From aparajita_de at rediffmail.com Tue Jun 1 17:27:28 2004 From: aparajita_de at rediffmail.com (Aparajita De) Date: 1 Jun 2004 11:57:28 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Posting II Message-ID: <20040601115728.4275.qmail@webmail17.rediffmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040601/60bd685b/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- IMAGINED GEOGRAPHIES: GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE OF SELF AND OTHERS IN EVERDAY LIFE.THE CASE OF AHMEDABAD The main attempt of my study is to understand how groups locate themselves in relation to others. Location here pertains to the position that groups are situate in, in society with respect to others. Here I presume that when a group tries to late itself they do so in terms of their perceived status and power in comparison to others. My second assumption is that this social location of a group with respect to other groups will manifest itself on physical space particularly in terms of who lives where and ones choice of residence. In other words, social location may correspond with physical location of a group in relation to others. The subsequent questions that are raised are: who represents whom? Who constitutes a particular group and who does not? Who constitutes the other and who does not? Is social location or physical location a rather one sided self generated one? Is it also derived from where the others situate them? Is it given and static or is it dynamic and fluid? Armed with these questions and confusions I went to face the field. The methodology that I had adopted for the study was that of mapping how groups located themselves and others within the walled city of Ahmedabad. I planned on a few case studies that would help me to link the ‘form’ with the ‘processes’. I prepared four sets of maps that were to be pre-tested before finalizing which to use. The first was an outline map of the entire city of Ahmedabad in which all the administrative wards were shown. The second was of the walled city alone with its administrative wards. The third was of the walled city and surrounding areas along with the transport network (only the main arteries were included) and names of the different areas. The last map depicted the walled city with its dense transport network including the main, secondary and tertiary arteries and landmarks. For pre-testing of the schedule I selected three cases one each from Hindu dominated and Muslim dominated areas and one from a mixed area. The Hindu dominated area being Khadia, the Muslim dominated area being Jamalpur and the mixed area being that of Dariapur. Khadia and Jamalpur are not conflict prone while Dariapur is a highly riot prone area. The source of data that is the residential location of population according to different communities and conflict prone areas, was my PhD thesis (submitted in 2002) entitled “Spatial Structure and Social Interaction in the Core Areas of Indian Cities. The Case Study of Ahmedabad” What I found was that respondents were unable to figure out the first and second maps. They best responded to the third and fourth type of maps. So I finally decided to keep the third and the fourth map as the final schedule.   APARAJITA DE Research Associate Centre for Social Studies South Gujarat University Campus Udhna Magdalla Road Surat 395007 Phone: 0261 2227173/74 0 9825808100(m) Fax:0261 2223851 email: css_surat at satyam.net.in From aparajita_de at rediffmail.com Tue Jun 1 17:28:55 2004 From: aparajita_de at rediffmail.com (Aparajita De) Date: 1 Jun 2004 11:58:55 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Posting III Message-ID: <20040601115855.30693.qmail@webmail28.rediffmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040601/58336b7a/attachment.html -------------- next part --------------  IMAGINED GEOGRAPHIES: GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE OF SELF AND OTHERS IN EVERDAY LIFE.THE CASE OF AHMEDABAD After finalizing the schedule what plagued me was which would be ‘the cases’ to choose and what would be the logic in deciding my selection of these cases. The first criterion for selecting cases would be from specific geographical locations. But would this be based on administrative wards? It was evident from my pre-testing exercise that respondents could not really associate themselves with the administrative wards but were actually more familiar with the popular names of the areas. So what I found was that the walled city broadly encompasses six areas, they being Khadia, Jamalpur, Raikhad, Kalupur, Dariapur and Shahpur. Gandhi Road, Relief Road and Gheekantha Road were thought of as separate and independent areas and regarded as commercial and business areas. So I decided that my case studies would be selected from these six areas, particularly because my study focuses on the relation between social and physical location of groups through their relative residential locations. My second criterion was to select cases from different social groups living in these six main areas. But how do I define the ‘different social groups’? In the present context should it be based on the broader categories of Hindus and Muslims? Should they be considered as two monolithic categories? Who defines these categories – myself, the researcher or the researched? More importantly are the categories defined by the researcher and the researched different? If so, cant the categories of analysis and the categories of practice assimilated? Thus based on my field experiences I decided to consider a ‘stratified Hindu category’ and a ‘stratified Muslim category’. The composition of the respective strata was also based on my field experiences now and those while pursuing my PhD between 1999 and 2002. In other words, I am implying that these categories are constructs that are not given and rigid and are subject to change over a period of time. The stratified Hindu category is composed of the upper, intermediate and low castes. The upper castes included the Vanias (both Jains and Vaishnavs), Brahmins and Patels, the low castes includes the scheduled castes and the remaining is included in the intermediate caste group. In the stratified Muslim category there are two main divisions that of Sunnis and Shias. In the case of Sunnis they are further sub divided into Ashrafs that includes Saiyad, Sheikh and Pathan and the rest composes the Ajlafs and within the Shias there are Vohras and the Khojas. The other criteria that I would like to bear in mind are age and gender of the respondents; degree of segregation and the extent to which the areas that the respondents live in are prone to conflicts. So with the logic of selecting the case studies falling into place I am now ready to initiate the first phase of my field work. APARAJITA DE Research Associate Centre for Social Studies South Gujarat University Campus Udhna Magdalla Road Surat 395007 Phone: 0261 2227173/74 0 9825808100(m) Fax:0261 2223851 email: css_surat at satyam.net.in From christina112 at earthlink.net Tue Jun 1 21:47:24 2004 From: christina112 at earthlink.net (Christina McPhee) Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 09:17:24 -0700 Subject: [Reader-list] [-empyre-] Emergent Issues in Contemporary Practice In-Reply-To: <07eb01c447a6$d823bae0$720410ac@fluffy> Message-ID: -empyre- in June: Emergent Issues in Contemporary Practice In conjunction with the 2004 exhibition - a joint project of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the National Gallery of Victoria, -empyre - presents 26 artists, curators, theorists, and information professionals discussing current issues in contemporary art practice over four themed weeks: --->June 3 - 9 click for activism - Tactical media and political art practices, with Melinda Rackham, Scott Redford, Sue Dodd, Sam de Silva, Escape from Woomera, and boat-people.org. --->June 10 - 16 in situ - As place dissolves in an increasingly connected world what becomes of situated practice?-with Alexie Glass, Nat and Ali, Adam Nash, Chris Caines, Zina Kaye and qnoors. --->June 17 - 23 game to game - The art and theory of games and game technologies. with Helen Stuckey, Anita Johnson, Escape from Woomera, Troy Innocent, Rebecca Cannon, and Dr Melanie Swalwell. --->June 24 - 30 media, mutation, migration and decay - Addressing questions of stability, ephemerality and archiving, with Clare Stewart, Damien Frost, Tom Nicholson, David Wadelton, Tim Plaisted and Margaret Phillips and Paul Koerbin from PANDORA archive. Moderated this month by Melinda Rackham. Join us at -empyre- soft skinned space _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre From definetime at rediffmail.com Wed Jun 2 10:11:15 2004 From: definetime at rediffmail.com (sanjay ghosh) Date: 2 Jun 2004 04:41:15 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] (no subject) Message-ID: <20040602044115.26816.qmail@webmail17.rediffmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040602/e9ca4a56/attachment.html -------------- next part --------------   John Negroponte's record in Honduras Duncan Campbell / Wednesday June 2, 2004 / The Guardian Suspicious deaths in custody. Allegations of torture. Claims of a military out of control. These are some of the key issues that will face John Negroponte, US ambassador to the United Nations, when he takes over this month as US ambassador to Iraq. Suspicious deaths in custody. Allegations of torture. Claims of a military out of control. Those were some of the key issues that faced John Negroponte 20 years ago when he was US ambassador to Honduras. So it is worth examining how he reacted then when faced with evidence of extra-judicial killings, torture and human rights abuses. Central America in the early 80s was, for a few years, the centre of the world in much the way that the Middle East now is. There had been a revolution in Nicaragua in which a dictator had been removed by the Sandinistas, who had then embarked on a political path that was anathema to the US. The country became a magnet for the international left, who saw hopeful signs in the revolution. El Salvador and Guatemala were in turmoil as leftwing guerrillas battled with the military in their efforts to overturn years of military oppression and corruption. In those days the enemy, as far as the US was concerned, was international communism rather than al-Qaida, but the rhetoric of "good" versus "evil" took a similar pattern to today's. Into this world in 1981 came diplomat John Negroponte as ambassador to Honduras. At the time, the US was covertly backing the contras, the counter-revolutionaries who opposed the Sandinistas. Honduras was a vital base for them. An air base was built at El Aguacate, where they could be trained and which was used, according to Honduran human rights activists, as a detention centre where torture took place. It was also used as a burial ground for 185 dissidents, whose remains were only discovered in 2001. Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, was appointed by Jimmy Carter. He had made public his concerns about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. Binns has since affirmed that when he handed over to Negroponte he gave him a full briefing on the abuses. Negroponte has always denied having knowledge of such violations. A former Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the Baltimore Sun, which re-examined the behaviour of the US in 1995, of Negroponte and other US officials: "Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed." For their cooperation with the US in its long-running battle to remove the Sandinistas - who, it should be remembered, won the election in Nicaragua in 1984 - the Honduran government was royally rewarded. Military aid increased from $4m to $77m a year. Had Negroponte reported to the US Congress that the military were engaged in human rights abuses, such aid would have beenthreatened. No report of such abuses was allowed to interfere with the US destabilisation of Nicaragua. Negroponte was one of a group of officials involved in Central America at that time who have since - to the astonishment of the international diplomatic community - been rehabilitated by President Bush. His behaviour in Honduras would have come under scrutiny when he was appointed as US ambassador to the UN in 2001, but his appointment hearing came in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when there was little appetite for such an inquiry and when there was a desire to have such a key post filled speedily. "Exquisitely dangerous", is how Larry Birns of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs described Negroponte this week in a conversation from Washington. He called Negroponte's role in Honduras "eerily familiar to the Bush adminustration's present goal in Iraq". Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch had this to say when Negroponte was appointed ambassador to the UN: "When Negroponte was ambassador [in Honduras] he looked the other way when serious atrocities were committed. One would have to wonder what kind of message the Bush administration is sending about human rights." The US policy in Central America in the 80s was essentially that the ends justified the means, even if the ends involved misleading Congress, dealing with the supposedly hated Iran, the illegal mining of harbours and the promotion, funding and encouragement of rebel forces. Many of those involved in the atrocities in Central America were graduates of the School of the Americas (which has since changed its name to the anodyne Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) where interrogation techniques of the kind that have come to light in Iraq were taught. When Negroponte was ambassador in Honduras his building in Tegucigalpa became one of the nerve centres of the CIA in Latin America with a tenfold increase in staff. In Baghdad, he will have a similar role. Negroponte represented the US during one of the most corrupt periods of its foreign policy, presided over by Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior. He had an opportunity to challenge what was happening, but chose not to. His new appointment is one of a number that fly in the face of reason. Bush made Henry Kissinger head of the commission to investigate the events leading up to 9/11. At the time, many found it bizarre that a man of such limited international credibility and such impressively flexible standards of morality should have been entrusted with such a task. Kissinger accepted the post as an opportunity to serve his country - until it transpired that it would interfere with his lucrative consultancy business, at which point he bowed out. Now a man who has been accused of not spotting human rights abuses taking place in front of his eyes in Honduras is being sent to Iraq at a time when allegations of human rights abuses are at the heart of the occupation. As a policy, the appointment of Negroponte at this point in the history of Iraq seems "exquisitely dangerous" indeed. · Duncan Campbell is a senior Guardian correspondent who for many years covered Central America duncan.campbell at guardian.co.uk From mklayman at leonardo.info Wed Jun 2 01:12:38 2004 From: mklayman at leonardo.info (Melinda Klayman) Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 12:42:38 -0700 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Leonardo Call for Posters: Reconnecting Art, Science and Spirituality Message-ID: To: Leonardo Network From: Roger Malina, Julien Knebusch I would like to bring to your attention this opportunity: Colloque Melilla / Melilla Symposium 18-20 July 2004 Call for Poster Presentations and Invitation to attend: A Colloquium on Art/Science/Spirituality Reconnections Within Emerging Planetary Cultures Web site with further information: http://www.olats.org Persons wishing to attend the Colloquium: http://www.melillafestival.org Host: First International Festival of Cultures, Melilla, Spain Poster Submission Deadline: June 20, 2004 Leonardo is pleased to announce a collaboration with the City of Melilla and the Al Andalus Foundation, for a colloquium on the reconnection of art, science, and spirituality. This intercultural dialogue is offered as one contribution towards cultural developments within the new planetary context. Modern cosmology and physics emphasize the interdependence of complex systems on scales from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Contemporary genetics reveal the underlying shared genetic identity not only of all human beings, but the genetic relatedness of all life on earth. Current scientific discoveries reconnect science to a number of philosophical and spiritual traditions. These reconnections offer the promise of the development of new philosophical and value systems appropriate to new emerging linked planetary cultures. Artists and scientists have been at the forefront of the use of these new systems to build life enhancing cultural developments in linked planetary contexts. This colloquium, with 20 participating artists, scientists and philosophers, (see http://www.olats.org for a list of participants) is intended to be a listening post, an opportunity for inter-cultural dialogue and a specific step towards magnifying and amplifying emerging new planetary cultural practice. The choice of the City of Melilla as the host for this colloquium is not an accident. Melilla has a millennial history of multi-cultural, multi-lingual synergy and dialogue within the Mediterranean context. The city offers itself as a podium to communicate outcomes of this first colloquium: to make real the opportunities for the reconnection of art, science and spirituality for the building of new 21st century planetary cultures. Call for Posters Leonardo is issuing a call for posters for the colloquium from artists, scientists, engineers and philosophers. A poster presentation lasts at maximum 5 minutes. Posters will be also displayed during 3 days in the colloquium public spaces. If you cannot attend the Colloquium in person, you may send a VHS cassette which could be displayed for 5 minutes. There is no funding available for participation in the symposium, but there is no registration fee and there are reduced hotel rates and travel on Iberia. If you are interested in presenting a poster, please contact the following email address: julien_knebusch at yahoo.fr and submit an abstract (500 words maximum). You are encouraged to submit also website addresses where any texts on your work could be found. We are seeking presentations that present specific scientific and artistic projects, and make visible the cultural/philosophical/religions situations that set a priori conditions and constraints on approaches and specific work. The official languages of the colloquium will be English and Spanish, with simultaneous translation also into French. Examples of topics: - Planetary cultures as new creation of worlds - Planetary consciousnesses: towards spiritual developments - Experiences of networks (collaboration, artistic and scientific work, community building) in different cultural contexts - Scientific discoveries and artistic work which cast new light on humans as inhabitants of a single planet Partial Funding for this Leonardo project has been provided by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and UNESCO DIGIARTS. For Further Information: http://www.olats.org click on Melilla button. Send email poster proposals to: julien_knebusch at yahoo.fr 500 words and URL. To attend: http://www.melillafestival.org/ -- NEW ADDRESS! Please note our new contact information as of May 1, 2004: Leonardo/ISAST 211 Sutter Street, Suite 800 San Francisco, CA 94108 phone: (415) 391-1110 fax: (415) 391-2385 Email: isast at leonardo.info Web: http://www.leonardo.info _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From ravikant at sarai.net Thu Jun 3 01:13:45 2004 From: ravikant at sarai.net (ravikant at sarai.net) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 21:43:45 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] History text books debate in India Message-ID: This is for those who do not access Times of India, with apologies to those who do. ravikant From:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/713416.cms Educational Reforms: What Is Not To Be Done SHAHID AMIN [ WEDNESDAY, JUNE 02, 2004 12:00:07 AM ] With an erstwhile professor of economics now as our prime minister, there is great expectation among teachers at all levels of the educational pyramid. All those who dirty their hands with chalk-and-duster, whether in manicured management institutes, or the stable-like lecture-rooms in most universities across the land, are visibly relieved. The dark phase of thought control, the arrogation of educational wisdom to a handpicked coterie of under-qualified academic bureau-crats, the systematic slandering of our tallest scholars as inadequately Bharatiya, the throwing of muck, often quite literally, at some of the most distinguished foreign scholars of India’s cultural and religious past — all this is mercifully over, for five years at least. So we hope. The common minimum programme, while promising to take up universal elementary education seriously, goes on to assure autonomy for university and professional institutions. There is talk already of an urgent need for ‘detoxification’ of school and college curricula. This is understandable. No doubt there is a need to undo the ‘wrongs’ done to our institutions, to our children, to our teachers. But let us press ahead only after due deliberation; let the urgency of the task not become an excuse for the darning of frayed ideas and the regurgitation of old mantras, unmindful of their past efficacy and present suitability. Those in charge of the education ministry — a far better term than the fluffy acronym HRD — must learn to get over the control-centralise itch that seems almost to go with the job. We’d also do well to remember that some of the most odious diktats emerging from the HRD over the past five years, were very often the redeployment of weapons of surveillance developed in the early and mid-1970s. The mindless control over the grant of visas to foreign or foreign-based Indian scholars on grounds of ‘sensitivity’, and the totalitarian control that the HRD sought to exercise over international scholars wishing to speak in India , were not necessarily the creation of the last government. They date back to an earlier and different, though by no means intellectually less debilitating, consensus on what was properly national. Not that tax-paying bona fide Indian scholars were necessarily given more leeway, if the myrmidons of state-funded bodies thought, in their fawning wisdom, that they had somehow crossed the academic Lakshman-rekha. As we move to free education from the fist of smug, sectarian certitude, let us not hurry over the fact that there once was a well-placed intellectual component of the now-discredited licence permit raj. Some 30 years separate 1974 from 2004. During this period, the world, India included, has hurtled through calendrical time at an astonishing pace. Were we to limit ourselves to picking some high points and potholes from the field of education: There has been a phenomenal increase in the international market worth of IIMs and IITs, combined with a hyper-inflation of indifferent regional universities; while most metro universities have held their own under the pressure of a rush of student intake, many premier universities of yesteryears have sunk into second-rate teaching shops; tuition, coaching, tutoring, entrance tests, all these have usurped the place of class room pedagogy: the Great Education Bazaar is now flooded with all manner of indifferent and inferior goods, some of these attractively packaged by branch outlets of overseas institutes and colleges. And then there is the great rush to study in the US . The new educational dispensation will no doubt address these and several other pressing problems — there is talk of a new education commission. It is not my aim to prepare a laundry list for such a commission. Suffice it to say that this government would do well to involve many more actual teachers, irrespective of rank and age, rather than fall back, as a matter of habit, on academic bureaucrats and retired pedagogues. The other area of immediate concern would be the issue of middle and secondary school text-books, especially history text-books, which were hurriedly re-scripted in the last regime, so the argument went, to correct the ‘leftist’ bias of the 1970s history primers. Here again greater deliberation is called for, and a new consensus, which takes into account the developments in the discipline of history more generally and Indian history writing specifically, arrived at. Educationists have recently drawn attention to the fact that an obsessive Arjun-like concentration on the eye of the targeted-bird — in this case the Indian nation-state — in school books is to rob both the child and the discipline of history of an informative, yet critical perspective on the relationship between our past and our present. History text-book writers need to take all this into account. They might also like to mull over the forthright enunciation in December 1947 by professor Mohammad Habib, one of the doyens of Indian history: ‘The writing of histories should not, as a rule, be directly subsidised by the state... Under the old regime we wrote in a spirit of constraint... Our national leaders should now be willing to pass on to us a fraction of the freedom they have obtained. A state-dominated interpretation of history is one of the most effective means of sabotaging democracy’. Strong words indeed, given that they were uttered on the eve of the Nehruvian consensus, and doubly salutary for a fractured polity that is India today. (The author teaches at the University of Delhi .) From pbkasturi at usermail.com Wed Jun 2 19:41:51 2004 From: pbkasturi at usermail.com (Poonam Bir Kasturi) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 19:41:51 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] 4th posting Message-ID: Today we had an interesting meeting with a market research expert. The question we have been asking and seeking insights to is "Why don't people segregate waste at home?" Naturally the implications that surround all of this is "Do people know they can create zero waste homes?" "Can they be inconvenienced to achieve this?" "What is waste to different people?" EtC. To this end the students and faculty had prepared a questionnaire that was largely visual - it asked specific questions of details and showed pictures of harpic bottle, rubber bands, batteries etc. Now- faced with a market research person it was interesting to see how that domain which defines castor oil and vim soap in different ways and has the ability to segregate people into demographics and attitudes can respond to a seeking like ours. Watching myself build enormous resistance to her objections, I was surprised. So discussing this with her and the others we were forced to ask ourselves about the role of design and the different ways design could be practiced. What was the feedback that led to this discussion - The feedback was about the way the visuals were presented and the type of visual used- the harpic bottle image could be better if there was no harpic label. And other details about how the question is framed etc. This is fine - it was the other implication that no designer can create without investment in research of the market that began nagging me. The questions I have are : 1. Most designers if they want to be driven by hunches will then face the fact that they have no money to do this kind of research. So end of hunch driven design? 2. If the designer has a very strong hunch do we need data and spend money on that data or just go ahead and prototype? 3. How can a person who is a designer (sorry its the domain i am concerned with at the moment) build the abiltiy to cut through data or evolve a method that is more immediate, sensible and cheap? 4. How does this impact the way we teach design in a school like Srishti? I know that too much expense will deter anyone - and yet a great conviction will carry one through. How does a designer create a space for something where there is no precedence and therefore by that logic - how can you get data for that? So we will ask more on this with the next meeting with Rasika - the market research person who has very willingly agreed to journey with us!! Till then Poonam Bir Kasturi part of the Srishti Team From fatimazehrarizvi at hotmail.com Thu Jun 3 03:06:00 2004 From: fatimazehrarizvi at hotmail.com (zehra rizvi) Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 17:36:00 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] "Suburban Sahibs" released in South Asia Message-ID: dear sarai people.. i have read this book and will be (hopefully!) interviewing mitra on my radio show in NJ.....please help her out if you can since the book is really very wonderful. i am going to cc her on this email so please feel free to get in touch with her if you need to. best, zehra. mitra, if you havent already, check out sarai.net >From: "S. Mitra Kalita" <smkalita at yahoo.com> >To: saja-disc at lists.jrn.columbia.edu, students <sajastudents at yahoogroups.com>, sawcc <sawcc at yahoogroups.com> >Subject: [sawcc] STORY IDEA: "Suburban Sahibs" released in South Asia >Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 21:02:37 -0700 (PDT) > >Review copies (journalists only): >hemali.sodhi at penguin-india.com. > >Interviews: smkalita at yahoo.com or call 202-607-6836 > >Hi, all: > >I'd like to thank you for your support of my book, >"Suburban Sahibs: Three immigrant families and their >passage from India to America." Initially published by >Rutgers University Press, the book sold out of its >first edition, is currently in a second printing and >should be out in paperback next year. None of that >would have been possible without community support and >favorable press (including a New York Times book >review). > >I'm writing to ask for your help now as the book >launches in South Asia and Singapore, published by >Penguin-India. If you are a journalist in those >countries, please consider doing a review or story on >the book. If you live there, please approach your >local bookstores and ask for the title. If you have >family or media contacts on the subcontinent, please >do forward this e-mail to them. > >For review copies (journalists only), contact: >hemali.sodhi at penguin-india.com. > >For interviews, feel free to contact me via e-mail at >smkalita at yahoo.com or at 202-607-6836. If you need me >to call you at an overseas number, please send me an >e-mail and the best time to do so. > >Below, I've included the blurb from the Penguin >edition, a bio and a just-published piece in the >Economic Times (of India). More information is >available at www.desiwriter.com. > >Thank you again for all your support. > >Best, > >Mitra > >00000000000000000000000 > >American-Born Confused Desi, Emigrated From Gujarat, >Housed In Jersey, Keeping Lotsa Motels, Named >Omkarnath Patel� > >Many Indians know that thousands of their compatriots >live in New Jersey, USA, but the realities of these >immigrants� lives are often obscured by the image of >the wealthy NRI. In this pioneering profile of one of >America�s most dynamic ethnic communities, S. Mitra >Kalita, an award-winning journalist at the Washington >Post, enters the lives of three families � the >Kotharis, Patels and Sarmas � and shows how varied the >Indian experience can be in one US locality. > >Increasingly moving straight to the suburbs rather >than �paying their dues� in a city, New Jersey�s >newest Indians soon face problems of transportation, >affordable housing and, on occasion, resentful >reactions to their growing success. The fates of those >on professional visas are tied to the economy, but >others have continual difficulty finding jobs; Harish >Patel, a former banker, returns to Baroda several >times in defeat, declaring the US an �awful, lonely, >back-breaking place to live and work.� Pradip Kothari, >who owns a travel agency, gets so weary of Indians� >lack of representation that he runs for political >office. > >Yet while parents struggle, their children often >excel, and they are all in good company: the largest >celebration of Navratri outside India now takes place >in Edison, New Jersey. �Whiz kids Sankumani and >Shravani Sarma,� says Kalita, �left a rapidly >Americanizing India only to find a rapidly Indianizing >America.� Lucid and sympathetic, Housed in Jersey puts >a human face on India�s massive diaspora. > >00000000000000000000000 > >S. MITRA KALITA is an education reporter at The >Washington Post and serves as president of the South >Asian Journalists Association. She is the author of >"Suburban Sahibs: Three immigrant families and their >passage from India to America," published by Rutgers >University Press (2003) and Penguin-India (2004). She >has written extensively about immigration and the >South Asian diaspora. She previously worked for >Newsday in New York City as a business reporter, >carving a beat out of immigration and the economy. In >the aftermath of Sept. 11, she did extensive reporting >on the backlash faced by Arabs and South Asians in the >New York area, and authored a chapter in a book about >the experience ("At Ground Zero: The Young Reporters >Who Were There Tell Their Stories"). She has reported >from Buffalo and Bombay, and many points in between. >Mitra graduated from Rutgers University, Phi Beta >Kappa, with a bachelor's in history and journalism. >She received her master's degree from Columbia >University Graduate School of Journalism. Mitra has >received numerous awards for her work, is featured in >the "Best Business Stories of 2003" and was most >recently named Young Journalist of the Year by the New >York State Associated Press Association. The daughter >of immigrants from Assam, she was born in New York >City and has lived in Long Island, New Jersey and >Puerto Rico. She now lives in Washington, D.C., with >her husband, artist Nitin Mukul. > >00000000000000000000000000000 > ><http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/709544.cms> > >Helping America understand Indian Immigrants >ISHANI DUTTAGUPTA > >TIMES NEWS NETWORK > >MONDAY, MAY 31, 2004 01:14:31 AM > >S Mitra Kalita has helped the American public >understand immigrants better through her writing The >author of Suburban Sahibs-three immigrant families and >their passage from India to America, S Mitra Kalita, >is in many ways telling her own story and that of her >family in the narrative non-fiction work. > >The difference is that a lot of second generation >Indian immigrants have been writing about themselves, >while Kalita focuses more on her parents� generation. > >�When I started working on this book, a lot of the >work coming from my generation was about us. While I >applaud this, some of the works tended to dismiss the >experience of people like my parents' - seemingly >average experiences of working hard, saving money, >buying houses, sending kids to college, wanting a >better life for their kids than they had. In my book, >I really tried to get inside the heads of immigrants, >to understand their displacement, their desires, as >well as those for their kids,� says Kalita who is a >reporter at The Washington Post and serves as >president of the South Asian Journalists Association >(SAJA). > >She has written extensively about immigration and the >South Asian diaspora even in her previous job with >Newsday in New York City as a business reporter, >carving a beat out of immigration and the economy. > >�I think my reportage and writing on South Asians >stems mainly from two places: a desire to help a >public better understand the subcontinent and its >diverse diaspora, and a desire to better understand >myself, my family and where we came from. You cannot >understand the second generation without attempting to >understand the first,�� says Kalita who is a graduate >from Rutgers University, Phi Beta Kappa, with a >bachelor's in history and journalism. > >She received her master's degree from Columbia >University Graduate School of Journalism and has >received numerous awards for her work, is featured in >the Best Business Stories of 2003 and was most >recently named Young Journalist of the Year by the New >York State Associated Press Association. > >And her specialisation on the South Asian ethnic >community has been a fillip for her career in >journalism. �My background and interest in immigration >has only positively affected my career. I am lucky to >have a lot of control over the types of stories I >pitch and write, so I try not to do stories that I >don�t see as legitimately newsworthy. A good story is >a good story, regardless of the subjects' colour of >the skin. I work for a very large U.S. newspaper - the >Washington Post - and feel it is incumbent upon people >like me to bring stories of different communities, not >just the Indian community, to the mainstream. Then >only can we start to redefine the mainstream to >include people like us,�� she says. > >Kalita looks at three different Indian families from >different economic groups rather than from different >regions of India. �I think I tried to look at trends >among Indians immigrating to the United States as an >aggregate group. Certainly, regional distrinctions can >be drawn but I felt like there was much more to be >said about the eras in which immigrants landed on US >shores, the India they left behind and the America >they encountered. > >The distinctions _ geographic, linguistic, religious >-- can also be drawn among Indians in India. I felt >the increasing economic diversity of Indian immigrants >(not all are wealthy and living in mansions) is a >story that warranted telling, for both our community >and a readership at large,�� she feels > >�The goal was not to try to include every single type >of Indian immigrant in the United States. The goal was >to tell dramatic stories of real people who represent >different waves of immigration into the American >suburb,�� she says. > >Her book has been set in the backdrop of suburban NYC >in New Jersey mainly because of the economic diversity >among the Indian community in that region. �In some >ways the West Coast might be more progressive. >However, the communities there have burgeoned largely >due to the hi-tech boom, and I did not see the same >economic diversity that I witnessed in New Jersey. But >perhaps it exists and I just missed the signs,�� she >says. > >As for being compared to Jhumpa Lahiri, she doesn�t >mind. �I admire her work greatly. But remember, my >work is all nonfiction, rooted in real people and real >stories,�� she says. But unlike Lahiri, who chose to >be married to her American fiance in Kolkata, Kalita >recently married Nitin Mukul, a second generation >Indian immigrant and an artist, in a traditional Hindu >ceremony in New Jersey. > >-30- > > > > > > >===== >S. Mitra Kalita > >Order your copy of my book, "Suburban Sahibs," today! Details at www.desiwriter.com. > > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. >http://messenger.yahoo.com/ > > >------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> >Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70 >http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/J.MolB/TM >--------------------------------------------------------------------~-> > >Visit us online at http://www.sawcc.org > >To Post a message, send it to: sawcc at eGroups.com > >To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: sawcc-unsubscribe at eGroups.com >Yahoo! Groups Links > ><*> To visit your group on the web, go to: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sawcc/ > ><*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: > sawcc-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com > ><*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: > http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ > > _________________________________________________________________ Watch the online reality show Mixed Messages with a friend and enter to win a trip to NY http://www.msnmessenger-download.click-url.com/go/onm00200497ave/direct/01/ From shuddha at sarai.net Thu Jun 3 10:58:20 2004 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2004 10:58:20 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] CAE Artists Subpoenaed - Artistic Freedom under Attack in the USA Message-ID: <40BEB6F4.4070609@sarai.net> Dear Friends on the Reader List, Paranoia sometimes attains heights difficult for us to even imagine. That the so called 'War Against Terror' is going drastically wrong is obvious to anyone who cares to examine the facts as they present themselves to us. The pictures in Iraqi prisons (although not very different in terms of the attitudes they portray from what is commonplace in US prisons) have confirmed that what we are seeing is a deep systemic pathology manifesting itself in every possible way. I am appending below news of another symptom of the same malaise. Not in Iraq, but in the United States. The persons involved are not 'terrorist' but 'artists', people many of us know and respect. Steve Kurtz, artist, thinker and writer, member of the Critical Arts Ensemble, known to some of us on this list as an incisive but gentle creative practitioner- intellectual who has always (together with his colleauges in CAE) in the foreground of inaugurating new ways of thinking and doing art, was detained for questioning by the Joint Terrorism Task Force and FBI agents following the tragic death of his wife Hope due to a cardiac arrest (see background below). Following this detention, Kurtz's papers, computer, and materials for a CAE Art Project in process were also imponded. Subsequently, Kurtz, and his colleagues in the Critical Arts Ensemble, Beatriz da Costa and Steve Barnes have been subpoenaed under the Patriot Act in the United States. Some of you on this list may have had occasion to meet Beatriz at Sarai during her brief time here and have spoken to her about her projects. I personally know of very few people as gentle and as sensitive as Beatriz, only a sick and insane state apparatus can begin to see someone like Beatriz as a suspected terrorist. The immediate provocation for this sad turn of events seems to be materials associated with CAE's artistic projects that relate to Biotechnology. In a strange way, it is almost as if the things that CAE, in its dramatization of the new militarized culture and apparatus of the intersection between 'intelligence', state terror and surveillance and the bio science milieu, used to point our attention towards in gently allegorical ways, have now become scarily real. I have always had the highest regard for the intellectual rigour and artistic depth of the work of the CAE and I have found both their art projects as well as their writings inspiring, particularly in the way they are able to address the poltics of knowledge, and critically interrogate the cultures of science as it is practiced today, without ever falling into the trap of a vague and ill informed 'anti scientism' I find the arbitrary actions of the concerned US government agencies with regard to the members of the CAE insulting and injurious to the freedom of expression and artistic/scientific inquiry and urge everyone to make their protest known. Please read the notice below for more details. I would urge everyone on this list to write letters in his support at the address given below. In solidarity with Steve Kurtz, Beatriz da Costa, Steve Barnes and their colleagues in the Creative Arts Ensemble. Shuddha ____________________________________ June 2, 2004 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Beatriz da Costa, mailto:media at caedefensefund.org ARTISTS SUBPOENAED IN USA PATRIOT ACT CASE Feds STILL unable to distinguish art from bioterrorism Grand jury to convene June 15 HELP URGENTLY NEEDED - SEE BELOW Three artists have been served subpoenas to appear before a federal grand jury that will consider bioterrorism charges against a university professor whose art involves the use of simple biology equipment. The subpoenas are the latest installment in a bizarre investigation in which members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force have mistaken an art project for a biological weapons laboratory (see end for background). While most observers have assumed that the Task Force would realize the absurd error of its initial investigation of Steve Kurtz, the subpoenas indicate that the feds have instead chosen to press their "case" against the baffled professor. Two of the subpoenaed artists--Beatriz da Costa and Steve Barnes--are, like Kurtz, members of the internationally-acclaimed Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an artists' collective that produces artwork to educate the public about the politics of biotechnology. They were served the subpoenas by federal agents who tailed them to an art show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The third artist, Paul Vanouse, is, like Kurtz, an art professor at the University at Buffalo. He has worked with CAE in the past. The artists involved are at a loss to explain the increasingly bizarre case. "I have no idea why they're continuing (to investigate)," said Beatriz da Costa, one of those subpoenaed. "It was shocking that this investigation was ever launched. That it is continuing is positively frightening, and shows how vulnerable the PATRIOT Act has made freedom of speech in this country." Da Costa is an art professor at the University of California at Irvine. According to the subpoenas, the FBI is seeking charges under Section 175 of the US Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which has been expanded by the USA PATRIOT Act. As expanded, this law prohibits the possession of "any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system" without the justification of "prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose." (See http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/175.html for the 1989 law and http://www.ehrs.upenn.edu/protocols/patriot/sec817.html for its USA PATRIOT Act expansion.) Even under the expanded powers of the USA PATRIOT Act, it is difficult to understand how anyone could view CAE's art as anything other than a "peaceful purpose." The equipment seized by the FBI consisted mainly of CAE's most recent project, a mobile DNA extraction laboratory to test store-bought food for possible contamination by genetically modified grains and organisms; such equipment can be found in any university's basic biology lab and even in many high schools (see "Lab Tour" at http://www.critical-art.net/biotech/free/ for more details). The grand jury in the case is scheduled to convene June 15 in Buffalo, New York. Here, the jury will decide whether or not to indict Steve Kurtz on the charges brought by the FBI. A protest is being planned at 9 a.m. on June 15 outside the courthouse at 138 Delaware Ave. in Buffalo. HELP NEEDED Financial donations: The CAE Defense Fund has so far received over 200 donations in amounts ranging from $5 to $400. This is a wonderful outpouring of sympathy, but a drop in the bucket compared to the potential costs of the case. To make a donation, please visit http://www.caedefensefund.org/ Letters of support: Letters and petitions of support from biologists, artists, and others, especially those in positions of responsibility at prominent institutions or companies, could be very useful. See http://www.caedefensefund.org/ for a sample letter of support. Legal offers and letters of support: If you are a lawyer, offers of pro bono support or offers to write amicus briefs would be very helpful. BACKGROUND Early morning of May 11, Steve Kurtz awoke to find his wife, Hope, dead of a cardiac arrest. Kurtz called 911. The police arrived and, after stumbling across test tubes and petri dishes Kurtz was using in a current artwork, called in the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Soon agents from the Task Force and FBI detained Kurtz, cordoned off the entire block around his house, and later impounded Kurtz's computers, manuscripts, books, equipment, and even his wife's body for further analysis. The Buffalo Health Department condemned the house as a health risk. Only after the Commissioner of Public Health for New York State had tested samples from the home and announced there was no public safety threat was Kurtz able to return home and recover his wife's body. Yet the FBI would not release the impounded materials, which included artwork for an upcoming exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. While most observers assumed the Task Force would realize that its initial investigation of Steve Kurtz was a terrible mistake, the subpoenas indicate that the feds have instead chosen to press their "case" against Kurtz and possibly others. To donate to the CAE Defense Fund, and for up-to-date information on the case, please visit http://www.caedefensefund.org/ For more information on the Critical Art Ensemble, please visit http://www.critical-art.net/ To join a list about the case, please visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CAE_Defense Articles and television stories about the case: http://www.appliedautonomy.com/cae/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8278-2004Jun1.html http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny--materialsremoved0601jun01,0,3539235.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20040602/1048042.asp On advice of counsel, Steve Kurtz is unable to answer questions regarding his case. Please direct questions or comments to mailto:media at caedefensefund.org. -- (MAKE SURE TO CUT BELOW LINES OFF WHEN FORWARDING, or your personal profile will become known to everyone.) To edit your profile or unsubscribe from mailings, please visit http://rtmark.com/caedefense/dblist/prof.php?e=shuddha at sarai.net&x=796902518 From eye at ranadasgupta.com Thu Jun 3 13:14:56 2004 From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2004 13:14:56 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Letter of support for Steve Kurtz Message-ID: <40BED6F8.9080300@ranadasgupta.com> D-383 Defence Colony New Delhi 110 024 India June 3rd 2004 To Whom It May Concern *Re: Protest against charges against Steve Kurtz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Art, University of Buffalo* As a writer and independent scholar who has had frequent reason to draw on the work of Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), I would like to attest to its seriousness and importance, and to protest against the absurd and shameful charges brought against Mr Kurtz by the FBI. I would request that these charges be dropped immediately and that the FBI make a formal apology for their wrongful intervention in Mr Kurtz's life. A major element of Mr Kurtz's work has been to consider in a serious way the ethical questions raised by new biotechnologies - an undertaking acknowledged by all public figures (including President George W. Bush and Pope John-Paul II) to be crucial for a sane future. This work has taken as its starting-point the notion that ethical standards cannot be developed in private by "experts", but that they must be developed through genuinely public dialogue and debate. For this reason, it has always been conducted with great attention to openness and transparency. If the FBI were to consult the group's publications, public presentations and exhibitions, and online documents, it would discover that their ideas and activities have been conducted entirely in the public domain. Moreover, since public safety is precisely the question at stake in their work, this issue has always taken prime importance, and they have always addressed it in consultation with eminent scientists from leading U.S. institutions. There is nothing covert, suspicious, or irresponsible about their work. I have never met Steve Kurtz. However, I have followed closely the publications and art works of the Critical Art Ensemble for several years, and I have also had occasion to see public presentations by Beatriz da Costa, in which she answered extensive questions about the nature and guiding principles of the group's work. I can say on the basis of this engagement, not only that Steve Kurtz and the CAE are honest in their exploration of these pressing issues, but that their work is among the most important contributions to public debate in this arena. The attempt to denigrate this valuable work by throwing ignorant and melodramatic names at it is absurd and shameful, and highly embarassing for those doing the throwing. The suspicions of the FBI are based on little more than the observation that Steve had laboratory equipment in his house. This equipment is easily obtained, there is nothing illegal about possessing it, and the most cursory of Internet searches would have revealed exactly why it was there. To subject him to this treatment on such a basis of so trivial an observation represents a serious breach of the principles of freedom of expression and the presumption of innocence. In the /Washington Post/'s coverage of this story, Lt. Jake Ulewski, spokesman for the Buffalo police, is quoted as saying about Mr. Kurtz, "He's making cultures? That's a little off the wall." Is it now possible to detain someone and subject them to criminal charges just because some ignorant observer thinks what they do with their time appears "a little off the wall"? The society of homogeneity and conformity that is implied by such a scenario is one in which no one takes responsibility for asking or answering its more difficult questions. Steve Kurtz and the CAE have always been open about their commitment to doing just that. In an open, forward-thinking and just society, such an honourable enterprise would invite praise, not censure. Yours Faithfully Rana Dasgupta Writer and independent scholar www.ranadasgupta.com From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Thu Jun 3 22:31:44 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Shivam=20Vij?=) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2004 18:01:44 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Volunteers required for preparation of a Dossier on Ragging in India Message-ID: <20040603170144.48857.qmail@web8201.mail.in.yahoo.com> Volunteers required for preparation of a Dossier on Ragging in India People's Action for Change and Enforcement (PACE) is prepaaring a Dossier on Ragging in India for the benefit of students, teachers, human rights activists, journalists, and researchers for which we are looking for volunteers across India. We need at least one volunteer in every state with reasonable amount of access to the internet. Volunteers are primarily required to give us information about ragging practices and the status of ragging before and after the Supreme Court's landmark anti-ragging judgement in 2001. The dossier will be a comprehensive, exhaustive source of a variety of information and views on ragging in educational institutions and their hostels. It shall be made available on our website (under construction) as well as in a CD which shall be made available to anyone who asks for it. The CD shall be sent along with a press release to leading media organisations. The dossier shall be updated annually. The dossier will provide pointers towards these areas: * ragging and society; * ragging and the law; * ragging and the media; * ragging and class; * ragging and caste; * ragging and sexuality; * ragging and memory * ragging and educational institutions; * ragging and academicians; * ragging outside India: Sri Lanka, Britain, USA etc; * the anti-ragging movement in India and Sri Lanka. Are you game? Remember that we can't offer you anything more than credit in the dossier and a volunteer certificate. You can, however, take it to be a stepping stone towards involvement in other PACE projects. Apart from money we are also short of time. We want the dossier completed by 20 June 2004, and distributed in the first week of July 2004. So mail us right away at pace4change @ yahoo.com (Subject: ragging) about how you can help us. If there are any institutions into research or humman rights activism that can help us in any way, we shall be very grateful to them. Even if you cannot be a committed volunteer, you can help us by mailing in any articles, views, knowledge or information that you have about any aspect of ragging. We would be grateful to anyone who can send us articles (in English or Hindi) that have been published in print but are not available on the Net. We are also interested in any academic research that has been doen on the subject of ragging, and any articles about the history of educational ragging in India, Sri Lanka, and Britain. Articles that claim to have statistics are another area of curiousity. Another area we shall be looking at is the relation of ragging with memory, for which we would appreciate if you could send us or direct us towards alumni musings that romanticise ragging. Looking forward to hearing from you, Sachin Agarwal (tellsachin @ yahoo.com) Secretary, PACE 3 June 2004 Our postal address: People's Action for Change and Enforcement (PACE) Post Box No. 20 Ram Sagar Mishra Nagar Lucknow - 16 (INDIA) Phone: +91 94152 55042 ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From amc at autonomous.org Fri Jun 4 23:25:44 2004 From: amc at autonomous.org (Amanda McDonald Crowley) Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2004 20:55:44 +0300 Subject: [Reader-list] CAE - open letter of protest - request for signatories Message-ID: Helsinki / Amsterdam, June 4, 2004 Dear friends and colleagues on the Sarai reader list, We are sure that many of you have been following the deeply worrying events around the subpoenas that have been served to members of the US-based arts collective Critical Art Ensemble and have read Shuddhabrata Sengupta's recent posting on this issue. We, Eric Kluitenberg and Amanda McDonald Crowley (with support from a range of colleagues), have taken the initiative to write an open letter of protest asking for an immediate cessation of legal proceedings against our esteemed and distinguished colleagues. We think that this case signals a most worrisome trend in public political life in the United States and cannot be left unaddressed. We ask all of you who have worked with the Critical Art Ensemble in recent years, and others who feel offended by this unacceptable infringement on artistic freedom, to contact us to sign this letter of protest as members of a deeply concerned professional community. Please find the letter below. if you wish to sign send either one of us an email stating your name, your profession, your institutional affiliation (if you have one) and possibly a url that best represents your work or professional activity. Thank you. Amanda McDonald Crowley amc at va.com.au Eric Kluitenberg erick at balie.nl ---------------- To whom it may concern, We, the undersigned artists, curators, critics, cultural producers, theorists and writers who have worked with or followed the work of the collective known as Critical Art Ensemble, are writing to express our serious concern over legal proceedings brought against members of this highly respected artists group. Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of internationally recognised artists who work within pedagogic frameworks and art contexts to raise awareness of a range of social issues. Most recently their work has been directed towards providing the general public with awareness and understanding of issues to do with biological research. Their work is not alarmist but rather provides knowledge. CAE's work is always undertaken in a safe and considered way, using materials which are commonly available in scientific education and research practices. Their main motivation is to provide the public with the tools needed to make informed choices. It has come to our attention that there was a recent seizure of a substantial amount of the artists' work and research material. The international art scene was shocked and surprised to learn that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, following an analysis of the materials by the Commissioner of Public Health for New York State which returned the result that the material seized posed no public safety risk, have continued with their investigation and are now seeking to charge members of the collective under the US Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act as expanded by the USA Patriot Act. Whilst it is perhaps understandable in the current international political climate that such research might raise alarm bells with American authorities, it would have also been clear, upon investigation, that the aims of CAE are not a terrorist act, but an awareness raising action undertaken with cultural, artistic and educational agendas. Indeed CAE's work is quite in keeping with mainstream art practices, which have, throughout history, had pedagogical aims. Having worked with CAE in various settings throughout the world we have found CAE's approach has always been to understand and to know the topic that they are presenting. It comes as no surprise, given the current focus of their work, that the research tools included biological material. However, those of us in the art world who have worked with this artists' group also know that their work is undertaken with thorough research, in continuous consultation with members of the scientific community, in order to ensure that the artworks they produce are safe, but also real, in terms of the investigations they pursue. The work of CAE is internationally recognised as thorough, investigative, educative and safe. This matter is one that raises serious concerns internationally that the actions of the American government undermine the freedom of artistic expression, a fundamental democratic right, which is one of the cornerstones of the liberal democracies. As the materials have been tested and been shown to pose no public health threat, we demand that the American Government immediately cease legal action against members of the Critical Art Ensemble collective. The good reputation of Critical Art Ensemble must be immediately restored. Yours faithfully, Amanda McDonald Crowley, cultural worker/ curator, currently executive producer ISEA2004 (International Symposium of Electronic Art 2004), Australia/Finland http://www.isea2004.net Eric Kluitenberg Head of the Media Program De Balie - Centre for Culture and Politics Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://www.debalie.nl Signatories: name/profession/position/country/url From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Sat Jun 5 16:09:23 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Shivam=20Vij?=) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2004 11:39:23 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Call for entries Message-ID: <20040605103923.9084.qmail@web8206.mail.in.yahoo.com> Call for entries We are looking for original articles, anywhere between a paragraph to 2,000 words long, on the subject of ragging. Articles should be more fact than opinion, and should tell the story of how you or some acquaintance of yours ragged or was ragged at the undergraduate level. You can choose to write under your name, a pseudonym or anonymously. We will guard your identity with our lives if you want us to do so. All we want you to do is to speak up, speak out. We can't pay you for the article as we are an upstart NGO. Your contribution will be in a Dossier on Ragging in India, made available on the Net in our website (under construction) and in a CD made available to leading media organisations, journalists, researchers, legal experts, academicians and anyone who asks for it. Some pointers of what you could include your article: * name of the college; * year(s) of the incident; * degree and kind of ragging, with specific details; * whether or not the ragging was sexual (stripping and beyond, details required); * particular traditions of ragging in the institution mentioned; * the time-period through which ragging continues; * how did the writer take in this ragging: good, bad or ugly; * how did the college administration react: ignorance, inertia, acting upon complaints; pre-emptive action; * how, if at all, anti-ragging laws affected ragging in the institution; * did you initially regret ragging or you disliked it all along; * did you rag? why? how? DEADLINE: Sunday, 13 June 2004. EMAIL: anti-ragging @ yahoogroups.com (You do not have to be a member of the anti-ragging mailing list to send a mail to the above ID.) Looking forward to hearing from you, Sachin Agarwal, Secretary, PACE 4 June 2004 Our postal address: People's Action for Change and Enforcement (PACE) Post Box No. 20 Ram Sagar Mishra Nagar Lucknow - 16 (INDIA) Phone: (0) 94152 55042 Email: pace4change @ yahoo.com o o o o o Our mailing and discussion list: anti-ragging http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anti-ragging/ Countless suicides, a couple of murders, and dozens of laws later the practice of ragging continues in educational institutions in India and Sri Lanka. This group is meant to debate, discuss and disemminate ideas about ragging. This group is also a platform for members of the Anti-Ragging Cell of the People's Action for Change and Enforcement (PACE) to co-ordinate their activities throughout India. Post message: anti-ragging at yahoogroups.com Subscribe: anti-ragging-subscribe at yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: anti-ragging-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com List owner: anti-ragging-owner at yahoogroups.com ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From diya at sarai.net Sun Jun 6 05:40:58 2004 From: diya at sarai.net (diya at sarai.net) Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2004 02:10:58 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [Reader-list] About Baghdad Message-ID: <1060.203.101.5.76.1086480658.squirrel@203.101.5.76> Dear Friends, We are pleased to inform you that Jagori is organizing the screening of the Documentary Film “About Baghdad” in collaboration with Habitat World. The film is by Sinan Antoon, an exiled Iraqi writer and poet who returned to Baghdad to see what has become of his city after wars, sanctions, decades of oppression and violence, and now occupation. Antoon takes us on a journey exploring what Iraqis think and feel about the post-war situation and the complex relationship between the US and Iraq. About Baghdad is a journey into the hearts and minds of the hundreds of Iraqis encountered. In the simmering heat of Baghdad’s summer, Iraqis of various ethnic and political backgrounds and orientations, speak of part horrors and present fears. Reflections on the traumatic legacy of dictatorship, sanctions and war also reflect the resilience and humanity of a people who were, for decades, dehumanized and disappeared behind Saddam’s image. From poets to politicians, cabbies to communities, a retired senior citizen to an American soldier at Bremmer’s headquarters, About Baghdad navigates the dire and often misunderstood and misinterpreted, yet involving, both Iraqis and Americans. Date: June 19th 2004 Time: 6.30p m (the duration of the film is about two hours) Venue: Gulmohar Hall, India Habitat Centre We cordially invite all of you for the screening of About Baghdad. Jagori Team Jagori C-54 Top Floor, South Extension-Part-II, New Delhi-110049 Phone:91-11-26257015 Telefax:91-11-26253629 Website:www.jagori.org From atrehan at sarai.net Fri Jun 4 13:10:46 2004 From: atrehan at sarai.net (Amitabh Trehaan) Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2004 13:10:46 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Free Tread Mill: A `True' Satire Message-ID: <40C0277E.60404@sarai.net> Hi all, Here is a write-up on something I invented: Amitabh Trehaan -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: thenewtreadmill.txt Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040604/1cafbe33/attachment.txt From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Sat Jun 5 16:09:23 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Shivam=20Vij?=) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2004 11:39:23 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Call for entries Message-ID: <20040605103923.9084.qmail@web8206.mail.in.yahoo.com> Call for entries We are looking for original articles, anywhere between a paragraph to 2,000 words long, on the subject of ragging. Articles should be more fact than opinion, and should tell the story of how you or some acquaintance of yours ragged or was ragged at the undergraduate level. You can choose to write under your name, a pseudonym or anonymously. We will guard your identity with our lives if you want us to do so. All we want you to do is to speak up, speak out. We can't pay you for the article as we are an upstart NGO. Your contribution will be in a Dossier on Ragging in India, made available on the Net in our website (under construction) and in a CD made available to leading media organisations, journalists, researchers, legal experts, academicians and anyone who asks for it. Some pointers of what you could include your article: * name of the college; * year(s) of the incident; * degree and kind of ragging, with specific details; * whether or not the ragging was sexual (stripping and beyond, details required); * particular traditions of ragging in the institution mentioned; * the time-period through which ragging continues; * how did the writer take in this ragging: good, bad or ugly; * how did the college administration react: ignorance, inertia, acting upon complaints; pre-emptive action; * how, if at all, anti-ragging laws affected ragging in the institution; * did you initially regret ragging or you disliked it all along; * did you rag? why? how? DEADLINE: Sunday, 13 June 2004. EMAIL: anti-ragging @ yahoogroups.com (You do not have to be a member of the anti-ragging mailing list to send a mail to the above ID.) Looking forward to hearing from you, Sachin Agarwal, Secretary, PACE 4 June 2004 Our postal address: People's Action for Change and Enforcement (PACE) Post Box No. 20 Ram Sagar Mishra Nagar Lucknow - 16 (INDIA) Phone: (0) 94152 55042 Email: pace4change @ yahoo.com o o o o o Our mailing and discussion list: anti-ragging http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anti-ragging/ Countless suicides, a couple of murders, and dozens of laws later the practice of ragging continues in educational institutions in India and Sri Lanka. This group is meant to debate, discuss and disemminate ideas about ragging. This group is also a platform for members of the Anti-Ragging Cell of the People's Action for Change and Enforcement (PACE) to co-ordinate their activities throughout India. Post message: anti-ragging at yahoogroups.com Subscribe: anti-ragging-subscribe at yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: anti-ragging-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com List owner: anti-ragging-owner at yahoogroups.com ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From sallykenin at yahoo.com Sun Jun 6 18:49:15 2004 From: sallykenin at yahoo.com (sallykenin at yahoo.com) Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2004 06:19:15 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] Monthaly Posting ,Girls Madarsas, Message-ID: <20040606131915.20333.qmail@web10710.mail.yahoo.com> Friends here is another experience of Madarsa life. Often because of economic compulsions parents have to choose between educating the boys and educating the girls, and boys invariably get preference. This is one of the reasons for the educational backwardness of muslim women. Also, the low female literacy rate in muslim community can be attributed to the extreme form of purdah system prevalent in some sections of the community. Many of these sections still nurture centuries old belief that women should not leave the confines of the house to seek education. As a result many parents do not educate their daughters beyond the certain grade. According to some parents atmosphere and openness in college is not appropriate for their daughters from islamic point of view. So they are not in favour of co-education . These problems are still considered as a great hassle in imparting education to girls but now these problems to some extent have been sorted out because of madersa education system. The kind of atmosphere and arrangement of purdah has been made in these madersa are satisfactory for parents. Now more attention is being paid to impart education to the girls and gradually more madarsas are being founded exclusively for their girls. At present many madarsa in Andhera pardesh , Delhi, Gujrat, Karnataka,Kerala,Maharashtra, Tamilnadu and U.P offer facilities for girls education in Islamic and secular subjects. Among these states, highest number of girls madarsas are in Kerala , Maharashtra and U.P. Broadly speaking , two stream of courses are offered by these madarsas. One stream of courses is spread over a period of fourteen years and provides for elementary to higher level of education. The other stream includes short term compact courses of two years and three years duration in Islamic science for those girls who have already completed their modern secondary or higher education and are interested in acquiring religious education. In all the courses designed for girls , their special needs and their future role in the muslim society have been kept in view . In long term courses, emphasis has been laid on inclusion of more relevant portions of Islamic learning besides adding important modern subjects and matters relating to housekeeping, nursing, maternity, general medicine etc in the curriculum. For example, the subjects and activities included in the first eight years curriculum of Jamiatus salehat, a renowned residential madarsa for girls at Rampur U.P are Quran ,Hadeth,[Teachings of prophet] History of Islam, Fiqh, Arabic , Urdu, English, Hindi language, general knowledge, History,Geography, Science, Home science, Mathematics ,Arts, Tailoring, Sports and computer education etc. After completing this course the girls may either join the next higher course in Madarsa leading to the degree of AAlmiat and senior secondary school certificate or may go to a modern secondary school for further education in modern subjects . In many girls madarsa all modern subjects along with their Islamic education are taught from primary to senior secondary level. In comparison to boys madarsa, girls madarsa are more modernised and sophisticated in terms of syllabus and extra curricular activities perhaps its because they are newly formed . While commenting on the increasing popularity of Islamic education amongst girls it has been observed that there has been so much of rush in girls education sections that it is becoming difficult to make arrangements commensurate with the demand. According to Prof. M. Akhter Siddiqui ��community�s consciousness about girls education particularly their religious education is constantly increasing,,. There are very few madarsa in Delhi for girls. Only one of them is residential and that is Jamia Islamia Lilbanat situated in Shaheen bag jamia nager. The other thing about girls madarsa is that every student has to pay mess charge as it is compulsory. There is no concession to any one so here again those who can not afford 500 to 600 rupees every month for food, are deprived from education . For these poor parent�s daughters very few yateem khana {orphan�s home } are running across the country but here only those girls are given preference who have lost their father or mother while in most of the madersas boys are provided each and every thing free. We went to visit some of girls madarsa but we are not allowed to talk any student there is tight vigilance on outsiders without prior permission no body can enter in to the premises and even after taking permeation only parents or siblings are allowed in side. Girls are not allowed to go outside for walk or any thing during their stay in madarsa . We also came to know that parent or sibling are not permitted to talk their daughters over phone and if they write any letter to their daughters it first goes to principle or teacher who first reads it then it is handed over to the student. Now one can imagine the vigilance of these girls student and their freedom within the Madarsa campus [a moment to think of those who have got all kind of freedom of communication in this modern period] Apart from all these drawbacks these madarsas are contributing to women�s education in Muslim society. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/ From joshirutul at yahoo.co.in Sun Jun 6 20:12:21 2004 From: joshirutul at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Rutul=20Joshi?=) Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2004 15:42:21 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Posting- Surat- research questions Message-ID: <20040606144221.5641.qmail@web8206.mail.in.yahoo.com> After struggling with the conceptual positions and research framework, i am focusing on the following. I have identified more than 10 kind of social groups belonging to a particular geographical location in a city and i am currently conducting their interviews. The following posting will focus on the experiences in the field and excerpts from literature review. Conceptual Positions - Issues in Urban Composition Rapidly growing cities in India face peculiar problems of being demographically large, socially diverse and deficient in terms of urban basic services. Especially, the cities with a strong base of secondary sector witness a rapid growth of residential cum industrial ghettos being developed all around the historical core city. The migrating population from the other parts of the country locates itself in a particular area on the basis of class, castes or other regional and cultural preferences. This creates ‘distinct patches’ in the urban composition of the cities of the south, which otherwise represented as a ’melting pot of cultures’. The politics of space is manifested in the physical composition of the city leading to socially and psychologically segregated parts and generating disparity in terms of urban service provision. RESERCH QUESTIONS In a context of increasing urban diversity and growing economic disparities what are the processes involved in the making of new social, cultural and political identities in the city? How social relationships manifest in the social and geographical spaces of cities and their neighborhoods? How do social and political relationships evolve and manifest themselves in socially and culturally diverse cities? How do the social identities of citizens express themselves in changing built environments and how do land markets and physical living conditions influence the process of locational choice and community formation? The use of public space by different social groups is a distinctive feature of urban life. Squares and streets have always provided for spaces where people of diverse social and cultural origins would meet and share the experience of urban life. With the growing social diversity of urban residents and the increasing urban poverty, many city public spaces are being "privatized" by groups of specific social and cultural origin, or by local gangs. What actions are being taken to restore the urban function of public spaces? Rutul Joshi, Lecturer, Faculty of Architecture, SCET, Surat. Contact No.