diffused. One person read newspaper loudly and other two or three person listen it carefully or person who read anything else, summarized this to other in oral form. Information from print media disseminated in a large rank. This practice of oral tradition is effective still in slums. As the response shows media initiate its role of political consciousness in respective communities, but not so effectively. The illiteracy and social barriers may be the major hurdles in the direction. The impact of media regarding acceptability of the elementary education in respective communities is decisive. As well as, the pressure of urban life and living style are also major factors in this concern. In the context of girl's education, media is playing also an important role. In health issues, media played a quite significant role in respective slums. The numbers of respondents is less in favor of early marriage (only 18%) whereas; large number of the respondents (82%) is against the early marriage. The majority of the respondents (78%) realize a tremendous change in their role within and beyond the family's sphere. The number of negative respondents is very less (12%). It may be possible that they could not conceive the question or they felt hesitation to answer on it. The realization of a positive difference in their role by respondents is an important factor. The virtual world of visual media is transferring the hard reality of viewer's life. Even in the slums, respondents sometime find her selves like the visual characters on screen or the paper. The knowledge and information inputs reduce the power of the physical assets and money. Women (respondents) feel liberated from traditional limitations and find more meaningful role in the society. Like other positive attributes this changed role is a major indicator in the status of women especially in her self-image. At an extreme point, some respondents find their role models in media especially visual and follow their manners and style. Actually this is the matter of identification. Depending on their motives and values, viewers imagine as if they were on the screen. They develop empathy with some characters who happened to be somehow like them and identify themselves with the same or adopt them as models, sharing their feelings and values and copying them. What is to be done? It was a short-term study, so actually these are some impression, which indicates the scope of further explorations. To concretize the conceptual framework of empirical understand in-depth study is needed. It did not possible to analyze the process of deculturization and acculturization in slum communities with detail. The interface with their cultural memories of past life and the crisis of present identity as well as the struggle for recognition is not properly documented. Without enough interaction with the concerning communities we cannot explain the practice of social control and value-structure prevailing in slum life. So this question still unanswered that what sort of change takes place in the sexual behavior of women after the erosion of social control and traditional value structure? This and other such questions necessitate to be addressed. The social composition of urban slums is complex and dynamic. The residing communities are multi-lingual, multi-religious and multi-casts based but it cannot be called as multi culturism in modern sense. Cultural pluralism is a conscious state of the society wherever co-existence among various groups in the slum is spontaneous and situational in nature. The immigrant communities have almost relapsed their cultural memories; there are only some remnants. The traditional and folk cultural practices are only ritually adopted without live enthusiasm. The basis of these cultural forms mostly religion though it is a type of premodern and still remain untouched with the waves of recent communalism. But it may provide a fertile ground for this trend. Other aspect of the cultural scenario is domination of popular cultural forms projected by media. Due to the impact of it, process of acculturization has increased. Actually it distorted the 'forms' itself and deculturized the traditional practices. After all, urban slum are still far from the modern culture. No doubt, without socio-economic change, one cannot think about the progress of any segment of the society, but initiation in the universe of culture may be granted. Modern culture is value-added in its nature and content. These values are democratic and essential for an open society. Although it is quiet challenging to intervene in slums regarding such type culture, but there is also a wide scope because these communities are the most vital and dynamic component of the modern society. Cultural transition is the silent feature of this region, so active cultural intervention is most relevant here as well as also an urgent need. Residents of slums are marginalized and poverty ridden sections of the society. So the rights based approach may be only strategy here to be adopted for action. An alternative will be needed here for dominating cultural forms. The modern creative cultural forms i.e. theatre, dance, painting, cinema (of course in different kind) and literature may be the appropriate alternative. Cultural rights, i.e. acess to culture are the prime agenda of slum's context. The universalization of modern culture (like education) should be a project for urban slum and also remote rural areas. If this project will be delayed, the identity-based movement will emerge in its way. It may be so called cultural identity (based on religions fundamentalism), dalit identity (based on casts) or identities of language and regionalism. The vision of multi-culturism than will be reduced merely a dream. Since slums provides us a ground of its type of composite and mixed culture where various innovations can be used. Certainly, the imposition of a particular type of culture on any community is a fascist practice. It is also true that nobody can create culture for others. It is an intrinsic practice. So intervention of cultural field demands a democratic point of view and radical activism. Interaction with slum dwellers should be in the direction of capturing memories and emotions as well as other intangible things. An insight toward existing cultural forms and alternative modes may visualize the further course. The biases and myths of citizens about slum dwellers should be deconstructed. Culture should be included in the actions of present institutions and organizations that are working in slums areas. The exposure of slums people is must, such efforts should be made that they will be part of the audience of theatre, musical and literary programmes of the city like cinema. The modern cultural groups should be performing their arts also in slum area. But some pedagogical tasks are needed in these communities before it to familiar people with other forms of arts. If we have believed that everybody have individual dignity than he/she will not be in isolation. It is our duty to realize his/her rights as human being and link with the mainstream. The horizon of civil society could be broadened, if we are inclusive towards marginalized and deprived section of the society. If world is global, everybody have his/her place inside the sphere of this cultural universe. From lushinkk at yahoo.com Sat Dec 18 17:21:08 2004 From: lushinkk at yahoo.com (lush inkk) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 03:51:08 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] those in bombay could help-bandra slum fire Message-ID: <20041218115108.49672.qmail@web80901.mail.scd.yahoo.com> To all those in Mumbai, who can reach out a helping hand. Hi Everybody, I need your urgent help. The children who i teach at ASEEMA have all lost their homes to the fire at Bandra reclamation. I have just come back from there and it is a really heart-wrenching sight. All I could see was coal around me. By god�s grace there has been no loss of life, however their lives are all they could save. I request you all to plz help us. Any form of help will be appreciated. We r in urgent need of: Blankets, Bed sheets, Clothes of all sizes (for children, mothers and fathers), Towels, Innerwear, Shoes/chappal`s/slipper`s, Dry Snack`s, Utensil`s/Container`s. Monetary help shall also be appreciated. You could also Sponsor a meal which we provide to the children. Please help us help them. Our Address is ASSEMA G-3 Josephine Apartments Ground Floor, Chimbai Road Bandra, Mumbai 400 050, India Tel/Fax: x91 -(0)22 - 2640 72 48 e-mail: contact at aseema.org __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From eye at ranadasgupta.com Sun Dec 19 11:30:48 2004 From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 11:30:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Public Intellectuals in China Message-ID: <41C51910.9020905@ranadasgupta.com> Under fire, again Dec 9th 2004 | BEIJING From The Economist print edition Free expression worries the authorities IN AN Orwellian obfuscation of its role, the Chinese Communist Party's Propaganda Department prefers to translate its name these days as the Publicity Department. But one of its main tasks remains that of issuing secret directives to the state-controlled media telling them what not to report. And among its latest prohibitions is any encouragement for “public intellectuals” in China. In recent years, the party had become more relaxed about intellectuals. Outspoken academics helped fuel the campus fervour that eventually erupted into mass protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But the crackdown, followed a couple of years later by an economic boom, dampened demands for political change. The party began to worry more about unemployed workers and disgruntled peasants, and less about intellectuals—many of whom, anyway, were turning their attention to making money. More recently, however, the rapid spread of the internet and the increasing commercialisation of the Chinese media have given intellectuals new avenues of expression. A few, including economists, social scientists and lawyers, have become well-known among the chattering classes for their critiques of social ills (though prudently, in most cases, not of the party itself). The term “public intellectuals” has crept into the media, encouraged not least by a Chinese translation last year of “Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline”, a book by an American judge, Richard Posner, examining the role of such commentators in America. The Propaganda Department lost its patience after a magazine in Guangdong Province, Southern People Weekly, published a list of 50 Chinese public intellectuals in September. The market economy, said an accompanying commentary, had caused the rapid marginalisation of intellectuals. “But this is the time when China is facing the most problems in its unprecedented transformation, and when it most needs public intellectuals to be on the scene and to speak out.” If the 50 had been loyal party stooges, all might have been forgiven. But among them were several who are decidedly not, including Zhang Sizhi, a defence lawyer who has argued in the trials of some of China's best known dissidents; Cui Jian, a rock singer whose irreverence has irritated the authorities since his heyday in the Tiananmen era; Bei Dao, a poet who has been forced to live in exile since the 1989 unrest; and Wang Ruoshui (who died in 2002), a senior journalist and member of the party's inner circle who turned dissident. A scathing commentary on the list, published last month by a Shanghai newspaper and republished by the party's main mouthpiece, People's Daily, said that promoting the idea of “public intellectuals” was really aimed at “driving a wedge between intellectuals and the party.” The window for free debate that opened a crack over the past couple of years, as China's leadership shifted to the “fourth generation” of leaders, is closing again. Oddly, perhaps, given the supposed indifference of urbanites to politics, two of the bestselling books in China this year have been about the “anti-rightist” campaign of 1957, during which half a million of the party's intellectual critics were persecuted. One of the books, “Past Events Have Not Vanished Like Smoke”, was banned by the Propaganda Department. The other, “Inside Secrets of 1957: The Sacrificial Altar of Suffering”, is still for sale. Though probably not for long. From zainab at xtdnet.nl Sun Dec 19 21:00:55 2004 From: zainab at xtdnet.nl (zainab at xtdnet.nl) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 16:30:55 +0100 (MET) Subject: [Reader-list] Acts of Property Message-ID: <3137.219.65.13.78.1103470255.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl> Dear All, I have been thinking about the series of discussions which we had on the subject of 'Acts of Leisure'. I have been thinking about acts of publicness and acts of privateness in a city and relating these to acts of property. Acts of leisure could be both public and private. But the question is what is 'public'? Recently, while in Panchgani at the Initiatives of Change (IC) Center for a workshop on liberty and society, I realized that in the case of major institutions and campuses, the first renovation/decoration takes place through the designing of lavish high gates, usually the black bar and golden tip styles. In the case of IC, I have been part of this institution since 1998, but it was only a few years ago that a large and high gate was constructed and a security post was created around it. I recollected my first memories of JNU where a friend who is a student in the institution spoke of how the authorities had spent 5 lakh rupees in the putting up of the gate. I think of my own building society where the first signs of 'keeping up with the times' was to close the gates at nights and then gradually at all times in the day. I don't even remember when the security post was renovated and updated. And I think that the changes in the urban with respect to built structures are taking place along the lines of creating lavish and high gates. This makes me wonder whether the act of property is by itself always an act of exclusion? I am tempted to conclude, from my recent field visits to Nariman Point, that the fear of the tresspasser is either "too real" or "too imagined" or "too created" or all of these. The act of protecting the property, which includes the owned property as well as the by-lanes and the streets is the act of ensuring protection from the anonymous trespasser. Among the vast crowds, who knows who is scheming, who may attack, who may create mischief or trouble? I have also been thinking along the thought of whether the urban is only about the individual or only about the community. While researching on local trains, I realized that spaces in the urban are also about encouraging and fostering the sense of urban community along with the idea of the urban individual (or urban anonymous?). Recently, intercomm systems were introduced in our building society so that the watchmen below could phone us and check whether a visitor is truly known to us and hence should be allowed to the home or just sent away. What was damn funny and at the same time alarming to me was that I began to use the intercomm to communicate with my neighbours over the phone. Thus, the intercomm apart from serving the purpose of making decisions about the known and the unknown (and hence entry or exclusion), enabled me to avoid face-to-face contact with my neighbours and communicate with them through sound bytes! That's all for today. Cheers, Zainab Zainab Bawa Bombay www.xanga.com/CityBytes From lawrence at altlawforum.org Mon Dec 20 11:15:54 2004 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:15:54 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Leading Rock Band in India Announces it =?iso-8859-1?q?=B9?= s Open Music License Message-ID: Hi All Bangalore based rock band ³Thermal and a Quarter², who have in the past few years created quite a reputation for themselves have announced the release of their next album on an open music license called the ³Thermal and A Quarter Open Music License². Over the next eight weeks, you will be able to download a new song every week. I am including the link to the Thermal site, as well as a small extract from their introduction to why they are going down the open content route. Here is hoping for more such initiatives http://www.thermalandaquarter.com For a visual or text version of the license see: http://www.thermalandaquarter.com/planB_TOML_bendtheworld.html Lawrence ----------------------- ³We (Thermal and a Quarter) are an independent music band, which has been producing original music for the past eight years. Thermal and a Quarter ( TAAQ) has self-produced and distributed three independent albums, which we have distributed through informal networks. Our biggest connection with our listeners has been through more than 150 live concerts, most of which have been organized by the band itself. Our aim remains to reach as many people as possible with our music through our concerts and recordings. We acknowledge that you, our listener are an important factor in the spread of our music. We recognise that the internet offers bands like ours an immense opportunity to reach out to a much larger audience, within India and internationally. We are also inspired by initiatives like the Creative Commons which promotes greater possibilities for collaboration and creation between musicians. We would like you, our listener, to spread this music as much as possible within the liberal constraints of this open music license that has been created to make sharing our music easy and convenient. Unlike many recording contracts, we believe in giving our music the maximum freedom. We would also like you to support us and enable us to continue making original music by attending our concerts and purchasing our albums. We have therefore decided to take the lead in announcing the rel4easse of our latest album Plan B, on a free to download basis under the terms and conditions of the "Thermal and a Quarter Open Music License" From vivek at sarai.net Mon Dec 20 14:48:27 2004 From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 14:48:27 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Wash. Post.: Half of Americans poll want to restrict Muslims's civil liberties Message-ID: <41C698E3.8090206@sarai.net> Terrifying news. What can one say? V. washingtonpost.com NATION IN BRIEF http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9289-2004Dec17.html?sub=AR Saturday, December 18, 2004; Page A28 Limit Muslim Americans' Rights, Many in Poll Say ITHACA, N.Y. -- Nearly half of Americans believe the government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, according to a nationwide telephone poll of 715 people. The Cornell University survey found that 44 percent favored at least some restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. Forty-eight percent said liberties should not be restricted in any way. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. Pollsters found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims' civil liberties than Democrats or people who say they are less religious. Researchers also found that respondents who paid more attention to television news were more likely to fear terrorist attacks and support limiting the rights of Muslim Americans. From shivamvij at gmail.com Mon Dec 20 15:20:48 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:20:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] what democracy can do to mailing lists In-Reply-To: <-7240253921960230922@unknownmsgid> References: <-7240253921960230922@unknownmsgid> Message-ID: If you want to see what democracy can do a mailing list, see this. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: soc.culture.indian group Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 08:13:40 +0000 Subject: 309 new messages in 99 topics - abridged To: "soc.culture.indian abridged email subscribers" soc.culture.indian http://groups-beta.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian Today's most active topics: * Why Pakistan wont allow Kashmiris to visit Pakistani Kashmir - 28 new http://groups-beta.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian/browse_thread/thread/3909f74db382d8e1 * SOOTIYAS @SCP, kooly,romabize,subira,dumby,habshi, mahraj,torpedo etc - 18 new http://groups-beta.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian/browse_thread/thread/71f5a37d975bc4d * REMEMBER 1971 - INDIA SCREWED PAKISTAN UP ITS ASS! - 16 new http://groups-beta.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian/browse_thread/thread/9e8dadd877bcb412 * MUSHARRAF - THE PREMATURE EJACULATOR ! - 13 new http://groups-beta.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian/browse_thread/thread/18ae61814bdd9ca3 * Muslims, largest group in Euro Jails (NY Times) - 12 new http://groups-beta.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian/browse_thread/thread/18b4466de68a01b2 - ---abridged--- From oli at zeromail.org Mon Dec 20 19:58:23 2004 From: oli at zeromail.org (Oli) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:28:23 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Wash. Post.: Half of Americans poll want to restrict Muslims's civil liberties In-Reply-To: <41C698E3.8090206@sarai.net> References: <41C698E3.8090206@sarai.net> Message-ID: <0CF912D062F9118915BC5068@142F8154BC2F2AF7DF65AA7D> Dear Vivek, how much costs a nationwide telephone poll these days? where are the callcenter people located, who call "you"? how many of the polls are done daily world wide? what is their effect on "public" opinion? who orders polls and why? let it be done by a different company and see the difference! Polls have become a major means to produce "public" opinions. They are sometimes "scientific", e.g. the one you informed us about. In that case, when an university is its author, they are getting more credibility - as science is still an authority today. Than there are lots of "independent" commercial institutes, who do nothing but try to find out what product where to sell and so on (they call you (got your number through adress dealers) and ask you questions). A different type is the online poll, which is a basic daily thing for a "serious" website these days. it is almost always made for a rating of the site, tracking consumers, ... Is the Washington Post and Cornell so different to this setting? I guess not. So, let's just ignore those polls unless we are doing a critical research on polls. Yours Oli --On Monday, December 20, 2004 14:48:27 +0530 Vivek Narayanan wrote: > Terrifying news. What can one say? > > V. > > washingtonpost.com ost.com/> > NATION IN BRIEF > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9289-2004Dec17.html?sub=AR > > Saturday, December 18, 2004; Page A28 > > Limit Muslim Americans' Rights, Many in Poll Say > > ITHACA, N.Y. -- Nearly half of Americans believe the government should > restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, according to a > nationwide telephone poll of 715 people. > > The Cornell University survey found that 44 percent favored at least some > restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. Forty-eight > percent said liberties should not be restricted in any way. The margin of > error was plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. > > Pollsters found that Republicans and people who described themselves as > highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims' civil > liberties than Democrats or people who say they are less religious. > Researchers also found that respondents who paid more attention to > television news were more likely to fear terrorist attacks and support > limiting the rights of Muslim Americans. > > > > > _________________________________________ > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with > subscribe in the subject header. > List archive: > > From vijender_chauhan at hotmail.com Mon Dec 20 16:16:25 2004 From: vijender_chauhan at hotmail.com (vijender chauhan) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 16:16:25 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Politically (In)Correct : Quite Politely Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041220/d43e4d38/attachment.html From khadeeja at sarai.net Sun Dec 19 21:06:58 2004 From: khadeeja at sarai.net (khadeeja at sarai.net) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 16:36:58 +0100 (CET) Subject: [Reader-list] CC/Surveillance Message-ID: <1146.221.134.48.220.1103470618.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> When we talk of a space (public or private), it has a feeling of connectivity, association, usage, and, of course, freedom/leisure. Our association with a particular place must ensure that you experience/enjoy/feel/use that place according to our own will. Be it our home/ school/ playground/ community center/ balcony/ main road/public toilets/ gardens/ square/ historical monuments/ restaurants, coffee houses/ parks/ chai ka dhaba, and even your work place, it should be free of surveillance of any sort. This is what we all wish. But, unfortunately, it is not so!! No space (Public or private) ironically, is spare of a constant watchfulness of formal and informal kinds. All places, all people are under constant vigil. Tools employed are galore: ranging from the surveillance mechanism governed/operated from the state (“Pandu’s video camera”) or the gaze of some un/known, strange individual. At times, it could be your neighbor /remote acquaintances or some son of some pados ki aunti, who is simply interested in your life more than his own. Is it enough to identify surveillance in the form of some guidelines /institute rules/how to behave in a park/historical monuments, or rather as a paranoia of the state (to safe guard its citizen from any sorts of “terrorist attack”) etc? Or, is the distinction between two different kinds of vigilances: state operated and individual activity of watchfulness sharp or recognizable? Or, in other words, does a policeman shooting some students (of course without their knowledge) disturb more than a gaze of an individual, trying to note every action of yours out of his sheer moral responsibility to safeguard ‘his women’ (specially, when you are outside your own gali/mohalla)? For me, it is far more disturbing/uncomfortable when somebody tries to make me feel watched/observed/caught/ through gestures than a policewala making a video for some weird citizenship records out of some nonsensical fear psychosis. Living in a close-knit locality has both its advantages and disadvantages. Here everybody knows everybody. Some people, especially, men tend to take a moral responsibility of safeguarding every step of “their women” and if they find a woman trying to do something that goes against their way of living or their expectations, there is a problem. It was the summer of this year. For me, Walking out of the house at 10 in the night is normal. Most of the time I go to meet my friends at CC. Though I prefer to meet my friends at home, but the association with CC is strong enough to pull all us there. One night I set out of my home at 10:30 in the night to meet my friend Kavita at CC Mcdonald. Though it is not safe to pass New friends alone in the night, but still I took a rickshaw and started. As I was on the rickshaw, I noticed that a motorcycle is constantly crawling with my rickshaw. Initially, I thought I am being little too suspicious. But, then, I realized that these guys, on the motorcycle, were actually following me. On seeing closely, I found that these guys were from my own gali. I got down at CC (these guys also got down at CC) and found that Kavita was nowhere to be seen in McDonald. Well, as CC is too familiar a place to worry about sitting alone and waiting, I decided to sit outside the McDonald and wait. I noticed that these men are constantly having an eye on every movement of me. As I was walking in front of the McDonalds, one of them passed through me and commented: “ yaar itna intezaar karana bhi theek nahi”. They kept hovering around me, making clear through their gestures that they would catch me any moment with a guy (their imagination!). Finally, Kavita reached at 11pm. The moment they saw me with Kavita, they left. I think they were relieved or may be ashamed. In retrospect I wonder how would I have reacted (in a situation like this) had it been some guy who I was waiting for? Would have I felt awkward? Of course, not! But, then, why was I nervous at all? Was it because of the fact that I hated to be watched/scrutinized like this? Or I was anxious because these were people from my own locality, and somewhere I felt responsible to behave the way they wanted me (or any of ‘their women’ to behave)? Or I was uncomfortable because a place like CC (that symbolizes some kind freedom for me) was also not free of Vigilance???? Khadeeja From shivamvij at gmail.com Sat Dec 18 13:18:49 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 13:18:49 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Broadband? Broad loot. Sign the petition... Message-ID: You can sign this here: http://www.petitiononline.com/trai/petition.html To: Telecom Regulatory Authority of India To, The Chairman, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Dear Mr.Chairman, We, the customer of so called "Broadband" services provided by the so called "Broadband" Internet Service Providers (ISPs) petition you to take action against these ISPs for not providing broadband connections yet marketing their services as broadband that is misleading the consumers and bringing disrepute to broadband. We would like to bring to your notice that TRAI has defined a broadband service as "An always-on data connection that is able to support various interactive services, and has the capability of a minimum download speed of 256 Kbps." When these ISPs provide connections at 40 Kbps how can they claim it to be broadband. We want TRAI to take action against such ISPs. We would also like to remind TRAI that the broadband sector will not grow if such unscruplous service providers are allowed to cheat consumers. We hope TRAI in the interest of consumers and the future of broadband services in India takes an efficient and quick action and regularlizes broadband services in India. Sincerely, The Undersigned You can sign here: http://www.petitiononline.com/trai/petition.html -- Best Regards, Warren Brian Noronha. Norrix (http://www.norrix.com) From shivamvij at gmail.com Sat Dec 18 12:22:09 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 12:22:09 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] The Delhi Metro mailing list In-Reply-To: <8c10798f041217224629d1a324@mail.gmail.com> References: <8c10798f041217224629d1a324@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: The Delhi Metro line between Delhi University and ISBT/Kashmere Gate would be inaugurated on 19 December by the Indian Prime Minister, and ready for public use the next days. The Delhi Metro has now become a national phenomenon, with all metro cities wanting to copy it. Those of you who want to keep track of the technical aspects of transport in Delhi - not just the Metro, but generally - and in other cities, may want to join the useful Delhi Metro list on yahoogroups, started, i think, by some engineering students. Here it is: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/delhimetro/ On the web: http://www.irfca.org/users/delhimetro/ This list has even been covered by The Indian Express - which is how i got to know about it. Thanks, Shivam -- -30- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From space4change at gmail.com Mon Dec 20 11:18:43 2004 From: space4change at gmail.com (Space for Change) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:18:43 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] KITTE MIL VE MAHI (Fwd) Message-ID: <8c10798f04121921484b4e896@mail.gmail.com> India International Centre cordially invites you to a screening of the film Kitte Mil Ve Mahi – Where the Twain Shall Meet(72 min; dv; 2004; Punjabi with English sub-titles)Directed by Ajay Bhardwaj who will introduce the filmScreening will be followed by a discussionOn Thursday, 30th December 2004 at 6.30 pm in the Centre's Auditorium ______________________________________________________________________________________ KITTE MIL VE MAHI - Where the twain shall meet This film contends the dominant perceptions of the economic and spiritual heritage of Punjab. It does so through a people's narrative on the preservation and regeneration of its 'little' traditions, which often appear seamlessly cultural and political. Travel to the heart of Punjab. Enter a world of Sufi shrines worshipped and looked after by Dalits. Listen to B.S. Balli Qawwal Paslewale, the first generation Dalit Qawwals born out of this tradition. Join a fascinating dialogue with Lal Singh Dil—a radical poet, a Dalit, converted to Islam. Meet the last living legend of the Gadar movement, Baba Bhagat Singh Bilga, who contests the subversion of a common past, while affirming a new consciousness among Dalits, within and beyond Punjab. The interplay between the constituents of this mosaic brings to light the triple marginalisation of Dalits--- amidst the agricultural boom that is the modern Punjab, in the contesting ground of its 'major' religions, and in the intellectual construction of their 'syncretism' _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From souweine at hawaii.edu Tue Dec 21 05:39:54 2004 From: souweine at hawaii.edu (Isaac D W Souweine) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 19:09:54 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] Wash. Post.: Half of Americans poll want to restrict Muslims's civil liberties Message-ID: <7e75e97e4d31.7e4d317e75e9@hawaii.edu> I don't know if the poll should be dismissed out of hand, but I think that Oli has a point. Polls are a crucial aspect in the landscape of news as mediatainment. They are quantitative (and thus "scientific"), display extremely well in a graphical format and, most importantly, helpfully divide the most complicated issues into the simplest of black and white (or, as the recent election was constructed - red and blue) constructions. To ask whether someone is for or against limiting the civil liberties of Muslims seems a rather strange way to engage with questions of public policy - it is as if one were being asked whether they liked their eggs sunny side up or over easy (for the record, I prefer over easy and oppose special infringement on Muslim civil rights over and above the infringements already enabled by the patriot act and associated legal maneuverings by our intelligence services). I can only think about how many times since returning to the states that I have been told in the most superficial ways by my fellow "east coast liberals" that Kerry's loss can be attributed to the Republican machine's ability to turn out Christian evangelicals, a gloss that was supported most consistently (and vapidly) by the exit poll question which allowed voters to indicate "moral values" as their most important election concern. Talk about a floating signifier. . . . Again, I don't think such things should be simply dismissed out of hand, but when one considers the relatively enlightened behavior of Americans towards their fellow citizens of Muslim faith in the wake of 9/11, the Cornell statistic almost screams for contextualization. -Isaac ----- Original Message ----- From: Oli Date: Monday, December 20, 2004 9:28 am Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Wash. Post.: Half of Americans poll want to restrict Muslims's civil liberties > Dear Vivek, > > how much costs a nationwide telephone poll these days? > > where are the callcenter people located, who call "you"? > > how many of the polls are done daily world wide? > > what is their effect on "public" opinion? > > who orders polls and why? > > let it be done by a different company and see the difference! > > Polls have become a major means to produce "public" opinions. They > are > sometimes "scientific", e.g. the one you informed us about. In > that case, > when an university is its author, they are getting more > credibility - as > science is still an authority today. Than there are lots of > "independent" > commercial institutes, who do nothing but try to find out what > product > where to sell and so on (they call you (got your number through > adress > dealers) and ask you questions). A different type is the online > poll, which > is a basic daily thing for a "serious" website these days. it is > almost > always made for a rating of the site, tracking consumers, ... > > Is the Washington Post and Cornell so different to this setting? I > guess > not. > > So, let's just ignore those polls unless we are doing a critical > research > on polls. > > > Yours Oli > > > --On Monday, December 20, 2004 14:48:27 +0530 Vivek Narayanan > wrote: > > > Terrifying news. What can one say? > > > > V. > > > > > washingtonpost.com ost.com/> > > NATION IN BRIEF > > > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9289- > 2004Dec17.html?sub=AR> > > Saturday, December 18, 2004; Page A28 > > > > Limit Muslim Americans' Rights, Many in Poll Say > > > > ITHACA, N.Y. -- Nearly half of Americans believe the government > should> restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, > according to a > > nationwide telephone poll of 715 people. > > > > The Cornell University survey found that 44 percent favored at > least some > > restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. Forty-eight > > percent said liberties should not be restricted in any way. The > margin of > > error was plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. > > > > Pollsters found that Republicans and people who described > themselves as > > highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims' civil > > liberties than Democrats or people who say they are less religious. > > Researchers also found that respondents who paid more attention to > > television news were more likely to fear terrorist attacks and > support> limiting the rights of Muslim Americans. > > > > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > > Critiques & Collaborations > > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with > > subscribe in the subject header. > > List archive: > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with > subscribe in the subject header. > List archive: > From lokesh at sarai.net Tue Dec 21 12:35:50 2004 From: lokesh at sarai.net (Lokesh) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 12:35:50 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Invitation (Stree Samman DIvas) Message-ID: <41C7CB4E.6060706@sarai.net> Women's Rights Organisation cordially invites you to a Seminar & Cultural Programme on the occasion of the 77 th Anniversary of the 'Burning of Manusmriti' by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar which is being celebrated as 'Stree Samman Divas' ( Day for Women's Dignity) Time and Venue : 12 noon Wednesday, 22 rd December 2004 Tagore Hall, Arts Faculty, North Campus, Delhi University,Delhi Dear Friend You are cordially invited for a programme to be held on 22 nd December 2004 as part of the* STREE SAMMAN DIVAS (DAY FOR WOMEN'S DIGNITY)* celebrations organised by Stree Adhikar Sangathan ( Women's Rights Organisation) at TAGORE HALL, DELHI UNIVERSITY ( NORTH CAMPUS) at 12 noon You are quite aware that it was on 25 th December 1927 that thousands of people came together under the leadership of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar to consign to flames Manusmriti the 'sacred' book which epitomised and legitimised the subhuman existence of the socially and culturally downtrodden in the Indian society, especially the dalits and the women. As things stand today officially the Manusmriti might have been replaced by the more egalitarian Indian Constitution more than fifty years ago but at an informal level it continues to hold sway over the thinking and actions of a vast majority of the Indian people. Dalits, women and a broad section of the other socially oppressed strata are still condemned to live under the oppressive structures and institutions sanctified by it. To underline the fact of the societal violence which continues unabated till date we have been celebrating the day when Manusmriti was burnt as a day for Women's Dignity " Stree Samman Divas"since last two years.As part of this celebrations this year we have decided to hold a seminar to debate and discuss the 'Challenge of Communalism and Women's Movement'. LOOKING AT THE UNIVERSITY SCHEDULE WE ARE ORGANISING THE SAID PROGRAMME ON 22 ND DECEMBER ITSELF. You might be aware that STRRE ADHIKAR SANGATHAN has started to celebrate this day since last two years. Two years ago we have publicly felicitated BHANWARI DEVI from BHATERI, RAJASTHAN for her valiant struggle for women's rights. As part of this programme we have invited Social activist MS TEESTA SETALVAD, Feminist scholar Ms NIVEDITA MENON, Intellectual-activist ADITYA NIGAM, Dr. SWATI JOSHI and few other leading activists and academics to participate in the discussion on CHALLENGE OF COMMUNALISM AND INDIAN WOMEN. We will be very happy if you can join us for this event. A few leading cultural troupes from Delhi have also agreed to present a few songs and skits after the seminar. Hoping to meet you in the programme . for Women's Rights Organisation Ph: 011-27872835 / 0532-2552324 From g_lab_send at yahoo.co.uk Tue Dec 21 07:32:52 2004 From: g_lab_send at yahoo.co.uk (G LAB) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 02:02:52 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Antiradical Opera call Message-ID: <20041221020252.21197.qmail@web25806.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Antiradical Opera is ongoing interdisciplinary opera project in collaboration between composer Arturas Bumsteinas, media art group G-Lab (Bumstein & Garbstein) and poet Jesse Glass from Japan. Also it involves instrumental band and about 20 people from all over the world that appear with their sound material submissions. Audio part of the Antiradical Opera is already composed, selected and mixed. Now we are calling for submissions of visual data. Please send visual material on any media (VHS, miniDV, files in CD-R, photos...). Anything that reflects the subject of "radical-antiradical". send to: Arturas Bumsteinas Rinktines 21-64 Vilnius 2051 Lithuania Digital media files (mpg, compressed avi, jpg ) not exceeding 3MB send to: g_lab_send at yahoo.co.uk There is no near deadline Every participant will get documentation and one example of the final result when it will be released. For more info please write to: arturas at bumstein.com Website: www.bumstein.com/art --------------------------------- ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041221/82a95325/attachment.html From shivamvij at gmail.com Tue Dec 21 11:41:48 2004 From: shivamvij at gmail.com (Shivam) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 11:41:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Fwd: Demonstration and Dharna at Jantar Mantar against Disconnection of Electricity and Privatisation In-Reply-To: <12ddb9134860.13486012ddb9@vsnl.net> References: <12ddb9134860.13486012ddb9@vsnl.net> Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: nacdor at vsnl.net Rally and Dharna by Slum Dwellers Against Disconnection of Electricity at Jantar Mantar at 1.00 pm on Wednesday, 22nd December 2004 Dear friends, Electricity connections of more than 10 thousand slum dwellers of Sanjay Gandhi Transport Nagar JJ camp were disconnected by NDPL about a month ago. Similarly, electricity connections of more than 25 thousand citizens of Haiderpur JJ clusters were suddenly disconnected by the same NDPL Company on 7th December. Before disconnecting, NDPL gave no notice to the connection holders. Since the privatisation of electricity distribution in Delhi, the slum dwellers have been forced to arbitrary decisions and disconnections. All political parties have hand in gloves and hence no one comes in support of these poor people. As you may know that the National Conference of Dalit Organisations (NACDOR) has always been opposed to the privatisation of basic services such as Electricity, water, health, sanitation, education and other services. To press for reconnection of electricity in the slums of Delhi and to oppose the privatisation of basic services, the National Conference of Dalit Organisations (NACDOR) had decided to launch an agitation on Wednesday 22nd December by holding a Rally and Dharna at Jantar Mantar at 1.00 pm. The NACDOR and various other organisations working in the Delhi's slum will give a memorandum to the Prime Minister Mr. Man Mohan Singh, UPA Chairperson Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, and the Delhi's Chief Minister Mrs. Sheila Dixit. We request your support and solidarity in this struggle. To express your solidarity, kindly join us at Jantar Mantar at 1.00 pm on Wednesday 22nd December 2004. We request you to kindly circulate this among your friends & the people whom you feel it shall go. With warm regards, Ashok Bharti National Coordinator National Conference of Dalit Organisations (NACDOR) Mobile: 9810918008 - -- -30- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From captain.typo at gmail.com Tue Dec 21 15:58:38 2004 From: captain.typo at gmail.com (Captain Typo) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:58:38 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] FedEx logo, signage... A brand Message-ID: Brands. They are every where. Rather larger than life image unlike products, there poor cousins who tend to be sold in next door shops. Story of making of one such brand ... http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000273.php regards Captain Typo ------- Life is what happens while you're blogging From eye at ranadasgupta.com Wed Dec 22 12:51:26 2004 From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 12:51:26 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] More on Chinese intellectuals Message-ID: <41C92076.5010807@ranadasgupta.com> Writer held as China turns on intellectuals Jonathan Watts in Beijing Wednesday December 22, 2004 The Guardian The Chinese police arrested one of the country's most influential journalists yesterday in the latest phase of their campaign to stifle critical discussion by prominent liberal intellectuals. The detention of Chen Min, the chief editorial writer at China Reform Magazine, has heightened concern that the Communist party may be reverting to old-style repression to counter the spread of independent thinking on the internet, in the universities, and in the increasingly bold media organisations. Coming after the arrest or demotion of at least half a dozen other "public intellectuals" - a term of former media praise that has suddenly become an expression of political abuse - it has upset the hope that President Hu Jintao will allow more freedom of expression than his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. Mr Chen, who wrote under the pen name Xiao Shu, was working in his office when security officers arrived unannounced. "They went to the magazine office and took him away," an unnamed source told Reuters. The tactic