- +91-98243-83900. Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040606/e49f9b7b/attachment.html From shireen_sona at hotmail.com Sun Jun 6 13:35:51 2004 From: shireen_sona at hotmail.com (shireen mirza) Date: Sun, 06 Jun 2004 13:35:51 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] III The Everydays of Eternity:A Study of Muhurrum Processions Message-ID: III The Everydays of Eternity Any study on Muhurrum cannot be complete without analysing the proliferation of literatures on Muhurrum. I've made a feeble attempt. I need to get deeper into the resources, only it seems like looking for a drop in the ocean. Alot has been written on Marsiyas, but I've tried to understand how gender relations are implicated throught this tradition and its written form. This is also a paper written for a course on Feminism at CSCS and should become a part of a larger study. Any suggestion or comments will be very helpful...this project seems to be taking its own course, as and when I meet people who show such enthusiam and some who've responded to my postings on the reader's list. Thanks alot. Shireen The Eye that Cries: Concepts of Love and Suffering in Marsiyas, and their Appeal to Shia Women Even if streaks of blood now flow from our breasts May our hands never cease Let this matam continue on behalf of the one who was wronged For as long as Fatima's cry comes forth (Ali Javed Maqsud, Zehra Ke Dua cited Pinault, 2001, pg. 80.) Stories must be told because they are crying out to be told. They have an existence of their own. They bring vision when they are told. For the eye needs a vision as it cries. The story of rebellion and suffering of the Prophet's family and their 72 companions against the established regime of the Umayyad dynasty and its tyrannical ruler Yazid, is a story narrated, written about, sung, performed and enacted since 680 A.D. The gathering of the devout where the story of Imam Hussain is told by shedding tears is called a majlis. Generally a majlis begins with soz, literally meaning burning, in which poetry about the events of Karbala is chanted sometimes to an Indian raag or raagini. Even though musical instruments are not allowed in mainstream Islam, in some cultural contexts drums give the beat for the songs. After the soz comes the Salaam, a eulogy of Hussain and his family or a darud, a eulogy of the prophet. This is followed by a marsiya: "a poem describing some event related to the martyrdom of the prophet's grandson Imam Hussain, at Karbala in 680 composed, more often than not, in the six-line stanza form, musaddas." (CM Naim 2004, pg. 1) Marsiyas in Urdu were first written in the 16th century in South India, in the kingdom of Golconda and Bijapur, which were Shiite in orientation and closer to the Iranian religious tradition than the Turks and Pathan kingdoms of North India. In the beginning, marsiyas were written either in the two-line unit form, qasida, or in the four-line unit form, murabba. No particular meter was preferred, both long and short meters equally common. These marsiyas, not overly long, were usually sung, often set to some suitably mournful raga. In the murabba form the fourth line was often a refrain, repeated by the accompanists of the marsiya reciter and perhaps also by the audience. The recitation took place both outdoors in a procession and indoors. (Ibid, pg. 1-2) Slowly over a century or so the early marsiya, which was shorter in length as well as simpler in structure and emphasized more the grief and lament, became more performative and structured. Perhaps this might have something to do with urban centric developments that took place over the years. Firstly, the marsiya moved indoors and secondly they were performed more than sung. This performative style was given a new name soz-khani. As Abdul Halim Sharar writes in his Guzasta Lucknow, "The art of making desirable changes in the sound of words, of adjusting ones facial expression to the subject, of moving one's limbs in a away befitting the discourse and of making it forceful through minute gestures�" (Cited in translators introduction of Adha Gaun, Gillian Wright 2003) The new marsiya, however, developed and was brought to great heights by the poets of Lucknow, Mir Anis (1802-1874) and Mirza Dabir (1803-1875) in particular, who wrote them in the form of six-line stanzas, each stanza reaching a climax in the last couplet. Anis's poems are particularly popular perhaps because his eloquence enables him to use a great range of vocabulary and verbal conceits, while retaining idiomatic simplicity and pathos. In the words of Dr. Mujeeb Rizvi, "every character is shown as a perfect Indian. The bride-to-be, for example, is described as an Indian-Muslim bride; she breaks her bangles when her husband's corpse is brought." (Ibid) After the marsiya and the hadith (the sermon) the congregation stands as a mark of respect; Nauhas are sung, a lament sometimes sung to the melodies of Hindi film songs, and to the rhythm of beating chests, calling out "Hussain Hussain! Hussain Hussain!" Nauhas, are composed in couplets rhyming aa ba ca, the same form as the ghazal, the popular genre of poetry dealing traditionally with human and divine love. They are especially popular among young boys and girls. After the majlis, a tabarruk is distributed ranging from snacks, sharbath to an entire meal of biryani, khitchdi, and haleem- depending on the gathering. Manaths are asked at a taziya or in the name of Imam Hussain-for a child, for a wedding to take place, for illnesses to be cured, for passing exams. A majlis can either be an exclusive/private gathering or a general/aam gathering. It could either be a domestic space invariably associated with personal family histories or a public space like an imam badha/shrine or a mosque. The formal segregation of unrelated men and women during majlis' is systematically planned, especially in the way imam badhas are built. However Muhurrum, its traditions, its informal economy might be the only site of performance and active participation for Shia women. Despite the fact that almost all the literature in all its forms has been neither created nor developed by the women of the Shia community, there are many ways in which it has been appropriated into their lives and their being. The lexical forms embodied in the written literature are accessible in ways that no other aspect of a cultural tradition is. While narrativizing the political-historical-theological battle, enumerating the heroic qualities of the martyrs, this literature also deeply implicates gender relations as it prescribes a moral self, invested with virtues derived from the heroes of Karbala. What is this moral self that is being propagated? What is this self that this literature embodies? How does it intellectualize the world and the relationship of the self with it? What virtues do the women of the prophet's family within the narrative of Karbala uphold? What does revering women as exemplars within a theological narrative mean to women as followers? What kind of role does it play in forming a condition of subjecthood which women as followers enact? Why does the eye cry listening to their story? My paper will attempt to ask these questions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I am lost to myself and unconscious And my attributes are annihilated Today I am lost to all things: Naught remains but a forced expression (al-Kujwiri, cited Pinault 2001 pg. 61 ) A person 'enraptured', struck by the power and majesty of God, "is bereft of his senses and walks around in a fashion prohibited by the religious law"; such a person has transgressed a sense of ego-based identity and reached a state of fana. (Schimmel, 1975) The Sufi experiences the martyrs' death in the moment of fana: his individual selfhood has been annihilated as a result of his consuming love for God. Sacrifices are a means for attaining that higher selfhood; to give away parts of one's fortune, or to sacrifice members of one's family enhancing one's religious standing; the Biblical and Qur'anic story of Abraham who so deeply trusted in God that he, without questioning, was willing to sacrifice his only son, points to the importance of such sacrifice. Iqbal in a well known poem in Bal-i Jibril (1936), likens the sacrifice of Ismail and the martyrdom of Hussain, according to him both make up the beginning and the end of the story of the Ka'ba. He discusses the constant tension between positive and negative forces, between the prophet and saint on the one hand, and the oppressor and unbeliever on the other. Hussain and Yazid stand in the same line as Moses and Pharaoh. Iqbal then goes on to show how the khilafat was separated from the Qur'anic injunctions and became a worldly kingdom with the appearance of the Umayyads, and it was here that Hussain appeared like a rain cloud, the image of the blessing rain contrasting with the thirst and dryness of the scene of Karbala. It was Hussain's blood that rained upon the desert of Karbala and left the red tulips there. The connection between the tulips in their red garments and the bloodstained garments of the martyrs has been a favourite image of Persian poetry since at least the 15th century, and when one thinks of the central place which the tulip occupies in Iqbal's thought and poetry as the flower of the manifestation of the divine fire, as the symbol of the Burning Bush on Mount Sinai, and as the flower that symbolizes the independent growth of man's khudi (=self) under the most difficult circumstances, when one takes all these aspects of the tulip together, one understands why the poet has the Imam Hussain 'plant tulips in the desert of Karbala. (Schimmel Al-Serat, Vol XII 1986) The martyrdom of Hussain and his family acts as a rejuvenating force for the Shias separated in time and space from the prophet and his family. Ibn Sana'i (d. 1131) the first great Sufi poet of Iran, sees him as the prototype of the shahid. Your religion is your Husayn, greed and wish are your pigs and dogs You kill the one, thirsty, and nourish the other two. (Divan, p. 655 cited Schimmel 1986) Man can think only of his selfish purposes and wishes and does everything to gain the material aspects of his life; while his religion, his spiritual side is left without nourishment, withering away, just like Hussain and the martyrs of Karbala who were killed after nobody had cared to give them water in the desert. The manner in which the martyrdom of Karbala is recalled casts a worldview that is idealistic and tragic: because it postulates an unrealized world and the base self that requires a martyr to dedicate his/her life. But humans are given to flaws that will never attain or maintain this order. Karbala is the expression of this fault line, which means Islam will be attacked and Shias will be persecuted and the tragedy of Karbala will repeat itself. The Shias need to protect themselves by strengthening their moral values. The source of the moral values is derived from the martyrs of Karbala, they act as exemplars, they get transformed into characters in a mythic story on whom the Shiites model their lives. Women from the prophet's family play an active role in the battle of Karbala, they embody various forms of familial love: as a wife, a sister, a mother, a daughter, a bride. They take on the role of lamenters, sufferers as they send their husbands and sons to be sacrificed. They act as exemplary moral guides on whom other women are suppose to model themselves. I will discuss four prominent women who embody a certain kind of love by weeping for a particular martyr in the battle of Karbala: i. The daughter/wife/mother- Bibi Fatima ii. The sister- Bibi Zainab iii. The orphaned daughter- Bibi Sakina iv. The bride- Bibi Kulsum Abu Abd Allah (i.e. Imam Hussain), peace be upon him, said the following, "Fatima, peace be upon her: within her is a lamp. Hassan is the lamp within a glass. Hussain is the glass like unto a glittering star. Fatima is a 'glittering star' among the women of the people of the lower world, a star that is enkindled from a blessed tree. (Kulyani, cited Pinault 2001, pg. 65) -Fatima Kulayni uses the "light verse" from the Quran 24:35 to comment on the role of Fatima in Shia historical-philosophical thought. She is the source from which the Imams (leaders) are born. She is the womb that breeds martyrs like Hassan and Hussain, each collapsing into the other. She is the wife of the Shia leader Imam Ali, daughter of the prophet Muhummed. Although dead for almost fifty years before the battle of Karbala and the martyrdom of her second son Hussain, Fatima is remembered while recalling the incidents of Karbala. She is believed to descend to earth to grieve for her son Hussain and is present at every majlis. She is believed to provide Shafa'ah (healing) to anyone who cries at the injustice done to her son. There are shrines built and taziyas taken out in her name. Endless literature has been written on her, from Iqbal's homage to her in his Persian epic in 1917, Rumuz-I-be-Khudi (Mysteries of Selflessness) to Ali Schariatis Fatima is Fatima, which appeared during the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. An entire genre known as Fatima's dowry (Jihaznama-I-Fatima), enumerating her humble dowry, her ability to suffer and continue giving to the poor. (Schimmel, 2003) She is the only woman who has and ever will attain the stature of becoming a prophet. She is counted among the five people who form the nucleus of Imamat/leadership, the Panjetan. She embodies everything virtuous, of piety, of a suffering mother, a devoted daughter to the prophet. One who endured poverty and hardship. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Would that you could bury me too beside my brother!" -Zainab Zainab symbolizes defiant in defeat. She and Umme Kulthum were both sisters of Imam Hussain- present at Karbala and survived the battle, they were later lead as captives to Yazids court in Damascus. While still a prisoner in Damascus, she was the first to hold a majlis to mourn Hussain and the first to begin the tradition of majlis and matham. "�she who endured every injury and outrage after the martyrdom. Zaynab safeguarded the goal and aspirations of Hussain, Zainab made Islam safe from the flames." (Cited Pinault 2001, pg. 82) With all her male kinfolk dead or too incapacitated to fight, Zainab as the literature on the incident reveals becomes the spokesperson and the defender of the prophet's household. After the prophet, Ali his cousin succeeded him as the religious leader. On Hussain's death his sister Zainab succeeds him, maybe not as an Islamic leader but as someone who taken on the role of a protector, safeguarding Islam till the next Imam takes over. Zainul Abedin, the only son of Hussain to survive the battle of Karbala. Too ill to take part in the war, Imam Zainul Abedin helplessly couldn't be a part of the 72 martyred. He was brought along with the other prisoners to Kufa, where the governor Ibn Ziyad ordered to kill him. According to Majlisis' account Zainab rushes and clasps him in a protective embrace, "By God, I won't let go of him, she exclaims. "If you're going to kill him, you'll have to kill me along with him." (Cited Pinault 2001, pg. 73) How will I lift up your corpse? My head lacks any veil which I might spread out for you. Dust of the wasteland covers your body. Alas! Beloved son of Fatima, O Hussain! (ibid. pg. 77) De-veiling of the women in captivity is a fact much mourned and regretted, emphasizing shame as a virtue and hijab as a significant creed in Shia theological philosophy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ She was only fours years of age, alas! She was imprisoned, and she departed this life; Weep, yes weep in grief For how long could this child's spirit, at such a young age, Endure affliction and tragedy? Weep, yes weep in grief -Sakina Just as Zainab symbolizes defiance in defeat, and Fatima Zehra passive endurance through eternity, Sakina becomes emblematic of innocence and suffering against which the tyranny of Yazid is described. Merely four years old at the time of the battle, she is starved of food and water like the rest and eventually dies in captivity in Damascus. David Pinault quotes one of Majlisi's sermons on Sakina's dream in the prison that maps the Shia historical trajectory mapping certain women as signifiers of a larger historical process, also bringing out the timelessness of Karbala. The servant then took me by the hand (Majlisis has Sakina report) and led me into the palace. Within were five women whose appearance had been glorified by God and whose forms were radiant with divine light. In their midst was one woman in particular of wondrous appearance: her hair was disheveled; she was dressed in black garments; in her hand was a tunic stained with blood. Whenever she stood up, the other women stood with her; when she sat, so did they. I said to the servant, "who are these women whose appearance God has glorified? He replied, "Sakina, this person here is Eve, mother of humankind; and this is Mary bint 'Imaran [the mother of Jesus Christ]; and this is Khadija bint Khuwaylid (the Prophet Muhammad's first wife]; and this is Hagar; and this is Sarah. And this woman here, in whose hands is the bloodstained shirt, who whenever she stands, the others stand with her, and whenever she sits, so do the others: why, this is your grandmother, Fatima the Radiant." So I drew near and said to her, "Grandmother! By God, my father has been killed; and even though I'm so young, I've been left an orphan." Then she hugged me to her breast and she wept bitterly. All the women wept with her and said to her, "Fatima, may God judge between you and Yazid on Judgement Day!" (cited Pinault, 2001 pg. 69 ) Majlisi presents Sakina's dream in a manner so as to develop both doctrinal and liturgical themes. From the beginning of time, starting from Eve, tracing the prophetic lineage to Mary, mother of Jesus Christ to Khatija, the wife of the Prophet to Fatima. History is signified through women, who support the prophetic framework through their familial ties and their capacity for virtuous love. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Our wedding feast will take place at the Resurrection" -Fatima Kubra Fatima Kubra, the bride of Karbala, is one of the disputed figures, for there is no historical validity of a wedding that took place during the battle. She is described as an Indian bride, who bids her bridegroom (Imam Qasim) farewell at their wedding night. The seventh day of Muhurrum is reserved for Qasim, the nausha-e-Karbala. He is also one of the most popular figures of Karbala. Qasim is not given permission for martyrdom by his uncle Hussain. Shortly before the defeat during the battle, Qasim begs his uncle to allow him to fight, but Hussain and his mother refuse to let him go. He remembers an amulet given by his father, who asked him to open it only at a time of great sorrow and distress. He opens the amulet to find a message in his father's handwriting asking him to fight with his uncle Hussain in the desert of Karbala and to become a martyr. Qasim takes the note to his uncle, and asks his permission once more. Hussain cannot refuse his elder brothers request. Qasim bids his wife farewell who bravely lets her bridegroom get martyred. Conclusion "For reasons of faith, the poet must depict the martyrs of Karbala and their women as ideal beings, and nothing less. Not even a suggestion of fault , for example, can be allowed with reference to Hussain and his companions; his opponents, on the other hand, have to be evil incarnate, with no exception. Thus, the protagonist in the marsiya are all anonymously ideal." (CM Naim, 2004, pg. 16) But the genre of marsiya emerges from a particular historical/political/theological trajectory. Its motive is propagational as much as aesthetic. It gives its believers (as opposed to its readers) defining markers to build a concept of community, of a common historical past, of ways of coping with the present. While signifying historical/political processes that bind individuals within a community, it also propagates an ideal self for the individuals. This is not an individuated self, a normativized self entitled to rights, but a relational, communitarian self. The martyrs of Karbala from the literature, do not emerge as individuated persons but by the role they play within their familial space and within the larger communitarian space. Imam Hussain dies for the ideals and the values his grandfather, the Prophet stood for as much he dies in order to protect Islam and its 'truth'. Similarly the women of the prophet's family stand for the same ideals. In fact they become the site for propagating virtues and the moral self. They act as exemplars for the rest of the community to follow their examples. The eye weeps as it identifies with the forms of love they embody and the loss they suffer. And in the act of weeping the relational self gets appropriated, as it re-affirms its place within the familial space and within the larger community. As long as such a vision endures, this story needs to be told. _________________________________________________________________ Get ready to dream with Citibank Ready Cash. http://go.msnserver.com/IN/49355.asp The Next Generation Personal Loan! From kalyannayan at yahoo.co.in Tue Jun 8 17:44:43 2004 From: kalyannayan at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?kalyan=20nayan?=) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2004 13:14:43 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Third Posting: Making Sense of Spatial Politics in Jamshedpur Message-ID: <20040608121443.15935.qmail@web8101.in.yahoo.com> Making Sense of Spatial Politics in Jamshedpur City “We do not claim to be more unselfish, more generous or more philanthropic than other people. But we think we started on sound and straight forward business principles, considering the interests of shareholders our own, and the health and welfare of the employees, the sure foundation of our prosperity”. Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata The above statement might not be a remarkable and original insight into the social philosophy that should endow a man of wealth but it would be of interest to contrast it with an equally frank statement ten years later. During a conference in London with Tata’s representatives in 1904-05 regarding concessions in freight rates for bulk conveyance of raw materials, iron and steel, the Managing Director of Bengal Nagpur Railway said: “It does not appeal to us at all if you can only show that in an indirect and remote way this would be for the benefit of India. The only appeal that can be made to us is that we can make money out of it. This Railway Company, you must always bear in mind, is a commercial undertaking, and must only be actuated by commercial motives. We must not consider the advantages to India and, must not be actuated by anything like patriotic or philanthropic motives we do not consider a snap of the fingers about the advantages to India”. One could only guess the fundamental difference in opinion, which later on became the foundation stone of Indian industrial bourgeoisie at that point of time. Values of the Tata Iron and Steel Company were reflected in the city plans and architecture, how human interactions have been influenced by the architecture and urban design and how people have reacted to the company’s built environment. We have traced the lineage of the city in brief but here to convey the clear idea, we would not only see the establishment of Jamshedpur but also the sustenance of it as the oldest and the largest existing company town in the world. It was the prototype for post independence Indian industrial cities such as Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur, which were established in full-blown rural areas. But closely following J. N. Tata’s ideas we would also see that the objective of building the city was not considered only on the basis of philanthropic motives. There was larger philosophy behind it. In fact world over it has been experienced that the company towns are excellent examples of rational attempts by planners and architects in the employ of industrial capital to mold workers and manipulate social and economic interactions for the primary purpose of improving industrial production. For the purpose of moulding the worker, planning served as a significant tool. There was a constant desire on the part of the Company to constantly intervene in the built atmosphere of the city whenever it saw it escalating beyond control. It was truly one of the guiding factors of the planners and for that they took constant guidance and inspiration from the European and American conditions. But it was also true that these planning mechanisms became a tool in their hands to make regulation of space serve their need of controlling and disciplining the labour. For example, housing was one of the prime considerations of every planner. Efforts were made in every plan to negotiate with this impending requirement. But it was also a means to dissuade the worker from building whatever it liked. To quote Lefebvre, “In the extension and proliferation of cities housing is the guarantee of reproductivity, be it biological, social or political. Society i.e. capitalist society no longer totalizes it elements nor seeks to achieve total integration through monuments. Instead it strives to distill its essence into buildings”. In other words planning was also for the creation of a modern, industrial working ethic. It was not a matter of carrot and stick policy for the Tatas. The city served as the extension of their hegemony. To put it in more precise terms it was a platform to practice paternalism. They resisted every attempt to let go the control of the city from their hands even if it was coming out as a huge expenditure hole for them. Lefebvre referring to the concept of ‘spatial practice’ has stated, “Spatial practice embraces production and reproduction Spatial practice ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion. In terms of social space, and of each member of a given society’s relationship to that space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance It embodies complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not linked to underground side of social space”. This cohesion and creation of purpose seemed to be one of the primary objectives of the Tatas. One could still ask why this moulding? It is been observed that ‘each mode of production has its own space; the shift from one mode to another must entail production of a new space. A fresh space needs to be generated, a space which is organized and planned subsequently’. Not only this, it has to be fashioned, shaped and invested by social activities during a finite historical period. Probably this mindset although not pronounced justified the refashioning or remoulding. It should be pointed out that there were contending urges for hegemony, between worker and the capital, and contention over space for extending hegemony but this contention was more depicted in the attitude of ‘ambivalence’. An ambivalence that invited more and more negotiation rather than the confrontation in the city. ===== hi received your mail. thank you for calling me. i will reply you soon. sorry for the tantrum. bye ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From jcm at ata.org.pe Wed Jun 9 08:54:22 2004 From: jcm at ata.org.pe (Jose-Carlos Mariategui) Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2004 22:24:22 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] TESTER BOOK/LIBRO published (offline/online) Message-ID: ----ENGLISH version below------ "TRABAJO DE NODOS" El libro del proyecto TESTER www.e-tester.net Tras la primera presentación pública del proyecto TESTER, a cargo de los denominados "nodos" del proyecto, en Noviembre de 2004, presentamos ahora la publicación TESTER BOOK (Trabajo de nodos / Adabegiak lanean / Nodes at work), que recoge textos de los coordinadores, textos teóricos, intervenciones gráficas y un avance de la producción de proyectos. La publicación, dividida en tres partes, evidencia gráficamente en el índice de sus contenidos la extensión de la red TESTER, así como la labor de los nodos que la sostienen. Cada uno de estos nodos o coordinadores además de aportar su propio texto (apartado 1) ha invitado a colaboradores cuya aportación teórica conforma el apartado 2. El apartado 3 avanza los proyectos de los artistas que serán producidos en la siguiente fase del TESTER. El libro publicado en euskera, castellano e inglés, conforma un compendio de ensayos, relativo a la cultura digital, los nuevos soportes para el arte y la cultura contemporánea, desde una concepción política del hecho artístico. La publicación editada bajo la fórmula de "Copyleft", que promueve la libre circulación del saber y el disfrute colectivo de los bienes inmateriales. Un concepto que rebate las restricciones del "Copyright" y las lecturas mercantilistas vigentes sobre la propiedad intelectual. CONTENIDO POR... nodos / adabegiak / nodes Marina Grzinic / Oliver Ressler / Marcus Neustetter / José Carlos Mariátegui / Hito Steyerl / Fundación Rodríguez teoría / teoriak / theory Zoran Pantelic & Kristian Lukic / The Trinity Session / Iñaki Arzoz & Andoni Alonso / Kien Nghi Ha / Shulin Zhao / Jorge La Ferla proyectos / proiektuak / projects Tanja Ostojic + Marina Grzinic / Masaki Hirano / Ralo Mayer + Philipp Haupt / Sejla Kameric / Oliver Ressler + David Thorne / Usha Seejarim / Robin Rhode / Kathryn Smith / Marcus Neustetter / Stephen Hobbs / Diego Lama / Gabriela Golder / Iván Lozano / Lucas Bambozzi / Marcus Neustetter + Jose Carlos Mariategui / Yael Katz / Kirmen Uribe + Ibon Saenz de Olazagoitia / Hacklab Leioa Epílogo por Santiago Eraso (Arteleku) El libro está disponible online en: http://www.e-tester.net/cast/proyectos/book.asp ----ENGLISH------ NODES AT WORK The book of Tester Project www.e-tester.net Following the initial public presentation of the TESTER project by the project's "nodes" in November 2003 , we now present the TESTER BOOK (Trabajo de nodos / Adabegiak lanean / Nodes at work), which contains texts by the coordinators, theoretical texts, graphic works and a look ahead to the production of the projects. The contents of the publication, divided into three parts, provides graphic evidence of how extensive the TESTER network is, as well as the work of the nodes on which it is built. As well as contributing their own text (Section 1) each of these nodes or coordinators has invited collaborators whose theoretical contribution is contained in Section 2. Section 3 gives a foretaste of the artists' projects to be produced in the next phase of TESTER The book, published in Basque, Spanish and English, forms a collection of related to digital culture, the new support systems for art, and contemporary culture from a political conception of art. The book has been published using the "Copyleft" formula, which promotes the free circulation of knowledge and the collective enjoyment of intangible goods. This concept refutes the restrictions of "copyright" and the prevailing mercantilist views of intellectual property. CONTENT BY... nodos / adabegiak / nodes Marina Grzinic / Oliver Ressler / Marcus Neustetter / José Carlos Mariátegui / Hito Steyerl / Fundación Rodríguez teoría / teoriak / theory Zoran Pantelic & Kristian Lukic / The Trinity Session / Iñaki Arzoz & Andoni Alonso / Kien Nghi Ha / Shulin Zhao / Jorge La Ferla proyectos / proiektuak / projects Tanja Ostojic + Marina Grzinic / Masaki Hirano / Ralo Mayer + Philipp Haupt / Sejla Kameric / Oliver Ressler + David Thorne / Usha Seejarim / Robin Rhode / Kathryn Smith / Marcus Neustetter / Stephen Hobbs / Diego Lama / Gabriela Golder / Iván Lozano / Lucas Bambozzi / Marcus Neustetter + Jose Carlos Mariategui / Yael Katz / Kirmen Uribe + Ibon Saenz de Olazagoitia / Hacklab Leioa Epilogue by Santiago Eraso (Arteleku) The book is available online at: http://www.e-tester.net/eng/projects/book.asp TESTER is a Fundación Rodríguez project, produced by Arteleku, the Territorial Government of Gipuzkoa, with the sponsorship of the Basque Government. http://www.e-tester.net/ bizri at media.mit.edu From ravik_rk at hotmail.com Wed Jun 9 10:26:24 2004 From: ravik_rk at hotmail.com (Ravi Kumar) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 10:26:24 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Politics of Imperialism and CounterStrategies Message-ID: Friends, The Iraq War has been an instance of the new face of imperialism. There is a deeper process which culminates into such obnoxious manifestations. It emerges from the dynamics of capitalist development, from its desire to sustain its hegemony and expand. The two processes may appear as separate or as simultaneous. This imperialism bases itself on ideological terrain of local as well as global politics. Some might argue that the two are hardly any different. After all, these wars, torture chambers (which are no longer critiqued in the same manner as the Hitler's pogrom despite resemblances), and the new age, unprecedented media management, apart from a process of subtle politics that keeps criticality of general mass at bay, are meant for whom. Whose interest do they serve? Can they be understood in the simple rhetoric of annual fiestas at Porto Alegre or Mumbai? How can we trace the underlying logic and dynamic process of the protests, repression and imperialism today? These are some of the many questions that a recent anthology of articles published by Aakar Books, Delhi tries to raise. It's back cover reads: "The God's Cowboy Warrior holds world to ransom. While, Green and Saffron guards all play their part in this Grand Inquisition, extending and intensifying it. The papers in this collection grounding themselves in diverse Marxist traditions are united in their pursuit to understand the ongoing political conflicts around the globe. Imperialism and all its de-humanized representations are realizations of the systemic logic of capitalism. If alternative has to be anti-capitalist, its evolving forms/ contents have to be identified. One cannot simply go on rhetoricising ad infinitum - "another world possible". Even if we refrain from identifying that 'world', the system will define it in its own way. "Anti-capitalist indifference" leads to barbaric conclusions, reflected in nationalist vandalism of RSS and Shiv Sena in India, Al Qaeda in the Middle East, anti-immigrant racist resurgence in the "advanced" societies - "anti-capitalist capitalism". There is always a danger of being trapped in the systemic dungeon of mystifications reproducing the bourgeois society if the processes leading towards it are not comprehended; and it needs courage to break that trap. The Argentine, Venezuelan, Mexican and Bolivian upheavals and the officialization of sections of the dissent require explanation. Here, we have some representative Marxist modes of understanding the politics in present day Capitalism, i.e., the politics of Imperialism and forces against it." Title: The Politics of Imperialism and its Counterstrategies Editors: Pratysuh Chandra, Anuradha Ghosh and Ravi Kumar Contributors: Samir Amin, Massimo De Angelis, Werner Bonefeld, Ronald Chilcote. Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, John Bellamy Foster, John Holloway, Nathalia E. Jaramillo, Doug Lorimer, Peter Mclaren, Prabhat Patnaik, James Petras, William K. Tabb Price: Rs.200 (PB); Rs.675 (HB) Publisher: Aakar Books (aakarb at del2.vsnl.net.in) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040609/5c58dc13/attachment.html From atrehan at sarai.net Wed Jun 9 17:37:43 2004 From: atrehan at sarai.net (Amitabh Trehaan) Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 17:37:43 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Mail about a Hero Message-ID: <40C6FD8F.50803@sarai.net> Hi, heres a mail I got: >Hello Guys this mail is about one of the Great son of >Mother India. >So please take some time from ur busy schedule >and read it with a >great sense of Respect. > >During The Attack on Akshardham temple on 24th Septmeber 2002 this >Brave >man fought the Greatest battle of this life.. Yes he was the N.S.G. >Commando Late Mr.Surjan Singh who sacrificed his life for the Nation. >Sadly On 19th May 2004 he Lost the Toughest and Longest battle against >Life..Exactly after 600 Days being in Coma he lost this life. The >Bullete >Which hits him in the head made him Unconcious for almost 600 days.His >Family members were hoping that one day their Hero will open his eyes >but >he didn't.It was the Longest Wait for the family members of this Brave >Man.. >When the whole india is busy in Guessing abt Who will be the Next PM of >the Country.. > Will it be Sonia or will it be Manmohan singh,This man was fighting >his Last battle. > But it's so Sad that in the hype of all the Political Drama, the >News abt his Death was Lost like >a Niddle in a Grass.Not even the Leading News Papers & So Called >Best News Channels of india which Works on 24 X 7 basis, were Failed >to >Highlight this storyof a Brave Man. Unfortunately It was some where on >the >middle page of Some newspaper.....This was the Reward for the Brave >task >for which he lost his life.. > >Besides his Family members, Only one thing is there >with him During these Toughtest 600 days.It was there >near his bed till the last Moment.Can you Guess what >is thing?............... > >It was the "Tiranga",Yes our National Flag which was >Waving and >Saluting him for his Great Cause..Absolutely No words >can Suffice our >Gratitude towards him..So Pls forward this mail to as >many people as >you can. This is the only way we can Salute his >Bravery... > >Jai Hind From ritika at sarai.net Thu Jun 10 13:47:36 2004 From: ritika at sarai.net (Ritika) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 13:47:36 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] on going slaughterhouse research Message-ID: <40C81920.2060306@sarai.net> hi, recently i re-read a chapter of this book by - William Cronon: Nature's Metropolis – Chicago and the Great West. I re-read as it made more sense to me and i could find more similarities in what he had written his book and what i have observed in my ongoing fieldwork. What this particular chapter of Cronon's work does is that it gives an environmental perspective on the history of Chicago - through the case of the stockyard and meat trade. The excerpts of the chapter have been added in my blog. http://blog.sarai.net/users/ritika Feel free to pass the blog link to people you think might be interested in this work or are doing something similar... Cheers Ritika From simon at lipparosa.org Thu Jun 10 20:22:14 2004 From: simon at lipparosa.org (Simon Yuill) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 15:52:14 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] apologies for virus Message-ID: Hi, Apologies for this "call for entries" email that keeps popping up on this list in my name. I originally sent the message back in February or so but it appears to have been picked up and propagated by a virus. The email addresses that it is being sent under are not ones that I use. As far as I can tell the virus itself is not on my system as I have had no other incidences of this happening (nothing comes up on a virus check and I don't run Windows). However, I am going to temporarily unsubscribe from the list and suggest everyone just deletes any messages appearing under my name for the time being - perhaps the list mod could put a block on them even? best wishes, Si. PS - any comments please send to me directly. From definetime at rediffmail.com Fri Jun 11 08:43:53 2004 From: definetime at rediffmail.com (definetime at rediffmail.com) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 03:13:53 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Reader-list] Guardian Unlimited: Art becomes the next suspect in America's 9/11 paranoia Message-ID: <20040611031353.BB6C72016@mussel.gul3.gnl> Sanjay Ghosh spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it. To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk Art becomes the next suspect in America's 9/11 paranoia Gary Younge in Buffalo Friday June 11 2004 The Guardian On May 10 Steven Kurtz went to bed a married art professor. On May 11 he woke up a widower. By the afternoon he was under federal investigation for bioterrorism. What began as a personal tragedy for Mr Kurtz has turned into what many believe is, at best, an overreaction prompted by 9/11 paranoia and, at worst, a politically motivated attempt to silence a radical artist. Several of Mr Kurtz's colleagues and artistic collaborators have been subpoenaed and a date for a federal grand jury hearing set for Tuesday. Both artist and his art are set to go on trial for their alleged links with terrorism. The ordeal started when Mr Kurtz, who teaches at the University at Buffalo, New York state, called the emergency services when he woke up to find Hope, his wife of 25 years, had stopped breathing. A paramedic who came to his house saw laboratory equipment used in Mr Kurtz's art work. Within hours agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force were combing his house and had seized his books, personal papers, computer as well as his work which have still not been returned. Hope, it transpired, had died of a heart failure which no one suggests had anything to do with Mr Kurtz or his work. But as her body lay in the house Mr Kurtz, 46, was whisked off to be questioned for two days while his home was cordoned off and searched. "It's a complete fishing expedition," says Mr Kurtz's lawyer, Paul Cambria. "There's no question that it's a paranoid overreaction that would never have happened before 9/11. I only hope that it is not simply aimed at trying to silence his message or the methods he's using to convey his message." The FBI refuses to comment. Mr Kurtz, who is not speaking to the press, is part of the Critical Art Ensemble, "dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory". His art often involves blending biology with agricultural issues. In 2002 his exhibit Molecular Invasion, a statement against genetically modified crops, created a display of small soy, corn and canola plants growing under large incubating lamps. Other exhibits allowed visitors to watch bacteria grow in petri dishes. "He's trying to change the world through his work and his discourse," says Adele Henderson, the head of the art department at the University at Buffalo. The New York-based writer and artist Greg Sholette says: "His art itself is going to be on trial. The Critical Art Ensemble has a strong tradition of critiquing capitalism and pushing the edges through its art but always within constitutional boundaries." When the police came to Mr Kurtz's house they found equipment used for extracting and amplifying DNA, as well as three types of bacteria - prompting bioterrorism fears. "He is obviously not someone who is attempting to make a weapon," says Mr Cambria. "He explained that he uses the equipment for his art." The subpoenas say the FBI is seeking charges under section 175 of the US Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which has been expanded by the Patriot Act. It prohibits the possession of "any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system" without the justification of "prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose". Mr Cambria argues that Mr Kurtz's work "obviously" comes under the last two categories. "I know everything we did was legal," said Beatriz da Costa, a member of the CAE who says FBI agents followed her to an art show in Massachusetts to serve her a subpoena. "I can only think they are trying to intimidate us and maybe make us an example." Ms da Costa, a professor at the University of California, says everything found in the house has been exhibited in public before. Those close to Mr Kurtz or the case believe the case has spun out of control and has potentially huge ramifications. "I feel harassed and hassled," Ms Da Costa says. "But mostly I feel sorry for Steve Kurtz because he lost his wife, and his life has been a nightmare ever since. And he didn't even have time to grieve." Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited From definetime at rediffmail.com Fri Jun 11 12:55:59 2004 From: definetime at rediffmail.com (definetime at rediffmail.com) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 07:25:59 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Reader-list] Guardian Unlimited: Art becomes the next suspect in America's 9/11 paranoia Message-ID: <20040611072559.0A283201E@mussel.gul3.gnl> Sanjay Ghosh spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it. To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk Art becomes the next suspect in America's 9/11 paranoia Gary Younge in Buffalo Friday June 11 2004 The Guardian On May 10 Steven Kurtz went to bed a married art professor. On May 11 he woke up a widower. By the afternoon he was under federal investigation for bioterrorism. What began as a personal tragedy for Mr Kurtz has turned into what many believe is, at best, an overreaction prompted by 9/11 paranoia and, at worst, a politically motivated attempt to silence a radical artist. Several of Mr Kurtz's colleagues and artistic collaborators have been subpoenaed and a date for a federal grand jury hearing set for Tuesday. Both artist and his art are set to go on trial for their alleged links with terrorism. The ordeal started when Mr Kurtz, who teaches at the University at Buffalo, New York state, called the emergency services when he woke up to find Hope, his wife of 25 years, had stopped breathing. A paramedic who came to his house saw laboratory equipment used in Mr Kurtz's art work. Within hours agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force were combing his house and had seized his books, personal papers, computer as well as his work which have still not been returned. Hope, it transpired, had died of a heart failure which no one suggests had anything to do with Mr Kurtz or his work. But as her body lay in the house Mr Kurtz, 46, was whisked off to be questioned for two days while his home was cordoned off and searched. "It's a complete fishing expedition," says Mr Kurtz's lawyer, Paul Cambria. "There's no question that it's a paranoid overreaction that would never have happened before 9/11. I only hope that it is not simply aimed at trying to silence his message or the methods he's using to convey his message." The FBI refuses to comment. Mr Kurtz, who is not speaking to the press, is part of the Critical Art Ensemble, "dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory". His art often involves blending biology with agricultural issues. In 2002 his exhibit Molecular Invasion, a statement against genetically modified crops, created a display of small soy, corn and canola plants growing under large incubating lamps. Other exhibits allowed visitors to watch bacteria grow in petri dishes. "He's trying to change the world through his work and his discourse," says Adele Henderson, the head of the art department at the University at Buffalo. The New York-based writer and artist Greg Sholette says: "His art itself is going to be on trial. The Critical Art Ensemble has a strong tradition of critiquing capitalism and pushing the edges through its art but always within constitutional boundaries." When the police came to Mr Kurtz's house they found equipment used for extracting and amplifying DNA, as well as three types of bacteria - prompting bioterrorism fears. "He is obviously not someone who is attempting to make a weapon," says Mr Cambria. "He explained that he uses the equipment for his art." The subpoenas say the FBI is seeking charges under section 175 of the US Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which has been expanded by the Patriot Act. It prohibits the possession of "any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system" without the justification of "prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose". Mr Cambria argues that Mr Kurtz's work "obviously" comes under the last two categories. "I know everything we did was legal," said Beatriz da Costa, a member of the CAE who says FBI agents followed her to an art show in Massachusetts to serve her a subpoena. "I can only think they are trying to intimidate us and maybe make us an example." Ms da Costa, a professor at the University of California, says everything found in the house has been exhibited in public before. Those close to Mr Kurtz or the case believe the case has spun out of control and has potentially huge ramifications. "I feel harassed and hassled," Ms Da Costa says. "But mostly I feel sorry for Steve Kurtz because he lost his wife, and his life has been a nightmare ever since. And he didn't even have time to grieve." Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited From jeebesh at sarai.net Fri Jun 11 17:40:33 2004 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 17:40:33 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Politics of Imperialism and CounterStrategies In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <40C9A139.10603@sarai.net> Dear Ravi, What exactly do you mean by `imperialism`? What is the social relation or relation of production that you specifically mark as `imperialism`? Are you refreing to the processes of capital's expansion, it's social relation and it's terroritorial ambitions, as imperialism? If, so why the need for this term? best Jeebesh Ravi Kumar wrote: > Friends, > > The Iraq War has been an instance of the new face of imperialism. > There is a deeper process which culminates into such obnoxious > manifestations. It emerges from the dynamics of capitalist > development, from its desire to sustain its hegemony and expand. The > two processes may appear as separate or as simultaneous. This > imperialism bases itself on ideological terrain of local as well as > global politics. Some might argue that the two are hardly any > different. After all, these wars, torture chambers (which are no > longer critiqued in the same manner as the Hitler’s pogrom despite > resemblances), and the new age, unprecedented media management, apart > from a process of subtle politics that keeps criticality of general > mass at bay, are meant for whom. Whose interest do they serve? Can > they be understood in the simple rhetoric of annual fiestas at Porto > Alegre or Mumbai? How can we trace the underlying logic and dynamic > process of the protests, repression and imperialism today? These are > some of the many questions that a recent anthology of articles > published by Aakar Books, Delhi tries to raise. It’s back cover reads: > > // > > /“The God’s Cowboy Warrior holds world to ransom. While, Green and > Saffron guards all play their part in this Grand Inquisition, > extending and intensifying it./ > > The papers in this collection grounding themselves in diverse Marxist > traditions are united in their pursuit to understand the ongoing > political conflicts around the globe. Imperialism and all its > de-humanized representations are realizations of the systemic logic of > capitalism. If alternative has to be anti-capitalist, its evolving > forms/ contents have to be identified. One cannot simply go on > rhetoricising ad infinitum – “another world possible”. Even if we > refrain from identifying that ‘world’, the system will define it in > its own way. “Anti-capitalist indifference” leads to barbaric > conclusions, reflected in nationalist vandalism of RSS and Shiv Sena > in India, Al Qaeda in the Middle East, anti-immigrant racist > resurgence in the “advanced” societies – “anti-capitalist capitalism”. > There is always a danger of being trapped in the systemic dungeon of > mystifications reproducing the bourgeois society if the processes > leading towards it are not comprehended; and it needs courage to break > that trap. The Argentine, Venezuelan, Mexican and Bolivian upheavals > and the officialization of sections of the dissent require > explanation. Here, we have some representative Marxist modes of > understanding the politics in present day Capitalism, i.e., the > politics of Imperialism and forces against it.” > > *Title: The Politics of Imperialism and its Counterstrategies* > > *Editors:* Pratysuh Chandra, Anuradha Ghosh and Ravi Kumar > > *Contributors:* Samir Amin, Massimo De Angelis, Werner Bonefeld, > Ronald Chilcote. Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, John Bellamy Foster, John > Holloway, Nathalia E. Jaramillo, Doug Lorimer, Peter Mclaren, Prabhat > Patnaik, James Petras, William K. Tabb > > *Price:* Rs.200 (PB); Rs.675 (HB) > > *Publisher:* Aakar Books (aakarb at del2.vsnl.net.in) > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_________________________________________ >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 vidyashah at hotmail.com Tue Jun 15 12:50:07 2004 From: vidyashah at hotmail.com (vidya shah) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 07:20:07 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Film review Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040615/cdc4558b/attachment.html From abhitamhane at gmail.com Tue Jun 15 13:12:05 2004 From: abhitamhane at gmail.com (abhijeet tamhane) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 13:12:05 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Film review In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I presume the the poster of this mail is irked by equating women's groups' protest with the right-wing politics. But in the post, is it the right-wing stance that compells to call the film "rubbish", without watching it? One does not know why any group should oppose lesbianism PER SE. Is it a RIGHT-WING women's group that prostested against the film? As far as "rubbish" goes, isn't any Karan Johar film "rubbish"? -- abhijeet tamhane ----- Original Message ----- From: vidya shah Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 07:20:07 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Film review To: reader-list at sarai.net Review of the competely regressive pronographic flick on "lesbianim" As in this review, it gets a bit problematic when the press clubs two sets of protests together - activists from the right wing and the women's groups definitely have different reasons for which they protest against this kind of rubbish! 'Girlfriend' causes India storm ** A new film about lesbians in India is criticised by Hindu hardliners and women's groups. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/3805905.stm > ________________________________ Pay Cash on delivery on lakhs of products. Only on Baazee.com noname - 1K Download From shveta at sarai.net Tue Jun 15 15:04:47 2004 From: shveta at sarai.net (Shveta Sarda) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 15:04:47 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Film review In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <40CEC2B7.7010403@sarai.net> FWD MSG... Subject: Girlfriend Protest From: "Humjinsi Cluster" Dear all, This is an urgent and serious matter. Tejal and Sheba saw the premier of the film ‘Girl Friend’ yesterday. The film portrays Isha Koppikar as a sexually abused, violent, obsessive, killer, psychopath lesbian. The film claims to address the issue of ‘lesbianism’ but operates from a totally homophobic, hetero- patriarchal viewpoint. It will do unspeakable damage for the movement and simply put, it is downright dangerous for those of us trying to survive in an already hateful world. The movie tears away the anonymity of lesbian existence; the word lesbian is actually used in the film and the image created is a ghastly and revolting one. The character is not a lesbian, she is a woman hunter, a man hater, there are so many things in the film that are absolutely despicable that one cannot even begin to describe them. The absolute folly is that this movie is going to show in movie theatres all across the country. So while the film capitalizes on the lesbian angle (there is even a sleazy bedroom scene) the axe comes down so fast and so hard on the lesbian (she dies a gruesome death, which is obviously retribution) that there is not even a sliver of doubt. Women who hate men become lesbians- who are bloodthirsty, abusive killer- who finally bring on their own annihilation. We have to take a stand and make a statement against this film and we have to come up with strategies to make a strong protest. We urge all of you to make time and suffer through the film this weekend so that we are well aware of what we are up against. Tejal has reviewed this film for MID-DAY. What she has to say and that reflects how the rest of us feel as well, is written below. Do go through it as well. We urge everyone to come together. We will continue posting minutes of every meeting and action taken. In Solidarity, Shruti, Tejal, Sheba, Aditi Humjinsi From the fire into the frying pan Dear Mr. Karan Razdan (director of Girlfriend), This was supposed to be a film review. If the Shiva Sena and the Bajrang Dal go on a rampage yet again, to protest your film ‘Girlfriend’, ask for the film to be banned or sent back to the censor board, I might even forgive you. But I know, that six years after Deepa Mehta’s film ‘Fire’ was released, the right wing will see no reason to protest your film because your portrayal of a lesbian as ‘a psychopath, sexually abused, man hating, murderer and killer’ fits just fine into their hetero-patriarchal agenda of portraying lesbians & gays as freaks, abnormal and as people who must die at the end of the film, so they are aptly punished for their unnatural existence. On the out set, it must be stated that the ‘Lesbian’ issue is a hot topic; it attracts audiences, creates a curiosity and definitely impacts the box office collections. I mean, if you were to tell me that you made this film because you care so much about lesbians and the issues affecting them, that you wanted to bring this issue into the public realm, into every Indian household, surely you mean it as a devastatingly, nasty joke! Your film is a presentation of the worst possible misnomers (I consciously refrain from using the word ‘stereotype’) about anyone who may be attracted to a person of the same gender. The male, macho but normal (read heterosexual) hero has no qualms about playing a hyper-exaggerated, sissy, gay man when he needs to seduce the simple minded, generous at heart, ‘one-night’ lesbian, but basically reformed, heterosexual heroine, Amrita Arora. The straight heroine who is being continuously misled by the lesbian villain must be saved by the good-boy-hero. In the end, values of heterosexual love, marriage and ‘normal’ families must be upheld. The character of Tanya, acted by Isha Koppikar is nothing short of a ‘lesbian animal’ aided as it is by the background score to help us see her as a wild, almost cannibalistic man-eating/man-hating woman who dares to behave like a man, a Sahela. All this of course is explained by the simple truth that she was sexually abused as a child simultaneously implying that what makes women ‘this way’ is possibly, abuse at the hands of men! After watching a film like this, it is impossible for anyone to think of ‘women who love women’ as normal human beings with two hands and two feet, who may be a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a neighbour, a grand mother and least of all a caring lover. It must be pointed out that under the section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are looked upon as/considered criminals, existing against the order of nature. Hey! and if you thought it was just about ‘those guys & their lifestyles’, let me remind you that anytime you have non peno-viginal penetrative sex, you are as much of a criminal and can be put in the prison for 7 years or heavily fined or both. Mr. Razdan, the next time you say that you are taking a neutral position in this film and portraying the case of just one lesbian, let me remind you precisely, that the fiction you are choosing is a cleverly developed and thought out story that carries a clear message. This message is a dangerous and retrogressive one. It is a message that endangers the life of any woman who may look or behave boyish, any woman who chooses to experiment with her sexuality, and any woman who asserts her right to different choices, even those women who are good friends and hold hands when they walk down the street. Welcome to the world of blatant hate crimes based on your sexual and gender orientation! As men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, films like these take us many steps backwards. More than two decades of work done by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender groups, feminists groups, human rights groups, women’s groups and progressive artists groups, is going to suffer as this film is commercially released in every part of India from small towns to big cities. Every time I hear of another lesbian suicide, another girl who hanged herself for being teased about her ‘best’ friend, another hijra woman raped in police custody, another woman sent for shock treatment and aversion therapy to cure her of her homosexuality, another couple put under house arrest by their parents when they find out about their same-sex love, I will think of this film and I will be reminded of the power that Bollywood wields in creating a mass consciousness of one sort or the other. In this case, it will be a conscious, articulated, homophobia. Thank-you very much Mr. Razdan, but we, as progressive citizens are not interested in lip-service. I can assure you of one thing: the homosexual community in this country would much rather live in quiet anonymity than be mis-represented in such a ghastly, contorted fashion. Even a little bit of research on your part would have revealed that there are at least three active lesbian and bisexual women’s groups in Bombay city alone and hundreds of ‘women who love women’ leading their lives openly and happily but that’s only possible when one makes a film on a hot issue (like lesbianism is in India) when you foresee beyond profits and publicity and see, real lives and real people who will live the consequences of your doing. It’s time that we stopped separating the issues that films address and their impact on the audience/citizen within a given socio-political context/environment. It is also high time that we stand in protest against any film that causes damage to the rights of any minority group. Tejal Shah (The writer is a visual artist and the co-founder, organiser and curator of Larzish…tremors of a revolution, International Film festival of Sexuality & Gender Plurality, India since 2003) abhijeet tamhane wrote: > I presume the the poster of this mail is irked by equating women's > groups' protest with the right-wing politics. > > But in the post, is it the right-wing stance that compells to call the > film "rubbish", without watching it? One does not know why any group > should oppose lesbianism PER SE. Is it a RIGHT-WING women's group that > prostested against the film? > > As far as "rubbish" goes, isn't any Karan Johar film "rubbish"? > > -- abhijeet tamhane > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: vidya shah > Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 07:20:07 +0000 > Subject: [Reader-list] Film review > To: reader-list at sarai.net > > > > Review of the competely regressive pronographic flick on "lesbianim" > As in this review, it gets a bit problematic when the press clubs two > sets of protests together - activists from the right wing and the > women's groups definitely have different reasons for which they > protest against this kind of rubbish! > > 'Girlfriend' causes India storm ** > A new film about lesbians in India is criticised by Hindu hardliners > and women's groups. > < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/3805905.stm > > > From joy at sarai.net Tue Jun 15 23:51:52 2004 From: joy at sarai.net (joy at sarai.net) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 20:21:52 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] Disturbed by browsing Message-ID: <23000e869756e154bcfabf659741d269@sarai.net> I was browsing through the net and came accross the Falung Gong site. The image of life in China that emerges from this site looks really tough. The link is http://www.clearharmony.net Also enlosed one of the articles that perticularly interested me. Best Joy ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ No Torture too Extreme – Labour Camps in China http://www.clearharmony.net/articles/200204/4176.html By a practitioner from China Fushun Forced Labour Camp hired thugs to persecute [Falun] Dafa practitioners and recruited former practitioners who have gone astray due to brainwashing and torture (hereafter referred to as "collaborators") released from Masanjia Labour Camp, intending to con and deceive practitioners. Led by evil police officer Chen, the collaborators set up "work shifts," enjoyed free lunches, and even received monthly "bonuses." The following are accounts of their brutal persecutory crimes. Hitting the foreheads: While holding the practitioners down or clutching their hair, the scoundrels beat practitioners' foreheads for an extended period of time until blood gathers around the eye sockets and at the corners of the mouth. Afterwards, they framed the practitioners as demons, and the collaborators dressed themselves up as witches or sorcerers to severely beat the practitioners, with the excuse of "exorcising demons." One day the City Council came to inspect the camp. At that time six practitioners suffered black eyes, purple lips, and swollen faces due to torture. The labour camp feared the outside world finding out, so they hid the practitioners in a small room. Psychological manipulation: After almost beating the practitioners to unconsciousness, the collaborators gripped the practitioners' hands and forced them to write "repentance letters." While writing, they slowly dictated the words, saying that it was the practitioners themselves who wrote the letter. Their intention was to make temporarily unaware practitioners believe that they actually wrote the letter themselves. Also, practitioners suffered torture in the forms of crouching, bending over, and "flying." Some collaborators in the female brigade sadistically beat, cursed, and tortured practitioners without regard to basic human morals, conduct, or retribution. The forced labour camp also forced the men and the women to stay in the same cell. As a persecution technique the female practitioners were sent to the male ward, and the male practitioners were sent to the female ward. The inmates would scream loudly into the practitioner's ears and pull their ears. Others cells would echo the screams, and the sounds travelled very far. The prisoners used all kinds of degrading methods, such as hitting the temples, beating with sticks, bodily torture, group coercion, and slapping, to force practitioners to conform. They also tossed practitioners into the air and banged their heads against the wall. The police beat and kicked practitioners in the name of "maintaining order." They required the male practitioners to stay in the female ward where they endured 24-hours of beating, torture, and restlessness. In dealing with hunger strikes, supervisor Wu declared in a meeting: "It is okay if they foam from the mouths after three to five days of being on hunger strikes. Afterwards, their faces will turn red, but it's only dangerous if they turn black." An elderly practitioner in her sixties had been on hunger strike for 11 days. The collaborators forced her to bend over and imposed her to write a "repentance letter." Another female practitioner suffered kidney failure during a hunger strike, and died two days later after being sent home. A male practitioner sustained nervous system damage, and another female practitioner had an injury to the brain after beating. At the Fuxin Forced Labour Camp, male [Falun] Dafa practitioners were forced to perform heavy physical labour like loading and unloading train cars. Female practitioners didn't receive enough food to fill their stomachs. After October of 1999, a meal consisted only of a piece of rice cake smaller than a cigarette carton, and a small piece of pickled turnip. The police often abused those on hunger strikes by recklessly using electric batons. During the first half of 2001, newly recruited police officers frequently shocked practitioners with electric batons without reason. Using two electric batons, some policemen would often pace around looking for the most frivolous faults among practitioners, and then unreasonably shock them with batons. In late June, six practitioners on hunger strike were forced to join the second brigade and do work outside. The practitioners were dragged like sacks all over the place and into truck beds where they were crammed and stepped on. When they arrived at the construction site, the practitioners were pushed into a shack where assistant supervisor Xin and four to five other policemen beat them with rods, and took turns shocking them using four electric batons. On the next day the shocking continued. The police had completely lost their minds and their actions were completely without human nature. They feared that the voltage wasn't high enough, they feared failing to shock the most sensitive places, and they feared that the clubs didn't inflict enough injury. With four electric batons, two would be placed at the temples, another at the back of the head, and the last one at the navel, genitals, or the under arms. When the practitioners passed out, they'd wake them up to resume the torturing. Some forced labour camps, in order to destroy the indestructible faith of the practitioners on hunger strikes, force-fed large amounts of salt or white wine. The staff at Fuxin Labour Camp was even more heartless, as the staff director announced one day that the Party Committee had decided to "rescue" the practitioners. They ordered the inmates of the labour camp to pinch practitioners' noses, and stuff their mouths with dirty rags. Using a needle they injected high-concentration brine (with salt solids) into their mouths while the inmates compressed practitioners' rib cages and lungs. Most of the brine went into the lungs. When they passed out, the police tilted practitioners' heads forward to dispose the brine and afterwards, re-injected it. In the end, Dafa practitioners' unshakable faith still was not weakened. The leftover brine was dumped into the pants of practitioners (as further degradation). Police at the Huludao Forced Labour Camp beat a Dafa practitioner unconscious for 14 hours, and then didn't send the practitioner to a hospital until he failed to react to electric shocks. Seeing how unshakable Dafa practitioners were, they poured water onto practitioners and used five to six electric batons at the same time. Each practitioner on hunger strike was force fed a bag of salt. In March of 2001 practitioner Chen Dewen died at the scene as a result of force-feeding. Later, they chained the practitioners on hunger strike to a bed, and removed all the board pieces except the ones under the head, feet, and the torso, so the majority of the body was unsupported (some beds in China are supported by pieces of wooden boards across the length of the bed). This lasted for over a dozen days. After two months of being chained to the bed, some practitioners were unable to move their arms. Some couldn't walk after 24 days, and others suffered numbness after 35 days. In treating the most compassionate and tolerant Dafa practitioners who don't ever resort to violence or bad words, these evil police have completely lost their human nature. In January of 2000, before the dismissal of the female brigade at Chaoyang Forced Labour Camp, a supervisor escalated the persecution of Dafa practitioners. After the female practitioners were sent to Masanjia Labour Camp, this supervisor received due retribution, and was hospitalised after a car accident. People often said, "It's not that due retribution won't come, but it's because the time hasn't arrived. When the moment comes, everything will be repaid." Chaoyang Labour Camp coerced practitioners to engage in extreme physical labour -- everyday a six-meter deep foundation excavation must be completed. The scoundrels tortured the unwavering practitioners, and forced them to stand, crouch, and line up against the wall (practitioners had to raise their hands and arms upwards against the wall, head down, and stand with lower backs against the wall). They also ordered the inmates to monitor and harass practitioners. In December of 2000, Police Captain Gao and five other police guards forced the practitioners to strip, while whipping them with belts and beating them with wooden boards. A practitioner's eardrum was broken, an elderly practitioner in her sixties fainted, and another's face became swollen after "standing against the wall," all at the hands of the evil police. The police ordered a few inmates to monitor, cruelly beat, and torture Dafa practitioners. Among the perpetrators, policeman Jia died of drug overdose in February of 2001, and policeman Zhang became mentally retarded. Many forced labour camps try to attack Dafa practitioners because of "orders from above." This is the Chinese legal system that Jiang imposes, and this the real portrait of human rights in China! Published: Wednesday 17th April 2002 From Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com Tue Jun 15 19:29:09 2004 From: Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com (Asthana, Rahul) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 09:59:09 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Film review Message-ID: "This is an urgent and serious matter." Opposition for this piece of crap? Let the front benchers have their titillation and it die a natural death. Let there be no exceptions to the freedom of expression. If someone makes an opinion based on this movie they deserve it.If someone lets their lives be affected by such people, they deserve that too. -----Original Message----- From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Shveta Sarda Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2004 5:35 AM Cc: reader-list at sarai.net Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Film review FWD MSG... Subject: Girlfriend Protest From: "Humjinsi Cluster" Dear all, This is an urgent and serious matter. Tejal and Sheba saw the premier of the film ‘Girl Friend’ yesterday. The film portrays Isha Koppikar as a sexually abused, violent, obsessive, killer, psychopath lesbian. The film claims to address the issue of ‘lesbianism’ but operates from a totally homophobic, hetero- patriarchal viewpoint. It will do unspeakable damage for the movement and simply put, it is downright dangerous for those of us trying to survive in an already hateful world. The movie tears away the anonymity of lesbian existence; the word lesbian is actually used in the film and the image created is a ghastly and revolting one. The character is not a lesbian, she is a woman hunter, a man hater, there are so many things in the film that are absolutely despicable that one cannot even begin to describe them. The absolute folly is that this movie is going to show in movie theatres all across the country. So while the film capitalizes on the lesbian angle (there is even a sleazy bedroom scene) the axe comes down so fast and so hard on the lesbian (she dies a gruesome death, which is obviously retribution) that there is not even a sliver of doubt. Women who hate men become lesbians- who are bloodthirsty, abusive killer- who finally bring on their own annihilation. We have to take a stand and make a statement against this film and we have to come up with strategies to make a strong protest. We urge all of you to make time and suffer through the film this weekend so that we are well aware of what we are up against. Tejal has reviewed this film for MID-DAY. What she has to say and that reflects how the rest of us feel as well, is written below. Do go through it as well. We urge everyone to come together. We will continue posting minutes of every meeting and action taken. In Solidarity, Shruti, Tejal, Sheba, Aditi Humjinsi From the fire into the frying pan Dear Mr. Karan Razdan (director of Girlfriend), This was supposed to be a film review. If the Shiva Sena and the Bajrang Dal go on a rampage yet again, to protest your film ‘Girlfriend’, ask for the film to be banned or sent back to the censor board, I might even forgive you. But I know, that six years after Deepa Mehta’s film ‘Fire’ was released, the right wing will see no reason to protest your film because your portrayal of a lesbian as ‘a psychopath, sexually abused, man hating, murderer and killer’ fits just fine into their hetero-patriarchal agenda of portraying lesbians & gays as freaks, abnormal and as people who must die at the end of the film, so they are aptly punished for their unnatural existence. On the out set, it must be stated that the ‘Lesbian’ issue is a hot topic; it attracts audiences, creates a curiosity and definitely impacts the box office collections. I mean, if you were to tell me that you made this film because you care so much about lesbians and the issues affecting them, that you wanted to bring this issue into the public realm, into every Indian household, surely you mean it as a devastatingly, nasty joke! Your film is a presentation of the worst possible misnomers (I consciously refrain from using the word ‘stereotype’) about anyone who may be attracted to a person of the same gender. The male, macho but normal (read heterosexual) hero has no qualms about playing a hyper-exaggerated, sissy, gay man when he needs to seduce the simple minded, generous at heart, ‘one-night’ lesbian, but basically reformed, heterosexual heroine, Amrita Arora. The straight heroine who is being continuously misled by the lesbian villain must be saved by the good-boy-hero. In the end, values of heterosexual love, marriage and ‘normal’ families must be upheld. The character of Tanya, acted by Isha Koppikar is nothing short of a ‘lesbian animal’ aided as it is by the background score to help us see her as a wild, almost cannibalistic man-eating/man-hating woman who dares to behave like a man, a Sahela. All this of course is explained by the simple truth that she was sexually abused as a child simultaneously implying that what makes women ‘this way’ is possibly, abuse at the hands of men! After watching a film like this, it is impossible for anyone to think of ‘women who love women’ as normal human beings with two hands and two feet, who may be a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a neighbour, a grand mother and least of all a caring lover. It must be pointed out that under the section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are looked upon as/considered criminals, existing against the order of nature. Hey! and if you thought it was just about ‘those guys & their lifestyles’, let me remind you that anytime you have non peno-viginal penetrative sex, you are as much of a criminal and can be put in the prison for 7 years or heavily fined or both. Mr. Razdan, the next time you say that you are taking a neutral position in this film and portraying the case of just one lesbian, let me remind you precisely, that the fiction you are choosing is a cleverly developed and thought out story that carries a clear message. This message is a dangerous and retrogressive one. It is a message that endangers the life of any woman who may look or behave boyish, any woman who chooses to experiment with her sexuality, and any woman who asserts her right to different choices, even those women who are good friends and hold hands when they walk down the street. Welcome to the world of blatant hate crimes based on your sexual and gender orientation! As men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, films like these take us many steps backwards. More than two decades of work done by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender groups, feminists groups, human rights groups, women’s groups and progressive artists groups, is going to suffer as this film is commercially released in every part of India from small towns to big cities. Every time I hear of another lesbian suicide, another girl who hanged herself for being teased about her ‘best’ friend, another hijra woman raped in police custody, another woman sent for shock treatment and aversion therapy to cure her of her homosexuality, another couple put under house arrest by their parents when they find out about their same-sex love, I will think of this film and I will be reminded of the power that Bollywood wields in creating a mass consciousness of one sort or the other. In this case, it will be a conscious, articulated, homophobia. Thank-you very much Mr. Razdan, but we, as progressive citizens are not interested in lip-service. I can assure you of one thing: the homosexual community in this country would much rather live in quiet anonymity than be mis-represented in such a ghastly, contorted fashion. Even a little bit of research on your part would have revealed that there are at least three active lesbian and bisexual women’s groups in Bombay city alone and hundreds of ‘women who love women’ leading their lives openly and happily but that’s only possible when one makes a film on a hot issue (like lesbianism is in India) when you foresee beyond profits and publicity and see, real lives and real people who will live the consequences of your doing. It’s time that we stopped separating the issues that films address and their impact on the audience/citizen within a given socio-political context/environment. It is also high time that we stand in protest against any film that causes damage to the rights of any minority group. Tejal Shah (The writer is a visual artist and the co-founder, organiser and curator of Larzish tremors of a revolution, International Film festival of Sexuality & Gender Plurality, India since 2003) abhijeet tamhane wrote: > I presume the the poster of this mail is irked by equating women's > groups' protest with the right-wing politics. > > But in the post, is it the right-wing stance that compells to call the > film "rubbish", without watching it? One does not know why any group > should oppose lesbianism PER SE. Is it a RIGHT-WING women's group that > prostested against the film? > > As far as "rubbish" goes, isn't any Karan Johar film "rubbish"? > > -- abhijeet tamhane > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: vidya shah > Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 07:20:07 +0000 > Subject: [Reader-list] Film review > To: reader-list at sarai.net > > > > Review of the competely regressive pronographic flick on "lesbianim" > As in this review, it gets a bit problematic when the press clubs two > sets of protests together - activists from the right wing and the > women's groups definitely have different reasons for which they > protest against this kind of rubbish! > > 'Girlfriend' causes India storm ** > A new film about lesbians in India is criticised by Hindu hardliners > and women's groups. > < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/3805905.stm > > > _________________________________________ 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 zest_india at yahoo.co.in Tue Jun 15 20:37:32 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Shivam=20Vij?=) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 16:07:32 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Final Solution: An invitation Message-ID: <20040615150732.37993.qmail@web8201.mail.in.yahoo.com> [8] INVITATION: You are invited to the following screenings: 1. The Boy in the Branch, 27 mins 2. Men in the Trees, 98 mins Both directed by Lalit Vachani 3. Final Solution, 150 mins [shorter version] Dir: Rakesh Sharma Date: 19th June, 2004, Saturday Time: 2:30 p.m. Venue: Juhu Jagruti Hall, A.J. Commerce College, 1st floor, Opp NM College, Vile Parle West, Mumbai Amrit Gangar This has been organized by various institutions. The idea is to sensitize the middle classes [particularly Gujarati] about Gujarat genocide. o o o o o I am enclosing information about my recent film - Final Solution ( India; 2004; Digital Video format - miniDV; 209 minutes). Awards : Wolfgang Staudte award and Special Jury Award (Netpac), Berlin International film festival (Feb 2004). Silver (Best Doc category)/Humanitarian award, HongKong International film festival. Special Jury Mention, Munich Dokfest. Special Award instituted and given by NRIs for a Secular and Harmonious India (NRI-SAHI), USA. Festivals: Berlinale ( International premiere of the film), HongKong, Fribourg, Hot Docs (Canada), Zanzibar, Durban, Commonwealth film festival (UK), One world filmfest (Prague), Istanbul 1001fest, Singapore, Flanders (Belgium), World Social Forum (Mumbai; Indian premiere), Vikalp (Mumbai filmfest organised by Campaign against Censorship) and several other filmfests. Please let me know whether you will be interested in acquiring a copy of the film for your institution/ library. I'd be very grateful if you could forward information about the film to your colleagues and friends, especially those teaching at Universities or working with institutions/NGOs, asking them to support the film by buying copies. Please note that copies are available at a discount for individuals/ activists/ students. Please also note that the film has distributors in different countries - so, to place an order or for price queries, please send your postal address as well. Regards Rakesh Sharma Final Solution is a study of the politics of hate. Set in Gujarat during the period Feb/March 2002 - July 2003, the film examines the consequences of Hindu-Moslem polarization in the state. Part 1 : Pride and Genocide deals with the genocidal violence against Moslems and its immediate aftermath. It probes the patterns of pre-planned violence by right-wing Hindu cadres which many claim was state-supported, if not state-sponsored. Part 2 : The Terror Trail reconstructs through eyewitness accounts the attack on Gulbarg (Ahmedabad) and acts of barbaric violence against Moslem women at Eral and Delol/Kalol (Panchmahals) even as Chief Minister Modi traverses the state on his Gaurav Yatra. Part 3 : The Hate Mandate documents the poll campaign during the Assembly elections in Gujarat in late 2002. It records in detail the exploitation of the Godhra incident ( in which 58 Hindus were burnt alive) by the right-wing propaganda machinery for electoral gains. Part 4 : Hope and Despair studies the situation after the storm and its impact on Hindus and Moslems - ghettoisation, the call for economic boycott of Moslems and continuing acts of violence more than a year after the carnage. The film is anti-hate/ violence as "those who forget history are condemned to relive it". Dir: Rakesh Sharma Tel : +91 98203 43103 email carnagefilm at yahoo.com / actindia at vsnl.com Final Solution has been shot and edited on DVcam; it is subtitled in English. Copies of the film are available on VHS pal / Video for Rs 2000 for NGOs/ activists groups/ libraries and organisations. Copies are available for Rs 1000 for Individuals and for Rs 600 for students/ grassroots activists. Please mail a bank draft payable at Mumbai favouring Rakesh Sharma to : PO Box 12023, Azad Nagar post office, Mumbai 400053. Rakesh Sharma began his film/TV career in 1986 as an assistant director on Shyam Benegal's Discovery of India. His broadcast industry experience includes the set up/ launch of 3 broadcast channels in India: Channel [V], Star Plus and Vijay TV and several production consultancy assignments. He has now gone back to independent documentary film-making. His last film Aftershocks : The Rough Guide to Democracy won the Best documentary film award at Fribourg, Big Mini-DV and at Big Muddy and won 7 other awards {including the Robert Flaherty prize}at various festivals in USA and Europe during 2002-03. It has been screened at over 90 international film festivals. Event info brought t you by ZEST via SACW ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Tue Jun 15 20:35:32 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Shivam=20Vij?=) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 16:05:32 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Seeking contacts with South Asian Sociologists Message-ID: <20040615150532.97088.qmail@web8206.mail.in.yahoo.com> Seeking contacts with South Asian Sociologists/Anthropologists for Workshop in Delhi in Feb. 2005 ************************************************** From: Ravinder Kaur The Indian Sociological Society, supported by the International Sociology Association, is planning to hold a South Asia Workshop in Feb. 2005 in Delhi. The theme of the workshop is "The State of Sociology: Issues of Relevance and Rigour". As convener of the Workshop I would appreciate information on sociologists/anthroplogists from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka who could participate in this workshop. This workshop seeks to bring together south asian sociologists working out of their own countries. Please reply directly at this address: ravinder_iitd at yahoo.com Ravinder Kaur Convener, South Asia Workshop Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences IIT, Delhi E-mail: ravinder_iitd at yahoo.com This info brought to you by ZEST ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Tue Jun 15 20:40:27 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Shivam=20Vij?=) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 16:10:27 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Wahhabism, feminism and AMU Message-ID: <20040615151027.98138.qmail@web8206.mail.in.yahoo.com> Apologies to those of you who are ZEST members. The Muslim Experience at Aligarh Muslim University By Nazia Y.Izuddin Tribune International / June 9, 2004 http://www.tribune-intl.com/Letters.htm Aligarh Muslim University is a romantic dream for Muslims all over the world. True that in the late 80's, the university, then, the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College, revolutionized education for the backward Muslim community. The founder Sir Syed Ahmad Khan envisioned that this institution would educate men and women who would lead Muslim community to modern thought, liberation and progress. A vision that progressive Muslims globally are still trying to achieve. Whenever I talk about Aligarh Muslim University to its alumni, many have been offended by what they think is criticism by a westernized wannabe-feminist Muslim girl who has forgotten her roots and culture. It has been difficult for me to not express concerns not just as a present student of the institution but also as a member of the Muslim community wanting to uphold the sanctity of an institution as great as AMU. After enough contemplation I have decided to share my experiences even if it may raise discontempt from any quarters. When I joined Aligarh Muslim University, I had in mind a grand central university fulfilling international standards in adult learning. An institution that would expose young men and women to radical thinking and action. Where, the community would find a vent to overcome the backwardness it has been crippled with educationally and socially. Unfortunately my four years has revealed the reasons why we cannot break through the great cultural divide between education and progress. One of the reasons being my gender that pre dominates categories for judgment in the still biased university. It was only after a month in the university that I discovered that classes in bachelors degrees and courses till twelfth grade were separate for men and women. Well the question might be "is this a genuine issue that needs deliberation"? My answer being, yes, it is. The reasons that women still are restricted in Abdullah Hall, an exclusive hall for women, including all facilities from classes to shopping to play grounds is succumbing to the so called Islamic view that women need to be protected. And since the authority, every one from the watchman to the Proctor claim that Aligarh Muslim University upholds Islamic values, they have to cater to women's education within these so-called values. These values made it very difficult for the men to accept my presence in the arts center, in the debating societies that were exclusive to men, the drama club that hadn't cast female roles in years and even the university roads and playgrounds. Women were expected to take rickshaws and not walk. And all the while, you are a subject of scrutiny to male eyes examining righteousness and piety in your clothes, actions and speech. Power has always been a male phenomenon here. They make the rules, to their convenience and enforce it in the guise of Islam and the need for protecting women. Isn't education about equipping individuals to protect and defend themselves. If the system endorses your cripple status, who will liberate you? Here begins the concern to take Aligarh Muslim University for the values that it truly upheld at one point in history. Aligarh Muslim University has never had a female member in the students union. It has never had women representation in intervarsity sports and games competitions, for thirteen long years, women did not represent the university in the national youth festival. It was in 2000, the year I joined college, the secretary of the literary club convinced the Coordinator that the girls could be part of the team. After severe deliberation, finally the university took its first mixed group of men and women. Though it was historical and might sound primitive for an age old institution, the opposition and the criticism and scrutiny the girls had to go through can't be stated in words. We are not talking about a team of students here. But a team of men who have renounced the student status and taken upon themselves to guard women in their university from the clutches of modernity and liberal influences. They would watch whom you talk to, the way you talk and tell you when to move, when to sit and when to eat. When I am at Aligarh Muslim University, I am quite often reminded that I am a girl and how indecent it is for me to be moving with men, even if there is an educational cause. Scared of these value judgments, girl students restrict themselves to their hostels. Which means a life of only lectures and classes in a residential university where a student spends on an average at least three years. I see a few of my class mates, girls who had come with ambition and talent who are now silent residents in their respective halls. There is no life beyond tutors and classes in the university campus for women while on the other hand men play football and basketball in the playgrounds, learn sitar and tabla in the music club and spend their night hours in the university's 24 hour Maulana Azad Library. Who will take up our cause? Is it that Muslim girls don't deserve quality education? Or is that they are second to men and should only live in the shadow of their male members always? Or is it that Aligarh Muslim University for women is only an elitist qualification for a good social marriage? Whatever it has been, I don't think I would be one of those to silently accept the majority endorsed status of segregated education. Our identities can't be crushed within the walls of the university campus. For all I know, as the students gain more exposure, they will stand up for themselves. And if the university does not shed its feudal and dictatorial qualities, it is going to go down on quality, both in terms of education and students. We need professors and lecturers who can give us the strength to attend to our minds and the needs of higher education. We need guardians who will come out of the 50's mindset and adapt to the changing scenario. We want support from students, academicians, scholars and most importantly from the alumni who share with us the love for and spirit of our alma mater. From this short piece, I surely hope that I can draw attention and support to revive a great institution which otherwise might kill its own self because of an identity crisis or an imposed identity. I hope the coming years spell change and action for this inevitable cause. (The writer is a Student of Law at Aligarh Muslim University.) o o o o o The Wahhabi Threat To Islam By Mona Eltahawy The Washington Post / 4 June 2004 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17037-2004Jun4.html Egyptian born Mona Eltahawy is managing editor of Arabic Women's eNews and a columnist for the London-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsat. When gunmen killed 22 people in the city of Khobar in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern province last weekend, they set off alarm bells in international oil markets. But louder bells should be ringing throughout the Muslim world over the cost to Islam of this conflict between the Saudi royal family and the Wahhabi zealots it helped create and who now vow to overthrow it. Islam was born in what is now Saudi Arabia. King Fahd calls himself "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" in Mecca and Medina, which millions of Muslim pilgrims visit every year. If oil has been Saudi Arabia's trump card on the international stage, then Islam has given it plenty of cachet on the Muslim one. So when those gunmen in Khobar tell terrified foreign oil workers they are looking for "infidels" during an hours-long shooting spree that leaves 22 dead, including a 10-year-old Egyptian schoolboy, and claim that it is in the name of Islam that they drag the corpse of a 62-year-old Briton through the streets and slit the throats of nine hostages, the Muslim world cannot be silent. It is long past time for Muslims to question the Wahhabi ideology that is pulling the rug out from under Saudi life, for it is that same ideology that has been involved in militant movements throughout the Muslim world for years. I lived in Saudi Arabia for six years in the 1980s and know how all-pervasive Wahhabism is. It was there in posters that lined the corridors of my women-only university showing how a "good Muslim woman" should dress -- in black from head to toe -- and it made sure that gender apartheid kept those same good Muslim women in the back two rows of the bus. It was there in shopping malls patrolled by morality police ready to arrest shopkeepers who didn't close their stores for prayer time and it was there in the grim Friday evening news tally of the day's public beheadings. And it is there today, clearly, in the issues that occupy the time of Saudi clerics. Two weeks before the Khobar rampage, a young Saudi friend forwarded me a copy of a fatwa, or religious ruling, issued by Saudi Arabia's senior clerics. It was a fatwa banning the giving of flowers when visiting the sick in the hospital. "It is not the habit of Muslims to offer flowers to the sick in hospital. This is a custom imported from the land of the infidels by those whose faith is weak. Therefore it is not permitted to deal with flowers in this way, neither to sell, to buy nor to offer them as gifts," the fatwa said. Wahhabi militants operate in that chasm between the mind-set that bans flowers for the sick and life as we know it in 2004. Osama bin Laden may be Wahhabism's most recognizable face but it does not lack for followers or hatred, and not just for the "infidels" -- women and non-Wahhabis are equally derided. While there is little doubt that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and now the U.S. occupation of Iraq fuel many a militant's fire in the Middle East, Wahhabi Islam can be found in most of the embers. The Saudi royal family has its own reckoning to do with Wahhabism. By giving Wahhabis a free hand over Saudi Arabia's religious and educational sectors, the royal family guaranteed the showdown. Instead of fostering a liberal and intellectual class that despises the Wahhabis and could have been an important ally against them, the Saudi government instead imprisons those calling for liberal reform. Last year, Crown Prince Abdullah brought together Saudi intellectuals, including women and members of the country's Shiite minority, to debate much-needed reform as an antidote to Wahhabism run amok, but every discussion of reform is tempered with the caveat: "It cannot be too fast." What is "too fast" when militants carry out two audacious attacks within a month against expatriates in the oil sector? What is too fast when their car bombings kill Saudis and non-Saudis, Muslims and non-Muslims alike? "I am scared," a Saudi man told me after the Khobar attacks. "There is no clear vision to where my country is heading. We want to progress, but we also want to live like the good Muslims did 1,400 years ago. We want to change, but we believe that change is the road to hell. We want the people to have a role in leading the country, but we don't want democracy. We want to have dialogue with the West, but our preachers are preaching every Friday that all westerners, or non-Muslims, go to hell." The Muslim world must speak up not only for its religion but for Saudis caught between the rock of the royal family and its absolute rule and the hard place of the Wahhabis and their unforgiving Islam. ZEST circulates at the most one article and one event information per day. Did you get this mail as a forward? Subscribe to ZEST by sending a blank mail to * zest-india-subscribe at yahoogroups.com * For queries, comments and suggestions, write to * zest-india-owner at yahoogroups.com * To change your ZEST settings, visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/join Post good reading material and event information to * zest-india at yahoogroups.com * and NOT to zest_india at yahoo.co.in No personal hi-hello messages, no ads, no debates! ZEST is a *reading* group. Post articles in *text* format only, with a valid internet URL. See ZEST Economics: * http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics * See ZEST Poets: * http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zestpoets * ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From vidyashah at hotmail.com Wed Jun 16 11:48:06 2004 From: vidyashah at hotmail.com (vidya shah) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 06:18:06 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Film review Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040616/e3aa8955/attachment.html From jeebesh at sarai.net Wed Jun 16 14:13:31 2004 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 14:13:31 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] on going slaughterhouse research In-Reply-To: <40C81920.2060306@sarai.net> References: <40C81920.2060306@sarai.net> Message-ID: <40D00833.9070504@sarai.net> With this kind of public research methodology, i think ritika is making a very critical intervention in our research ethos. A minor mphil in a university departments begins a lively process of being an attractor for people to think and build critical resources togather. otherwise all these mphils gets lost and rarely appears into any public conversations. looking forward to more reserach blogs and building of public critical resources and conversations. best jeebesh Ritika wrote: > hi, recently i re-read a chapter of this book by - William Cronon: > Nature's Metropolis – Chicago and the Great West. I re-read as it made > more sense to me and i could find more similarities in what he had > written his book and what i have observed in my ongoing fieldwork. > What this particular chapter of Cronon's work does is that it gives an > environmental perspective on the history of Chicago - through the case > of the stockyard and meat trade. The excerpts of the chapter have been > added in my blog. > > http://blog.sarai.net/users/ritika > > Feel free to pass the blog link to people you think might be > interested in this work or are doing something similar... > > Cheers > Ritika > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > 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 abhayraj at nls.ac.in Wed Jun 16 18:23:34 2004 From: abhayraj at nls.ac.in (abhayraj at nls.ac.in) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 12:53:34 -0000 (Local time zone must be set--see zic manual page) Subject: [Reader-list] On Anonymous Notice Boards in Universities Message-ID: <1092.219.65.142.155.1087390414.squirrel@mail.nls.ac.in> Hi. This is my second posting on the project entitled ‘The Need for Anonymous Notice Boards in Universities in Bangalore: An Empirical Study.’ An abstract of the broad framework of this project is available at (last visited on 15th June, 2004) http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2004-January/003363.html. In light of my technical inadequacy in reproducing TABLE 1 below (which is crucial to this posting) in a more reader friendly form in this email, this posting makes a much better read from the Word document [POSTING TWO] I have attached along with this email. Apologies to all group members for the bulky size of this email. As regards current project status, a preliminary literature survey on the broad areas of free speech, hate speech, and anonymity (with relevance to universities) has been completed, while the primary thrust of the project, viz. determination of the existence, characteristics and functioning of institutional and non-institutional forums for anonymous speech and expression in a cross-section of universities across Bangalore has begun, and is well underway. In this posting I shall be focusing on the background scenario for one primary case-study undertaken, which reflects a unique phenomenon documented at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore – the creation [birth] of an institutional anonymous forum in a scenario where none existed, the operation of the same in a university setting [life], and the consequent regulation leading to the eventual termination [death] of the forum (this fascinating trajectory discernible from the case-study will be extensively detailed in my next posting.)This posting has three broad parts: I The Quantified Setting – with a statistical analysis of the notice boards present in the NLSIU academic block and the nature of student access to the same. II Choking of Voice – comments and analysis on the collected data. III The Poetic Birth, Life, and Death of a Forum for Anonymous Speech – The contextual introduction to a major case-study undertaken. I. The Quantified Setting: As of mid June 2004, the central academic block of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore boasts a total of 61 notice boards of varying sizes, locations, colours, and significantly, student access rules. A detailed listing of the nature of these notice boards along with relevant access status is provided in Table 1 below. Table 1: Sl. No. Description of Notice Board. Number of Such Boards. Whether Open Access/Use Available to Students. Nature of Restriction on Access/Use. 1. Law & Technology Committee Board. 1 No. Signature of Committee member mandatory for all notices put up, which necessary entails only non-anonymous notices [SEE ENDNOTE 1] [process hereafter referred to as vetting ] 2. Issuing Library Board. 1 No. Librarian authorized access only 3. ‘Law in the News’ Board. 1 No. Librarian access only. 4. ‘New Arrivals (Books)’ Board. 1 No. Librarian access only. 5. ‘Current Journal Contents’ Board. 1 No. Librarian access only. 6. ‘Thought for the Day’ Board. 1. No. Librarian access only. 7. Individual Faculty Notice Boards. 28 No. Respective faculty use only. 8. Sports Committee/Cultural Committee/Literary and Debating Society Common Board. 1 No. Relevant committee vetting required. 9. Sports Committee Announcements Boards. 2 No. Sports Committee vetting required. 10. Undesignated Notice Board currently used for announcements of university organized activities and conferences. 1. No. University/Administration use only. 11. University Notices (Information/General) 1. No. University/Administration use only. 12. Master in Business Law (MBL) Notice Board. 1. No. MBL Administration use only. 13. Student Bar Association 19(1)(a) Notice Board. 1. No. Student Advocate Committee vetting required. 14. Student Groups/Students Notices. 2 No. Student Bar Association (SBA) President/Vice-President discretion to remove ‘undesirable’ notices. 15. Examination Notice Board. 2. No. Examination Department use only. 16. University Notices (Administration). 1 No. University/Administration use only. 17. Law & Society Committee/Campus Development and Management Committee Common Board. 1 No. Relevant committee vetting required. 18. CEERA Notice Board. 1. No. CEERA use only. 19. Library (Journal Section) Notice Board. 1. No. Librarian/University Access only. 20. Centre for Child & Law (CCL) Notice Board. 1. No. CCL use only. 21. Centre for Women & Law (CWL) Notice Board. 2. No. CWL use only. 22. The Institute for Law & Ethics in Medicine (TILEM) Notice Board. 1. No. TILEM use only. 23. Literary and Debating Society ‘Wall Mag’ 1. No. Vetting required. 24. Student Letters/Messages Notice Board. 1. Unknown. Unknown. 25. Undesignated Board current used for notifying students about courier/speed-post mail received. 1 Unknown. Unknown. 26. Class Notice Boards 5. Unknown. Unknown. Cumulative - 61 No open access/use – 54.Unknown – 7. No Access – 45. Vetting Required – 7.President/Vice-President discretion to remove/edit undesirable notices– 2.Unknown – 7. Tabular Note 1: Open access/use is defined as the absence of regulation/restriction of any nature on content/source/quality of student notices along with the absence of any possibility of legitimate censorship/editing/removal of notices before or after they have been up on a notice board. This does not include within its ambit restrictions necessitated by paucity of space or ‘illegitimate’ censorship/editing/removal of notices by ‘unauthorized’ persons. Tabular Note 2: The entries made in columns 4 and 5 are based on existing enumerated rules/regulations, prevailing university/student practices and conventions, general prevailing perceptions, and physical factors such as presence of a locked casing for the notice board, etc. While denoting a notice board as one with no open access/use to students, I have considered the “power to regulate” as opposed to “actual regulation”. Therefore, for example, while an anonymous notice may, in actuality, be un-problematically displayed on the notice boards referred to in entries 10 and 23, these boards are denoted as no open access/use above simply because the SBA President/Vice-President or the Literary & Debating Society has, in the absence of contrary practice and in light of existing information, the power to remove such a notice at any stage on account of its anonymity. Tabular Note 3: Entries 24, 25, & 26 are denoted ‘unknown’ because no reasonably conclusive determination may be made as to access status of the same, in light of the existing information pertaining to the indicia referred to in Note 2 above, Tabular Note 4: The notice boards referred to in entries 24, 25 & 26 are generally unused/empty and do not factually serve as active fora for student expression. II The Choking of Voice? While the multitudes of notices marking the corridors of NLSIU’s academic block may suggest an active institutional framework promoting student expression, a closer critical look raises some important facts and questions. Significantly, of the 61 existing notice boards, students have access (limited or open; regulated or unregulated) to only 16 boards. Of these 16 notice boards, 9 boards have clearly identifiable regulation/restriction rules, which apart from enabling notice-content regulation also render student anonymity impossible. Of the remaining 7 boards, no conclusive determination of access/use status was possible in the available time, but their relative desuetude juxtaposed with the considerable examples of non-institutional [SEE ENDNOTE 2] anonymous student expression,[SEE ENDNOTE 3] is suggestive of the fact that they too are non-facilitative of anonymous speech. [SEE ENDNOTE 4] Therefore, we are faced with a thought-provoking conclusion: there exists no institutional forum (in the form of a notice board) for anonymous speech and expression in NLSIU. This conclusion merits contemplation in the light of several complex deep-rooted factors, of significance, which I must mention here without going into the extensive detailing of each. · The student community in NLSIU, as in most universities in Bangalore, while being highly pluralistic has a clearly identifiable ‘mainstream’ and ‘fringe’ student population. The relative importance of anonymity to the student fringe/minority vis-à-vis the majority, in the conceptualized setting of a university, is significant. [SEE ENDNOTE 5] · Hate speech and abusive language, defamatory statements and allegations, sexually explicit references and caricatures, wrongful information, etc have been expressed in the past, under the protective shroud of anonymity, through the several ‘illegitimate’ non-institutional forums for anonymous speech that I have made reference to earlier (See endnotes ii and iii). Importantly, a little probing revealed that the prevention of hate speech and of wrongful information are the primary rationales for the regulation present in all 9 notice boards referred to in entries 1, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, and 23 in Table 1 above. · Flowing from the point above, the regulations relevant to the notice boards permitting limited student access/use are formulated, put in place, and enforced, by students themselves [in their role as authority wielders – for example, regulation by the SBA President or by a particular student committee] and not by the university administration. · All anonymous expression has not been derogatory/misleading/offensive. Consequently, a significant amount of anonymous speech expressed through non-institutional fora is tolerated and left un-molested. Crucially though, legitimate anonymous speech through an institutional forum of a notice board is not possible. · The expression of hate speech/undesirable expression through non-institutional fora is temporally contemporaneous with the regulation of institutional fora to prevent hate-speech/undesirable expression. These factors, it is submitted, play an important role in deciding the ultimate question of whether and to what extent anonymous speech is to be proscribed/facilitated/permitted/ in university settings, through both institutional and non-institutional fora. III The Poetic Birth, Life, and Death of a Forum for Anonymous Speech Before I conclude this posting, I would like to briefly introduce the essence of what my next posting shall deal with in a detailed fashion: the circumstances under which an institutional forum for anonymous speech can be created, the possible trajectory of operation of such a forum, and the circumstances under which such a forum is subject to regulation that eventually mutates its character to one preventing anonymous speech. By the happy coincidental marriage of my poetic ambitions and my research objectives, a fascinating case study was presented by the ‘Wall Mag’ operated by the Literary & Debating Society of NLSIU (entry 23 in Table 1 above) in the time period commencing from the first week of April till mid June, which enabled one to witness a transition from a notice board implicitly disallowing anonymity [given the general premise that all committee notice boards in NLSIU require vetting by a member of the student committee concerned, before student notices may be put up] to a notice board facilitating anonymous ‘poetic’ expression to a board expressly disallowing anonymity, under the influence and incidence of anonymous and non-anonymous ‘poems’ exhibited thereon in the above-mentioned period. A detailed report of this phenomenon will be provided by my next posting, which I expect to be able to send within a few days. ENDNOTES 1. The non-anonymity could be either direct, that is, requiring a name or other identifying mark of the student indicated in the notice as a pre-requisite to the notice’s authorization by those entitled to give such authorization, or indirect, that is, the student’s loss of anonymity in merely approaching the authority-wielder for authorization of her/his notice. 2. I use the term non-institutional here to refer to those fora for expression that are not conceived/created/supported/tolerated by the university and its authority-wielders as forums for expression. Endnote iii provides illustrations of such non institutional fora. 3. [NON INSTITUTIONAL FORA/ ILLEGITIMATE FORA] Anonymous writing/illustration on varied student/general issues can be found on the benches and walls of all five classrooms in the academic block, on the walls of the men’s and women’s toilets in the academic block, and on the notices on most notice boards across the academic block. The ‘illegitimacy ‘of such anonymous expression is evidenced by the institutional/authority responses to the more extreme cases of such anonymous expression – the graffiti and writing in the men’s toilet on the ground floor has been freshly painted over, ‘unbearable’ benches and walls are repainted or replaced, and ‘undesirable anonymous expression’ is regularly whitened/scored-off from the notices by the appropriate authority wielders. 4. The point simply being that if someone could anonymously communicate her/his point by a notice on a widely-read, well-located notice board, she/he would resort to that notice board instead of laboriously and illegitimately making use of a bench, wall, or other notice, at risk of discovery and/or immediate censorship. Of course, it is conceded that such analysis wont stand with regard to the small proportion of confirmed bathroom/bench/notice graffiti aficionados. 5. Apt at this juncture would be a short reference to the tale regarding the creation of the central 19(1)(a) notice board, which currently serves as one of the most active forums for student expression on the NLSIU campus. Almost 15 years ago, at a time when no student notice board existed in NLSIU, an anonymous notice drawing attention to the growing elitism in the NLSIU community was found on an administrative notice board. In the furore that followed, one of the several issues that unfolded was the need for a forum for student expression. Consequently, 19(1)(a) was born. I look forward to any comments, suggestions or information. I can be contacted at abhayraj at nls.ac.in Abhayraj Naik -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: POSTING TWO.doc Type: application/msword Size: 58880 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040616/a8266d80/attachment.doc From office at roomade.org Mon Jun 14 19:05:22 2004 From: office at roomade.org (Office Roomade) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 15:35:22 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] Roomade Opening - Global Islands - 16/06/2004 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>>>> GLOBAL ISLANDS: >>>>> >>>>> REUNION AS AGORA >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Caecilia Tripp & Jean-Christophe Royoux >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> 17/06/2004 ­ 18/07/2004 >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Roomade, Koopliedenstaat 60-62, B1000 Brussels >>>>> Open from Thursday to Sunday, from 11am through 19pm >>>>> >>>>> We kindly invite for a drink at the occasion of the opening of the >>>>> exhibition Global Islands Wednesday June 16th, 2004 from 17pm to 20pm >>>>> at Roomade, Koopliedenstraat 60-62, B1000 Brussels. >>>>> >>>>> Barbara Vanderlinden >>>>> Director >>>>> Roomade > > >>>>> For more information see our website: http://www.roomade.org/en/index.html >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> ---- >>>>> >> >>>>> Global Islands: Reunion as Agora, (Une agora réunionnaise) is an >>>>> ³archipelago² film in 10 parts (210 min.), produced in collaboration with >>>>> the post-colonial critic Françoise Vergès. It puts into relation the >>>>> subjectivities of the various narrators; together they weave the entire >>>>> history of an island with its multiple origins. Reunion, in the heart of >>>>> the Indian Ocean, is a "global island" at the crossroads of African, >>>>> European, Islamic and Asian cultures. It is a landmark that embodies >>>>> Europe¹s role in the history of globalization, characterized by >>>>> colonialism, slavery, Indian indentured labor (engagisme), and finally >>>>> political assimilation into the French Republic. >>>>> >>>>> As a particularly active zone in the translation, interpretation and >>>>> appropriation of cultures, the culture of Reunion has become a model of >>>>> the phenomena of "creolization" in which we are all now involved to some >>>>> extent. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the notion of ³creolization² has >>>>> been used increasingly by intellectuals and artists to describe and >>>>> interpret the practices of cross-breeding and hybridization endemic to >>>>> globalization. Initially coined in >>>>> the context of Creole societies, the term implies an intellectual, >>>>> spiritual and aesthetic opening-up to a wide diversity of experiences >>>>> emerging from different cultures. With creolization, ³identity² itself >>>>> becomes unidentifiable, the concept of a community yet to come, a >>>>> perpetual process of transgression of all existent identities. >>>>> >>>>> Using the form of an exhibition installation, Global Islands: Reunion as >>>>> Agora attempts to explore the effects and the methods of creolization in >>>>> Reunion during the last thirty years. It examines the different ways in >>>>> which multiple cultural identities interact with each other to reveal an >>>>> amazing flexibility of process through which identities can be >>>>> constructed. Thus the question of "identity" is not approached via the >>>>> search for origins, but rather as a problem of translatability of the >>>>> stories through which the participating narrators represent their history. >>>>> It reverts to asking what narrative forms can be used to evince this >>>>> relation between such different discourses of origins. >>>>> >>>>> Global Islands: Reunion as Agora can be described as a plurivocal >>>>> archipelago. Some of the participating narrators call the creolization >>>>> processes specific to the island ³reunionity². In order to chart the >>>>> cultural diversity of this island, the tensions and contradictions that >>>>> occur within it must not be avoided. It is therefore a question of >>>>> allowing each narrator in this ³visual symposium² to experience the >>>>> inherent tensions of the situation and thus prevent any fixed >>>>> representation of ³the Reunion identity.² >>>>> >>>>> The exhibition invites spectators to a specific experience of >>>>> "creolization² through a process of reflection that is firmly rooted in >>>>> the reality of multiple narratives. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> With: Laurita Alendroit-Ankrake, Gilbert Aubry, Rabia Hosman Badat, >>>>> Fabrice Banor, Christophe Barret, Jack Beng-Thi, Ghislaine and Philippe >>>>> Bessière and Rasine Kaf, Dominique Carrère, Attila Cheyssial, Gilbert >>>>> Clain, Mickaël Crochet, Emmanuèle Delossedat, Nelson Dijoux, J. René >>>>> Dreinaza and Batay Coq, Prosper Eve, Thierry Fontaine, Sudel Fuma, >>>>> Nathalie Gonthier, Anny Grondin, Bertrand Grondin and Radio Pikan, Joël >>>>> Grondin, Serge Icard, Idriss Issop-Banian, Christian Jalma, Saminadin Axel >>>>> Kichenin, Lucette Labache, Carpanin Marimoutou, Ninine Michaud and >>>>> Fabienne Sevaye, Antoine Minatchy, Jean-Max Moutiapoullé, Michel Nasseau, >>>>> Nathalie Natiembé, Alain Padeau, Michèle Picardo, Jean-Claude Picardo, >>>>> Colette Pounia, Gilbert Pounia, Christiane Rafidinarivo Rakotolahy, >>>>> Ginette Ramassamy, Jean-François Reverzy, Florence Rivière, Michèle >>>>> Rivière, Eugène Rousse, Daniel Singaïny, Swami Prémânanda Puri, Thierry >>>>> Nicolas Tchakaloff, Françoise Vergès, Paul Vergès, Jean-Paul Virapoullé, >>>>> Danyèl Waro, Edith Wong-Hee-Kam, Live Yu-Sion, Wilhiam Zitte, and Elsa, >>>>> Lionel, Nassur, Sanjiv, Leïla, Alexandre, Marine. >>>>> Special guests: Edouard Glissant and Stuart Hall. >>>>> >>>>> Curator: Barbara Vanderlinden >>>>> >>>>> Produced by: The Regional Council of Réunion, the French Ministry of >>>>> Culture and Communication and the FRAC-Réunion. >>>>> >>>>> Press Contact: Phone +32 475 34 12 44, +32 473 61 71 93, e-mail: >>>>> office at roomade.org , http://www.roomade.org >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040614/795526e2/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 3044 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040614/795526e2/attachment.jpe From sappho1999 at rediffmail.com Tue Jun 15 10:21:18 2004 From: sappho1999 at rediffmail.com (Sappho for Equality) Date: 15 Jun 2004 04:51:18 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' Message-ID: <20040615045118.18954.qmail@webmail10.rediffmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040615/a9ebe8d3/attachment.html -------------- next part --------------   Note: Forwarded message attached -- Orignal Message -- From: TS To: Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: TS Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' Date: no date Size: 18768 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040615/a9ebe8d3/attachment.mht -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: TS Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' Date: no date Size: 18768 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040615/a9ebe8d3/attachment-0001.mht From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Tue Jun 15 20:37:32 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Shivam=20Vij?=) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 16:07:32 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Final Solution: An invitation Message-ID: <20040615150732.37993.qmail@web8201.mail.in.yahoo.com> [8] INVITATION: You are invited to the following screenings: 1. The Boy in the Branch, 27 mins 2. Men in the Trees, 98 mins Both directed by Lalit Vachani 3. Final Solution, 150 mins [shorter version] Dir: Rakesh Sharma Date: 19th June, 2004, Saturday Time: 2:30 p.m. Venue: Juhu Jagruti Hall, A.J. Commerce College, 1st floor, Opp NM College, Vile Parle West, Mumbai Amrit Gangar This has been organized by various institutions. The idea is to sensitize the middle classes [particularly Gujarati] about Gujarat genocide. o o o o o I am enclosing information about my recent film - Final Solution ( India; 2004; Digital Video format - miniDV; 209 minutes). Awards : Wolfgang Staudte award and Special Jury Award (Netpac), Berlin International film festival (Feb 2004). Silver (Best Doc category)/Humanitarian award, HongKong International film festival. Special Jury Mention, Munich Dokfest. Special Award instituted and given by NRIs for a Secular and Harmonious India (NRI-SAHI), USA. Festivals: Berlinale ( International premiere of the film), HongKong, Fribourg, Hot Docs (Canada), Zanzibar, Durban, Commonwealth film festival (UK), One world filmfest (Prague), Istanbul 1001fest, Singapore, Flanders (Belgium), World Social Forum (Mumbai; Indian premiere), Vikalp (Mumbai filmfest organised by Campaign against Censorship) and several other filmfests. Please let me know whether you will be interested in acquiring a copy of the film for your institution/ library. I'd be very grateful if you could forward information about the film to your colleagues and friends, especially those teaching at Universities or working with institutions/NGOs, asking them to support the film by buying copies. Please note that copies are available at a discount for individuals/ activists/ students. Please also note that the film has distributors in different countries - so, to place an order or for price queries, please send your postal address as well. Regards Rakesh Sharma Final Solution is a study of the politics of hate. Set in Gujarat during the period Feb/March 2002 - July 2003, the film examines the consequences of Hindu-Moslem polarization in the state. Part 1 : Pride and Genocide deals with the genocidal violence against Moslems and its immediate aftermath. It probes the patterns of pre-planned violence by right-wing Hindu cadres which many claim was state-supported, if not state-sponsored. Part 2 : The Terror Trail reconstructs through eyewitness accounts the attack on Gulbarg (Ahmedabad) and acts of barbaric violence against Moslem women at Eral and Delol/Kalol (Panchmahals) even as Chief Minister Modi traverses the state on his Gaurav Yatra. Part 3 : The Hate Mandate documents the poll campaign during the Assembly elections in Gujarat in late 2002. It records in detail the exploitation of the Godhra incident ( in which 58 Hindus were burnt alive) by the right-wing propaganda machinery for electoral gains. Part 4 : Hope and Despair studies the situation after the storm and its impact on Hindus and Moslems - ghettoisation, the call for economic boycott of Moslems and continuing acts of violence more than a year after the carnage. The film is anti-hate/ violence as "those who forget history are condemned to relive it". Dir: Rakesh Sharma Tel : +91 98203 43103 email carnagefilm at yahoo.com / actindia at vsnl.com Final Solution has been shot and edited on DVcam; it is subtitled in English. Copies of the film are available on VHS pal / Video for Rs 2000 for NGOs/ activists groups/ libraries and organisations. Copies are available for Rs 1000 for Individuals and for Rs 600 for students/ grassroots activists. Please mail a bank draft payable at Mumbai favouring Rakesh Sharma to : PO Box 12023, Azad Nagar post office, Mumbai 400053. Rakesh Sharma began his film/TV career in 1986 as an assistant director on Shyam Benegal's Discovery of India. His broadcast industry experience includes the set up/ launch of 3 broadcast channels in India: Channel [V], Star Plus and Vijay TV and several production consultancy assignments. He has now gone back to independent documentary film-making. His last film Aftershocks : The Rough Guide to Democracy won the Best documentary film award at Fribourg, Big Mini-DV and at Big Muddy and won 7 other awards {including the Robert Flaherty prize}at various festivals in USA and Europe during 2002-03. It has been screened at over 90 international film festivals. Event info brought t you by ZEST via SACW ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Tue Jun 15 20:35:32 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Shivam=20Vij?=) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 16:05:32 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Seeking contacts with South Asian Sociologists Message-ID: <20040615150532.97088.qmail@web8206.mail.in.yahoo.com> Seeking contacts with South Asian Sociologists/Anthropologists for Workshop in Delhi in Feb. 2005 ************************************************** From: Ravinder Kaur The Indian Sociological Society, supported by the International Sociology Association, is planning to hold a South Asia Workshop in Feb. 2005 in Delhi. The theme of the workshop is "The State of Sociology: Issues of Relevance and Rigour". As convener of the Workshop I would appreciate information on sociologists/anthroplogists from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka who could participate in this workshop. This workshop seeks to bring together south asian sociologists working out of their own countries. Please reply directly at this address: ravinder_iitd at yahoo.com Ravinder Kaur Convener, South Asia Workshop Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences IIT, Delhi E-mail: ravinder_iitd at yahoo.com This info brought to you by ZEST ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From shveta at sarai.net Wed Jun 16 16:35:41 2004 From: shveta at sarai.net (Shveta Sarda) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 16:35:41 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Film review In-Reply-To: <40CEC2B7.7010403@sarai.net> References: <40CEC2B7.7010403@sarai.net> Message-ID: <40D02985.4000906@sarai.net> Hello! Girlfriend may not exactly be the best film made in history (or anywhere close :) but it's an interesting film all the same (As I discovered on seeing it yesterday!) Yes, one of the women is a self declared man-hater and this is posed as the explanation for her being a lesbian. But it would perhaps be interesting to see this in the context of Bollywood film history. We have several recent examples - Darr and Baazigar for instance. There is invariably some childhood trauma that is made part of the protagonists' biography. In the case of males, it is the mother leaving, or being thrown out of the house in childhood. In case of Tania (Boyfriend) it was child sexual abuse. Interestingly, a small change in one variable (the jealous lover) is what produces interesting disruptions - and possibilities. While the audience seemed to enjoy the first song where the two women/friends danced and sang, there was a puzzlement about the nature of the response when the women had sex, or when they danced together in a party thereafter, or spoke about the intimacies they shared as friends. There were no cat-calls; and there was definitely a meditative silence during the intermission and when the audience left the hall after the movie. I think perhaps there need to be more ways than viewing the film - any popular film for that matter - in terms of whether it was a good/bad representation of lesbian love. Girlfriend is interesting in the small disruption, hesitation in response, the puzzlement it produces. It may perhaps open up some spaces for conversations. best shveta Shveta Sarda wrote: > FWD MSG... > > Subject: > Girlfriend Protest > From: > "Humjinsi Cluster" > > Dear all, > > This is an urgent and serious matter. Tejal and Sheba saw the premier > of the film ‘Girl Friend’ yesterday. The film portrays Isha Koppikar as > a sexually abused, violent, obsessive, killer, psychopath lesbian. The > film claims to address the issue of ‘lesbianism’ but operates from a > totally homophobic, hetero- patriarchal viewpoint. It will do > unspeakable damage for the movement and simply put, it is downright > dangerous for those of us trying to survive in an already hateful world. > The movie tears away the anonymity of lesbian existence; the word > lesbian is actually used in the film and the image created is a ghastly > and revolting one. The character is not a lesbian, she is a woman > hunter, a man hater, there are so many things in the film that are > absolutely despicable that one cannot even begin to describe them. > > The absolute folly is that this movie is going to show in movie theatres > all across the country. So while the film capitalizes on the lesbian > angle (there is even a sleazy bedroom scene) the axe comes down so fast > and so hard on the lesbian (she dies a gruesome death, which is > obviously retribution) that there is not even a sliver of doubt. Women > who hate men become lesbians- who are bloodthirsty, abusive killer- who > finally bring on their own annihilation. > > We have to take a stand and make a statement against this film and we > have to come up with strategies to make a strong protest. We urge all of > you to make time and suffer through the film this weekend so that we are > well aware of what we are up against. > > Tejal has reviewed this film for MID-DAY. What she has to say and that > reflects how the rest of us feel as well, is written below. Do go > through it as well. > > We urge everyone to come together. We will continue posting minutes of > every meeting and action taken. > > In Solidarity, > > Shruti, Tejal, Sheba, Aditi > Humjinsi From ritika at sarai.net Thu Jun 17 01:07:11 2004 From: ritika at sarai.net (ritika at sarai.net) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 21:37:11 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [Reader-list] Re: slaughterhouse research In-Reply-To: <20040614074430.32763.qmail@web14608.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20040614074430.32763.qmail@web14608.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4407.219.65.236.8.1087414631.squirrel@219.65.236.8> Dear Rustam, Apologies for delay in replying. Just got caught up. Thanx for a thoughtful reply to my work. > I don't think any newbie wanting to do some environment related work will not be scanning through DTE. I have definitely read the article and had also gotten in touch with Nidhi (who had written the article). >>Well, the work began with the my understanding (which i must admit was cursory)of the notion of 'cleanliness and associated perception of nuisance', however, as u have also pointed out, my thought process was getting very predicatable. That is - in your words: Brahiminism (higher;vegetarian;holy) v Dalit (lower;non-veg;untouchable) So as of now i don't really know what all am i going to say with the material that i have generated. >>>I am reading kancha Illaiya's work and will write soon about it on my blog as well. >>>> Regarding your suggestion on tracing the ecological footprints of Delhi's meat consumption: must admit that i had been thinking on the same lines, but was a bit apprehensive of whether it would be worth it. But Thanx for putting my thinking on track....:) >>>>>I have been thinking of having some long interviews with almost all types of people who are involved with this trade. Will keep everybody on the list posted, Thanx ritika Dear Ritika, > > Have been reading some of your mails on your Slaughter > House Mails on the Sarai list. > > I am Rustam Vania. I work for the Centre for Science > and Environment, based in Bangalore. > > Some thoughts and ideas based on your work: > > 1. I guess you must have seen the report in Down To > Earth - Aug 15/2003, on slaughter houses in Aligarh. > > 2. I was wondering if you were looking at the issue of > being 'clean/unclean' in the context of Caste and the > spatial aspect of settlements. > > Brahiminism (higher;vegetarian;holy) v Dalit > (lower;non-veg;untouchable). Most of the lower castes, > some kshatriyas and non-hindus (muslims, christians, > parsees, Sikhs) are the ones who deal with the > production and trade of animal and animal parts. > > There is an interesting account of Markets and Economy > of a village by Kanchan Illaiah in his book 'Why am I > not a Hindu'. > > 3. Though 'factory farming' is yet to arrive in the > manner it is practised in the developed world..but we > are getting there. In the context of the book > 'Nature's Metropolis – Chicago and the Great West' it > would be fascinating to look at the ecological > footprint of the meat demand of a city like Delhi on > hinterland..say for example on the productive > grasslands of arid rajasthan..tracing 'animal routes' > to the city. Western India has had a very productive > and intensive animal husbandry economy thanks to its > unique arid grassland ecology. > > 4. Point number 2 is usually disscussed passionately > by advocates of vegetarianism and new age right wing > saffronised/sanskritised NRI 'greenies' , ignoring the > landless lower castes (rural producers), while point > number 3 is used by the the animal welfarists to > oppose meat eating on the grounds of ethics and > morality. > > The truth lies somewhere in between and cannot be > reduced to such simplistic notions of right and wrong. > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. > http://messenger.yahoo.com/ > From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Wed Jun 16 17:34:48 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?shivam?=) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 13:04:48 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' In-Reply-To: <20040615045118.18954.qmail@webmail10.rediffmail.com> Message-ID: <20040616120448.47732.qmail@web8207.mail.in.yahoo.com> I agreewith much of what Ms Tejal Shah writes in the Mid Day review, but I don't understand why she has a problem with Girlfriend's character becoming a lesbian because of child sexual abuse. Isn't that possible? I have found that while homosexuality is a very important issue in intellectual circles, I wonder why this disdain and indifference towards child sexual abuse. There's a book called "Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India" by Pinki Virani in which she writes that homosexuals sometimes abuse children with the purpose of making them homosexuals. Regards, Shivam --- Sappho for Equality wrote: >   > > > Note: Forwarded message attached > > -- Orignal Message -- > > From: TS > To: > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > ATTACHMENT part 2 message/rfc822 > From: TS > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > 'Girlfriend' > To: > > Dear Friends, > Some of us were unfortunate enough to be present at > the preview screening of film 'Girlfriend' in Bombay > on Thursday, 10th June. > Today, the film has been released nationwide. It is > the worst possible film that has ever been made in > the history of cinema about a 'Lesbian'. > In a country like India where lesbian women exist on > the invisible margins, as criminals without any > rights, doubly oppressed as women and lesbian, not > to mention the layers added by class, caste, > religion and ability, a film like 'Girlfriend' is a > severe blow to the advancement of the human rights > and sexuality rights of all women. We must do > something in the face of such callousness. > > Please do write critical articles and reviews about > the film, hold press conferences, protest rallies, > distribute parchas or anything to 'damage control'. > I have written a small piece below and I urge you to > please circulate this email as widely as possible. > In solidarity, > tejal > > > >From Fire into the furnace > Dear Mr. Karan Razdan (director of Girlfriend), > If the Shiv Sena and the Bajrang Dal go on a rampage > yet again, to protest your film 'Girlfriend', ask > for the film to be banned or sent back to the censor > board, I might even forgive you. > > But I know, that six years after Deepa Mehta's film > 'Fire' was released, the right wing will see no > reason to protest your film because your portrayal > of a lesbian as 'a psychopath, sexually abused, man > hating, murderer and killer' fits just fine into > their hetero-patriarchal agenda of portraying > lesbians & gays as freaks, abnormal and as people > who must die at the end of the film, so they are > aptly punished for their unnatural existence. > > On the out set, it must be stated that the 'Lesbian' > issue is a hot topic; it attracts audiences, creates > a curiosity and definitely impacts the box office > collections. I mean, if you are telling me that you > made this film because you care so much about > lesbians and the issues affecting them, that you > wanted to bring this issue into every Indian > household, surely you mean it as a devastatingly, > nasty joke! > > Your film is a presentation of the worst possible > misnomers (I consciously refrain from using the word > 'stereotype') about anyone who may be attracted to a > person of the same gender. The male, macho but > normal (read heterosexual) hero has no qualms about > playing a hyper-exaggerated, sissy, gay man when he > needs to seduce the simple minded, generous at > heart, 'one-night' lesbian, but essentially, a > reformed, heterosexual girl played by Amrita Arora. > The straight heroine who is being continuously > misled by the lesbian villain must be saved by the > good-boy-hero. In the end, values of heterosexual > love, marriage and 'normal' families must be upheld. > The character of Tanya, acted by Isha Koppikar is > nothing short of a 'lesbian animal' aided as it is > by the background score to help us see her as a > wild, almost cannibalistic man-eating/man-hating > woman who dares to behave like a man, a Sahela (a > mere saheli would be far too sensitive). All this is > of course explained by the simple fact that Tanya > was sexually abused as a child simultaneously > implying that what makes women 'this way' is > possibly, abuse at the hands of men! > > After watching a film like this, it is impossible > for anyone to think of 'women who love women' as > normal human beings with two hands and two feet, who > may be a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a > neighbour, a grand mother and least of all a caring > lover. > > It must be pointed out that under the section 377 of > the Indian Penal Code, gay, lesbian, bisexual and > transgender people are looked upon as/considered > criminals, existing against the order of nature. > Hey! and if you thought it was just about 'those > guys & their lifestyles', let me remind you that > anytime you have non peno-viginal penetrative sex, > you are as much of a criminal and can be put in the > prison for a term extending to 10 years & shall also > be liable to fine. > > Mr. Razdan, the next time you say that you are > taking a neutral position in this film and > portraying the case of just one lesbian, let me > remind you precisely, that the fiction you are > choosing is a cleverly developed and thought out > storyline that carries a clear message. This message > is a dangerous and retrogressive one. It is a > message that endangers the life of any woman who may > look or behave boyish, any woman who chooses to > experiment with her sexuality, and any woman who > asserts her right to different choices including > those women who are good friends and hold hands when > they walk down the street. > > Welcome to the world of blatant hate crimes based on > your sexual and gender orientation! > > As men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, films > like these take us many steps backwards. More than > two decades of work done by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual > and Transgender groups, feminists groups, human > rights groups, women's groups and progressive > artists groups, is going to suffer as this film is > commercially released in every part of India from > small towns to big cities. > > Every time I hear of another lesbian suicide, > another girl who hanged herself for being teased > about her 'best' friend, another hijra woman raped > in police custody, another woman sent for shock > treatment and aversion therapy to cure her of her > homosexuality, another couple put under house arrest > by their parents when they find out about their > same-sex love, I will think of this film and I will > be reminded of the power that Bollywood wields in > creating a mass consciousness. In this case, it will > be a conscious, articulated, homophobia. > > Thank-you very much Mr. Razdan, but we, as > progressive citizens are not interested in > lip-service. I can assure you of one thing: the > homosexual community in this country would much > rather live in quiet anonymity than be > mis-represented in such a ghastly, contorted > fashion. Even a little bit of research on your part > would have revealed that there are at least three > active lesbian and bisexual women's groups in Bombay > city alone and hundreds of 'women who love women' > leading their lives openly and happily but that's > only possible when one makes a film on a hot issue > (like lesbianism is in India) when you foresee > beyond profits and publicity and see, real lives and > real people who will live the consequences of your > doing. > > It's time that we stopped separating the issues that > films address and their impact on the audience > within a given socio-political context. It is also > high time that we stand in protest against any film > that causes damage to the rights of any minority > groups. > > Tejal Shah > > (The writer is a visual artist and the co-founder, > organiser and curator of Larzish.tremors of a > revolution, International Film festival of Sexuality > & Gender Plurality, India since 2003) > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > 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: ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From nkarani at hotmail.com Thu Jun 17 03:15:19 2004 From: nkarani at hotmail.com (Nitin Karani) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 03:15:19 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' References: <20040616120448.47732.qmail@web8207.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: shivam, if pinki virani actually wrote that, it's ludicrous! (it sounds like the myth about hijras--that they kidnap and castrate children!) READ MY LIPS: we (gay people) are not on a 'conversion'/proselytization agenda! about the other more common myth that sexual abuse in childhood 'causes' homosexuality, it's again just that--a myth! in all my 33 years, i haven't come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse. agreed not everyone would have been honest whether they have faced abuse, but it's safe to say the incidence is low. in all these years of interaction, on-line and offline sexual abuse has never been an issue--and it's not like the gay communities have some kind of collective amnesia about their childhood or taboo about the topic! yes, i ahve come across just a couple of guys who were abused but even they are clear in their mind that abuse was not the reason for 'turning' gay. (i can't claim to speak on behalf of my lesbian sisters, but i am sure things are no different for them). and i remember reading about a survey in what was then the Times's groups 'Metropolis on Saturday' about a survey which said that in cases of abuse, the perpetrators were more often heterosexuals! (could this be the reason for the 'disdain' on the issue??) I haven't read her book, but i wonder if Ms. Virani actually did any research! or like razdan, set out to write on issues they know nothing about and don't care to find out! best, nitin karani bombay ----- Original Message ----- From: "shivam" To: Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:34 PM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of film 'Girlfriend' > > I agreewith much of what Ms Tejal Shah writes in the > Mid Day review, but I don't understand why she has a > problem with Girlfriend's character becoming a lesbian > because of child sexual abuse. Isn't that possible? > > I have found that while homosexuality is a very > important issue in intellectual circles, I wonder why > this disdain and indifference towards child sexual > abuse. There's a book called "Bitter Chocolate: Child > Sexual Abuse in India" by Pinki Virani in which she > writes that homosexuals sometimes abuse children with > the purpose of making them homosexuals. > > Regards, > Shivam > > > --- Sappho for Equality > wrote: > > > > > > > Note: Forwarded message attached > > > > -- Orignal Message -- > > > > From: TS > > To: > > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > > > > > > > ATTACHMENT part 2 message/rfc822 > > From: TS > > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > > 'Girlfriend' > > To: > > > > Dear Friends, > > Some of us were unfortunate enough to be present at > > the preview screening of film 'Girlfriend' in Bombay > > on Thursday, 10th June. > > Today, the film has been released nationwide. It is > > the worst possible film that has ever been made in > > the history of cinema about a 'Lesbian'. > > In a country like India where lesbian women exist on > > the invisible margins, as criminals without any > > rights, doubly oppressed as women and lesbian, not > > to mention the layers added by class, caste, > > religion and ability, a film like 'Girlfriend' is a > > severe blow to the advancement of the human rights > > and sexuality rights of all women. We must do > > something in the face of such callousness. > > > > Please do write critical articles and reviews about > > the film, hold press conferences, protest rallies, > > distribute parchas or anything to 'damage control'. > > I have written a small piece below and I urge you to > > please circulate this email as widely as possible. > > In solidarity, > > tejal > > > > > > >From Fire into the furnace > > Dear Mr. Karan Razdan (director of Girlfriend), > > If the Shiv Sena and the Bajrang Dal go on a rampage > > yet again, to protest your film 'Girlfriend', ask > > for the film to be banned or sent back to the censor > > board, I might even forgive you. > > > > But I know, that six years after Deepa Mehta's film > > 'Fire' was released, the right wing will see no > > reason to protest your film because your portrayal > > of a lesbian as 'a psychopath, sexually abused, man > > hating, murderer and killer' fits just fine into > > their hetero-patriarchal agenda of portraying > > lesbians & gays as freaks, abnormal and as people > > who must die at the end of the film, so they are > > aptly punished for their unnatural existence. > > > > On the out set, it must be stated that the 'Lesbian' > > issue is a hot topic; it attracts audiences, creates > > a curiosity and definitely impacts the box office > > collections. I mean, if you are telling me that you > > made this film because you care so much about > > lesbians and the issues affecting them, that you > > wanted to bring this issue into every Indian > > household, surely you mean it as a devastatingly, > > nasty joke! > > > > Your film is a presentation of the worst possible > > misnomers (I consciously refrain from using the word > > 'stereotype') about anyone who may be attracted to a > > person of the same gender. The male, macho but > > normal (read heterosexual) hero has no qualms about > > playing a hyper-exaggerated, sissy, gay man when he > > needs to seduce the simple minded, generous at > > heart, 'one-night' lesbian, but essentially, a > > reformed, heterosexual girl played by Amrita Arora. > > The straight heroine who is being continuously > > misled by the lesbian villain must be saved by the > > good-boy-hero. In the end, values of heterosexual > > love, marriage and 'normal' families must be upheld. > > The character of Tanya, acted by Isha Koppikar is > > nothing short of a 'lesbian animal' aided as it is > > by the background score to help us see her as a > > wild, almost cannibalistic man-eating/man-hating > > woman who dares to behave like a man, a Sahela (a > > mere saheli would be far too sensitive). All this is > > of course explained by the simple fact that Tanya > > was sexually abused as a child simultaneously > > implying that what makes women 'this way' is > > possibly, abuse at the hands of men! > > > > After watching a film like this, it is impossible > > for anyone to think of 'women who love women' as > > normal human beings with two hands and two feet, who > > may be a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a > > neighbour, a grand mother and least of all a caring > > lover. > > > > It must be pointed out that under the section 377 of > > the Indian Penal Code, gay, lesbian, bisexual and > > transgender people are looked upon as/considered > > criminals, existing against the order of nature. > > Hey! and if you thought it was just about 'those > > guys & their lifestyles', let me remind you that > > anytime you have non peno-viginal penetrative sex, > > you are as much of a criminal and can be put in the > > prison for a term extending to 10 years & shall also > > be liable to fine. > > > > Mr. Razdan, the next time you say that you are > > taking a neutral position in this film and > > portraying the case of just one lesbian, let me > > remind you precisely, that the fiction you are > > choosing is a cleverly developed and thought out > > storyline that carries a clear message. This message > > is a dangerous and retrogressive one. It is a > > message that endangers the life of any woman who may > > look or behave boyish, any woman who chooses to > > experiment with her sexuality, and any woman who > > asserts her right to different choices including > > those women who are good friends and hold hands when > > they walk down the street. > > > > Welcome to the world of blatant hate crimes based on > > your sexual and gender orientation! > > > > As men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, films > > like these take us many steps backwards. More than > > two decades of work done by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual > > and Transgender groups, feminists groups, human > > rights groups, women's groups and progressive > > artists groups, is going to suffer as this film is > > commercially released in every part of India from > > small towns to big cities. > > > > Every time I hear of another lesbian suicide, > > another girl who hanged herself for being teased > > about her 'best' friend, another hijra woman raped > > in police custody, another woman sent for shock > > treatment and aversion therapy to cure her of her > > homosexuality, another couple put under house arrest > > by their parents when they find out about their > > same-sex love, I will think of this film and I will > > be reminded of the power that Bollywood wields in > > creating a mass consciousness. In this case, it will > > be a conscious, articulated, homophobia. > > > > Thank-you very much Mr. Razdan, but we, as > > progressive citizens are not interested in > > lip-service. I can assure you of one thing: the > > homosexual community in this country would much > > rather live in quiet anonymity than be > > mis-represented in such a ghastly, contorted > > fashion. Even a little bit of research on your part > > would have revealed that there are at least three > > active lesbian and bisexual women's groups in Bombay > > city alone and hundreds of 'women who love women' > > leading their lives openly and happily but that's > > only possible when one makes a film on a hot issue > > (like lesbianism is in India) when you foresee > > beyond profits and publicity and see, real lives and > > real people who will live the consequences of your > > doing. > > > > It's time that we stopped separating the issues that > > films address and their impact on the audience > > within a given socio-political context. It is also > > high time that we stand in protest against any film > > that causes damage to the rights of any minority > > groups. > > > > Tejal Shah > > > > (The writer is a visual artist and the co-founder, > > organiser and curator of Larzish.tremors of a > > revolution, International Film festival of Sexuality > > & Gender Plurality, India since 2003) > > > > > > > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > 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: > > > ===== > ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ > > ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ > > ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ > > ________________________________________________________________________ > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > _________________________________________ > 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 info at art-action.org Thu Jun 17 03:41:59 2004 From: info at art-action.org (Rencontres internationles Paris/Berlin) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 00:11:59 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] =?iso-8859-1?q?Festival_2004_=3A=3A=3A_Cinema_vide?