appears to be similar to that used in several other cases. On December 13 three prominent reform advocates, Yu Jie, Liu Xiabo and Zhang Zuhua, were held by the police and accused of revealing state secrets to foreigners: a catch-all phrase often invoked in clampdowns on critics. Two weeks earlier the poet Shi Tao was arrested on his way to his mother's house and his wife was warned not to tell anyone he was missing. Echoing past campaigns against "rightists" and "counter-revolutionary" critics, the clampdown was heralded by a furious invective against "public intellectuals" in the Liberation Daily on November 23. In language observers said was reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, it accused such intellectuals of "arrogant elitism". They were trying to "estrange the relationship between the party and intellectuals and between intellectuals and the masses", said the commentary, which was reproduced in full by People's Daily, the party mouthpiece. Shortly afterwards reports emerged of a "grey list" of liberal academics and journalists whose writings were no longer allowed to be published in newspapers and magazines, all of which are controlled by the state or the party. Journalists say the propaganda department has also lengthened its list of forbidden topics, including stories about the growing gap between rich and poor and a number of big protests in the provinces. As was the case in many previous political campaigns, the targets appear to have little in common other than a record of challenging someone in authority. Among those who have been either demoted or detained are Jiao Guobiao, a media professor at Beijing University, who accused the propaganda department of using Nazi tactics to cover up corruption and disease; Li Boguang, a lawyer who has represented farmers against the government in one of many cases of alleged illegal land seizures; and Huang Jingao, a local party official who blew the whistle on corruption among his colleagues in Fujian province. The clampdown fits into a long cycle of loosening and tightening intellectual expression in China, the last major phase of which took place in the late 1980s and ended with the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Although most of those arrested recently have subsequently been released, making this a relatively restrained clampdown compared with the violence of previous campaigns, it has disappointed liberal supporters of President Hu. Many had expected him to loosen media restrictions after removing Mr Jiang from the senior military post this summer. But in the face of increasingly frequent reports of unrest in the provinces and strikes in urban centres, Mr Hu appears to have moved in the opposite direction. Silenced voices of dissent Chen Min Chief editorial writer at China Reform magazine. Detained 21 December without explanation. Yu Jie Founder of the China PEN, the pro-freedom of expression organisation. Detained 13 December and accused of revealing state secrets. Liu Xiabo Democracy activist imprisoned after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and president of China PEN. Detained 13 December and accused of revealing state secrets. Shi Tao Poet and journalist Detained 24 November accused of revealing secrets. Li Boguang Lawyer and writer who represented farmers against the government. Detained 14 November. Jiao Guobiao Beijing University professor who accused the propaganda department of shielding corrupt officials and whitewashing Chines history. Stripped of teaching responsibilities. From basvanheur at gmx.net Wed Dec 22 23:09:28 2004 From: basvanheur at gmx.net (Bas Van Heur) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 18:39:28 +0100 (MET) Subject: [Reader-list] Issue #4 of cut.up.magazine online Message-ID: <20358.1103737168@www68.gmx.net> Why celebrate Christmas with family if you can do so with cut.up.magazine? The fourth edition is now online on http://www.cut-up.com. In English: Heiko Hansen describes the search for the elementary core of Russian Babuschka’s. In Dutch: Theo Ploeg interviews Peter Gijselaars of Dirt Crew, Break3000 and the dance-recordshop Sirius in Maastricht; Alexis Vos desscribes the Dutch TV-moment of 2004; Franziska Martinsen talks to the three trombonists of the Swiss project GoingPublik about musical scores, sattelites and wearable computing; and Xander van Aart offers us a report of his last experiences in Las Vegas. The astonishing images are by Frank Kloos and John Klijnen. And, of course, reviews: Sound & the City, Playful:Japan, Oddpop, Psychon and the Berlin debate on Theo van Gogh. Praise, critique, ideas, contributions? Go for it: editorial staff info at cut-up.com cut.up.media po box 313 2000 AH Haarlem the Netherlands -- Psssst! Mit GMX Handyrechnung senken: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail 100 FreeSMS/Monat (GMX TopMail), 50 (GMX ProMail), 10 (GMX FreeMail) From definetime at rediffmail.com Wed Dec 22 16:56:14 2004 From: definetime at rediffmail.com (sanjay ghosh) Date: 22 Dec 2004 11:26:14 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] (fwd) Quiet, or I'll call democracy Message-ID: <20041222112614.32018.qmail@webmail46.rediffmail.com> Quiet, or I'll call democracy Iraqi women were long the most liberated in the Middle East. Occupation has confined them to their homes Haifa Zangana Wednesday December 22, 2004 The Guardian The US state department has launched a $10m "Iraqi women's democracy initiative" to train Iraqi women in the skills and practices of democratic life ahead of the forthcoming elections. Paula Dobriansky, US undersecretary of state for global affairs, declared:"We will give Iraqi women the tools, information and experience they need to run for office and lobby for fair treatment." The fact that the money will go mainly to organisations embedded with the US administration, such as the Independent Women's Forum (IWF) founded by Dick Cheney's wife Lynn, was, of course, not mentioned. Of all the blunders by the US administration in Iraq, the greatest is its failure to understand Iraqi people, women in particular. The main misconception is to perceive Iraqi women as silent, powerless victims in a male-controlled society in urgent need of "liberation". This image fits conveniently into the big picture of the Iraqi people being passive victims who would welcome the occupation of their country. The reality is different. Iraqi women were actively involved in public life even under the Ottoman empire. In 1899 the first schools for girls were established, the first women's organisation in 1924. By 1937 there were four women's magazinespublished in Baghdad. Women were involved in the 1920 revolution against British occupation, including in fighting. In the 50s, political parties established women's organisations. All reflected the same principle: fighting alongside men, women were also liberating themselves. That was proven in the aftermath of the 1958 revolution ending the British-imposed monarchy when women's organisations achieved within two years what over 30 years of British occupation failed to: legal equality. This process led Unicef to report in 1993: "Rarely do women in the Arab world enjoy as much power as they do in Iraq ... men and women must receive equal pay for equal work. A wife's income is recognised as independent from her husband's. In 1974, education was made free at all levels, and in 1979 it was made compulsory for girls and boys until the age of 12." By the early 90s, Iraq had one of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world. There were more professional women in positions of power than in almost any other Middle Eastern nation The tragedy was that women were living under Saddam's oppressive regime. True, women occupied high political positions, but they did nothing to protest at the injustice inflicted on their sisters who opposed the regime. The same is happening now in "the new democratic Iraq". After "liberation", Bush and Blair trumpeted women's advancement as a centrepiece of their vision for Iraq. In the White House, hand-picked Iraqi women recited desperately needed homilies to justify the invasion of Iraq. In June, nominal sovereignty was handed over to a US-appointed Iraqi interim government, including six women cabinet ministers. They were not elected by Iraqi people. Under Ayad Allawi's regime, "multinational forces" remain immune from legal redress, rarely accountable for crimes committed against Iraqis. The gap between women members of Allawi's regime and the majority of Iraqi women is widening by the day. While cabinet ministers and the US-UK embassies are cocooned inside the fortified green zone, Iraqis are denied the basic right of walking safely in their own streets. Right of road is for US tanks labelled: "If you pass the convoy you will be killed." Lack of security and fear of kidnapping make Iraqi women prisoners in their own homes. They witness the looting of their country by Halliburton, Bechtel, US NGOs, missionaries, mercenaries and local subcontractors, while they are denied clean water and electricity. In the land of oil, they have to queue five hours a day to get kerosene or petrol. Acute malnutrition has doubled among children. Unemployment at 70% is exacerbating poverty, prostitution, backstreet abortion and honour killing. Corruption and nepotism are rampant in the interim government. Al-Naqib, minister of interior admitted that he had appointed 49 of his relatives to high-ranking jobs, but only because they were qualified. The killing of academics, journalists and scientists has not spared women: Liqa Abdul Razaq, a newsreader at al-Sharqiyya TV, was shot with her two-month-old baby. Layla al-Saad, dean of law at Mosul University was slaughtered in her house. The silence of the "feminists" of Allawi's regime is deafening. The suffering of their sisters in cities showered with napalm, phosphorus and cluster bombs by US jet fighters, the death of about 100,000 Iraqi civilians, half of them women and children, is met with rhetoric about training for democracy. Tony Blair, acknowledged yesterday in Baghdad that violence would continue both before and after the January 30 elections, but added: "On the other hand we will have a very clear expression of democratic will." Does he not know that "democracy" is what Iraqi women use nowadays to frighten their naughty children, by shouting: "Quiet, or I'll call democracy." · Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi-born novelist and former prisoner of the Saddam regime haifa_zangana at yahoo.co.uk -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041222/e2fc470e/attachment.html From nck at ifrance.com Thu Dec 23 00:33:07 2004 From: nck at ifrance.com (nck) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 20:03:07 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] You are the network! Message-ID: <001801c4e858$e562a5b0$ac3d4051@z> PRESS RELEASE Franck Ancel has been questioning technology for the past fifteen years, by tracing lines from the avant-garde art movements of the last century to recent mutations of creation on a planetary level. He has in this way organized or coordinated conferences, exhibitions, installations and performances in contact with associations and institutions. The last to date is the one-man retrospective of Jacques Polieri, the creator of modern scenography, by the French National Library. Since the 9/11 attacks, Franck Ancel sets up collaborative-interactive actions that question art, image and technology on 20th century architectural sites. In October 2002 at the monastery built by Le Corbusier and Xenakis near Lyon, then in September 2003 at a listed auditorium in Catalonia. The show questions the visitor outside conventional "borders", by projecting a "networking" of data onto "screens". Now in Paris, the heart of the urban network becomes the theatre of his operations. In the age of the launching of new technologies for post-Internet mobile communication that prefigures a generalized interconnexion in France called "smart mobs" by the American visionary Howard Rheingold. Ten years after the invention by a computer scientist at the European Centre for Nuclear Research in Switzerland of the World Wide Web file exchange protocol that brought the Internet within everyone's reach, "Being = Network" brings the year 2004 to a close - and the project of a triptych - with a loop that began with "From the image to the virtual // thinking the screen" then with "Walter Benjamin>< Marcel Duchamp". This third show will light up Square 18 June 1940 in Paris. The screen of the Van Wagner Company on the Montparnasse Tower will host a visual composition integrated with the stream of media, with an image projected and conceived from documents deriving from all these productions like particles that accelerate faster and faster in a rhyzomatic vision. On thirty-six square metres, windows of videos, movements and lights play an inside-outside with the project intermittently in the context of the site. To dancing rhythms, the one and the other defragment the spectator's eye and habits by making key words appear: mobile - wireless - digital. Announcing a new action in real time for 2005 between this screen in Paris and another screen in Los Angeles, USA. This is the production of an image acted by our memory more complex than a simple animation. It introduces questions of artistic freedom in this networking of data, of the project. A take off to leave all modernist references behind for good, out of bounds. A still imaginary localization yet geographically alive in the city, to visit with a glance, towards another world that represents an open way of inhabiting the planet. Contact Email: info at franck-ancel.com GSM: 33 0 677 804 966 Free showing from 7 P.M. to 1A.M. several times an hour >From Saturday 11 to 31 December 2004 Screen of the Montparnasse Tower opposite rue de Rennes - Paris http://franck-ancel.com This is an invitation, but if you wish being to remove our contacts. Answer this email with for object "STOP thank you". _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From pz at vsnl.net Thu Dec 23 14:31:48 2004 From: pz at vsnl.net (Punam Zutshi) Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 14:31:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] I &B Minister's response in the Lok Sabha about the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Message-ID: <004601c4e8ce$0adcdc50$9bee41db@punamzutshi> http://www.hindu.com/2004/12/19/stories/2004121902511000.htm Online edition of India's National Newspaper Sunday, Dec 19, 2004 Dilemma over Mahatma's works By Our Special Correspondent NEW DELHI, DEC. 18. The Government has found complaints of errors and omissions in the "revised reprint'' of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) to be true but has not decided on withdrawing it from circulation. The Information and Broadcasting Ministry is also facing a piquant situation - there is no record on who issued the orders to begin the new series. In fact, the Information and Broadcasting Minister, S. Jaipal Reddy, admitted as much in his reply to a question on the CWMG in the Lok Sabha this week. Stating that the complaints have been found to be true, he said that "enquires so far made do not show the basis on which the new series were launched in the first place; nor do the enquiries show the names of scholars chosen by the Government for the purpose.'' Also, he said, efforts were initiated in November 2003 by the previous regime itself to take corrective actions. "Although this process of correction has been initiated, complaints from authoritative sources are continuing with the demand that the new series have so many defects as to make any remedy impossible. The situation resulting from this problem is under consideration of the Government.'' The revised edition of the CWMG was brought out by the Publications Division in 1999 along with a CD-Rom version which includes 30 minutes of film footage, over 550 photographs and 15 minutes of Mahatma Gandhi's voice. However, following the release of the revised edition and the electronic version of the 100-volume collection, Gandhian institutions and other organisations, including the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust (Ahmedabad), Servants of the People Society (New Delhi), the Gandhi Peace Foundation (New Delhi), the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi (New Delhi), Gujarat Vidyapith (Ahmedabad), and the Albert Einstein Institution (U.S.A), sent in complaints about the errors, omissions and deletions. Ban sought More recently, after the change of guard at the Centre, the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, the Sarva Seva Sangh, Sevagram (Wardha) and the Gandhi Peace Foundation demanded a ban on the "revised reprint'' and urged the Government to pass a law treating the original 100-volume collection of the Mahatma's works as a national heritage to prevent any tampering of his works in the future. Stating that there were 500 omissions in the CD version of the collected works and about 500 deletions in the revised version, they demanded their withdrawal, and reprint of the original volumes. Referring to the Publisher's Note to the "revised reprint'' - wherein the changes are justified on the premise that "reports of his [Gandhiji's] speeches, interviews and conversations which did not seem to be authentic have been avoided as also reports of his statements in indirect form" - the three institutions said that comparison with the original volumes makes it "difficult to believe that the changes have been done without a biased motive." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041223/1d9ec9b9/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: hindux.gif Type: image/gif Size: 3057 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041223/1d9ec9b9/attachment.gif From zainab at xtdnet.nl Thu Dec 23 21:12:28 2004 From: zainab at xtdnet.nl (zainab at xtdnet.nl) Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 16:42:28 +0100 (MET) Subject: [Reader-list] The City Message-ID: <3120.219.65.9.7.1103816548.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl> 23rd December 2004 Winter has set into the city. People have adorned sweaters. The Nepalis are back in the city, selling woolens on the streets of Fort Market. And as the city is witnessing some very rapid changes, I sit here, right before my computer, thinking about individual rights and group rights. This morning, Sam Pitroda’s photo on the front page of Bombay Times struck me. Pitroda is in the city. His photo was shot in the backdrop of Nariman Point/Marine Drive. Some months ago, when Suketu Mehta released his book Maximum City, his photos too (which were on various front and third pages) were shot in the backdrop of Nariman Point/Marine Drive. And this evening, as I walked past NP/MD, a huge signboard said, “Photography not allowed. Have to take BMC permission to shoot here.” Yet, several people at the promenade this evening were shooting pictures of themselves and each other. People with new handycams were all out to take shots of the sea. And a guy from a group of college-going youngsters said to his mates who were clicking pictures of the sea and the Queen’s Necklace, “Mumbai looks sahi (perfect) from here!” Winter has sent in the city and this morning, news on the third page of Times of India read, “Migrants going back to their villages.” Given the demolition drives across the city, migrants from the slums, of the hawker community, are all going back to the city. The Municipal Commissioner Johnny Joseph has confirmed this news. As I read this piece, I think of Stephie, the Chinese woman who owns the saloon near my place. She is from China. She set up dhanda (business) here, picked up Hindi and now she earns in five to six figures every month. I wonder why she is not being sent back to her village. Right now, as I am passing by the hawkers who have set up stalls on the back side of Hilton Towers at NP/MD, I am thinking, “Stephie should also go back. I want her to go back. I want everyone to go back.” Yes, I want everyone to go back. Nobody belongs here. Everybody should go back. This is freedom struggle part II – GO BACK! But wait a minute, Stephie is legal. She has a property establishment. She is not sitting on the roads, on loose space. She is sitting on prime land. She is legal. But I still want her to go back. Everybody is going back. She must also go back. It is chilly as I walk the streets of this city, as I masquerade VT Station, Churchgate Station and Nariman Point. I feel cold. I read banners across the roads along these areas which say, ‘Jay Walking is Injurious to Health’, ‘Jay Walking is Hazardous to Health’, and finally, ‘Make use of subway to get into the railway station else you shall be fined Rs.100.’ That’s it – hundred bucks fine. And the cops are pretty stern about this one, this time. People are being disciplined. The subway has to be used. Crossing the roads which was earlier a practice of time has been curbed. We have to change our practices of time because space has to be cleaned and expanded. As I walk the roads of VT, I realize that the illegal global market has become funny these days. For sometime, it is not there. After a while, it is there. Then again, it is gone somewhere. I think the market as an entity is becoming vigilant as the State employs guards and private security to protect loose, open spaces. This morning, another piece of news hit me. It says that now that the commissioner has cleared the slums, he is hiring private security to ensure that encroachments don’t occur again on the lands. He is asking the State Government to do something about this because it is state land. He is also employing Karate Champions to keep the encroachers out. I think again of the rights of property of the state and rights of property of the public and rights of property of groups and rights of property of individuals. Quite a mess nah? A couple of days ago, I met with a government guy who was speaking to me about the processes of rehabilitation for slum dwellers. He said to me, “This morning, I went to an area in the Western Suburbs. When I looked from the top floor of an unfinished building, I got this birds’ eye view of an encroachment. I realized that the encroachment was deliberate, an attempt to raise land prices. This is not to say that I am anti-slum. But there are times when these deliberate moves are made. It is madness in this city. Land prices get inflated so easily!” I think it is not just about space, but the very notions of property which are precarious and dangerous in this city. We have fought gang wars for property deals. We have employed the illegal to do for us what the legal could not do. Now we have hired the private for protecting the public. I am amused right now and am unsure whether I should laugh aloud or cry aloud or simply wait and watch. Sanity prevails along Nariman Point. Time is relaxed here. Right now, I am on the seafront. And I am okay. How about you? Zainab Bawa Bombay www.xanga.com/CityBytes From ttsetan at yahoo.com Thu Dec 23 17:34:12 2004 From: ttsetan at yahoo.com (tenzin tsetan) Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 12:04:12 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] More on Chinese intellectuals Message-ID: <20041223120412.27370.qmail@web50605.mail.yahoo.com> Persecution of Tibetan Writer Mirrors Chinese Imperialism, says Mainland Researcher Office of Tibet, New York[Tuesday, December 21, 2004 10:12] NEW YORK, December 20 - In a lengthy essay, entitled "Tibet Facing Imperialism of Two Kinds: An Analysis of the Woeser Incident", Wang Lixiong, one of Mainland China's foremost researchers on Tibet, argues that the persecution of Woser, a Tibetan writer, for her devotion to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan religion is but a reflection of the imperialistic nature of Chinese rule in Tibet. The following is excerpted from Wang's essay: Woeser is a Tibetan author writing in Chinese. Born in Lhasa in 1966, she grew up in the Tibetan region of Sichuan Province. She graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at the Southwest Minorities College in 1988. After working as a reporter for Ganzi (Kanze in Tibetan) Daily, in 1990 she was transferred to Lhasa to work as an editor with Tibetan Literature (Xizang Wenxue), an official journal of the Literature Association of the Tibet Autonomous Region (Xizang Wenlian). She has so far published Tibet Above (Xizang Supreme), Map of Burgundy Red (Xianghongsede Ditu), and Notes on Tibet (Xizang Biji). It is Notes on Tibet that has caused her troubles. Notes on Tibet is an anthology of Woeser's prose writing, which was first published in 2003 by Huacheng Publishing House in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. While the book was popular, and soon went into a second printrun, it also attracted the attention of the censors. At first, the United Front Department of the Chinese Communist Party considered the book to have made "serious political mistakes." This accusation was followed by the demand from those in charge of ideological work in Tibet to examine the book. At the same time, its sale in TAR was banned. Finally, the Bureau of Journalism and Publication, Guangdong Province, was ordered to completely ban the book. The TAR Literature Association, the working unit to which Woeser used to belong, concluded its comments on Notes on Tibet by writing: It exaggerates and beautifies the positive function of religion in social life. Individual essays convey the author's faith in and reverence for the Dalai. Certain contents reveal a rigid thinking on nationalism and opinions that are harmful to the unification and solidarity of our nation. Some of its contents render the great achievements of Tibet Reform in the past decades invisible; meanwhile, it indulges in nostalgia for the old Tibet without tangible examples. The book appears to have made false value judgments and divorced itself from the correct political principles; the author has abandoned the social responsibility that a contemporary writer ought to have and lost her political commitment towards the progressive civilization movement. Shi Jifeng, Deputy Director of the General Bureau of Journalism and Publication in China, outlined the official charges against Notes on Tibet in a business meeting: The book praises the XIV Dalai Lama and the XVII Karmapa, and it encourages reverence to, and belief in, religion. These are serious mistakes in the author's political stance and her point of view. Some of the chapters have, to a certain degree, stepped into the wrong political terrain. For instance, in "Nyima Tsering," the author depicts the confusion that the famous religious figure Nyima Tsering had when he encountered the supporters of the Dalai in an international conference. It reflects that the author is not clear about the essence of the Dalai's splittism and promotion of Tibet independence. Also, chapters such as "Tenzin and His Son" reveal her misunderstanding of the history of the Sino-Tibet conflict in the 1950s. (Publication Newsletter 22; posted on www.intelnet.com at 02/23/2004) The charges cited here come from a totally imperialistic attitude, which denies the Tibetan nation's consciousness of self. It is unthinkable in any society to define "reverence to, and belief in, religion" as serious mistakes in a writer's political stance and viewpoint. Woeser herself is a believer in Tibetan Buddhism. It is natural for her to praise her religious leaders like the Dalai Lama and Karmapa. Only a colonizer who has the need to suppress the minority nationality would think that such an attitude towards religion is a crime. Does it not sound like a violent domination and an imperialistic manipulation to accuse a publication of having "made false value judgments and divorced itself from the correct political principles," and its author of having "abandoned the social responsibility that a contemporary writer ought to have and lost her political commitment towards the progressive civilization movement," only because she does not sing the praises of "the great achievements of the past decades," but "indulges in a nostalgia for the old Tibet without tangible examples?" To a certain degree, the publication of Notes on Tibet under Chinese censorship is itself a miracle. Perhaps it is due to the fact that Guangdong Province currently has the most commercial environment in China, with a relatively relaxed political atmosphere, that the book had a chance to reach the public. A chapter such as "Nyima Tsering," that was singled out for criticism by the General Bureau of Journalism and Publication, has articulated in depth the repression and lack of choice that the suppressed nationalities are facing. We can see the sympathetic response the story received from a Uyghur reader's email to Woeser -- in not very good Chinese: I am reading your book. Nyima Tsering in Norway after the little girl talked to him, I feel very sad. I could not control myself and naturally allowed myself a good cry. I read several more times. Who knows why when reading the paragraph on Nyima Tsering's answer to the girl, I could no longer control myself. I cried loudly. I was alone crying for a long time, feeling something pushed into my heart badly. It is unbearable to my weak heart. I want to shout loudly, but I don't have the courage. I have much more pity than Nyima Tsering's. (See the translator's note at the end of this article.) Woeser happened to be in Beijing attending an advanced seminar on journal editing at Luxun Literature Institute when the ban was imposed on Notes on Tibet. Prior to the incident, the TAR Literature Association was considering promoting her to vice editor-in-chief of Tibetan Literature. However, as soon as the book got into trouble, her study was immediately suspended. She was summoned back to Lhasa. A "Helping and Teaching Group (Bangjiao Xiaozu)" was organized for her "education in thinking (sixiang jiaoyu)." She was asked to "examine (jiantao)" and "jump the hurdle (guoguan)." These phrases that I have put in parentheses are the special terminology of the Chinese Communist Party. They form a set of methods of mental control that are vividly described as the tools for "fixing people (zhengjen)." The essence of them is to make individuals bend their knees in front of dominant authority and surrender their independence and dignity. He or she is repeatedly interrogated and forced to confess, while the authorities have already compiled their own record on the person anyway. Only after the Party is satisfied is the subject granted the chance to "make him/herself a new person (chongxin zuojen)." Presumably, he or she would not dare to transgress again and would sincerely bow before the Party's mercy. The Party has operated such a mechanism for decades, which permeates every level of the system; it is automatically utilized as soon as the need arises. When getting into trouble, the majority of the Chinese population might just surrender to this system in order to sidestep the problem. This has been the practice in China for years; people have long gotten used to it and do not experience any shame. While Woeser had no more chance of promotion, and was even facing the threat of re-education in the countryside, she may have at least been paid her monthly salary, which is seen as so essential in Tibet when the space that allows individuals to survive and develop outside the system is so narrow. There is a Tibetan saying that "Having a salary is just like keeping a cow; it guarantees one's daily milk supply." However, Woeser was unable to overcome this setback, because at first she could not repudiate her own faith. Since she had been accused of "praising" the XIV Dalai Lama, the only way to redeem herself was to attack him, or at least to repeat the utterances of Li Ruihuan, an ex-member of the Party's Politburo in charge of the affairs of minority nationalities, that "the Dalai is the head of the splittist gang for Tibetan independence, is the loyal instrument of the international campaign against China, is the fundamental root and origin that inspires social unrest in Tibet, and is the biggest obstacle to Tibetan Buddhism establishing a normal order." How could Woeser repeat such a criticism of her own religious leader? Would it not be topsy-turvy to say the Dalai Lama has created social unrest in Tibet and blocked the establishment of Tibetan Buddhism's normal order? No matter whether it is because of her religious belief or her conscience, Woeser could not utter charges of this kind. According to Buddhism, attacking one's guru creates serious negative karma. And after all, who chased away the Dalai Lama, killed hundreds of thousands of Tibetans, and destroyed nearly all of the monasteries in Tibet? They are indeed the leading criminals in creating social disorder in Tibet and interrupting the establishment of Tibetan Buddhism's normal order! During his "reorganize monasteries (zhengdun simiao)" campaign, Chen Kuiyuan, the previous Party Secretary of the TAR, ordered all Tibetan monks and nuns to copy by hand Li Ruihuan's charges against the Dalai Lama. Whoever resisted the order would be kicked out from their monastery. However, the difference between "is" and "is not" in written Tibetan is just a dot. Many monks added a barely visible light touch on top of "is," to complete the task without attacking their guru. Yet Woeser could not do so. She writes in Chinese, and in this language "is not" is not merely an extra dot but involves an extra character. She could not pass the test so easily. Various officials took turns to "do the thinking work (zuo sixiang gongzuo)" with her and her family. (In substance, it is to torture and damage one's morale.) The constant harassment by the authorities was stressful and became an unbearable burden for Woeser. Meanwhile, since she had always taken a critical stance on the issue of the Amdo-Tibet Railway, she was ordered to "receive education (jieshou jiaoyu)" at the construction site of the railway. Knowing that she did not have the strength to directly or indirectly fight against the system, she chose to go away, to leave Tibet. Upon her departure, she left a letter for the TAR Literature Association's highest decision-making circle, the Party group. The letter is entitled "I am forever a Tibetan writer believing in Buddhism." Following is the letter in its entirety: Wenlian Party Group: 09/14/2003 The charges against Notes on Tibet have mainly centered around my points of view on religion and Tibet's reality. Asking me to "jump the hurdle" is to demand that I state that my believing in Buddhism is false, that I should not have used my own eyes to observe Tibet's reality, and that in my future writing I must renounce religion and keep in tune with official directives to describe Tibet... Regarding all of these demands, I can only say that I am unable, and also unwilling, to jump this kind of "hurdle." From my perspective, to cooperate is to violate the calling and conscience of a writer. Under the current circumstances, staying in Lhasa to receive the re-education that I am not going to accept would not create any positive result; and it would add too much unnecessary trouble to everyone and make it difficult for the Association to close the case. Therefore, I think the best choice is to have me temporarily leave Lhasa and wait somewhere else for the final outcome to be announced by the concerned offices. I am willing to face any result of my own decision. Woeser Until now, Woeser has been punished: 1. In the name of voluntary resignation, she was removed from her post in the TAR Literature Association and deprived of her income. 2. The housing assigned to her has been confiscated; she now stays temporarily with her mother. 3. By the suspension of her medical and retirement insurance she is left with no social security. 4. She is restricted from applying for a passport to leave the country. So, in spite of not being thrown into prison, she has been deprived of everything that can be taken away from her. For people living in free societies or in today's inland China, the significance of this kind of punishment to Tibetans might not be clearly understood. Society within inland China has now diversified into different options. There are enough opportunities beyond the official system to allow many people to survive and prosper without dependence on the system. In contrast, the modernizing of Tibet and its society has been structured to completely rely financially on Beijing. There is no real social stratification there. With the monastic sector as the sole exception, nearly all other kinds of cultural workers and intellectuals have been entirely recruited into the system. In other words, only when inducted as a part of the system can one have a chance to become a professional working in the fields of culture; otherwise, there is even no guarantee of basic survival. I had been puzzled that while dissenting intellectuals were active in the public sphere in the previous Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and are now in inland China, this has not been the case in Tibet, despite the suffering Tibetan people have experienced, the international support they have received, and the fact that they have the spiritual leadership (of the Dalai Lama – trans.). Why have we so far only heard about the quiet resistance from the monastics or at a very grassroots level? I think one important reason for this is Tibetan intellectuals' lack of space to survive outside the system. The system therefore retains the power of deciding an individual's life and death. The system that feeds all of the cultural professionals is also the system that disciplines all of them. When one is scared by the system, there is no chance to be against it. The current suppression of Tibetan culture is carried out through this kind of control from within the system. To punish Woeser is to send out an alarm to the rest. --------------------------------- ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041223/d31d759e/attachment.html From icianita at hotmail.com Fri Dec 24 02:53:05 2004 From: icianita at hotmail.com (anne) Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 22:23:05 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Data restitution in Social Sciences research. Workshops in Delhi. Message-ID: Young Indian Studies Association www.ajei.org Young Researchers Workshops, 2005 8th edition Data restitution in Social Sciences research: techniques and stakes New Delhi, February 28th - March 04th. Since 1998 the AJEI (Young Indian Studies Association) has annually organized Young Researchers Workshops in Social Sciences in India. The aim of these workshops is to connect young researchers (from masters to post-doctorate) to experienced researchers, in order to create an interdisciplinary space, generating meetings and exchanges on the institutional as well as the scientific level. The AJEI 2005 Workshops, which will be held in New Delhi from the 28th to the 5th of March, are part of a Franco-Indian exchange. We wish to invite both Indian researchers and students and broaden the participation of French students and researchers to their French-speaking fellow-members, based for example in Quebec, Belgium or Switzerland. This year, in continuation of the 2004 Workshops which focussed on fieldwork practices and scientific speech in South Asia, we would like to examine, the question of the restitution of data in Social Sciences research. Please, read the presentation and Call for Paper in attachement. Deadline is 1th of January. For the Ajei, Anne GOLDENBERG Anne Doctorante en Communication Université du Québec à Montréal LabCMO tel : 001 (514) 987 3000. 1720 # adresse personnelle: 4458 rue de Bullion H2G2W1 Montreal tel : 001 (514) 849 38 06 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041223/cd71ee95/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: YoungResearchersWorkshops.doc Type: application/msword Size: 44032 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041223/cd71ee95/attachment.doc -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From lalitbatra77 at yahoo.co.in Fri Dec 24 15:14:38 2004 From: lalitbatra77 at yahoo.co.in (lalit batra) Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2004 09:44:38 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Pushta & NHRC Message-ID: <20041224094438.17837.qmail@web8401.mail.in.yahoo.com> Dear friends, I am sure you know about the Yamuna Pushta evictions that took place in Delhi early this year. Following the evictions, the NHRC had carried out an investigation into conditions at the resettlement colonies of Bawana, Holabi Kalan and Madanpur Khadar- places where those evicted form Pushta have been sent. It's now three months since the investigation was done. But so far the Commission has not issued any directions in this regard. The investigation report as we got to know is still to be prepared in a "proper format". I feel it's about time we start building pressure all over again. Because this case can have ramifications far beyond Bawana, Holambi and Khadar. Scroll down and you’ll find a letter addressed to the NHRC chairperson. It would really help if you can send the same to the NHRC in your individual/ organisation's name and letterhead. In solidarity, Lalit Batra Hazards' Centre ....................................................................... Sh. A. S. Anand Chairperson National Human Rights Commission Sardar Patel Bhawan Sansad Marg New Delhi 110001 December 24, 2004 Subject: Case No 4080/30/2003-2004/UC Dear Sh. Anand, The eviction of over 1.5 lakh slum dwellers from Yamuna Pushta will go down in the history of Delhi as one of the worst humanitarian disasters. We had filed the aforesaid complaint on February 12, 2004 when the process of demolishing Yamuna Pushta slums had just started. The NHRC accepted the complaint on February 16 but no action was taken for over six months. In the meantime, all the slums from Yamuna Pushta were removed with the use of unprecedented police brutality and coercion and in a completely unconstitutional manner. The human rights of over a hundred and fifty thousand people were trampled upon with impunity by the agencies of the state. Only about a sixth of those displaced got alternative plots in resettlement colonies like Bawana, Holambi Kalan and Madan Pur Khadar. Devoid of even a modicum of basic amenities like water, electricity, toilets, health and educational services etc., these areas are little more than barren pieces of land in a wilderness of hopelessness. Furthermore, relocation to such far-flung areas meant that most of the people either lost their jobs or their already meagre earnings were reduced to less than half of what they had before eviction. It is not a co-incidence then that many people, especially children and aged, have died in these colonies due to lack of food and water-borne diseases in the past five months. All this while we kept updating you on the ground situation and urging you to take immediate action. In this context when we heard (yes, we were not officially intimated despite being a complainant) that the NHRC has ordered an investigation on the issues of availability and quality of basic civic amenities in the resettlement colonies, we heaved a sigh of relief. The investigation was carried out in Bawana, Holambi Kalan and Madan Pur Khadar on 3rd, 6th and 8th of September respectively. Activists of Hazards Centre and Sajha Manch also accompanied the investigation team led by DSP Mr. Isaac. At that time we were told that the report of the investigation team would be finalised within 7-8 days and placed before the NHRC panel within 15 days. It’s now three months since the investigation was completed. But still there are no directions issued by the NHRC on the basis of the investigation. Meanwhile, the situation in Bawana, Holambi Kalan and Madan Pur Khadar has only worsened. Therefore, we request you to directly take the matter into your hand and ensure that justice is delivered at the earliest so that the aggrieved residents of the resettlement colonies can look forward to immediate relief and justice. After all, justice delayed, as the saying goes, is justice denied. Yours faithfully Lalit Batra Hazards Centre ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partner online Go to: http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From zainab at xtdnet.nl Sat Dec 25 14:53:37 2004 From: zainab at xtdnet.nl (zainab at xtdnet.nl) Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2004 10:23:37 +0100 (MET) Subject: [Reader-list] Shah Rukh In-Reply-To: <20041218143508.29823.qmail@web12210.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20041218143508.29823.qmail@web12210.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3186.219.65.12.193.1103966617.