= =?iso-8859-1?q?o_multimedia_=5BEN=5D_=5BFR=5D_=5BDE=5D=3A=3A=3A_20?= =?iso-8859-1?q?04_Call_for_Entries_=3A=3A=3A_Appel_=E0_proposition?= =?iso-8859-1?q?_2004_=3A=3A=3A_Teilnahmeaufruf_2004?= Message-ID: Recipient/ Destinataire/ Empfänger: reader-list at sarai.net >>> reader-list at sarai.net unsubscribe/ se désinscrire/ abbestellen: mailto:info at art-action.org?subject=unsubscribe(5)_reader-list at sarai.net ========================================= Call for entries - Appel 'a proposition - Teilnahmeaufruf ||||| FESTIVAL #8.9 ||||| RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES PARIS/BERLIN ||||| CINEMA VIDEO MULTIMEDIA ||||| http://art-action.org Please forward this information - Merci de faire suivre cette information - Bitte leiten Sie diese Informationen weiter. ========================================= EN FRANÇAIS PLUS BAS DANS LE MESSAGE AUF DEUTSCH UNTEN ========================================= ------------- IN ENGLISH | ------------- CALL FOR ENTRIES: UNTIL THE 30TH OF JUNE, 2004 ||||| FESTIVAL #8.9 ||||| RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES PARIS/BERLIN ||||| CINEMA VIDEO MULTIMEDIA ||||| http://art-action.org *** Please forward this information *** The festival "Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin" (Paris/Berlin international Meetings) will present in the two cities in autumn 2004 an international program focused on cinema, contemporary video creation and multimedia, gathering works of artists and directors acknowledged on the international scene along with young artists and directors who still cannot enjoy a substantial distribution. Each year, the festival present those works to a large audience, and create new exchanges between audiences, artists, directors and professionals in different areas of creation. More information at : http://art-action.org The "Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin", a non-profit event without competition, are supported by French, German and international institutions. http://art-action.org/en_soutien.htm =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ ALL INDIVIDUALS OR ORGANIZATIONS CAN SUBMIT ONE OR SEVERAL PROPOSALS. THE CALL FOR ENTRIES IS OPEN TO CINEMA, VIDEO AND MULTIMEDIA CYCLES, without any restriction of length or genre. All submissions are free, without any limitation of geographic origin. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ CINEMA AND VIDEO CYCLES * Fiction - short, medium and feature length - All film and video formats * Documentary - All film and video formats * Experimental Film - All film formats * Video art / Experimental video - All video formats * Animation movie - All formats MULTIMEDIA CYCLES * Performance art * Installation art * Net art, CD-rom * Sound work =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Video and film proposals are received on DVD or VHS. All proposals are sent by mail, enclosed with an ENTRY FORM, UNTIL JUNE 30, 2004. The entry form as well as the information regarding the "Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin" are available on our website http://art-action.org/en_info.htm or on demand by email: info at art-action.org =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Please forward this information to organizations or artists and filmmakers. Do not hesitate to diffuse it around you, the most largely possible. Feel free to contact us for any information. Best regards ----------------- Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin roARaTorio - 51 rue Montorgueil - 75002 Paris Site: http://art-action.org Email: info at art-action.org ========================================= unsubscribe: mailto:info at art-action.org?subject=unsubscribe(5)_reader-list at sarai.net ========================================= ------------- EN FRANÇAIS | ------------- APPEL A PROPOSITION: JUSQU'AU 30 JUIN 2004 ||||| FESTIVAL #8.9 ||||| RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES PARIS/BERLIN ||||| CINEMA VIDEO MULTIMEDIA ||||| http://art-action.org *** Merci de faire suivre cette information *** Les Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin présenteront dans les deux villes à l'automne 2004 une programmation internationale consacrée au cinéma de recherche, à la création vidéo contemporaine et au multimédia, réunissant des œuvres d'artistes et de réalisateurs reconnus sur la scène internationale aux côtés de jeunes artistes et de réalisateurs peu diffusés. Les Rencontres internationales ont pour vocation de faire découvrir ces œuvres à un large public, de décloisonner les différents milieux de création et faire communiquer leurs publics, de susciter des échanges entre artistes, réalisateurs et acteurs de la vie artistique et culturelle. Plus d'information sur : http://art-action.org Les Rencontres internationales, événement non commercial et sans compétition, sont soutenues par des institutions françaises, allemandes et internationales. http://art-action.org/fr_soutien.htm =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ TOUT INDIVIDU OU ORGANISME PEUT EFFECTUER UNE OU PLUSIEURS PROPOSITIONS D'OEUVRE. L'APPEL A PROPOSITION EST OUVERT POUR LES CYCLES FILM, VIDEO ET MULTIMEDIA, sans restriction de genre et de durée. Les propositions sont gratuites, sans limitation de provenance géographique. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ CYCLES FILMS ET VIDEOS * Fiction / Court, moyen, long métrage - Tout support film et vidéo * Documentaire - Tout support film et vidéo * Cinéma expérimental - Tout support film * Art vidéo / Vidéo expérimentale - Tout support vidéo * Film d'animation - Tout support film et vidéo CYCLES MULTIMEDIAS * Performance * Installation * Net art, CD-rom * Création sonore =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Les propositions film et vidéo sont reçues sur DVD ou VHS. TOUTES les propositions sont reçues, par courrier, accompagnées d'une FICHE DE PROPOSITION remplie, JUSQU'AU 30 JUIN 2004. La fiche de proposition, ainsi que toutes les informations relatives aux Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin sont disponibles sur notre site web http://art-action.org/fr_info.htm ou sur demande par email info at art-action.org =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ N'hésitez pas à diffuser cette information auprès d'organismes de création ou d'artistes et réalisateurs avec lesquels vous êtes en relation. N'hésitez pas à nous contacter pour toute question. Cordialement. ----------------- Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin roARaTorio - 51 rue Montorgueil - 75002 Paris Site: http://art-action.org Email: info at art-action.org ========================================= se désinscrire: mailto:info at art-action.org?subject=unsubscribe(5)_reader-list at sarai.net ========================================= ------------ AUF DEUTSCH | ------------ TEILNAHMEAUFRUF - EINSENDESCHLUSS 30. JUNI 2004 ||||| FESTIVAL #8.9 ||||| RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES PARIS/BERLIN ||||| CINEMA VIDEO MULTIMEDIA ||||| http://art-action.org *** Bitte leiten Sie diese Informationen weiter *** Die "Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin" (Paris/Berlin internationale Begegnungen) stellen im Herbst 2004 in den beiden Städten ein internationales Programm vor, das sich vorallem dem experimentellen Kino, zeitgenössischen Videos und dem Multimedia Bereich widmet, und sich aus Werken von international anerkannten Künstlern und Filmschffenden, sowie aus Beiträgen weniger bekannter Künstler zusammensetzt. Das Anliegen der "Rencontres internationales" ist es, diese Werke einem breiten Publikum zugänglich zu machen, die verschiedenen Schaffensbereiche einander näherzubringen und den Austausch zwischen Künstlern, Regisseuren und Persönlichkeiten aus der kulturellen und künstlerischen Szene zu fördern. Für weitere informationen : http://art-action.org Als Veranstaltung ohne lukrative Absichten und ohne Wettbewerb werden die "Rencontres internationeles Paris/ Berlin" von deutschen, französischen und internationalen Institutionen unterstützt. http://art-action.org/de_soutien.htm =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ JEDE PERSON, EINRICHTUNG ODER GESELLSCHAFT KANN SICH MIT EINEM ODER MEHREREN WERK(EN) BEWERBEN. DER TEILNAHMEAUFRUF BETRIFFT DIE KATEGORIEN FILM, VIDEO UND MULTIMEDIA, ohne Einschränkungen in Hinblick auf Genre oder Dauer. 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Das Bewerbungsformular, sowie sämtliche Informationen zu den "Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin" finden Sie auf unserer Homepage: http://art-action.org/de_info.htm oder bekommen Sie auf Anfrage über email: info at art-action.org =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Wir würden uns sehr freuen, wenn Sie diese Information an künstlerische Organisationen, Künstler und Regisseure, mit denen Sie in Kontakt stehen, weiterleiten könnten bzw. wenn Sie ihrerseits mit einem oder mehreren Werken, die Sie geschaffen, produziert, unterstützt oder vertrieben haben, antreten würden. Wir stehen Ihenen für weitere Informationen jederzeit gerne zur Verfügung! Mit freundlichen Grüßen ----------------- Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin roARaTorio - 51 rue Montorgueil - 75002 Paris Site: http://art-action.org Email: info at art-action.org ========================================= unsubscribe/ se désinscrire/ abbestellen: mailto:info at art-action.org?subject=unsubscribe(5)_reader-list at sarai.net ========================================= From ravikant at sarai.net Thu Jun 17 11:49:39 2004 From: ravikant at sarai.net (Ravikant) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 11:49:39 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] TOI article by Alok Rai Message-ID: <200406171149.39680.ravikant@sarai.net> For those who do not read Times of India. Enjoy and circulate it further. Times of India/Edit/Leader/TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2004 Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/738962.cms Ravikant --------------------------------------------------------- THE TAINTED AND THE SAINTED By Alok Rai Of course I can imagine a civilized parliament and, with a little voice training, even Sushma Swaraj and Mamata Banerjee might be granted a place in it, provided they promise to keep their hair on. (And Mr Jaitley of course - he looks so sincere!) But if all people with serious criminal charges against their names are to be excluded, it will be a very small parliament indeed. The former Home Minister, we know, will be forced to stay at home. And this is the real reason why the BJP has dug up the quaintly religious idea of a "taint", whereby a flexible sort of distinction is sought to be established between different sorts of charges and different sorts of unconvicted crimes. Thus, the Bihari Uddins, so to speak, are accused of offences like kidnapping, extortion and murder. And these are, beyond doubt, horrible crimes. And so the Uddins are deemed to be "tainted" merely by virtue of the fact of being accused of such heinous crimes. It is of course a damn pity, and an embarrassment, that these people have all been elected - rather like Mr Advani and the infamous Modi. One may still try to base some kind of distinction on the grounds that one lot are elected because of their crimes, while the others are elected despite them. But I defy anyone to work out which is which. (Consider Shahabuddin: despite? because? Consider Modi: because? despite?…) But, be that as it may, election can hardly offer exemption from justice. Legislators cannot be presumed to be above the law, like policemen. We know, of course, that all of these people are still unconvicted - so perhaps we could just pick on the judicial system, and forget the whole messy business? But even this would be somewhat complicated by the fact that, until lately, Mr Advani actually presided over the very department that was supposed to investigate and perhaps convict him! I suppose saints must be presumed to be above mere conflict of interest. So, what is the real distinction between the tainted and the sainted - between say, Shahabuddin and, say, Advani? Somehow, the implication is that the former's crimes are worse than the latter's; that the latter's crimes are, in fact, not crimes at all. Mr Vajpayee is actually quoted as saying only yesterday [ PTI, June 10 ] that the cases of his colleagues were “of a different nature”. He introduced the notion of a “political crime” that was fundamentally different from the “other” kind. He opined magisterially if ungrammatically that “you cannot have one gauge to (sic) all issues,” thereby lending his authority to the idea of multiple standards. Now, I hold no brief for the louts, those ordinary “ordinary” criminals - exclusion isn't enough, hang them if you can, pull out their fingernails! But I wish to examine the arguments whereby Advani and MMJoshi and Uma Bharati, the Babri Three, are sought to be exempted from this necessary justice. One can understand why the "sainted" ones are reluctant to name the tradition whose moral glamour they seek to invoke in their favour. This is the tradition of civil disobedience, associated indissolubly with the name of the assassinated Father of the Nation - assassinated, let us never forget, by a member of Mr Advani's own ideological fraternity. In civil disobedience, the law is broken publicly, declaredly, without violence and with the explicit political intent of subjecting the law to the critique of a higher, undeniable moral law. One thinks of Gandhi breaking colonial law on the beach at Dandi; of Martin Luther King breaking the segregationist, racist law in the southern U.S.; of Mandela and apartheid… It is of the very nature of such "law breaking" that conviction is a certainty - unless of course one is a friend of the Home Minister or, better, one is oneself the Home Minister! Gandhi, as every schoolboy knew - before Joshi got to work on the textbooks! - actually requested Judge Broomfield to convict him. Though Vajpayee may claim that Advani's "crimes" are different, the fact of the matter is that Advani, unlike Gandhi, has actually sought to escape conviction - rather like the Bihari Uddins, in fact! But, perhaps, there is something in Vajpayee’s distinction after all. It is possible that the "crimes" of Advani et al are a distinct third category, distinct both from the common or garden crimes of the Uddins and from non-violent civil disobedience. The difference lies in the fact that these are calculated acts of public violence, executed in order to achieve political ends. The commonly available designation for such acts, I fear, is terrorism. Lawyers make a fundamental distinction between civil and criminal law. While disputes regarding property fall within the purview of civil law, resorting to extra-legal means to settle such disputes - whether through violence or subterfuge, as in forgery - are the subject of criminal law. In the light of this distinction, the violence of the Uddins are still, essentially, about seizing property and are arguably therefore, admittedly from a macro godlike perspective, still a zero sum game: your money, my pocket, that sort of thing! But the political violence associated with the proponents of "cultural nationalism" is radically different. When it rises "idealistically" above mundane intentions like clearing slum properties and benefitting land mafias, it aims at nothing less than kidnapping the nation, Constitution and all. The existing civil and criminal law – existing by virtue of the same Constitution - can hardly capture its fundamental enormity. After all, Germany barely survived the paroxysm of perverted Hitlerite nationalism in the 1930s. I believe that India 2004 has had a narrow escape from a similar fate: India, that is Bharat, that might have been Modi’s Gujarat. Mere murderers are nothing compared to these madmen. And women. Of course they must all, the tainted and the sainted, be convicted under the existing law. But it is only consistent with the moral altitude claimed by these “sainted” ones – perpetually implying and declaring that they are “above” the law – that they receive a “higher” sentence. (Alok Rai teaches English at Delhi University) From Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com Thu Jun 17 20:57:40 2004 From: Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com (Asthana, Rahul) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 11:27:40 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' Message-ID: Nitin, "in all my 33 years, i haven't come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse." Did the question answer session go this way? "Q.Do you prefer Coke over Pepsi[Yes/No]""Q.Are you gay because you were abused as a child?[Yes/No]" I would think neither the question nor the answer are that simple or straightforward.It is very difficult for anybody to "say " that they are "this" because "that" happened to them when they were young. It would need some sort of psychological suggestion(from someone who is trained to doing that) and unravelling to get the answer.Another way could be extensive data gathering and then trying to find a correlation.This issue deserves more serious analysis. Thanks Rahul -----Original Message----- From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Nitin Karani Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:45 PM To: shivam Cc: reader-list at mail.sarai.net Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' Importance: High shivam, if pinki virani actually wrote that, it's ludicrous! (it sounds like the myth about hijras--that they kidnap and castrate children!) READ MY LIPS: we (gay people) are not on a 'conversion'/proselytization agenda! about the other more common myth that sexual abuse in childhood 'causes' homosexuality, it's again just that--a myth! in all my 33 years, i haven't come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse. agreed not everyone would have been honest whether they have faced abuse, but it's safe to say the incidence is low. in all these years of interaction, on-line and offline sexual abuse has never been an issue--and it's not like the gay communities have some kind of collective amnesia about their childhood or taboo about the topic! yes, i ahve come across just a couple of guys who were abused but even they are clear in their mind that abuse was not the reason for 'turning' gay. (i can't claim to speak on behalf of my lesbian sisters, but i am sure things are no different for them). and i remember reading about a survey in what was then the Times's groups 'Metropolis on Saturday' about a survey which said that in cases of abuse, the perpetrators were more often heterosexuals! (could this be the reason for the 'disdain' on the issue??) I haven't read her book, but i wonder if Ms. Virani actually did any research! or like razdan, set out to write on issues they know nothing about and don't care to find out! best, nitin karani bombay ----- Original Message ----- From: "shivam" To: Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:34 PM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of film 'Girlfriend' > > I agreewith much of what Ms Tejal Shah writes in the > Mid Day review, but I don't understand why she has a > problem with Girlfriend's character becoming a lesbian > because of child sexual abuse. Isn't that possible? > > I have found that while homosexuality is a very > important issue in intellectual circles, I wonder why > this disdain and indifference towards child sexual > abuse. There's a book called "Bitter Chocolate: Child > Sexual Abuse in India" by Pinki Virani in which she > writes that homosexuals sometimes abuse children with > the purpose of making them homosexuals. > > Regards, > Shivam > > > --- Sappho for Equality > wrote: > > > > > > > Note: Forwarded message attached > > > > -- Orignal Message -- > > > > From: TS > > To: > > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > > > > > > > ATTACHMENT part 2 message/rfc822 > > From: TS > > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > > 'Girlfriend' > > To: > > > > Dear Friends, > > Some of us were unfortunate enough to be present at > > the preview screening of film 'Girlfriend' in Bombay > > on Thursday, 10th June. > > Today, the film has been released nationwide. It is > > the worst possible film that has ever been made in > > the history of cinema about a 'Lesbian'. > > In a country like India where lesbian women exist on > > the invisible margins, as criminals without any > > rights, doubly oppressed as women and lesbian, not > > to mention the layers added by class, caste, > > religion and ability, a film like 'Girlfriend' is a > > severe blow to the advancement of the human rights > > and sexuality rights of all women. We must do > > something in the face of such callousness. > > > > Please do write critical articles and reviews about > > the film, hold press conferences, protest rallies, > > distribute parchas or anything to 'damage control'. > > I have written a small piece below and I urge you to > > please circulate this email as widely as possible. > > In solidarity, > > tejal > > > > > > >From Fire into the furnace > > Dear Mr. Karan Razdan (director of Girlfriend), > > If the Shiv Sena and the Bajrang Dal go on a rampage > > yet again, to protest your film 'Girlfriend', ask > > for the film to be banned or sent back to the censor > > board, I might even forgive you. > > > > But I know, that six years after Deepa Mehta's film > > 'Fire' was released, the right wing will see no > > reason to protest your film because your portrayal > > of a lesbian as 'a psychopath, sexually abused, man > > hating, murderer and killer' fits just fine into > > their hetero-patriarchal agenda of portraying > > lesbians & gays as freaks, abnormal and as people > > who must die at the end of the film, so they are > > aptly punished for their unnatural existence. > > > > On the out set, it must be stated that the 'Lesbian' > > issue is a hot topic; it attracts audiences, creates > > a curiosity and definitely impacts the box office > > collections. I mean, if you are telling me that you > > made this film because you care so much about > > lesbians and the issues affecting them, that you > > wanted to bring this issue into every Indian > > household, surely you mean it as a devastatingly, > > nasty joke! > > > > Your film is a presentation of the worst possible > > misnomers (I consciously refrain from using the word > > 'stereotype') about anyone who may be attracted to a > > person of the same gender. The male, macho but > > normal (read heterosexual) hero has no qualms about > > playing a hyper-exaggerated, sissy, gay man when he > > needs to seduce the simple minded, generous at > > heart, 'one-night' lesbian, but essentially, a > > reformed, heterosexual girl played by Amrita Arora. > > The straight heroine who is being continuously > > misled by the lesbian villain must be saved by the > > good-boy-hero. In the end, values of heterosexual > > love, marriage and 'normal' families must be upheld. > > The character of Tanya, acted by Isha Koppikar is > > nothing short of a 'lesbian animal' aided as it is > > by the background score to help us see her as a > > wild, almost cannibalistic man-eating/man-hating > > woman who dares to behave like a man, a Sahela (a > > mere saheli would be far too sensitive). All this is > > of course explained by the simple fact that Tanya > > was sexually abused as a child simultaneously > > implying that what makes women 'this way' is > > possibly, abuse at the hands of men! > > > > After watching a film like this, it is impossible > > for anyone to think of 'women who love women' as > > normal human beings with two hands and two feet, who > > may be a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a > > neighbour, a grand mother and least of all a caring > > lover. > > > > It must be pointed out that under the section 377 of > > the Indian Penal Code, gay, lesbian, bisexual and > > transgender people are looked upon as/considered > > criminals, existing against the order of nature. > > Hey! and if you thought it was just about 'those > > guys & their lifestyles', let me remind you that > > anytime you have non peno-viginal penetrative sex, > > you are as much of a criminal and can be put in the > > prison for a term extending to 10 years & shall also > > be liable to fine. > > > > Mr. Razdan, the next time you say that you are > > taking a neutral position in this film and > > portraying the case of just one lesbian, let me > > remind you precisely, that the fiction you are > > choosing is a cleverly developed and thought out > > storyline that carries a clear message. This message > > is a dangerous and retrogressive one. It is a > > message that endangers the life of any woman who may > > look or behave boyish, any woman who chooses to > > experiment with her sexuality, and any woman who > > asserts her right to different choices including > > those women who are good friends and hold hands when > > they walk down the street. > > > > Welcome to the world of blatant hate crimes based on > > your sexual and gender orientation! > > > > As men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, films > > like these take us many steps backwards. More than > > two decades of work done by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual > > and Transgender groups, feminists groups, human > > rights groups, women's groups and progressive > > artists groups, is going to suffer as this film is > > commercially released in every part of India from > > small towns to big cities. > > > > Every time I hear of another lesbian suicide, > > another girl who hanged herself for being teased > > about her 'best' friend, another hijra woman raped > > in police custody, another woman sent for shock > > treatment and aversion therapy to cure her of her > > homosexuality, another couple put under house arrest > > by their parents when they find out about their > > same-sex love, I will think of this film and I will > > be reminded of the power that Bollywood wields in > > creating a mass consciousness. In this case, it will > > be a conscious, articulated, homophobia. > > > > Thank-you very much Mr. Razdan, but we, as > > progressive citizens are not interested in > > lip-service. I can assure you of one thing: the > > homosexual community in this country would much > > rather live in quiet anonymity than be > > mis-represented in such a ghastly, contorted > > fashion. Even a little bit of research on your part > > would have revealed that there are at least three > > active lesbian and bisexual women's groups in Bombay > > city alone and hundreds of 'women who love women' > > leading their lives openly and happily but that's > > only possible when one makes a film on a hot issue > > (like lesbianism is in India) when you foresee > > beyond profits and publicity and see, real lives and > > real people who will live the consequences of your > > doing. > > > > It's time that we stopped separating the issues that > > films address and their impact on the audience > > within a given socio-political context. It is also > > high time that we stand in protest against any film > > that causes damage to the rights of any minority > > groups. > > > > Tejal Shah > > > > (The writer is a visual artist and the co-founder, > > organiser and curator of Larzish.tremors of a > > revolution, International Film festival of Sexuality > > & Gender Plurality, India since 2003) > > > > > > > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > 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: > > > ===== > ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ > > ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ > > ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ > > ________________________________________________________________________ > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > _________________________________________ > 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 nkarani at hotmail.com Thu Jun 17 21:12:05 2004 From: nkarani at hotmail.com (NITIN KARANI) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:42:05 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film'Girlfriend' Message-ID: mr. asthana, i have already said it's a subject that needs to be treated seriously, instead of repeating myths! as to the nature of my interaction with other gay people, please do not try to speculate or trivialize it. nitin From: "Asthana, Rahul" To: "'Nitin Karani'" ,shivam CC: reader-list at mail.sarai.net Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film'Girlfriend' Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 11:27:40 -0400 Nitin, "in all my 33 years, i haven't come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse." Did the question answer session go this way? "Q.Do you prefer Coke over Pepsi[Yes/No]""Q.Are you gay because you were abused as a child?[Yes/No]" I would think neither the question nor the answer are that simple or straightforward.It is very difficult for anybody to "say " that they are "this" because "that" happened to them when they were young. It would need some sort of psychological suggestion(from someone who is trained to doing that) and unravelling to get the answer.Another way could be extensive data gathering and then trying to find a correlation.This issue deserves more serious analysis. Thanks Rahul -----Original Message----- From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Nitin Karani Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:45 PM To: shivam Cc: reader-list at mail.sarai.net Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' Importance: High shivam, if pinki virani actually wrote that, it's ludicrous! (it sounds like the myth about hijras--that they kidnap and castrate children!) READ MY LIPS: we (gay people) are not on a 'conversion'/proselytization agenda! about the other more common myth that sexual abuse in childhood 'causes' homosexuality, it's again just that--a myth! in all my 33 years, i haven't come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse. agreed not everyone would have been honest whether they have faced abuse, but it's safe to say the incidence is low. in all these years of interaction, on-line and offline sexual abuse has never been an issue--and it's not like the gay communities have some kind of collective amnesia about their childhood or taboo about the topic! yes, i ahve come across just a couple of guys who were abused but even they are clear in their mind that abuse was not the reason for 'turning' gay. (i can't claim to speak on behalf of my lesbian sisters, but i am sure things are no different for them). and i remember reading about a survey in what was then the Times's groups 'Metropolis on Saturday' about a survey which said that in cases of abuse, the perpetrators were more often heterosexuals! (could this be the reason for the 'disdain' on the issue??) I haven't read her book, but i wonder if Ms. Virani actually did any research! or like razdan, set out to write on issues they know nothing about and don't care to find out! best, nitin karani bombay ----- Original Message ----- From: "shivam" To: Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:34 PM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of film 'Girlfriend' > > I agreewith much of what Ms Tejal Shah writes in the > Mid Day review, but I don't understand why she has a > problem with Girlfriend's character becoming a lesbian > because of child sexual abuse. Isn't that possible? > > I have found that while homosexuality is a very > important issue in intellectual circles, I wonder why > this disdain and indifference towards child sexual > abuse. There's a book called "Bitter Chocolate: Child > Sexual Abuse in India" by Pinki Virani in which she > writes that homosexuals sometimes abuse children with > the purpose of making them homosexuals. > > Regards, > Shivam > > > --- Sappho for Equality > wrote: > > > > > > > Note: Forwarded message attached > > > > -- Orignal Message -- > > > > From: TS > > To: > > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > > > > > > > ATTACHMENT part 2 message/rfc822 > > From: TS > > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > > 'Girlfriend' > > To: > > > > Dear Friends, > > Some of us were unfortunate enough to be present at > > the preview screening of film 'Girlfriend' in Bombay > > on Thursday, 10th June. > > Today, the film has been released nationwide. It is > > the worst possible film that has ever been made in > > the history of cinema about a 'Lesbian'. > > In a country like India where lesbian women exist on > > the invisible margins, as criminals without any > > rights, doubly oppressed as women and lesbian, not > > to mention the layers added by class, caste, > > religion and ability, a film like 'Girlfriend' is a > > severe blow to the advancement of the human rights > > and sexuality rights of all women. We must do > > something in the face of such callousness. > > > > Please do write critical articles and reviews about > > the film, hold press conferences, protest rallies, > > distribute parchas or anything to 'damage control'. > > I have written a small piece below and I urge you to > > please circulate this email as widely as possible. > > In solidarity, > > tejal > > > > > > >From Fire into the furnace > > Dear Mr. Karan Razdan (director of Girlfriend), > > If the Shiv Sena and the Bajrang Dal go on a rampage > > yet again, to protest your film 'Girlfriend', ask > > for the film to be banned or sent back to the censor > > board, I might even forgive you. > > > > But I know, that six years after Deepa Mehta's film > > 'Fire' was released, the right wing will see no > > reason to protest your film because your portrayal > > of a lesbian as 'a psychopath, sexually abused, man > > hating, murderer and killer' fits just fine into > > their hetero-patriarchal agenda of portraying > > lesbians & gays as freaks, abnormal and as people > > who must die at the end of the film, so they are > > aptly punished for their unnatural existence. > > > > On the out set, it must be stated that the 'Lesbian' > > issue is a hot topic; it attracts audiences, creates > > a curiosity and definitely impacts the box office > > collections. I mean, if you are telling me that you > > made this film because you care so much about > > lesbians and the issues affecting them, that you > > wanted to bring this issue into every Indian > > household, surely you mean it as a devastatingly, > > nasty joke! > > > > Your film is a presentation of the worst possible > > misnomers (I consciously refrain from using the word > > 'stereotype') about anyone who may be attracted to a > > person of the same gender. The male, macho but > > normal (read heterosexual) hero has no qualms about > > playing a hyper-exaggerated, sissy, gay man when he > > needs to seduce the simple minded, generous at > > heart, 'one-night' lesbian, but essentially, a > > reformed, heterosexual girl played by Amrita Arora. > > The straight heroine who is being continuously > > misled by the lesbian villain must be saved by the > > good-boy-hero. In the end, values of heterosexual > > love, marriage and 'normal' families must be upheld. > > The character of Tanya, acted by Isha Koppikar is > > nothing short of a 'lesbian animal' aided as it is > > by the background score to help us see her as a > > wild, almost cannibalistic man-eating/man-hating > > woman who dares to behave like a man, a Sahela (a > > mere saheli would be far too sensitive). All this is > > of course explained by the simple fact that Tanya > > was sexually abused as a child simultaneously > > implying that what makes women 'this way' is > > possibly, abuse at the hands of men! > > > > After watching a film like this, it is impossible > > for anyone to think of 'women who love women' as > > normal human beings with two hands and two feet, who > > may be a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a > > neighbour, a grand mother and least of all a caring > > lover. > > > > It must be pointed out that under the section 377 of > > the Indian Penal Code, gay, lesbian, bisexual and > > transgender people are looked upon as/considered > > criminals, existing against the order of nature. > > Hey! and if you thought it was just about 'those > > guys & their lifestyles', let me remind you that > > anytime you have non peno-viginal penetrative sex, > > you are as much of a criminal and can be put in the > > prison for a term extending to 10 years & shall also > > be liable to fine. > > > > Mr. Razdan, the next time you say that you are > > taking a neutral position in this film and > > portraying the case of just one lesbian, let me > > remind you precisely, that the fiction you are > > choosing is a cleverly developed and thought out > > storyline that carries a clear message. This message > > is a dangerous and retrogressive one. It is a > > message that endangers the life of any woman who may > > look or behave boyish, any woman who chooses to > > experiment with her sexuality, and any woman who > > asserts her right to different choices including > > those women who are good friends and hold hands when > > they walk down the street. > > > > Welcome to the world of blatant hate crimes based on > > your sexual and gender orientation! > > > > As men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, films > > like these take us many steps backwards. More than > > two decades of work done by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual > > and Transgender groups, feminists groups, human > > rights groups, women's groups and progressive > > artists groups, is going to suffer as this film is > > commercially released in every part of India from > > small towns to big cities. > > > > Every time I hear of another lesbian suicide, > > another girl who hanged herself for being teased > > about her 'best' friend, another hijra woman raped > > in police custody, another woman sent for shock > > treatment and aversion therapy to cure her of her > > homosexuality, another couple put under house arrest > > by their parents when they find out about their > > same-sex love, I will think of this film and I will > > be reminded of the power that Bollywood wields in > > creating a mass consciousness. In this case, it will > > be a conscious, articulated, homophobia. > > > > Thank-you very much Mr. Razdan, but we, as > > progressive citizens are not interested in > > lip-service. I can assure you of one thing: the > > homosexual community in this country would much > > rather live in quiet anonymity than be > > mis-represented in such a ghastly, contorted > > fashion. Even a little bit of research on your part > > would have revealed that there are at least three > > active lesbian and bisexual women's groups in Bombay > > city alone and hundreds of 'women who love women' > > leading their lives openly and happily but that's > > only possible when one makes a film on a hot issue > > (like lesbianism is in India) when you foresee > > beyond profits and publicity and see, real lives and > > real people who will live the consequences of your > > doing. > > > > It's time that we stopped separating the issues that > > films address and their impact on the audience > > within a given socio-political context. It is also > > high time that we stand in protest against any film > > that causes damage to the rights of any minority > > groups. > > > > Tejal Shah > > > > (The writer is a visual artist and the co-founder, > > organiser and curator of Larzish.tremors of a > > revolution, International Film festival of Sexuality > > & Gender Plurality, India since 2003) > > > > > > > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > 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: > > > ===== > ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ > > ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ > > ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ > > ________________________________________________________________________ > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > _________________________________________ > 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: _________________________________________ 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: _________________________________________________________________ Expressions unlimited! The all new MSN Messenger! http://server1.msn.co.in/sp04/messenger/ Change the way you communicate! From geeta.patel at verizon.net Thu Jun 17 22:08:44 2004 From: geeta.patel at verizon.net (Geeta Patel) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 12:38:44 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film'Girlfriend' References: Message-ID: <000701c45489$8f3cdd80$6401a8c0@GeetaPatel> Dear Rahul: I think one should begin by doing a study on how straight people became straight, turned straighter and stayed straight. There is nothing natural in heterosexuality as a pure form. Because if one begins to analyze the supports available for straight people, one realizes very quickly that being straight seems to require a lot of help, regular financial and legal aid from constitutions, governments, insurance firms -- the list goes on. And if heterosexuality was so easy to come by and stay in (without any of those quick glances at beautiful men or women or trannys or hijras or .. that direct desire away from heterosexuality) why the obsessive need to help it, ensure it, protect it, hold onto it. Nivedita Menon has a great piece on this in The Indian Express in January of this year. Janet Halley, a legal scholar writing in the US, also finds that judicial opinions on queer matters spend inordinate time on remarking on the instability of heterosexuality, and on its reproduction. (this is a simplified version of Halley's work, but sufficient for this task) In India, the British gave conventional forms of heterosexuality a big push and lots of legal help beginning in the early 19th century, which I and many other researchers have come upon when looking at the questions of passing property onto other people. Of course those issues, of inheritance lineage, are often looked at as something other than a mandate and push towards seemingly quotidian forms of heterosexuality. So, I think that encountering a film like "Girlfriend" should not only make audiences ask questions about lesbians, but also about their others, the supposedly straight people that ostensibly live their sexual lives without question. Hence one could easily ask the question: How many straight people derive the forms of their sexual desires through, from and with sexual abuse, including abuse that violated their childhoods? That might form the nucleus of a truely valuable study. And as for Pinky Virani's book--one would know that abuse is about the violent and subtle enactments of power, not about the sexual inclinations of a person, if one had actually worked with people dealing with sexual or physical abuse. And conversion is not the important issue when addressing or taking on abuse-- the construction of the abused person by an abuser is rarely so simple, i.e. as potential convert. Abusers come in all forms, ages, shapes and sizes, as do the abused, as does the specifics of the violence. I tried reading Pinky Virani's book when I was helping design programs to address abuse and was so irritated by it I was unable to finish it. Geeta Patel ________________________________________________________________________ > > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. > http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > > _________________________________________ > > 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: > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "NITIN KARANI" To: ; Cc: Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 11:42 AM Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of film'Girlfriend' > mr. asthana, > > i have already said it's a subject that needs to be treated seriously, > instead of repeating myths! > > as to the nature of my interaction with other gay people, please do not try > to speculate or trivialize it. > > nitin > > > From: "Asthana, Rahul" > To: "'Nitin Karani'" ,shivam > CC: reader-list at mail.sarai.net > Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of > film'Girlfriend' > Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 11:27:40 -0400 > > Nitin, > "in all my 33 years, i haven't > come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse." > Did the question answer session go this way? > "Q.Do you prefer Coke over Pepsi[Yes/No]""Q.Are you gay because you were > abused as a child?[Yes/No]" > I would think neither the question nor the answer are that simple or > straightforward.It is very difficult for anybody to "say " that they are > "this" because "that" happened to them when they were young. > It would need some sort of psychological suggestion(from someone who is > trained to doing that) and unravelling to get the answer.Another way could > be extensive data gathering and then trying to find a correlation.This issue > deserves more serious analysis. > Thanks > Rahul > > -----Original Message----- > From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net > [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Nitin Karani > Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:45 PM > To: shivam > Cc: reader-list at mail.sarai.net > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of > film 'Girlfriend' > Importance: High > > > shivam, > > if pinki virani actually wrote that, it's ludicrous! (it sounds like the > myth about hijras--that they kidnap and castrate children!) > > READ MY LIPS: we (gay people) are not on a 'conversion'/proselytization > agenda! > > about the other more common myth that sexual abuse in childhood 'causes' > homosexuality, it's again just that--a myth! in all my 33 years, i haven't > come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse. agreed > not everyone would have been honest whether they have faced abuse, but it's > safe to say the incidence is low. in all these years of interaction, on-line > and offline sexual abuse has never been an issue--and it's not like the gay > communities have some kind of collective amnesia about their childhood or > taboo about the topic! yes, i ahve come across just a couple of guys who > were abused but even they are clear in their mind that abuse was not the > reason for 'turning' gay. (i can't claim to speak on behalf of my lesbian > sisters, but i am sure things are no different for them). > > and i remember reading about a survey in what was then the Times's groups > 'Metropolis on Saturday' about a survey which said that in cases of abuse, > the perpetrators were more often heterosexuals! (could this be the reason > for the 'disdain' on the issue??) > > I haven't read her book, but i wonder if Ms. Virani actually did any > research! or like razdan, set out to write on issues they know nothing about > and don't care to find out! > > best, > nitin karani > bombay > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "shivam" > To: > Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:34 PM > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of film > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > > I agreewith much of what Ms Tejal Shah writes in the > > Mid Day review, but I don't understand why she has a > > problem with Girlfriend's character becoming a lesbian > > because of child sexual abuse. Isn't that possible? > > > > I have found that while homosexuality is a very > > important issue in intellectual circles, I wonder why > > this disdain and indifference towards child sexual > > abuse. There's a book called "Bitter Chocolate: Child > > Sexual Abuse in India" by Pinki Virani in which she > > writes that homosexuals sometimes abuse children with > > the purpose of making them homosexuals. > > > > Regards, > > Shivam > > > > > > --- Sappho for Equality > > wrote: > > > > > > > > > > Note: Forwarded message attached > > > > > > -- Orignal Message -- > > > > > > From: TS > > > To: > > > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > > > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ATTACHMENT part 2 message/rfc822 > > > From: TS > > > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > > > 'Girlfriend' > > > To: > > > > > > Dear Friends, > > > Some of us were unfortunate enough to be present at > > > the preview screening of film 'Girlfriend' in Bombay > > > on Thursday, 10th June. > > > Today, the film has been released nationwide. It is > > > the worst possible film that has ever been made in > > > the history of cinema about a 'Lesbian'. > > > In a country like India where lesbian women exist on > > > the invisible margins, as criminals without any > > > rights, doubly oppressed as women and lesbian, not > > > to mention the layers added by class, caste, > > > religion and ability, a film like 'Girlfriend' is a > > > severe blow to the advancement of the human rights > > > and sexuality rights of all women. We must do > > > something in the face of such callousness. > > > > > > Please do write critical articles and reviews about > > > the film, hold press conferences, protest rallies, > > > distribute parchas or anything to 'damage control'. > > > I have written a small piece below and I urge you to > > > please circulate this email as widely as possible. > > > In solidarity, > > > tejal > > > > > > > > > >From Fire into the furnace > > > Dear Mr. Karan Razdan (director of Girlfriend), > > > If the Shiv Sena and the Bajrang Dal go on a rampage > > > yet again, to protest your film 'Girlfriend', ask > > > for the film to be banned or sent back to the censor > > > board, I might even forgive you. > > > > > > But I know, that six years after Deepa Mehta's film > > > 'Fire' was released, the right wing will see no > > > reason to protest your film because your portrayal > > > of a lesbian as 'a psychopath, sexually abused, man > > > hating, murderer and killer' fits just fine into > > > their hetero-patriarchal agenda of portraying > > > lesbians & gays as freaks, abnormal and as people > > > who must die at the end of the film, so they are > > > aptly punished for their unnatural existence. > > > > > > On the out set, it must be stated that the 'Lesbian' > > > issue is a hot topic; it attracts audiences, creates > > > a curiosity and definitely impacts the box office > > > collections. I mean, if you are telling me that you > > > made this film because you care so much about > > > lesbians and the issues affecting them, that you > > > wanted to bring this issue into every Indian > > > household, surely you mean it as a devastatingly, > > > nasty joke! > > > > > > Your film is a presentation of the worst possible > > > misnomers (I consciously refrain from using the word > > > 'stereotype') about anyone who may be attracted to a > > > person of the same gender. The male, macho but > > > normal (read heterosexual) hero has no qualms about > > > playing a hyper-exaggerated, sissy, gay man when he > > > needs to seduce the simple minded, generous at > > > heart, 'one-night' lesbian, but essentially, a > > > reformed, heterosexual girl played by Amrita Arora. > > > The straight heroine who is being continuously > > > misled by the lesbian villain must be saved by the > > > good-boy-hero. In the end, values of heterosexual > > > love, marriage and 'normal' families must be upheld. > > > The character of Tanya, acted by Isha Koppikar is > > > nothing short of a 'lesbian animal' aided as it is > > > by the background score to help us see her as a > > > wild, almost cannibalistic man-eating/man-hating > > > woman who dares to behave like a man, a Sahela (a > > > mere saheli would be far too sensitive). All this is > > > of course explained by the simple fact that Tanya > > > was sexually abused as a child simultaneously > > > implying that what makes women 'this way' is > > > possibly, abuse at the hands of men! > > > > > > After watching a film like this, it is impossible > > > for anyone to think of 'women who love women' as > > > normal human beings with two hands and two feet, who > > > may be a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a > > > neighbour, a grand mother and least of all a caring > > > lover. > > > > > > It must be pointed out that under the section 377 of > > > the Indian Penal Code, gay, lesbian, bisexual and > > > transgender people are looked upon as/considered > > > criminals, existing against the order of nature. > > > Hey! and if you thought it was just about 'those > > > guys & their lifestyles', let me remind you that > > > anytime you have non peno-viginal penetrative sex, > > > you are as much of a criminal and can be put in the > > > prison for a term extending to 10 years & shall also > > > be liable to fine. > > > > > > Mr. Razdan, the next time you say that you are > > > taking a neutral position in this film and > > > portraying the case of just one lesbian, let me > > > remind you precisely, that the fiction you are > > > choosing is a cleverly developed and thought out > > > storyline that carries a clear message. This message > > > is a dangerous and retrogressive one. It is a > > > message that endangers the life of any woman who may > > > look or behave boyish, any woman who chooses to > > > experiment with her sexuality, and any woman who > > > asserts her right to different choices including > > > those women who are good friends and hold hands when > > > they walk down the street. > > > > > > Welcome to the world of blatant hate crimes based on > > > your sexual and gender orientation! > > > > > > As men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, films > > > like these take us many steps backwards. More than > > > two decades of work done by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual > > > and Transgender groups, feminists groups, human > > > rights groups, women's groups and progressive > > > artists groups, is going to suffer as this film is > > > commercially released in every part of India from > > > small towns to big cities. > > > > > > Every time I hear of another lesbian suicide, > > > another girl who hanged herself for being teased > > > about her 'best' friend, another hijra woman raped > > > in police custody, another woman sent for shock > > > treatment and aversion therapy to cure her of her > > > homosexuality, another couple put under house arrest > > > by their parents when they find out about their > > > same-sex love, I will think of this film and I will > > > be reminded of the power that Bollywood wields in > > > creating a mass consciousness. In this case, it will > > > be a conscious, articulated, homophobia. > > > > > > Thank-you very much Mr. Razdan, but we, as > > > progressive citizens are not interested in > > > lip-service. I can assure you of one thing: the > > > homosexual community in this country would much > > > rather live in quiet anonymity than be > > > mis-represented in such a ghastly, contorted > > > fashion. Even a little bit of research on your part > > > would have revealed that there are at least three > > > active lesbian and bisexual women's groups in Bombay > > > city alone and hundreds of 'women who love women' > > > leading their lives openly and happily but that's > > > only possible when one makes a film on a hot issue > > > (like lesbianism is in India) when you foresee > > > beyond profits and publicity and see, real lives and > > > real people who will live the consequences of your > > > doing. > > > > > > It's time that we stopped separating the issues that > > > films address and their impact on the audience > > > within a given socio-political context. It is also > > > high time that we stand in protest against any film > > > that causes damage to the rights of any minority > > > groups. > > > > > > Tejal Shah > > > > > > (The writer is a visual artist and the co-founder, > > > organiser and curator of Larzish.tremors of a > > > revolution, International Film festival of Sexuality > > > & Gender Plurality, India since 2003) > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > > 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: > > > > > > ===== > > ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ > > > > ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ > > > > ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ > > > > ________________________________________________________________________ > > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. > http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > > _________________________________________ > > 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: > _________________________________________ > 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: > > _________________________________________________________________ > Expressions unlimited! The all new MSN Messenger! > http://server1.msn.co.in/sp04/messenger/ Change the way you communicate! > > _________________________________________ > 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 zest_india at yahoo.co.in Thu Jun 17 20:55:53 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?shivam?=) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 16:25:53 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Return of the NYRB Message-ID: <20040617152553.89543.qmail@web8201.mail.in.yahoo.com> The Rebirth of the NYRB By Scott Sherman The Nation / 7 June 2004 http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040607&s=sherman QUOT-Dear Mr. Secretary: I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as political counselor in US Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart." So wrote Brady Kiesling, a career US diplomat, in a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell last year. The letter was candid and direct: "Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson.... Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security." Greek newspapers were quick to publish Kiesling's pithy and prescient statement, but it was virtually ignored in the US press until The New York Review of Books reprinted it at the onset of the Iraq war. Kiesling invoked a number of themes that had been percolating in the Review's pages since late 2001: the recklessness of George Bush and his Administration; the erosion of civil liberties and constitutional protections at home; the growing estrangement of the United States from the rest of the world; and--a decisive matter for the Review--the rupture with longtime allies France and Germany. The manner in which Kiesling's letter arrived on these shores points to a significant new development in the higher echelons of American culture: the re-emergence of The New York Review of Books as a powerful and combative actor on the political scene. Born as a highbrow literary magazine in 1963, the Review took a vocal role in contesting the Vietnam War, and its pages were filled with essays by Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, I.F. Stone, Andrew Kopkind, Ellen Willis, Tom Hayden and other leading writers from the left. Around 1970, a sturdy liberalism began to supplant left-wing radicalism at the paper. As Philip Nobile observed in his 1974 book Intellectual Skywriting, the Review returned to its roots and became "a literary magazine on the British nineteenth-century model, which would mix politics and literature in a tough but gentlemanly fashion." In the wake of the Vietnam War, the Review became a formidable--and, in some sense, unique--journalistic institution. Many of its readers reside in academia, but the paper has a devoted following in the upper reaches of media, politics and philanthropy, which gives it an influence vastly out of proportion to its circulation of 130,000. (One recent essay, Peter Galbraith's "How to Get Out of Iraq," even caused a stir among some military intellectuals.) That influence translates into dollars: In contrast to virtually all serious literary and political journals, which drain money from their owners, the Review has been profitable for decades. But the formula is not without its imperfections, which have grown more pronounced in recent years. The publication has always been erudite and authoritative--and because of its analytical rigor and seriousness, frequently essential--but it hasn't always been lively, pungent and readable. A musty odor, accompanied by a certain aversion to risk-taking, has pervaded its pages for a long time. "In recent years," says the historian Ronald Steel, who has contributed since 1965, "the paper has sometimes verged on being bland or predictable, always using the same people." But the election of George W. Bush, combined with the furies of 9/11, jolted the editors. Since 2001, the Review's temperature has risen and its political outlook has sharpened. Old warhorses bolted from their armchairs. Prominent members of the Review "family"--a stable that includes veteran journalists (Thomas Powers, Frances FitzGerald, Ian Buruma), literary stars (Joan Didion, Norman Mailer) and academic heavyweights (Stanley Hoffmann, Ronald Dworkin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.)--charged into battle not only against the White House but against the lethargic press corps and the "liberal hawk" intellectuals, some of whom are themselves prominent members of the Review's extended family. In stark contrast to The New Yorker, whose editor, David Remnick, endorsed the Iraq war in a signed essay in February 2003, asserting that "a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all"; or The New York Times Magazine, which gave ample space to Michael Ignatieff, Bill Keller, Paul Berman, George Packer and other prowar liberal hawks, the Review opposed the Iraq war in a voice that was remarkably consistent and unified. The firepower it directed against the liberal hawks reveals much about the Review's political mood these days. Like many in the liberal hawk camp, the publication sanctioned US military intervention in the Balkans on humanitarian grounds. But when Ignatieff & Co. invoked the logic of humanitarian intervention as a basis for military action against Saddam Hussein, the Review (which has showcased Ignatieff's work for years) insisted that Bush's crusade against Iraq was something closer to old-fashioned imperialism. As Ian Buruma wrote in a quietly devastating assessment of Paul Berman's 2003 book Terror and Liberalism: "There is something in the tone of Berman's polemic that reminds me of the quiet American in Graham Greene's novel, the man of principle who causes mayhem, without quite realizing why." What blew the dust off The New York Review? In no sense, really, has the paper returned to its New Left sensibility of the late 1960s: Chomsky, Hayden and Willis have not been reinstated; young lions like The Baffler's Tom Frank and The Village Voice's Rick Perlstein have not been invited to contribute; Eric Foner, Bruce Cumings, Richard Rorty, Chalmers Johnson, Stephen Holmes, Anatol Lieven, Elaine Showalter and Carol Brightman continue to publish much of their finest work not in The New York Review of Books but in the more radical, eccentric and sprightly pages of the London Review of Books. In short, the Review's liberal (and establishment) soul remains intact. What has changed significantly, in the age of Bush, is the Review's style of rhetoric and degree of political focus and commitment. Longtime editor Robert Silvers is not eager to discuss the Review, but he does allow, "The pieces we have published by such writers as Brian Urquhart, Thomas Powers, Mark Danner and Ronald Dworkin have been reactions to a genuine crisis concerning American destructiveness, American relations with its allies, American protections of its traditions of liberties." He worries that critical voices are being silenced: "The aura of patriotic defiance cultivated by the Administration, in a fearful atmosphere, had the effect of muffling dissent." The Review's response to that atmosphere is a most welcome return to form. By forcefully articulating what was essentially the European position on Iraq and the "war on terror," the Review has recovered much of the élan and urgency it possessed in the late 1960s. "They have been quite influential," notes Brady Kiesling, "in consolidating the gut feeling of a whole intellectual class that Bush is a frighteningly weak and ignorant President." "One didn't think of it in recent years as being particularly a political magazine," says Norman Mailer, who has contributed to the Review off and on since 1963, and who is a principal actor in the paper's current revival. "I think that The New York Review, which has been evolving for many years, has evolved one more time." In 1959 Elizabeth Hardwick wrote an acerbic essay for Harper's titled "The Decline of Book Reviewing." "The book-review sections as a cultural enterprise are, like a pocket of unemployment, in a state of baneful depression insofar as liveliness and interest are concerned," she professed. Three years later, during the winter of 1962-63, a newspaper strike kept the New York dailies off the streets for several months, and Hardwick and her friends came to realize that a Sunday afternoon without the New York Times Book Review was bliss. In 1963 Hardwick, along with Robert Lowell and Jason Epstein, launched the Review and in the process assembled a stellar cast of writers. The editors who helped to create the Review--Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, both of whom are now 74--are still at the helm today. In the mid-1960s political developments at home and abroad drove the paper to the left. I.F. Stone, Bernard Fall and Jean Lacouture were among the first to expose the folly of the Vietnam War, and they did so at length in the pages of the Review. In its most militant and pugnacious phase in the late 1960s, the Review published several of Noam Chomsky's most magisterial essays, alongside articles by writers like Hayden and Kopkind, whose 1967 essay on Martin Luther King Jr. was accompanied by a drawing of a Molotov cocktail on the cover, which drew a firestorm of outrage and became the centerpiece of the neoconservative campaign against the Review. After Vietnam, the Review jettisoned its radical sensibility and moved closer to the center. To a considerable extent, a tight circle of New York intellectuals, Ivy League stars, Nobel laureates and Oxbridge luminaries replaced Chomsky and his cohort. The paper still printed the work of dissidents, but they now tended to be dissidents from within the establishment. If Chomsky did much to shape the Review's identity in the 1960s, it was Silvers's close friend, the Oxford political theorist Isaiah Berlin, who helped to define the Review after Vietnam with his emphasis on liberalism, pluralism, individual liberty and the dangers of political extremism. (Vaclav Havel, to some extent, played that role in the 1990s.) "There was a very drastic shift," says Chomsky, whose work stopped appearing in the Review in 1975, and who insists today that writers who had "any connection with activist sectors of the peace movement" were "virtually eliminated, except for token participation." (Silvers declines to discuss Chomsky or his allegations: "I don't feel it's right for me," he says, "to get into a personal account of my relationship with any writer.") Some left-leaning members of the Review family evince frustration with the paper's trajectory. Says Gore Vidal, "It's essentially bien-pensant on most matters." He produces a familiar litany of complaints about the Review: stodginess, Anglophilia, nonchalance toward younger contributors. Vidal has a long history with the Review, whose editors have routinely published his literary criticism but have rejected some of his most brilliant and acerbic political essays--including "The Holy Family" and "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star," the latter of which appeared in The Nation. "I am forbidden politics" at the Review, he professed in a 1991 letter to a friend, portions of which appear in Fred Kaplan's Gore Vidal: A Biography. The Review, Vidal wrote, "grows not only duller and duller, the fate of most papers, but the writers do not question the status quo and the examined life is too dangerous for their pages." Perhaps. But the Review's political virtues should not go unnoticed. The paper was always hostile to neoconservatism: Silvers and Epstein never followed Norman Podhoretz, Hilton Kramer and other New York intellectuals into the Republican camp. Indeed, one of the most piquant surveys of the neoconservative throng was undertaken by Alfred Kazin in 1983--and published in The New York Review of Books. Down through the years, the Review has maintained its commitment to New Deal/Great Society liberalism and to civil liberties, racial equality and human rights. The Review responded to the election of George W. Bush with dismay, and was quick to assail the Administration's rejection of the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and the ABM treaty. But the paper's reawakening really began with the events of September 11. A former State Department counterterrorism expert, Philip Wilcox Jr., crafted the Review's first response to the attacks. Responding to Bush's declared "war on terrorism," Wilcox wrote, "Armed force...while politically popular, is usually an ineffective and often counterproductive weapon against terror." The Administration, he insisted, should embrace a foreign policy that "moves away from unilateralism and toward closer engagement with other governments." Wilcox's essay did much to define the Review's post-9/11 coverage. His principal arguments--that military power has stark limitations, and that multilateral diplomacy is essential--would be echoed (and expanded) in the weeks and months after September 11 by dozens of contributors, many of whom were skeptical of the US war in Afghanistan. "Accountants mulling over shady bank accounts and undercover agents bribing their way," Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit wrote a few months later, "will be more useful in the long-term struggle than special macho units blasting their way into the caves of Afghanistan." "Embarking on a full-scale war to rid oneself of terrorists is analogous to hunting a hornet with a Sherman tank," wrote Norman Mailer. "When the tank knocks down the house that shelters the hornet, the creature whips into the attic of the next house." In the wake of 9/11, the Review also published a barrage of essays documenting the perilous state of American civil liberties as a result of the "war on terror," alongside some remarkable reportage from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But it was the Administration's obsession with Iraq that drove the Review to new heights of skepticism and indignation. In 1990 the paper supported the Gulf War on the grounds that it was a multilateral affair; but the editors came to realize that things would be different this time around. In September 2002 Frances FitzGerald published an essay titled "George Bush and the World," in which she contrasted the multilateral foreign policy of the first Bush Administration with the reckless, arrogant unilateralism of the second. Other Review writers were quick to take the full measure of Bush's foreign policy ambitions. "I find it increasingly hard to believe that Mr. Bush's objective is limited to seeing that Saddam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction," Anthony Lewis wrote a few weeks later. "The history and the theology of the men whose advice now dominates Mr. Bush's thinking point to much larger purposes. I think this president wants to overthrow the rules that have governed international life for the last fifty years." As war drew closer, and the press grew more accommodating and deferential, the Review's disgust increased, and the editors fired their heavy weaponry. Two months before the Iraq war, Joan Didion published "Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History," a melancholy account of her own journeys through the United States since 9/11 and a dark rumination on intellectual and political cowardice, the degradation of language, the machinations of faux patriots, the docility of our politicians and the closing of the American mind since the attacks on New York and Washington. Shortly thereafter, Mailer surfaced with an essay titled "Only in America." Accompanied by David Levine's caricature of a swaggering George W. Bush outfitted in the costume of a Roman gladiator (with missiles protruding from his shield), Mailer's essay was a dazzling rumination on revenge, masculinity, sports, television, oil consumption, empire, the Bomb, and--most of all--the fate of American democracy: Democracy, I would repeat, is the noblest form of government we have yet evolved, and we may as well begin to ask ourselves whether we are ready to suffer, even perish for it, rather than readying ourselves to live in the lower existence of a monumental banana republic with a government always eager to cater to mega-corporations as they do their best to appropriate our thwarted dreams with their elephantiastical conceits. The fall of Baghdad only deepened the fury of the Review's contributors. Jason Epstein penned a scorching essay in which he compared President Bush to Captain Ahab, and wherein he invoked the specter of World War I with a quotation from Sigmund Freud: "Never has an event destroyed so much that was precious in the common property of mankind, confused so many of the most lucid minds, so thoroughly debased the elevated." Last December, when many political observers were still giving the Administration the benefit of a doubt on Iraq's WMD potential, Thomas Powers insisted, in a much-read essay titled "The Vanishing Case for War," that anthrax, sarin, mustard gas, Scud missiles, biological warheads, etc. were nowhere to be found in Iraq. "There was no imminent danger--indeed there was no distant danger," Powers noted. "How is it possible then that the United States Congress allowed itself to be convinced to believe in this nonexistent danger, and to authorize in advance a war for which there was no justification?" One notices a clear generational aspect to the Review's recent output: With certain exceptions, the finest writing has flowed from the pens of contributors over the age of 60. "It isn't a bunch of youngbloods doing the lively political coverage at the Review, it's the old pros who have been writing for them for years," says James Wolcott, a columnist for Vanity Fair. "To me it's similar to the situation that occurred before the war with Iraq, when it was the silver-haired brigade--Mailer, Vidal, John le Carré, Kurt Vonnegut, Jimmy Breslin--who were most vehemently opposed while so many baby boomer journalists and intellectuals, from Michael Kelly to Paul Berman to Andrew Sullivan, were on board with Bush. The silver foxes had enough history under their belt to recognize what a wrenching departure this optional pre-emptive war was from the past." Some of the most astringent prose in the paper has come from a younger member of the family, Professor Tony Judt. A few weeks ago I called on Judt, 56, in his cluttered office at New York University's Remarque Institute. Bald, with glasses and a gray beard, Judt is wearing a stylish short-sleeve gray sweater and pressed black slacks. He is remarkably self-assured. He offers me a glass of scotch, while he sips mineral water. Born in England, Judt has taught European history at Oxford, Cambridge and Berkeley, and his best-known book is Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-1956, a fierce assault on leading French thinkers for their obeisance to Stalinism. "I started writing for The New York Review in 1993," Judt explains. "You start writing when they ask you. You don't send stuff in. They ask you." He has since contributed essays on France, Austria, the Balkans, Belgium, Albert Camus, Primo Levi and various aspects of international affairs since 2001. How did 9/11 influence him? "For the first time I felt alien, a little out of place, even in New York. And then I realized that, in some ways, it was especially in New York, and that was because of the Israel thing." For years Judt had privately lamented the passivity of the "American Jewish community, and indeed, the American Jewish intelligentsia, what used to be called 'the New York Intellectuals' and so on." Their silence on Israel--and their reluctance to accept, as he wrote in November 2001, that the "Israel-Palestine conflict and America's association with Israel are the greatest single source of contemporary anti-US sentiment"--bothered him. After 9/11, he says, "I started saying what I have for fifteen years been thinking, but had not written." What he wrote, in a series of essays for the Review, was not unfamiliar to readers of Israeli or European newspapers but, in the American context, was rather startling. These essays, which were provocations as much as prescriptions, tackled a variety of themes: the political uses of the Holocaust, the Jewish psyche, Israeli assassination squads and Ariel Sharon's "shameless" manipulation of the US government. "Most Israelis are still trapped in the story of their own uniqueness," Judt wrote in May 2002. "The problem for the rest of the world is that since 1967, Israel has changed in ways that render its traditional self-description absurd. It is now a regional colonial power, by some accounts the world's fourth-largest military establishment." Three hundred letters, most of them abusive, greeted that essay. In an even more incendiary essay, "Israel: The Alternative," published in October 2003, Judt argued that the very structure of the Israeli state is hopelessly--and dangerously--rooted in the past: The problem with Israel, in short, is not--as is sometimes suggested--that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world, but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a 'Jewish state'--a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded--is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism. Judt finished with a thunderclap: "The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews.... The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews." And he went on to propose a rather provocative solution to the current impasse: "A single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians." (The New York Review wasn't always friendly to the "binational state" concept. When Noam Chomsky proposed "socialist binationalism" in his 1974 book Peace in the Middle East?, Bernard Avishai, writing in the Review, dismissed the idea as "misleading and contradictory.") Judt's essay drew 1,000 smoldering letters. "I got no direct death threats," Judt recalls, "except for a number of e-mails that said, 'You'd be better off dead.'" He has since implemented certain changes to his daily routine. "We do now very carefully check our mail. My wife and kids don't open the mail. It's awful." But the venom of his critics has only served to fortify his opinions. "To be a Jewish American--what does the identity comprise?" Judt pointedly inquires. "It now comprises one identity in space and one in time. Its space is Israel and its time is Auschwitz. This is something I find obscene, ultimately dangerous and abusive on multiple counts." Judt is not the Review's only critical voice on Israel. Henry Siegman and Amos Elon have also written with great force and clarity, and in August 2001 Robert Malley and Hussein Agha produced the most nuanced insider account of the demise of the Camp David 2000 summit, one that shattered the mythology of "Ehud Barak's unprecedented offer and Yasser Arafat's uncompromising no." Gore Vidal affirms, with a trace of admiration and surprise in his voice, "They're getting very interesting on Israel, which they're taking a lot of flak for, obviously. For them, that's quite brave." What accounts for the Review's post-9/11 revival? One word that continually tumbles from the lips of seasoned Review-watchers is "Vietnam." Says Mark Danner, who worked for Silvers after he graduated from Harvard in the early 1980s, and who has recently produced some searching essays in the Review about Iraq, "If you look back over the Review's history, you'll find that periods of crisis bring out the best editorial instincts of the leadership of The New York Review. It certainly happened with Vietnam and Iran/contra. It gets the juices flowing." Some observers point to a circular continuity between the Review's coverage of Vietnam and Iraq. "The late 1960s, for the paper, were, to some extent, the age of Chomsky," says Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann. "The Review was a very strong critic of the Vietnam War. Gradually it became less militant, if you like. And indeed in the last year it has found some of its old vigor again, but it never lost what can be called a highly critical viewpoint about a number of aspects of international relations and foreign affairs." New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, who got his start at the Review, takes the view that Bush's shenanigans on Iraq have "reawakened the youthful energies of some of these people." He's referring to Judt and Mailer, but the same sentiment may well apply to Silvers and Epstein. In the run-up to the Iraq war, Silvers phoned Judt in London--at 3 am--and begged him to draft the text of a full-page advertisement in the New York Times protesting the rush to war. "He thought this was an urgent matter," recalls Judt. The same urgency propelled Silvers to track down Brady Kiesling in Greece and obtain permission to reprint his resignation letter. These faint echoes of the late 1960s--late-night phone calls, antiwar petitions, diplomatic contretemps--must have provided Silvers with at least a fleeting sense of déjà vu. In the case of Iraq, as with Vietnam, the Review saw what many other commentators missed or ignored. "In both instances," Hoffmann says, "Bob Silvers was, in effect, whether deliberately or not, compensating for the weaknesses of the more established media." Hoffmann recalls that Silvers and Epstein published some of the earliest criticisms of the Indochinese conflict--years before the mainstream press awoke from its slumber. "It was important," he says, in the case of Iraq, "that a journal which has the authority of the Review in a sense took up the slack and presented viewpoints which were extremely hard to get into the established media." Indeed, a great many Review contributors have objected to the media's performance since 9/11, and few were as lucid as Norman Mailer. With war imminent, Mailer noted that support for a full-scale invasion of Iraq was prevalent within influential sectors of the "liberal" media. Dissecting a New York Times op-ed column by Bill Keller, in which Keller aired his ambivalent prowar sentiments, Mailer noted, with pitch-perfect accuracy, "It is as if these liberal voices have decided that Bush cannot be stopped and so he must be joined." How refreshing to see Norman Mailer aggressively confront the Bill Kellers of the world; and how refreshing, too, to see the Review once again engaged in pugilistic combat on the pressing issues of the day. It's probably too much to infer, as Mailer does, that Silvers and Epstein were "radicalized" by Bush, since they are not radical people by background or temperament. One suspects they yearn for the day when they can return to their normal publishing routine--that gentlemanly pastiche of philosophy, art, classical music, photography, German and Russian history, East European politics, literary fiction--unencumbered by political duties of a confrontational or oppositional nature. That day has not yet arrived. If and when it does, let it be said that the editors met the challenges of the post-9/11 era in a way that most other leading American publications did not, and that The New York Review of Books--which turned forty last fall--was there when we needed it most. ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com Thu Jun 17 22:38:21 2004 From: Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com (Asthana, Rahul) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 13:08:21 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' Message-ID: Geeta\Nitin, If I came off implying that homosexuality is an aberration,which is caused by child abuse,it was never my intention.Its just how Nitin seemed to arrive at the conclusion that he did,that bothered me. Nitin,the allusion to coke\pepsi was wrong and I realize that in hindsight.I was just trying to make a point.I hope you realize it. Geeta, i agree with you that the study of child abuse should contain a sampling of the whole society,so that how it manifests itself can be investigated.It may or may not result in a better understanding of homosexuality from an academic point of view.After all, the matters of the psyche are always going to hold some mystery for us,aren't they?The least we can do is try to be as objective as possible. By the way,you make a lot of good points. Thanks Rahul -----Original Message----- From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Geeta Patel Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 12:39 PM To: NITIN KARANI; Asthana, Rahul; zest_india at yahoo.co.in Cc: reader-list at mail.sarai.net Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film'Girlfriend' Dear Rahul: I think one should begin by doing a study on how straight people became straight, turned straighter and stayed straight. There is nothing natural in heterosexuality as a pure form. Because if one begins to analyze the supports available for straight people, one realizes very quickly that being straight seems to require a lot of help, regular financial and legal aid from constitutions, governments, insurance firms -- the list goes on. And if heterosexuality was so easy to come by and stay in (without any of those quick glances at beautiful men or women or trannys or hijras or .. that direct desire away from heterosexuality) why the obsessive need to help it, ensure it, protect it, hold onto it. Nivedita Menon has a great piece on this in The Indian Express in January of this year. Janet Halley, a legal scholar writing in the US, also finds that judicial opinions on queer matters spend inordinate time on remarking on the instability of heterosexuality, and on its reproduction. (this is a simplified version of Halley's work, but sufficient for this task) In India, the British gave conventional forms of heterosexuality a big push and lots of legal help beginning in the early 19th century, which I and many other researchers have come upon when looking at the questions of passing property onto other people. Of course those issues, of inheritance lineage, are often looked at as something other than a mandate and push towards seemingly quotidian forms of heterosexuality. So, I think that encountering a film like "Girlfriend" should not only make audiences ask questions about lesbians, but also about their others, the supposedly straight people that ostensibly live their sexual lives without question. Hence one could easily ask the question: How many straight people derive the forms of their sexual desires through, from and with sexual abuse, including abuse that violated their childhoods? That might form the nucleus of a truely valuable study. And as for Pinky Virani's book--one would know that abuse is about the violent and subtle enactments of power, not about the sexual inclinations of a person, if one had actually worked with people dealing with sexual or physical abuse. And conversion is not the important issue when addressing or taking on abuse-- the construction of the abused person by an abuser is rarely so simple, i.e. as potential convert. Abusers come in all forms, ages, shapes and sizes, as do the abused, as does the specifics of the violence. I tried reading Pinky Virani's book when I was helping design programs to address abuse and was so irritated by it I was unable to finish it. Geeta Patel ________________________________________________________________________ > > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. > http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > > _________________________________________ > > 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: > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "NITIN KARANI" To: ; Cc: Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 11:42 AM Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of film'Girlfriend' > mr. asthana, > > i have already said it's a subject that needs to be treated seriously, > instead of repeating myths! > > as to the nature of my interaction with other gay people, please do not try > to speculate or trivialize it. > > nitin > > > From: "Asthana, Rahul" > To: "'Nitin Karani'" ,shivam > CC: reader-list at mail.sarai.net > Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of > film'Girlfriend' > Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 11:27:40 -0400 > > Nitin, > "in all my 33 years, i haven't > come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse." > Did the question answer session go this way? > "Q.Do you prefer Coke over Pepsi[Yes/No]""Q.Are you gay because you were > abused as a child?[Yes/No]" > I would think neither the question nor the answer are that simple or > straightforward.It is very difficult for anybody to "say " that they are > "this" because "that" happened to them when they were young. > It would need some sort of psychological suggestion(from someone who is > trained to doing that) and unravelling to get the answer.Another way could > be extensive data gathering and then trying to find a correlation.This issue > deserves more serious analysis. > Thanks > Rahul > > -----Original Message----- > From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net > [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Nitin Karani > Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:45 PM > To: shivam > Cc: reader-list at mail.sarai.net > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of > film 'Girlfriend' > Importance: High > > > shivam, > > if pinki virani actually wrote that, it's ludicrous! (it sounds like the > myth about hijras--that they kidnap and castrate children!) > > READ MY LIPS: we (gay people) are not on a 'conversion'/proselytization > agenda! > > about the other more common myth that sexual abuse in childhood 'causes' > homosexuality, it's again just that--a myth! in all my 33 years, i haven't > come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse. agreed > not everyone would have been honest whether they have faced abuse, but it's > safe to say the incidence is low. in all these years of interaction, on-line > and offline sexual abuse has never been an issue--and it's not like the gay > communities have some kind of collective amnesia about their childhood or > taboo about the topic! yes, i ahve come across just a couple of guys who > were abused but even they are clear in their mind that abuse was not the > reason for 'turning' gay. (i can't claim to speak on behalf of my lesbian > sisters, but i am sure things are no different for them). > > and i remember reading about a survey in what was then the Times's groups > 'Metropolis on Saturday' about a survey which said that in cases of abuse, > the perpetrators were more often heterosexuals! (could this be the reason > for the 'disdain' on the issue??) > > I haven't read her book, but i wonder if Ms. Virani actually did any > research! or like razdan, set out to write on issues they know nothing about > and don't care to find out! > > best, > nitin karani > bombay > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "shivam" > To: > Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:34 PM > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of film > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > > I agreewith much of what Ms Tejal Shah writes in the > > Mid Day review, but I don't understand why she has a > > problem with Girlfriend's character becoming a lesbian > > because of child sexual abuse. Isn't that possible? > > > > I have found that while homosexuality is a very > > important issue in intellectual circles, I wonder why > > this disdain and indifference towards child sexual > > abuse. There's a book called "Bitter Chocolate: Child > > Sexual Abuse in India" by Pinki Virani in which she > > writes that homosexuals sometimes abuse children with > > the purpose of making them homosexuals. > > > > Regards, > > Shivam > > > > > > --- Sappho for Equality > > wrote: > > > > > > > > > > Note: Forwarded message attached > > > > > > -- Orignal Message -- > > > > > > From: TS > > > To: > > > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > > > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ATTACHMENT part 2 message/rfc822 > > > From: TS > > > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > > > 'Girlfriend' > > > To: > > > > > > Dear Friends, > > > Some of us were unfortunate enough to be present at > > > the preview screening of film 'Girlfriend' in Bombay > > > on Thursday, 10th June. > > > Today, the film has been released nationwide. It is > > > the worst possible film that has ever been made in > > > the history of cinema about a 'Lesbian'. > > > In a country like India where lesbian women exist on > > > the invisible margins, as criminals without any > > > rights, doubly oppressed as women and lesbian, not > > > to mention the layers added by class, caste, > > > religion and ability, a film like 'Girlfriend' is a > > > severe blow to the advancement of the human rights > > > and sexuality rights of all women. We must do > > > something in the face of such callousness. > > > > > > Please do write critical articles and reviews about > > > the film, hold press conferences, protest rallies, > > > distribute parchas or anything to 'damage control'. > > > I have written a small piece below and I urge you to > > > please circulate this email as widely as possible. > > > In solidarity, > > > tejal > > > > > > > > > >From Fire into the furnace > > > Dear Mr. Karan Razdan (director of Girlfriend), > > > If the Shiv Sena and the Bajrang Dal go on a rampage > > > yet again, to protest your film 'Girlfriend', ask > > > for the film to be banned or sent back to the censor > > > board, I might even forgive you. > > > > > > But I know, that six years after Deepa Mehta's film > > > 'Fire' was released, the right wing will see no > > > reason to protest your film because your portrayal > > > of a lesbian as 'a psychopath, sexually abused, man > > > hating, murderer and killer' fits just fine into > > > their hetero-patriarchal agenda of portraying > > > lesbians & gays as freaks, abnormal and as people > > > who must die at the end of the film, so they are > > > aptly punished for their unnatural existence. > > > > > > On the out set, it must be stated that the 'Lesbian' > > > issue is a hot topic; it attracts audiences, creates > > > a curiosity and definitely impacts the box office > > > collections. I mean, if you are telling me that you > > > made this film because you care so much about > > > lesbians and the issues affecting them, that you > > > wanted to bring this issue into every Indian > > > household, surely you mean it as a devastatingly, > > > nasty joke! > > > > > > Your film is a presentation of the worst possible > > > misnomers (I consciously refrain from using the word > > > 'stereotype') about anyone who may be attracted to a > > > person of the same gender. The male, macho but > > > normal (read heterosexual) hero has no qualms about > > > playing a hyper-exaggerated, sissy, gay man when he > > > needs to seduce the simple minded, generous at > > > heart, 'one-night' lesbian, but essentially, a > > > reformed, heterosexual girl played by Amrita Arora. > > > The straight heroine who is being continuously > > > misled by the lesbian villain must be saved by the > > > good-boy-hero. In the end, values of heterosexual > > > love, marriage and 'normal' families must be upheld. > > > The character of Tanya, acted by Isha Koppikar is > > > nothing short of a 'lesbian animal' aided as it is > > > by the background score to help us see her as a > > > wild, almost cannibalistic man-eating/man-hating > > > woman who dares to behave like a man, a Sahela (a > > > mere saheli would be far too sensitive). All this is > > > of course explained by the simple fact that Tanya > > > was sexually abused as a child simultaneously > > > implying that what makes women 'this way' is > > > possibly, abuse at the hands of men! > > > > > > After watching a film like this, it is impossible > > > for anyone to think of 'women who love women' as > > > normal human beings with two hands and two feet, who > > > may be a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a > > > neighbour, a grand mother and least of all a caring > > > lover. > > > > > > It must be pointed out that under the section 377 of > > > the Indian Penal Code, gay, lesbian, bisexual and > > > transgender people are looked upon as/considered > > > criminals, existing against the order of nature. > > > Hey! and if you thought it was just about 'those > > > guys & their lifestyles', let me remind you that > > > anytime you have non peno-viginal penetrative sex, > > > you are as much of a criminal and can be put in the > > > prison for a term extending to 10 years & shall also > > > be liable to fine. > > > > > > Mr. Razdan, the next time you say that you are > > > taking a neutral position in this film and > > > portraying the case of just one lesbian, let me > > > remind you precisely, that the fiction you are > > > choosing is a cleverly developed and thought out > > > storyline that carries a clear message. This message > > > is a dangerous and retrogressive one. It is a > > > message that endangers the life of any woman who may > > > look or behave boyish, any woman who chooses to > > > experiment with her sexuality, and any woman who > > > asserts her right to different choices including > > > those women who are good friends and hold hands when > > > they walk down the street. > > > > > > Welcome to the world of blatant hate crimes based on > > > your sexual and gender orientation! > > > > > > As men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, films > > > like these take us many steps backwards. More than > > > two decades of work done by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual > > > and Transgender groups, feminists groups, human > > > rights groups, women's groups and progressive > > > artists groups, is going to suffer as this film is > > > commercially released in every part of India from > > > small towns to big cities. > > > > > > Every time I hear of another lesbian suicide, > > > another girl who hanged herself for being teased > > > about her 'best' friend, another hijra woman raped > > > in police custody, another woman sent for shock > > > treatment and aversion therapy to cure her of her > > > homosexuality, another couple put under house arrest > > > by their parents when they find out about their > > > same-sex love, I will think of this film and I will > > > be reminded of the power that Bollywood wields in > > > creating a mass consciousness. In this case, it will > > > be a conscious, articulated, homophobia. > > > > > > Thank-you very much Mr. Razdan, but we, as > > > progressive citizens are not interested in > > > lip-service. I can assure you of one thing: the > > > homosexual community in this country would much > > > rather live in quiet anonymity than be > > > mis-represented in such a ghastly, contorted > > > fashion. Even a little bit of research on your part > > > would have revealed that there are at least three > > > active lesbian and bisexual women's groups in Bombay > > > city alone and hundreds of 'women who love women' > > > leading their lives openly and happily but that's > > > only possible when one makes a film on a hot issue > > > (like lesbianism is in India) when you foresee > > > beyond profits and publicity and see, real lives and > > > real people who will live the consequences of your > > > doing. > > > > > > It's time that we stopped separating the issues that > > > films address and their impact on the audience > > > within a given socio-political context. It is also > > > high time that we stand in protest against any film > > > that causes damage to the rights of any minority > > > groups. > > > > > > Tejal Shah > > > > > > (The writer is a visual artist and the co-founder, > > > organiser and curator of Larzish.tremors of a > > > revolution, International Film festival of Sexuality > > > & Gender Plurality, India since 2003) > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > > 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: > > > > > > ===== > > ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ > > > > ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ > > > > ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ > > > > ________________________________________________________________________ > > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. > http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > > _________________________________________ > > 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: > _________________________________________ > 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: > > _________________________________________________________________ > Expressions unlimited! The all new MSN Messenger! > http://server1.msn.co.in/sp04/messenger/ Change the way you communicate! > > _________________________________________ > 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 nkarani at hotmail.com Fri Jun 18 04:37:51 2004 From: nkarani at hotmail.com (Nitin Karani) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 04:37:51 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film'Girlfriend' References: Message-ID: asthana, the point is i am happy with the way i draw my conclusions! and now that you have clarified too, i believe the four of us seem to at least veer towards the idea that there is little or no connection between child abuse and sexual orientation. No? cheers, nitin ----- Original Message ----- From: "Asthana, Rahul" To: "'Geeta Patel'" ; "NITIN KARANI" ; Cc: Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:38 PM Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film'Girlfriend' > Geeta\Nitin, > If I came off implying that homosexuality is an aberration,which is caused > by child abuse,it was never my intention.Its just how Nitin seemed to arrive > at the conclusion that he did,that bothered me. > Nitin,the allusion to coke\pepsi was wrong and I realize that in hindsight.I > was just trying to make a point.I hope you realize it. > Geeta, i agree with you that the study of child abuse should contain a > sampling of the whole society,so that how it manifests itself can be > investigated.It may or may not result in a better understanding of > homosexuality from an academic point of view.After all, the matters of the > psyche are always going to hold some mystery for us,aren't they?The least we > can do is try to be as objective as possible. > By the way,you make a lot of good points. > Thanks > Rahul > > > -----Original Message----- > From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net > [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Geeta Patel > Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 12:39 PM > To: NITIN KARANI; Asthana, Rahul; zest_india at yahoo.co.in > Cc: reader-list at mail.sarai.net > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of > film'Girlfriend' > > > Dear Rahul: > I think one should begin by doing a study on how straight people became > straight, turned straighter and stayed straight. There is nothing natural in > heterosexuality as a pure form. Because if one begins to analyze the > supports available for straight people, one realizes very quickly that being > straight seems to require a lot of help, regular financial and legal aid > from constitutions, governments, insurance firms -- the list goes on. And > if heterosexuality was so easy to come by and stay in (without any of those > quick glances at beautiful men or women or trannys or hijras or .. that > direct desire away from heterosexuality) why the obsessive need to help it, > ensure it, protect it, hold onto it. Nivedita Menon has a great piece on > this in The Indian Express in January of this year. Janet Halley, a legal > scholar writing in the US, also finds that judicial opinions on queer > matters spend inordinate time on remarking on the instability of > heterosexuality, and on its reproduction. (this is a simplified version of > Halley's work, but sufficient for this task) > In India, the British gave conventional forms of heterosexuality a big push > and lots of legal help beginning in the early 19th century, which I and many > other researchers have come upon when looking at the questions of passing > property onto other people. Of course those issues, of inheritance lineage, > are often looked at as something other than a mandate and push towards > seemingly quotidian forms of heterosexuality. > > So, I think that encountering a film like "Girlfriend" should not only make > audiences ask questions about lesbians, but also about their others, the > supposedly straight people that ostensibly live their sexual lives without > question. Hence one could easily ask the question: How many straight people > derive the forms of their sexual desires through, from and with sexual > abuse, including abuse that violated their childhoods? That might form the > nucleus of a truely valuable study. > > And as for Pinky Virani's book--one would know that abuse is about the > violent and subtle enactments of power, not about the sexual inclinations of > a person, if one had actually worked with people dealing with sexual or > physical abuse. And conversion is not the important issue when addressing > or taking on abuse-- the construction of the abused person by an abuser is > rarely so simple, i.e. as potential convert. Abusers come in all forms, > ages, shapes and sizes, as do the abused, as does the specifics of the > violence. I tried reading Pinky Virani's book when I was helping design > programs to address abuse and was so irritated by it I was unable to finish > it. > > Geeta Patel > > > ________________________________________________________________________ > > > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. > > http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > > > _________________________________________ > > > 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: > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "NITIN KARANI" > To: ; > Cc: > Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 11:42 AM > Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of > film'Girlfriend' > > > > mr. asthana, > > > > i have already said it's a subject that needs to be treated seriously, > > instead of repeating myths! > > > > as to the nature of my interaction with other gay people, please do not > try > > to speculate or trivialize it. > > > > nitin > > > > > > From: "Asthana, Rahul" > > To: "'Nitin Karani'" ,shivam > > CC: reader-list at mail.sarai.net > > Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of > > film'Girlfriend' > > Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 11:27:40 -0400 > > > > Nitin, > > "in all my 33 years, i haven't > > come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse." > > Did the question answer session go this way? > > "Q.Do you prefer Coke over Pepsi[Yes/No]""Q.Are you gay because you were > > abused as a child?[Yes/No]" > > I would think neither the question nor the answer are that simple or > > straightforward.It is very difficult for anybody to "say " that they are > > "this" because "that" happened to them when they were young. > > It would need some sort of psychological suggestion(from someone who is > > trained to doing that) and unravelling to get the answer.Another way could > > be extensive data gathering and then trying to find a correlation.This > issue > > deserves more serious analysis. > > Thanks > > Rahul > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net > > [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Nitin Karani > > Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:45 PM > > To: shivam > > Cc: reader-list at mail.sarai.net > > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of > > film 'Girlfriend' > > Importance: High > > > > > > shivam, > > > > if pinki virani actually wrote that, it's ludicrous! (it sounds like the > > myth about hijras--that they kidnap and castrate children!) > > > > READ MY LIPS: we (gay people) are not on a 'conversion'/proselytization > > agenda! > > > > about the other more common myth that sexual abuse in childhood 'causes' > > homosexuality, it's again just that--a myth! in all my 33 years, i haven't > > come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse. > agreed > > not everyone would have been honest whether they have faced abuse, but > it's > > safe to say the incidence is low. in all these years of interaction, > on-line > > and offline sexual abuse has never been an issue--and it's not like the > gay > > communities have some kind of collective amnesia about their childhood or > > taboo about the topic! yes, i ahve come across just a couple of guys who > > were abused but even they are clear in their mind that abuse was not the > > reason for 'turning' gay. (i can't claim to speak on behalf of my lesbian > > sisters, but i am sure things are no different for them). > > > > and i remember reading about a survey in what was then the Times's groups > > 'Metropolis on Saturday' about a survey which said that in cases of abuse, > > the perpetrators were more often heterosexuals! (could this be the reason > > for the 'disdain' on the issue??) > > > > I haven't read her book, but i wonder if Ms. Virani actually did any > > research! or like razdan, set out to write on issues they know nothing > about > > and don't care to find out! > > > > best, > > nitin karani > > bombay > > > > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "shivam" > > To: > > Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:34 PM > > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of film > > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > > > > > > I agreewith much of what Ms Tejal Shah writes in the > > > Mid Day review, but I don't understand why she has a > > > problem with Girlfriend's character becoming a lesbian > > > because of child sexual abuse. Isn't that possible? > > > > > > I have found that while homosexuality is a very > > > important issue in intellectual circles, I wonder why > > > this disdain and indifference towards child sexual > > > abuse. There's a book called "Bitter Chocolate: Child > > > Sexual Abuse in India" by Pinki Virani in which she > > > writes that homosexuals sometimes abuse children with > > > the purpose of making them homosexuals. > > > > > > Regards, > > > Shivam From Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com Fri Jun 18 04:50:17 2004 From: Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com (Asthana, Rahul) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 19:20:17 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film 'Girlfriend' Message-ID: No. I don't draw any conclusion or veer towards any idea.I have insufficient information for doing so. Thanks Rahul -----Original Message----- From: Nitin Karani [mailto:nkarani at hotmail.com] Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 7:08 PM To: Asthana, Rahul; 'Geeta Patel'; zest_india at yahoo.co.in Cc: reader-list at mail.sarai.net Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film'Girlfriend' asthana, the point is i am happy with the way i draw my conclusions! and now that you have clarified too, i believe the four of us seem to at least veer towards the idea that there is little or no connection between child abuse and sexual orientation. No? cheers, nitin ----- Original Message ----- From: "Asthana, Rahul" To: "'Geeta Patel'" ; "NITIN KARANI" ; Cc: Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:38 PM Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of film'Girlfriend' > Geeta\Nitin, > If I came off implying that homosexuality is an aberration,which is caused > by child abuse,it was never my intention.Its just how Nitin seemed to arrive > at the conclusion that he did,that bothered me. > Nitin,the allusion to coke\pepsi was wrong and I realize that in hindsight.I > was just trying to make a point.I hope you realize it. > Geeta, i agree with you that the study of child abuse should contain a > sampling of the whole society,so that how it manifests itself can be > investigated.It may or may not result in a better understanding of > homosexuality from an academic point of view.After all, the matters of the > psyche are always going to hold some mystery for us,aren't they?The least we > can do is try to be as objective as possible. > By the way,you make a lot of good points. > Thanks > Rahul > > > -----Original Message----- > From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net > [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Geeta Patel > Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 12:39 PM > To: NITIN KARANI; Asthana, Rahul; zest_india at yahoo.co.in > Cc: reader-list at mail.sarai.net > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of > film'Girlfriend' > > > Dear Rahul: > I think one should begin by doing a study on how straight people became > straight, turned straighter and stayed straight. There is nothing natural in > heterosexuality as a pure form. Because if one begins to analyze the > supports available for straight people, one realizes very quickly that being > straight seems to require a lot of help, regular financial and legal aid > from constitutions, governments, insurance firms -- the list goes on. And > if heterosexuality was so easy to come by and stay in (without any of those > quick glances at beautiful men or women or trannys or hijras or .. that > direct desire away from heterosexuality) why the obsessive need to help it, > ensure it, protect it, hold onto it. Nivedita Menon has a great piece on > this in The Indian Express in January of this year. Janet Halley, a legal > scholar writing in the US, also finds that judicial opinions on queer > matters spend inordinate time on remarking on the instability of > heterosexuality, and on its reproduction. (this is a simplified version of > Halley's work, but sufficient for this task) > In India, the British gave conventional forms of heterosexuality a big push > and lots of legal help beginning in the early 19th century, which I and many > other researchers have come upon when looking at the questions of passing > property onto other people. Of course those issues, of inheritance lineage, > are often looked at as something other than a mandate and push towards > seemingly quotidian forms of heterosexuality. > > So, I think that encountering a film like "Girlfriend" should not only make > audiences ask questions about lesbians, but also about their others, the > supposedly straight people that ostensibly live their sexual lives without > question. Hence one could easily ask the question: How many straight people > derive the forms of their sexual desires through, from and with sexual > abuse, including abuse that violated their childhoods? That might form the > nucleus of a truely valuable study. > > And as for Pinky Virani's book--one would know that abuse is about the > violent and subtle enactments of power, not about the sexual inclinations of > a person, if one had actually worked with people dealing with sexual or > physical abuse. And conversion is not the important issue when addressing > or taking on abuse-- the construction of the abused person by an abuser is > rarely so simple, i.e. as potential convert. Abusers come in all forms, > ages, shapes and sizes, as do the abused, as does the specifics of the > violence. I tried reading Pinky Virani's book when I was helping design > programs to address abuse and was so irritated by it I was unable to finish > it. > > Geeta Patel > > > ________________________________________________________________________ > > > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. > > http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > > > _________________________________________ > > > 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: > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "NITIN KARANI" > To: ; > Cc: > Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 11:42 AM > Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of > film'Girlfriend' > > > > mr. asthana, > > > > i have already said it's a subject that needs to be treated seriously, > > instead of repeating myths! > > > > as to the nature of my interaction with other gay people, please do not > try > > to speculate or trivialize it. > > > > nitin > > > > > > From: "Asthana, Rahul" > > To: "'Nitin Karani'" ,shivam > > CC: reader-list at mail.sarai.net > > Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of > > film'Girlfriend' > > Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 11:27:40 -0400 > > > > Nitin, > > "in all my 33 years, i haven't > > come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse." > > Did the question answer session go this way? > > "Q.Do you prefer Coke over Pepsi[Yes/No]""Q.Are you gay because you were > > abused as a child?[Yes/No]" > > I would think neither the question nor the answer are that simple or > > straightforward.It is very difficult for anybody to "say " that they are > > "this" because "that" happened to them when they were young. > > It would need some sort of psychological suggestion(from someone who is > > trained to doing that) and unravelling to get the answer.Another way could > > be extensive data gathering and then trying to find a correlation.This > issue > > deserves more serious analysis. > > Thanks > > Rahul > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net > > [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Nitin Karani > > Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:45 PM > > To: shivam > > Cc: reader-list at mail.sarai.net > > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace, review of > > film 'Girlfriend' > > Importance: High > > > > > > shivam, > > > > if pinki virani actually wrote that, it's ludicrous! (it sounds like the > > myth about hijras--that they kidnap and castrate children!) > > > > READ MY LIPS: we (gay people) are not on a 'conversion'/proselytization > > agenda! > > > > about the other more common myth that sexual abuse in childhood 'causes' > > homosexuality, it's again just that--a myth! in all my 33 years, i haven't > > come across any guy who said he 'became' gay because of sexual abuse. > agreed > > not everyone would have been honest whether they have faced abuse, but > it's > > safe to say the incidence is low. in all these years of interaction, > on-line > > and offline sexual abuse has never been an issue--and it's not like the > gay > > communities have some kind of collective amnesia about their childhood or > > taboo about the topic! yes, i ahve come across just a couple of guys who > > were abused but even they are clear in their mind that abuse was not the > > reason for 'turning' gay. (i can't claim to speak on behalf of my lesbian > > sisters, but i am sure things are no different for them). > > > > and i remember reading about a survey in what was then the Times's groups > > 'Metropolis on Saturday' about a survey which said that in cases of abuse, > > the perpetrators were more often heterosexuals! (could this be the reason > > for the 'disdain' on the issue??) > > > > I haven't read her book, but i wonder if Ms. Virani actually did any > > research! or like razdan, set out to write on issues they know nothing > about > > and don't care to find out! > > > > best, > > nitin karani > > bombay > > > > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "shivam" > > To: > > Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:34 PM > > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Fwd: From Fire into the furnace,review of film > > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > > > > > > I agreewith much of what Ms Tejal Shah writes in the > > > Mid Day review, but I don't understand why she has a > > > problem with Girlfriend's character becoming a lesbian > > > because of child sexual abuse. Isn't that possible? > > > > > > I have found that while homosexuality is a very > > > important issue in intellectual circles, I wonder why > > > this disdain and indifference towards child sexual > > > abuse. There's a book called "Bitter Chocolate: Child > > > Sexual Abuse in India" by Pinki Virani in which she > > > writes that homosexuals sometimes abuse children with > > > the purpose of making them homosexuals. > > > > > > Regards, > > > Shivam From jeebesh at sarai.net Fri Jun 18 10:51:39 2004 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 10:51:39 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Voices from the Gulag Message-ID: <40D27BE3.9010705@sarai.net> Dear all, Having read about what happenned in the Abu Gharaib prison, and in Guantanamo Bay, one begins to wonder about whether the brutal abuses of confinement are not a systemic feature of the legacy handed down to us by the history of the twentieth century. Here, is a brief note about the history of confinement in post second world war Bulgaria. Perhaps the excavation of such realities in every society can help us deepen our understanding of the (tragic) certainties of twentieth century political practices. regards Jeebesh ---------------------------- Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria Tzvetan Todorov The Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 1999 *Historical Summary* (pg 37 - 42) ------------------------------------------- Modern Bulgaria was born in 1878, when five hundred years of Turkish occupation were brought to an end by a war between czarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire. This event, known to all Bulgarians as the Liberation, was followed by the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. In the wake of World War I, during / which Bulgaria was allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary, national elections brought the Agrarian Party to power. Led by the charismatic Aleksander Stamboliyski, the Agrarians were initially supported by the Communist Party. However, in June 1923 Stam- boliyski was assassinated and the government overthrown in a coup d'etat. Though the Communists at first adopted a wait-and- see attitude, in September they sparked an insurrection, one that was drowned in blood and forced a number of Communist leaders to flee the country. For the next decade and a half, a series of authoritarian regimes governed the country. At the outbreak of World War II, Bulgaria was allied with Nazi Germany. However, the coun- try neither took an active part in the war effort nor' cooperated in the persecution of its native Jewish population. The Communist Party was declared illegal, which led to the creation of several resistance-or partisan-groups by 1941. Bulgaria's postwar fate was decided at the Yalta Conference, which assigned the country to the Soviet zone of influence. This fate was sealed on 9 September 1944, when the Red Army entered and occupied Bulgaria. In the aftermath of this second "liberation," the Fatherland Front, which was the name given to the wartime antifascist coalition in Bulgaria, came to power. Though they were just one among a number of participating parties, the Communists held the critical posts of minister of the interior and minister of justice. Over the next few years, the other coalition parties knuckled under to the Communist ascendancy; those who resisted were labeled "oppositionists" and executed (as was most notably the case with Nikola Petkov, the leader of the Independent Agrarian Party}. Georgi Dimitrov, who was leader of the Communist Party, "hero" of the Reichstag fire trial in 1933, secretary general of the Komintern, and an active participant in Stalin's purges after fleeing to the Soviet Union, returned to Bulgaria in 1945 and became head of state. The first trials against veteran Communists (echoing the prewar Stalinist purges of the Russian Revolution), climaxing with the execution of Traycho Kostov, took place in 1948-49. Upon Dimitrov's death in 1949, power soon passed to Vulko Chervenkov (1950-56}, whose policies were inspired by the Stalinist model. It was under Chervenkov that the farms were forcefully collectivized, the peasantry was obliged to join cooperatives, and massive investments were made in heavy industry. In 1956 Chervenkov was forced from power, and his place was gradually assumed by Todor Zhivkov. Bulgaria pursued an orthodox pro-Soviet policy under Zhivkov, but by the 1980s a new element was added: the persecution of native Turks. Frightened by the growth of the Turkish minority, the Bulgarian leadership ordered the Bulgarization of names, outlawed the use of the Turkish language, and forbade Muslim religious practice. This policy of cultural repression sparked a massive exodus of the persecuted minority into Turkey. On the eve of 1989, Zhivkov sensed that the wind was changing direction, and he tried to present himself as a reformer. But the effort failed, and he was deposed by yet other Communist reformers in November 1989. Finally, in the legislative elections of late 1991, the non-Communist opposition won a majority of the seats and assumed the reins of government. Let us now return to the days immediately after Bulgaria's "liberation," which heralded the Communist repression. In September 1944 the partisans "avenged" themselves by summarily executing tens of thousands of victims. This hecatomb included active fascists and members of the political police, but also many others whose sole crime was to belong to the non-Communist intelligentsia, professional or bourgeois classes. In fact, the crime could extend to simply displeasing a Communist cadre. Dimitrov actively encouraged these massacres: in a telegram sent from Moscow just a week after the Red Army had arrived in Sofia, he called for the "torching of all signs of Bulgarian jingoism, nationalism, or anti- Communism." Following suit, the Central Committee, in a circular dated 20 September 1944, called for the liquidation of all the nests of "anti-Communist resistance" and the extermination of all " counterrevolutionaries. " In October 1944, the People's Tribunal was created, a special court devoted to the postwar purge. The death penalty was pronounced 12,000 times, and more than 2,700 individuals were ultimately executed. By way of comparison, between 1941 and 1944 - the years of active Communist resistance-357 people were sentenced to death and actually executed (all crimes included). The political and social repression was given a juridical basis in early 1945. A government decree authorized the creation of the so- called Work Education Centers, known in Bulgarian as the TVO, or Trudovo-vuzpitatelni obshtezhitya. TVO was a euphemism for concentration camp. All of the constituent parties of the Fatherland Front, including those who would soon be its victims, approved this decision. The profiles of those for whom the camps were created covered two major categories: in one were placed pimps, blackmailers, beggars, and idlers, while the second included all those individuals judged political threats to the stability and security of the state. The task of executing this decree was given to the Ministry of the Interior-more precisely, the omnipotent Office of State Security- rather than the Ministry of Justice. A series of laws and decrees enacted over the next ten years reaffirmed and sharpened the powers of the state police. There were six major stages in the history of the concentra- tion camps in Bulgaria. (1) 1945 to 1949. There was forced labor at numerous work sites across Bulgaria. The camps were built in the vicinity of dams under construction, coal mines, and certain agricultural areas. Among the most notorious were Bobov Dol, Bogdanov Dol, Rositsa, Kutsian, Bosna, Nozharevo, and Chernevo. (2) 1949 to 1953. Political prisoners were gathered from other camps and regrouped in the camp of Belene, located on Persin, a small island in the Danube and bordering on Romania. (3) 1954 to 1956. Deportations to the camps were dramatically reduced, if not ended altogether. Belene nevertheless continued to operate. (4) 1956 to 1959. Belene welcomed a number of new prisoners in the wake of the failed Hungarian revolt in the fall of 1956, as well as a crime wave in Sofia in the early months of 1958. (5) 1959 to 1962. Following a hunger strike among the prisoners, Belene was closed down in 1959. Those prisoners who were not freed-according to certain documents, there were 166-were transferred to a new camp at Lovech, which bordered a rock quarry. Several thousand new prisoners eventually joined this first contingent. In September 1961, a hundred or so women prisoners were sent to a neighboring camp in Skravena. In November, the quality of camp life at Lovech was noticeably improved. In the following spring of 1962, the Political Bureau created a commission led by Boris Velchev to visit Lovech. As a result, the camp was shut down in April. (6) 1962 to 1989. State repression had its high and low points during this period. A decision rendered by the Political Bureau in 1962 established that an individual, without trial in court, could be imprisoned and assigned to forced labor for up to five years. This repression was solely administrative, aimed at those accused of "social parasitism" or "loose morals," and often a response to information provided by "people's organizations" such as the neighborhood sections of the Fatherland Front. In the 1980s, numerous members of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria were also sent to Belene. According to the statistics provided in 1990 by an inquiry commission created by the Communist Party, between 1944 and 1962 there were approximately one hundred concentration camps in a country of eight million individuals. Some 12,000 men and women passed through these camps between 1944 and 1953, and another 5,000 between 1956 and 1962. One witness affirms that in 1952 there were, in Belene alone, about 7,000 inmates. Yet another estimates that there were 186,000 prisoners during this entire period. For the moment, it is very difficult to know the precise numbers. The camps were not the only means the government used to rid itself of pariahs during this same period. The government also used the administrative practice of deportation, which entailed forced residence in distant corners of the provinces. It is known, for example, that between 1948 and 1953 approximately 25,000 people were deported. For the period of Lovech and Skravena (1959-62), which is the context for the majority of the following accounts, we can re create an organizational chart of state repression as it pertains to these camps. (Though the principal political and bureaucratic actors are listed, the reader must keep in mind that this list is far from exhaustive.) (1) At the head of the Party and state is Todor Zhivkov, who in turn is assisted by a succession of prime ministers, including Anton Yugov, who was a former interior minister. (2) Under their orders are placed the Interior Ministry, run by Georgi Tsankov, with the assistance of Mincho Minchev, who was attorney general and whose signature was required for any and all internments. (3) At the next tier we find Mircho Spasov, who was vice- minister of the interior and in charge of the concentration camps. Alongside him was Colonel Delcho ChakUrov, director of the Office of Internment and Deportation. (4) The camp at Lovech was run by Colonel Ivan Trichkov (1959-61), who had previously commanded Belene. He was succeeded by Major PetUr Gogov (1961-62). The next in command was Major Tsviatko Goranov, who oversaw the work details, and Lieutenant Nikolas Gazdov, who was the camp's representative from the Bureau of State Security. All of these officers, moreover, had pre- viously served in other concentration camps. (5) The camp's commanding officers were assisted by a team of low-ranking officers, noncommissioned officers, adjutants, and brigade chiefs, these last recruited from the criminals assigned to the camp. Finally, a few words need to be said about the camp at Lovech. The city of Lovech, which gave its name to the camp, is located in central Bulgaria, at the edge of the Balkan Mountains. An abandoned rock quarry outside the city became the site for the last and harshest of the Communist labor camps. Before 1959, the labor camps had been spread across Bulgaria. But most were closed following the fall of Chervenkov, and the inmates were transferred to Lovech. The camp was under the direct authority of the Ministry of the Interior rather than the regional authorities. Most Bulgarians did not know of the camp's existence, yet for those who went afoul of the state, Lovech had a sinister reputation: it was known to be a place that one might never leave alive. From ravikant at sarai.net Fri Jun 18 12:05:37 2004 From: ravikant at sarai.net (Ravikant) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 12:05:37 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] changing map of film exhibition Message-ID: <200406181205.37641.ravikant@sarai.net> Some people had predicted this a couple of years ago. It has been happening for a while and may completely change the idea of both exhibition and control, I think. Enjoy! Ravikant ------------------------------------ Source: http://www.hindu.com/2004/06/18/stories/2004061803621300.htm India, world leader in e-cinema By Anand Parthasarathy SINGAPORE, JUNE 17. A summit on digital cinema has revealed a surprising and little known fact that India is the world leader in the cutting edge of e-cinema - digitally delivered and exhibited. At the "BroadcastAsia 200" Conference here on Wednesday, Sunil Patil, chief executive officer of the Mumbai-based Adlabs Films, said that over 130 cinema theatres, most of them in the small towns of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Gujarat, had changed over from film-based systems and were exhibiting their fare using digital projectors backed by computer servers. Their number was poised to go up to 200 by August when the country would have more digital screens than the rest of the world put together. July will also see an Indian cinema house - Adlabs' own preview theatre in Mumbai - receive the entire movie via satellite direct from the processing lab, notching another landmark in digital cinema. Since April 2003, one Indian film a week - mostly Hindi - has been released in digital format, in addition to the conventional celluloid version. This has made India one of the world's first adopters of digital-all-the-way delivery and exhibition. Other early movers in Asia are China, currently with 57 digital screens, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan. Host Singapore notched up a world first when in May this year, the local Eng Wah organisation inaugurated the first-ever digital cinema deployment across five screens of a multiplex - all with the maximum quality rating. Thomas Lin, Director Games and Entertainment for the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, said the city-state was positioning itself to become a hub for all aspects of D-Cinema. Chong Man-Nang, chief executive of GDC Technology Ltd., a partner with Adlabs and Mukta Arts, for server technology, told The Hindu that units made by the company and deployed in India used open systems such as Linux and global standards like MPEG-2. Brooke Williams of Texas Instruments, whose Digital Light Processor chip fuels the digital, explained that the systems were scalable - from the cost effective solutions that Adlabs was harnessing, to "2K" systems - jargon for projections of 2048 pixels across 1080 pixels, where the quality exceeded the best that the old fi-based projectors could deliver. The Indian experience of e-cinema, which also translated into affordable cinema, was the subject of much discussion here because uniquely among nations in the region, the digital drive had received no government support, and was very much a home-grown solution. "You have beaten Hollywood at its game" said one speaker - a reference to the rather slow pace of acceptance of digital cinema in the United States, the country that virtually invented the technology. From nc-agricowi at netcologne.de Fri Jun 18 12:51:57 2004 From: nc-agricowi at netcologne.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?[R][R][F]2004---=3EXP?=) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 09:21:57 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] global://Havanna and Split Message-ID: <20040618092157.EF6A427E.8354C87B@127.0.0.1> [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP ~ E-Journal - Vol.6 www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004 //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// editorial at the end of this text---> /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Features . 1 [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP - News!! 2. global://Havanna and Split - new media art additions //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// 1. News . The 3rd presentation suite includes in June two media festivals hosting [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP nearly simultaneously ---> VI Salon y Colloquio International de Arte Digital - Havanna (Cuba) 21-24 June www.centropablo.cult.cu ---> International Festival of New Film and New Media Split/Croatia (26 June-2 July) www.splitfilmfestival.hr . b) [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP announces a new "Memory Channel" to launched in coming September on occasion of its participation in Biennale for Electronic Arts Perth/Australia www.beap.org (7 September - 17 November 2004) --->SoundLab Channel, which will be dedicated exclusively to soundart in its various forms. --->Call for soundart submissions www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004/call_soundart.htm Deadline 27 August 2004. . 2. global://Havanna and Split - new media art additions--> ~E-Journal - Vol.5 features numerous new additions to following "Memory Channels" . a) VideoChannel - video works from Italy b) Program Channel - Counter Surveillance by Rozalinda Borzila c) Violence Channel - Iraq project - new featured artists . a) after curatorial contributions from Romania, Spain, Chile and Malaysia to VideoChannel, [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP is featuring the contribution of video art from Italy curated by Laura Chiari (Rome) including Alessandro Orlandi, Speranza Casillo, Lorenzo Oggiano, Gruppo Sinestetico, Andrea Ferrara, Fiorella Nicosia, Polytimi Patapi --> and as an individual art work addition -->the suite of video poetry by Wilton Azevedo (Brazil), entitled "Quando assim termino o nunca....." . The participation in the Festivals in Havanna and Split was an excellent occasion to do this. . The streaming video works and detailed biographical info about the curators and artists can be accessed via VideoChannel on www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004/ or www.le-musee-divisioniste.org/mediacentre/ or directly from this email via www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004/vchannel.htm . DSL broadband Internet connection required!! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ b) Program Channel features the addition of a new module i.e. the project "Counter Surveillance" by Rozalinda Borzila (Romania/USA) --> "Geography Lessons (... cont.) Increasingly, the spaces we navigate are policed through technologies of visualization and information management. The X-Ray machine, racial profiling practices, surveillance devices, scrutiny of documents, fingerprinting etc are meant to make everything, visible or invisible, a vailable for inspection. Justified through the imperative of security, vast databases track our movements, health records, purchases, reading habits, web navigation and so on. And much is at stake in representation. This series of small interventions in highly controlled spaces began shortly after September 11th 2001. Using a video camera as a way of looking back, I shoot images in airport security zones: inside X-Ray machines, at passport check points, immigration control, baggage claim. Geography Lessons (... cont.) is an on-going archive of these video images, a structured and somewhat absurd system of unauthorized counter surveillance, a meditation on the nature and implications of representation. This website contains excerpts of a few videos taken around, and inside of, airport X-Ray machines." (artist's statement) c) Violence Channel is featuring the project "Virus" by Grègoire Zabé and--> " IRAQ - the war and post war periode", a new ongoing project. Artist go down to the post war situation in Iraq from most different views. The torture executed by US military against Iraqi prisoners shocked the world and made of the war in Iraq a never ending story. . Currently these artists joint the project and are featured ---> SCART, CEZAR LÃZÃRESCU Jaqueline Heer, Brian Goeltzenleuchter dlsan and Jody Zellen and hopefully more will join---> . There works can be accessed on the artistic body of [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP at "Violence Channel" on www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004/ . --->Call for submissions to Iraq project www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004/call_iraq.htm Deadline ongoing. /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP is part of ---> 01. National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucaresti/Romania (5 March - 30 April) 02. Bergen Electronic Arts Centre Bergen/Norway (5 March - 28 March) 03. New Media Art Festival Bangkok (Thailand) (20-28 March) 04. Now Music Streaming Festival Berlin - 7 April 05. Version'04 Festival - Invisible Networks - Chicago/USA - 16 April-01 May 06. Electronic Art Meeting - PEAM 2004 - Pescara (Italy) 19-23 May 07. BASICS Festival Salzburg/Austria - 8-16 May 2004 - 08. VI SALON Y COLOQUIO INTERNACIONAL DE ARTE DIGITAL - Havanna (Cuba) 21-24 June 09. International Festival of New Film and New Media Split/Croatia (26 June-2 July) . /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// The next edition of ~E-Journal Vol.7 will be published on occasion of the third physical presentation suite in June---> -->public_space_festival Yerewan/Armenia 23 July - 03 August -->West Coast Numusic & Electronic Arts Festival Stavanger/Norway 17-22 August /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Editorial ~~~~~~ [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP global networking project by Agricola de Cologne, media artist and New Media curator from Cologne/Germany www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004/ rrf2004 at newmediafest.org . As a corporate part of [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||Cologne, the project will develop and operate until deep in the year 2005. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// In case, you missed one of the email ~E-Journals, all volumes of ~E-Journal can be found on www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004/ in the section ~E-Journal . As an extension of the global networking project, [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP ~ E-Journal will be edited periodically in order to feature projects, curators, artists and other networking instances on a textual information basis. . copyright © 2004 by Agricola de Cologne. All rights reserved. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// From Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com Fri Jun 18 20:47:58 2004 From: Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com (Asthana, Rahul) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 11:17:58 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] FW: csa and homosexuality Message-ID: Seeking clarification from sarai.Please see Shivam's and mine emails below. Thanks Rahul -----Original Message----- From: shivam [mailto:zest_india at yahoo.co.in] Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 11:07 AM To: Asthana, Rahul Subject: RE: csa and homosexuality Rahul, these are predicaments i deal with every day, and i want to annoy as few people as possible. i don't know what the list is meant for. we should ask the sarai ppl to clarify? thanks shivam --- "Asthana, Rahul" wrote: > Shivam, > Thanks for your views. > I want to ask you a question,though. > Why did you take the list off the thread? > I know somebody protested that we should not be > filling up their mailbox or > something like that(and I accidentally deleted that > mail),but aren't we > supposed to discuss issues here?I really did not > think that me and Nitin got > personal.We do sometimes tend to get terse, or may > be even personal,but > thats how we revise our opinion,realize our > mistakes,provoke thoughts and > reach some sort of conclusion.Like I did when Nitin > pointed out that I was > trying to trivialize his conversation. > Or perhaps I am getting it wrong.This list is mainly > for announcements? > Thanks > Rahul > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: shivam [mailto:zest_india at yahoo.co.in] > Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 7:33 AM > To: Asthana, Rahul; nkarani at hotmail.com; > geeta.patel at verizon.net > Subject: csa and homosexuality > > > > dear nitin, > > we are talking about two things here really: > > 1) a homosexual abusing a minor with the INTENTION > of > turning him or her a homosexual; > 2) a minor becoming a homosexual because of child > sexual abuse. > > Both are ideas coming from Virani's book, and though > I > agree with you that the first may be debatable, I > think the second is undeniable. This is not to say > that every gay is a CSA victim or that every CSA > victim is a gay. But surely, if a person is sexually > abused in his or her formative years, it may have > some > effect on his or her sexuality. Homosexuality, > according to Virani's book, can be one of these > effects. I suggest you pick up the book and try and > understand CSA and its trauma, though you and I can > never understand it the way a victim does. Virani > estimates that 1 in every 4 girls and 1 in every 6 > boys in India are CSA victims. That's huge, no? > > Regards, > Shivam > > ________________________________________________________________________ > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. > http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Fri Jun 18 20:49:06 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?shivam?=) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 16:19:06 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] flooding my mailbox Message-ID: <20040618151906.4938.qmail@web8201.mail.in.yahoo.com> Hi! Someone said on this list that the debate about CSA and homosexuality should be carried out privately, and that we should not flood people's mailboxes. The list's moderator is requested to publicly clarify her stand on this. Living between a a couple of email IDs and a few dozen mailing lists, these are problems I struggle with every day, both as moderator and member. When does a public discussion become private? What is the drawing line between censorship, self-censorship and spamming? These question become particularly relevant for we poor third-world wallahs, struggle as we do with problems of digital divide and informaton overload, both at the same time. Yes, I did make my point about that debate privately, but I still thought it was relevant for the list. As I write this, my messengar shows tha Rahul has forwarded my mail to the list. That brings me to issues of net-ethics. As I see it, or maybe this is the case only with me, netiquette is in its pre-historic stage and we need to deal with issues of online behaviour instead of shoving them under the carpet with the delete button. Thanks Shivam ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com Fri Jun 18 21:13:35 2004 From: Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com (Asthana, Rahul) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 11:43:35 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] flooding my mailbox Message-ID: "That brings me to issues of net-ethics." I live and learn every day.I realize my mistake. -----Original Message----- From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of shivam Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 11:19 AM To: reader-list at sarai.net Subject: [Reader-list] flooding my mailbox Hi! Someone said on this list that the debate about CSA and homosexuality should be carried out privately, and that we should not flood people's mailboxes. The list's moderator is requested to publicly clarify her stand on this. Living between a a couple of email IDs and a few dozen mailing lists, these are problems I struggle with every day, both as moderator and member. When does a public discussion become private? What is the drawing line between censorship, self-censorship and spamming? These question become particularly relevant for we poor third-world wallahs, struggle as we do with problems of digital divide and informaton overload, both at the same time. Yes, I did make my point about that debate privately, but I still thought it was relevant for the list. As I write this, my messengar shows tha Rahul has forwarded my mail to the list. That brings me to issues of net-ethics. As I see it, or maybe this is the case only with me, netiquette is in its pre-historic stage and we need to deal with issues of online behaviour instead of shoving them under the carpet with the delete button. Thanks Shivam ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ _________________________________________ 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 shuddha at sarai.net Fri Jun 18 21:17:50 2004 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddha) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 21:17:50 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] flooding my mailbox In-Reply-To: <20040618151906.4938.qmail@web8201.mail.in.yahoo.com> References: <20040618151906.4938.qmail@web8201.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <40D30EA6.8080505@sarai.net> Dear Shivam, (and others) The Reader List is an un-moderated list. It does have an administrator, but she does not act as a censor. As she is away at the moment and not able to check mail regularly, I am taking the liberty of responding to Shivam, just as one list member to anothe, on the questions that he has raised. As we have no 'moderator' no one is technically in a position to tell anyone else to discuss something, or anything, privately. People can discuss something privately if they so desire, but, if it is a discussion that has been sparked off by postings on the list, and is not of a 'personal' nature, I do not see any justification in demanding that such discussions to be sequestered from the general discussion on the list. However, I do think that Shivam's point about having his private mails to another list member being forwarded on to the list is something that merits consideration. I would say that forwarding mail that you have recieved 'privately' to the general list, without the consent of the concerned correspondent is poor nettiquette. Having said that, I do think that it would be unfortunate if the most interesting discussions on this list happened on 'private' channels. I do think that a culture of vigourous discussion on this list needs a revival. We, at Sarai, are exploring the possibility of inviting individuals to 'shape' the discussion on the list so that threads get nurtured, arguments taken further, and new ideas and energies are made available to the list from time to time. I can assure you and all other list members that this will not mean r 'moderation' rather it will represent an attempt at evolving a model of 'custodianship' or 'curation' of the discussions on the list. It will definitely not be an attempt to censor and block postings by members. I have followed with interest the debate that has been sparked off by the posting about 'Girlfriend'. I can see several strands of discussion emerging, one is about the film itself and what it has come to represent, as an object of anxiety both for the self appointed guardians of morality, and for some vocal representatives of the Gay and Lesbian rights movement in India, the other is of exploring what recognizing or acknowledging homosexuality is, the third is of understanding what Child Sexual Abuse is all about. Interestingly, I think that the material of the film 'Girlfriend' actually enables a discussion on each of these issues. In other words, - do lesbians really exist, if they do, should they be visible and should they make themselves visible, and finally does homosexuality have anything to do with a loss of agency in childhood due to abuse. I am not venturing an opinion at the moment on any of these issues, merely flagging the fact that the three seemingly divergent threads of conversation between Shivam, Nitin, Rahul, Shveta, Sappho (the forwards sent by them) actually all have traces of these three elements. I would like to make a case for seeing the film as a normal, perhaps b-grade, Hindi film, which happens to have a lesbian as a character of some importance. I will make a longer posting on the issue, (once I have thought through some of the issues at some length, and am less encumbered)but I do think that the fact that a simple, not very well made, borderline b grade Hindi film has generated this much discussion (and I would argue, not simply because it happens to have a lesbian character or theme) is not insignificant. At least it is not the stupor that normally overcomes me as i come out of the cinema. Perhaps there are a few things that we can thank 'Girlfriend' for, like making the culture of discussion on this list fine new voices, registers and things to say. So, lets keep talking cheers Shuddha From shuddha at sarai.net Fri Jun 18 21:39:15 2004 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddha) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 21:39:15 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] flooding my mailbox In-Reply-To: <40D30EA6.8080505@sarai.net> References: <20040618151906.4938.qmail@web8201.mail.in.yahoo.com> <40D30EA6.8080505@sarai.net> Message-ID: <40D313AB.2080501@sarai.net> Dear All, Apologies for hurried drafting of emails to this list - the following line - "I am not venturing an opinion at the moment on any of these issues, merely flagging the fact that the three seemingly divergent threads of conversation between Shivam, Nitin, Rahul, Shveta, Sappho (the forwards sent by them) actually all have traces of these three elements."