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl> 24th December 2004 Dear Santa Claus and God, On this Christmas eve, please put into my Christmas Stocking a return air ticket to Shanghai and a couple of thousand yens. That is all for this year. Yours (trying to be) truly, Zainab I am curious about Shanghai. What is Vilasrao Deshmukh’s obsession to create Mumbai into a Shanghai? What I understand is that some things Chinese are already beginning to happen in this city (and even the country for that matter). This evening, while at Nariman Point, I checked out the new steel notice board which says ‘CAUTION’ and goes on to state that photographing the Nariman Point footpath or for that matter any municipal footpath in ‘A’ Ward is not allowed. If you wish to photograph the footpaths and pavements in ‘A’ Ward, then you have to obtain permission from the municipal office of the ward. Otherwise, ‘offenders’ shall be seriously fined. And below the high steel board is a strong statement ‘hawking is strictly prohibited’. I am coming to conclude that the first steps towards the creation of Shanghai are a strict government, a punitive state, curtailing of basic freedoms, curbing any flow of loose information, controlling the loose spaces, and of course making revenue out of everything. Then I think about the ‘A’ ward which is the city’s Garden of Eden. ‘A’ Ward encompasses the prestigious South Mumbai. In the times of the British, South Mumbai was a walled city with access permitted to some. It is said history repeats itself. Perhaps history is going to be recreated if we manage to wall South Mumbai once again. And I think about terms of entry for people into certain places and spaces; I think about public domain; I think about walls and histories; I think about conflicts and wars. I think too much nah? Today is Christmas Eve. VT Railway Station is buzzing with people trying to get back home. It appears that Christmas holds more excitement for people than Diwali. Perhaps now with the idea and image of the ideal American family, Christmas fits in more perfectly than Diwali. But how does it matter even if the BJP was once gunning for Christians? In Mumbai, faith is a matter of dhanda. If dhanda says Christmas is the in-thing, then so be it. (In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – Dhanda Amen!) Newspapers are buzzing with news about the various parties taking place in the city. The entire town is red. And as I walk out of VT Station, I notice the Central Railway Motormen’s wishes of a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all the commuters. A nice holly tree laced board has been created and put up for all to see. Of all the people on VT Railway Station, it is the motormen who care most for commuters. Really! They are some people after all. They ferry the commuters across the city. They are the whole-and-soul of VT Railway Station and hence a motormen’s strike can be dangerous as they have the power to put the city to a halt. The motormen are the daddies of the city, of us everyday peoples. Christmas has caught on in the city. Newspapers are abuzz with the town painted red all over. Streets are buzzing with activity. Some peoples of the city are preparing for midnight mass which is no longer midnight – it happens at 10PM these days. Talk about restrictions. Talk about maintaining law and order in the city. I wonder if what would happen if we legalize night life in the city. Will crime vanish? Will people be safe? Will the legal lose out on its (illegal) income then? Will the legal have no job to do then? Law and order is being enforced on city streets these days. As I pass by in the bus, from VT to Nariman Point, I notice that many institutions in the city care for us. The WIAA cares for us and hence tells us not to talk on our cell phones else we will have to talk to doctors instead. The WIAA also warns that because Ravana had nine heads he could choose not to wear helmets but that we human beings cannot afford to do the same. The Police care for us and tell us to use the subway to get to the railway station. At each point in time, we legal citizens end up trespassing on some terrain or the other – the hawkers trespassing on the pedestrian paths, the pedestrians trespassing on the roads meant for cars. And at each point in time, we need to curb trespassing. And then the question arises about space! I am at Nariman Point right now. Winter has set into the city. It is chilly. There are many couples at the promenade today. Each one is intimate. Some of the couples are sitting at a little distance away from each other. It is festival time for the colleges. Groups of collegians, dressed in traditional dresses are gathered around here today. It seems like a night of intimacy for the city. I don’t know about love. How can I speak about love? Sometimes I think love is a matter of time. Just as people no longer love this city because it is nobody’s child. It is an unfaithful entity, belonging to none, like the girl in the dance bar who belongs to none. Work on the promenade is moving fast. Boards on the promenade state that this renovation work is half funded by the BMC and half by the MMRDA. The MMRDA is becoming a powerful authority in the city. I see some Reliance Banners on the roads across the seafront. At one point in time, Reliance was very interested in adopting the promenade. Then things fell apart. I wonder whether Reliance is getting interested again. And I am not sure about what happens when a public space is ‘adopted’ by a corporate entity? Why does a public space need adoption? I guess because it is public and hence belongs to none. I walk past. People are shooting the sea with their digital cameras and handycams. Nariman Point is crowded. There is a wedding procession starting from NCPA Apartments. And the bands are playing the ‘Dhoom’ song aloud! Dhoom is the song of the year – as everyone goes ‘Dhoom macha le dhoom macha le dhoom!’ Even cell phone ring tones have been set to the tune of this song. Life’s a dhoom after all, in this city at least! Sitting by Nariman Point, Shah Rukh, the little tea and coffee selling boy comes over to me. I have been wanting to talk to him for a long time now, trying to convince him to tell me about himself. He is a clever boy. He knows that he can sell me tea and coffee and along with it the promise that some day he will talk. He says, “Today, today we will talk.” He promises me that after one more round of sale, he will come and talk to me. I wait, like I always do! A while later, I notice that Shah Rukh is being dragged by the BMC men. Two of them are holding him by the collar. One of them has taken control of his only asset – his thermos and some of the maal inside. He is pleading them to leave him. They are firm. ‘No doing business here,’ they tell him. They treat him like a kid. He goes on pleading. I follow the men. Finally, one of them puts Shah Rukh’s thermos into the grey surveillance van and locks the door from the outside. Shah Rukh is telling them to let him go this time. But they are not interested in his pleas. They tell him, with an attitude of power and authority, “No. Go away. You should know not to do business here. You are a kid. You have to learn the rules.” As I am watching this drama from a distance, a man standing by me is also looking and peering at Shah Rukh. I deduce that he is also a hawker on the seafront. His name is Manoj Kumar. “Will they let him go?” I ask Manoj. “No. They will make him pay hundred rupees and then only will they let him go. He is going to make every effort to release his thermos. That is because there is other stuff that he has stored away on the back side. If the thermos is not released today, the other milk and water he has kept aside, behind, will also get spoilt.” Shah Rukh lives with Manoj. Manoj is very concerned about the little boy. “I was taking orders from customers (people sitting on the promenade). He followed me. I told him that BMC people are lurking around and that he should run away. But he did not listen. He was insistent, wanting to do business. And now they have caught him.” Manoj tells me that Shah Rukh has an elder brother. All this while, Shah Rukh had been fooling me, telling me how his father also does business around here. “What father?” Manoj asks baffled. “There is no father. He is such a cute boy. Some people who have a stall behind felt a lot for Shah Rukh. They were willing to keep him with them and pay him a salary for working. He was also willing to go. But his elder brother intervened and asked him not to go. He lives with me, over there,” Manoj said, pointing out to behind Nariman Point. I assume they live in the Backbay slums. Shah Rukh is cutest boy around the promenade. Often times I have found that people buy tea and coffee from him not because they want tea or coffee, but because they are moved by his innocence and his sweet face. And he is cheeky enough to fool people with this. “He is a clever boy,” Manoj continues, “Once, the BMC guys caught hold of him as he was trying to run. They placed their hands firmly on his left shoulder and he started screaming loud telling them, ‘I am hurt here. I am hit here. Don’t touch me here’. I got worried, wondering what’s happening. But he was fibbing. The BMC guys just left him.” Manoj tells me that he has been around the seafront since ten years now. “The NCPA Apartment guys moved us out,” Manoj tells me when I verify with him about who moved out the hawkers from the seafront. “There are sahibs who live in this building,” Manoj continues, “government officials. One of them had clearly told us that till twenty years, we hawkers could do business here, but after that period we would all be moved out. And exactly after the completion of twenty years, bang on the day, we were moved out. You must be aware that the BMC people had actually chained our bodies with thick steel chains and moved us out from here.” I was aware of this fact. Santhya had told me about this episode. I could not believe it then. But coming from Manoj, I could imagine the force and obstinacy from all the concerned parties. It is a matter of space, of economics, of dhanda, proprietorship and property. Whose space? “Kahan sau rupaiye tab ke aur kahan aaj ke dus,” Manoj tells me in the usual metaphor of how business then was ten times better than what it is today. “Now there are problems.” I ask him about the private security guards along the seafront. “Oh these? These are of appointed by the NCPA Apartments residents. They are also supposed to not allow us to do business here. But how dare they stop us? They are afraid of us. I had once beaten one of these private security guards because he was harrowing me when I was setting up business. The only people who have punitive power over us are these BMC guys.” Manoj recounts his days at Nariman Point. “I have seen this place. I used to earn thousand, two thousand rupees in a day when film stars would come here and film shootings would take place. Having earned so much in a day, I would not set up dhanda in the evenings. Aaram karne ka!” Manoj asks me why I am waiting, “I am writing a book. I want to talk to Shah Rukh for that.” “What will he tell you?” Manoj wonders, “You go. Today he will not talk to you,” Manoj says conclusively. I thank Manoj and walk ahead. Hmmm, either Shah Rukh is too lucky or I am too unlucky or whatever. People develop tactics over a period of time. They develop tactics of how to deal with power and with persons in power. They know how to make their way around. The key lies in not being fearful of authority. If you fear, you can be terrorized. The edge of Nariman Point is lined with a few couples. It is largely empty. I walk back. I catch a glimpse of Shah Rukh – he still hanging around, cool and also a bit worried. But he knows that he will manage a way out. The children of city streets are very clever. Street-Smart! I am unaware of my own state. I feel like laughing out loud. I don’t want any government to sit on my head. Two days ago, a bureaucrat said to me, “Government? It is taking care of the private domain – the ballcocks, the windows, the taps, the nanaks, the little things because that’s where the money lies. That is where you have the opportunity to be corrupt. Government hardly plays a role in the public domain.” And if government plays no role in the public domain, and the public too don’t seem much interested, then is the ultimate consequence property? From zainab at xtdnet.nl Sat Dec 25 14:56:04 2004 From: zainab at xtdnet.nl (zainab at xtdnet.nl) Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2004 10:26:04 +0100 (MET) Subject: [Reader-list] Arjun Bhai Message-ID: <3220.219.65.12.193.1103966764.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl> 25th December 2004 Arjun Bhai Today is Christmas. I have a present in the offing, soon to come true. Arjun bhai, who has been around VT Station since he was ten years old, is going to talk to me today. Arjun bhai is a hawker. He sits right outside the ticket counter, selling socks. Since sometime now I have been trying to get hold of him. We have a hit-and-miss relationship. But today, we have promised to meet and talk. Today is Christmas. I board a train from Byculla to VT Station. It is 9:20 AM when I land at the station. The station is quiet and empty. I suddenly sense loneliness on the station. The platforms are quiet. Life appears on a standstill. This is not the VT Railway Station I have known. I walk out of the station. Sitting outside is Raghu kaka. Raghu kaka sets up his plastic sheet and sells newspapers right opposite Arjun bhai. Kaka always wears a depressed look on his face. He sits on the road with the newspapers spread out. Inside the railway station, we have the Video Wall. Outside, we have kaka. As people walk past him, I realize that they either slow down or halt for a while to take a peek at the headlines. Democracy and information operate despite labels and boundaries of legality and illegality. And people practice time as they walk out and get inside the railway station. ‘Headlines for Free!’ is what I think Raghu kaka’s slogan should be. Arjun bhai later told me that Raghu kaka has been around even before he came to the place and started selling goods. As I wait for Arjun bhai, I notice several people walking past. Visibility, marks and signs are the ways in which we make sense of the crowds. We make sense of the city through known symbols. And the symbols, marks and signs change over periods of time. In 1984, it was the textile mill workers. In the period after the 1992-93 riots, it was the Muslims. And in this year, our marks and signs are fixated on hawkers, slum-dwellers and the dirt which constitutes the illegal and the unwanted! In each era, ‘the other’ changes. And we love to create ‘the other’ because we cannot live without it. Something has to be fearful and terrorizing. Sometime ago, ‘the other’ was the leopard who was on the killing spree. And what an irony! Standing right opposite VT Station is the Times of India Building which facilitates the creation and fear of ‘the other’. I think it is all about moving images and time. Wow! I practice marking myself. And I try to avoid being marked. Wherever I go, my name is a mystery to everyone. Zainab Bawa – Parsi? Punjabi? Gujarati? Thus far, my surname has protected my identity at least until the multiples don’t know yet that Zainab is a Muslim name. It’s funny huh! I am the researcher and I am the subject. I trace practices and I am a practitioner myself. Whoops! Self-indulgence huh? Arjun bhai comes running out of the railway station. “I thought you must be gone! That’s why I came dhawat-padat (scampering and running). If there is ever a problem, you must inform Raghu kaka. He knows me and will give me the message.” “Have you had tea?” I ask him. “No, let’s go inside and talk,” he replies. Arjun bhai leads me to one of the tea and coffee stalls inside VT Station. I take out my wallet to pay. He looks and gives me a benign smile, “No. This is on me.” He pays and hands me a cup of coffee. I am a trifle surprised. Is it coffee because he likes it? Or is it because he assumes that today’s office going persons are more coffee drinkers than tea lovers? That’s not a question on my list today, but it’s worth examining! We walk over to the area of the ticket counter which has several pillars. Arjun bhai and I stand near one of the pillars and start talking. “I come from a village in Maharashtra. When I was young, I was not interested in studies. I would go off with my maternal uncle and participate in his business activities. My parents would always tell me, ‘study, study, study!’ but I was not one to listen. I am educated till the fourth class. If I had seriously pursued education, I would be sitting in an office, not selling socks outside VT. When I first came to Bombay, I was selling toys, right here where I am. Then we used to find it very difficult to run with our goods when the BMC van would come to evict us. Toys are difficult to get hold of all at once. So, we stopped selling toys and began to sell socks. It is easy to run with socks when the officials come chasing. This is not my business. It belongs to someone else. I work for him. I have several relations with him. I can’t just say that he is my boss. He is like my brother-in-law because I married a girl from his village. He is also like an elder brother. He is a friend, a companion. And so, I work hard for him. That is why when you would come to ask me to talk, I would tell you to come in the mornings. It is not good to talk at the time of business. Besides, if a customer would come, I would have to attend to him and leave you in between. And I would not like to see you standing on the roads, talking to me. You are like my sister,” he says in a protective tone. “Why did you come here and decide to do business?” I ask him. “For generations we have been doing business here. So I also came here. Public is always here. There is no time when there is no public here, except from 2 – 2:30 PM in the afternoons. Now, everybody knows me here. Even my customers know me. We have a little network here, with those of us who work in the area. But I don’t care or intervene in someone else’s business by the side. Everybody knows that I set up dhanda here. Nobody will encroach on my space. For a day or two someone may come and set up business. But after that, they will go away. It is like guests we have in our house. They come for a day or two and that’s okay. But if they enter your house, you will naturally defend your territory. Isn’t it?” he asks rhetorically. Arjun bhai had disappeared for a few days in between. He says that whenever the officials decide to get strict, it’s good to lay low and not do business for a couple of days. “I set up business somewhere else in that period. Earlier it was Kharinar and Rajendra Rao. These two had done a lot of evict us hawkers. Then it was okay for a while. Now, again they are behind us. The police and the BMC both harass us. Otherwise there is no other problem. The police will come, take our goods, give us two slaps and either extract the legal 1200-rupee fine or just take some money and settle the mamla (affair). But you must never be afraid of the police. Look at me, I am not afraid any more. Sometimes the BMC operates independently; sometimes they are hand-in-glove with the police. We have to pay haftas. In my grandfather’s time, it used to be Re.1 and now, it is Rs.100.” As Arjun bhai tells me the story of the value of money, I realize that the value of money is also a matter of time. Time changes everything. “You know, when I first came here, I used to sleep on the footpath. But I am particular about some habits. I need to take a bath once a day and wear washed clothes everyday. So, I used to spend one rupee everyday to buy a pot of water. I would have a bath. And everyday, I would spend two rupees to get my clothes washed. You asked me why I came and started business here nah? I don’t have any bad habits. My heart is clean. I was never into doing drugs. Look at the boys around here, they do drugs. I am not into this. In fact, when they dope and smoke, I start to feel giddy with the smell. So I came here and started doing dhanda. I travel across the city. I see boys doing drugs on the Chowpatty beach. But I never go there.” “Do you go to Nariman Point?” I ask him excitedly. “I have never been there, even in times of absolute loneliness, I never go there. What happens when you go to the sea face? You just sit there and see the rocks and stones, that’s it! So I don’t go there,” he tells me bluntly. Arjun bhai is a hard worker. “I come here everyday from 10 in the morning and stay till 9 at night. I come from Kurla. We store our goods here at a godown, at Fort. Even on Sundays, we set up shop because on Sundays, we have tourists from small towns who shop. Moreover, on Sundays, people from the suburbs come to town because they want to give a nice time to their children – picnic. So they come and buy as well.” “So when do you get time for yourself?” I asked him. “No time. Just business. Earlier I used to watch movies a lot. Now, I think all movies are alike and there is no family film. Haan, yes, when Mughal-e-Azam got released recently, I went to see it with my family. It is a family film.” “Now, it is hard time. There is no one to care for hawkers and the union is also not a hopeful prospect. We know immediately when the BMC van is around. Believe me, I have hardly been caught. I always manage to escape.” “You have two more boys with you these days?” I asked him. He started smiling, “Oh yes, that is because the boys can help when it is time to run with the goods. Otherwise it gets tough when I am alone. Nowadays, the hawkers on the main road don’t set up shop between 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM. Also, if you have noticed, earlier, the shops used to be on both sides of the sidewalk. Now, we are allowed to set up shop only on one side.” I asked him if the ban on crossing roads and the compulsion to use the subway has affected his business. “Not much. Those who use the roads use them anyway. If you see from the point of view of humanity, it is dangerous to cross roads. But public is public. They do dadagiri (bullying) and they cross the roads despite being fined. Anyway, there are not many people who like using the subway. So they walk on the roads.” Arjun bhai has seen all kinds of changes at VT Station – the laying down of tiles on the road, the beautification of Bhatia baug park and the creation of the subway. “The coming of the subway did affect my business. But then, the prices are more in the shops down there. Some people these days believe that the goods we sell on the roads are not of nice quality. So they buy from shops. Actually, there is not much difference. I sell the same thing on the roads for ten rupees and in the shop, you pay fifteen rupees.” “But there is also a difference in the packaging nah?” I interjected. “No. We do the same nice packaging for people to like and buy.” “When I first came here, I used to pay Rs.2 for the rice plate in the GPO (General Post Office) Canteen. Now, it is all expensive. Also, I can’t digest roadside food. I bring food from home and fill up a bottle of water from outside.” “Oh”, I said, “you can get free water from the charitable taps behind.” “No,” he replied, “You are supposed to drink water then and there. Cannot take water outside,” he informs me. “Life is difficult. I love my village. But I can’t stay there for too long because I am very used to the city. But I don’t love the city. I am here only to do business, just to earn money. That is what Bombay is about – earning money. Here there is no humanity. In a rupee, twenty five paisa is honesty and the rest of the twelve annas, there’s nothing.” “What do you think about VT Railway Station? They say they are going to build a museum here? Also, what changes have you seen at VT Station?” I asked Arjun Bhai. “Museum? When they make one, I shall see. They have been saying this for years now and I am yet to see something happen. Nothing happens. VT station, I think it is the same as always. Crowds were always there. If 10% people go out of the city, another 20% come in. It is like this only. And what is a railway station? It is like how my home is. To me, my home is a place where I come and go. Same with the railway station – I come and go here. Nothing more. And public is public. You see, when I was in school, I had studied that the British introduced the railways. Why? Because goods had to be transported. We are like cattle. And this railway station is a place where herding takes place. Sometimes there is lots of public, sometimes there is none. You know it is the same thing that happens with my business too. At some point, there are several people at the same time. And everybody buys. And sometimes, there are many people, but if one person does not buy, all move off. It is the same with the railway station. If one person is moving, everybody is moving. If one person stops, people around stop. And this VT is one place where there will always be public. Lots of public!” “I live in a chawl in Kurla. My wife and children live with me. I always laugh and smile, even when there is tension. And, you should never get angry. Be patient. That is important in life.” I asked him a little more about the subway market. “Hmmm. In the subway, there was a problem. The shop-owners used to sell stuff even outside the limits of their shop. So the BMC came running on them.” “But,” I asked him, “hawkers sell goods even inside the subway.” “Yes, of course,” he tells me, “business is business. Have to do!” I conclude for the day and tell him that I may come back another day. While we were talking, a beggar boy had come asking for alms. Arjun bhai gave his cup of coffee to him. Maybe he doesn’t like coffee and was drinking because I was around. As I walked out of the station, I remembered Arjun bhai’s gesture of paying for the coffee. I think we all live by the generosity of people who themselves have little they own. At least I survive by this generosity! Zainab Bawa Bombay www.xanga.com/CityBytes From zainab at xtdnet.nl Mon Dec 27 10:15:25 2004 From: zainab at xtdnet.nl (zainab at xtdnet.nl) Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2004 05:45:25 +0100 (MET) Subject: [Reader-list] Re: marking city scapes In-Reply-To: <20041226104936.61508.qmail@web8405.mail.in.yahoo.com> References: <3220.219.65.12.193.1103966764.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl> <20041226104936.61508.qmail@web8405.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3187.219.65.14.138.1104122725.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl> Hi Solly, Thanks for the insights and comments. I am still caugetating over them. One of the things that I find very funny and at the same time dangerous in this city is when bureaucrats decide to undertake beautification projects in the city. This is what is happening between the State Govt., the MMRDA and some of the bureaucrats. Come to think of it, Vilasrao is interested in Mumbai precisely because here is where he can show the works he has done. Right now, the state govt. is bad in terms of its financial shape. Let's cash in on Mumbai. What I also find intriguing is the relaitonship or should I say nexus, but I am going to avoid that word for now between the state government and the businesses. The big businesses. Big businesses are interested in beautifying the city, coverting it into a tourist hub. But frankly, there is no tourism in Mumbai without the street life. That is exactly what is most fascinating and daring about this city. In the next two days, I shall post something which sums up my investigations of VT railway station - the very diversity of the space is what makes it beautiful apart from the structure which admittedly is fabulous and built with fascinating detailing. Yeah, I think Shantaram is brilliant, most beautiful piece of work on Bombay thus far. A must read! More later. Cheers, Zainab Zainab Bawa Bombay www.xanga.com/CityBytes From zainab at xtdnet.nl Mon Dec 27 10:17:02 2004 From: zainab at xtdnet.nl (zainab at xtdnet.nl) Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2004 05:47:02 +0100 (MET) Subject: [Reader-list] Manoj Kumar Message-ID: <3202.219.65.14.138.1104122822.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl> Dear All, In my last post, I had said that we live by the generosity of those who own nothing or very little themselves. Today's story of Manoj Kumar only reinstates how the spirit of Mumbai city emanates very much from the people of the footpaths, the roads. They are the ones who care for the migrants, the outsiders! Cheers, Zainab 25th December 2004 Oral Culture on Christmas Day! This evening I am at Nariman Point. It is Christmas today. And today is the day to record the oral culture of the city’s people. Families have come in bunches and are having a picnic at Nariman Point. I am sitting next to one such family. It is a Kutchi family, perhaps from Borivali (now you see how I make sense of the city. I determine people’s home addresses through the ghettos existing in the city – is that dangerous?). This family has come fully armed, like most Gujju families. And the armaments in this case include dhoklas, ghatiyas, chikki, undhiyu and theplas – in short, all the snacks which make for a good family picnic. The kids in the family are having a good time. The double-decker open air upper deck MTDC bus passes by Nariman Point and one of the kids from our Kutchi family shouts, “Hey look, the bus is open from the top. It has no roof.” And he giggles and breaks into a loud laugh. The city’s children are having a gala time at Nariman Point today. On my left is a bunch of three kids – two sisters and a little brother. Their parents are sitting on the opposite side, each one a separate single bench. This is a middle-class family where husband and wife become brother and sister after children are born. There is no romance between this couple. Both of them are blankly staring at the sea. The husband asks the wife to keep a watch on the kids as they sit on the seafront plinth. The wife loathes this duty – this is what she does everyday. She ignores her husband’s commands. Ultimately when the children get too truant she starts to field after them, like fielders in a cricket match running all over to stop the ball! This is one such woman – fieldswoman! What does Nariman Point mean to her and to the larger tribe of women in this city of which she is part of? What is this place? Is it their breathing space or is it just any other space where there is no freedom from roles? Shah Rukh is a little away from me. His tribe of hawkers is trying to make most of this festive day. This is their day of dhanda, dhoom dhanda! I find that Shah Rukh is moving with two other hawkers. Apparently, this is either some strategy of collective sales or that the two older hawkers are protecting him. Shah Rukh comes closer and I see that he is carrying a heavy white thermos flask today. It is different from the smaller one he was carrying yesterday. “What happened yesterday?” I ask him. “They did not leave my thermos,” he replies. Before he can talk more, one of his friends tells him, “Come, let’s move faster.” He goes ahead. I decide to take a walk right up to the Nariman Point, the point of the sea, the point of romance, of love, of danger, of dreams, of depression, of hope and of aspiration. As I start walking along, I notice the private security guards walking in pairs. They have their chests swelled out. And they are holding the sticks and walking with their authority and pride (which is what I find absolutely deceptive and funny). “Don’t be scared” – I remember Arjun Bhai and Manoj Kumar’s words. Suddenly, I notice some ugly, fat and intimidating cops gathering somewhere. I remember then that today when I landed at Nariman Point, there was a Pandu (havaldar) who was doing rounds of the promenade on a motorcycle. Goodness me! What is happening today? I sense some trouble. When private security and police get together, there is something obnoxious and dangerous about to happen. And that’s it. This is exactly what happens. Today is the day when the private security guards can have their vengeance against the hawkers who refuse to accept their authority. Today is the day to show that we have the power! And it is going to rock man! The security guards and police get together and start nabbing the hawkers on the seafront. The first one to go is one of my personal favorite hawker – he is dark, fat but he has the most loving look on his face. He sells tea. Today, he notices the police and starts to look about him. His moves are like that of a scared animal who is aware of the predator. And just as he is about to move, I find a fat man who holds him from behind and grabs his thermos flask. He has been caught, in full public view. But the public is not bothered with this sight. Everyone is still doing their own thing. The hawker starts pleading with the policewallah to let him go. But the policeman is not in a mood to listen to him. There is no forgiveness on Christmas Day. Nothing doing man! Gradually, either hawkers are being caught or their wares are being seized. Today is the day of intimidation – Jesus Christ! I walk ahead. I stand for a while at the Point, right opposite Tata Theater. People are talking here. A man is explaining to his family about the Tata Theater and the NCPA Apartments. He is saying, “Industrialists live here. This is a very expensive place. This is Tata Theater. All this area belongs to the Tata’s.” I find that at the Point, all of us insiders of the city become tourist guides to our family and near and dear ones. Lovers become tourist guides here to impress their objects of attraction. And everyone dreams here, right at this space, this space which is the prime real estate of Mumbai. Another man is pointing out to two of his colleagues, “From opposite the sea, you can see Colaba, Navy Nagar and all those areas.” Each one is explaining something to the other. And people are sitting on the tetrapods. They are on the sea. And then, the security guards and the policemen come and say, “It is 7 PM. Now move from the sea!” Two elderly joggers (they seemed like residents of the area) say, “Gosh. What is their problem? Why don’t these guards let people sit on the rocks? Where will people go?” Yes, where will people go? Where will people go if they are policed and thrown out? Where is the outlet for people? Everybody moves from the tetrapods and start gathering around. “Don’t be scared” – I remember Arjun bhai and Manoj Kumar’s words! I walk back to the promenade. On my way, I find little hawker boys still doing business. I want to shout and warn all of them – “Move off! Lay low. The police are here!” But words refuse to come out. Suddenly, I find Shah Rukh from nowhere. I tell him, “Don’t go ahead, the police are there. You will be caught.” “Really?” Shah Rukh asks. “Oh yes,” I reply. “Okay”, he says, “Do you want tea or coffee?” “No,” I reply. As I walk ahead, I notice old boys hanging out at Nariman Point. Nariman Point is their breathing space, their outlet. I walk back towards the Point to see if anyone is flouting the rules and still sitting on the tetrapods. On my way, I notice that Shah Rukh has been caught again. He is quite a reckless businessman. Maybe he is greedy. He is hungry to sell. The fat policeman is around and he is issuing warnings to the little boys who are doing dhanda “You watch out. I am going to catch hold of you guys soon.” Meanwhile, the senior hawkers are warning the little boys, “Go individually to do dhanda. Don’t move in groups.” I decide to take a round of the little hawker’s bazaar which is now settled on the back of Oberoi Towers. As I walk there, suddenly a man from the dark shouts to me, “Hello madam!” This is Manoj Kumar. Oh shit! I am a visible entity now! I reply to his greeting. The hawkers are sitting idle today. No business at all. The food stalls are empty, bereft of customers. I decide to head home for home is where the computer is. I need to punch all of this into my diary. All these sights and scenes I have watched today. Manoj Kumar As I am walking back, Manoj Kumar sees me. He is sitting on one of the benches on the seafront. He asks me, “Did you meet Shah Rukh today?” “No,” I replied, “He has been caught again.” “Oh my God! He is becoming a chutiya everyday. We tell him not to go but he does not care to listen. Do you come here everyday? Yes, yes! It is good to come to Chowpatty (hawkers call the Nariman Point sea face as Chowpatty). Good to walk” Manoj Kumar tells me. We walk together. He insists after a while that I sit down and listen to him. “You asked me what changes I have seen at Nariman Point in all these years? The only change I have seen is that we hawkers have been moved off from the seafront. You know madam, we used to earn three thousand, five thousand and sometimes seven thousand rupees a day when we used to set up dhanda. I have seen some of our men carrying sacks full of notes and going back to the village. Really, we have seen the best times here. Now, we manage about a thousand a day. We pay hafta, big haftas to the policemen, but still they harrow us. The senior (inspector) of this area is a good man. But it is the senior’s friend who is a harami (bastard). The senior’s friend lives there, in the NCPA Apartments. He insisted and told the senior to push us off from here. And you know what clever tactics were employed to move us off? First, they started putting tiles on the promenade floor. We were told that after the tiling is done, we could come back and set up our dhanda. After the tiling was done, the concretizing of the seafront wall began. We were told to come back after that. And when we came after all this, we were told to get lost, that we could no longer sell here. See, how cleverly we were moved off.” “I was a truant when I was a kid. I would not study. Father used to insist. Ultimately, my mother asked me to go off to Mumbai to earn money for the family. I came here with my uncle. I live there, behind the Express Towers, on the roads. Now I cannot think of going back to my village. I am so used to living in Mumbai. After all, I have been here for 20 years now. Mera man nahi lagta gaon mein. Kya karega? When we were doing business here, there used to be beggars and kids who would come from everywhere and beg here. We hawkers were the ones who would give food to the beggars at night. We would give them shelter – chal, so ja hamare saath, le yeh kuch kha le. Sometimes we would employ them with us. You can’t get water here for free. We would be the ones who would give them water. Now you see, when new kids come here, they find it hard to even procure water.” “This place belongs to Sunil Shetty. He started the gaming and water sports at Chowpatty. He wanted to do something here as well. When he first set up his establishment at Chowpatty beach, he came here and distributed sweets to us all. We ate the laddoos. You see the one who has money has power. It is only the paisewalla who gets izzat (the man with money gets respect) here. Nobody gets hold of me. I look like a common man here, not a hawker. Today also the havaldar told me to lay low and do less business. Today is the day for business and look what is happening?” “No policeman is ever a friend. If you do something wrong, they will book you. When it comes to crime, the police sees no relations of friendship. Chowgule sahib of Marine Lines Police Station knows me. When I am caught for petty crimes, they put me in the van along with others and then I go to Chowgule sahib and tell him ‘what sahib, you brought me here?’ Sahib warns me and lets me go. He knows that I am not a bad person. I am not a criminal.” “Once, a senior guy came and gave me an identity card. It is a very important card. You can go anywhere with that card. Really! I have been to places where ordinary people are stopped. I have gone inside Oberoi Towers and no one dare stop me. I have been inside the Mantralaya (state government headquarters). Nobody can get inside the Air India building without a pass. I have gone there as well and have eaten food inside the canteen!” “Your city cannot work without us footpathwalas. You see the bhutta (corn) which I sell for fifteen rupees, the same thing you get inside Oberoi for ninety rupees. I know that. I have gone inside their kitchens to see how they roast the corn. What you get on the roads for ten rupees, you get the same inside a store for hundred rupees. Yeh sheher nahi chal sakta footpathwalon ke bina. I am telling you.” “Police is no one’s friend. When you commit a crime, you have to serve punishment. After all, police is the bhai of this city, the big brother. Isn’t it?” I patiently listen to Manoj. I think he has several stories to tell me. He asks me where I live, what I do. He imagines that I work in one of the big offices at Nariman Point and hence I can come here everyday. “Now that you come here everyday, we will meet. And if you don’t find me, I am certain to find you!” he tells me as I prepare to leave. I don’t know what kind of invitation or statement this is. I am taking it on face value right now. This is the end of today, but the beginning of something new, something interesting, something dangerous and something exciting. That is what the wonderful Everyday is about? Cheers! Zainab Bawa Bombay www.xanga.com/CityBytes From sollybenj at yahoo.co.in Sun Dec 26 16:19:36 2004 From: sollybenj at yahoo.co.in (solomon benjamin) Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2004 10:49:36 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] marking city scapes In-Reply-To: <3220.219.65.12.193.1103966764.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl> Message-ID: <20041226104936.61508.qmail@web8405.mail.in.yahoo.com> Dear Group This is a response to Zainab's two richly detailed and wonderful essays which evoke so many senses of the city as it operates for those who are so closely connected to street life but also impacted by broader events. Some wonderful lines from Zainab's postings: Democracy and information operate despite labels and boundaries of legality and illegality. .....People develop tactics over a period of time. They develop tactics of how to deal with power and with persons in power. They know how to make their way around. The key lies in not being fearful of authority. If you fear, you can be terrorized. I am reminded of a wonderful book that shows Bombay (of the early eighties) in a similar detail, 'Shantaram' by Gregory Roberts. What I feel is critically important in these accounts is that they force us to look at the city terrain from alternative categories, and see how the ones used by architects and planners (to beautify the city and urban form) can seriously hurt others who use the city as a place for survival. The move Zainab writes of selling toys to socks being dictated by what you can save from a police raid in a zone declared as a no-hawking zone. Or then, the move to make VT a museum (by the conservationist?). Are these then competing forms of marking? I am reminded of some recent debates in Bangalore where in the concern for trees being cut, and disappearing wetlands, we have almost a comical reaction - if the issue was not so tragic and serious. First, if one should term tanks as lakes or not, the discussion being steeped in aesthetics - leading to a subtle hedging of the more serious underlying political issues. Second, and equally de-politicizing, is the argument to bring back greenery and developing 'mini-forests'. Like the conservation efforts made in Bombay, these three approaches coming from architecture and urban design, see the city as a physical entity and hence the marking of it, in those terms. Can we then move beyond the physical attributes of space and location which seem to imprison us in politically neutralizing categories? Zainab's essay, reminds me of a wonderful book, "Street signs Chicago: Neighborhood and other illusion of big city life" by Bowden and Kreinberg which is a devastating critique of the planners aligning with big business to make the concept of neighborhoods a myth. This however, brings me to what seems a saving grace for our context which in the US has been cleaned out from the era of Tammany Hall: The complex, messy, local politics that still may allow the Shah Rukh, Raghu Kaka, and Arjun Bhai to survive. Such a democracy may not resemble the one that George Bush wants (and perhaps thank god for that!) or be one that the BBC sees as being "proper". If some of you saw the recent documentary films on Venezuela and the election of Chavez, such a democracy is also not one coming out as social movements against an authoritarian dictatorship. Instead, it is perhaps one of stealth, of tactic, and how to not feel terrorized despite the difficult situations. Perhaps, this is the real nightmare of the Master planners, the return home landscapists, conservationists and the "Swadesh" types, the party high commands, the World Bank lending to the MMRDA, the Bangalore Agenda Task Force and their corporate funders, the Kharniars and Ragendra Raos: A politics of "Juugaard" which is human but also few central figures to drive it, which is underground but open in every street corner, and where the everyday acts of people in the street form its building blocks. Solly Benjamin 26 dec 2004 Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partneronline. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041226/dc1af34b/attachment.html From space4change at gmail.com Sat Dec 25 18:32:16 2004 From: space4change at gmail.com (SPACE) Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2004 18:32:16 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] PRESS STATEMENT: The Mohan Karthik Suicide In-Reply-To: <1103979521.289.14703.m23@yahoogroups.com> References: <1103979521.289.14703.m23@yahoogroups.com> Message-ID: <8c10798f0412250502637bd875@mail.gmail.com> Society for People's Action, Change and Enforcement Stop Ragging Campaign PRESS STATEMENT For immediate release and circulation The Stop Ragging Campaign of SPACE (Society for People's Action, Change and Enforcement) condemns the ragging suicide of Mohan Karthik (19) a first year student of Electronics and Communication Engineering at SKR Engineering College, Chennai, on Sunday, 19 December 2004. Karthik was reportedly made to bathe in his own urine by two third year students, KV Bhargav Kumar and Venu Madhava Reddy. News reports say that the Managing Director of the institute has been arrested and the Principal is absconding. Under the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Ragging Act, 1997, the institute authorities are liable for prosecution should they fail to curb ragging. In this case the authorities even ignored a written complaint, reportedly, from Karthik's parents. It is clearly the lack of implementation of the law that has resulted in this suicide, not the first one in Tamil Nadu or India. The SPACE Stop Ragging Campaign believes the Government of India, the UGC, the AICTE, state governments and police authorities have not been doing enough to curb ragging, and show concern only when a suicide takes place. We demand that the Indian Penal Code be amended to make ragging a criminal offence. Funding and affiliating agencies should conduct routine inspections to find out the status of ragging in the campuses that they recognize. We also condemn the national media's silence over Karthik's suicide, which comes over three years after a landmark Supreme Court judgement on ragging. This is in contrast to the hype with which the media treated the recent "MMS case" in Delhi. Signed SACHIN AGARWAL Secretary, SPACE [Society for People's Action, Change and Enforcement] From space4change at gmail.com Mon Dec 27 18:08:38 2004 From: space4change at gmail.com (SPACE) Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2004 18:08:38 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] 49A and the sarkari monsters Message-ID: <8c10798f04122704385ab44881@mail.gmail.com> the income tax department of the government of india deserves a nuclear bomb dropped on it. i am a student who has to recieve some amount from an organisation, for which i need a PAN number. my annual income is certainly not taxable. i don't understand why they've made this rule that everyone needs a PAN number, even to open a bank acount. now the PAN form is called "49A", sarkari style, thanks to a friend who told me. my friend told me that the one-page form can be downloaded from the income tax dept website. one page my foot! it is 14 pages long, of which half describe how to fill the other half. the first page is completely incomprehensible. then there are questions such as "Your Sex: M__ F__" (Tick only one.) Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww! Then they want a black and white mugshot of mine. But why b/w in the 21st century? And then they will not tell you where to submit the form. They have dozens of ofices in delhi, and the idea of entering any one of them scares me. one sarkari official, a monster with no pretensions of being a public servant, will direct me to another sarkari monster. the site has a search engine, which, of course, does not work. it has a link called helpline, which has no helpline numbers or email ID, only a pompous "Message" by A.Balasubramanian, Chairman, Central Board of Direct Taxes, Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, North Block , New Delhi-110 001, Tel:301 2648. It reads: "I am sanguine that the Commmissionerate will be able to effectively redress urgent tax problems of fixed income group, corporate sector, foreign investors and others... I wish this user - friendly interactive focal point all success in providing advise and assistance to tax payers in the shortest possible time." You know there's this novel on the subject of our sarkari monsters, called "Mammaries of the Welfare State". A sarkari institution called the Sahitya Akademi just gave this novel an award, a couple of years after the novel was first published! The sahitya akademi has no sense of irony! When i have figured how to fill 49A, I will make copies of it and send it to every Income Tax office by post, with a 14 page explanation letter about why i am doing this. let them have a taste of their own pill. just that i will never get a PAN number that way. hmmmmm, is there anyone here who's a income tax office dalal? s From radiofreealtair at gmail.com Tue Dec 28 10:37:01 2004 From: radiofreealtair at gmail.com (Anand Vivek Taneja) Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 10:37:01 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] a tsunami blog Message-ID: <8178da9904122721074439c56c@mail.gmail.com> there is website up to help those affected by the tsunami in south and south east asia. it seems like the ease with which blogger allows you to put up a website, has made it easier and quicker for people to co-ordinate relief and share information, with or without institutional aid. perhaps a 'riot blog' could have made things slightly different? please do visit - http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/ -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup. http://www.synchroni-cities.blogspot.com/ From itsnishant at gmail.com Tue Dec 28 11:08:07 2004 From: itsnishant at gmail.com (Nishant Shah) Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 11:08:07 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] a tsunami blog In-Reply-To: <8178da9904122721074439c56c@mail.gmail.com> References: <8178da9904122721074439c56c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Blogs have changed the way we communicate and represent things. Increasingly blogs have also come to get an 'authority' of their own because they do not belong to any institutions and also because the bloggers do not have to subscribe to any particular "ideologies of belonging." however, even as one celebrates the freedom and empowerment of blogs, one maybe also needs to look at the visibility that the blogs get. As non commercial ventures, their ranking within search engines is low. With the increasing number of bloggers, Blogs on different sites {blogspot, livejournal, rediff., etc} blogs are also quickly turning into a kind of junkyard archive that seems to be the inevitable for any genre on the cyberspace. Blogs are, however, precious. They are first hand accounts of- not just the native informants- people who don't only experience and event but also analyse it and hence give a better perspective on things. Maybe better archiving facilities, search engines made exclusively for blogs, new ranking patterns and trust points to blogs can indeed make them the powerful tool they have the poetential of becoming. The tsunami blog has many replicas already...the Bangalore community on livejournal also has people making posts about their own efforts at providing aid to the victims. http://www.livejournal.com/community/bangalore/163954.html There should be some way of collecting a comprehensive database of all these blogs and help them talk and converge with each other because a lot of them are actually wasting valuable energy in replicating groudwork and necessary formalities. Just passing thoughts on the matter... Nishant On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 10:37:01 +0530, Anand Vivek Taneja wrote: > there is website up to help those affected by the tsunami in south and > south east asia. > > it seems like the ease with which blogger allows you to put up a > website, has made it easier and quicker for people to co-ordinate > relief and share information, with or without institutional aid. > > perhaps a 'riot blog' could have made things slightly different? > > please do visit - > http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/ > -- > Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, because you are crunchy and > taste good with ketchup. > http://www.synchroni-cities.blogspot.com/ > _________________________________________ > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header. > List archive: > -- Nishant says Tell me something about yourself. Go ahead...tell all From sastry at cs.wisc.edu Tue Dec 28 23:42:08 2004 From: sastry at cs.wisc.edu (Subramanya Sastry) Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 23:42:08 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] Tsunami news on News Rack Message-ID: Hello everyone, With support from Sarai's FLOSS independent fellowship between April and September, I started work on an automated news monitoring tool called News Rack. A very preliminary system has been up and running for the past 2 months. At this time, responding to suggestions from friends, I have created a profile on News Rack to collect tsunami-related newsclippings (from a few newspapers providing RSS feeds) and categorize them. I have created a quick and rudimentary categorization at this time -- it can (and will be) refined over time -- please feel free to email me your suggestions as to how this can be recategorized. You can visit this page at: http://floss.sarai.net/newsrack/Browse.do?owner=tsunami&issue=tsunami News on this page will be continually updated. You can also visit this by clicking on the 'Browse' link on the front page http://floss.sarai.net/newsrack I will not pretend that this will be terribly useful to many of you, but, perhaps it might be of some interest and use to hopefully some of you. Having said that, I have found interesting articles that I would otherwise have not seen. Feedback on the classification specifically, and more generally about the tool is welcome and appreciated. Subbu. From space4change at gmail.com Wed Dec 29 14:13:35 2004 From: space4change at gmail.com (SPACE) Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 14:13:35 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Tsunami news on News Rack In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8c10798f04122900435d80e72b@mail.gmail.com> Hi, I've followed your News Rack through the reasearch postings. I want to know what advantages does News Rack have over Google News and Google News Alert, aprt from Google being commercial and News Rack being 'free'? Many thanks, s On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 23:42:08 +0530 (IST), Subramanya Sastry wrote: > Hello everyone, > > With support from Sarai's FLOSS independent fellowship between April and > September, I started work on an automated news monitoring tool called > News Rack. > > A very preliminary system has been up and running for the past 2 months. At > this time, responding to suggestions from friends, I have created a profile on > News Rack to collect tsunami-related newsclippings (from a few newspapers > providing RSS feeds) and categorize them. I have created a quick and > rudimentary categorization at this time -- it can (and will be) refined over > time -- please feel free to email me your suggestions as to how this can be > recategorized. > > You can visit this page at: > http://floss.sarai.net/newsrack/Browse.do?owner=tsunami&issue=tsunami > News on this page will be continually updated. > > You can also visit this by clicking on the 'Browse' link on the front page > http://floss.sarai.net/newsrack > > I will not pretend that this will be terribly useful to many of you, but, > perhaps it might be of some interest and use to hopefully some of you. > Having said that, I have found interesting articles that I would otherwise > have not seen. > > Feedback on the classification specifically, and more generally about the tool > is welcome and appreciated. > > Subbu. > _________________________________________ > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header. > List archive: > From oli at zeromail.org Wed Dec 29 20:36:41 2004 From: oli at zeromail.org (Oli) Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 16:06:41 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Opening the Digital Message-ID: <40C73DD2F9FEFF615D02A8C8@hipparchia> Dear all, as the IP-conference in Delhi is coming closer, I have been reading articles on the subject, like probably others on this list too. You all know the ambivalent term "digital divide", which is on high circuit in development agendas. In opposition to a moral, paternalistic discourse backed by Microsoft and others, I am looking for a different perspective on the issue of 'the digital'. The general idea is not to fall into the trap of the discourse of the 'digital divide' like it is held by the UNO with its World Summit on Information Society (WSIS). Not taking for granted any meaning of 'the digital' and its relations to societies, the term 'digital inequalities' is proposed, which is nothing but a container of questions, so far. With this, I tried to step back and look for a variety of questions, which give us an idea of the multifaceted thing called 'the digital'. I invite everyone on the list to comment, add and critique. As my stay at sarai is connected to a work on 'digital inequalities', I would be happy to get some feedback. I've just started to sketch a framework of questions. There is no determining goal. It's supposed to be processual work. The questions below don't cover the whole topic, and also some of them might be pure nonsense. Digital Inequalities concern a wide field of consequences, that emerge when the Digital has become the dominant signifier for modern life and when it reshapes societies. But it is necessary to understand that Digital Inequalities are not solely, maybe even not at all, social inequalities. They arise within the whole spectre of the questions below. Digital Inequalities will not stop when everyone is connected. Digital Inequalities are subject to every single individual's lust, skills and curiosity to explore the Digital. The local dispositivs* one is related to are affected by and affect the Digital. Speaking of global digital inequalities does not make much sense. Saying that it is a digital inequality that in the U.S. far more connected users exist than in Angola is redundant. A digital inequalitiy has a wide horizon of parameters, most of them will remain unknown if the term is continued being used an essentialist concept, that leaves no space for questions. Digital Inequalities are a net of relations that relies on previous relations. * Dispositiv is a concept by Foucault which -in very short- refers to the adjusting of power relations when any kind of change in society occurs. It reconnects loose threads to e.g. economy. it fills the gap, that emerged through e.g. technological changes. I am not sure about the english translation. The french word is 'dispositif'. 1. --- Changes ---- The search for a language and concepts of the Digital era hasn't even begun. The Digital is not the opposite or other half of a binary digital / analog, but a different state of things. 2. ---- Everyday life and the Digital ---- What kind of relations exist between people and the Digital exist? What do these relations stand for? Digital practices in everyday life In which ways does the Digital affect your life? 3. ---- Imaginaries of the Digital ---- What are our Digital dreams? Lust for power in the metaphors of the Digital: cyberspace, world wide web, ... 4. ---- The Future and the Digital ---- What timeregime does the Digital impose upon users? (e.g. organism's stress with the Digital) What would be a contempary usage of the Digital? (that does not just use it as a simulation of old media/ analog? How boring is that: using the computer as a telephone...) A philosophy of Digital history. What would that be? The Digital as a simulation machine that ends history? Possible futures of the Digital What is the (conceptual) relation of postmodernity and the Digital? Future subjectivities shaped by the Digital 5. ---- Aspects of Power in the Digital era ---- Don't believe the hype! The strata of control and surveillance are much about the making of compatible, governable subjectivities. Connecting everyone as a sequel of counting populations and making up identities. Dispositivs of the Digital: subjectivities, relations, economics. Which older dispositivs take a backseat when the dispositiv of the Digital is in state of action? A historical research on the shaping of contempory life that concentrates on the left-outs through the Digital. What have we missed because of the Digital? The speed of light is not suitable for organisms: The Digital as an accelerator of some aspects of modern life. Paternalistic politics: the imperative of being connected Some languages preferred: english as a structural component of Digital inequalities. Interesting: the delay of the implementation of local languages is not caused by technical problems. So whats the problem then? Examples of use against intention the 'gating' of information: the re-use of old concepts in the Digital, which is a field with different structures. 6. ---- Conflicts between old concepts and the Digital ----- Privacy under the Digital: In which ways does the concept of privacy change? (Obviously, the privacy concept, which derived from the "rights of the individual" in bourgeois liberalism is outdated in the digital era, as it is everywhere in decline) Digital illiteracy: a concept from the enlightment needs modification in the Digital era. The reign of the Digital. Are we already cyborgs and just don't know yet, because we are stuck to ideas of humanism? Data is not Information. The production of meaningless data is a psychic affair, rooted in the modern believe of knowledge. 7. --- Micro-political steps towards the making of digital-wise relatedness --- The handbook for Digital independence. What could that be? Making up tales and stories about the Digital is fighting the imperialism of the meaning machine Strategies for a situated knowledge in a hyper-hysterical society: why shall i write an email when i can talk to the person? Networking our ways: inequalities of participation through non-access? Health advisories for life in the Digital era / Offline and pottery Losing fear of the Digital technique / queering the digital. Examples of use against intention: fooling the engineers ------------ cheers, Oli From sastry at cs.wisc.edu Thu Dec 30 12:22:16 2004 From: sastry at cs.wisc.edu (Subramanya Sastry) Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 00:52:16 -0600 (CST) Subject: [Reader-list] Tsunami news on News Rack Message-ID: the following was a quick response i sent out... fwding the same to the list. -subbu. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 02:54:51 -0600 (CST) From: sastry at cs.wisc.edu To: SPACE Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Tsunami news on News Rack > I've followed your News Rack through the reasearch postings. I want to > know what advantages does News Rack have over Google News and Google > News Alert, aprt from Google being commercial and News Rack being > 'free'? several ... . long-term archiving . user-directed classification of content . long-term, incremental maintainability of the classification system . collaborative and shared development of the classification system. google news alert sends you email alerts for keywords that you enter. now, it works well for one or two keywords. even then, you have to have do some post processing for archiving the content and filing it in folders. but, anything more involved than this quickly becomes quite complicated and hard to maintain. imagine the search phrase below: (rehabilitation OR R&R OR resettlement OR displacement OR ....) AND (sardar-sarovar OR ssp OR SSNNL OR sardar sarovar narmada nigam limited ...) In Newsrack, this would simply be "rehabilitation AND ssp" where these rehabilitation and ssp are concepts that are maintained separately, and whenever new terms and phrases are discovered, the concepts are updated, and the rule itself stays unchanged. regards, subbu. From anand at sarai.net Mon Dec 27 14:09:22 2004 From: anand at sarai.net (Anand V. Taneja) Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2004 09:39:22 +0100 (CET) Subject: [Reader-list] Re: [Urbanstudy] marking city scapes In-Reply-To: <20041226104936.61508.qmail@web8405.mail.in.yahoo.com> References: <3220.219.65.12.193.1103966764.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl> <20041226104936.61508.qmail@web8405.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1701.221.134.51.239.1104136762.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> hi, am pasting here the last part of apaper i wrote in september 2003, as a sarai student stipendiary. it deals with issues of 'democracy', jugaad, narrating/imagining the city, and conservation... cheers, anand Suppose you went to the Qila on a Sunday morning, when most people do; and got off at the Pragati Maidan Bus Terminal. Then, between the drab concrete of the Bus Terminal and the elevated sandstone, marble and quartzite of the Qila-e-Kohna mosque, you would notice the hustle and bustle and colour of the regular Sunday mela around the place. You would see a long line of people, easily over a thousand, gathered on a field and moving towards the interiors of the Bhairon Mandir, built into the eastern wall of the Purana Qila. You would observe that Bhairon seems to have a preference for whiskey over other alcohol, if the bottles the people carry is any indication. You would observe that for a place that has a tantric, alcohol-swilling main deity, there is a remarkable amount of brahminical Aloo-Kachori being served. You would observe that the Mata Kunti Dvar constructed in 1994, and inaugurated by Sahib Singh Verma, is in obvious contravention of ASI laws. It’s way too close to the Qila walls, and what it does is create a juxtaposition with the mosque looming overhead, particularly if you’re on the ground below standing there with whiskey in your hands, in anticipation of pouring it over the tantric figure of black Bhairon. The gate, which states the Pandav Kaleen lineage of the temple, which no signage in the temple will let you miss anyway, framing the sixteenth century mosque above, and the long line of Sunday Hindus below, creates a narrative that is altogether too common now, post Babri-Masjid. The other signage you can’t miss is the bright banners everywhere saying that it is forbidden to give alcohol to the beggars. As you leave the temple, and the concrete cow that has water taps in its udders, you walk beside the east wall of the Qila, on the road parallel to it, exclusively leading to the temple, and you pass a few hundred beggars on hand-pedalled rickshaws. Most of them will seem to be genuinely handicapped, but you might encounter a woman, Asha, who jumps out of her rickshaw at periodic intervals, and chases and picks fights with anyone drunk enough to be rude to the handicapped. If you ask her she’ll probably tell you that like a lot of the beggars here, she comes from the slum near Gate no. 7 of Nehru Stadium. She’ll tell you her regular begging haunts, at Sai Baba Temple, Hanuman Mandir, CP and here, on fixed days of the week. That she brings her eight-year-old son along with her, but what she really wants to do is put him into a school with a hostel, except that she doesn’t have a birth certificate for him, which complicates manners. And that all the babus know that she isn’t handicapped, but they give her money/booze anyway, because her husband used to be handicapped, but since his death she doesn’t get a pension, so what choice does she have? Her fellow beggars will laugh with you, and you will probably enjoy the carnival sense of bonhomie and drunken revelry that begins from mid-morning and goes on well into the night; despite those big signs warning you off from giving beggars alcohol. From here, you round the corner bastion of the Qila, along with others from the mandir, and enter the DDA Physical Fitness Trail, which has built parallel bars right beside the northern walls of the fort, next to the gravel lined path that takes you to the Delhi Tourism Boats on the Old Fort Lake. You might wonder about all this nineties development around the Qila, the smooth geographical continuity between religion, recreation and physical fitness. You might be tempted to usurp the phrase Shahid Amin so evocatively uses to describe the condition of the North Delhi Ridge – the Purana Qila has been made to exist in a non-historical present. You exit the Physical Fitness trail near the entrance to the Fort, where couples, and those rebuffed by the huge crowds at the Zoo, are moving in to the Fort, and you go in along with them. For a place as historically significant as this is, strangely enough, there are no guides. If you’re with a significant other, however, and want to make out, you might have a hard time. Since this May, private security guards have been hired, eight of them patrolling the fort in two shifts – to stop, in the words of BS Negi, in charge of the horticultural division with in the fort – ‘close up’ activities. Meanwhile, many parts of the Fort are a totally unkempt mess, so you wonder if the ASI doesn’t have slightly misplaced priorities. Plastic bottles and other junk are piled up in many corners, and the grass has grown over six feet tall in some places. If you aren’t looking for the sites of the excavations you won’t notice them. The ASI hasn’t exactly gone out of it way to help. Forget signposting, the sites are overgrown and covered with debris to the point where they look like shallow, pointless scratchings. The Archeological Museum inside the Qila has been closed for the last three years, and according to the various people who at various times sit by its locked doors, the entire collection has been moved to the Red Fort. But there is a permanent, and unfriendly, Police picket inside the Qila, and rumours are rife of treasure unearthed in the digs. Inside the Qila-I-Kohna, you might meet Ram Pyari, who like about a hundred other ASI employees was moved out of the Qila when she lived here in the mid-eighties. She might tell you about how she now lives in the nearby illegal settlement of Nangla Majhi, and about the Chidiya Ghar Waali Colony, built between the zoo wall and the railway line, originally settled by zoo employees. And how the only reason they can keep their illegal homes is because of the intervention of the local MLA, Tajdar Babar. If you’re really lucky you might meet Bhardwaj of the Kunti Mata Mandir inside the Qila, which is hard to spot because the ASI (according to him) has planted rows of thick Ashoka trees all around it. His father refused to move out with the refugees in 1963, because the temple, he claims dates back to the original Indarpat village. He still lives with his family in the small temple hidden by trees inside the Purana Qila, under a stay order in a court case filed by the ASI. He claims that The Bhairon Mandir was actually built only in the last thirty years, that all history taught in schools is ‘duffer’ history, and that the five arches of the Qila-e-Kohna Masjid signify the five halls in which the Pandavas used to sit, and hence is their palace. There are so many more stories to narrate, incidents to tell, but let us get out from the Qila now to Kishan Lal’s teashop. Kishan Lal’s life has been associated with the Qila for the past fifty-five years. It was his home, his brothers studied here, his children were born here, his shop is just outside it. He is the most stoic of people, about all the changes in the Purana Qila since he has known it , he says, “Pehle rihaish thi, ab sairgah hai.” ( roughly - “It was a dwelling earlier, now it is a place to stroll.”) But now, he is worried because of Jagmohan’s proposal to turn it into a World Heritage Site. He is afraid that the row of shops leading to the Qila, including his own, won’t fit with Jagmohan’s plans to ‘welcome the Pandavas back to the Purana Qila.’ His fears were not unfounded. By late August, Kishan Lal and the other shop owners, who cater to tourists who come to the Zoo and the Qila, had got eviction notices. They are within the three hundred metre regulated zone, and though they hope to be around till the end of October, none of them expects to be here after that. At age seventy (?), Kishan Lal will have to relocate again, if only his business; and when the ASI offices inside the Qila, in what used to be the school for the refugee camp are demolished, the last traces of the Qila’s refugee camps will have been removed from its vicinity. Since its inclusion as an important element of the British plan for their new capital, the Purana Qila and its pasts have become vital to the narrative of the Empire and later, the Nation. Since then, there has always been an attempt to ignore, and to remove, the histories of the banal, the quotidian, the everyday, from ever having happened here. The Sound and Light show, which is as official a history of the Qila as you can get, has the Yamuna as its narrator, history as a river, flowing down the great events of the past of the nation, towards the sea of Independence. But as twentieth century histories around the Qila prove, it is the flotsam and jetsam left by that grand narrative current, the stories of migration, settlement and displacement that make the histories of a city, and give meaning to its monuments. David Lowenthal writes, ‘Once aware that relics, history, and memory are continually refashioned, we are less inhibited by the past, less frustrated by the fruitless quest for sacrosanct originals. We must reckon with the artifice no less than the truth of our heritage. Nothing ever made has been left untouched, nothing ever known remains immutable; yet these facts should not distress but emancipate us. It is far better to realize the past has always been altered than to pretend it has always been the same...’ The Conservation Movement, perhaps, needs to rethink its approach to the preservation of the past, lest they find themselves unwitting allies to Jagmohan’s agenda. It might be relevant here to recall what Walter Benjamin had to say about the class struggle and ‘cultural treasures’, “ All rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The tombs and palaces and forts of Delhi, the ‘elite’ remains of the past for which the conservationist is willing to spout the discourse of ‘encroachment’ and ‘eviction’ against the underdogs of the present, are all drenched in blood. If we continue to think in this Benjamin-ian fashion, can we not imagine the Purana Qila being redeemed from this history of barbarism, because of the shelter it has provided to the victims of history, time and time again, over two centuries. A redemption that might soon be forgotten. What if the conservationists of Delhi campaigned for a memorial to the post-partition camps inside the Purana Qila? What better metaphor could there be for the common ground, the shared suffering of those times? For if we keep going the Jagmohan way, only preserving Indraprastha and nothing that came beyond, then this city will be like Leonard Shelby from the movie ‘Memento’ . A man who cannot form new memories, and hence is condemned to be constantly manipulated into an endless cycle of retributive violence. If the horrors of 1947 are erased from a space that sheltered its victims, then aren’t we already condemned to repeat it? In the words of Leonard Shelby, ‘How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time?’ XXX closely connected to street life but also impacted by broader events. > > Some wonderful lines from Zainab's postings: > > Democracy and information operate despite labels and boundaries of > legality and illegality. .....People develop tactics over a period of > time. They develop tactics of how to deal with power and with persons in > power. They know how to make their way around. The key lies in not being > fearful of authority. If you fear, you can be terrorized. > > I am reminded of a wonderful book that shows Bombay (of the early > eighties) in a similar detail, 'Shantaram' by Gregory Roberts. What I feel > is critically important in these accounts is that they force us to look at > the city terrain from alternative categories, and see how the ones used by > architects and planners (to beautify the city and urban form) can > seriously hurt others who use the city as a place for survival. The move > Zainab writes of selling toys to socks being dictated by what you can save > from a police raid in a zone declared as a no-hawking zone. Or then, the > move to make VT a museum (by the conservationist?). Are these then > competing forms of marking? I am reminded of some recent debates in > Bangalore where in the concern for trees being cut, and disappearing > wetlands, we have almost a comical reaction - if the issue was not so > tragic and serious. First, if one should term tanks as lakes or not, the > discussion being steeped in aesthetics - leading to a subtle hedging of > the more serious underlying political issues. Second, and equally > de-politicizing, is the argument to bring back greenery and developing > 'mini-forests'. Like the conservation efforts made in Bombay, these three > approaches coming from architecture and urban design, see the city as a > physical entity and hence the marking of it, in those terms. Can we then > move beyond the physical attributes of space and location which seem to > imprison us in politically neutralizing categories? Zainab's essay, > reminds me of a wonderful book, "Street signs Chicago: Neighborhood and > other illusion of big city life" by Bowden and Kreinberg which is a > devastating critique of the planners aligning with big business to make > the concept of neighborhoods a myth. This however, brings me to what > seems a saving grace for our context which in the US has been cleaned out > from the era of Tammany Hall: The complex, messy, local politics that > still may allow the Shah Rukh, Raghu Kaka, and Arjun Bhai to survive. > Such a > democracy may not resemble the one that George Bush wants (and perhaps > thank god for that!) or be one that the BBC sees as being "proper". If > some of you saw the recent documentary films on Venezuela and the > election of Chavez, such a democracy is also not one coming out as social > movements against an authoritarian dictatorship. Instead, it is perhaps > one of stealth, of tactic, and how to not feel terrorized despite the > difficult situations. Perhaps, this is the real nightmare of the Master > planners, the return home landscapists, conservationists and the > "Swadesh" types, the party high commands, the World Bank lending to the > MMRDA, the Bangalore Agenda Task Force and their corporate funders, the > Kharniars and Ragendra Raos: A politics of "Juugaard" which is human but > also few central figures to drive it, which is underground but open in > every street corner, and where the everyday acts of people in the street > form its building blocks. > > Solly Benjamin 26 dec 2004 > > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life > partneronline._______________________________________________ > Urbanstudygroup mailing list > Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City > -- The Sarai Programme http://www.sarai.net/ Weblog http://synchroni-cities.blogspot.com/ From relief at mysprat.org Wed Dec 29 12:39:49 2004 From: relief at mysprat.org (relief at mysprat.org) Date: 29 Dec 2004 12:39:49 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] NATURAL CALAMITY AND HUMAN RESPONSE - SEA Relief Message-ID: <20041229123941.89469FBBE59650D9@mysprat.org> -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- (This safeguard is not inserted when using the registered version) -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- (This safeguard is not inserted when using the registered version) -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041229/f7a93001/attachment.html From ohm at zedat.fu-berlin.de Thu Dec 30 22:34:06 2004 From: ohm at zedat.fu-berlin.de (Britta Ohm) Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 18:04:06 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] FW: [boell] politics of ict conference + genardis funding for ict project in rural areas Message-ID: <20041230170302.6279C28E58B@mail.sarai.net> From taha at sarai.net Fri Dec 31 16:05:54 2004 From: taha at sarai.net (taha at sarai.net) Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 11:35:54 +0100 (CET) Subject: [Reader-list] three men and a tenant verification form Message-ID: <49229.210.7.77.145.1104489354.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> dear all, an account of the day I was verified. I'm sure there will be more people with similar stories to tell... cheers, taha Last Sunday, as I was returning home after buying some stuff for the kitchen, Luckvinder Singh my landlord met me. He was looking worried. He handed me a form for tenant verification that had to be immediately had to be filled otherwise the Police will create trouble. It was around eleven in the morning and we decided to meet at one in the afternoon. The form said, ’Format For Information Of Tenants’. It had three sections. One to be filled by the landlord, one by the tenant, and one was the Acknowledgement Slip to be filled by the police. The landlord had to give his/her name, occupation with details of office and phone number,and residential address with phone number. The Tenant had to provide four addresses with phone numbers, present, previous, past and office’s. Date of leaving, details of office, family details and details of either of the following, Passport, driving license, Arms License, Ration Card, Voter ID Card, or Income tax [PAN NO] The Acknowledgement slip had the following details: received from, son/daughter of, resident of, phone no., intimation of letting out, to [person’s name], son/daughter of, date diary number, name and designation and signature of the recipient. Initially, I was extremely angry, at being subjected to this inspection/ verification. But gradually that anger gave away to frustration. The form was bi lingual, so everything was in Hindi also. It was a particular section on family details which particularly irked me. It asked for the naam [name], umr [age] and sambandh [ralationship] with whom you are living. Why should the Delhi Police be interested in what kind of `Sambandh’ I have with the persons I was living with? Nevertheless I filled the form and went to Lucky [Luckvinder, my landlord] and this is the conversation that ensued: Taha: Lucky ji maine form bhar diya hai. [I have filled the form, lucky ji] Lucky : Accha thik hai. [All right] Taha: Aap iska pehla section bhar di jiye mein phir iski photocopy kara ke aapko de doonga. [please fill the first section, I will make a Xerox and give it back] Lucky: Pehla Section ? Woh kya Hai? [First Section?! What’s that?] Taha : Pehle section mein aap se details maangi hain na. Aap bhar deejiyee main karwa doonga. [They are asking details from you too] Lucky, so far is standing in the first floor landing- all our conversations from rent to electricity to water bills happen here. He takes the form from my hand and ushers me inside his house. This is the first time I’ve been `invited’. The first room looks like the family dining area. Lucky is standing at one end of the table and I am standing beside him, and Lucky is looking at the form. After going through he first section, he seems worried. My landlord looks at me and says: Lucky: Yeh to naam pooch rahe hain ji. [They asking for a name] Taha: To Likh di jiye. [So! Write it down] Lucky writes Smt.. Harcharan kaur. Lucky: Ye ghar to maa ke naam pe hai. [The house is in my Mother’s name] Lucky: Ab to ye occupation pooch rahein hain with details of office and phone number kya likoon ji [Now, they are asking for details of occupation with phone number of the office. What should I write?] I just shrug my shoulders. Taha: kuch bhi likh di jeeye Lucky ji par jaldi ki jiyee. [Please write anything and hurry.] Lucky: Par mata ji to house wife hain. [But my mother is a house- wife] Taha: To aap house- wife likh di jiyee. [So write that down] Lucky: Par ji ghar to pitaji ne banwaya tha. [But the house was made by my father] Taha: To? [So?] Lucky: Woh to nahi rahe. [He is not alive any more.] Taha: Lucky ji kuch bhi likh deejiyee. [Please write anything] Lucky: hmmm Lucky gives a hard looks at the form, looks at me, then looks down, thinking. After a while, he begins to write down murmuring . Lucky: Dekho ji ghar pitaji ka tha, woh hain nahi, maa house wife hain par widow hain , to main details ke aage widow- wife likh raha hoon. [Listen, the house was made by my father but he is no more, my mom was a house wife but she is a widow now, so I am writing in the details of office and occupation section- Widow wife.] Before I could react, Lucky has written the following- W/o. Late. Sh Hardev Singh widow/wife, for the details of office and phone no section. Lucky: Thik hai naa [ Its okay, right?] Taha : hmmm Lucky: ab aapko mere saath thane chalna padega [Now, you will have to come with me to the Police station with me] Taha: Thane? kyon? [Police Station? But why?] Lucky: Bas chalna padega [you will have to come] Taha: par Llucky ji maine to form bhar diya hai. Aur yaha pe mere sign bhi nahi maange hain. Ye mamla to aapke aur police waaloon ke beech ka hai. Main kyon phasoon isme. [Why should I come? They haven’t asked for my signature. It is clearly between you and the police now.] Lucky: Nahi nahi thane to chalna padega verification ke liye. [No, no but you will have to come to the police station for the verification] Taha: Par Lucky ji unhoone verify karna hain to phone kar ke office mein pooch lein. Main kyon chaloon. [Listen! If they have to verify me they can call up my office and do as they damn well please. Why should I come?] Lucky: Aaisa hai naa. Mein wahan pe ja ke unko bataon ga ki aap mere tenant hain aur woh aapse poochenge ki aap kahan rahete ho. [See the thing is, I will go there and tell them that you are my tenant and they will ask you where do you reside?] Taha : par mein kyon jaoon maine kuch galat information thode he di hai. [But why should I go I haven’t given any wrong information.] Lucky : Dikheye mujhe to yehi kaha gaya hai ki thane le kar aana hai aapko [ Listen, I don’t know all this but I have been told to bring you along] Taha: Aajeeb baat hai! [That’s strange!!] Lucky : kuch nahi hoga ji deekihye hum to makan good faith par hi dete hain. Aap hum ko sharif lage- hum ne makan de diya. Par ye police waloon ko kaise samjhain. Woh to saale paise bhi maang rahein hain. [Nothing will happen, don’t worry! We rent our place on good faith. You seemed okay to us so we gave you the house, but the police will never understand this. Those buggers even ask for money!] Taha: Kya Paise? Mein koi paise waise nahi dene wala. Main kyon paise doon . Kisliye? Arre bhai information mujhse mangi, maine di, form bhi maine bhara, jamaa kar bhi main aaoon aur paise bhi doon. Bhaad mein gaye main paise nahi doonga. [Why should I give money? I have filled the form, given correct information, I will deposit it and now I should give money also, no way! ] Lucky: Ji paise to dene padenge! Maine uper waloon ka form jama karwaya tha to 50/- rupaye diye the. [One has to pay money, I have done the same for the other tenants too!] Taha: Achha chal kar dekhte hain. [Okay lets go and see what happens.] WE go on Lucky’s scooter to the local police station. Inside, its not crowded- maybe because it’s a Sunday. Five or six constables are sitting around and a head constable is going through some files. Lucky goes and stands there respectfully, hands folded, very subdued. How the mighty have fallen. I thought. At the reception desk, a constable is standing. Cap worn like a skull- cap, shirt is unbuttoned slowly massaging his chest hair- very Bollywood I must say. Constable: Kya hai? [What do you want?] Lucky: Sir ji, ye tenant verify karwana tha. [I wanted to verify my tenant, Sir] Constable: Hmmm Looks at me from toe to head. Constable: Hmmm. Form laye ho? [Have you bought the forms?] Lucky: Ji yeh raha. [Yes, it is here.] Gives the form to the constable. Constable: Par yeh neeche ka to bhara hi nahi. [The last section remains to be filled] He is referring at the acknowledgement section- meant to be filled by them Taha: Yeh aap ko bharna hai sarkaar. [Sir, you will have to fill this] Constable: Nahi nahi aap hi bhar do mein sign kar doonga. [ No, you go ahead and fill it, I will sign it later] Taha: Lucky ji bhar deejiyee. [Please fill the section, Lucky ji] Lucky : Ab mein kyon bharoon? [Why should I fill the form?] Constable: Aap dono mein se landlord kaun hai. [Who’s the landlord?] Lucky: Ji meri mata ji . [It’s my mom, Sir] Constable: To tum bharoo. [So you fill the form] Lucky: Ji thi hai. [Okay] Taha: Arre bhar di jiyee na. kya problem hai.? [What’s the problem, fill it] Lucky reluctantly takes the form back and starts filling it. Mean while Two other individuals enter the police station. They have a helmet each in one hand and some papers in the other. The head constable looks at them. And asks who they want to meet? To which the first person replied: Person 1: Zee yee af I Yaar Likwaanee thee [ I had to lodge an FIR, Sir] His accent a dead giveaway that he was a Malayali residing in Delhi. Head constable: Ohhooo! Aapne FIR likhwani hai. Sab thik thak to hai bhaiyya. [Is everything all right?] Person 1 : Zee yeh mobile block karwana tha. [I want my cell no to be blocked] Head Constable: Ohhooo! Mobile block karvane ke liye FIR chahiye. Kya hua? [What happened] Person11: Zee main red light pe khara tha, ki phone aaya to maine helmet utaari aur mobile nikala, to mera balance bigad gaya, to koyi aaya aur mobile cheen ke bhaag gaya. [I was at the red light when somebody came and snatched my mobile from my hand, while I was speaking] Head Constable: Ohhooo! Yeh to bahut bura hua bhaiyyaa [Bad!] Person 1: Zeee haan [ Yah] Head constable: Aapko pata hai pichle saal mere saath kya hua tha?. [Do you know what happened to me last year?] Person 1 nods his head in negation. Head Constable: Ohhooo! Nahi pata. Abhi batata hoon. Pichle saal mein meri patni ke saath Kumbh ke mele mein gaya tha. Wahan bahut saari bheed thi. Meri patni ka haath mere haath mein tha. Itne mein bheed ka ek rela aaya aur meri patni ko mujhse cheen ke le gaya. Mein bhaga. Aur aapni patni ko pakad ke wapas le aayaa. [Last year I went to Allahbad for Kumbh Mela. There was a huge crowd all around. My wife and me were walking together, suddenly somebody pushed us from behind and snatched my wife taking her far away from me. I ran after her. Got hold of her and bought her back] Person 1 : Zeee [ya] Head Constable: To aap ne isi tarah apne mobile ko nahi pakda bhaiyya! [So why didn’t you catch your mobile phone in a similar fashion, brother ] Person 1 : Zee mein red light pee tha! [I was standing at the red light, Sir] Meanwhile Lucky has completed the form and gives it back to the constable. The constable looks at it stamp it and signs and give a copy to us. But leaves the entries, on date, dairy number, name and designation, vacant. Taha: Pehle yeh bhariye, phir form dijeyee [ First fill this then give the form back] Constable: Nahi nahi iski jaroorat nahi hai. [No it’s not required] Taha: Kaise nahi hai .. yahan likha hai to bharna to padgaa hi [Listen, it’s written here so you will have to fill this.] Constable : Stamp laga diya hai naa .. naam likhne ki zaroorat nahi hai kaam chal jaayee gaa . [It isn’t required I am telling you. I have stamped it. It’s okay] Lucky: Arre thik hai na Taha ji kaam ho gaya na. Ab chaliyee [It’s alright. The work’s finished. Lets go.] Lucky drops me home and leaves. As I am climbing the stairs to my flat I run into the old couple who stay on the second floor. I wish them hello and ask them whether they have been verified by the police or not. Uncle: Arre hamne hi to isko (Lucky) bataya. Isko to kuch pata hi nahi tha. [ I told him what to do, he didn’t know a thing] Taha: Achha [ya] Uncle : Arre bhai hum bhoodhe retired aadmi. Agar kuch ho jata to? [We are old retired people, we don’t want trouble] Taha: Samajh mein nahi aaya uncle . Matlab? [I don’t understand this.] Uncle: arre hamare yahan Hindustan Times aata hai. Usme 2 ya 3 december ko HT City mein ek article aaya tha. Usme likha tha ki agar tenent aur landlord ka verification 23 december tak nahi hua to police mein jail ho jayegi. Aur fine dena padga so alag. [ We subscribe to Hindustan Times paper. On 2nd or 3rd of december there was a piece in HT city supplement that said, that all the landlords have to verify there tenants by 23 of december other wise they will face arrest. They might be fined also.] Taha: Phir. [so] Uncle : Phir kya padh ke mein dar gaya mein seedhe police thane bhaga aur form laya, meine bhara or isko bhi bataya. Yeh Lucky ko to pata hi nahi tha. Maine bataya ke bhar aur upper niche waloon ko bhi bharwa nahi to police ke saath involve ho jayenge. Koi fayeda hi nahi. [So what! After reading the piece I got scared. I went to the Police Station, got the form, filled it and told Lucky about it. He didn’t even know all this. I told him to make sure that all the tenants fill this from. Otherwise we might get involved with the Police.] I thank him and go to my flat. The three of us obviously had different reactions to the form. None wanted to fill it. Lucky, the reluctant, landlord , the old vulnerable man, and I. Well! for the sake of Bhagidari we did collaborate with the constable but I am amazed at the level of fear, suspicion, frustration and compliance the tenant verification from was able to generate at one level, to a total and complete nonchalance at the other. While the old man self-righteously filled the form and submitted it, the police constable was least bothered. For the old man the fear of prosecution was internalised. After reading a News item in the paper, the only thing he was bothered about, was not getting ‘involved’ with the police. While Lucky, on the other hand had not wanted the police to know that he rents out his place. He was equally scared to write his name on the form. On two occasions he wrote his mother's name and once even invoked the name of his dead father, likewise, the constable, didn’t write his name and designation even when I asked him to. He was also afraid of something. He hid behind the stamp of the police to justify his anonymity. I don’t know what will happen to the forms? What sorts of databases will be made? What they will be used for? But for a moment the whole form thing was able to create extreme amount of frustration, anger, and a feeling of vulnerability in all of us. ___________________________________ An Internal Sarai List internal at sarai.net From tellsachin at yahoo.com Thu Dec 30 15:38:44 2004 From: tellsachin at yahoo.com (Sachin Agarwal) Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:08:44 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] HAPPY NEW YEAR Message-ID: <20041230100844.76237.qmail@web41507.mail.yahoo.com> Wishing you and all your near and dear ones a very and a prosperous new year 2005. Regards, Sachin Agarwal --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Jazz up your holiday email with celebrity designs. Learn more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20041230/7e2adbf7/attachment.html