- is incomplete, and should read as follows, "I am not venturing an opinion at the moment on any of these issues, merely flagging the fact that the three seemingly divergent threads of conversation between Shivam, Nitin, Rahul, Shveta, Sappho (and the forwards sent by them) all do have a relationship to the body of the film, and that the film itself tries to present itself through an argument about these elements" I completely agree with Shivam that "We need to deal with issues of online behaviour instead of shoving them under the carpet with the delete button". cheers Shuddha From geeta.patel at verizon.net Sat Jun 19 00:41:46 2004 From: geeta.patel at verizon.net (Geeta Patel) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 15:11:46 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Re: csa and homosexuality References: Message-ID: <001801c45568$1bb31f20$6501a8c0@GeetaPatel> In response to Rahul's question about reading suggestions I have the following. I have picked them because Pinky Virani's analyses are replete with badly rehashed conceptualizations about sexuality that emerge from the writings of sexologists (primarily American but also European and British) from the late 19th century through to the mid 20th century. Many (not all) of the positions espoused by Virani have been discredited and historicized. Virani ought to have read those analyses before she ventured on her project precisely because she was one of the first people in South Asia to assay writing, in an analytic mode, about the very fraught issues on child abuse. Rather than offering readers terrible and truncated rehashings (without giving credit where it was due), Virani might then have given those who were concerned about child abuse reasonable psychological conceptualizations that helped people think through the issues. For example: Among other things, her revivification (again truncated) of Freud's theory of the libido taken from his engagement with the theories of fluid dynamics turns into: sublimation will help people control the urge to sex--which if allowed to run amok leads people to abuse. Awful--and it obscures what she also talks about and which people who have worked long and hard on abuse believe is the most important issue-- the imbrication of abuse with power. These readings given below might also help people to take on some of the positions held by people like Sudhir Kakar: One recent title that takes on sexology: Siobhan B. Somerville "Queering the Color Line" (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) Earlier titles and still trenchant and to the point are: Janice M. Irvine, "Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology" (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990) Paul Robinson, "The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson" (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). One recent book that thinks through capitalism; the emergence of childhood as a conceptual category; sexuality and searches for causation (this is simplified shorthand) is: Roger Lancaster, "The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Good book for folks who want to think political economy and sexuality in the West, but also generally useful. Has a great bibliography. For the production of childhood, Philippe Aries, "Centuries of Childhood" is still worth reading, though researchers have begun taking him up on his positions. I am including the works on childhood to address Virani's discussions about children and the place she feels they have not been given--her positions and opinions cannot even begin to speak to the historical emergence of childhood as a site of obsessive interest. For South Asia, Meena Alexander's extraordinarily brave rewriting of her memoir, her life and the abuse in it, in "Fault Lines: A memoir" (New York: The Feminist Press, 2004), offers another take on memory and abuse. She rewrote the memoir, first published in 1993, after she began seeing her acts of forgetting -- see section 16, Writing in fragments. Grace Poore's film, "Children We Sacrifice," offers stories, reminiscences and analyses by survivors of childhood abuse who are from or live in South Asia, broadly conceived. Finally Ginu Kamani's "Junglee Girl" turns the sexuality of children and power and class on their heads. The stories focus on Mumbai. They can be very disturbing and should not be taken as paradigmatic. Virani's bibliography at the end of the book is fairly substantive -- I know some of those books but have not read them all. There are so many. I have asked psychologists who work with children who have been abused for their recommendations. When and if those come in, I will forward them to the list serve. Geeta ----- Original Message ----- From: "Asthana, Rahul" To: ; "shivam" ; Cc: Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 11:49 AM Subject: RE: csa and homosexuality > Is there any other literature on this subject besides Pinky Virani? > -----Original Message----- > From: vze24hwy at verizon.net [mailto:vze24hwy at verizon.net] > Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 11:41 AM > To: shivam; Asthana, Rahul; nkarani at hotmail.com > Cc: geeta.patel at verizon.net > Subject: Re: csa and homosexuality > > > > > Dear Shivam: > I think that I will say just one more thing on the subject. Having worked > for many years with people and children who have been abused and involved > with a film made on South Asian women who have been abused, I can say both > from my observations and research and writing conducted on abuse, there > seems to be no correlation between abuse and homosexuality. There is some > correlation between abuse and sexual practices, but that is quite a > different matter. You yourself probably know quite a few people who have > been abused in your own circle (however large or small you think that ought > to be. A person seems to be just as likely to remain straight as turn gay > if they have been abused. This is because abuse is not one thing. > > Pinky Virani is not the place to go to find out about abuse and its > lingering effects. One has to move away from strange presuppositions when > dealing with abuse. Because those presuppositions and causalities cloud > one's expectations and the production of facts as well as feelings. In this > case-- about people who have been abused (I won't say victims), and about > queers. > > Geeta > > From: shivam > > Date: 2004/06/18 Fri AM 11:32:48 GMT > > To: Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com, nkarani at hotmail.com, geeta.patel at verizon.net > > Subject: csa and homosexuality > > > > > > dear nitin, > > > > we are talking about two things here really: > > > > 1) a homosexual abusing a minor with the INTENTION of > > turning him or her a homosexual; > > 2) a minor becoming a homosexual because of child > > sexual abuse. > > > > Both are ideas coming from Virani's book, and though I > > agree with you that the first may be debatable, I > > think the second is undeniable. This is not to say > > that every gay is a CSA victim or that every CSA > > victim is a gay. But surely, if a person is sexually > > abused in his or her formative years, it may have some > > effect on his or her sexuality. Homosexuality, > > according to Virani's book, can be one of these > > effects. I suggest you pick up the book and try and > > understand CSA and its trauma, though you and I can > > never understand it the way a victim does. Virani > > estimates that 1 in every 4 girls and 1 in every 6 > > boys in India are CSA victims. That's huge, no? > > > > Regards, > > Shivam > > > > ________________________________________________________________________ > > Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. > http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > > From Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com Sat Jun 19 02:42:00 2004 From: Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com (Asthana, Rahul) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 17:12:00 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] flooding my mailbox Message-ID: Shuddha, You write- "I do think that a culture of vigorous discussion on this list needs a revival." So you mean there was this culture here?I never seem to have seen much of it since I joined. If there was a culture and it has died,we need to look into why that happenned.Cultures dont die without any reason. And IMHO, in case of disemmination of information, errors of omission are far more potent than errors of commission. Further,you write- "We, at Sarai, are exploring the possibility of inviting individuals to 'shape' the discussion on the list so that threads get nurtured, arguments taken further, and new ideas and energies are made available to the list from time to time." This is a very good idea, with great potential.I suggest someone can draft a formal takeaway from the discussion whenever each thread reaches a saturation point.There would be, perhaps a little bit of additional argument on the final takeaway, and then it could be archived separately on the sarai site for easy reading. Thanks Rahul -----Original Message----- From: Shuddha [mailto:shuddha at sarai.net] Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 11:48 AM To: shivam Cc: reader-list at sarai.net Subject: Re: [Reader-list] flooding my mailbox Dear Shivam, (and others) The Reader List is an un-moderated list. It does have an administrator, but she does not act as a censor. As she is away at the moment and not able to check mail regularly, I am taking the liberty of responding to Shivam, just as one list member to anothe, on the questions that he has raised. As we have no 'moderator' no one is technically in a position to tell anyone else to discuss something, or anything, privately. People can discuss something privately if they so desire, but, if it is a discussion that has been sparked off by postings on the list, and is not of a 'personal' nature, I do not see any justification in demanding that such discussions to be sequestered from the general discussion on the list. However, I do think that Shivam's point about having his private mails to another list member being forwarded on to the list is something that merits consideration. I would say that forwarding mail that you have recieved 'privately' to the general list, without the consent of the concerned correspondent is poor nettiquette. Having said that, I do think that it would be unfortunate if the most interesting discussions on this list happened on 'private' channels. I do think that a culture of vigourous discussion on this list needs a revival. We, at Sarai, are exploring the possibility of inviting individuals to 'shape' the discussion on the list so that threads get nurtured, arguments taken further, and new ideas and energies are made available to the list from time to time. I can assure you and all other list members that this will not mean r 'moderation' rather it will represent an attempt at evolving a model of 'custodianship' or 'curation' of the discussions on the list. It will definitely not be an attempt to censor and block postings by members. I have followed with interest the debate that has been sparked off by the posting about 'Girlfriend'. I can see several strands of discussion emerging, one is about the film itself and what it has come to represent, as an object of anxiety both for the self appointed guardians of morality, and for some vocal representatives of the Gay and Lesbian rights movement in India, the other is of exploring what recognizing or acknowledging homosexuality is, the third is of understanding what Child Sexual Abuse is all about. Interestingly, I think that the material of the film 'Girlfriend' actually enables a discussion on each of these issues. In other words, - do lesbians really exist, if they do, should they be visible and should they make themselves visible, and finally does homosexuality have anything to do with a loss of agency in childhood due to abuse. I am not venturing an opinion at the moment on any of these issues, merely flagging the fact that the three seemingly divergent threads of conversation between Shivam, Nitin, Rahul, Shveta, Sappho (the forwards sent by them) actually all have traces of these three elements. I would like to make a case for seeing the film as a normal, perhaps b-grade, Hindi film, which happens to have a lesbian as a character of some importance. I will make a longer posting on the issue, (once I have thought through some of the issues at some length, and am less encumbered)but I do think that the fact that a simple, not very well made, borderline b grade Hindi film has generated this much discussion (and I would argue, not simply because it happens to have a lesbian character or theme) is not insignificant. At least it is not the stupor that normally overcomes me as i come out of the cinema. Perhaps there are a few things that we can thank 'Girlfriend' for, like making the culture of discussion on this list fine new voices, registers and things to say. So, lets keep talking cheers Shuddha _________________________________________ 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 definetime at rediffmail.com Sat Jun 19 04:12:04 2004 From: definetime at rediffmail.com (sanjay ghosh) Date: 18 Jun 2004 22:42:04 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: Summer of hate Message-ID: <20040618224204.30741.qmail@webmail27.rediffmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040618/bdfaabf6/attachment.html -------------- next part --------------   everyone, An article from yesterday's Guardian, tracing a historic event of institutional brutality in the land now threatening to flash the 'beacon of democracy' on anyone who tries to sit on too much oil. Sanjay Ghosh Summer of hate Forty years ago, as Yale graduate student Jonathan Steele headed for Mississippi to join the Freedom Summer of protests, three of his co-activists were murdered by racist rednecks. He recalls his involvement in one of the most infamous events of the civil rights struggle Friday June 18, 2004 / The Guardian The voice on the line was polite but insistent. The FBI was conducting a nationwide manhunt for three men who had disappeared in Mississippi. My car had been found abandoned in suspicious circumstances in nearby Louisiana. Would I come immediately to explain why, and whether I knew anything about the men? The phone call was unnerving even though I had nothing to hide, and I hastened to obey the summons. Of course I knew that the men had gone missing: the case was rocking America that summer, exactly 40 years ago. America's turbulent civil rights decade was at its height and the missing men were three volunteer activists who had been helping black people stand up for their rights and register to vote in the Deep South's most violent state. They had been arrested by the deputy sheriff of Neshoba county on June 21, held for a few hours, and released after dark. Two days later their burned-out station wagon was discovered on a lonely road, but the men were nowhere to be found. James Chaney, 21, was a black Mississippian from Meridian, a city in the eastern part of the state. Micky Schwerner, 24, was a Jewish activist from New York City who had spent four months in Meridian, running various civil rights projects. Andrew Goodman, 20, came from an upper-middle-class New York family, and had arrived in Mississippi only the day before he went missing. Their terrible story was later turned into a film, Mississippi Burning. The three activists had disappeared a few hours after a cavalcade of 200 young people arrived in Mississippi for what was called the Freedom Summer. The term "human shields" was not yet in vogue but that is what we were. The idea was that as outsiders we might shame Mississippi's police and sheriffs into reducing their brutality. With the exception of a handful of foreigners such as myself, the roughly 800 volunteers were American - mostly students from prestigious Ivy League universities and other private colleges. We had to bring $500 for use as bail money in the very probable case of being arrested on trumped-up or minor charges. There were a few middle-class blacks but the majority were affluent whites, and firm believers in the American dream. In the deep south they were vilified as "outside agitators", as though they had no business to be there. They discovered another America, a society in which they were indeed foreigners. Here was a state where blacks made up 45% of the population but only 6% had managed to overcome the poll taxes, the unfairly administered literacy tests and violent reprisals, just to get on the register to exercise their American right to vote. Before we reached Mississippi we had attended a week-long orientation session at a college in Oxford, Ohio. The three men who went missing were on the course, too. Activists from the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee organised role-plays of redneck thugs beating up defenceless blacks to show us how to curl up and - with luck - avoid serious injury. We were advised of our legal rights. The instructors, dressed in blue denim overalls, included firebrands such as Stokely Carmichael and Marion Barry, who later became "black power" symbols. But there were quieter ones such as James Forman, who warned us that our presence in Mississippi would inevitably provoke violence, and that we should not provoke it further through sassy behaviour: "I may be killed. You may be killed. But Mississippi is not the place to start conducting constitutional law classes for policemen, many of whom don't have a fifth-grade education." We piled into cars and set off for Mississippi. I was assigned to Vicksburg, a town of around 25,000 people. Our headquarters was a rambling wooden house set high above a pot-holed road in one of the many black parts of town. The plan was to teach literacy and arithmetic in "freedom schools", run health clinics, and accompany local people to the courthouse to get registered. It was rather different from what I had expected of my Harkness postgraduate fellowship to study at Yale. Within weeks of arriving at Yale, Mississippi had loomed large on my inquisitive horizon. A group of black Mississippi leaders and a white thirtysomething law professor called Allard Lowenstein were launching what would become the prototype for the Freedom Summer. To highlight the exclusion of blacks from politics, they organised a parallel vote during the election for Mississippi's governor in November 1963. Dubbed a "mock election", it was like the official contest in all but the participants: there was a black candidate who took, symbolically, a white running-mate for the post of deputy governor. There were polling stations in black churches and schools. The aim was to show that blacks would vote if they could. Conscientiously, I told the Harkness fellowship administrators of my plan to go to Mississippi. The reaction was horror. This was not the sampling of life in the south they wanted. But after prolonged efforts to dissuade me, they pleaded, "Well, if you must go, at least don't take the car." I consented, and got a lift south with friends. My first Mississippi visit was a shock. We took part in crowded church-hall rallies that were invaded by heavy-set fire marshals, who ordered everyone out because the meetings allegedly constituted a fire hazard. In a modern church in Biloxi we had to cower behind pillars in the aisle when local white thugs threw volleys of stones through the plate-glass windows. We were tailed by state troopers who pulled our cars over for minor infractions, or slapped on fines for obstruction because the car was parked more than two inches from the kerb. Several of us were arrested. A few were beaten. We quickly realised that there were many Americas. The one we saw in Mississippi was run by lawless law officers and vicious thugs, while the "power structure" of nice white folks went along or deliberately encouraged it. When I told the Harkness people I was planning to return to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer, their reaction was similarly desperate. This time I insisted on taking the car since I planned to go on from the south to do some life-sampling on the west coast. We reached a compromise whereby I would drive to the Ohio training, go on to Vicksburg, drop my friends, and then leave the car safely in Louisiana until I had finished in Mississippi. So on June 22, before word got out that our three colleagues had disappeared at the other side of the state, I set off for Baton Rouge and left my gleaming Chevrolet in an open-air parking lot on the edge of town. The car had New York licence plates, which, to many whites in the south, was equivalent to a declaration of war. Yankees were only one degree better than communists. I told the attendant I was leaving the car for several weeks. My English accent startled him further. In Vicksburg, we heard the news that Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were missing. We immediately assumed that they had been lynched, as a warning to all outside agitators. Mississippi's law enforcement officials showed an unsurprising lack of concern at the news. White Mississippi politicians claimed the missing men had been whisked off by their masters in Cuba as a communist plot to discredit the good white people of America. Fortunately, one aspect of the thinking behind the decision to bring in affluent white students quickly kicked in. The families of Goodman and Schwerner demanded action. Northern liberal politicians took up the cry, and Lyndon Johnson, the Texan vice-president who had unexpectedly become chief executive on John F Kennedy's death, was pressed to show he was a national and not just a regional politician. Alerted by the hue and cry and the FBI's call for information, the Baton Rouge parking-lot attendant advised them a few days later of the abandoned Yankee vehicle with the foreign driver. Was this the getaway car that had spirited the activists part of the way to Havana? The Harkness people, dumbfounded, confirmed to the FBI that they had leased the Chevrolet on behalf of a young Englishman, who had gone to Mississippi. My interview at the FBI regional headquarters in New Orleans was not as arduous as I feared. The detectives were cold and unsmiling but I sensed they knew that my car was irrelevant and were only going through the motions. Top FBI officials were already on the case in Mississippi, working on the assumption that the missing men had been killed and secretly buried soon after the Neshoba county sheriff had released them. There was no getaway car. There was no Cuban link. They had been murdered by the same thugs in uniform who had released them into the Mississippi night. So it turned out to be. The truth emerged, largely thanks to John Doar, the US Justice Department's representative in Mississippi. Alerted to the disappearances, he ordered the Meridian-based FBI agent (played by Gene Hackman in the film) to investigate. Eleven other agents were sent in. Johnson dispatched sailors from the navy to search the swamps and backwaters of Neshoba county. But the task was futile unless someone cracked. The FBI offered rewards and interviewed th sheriff of Neshoba County, Lawrence Rainey, his deputy, Cecil Price, and scores of their assistants and friends. After several weeks James Jordan, a liquor-store owner and member of the local Ku Klux Klan, decided to become a federal witness in return for a lighter sentence. He led the FBI to a dam where the men's bodies were found under tons of earth piled up by an excavator. He had been on the scene when the murders occurred: Price and several other men had chased the men's stationwagon, got it to stop, and then shot them one by one. The trial took place in Meridian in 1967. The defendants included the sheriff and his deputy, the mayor of Philadelphia, the only town in Neshoba county, and several Klan leaders. The judge, William Cox, was a fiercely pro-segregation Mississippian. The jury heard that Sam Bowers, who boasted the laughable title of Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, had instructed the klansmen of Neshoba as far back as May 1964 to eliminate Schwerner, whom they called "Goatee" or "Jew-Boy". It took them a month to find the right opportunity. Chaney and Goodman were just unlucky to be with Schwerner at the time. The all-white jury came up with a compromise verdict, convicting Price, Bowers, and five others, but letting Rainey go free. Cox gave Bowers 10 years and Price six, commenting: "They killed one nigger, one Jew and a white man - I gave them all what I thought they deserved." Although Rainey got off, it was the first time a Mississippi court had ever convicted someone for killing civil rights workers. The image of Price and Rainey, leering and chewing tobacco through the trial, was branded on many Americans' minds as a symbol of ignorant racism. Ironically, Johnson's leadership on civil rights allowed him to win an easy victory in the 1964 election, which he then used to send US forces to Vietnam. The Freedom Summer also gave huge impetus to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which removed most of the artificial qualifications for registration. But in the end the Freedom Summer of 1964 may have done more for the volunteers who took part in it than for the people they tried to help. Some went back into the mainstream, but with a new commitment to justice. A few became lifelong radicals. None remained untouched. j.steele at guardian.co.uk From iyer_renu at rediffmail.com Wed Jun 16 15:58:24 2004 From: iyer_renu at rediffmail.com (renu swaminathan iyer) Date: 16 Jun 2004 10:28:24 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Russian Ark - Art, museology and history Message-ID: <20040616102824.24558.qmail@webmail9.rediffmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040616/5a89de4b/attachment.html -------------- next part --------------   An art gallery here in Pune recently screened the film 'Russian Ark' by Alexander Sokurov at an inaugural function to discuss the politics of museology and art history. The film exercise was nothing if not critical to the discussion, and I hope more such screenings and discussion are in the offing here and elsewhere. The film is a brilliant meditation on art, museuology, history, anthropology and Russia all captured in this lurid and lush world’s first ever one-take, entirely unedited feature film. I'd recommend this film to anyone with a more than passing interest in the above. Focusing on three centuries of Russian history, from Peter the Great to Tsar Nicholas II, Russian Ark, takes the viewer into the great Hermitage Collection in St. Petersburg, Russia, showing real works of art from 33 rooms and exploring their meaning in a larger context. Most importantly the film is a sublime meditation on the individual's place in the universe, one that does not recreate history but allows us to revisit it on a dreamlike stage where past, present, and future are one. Russian Ark is a refined examination of the links between past and present, various art forms, Russian and European civilisation, illusion and reality; arthouse aspirations that serve as a beautiful eulogy of cinema history, a noble, elegiac testament to celluloid. The film is an allusive celebration tinged with melancholy, a closure, an opening, a deliciously surreal journey from within a disturbed mind, through a cultural warren. It is a meditation on vision, voyeurism, identity, an ethereal exploration of time and history, a remembrance of things past and eternity. For an indepth guide to understanding the history found in Russian Ark here are some official websites: http://webpages.acs.ttu.edu/cmcdouga/arkhome.htm Official Russian Ark Website The Island of Sokurov The Hermitage Museum Cheers, Renu From monica at sarai.net Sat Jun 19 17:04:48 2004 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 17:04:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] FW: csa and homosexuality In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Dear Rahul, Shivam The list is meant for discussion, and NOT only for announcements! As long as all of us are aware that getting personal and ad hominem is not going to favour conversation, then there is really no problem. As far as Sarai is concerned, we are strongly in favour of a lively discussion. Please do not feel constrained. I am afraid i cannot speak on behalf of those who might have written to you personally, but i do think they can easily hit delete, don't you? best M At 11:17 -0400 18/6/04, Asthana, Rahul wrote: >Seeking clarification from sarai.Please see Shivam's and mine emails below. >Thanks >Rahul >-----Original Message----- >From: shivam [mailto:zest_india at yahoo.co.in] >Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 11:07 AM >To: Asthana, Rahul >Subject: RE: csa and homosexuality > > > >Rahul, these are predicaments i deal with every day, >and i want to annoy as few people as possible. i don't >know what the list is meant for. we should ask the >sarai ppl to clarify? >thanks >shivam > >--- "Asthana, Rahul" wrote: > >Shivam, >> Thanks for your views. >> I want to ask you a question,though. >> Why did you take the list off the thread? >> I know somebody protested that we should not be >> filling up their mailbox or >> something like that(and I accidentally deleted that >> mail),but aren't we >> supposed to discuss issues here?I really did not >> think that me and Nitin got >> personal.We do sometimes tend to get terse, or may >> be even personal,but >> thats how we revise our opinion,realize our >> mistakes,provoke thoughts and >> reach some sort of conclusion.Like I did when Nitin >> pointed out that I was >> trying to trivialize his conversation. >> Or perhaps I am getting it wrong.This list is mainly >> for announcements? >> Thanks >> Rahul >> >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: shivam [mailto:zest_india at yahoo.co.in] >> Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 7:33 AM >> To: Asthana, Rahul; nkarani at hotmail.com; >> geeta.patel at verizon.net >> Subject: csa and homosexuality >> >> >> >> dear nitin, >> >> we are talking about two things here really: >> >> 1) a homosexual abusing a minor with the INTENTION >> of >> turning him or her a homosexual; >> 2) a minor becoming a homosexual because of child >> sexual abuse. >> >> Both are ideas coming from Virani's book, and though >> I >> agree with you that the first may be debatable, I >> think the second is undeniable. This is not to say >> that every gay is a CSA victim or that every CSA >> victim is a gay. But surely, if a person is sexually >> abused in his or her formative years, it may have >> some >> effect on his or her sexuality. Homosexuality, >> according to Virani's book, can be one of these >> effects. I suggest you pick up the book and try and >> understand CSA and its trauma, though you and I can >> never understand it the way a victim does. Virani >> estimates that 1 in every 4 girls and 1 in every 6 >> boys in India are CSA victims. That's huge, no? >> >> Regards, >> Shivam >> >> >________________________________________________________________________ >> Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. >> http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ > >===== >ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ > >ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ > >ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ > >________________________________________________________________________ >Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. >http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ >_________________________________________ >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: -- Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective] Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From mapasha at indiatimes.com Thu Jun 17 21:16:04 2004 From: mapasha at indiatimes.com (Pasha) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 21:16:04 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] settlement a nizamuddin basti Message-ID: <200406171542.VAA08045@WS0005.indiatimes.com> dear yousuf i'm sorry for not having responded to your mail earlier. the dates which i have stated in the postings have been taken from nizami bansuri written by hasan sani, a scholar on nizamuddin aulia and whose family claims to be the real descendents of the saint, so if there is a conflict in the dates which u have come across and the ones which i have stated, the only thing that i think can be done is to give the probable dates cited by different scholars. the story about amir khusro's grandfather has also been taken from the same book [ which is basically a compilation of oral history ] and according to it he was still alive when amir khusro became a disciple of nizamuddin aulia and did in fact give him refuge in his haveli at arab ke sarai in old delhi. also chaunsat khambe is the tomb of shamsuddin who was the brother of mirza aziz kokantash, i am sorry if i had mis splelt kokantash earlier. i am glad that u are taking a keen interest in our research and hope that u will continue to do so in the future. naveid Indiatimes Email now powered by APIC Advantage. Help! HelpClick on the image to chat with me -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040617/44f3a174/attachment.html From mirzachhotoo at yahoo.co.in Wed Jun 16 22:21:41 2004 From: mirzachhotoo at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?nisha=20-?=) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 17:51:41 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] reducing lesbianism to child sexual abuse is pathologizing sexuality In-Reply-To: <20040616120448.47732.qmail@web8207.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20040616165141.63965.qmail@web8306.mail.in.yahoo.com> To take up the issue of Girlfriend's character becoming a lesbian because of child sexual abuse, the linkage is too simplistic and heterosexual way. If we accept this Freudian analysis, it would mean acceptance of heterosexuality as the norm and other sexualities as outcomes of sexual exploitation and tragic events. And that reduces an argument for the existence of sexualities to 'effects' and 'consequences' which could be 'fixed' or 'cured'. To cut the argument short, reducing lesbianism to child sexual abuse is pathologizing homosexuality and denying existence of lesbian/gay/bi-sexuality as 'normal'. Child sexual abuse could also do well without without stereotyping of consequences. If a survivor of CSA is actually a lesbian/gay/bi, this sort of stereotying will complicate matters for that person by reinforcing internalized homophobia and shame. It would also mean that the considerations of identity acceptance coming out by that person will be governed by the fear of being pathologized or seen as 'poor victim' who has to live such a dreadful consequence. CSA and sexualities are two important issues, each requiring urgent social action of different kinds. The connection between CSA and lesbianism is only as much as it is between CSA and heterosexuality. CSA is not heterosexual sexual abuse. It is a form of sexual abuse which is possible and takes place in same sex relationships as well. Nisha shivam wrote: I agreewith much of what Ms Tejal Shah writes in the Mid Day review, but I don't understand why she has a problem with Girlfriend's character becoming a lesbian because of child sexual abuse. Isn't that possible? I have found that while homosexuality is a very important issue in intellectual circles, I wonder why this disdain and indifference towards child sexual abuse. There's a book called "Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India" by Pinki Virani in which she writes that homosexuals sometimes abuse children with the purpose of making them homosexuals. Regards, Shivam --- Sappho for Equality wrote: > > > > Note: Forwarded message attached > > -- Orignal Message -- > > From: TS > To: > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > 'Girlfriend' > > > > > ATTACHMENT part 2 message/rfc822 > From: TS > Subject: From Fire into the furnace, review of film > 'Girlfriend' > To: > > Dear Friends, > Some of us were unfortunate enough to be present at > the preview screening of film 'Girlfriend' in Bombay > on Thursday, 10th June. > Today, the film has been released nationwide. It is > the worst possible film that has ever been made in > the history of cinema about a 'Lesbian'. > In a country like India where lesbian women exist on > the invisible margins, as criminals without any > rights, doubly oppressed as women and lesbian, not > to mention the layers added by class, caste, > religion and ability, a film like 'Girlfriend' is a > severe blow to the advancement of the human rights > and sexuality rights of all women. We must do > something in the face of such callousness. > > Please do write critical articles and reviews about > the film, hold press conferences, protest rallies, > distribute parchas or anything to 'damage control'. > I have written a small piece below and I urge you to > please circulate this email as widely as possible. > In solidarity, > tejal > > > >From Fire into the furnace > Dear Mr. Karan Razdan (director of Girlfriend), > If the Shiv Sena and the Bajrang Dal go on a rampage > yet again, to protest your film 'Girlfriend', ask > for the film to be banned or sent back to the censor > board, I might even forgive you. > > But I know, that six years after Deepa Mehta's film > 'Fire' was released, the right wing will see no > reason to protest your film because your portrayal > of a lesbian as 'a psychopath, sexually abused, man > hating, murderer and killer' fits just fine into > their hetero-patriarchal agenda of portraying > lesbians & gays as freaks, abnormal and as people > who must die at the end of the film, so they are > aptly punished for their unnatural existence. > > On the out set, it must be stated that the 'Lesbian' > issue is a hot topic; it attracts audiences, creates > a curiosity and definitely impacts the box office > collections. I mean, if you are telling me that you > made this film because you care so much about > lesbians and the issues affecting them, that you > wanted to bring this issue into every Indian > household, surely you mean it as a devastatingly, > nasty joke! > > Your film is a presentation of the worst possible > misnomers (I consciously refrain from using the word > 'stereotype') about anyone who may be attracted to a > person of the same gender. The male, macho but > normal (read heterosexual) hero has no qualms about > playing a hyper-exaggerated, sissy, gay man when he > needs to seduce the simple minded, generous at > heart, 'one-night' lesbian, but essentially, a > reformed, heterosexual girl played by Amrita Arora. > The straight heroine who is being continuously > misled by the lesbian villain must be saved by the > good-boy-hero. In the end, values of heterosexual > love, marriage and 'normal' families must be upheld. > The character of Tanya, acted by Isha Koppikar is > nothing short of a 'lesbian animal' aided as it is > by the background score to help us see her as a > wild, almost cannibalistic man-eating/man-hating > woman who dares to behave like a man, a Sahela (a > mere saheli would be far too sensitive). All this is > of course explained by the simple fact that Tanya > was sexually abused as a child simultaneously > implying that what makes women 'this way' is > possibly, abuse at the hands of men! > > After watching a film like this, it is impossible > for anyone to think of 'women who love women' as > normal human beings with two hands and two feet, who > may be a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a > neighbour, a grand mother and least of all a caring > lover. > > It must be pointed out that under the section 377 of > the Indian Penal Code, gay, lesbian, bisexual and > transgender people are looked upon as/considered > criminals, existing against the order of nature. > Hey! and if you thought it was just about 'those > guys & their lifestyles', let me remind you that > anytime you have non peno-viginal penetrative sex, > you are as much of a criminal and can be put in the > prison for a term extending to 10 years & shall also > be liable to fine. > > Mr. Razdan, the next time you say that you are > taking a neutral position in this film and > portraying the case of just one lesbian, let me > remind you precisely, that the fiction you are > choosing is a cleverly developed and thought out > storyline that carries a clear message. This message > is a dangerous and retrogressive one. It is a > message that endangers the life of any woman who may > look or behave boyish, any woman who chooses to > experiment with her sexuality, and any woman who > asserts her right to different choices including > those women who are good friends and hold hands when > they walk down the street. > > Welcome to the world of blatant hate crimes based on > your sexual and gender orientation! > > As men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, films > like these take us many steps backwards. More than > two decades of work done by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual > and Transgender groups, feminists groups, human > rights groups, women's groups and progressive > artists groups, is going to suffer as this film is > commercially released in every part of India from > small towns to big cities. > > Every time I hear of another lesbian suicide, > another girl who hanged herself for being teased > about her 'best' friend, another hijra woman raped > in police custody, another woman sent for shock > treatment and aversion therapy to cure her of her > homosexuality, another couple put under house arrest > by their parents when they find out about their > same-sex love, I will think of this film and I will > be reminded of the power that Bollywood wields in > creating a mass consciousness. In this case, it will > be a conscious, articulated, homophobia. > > Thank-you very much Mr. Razdan, but we, as > progressive citizens are not interested in > lip-service. I can assure you of one thing: the > homosexual community in this country would much > rather live in quiet anonymity than be > mis-represented in such a ghastly, contorted > fashion. Even a little bit of research on your part > would have revealed that there are at least three > active lesbian and bisexual women's groups in Bombay > city alone and hundreds of 'women who love women' > leading their lives openly and happily but that's > only possible when one makes a film on a hot issue > (like lesbianism is in India) when you foresee > beyond profits and publicity and see, real lives and > real people who will live the consequences of your > doing. > > It's time that we stopped separating the issues that > films address and their impact on the audience > within a given socio-political context. It is also > high time that we stand in protest against any film > that causes damage to the rights of any minority > groups. > > Tejal Shah > > (The writer is a visual artist and the co-founder, > organiser and curator of Larzish.tremors of a > revolution, International Film festival of Sexuality > & Gender Plurality, India since 2003) > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > 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: ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ _________________________________________ 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: Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040616/a072763c/attachment.html From nkarani at hotmail.com Thu Jun 17 13:48:48 2004 From: nkarani at hotmail.com (Nitin Karani) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 13:48:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] BT: Happy to be Gay - ARK responds to RSS Chief K Sudarshan Message-ID: Happy to be gay http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/743201.cms TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ THURSDAY, JUNE 17, 2004 01:39:42 AM ] Activist Ashok Row Kavi responds to RSS chief K Sudarshan's barbs against the gay community Dear Mr. Sudarshan, Though I am not a Sanghi, I am a faithful Hindu. I therefore appeal to you to stop targeting the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) communities as a foreign lifestyle issue. If you read the Vedas, the Puranas and the Itihaasas, you'll find that LGBT communities existed even then. There are over 10 genders of males mentioned in our sacred literature; there are more sophisticated definitions than in any other civilisation, whereas the West only had binary definitions like homosexual and heterosexual. It was only in India that we recognised and cherished different kinds of sexualities as valid. LGBT identities were never brushed under the carpet. Homosexuals were never stoned to death or even persecuted in Hindu India or even in the worst days of Aurangzeb, the Mughal bigot. It is only with the advent of the British, during their brutal Raj, that homosexuality was criminalised under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This law was ironically enacted by Lord Macaulay and comes from Leviticus in the St James' Bible. So you see, hatred for homosexuals (homophobia) is not a Hindu tradition. Finally, HIV is spread by unprotected sex and has nothing to do with homosexuality. In India, the highest risk factor for women to get HIV-infected is being married to men. It is our lesbian sisters who are possibly the safest because they rarely spread HIV. LGBT communities are already under great pressure from society, even as we modernise. With families breaking up and single people still not recognised as family units, we have no place to go or support systems. We are just emerging from the darkness to find a place as equals in society. We are not interested in anything but to survive with dignity within Indian society. Neither do we claim special privileges or affirmative action. But we'll never accept second- class citizenship and be pushed into the darkness again. If need be, we'll fight you. I plead with you to stop this campaign. Ashok Row Kavi -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040617/4f5ae1e1/attachment.html From Offers at fourthdime.com Fri Jun 11 18:48:13 2004 From: Offers at fourthdime.com (Offers at fourthdime.com) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 18:18:13 +0500 Subject: [Reader-list] [Offers] Spurious bottled water floods Karachi market Message-ID: <003f01c44fb6$8fd10960$0a0a8383@herbsmd.net> KARACHI: Spurious bottled water floods market The Dawn, By Bahzad Alam Khan, 27/11/2001 http://www.dawn.com/2001/11/27/local6.htm KARACHI, Nov 26: Thousands of people in the city are every day exposed to various types of water-borne diseases by consuming bottled water unfit for drinking. Sources told Dawn that at present the consumer market was flooded with at least 150 spurious brands of bottled water which was not only unfit for drinking but could bring on diseases. They added that while the sale and manufacture of bottled water unfit for human consumption was not permissible under the Sindh Local Government Ordinance, promulgated on Aug 8, the city government had failed to check the sale of spurious brands of bottled water. Besides, they pointed out, the drug and health inspectors of the government in the 18 towns of the city had not been able to ensure that shopkeepers kept a certificate of laboratories stating that the brands of bottled water on sale were fit for human consumption. Section 11 of the part 1 of the fourth schedule of the Sindh Local Government Ordinance says: "Supplying or marketing drinking water for human consumption in any form, from any source which is contaminated or suspected to be dangerous to public health, or its use has been prohibited by a local government on the ground of being unsafe for human consumption, or whose quality or suitability for human consumption has not been ascertained and certified by a laboratory authorized by the local government." It also outlaws "manufacturing, trading, storing or supplying any eatable or drinkable and other items unsafe for human consumption". The sources told Dawn that the Aga Khan University Hospital had recently examined 26 samples of bottled water collected from different areas of the city, such as Clifton, Hyderi, Gulberg, Sohrab Goth, etc. Out of the 26 samples of bottled water, the microbiology laboratory of the hospital had found 19 brands unfit for human consumption. Only seven brands of bottled water had been found "satisfactory". The samples had been collected and sent to the Aga Khan University Hospital by the Consumer Protection Council. According to the microbiology reports, the following seven brands of bottled water are fit for human consumption: Nestle, Gulfa, Masafi, AVA, Aqua Pure, Rainbow, AVA Water. The microbiology reports declare that the following 21 brands are unfit for drinking: Best Water, Mineral Plus, Trust Water, Delight Drinking Water, Blue Rain Water, Aab-e-Shifa, Best and Safe, Zee International, Hirrah International, Minhal Pure Drinking Water, Hayyat Water, Clear and Crystal, Peggy, Swan Pure Natural Mineral Water, Orient Pure Water, Fresh, Spring Fresh, Oslo, Mineral Plus Water. Insiders said that empty bottles of standard brands were sold at bottle gali at Rs2 each. These empty bottles were purchased by illegal marketeers who put new seals on the used bottles and sold them as new bottles, sometimes at rates higher than the ones at which genuine bottles were sold. From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Sat Jun 19 18:37:50 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?shivam?=) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 14:07:50 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Struggling to keep an owl's watch on the giant India media Message-ID: <20040619130750.2134.qmail@web8205.mail.in.yahoo.com> TheHoot.org: Struggling to keep an owl's watch on the giant India media By Frederick Noronha Indymedia / 17/09/2002 At 02:04 http://mumbai.indymedia.org/en/2002/09/2161.shtml India's media is vibrant and lively, yet journalists in the country are seen as either being the handmaiden of the government, a law unto themselves and excessively racket-prone or anything in between. Can a humble website set up at the cost of under Rs 200,000 (US$4000) change this situation some way? Poor payments from most of the small and medium papers, a lack of ethics, blurred or non-existant codes of conduct... these are only some of the dilemmas and difficulties facing mediapersons in this geographically vast and diverse country of some 5000+ newspapers and many languages. If The Hoot has its way, it hopes to bring in some degree of accountability. By making clear what are the critical issues affects the media, the site www.thehoot.org hopes to push towards positive change. "I feel strongly that the media matters in a democracy, and needs to be kept on course by people from within it," says Delhi-based senior media critic Ms Sevanti Ninan, who has played a key role in putting up thehoot.org site. As thehoot.org site explains: "The sub-continent has plenty of media, it does not have enough scrutiny of the media. This portal is the outcome of the concern felt by a group of practicing journalists at some recent trends in journalism in this part of the world. It is an attempt to revive a concern for media ethics, restore focus on development in the subcontinent, and preserve press freedom. It will attempt to hold a mirror to the way journalists practice their craft in this region." The Hoot (www.thehoot.org) calls itself a 'media ethics' website. Over a year old now, this site however recently faced pressures for its survival. Said Ninan, in an open letter to supporters: "(You) have supported the idea over the past year, without losing too much sleep over it. But this missive is to ask for more active support, if The Hoot is to survive." The Hoot, to quote Ninan, "started purely out of a felt need to have a forum to discuss media practice, not because any resources were available!" It was started through the Media Foundation run by veteran journalist B G Verghese and with with moral or initial financial support from Shailaja Bajpai, Mannika Chopra and Shubra Gupta, all media critics based in Delhi. "There was no long-term funding in sight.... But we got a small grant from Unesco and got going. It has now developed into something useful, though it has many drawbacks arising out of a lack of staff and resources. Word about it has spread, and the number of those using it have grown. There definitely is not anything else of this range in the subcontinent," says Ninan. She says the total investment crossed Rs 175,000 or thereabouts, with no staff, or office or budget. "It has been partly financed out of journalist contributions. Our business plan, if you can call it that, is that 200 journalists paying Rs 100 a month can ensure its survival. But only ten have responded!," says she. What prompted the setting up of this site? Says Ninan, in an interview with this writer: "The fact that there was no forum in India where you could honestly critique both the print and other media, and the fact that such critiquing was desperately needed. Journals cannot respond as fast as a website can." Ninan has herself covered television since 1986, beginning with the Indian Express and going on to the Hindu. She has also written a book on television and change in India ('Through the Magic Window', Penguin 1995), and is working on another on the regional print media in North India. She contributed to a book on broadcasting reform. There's a whole lot of interesting content on this site. It's clear that it has been put together by professionals who understand what makes an interesting read. One recent visit to the site took us to a link on 'Dhirubhai (Ambani) and the media' -- a blunt, critical yet balanced piece of the billion-rupee magnate done with the depth, perception and sharpness that few newspapers or other media organisations have done since Ambani's death. There were write-ups on foreign direct investment in the Indian media, the Prime Ministerial "paranoia" and press freedom ("The overreaction to the Time story is because most of India's 'trusted' publications appear to lack the courage and the leadership to expose truth or touch controversial subjects.") Other topics covered include Press freedom in Pakistan, the Deccan Chronicle needs a new editor, covering land alienation in Jharkhand, and censoring peace ("It is a strange world where nuclear weapons are believed to help prevent war and a film on peace is seen as a potential instigator of violence.") One study offers a "systematic survey" of the coverage given by Bangalore-based newspapers in Kannada and English to the violence in Gujarat. There's even another feature on how a network of women journalists presents its study of media coverage of the events in Gujarat in English, Gujarati, Marathi, Urdu and Hindi newspapers published in Mumbai. This is the irreverent but relevant tone of the site, as reflected in one article recently: "The Hindustan Times, located just beyond Connaught Place in Delhi, has solved the problem of parking for employees by decreeing that those above forty can park inside the compound, but those below forty have to park outside! A wag wants to know if this applies to the proprietor's children." The Hoot's self-described goal is: "Watching media in the subcontinent. The more the media matters, the more we must track what it does." On http://www.thehoot.org one finds links to a media-watch column, media resources, and media-law information. There's also material on the Right to Information debate, which could be of immense use to journalists, provided they make efforts to use the law when passed. (In Goa, a law already existes; but after a potent protest over the same, hardly any journalists have sought information under this law.) There are also special 'buttons' covering 'views from the region', media-ethics, media comments on the media, media-research, press-freedom issues, and a focus on media-and-conflict, media activism, media-and-gender, and related themes. As one scrolls down the options available, it's surprising to see how many often-forgotten dimensions the life of a mediaperson could have. (Development reporting, grassroots media, community radio, new media, media jobs, and much else....) There are sections 'for journalists' and 'for journalism students'. Surfers are told: "The Hoot welcomes articles, letters, reviews, and comments from readers and fellow journalists." You can contact The Hoot at editor at thehoot.org But there have been difficulties in keeping going. "Because neither media houses, nor business houses would want to be associated with something which critiques mainstream media. Everybody needs the media. Also because the Media Foundation does not take foreign funds," says she. What were the high points of The Hoot so far? Its promoters site coverage of the handling of the massacre in Nepal, in which case MediaChannel.org in the US picked up The Hoot's story by Ammu Joseph. What was also noticed was coverage from an Indian point of view of the info-war between 'terrorists' and the USA, written after September 11 happened. There was also strong reader response to an article called 'The Ungreat Indian Middle Class' and other stories, and the community radio conference which must have been the first Net event of its kind in this region, on community radio, recalls Ninan. Above all, TIME journalist Alex Perry, caught up in a controversy over his report on the health (or poor health) of prime minister Vajpayee, mailed Mannika Chopra to say that he thought her story on the site on the whole TIME and Prime Minister's Office issue was the fairest and most complete, even though it contained "two rather rude paras about his brand of journalism", according to Ninan. This site was set up in March-end 2001. Hits climbed slowly from nothing to 17,000 a week at the beginning of this year. (At the time of writing, it was at 371 visits -- 870 page views -- a day and 21000 hits a week. By July 10, it was at 591 daily visits and 4400 daily hits.) The site suffered when the company that had booked the url did not forward reminders and the url lapsed. It was off the air for two weeks. "It ... needs to do much better than that. I have no means to publicise it off the Net," says Ninan. What would be the best chance of making the site sustainable? Sevanti believes it could hinge on getting a broad base of people, five hundred on more, to pay an annual subscription to support it. "We have said Rs 100 a month, but much smaller amounts are also welcome. Alternatively, becoming part of large, well-funded, public interest Net initiative (could work). Needless to say, I prefer the former, but have not had much success with it so far," says Ninan. There are challenges too. One of the biggest is trying to manage a media watch site without enough money, and with no daily help, editorial, managerial or technical. Plus doing fund raising and publicising the site. The costs of putting up the site excludes part payment for a content management system, which is avaited. Freelance journalists are paid for articles exclusive to The Hoot. Ninan is clear when asked which three achivements makes her proud of The Hoot. She says: "The fact that it has completed a year, that fact that it is current and outspoken, and the fact that journalists and readers are slowly but surely pitching in to support it with money and articles, which shows that they feel the need for such an initiative." In recent weeks, the Media Foundation has applied for permisson to accept foreign funding, while the current shortfall has been bridged with a personal loan, and small donations are trickling in. >From here, where? "In terms of survival, the Hoot is not over the hump yet. If it survives I hope it can go on to a more secure platform with other public interest sites, so that it becomes a media-watch and media-research hub for the subcontinent," says she. "Personal letters written by Mr. Verghese to all the big newspapers in the country to contribute towards a corpus have yielded no response at all. We will now be writing to Indian business houses. I can no longer keep The Hoot up and running without support from a much wider base of people," Ninan said in her open letter some months back. She seeks Rs 100-a-month contribution from journalists wanting to support this venture for "a hundred rupees a month is not a lot, and media as we practice it, could do with some scrutiny". Her appeal concluded: "If you believe we need something like The Hoot, please help save this endangered owl." The Hoot can be contacted via mail at 180 National Media Centre, Gurgaon 122002. Sevanti Ninan can be contacted via email at sevantininan at vsnl.com ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From coolzanny at hotmail.com Mon Jun 21 12:57:23 2004 From: coolzanny at hotmail.com (Zainab Bawa) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 12:57:23 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Architectural Projects Message-ID: Dear All, I am looking for proposed architectural projects in Delhi and Kashmir. If anyone has information, contacts or links which would be useful, please pass them on. Thank you. Best wishes, Zainab Bawa _________________________________________________________________ Screensavers for every mood! Jazz up your screen! http://www.msn.co.in/Download/screensaver/ Bring your PC to life! From yukihiko at sfc.keio.ac.jp Mon Jun 21 16:38:44 2004 From: yukihiko at sfc.keio.ac.jp (Yukihiko Yoshida) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 20:08:44 +0900 Subject: [Reader-list] autonomia Message-ID: <200406211108.i5LB8i820476@ccz03.sfc.keio.ac.jp> Hello from TOKYO, Is there any useful website on "Autonomia" Movement in Italy ? Yours Sincerely, Yukihiko YOSHIDA 3 Elements of the world: Joy / Fun / Love - --Yuk;-)iko YOSHIDA Yukihiko YOSHIDA A Roue,Systems Humanist/Generalist -artist researcher- Research Fields: Cyborg,Media Technologies,Dance <.org> Keio University,Graduate School for Media and Governance webmaster:Japanese Society for Dance Research From s0metim3s at optusnet.com.au Mon Jun 21 23:02:13 2004 From: s0metim3s at optusnet.com.au (.: s0metim3s :.) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 03:32:13 +1000 Subject: [Reader-list] autonomia In-Reply-To: <200406211108.i5LB8i820476@ccz03.sfc.keio.ac.jp> Message-ID: <200406211737.i5LHbGL06794@mail024.syd.optusnet.com.au> : Hello from TOKYO, : : Is there any useful website on : "Autonomia" Movement in Italy ? Hello, Try this: http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html / Angela _______________ From abhayraj at nls.ac.in Tue Jun 22 11:26:25 2004 From: abhayraj at nls.ac.in (abhayraj at nls.ac.in) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 05:56:25 -0000 (Local time zone must be set--see zic manual page) Subject: [Reader-list] Birth, Life, & Death of an Anonymous Institutional Forum - A Case Study Message-ID: <1185.219.65.142.143.1087883785.squirrel@mail.nls.ac.in> Hi. The recent dialogue under the subject string of ‘homosexuality and csa’ that propelled varied articulations on the reader list’s ‘position’ on the purpose/ambit/limitations/restrictions as regards this list itself, is a fitting subjective-temporal context for my third posting on our project entitled ‘The Need for Anonymous Notice Boards in Universities in Bangalore: An Empirical Study.’ An abstract of the broad framework of this project is available at (last visited on 21st June, 2004) http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2004-January/003363.html. In this posting, I intend to trace (through the structured reproduction of ‘poetry expressed’ by university students), as a case-study, a phenomenon documented at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore (NLSIU) in the rough period commencing from the first week of April and extending until mid-June - the creation [birth] of an institutional anonymous forum in a scenario where none existed, the operation of the same in a university setting [life], and the consequent regulation leading to the eventual termination [death] of the forum. Since this trajectory is located in a particular institutional socio-spatial setting, the leisurely/interested reader will find it useful to refer to my prior posting, where I have extensively detailed my chosen contextual setting of analysis and introduced terminology employed in this posting as well, available at (last visited on 21st June, 2004) http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2004-June/003806.html. To retain meaningful individuality for this posting, it will suffice to state that there exists no institutional forum (in the form of a notice board) for anonymous speech and expression in the NLSIU academic block. The Parameters, Methodology, and Specificities of the Case-study and this Posting. This case-study focuses on one of the 61 notice boards that mark the NLSIU academic block – the ‘Wall Mag’, which is operated and maintained by the Literary and Debating Society (LnD hereafter), one of several student committees at NLSIU. Further, this case-study is restricted to the period from 29th March, 2004 to 6th June, 2004, which was the last date of the 2003-04 academic year at NLSIU. Independent of any research objectives in this project, I put up five poems (Bangled Men – 29th March, 2004; Flirting – 3rd April, 2004; The Dark Side of Boredom - 7th April, 2004; Community – 16th April, 2004 and; Excalibur – 23rd April, 2004) bearing my name under the tagline ‘Almost Poetry’ on the ‘Wall Mag’, while at the same time urging other students to put up their poetry. From 29th March – 24th April, 2004, 22 poems were put up on the Wall Mag, 5 of which were direct unsigned anonymous poems or poems signed under an identity-hiding pseudonym. On 24th April, 2004, immediately following the fifth anonymous poem being put up, the LnD removed all poetry then exhibited on the Wall Mag and put up a notice stating that all further ‘attempts at poetry’ would have to be vetted by a LnD committee member before being put up. >From 25th April – 6th June, a total of 6 more duly vetted non-anonymous poems were put up, 4 of which continue to be on the Wall Mag, as of 21st June, 2004. Of a total of 28 poems, 24 were in English, 2 in Bengali, 1 in Hindi, and 1 in an unidentified language. The basic material for my case-study was the entire collection of poems that remained with the LnD, which the LnD Convenor Shri Singh kindly let me use for my research purposes. The case-study sought to analyse the nature and dynamics of the processes that resulted in the LnD’s intervention on 25th April, 2004; the nature of the regulation imposed and its potential impact in the context of NLSIU as an university; the changing nature of the Wall Mag as a forum for speech and expression; and the nature of policies that need to be deliberated and effected to operate in such scenarios. In this posting, I intend to selectively use reproductions of the poetry put up on the Wall Mag so as to most authentically communicate the complex web of issues involved while considering the sticky issue of anonymous speech in university settings. The authors of the poems used in this posting have been individually contacted for permission to use their writing, where possible. In the interests of space and brevity, only a few ‘selected’ [my discretion] poems have been reproduced in this posting. Before I move on to the substantial part of my posting, one final comment on what I perceive is the importance/need underlying the verbatim use of poems actually displayed on the Wall Mag so as to pose essentially academic questions – I believe that the actual poems, as such, communicate the fine line between free and proscribed speech with the significant ramifications thereof in a manner far superior to that which even the best impersonal literary offering could. The bottom-line being of course that, while some readers may find trudging through abstract student poetry a laborious task, it is believed that the interests of greater accuracy and authenticity necessitate such a rendering. That apart, poetry is fun! Locating the Forum: The Literary and Debating Society’s Wall Mag As detailed in my prior posting (Yes, I really do think both postings be ideally read together, without being too pushy about it J), the Wall Mag essentially does not permit anonymous speech and expression, simply by virtue of the fact that it is operated and maintained by the LnD. This is because, as is the custom/practice with all community-specific notice boards in the NLSIU academic block, notices to be displayed on the Wall Mag need to be vetted [thereby entailing loss of anonymity] by a member of the LnD committee before being put up. In actuality, the Wall Mag is used exclusively by the LnD as an ‘announcement board’ of sorts, with students preferring to use the larger 19 (1) (a) board (with similar vetting requirements by the Student Advocate Committee) for their varied forms of expression. Slow Birth of an Anonymous Forum? Responding to my poetic urges, in the last week of March I requested the LnD Convenor as to whether I could put up my poetry on the Wall Mag in the hope of fostering a more active poetry culture on campus. On receiving an affirmative response, I put up Bangled Men on 29th March, 2004. The poem was accompanied by the following notice: _________________________ ALMOST POETRY The Plan: to write poetry or almost, at least once a week. Theme: not fixed, some thread of life in law school that I’ve experienced or learned/felt about Risks: Controversy, distaste, defamation, rudeness, over abstraction, “he’s right on the almost bit” comments. Benefits: · almost poetry! · You writing some too, and putting it up here. Veracity Concerns: some kernel of truth generally, hyper-magnanimous poetic license operating at will though. Opening Victim: me. Narcissism has finished her siesta. Title: Almost Poetry 01: “Bangled Men” Comments, brickbats and bookies: abhayraj at nls.ac.in ___________________________________ This first poem contained in it the line “‘Fuck the world and its rules! I’m different and I’ll wear bangles’ says Butch burning,” and on the same day the ‘uck’ in ‘fuck’ were blackened out by the LnD. On 30th March, 2004, I was politely asked by the LnD Convenor to refrain from directly using epithets like ‘fuck’ in any poetry exhibited on the Wall Mag. My second poem Flirting had the word ‘fucking’ in it; it was I who blackened out the ‘ucking’ this time before putting it up on the Wall Mag on 3rd April, 2004. The poem stayed on unmolested for the subsequent week, until I eventually took it off. From this isolated single incident it seemed that the Wall Mag was a regulated forum content-wise, with the LnD retaining final ‘editorial’ power while broadly permitting free speech and expression. The first three weeks of April saw significant activity on the Wall Mag with over 20 poems being put up for different periods of time. Significantly however, in its new avatar as a forum for poetry, the Wall Mag had transmuted from a forum preventing anonymous speech into something the likes of which did not exist earlier in the NLSIU academic block – an institutional forum permitting both anonymous and non-anonymous poetry-speech subject, of course, to the LnD’s overall editorial/censorship power mentioned earlier. The Life of a Forum permitting Anonymous Speech We now directly turn to some of the poetry displayed so as to get the flavour of the student-body response to the existence of such an institutional forum in a university setting. I have reproduced 16 short poems numbered below, the 5 anonymous entries are indicated as such. 1. 21st April, 2004 “Almost Poetry” Poetr. 2. 21st April, 2004 Poetry in Motion MOTPOETRYION 3. 22nd April, 2004 THE LIZARD The lizard could not climb the walls They were way too slippery. Without crevice Without bump without adhesive charity. No ascent for him. No perching on the ceiling fan. He could crawl across the grimy floor And explore like a surveyor each uncultivable marble tile. He could squirm into the kitchen And shudder at the barbaric complexity of human diet. He could slink into the bedroom, watch people have sex And come out retching, aghast at the useless bustle and sweat of the whole deal. He could tip-toe feather-footed into the toilet And see people reveal everything: breast, cock, grudge, hope. [COMPARE WITH POEM 16] He could scamper around in the cellar And wonder why that tolerant Eden was not visited too often. He could sneak under the dinner table And think how human feet were more bearable than human faces. He could do all that and more. Lots more. But scaling the walls? Nay. Getting a broader bustier view? Never. Learning bigger puffier grander secrets? Out of the question. No ascent for him. None. 4. 23rd April, 2004 Almost Poetry Somewhere along the line, we almost Poets have stopped even trying to write Poetry and Instead we write Ungrammatical, unrhyming nonsentences That end abruptly and. 5. 24th April, 2004 [ANONYMOUS] Strangers As I pass you by on the street, Stranger, you see me & I see you. But who is to say you are you, & I am I, SO GOODBYE - An anonymous poet 6. 24th April, 2004 [ANONYMOUS] Buckets I look out the window & see a Blue Bucket, It looks as Empty as my Pocket, Oh NO!; But it has my lucky-charm locket, Then its not so empty. 7. 24th April, 2004 Almost Poetry Deception This is not verse But it only appears to be so because the breadth of this paper is particularly small. 8. 24th April, 2004 Almost Poetry ‘GANGA’ Ground Floor: 101 to 110 And a loo. First Floor: 201 to 210 And a loo. Second Floor: 301 to 310 And a loo. Terrace: Broken Door No loo. 9. 24th April, 2004 Almost Poetry Monday Morning Blues International Law Indirect Tax Insurance Trust, Equity & Specific Reliefs Time-Table. 10. 24th April, 2004 The Ride of the Valkyries The Valkyries. They rode. Who cares? Bring on the horny wombats! 11. 24th April, 2004 Wombats in Heat Im a little teapot, short and stout Who cares!! Bring on the horny wombats!! OK _______________________ CENSORED ______________________ Aah!! 12. 24th April, 2004 A chat with myself Hi. Hi. I’m Mark, No shit! So am I. Cool! Cool! But..er..you don’t look like a “Mark” Nor do you. By the way, what does a Mark look like? I don’t know – not like you. Oh. Yeah. Ok, I gotta go now. Alright. Bye. That’ll be 5000 Rupees for consultation. Screw you! 13. 24th April, 2004 Almost Poetry LOOK HERE !! Efforts mine Attention seek Failed This one had better work It’s working!! I’m writing this. It’s almost ‘Almost Poetry’ Amen! 1. I even put a footnote!! 14. 24th April, 2004 [ANONYMOUS – PSEUDONYM; This anonymous poem written in Hindi has been directly rendered in the English script here] Ek ladki thee, sundar see, achee see, pyari see Ek ladki thee, sundar see, achee see, pyari see Sur jhuka ke shurma ke guliyo se guzurti thee, Sur jhuka ke shurma ke guliyo se guzurti thee, Aur kaha kartee thee – “burtun le lo burtun ” - Babbur Sher 15. 24th April, 2004 [ANONYMOUS] why write poetry when you can write prose poetry is so morose joining long words wherever they fit so it all means utter shit express your passion – sure, go ahead. Honestly, Id rather go to bed . 16. 24th April, 2004 [ANONYMOUS – PSEUDONYM] Almost Poetry breast cock grunge fuck [See poem 3 above] This is what all most poetry is about. BANG BANGITY BANG BANG The Death of Anonymity Following the anonymous poem [Poem 16 above] the LnD, on 24th April, 2004, took off all the poems displayed on the Wall Mag and put up a notice: “Henceforth all attempts at poetry will have to be vetted by a LnD member.” The LnD could be contacted if anyone wanted his or her poetry back. Ironically enough, I even found a LnD poem communicating the new transition, which was never put up: _______________________________________________ (ALMOST) NOTICE YES THE BOARD HAS BEEN CLEARED, BECAUSE MOST OF IT WAS MERDE, ALL FUTURE POETS MUST, SATISFY THE LND LUST FOR GETTING THEIR POETRY SIGNED, BY A MEMBER WHO WOULDN’T MIND, UNCONTROLLED POETRY ISN’T GREAT REGULATION, LETS CELEBRATE. YES MY POETRY SUCKS. for LND Signature ___________________________________________________ When asked by the researcher as to why the poetry had been taken off the Wall Mag, the LnD position was that it was because ‘some anonymous crap’ was put up, with primary reference to Poem 16 reproduced above. If one takes a closer look at 16-word Poem 16, the only words that could be objectionable are – breast or cock or fuck. The first two words were acceptable in the non-anonymous Poem 3 above, which was not edited/censored in any manner, while the word ‘fuck’ was not considered sufficient reason to remove both of my first two non-anonymous poems, which contained the word in different forms. Poem 16 above, importantly, was anonymous. Significantly, the nature of the Wall Mag had changed once again on 24th April, 2004 – it no longer permitted anonymous speech – the only institutional forum permitting (however tenuously) anonymous speech had died. Simultaneously, the termination of an anonymous forum had also resulted in explicit and greater regulation – whereby all notices had to be vetted by an authority-wielder as a pre-requisite before they could be put up, thereby raising the spectre of heightened content restrictions/limitations. In this context, the fact that only 6 more poems (each of which was vetted by the LnD) were put up on the Wall Mag between 25th April – 6th June, 2004 is significant. Incidentally, during this period no poem was denied authorization by the LnD – only 6 poems were submitted for vetting though. Some Elegiac Comments Having broadly attempted to trace the phenomenon of the creation of an institutional anonymous forum in a scenario where none existed, the operation of the same in a university setting, and the consequent regulation leading to the eventual termination of the anonymous forum, some brief comments/questions keeping in mind the broad focus of this project are in order: · Is the LnD action of 24th April, 2004 or similar action in similar contexts justified? Can there be some reasonable criterion agreed upon (and openly communicated) to inform and moderate such interventionist decisions as regards free speech? · Flowing from the above question, can action such as the LnD’s theoretically pass constitutional muster in light of the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by Article 19 of the Constitution of India and of the equal treatment guaranteed by Article 14 of the Constitution of India? · Continuing on the same line, is a distinction between anonymous notices and non-anonymous notices per se justified/warranted/desirable? · What are the discernible consequences of the absence of an institutional anonymous forum/increased regulation, as regards freedom of speech and expression in a university setting? · Will the risks posed by anonymity (no accountability/hate speech/wrong and misleading information, etc.) be countered by a scenario/policy that while permitting anonymous speech per se, still subjects it to ultimate censorship if such anonymous speech be deemed undesirable as per pre-determined standards? · In a scenario where vetting is a mandatory pre-requisite for notices, can anonymity still be preserved by accommodating for content vetting of anonymous notices? What institutional mechanisms can facilitate such a balance between anonymity and free speech? · What, if any, is the correlation between the existence of an institutional anonymous forum and hate speech? These are the thorny issues that I hope to have a clearer understanding of at least, by the end of this project. I conclude with my well-worn but little heeded refrain: I look forward to any comments, suggestions or information. I can be contacted at abhayraj at nls.ac.in Abhayraj Naik From z3118338 at student.unsw.edu.au Tue Jun 22 11:24:06 2004 From: z3118338 at student.unsw.edu.au (Martin Hardie) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 07:54:06 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] autonomia In-Reply-To: <200406211108.i5LB8i820476@ccz03.sfc.keio.ac.jp> References: <200406211108.i5LB8i820476@ccz03.sfc.keio.ac.jp> Message-ID: <200406220754.06959.z3118338@student.unsw.edu.au> Yuki i am on an "autonomist list" I will forward your message there and get some answers for you but have a look at www.endpage.com to start it has quite a lot of stuff Martin On Monday 21 June 2004 13:08, Yukihiko Yoshida wrote: > Hello from TOKYO, > > Is there any useful website on "Autonomia" Movement in Italy ? > > Yours Sincerely, > Yukihiko YOSHIDA > > 3 Elements of the world: Joy / Fun / Love > - --Yuk;-)iko YOSHIDA > Yukihiko YOSHIDA > A Roue,Systems Humanist/Generalist -artist researcher- > Research Fields: Cyborg,Media Technologies,Dance > <.org> > Keio University,Graduate School for Media and Governance > > webmaster:Japanese Society for Dance Research > > _________________________________________ > 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: > -- :::::::::::::::::: http://auskadi.tk + 34 665757391 + 34 944668670 :::::::::::::::::: From z3118338 at student.unsw.edu.au Tue Jun 22 11:25:13 2004 From: z3118338 at student.unsw.edu.au (Martin Hardie) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 07:55:13 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] autonomia In-Reply-To: <200406211737.i5LHbGL06794@mail024.syd.optusnet.com.au> References: <200406211737.i5LHbGL06794@mail024.syd.optusnet.com.au> Message-ID: <200406220755.13034.z3118338@student.unsw.edu.au> Angela you are here as well! Martin On Monday 21 June 2004 19:32, .: s0metim3s :. wrote: > : Hello from TOKYO, > : > : Is there any useful website on > : "Autonomia" Movement in Italy ? > > Hello, > > Try this: > http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html > / > > Angela > _______________ > > > > > _________________________________________ > 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: > -- :::::::::::::::::: http://auskadi.tk + 34 665757391 + 34 944668670 :::::::::::::::::: From definetime at rediffmail.com Tue Jun 22 00:03:33 2004 From: definetime at rediffmail.com (sanjay ghosh) Date: 21 Jun 2004 18:33:33 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] (Fwd) Right-wing attack Fahrenheit 9/11 Message-ID: <20040621183333.8840.qmail@webmail32.rediffmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040621/7b89911a/attachment.html -------------- next part --------------   By David Walsh / 21 June 2004 US filmmaker Michael Moore’s new documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, scheduled to open in more than 500 theaters on June 25, has come under fierce attack from right-wing Republican elements. The campaign against the film, which harshly criticizes the Bush administration’s response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, is an indication of the sensitivity of the cabal in the White House to any light being shed on its activities. A Republican front group, Move Forward America, has set up a web site and urged its supporters to pressure movie theaters not to show the film. The site declares: “ ‘Bash America’ filmmaker Michael Moore is about to unleash an attack on the U.S. Military, the heroic men and women of the Armed Forces and our Commander-In-Chief via his film Fahrenheit 9/11.... The goal of the film is abundantly clear: to undermine the war on terrorism.” The group’s web site also states: “Since we are the customers of the American movie theatres, it is important for us to speak up loudly and tell the industry executives that we don’t want this misleading and grotesque movie being shown at our local cinema.” The chairman of Move Forward America is Howard Kaloogian, a former California assemblyman who helped organize last year’s recall election in California and made a failed bid for the Republican US Senate nomination. The public relations firm for the organization is Russo Marsh & Rogers. One of its partners, Ron Rogers, teamed up with longtime Republican strategists Lyn Nofziger and Ed Rollins to work on the unsuccessful 2002 California gubernatorial campaign of Bill Simon. Whether Move Forward America’s effort to suppress Fahrenheit 9/11 will bear any fruit remains to be seen. On his web site, Michael Moore notes that “three national/regional theater chains...have not booked the movie in their theaters. One theater owner in Illinois has reported receiving death threats.” Moore’s difficulties in getting his film made and into cinemas are by now well known. According to Roger Friedman of Fox News Channel, Mel Gibson’s company Icon Productions was all set to finance Moore’s film, but when the $5 million deal was announced, “Gibson got calls from Republican friends urging him to back out of it right away.” Miramax, a company owned by Disney, stepped in and financed the documentary. Michael Eisner of Disney, in turn, refused to allow Miramax to distribute the film, claiming that the film’s political content was at odds with the company’s “nonpartisan” stature. Lions Gate and IFC Films then picked up the distribution. On another front, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has saddled Fahrenheit 9/11 with an R rating, meaning that those younger than 17 cannot see the film unless accompanied by an adult. The MPAA gave the film an R rating for “violent and disturbing images and for language.” The film’s images reportedly include a public beheading in Saudi Arabia, Iraqis burned with napalm and a scene of an Iraqi man dumping a dead baby into a truck along with other corpses. There are also scenes of US abuse of Iraqi detainees. The president of Lions Gate, Tom Ortenberg, told the press: “I think the message of the movie is so important that it should be available to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. Frankly, I don’t consider any of the images in the film any more disturbing than what we have all seen on the cable news networks and the gratuitous violence that fills the screen of so many PG-13-rated action pictures.” A PG (Parental Guidance)-13 rating is supposed to alert parents to the fact that there might be material in a given film that is inappropriate for children under 13. An R rating is considerably more restrictive. Ortenberg said the latter rating might mean cutting the film’s audience by 20 percent. Moore writes on his web site: “I want all teenagers to see this film. There is nothing in the film in terms of violence that we didn’t see on TV every night at the dinner hour during the Vietnam War. Of course, that’s the point, isn’t it? The media have given the real footage from Iraq a ‘cleansing’—made it look nice, easy to digest.... I trust all of you teenagers out there will find your way into a theater to see this movie. If the government believes it is OK to send slightly older teenagers to their deaths in Iraq, I think at the very least you should be allowed to see what they are going to draft you for in a couple of years.” Lions Gate and IFC Films are appealing the MPAA’s rating. They have hired former New York Democratic governor Mario Cuomo, in private practice since 1994, to represent the film before the MPAA. A hearing is scheduled for June 22. After viewing the film three times, Cuomo told the press, “I was convinced that it should be viewed and reflected upon by as many Americans as possible...especially young people who, in a few years, might be part of our military forces.” Moore also notes that “some very sophisticated individuals have been hacking into and shutting down our website. It is an hourly fight to keep it up. We are going to find out who is doing this and we are going to pursue a criminal prosecution.” The filmmaker also promises to take to court anyone who maligns the film or damages his reputation. Moore has hired fact-checkers and claims that every word and image in the film is accurate. He has engaged a former Clinton adviser, Chris Lehane, to organize a “war room” to offer an instant response to any attacks from the right wing. The film was well received at star-studded premieres in New York City and Los Angeles on June 14 and 15. The crowd in New York, which included Tim Robbins, Mike Myers, Tony Bennett, Glenn Close, Al Sharpton, authors Frank McCourt and Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Gere, Lauren Bacall, former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, anchorman Tom Brokaw, director Barry Levinson and many others, gave Moore’s work a standing ovation. Audiences at two screenings in Los Angeles, packed with film industry luminaries, were equally receptive. Actress Drew Barrymore told the media: “I never come to premieres, but I’m so here on this one. I’m looking forward to this more than anything in the world.” Actress Leelee Sobieski told reporters after one of the screenings that she was moved to tears while watching the documentary and said that Fahrenheit 9/11 “should be required for everyone in America to see as part of their education in high schools.” Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was so enthusiastic that he reportedly attended screenings on both coasts. The hysterical reaction of the ultra-right and the massive popular anticipation of the film—entirely unprecedented for a documentary work—underscore the extraordinary volatility of the political situation in the US. More than that, in a year dominated by an election campaign in which the two major figures, George W. Bush and John Kerry, are both pro-war candidates, with virtually indistinguishable platforms, Fahrenheit 9/11 has become the focal point for something practically unheard of in the US—open political debate. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/fahr-j21.shtml From definetime at rediffmail.com Tue Jun 22 11:20:37 2004 From: definetime at rediffmail.com (sanjay ghosh) Date: 22 Jun 2004 05:50:37 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] (fwd) Democracy isn't working Message-ID: <20040622055037.26904.qmail@webmail18.rediffmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040622/58ac2f4f/attachment.html -------------- next part --------------   Dear reader-listed, The following article appeared in today's Guardian. An important argument on the state of democracy in the west, it's usefulness for the rest of the world and especially when considered in the afro-asian context. Sanjay Ghosh Democracy isn't working Martin Jacques Tuesday June 22, 2004 The Guardian However implausibly, President Bush continues to reiterate his commitment to the early introduction of democracy in Iraq. Indeed, the idea of democratic reform in the Arab world has been central to the Anglo-American position on Iraq. There should be nothing surprising in that. Democracy has become the universal calling card of the west, the mantra that is chanted at every country that falls short (when politically convenient, of course), the ubiquitous solution to the problems of countries that are not democratic. The boast about democracy is largely a product of the last half-century, following the defeat of fascism. Before that, a large slice of Europe remained mired in dictatorship, often of an extremely brutal and distasteful kind. The idea of democracy as a western virtue was blooded during the cold-war struggle against communism, though its use remained highly selective: those many dictatorships that sided with the west were happily awarded membership of the "free world"; "freedom" took precedence over democracy, regimes as inimical to democracy as apartheid South Africa, Diem's South Vietnam and Franco's Spain were welcomed into the fold. Following the collapse of communism, however, "free markets and democracy" became for the first time - at least in principle - the universal prescription for each and every country. Democracy is viewed by the west in a strangely ahistorical way. It is seen as eternal and unchanging, neither historically nor culturally specific, but a kind of universal truth. But, of course, nothing is eternal. The western model of democracy, like everything else, is a distinct phase in history, which depends upon certain conditions for its existence. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it should not be assumed that it is of universal application, nor that it will always exist. Russia is a classic test of the western shibboleth. For the west, the simple answer to Russia's ills after the collapse of communism was a combination of the free market and democracy. The free market never happened; worse, the attempt to engineer it under Yeltsin produced, with western blessing, the theft of Russia's most valuable natural resources by its leader's cronies. The country is paying a terrible price for following western advice. Meanwhile, democracy has been shaped and constrained by the personal power of Putin, a reminder of the country's long, despotic past. The lessons? History and culture leave an indelible imprint on the nature of any democracy; the market similarly. The west, in its enthusiasm for democracy, suffers from historical amnesia. Britain has only enjoyed universal suffrage for about 80 years, by which time it was already highly industrialised. For many west European countries it was even later. The great majority of countries that have experienced economic takeoff, including Britain, have done so under forms of authoritarian rule. The most successful recent examples of takeoff, those in east Asia, were similarly achieved under authoritarianism: the legitimacy of these regimes has depended on economic growth rather than the ballot box. Democracy, historical experience suggests, is not that well-suited to achieving the conditions necessary for economic takeoff. Given that democracy is now the universal western prescription for developing countries, this is rather ironic. It does not mean, of course, that authoritarian rule is necessarily good at achieving takeoff: the Latin American model has proved extremely poor, the East Asian very effective. Nor does it mean that democracy can't deliver economic takeoff: India is a case in point. Clearly, though, democracy is not a universal formula for economic success, irrespective of a society's state of development. The west is the traditional home of democracy. The fact that western countries share various, usually unspoken characteristics, however, is often ignored. They were the first to industrialise. They colonised a majority of the world, invariably denying their colonies democracy. They were overwhelmingly ethnically homogeneous. Developing countries, for the most part, have faced the opposite circumstances: takeoff in the context of an economically dominant west; the absence, in the context of colonial rule, of indigenous democratic soil; and far greater ethnic diversity. The west remains oblivious to the profound difficulties presented by ethnic diversity. As Amy Chua points out in World on Fire, democracy is far from a sufficient condition for benign governance in the kind of multiracial societies that are common in Africa and Asia. Democracy, the politics of the majority, allows the majority ethnic group to govern, potentially without constraint. Multi-ethnic societies, like Malaysia or Nigeria, require, for their stability, a racial consensus: democracy, resting on majorities and minorities, is deaf to this problem. Moreover, democracy works very differently in different cultures. In Japan, the Liberal Democrats have formed every government, apart from a brief interruption, since democracy was introduced more than 50 years ago. The political arguments that count take place between unelected factions of the governing party rather than between elected parties. The Japanese model of democracy - or the Korean or Taiwanese - may have the same trappings as western democracy, but there the similarities largely end. If it is mistaken to regard western democracy as a universal abstraction that is equally applicable across the world, it is also wrong to see it as frozen and unchanging. Indeed, there are grounds for believing that western democracy, as we have known it, is in decline. The symptoms have been well-rehearsed: the decline of parties, the fall in turnout, a growing disregard for politicians, the displacement of politics from the centre-stage of society. These trends have beenobservable more or less everywhere for at least 15 years. The underlying reasons are even more disturbing than the symptoms. The emergence of mass suffrage and modern party politics coincided with the rise of the labour movement, which drove the extension of the vote and obliged political parties to engage in popular mobilisation. The rise of the modern labour movement, moreover, provided societies with real choices: instead of the logic of the market, it offered a different philosophy and a different kind of society. The decline of traditional social-democratic parties, as illustrated by New Labour, has meant the erosion of choice, at least in any profound sense of the term. The result is that voting has often become less meaningful. Politics has moved on to singular ground: that of the market. The influence of the market is manifest in multiple ways. The funding of parties now moves solely to its rhythm: big business and the rich are as important to New Labour as they are to the Conservatives. The same interests fund, and therefore influence, the parties. Big money calls the tune. Nowhere is this truer than in American politics, which has become a plutocracy mediated by democracy, rather than the reverse. As the media has displaced traditional forms of discourse and mobilisation, ownership of the media has become increasingly important in the determination of political choices and electoral results. The most dangerous example is in Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi's ownership of the bulk of the private media has enabled him to transform Italian democracy into something verging on a mediaocracy, leaving politics and the state besieged by his immense personal power and wealth. Perhaps these developments point to a deeper problem incipient in western democracies. Far from the free market and democracy enjoying the kind of harmonious relationship beloved of western propaganda, democracy grew in fact as a constraint on the market, holding it at bay and enabling a pluralism of values and imperatives. What happens when this healthy tension becomes a dangerous imbalance, in which the market is dominant and consumerism is established as the overriding ethos of society, permeating politics just as it has invaded every other nook and cranny of society? Democracy comes under siege. In Italy it is already gasping for breath. In the US it is deeply and increasingly flawed. Democracy is neither a platitude nor an eternal verity - either for the world or for the west. •: Martin Jacques is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre martinjacques1 at aol.com For html version http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1244327,00.html From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Sat Jun 19 18:31:09 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?shivam?=) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 14:01:09 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Poetry vs Journalism Message-ID: <20040619130109.76146.qmail@web8201.mail.in.yahoo.com> Line Byline: Poetry As and Against Journalism By Amitava Kumar Courtesy http://eserver.org/clogic http://www.freeindiamedia.com/poetry/16_dec_poetry.htm 1. Let me begin with the obscure. Not simply in the sense of the obscurity, subtlety, or indirection of poetry that is often posited against the professed plainness of prose and its accessibility. Instead, let us take up the obscure in the sense of being unknown, ignored, not open to discovery: that, then, which is not news. This is the twentieth April of Nineteen Seventy-Four or a professional assassin's right hand or the leather glove of a detective or a spot stuck on the binoculars of an attacker? Whatever it be--I cannot call it just another day! The poet Alokdhanwa, writing in an old, sprawling city on the banks of the Ganges in India, approaches a date and makes it unreal. This could really be an important day, maybe they shot the leader of the new democracy movement. Maybe the neofascist government at the center sterilized all the male members of the minority Muslim community in one colony. A woman was raped. Perhaps. This could be an important day: its unreality is announced by this poet by comparing it to a grainy detail of the detective's glove in a B-grade Hindi movie. In a world rendered surreal by capitalism, it is not the realism of journalism but the contrary realism of poetry that brings us the news. The different orders of the real.... What does it mean to call to mind the detail of a Hindi movie while speaking in New Jersey--even if it's true that the poet Alokdhanwa counts among his heroes Walt Whitman who has the honor of having one highway rest-plaza named after him in this state? That invocation, it seems to me, inaugurates an inquiry that involves, but also exceeds, the poetry inscribed in the posters held by protesters after the Brixton riots in Britain proclaiming "Because You Were There We Are Here." It includes the place of the East in the imagination--the minds and the media--of the West. 2. The newspapers did not fail to mention the Hollywood story, "An Affair to Remember." I read of the February 23 shooting at the Empire State Building in the newspapers and wondered how I could talk about this with my students. Suddenly, truth became a matter not to be sought from books or the words teachers write on the blackboard. This time we were to study the lines of chalk drawn around dead bodies. The newspapers made no mention of the fact that in the US last year, 20,000 people died in homicides and 30,000 in suicides. The book of poems written by an Egyptian Jew in exile gave way to another image. A foreigner carrying in the crook of his arm a tiny gun. There is a terrible solitude that surrounds the dead; it is only enhanced when the dead is also a killer. I looked at the newspaper photographs of Ali Abu Kamal. In one of them, his young son, sitting between his grief-stricken mother and sister, holds a large, framed picture of his father. Printed beneath that photograph was a blow-up of Abu Kamal's face from the same picture, the only mug-shot we will now see of the dead man. In the second photograph, Abu Kamal was no longer a father or a husband. We no longer saw him against the cheap backdrop of a Third World studio-photographer's imagination: a canvas curtain with flower-beds painted on them, simulating a large garden outside one's home or, perhaps, the romance of easy, unrestrained travel to far-away places. The black and white pages of the newspapers we held in our hands did not hold our vision: that had fled the land about which the poet Yehuda Amichai once wrote: Sometimes pus Sometimes a poem. Something always bursts out. And always pain. If we were so inclined, we might already have seen in that close-up of his photograph the face that was described by one of Abu Kamal's victims, "He looked crazy, just a mad old man." Amichai could only find this terrible, moving consolation for his own pain: But through the wound on my chest God peers into the world. I am the door to his apartment. What color are God's eyes? I ask because I read about the wife of a "recent immigrant" who was also badly injured in the Sunday shooting. "She's got the reddest eyes I've ever seen," a hospital worker said of the grieving Mrs. Carmona. In Abu Kamal's violent end and in the grief of the Carmona's, like the shadow of the negatives that persist in the black and white images we see, we were confronted with immigrant histories. "Despair is still my star," bemoaned the Syrian poet Adonis. And I'm ready to see--quickly, urgently--how it comes to be that a single man's sense of unremitting loss draws upon another buried, often denied, narrative of collective injury inflicted in an unequal world. It is a recognition of that which should turn this story of Ali Abu Kamal into the history of the grief of entire nations. Or, if you prefer, rewrite the symbol of the Empire State Building, from the Hollywood romance of a single man sleepless in Seattle into the nightmare of millions living life as a waking sleep. And it is in writing, I would like to tell my students, that one works against death. That one protests against annihilation. Against the failure of memory. A ruse that works as revenge against the collective forgetting of other deaths. It was perhaps this that Amiri Baraka had in mind when he wrote in "The Flying Dutchman" that Charlie Parker would have played not a note of music if he could have walked up the East 67th Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! 3. I am riding in a New York subway car, reading a literary article about the Brazilian poet, João Cabral de Melo Neto. The review mentions that Cabral had reached a dead end as a poet "[u]ntil he happened to read one day that life expectancy in his native Recife was even lower than India." As a result of this new knowledge, the poet made a turn from speculative poetry to a social one. He wrote The Dog Without Feathers. "With that poem he rediscovered the city of his birth, its river, the Rio Capibaribe, and the people who survive however marginally along its banks." Shortly thereafter, I search for and find Cabral's poem about the river in his birthplace. And I never saw it seethe (as bread when rising seethes). In silence the river bears its bloating poverty, pregnant with black earth." I am held by the poem's presentation of this image of the river that "never opens up in fish." Even in the description of its stagnation, Cabral conveys the dynamism of his inquiry. The sluggishness of the river and its poverty evokes a response very different from that which is incited by the closed-mindedness or the complacency of the bourgeoisie on its banks. It is there, with their backs to the river, that the city's "cultured families" brood over the fat eggs of their prose. In the complete peace of their kitchens they viciously stir their pots of sticky indolence. I invoke this poetry in opposition to the popular journalism of the West. When the sun rises over the skyscrapers of New York City, darkness has already fallen in the land of my birth. In that area of darkness, the head of the New Delhi bureau of The New York Times discovers the face of otherness that offers the comfort of absolute difference. "Shackled by Past, Racked by Unrest, India Lurches Toward Uncertain Future" is the title of a story filed by Edward R. Gargan. From that remote wasteland of meaning, the journalistic Indiana Jones files his report on his reading of the runes of frozen time. "More than 70 percent of India's people live in villages, where their habits, customs and traditions have changed little over the centuries, even as economic, religious and political forces have changed around them." By the article's end, it has become possible to pyschologize current struggles and fit them in a vision of the eternal, fixed psyche. The concluding quote reads: "The Indian temperament is not democratic enough." Let me engage in a bit of psychologizing myself. In this article, we are back in the nightmare space of an American childhood-memory of the fifties and sixties. It is dinner time in a white, middle-class American home. The child, who is refusing to finish the food on the plate, is remonstrated by the mother, "Eat your food, Billy. There are children going to bed hungry in India." The Times of India is not too different from the The New York Times. To quote Alokdhanwa again: They are professional murderers those who choke and strangle to death the naked news in the shadow of sensational headlines they show themselves again and again the serfs of that one face the map of whose bathroom is bigger than the map of my village. The publishing houses of this country like the pale worms found in the icy cracks: on the banks of the river Hooghly, before taking his own life why has the young poet screamed--"Times of India" Why, indeed? Because, as Neruda wrote in his memoirs, "we can say that our readers have not yet been born." Poetry is unable to function as journalism because journalism will not allow any space for the poetry of protest--the poor and the illiterate find space neither in the pages and TV screens of the powerful media, nor, lest we get carried away let us also declare, between the covers of the prestigious, prize-winning volumes of poetry. 4. Even news is only advertising. In a poem entitled "What's in the News: A Type of Love Poem," I have attempted to allow poetry to present a critique of that condition. Let me quote the beginning stanza: As I flip the channels on my TV the flames in L.A. are melting the cheese on a burger in a Perkin's commercial. I am saying this to you in a far off space to the right which is empty now but will have two hours from now the density of your body, your voice and short hair, the thin skin of veins on your thigh supporting me as I watch the beaten-down brutalized body of Rodney King boldly going where no one has gone before, and even as I catch a glimpse of a crowded meeting in a ghetto, a split-second later, I'm only left witnessing the whole of Americana ventriloquizing through the single drop of beer left shimmering on a bottle's lip: "Why Ask Why?" And yet, unlike journalism which presumes a public sphere, in other words, a public, poetry is often unable to boast of a broad constituency. Why? To an extent, that is because of poetry's affectation. Even in postcolonial zones of poetic engagement, drawn perhaps by the strain of Western romantic tradition, poets continue to speak about the conditions of loneliness--albeit in strict, interrogative materialist terms. Maheshwar, a journalist and poet of the Indian People's Front, writes from his hospital bed just before his death: My friends do not want to stick by my side beyond the ritual exchanges about our well-being. It is right at this point that my loneliness descends and like the dusk spreading in the sky fills the corners and the insides of my brain. This loneliness alone is my strength in its womb takes birth my desire to live.... You will be finished-- you will be killed because-- when did you learn in life the politics of sharing with someone someone's loneliness. This is no ordinary loneliness, after all it insists on a shared condition. Yes; and yet, as a repeated gesture, it marks the poet, however self-critically, as nevertheless solitary. For poetry to adopt the publics produced by, and available to, journalism, poetry will have to inaugurate another politics of affiliation. While retaining its difference from journalism-- forcing singular constructions over allegedly objective ones, ditching an ideologically saturated realism for irruptions of marginalized realities, exchanging news for the newsworthy--poetry will need poets as public intellectuals. Poets, not uprooted souls wandering the dark fields of the republic, but grounded in possibilities. Is the poignant lament of the Indian poet Ved Prakash Vatuk, an immigrant in the U.S., the most effective one available to us? To each community I have become nothing more than a lost part of some other "they." My home is a prison of time the world my exile. ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Sat Jun 19 18:28:11 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?shivam?=) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 13:58:11 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] The latest at India Together Message-ID: <20040619125811.94245.qmail@web8204.mail.in.yahoo.com> India Together 16 June 2004 Newsletter http://www.indiatogether.org/ The news that matters Editors: Ashwin Mahesh, Subramaniam Vincent Dear Reader: The June 16, 2004 newsletter from India Together includes articles on the following regular sections: Agriculture, Economy, Education, Environment, Health, Government, Opinion, Women and Space Share features from Combat Law and Manushi. In addition, all previous India Together stories, articles are archived and freely available online. Several Interact conversations are also currently open for discussion. ############## ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ################ READER FUNDING AND INDIA TOGETHER Making your support count Dear Reader, have you made your annual contribution yet? Every day India Together brings you information and news on the issues that matter. As a regular reader of this newsletter and the online magazine, your support is vital in making India Together possible. To make your annual contribution today, start here. http://www.indiatogether.org/support/ For more on why your support is vital, click here. http://www.indiatogether.org/support/whyfund.htm ############## ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ################ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ IN THIS ISSUE ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Agriculture ~~~~~~~~~~~ Standing apart on common ground: As the Congress promises priority to agriculture, it needs to strike a balance between its policies and those of the Left Front, on whose support it depends. These policies show considerable disagreement in key areas, most notably in support prices, and subsidies for food security. Ashok B Sharma reports. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/agr-commagr.htm Once again, fooling the world: Removal of agricultural subsidies should be a pre-requisite to further movement on the WTO agricultural negotiations. The current proposals from negotiators in the developed countries completely sidesteps this, and instead tries to cement their personal legacies, says Devinder Sharma. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/agr-wtoagro.htm Combat Law ~~~~~~~~~~ Children's rights in Shining India : Despite Constitutional guarantees of opportunity and civil rights, millions of children face wide-spread deprivation and discrimination. A large part of this stems from being seen through the lens of adults who make decisions for them, and who prefer to address their welfare rather than rights, says Enakshi Ganguly Thukral. http://www.indiatogether.org/combatlaw/vol3/issue1/crights.htm Economy ~~~~~~~ Orissa's labour industry: A conniving chain of regulators, police, and contractors is profiteering upon the backs of gruelling labour by migrant Oriyas. Desperate for employment, thousands have little choice but to take up the virtual bondage of the jobs they are forced into. Jaideep Hardikar reports on the exploitation. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/eco-laborbiz.htm Dial R to reroute funds : A financially sick state corporation in Maharashtra gets an infusion of life from the generosity of MTNL, the Centre-owned phone company, as political players obligingly fritter away the assets of the latter. Eventually, taxpayers in all states must foot the bill. Himanshu Upadhyaya reports. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/eco-dialr.htm Education ~~~~~~~~~ Barriers to girls' education: Poor people make choices that appear to limit the education of girls simply because of their poverty. But we should not be too quick to attribute low literacy among girls to poverty alone. A number of other factors are just as responsible. Wahidul Hasan Khan lists some of these. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/edu-barriers.htm Environment ~~~~~~~~~~~ Environment and the new Government: June 5 is the United Nations World Environment Day. Amidst conflicting demands from coalition partners, international funding agencies, and community groups, Ashish Kothari reflects on the challenges and opportunities for the new government. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/env-newgov.htm In Pictures: Greening the Vellore hills http://www.indiatogether.org/photo/2004/env-greenhill.htm Health ~~~~~~ The Gandhi at Gandhigram: Septuagenarian Dr. R. Kausalya Devi, head of the award winning Gandhigram Rural Hospital near Madurai, has worked for four decades with single-minded dedication and no distractions in a cause that chose her. Lalitha Sridhar finds proof that Gandhi still lives in India. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/hlt-gramhosp.htm Government ~~~~~~~~~~ Municipal budgets and poverty: As poverty in Karnataka acquires a larger urban face, municipal administrations must reorient themselves to meet basic needs like livelihoods, sanitation, and shelter - and set aside beautification programs - if the state's development goals are to be achieved, says Kathyayini Chamaraj. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/gov-munibudg.htm Manushi ~~~~~~~ Bollywood as cultural ambassador : Those who accuse filmdom in India of obscurantism and of perpetuating stereotypes are embarrassed of it, and aggressive in their disapproval. But Bollywood is much more complex and a far greater agent for positive social change than is acknowledged by those who claim to represent the high culture of India, says Madhu Kishwar. http://www.indiatogether.org/manushi/issue139/idea.htm Opinion ~~~~~~~ Sense and nonsense: Few sensible people support the treatment given to widows within Hindu society. In many places, such regressive traditions have been discarded. Yet, Sushma Swaraj used this most backward face of religion to register her protest at the prospect of Sonia as PM, notes Kalpana Sharma. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/ksh-widowsym.htm A new security agenda: While defense may be at the heart of security concerns, it is not necessarily the most important sector for security. The Congress-led government must demonstrate its differences from the policies of the NDA in three important areas, says Firdaus Ahmed. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/fah-newsecure.htm Women ~~~~~ Gender - a Left priority: While land reforms and decentralisation in West Bengal have been successful, far less has been achieved in tackling gender disparities and discrimination. Literacy and economic empowerment, in particular, need much more attention immediately, says Jayati Ghosh. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/wom-leftwomen.htm One village, one computer: Is information technology any use to poor and uneducated populations? Anil Shaligram certainly thinks so. With initial help from the Maharashtra Foundation, his 1V1C initiative has trained villagers, most of them women, not only to use computers, but to put them to productive use in solving local problems. Surekha Sule reports. http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/jun/wom-onevill.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Currently on Interact ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ What's feminism to you? http://www.indiatogether.org/interact/2004/itr-000018.html Guns versus butter http://www.indiatogether.org/interact/2004/itr-000017.html 498A - Retain, revise or remove? http://www.indiatogether.org/interact/2004/itr-000016.html Elections - Are you in the process? http://www.indiatogether.org/interact/2004/itr-000015.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Regular Services ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Free advertising for development organizations. http://www.indiatogether.org/main/advertise.htm List your upcoming non-profit event, and view already scheduled ones. http://www.indiatogether.org/php/eventlist.php List merchandise from your non-profit operation http://www.indiatogether.org/shop/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Your annual support for India Together Credit/Bank card, cheque ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ India Together is funded by your annual reader contributions. 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Editors: Subramaniam Vincent, Ashwin Mahesh ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Subscribe/Unsubscribe ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You can subscribe to this free newsletter at any web page on India Together. To subscribe, enter your email address in the subscription box on the page. You will be prompted for email confirmation to verify your interest, and after that, the newsletters will be on their way to you regularly. ===== ZEST Reading Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/ ZEST Economics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-economics/ ZEST Poets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-poets/ ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From 133344 at soas.ac.uk Wed Jun 23 00:34:50 2004 From: 133344 at soas.ac.uk (TARAN KHAN) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 19:04:50 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Independent Fellowship Posting Message-ID: <1087931090.cfe730c0133344@soas.ac.uk> Sarai posting June 2004 ‘Very Progressive People: Stories of Women and Movements from post-Independence Bombay’ Taran Khan 220604 -------------------------------------------- ‘In Which Sultana and Shaukat Weigh In’ But first, Bombay. Every trip is different, to this “maddening, frustrating, complex, immensely rewarding city by the sea”, as assorted blurbs on (often bad) book jackets call it. Bombay is a city of migrants. A fact I always knew, but had never touched. Sultana and Shaukat walk with me through its streets, actual and in memory; talk to me about the ‘mehbooba’ the city was for their husbands and for them, and I see the charmer, the gracious hostess so far from home, all its vast spaces asking to be conquered, filled with new ideas, music and revolutions. If Bombay were to have a city symphony, it would be, to my mind, a medley. And one of the scores would be that composed by a very special, talented bunch of migrants out to raise hell. For whatever excellent reasons (sociology begone!) Bombay has provided the backdrop for a thousand such stories, it was here that once upon a time “something quite amazing and wonderful happened. For a while, the very cream of Urdu literary talent, the absolute best minds of our generation got together here and created such a storm”. Sultana Jafri told me that. This is her particular talent-that of providing perspective, signposting my/our erratic forays into three sets of memories. She provides me with a narrative that combines assurance with ideological commitment and consistence. To explain. Sultana came to Bombay not as a bride or even a young woman just out of the confines of the maternal home. She came as a recent divorcee, a single mother on a transfer posting from the AIR station in Lahore. Bombay for her was an adventure, but also just another big city, also a continuation of her career- a scarce commodity, she alone amongst my three women had it this early. It was also romance. Living in her school friend Ismat Chugtai’s house near Shivaji Park, Sultana rediscovered the twin passions of her life-Ali Sardar Jafri and the Communist Party (or the Communist Cause? I hate to hem in such a free spirit) re-discovered, because she knew the poet as a Masters stuent in Lucknow University, had campaigned for him as a candidate of the Students Federation with no thought of marrying him. Her ties to Marx had also taken root then; after living in Bombay for few months she “left the government ki naukri and joined the Communist Party as a full timer, phir Sardar se shaadi bhi kar li.” “ I also married Sardar.” Her narrative is important for several reasons. Much of its colour and power comes from the fact that she chose to enter the arena of Left associated social movements—she did not marry into it like the others. Second, she was a (seriously!) active member of the Party. Talking to her is slightly exhausting, and it is easy to see why her friends remember her “walking, walking, walking”. She walked all over Madanpura, a Muslim majority industrial area where she worked with the trade unions for several years, even contested an election. I can see her quite easily, selling newspapers for the Party, creating revolutionary consciousness amongst the masses of mazdoors, hauling up a young Habib Tanvir for scrounging free lunches at the commune. I get a sense that in a way she was the ideal Communist Mate- the kind Kaifi Azmi wrote about in his lines “Uth meri jaan mere saath hi chalna hai tujhe”. Her being placed in a position of authority in the commune (she was responsible for collecting dues and administration for a while)would appear to indicate this; simultaneously the whole hearted enthusiasm with which she entered the arenas of mazdoors and rallies, elections and ‘working with the people’ shows how ready she was to push the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour even in her liberal set. What did she seem like to her relatively naïve flatmates-especially Shaukat and Zehra? And vice versa? Sultana herself is quick to dismiss any suggestions that she may have played a mentoring style of role for these women, leave alone been an inspiration for them. In their accounts however, she is central, a source of guidance and support. My sense is that at least in those early months at the commune, in her rush to do things in the real world, Sultana discounted the domestic. This included Shaukat and Zehra. Not meaning a discounting in affection, or a disdain for their domestic ambitions. Rather, I suppose I mean that her memory of “those things” is fuzzy, treated as an unimportant but pleasant aspect of heady, work filled days. There is also a hint in the conversations of the other two that they found Sultana Apa altogether too overpowering. Again, not meaning a revulsion from her obviously sincere workload, but the conviction that they could “never” do what she did, and if that’s what it meant to be a Communist helpmate, they would rather sit this one out, thanks. It is interesting that Sultana herself repeatedly points out to me the various ways in which being wives of Communists affected her two friends-to her mind, they were good RedMates. Shaukat is already famous, the most celebrated of the trio. She is the only one amongst them who has written her memoirs, which I find heartening—at least one of them realizes the importance of their stories. She reads them out to me in her wonderful actor’s voice. Shaukat or Moti Apa as she is affectionately called was catapulted into the world of Walkeshwar Road communes through a whirlwind romance and a most unusual nikah at the commune itself, presided over by her father and no one else from her family. She touches lightly over the grim realities of penury that followed her fairytale marriage, but it is clear that it was a difficult period of adjustment. Her narrative is a sort of middle ground between the two extremes of Zehra and Sultana, giving importance both to the domestic and to her professional life, which was again deeply linked to the idea of being a Communist’s wife. She resolved to start working after PC Joshi told her that a comrade never sits idle. There was also the consideration of finances- Kaifis earnings as a Party full timer were just not enough. She chose to work in theatre- because she “felt she would be good at it”. She was initially was joined by Zehra in acting in IPTA plays. IPTA provided legitimacy to the women’s entry on the stage, an armour against family criticisms. Zehra gave up acting soon after getting pregnant with her first child, but Moti continued, making it her pehchan. We did one joint session in Bombay, when Sultana went with me to Shaukat’s house in Juhu. They spoke of many things, but one exchange tickled me no end. Sultana the entirely practical, talking about her desire to give away all her things before she dies. She says “ mera to dil chahta hai apni puri almari khol dun-here, take it all away”. Shaukat stares in astonishment. But what if you feel like wearing those things later, she asks? Sultana is dismissive-marne ke baad to dena hi hai, might as well give my things to people during my lifetime. I hardly have anything left, she muses, but looking at even the small pile that is left I feel restless. Shaukat is amazed. “hain Sultana Apa, I have 5 cupboards full of clothes, and I still feel like buying some more. Mujhe to woh, kya kehte hain, hauka hai hauka”. They laugh for a long time after that, perfectly aware of their differences, perfectly at ease with them. A few days before I leave Bombay, I watch the election results come in. Sultana is ecstatic, she calls up all her friends and talks for ages, exulting and exclaiming endlessly. Finally she turns to me and says, you see, we were right, after all. We were right to work, and to trust the people we worked for. Every time you think --they’ve finally got you, its over-- she says, staring at the pie charts on the television, it turns out there is still some dum left in our people, a bit more fight in us after all. From srhodes at well.com Wed Jun 23 08:17:16 2004 From: srhodes at well.com (Steve Rhodes) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 18:47:16 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] Frontline/World - India, Mexico and China (fwd) Message-ID: <2.1-228569-391-A-OEWW@smtp.well.com> The full stories will be available for streaming online next Monday (possibly earlier). --- begin forwarded text FRONTLINE/World :::Stories from a small planet http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/ - This Week on FRONTLINE/World: "India: The Sex Workers" "Mexico: A Death in the Desert" "China: Shanghai Nights" - Live Discussion: Chat with reporter Raney Aronson about covering India's red-light districts and confronting the AIDS epidemic, Friday at 11am ET - Stay Tuned This Summer: Special Election Coverage From Around the Globe - Educators: New Classroom Resources ---------------------------- FRONTLINE/World returns this week with our unique mix of extraordinary and eclectic stories -- personal stories about people and places, stories you are not likely to see elsewhere. This time, our adventurous journalists -- Raney Aronson, Claudine LoMonaco and Nguyen Qui Duc -- take us inside the sprawling red-light districts of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and Kolkata (formerly Calcutta); bring us along on a perilous desert border crossing; and sneak us through the back door of one of Shanghai's underground nightclubs. We start in India, where there are more than 3.5 million sex workers, yet they are almost invisible. When "Aloka" was just 16 years old, her parents sold her into prostitution. After five years of sexual enslavement in a brothel in Mumbai, Aloka is HIV positive. "The brothel keepers would force me into a small room, and the clients would refuse to wear a condom," she says. "At that young age, I had no idea what to do but to listen to them -- and now I am paying the price." Aloka is not alone. She is just one of thousands of HIV-infected sex workers who are at the center of India's AIDS crisis. Already India has more than 4.5 million cases of HIV -- second only to South Africa. If drastic measures are not taken, it is feared that more than 25 million Indians could be HIV positive by 2010. "The Sex Workers" is a tale of two cities -- Mumbai, where more than 60 percent of the sex workers are infected with the AIDS virus, and Kolkata, where a strong sex worker union, a history of militancy and a model AIDS prevention program have managed to limit the infection rate to 10 percent. In an astonishing scene, reporter Raney Aronson shows us women from the Sonagachi AIDS Project confronting a group of men -- pimps, brothel owners and clients -- urging them to use condoms. And in a heartbreaking encounter, Aronson visits a shelter outside Kolkata and talks with girls who have been rescued from brothels where they had been sold into prostitution. Their faces and stories are unforgettable. Closer to home, we bring you the story of Matias Garcia, a 29-year-old migrant from the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, who died in the Arizona desert last year as he tried to cross illegally into the United States in search of work. A married man, the father of two, Garcia had been making an annual journey north since he was a teenager, to work in the fields of California. But these days the border crossings are more dangerous. Fences and tightened patrols in California are causing migrants to risk crossing through Arizona's deserts, where temperatures are extreme. Garcia was one of more than 200 migrants who died last year in the Arizona desert. In this intimate and moving portrait, reporter Claudine LoMonaco and producer Mary Spicuzza track down Garcia's family in a Zapotec Indian village. They find a village in mourning for a lost son. It's a simple, powerful story -- one that you are likely to remember every time you read of an anonymous migrant death on our southern border. Finally, in "Shanghai Nights," reporter Nguyen Qui Duc introduces us to the new cultural revolution unfolding in China's most open, cosmopolitan city. We meet young writers, artists, and rock 'n' rollers who are pushing for more personal freedom. Duc's guide is Mian Mian, "the bad girl of Shanghai," notorious for her banned novel, Candy, an underground best-seller about taboo subjects in China: sex, drugs, and crime. It's the story of a generation that no longer accepts the old rules, but doesn't want to confront the government directly -- a generation that would like to have some fun. On the Web site, you can read excerpts from Mian Mian's scandalous book, "Candy," then prowl the Shanghai streets in our "Bright Lights, Big City" reporter's slide show. On an interactive map, you can follow the spread of HIV/AIDS around the world and see where prevention and treatment are making a difference. And you can read about our producer/reporters' experiences filming in Mexico. This is our season finale for FRONTLINE/World, a season in which we took viewers to Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, Spain, Belize, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kenya -- and now India, Mexico and China. You can revisit all of these stories on our Web site. Then take new journeys with us when we return to FRONTLINE this fall. Meanwhile stay tuned to our Web site, where this summer we will publish 14 fresh dispatches from around the globe as part of a special PBS FRONTLINE/World series, "As Others See Us -- Bringing an International Perspective to U.S. Elections." Our first report, from Lebanon and Syria, will launch Tuesday, July 27, and we'll bring you weekly updates from all over the world. As always, let us know what you think of our stories from a small planet. Sincerely, Stephen Talbot Series Editor ---------------------------- + Live Online Discussion on Washingtonpost.com This Friday, June 25 at 11am ET, join FRONTLINE/World reporter Raney Aronson for a live online discussion about her story "Sex Workers." For details, go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34616-2004Jun11.html ---------------------------- + Special Summer Election Coverage Starting July 27 and continuing into November, weekly reports each Tuesday from around the world: What do people and officials in other countries think of our presidential campaign? Do they care who wins? Why or why not? What do they hope -- or fear -- will be the consequences for them and their country if George W. Bush is re-elected? if John Kerry defeats Bush? How do they view American-style democracy? Other dispatches will report on foreign elections -- and what those results mean for Americans. ---------------------------- + Educators New Classroom Resources With a Global Perspective! Come explore the latest collection of standards-based classroom activities and recommended literature on the FRONTLINE/World Web site. These new resources will help grades 7 through 12 investigate press freedom around the world, evaluate the pros and cons of command and market economies, role-play peace talks, and more. All activities tap into the wealth of free video and Web resources from FRONTLINE/World. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/educators/ ------------------------------------- FRONTLINE/World Fellows If you haven't already done so, check out our special report from Sicily -- "A Bridge Too Far?" -- about the controversy over a proposed bridge that would link Sicily to Italy's mainland. It's the latest in our series of FRONTLINE/World Fellows stories by talented young journalism students. Reporter Mary Spicuzza just graduated from Berkeley's graduate school of journalism. You can access a full archive of Web-exclusive FRONTLINE/World Fellows reports at: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/fellows.html ---------------------------- FRONTLINE/World is co-produced by WGBH Boston and KQED San Francisco and is broadcast nationwide on PBS and PBS.org. Major funding and underwriting support comes from the corporation ABB Ltd., the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding from Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor, and the Tides Foundation. The FRONTLINE/World Fellows program is funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. ---------------------------- FRONTLINE/World http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/ 125 western avenue, boston, ma 02134 June 2004 copyright WGBH and KQED (c)2004 ---------------------------- From ysaeed7 at yahoo.com Wed Jun 23 15:30:28 2004 From: ysaeed7 at yahoo.com (Yousuf) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 03:00:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] Religious popular art : posting #5 Message-ID: <20040623100028.48606.qmail@web51406.mail.yahoo.com> Sarai Fellowship 2004: Muslim Religious Posters What You See is What You Believe: The Tangible Versus Intangible Divinity Among the common users of Muslim devotional posters interviewed during this study, many are unclear and sometimes confused about the nature of attitude and status to be given to these images, unlike, say Hindu devotees, who would use the image or idol of a deity solely for worshipping. Since most of the devotees (interviewed) came from poor or lower middle class or rural areas, many were probably not familiar with the concept of iconoclasm in Islam. They broadly knew that idolatry is certainly unIslamic (this is what differentiates them from the Hindus), but the images of local saints, their tombs, other Islamic folklore, and many symbols of composite culture ingrained in their collective/folk memory, are openly accepted and venerated, without drawing any lines between Islamic and unIslamic � until someone with a Wahhabi/purist bend of mind comes and tells them that what they are doing is not right. So, what exactly goes on in the minds and hearts of the religious people who fall in the gray area between iconoclasm and idolatry? We may begin by exploring first what is Islamic iconoclasm. The prohibition of religious iconography existed even before Islam. Recently, when the world was crying on the demolition of Buddha�s statue in Afghanistan�s Bamian by the Taliban, somebody pointed out that one person who would be happiest to see this demolition is Buddha himself, as he was himself one of the first destroyers of religious icons. Aniconism, or the opposition to the use of icons, existed in Christianity too for a brief period, in Byzantine, interestingly a century after Prophet Muhammad had died in the not-so-distant Mecca. Some historians have pointed out that the ideas of Plato, Plotinus and other Greek philosophers, who dismissed representative art as an �imitation of nature�, may have influenced early development of Islam. Islamic iconoclasm basically assumed that God is the sole author of life and anyone else producing the likeness of a living being seeks to rival God. Most devoted Muslims stay away from iconography due to a tradition (hadith) ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad that a person drawing the picture of a living thing would be asked on the Day of Judgment to fuse life into it. But the Qur�an, interestingly, does not contain a single line prohibiting the drawing of representative figures � though it does taboo idolatry. But this prohibition did not stop the artists in most Islamic societies to produce figurative art, whether for religious or secular purposes. Miniature paintings developed in Persian, Turkish and Indo-Muslim areas throughout medieval period freely illustrated angels, prophets, Qur�anic anecdotes, and the Prophet Muhammad, including his family - their faces mostly veiled. The Prophet or his companions are also shown with halos or flames leaping out of their torso to show their jalaal or spiritual radiance. Most of these images were either a part of the illuminated manuscripts or decorated in the royal palaces, but seldom displayed in public. As a result, they neither became the object of mass veneration nor mass duplication. But one such scene that has regularly been illustrated and circulated amongst the masses, is the Prophet�s ascension to the heavens, called the Mi�raj, riding the mythical creature, Burraq � a flying horse with a woman�s head and a peacock�s tail. Many Indian devotional posters, depicting Burraq in local adaptations, are venerated by the faithful, especially on occasions like Muharram or Shab-e Barat. Though the original artists from central Asia who conceived such an image may not have imagined it becoming an object of adoration later. Most cultures or religions, including Islam, which adopted iconoclasm, did so after an evolved realization that God or supernatural could be found or invoked �spiritually�, within the sub-conscious of the seeker, rather than by worshipping his material manifestations that prevail in the culture. This might be the basis of many mystical and reformist religious movements that rejected icon-worship. In fact if you went a step further, you could enter the realm of atheism, which some reformists did. However, the concept of an unseen God, or no God, could probably be grasped only by some evolved or emancipated minds (not necessarily �educated� ones). The mind of an ordinary believer, embroiled in his day-to-day tribulations of life, would probably feel extremely uncomfortable or shaky in the absence of a tangible sustenance-giver. Hence the need for idols, sacred objects, and symbols that could provide the believer a face-to-face communion with the divine. The saints or holy men, (and their tombs or relics after their death) also worked as worldly intercessors between the believer and the God, and continue to do so; though the purists in Islam vehemently oppose the use of such mediators or symbols as �shirk� (polytheism). An obvious question anyone may ask is, if Islam prohibits iconic devotion, then what about Kaaba, the cubical shrine at Mecca which every Muslim faces while praying, and the black stone embedded in it, which the pilgrims kiss? Frankly, it may be too complex an issue to be answered satisfactorily in this forum. But in short, Kaaba the house of God (though the God doesn�t live in it, according to the Muslims), was constructed by the Prophet Abraham (circa 2000 BC), and is being visited by pilgrims since then, who circumambulate it in a variety of rituals. The black stone, probably a meteorite, is the only relic left now from Abraham�s shrine, and Prophet Muhammad is attributed to have kissed it, probably out of historical familiarity. Pilgrims performing the tawaf or parikrama of the Kaaba kiss or wave towards the black stone to mark each round. When the Prophet re-entered Mecca in 7th century AD and made his first Islamic pilgrimage (Hajj), he demolished most of the idols, but retained some rituals of the pilgrimage that were reminiscent of the events from Abraham�s life, probably for their importance to the Arab society. The Kaaba was made a qibla or pole to which Muslims turn for prayers, so that everyone always faces the same direction, rather than different ones � basically a consolidation of the monotheistic attitude. Praying towards Mecca, in principle, doesn�t mean worshipping the cubical shrine � it is there only to discipline the masses towards one God. (But isn�t that what Hindus and other icon-worshippers too believe � idols are not Gods themselves; they are only markers for concentration or dhyana.) A pilgrim visiting the various sacred sites in and around Mecca is supposed to show only a respect or homage (as you would show to a historical monument) rather than adoration or veneration. But this is where the lines get blurred � the ordinary pilgrims cannot differentiate between respect and veneration. Everyday, when thousands of crying pilgrims want to touch and kiss the wall or the cloth cover of Kaaba, the Saudi police, the guardians of iconoclasm, try to dissuade them forcefully from doing so. In the graveyards in Mecca and Medina where some of the most important historical personalities of early Islam are buried, there are no identifiable grave marks, to avoid them from becoming the objects of adoration, as they do in much of south Asia or elsewhere. Back in Delhi, while sitting in front of the tomb of Amir Khusrau one evening, I noticed an old woman in her white bottle-shaped burqa who had dropped herself on the doorway of the grave and was crying loudly. She or her family was obviously struck by some misfortune in life. Out of those hysterical wails one could hear her say, �You are the only one who can save us� please take us out of this museebat (calamity)�� She went on for quite some time, as many devotees do at these dargahs. I couldn�t help be a bit amused, since I knew that Khusrau, as it is known from his Persian poetry and prose, was a courtier who indulged in all the worldly pursuits of life, and could hardly be recognized as a saint by the historians; though he was closely associated with Nizamuddin Aulia who was a saint. But my observation that evening was focused more on the fact that this lady really needed a stone grave or a doorway to have her catharsis which involved an emotional flow, a direct prayer, and some healing from the on-going crisis, something she couldn�t achieve so effectively before an unseen God at home or even inside a mosque. It didn�t matter whose grave it was. (Or may be it did � who am I to know). �Sajdah usee ka naam hai jab tum ho saamne, Aisee namaaz kya jo barooay sanam naheen� A prostration is that when you (my dear) are ahead; What use a prayer if not facing the beloved? ----- Yousuf Saeed ----- References: Imtiaz Ahmad, ed.: Ritual and Religion Among Muslims in India, Manohar Publications, Delhi, 1984 Laleh Bakhtiar: Sufi, Expressions of the Mystic Quest, Thames & Hudson, 1976 Desmond Stewart: Early Islam, Time-Life Books, New York, 1967 Encyclopedia Britannica: Muhammad and the Religion of Islam, Vol. 22, 15th edition --------- For those who missed the first 4 postings: this project seeks to collect the contemporary religious posters and calendar art, depicting Muslim themes, mostly in north India, and analyze their content, focusing on the symbols of multi-faith or composite culture, besides studying briefly the industry and the artists who manufacture and sell them, the devotees who buy them, the milieu where they are adorned, and the reverence they evoke. This posting is only a section of the research and may not represent the holistic picture or the chronological sequence of the findings. More details, updates and a colourful poster gallery of the project can be seen at: www.alif-india.com/popart __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Thu Jun 24 09:16:36 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (shivam) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 20:46:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] Caste in the newsroom? Message-ID: <20040624034636.34584.qmail@web8205.mail.in.yahoo.com> Caste in the newsroom? Caste discrimination in the newsroom? Rubbish, say most upper caste journalists in Uttar Pradesh. It�s all over, say backward caste journalists. By Shivam Vij in Lucknow The Hoot / 24 June 2004 Read the story at http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web2196523711Hoot122711%20AM1229&pn=1 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From zest_india at yahoo.co.in Tue Jun 22 17:24:56 2004 From: zest_india at yahoo.co.in (shivam) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 04:54:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Remembering Dom Moraes (via ZEST Poets) Message-ID: <20040622115457.26198.qmail@web8201.mail.in.yahoo.com> Memorial Meeting for Dom Moraes Tuesday, 22 June 2004, 6:30 pm Conference Room 1, India International Centre, Delhi Tributes and readings from a selection of works by Mr. Edmund Marsden, Director, British Council Division; H.E. Mr. Philip McDonagh, Ambassador of Ireland; Shri P.C. Sen, Director, India International Centre; Shri Sudeep Banerjee, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Human Resource Development; Dr. Geeti Sen; and well known artists and writers including Shri Roshan Seth, Shri Sunit Tandon and Shri Jatin Das Chair: Shri Keki N. Daruwalla (In collaboration with The Poetry Society of India and British Council Division) Dom Moraes Dom Moraes was born in Bombay in 1938. His father was the editor and author Frank Moraes. With him, Dom Moraes as a child travelled through Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand and the whole of South-East Asia, territories he was often to revisit in the course of his career. He began to write poetry at the age of twelve. By fifteen W.H. Auden had read and liked his poems. Stephen Spender published them in Encounter and Karl Shapiro did so in Poetry Chicago. At nineteen he published his first book of poems, A Beginning, with the Parton Press in London which won the Hawthornden Prize for the best work of the imagination in 1958. Moraes remains the first non-English person to win this prize, also the youngest. In 1960 his second book of verse, Poems, became the Autumn Choice of the Poetry Book Society. In 1965 his third book of verse, John Nobody, appeared to much critical acclaim. Apart from these three volumes, he published a pamphlet of verse, Beldam & Others, in 1967. In 1983 he published a privately printed book of poems, Absences, and in 1987 his Collected Poems appeared. Event info brought to you by ZESTPoets http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zestpoets/message/40 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From chandernigam at rediffmail.com Thu Jun 24 11:26:27 2004 From: chandernigam at rediffmail.com (chander nigam) Date: 24 Jun 2004 05:56:27 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] a biography from tis hazaari Message-ID: <20040624055627.693.qmail@mailweb34.rediffmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040624/1aa5325d/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- Dear all My research under Sarai Independent fellowship is going well. For the last 2 months I am interviewing and talking to people of different walks in Tis Hazaari and getting some interesting stories. This mail is basically a brief biography of a female criminal lawyer. I hope you will enjoy going through this and bombarding your suggestions and questions. If you go to criminal side, Tis Hazari and ask for any senior lady advocate to any person, most probably you will get the name Urmila Gupta. She is practicing law almost for the last 30 years. Moreover, she is the 2nd lady advocate, who joined the practice of criminal cases. When I entered into her chamber, she was busy in giving dictation to her staff. After initial exchange when I requested for an interview with her, she became ready to talk with me. She talked at length about her professional career and experience. Can you imagine a Sanskrit graduate turning to a Criminal Lawyer? Yes, she is one. She says, “Neither my father side nor in-laws side had any lawyer prior to me. I was the first person from either side who joined law. And tell you, no body in my family was willing to let me choose this profession.” Actually her story goes something like this. As a daughter of middle class family she passed higher secondary from I. P. School in 1969 with distinction in all the subjects. Her father was a business man, so he did not have much to guide her, what to pursue after school. Her brother was a TGT in a government school, who used to teach Sanskrit. This was he, who persuaded her in all possible ways to opt Sanskrit in graduation. She had no option but to go with her suggestion. And thus she landed up in the prestigious Inderprastha College, DU. There again she performed well and came out with a 1st class in Sanskrit. Once again her career became a question in the family. Her brother was thinking of get her admitted in B. Ed, which she was least interested in. In fact, she says, “Since my childhood I was fascinated about law, so that I was not in favour of making any compromise then. Finally after so many rounds of heated exchange I managed to get admission in my dream project, i.e., LL. B. in 1972. In fact those days there was no entrance test for getting into LL. B., but People were serious about their studies. After spending three consecutive years in Campus Law Center, Delhi University I came out with a professional degree. And you know, you have come to interview me only because of that ha ha ha (she laughs). She says that there were very few females those days, interested in Law, at least in my faculty the number of girls were very less. She got first division in LL. B. also. This is her 29th year of her Bar Council membership. She joined the Bar in July 1975. She very proudly says, “You know, Maine use sail love marriage kid this. And us jasmine I love marriage karma kopi asana cam naming than. Ajar to hard gnat me hot hay aisi shadiayan. Can you imagine a SHUDDHA BANIA marrying with a MUSLIM in 1975? But we did .” I could not hide the resemblance of marriage of mine with her, “madam, maine bhi love marriage ki hai”. This discloser brought us slightly closer. Now whatever Urmila Gupta speaks is more interesting and hurting also in some amount. As I earlier mentioned that she was the second lady advocate in Tis Hazari who joined criminal practice. Ms. Mahender Chaudhary was the first, who expired a few years back. She started her days in Tis Hiszaari working as a junior of Advocate Mr. B. B. Sood. Advocate Sood was a reputed Civil Lawyer those days. He has a chamber in the Civil Side and a seat also in front of Treasury building. Mr. Sood’s practice was very good, his chamber was full of case-files, but all were of civil matters, which Urmila was least interested. “Knowing my interest he offered me his seat and said that I am free to entertain my clients from the seat”, says she. After a week she realized that the attitude of male in general was very terrible. People used to roam around; sometimes they used to spend hours on her seat without any reason. Moreover, some male advocates also used to treat her like a women, who is there only to please their eyes. “And I cannot tell you, how I managed those seven days on that seat. I felt I was like a tongue stuck between 32 teeth. I became very disturbed”, says she. She shared her problem and dilemma with a very close friend of her Kamna Prasad, who was spending her days within her house after having the LL.B degree. In the course of problem sharing she offered her to start practice jointly from the seat, which she was given by her senior. “Fortunately Kamna accepted my offer and we started practice together”, says Urmila. But that settlement also did not help the ladies duo in getting cordial place in the patriarchal world of advocates. Being new in the profession the Ladies had very few cases. But one bail, which Urmila managed to get in a case under section 307 IPC (attempt to murder), gave a kind of work satisfaction and immediate relief for the ladies duo in the mail dominated advocates’ world. She says, “Now they started whispering about our success and gradually their attitude also started changing towards us, they started discussing cases with us. After some time clients started approaching us too. It is amazing that in spite of not being in sound position in some of our cases in the beginning we got bail. Influencing by our performance and ability the advocates started asking us to appear before the court in bail matters on behalf of them. In number of bail matters we got relief. And that performance built my confidence.” She says, “ho sakta hai tab magistrates ne hume encourage karne ke liye relief diye hon, kyonki tab criminal cases me females jati hi nahin thi, lekin kewal magistrates ke liberal hone se to humari practice chalti nahin”. In fact they were laboring hard also. They started coming to courts in vacations also. Those days very few lawyers used to come in vacations. Even today when the number of lawyers has increased tremendously the income of those suddenly becomes high, who come in vacations, therefore, and it is not difficult to assume the income of vacation lawyers those days. She says, “Sometimes we used to earn Rs. 500- 600 in a day. Remember the value of 5-600 in 1970’s And In fact after earning 5-600 in a day we were thinking ourselves not less than a queen. If I exclude the ill behavior of male counterparts in the beginning I would say practicing the criminal law is really a fantastic experience Her professional association with Kamna Prasad got an end in 1980 with Kamna’s marriage. Her in-laws were not in favor of her practicing law. Even her husband was not keen of her profession. There was hardly any option for her except accepting the dictates of husbands and SAS-SASUR. Actually Urmila remained in touch with her for some time after her marriage but she had to disconnect her relationship with Kamna because her in-laws did not want it to continue. In fact this was not the problem of 1980’s Kamna but several Kamnas and others have to surrender before their families even today. First thing is that the parents do not give permission to the girls to opt a career in law and in case they manage to get permission after much hue and cry in their families, many of them have to leave the profession after marriage. “If I am a successful lawyer today then it is only because of my husband’s support. Because our’s is a love marriage. Generally the spouses in this kind of marriage understand each other’s aspirations and to some extent they support and help each other in pulling off those aspirations also”, says she. She further suggests, “why not you study the matrimonial life of female lawyers? If the constituency appears you vast, then limit yourself only to Tis Hazaari or to those only who are regular to the Ladies Bar room of Criminal side. Quite often I see you in the bar room, you must be familiar with most of them. So you can do it. Yes, you do it. It would be helpful in general and to our folk particular.” Comparing the state of affairs in Tis Hazari of 2004 to Tis Hazaari of 1980’s she opines that it is deteriorated. According to her only Delhi wallahs were in the profession those days and the reputation of the profession was also good. Advocates used to get handsome fees. Speaking about the degradation of profession she says, “But today Biharis have defamed the profession. Like any other profession they are coming into this profession also in large numbers. If you walk around the courts you will find every second person is a Bihari Advocate. If we ask Rs. 11000 as fees for a work, they become ready to do the same work on a mere fee of 500 or 1000. Even some of them offer their service for 200-300. This is not good for our profession.” My interruption firstly, that the number of Bihari advocates are not as huge as she spoke and secondly, if somebody offering service on meager fee then it is good for the poor litigants incensed her a bit. “I am not saying that all advocates are from Bihar and all are ready to work on lesser fees. It can not be and it should not be. But Biharis are practicing in Delhi in large numbers. And if you think offering service on 500-600 rupees is a help for poor then your perception is wrong. Poor litigants can move to Legal Aid Cell, they can get free lawyers form there. If they are taking money from the poor, they are cheating them. In fact these are the lawyers who are defaming our profession. They are actually not lawyers but a gang of touts. That’s why I am saying that the reputation of the profession has decreased.” Recollecting the notorious emergency of Mrs. Indira Gandhi in 1975 she says, “The lawyer community in Delhi was also on the hit list of Sanjay Gandhi. He was working like a prime minister de-facto. The general mass of Delhi was frightened by his terror. All those centers of meetings and discussions became the target of Sanjay Gandhi, which seemed to him possible threat to Ms. Gandhi. Our campus was also targeted.” She tries to recall the exact date when the chambers were demolished in Tis Hazaari, but she can not. She says that without any notice Sanjay Gandhi’s bulldozer ran over the chambers, which were legally allotted by the bar. Within an hour the chambers of civil and criminal sides transformed into debris. All the furniture and case files of advocates transformed into garbage. “That day is known as the black day in the history of Tis Hazaari”, says she. Next time the fresh allotments were made only after the change of guard in the center. In 1977 the bar made fresh allotments of CHABUTRAS. There were total 1000 chabutras in civil and criminal side, 500 each. From 1977 to 1984 advocates did their practice from the chabutras. It was only in 1984 that the bar gave permission for constructing chambers. But today the number of chambers in Tis Hazaari is more than double of the chabutras. In fact, she says, “gradually, people started encroaching the land and constructing chambers. Although the structures made in the name of chambers are illegal but sooner or later they were regularized by the Delhi Bar Association (DBA).” One chabutra was allotted to her also, which she transformed into chamber in 1984. And from ’84 onwards she is working form there only. Talking about the nature of cases she says that comparatively the number of matrimonial cases has increased tremendously. And she explains section 498A of IPC (related to dowry, harassment of women by her in laws and husband), the key factor of increasing number of matrimonial cases. Section 498 A was inserted in the IPC in 1983. “Actually before this section, women had hardly any way to resolve their matrimonial troubles; they were forced to accept all kinds of ill treatments and exploitation by in-laws. So through the section 498A for the first time Indian women got legal voice against matrimonial disturbances and troubles”, says she. But at the same time she admits that the misuse of this section has become a fashion today, which is alarming. Talking about the functioning and the work culture of the courts she says, “Corruption, fraud, dishonesty, treachery all are the part of courts’ functioning. You already are practicing in Tis Hazaari you already have experienced the court staff. So it is worthless to talk about the courts’ work culture. If you are able to bribe every desk and table, no body can stop your work to be done.” However she also feels that being a female one has to face a lot of difficulties in the profession. A female has no liberty to go home late or attend parties and all like her mail counterpart. She is bound to perform certain household responsibility. She has to look after her children, attend her husband and in-laws in the house while if she is a junior advocate she has to obey the orders and dictates of her senior also in the courts. That is what she feels being a female lawyer. Finally she speaks about her family. Her husband is a businessman. She has two children. Daughter Samita, a fashion designer married last year. Although Urmila Gupta herself went into love marriage but she had to search a groom for Samita. Her son Samit has written the final year exams, and is waiting for a degree of English Graduate from Zakir Husain College. “Though Samit’s father is an established businessman, he is trying to go with me, he has given the entrance examination for LL.B in DU”, she says.   My next posting, again a biography of a former employee of Delhi Bar Association will followed very soon. For the time being I am waiting for you suggestions and comments. cheers chander From ambarien at yahoo.co.uk Thu Jun 24 11:38:43 2004 From: ambarien at yahoo.co.uk (=?iso-8859-1?q?ambarien=20qadar?=) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 07:08:43 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Film Screening Message-ID: <20040624060843.8951.qmail@web25007.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> FILM SCREENING June 24, 2004 WHO CAN SPEAK OF MEN? A film by Ghazala Nihal Ambarien 34 min/ Betacam/ Hindi with English subtitles Produced by AJK Mass Communication Research Center, 2002 Synopsis Chini is a 7year old girl. Kafeela and Arshi are women in their late twenties. Along with the filmmaker, they share a middle class neighborhood and stories in the form of memories and encounters where they are seen as everything women are not to be! Who Can Speak of Men? is a collection of anecdotes about the everyday encounters of its characters as cross dressers within the neighborhood, families and beyond. Situated within the overlapping spaces of recollection and desire, the film explores the fluidity of sexual identities and its contradictions with the social construction of gendered identities. The visibility of the body as it ‘appears’ is at odds with how it is experienced. The film raises some interesting debates as cross-dressed women share their experiences of masculinity and being men. The film will be followed by a discussion moderated by filmmaker and scholar, Shohini Ghosh. Screening Schedule June 24, 2004, 7 p.m. The India Habitat Centre, Gulmohar Hall. --------------------------------- ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - sooooo many all-new ways to express yourself -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040624/3e177ed1/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From coolzanny at hotmail.com Thu Jun 24 21:56:00 2004 From: coolzanny at hotmail.com (Zainab Bawa) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 21:56:00 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Sixth Research Posting Message-ID: Ladies Compartment, Women and Sexuality - Do we need exclusive spaces for women? 24th June 2004 This morning, I watched the film �Ladies Special�. The film is about the Ladies Special train service which has been introduced in Mumbai Rail Network since 1992 (on Central and Western Railway Lines). There are a couple of trains in the morning and couple in the evening exclusively meant for women to travel in. It becomes interesting then to compare the experience women have in the ladies compartment (numbering to about 2 and a half to 3 coaches) as against an entire train (with 9 coaches) for women alone. The film �Ladies Special� not only captured women�s experiences in ladies special trains, but also moved further beyond to capture lives of some women commuters on this train. The film covered issues relating to the contemporary working single women and working housewives. It spanned over the issues of marriage, love marriage, women not wanting to marry at early ages today, train groups and relationships which develop on the ladies special train, relationship between husband and wife, subtly changing gender norms, and innovations by women in traditions (an example of which was women forming the chain on Gokul Ashtami [Lord Krishna�s birthday] to break the handi [earthen pot containing butter], something which has always been the bastion of men). What I felt particularly interesting about the film and connecting it with my observations on trains is how women express themselves in spaces marked for women only. One of the women in the film remarked in the opening scenes, �poori train hamare liye hoti hai. Jahan chahe wahan baitho (The entire train is for us. Sit where you wish),� indicating that there is no constraint of space. During the film, the camera captures scenes where women are singing freely on the train, a form of expression which I find vital for women. On the trains, you will notice women singing loud and clear. It is not only the women in the group who are singing; the singing bug spreads over to lone women standing near the door (singing and fantasizing simultaneously) and women in various other corners tapping their feet to the songs of the group. I find that when singing takes place in the ladies compartment, it provides a space for lone women to simply be lost in their most cherished fantasies. While I have not yet entered their minds (literally), their faces reveal that their fantasies are spread over ideas of �filmi romance�, (with a prince charming and Cinderella), dreams (of careers) which they have not been able to or hope (at some point) to fulfill in their lives, ideas of a peaceful and easier life. I do not mean to indicate here that their lives are full of sadness, but what I am intending to convey is that each one of us has fantasies (fantastic fantasies too!!!) which we hold and cherish in our lives (and our fantasies are perhaps what make life interesting to live). An anonymous woman in the film makes a remark stating, �Our�s life is a very routine life�. She then went to state how the daily train journey is a break from the everyday routine-ness of women�s lives. In this respect, local trains seem to provide a strong value for women in Mumbai City. The film also captured scenes of women sitting on the laps of other women (inspite of there being space for everyone to sit comfortably), women holding their female friends tightly while they are sitting on their laps, women with one of their arms circled around the neck and shoulders of female companions sitting next to them. These are expressions of affection, intimacy, joy and excitement. I have noticed these scenes when I watch women in the rush hours of the day. Circling one�s arms around one�s female friend appears to me as an indication of a very intimate friendship or expression of a kind of �sister fraternity� or in the least, expression of some mirth inside. During one of my journeys to Kalyan in the peak hours of evening, I noticed a young girl who had circled one of her arms around her friend Joyce. She was talking to Joyce about certain very intimate issues like marriage in her family, issues concerning her own marriage, the boy in her life, etc. Joyce and she appeared to be friends for quite sometime. Joyce and the young girl were both part of a larger train group. That evening, Joyce had worn a saree and she was looking quite elegant. Everyone in the group remarked, �Hey Joyce, wearing a saree in this heat?� Joyce responded saying that that day was her wedding anniversary and hence the saree. Some women look really beautiful, graceful and elegant in sarees on the train. And I have seen how female friends comment on each other�s appearances openly, and at times make subtle sexy remarks, and have a great laugh together. Girls hold hands on trains, sit close and make intimate conversations, and express their affection for each other through physical gestures. Trains seem to provide a space to women to be playful. Playfulness to me is an expression of sexuality and spontaneity. But, expression of one�s sexuality is strictly curbed in our society. During the opening scenes of the film, a woman on the camera states in Marathi, �From childhood, we have always been told to keep away from boys.� Upbringing, both for girls and for boys, is filled with conditionings about strict segregation of sexes. Notions develop in the mind about the opposite sex, what I call another other. And thereafter, the opposite sex, the another other, appears like some sort of a mysterious delicacy. While girls are brought up, their playfulness is not only curbed but is also often condemned. The statement accompanying the reprimand almost always is, �Girls are NOT SUPPOSED to behave like this�. While in trains, women sing, celebrate occasions, and have fun, and to my mind, this opportunity to have fun is critical. While I was excavating train groups, one of the women in an interview told me, �I loved being with my train group. It�s like the train group is an addiction. We would celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and other occasions on the train between us. I wouldn�t care if my husband forgot to wish me on my birthday, but my train group should not forget and they would never forget!� Women discuss personal problems in train groups. A quote from the film in this context was, �I can�t say that this woman or that woman is completely happy and satisfied in life. Everyone has one or another problem.� She went on to say that on trains, women are able to discuss personal problems with their groups or at least forget their problems for a while and have a good time during the journey. Women in the film spoke about how they discuss fashion, trends and how it is important to �look good and presentable on the job�. During my recent experiences in Delhi city, I observed that women are not playful in Delhi. There is a common expression which characterizes every woman at middle age (35-40). I cannot conclude very conclusively about women in Delhi, but am trying to imagine what would happen if separate meeting spaces were created for women in Delhi, spaces which are beyond shopping malls, where women have the opportunity to be themselves. What is sexuality and what does it mean to express one�s sexuality? I have, through various experiences, come to understand that sexuality is about being comfortable with oneself � physically and mentally. To express one�s sexuality means to be spontaneous, to be oneself. Expression of sexuality does not mean �free sex� or indicate �having sex with another man at the next opportunity�. Sexuality is about attitudes � attitudes towards oneself and towards others. It is about respecting one�s body and one�s self for who one is. My experiences and observations on trains seem to indicate that there is a need for exclusive spaces for women. This need is characterized by need for �separate, private space�. By this logic, I also conclude that there is a need for �separate, private spaces� for men, where they can be with other men and live their innermost feelings and desires. When I was working in the craft sector organizing art and craft workshops for children, a married woman who had come to register her kids for a pottery workshop said to me, �My husband was suggesting that you should organize pottery and craft workshops for men too. He works in the banking sector and says that men need these opportunities too. They may not create something brilliant, but the space for them to use their hands, dirty themselves, have fun and a good time are important in today�s day and age.� Definitely we need meeting spaces for men and women, but at some point, we also need these exclusive spaces to bond with the same sex. Hopefully, from here, we would be able to move beyond the oppression of gender roles. - Zainab Bawa www.xanga.com/zainabbawa (Please be forthcoming in sharing your views, thoughts, and experiences about women in your city and various other cities on zainabbawa at yahoo.com) _________________________________________________________________ Maximum benefits! http://go.msnserver.com/IN/51406.asp No minimum balance! From lalitbatra77 at yahoo.co.in Fri Jun 25 00:03:33 2004 From: lalitbatra77 at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?lalit=20batra?=) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 19:33:33 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Water Supply in Bhalsawa- 2nd posting Message-ID: <20040624183333.75456.qmail@web8204.mail.in.yahoo.com> Water Supply in Bhalsawa Bhalsawa JJ colony is situated on the Northeastern edge of Delhi surrounded by an overused landfill site, Bhalsawa Dairy and a string of unauthorised colonies. The colony was set up in November 2000 when 526 slums were evicted from the Yamuna Pushta area and resettled in Bhalsawa. Within 14 months another 4000 odd families were moved to Bhalsawa from slum clusters located in areas as far flung as Garhi (East of Kailash), Jehangirpuri, Gopal Pur, Preet Vihar, Ashok Vihar, Seelam Pur, Teen Murti, Dakshin Puri, Rohini and Nizamuddeen. Bhalsawa was touted as the model resettlement colony by the then Union Minister for Urban Development but that gave little solace to the people who when moved to Bhalsawa found out that it was a completely barren piece of land with virtually no facility to meet even the most basic human necessities. One of the things that people desperately wanted and couldn’t see anywhere was water both for drinking as well as other purposes. There were of course a few hand pumps installed but instead of water they poured out a foul smelling, saline liquid. On the back wall, in bold red lettering there was a warning cautioning people not to use this liquid for drinking purposes. In desperation many people turned to the nearby gurudwara, which had been standing lonely in the middle of this barren wasteland for quite some years. The gurudwara authorities who were probably annoyed with the sudden deluge of ramshackle hutments in its courtyard refused to oblige. But this cold- shouldering couldn’t last long as people became more desperate and thus more persistent. Even then they didn’t allow people to fetch water from inside its premises. Instead a water pipe would be given outside the boundaries of the gurudwara on certain hours of the day and people were expected to take, in a ‘disciplined’ manner, not more than their minimum requirements of water. Its now over three and a half years since Bhalaswa JJ colony was set up but even now it stands on the margins of the water supply network of the city both in terms of the quantity as well as the quality of water with little opportunity (because of geographical marginalisation) for the people to tap into the pipes that give more and better quality water, something which they could do when they were living in jhuggie-jhopri clusters. The move from inner city slums to the ‘colony’, lying outside the network of a functional civic infrastructure, has thus severely limited the capacity of the poor to lay claim to common urban resources. Presently, there are three main sources of water in Bhalaswa JJ colony. The first one being hand pumps, some of which have been installed by the government while some are individually owned. Hand pumps promise 24 hours supply of water though this water is absolutely unfit for drinking, cooking or bathing. Hand pumps seem to be fairly evenly distributed within the colony. The second source of water is the sarkari tap. These are few and are concentrated in blocks A-2, A-3 and A-5. The reason for these blocks having more taps probably lies in the presence of a powerful CBO called Bhalsawa Lok Shakti Manch, which is associated with an NGO called Ankur. These three blocks are mainly inhabited by people from Gautam Puri (Yamuna Pushta) and Garhi. Since Ankur had been working amongst the people of Gautam Puri for more than a decade they are a lot more organised than people living in other blocks. The activists of Ankur and Bhalsawa Lok Shakti Manch have staged many protests against the pathetic water condition in the colony and forced the authorities to improve it to some extent. Now, in town planning parlance, the arrival of sarkari taps signals an integration of the settlement with the main supply network of the city. But for the residents of Bhalsawa taps are more of a bane than a boon. The reason being that the water these taps give is no better than the water that hand pumps provide. I saw people fighting with each other to fetch a bucket or two of a stinking, dark yellow liquid, which is provided by the authorities in the name of water. People told me that on some fortunate late nights or early mornings water is not coloured though it is foul smelling nevertheless. This water is preserved and used for drinking purposes. The blocks where water taps are practically non-existent are serviced through water tankers. Tanker water is locally believed to be the purest water available in the colony. But tankers come only once every two–three days. So every time a tanker arrives, there is a mad scramble, which has many a time resulted in violent skirmishes between the people. The curious paradox lies in the fact that those who have gained better access to ‘regular’ or ‘mainstream’ water supply are forced to drink dirty water whereas those who rely on ‘irregular’ or ‘ad hoc’ supply through tankers seem to be getting relatively better quality of water. So we have a situation where the colony is largely divided into the blocks getting more but filthy water and blocks getting less but comparatively better quality water. And the experience of people in both the circumstances is quite painful. Lalit Batra ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/ From mirzachhotoo at yahoo.co.in Thu Jun 24 16:15:46 2004 From: mirzachhotoo at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?nisha=20-?=) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 11:45:46 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Media romanticizing rapists Message-ID: <20040624104546.721.qmail@web8307.mail.in.yahoo.com> http://epaperdaily.timesofindia.com/Daily/skins/TOI/navigator.asp?skin=TOIKM This is regarding two articles published in Kolkata edition of the Times of India on Thursday, June 24, 2004, page 3 - 'Few minutes that could have saved schoolgirl from murder' and 'Terrible nightmares mingle with fond memories of childhood'. Both articles are related to the death sentence given to Dhananjoy Chatterjee who raped and murdered a 14 year old girl in December 1989. This man was a security guard of the building where his victim lived with her family. The man was supposed to protect her. In stead of raising the delay in justice to the victim (after all it took nearly 15 years for the justice to be read out by our revered court of law), the first article - 'Few minutes that could have saved schoolgirl from murder' - after saying that if the rapist and murderer’s supervisor were to arrive on the spot a few minutes before he did the girl would have been saved from being raped and killed, it goes on to absolve the rapist cum murderer of his crime and to romanticise the life he could have had. I quote from the news article: "And a prisoner inside the condemned cell of Alipore Central Jail — awaiting death on Friday — might have been leading a more normal life in the city, with a wife and children living their lives in Chhatna in Bankura." In one stroke the article completely shifts the blame from the criminal to the supervisor. The message from the article is that it is the supervisor's fault that the girls was raped and murdered. It is also the supervisor's fault that the 'poor criminal' got an opportunity to commit the crime and not be able to lead a happy 'a more normal life' with his wife and children. They do not say that despite receiving a complaint from the father of the victim, the security agency where this criminal used to work, did not immediately remove him from the job. They do not analyze why did the security agency did not take a complaint of crime against women seriously enough. They do not point out why the supervisor was given a brief only to, I quote: "... give Chatterjee a dressing down and send him elsewhere (to a building in a less-populated locality near Ballygunge Phari)." They do point out that the security agency 'was good as its word' tot he father of the victim. It sent the supervisor next day. But it is the supervisor who came a few minutes left. Are the reporters so naive to assume that this was the first and the only crime this rapist cum murderer would have committed in his life and that he would not have victimized his own family and children? Definitely not. Then, are they romanticizing the 'innate' goodness and moping over the 'harsh' punishment for the 'once in lifetime deviation' by this man? Definitely yes. Reasons for this duality must be publically interrogated. The second article - 'Terrible nightmares mingle with fond memories of childhood' - goes beyond the first one in presenting a caring 'personal account of a man who has but hours to live'. It weaves 'fond recollections of a childhood spent in a village' with how the rapist and murderer, or the man in a mood that is, to use the journalist's words, “introspective and sombre” has to be kept occupied with the games like ludo and chess, how he gulped down four cups of tea and did not eat breakfast and how his diary is taking the form of an autobiography. Who know, this diary may get published as an autobiography. It may sell copies and more copies and more copies. The criminal will live on, a glorified and romanticized life. Who know, it may inspire some budding Dhananjoys to take the joy out of women and young girls' lives, to take women and young girls' lives and to aspire for two articles devoted to them in the 'country's largest circulating national newspaper'. Nisha Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040624/bd75c097/attachment.html From shuddha at sarai.net Fri Jun 25 14:18:51 2004 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddha) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 14:18:51 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Media romanticizing rapists In-Reply-To: <20040624104546.721.qmail@web8307.mail.in.yahoo.com> References: <20040624104546.721.qmail@web8307.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <40DBE6F3.105@sarai.net> Dear Nisha This is a brief response to your post about the report in the Kolkata edition of the Times of India about the death sentence and impending execution by handing of Dhanajoy Chatterjee who raped and murdered a 14 year old girl. Let me clarify one thing at the very begining. I have absolutely no sympathy for any man who has raped and murdered anyone, and least of all someone who has raped and murdered a minor.And I agree with your revulsion at any attempt to romanticize the life of any such person, just as I would be critical of any attempt to romanticize the life of military personnel, prison staff, policemen, terrorists, powerful and well connected individuals who operate within and outside the law and others who rape and murder, routinely. in the line of their work, and in the pursuit of their pleasures. However, I have absolutely no qualms in saying and believing that the death penalty is a barbarous and deeply violent institution that in my opinion should only be a matter of shame in any civilized society. The fact that the death penalty continues to exist in India, and is routinely used, not only against rapists and murderers but also against others, is a shocking indictment in my opinion of the routine, institutionalized violence that we are prepared to condone in our society. Dhananjay Chatterjee's death by hanging, within the confines of a state institution, in Alipore Central Jail, will not bring the girl he raped and murdered back to life. A life for a life is the ethic of the blood feud that we continue to enshrine in our constitution, i think it only brings the taint of killing on us all. I doubt that the death penalty is an effective deterrent against violent crime, if anything, societies that retain the death penalty (the United States and China being leaders in this field, are arguably much more violent than those that have abolished it, after all, the death penalty confers on the act of killing a certain legitimacy, and this, in my opinion contributes to more, not less violence in society) I have for many years believed that there needs to be a considered and an honest debate about the existence of the death penalty, and extra-judicial executions, and concomitantly about the romantic cult of violence that is so much a part of the vocabulary of resistance movements in India. I am not a pacifist, but I would call for a disbanding of military and police functions, I do not believe that violence has any virtues, I do not believe that any valuable social or political transformations can be brought about by violent means and at the same time I am not an absolutist believer in what is called 'non-violence' (in that I do believe that armed resistance, by individuals, or by groups, in self defence is justified, when no other options are left, and when survival is at stake) but I do believe that the death penalty and thinking that killing people is a solution of any kind, is the kind of attitude that actually engenders and fosters violence in society. Dhananjay Chatterjee is responsible for the life he took, and he deserves the harshest punishment for it, but we are all responsible for the taking of his life, and by ensuring his death we are also cutting off the possibility that he would be condemned to live out a life contemplating the enormity of the violence that he unleashed on a defenceless person. We ensure that neither Dhananjay, nor we, have to really think about what violence means. I look forward to more thinking on the list about this issue. regards Shuddha >_________________________________________ >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 mazzarel at midway.uchicago.edu Fri Jun 25 18:06:33 2004 From: mazzarel at midway.uchicago.edu (William Mazzarella) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 07:36:33 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [Reader-list] death penalty Message-ID: Further to the debate on the death penalty, this recent-ish article by the American crime writer and lawyer Scott Turow is remarkably thoughtful - as well as being written from an interestingly ambivalent position. TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL by SCOTT TUROW Coming to terms with capital punishment. Issue of 2003-01-06 Posted 2002-12-30 When Joseph Hartzler, a former colleague of mine in the United States attorney's office in Chicago, was appointed the lead prosecutor in the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, he remarked that McVeigh was headed for Hell, no matter what. His job, Hartzler said, was simply to speed up the delivery. That was also the attitude evinced by the prosecutors vying to be first to try the two Beltway sniper suspects. Given the fear and fury the multiple shootings inspired, it wasn't surprising that polls showed that Americans favored imposing what Attorney General Ashcroft referred to as the "ultimate sanction." Yet despite the retributive wrath that the public seems quick to visit on particular crimes, or criminals, there has also been, in recent years, growing skepticism about the death-penalty system in general. A significant number of Americans question both the system's over-all fairness and, given the many cases in which DNA evidence has proved that the wrong person was convicted of a crime, its ability to distinguish the innocent from the guilty. Ambivalence about the death penalty is an American tradition.When the Republic was founded, all the states, following English law, imposed capital punishment. But the humanistic impulses that favored democracy led to questions about whether the state should have the right to kill the citizens upon whose consent government was erected. Jefferson was among the earliest advocates of restricting executions. In 1846, Michigan became the first American state to outlaw capital punishment, except in the case of treason, and public opinion has continued to vacillate on the issue. Following the Second World War and the rise and fall of a number of totalitarian governments, Western European nations began abandoning capital punishment, but their example is of limited relevance to us, since our murder rate is roughly four times the rate in Europe. One need only glance at a TV screen to realize that murder remains an American preoccupation, and the concomitant questions of how to deal with it challenge contending strains in our moral thought, pitting Old Testament against New, retribution against forgiveness. I was forced to confront my own feelings about the death penalty as one of fourteen members of a commission appointed by Governor George Ryan of Illinois to recommend reforms of the state's capital-punishment system. In the past twenty-five years, thirteen men who spent time on death row in Illinois have been exonerated, three of them in 1999. Governor Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in January, 2000, and five weeks later announced the formation of our commission. We were a diverse group: two sitting prosecutors; two sitting public defenders; a former Chief Judge of the Federal District Court; a former U.S. senator; three women; four members of racial minorities; prominent Democrats and Republicans. Twelve of us were lawyers, nine with experience as defense attorneys and elevenincluding William Martin, who won a capital conviction against the mass murderer Richard Speck, in 1967with prosecutorial backgrounds. Roberto Ramrez, a Mexican-American immigrant who built a successful janitorial business, knew violent death at first hand. His father was murdered, and his grandfather shot and killed the murderer. Governor Ryan gave us only one instruction. We were to determine what reforms, if any, would make application of the death penalty in Illinois fair, just, and accurate. In March, 2000, during the press conference at which members of the commission were introduced, we were asked who among us opposed capital punishment. Four people raised their hands. I was not one of them. For a long time, I referred to myself as a death-penalty agnostic, although in the early seventies, when I was a student, I was reflexively against capital punishment. When I was an assistant U.S. attorney, from 1978 to 1986, there was no federal death penalty. The Supreme Court declared capital-punishment statutes unconstitutional in 1972, and although the Court changed its mind in 1976, the death penalty did not become part of federal law again until 1988. However, Illinois had reinstated capital punishment in the mid-seventies, and occasionally my colleagues became involved in state-court murder prosecutions. In 1984, when my oldest friend in the office, Jeremy Margolis, secured a capital sentence against a two-time murderer named Hector Reuben Sanchez, I congratulated him. I wasn't sure what I might do as a legislator, but I had come to accept that some people are incorrigibly evil and I knew that I could follow the will of the community in dealing with them, just as I routinely accepted the wisdom of the RICO statute and the mail-fraud and extortion laws it was my job to enforce. My first direct encounter with a capital prosecution came in 1991. I was in private practice by then and had published two successful novels, which allowed me to donate much of my time as a lawyer to pro-bono work. One of the cases I was asked to take on was the appeal of Alejandro (Alex) Hernandez, who had been convicted of a notorious kidnapping, rape, and murder. In February, 1983, a ten-year-old girl, Jeanine Nicarico, was abducted from her home in a suburb of Chicago, in DuPage County. Two days later, Jeanine's corpse, clad only in a nightshirt, was found by hikers in a nearby nature preserve. She had been blindfolded, sexually assaulted several times, and then killed by repeated blows to the head. More than forty law-enforcement officers formed a task force to hunt down the killer, but by early 1984 the case had not been solved, and a heated primary campaign was under way for the job of state's attorney in DuPage County. A few days before the election, three menAlex Hernandez, Rolando Cruz, and Stephen Buckleywere indicted. The incumbent lost the election anyway, to a local lawyer, Jim Ryan, who took the case to trial in January, 1985. (Ryan later became the attorney general of Illinois, a position he is about to relinquish.) The jury deadlocked on Buckley, but both Hernandez and Cruz were convicted and sentenced to death. There was no physical evidence against either of themno blood, semen, fingerprints, or other forensic proof. The state's case consisted solely of each defendant's statements, a contradictory maze of mutual accusations and demonstrable falsehoods. By the time the case reached me, seven years after the men were arrested, the charges against Buckley had been dropped and the Illinois Supreme Court had reversed the original convictions of Hernandez and Cruz and ordered separate retrials. In 1990, Cruz was condemned to death for a second time. Hernandez's second trial ended with a hung jury, but at a third trial, in 1991, he was convicted and sentenced to eighty years in prison. Hernandez's attorneys made a straightforward pitch to me: their client, who has an I.Q. of about 75, was innocent. I didn't believe it. And, even if it was true, I couldn't envision persuading a court to overturn the conviction a second time. Illinois elects its state-court judges, and this was a celebrated case: "the case that broke Chicago's heart" was how it was sometimes referred to in the press. Nevertheless, I read the brief that Lawrence Marshall, a professor of law at Northwestern University, had filed in behalf of Cruz, and studied the transcripts of Hernandez's trials. After that, there was no question in my mind. Alex Hernandez was innocent. In June, 1985, another little girl, Melissa Ackerman, had been abducted and murdered in northern Illinois. Like Jeanine Nicarico, she was kidnapped in broad daylight, sexually violated, and killed in a wooded area. A man named Brian Dugan was arrested for the Ackerman murder, and, in the course of negotiating for a life sentence, he admitted that he had raped and killed Jeanine Nicarico as well. The Illinois State Police investigated Dugan's admissions about the Nicarico murder and accumulated a mass of corroborating detail. Dugan was not at work the day the girl disappeared, and a church secretary, working a few blocks from the Nicarico home, recalled a conversation with him. A tire print found where Jeanine's body was deposited matched the tires that had been on Dugan's car. He knew many details about the crime that had never been publicly revealed, including information about the interior of the Nicarico home and the blindfold applied to Jeanine. Nevertheless, the DuPage County prosecutors refused to accept Dugan's confession. Even after Cruz's and Hernandez's second convictions were overturned in the separate appeals that Larry Marshall and I argued, and notwithstanding a series of DNA tests that excluded Cruz and Hernandez as Jeanine Nicarico's sexual assailant, while pointing directly at Dugan, the prosecutors pursued the cases. It was only after Cruz was acquitted in a third trial, late in 1995, that both men were finally freed. Capital punishment is supposed to be applied only to the most heinous crimes, but it is precisely those cases which, because of the strong feelings of repugnance they evoke, most thoroughly challenge the detached judgment of all participants in the legal processpolice, prosecutors, judges, and juries. The innocent are often particularly at risk. Most defendants charged with capital crimes avoid the death penalty by reaching a plea bargain, a process that someone who is innocent is naturally reluctant to submit to. Innocent people tend to insist on a trial, and when they get it the jury does not include anyone who will refuse on principle to impose a death sentence. Such people are barred from juries in capital cases by a Supreme Court decision, Witherspoon v. Illinois, that, some scholars believe, makes the juries more conviction-prone. In Alex Hernandez's third trial, the evidence against him was so scant that the DuPage County state's attorney's office sought an outside legal opinion to determine whether it could get the case over the bare legal threshold required to go to a jury. Hernandez was convicted anyway, although the trial judge refused to impose a death sentence, because of the paucity of evidence. A frightened public demanding results in the aftermath of a ghastly crime also places predictable pressures on prosecutors and police, which can sometimes lead to questionable conduct. Confronted with the evidence of Brian Dugan's guilt, the prosecutors in Hernandez's second trial had tried to suggest that he and Dugan could have committed the crime together, even though there was no proof that the men knew each other. Throughout the state's case, the prosecutors emphasized a pair of shoe prints found behind the Nicarico home, where a would-be burglari.e., Hernandezcould have looked through a window. Following testimony that Hernandez's shoe size was about 7, a police expert testified that the shoe prints were "about size 6." Until he was directly cross-examined, the expert did not mention that he was referring to a woman's size 6, or that he had identified the tread on one of the prints as coming from a woman's shoe, a fact he'd shared with the prosecutor, who somehow failed to inform the defense. This kind of overreaching by the prosecution occurred frequently. A special grand jury was convened after Cruz and Hernandez were freed. Three former prosecutors and four DuPage County police officers were indicted on various counts, including conspiring to obstruct justice. They were tried andas is often the case when lawenforcement officers are charged with overzealous execution of their dutiesacquitted, although the county subsequently reached a multimillion-dollar settlement in a civil suit brought by Hernandez, Cruz, and their onetime co-defendant, Stephen Buckley. Despite assertions by DuPage County prosecutors that Jeanine Nicarico's killer deserves to die, Brian Dugan has never been charged with her murder, although Joseph Birkett, the state's attorney for the county, admitted in November that new DNA tests prove Dugan's role with "scientific certainty." In the past, Birkett had celebrated the acquittal of his colleagues on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice and had attacked the special prosecutor who'd brought the charges. He continues to make public statements suggesting that Cruz and Hernandez might be guilty. An ultimately unsuccessful attempt was made to demote the judge who acquitted Cruz, and last year, when the judge resigned from the bench, he had to pay for his own going-away party. In the meantime, the prosecutor who tried to incriminate Alex Hernandez with the print from a woman's shoe is now Chief Judge in DuPage County. If these are the perils of the system, why have a death penalty? Many people would answer that executions deter others from committing murder, but I found no evidence that convinced me. For example, Illinois, which has a death penalty, has a higher murder rate than the neighboring state of Michigan, which has no capital punishment but roughly the same racial makeup, income levels, and population distribution between cities and rural areas. In fact, in the last decade the murder rate in states without the death penalty has remained consistently lower than in the states that have had executions. Surveys of criminologists and police chiefs show that substantial majorities of both groups doubt that the death penalty significantly reduces the number of homicides. Another argumentthat the death penalty saves money, because it avoids the expense of lifetime incarcerationdoesn't hold up, either, when you factor in the staggering costs of capital litigation. In the United States in 2000, the average period between conviction and execution was eleven and a half years, with lawyers and courts spewing out briefs and decisions all that time. The case for capital punishment that seemed strongest to me came from the people who claim the most direct benefit from an execution: the families and friends of murder victims. The commission heard from survivors in public hearings and in private sessions, and I learned a great deal in these meetings. Death brought on by a random element like disease or a tornado is easier for survivors to accept than the loss of a loved one through the conscious will of another human being. It was not clear to me at first what survivors hoped to gain from the death of a murderer, but certain themes emerged. Dora Larson has been a victims'-rights advocate for nearly twenty years. In 1979, her ten-year-old daughter was kidnapped, raped, and strangled by a fifteen-year-old boy who then buried her in a grave he had dug three days earlier. "Our biggest fear is that someday our child's or loved one's killer will be released," she told the commission. "We want these people off the streets so that others might be safe." A sentence of life without parole should guarantee that the defendant would never repeat his crime, but Mrs. Larson pointed out several ways in which a life sentence poses a far greater emotional burden than an execution. Because her daughter's killer was under eighteen, he was ineligible for the death penalty. "When I was told life, I thought it was life," Larson said to us. "Then I get a letter saying our killer has petitioned the governor for release." Victims' families talk a lot about "closure," an end to the legal process that will allow them to come to final terms with their grief. Mrs. Larson and others told us that families frequently find the execution of their lost loved one's killer a meaningful emotional landmark. A number of family members of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing expressed those sentiments after they watched Timothy McVeigh die. The justice the survivors seek is the one embedded in the concept of restitution: the criminal ought not to end up better off than his victim. But the national victims'-rights movement is so powerful that victims have become virtual proprietors of the capital system, leading to troubling inconsistencies. For instance, DuPage County has long supported the Nicarico family's adamant wish for a death sentence for Jeanine's killer, but the virtually identical murder of Melissa Ackerman resulted in a life term with no possibility of parole for Brian Dugan, because Melissa's parents preferred a quick resolution. It makes no more sense to let victims rule the capital process than it would to decide what will be built on the World Trade Center site solely according to the desires of the survivors of those killed on September 11th. In a democracy, no minority, even people whose losses scour our hearts, should be entitled to speak for us all. Governor Ryan's commission didn't spend much time on philosophical debates, but those who favored capital punishment tended to make one argument again and again: sometimes a crime is so horrible that killing its perpetrator is the only just response. I've always thought death-penalty proponents have a point when they say that it denigrates the profound indignity of murder to punish it in the same fashion as other crimes. These days, you can get life in California for your third felony, even if it's swiping a few videotapes from a Kmart. Does it vindicate our shared values if the most immoral act imaginable, the unjustified killing of another human being, is treated the same way? The issue is not revenge or retribution, exactly, so much as moral order. When everything is said and done, I suspect that this notion of moral proportionultimate punishment for ultimate evilis the reason most Americans continue to support capital punishment. This places an enormous burden of precision on the justice system, however. If we execute the innocent or the undeserving, then we have undermined, not reinforced, our sense of moral proportion. The prosecution of Alex Hernandez demonstrated to me the risks to the innocent. A case I took on later gave me experience with the problematic nature of who among the guilty gets selected for execution. One afternoon, I had assembled a group of young lawyers in my office to discuss pro-bono death-penalty work when, by pure coincidence, I found a letter in my in-box from a man, Christopher Thomas, who said he'd been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, even though none of the four eyewitnesses to the crime who testified had identified him. We investigated and found that the letter was accuratein a sense. None of the eyewitnesses had identified Thomas. However, he had two accomplices, both of whom had turned against him, and Thomas had subsequently confessed three different times, the last occasion on videotape. According to the various accounts, Chris Thomaswho is black, and was twenty-one at the time of the crimeand his two pals had run out of gas behind a strip mall in Waukegan, Illinois. They were all stoned, and they hatched a plan to roll somebody for money. Rafael Gasgonia, a thirty-nine-year-old Filipino immigrant, was unfortunate enough to step out for a smoke behind the photo shop where he worked as a delivery driver. The three men accosted him. Thomas pointed a gun at his head, and when a struggle broke out Thomas fired once, killing Gasgonia instantly. I was drawn to Chris Thomas's case because I couldn't understand how a parking-lot stickup gone bad had ended in a death sentence. But after we studied the record, it seemed clear to us that Thomas, like a lot of other defendants, was on death row essentially for the crime of having the wrong lawyers. He had been defended by two attorneys under contract to the Lake County public defender's office. They were each paid thirty thousand dollars a year to defend a hundred and three cases, about three hundred dollars per case. By contract, one assignment had to be a capital case. The fiscal year was nearly over, and neither of the contract lawyers had done his capital work, so they were assigned to Thomas's case together. One of them had no experience of any kind in death-penalty cases; the other had once been standby counsel for a man who was defending himself. In court, we characterized Thomas's defense as all you would expect for six hundred dollars. His lawyers seemed to regard the case as a clear loser at trial and, given the impulsive nature of the crime, virtually certain to result in a sentence other than death. They did a scanty investigation of Thomas's background for the sentencing hearing, an effort that was hindered by the fact that the chief mitigation witness, Thomas's aunt, who was the closest thing to an enduring parental figure in his life, had herself been prosecuted on a drug charge by one of the lawyers during his years as an assistant state's attorney. As a result, Thomas's aunt distrusted the lawyers, and, under her influence, Chris soon did as well. He felt screwed around already, since he had confessed to the crime and expressed remorse, and had been rewarded by being put on trial for his life. At the sentencing hearing, Thomas took the stand and denied that he was guilty, notwithstanding his many prior confessions. The presiding judge, who had never before sentenced anybody to death, gave Thomas the death penalty. In Illinois, some of this could not happen now. The Capital Litigation Trust Fund has been established to pay for an adequate defense, and the state Supreme Court created a Capital Litigation trial bar, which requires lawyers who represent someone facing the death penalty to be experienced in capital cases. Nonetheless, looking over the opinions in the roughly two hundred and seventy capital appeals in Illinois, I was struck again and again by the wide variation in the seriousness of the crimes. There were many monstrous offenses, but also a number of garden-variety murders. And the feeling that the system is an unguided ship is only heightened when one examines the first-degree homicides that have resulted in sentences other than death. Thomas was on death row, but others from Lake Countya man who had knocked a friend unconscious and placed him on the tracks in front of an oncoming train, for instance, and a mother who had fed acid to her babyhad escaped it. The inevitable disparities between individual cases are often enhanced by social factors, like race, which plays a role that is not always well understood. The commission authorized a study that showed that in Illinois, you are more likely to receive the death penalty if you are whitetwo and a half times as likely. One possible reason is that in a racially divided society whites tend to associate with, and thus to murder, other whites. And choosing a white victim makes a murderer three and a half times as likely to be punished by a death sentence as if he'd killed someone who was black. (At least in Illinois, blacks and whites who murdered whites were given a death sentence at essentially the same rate, which has not always been true in other places.) Geography also matters in Illinois. You are five times as likely to get a death sentence for first-degree murder in a rural area as you are in Cook County, which includes Chicago. Gender seems to count, too. Capital punishment for slaying a woman is imposed at three and half times the rate for murdering a man. When you add in all the uncontrollable variableswho the prosecutor and the defense lawyer are, the nature of the judge and the jury, the characteristics of the victim, the place of the crimethe results reflect anything but a clearly proportionate morality. And execution, of course, ends any chance that a defendant will acknowledge the claims of the morality we seek to enforce. More than three years after my colleagues and I read Chris Thomas's letter, a court in Lake County resentenced him to a hundred years in prison, meaning that, with good behavior, he could be released when he is seventy-one. He wept in court and apologized to the Gasgonia family for what he had done. Supporters of capital punishment in Illinois, particularly those in law enforcement, often use Henry Brisbon as their trump card. Get rid of the death penalty, they say, and what do you do about the likes of Henry? On the night of June 3, 1973, Brisbon and three "rap partners" (his term) forced several cars off I-57, an interstate highway south of Chicago. Brisbon made a woman in one of the cars disrobe, and then he discharged a shotgun in her vagina. He compelled a young couple to lie down in a field together, instructed them to "make this your last kiss," and shot both of them in the back. His role in these crimes was uncovered only years later, when he confessed to an inmate working as a law librarian in the penitentiary where he was serving a stretch for rape and armed robbery. Because the I-57 killings occurred shortly after the Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional, Brisbon was not eligible for the death penalty. He was given a sentence of one thousand to three thousand years in prison, probably the longest term ever imposed in Illinois. In October, 1978, eleven months after the sentencing, Brisbon murdered again. He placed a homemade knife to the throat of a guard to subdue him, then went with several inmates to the cell of another prisoner and stabbed him repeatedly. By the time Brisbon was tried again, in early 1982, Illinois had restored capital punishment, and he was sentenced to death. The evidence in his sentencing hearings included proof of yet another murder Brisbon had allegedly committed prior to his imprisonment, when he placed a shotgun against the face of a store clerk and blew him away. He had accumulated more than two hundred disciplinary violations while he was incarcerated, and had played a major role in the violent takeover of Stateville prison, in September, 1979. Predictably, the death sentence did not markedly improve Brisbon's conduct. In the years since he was first condemned, he has been accused of a number of serious assaults on guards, including a stabbing, and he severely injured another inmate when he threw a thirty-pound weight against his skull. Brisbon is now held at the Tamms Correctional Center, a "super-max" facility that houses more than two hundred and fifty men culled from an Illinois prison population of almost forty-five thousand. Generally speaking, Tamms inmates are either gang leaders or men with intractable discipline problems. I wanted to visit Tamms, hoping that it would tell me whether it is possible to incapacitate people like Brisbon, who are clearly prone to murder again if given the opportunity. Tamms is situated near the southernmost point of Illinois, farther south than parts of Kentucky. The Mississippi, a wide body of cloacal brown, floods the nearby lowlands, creating a region of green marshes along orange sandstone bluffs. Tamms stands at the foot of one of those stone outcroppings, on a vast, savannalike grassland. The terms of confinement are grim. Inmates are permitted no physical contact with other human beings. Each prisoner is held twenty-three hours a day inside a seven-by-twelve-foot block of preformed concrete that has a single window to the outside, roughly forty-two by eighteen inches, segmented by a lateral steel bar. The cell contains a stainless-steel fixture housing a toilet bowl and a sink and a concrete pallet over which a foam mattress is laid. The front of the cell has a panel of punch-plate steel pierced by a network of half-inch circles, almost like bullet holes, that permit conversation but prevent the kind of mayhem possible when prisoners can get their hands through the bars. Once a day, an inmate's door is opened by remote control, and he walks down a corridor of cells to an outdoor area, twelve by twenty-eight feet, surrounded by thirteen-foot-high concrete walls, with a roof over half of it for shelter from the elements. For an hour, a prisoner may exercise or just breathe fresh air. Showers are permitted on a similar remote-control basis, for twenty minutes, several times a week. In part because the facility is not full, incarceration in Tamms costs about two and a half times as much as the approximately twenty thousand dollars a year that is ordinarily spent on an inmate in Illinois, but the facility has a remarkable record of success in reducing disciplinary infractions and assaults. George Welborn, a tall, lean man with a full head of graying hair, a mustache, and dark, thoughtful eyes, was the warden of Tamms when I visited. I talked to him for much of the day, and toward the end asked if he really believed that he could keep Brisbon from killing again. Welborn, who speaks with a southern-Illinois twang, was an assistant warden at Stateville when Brisbon led the inmate uprising there, and he testified against him in the proceedings that resulted in his death sentence. He took his time with my question, but answered, guardedly, "Yes." I was permitted to meet Brisbon, speaking with him through the punch-plate from the corridor in front of his cell. He is a solidly built African-American man of medium height, somewhat bookish-looking, with heavy glasses. He seemed quick-witted and amiable, and greatly amused by himself. He had read all about the commission, and he displayed a letter in which, many years ago, he had suggested a moratorium on executions. He had some savvy predictions about the political impediments to many potential reforms of the capital system. "Henry is a special case," Welborn said to me later, when we spoke on the phone. "I would be foolish to say I can guarantee he won't kill anyone again. I can imagine situations, God forbid . . . But the chances are minimized here." Still, Welborn emphasized, with Brisbon there would never be any guarantees. I had another reason for wanting to visit Tamms. Illinois's execution chamber is now situated there. Unused for more than two years because of Governor Ryan's moratorium, it remains a solemn spot, with the sterile feel of an operating theatre in a hospital. The execution gurney, where the lethal injection is administered, is covered by a crisp sheet and might even be mistaken for an examining table except for the arm paddles that extend from it and the crisscrossing leather restraints that strike a particularly odd note in the world of Tamms, where virtually everything else is of steel, concrete, or plastic. Several years ago, I attended a luncheon where Sister Helen Prejean, the author of "Dead Man Walking," delivered the keynote address. The daughter of a prominent lawyer, Sister Helen is a powerful orator. Inveighing against the death penalty, she looked at the audience and repeated one of her favorite arguments: "If you really believe in the death penalty, ask yourself if you're willing to inject the fatal poison." I thought of Sister Helen when I stood in the death chamber at Tamms. I felt the horror of the coolly contemplated ending of the life of another human being in the name of the law. But if John Wayne Gacy, the mass murderer who tortured and killed thirty-three young men, had been on that gurney, I could, as Sister Helen would have it, have pushed the button. I don't think the death penalty is the product of an alien morality, and I respect the right of a majority of my fellow-citizens to decide that it ought to be imposed on the most horrific crimes. The members of the commission knew that capital punishment would not be abolished in Illinois anytime soon. Accordingly, our formal recommendations, many of which were made unanimously, ran to matters of reform. Principal among them was lowering the risks of convicting the innocent. Several of the thirteen men who had been on death row and were then exonerated had made dubious confessions, which appeared to have been coerced or even invented. We recommended that all interrogations of suspects in capital cases be videotaped. We also proposed altering lineup procedures, since eyewitness testimony has proved to be far less trustworthy than I ever thought while I was a prosecutor. We urged that courts provide pretrial hearings to determine the reliability of jailhouse snitches, who have surfaced often in Illinois's capital cases, testifying to supposed confessions in exchange for lightened sentences. To reduce the seeming randomness with which some defendants appear to end up on death row, we proposed that the twenty eligibility criteria for capital punishment in Illinois be trimmed to five: multiple murders, murder of a police officer or firefighter, murder in a prison, murder aimed at hindering the justice system, and murder involving torture. Murders committed in the course of another felony, the eligibility factor used in Christopher Thomas's case, would be eliminated. And we urged the creation of a statewide oversight body to attempt to bring more uniformity to the selection of death-penalty cases. To insure that the capital system is something other than an endless maze for survivors, we recommended guaranteed sentences of life with no parole when eligible cases don't result in the death penalty. And we also outlined reforms aimed at expediting the post-conviction review and clemency processes. Yet our proposals sidestepped the ultimate question. One fall day, Paul Simon, the former U.S. senator who was one of the commission's chairs and is a longtime foe of the death penalty, forced us to vote on whether Illinois should have a death penalty at all. The vote was an expression of sentiment, not a formal recommendation. What was our best advice to our fellow-citizens, political realities aside? By a narrow majority, we agreed that capital punishment should not be an option. I admit that I am still attracted to a death penalty that would be applied to horrendous crimes, or that would provide absolute certainty that the likes of Henry Brisbon would never again satisfy their cruel appetites. But if death is available as a punishment, the furious heat of grief and rage that these crimes inspire will inevitably short-circuit any capital system. Now and then, we will execute someone who is innocent, while the fundamental equality of each survivor's loss creates an inevitable emotional momentum to expand the categories for death-penalty eligibility. Like many others who have wrestled with capital punishment, I have changed my mind often, driven back and forth by the errors each position seems to invite. Yet after two years of deliberation, I seem to have finally come to rest. When Paul Simon asked whether Illinois should have a death penalty, I voted no. From Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com Fri Jun 25 20:44:35 2004 From: Rahul.Asthana at CIBC.com (Asthana, Rahul) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 11:14:35 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Media romanticizing rapists Message-ID: Here is the summation in the famous Leopold and Loeb trials,one of the most famous attacks on death penalty,by that wonderful man Clarence Darrow, who did not let any kind of odds deter him from fighting for what he believed was right. It is unusually long, and perhaps one would find some a gist somewhere, but it is worth reading. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/darrowclosing.html -----Original Message----- From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Shuddha Sent: Friday, June 25, 2004 4:49 AM To: nisha - Cc: sarai Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Media romanticizing rapists Dear Nisha This is a brief response to your post about the report in the Kolkata edition of the Times of India about the death sentence and impending execution by handing of Dhanajoy Chatterjee who raped and murdered a 14 year old girl. Let me clarify one thing at the very begining. I have absolutely no sympathy for any man who has raped and murdered anyone, and least of all someone who has raped and murdered a minor.And I agree with your revulsion at any attempt to romanticize the life of any such person, just as I would be critical of any attempt to romanticize the life of military personnel, prison staff, policemen, terrorists, powerful and well connected individuals who operate within and outside the law and others who rape and murder, routinely. in the line of their work, and in the pursuit of their pleasures. However, I have absolutely no qualms in saying and believing that the death penalty is a barbarous and deeply violent institution that in my opinion should only be a matter of shame in any civilized society. The fact that the death penalty continues to exist in India, and is routinely used, not only against rapists and murderers but also against others, is a shocking indictment in my opinion of the routine, institutionalized violence that we are prepared to condone in our society. Dhananjay Chatterjee's death by hanging, within the confines of a state institution, in Alipore Central Jail, will not bring the girl he raped and murdered back to life. A life for a life is the ethic of the blood feud that we continue to enshrine in our constitution, i think it only brings the taint of killing on us all. I doubt that the death penalty is an effective deterrent against violent crime, if anything, societies that retain the death penalty (the United States and China being leaders in this field, are arguably much more violent than those that have abolished it, after all, the death penalty confers on the act of killing a certain legitimacy, and this, in my opinion contributes to more, not less violence in society) I have for many years believed that there needs to be a considered and an honest debate about the existence of the death penalty, and extra-judicial executions, and concomitantly about the romantic cult of violence that is so much a part of the vocabulary of resistance movements in India. I am not a pacifist, but I would call for a disbanding of military and police functions, I do not believe that violence has any virtues, I do not believe that any valuable social or political transformations can be brought about by violent means and at the same time I am not an absolutist believer in what is called 'non-violence' (in that I do believe that armed resistance, by individuals, or by groups, in self defence is justified, when no other options are left, and when survival is at stake) but I do believe that the death penalty and thinking that killing people is a solution of any kind, is the kind of attitude that actually engenders and fosters violence in society. Dhananjay Chatterjee is responsible for the life he took, and he deserves the harshest punishment for it, but we are all responsible for the taking of his life, and by ensuring his death we are also cutting off the possibility that he would be condemned to live out a life contemplating the enormity of the violence that he unleashed on a defenceless person. We ensure that neither Dhananjay, nor we, have to really think about what violence means. I look forward to more thinking on the list about this issue. regards Shuddha >_________________________________________ >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 shuddha at sarai.net Fri Jun 25 20:44:40 2004 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddha) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 20:44:40 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Media romanticizing rapists In-Reply-To: <20040625142803.23255.qmail@web8308.mail.in.yahoo.com> References: <20040625142803.23255.qmail@web8308.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <40DC4160.3080409@sarai.net> Dear Nisha, I agree with you that the 'individualization' (at least on the terms that you mention) of a person who has committed a really heinous crime is problematic, but I think that if we stop looking at human beings as individuals, no matter how unpleasant and hateful they may be to us, we run the risk of begining to see them as abstractions - as the 'perverse criminal', the 'terrorist', the 'heretic', the 'anti national'. In my view the first act of violence begins with this attempt to see people as if they were vessels for our anxieties, rather than as flesh and blood individuals with their own biographies. To talk about a man's last days as he waits for the noose, is not necessarily to romanticize him and although I am sure that the media reports that you refer to may be quite problematic, I would still hesitate to say that a blanket refusal to treat a human being on death row (again, no matter how heinous his crime) as an individual human being is something that I would be uncomfortable with. I think that the issue here is fairly stark, and I do not think that it is not a question of whether the death penalty should exist or not. We all are comfortable with denouncing the death penalty when the person in question is obviously innocent, but the problems all arise when the man to be hanged is guilty as charged. Does doubt about the death penalty necessarily mean that we are condoning the crime, I do not think so. Let us also be clear that violence against women and children (just as it is easy to dismiss, is also very easy to be outraged by, juries in the US typically vote to hang people when crimes against children come up for trial, and this generally happens because the trial, judges, juries and the public are thirsting for a verdict and not patient to go through the details of the case - a number of verdicts are reached in great hurry, to stoke the passion for retribution, so it cuts both ways, just as crimes against women and children can be marginalized, they can also become the ritual exorcizer of a society's obsession with its own violence) regards Shuddha From surekha at servelots.com Sat Jun 26 11:43:57 2004 From: surekha at servelots.com (surekha at servelots.com) Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 02:13:57 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Monthly report Message-ID: <274090-22004662661357732@M2W094.mail2web.com> Hello all, This is my third monthly posting for the project titled "Multilingual support for web applications using server-side java". Surekha. *************************************************************************** Multi-lingual support for Web applications using Server Side Java. ------------------------------------------------------------------ A collaborative work of Surekha Sastry and K.Srinivasa Raghavan. Input Method Editor (IME): -------------------------- We have been working on making the IME available on the web browser rather than on a web page. This will allow the user to type in any Indian language and in any of the web pages. E.g., if I would like to type my email in Kannada in my "yahoo" mail, then I can just do that by invoking the IME, which is a link on the browser. The IME can be made available on any browser by the concept of "Bookmarklets". Bookmarklets (http://www.bookmarklets.com) are small, reusable JavaScript routines that you can save on your computer in your browser's Bookmark (or Favorites) section. Hence the name bookmarklet. Bookmarklets work on all platforms and there's no special software to download. All you need is a JavaScript-enabled browser. There is a limit to the number of characters a bookmarklet can contain. This limit again differs between browser versions. For example, Internet Explorer 6 can handle up to 508 characters. Since our IME (Input Method Editor), implemented in JavaScript, exceeds the character limit of a bookmarklet, we resolved the problem using the following procedure. 1. The html page (languageSelection.html), which brings up a drop down list of Indian languages and the JavaScript file (IndicInput_IME.js) containing the IME logic, are kept in a web server. The html page (languageSelection.html) refers to this JavaScript file (IndicInput_IME.js). 2. The bookmarklet is just a link to this html page. This is how a bookmarklet looks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- IME Bookmarklet -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just drag this link to your favorites section or bookmarks to store it as a bookmarklet. 3. When user clicks on this bookmarklet on any web page, it will bring up a drop down list of Indian languages. When a user selects a language, the JavaScript code is executed and the user will be able to type in his/her language. Technically, when the user clicks on the bookmarklet, the html page (languageSelection.html) pops up in a new window and downloads the javascript (IndicInput_IME.js). Now, this javascript will capture 'KeyPress' events on the web page being viewed. We were successful in creating a bookmarklet which works in a local web server. If the web page is from a different web server (say yahoo mail), then the browser does not allow to capture events because of the security reasons. This problem can be solved by signing the javascript file (IndicInput_IME.js). To do this, we need a certificate from an authorized Certificate Authority (like Verisign) or generate a self-signed certificate for testing purposes. 1. We tried generating a test certificate using Netscape Sign Tool 1.3 using the following command: signtool -G myCertificate -k myCertificate -d NetscapeCertificates/ where myCertificate --> nickname of certificate and NetscapeCertificates --> directory containing netscape databases (cert7.db and key3.db) 2. We then imported the certificate to the browser. 3. We signed the html page (languageSelection.html) and the javascript file (IndicInput_IME.js) with the generated certificate. To sign the files, we used the following command of the Netscape Sign Tool 1.3: signtool -d -k -Z E.g.: signtool -d NetscapeCertificates -k myCert -Z myScript.jar myScripts This command creates the jar file (myScript.jar) and signs all the files present in the JAR with the certificate "myCertificate". 4. The bookmarklet is changed to refer to this JAR. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- IME Bookmarklet ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The tag of the languageSelection.html file is changed to: