From emma.med at gmail.com Thu Mar 1 10:56:14 2007 From: emma.med at gmail.com (emma d) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 10:56:14 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response Message-ID: Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the outrageously content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone Abhik's response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo like you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070301/402f947c/attachment.html From iram at sarai.net Thu Mar 1 14:38:41 2007 From: iram at sarai.net (Iram Ghufran) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 14:38:41 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <45E69819.9080406@sarai.net> Dear list members, Please refrain from making personal/ individual statements regrading other list members and communities on this forum. The reader list is a non moderated public list. And I guess thats where the challenge lies - How do we - as members of this list (of more than 1200 people) exercise our freedom of speech? How will our speech acts be remembered by the archives of this list and read/ understood by people who browse our public archives in future? No one can stop a list member from writing what they like but its a personal request - please think before you click the send button. Best Iram (co - member of reader-list) emma d wrote: > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the outrageously > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone Abhik's > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he > comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo like > you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more > dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From hpp at vsnl.com Thu Mar 1 16:30:12 2007 From: hpp at vsnl.com (hpp at vsnl.com) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:00:12 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] The Day of the Jackal Message-ID: The Day of the Jackal by Rahul B rahul.indauri at gmail.com http://rahulbanerjee.notlong.com/ Sagarbai a Bhilala adivasi (tribal) widow has finally emerged victorious after a long drawn legal battle for justice fought in the High Court of Madhya Pradesh over the last eight years against a government and administration bent on disregarding the "rule of law" and their constitutional obligations towards the adivasis. In September 1999 a team of forest department officials raided the village of Katukya in Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh at 6 am in the morning and fired on and killed Roopsingh, a Bhilala adivasi who was returning from answering nature's call. The forest officials had gone ostensibly to arrest one Balu for allegedly having cut timber from the forest. Why they had to go at the unearthly hour of 6 a.m. to do this and why they had to enter the village with their guns spitting bullets remains officially unexplained to this day. However, the fact is that this murderous foray was part of an ongoing illegal exercise sanctioned by the government of the day to crush a mass organisation of the adivasis, Adivasi Morcha Sangathan (AMS), which had over the past four years or so been protesting against the corruption and mis-governance rampant in the area since independence and demanding the implementation of the special provisions of local governance enacted for Scheduled adivasi areas in accordance with the Panchayat Provisions (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996. The murder of Roopsingh evoked an immediate protest response from the AMS members as they amassed in thousands in front of the Police Station in Udainagar with his dead body demanding the immediate filing of a case of murder and the arrest of the guilty officials. The administration had to yield to these demands under public pressure. According to the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Rules 1995, the state has to provide monetary compensation to the heirs of the deceased when an adivasi is murdered by a non-adivasi. So the AMS pressed for this compensation to be paid to Roopsingh's widow Sagarbai. Despite all the formalities being completed the District Magistrate did not pay the compensation making the specious plea that since the forest guard who had fired on Roopsingh was an adivasi, the provisions of the Atrocities Act did not apply. The counter arguments of the AMS that all the members of the team, which included and was led by non-adivasis, had gone together to perform state duty and had illegally killed Roopsingh and so they were all together along with the state responsible for the crime were summarily brushed aside. The AMS then went to the High Court in Indore against this arbitrary decision of the District Magistrate in September 2000 and the case was admitted. However, on the day of the final hearing the honourable judge gave the astounding excuse that since the rules for Madhya Pradesh were framed in Hindi he could not give a judgment as this latter had to be written in English. No amount of pleading that the rules in question had been published in the gazette of Madhya Pradesh in Hindi only could make the judge budge and he demanded an official translation from the government advocate. The latter conveniently dilly-dallied and so the case was thus pushed back onto the slow backburner of pending cases. Even though the judge hearing the case was changed after some time the government advocate would make some plea or other and get the case postponed every time it came up for a hearing. Things would have continued in this frustrating manner had not the Supreme Court sent strict orders to the High Court that during the summer vacation of 2005 a special bench should be constituted to dispose of the 1000 oldest cases that were still pending in the court. Roopsingh's case happened to be in this list and so it came up for hearing on 19.5.2005. This time the government prosecutor made the weird plea that since the District Magistrate had not passed any written order refusing to give the relief that was demanded there was no cause for action by the High Court. Surprisingly the learned judge despite protests from the petitioner's lawyer went along with this to some extent but had the grace to admit that the District Magistrate had no business not to give a written order even after so much time had elapsed. So he passed an order directing that the District Magistrate should give the relief to the petitioner in accordance with the rules and write a reasoned order based on the facts of the case within two months of a repeat application being made by the petitioner along with the certified copy of the High Court's order. When Roopsingh's widow Sagarbai met the District Magistrate and gave him this new application along with the High Court's order, the first comment that he made after reading it was that in his opinion this was not a fit case as the forest guard who had fired and killed Roopsingh was an adivasi! This was a different person from the District Magistrate who had initially given this same idiotic excuse some six years back but such is the consistency of the training in stonewalling given to the bureaucracy in this country that they invariably come out with the same checkmating answers regardless of the person. The AMS once again went to the High Court against this order of the District Magistrate. On December 6th 2006 the High Court passed an order directing the administration to deposit Rs 2,00,000 in a fixed deposit in a nationalised bank in the name of Sagarbai within a month of the passing of the order, failing which it would have to pay interest at the rate of 9% per annum on the amount. The honourable judge while passing the order made note of two landmark judgments of the Supreme Court stating that - 1. Functionaries of the government cannot themselves become law breakers and adopt inhuman methods in trying to enforce the law against alleged offenders as they had done in this case while ostensibly going to apprehend Balu for an alleged timber cutting offence (D. K. Basu vs State of West Bengal, 1997 (1) SCC 416). 2. The Government is vicariously liable to compensate the victims of such lawlessness on the part of its functionaries and if it doesn't then it is the responsibility of the High and Supreme Courts to ensure that it does so (Nilabati Behera vs State of Orissa, 1993 (2) SCC 746). The AMS persisted with this case and spent Rs 50,000 on it not just for the compensation, which is paltry in any case, but more importantly to make a small contribution towards establishing the non-existent "rule of law" for the long suffering adivasis in this country. I have fought many battles for the rights of the Bhil adivasis over the past quarter of a century and lost most given the odds that are stacked against them. This is one of the rare victories won in the teeth of governmental opposition and it is by far the sweetest. In a presently pending case before the honourable Supreme Court filed by the National Council of Civil Liberties of Ahmedabad against the Narmada Bachao Andolan, I too have been impleaded along with the NBA for allegedly being a seditious anti-national. The basis for this serious charge as usual is a farrago of lies and false cases against me compiled by the biggest law-breakers in this country - the police. If one is to believe their story then I am as dangerous and wily as the assassin "Jackal" in Frederick Forsyth's thriller "The Day of the Jackal". While Forsyth's nefarious Jackal failed in his mission to assassinate the French President Charles de Gaulle, our own nefarious government has finally been checkm ated by this jackal! From hpp at vsnl.com Thu Mar 1 16:31:45 2007 From: hpp at vsnl.com (hpp at vsnl.com) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:01:45 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] The Day of the Jackal Message-ID: The Day of the Jackal by Rahul B rahul.indauri at gmail.com http://rahulbanerjee.notlong.com/ Sagarbai a Bhilala adivasi (tribal) widow has finally emerged victorious after a long drawn legal battle for justice fought in the High Court of Madhya Pradesh over the last eight years against a government and administration bent on disregarding the "rule of law" and their constitutional obligations towards the adivasis. In September 1999 a team of forest department officials raided the village of Katukya in Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh at 6 am in the morning and fired on and killed Roopsingh, a Bhilala adivasi who was returning from answering nature's call. The forest officials had gone ostensibly to arrest one Balu for allegedly having cut timber from the forest. Why they had to go at the unearthly hour of 6 a.m. to do this and why they had to enter the village with their guns spitting bullets remains officially unexplained to this day. However, the fact is that this murderous foray was part of an ongoing illegal exercise sanctioned by the government of the day to crush a mass organisation of the adivasis, Adivasi Morcha Sangathan (AMS), which had over the past four years or so been protesting against the corruption and mis-governance rampant in the area since independence and demanding the implementation of the special provisions of local governance enacted for Scheduled adivasi areas in accordance with the Panchayat Provisions (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996. The murder of Roopsingh evoked an immediate protest response from the AMS members as they amassed in thousands in front of the Police Station in Udainagar with his dead body demanding the immediate filing of a case of murder and the arrest of the guilty officials. The administration had to yield to these demands under public pressure. According to the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Rules 1995, the state has to provide monetary compensation to the heirs of the deceased when an adivasi is murdered by a non-adivasi. So the AMS pressed for this compensation to be paid to Roopsingh's widow Sagarbai. Despite all the formalities being completed the District Magistrate did not pay the compensation making the specious plea that since the forest guard who had fired on Roopsingh was an adivasi, the provisions of the Atrocities Act did not apply. The counter arguments of the AMS that all the members of the team, which included and was led by non-adivasis, had gone together to perform state duty and had illegally killed Roopsingh and so they were all together along with the state responsible for the crime were summarily brushed aside. The AMS then went to the High Court in Indore against this arbitrary decision of the District Magistrate in September 2000 and the case was admitted. However, on the day of the final hearing the honourable judge gave the astounding excuse that since the rules for Madhya Pradesh were framed in Hindi he could not give a judgment as this latter had to be written in English. No amount of pleading that the rules in question had been published in the gazette of Madhya Pradesh in Hindi only could make the judge budge and he demanded an official translation from the government advocate. The latter conveniently dilly-dallied and so the case was thus pushed back onto the slow backburner of pending cases. Even though the judge hearing the case was changed after some time the government advocate would make some plea or other and get the case postponed every time it came up for a hearing. Things would have continued in this frustrating manner had not the Supreme Court sent strict orders to the High Court that during the summer vacation of 2005 a special bench should be constituted to dispose of the 1000 oldest cases that were still pending in the court. Roopsingh's case happened to be in this list and so it came up for hearing on 19.5.2005. This time the government prosecutor made the weird plea that since the District Magistrate had not passed any written order refusing to give the relief that was demanded there was no cause for action by the High Court. Surprisingly the learned judge despite protests from the petitioner's lawyer went along with this to some extent but had the grace to admit that the District Magistrate had no business not to give a written order even after so much time had elapsed. So he passed an order directing that the District Magistrate should give the relief to the petitioner in accordance with the rules and write a reasoned order based on the facts of the case within two months of a repeat application being made by the petitioner along with the certified copy of the High Court's order. When Roopsingh's widow Sagarbai met the District Magistrate and gave him this new application along with the High Court's order, the first comment that he made after reading it was that in his opinion this was not a fit case as the forest guard who had fired and killed Roopsingh was an adivasi! This was a different person from the District Magistrate who had initially given this same idiotic excuse some six years back but such is the consistency of the training in stonewalling given to the bureaucracy in this country that they invariably come out with the same checkmating answers regardless of the person. The AMS once again went to the High Court against this order of the District Magistrate. On December 6th 2006 the High Court passed an order directing the administration to deposit Rs 2,00,000 in a fixed deposit in a nationalised bank in the name of Sagarbai within a month of the passing of the order, failing which it would have to pay interest at the rate of 9% per annum on the amount. The honourable judge while passing the order made note of two landmark judgments of the Supreme Court stating that - 1. Functionaries of the government cannot themselves become law breakers and adopt inhuman methods in trying to enforce the law against alleged offenders as they had done in this case while ostensibly going to apprehend Balu for an alleged timber cutting offence (D. K. Basu vs State of West Bengal, 1997 (1) SCC 416). 2. The Government is vicariously liable to compensate the victims of such lawlessness on the part of its functionaries and if it doesn't then it is the responsibility of the High and Supreme Courts to ensure that it does so (Nilabati Behera vs State of Orissa, 1993 (2) SCC 746). The AMS persisted with this case and spent Rs 50,000 on it not just for the compensation, which is paltry in any case, but more importantly to make a small contribution towards establishing the non-existent "rule of law" for the long suffering adivasis in this country. I have fought many battles for the rights of the Bhil adivasis over the past quarter of a century and lost most given the odds that are stacked against them. This is one of the rare victories won in the teeth of governmental opposition and it is by far the sweetest. In a presently pending case before the honourable Supreme Court filed by the National Council of Civil Liberties of Ahmedabad against the Narmada Bachao Andolan, I too have been impleaded along with the NBA for allegedly being a seditious anti-national. The basis for this serious charge as usual is a farrago of lies and false cases against me compiled by the biggest law-breakers in this country - the police. If one is to believe their story then I am as dangerous and wily as the assassin "Jackal" in Frederick Forsyth's thriller "The Day of the Jackal". While Forsyth's nefarious Jackal failed in his mission to assassinate the French President Charles de Gaulle, our own nefarious government has finally been checkm ated by this jackal! From iram at sarai.net Thu Mar 1 16:56:22 2007 From: iram at sarai.net (Iram Ghufran) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 16:56:22 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: References: <45E69819.9080406@sarai.net> Message-ID: <45E6B85E.2010406@sarai.net> Emma, I think you are confusing issues. A) "don't you have anyone to fuck" is not a nice thing to say to anyone but these sentiments were expressed in a personal mail by Abhik. I chose not to comment on those. B) "awaiting moderator's approval" is an AUTOMATED response to TECHNICAL glitches. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the content of the mail (unless there are attachments) I think you need to read posting protocols again. They have been sent on this list before and I will forward them to you in a separate mail. C) By the way, I think Shuddhabrata's response did express concerns regarding Abhik's unfortunate statement to Vedavati's provocative statement. You should read it again. "Let me clarify at the very beginning that I find the contents of the exchange between Vedavati and Abhit (which we have all been subjected to because of Vedavati's forward, with comment, of Abhik's off list email to her) sad and deplorable. While Abhik's language betrays an unfortunate misogyny, Vedavati's postings and responses are not exactly exemplars of liberality and tolerance." Best Iram emma d wrote: > Dear Iram, It would have been nice if you could have expressed > similar concerns when the "don't you have anyone to fuck" first > appeared on the list! Where did the "awaiting moderator's approval" > thingy disappear then! Emma > > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* > > wrote: > > Dear list members, > Please refrain from making personal/ individual statements regrading > other list members and communities on this forum. The reader list > is a > non moderated public list. And I guess thats where the challenge > lies - > How do we - as members of this list (of more than 1200 people) > exercise > our freedom of speech? How will our speech acts be remembered by the > archives of this list and read/ understood by people who browse our > public archives in future? No one can stop a list member from writing > what they like but its a personal request - please think before you > click the send button. > Best > Iram > (co - member of reader-list) > > > > > emma d wrote: > > > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the > outrageously > > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone > Abhik's > > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he > > comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo > like > > you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more > > dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > _________________________________________ > > 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. > > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > From iram at sarai.net Thu Mar 1 17:38:30 2007 From: iram at sarai.net (Iram Ghufran) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 17:38:30 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: References: <45E69819.9080406@sarai.net> <45E6B85E.2010406@sarai.net> Message-ID: <45E6C23E.6080500@sarai.net> Dear Emma, You should have thought of that before you make statements like - "Even pimps have more dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you!" on a public list. Anyway, I do hope your anxieties regarding list 'moderation' are satisfied. Best Iram emma d wrote: > Get a life man! Is there any point in going on and on about Shuddha's > response to Jogis' posting! Seriously, get a life! Besides, I > certainly believe you ought to re-read Shuddha's response entirely > again, wherein he expresses how he "understands" that weirdo's > response to Jogi's crazed posting! > The end? Amen? > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* > > wrote: > > Emma, > > I think you are confusing issues. > > A) "don't you have anyone to fuck" is not a nice thing to say to > anyone but these sentiments were expressed in a personal mail by > Abhik. > I chose not to comment on those. > > B) "awaiting moderator's approval" is an AUTOMATED response to > TECHNICAL > glitches. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the content > of the > mail (unless there are attachments) > > I think you need to read posting protocols again. They have been > sent on > this list before and I will forward them to you in a separate mail. > > C) By the way, I think Shuddhabrata's response did express concerns > regarding Abhik's unfortunate statement to Vedavati's provocative > statement. You should read it again. > > "Let me clarify at the very beginning that I find the contents of the > exchange between Vedavati and Abhit (which we have all been > subjected to because of Vedavati's forward, with comment, of > Abhik's off list email to her) sad and deplorable. While Abhik's > language betrays an > unfortunate misogyny, Vedavati's postings and responses are not > exactly exemplars of liberality and tolerance." > > Best > Iram > > emma d wrote: > > Dear Iram, It would have been nice if you could have expressed > > similar concerns when the "don't you have anyone to fuck" first > > appeared on the list! Where did the "awaiting moderator's approval" > > thingy disappear then! Emma > > > > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* >> > > wrote: > > > > Dear list members, > > Please refrain from making personal/ individual statements > regrading > > other list members and communities on this forum. The reader > list > > is a > > non moderated public list. And I guess thats where the challenge > > lies - > > How do we - as members of this list (of more than 1200 people) > > exercise > > our freedom of speech? How will our speech acts be > remembered by the > > archives of this list and read/ understood by people who > browse our > > public archives in future? No one can stop a list member > from writing > > what they like but its a personal request - please think > before you > > click the send button. > > Best > > Iram > > (co - member of reader-list) > > > > > > > > > > emma d wrote: > > > > > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the > > outrageously > > > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone > > Abhik's > > > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a > background he > > > comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A > pseudo > > like > > > you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have > more > > > dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > > 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. > > > To unsubscribe: > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > > List archive: > <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > > > > > From t.ray at vsnl.com Thu Mar 1 17:55:47 2007 From: t.ray at vsnl.com (Tapas Ray) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 07:25:47 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response References: Message-ID: <007901c75bfc$be9b6650$ba00a8c0@Tapas> 1. What is happeing on this list is a reflection of what has been happening in India at large. By posting the link to that weird blog with an incedibly offensive title, Ms Jogi has succeeded in turning this list into a hate space - just what the Hindutva people have managed to do with politics at large in India. 2. As a Bengali man, I find Emma's reference to "some Bong men" offensive. I wonder if someone with a mindset and a language like that is competent to wonder about Abhit's "background". Tapas > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the outrageously > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone Abhik's > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he comes > from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo like you seems > to > "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more dignity than some Bong > men, some Bong men like you! From emma.med at gmail.com Thu Mar 1 16:15:38 2007 From: emma.med at gmail.com (emma d) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 16:15:38 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: <45E69819.9080406@sarai.net> References: <45E69819.9080406@sarai.net> Message-ID: Dear Iram, It would have been nice if you could have expressed similar concerns when the "don't you have anyone to fuck" first appeared on the list! Where did the "awaiting moderator's approval" thingy disappear then! Emma On 3/1/07, Iram Ghufran wrote: > > Dear list members, > Please refrain from making personal/ individual statements regrading > other list members and communities on this forum. The reader list is a > non moderated public list. And I guess thats where the challenge lies - > How do we - as members of this list (of more than 1200 people) exercise > our freedom of speech? How will our speech acts be remembered by the > archives of this list and read/ understood by people who browse our > public archives in future? No one can stop a list member from writing > what they like but its a personal request - please think before you > click the send button. > Best > Iram > (co - member of reader-list) > > > > > emma d wrote: > > > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the outrageously > > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone Abhik's > > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he > > comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo like > > you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more > > dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > _________________________________________ > > 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. > > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070301/dd2631e0/attachment.html From emma.med at gmail.com Thu Mar 1 17:10:48 2007 From: emma.med at gmail.com (emma d) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 17:10:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: <45E6B85E.2010406@sarai.net> References: <45E69819.9080406@sarai.net> <45E6B85E.2010406@sarai.net> Message-ID: Get a life man! Is there any point in going on and on about Shuddha's response to Jogis' posting! Seriously, get a life! Besides, I certainly believe you ought to re-read Shuddha's response entirely again, wherein he expresses how he "understands" that weirdo's response to Jogi's crazed posting! The end? Amen? On 3/1/07, Iram Ghufran wrote: > > Emma, > > I think you are confusing issues. > > A) "don't you have anyone to fuck" is not a nice thing to say to > anyone but these sentiments were expressed in a personal mail by Abhik. > I chose not to comment on those. > > B) "awaiting moderator's approval" is an AUTOMATED response to TECHNICAL > glitches. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the content of the > mail (unless there are attachments) > > I think you need to read posting protocols again. They have been sent on > this list before and I will forward them to you in a separate mail. > > C) By the way, I think Shuddhabrata's response did express concerns > regarding Abhik's unfortunate statement to Vedavati's provocative > statement. You should read it again. > > "Let me clarify at the very beginning that I find the contents of the > exchange between Vedavati and Abhit (which we have all been subjected to > because of Vedavati's forward, with comment, of Abhik's off list email to > her) sad and deplorable. While Abhik's language betrays an > unfortunate misogyny, Vedavati's postings and responses are not exactly > exemplars of liberality and tolerance." > > Best > Iram > > emma d wrote: > > Dear Iram, It would have been nice if you could have expressed > > similar concerns when the "don't you have anyone to fuck" first > > appeared on the list! Where did the "awaiting moderator's approval" > > thingy disappear then! Emma > > > > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* > > > wrote: > > > > Dear list members, > > Please refrain from making personal/ individual statements regrading > > other list members and communities on this forum. The reader list > > is a > > non moderated public list. And I guess thats where the challenge > > lies - > > How do we - as members of this list (of more than 1200 people) > > exercise > > our freedom of speech? How will our speech acts be remembered by the > > archives of this list and read/ understood by people who browse our > > public archives in future? No one can stop a list member from > writing > > what they like but its a personal request - please think before you > > click the send button. > > Best > > Iram > > (co - member of reader-list) > > > > > > > > > > emma d wrote: > > > > > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the > > outrageously > > > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone > > Abhik's > > > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he > > > comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo > > like > > > you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more > > > dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > > 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. > > > To unsubscribe: > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070301/ec0e87bf/attachment.html From emma.med at gmail.com Thu Mar 1 17:38:11 2007 From: emma.med at gmail.com (emma d) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 17:38:11 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: <45E6C23E.6080500@sarai.net> References: <45E69819.9080406@sarai.net> <45E6B85E.2010406@sarai.net> <45E6C23E.6080500@sarai.net> Message-ID: Thought of what?! I still believe that even pimps have more dignity than certain Bong men like Shuddha! And, yes thanks for the "moderator" advice On 3/1/07, Iram Ghufran wrote: > > > Dear Emma, > > You should have thought of that before you make statements like - "Even > pimps have more dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you!" on > a public list. > > Anyway, I do hope your anxieties regarding list 'moderation' are > satisfied. > > Best > Iram > > > emma d wrote: > > Get a life man! Is there any point in going on and on about Shuddha's > > response to Jogis' posting! Seriously, get a life! Besides, I > > certainly believe you ought to re-read Shuddha's response entirely > > again, wherein he expresses how he "understands" that weirdo's > > response to Jogi's crazed posting! > > The end? Amen? > > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* > > > wrote: > > > > Emma, > > > > I think you are confusing issues. > > > > A) "don't you have anyone to fuck" is not a nice thing to say to > > anyone but these sentiments were expressed in a personal mail by > > Abhik. > > I chose not to comment on those. > > > > B) "awaiting moderator's approval" is an AUTOMATED response to > > TECHNICAL > > glitches. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the content > > of the > > mail (unless there are attachments) > > > > I think you need to read posting protocols again. They have been > > sent on > > this list before and I will forward them to you in a separate mail. > > > > C) By the way, I think Shuddhabrata's response did express concerns > > regarding Abhik's unfortunate statement to Vedavati's provocative > > statement. You should read it again. > > > > "Let me clarify at the very beginning that I find the contents of > the > > exchange between Vedavati and Abhit (which we have all been > > subjected to because of Vedavati's forward, with comment, of > > Abhik's off list email to her) sad and deplorable. While Abhik's > > language betrays an > > unfortunate misogyny, Vedavati's postings and responses are not > > exactly exemplars of liberality and tolerance." > > > > Best > > Iram > > > > emma d wrote: > > > Dear Iram, It would have been nice if you could have expressed > > > similar concerns when the "don't you have anyone to fuck" first > > > appeared on the list! Where did the "awaiting moderator's > approval" > > > thingy disappear then! Emma > > > > > > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* < iram at sarai.net > > > >> > > > wrote: > > > > > > Dear list members, > > > Please refrain from making personal/ individual statements > > regrading > > > other list members and communities on this forum. The reader > > list > > > is a > > > non moderated public list. And I guess thats where the > challenge > > > lies - > > > How do we - as members of this list (of more than 1200 people) > > > > exercise > > > our freedom of speech? How will our speech acts be > > remembered by the > > > archives of this list and read/ understood by people who > > browse our > > > public archives in future? No one can stop a list member > > from writing > > > what they like but its a personal request - please think > > before you > > > click the send button. > > > Best > > > Iram > > > (co - member of reader-list) > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > emma d wrote: > > > > > > > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the > > > outrageously > > > > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to > condone > > > Abhik's > > > > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a > > background he > > > > comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A > > pseudo > > > like > > > > you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have > > more > > > > dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! > > > > > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > > > > > _________________________________________ > > > > 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. > > > > To unsubscribe: > > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > > > List archive: > > <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > > > > > > > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070301/15f40158/attachment.html From anjalisaga at blueyonder.co.uk Thu Mar 1 18:08:21 2007 From: anjalisaga at blueyonder.co.uk (Anjalika Sagar) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:38:21 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: References: <45E69819.9080406@sarai.net> <45E6B85E.2010406@sarai.net> <45E6C23E.6080500@sarai.net> Message-ID: <45E6C93D.20209@blueyonder.co.uk> Hello, I following this all with a certain distance, but as someone who is interested in slang I am intrigued ; what on earth is a bong man .... Bests Anjali From anjalisaga at blueyonder.co.uk Thu Mar 1 18:21:51 2007 From: anjalisaga at blueyonder.co.uk (Anjalika Sagar) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:51:51 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: <495206.31084.qm@web53604.mail.yahoo.com> References: <495206.31084.qm@web53604.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <45E6CC67.3030105@blueyonder.co.uk> Thanks - but could you or someone explain the root of this term. Ok I know what a Bong is ... but how does this relate to Bengalis in particular. Cheers Anj > From t.ray at vsnl.com Thu Mar 1 18:32:39 2007 From: t.ray at vsnl.com (Tapas Ray) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 08:02:39 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response References: Message-ID: <00ae01c75c01$e4f59190$ba00a8c0@Tapas> PS to my earlier post: Even though Ms Jogi is probably happy with the way her posts have turned the Sarai list from a very imperfect approximation of a public sphere type space of rational critical discourse into a hate space where identities are being attacked (by Ms Jogi and Emma, for instance) or asserted and defended (as I have done just now), I cannot help thinking that she has reason to be unhappy, too - she can see that there are plenty of list members who will not accept in silence her proselytizing efforts in aid of certain primitive points of view. And yes, I stand with Shuddhabata in "understanding" Abhit's outrage, even though I think, like Shuddha, that his language was wrong, and probably misogynic - even though he merely referred to copulation while the original sin - spreading hatred against Muslims - is often accompanied by rape and murder on a large scale, as in Gujarat, and is not limited to mere verbal references to sexual intercourse ... I should add that I do not know whether Ms Jogi has personally taken part in that sort of mayhem, but she does defend those who indulge in these for breakfast. In law, there is something called "mitigating circumstance". A murder who kills under grave provocation, gets a lesser sentence than one who kills in cold blood. Abhit wrote what he wrote under grave provocation from Ms Jogi. Hence our "understanding". Hope this helps. Tapas Ray > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the outrageously > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone Abhik's > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he comes > from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo like you seems > to > "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more dignity than some Bong > men, some Bong men like you! From rahul_capri at yahoo.com Thu Mar 1 18:38:43 2007 From: rahul_capri at yahoo.com (Rahul Asthana) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 05:08:43 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] Origin of "Bong" In-Reply-To: <45E6CC67.3030105@blueyonder.co.uk> Message-ID: <904909.34649.qm@web53612.mail.yahoo.com> I would think its just an onomatopoeic connection. p.s. Your attempt to derail the more important discussion is noted:) wrote: > Thanks - but could you or someone explain the root > of this term. Ok I > know what a Bong is ... but how does this relate to > Bengalis in particular. > > Cheers > > Anj > > > > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Cheap talk? Check out Yahoo! Messenger's low PC-to-Phone call rates. http://voice.yahoo.com From rana at ranadasgupta.com Thu Mar 1 19:02:31 2007 From: rana at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:02:31 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Pankaj Mishra and Rana Dasgupta Message-ID: <45E6D5EF.9020405@ranadasgupta.com> *HOW TO BE MODERN * Picador India invites you to a conversation between *Pankaj Mishra* author of TEMPTATIONS OF THE WEST *and Rana Dasgupta* author of TOKYO CANCELLED at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, 6 March 2007 Conference Room I, India International Centre 40 Max Mueller Marg, New Delhi *Pankaj Mishra *is the author of /Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India/, /An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World/, and a novel, /The Romantics/, which won the /LA Times /Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. He writes for several publications, including the /New York Review of Books/, the /New Statesman/, /Granta/, the /Times Literary Supplement /and the /Guardian/. /Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond /is his most recent book. *Rana Dasgupta* is based between India and the UK. His first novel, /Tokyo Cancelled/, a thirteen-part story cycle, was published in 2005 and has been translated into nine languages. His work has appeared in such places as the /Guardian/, the /New Statesman /and BBC Radio. He is currently at work on his second novel. From tbd.lists at gmail.com Thu Mar 1 19:05:41 2007 From: tbd.lists at gmail.com (Dinesh, Servelots) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 19:05:41 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: <00ae01c75c01$e4f59190$ba00a8c0@Tapas> References: <00ae01c75c01$e4f59190$ba00a8c0@Tapas> Message-ID: <4573cd0e0703010535k4b6c3ed3ncbc224ec65f33058@mail.gmail.com> My apologies to Ms. V [on behalf of the list?]. I do not consider Abhits mail as personal in the sense it has been discussed here. If anything, it is an indication of what Rahul wrote (ref: sleeve) and I assumed Rahul was talking more about Abhit than Shuddha; and am surprised Shuddha took it personally. And I understand more Emma and Rahuls stance; (and likely empathize with them in also the way..) I always have read Shuddha's writings with joy and would have liked to think he expresses my sentiments (atleast until his response and [ad hominem] biases re: V and A! - as noted by Emma - in this list and as a moderator!?). True, many of us are *beyond Hindutva*.. I wonder if we are *beyond Terrorism* for we desire to empathize with fellow folk -- and maybe anything else would just be farse? :) On 3/1/07, Tapas Ray wrote: > PS to my earlier post: > > Even though Ms Jogi is probably happy with the way her posts have turned the > Sarai list from a very imperfect approximation of a public sphere type space > of rational critical discourse into a hate space where identities are being > attacked (by Ms Jogi and Emma, for instance) or asserted and defended (as I > have done just now), I cannot help thinking that she has reason to be > unhappy, too - she can see that there are plenty of list members who will > not accept in silence her proselytizing efforts in aid of certain primitive > points of view. > > And yes, I stand with Shuddhabata in "understanding" Abhit's outrage, even > though I think, like Shuddha, that his language was wrong, and probably > misogynic - even though he merely referred to copulation while the original > sin - spreading hatred against Muslims - is often accompanied by rape and > murder on a large scale, as in Gujarat, and is not limited to mere verbal > references to sexual intercourse ... I should add that I do not know whether > Ms Jogi has personally taken part in that sort of mayhem, but she does > defend those who indulge in these for breakfast. > > In law, there is something called "mitigating circumstance". A murder who > kills under grave provocation, gets a lesser sentence than one who kills in > cold blood. Abhit wrote what he wrote under grave provocation from Ms Jogi. > Hence our "understanding". > > Hope this helps. > > Tapas Ray > > > > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the outrageously > > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone Abhik's > > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he comes > > from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo like you seems > > to > > "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more dignity than some Bong > > men, some Bong men like you! > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> -- Dinesh, http://pantoto.com, +9180 26762963 From anjalisaga at blueyonder.co.uk Thu Mar 1 19:28:54 2007 From: anjalisaga at blueyonder.co.uk (Anjalika Sagar) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:58:54 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: <20070301133431.43369.qmail@web53602.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20070301133431.43369.qmail@web53602.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <45E6DC1E.7050405@blueyonder.co.uk> no smiley appeared !! ok cool no worries!!! :-[ > From sadiafwahidi at yahoo.co.in Thu Mar 1 20:30:13 2007 From: sadiafwahidi at yahoo.co.in (S Fatima) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 15:00:13 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] urgent meeting for Delhi's trees Message-ID: <347394.55850.qm@web8412.mail.in.yahoo.com> Dear all, They come, they see, and they cut - yes - those who build cities and develop it - always find trees standing in the way - As one date - there are over 5000 trees in South- central delhi marked for felling - any body going down Josep Broz tito marg would have seen signs of High capacity bust serve boards and numbers on trees there- similarly numbered are the trees along IIT- towards the airport - near Tilak bridge on the left side the the number was 1300+ just one side many of the trees are nearly centurey old amazing beauriful ones- all marked for felling. Imagine what delhi will be , without these ancientgreen caponies, grey cement and concrete with no respite...can we just let them go? - Please come for an urgent meeting, on cutting of Delhi's trees en mass, at Toxics Link office on Monday 5 March 2007 at 2.30pm. Address is H-2 Jangpura Extension New Delhi (Near Eros cinema) The above message was received through SMS from Ravi Agarwal (Toxics Link). Please pass this on to as many people who can make a difference Further, two RTI applications were filed today. One each with NDMC and PWD for the above. Information has been sought for the period March 2007 to March 2008 RTI would also be filed with MCD, Transport Department this week. The information sought in the RTI is as follows. Total number of trees to be cut on PWD/NDMC roads for Road widening, flyovers, High Capacity Bus, metro, Parking Lots, etc Details of the above -project wise which roads, number of trees, species, age of trees Copy of the policy letter/permission letter for cutting trees Copy of compensatory plantation policy document, Name of the officer/and inspection officer responsible Were any alternate plans explored before deciding on cutting the trees. What were they please give details What are the plans for wood disposal that would result after cutting the trees Here is hoping for the best and praying.... take care and come and get as many as you can who can make a difference jaya / Ayush __________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Answers: Share what you know. Learn something new http://in.answers.yahoo.com/ From aman.am at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 00:51:43 2007 From: aman.am at gmail.com (Aman Sethi) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 00:51:43 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response In-Reply-To: <45E6DC1E.7050405@blueyonder.co.uk> References: <20070301133431.43369.qmail@web53602.mail.yahoo.com> <45E6DC1E.7050405@blueyonder.co.uk> Message-ID: <995a19920703011121xeb225f2u25c5c21d7cec6b7a@mail.gmail.com> But what about the pimp? Who is the pimp, and why doesnt he have any dignity? If one was to take the idea of the pimp as "the dalal", then, the dalal is often a much respected person - he/she (yes there are women who are dalals) is the one who makes possible impossible things - such as the provision of water/ electricty and land in some authorised colonies; the fixer of arranged marriages between agra and azamgarh; and the person who manipulates autorickshaw meters. So the term dalal to anyone who does anything for a commission. Is that respectable or dignified? well, i would say yes in many instances. Now if one did not translate pimp into dalal - and just considered its usage in certain cultures - like MTV :) - pimping is something that is rather cool. As an example, i offer - MTV's Pimp my Ride, presented by Xzibit. Pimp my Ride, for the uninitiated, is a show where polite, well adjusted individuals get MTV to spent hundreds of dollars to transform their bashed old cars into lean mean automachines. Pimping in this context seems to mean "to ameliorate" or to coin a phrase , "coolize". Given the current coolness of some pimps, i think emma might just be right . A lot of pimps have waaay more dignity than i guess i do. Best, as always, A. On 3/1/07, Anjalika Sagar wrote: > no smiley appeared !! ok cool no worries!!! :-[ > > > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From shuddha at sarai.net Fri Mar 2 02:13:50 2007 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:13:50 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response] Message-ID: <45E73B06.4010504@sarai.net> Dear Emma, Iram, Rahul, Tapas, Anjalika, Dinesh, Aman (and everyone else) Now this is really getting interesting. :) In fact far more interesting than what was going on when Vedavati and Abhik were trading charges. The question of dignity is actually worth a real discussion, so maybe we could get down to it one of these days, and while we are at it we should also talk about robustly multi-coloured categories such as humiliation. I am in complete agreement with Emma D when she says that "even pimps have more dignity than certain bong men" and I am including myself in the category of the bong man, once more, in agreement with her when she ends the above statement by saying 'like shuddha'. One cannot escape what in bengali we call 'bongshodosh' (the misfortune of our descent, to which I could add the curse, or mixed blessing, or 'bad luck hi kharab hai' - of one's gonads, though it appears that surgery and modern medicine bring hope to many, especially to those nominally XY chromosomed individuals made melancholic by the misfortune of inappropriate gendering) So, some pimps have a great deal of dignity. Certainly. But let's make things a little more precise and complicated at the same time. Some bong men (not all, some) may have as much dignity as your common or garden pimp, and an insignificant few may in fact have more dignity than the average pimp. It's incredible, I know, but it has been known to happen. I have in fact met one or two incredibly dignified, refined, erudite, and slightly mad, very sad, bong men in my life. (And none of them are now or ever have been, relatives of mine. Dignity is probably a recessive gene in the case of my extended lineage and kinship network.) This is also further complicated by the fact that there are several pimps who also happen to be bong men. I mean, you dont even need to stroll down Shonagachi to know that gentlemen who might answer to names such as 'Tokai','Jhonta' 'Deb-dulal', 'Mortaza moshai' 'Gomes' and 'Boro Photik' are bong, men and pimps. They smell of kashundi, parshey maacch and make their money as only they know best. Some, maybe, such as Deb-dulal, Mortaza Moshai, Gomes, and Boro Photik are honourable and dignified pimps, 'oder baajaare naam-daak acchey', others, such as Tokai and Jhonta are what we would call 'cchoto-lpk, raskel (rascal) and luj (loose) character'. Mairi bolcchi, Dignity comes striated, even when it visits pimps. It is not yet established as to whether all bong women have as much dignity as pimps or bong men. It is also not yet known as to whether bong women who pimp retain as much dignity as others who don't, and other men who do. This is a matter of ongoing investigation. Being a bong man, I am possesed about an ontological certainty about myself and others like me. But I cannot speak with any certainty about bong women. Perhaps the bong women on this list might like to undertake their own self-reflexive auto-critique. But let me not stray. Once again, some women sex workers in genteel semi retirement who do not get to the position of being the 'madam' or 'mashi' sometimes have to make do with being 'ejent (agent)' or 'didi' or dalal, or pimp. This happens, and some, who might be called 'Komola', or 'Mrinmoyee' (Minu) or 'Fatema-bi', or 'Agnes' might be actually women possessed of great honour and dignity. On the other hand, it is quite likely that others who might have names like 'Elokeshi' and 'Paanchi' might have cheated a lot of sex workers (their own erstwhile comrades) of their due. "Kono shala maagi ba dalaaler maathaye morjaadar hishep aanka nei.Maathai tilok kaata bamun-thakur hoyto-ba morjaadar naap ta nitey ebong ditey paaren, kintu aamar moto dalaaler eto baar ekhono baareni je haamesha inchi tape niye nijer morjadar aaga-paanch-tola doirgho-prosto nepey berabo. Shomoye'r boro obhab, memshayeb, boro shonkot. Aar ta cchara, koto jinisher hisheb jey ekhono baaki." yani-ke "Kisi raand ya bharue ke maathe par uske maryada ka naap-tol likha nahin hota. Maathey pe tilak kaat kar maryaada ko pongey-pandit naapte honge, lekin mujh jaise bharuey ki itni aukaad nahin hai ki mai hamesha inchi tape leke apney maryaade ke lambaai-chaaurai ke maujuda haal ka khabar detey firun. Time-time ki baat hoti hai mem'saab, aur hamaare paas time kam hai. Aur bahut kuch baaki hai naapne ko. " Apologies, readers, for the untranslatable, which must remain more or less as such. But since ethnic references have come into play with such full force, I thought it might be interesting to ask how we gloss 'pimping' which describes an activity in relation to 'bong' which describes the accident of birth, language and to some extent, geography. I can see quite easily how one can put 'pimps' with 'commission agent' or 'negotiator' or 'adjuster' or even 'accountant' or 'public relations professional' in one sub set and 'mallus' with 'bongs' and 'uplas' in another. One is a vocation or profession or calling, and the other is a description of the language one speaks, or the cultural matrix one inherits, embedded in, or trapped by. But the mathematics that allows us to construct a calculation that involves both 'bongs' and 'pimps' as indices that can be read off each other in terms of the intensity of dignity is somehow opaque to me. I want to understand how we can actually conduct this operation, how 'pimp' and 'bong' can be made to stand together as terms with interchangable valence in the same equation. (How else would we be able to make a quantitative comparison between these two vis a vis that enigmatic third term - 'dignity') Instinctively, I have a sense that what Emma D is saying is right. "Even pimps have more dignity than certain bong men". But I want to understand what makes this sentence so accurate. I really do. I will be grateful if Emma d or anyone else, can shed light on this matter. warm regards, benche thakun, I hope none of you will take amiss my sincere effort to understand all that is being said, by everyone concerned. Shuddha, emma d wrote: > Thought of what?! I still believe that even pimps have more dignity than > certain Bong men like Shuddha! > > And, yes thanks for the "moderator" advice > > > On 3/1/07, Iram Ghufran wrote: > >> >> >> Dear Emma, >> >> You should have thought of that before you make statements like - "Even >> pimps have more dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you!" on >> a public list. >> >> Anyway, I do hope your anxieties regarding list 'moderation' are >> satisfied. >> >> Best >> Iram >> >> >> emma d wrote: >> > Get a life man! Is there any point in going on and on about Shuddha's >> > response to Jogis' posting! Seriously, get a life! Besides, I >> > certainly believe you ought to re-read Shuddha's response entirely >> > again, wherein he expresses how he "understands" that weirdo's >> > response to Jogi's crazed posting! >> > The end? Amen? >> > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* > >> > wrote: >> > >> > Emma, >> > >> > I think you are confusing issues. >> > >> > A) "don't you have anyone to fuck" is not a nice thing to say to >> > anyone but these sentiments were expressed in a personal mail by >> > Abhik. >> > I chose not to comment on those. >> > >> > B) "awaiting moderator's approval" is an AUTOMATED response to >> > TECHNICAL >> > glitches. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the content >> > of the >> > mail (unless there are attachments) >> > >> > I think you need to read posting protocols again. They have been >> > sent on >> > this list before and I will forward them to you in a separate mail. >> > >> > C) By the way, I think Shuddhabrata's response did express concerns >> > regarding Abhik's unfortunate statement to Vedavati's provocative >> > statement. You should read it again. >> > >> > "Let me clarify at the very beginning that I find the contents of >> the >> > exchange between Vedavati and Abhit (which we have all been >> > subjected to because of Vedavati's forward, with comment, of >> > Abhik's off list email to her) sad and deplorable. While Abhik's >> > language betrays an >> > unfortunate misogyny, Vedavati's postings and responses are not >> > exactly exemplars of liberality and tolerance." >> > >> > Best >> > Iram >> > >> > emma d wrote: >> > > Dear Iram, It would have been nice if you could have expressed >> > > similar concerns when the "don't you have anyone to fuck" first >> > > appeared on the list! Where did the "awaiting moderator's >> approval" >> > > thingy disappear then! Emma >> > > >> > > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* < iram at sarai.net >> > > > >> >> > > wrote: >> > > >> > > Dear list members, >> > > Please refrain from making personal/ individual statements >> > regrading >> > > other list members and communities on this forum. The reader >> > list >> > > is a >> > > non moderated public list. And I guess thats where the >> challenge >> > > lies - >> > > How do we - as members of this list (of more than 1200 >> people) >> >> > > exercise >> > > our freedom of speech? How will our speech acts be >> > remembered by the >> > > archives of this list and read/ understood by people who >> > browse our >> > > public archives in future? No one can stop a list member >> > from writing >> > > what they like but its a personal request - please think >> > before you >> > > click the send button. >> > > Best >> > > Iram >> > > (co - member of reader-list) >> > > >> > > >> > > >> > > >> > > emma d wrote: >> > > > >> > > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the >> > > outrageously >> > > > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to >> condone >> > > Abhik's >> > > > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a >> > background he >> > > > comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A >> > pseudo >> > > like >> > > > you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have >> > more >> > > > dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! >> > > > >> > > >> > >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> > > > >> > > > _________________________________________ >> > > > 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 > reader-list-request at sarai.net >> > >> > > > > > with subscribe in the >> > > subject header. >> > > > To unsubscribe: >> > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list >> > > > List archive: >> > <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> >> > > >> > > >> > >> > >> >> > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From t.ray at vsnl.com Fri Mar 2 07:05:53 2007 From: t.ray at vsnl.com (Tapas Ray) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 20:35:53 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response] References: <45E73B06.4010504@sarai.net> Message-ID: <001501c75c6b$241f0fe0$ba00a8c0@Tapas> Shuddha, I would love to know where those quotes are from. You really do take the cake, though not in the way someone ... I think it was Emma D (or was it E or F?) ... said you did. That is a most enjoyable post, and not the least because of the inside stuff from Shobhabajar. (For those who are not familiar with Calcutta, Shobhabajar is the metro railway stop at which one would have to get off if one wanted to meet Shuddha's dignified pimps, for whatever purpose.) ... I can hear some people hiss on the sidelines: "See! The Bong pseudosecularist starts drooling the moment someone says "pimp"!" Having said that, I must take issue with you for appropriating all the pimply (I mean pimp-ly, not zitty) dignity for us Bongs. Going by his name, Gomes could very well be an Anglo-Indian or Goanese individual. If that were indeed the case, pimps of the Anglo-Indian community or those from the Konkan coast (that's where Goa is, isn't it?), as the case might be, would be justified in feeling aggrieved. We wouldn't want to hurt their feelings, would we? In case anyone has any doubts about my motive for standing up for Anglo-Indian and Konkanese pimps, let me confess that I just want to demonstrate my broadmindedness (not in the sense in which "BM couples" or "broadminded couples" are said to do). This comes naturally to pseudosecularists who wear their pseudosecularism and assorted liberalisms on their sleeves. Tapas > Dear Emma, Iram, Rahul, Tapas, Anjalika, Dinesh, Aman (and everyone else) > > Now this is really getting interesting. :) > > In fact far more interesting than what was going on when Vedavati and > Abhik were trading charges. > > The question of dignity is actually worth a real discussion, so maybe we > could get down to it one of these days, and while we are at it we should > also talk about robustly multi-coloured categories such as humiliation. > > I am in complete agreement with Emma D when she says that "even pimps > have more dignity than certain bong men" and I am including myself in > the category of the bong man, once more, in agreement with her when she > ends the above statement by saying 'like shuddha'. > > One cannot escape what in bengali we call 'bongshodosh' (the misfortune > of our descent, to which I could add the curse, or mixed blessing, or > 'bad luck hi kharab hai' - of one's gonads, though it appears that > surgery and modern medicine bring hope to many, especially to those > nominally XY chromosomed individuals made melancholic by the misfortune > of inappropriate gendering) > > So, some pimps have a great deal of dignity. Certainly. > > But let's make things a little more precise and complicated at the same > time. Some bong men (not all, some) may have as much dignity as your > common or garden pimp, and an insignificant few may in fact have more > dignity than the average pimp. It's incredible, I know, but it has been > known to happen. I have in fact met one or two incredibly dignified, > refined, erudite, and slightly mad, very sad, bong men in my life. (And > none of them are now or ever have been, relatives of mine. Dignity is > probably a recessive gene in the case of my extended lineage and kinship > network.) > > This is also further complicated by the fact that there are several > pimps who also happen to be bong men. I mean, you dont even need to > stroll down Shonagachi to know that gentlemen who might answer to names > such as 'Tokai','Jhonta' 'Deb-dulal', 'Mortaza moshai' 'Gomes' and 'Boro > Photik' are bong, men and pimps. They smell of kashundi, parshey maacch > and make their money as only they know best. Some, maybe, such as > Deb-dulal, Mortaza Moshai, Gomes, and Boro Photik are honourable and > dignified pimps, 'oder baajaare naam-daak acchey', others, such as Tokai > and Jhonta are what we would call 'cchoto-lpk, raskel (rascal) and luj > (loose) character'. Mairi bolcchi, Dignity comes striated, even when it > visits pimps. > > It is not yet established as to whether all bong women have as much > dignity as pimps or bong men. It is also not yet known as to whether > bong women who pimp retain as much dignity as others who don't, and > other men who do. This is a matter of ongoing investigation. Being a > bong man, I am possesed about an ontological certainty about myself and > others like me. But I cannot speak with any certainty about bong women. > Perhaps the bong women on this list might like to undertake their own > self-reflexive auto-critique. > > But let me not stray. Once again, some women sex workers in genteel semi > retirement who do not get to the position of being the 'madam' or > 'mashi' sometimes have to make do with being 'ejent (agent)' or 'didi' > or dalal, or pimp. This happens, and some, who might be called 'Komola', > or 'Mrinmoyee' (Minu) or 'Fatema-bi', or 'Agnes' might be actually women > possessed of great honour and dignity. On the other hand, it is quite > likely that others who might have names like 'Elokeshi' and 'Paanchi' > might have cheated a lot of sex workers (their own erstwhile comrades) > of their due. > > "Kono shala maagi ba dalaaler maathaye morjaadar hishep aanka > nei.Maathai tilok kaata bamun-thakur hoyto-ba morjaadar naap ta nitey > ebong ditey paaren, kintu aamar moto dalaaler eto baar ekhono baareni je > haamesha inchi tape niye nijer morjadar aaga-paanch-tola doirgho-prosto > nepey berabo. Shomoye'r boro obhab, memshayeb, boro shonkot. Aar ta > cchara, koto jinisher hisheb jey ekhono baaki." > > yani-ke > > "Kisi raand ya bharue ke maathe par uske maryada ka naap-tol likha nahin > hota. Maathey pe tilak kaat kar maryaada ko pongey-pandit naapte honge, > lekin mujh jaise bharuey ki itni aukaad nahin hai ki mai hamesha inchi > tape leke apney maryaade ke lambaai-chaaurai ke maujuda haal ka khabar > detey firun. Time-time ki baat hoti hai mem'saab, aur hamaare paas time > kam hai. Aur bahut kuch baaki hai naapne ko. " > > Apologies, readers, for the untranslatable, which must remain more or > less as such. But since ethnic references have come into play with such > full force, I thought it might be interesting to ask how we gloss > 'pimping' which describes an activity in relation to 'bong' which > describes the accident of birth, language and to some extent, geography. > I can see quite easily how one can put 'pimps' with 'commission agent' > or 'negotiator' or 'adjuster' or even 'accountant' or 'public relations > professional' in one sub set and 'mallus' with 'bongs' and 'uplas' in > another. One is a vocation or profession or calling, and the other is a > description of the language one speaks, or the cultural matrix one > inherits, embedded in, or trapped by. > > But the mathematics that allows us to construct a calculation that > involves both 'bongs' and 'pimps' as indices that can be read off each > other in terms of the intensity of dignity is somehow opaque to me. I > want to understand how we can actually conduct this operation, how > 'pimp' and 'bong' can be made to stand together as terms with > interchangable valence in the same equation. (How else would we be able > to make a quantitative comparison between these two vis a vis that > enigmatic third term - 'dignity') > > Instinctively, I have a sense that what Emma D is saying is right. "Even > pimps have more dignity than certain bong men". But I want to understand > what makes this sentence so accurate. I really do. I will be grateful if > Emma d or anyone else, can shed light on this matter. > > warm regards, benche thakun, I hope none of you will take amiss my > sincere effort to understand all that is being said, by everyone > concerned. > > Shuddha, > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From anjalisaga at blueyonder.co.uk Fri Mar 2 07:16:49 2007 From: anjalisaga at blueyonder.co.uk (Anjalika Sagar) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:46:49 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response] In-Reply-To: <45E73B06.4010504@sarai.net> References: <45E73B06.4010504@sarai.net> Message-ID: <45E78209.4020208@blueyonder.co.uk> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070302/54865884/attachment.html From ravig64 at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 07:34:03 2007 From: ravig64 at gmail.com (Ravi Agarwal) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 07:34:03 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Butchering Trees and Pavements Message-ID: Dear all, As I spend another morning today trying to gather evidence of the trees , over 2500, marked for felling, I find I cannot shoot for more than some minutes. To see fully grown trees, of all shades and varieties, the type you cannot find in Delhi any more, some over 50 years old marked for felling in yellow ink and numbers etched onto the tree trunks, is more than I can accept. Behind the construction boards of the HSBS ( High Capacity Bus Service) lies a trail of disaster. Uprooted giants of trees, some axed, some bleeding at the roots, mercilessly felled. I know of no other city where 8 land higways criss cross it. ( From exisiting 6 lane this will now become 8 lane with the new service). Cleave it through and hack all that in its way. And a citenzery whcih is so quiet that it took a week to even get the media to do a story on it. There is such silence and such uncertainty. The isolation which can be afforded through the window panes of cars, where we sit an decide if we can afford to raise our voices or maybe this will go away and no one will know. Like it never hapenned. My friend the photo printer told me "dil dehal jaata hai jab mei us sarak per jaato hoon. Kitne bade and sunder per, aise hi kaat denge.?" My heart stops when I go on that road, will such big and majestic trees just be cut? Another friend who lives in Saket, refuses to look out of the taxi window, since it upsets her so much. Like it does me. Whose consensus was sought. When this project was approved. Who made the decision that the road is needed. Who saw the traffic studies? Who justified it. Who executed it? How is the consensus made? How are such decisions taken? Someone's pet project. Someone well respected in the city. Someone who has always talked about pedisterisation and cycle ways. Now that very project stripping the city of trees, and pavements. For a high capacity bus! In the last post I wrote about my inability to act. I wonder if it is the larger inability to act. How we seem to have said 'yes' without saying anything. How we maybe are caught up in our not wanting to neogotiate our little gains or how we justify them to ourselves (the city needs better transport! - read as "I like my car!"). There is not point thinking and pontificating if we are not prepared to participate in what is going on. The city has been changing as I write. By April end, the city would have lost over 3000 of its most glorious and old trees. Then we can get to work on time. I suppose - to a better future! ravi agarwal From taraprakash at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 07:57:16 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 07:57:16 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Butchering Trees and Pavements References: Message-ID: <00f601c75c72$4ed27130$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> It's really sad. What are these high capacity buses by the way? The same low floor buses supposed to be convenient for the physically challenged? If yes, they are simply white elephants. till the time I was in Delhi last year, they plied on a route hardly used by the supposed beneficiaries. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ravi Agarwal" To: Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 7:34 AM Subject: [Reader-list] Butchering Trees and Pavements > Dear all, > > As I spend another morning today trying to gather evidence of the > trees , over 2500, marked for felling, I find I cannot shoot for more > than some minutes. To see fully grown trees, of all shades and > varieties, the type you cannot find in Delhi any more, some over 50 > years old marked for felling in yellow ink and numbers etched onto > the tree trunks, is more than I can accept. Behind the construction > boards of the HSBS ( High Capacity Bus Service) lies a trail of > disaster. Uprooted giants of trees, some axed, some bleeding at the > roots, mercilessly felled. > > I know of no other city where 8 land higways criss cross it. ( From > exisiting 6 lane this will now become 8 lane with the new service). > Cleave it through and hack all that in its way. And a citenzery whcih > is so quiet that it took a week to even get the media to do a story > on it. There is such silence and such uncertainty. The isolation > which can be afforded through the window panes of cars, where we sit > an decide if we can afford to raise our voices or maybe this will go > away and no one will know. Like it never hapenned. > > My friend the photo printer told me "dil dehal jaata hai jab mei us > sarak per jaato hoon. Kitne bade and sunder per, aise hi kaat > denge.?" My heart stops when I go on that road, will such big and > majestic trees just be cut? Another friend who lives in Saket, > refuses to look out of the taxi window, since it upsets her so much. > Like it does me. > > Whose consensus was sought. When this project was approved. Who made > the decision that the road is needed. Who saw the traffic studies? > Who justified it. Who executed it? How is the consensus made? How are > such decisions taken? Someone's pet project. Someone well respected > in the city. Someone who has always talked about pedisterisation and > cycle ways. Now that very project stripping the city of trees, and > pavements. For a high capacity bus! > > In the last post I wrote about my inability to act. I wonder if it is > the larger inability to act. How we seem to have said 'yes' without > saying anything. How we maybe are caught up in our not wanting to > neogotiate our little gains or how we justify them to ourselves (the > city needs better transport! - read as "I like my car!"). There is > not point thinking and pontificating if we are not prepared to > participate in what is going on. The city has been changing as I > write. By April end, the city would have lost over 3000 of its most > glorious and old trees. Then we can get to work on time. I suppose - > to a better future! > > ravi agarwal > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From ravig64 at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 08:37:46 2007 From: ravig64 at gmail.com (Ravi Agarwal) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 08:37:46 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Butchering Trees and Pavements In-Reply-To: <00f601c75c72$4ed27130$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> References: <00f601c75c72$4ed27130$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> Message-ID: <453C18C2-CD91-47EF-8A63-62AB50185053@gmail.com> Dear Taraprakash, Long buses which swivel in the middle I think! Maybe some of them also can lower for those who cannot alight otherwise. All made by Volvo i think. But that is also the issue. No one really knows. No one has been told. Till a couple of months back they needed 'no new roads.' But then that could not be really true. So then what was told was untrue. All deadlines are now on high speed. There is the Commonwealth Games to cater to. What would have taken long earlier, is now only a matter of months. Budget constraints are non existent. All contraversial projects are now "full speed ahead." Yamuna riverfront clearance of settlements, metro through the ridge, tunnel road under Humayun's tomb, High Capacity Bus through the city, Commonwealth village on the riverbed, at least two new river bridges.....the list is endless. The last time such massive changes (actually on a much smaller scale compared to now) was in the mid seventies for the Asian Games. Now the Commonwealth Games. Who can question 'national pride?!' ravi On Mar 2, 2007, at 7:57 AM, Taraprakash wrote: It's really sad. What are these high capacity buses by the way? The same low floor buses supposed to be convenient for the physically challenged? If yes, they are simply white elephants. till the time I was in Delhi last year, they plied on a route hardly used by the supposed beneficiaries. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ravi Agarwal" To: Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 7:34 AM Subject: [Reader-list] Butchering Trees and Pavements > Dear all, > > As I spend another morning today trying to gather evidence of the > trees , over 2500, marked for felling, I find I cannot shoot for more > than some minutes. To see fully grown trees, of all shades and > varieties, the type you cannot find in Delhi any more, some over 50 > years old marked for felling in yellow ink and numbers etched onto > the tree trunks, is more than I can accept. Behind the construction > boards of the HSBS ( High Capacity Bus Service) lies a trail of > disaster. Uprooted giants of trees, some axed, some bleeding at the > roots, mercilessly felled. > > I know of no other city where 8 land higways criss cross it. ( From > exisiting 6 lane this will now become 8 lane with the new service). > Cleave it through and hack all that in its way. And a citenzery whcih > is so quiet that it took a week to even get the media to do a story > on it. There is such silence and such uncertainty. The isolation > which can be afforded through the window panes of cars, where we sit > an decide if we can afford to raise our voices or maybe this will go > away and no one will know. Like it never hapenned. > > My friend the photo printer told me "dil dehal jaata hai jab mei us > sarak per jaato hoon. Kitne bade and sunder per, aise hi kaat > denge.?" My heart stops when I go on that road, will such big and > majestic trees just be cut? Another friend who lives in Saket, > refuses to look out of the taxi window, since it upsets her so much. > Like it does me. > > Whose consensus was sought. When this project was approved. Who made > the decision that the road is needed. Who saw the traffic studies? > Who justified it. Who executed it? How is the consensus made? How are > such decisions taken? Someone's pet project. Someone well respected > in the city. Someone who has always talked about pedisterisation and > cycle ways. Now that very project stripping the city of trees, and > pavements. For a high capacity bus! > > In the last post I wrote about my inability to act. I wonder if it is > the larger inability to act. How we seem to have said 'yes' without > saying anything. How we maybe are caught up in our not wanting to > neogotiate our little gains or how we justify them to ourselves (the > city needs better transport! - read as "I like my car!"). There is > not point thinking and pontificating if we are not prepared to > participate in what is going on. The city has been changing as I > write. By April end, the city would have lost over 3000 of its most > glorious and old trees. Then we can get to work on time. I suppose - > to a better future! > > ravi agarwal > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From gowharfazili at yahoo.com Fri Mar 2 10:43:52 2007 From: gowharfazili at yahoo.com (gowhar fazli) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 21:13:52 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] On Abhik-Vedavati controversey In-Reply-To: <45E78209.4020208@blueyonder.co.uk> Message-ID: <427268.73650.qm@web60623.mail.yahoo.com> Have been silently reading these mails with intellectual as well as voyeuristic interest. While understanding the insult felt by Vedavati by the personal manner in which the question was addressed to her by Abhik and expressing my sincere condemnation... i think the question if addressed more generally is still valid and parliamentary... i.e. Whether there is a connection between sexual deprivation/repression and communal/fascist mindset. Is it a huge coincidence that various brands of fundamentalism/fascism seem to have a problem with sexuality/sex while being xenophobic at the same time? Is it then a bad question to ask? Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a super-abundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares. Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. Peter Ustinov ____________________________________________________________________________________ Want to start your own business? Learn how on Yahoo! Small Business. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/r-index From nityajacob at yahoo.com Fri Mar 2 09:53:17 2007 From: nityajacob at yahoo.com (Nitya Jacob) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 20:23:17 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response] Message-ID: <549891.21716.qm@web30810.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I guess Ms V J will be laughing all the way to Mandir. After all, she started this joke with an OFFENSIVE blog and look where its gone - to the Bongs. Its going bong bong, bongie, wongie, wonky. Time to get back on the rails guys - the Sangh is on its the upswing. all it takes is a woman in (khaki) knickers to set bongs off. Meanwhile what of the original, the one and only, Ms VJ. Like all our culprits and her shitty blog, she has proven to be a fake as well. N ----- Original Message ---- From: Anjalika Sagar To: shuddha at sarai.net Cc: sarai list Sent: Friday, March 2, 2007 7:16:49 AM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response] :-D :-D :-D Bong man is such a funny term of abuse ... kind of affectionate or am I wrong ? Nothing then to do with Bongs, i.e water pipes or buckets, only Gonads yes or no ? I will use it to irritate Bengali friends ... ! Anymore national treasures ? Bests anj Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: Dear Emma, Iram, Rahul, Tapas, Anjalika, Dinesh, Aman (and everyone else) Now this is really getting interesting. :) In fact far more interesting than what was going on when Vedavati and Abhik were trading charges. The question of dignity is actually worth a real discussion, so maybe we could get down to it one of these days, and while we are at it we should also talk about robustly multi-coloured categories such as humiliation. I am in complete agreement with Emma D when she says that "even pimps have more dignity than certain bong men" and I am including myself in the category of the bong man, once more, in agreement with her when she ends the above statement by saying 'like shuddha'. One cannot escape what in bengali we call 'bongshodosh' (the misfortune of our descent, to which I could add the curse, or mixed blessing, or 'bad luck hi kharab hai' - of one's gonads, though it appears that surgery and modern medicine bring hope to many, especially to those nominally XY chromosomed individuals made melancholic by the misfortune of inappropriate gendering) So, some pimps have a great deal of dignity. Certainly. But let's make things a little more precise and complicated at the same time. Some bong men (not all, some) may have as much dignity as your common or garden pimp, and an insignificant few may in fact have more dignity than the average pimp. It's incredible, I know, but it has been known to happen. I have in fact met one or two incredibly dignified, refined, erudite, and slightly mad, very sad, bong men in my life. (And none of them are now or ever have been, relatives of mine. Dignity is probably a recessive gene in the case of my extended lineage and kinship network.) This is also further complicated by the fact that there are several pimps who also happen to be bong men. I mean, you dont even need to stroll down Shonagachi to know that gentlemen who might answer to names such as 'Tokai','Jhonta' 'Deb-dulal', 'Mortaza moshai' 'Gomes' and 'Boro Photik' are bong, men and pimps. They smell of kashundi, parshey maacch and make their money as only they know best. Some, maybe, such as Deb-dulal, Mortaza Moshai, Gomes, and Boro Photik are honourable and dignified pimps, 'oder baajaare naam-daak acchey', others, such as Tokai and Jhonta are what we would call 'cchoto-lpk, raskel (rascal) and luj (loose) character'. Mairi bolcchi, Dignity comes striated, even when it visits pimps. It is not yet established as to whether all bong women have as much dignity as pimps or bong men. It is also not yet known as to whether bong women who pimp retain as much dignity as others who don't, and other men who do. This is a matter of ongoing investigation. Being a bong man, I am possesed about an ontological certainty about myself and others like me. But I cannot speak with any certainty about bong women. Perhaps the bong women on this list might like to undertake their own self-reflexive auto-critique. But let me not stray. Once again, some women sex workers in genteel semi retirement who do not get to the position of being the 'madam' or 'mashi' sometimes have to make do with being 'ejent (agent)' or 'didi' or dalal, or pimp. This happens, and some, who might be called 'Komola', or 'Mrinmoyee' (Minu) or 'Fatema-bi', or 'Agnes' might be actually women possessed of great honour and dignity. On the other hand, it is quite likely that others who might have names like 'Elokeshi' and 'Paanchi' might have cheated a lot of sex workers (their own erstwhile comrades) of their due. "Kono shala maagi ba dalaaler maathaye morjaadar hishep aanka nei.Maathai tilok kaata bamun-thakur hoyto-ba morjaadar naap ta nitey ebong ditey paaren, kintu aamar moto dalaaler eto baar ekhono baareni je haamesha inchi tape niye nijer morjadar aaga-paanch-tola doirgho-prosto nepey berabo. Shomoye'r boro obhab, memshayeb, boro shonkot. Aar ta cchara, koto jinisher hisheb jey ekhono baaki." yani-ke "Kisi raand ya bharue ke maathe par uske maryada ka naap-tol likha nahin hota. Maathey pe tilak kaat kar maryaada ko pongey-pandit naapte honge, lekin mujh jaise bharuey ki itni aukaad nahin hai ki mai hamesha inchi tape leke apney maryaade ke lambaai-chaaurai ke maujuda haal ka khabar detey firun. Time-time ki baat hoti hai mem'saab, aur hamaare paas time kam hai. Aur bahut kuch baaki hai naapne ko. " Apologies, readers, for the untranslatable, which must remain more or less as such. But since ethnic references have come into play with such full force, I thought it might be interesting to ask how we gloss 'pimping' which describes an activity in relation to 'bong' which describes the accident of birth, language and to some extent, geography. I can see quite easily how one can put 'pimps' with 'commission agent' or 'negotiator' or 'adjuster' or even 'accountant' or 'public relations professional' in one sub set and 'mallus' with 'bongs' and 'uplas' in another. One is a vocation or profession or calling, and the other is a description of the language one speaks, or the cultural matrix one inherits, embedded in, or trapped by. But the mathematics that allows us to construct a calculation that involves both 'bongs' and 'pimps' as indices that can be read off each other in terms of the intensity of dignity is somehow opaque to me. I want to understand how we can actually conduct this operation, how 'pimp' and 'bong' can be made to stand together as terms with interchangable valence in the same equation. (How else would we be able to make a quantitative comparison between these two vis a vis that enigmatic third term - 'dignity') Instinctively, I have a sense that what Emma D is saying is right. "Even pimps have more dignity than certain bong men". But I want to understand what makes this sentence so accurate. I really do. I will be grateful if Emma d or anyone else, can shed light on this matter. warm regards, benche thakun, I hope none of you will take amiss my sincere effort to understand all that is being said, by everyone concerned. Shuddha, emma d wrote: Thought of what?! I still believe that even pimps have more dignity than certain Bong men like Shuddha! And, yes thanks for the "moderator" advice On 3/1/07, Iram Ghufran wrote: Dear Emma, You should have thought of that before you make statements like - "Even pimps have more dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you!" on a public list. Anyway, I do hope your anxieties regarding list 'moderation' are satisfied. Best Iram emma d wrote: Get a life man! Is there any point in going on and on about Shuddha's response to Jogis' posting! Seriously, get a life! Besides, I certainly believe you ought to re-read Shuddha's response entirely again, wherein he expresses how he "understands" that weirdo's response to Jogi's crazed posting! The end? Amen? On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* > wrote: Emma, I think you are confusing issues. A) "don't you have anyone to fuck" is not a nice thing to say to anyone but these sentiments were expressed in a personal mail by Abhik. I chose not to comment on those. B) "awaiting moderator's approval" is an AUTOMATED response to TECHNICAL glitches. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the content of the mail (unless there are attachments) I think you need to read posting protocols again. They have been sent on this list before and I will forward them to you in a separate mail. C) By the way, I think Shuddhabrata's response did express concerns regarding Abhik's unfortunate statement to Vedavati's provocative statement. You should read it again. "Let me clarify at the very beginning that I find the contents of the exchange between Vedavati and Abhit (which we have all been subjected to because of Vedavati's forward, with comment, of Abhik's off list email to her) sad and deplorable. While Abhik's language betrays an unfortunate misogyny, Vedavati's postings and responses are not exactly exemplars of liberality and tolerance." Best Iram emma d wrote: > Dear Iram, It would have been nice if you could have expressed > similar concerns when the "don't you have anyone to fuck" first > appeared on the list! Where did the "awaiting moderator's approval" > thingy disappear then! Emma > > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* < iram at sarai.net >> > wrote: > > Dear list members, > Please refrain from making personal/ individual statements regrading > other list members and communities on this forum. The reader list > is a > non moderated public list. And I guess thats where the challenge > lies - > How do we - as members of this list (of more than 1200 people) > exercise > our freedom of speech? How will our speech acts be remembered by the > archives of this list and read/ understood by people who browse our > public archives in future? No one can stop a list member from writing > what they like but its a personal request - please think before you > click the send button. > Best > Iram > (co - member of reader-list) > > > > > emma d wrote: > > > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the > outrageously > > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone > Abhik's > > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he > > comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo > like > > you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more > > dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > _________________________________________ > > 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. > > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> ____________________________________________________________________________________ Need Mail bonding? Go to the Yahoo! Mail Q&A for great tips from Yahoo! Answers users. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396546091 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070301/e9e47a8b/attachment.html From sadan at sarai.net Fri Mar 2 16:08:51 2007 From: sadan at sarai.net (Sadan) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:38:51 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Sarai,CSDS Student Stipends 2007 Message-ID: <45E7FEBB.7060403@sarai.net> Dear all, Each year Sarai gives stipends to research scholars who are enrolled in academic institutions ( i.e. university and research institutes) from various parts of India. Apart from financial support, selected researchers get an opportunity to participate in three workshops, receive intellectual feedback on their ongoing research, interact with a wider community of academicians and practitioners ( working on the urban) and also get reading material for reference. We have now concluded our selection process for the Sarai,CSDS student stipend awards for 2007. We received a large number of proposals in English and Hindi from all over the country. We were delighted by a good number of very high quality research proposals received in response to our call. Of these, 20 proposals were finally selected for support. A list of selected stipendiaries are given below. Thanks Sadan Jha. Sarai,CSDS Student Stipendship Programme. List Of Selected Student Stipends For Research On The City 2007 1. Sangeeta Chandu Thosar, Pune, “Political Leadership of Women in Pune City: A Dalit Feminist study (1995-2007)”, M.Phil. Political Science, Yashwantrao Chavan Marathwada Open University, Nasik. rajsangitta at yahoo.co.in 2. Ipsita Sahu, Delhi, “Negotiating Boundaries: A comparative study of the Multiplex culture in the urban and the sub-urban space and the role of the multiplex in dissolving the urban and sub-urban boundary”, M.A. Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. ipssahu18 at gmail.com 3. Agniv Ghosh, Delhi, “Nabababus And Their New Calcutta”, M.A. Bengali Literature, Delhi University, Delhi. agnivghosh at gmail.com, agnivghosh at yahoo.com 4. Rohit Parkash, Patna, “Kalidas Rangalaya: Patna Ka Ek Sanskritik Kendra”, M.A. History, Patna University, Patna. 5. Alice Samson, Hyderabad, “Story of the Second Hand Book Stalls of Hyderabad”, M.A. English, CIEFL, Hyderabad. alicesamson at gmail.com 6.Bhavya Dore and Kartik Nair, Delhi, “Appu Ghar : Amusement Anxieties and the city”, M.A. Sociology, and English, Delhi University, Delhi.bhavya.dore at gmail.com dore_me at hotmail.com 7. Sreedeep Bhattacharya, Delhi, “Pornography in Urban India: from porn Sphere to mainstream from footpath to websites”, M.Phil, Sociology, J.N.U, Delhi, awbaaddho at yahoo.co.in 8. Meera Baindur, Sreeja K.G. and Sowjanya R. Peddi, Bangalore, “The 'Lake' As Urban Public Space”, Ph.D. National Institute of Advanced Studies. IISc. Bangalore.mansilight at gmail.com, kg.sreeja at gmail.com sowjanya.peddi at gmail.com 9. Sutapa Ghosh, Mumbai, “Modernist Planning”, Ph.D. Department of Humainities and Social Sciences, I.I.T, Bombay. suto8ph at yahoo.com, sutapa at hss.iitb.ac.in 10. Mayuri Samant, Delhi, “Caste Violence in Urban Spaces: A Study of Narratives”, M.Phil. Sociology, Delhi University. mayurisamant at yahoo.com 11. Naveen Ramamurthy Kanalu, Delhi, “Pirla Panduga: Weaver Migration and the Muharram practices in the Deccan”, M.A. Economics, Delhi University, Delhi. naveenkanal at gmail.com 12. Priyanka Gupta, Kolkata, “Graffiti and Kolkatascape; a discourse of conflicting rights, class and citizenship”, M.A. English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.estrangedstrings at gmail.com 13. Vineet Kumar, Delhi, "Niji Television Chennalon main Bhasha evam Sanskritik Nimittiyan", Ph.D. Hindi Literature, Delhi University. vineet_du at yahoo.com 14. Akhil Katyal, Bareilly, “Queer Urban Culture(s): The Case of New Delhi”, M.A. English, Delhi University. akhilkatyal at rediffmail.com 15. Abhishek Kumar Gupta, Delhi, “Bahati Ganga Main Ek Jindagi”, M.A. Museology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. abhishek2nmi at gmail.com 16. D.Karthikeyan, Chennai, “Music From The Margins: Gaana Songs As A Subaltern Phenomenon”, P.G. Diploma in Mass Communication, Asian School of Journalism, Chennai, Karthik.guevara at gmail.com 17. Geetanjoy Sahu, Bangalore, “Urban Environmental Governance”, Ph.D. Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, geetanjoy at rediffmail.com, geetanjoy at isec.ac.in 18. Hijam Eskoni Devi, Manipur, “Relevance of Traditional Institution in Urban Governance: A Case study of Nupi Keithel, Imphal”.M.A. Urban Design. CEPT. Ahmedabad. ehijam at yahoo.com 19. Renu P Cherian, Kottayam, “The ‘Space of Charisma’ in a City”, M.Phil. School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University. Kottayam. renucherianp at gmail.com 20. Sumalatha.B.S., Trivandrum, “Space for brokering branches in Kerala townships: A casual link with urbanisation”, M.Phil Economics. Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum. suma at cds.ac.in _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From satishrsv at yahoo.com Fri Mar 2 12:21:36 2007 From: satishrsv at yahoo.com (satish kumar) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 22:51:36 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response] In-Reply-To: <45E78209.4020208@blueyonder.co.uk> Message-ID: <735080.9864.qm@web58710.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Hi I have been following this list for a very long time. The recents slurs and counter slurs have intrigued me. Well guys, I just want to say that people here are getting confused between the issue and the personal remarks. Do we have a problem with the issue or with the people in question. If we have a problem with the issue (The vedavati post) we should address it, which we haven't done. Vedavati definitely echoes the sentiments of millions of Indians. By getting personal we are ignoring the real issue, rather running away from it. Lets not get into mudslinging (I am loving it, exploring new things, hehehehe). Anyway I find it very childish. Happiness always Satish Anjalika Sagar wrote: :-D :-D :-D Bong man is such a funny term of abuse ... kind of affectionate or am I wrong ? Nothing then to do with Bongs, i.e water pipes or buckets, only Gonads yes or no ? I will use it to irritate Bengali friends ... ! Anymore national treasures ? Bests anj Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: Dear Emma, Iram, Rahul, Tapas, Anjalika, Dinesh, Aman (and everyone else) Now this is really getting interesting. :) In fact far more interesting than what was going on when Vedavati and Abhik were trading charges. The question of dignity is actually worth a real discussion, so maybe we could get down to it one of these days, and while we are at it we should also talk about robustly multi-coloured categories such as humiliation. I am in complete agreement with Emma D when she says that "even pimps have more dignity than certain bong men" and I am including myself in the category of the bong man, once more, in agreement with her when she ends the above statement by saying 'like shuddha'. One cannot escape what in bengali we call 'bongshodosh' (the misfortune of our descent, to which I could add the curse, or mixed blessing, or 'bad luck hi kharab hai' - of one's gonads, though it appears that surgery and modern medicine bring hope to many, especially to those nominally XY chromosomed individuals made melancholic by the misfortune of inappropriate gendering) So, some pimps have a great deal of dignity. Certainly. But let's make things a little more precise and complicated at the same time. Some bong men (not all, some) may have as much dignity as your common or garden pimp, and an insignificant few may in fact have more dignity than the average pimp. It's incredible, I know, but it has been known to happen. I have in fact met one or two incredibly dignified, refined, erudite, and slightly mad, very sad, bong men in my life. (And none of them are now or ever have been, relatives of mine. Dignity is probably a recessive gene in the case of my extended lineage and kinship network.) This is also further complicated by the fact that there are several pimps who also happen to be bong men. I mean, you dont even need to stroll down Shonagachi to know that gentlemen who might answer to names such as 'Tokai','Jhonta' 'Deb-dulal', 'Mortaza moshai' 'Gomes' and 'Boro Photik' are bong, men and pimps. They smell of kashundi, parshey maacch and make their money as only they know best. Some, maybe, such as Deb-dulal, Mortaza Moshai, Gomes, and Boro Photik are honourable and dignified pimps, 'oder baajaare naam-daak acchey', others, such as Tokai and Jhonta are what we would call 'cchoto-lpk, raskel (rascal) and luj (loose) character'. Mairi bolcchi, Dignity comes striated, even when it visits pimps. It is not yet established as to whether all bong women have as much dignity as pimps or bong men. It is also not yet known as to whether bong women who pimp retain as much dignity as others who don't, and other men who do. This is a matter of ongoing investigation. Being a bong man, I am possesed about an ontological certainty about myself and others like me. But I cannot speak with any certainty about bong women. Perhaps the bong women on this list might like to undertake their own self-reflexive auto-critique. But let me not stray. Once again, some women sex workers in genteel semi retirement who do not get to the position of being the 'madam' or 'mashi' sometimes have to make do with being 'ejent (agent)' or 'didi' or dalal, or pimp. This happens, and some, who might be called 'Komola', or 'Mrinmoyee' (Minu) or 'Fatema-bi', or 'Agnes' might be actually women possessed of great honour and dignity. On the other hand, it is quite likely that others who might have names like 'Elokeshi' and 'Paanchi' might have cheated a lot of sex workers (their own erstwhile comrades) of their due. "Kono shala maagi ba dalaaler maathaye morjaadar hishep aanka nei.Maathai tilok kaata bamun-thakur hoyto-ba morjaadar naap ta nitey ebong ditey paaren, kintu aamar moto dalaaler eto baar ekhono baareni je haamesha inchi tape niye nijer morjadar aaga-paanch-tola doirgho-prosto nepey berabo. Shomoye'r boro obhab, memshayeb, boro shonkot. Aar ta cchara, koto jinisher hisheb jey ekhono baaki." yani-ke "Kisi raand ya bharue ke maathe par uske maryada ka naap-tol likha nahin hota. Maathey pe tilak kaat kar maryaada ko pongey-pandit naapte honge, lekin mujh jaise bharuey ki itni aukaad nahin hai ki mai hamesha inchi tape leke apney maryaade ke lambaai-chaaurai ke maujuda haal ka khabar detey firun. Time-time ki baat hoti hai mem'saab, aur hamaare paas time kam hai. Aur bahut kuch baaki hai naapne ko. " Apologies, readers, for the untranslatable, which must remain more or less as such. But since ethnic references have come into play with such full force, I thought it might be interesting to ask how we gloss 'pimping' which describes an activity in relation to 'bong' which describes the accident of birth, language and to some extent, geography. I can see quite easily how one can put 'pimps' with 'commission agent' or 'negotiator' or 'adjuster' or even 'accountant' or 'public relations professional' in one sub set and 'mallus' with 'bongs' and 'uplas' in another. One is a vocation or profession or calling, and the other is a description of the language one speaks, or the cultural matrix one inherits, embedded in, or trapped by. But the mathematics that allows us to construct a calculation that involves both 'bongs' and 'pimps' as indices that can be read off each other in terms of the intensity of dignity is somehow opaque to me. I want to understand how we can actually conduct this operation, how 'pimp' and 'bong' can be made to stand together as terms with interchangable valence in the same equation. (How else would we be able to make a quantitative comparison between these two vis a vis that enigmatic third term - 'dignity') Instinctively, I have a sense that what Emma D is saying is right. "Even pimps have more dignity than certain bong men". But I want to understand what makes this sentence so accurate. I really do. I will be grateful if Emma d or anyone else, can shed light on this matter. warm regards, benche thakun, I hope none of you will take amiss my sincere effort to understand all that is being said, by everyone concerned. Shuddha, emma d wrote: Thought of what?! I still believe that even pimps have more dignity than certain Bong men like Shuddha! And, yes thanks for the "moderator" advice On 3/1/07, Iram Ghufran wrote: Dear Emma, You should have thought of that before you make statements like - "Even pimps have more dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you!" on a public list. Anyway, I do hope your anxieties regarding list 'moderation' are satisfied. Best Iram emma d wrote: Get a life man! Is there any point in going on and on about Shuddha's response to Jogis' posting! Seriously, get a life! Besides, I certainly believe you ought to re-read Shuddha's response entirely again, wherein he expresses how he "understands" that weirdo's response to Jogi's crazed posting! The end? Amen? On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* > wrote: Emma, I think you are confusing issues. A) "don't you have anyone to fuck" is not a nice thing to say to anyone but these sentiments were expressed in a personal mail by Abhik. I chose not to comment on those. B) "awaiting moderator's approval" is an AUTOMATED response to TECHNICAL glitches. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the content of the mail (unless there are attachments) I think you need to read posting protocols again. They have been sent on this list before and I will forward them to you in a separate mail. C) By the way, I think Shuddhabrata's response did express concerns regarding Abhik's unfortunate statement to Vedavati's provocative statement. You should read it again. "Let me clarify at the very beginning that I find the contents of the exchange between Vedavati and Abhit (which we have all been subjected to because of Vedavati's forward, with comment, of Abhik's off list email to her) sad and deplorable. While Abhik's language betrays an unfortunate misogyny, Vedavati's postings and responses are not exactly exemplars of liberality and tolerance." Best Iram emma d wrote: > Dear Iram, It would have been nice if you could have expressed > similar concerns when the "don't you have anyone to fuck" first > appeared on the list! Where did the "awaiting moderator's approval" > thingy disappear then! Emma > > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* < iram at sarai.net >> > wrote: > > Dear list members, > Please refrain from making personal/ individual statements regrading > other list members and communities on this forum. The reader list > is a > non moderated public list. And I guess thats where the challenge > lies - > How do we - as members of this list (of more than 1200 people) > exercise > our freedom of speech? How will our speech acts be remembered by the > archives of this list and read/ understood by people who browse our > public archives in future? No one can stop a list member from writing > what they like but its a personal request - please think before you > click the send button. > Best > Iram > (co - member of reader-list) > > > > > emma d wrote: > > > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the > outrageously > > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone > Abhik's > > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he > > comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo > like > > you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more > > dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > _________________________________________ > > 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. > > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: --------------------------------- Have a burning question? Go to Yahoo! Answers and get answers from real people who know. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070301/bb0ab051/attachment.html From taraprakash at gmail.com Thu Mar 1 21:58:07 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 21:58:07 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response References: Message-ID: <01af01c75c1e$9e44ed00$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> I am surprised that these mails are appearing days after the unfortunate mails which caused these responses were written. I had expressed my views as soon as I read Shuddha's mail. But the mail never reached the list. I wrote to Shuddha but the mail was never acknoledged. The mail is also pasted below today's message. I strongly object any generalization about a religion, caste or culture on the basis of an individual. Bongs should not have been dragged in to the mess. We could have avoided quoting the unfortunate words which occurred in Abhik's deplorable mail. I still maintain that bullying someone, even if off list, on an issue related to an issue raised on list, cannot be condoned. There could have been other ways of expressing displeasure. The following is my mail which has thus far failed to reach the list. Dear Shuddha and all. The message that started this mess was quite insensitive and unscientific in its approach. And so were some responses, like one that linked invention of the computer and scientific thinking to Christianity. Scientific development could be possible in the west only after the discovery of pagan (not Christian) learning, (renaissance). What we today consider facts caused many people their lives, people with scientific thinking were burnt alive as heretics. Even today in the name of the religion people are not being allowed contraceptives; there is a very influential lobby in the US trying to ban abortion. Religion is a big headache for gay and lesbian activists. I am not sure what do various scriptures say about above mentioned issues, but I don't practice any religion so know these religions from their practitioners only. It was done all in the name of religion: Crusades between Christians and Muslims, hanging and burning of the practitioners of (black magic) science, slave trade, colonization and suppression of various cultures and languages, Partition of India and violence related to it, demolition of the mosque and the riots thereafter, Massacre in Gujarat, and blogs giving a ranking as to which religion is more violent/terrorist. (My knowledge of history is really poor). I am not afraid of hell, dozakh or nark ... so I would like to say that religions should be banned from the public sphere. I know there can be some rude messages in response to my message but this is my opinion and I don't want any flaming even off list, even if Shuddha may not consider it violation of list etiquettes. I beg to differ from the following opinion/ruling of Shuddha "Abhik Samanta has written in his private capacity to Vedavati, and not on the list. So his post (no matter how objectionable and misogynist its content may be, which I think it is, even though I can understand his outrage at Vedavati's clear act of hate speech) is not technically a breach of list etiquette." It might give precedence to a wrong practice. There are better ways of expressing your displeasure, showering obcenities, even if off list, on a member for an issue related to the list, should not be condoned. Writing objectionable mails to the members off list in order not to violate the list etiquettes is, in my opinion, akin to american government kid-napping people and harassing them away from the main land so as to avoid the law of the land. I deplore such practice. I am quite new to this list so not sure what the Hindutva-vadis have been doing in the past, but if someone is insensitive again and again why not ban that person or tell that person that such mails will not be allowed on the list? it is technologically possible to ban specific IP addresses, or mails with specific words in the body. Then individuals can create message rules in their e mail clients to ban such individuals, IP addresses or mails. Shouting obscenities is the worst, rather no solution at all. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Shuddhabrata Sengupta" < shuddha at sarai.net> To: < reader-list at sarai.net> Cc: < abhikauliya at googlemail.com> Sent: Monday, February 26, 2007 2:29 PM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] vedavati thought you would like "wrap the body of muslim terrorist with pig skin" > Dear All, > > Let me clarify at the very beginning that I find the contents of the > exchange between Vedavati and Abhit (which we have all been subjected to > because of Vedavati's forward, with comment, of Abhik's off list email > to her) sad and deplorable. While Abhik's language betrays an > unfortunate misogyny, Vedavati's postings and responses are not exactly > exemplars of liberality and tolerance. > > This is not the first time that Vedavati Jogi has posted material on > this list that many on this list will find objectionable, just as there > are many others on this list who post material that Vedavati, and > perhaps some others on this list might have found objectionable. We have > had other instances such as this in the past with others as well. The > history of a list such as this grows to accommodate all manner of > eccentricities, and that is a sign of the health and robustness of a > free and open electronic space. It is in the nature of an unmoderated > (that is uncensored) list such as this, that some people will use the > platform to post material that many of us will consider reprehensible. > However, I would suggest that one way to respond to such provocation is > also to not necessarily dignify every such provocation with a response. > > Abhik Samanta has written in his private capacity to Vedavati, and not > on the list. So his post (no matter how objectionable and misogynist its > content may be, which I think it is, even though I can understand his > outrage at Vedavati's clear act of hate speech) is not technically a > breach of list etiquette. > > Vedavati's reply to Abhik which is addressed both to Abhik and to the > list is however a clear case of someone dragging what is essentially a > private exchange between two people on to the public space of the list. > Doing so,without asking for the permission of the concerned persons (and > there is no indication that she has asked Abhik) is a clear breach of > list eitquette. > > As a list member, I would advise all other list members (including > Vedavati, and Abhik) to try and refrain from blowing this issue out of > proportion. I personally find the sentiments that Vedavati is asking us > to consider (in the blog whose url she has forwarded) pathetic. > > I personally think that the real power of Hindutva-vadis lies in their > ability to hog public attention. Just ignore what is said by > Hindutva-vaids , be amused, at best by the sad level of the arguments > and the rhetoric that they put forward, and see how powerful your > unwillingness to pay attention to their agenda can be. > > I hope this puts an end to what might become an otherwise unpleasant > distraction on this busy list. > > regards, > > Shuddha > > > > Vedavati Jogi wrote: >> this shows your level mr. abhik! >> >> when you people curse hindutv forces especially rss & family, we should >> not >> react >> but when we talk about muslim terrorism you can't tolerate moreover you >> use >> such a dirty language ...is it democracy? is it secularism?is it >> liberalism? >> >> vedavati >> >> >>>From: "Abhik Samanta" < abhikauliya at googlemail.com> >>>To: vedavati < vrjogi at hotmail.com> >>>Subject: Re: [Reader-list] vedavati thought you would like "wrap the body >>>of muslim terrorist with pig skin" >>>Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:01:43 +0530 >>> >>>depraved and poor deprived girl wats the use of wasting time thinkin >>>shit >>>dont u have anyone to fuck -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070301/7e90d35e/attachment.html From taraprakash at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 08:14:37 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 08:14:37 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response] References: <45E73B06.4010504@sarai.net> <45E78209.4020208@blueyonder.co.uk> Message-ID: <015401c75c74$b8e7a8e0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> I doubt they will be irritated. It is of the same category as Gujjus and Mallus. Not at all used as abusive term. ----- Original Message ----- From: Anjalika Sagar To: shuddha at sarai.net Cc: sarai list Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 7:16 AM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] shuddhabratas response] :-D :-D :-D Bong man is such a funny term of abuse ... kind of affectionate or am I wrong ? Nothing then to do with Bongs, i.e water pipes or buckets, only Gonads yes or no ? I will use it to irritate Bengali friends ... ! Anymore national treasures ? Bests anj Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: Dear Emma, Iram, Rahul, Tapas, Anjalika, Dinesh, Aman (and everyone else) Now this is really getting interesting. :) In fact far more interesting than what was going on when Vedavati and Abhik were trading charges. The question of dignity is actually worth a real discussion, so maybe we could get down to it one of these days, and while we are at it we should also talk about robustly multi-coloured categories such as humiliation. I am in complete agreement with Emma D when she says that "even pimps have more dignity than certain bong men" and I am including myself in the category of the bong man, once more, in agreement with her when she ends the above statement by saying 'like shuddha'. One cannot escape what in bengali we call 'bongshodosh' (the misfortune of our descent, to which I could add the curse, or mixed blessing, or 'bad luck hi kharab hai' - of one's gonads, though it appears that surgery and modern medicine bring hope to many, especially to those nominally XY chromosomed individuals made melancholic by the misfortune of inappropriate gendering) So, some pimps have a great deal of dignity. Certainly. But let's make things a little more precise and complicated at the same time. Some bong men (not all, some) may have as much dignity as your common or garden pimp, and an insignificant few may in fact have more dignity than the average pimp. It's incredible, I know, but it has been known to happen. I have in fact met one or two incredibly dignified, refined, erudite, and slightly mad, very sad, bong men in my life. (And none of them are now or ever have been, relatives of mine. Dignity is probably a recessive gene in the case of my extended lineage and kinship network.) This is also further complicated by the fact that there are several pimps who also happen to be bong men. I mean, you dont even need to stroll down Shonagachi to know that gentlemen who might answer to names such as 'Tokai','Jhonta' 'Deb-dulal', 'Mortaza moshai' 'Gomes' and 'Boro Photik' are bong, men and pimps. They smell of kashundi, parshey maacch and make their money as only they know best. Some, maybe, such as Deb-dulal, Mortaza Moshai, Gomes, and Boro Photik are honourable and dignified pimps, 'oder baajaare naam-daak acchey', others, such as Tokai and Jhonta are what we would call 'cchoto-lpk, raskel (rascal) and luj (loose) character'. Mairi bolcchi, Dignity comes striated, even when it visits pimps. It is not yet established as to whether all bong women have as much dignity as pimps or bong men. It is also not yet known as to whether bong women who pimp retain as much dignity as others who don't, and other men who do. This is a matter of ongoing investigation. Being a bong man, I am possesed about an ontological certainty about myself and others like me. But I cannot speak with any certainty about bong women. Perhaps the bong women on this list might like to undertake their own self-reflexive auto-critique. But let me not stray. Once again, some women sex workers in genteel semi retirement who do not get to the position of being the 'madam' or 'mashi' sometimes have to make do with being 'ejent (agent)' or 'didi' or dalal, or pimp. This happens, and some, who might be called 'Komola', or 'Mrinmoyee' (Minu) or 'Fatema-bi', or 'Agnes' might be actually women possessed of great honour and dignity. On the other hand, it is quite likely that others who might have names like 'Elokeshi' and 'Paanchi' might have cheated a lot of sex workers (their own erstwhile comrades) of their due. "Kono shala maagi ba dalaaler maathaye morjaadar hishep aanka nei.Maathai tilok kaata bamun-thakur hoyto-ba morjaadar naap ta nitey ebong ditey paaren, kintu aamar moto dalaaler eto baar ekhono baareni je haamesha inchi tape niye nijer morjadar aaga-paanch-tola doirgho-prosto nepey berabo. Shomoye'r boro obhab, memshayeb, boro shonkot. Aar ta cchara, koto jinisher hisheb jey ekhono baaki." yani-ke "Kisi raand ya bharue ke maathe par uske maryada ka naap-tol likha nahin hota. Maathey pe tilak kaat kar maryaada ko pongey-pandit naapte honge, lekin mujh jaise bharuey ki itni aukaad nahin hai ki mai hamesha inchi tape leke apney maryaade ke lambaai-chaaurai ke maujuda haal ka khabar detey firun. Time-time ki baat hoti hai mem'saab, aur hamaare paas time kam hai. Aur bahut kuch baaki hai naapne ko. " Apologies, readers, for the untranslatable, which must remain more or less as such. But since ethnic references have come into play with such full force, I thought it might be interesting to ask how we gloss 'pimping' which describes an activity in relation to 'bong' which describes the accident of birth, language and to some extent, geography. I can see quite easily how one can put 'pimps' with 'commission agent' or 'negotiator' or 'adjuster' or even 'accountant' or 'public relations professional' in one sub set and 'mallus' with 'bongs' and 'uplas' in another. One is a vocation or profession or calling, and the other is a description of the language one speaks, or the cultural matrix one inherits, embedded in, or trapped by. But the mathematics that allows us to construct a calculation that involves both 'bongs' and 'pimps' as indices that can be read off each other in terms of the intensity of dignity is somehow opaque to me. I want to understand how we can actually conduct this operation, how 'pimp' and 'bong' can be made to stand together as terms with interchangable valence in the same equation. (How else would we be able to make a quantitative comparison between these two vis a vis that enigmatic third term - 'dignity') Instinctively, I have a sense that what Emma D is saying is right. "Even pimps have more dignity than certain bong men". But I want to understand what makes this sentence so accurate. I really do. I will be grateful if Emma d or anyone else, can shed light on this matter. warm regards, benche thakun, I hope none of you will take amiss my sincere effort to understand all that is being said, by everyone concerned. Shuddha, emma d wrote: Thought of what?! I still believe that even pimps have more dignity than certain Bong men like Shuddha! And, yes thanks for the "moderator" advice On 3/1/07, Iram Ghufran wrote: Dear Emma, You should have thought of that before you make statements like - "Even pimps have more dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you!" on a public list. Anyway, I do hope your anxieties regarding list 'moderation' are satisfied. Best Iram emma d wrote: Get a life man! Is there any point in going on and on about Shuddha's response to Jogis' posting! Seriously, get a life! Besides, I certainly believe you ought to re-read Shuddha's response entirely again, wherein he expresses how he "understands" that weirdo's response to Jogi's crazed posting! The end? Amen? On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* > wrote: Emma, I think you are confusing issues. A) "don't you have anyone to fuck" is not a nice thing to say to anyone but these sentiments were expressed in a personal mail by Abhik. I chose not to comment on those. B) "awaiting moderator's approval" is an AUTOMATED response to TECHNICAL glitches. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the content of the mail (unless there are attachments) I think you need to read posting protocols again. They have been sent on this list before and I will forward them to you in a separate mail. C) By the way, I think Shuddhabrata's response did express concerns regarding Abhik's unfortunate statement to Vedavati's provocative statement. You should read it again. "Let me clarify at the very beginning that I find the contents of the exchange between Vedavati and Abhit (which we have all been subjected to because of Vedavati's forward, with comment, of Abhik's off list email to her) sad and deplorable. While Abhik's language betrays an unfortunate misogyny, Vedavati's postings and responses are not exactly exemplars of liberality and tolerance." Best Iram emma d wrote: > Dear Iram, It would have been nice if you could have expressed > similar concerns when the "don't you have anyone to fuck" first > appeared on the list! Where did the "awaiting moderator's approval" > thingy disappear then! Emma > > On 3/1/07, *Iram Ghufran* < iram at sarai.net >> > wrote: > > Dear list members, > Please refrain from making personal/ individual statements regrading > other list members and communities on this forum. The reader list > is a > non moderated public list. And I guess thats where the challenge > lies - > How do we - as members of this list (of more than 1200 people) > exercise > our freedom of speech? How will our speech acts be remembered by the > archives of this list and read/ understood by people who browse our > public archives in future? No one can stop a list member from writing > what they like but its a personal request - please think before you > click the send button. > Best > Iram > (co - member of reader-list) > > > > > emma d wrote: > > > > Alright guys enough is enough! This is not to condone the > outrageously > > content of the blog Vedvati wanted us to visit, or to condone > Abhik's > > response to the same (makes me wonder what kind of a background he > > comes from), but Shuddhabrata you really take the cake. A pseudo > like > > you seems to "understand" Abhik's posting! Even pimps have more > > dignity than some Bong men, some Bong men like you! > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > _________________________________________ > > 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. > > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070302/26ecc5b5/attachment.html From elkamath at yahoo.com Fri Mar 2 08:50:01 2007 From: elkamath at yahoo.com (lalitha kamath) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 19:20:01 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Reviving a Researcher's Discussion Forum- in Bangalore Message-ID: <31263.63754.qm@web53611.mail.yahoo.com> For those in Bangalore who are interested: Dear friends, Every day seems to bring new researchers to Bangalore to explore the rapidly changing urban landscape. So many people doing interesting and innovative research. Yet we know little of what's going on. To encourage greater dialogue and sharing, and stimulate feedback, collaborations, and a peer community, we would like to revive a Discussion Forum on the lines of the Arrupe Discussion Forum (ADF). Several years ago, for those who remember, we used to meet monthly at the Arrupe Hall (the reason we called ourselves Arrupe Discussion Forum) in Ashirvad. The ADF was a cross-disciplinary group who met on the first Saturday of every month in the afternoon. Participants contributed a nominal amount to cover tea and the cost of the hall. At the monthly discussions, different speakers shared their work with the group. People felt free to contribute ideas, ask for inputs, and even team up to do research on specific projects. We would like to propose a first meeting of a Researcher's Discussion Forum on March 3rd at 2.30pm, at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, IISc campus, in the new Faculty Block, Seminar Room (please write to me if you need directions). Subsequent meetings will be held at Ashirvad or another more convenient location. At the first meeting, we would like to spend some time discussing organizational issues, how we would like to proceed as a research/discussion forum, and, importantly, what we would like to call ourselves. During the second part of the meeting, Prof Michael Goldman from the University of Minnesota (Department of Sociology) will share with us thoughts on his ongoing project in Bangalore, entitled 'The making of a world city'. So please come for the first meeting on March 3rd. And talk about it to those who you think would be interested. Where : National Institute of Advanced Studies, IISc campus, in the Seminar Room, new Faculty Block. When : Saturday, March 3rd, 2.30-5pm Coffee/ tea will be served. It would be helpful if you could rsvp so that we can figure out how much coffee to get! Thanks Looking forward, Please forward this mail to others who may be interested. Lalitha and Carol 8 ____________________________________________________________________________________ 8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time with the Yahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#news -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070301/ec1f321e/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From nc-agricowi at netcologne.de Thu Mar 1 16:26:25 2007 From: nc-agricowi at netcologne.de (soundLAB) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:56:25 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] =?iso-8859-1?q?=5BAnnouncements=5D_call=3A_soundart?= =?iso-8859-1?q?_for_SoundLAB_-Edition_V?= Message-ID: <20070301115625.4F271E57.6A28F7B8@192.168.0.4> Call: soundart for SoundLAB - Edition V Theme: soundSTORY deadline 1 August 2007 --------------------------------------- SoundLAB - sonic art project environments http://soundlab.newmediafest.org is currently preparing its fifth edition looking for new soundart works In 2004, SoundLAB was launched as a corporate part of the global networking project [R][R][F]200x--->XP - http://rrf200x.newmediafest.org on occasion of BEAP - Electronic Art Festival Perth/Australia 2004, but started soon also individually acting as an environment for sonic art. Edition IV was launched in October 2006 under the title "memoryscapes" incorporating 144 artists and 235 soundart pieces dealing with "memory and identity" in most different ways, and it became corporate part of the media art show ://selfportrait - a show for Bethlehem - a show for Peace http://self.engad.org. - which is currently running at MACRO - Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Rosario/Argentina http://www.marcromuseo.org.ar . Edition V stands under the theme: --> "soundSTORY" exploring "sound" as a tool for storytelling. Therefore besides the soundart piece itself, the story this piece is telling has a particular relevance. SoundLAB is inviting soundartists, musicians and composers to submit such a soundart narrative. Please find all entry details and the submission form on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=24 . -------------------------------------------- SoundLAB Editions I - IV can be visited on http://soundlab.newmediafest.org -------------------------------------------- Released by NetEX - networked experience http://nmartproject.net/netex powered by [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne www.nmartproject.net - the experimental platform for art and New Media operating from Cologne/Germany. . info& contact _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From cahen.x at levels9.com Thu Mar 1 15:48:40 2007 From: cahen.x at levels9.com (xavier cahen) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:18:40 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] pourinfos Newsletter / 02-28 to 03-07-2007 Message-ID: <45E6A880.6030208@levels9.com> pourinfos.org l'actualité du monde de l'art / daily Art news ----------------------------------------------------------------------- >From Wenesday February 28, 2006 to Wenesday March 07 2007 (included) ------------------------------------------------------------------- (mostly in french) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ NOTRE ÉLECTION PRÉSIDENTIELLE 2007 / OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 2007 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://pourinfos.org/fichiers/_elections_04311_pourinfos_candidats.pdf Pourinfos.org is coming into the presidential campaign to whom it may concern : Antoine Waechter, Arlette Laguiller, Dominique Voynet, France Gamerre, François Bayrou, Jean-Marie Le Pen, José Bové, Marie-Georges Buffet, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Nicolas Sarkozy, Olivier Besancenot, Philippe de Villiers, Ségolène Royal. Write your comments ! http://pourinfos.org/index.php?commentaires=34302&categorie=elections @ 001 (28/02/2007) Publication : JARP Issue 1 Guest Editor: Simon Frith. University of Edinburgh, the on-line Journal on the Art of Record Production, London, United Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34407-tit--JARP-Issue-1-Guest-Editor-Simon-Frith- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 002 (28/02/2007) Rencontres : Eric Augier, Wednesday February 28, 2007, Observatoire des nouveaux medias, Ensad, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34461-tit--Eric-Augier-Mercredi-28-fevrier-2007- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 003 (28/02/2007) Residency : Halifax Artist Billet, Halifax , Canada. http://pourinfos.org/art-34491-tit--Halifax-Artist-Billet-Halifax- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 004 (28/02/2007) Residency : morisena - a centre for art residencies, cultural exchanges and local developement, Haarlem, Musafir Foundation, Haarlem, Netherlands. http://pourinfos.org/art-34492-tit--morisena-a-centre-for-art-residencies- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 005 (28/02/2007) Residency : le coLLombier, artist residency dof Cunlhat, le CoLLombier, Cunlhat, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34493-tit-Residence-le-coLLombier-Residence -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 006 (28/02/2007) Meetings : program : I have appointment with an artist in Seine-Saint-Denis, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34495-tit--programme-j-ai-rendez-vous-avec-un -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 007 (28/02/2007) Publication : Papiers Libres N#47. The topic of “Détour(s)”, editions Papiers Libres, Milhaud, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34506-tit--Papiers-Libres-N-47-Le-theme-du -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 008 (28/02/2007) Publication : Dan Perjovschi et de Marc Bauer, éditions Attitudes, Geneva, Switzerland. http://pourinfos.org/art-34507-tit--Dan-Perjovschi-et-de-Marc-Bauer-editions -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 009 (28/02/2007) Publication : "L'Insaisissable" (“The Imperceptible one”), Lionel Bourg & Jean-Gilles Badaire, Editions galerie Remarque, Trans-en-Provence, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34509-tit--L-Insaisissable-Lionel-Bourg- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 010 (28/02/2007) Publication : Pan Cake, Philippe Boisnard , editions Hermaphrodites, Laneuveville-devant-Nancy, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34511-tit--Pan-Cake-Philippe-Boisnard-editions -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 011 (28/02/2007) Program : the newsletter visu n° 68, for de visu, photographic I-gallery France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34517-tit--la-lettre-de-visu-n-68-pour-de-visu- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 012 (28/02/2007) Performance : "A la source de pays sages"(“With the source of wise countries”), Wednesday February 28, 2007, Hungarian Institute of Paris, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34519-tit--A-la-source-de-pays-sages-mercredi-28 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 013 (28/02/2007) Various : Libr-critique & trame-ouest present Vlog-trotter.org, spécial 11th salon du Livre de Tanger, Maroc. http://pourinfos.org/art-34522-tit-Divers-Libr-critique-trame-ouest -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 014 (28/02/2007) Divers : the Collection of the College / Frac Champagne-Ardenne is on line. http://pourinfos.org/art-34523-tit-Divers-la-Collection-du-College-Frac -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 015 (28/02/2007) Various : interview Dominique Berthet, Founder and director of and the Research Studies Center in Esthetics and Visual art (CEREAP), le Rare, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34524-tit-Divers-entretien-avec-Dominique-Berthet- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 016 (28/02/2007) Various : Call to support, Light Cone, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34525-tit-Divers-Appel-a-soutien-Light-Cone-Paris- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 017 (28/02/2007) Call : nicolasound radio, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34527-tit-Appel-a-participaton-nicolasound-radio- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 018 (28/02/2007) Call: Un cybermonde sans frontieres ? / A cyberworld without borders? March 23, 2007, Maison populaire, Montreuil, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34528-tit--Debats-Croises-Un-cybermonde-sans -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 019 (28/02/2007) Call : See, To describe, new number for the review "Images Re-vues", Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34529-tit--Voir-Decrire-numero-d-Images-Re-vues- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 020 (28/02/2007) Call : UpStage Festival, 7 March, 2007, New Zealand. http://pourinfos.org/art-34530-tit--UpStage-Festival-7-March-2007- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 021 (28/02/2007) Call : Popular Arts Fellowship: Call for Proposals, Tasveer Ghar Fellowship, New Delhi, India. http://pourinfos.org/art-34531-tit--Popular-Arts-Fellowship-Call-for -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 022 (28/02/2007) Call : for projects made of Light 2007, luminous and… dark! http://pourinfos.org/art-34532-tit--D-un-projet-Faites-de-la-Lumiere-2007- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 023 (28/02/2007) Call : Visions in the Nunnery, The Nunnery Gallery, East London, United Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34533-tit-Appel-a-particiaption-Visions-in-the -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 024 (28/02/2007) Call : Second edition of a Contemporary art on a hiking trail, Le Parcours des Fees, Crevoux, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34534-tit--Seconde-edition-d-un-Parcours-d-Art -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 025 (28/02/2007) Call : File, Festival 2007, Sao Paulo, Brasil. http://pourinfos.org/art-34535-tit--File-Festival-2007-Sao-Paulo- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 026 (28/02/2007) Call : Experimentations, Web Flash Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34536-tit--Experimentations-Web-Flash-Festival- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 027 (28/02/2007) Call : Prize, La vie aujourd'hui (the life today), “One Vision 2007” , Bristol-Myers Squibb EMEA, Rueil-Malmaison, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34537-tit--Concour-La-vie-aujourd-hui-One-Vision -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 028 (28/02/2007) Call : 2nd International Film Festival on Water, Bangalore Film Society, Karnataka, India. http://pourinfos.org/art-34538-tit--2nd-International-Film-Festival-on-Water- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 029 (01/03/2007) Meetings :La langue et les formes (The language and the shapes), Thursday March 1, 2007, Cineclub of Tanger, 11th Salon International du Livre de Tanger, Maroc. http://pourinfos.org/art-34494-tit--Table-ronde-La-langue-et-les-formes- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 030 (01/03/2007) Publication : #2, Le magazine du Palais de Tokyo, editions du Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34508-tit--2-Le-magazine-du-Palais-de-Tokyo- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 031 (01/03/2007) Program : Cultural program of March 2007, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34516-tit--Culturel-de-mars-2007-Ecole-Nationale -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 032 (02/03/2007) Meetings : Disonancias Tour, Centro Kursaal Elkargunea, 2, 3 March 2007, San Sebastian, Spain. http://pourinfos.org/art-34501-tit--Disonancias-Tour-Centro-Kursaal -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 033 (03/03/2007) Various : contemporary art sale, Leclere House of auction sales, Marseille, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34421-tit-Divers-vente-d-art-contemporain-Leclere -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 034 (03/03/2007) Various : poetry night: before-program, Lyon, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34423-tit-Divers-la-poesie-nuit-avant-programme- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 035 (03/03/2007) Meetings : Alain Della Negra et Kaori Kinoshita, The Upgrade! Paris / SL, on March 3, 2007, Second Life, On line. http://pourinfos.org/art-34504-tit--Alain-Della-Negra-et-Kaori-Kinoshita-The -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 036 (04/03/2007) Screening : "Stories to laugh at it - Documentary and humour", March 4, 2007, Documentaire sur Grand Ecran, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34515-tit--Histoires-d-en-rire-Documentaire-et -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 037 (05/03/2007) Various : program of the 9th Spring of the Poets, the 5 in March 26, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34422-tit-Divers-programme-du-9eme-Printemps-des -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 038 (05/03/2007) Meetings : Conference at the Pantheon "Les réseaux culturels en banlieue",“cultural networks in suburbs”, On Monday March 5, 2007, University Paris 1 the Pantheon - Sorbonne, Paris, France http://pourinfos.org/art-34503-tit--Conference-au-Pantheon-Les-reseaux -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 039 (06/03/2007) Meetings : Hospitality, Rene Scherer, Ce qui force a penser , Tuesday March 6, 2007, Maison Populaire, Montreuil, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34497-tit--L-hospitalite-Rene-Scherer-Ce-qui -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 040 (07/03/2007) Meetings : Fred Forest, Wednesday March 7, 2007, Bachelard Lecture theater, Sorbonne University, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34498-tit--Fred-Forest-mercredi-7-mars-2007-Amphi -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 041 (07/03/2007) Meetings : Dorkbot Paris #2, Wednesday March 7, 2007, La Pêche, Montreuil, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34500-tit--Dorkbot-Paris-2-mercredi-7-mars-2007- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 042 (07/03/2007) Screening : Sad In Country, Catherine Vertige & Kosten Koper , Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels, Belgium. http://pourinfos.org/art-34512-tit--Sad-In-Country-Catherine-Vertige- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 043 (07/03/2007) Screening : The Sun, Alexandre Sokurov, ecrans psy, movie theater Georges-Méliès, Montreuil, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34513-tit--Le-soleil-Alexandre-Sokurov-ecrans-psy- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 044 (07/03/2007) Performance : "Speech Act" Olivier Babin, Lilian Bourgeat, March 7, 2007, Ecole municipale des beaux-arts-galery Edouard Manet, Gennevillier, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34518-tit--Speech-Act-Olivier-Babin-Lilian -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 045 (07/03/2007) Exposition : Impermeables, Genevieve Québriac, S.E.P.A., Rennes, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34520-tit--Impermeables-Genevieve-Quebriac- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From pukar at pukar.org.in Fri Mar 2 10:39:49 2007 From: pukar at pukar.org.in (PUKAR) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 10:39:49 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [announcements] PUKAR Youth Fellowship: Visit us for a dialogue before March 15 Message-ID: <003001c75c89$135040d0$d466c2cb@freeda> Do you . live in the Mumbai metropolitan area.. . have curiosity / concerns about your city, your community & your place in this scheme. . want to explore these curiosities and concerns. . want to have Fun while researching / discovering your city, your locality and yourself? If your answer to all these questions is YES then PUKAR has an opportunity for YOU! PUKAR Youth Fellowship For the Fellowship year 2007-08, we invite you to have a dialogue with us about the ideas you want to explore, the research you wish to conduct, the people you would like to collaborate with in developing your project. For more details, please call us before March 15, 2007. Vandana 9821520724 Aditya 9820608328 Anita 022-6505-3302 Anupamaa 022-6574-8152 What is in it for YOU? A unique opportunity to be with like minded young people who are just as Interesting, Dynamic and Curious as YOU! What is PUKAR? PUKAR: · Is an independent research-action organization · Provides a forum for cross-disciplinary dialogue about issues of urbanization and globalization · Aims at producing new knowledge about the city - issues which impact the life of its citizens - through the citizen's contribution · Uses research as an educational tool · Opens up the process of research to everyone inside and outside the formal education system · Supports collaborative projects which encourage circulation of ideas and research processes. What is the Youth Fellowship programme? The Youth Fellowship programme at PUKAR is looking to assist young people - through financial, intellectual and material resources - to develop research projects based on their perspective about their city. Since 2005, working directly as well as through institutions, we have engaged with youth-led research projects which have helped about 600 youth in discovering many interesting things about their locality, their concerns and even themselves. For the year 2007-08, we are inviting young people based in the city to approach us for a dialogue about their possible participation in this unique and innovative programme. Each project receives a research grant of Rs. 60,000 for the duration of the Fellowship year. The Fellowship programme aims to: · Encourage youth in Mumbai Metropolitan Region to explore social, cultural, economic and political aspects of their neighborhood · Help the youth develop critical analysis and new perspectives regarding their locality and community · Encourage the idea of questioning established wisdom about city and the role youth can play in the present and the future of the city Who can apply? 1. Any resident of Metropolitan region of Mumbai. There are no educational or language qualifications 2. Any youth group with a creative idea is welcome to approach us to develop a research project 3. Anyone connected to the youth in some capacity and willing to develop a participatory research project 4. Individuals with an aptitude for participatory research and project idea but without a youth group may apply provided they are able to form a youth group by the 3rd June, 2007. Who could be a Youth Group? A youth group is any informal/formal group of young people willing to work with each other and PUKAR for the duration of one year. A few possible examples are: 1. Members of sports groups 2. Self employed or unemployed youth in the neighborhood 3. Members of various "mandals" 4. Group of friends who may be interested in a particular theme or a subject 5. Workers from the unorganized sector, from unlettered world. 6. Students from colleges or junior colleges in the communities 7. Youth belonging to a particular organization who are interested in research We encourage you to call and meet us to discuss your questions regarding the programme before March 15, 2007. We look forward to hearing from YOU! (Translation of this text is available in Marathi) PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research) Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001 Telephone:: +91 (22) 6574 8152 Fax:: +91 (22) 6664 0561 Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in Website:: www.pukar.org.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070302/aa384162/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From fouadbajwa at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 17:55:35 2007 From: fouadbajwa at gmail.com (Fouad Riaz Bajwa) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 17:25:35 +0500 Subject: [Reader-list] Live Your Culture - DANKA's electronic subcultural revolution from South Asia Message-ID: <45e817dd.4416e78d.437c.ffffa17e@mx.google.com> Live Your Culture - DANKA's electronic subcultural revolution from South Asia Feature by Fouad Riaz Bajwa, Independent Writer & Researcher A subcultural revolution is evolving, taking place right here in Lahore, the city where I live! Whenever someone who is well connected with the beautiful history of South Asia, hears the name of Lahore, a grand culture signified and colored by a great history comes to their mind. Lahore has always been the peaceful cultural capital of the country hosting beautiful Mughal gardens, historical buildings, mosques, libraries, museums, shrines, forts, towers and monuments dating back centuries old civilizations and empires of great rulers. The city is inhabited by the liveliest and joyful civilization ever, Lahoris, the entertaining people who are always in the mood for fun, games and cultural events spiced with great fiestas and decorated with the most delicious food ever! My new experience with this culture starts by accidentally walking into a meeting being held by the members of something called, DANKA, while waiting for a friend to show up for dinner. My friend's arrival as being delayed by traffic jams provoked me to socialize with the people around me at one of the most relaxing artistic cafes, "Nai Rang", owned by Pakistan's famous architect Nayar Ali Dada situated in the heart of Lahore metropolitan city, an interesting experience within itself. I sat down to share my moments with a creative group that leads South Asia's subcultural revolution "DANKA" in Pakistan. DANKA enables one to experience being part of an atmosphere that is something totally different and exciting. DANKA is the name they go by hosting an online electronic culture from the region built on top of Free and Open Source Software, if it's happening in Lahore, its right there on DANKA! Finding out about DANKA and getting the opportunity to meet its team of creative jolters was a profound experience in itself, although I intend to detail in my readers on DANKA and its objectives, I want you to join me on the DANKA ship to meet the crew for a moment. The DANKA ship, as I now call it was founded and is steered by Pierre Jolit, purely sophisticated French with more brains than emotions, a business graduate from the esteemed Edhec Business School in France. The captain of the DANKA ship is Dr. Andreas Daniel Matt, a creative Austrain holding a Ph.D. in Computers and Mathematics from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Luckily, he landed Lahore in his antique wagon three years ago and if it weren’t for Danka to be founded here in Lahore, he would have been across the world twice. He really knows how to manage his wagon ship through the deep waters of the five rivers of Pakistan! The DANKA online platform was cooked up by Yasir Hussain, who is believed to be half Islooite and half inhuman. Yasir also runs his own entrepreneurial venture here in Lahore with the name Al Rug. The drivers of DANKA are Jakob Steinkogler and Foaad Nizam. Jakob is the possibly the lead role for a future DANKA fantasized Punjabi film production since he is qualified as aggressive in nature but violence is prohibited at DANKA. On the other hand, even though Foaad teaches Guitar at Lahore Chitrkar, and is found on almost every musical evening in Lahore, he still has all the ingredients to be a part of Pakistani cricket team. DANKA's Spiritual Guide is Jakob Steiner dubbed as Sufi Sahab, a writer, thinker, social servant and charming young dude getting modeling offers on almost every visit to coffee cafes and makes sure DANKA's Newsletter is deliverd to its members every Thursday. That's not all, Sajjad Haider is the Speaker volunteer of Danka while carrying out a professional "sarkari naukri" urdu for a Government Job, at the Punjab Information Technology Board appearing as the Man in Black for the night! Nawab Manan Ejaz is the Steward of DANKA even though he isn't an actual Nawab but the designer champ who designed DANKA's cool dhol logo. The only missing chap from the meeting was an Ol Irish, Martin Beddeleem who kept police guard on Danka, barking after every other guy with a stick in his hand and whenever he found it suitable gave'em a good moral beating and also controlled quality. The DANKA team really misses this guy, I wonder. Once, acquainted with the crew members, they shared the spirit of DANKA with me. As Lahore is the cultural capital of Pakistan, and offers a wide range of cultural activities, Andreas said, "DANKA realized the need for Lahore to have a strong and independent tool to organize the communication of cultural events in order to inform the public and establish the essential link between cultural life and public like all the major cultural cities such as Paris, London, Berlin or Buenos Aires. DANKA is evolving a cultural networking spirit to promote active cooperation between artists, organizers, the public and cultural management to improve quality of events, their communication and organization." DANKA was originally developed within the frame of the culture branch of Proloka, an Austrian based NGO for development and culture (www.proloka.org). The name proLoka is based on two words of the languages Latin and Sanskrit where "pro" means "for" and "loka" equivalent to "the world" represents the overall goal of the organization's projects, to contribute meaningful activities to this world. ProLoka is a platform and network to exchange knowledge and competences between people, institutions and cultures improving the quality of life and personal development of everyone involved in its projects. DANKA is its live example for cultural and civilization exchange in the region! "In order to understand DANKA, one has to visit its website where everyone is invited to announce upcoming or ongoing events, the best part, its free to post and free to share!" said Andreas. "DANKA doesn't critic or judge the quality of the events that are registered on its website promoting an open and inclusive culture. The objective of DANKA is to host the widest range of cultural activity registered on the site, and promote the website amid the Lahoris by also offering a cultural picture data base, online forums and discussions on culture and related issues." Furthermore publications of directories of cultural centers, cultural and historical places, artists, etc. are planned to be added to DANKA soon. "Second, Danka is a networking and management effort dedicated to assist the cultural organizers and artists in their needs, these activities can range from event management, exchange programmes and technical assistance to consultancy and marketing. Danka also plans to carry out own cultural projects in the fields of theatre, dance, music, film, poetry, recording, documentation and conservation of art and culture. Feel free to contact the Danka Team for any enquiry." DANKA is destined to be a link between artists, cultural events organizers and the public. The link has been created by collecting, organizing, providing and broadcasting free information, all under a Creative Commons licensing, first time by any cultural group in Pakistan. By doing this, DANKA is confident that such steps will improve cultural activity in the South Asian state both in terms of quantity and quality. DANKA also sees the need to establish culture as a strong value by culturally educating people and motivating them to add, create and experience their own culture. This subculture revolution is in full gear as DANKA evolves into an online reference for cultural information and coordination from Lahore to other cities of Pakistan, so if you are thinking about hosting a cultural event and want to announce it to the world or want to know "what's on" on the cultural scene in Pakistan, just log on to DANKA and "Live Your Culture" at http://www.danka.com.pk or engage with the DANKA community on ORKUT at http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=9593000. DANKA is also open to partnerships with cultural centres, event organizers, distribution and marketing organizations to participate and support the project. DANKA's partner network promotes sharing information in the fields of music, theatre, exhibitions and to expand the DANKA outreach to other regions. Online Links: ---------------- DANKA. http://www.danka.com.pk proLoka http://www.proloka.org Al-Rug. http://www.alrug.com Lahore Chitrkar. http://www.lahorechitrkar.com ---------------- This article is share by Fouad Riaz Bajwa under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. ---------------- -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.446 / Virus Database: 268.18.5/707 - Release Date: 3/1/2007 2:43 PM From taraprakash at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 20:55:28 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 20:55:28 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] train from Pakistan References: <427268.73650.qm@web60623.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <027a01c75cdf$072758b0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> Train from Pakistan — sanitised Nirupama Subramanian Unprecedented security puts passengers on the Samjhauta Express in a fix. TWO METAL detectors and a dozen strapping gun-toting troopers of the Pakistan Rangers block the way on Platform No. 1 at Lahore Railway Station at the point where the rake for the 8 a.m. Lahore-Attari 402 Down, or the Pakistan-India Samjhauta Express, is stationed. Leashed near the metal detectors are two huge Labradors. The sniffer dogs have already been through each of the 10 carriages of the train, and are now on duty to smell out suspicious baggage as it passes through first the metal detectors, and then through a scanner. Along with police, the Rangers, Pakistan's border security force, have combed "every compartment" of the train and have certified it as secure. "In our South Asia, we always wake up after the incident, but we certainly don't want something like that to happen again," says a senior officer of the Rangers, who requested not to be named. Starting from the metal detectors, the Rangers have sealed the platform to all except ticket-holding passengers, railways officials, policemen. No exceptions will be made, including for this correspondent. "Sorry, please understand, we don't want to take any chances," the official says. * * * Ten days after the attack on the Samjhauta Express in India, Pakistan has implemented stringent measures for the security of the train, combing the train three hours before its departure at 8 a.m., posting guards on the platform as well in the train, and aside from the electronic scanning of bags, carrying out random checks on passengers. Considering the rush on the train and the amounts of baggage people carry with them, the new security procedures are a challenge, both for security agencies, and for passengers. The incident at Panipat has not in the slightest deterred people from travelling on the train. It is not a comfortable train, and as events last month showed, nor is it the safest. The train takes almost 24 hours from Lahore to Delhi. The distance between Lahore and Attari is 27 km, but takes five hours, of which the running time is only one hour. The rest goes into customs and immigration formalities at Wagah. The wait at Attari is even longer, and it can take more than eight hours before the passengers complete the Indian border procedures and board the link train to Delhi. But at Rs.90 for the journey from Lahore to Attari through Wagah, and between Rs.115 and Rs.225 for the onward journey to Delhi, it is certainly the cheapest. * * * Almost everybody taking the train shares the identical opinion when it comes to assessing their safety on the journey, post-Panipat. "Life and death are in the hands of the one above. If we die, we die, if we live, we reach our destination," says Zahida, a Pakistani who is headed to meet relatives in Lucknow. She planned long for this journey. "I am going after 27 years. For a long time I never got the visa. Now I have it, nothing can stop me." Most people are plain relieved that the train continues uninterrupted even after the incident. Wasim Shehzad from Multan is going for his niece's wedding in Jaipur. He's carrying a crockery set as a gift. "When I first heard about the attack, I thought there goes my trip, they will cancel the train now, but thankfully, they did not," he says. Noor Begum, who is returning home to Roorkee in India after visiting relatives in Gujarat town in Pakistan's Punjab province, says with fervour in her tone: "May they never stop this train, it's the only hope for people like us who have family on both sides." * * * But the new regulations are not easy to come to terms with. Inexplicably, tickets for the train have always been sold from only two hours before departure. No advance booking. The ticket counter is in a vast asbestos-roofed shed that leads to Platform No.1, from a side of the Lahore Railway Station that is clearly not its most well looked after part. At 6 am, people are pouring in through a narrow gate, pushing mountains of baggage on trolleys, carrying them on their heads or just dragging bags through the mud. Large groups of men and women wait while a family member queues up for the ticket. A new system is in place from today, and people are struggling to understand it. First, stand in line for a ticket, to be issued only against a passport; then, stand in a second line for a reservation, which is also when the booking clerk manually writes down passport details in a big ledger. No more unreserved tickets. And no more tickets for onward journeys. That is a joint decision by the Railways of Pakistan and India. So, here in Lahore, passengers can buy tickets only up to Attari, unlike earlier when they could also buy tickets for the next leg of their journey, to Delhi, and to other destinations. "This way, we can keep better track of who is boarding the train and from which point," said Station Master Mohammed Yousuf. * * * Ticketing done, passengers, helped by porters, and accompanied by gaggles of relatives and friends who have come to see them off, shove their bags towards Platform No.1. But a new shock awaits them. They must weigh their bags. Each person is allowed 35 kg, and excess is charged. Able-bodied family members take the weighty bags off trolleys and lug them to the scales one by one. Very few passengers are travelling within their baggage allowance. But it appears that as is the first day of the new rules, leniency rules. Passengers plead, and the officials are waiving 5 or 10 kg excess. * * * Halfway down Platform No.1, the metal detectors are not a surprise to the passengers, but having to part with family members at this point, much before the departure of the train, is a wrench. Also, as at airports, they have to leave behind their trolleys, and porters. Beyond the metal detectors, the platform looks like no other in South Asia. No crowds of people, no vendors, no people peering or shaking hands through windows, no sightseers. Only those with tickets and passports go through the metal detectors, dragging their huge bags behind them or carrying them on their heads towards the train and their allotted seats. * * * Over 700 passengers are on the train as it leaves Lahore. But some like Taiyyab Hussain from Gurgaon in India could not get a seat. And his 30-day visa will run out today. The Rangers are not listening to any argument. "No means no," says the trooper at the metal detector. Hussain is distraught. He tried talking to senior officials, the stationmaster, the ticket checker. Nothing worked. "Earlier it was so much easier. You just bought an unreserved ticket and travelled. Now they have created more problems all around. I don't know what I'm going to do for my visa," he says, as the train pulls off, leaving behind a clean platform. * * * The Railway authorities have also barred passengers from boarding at Wagah, the train's next stop, a 40-minute journey from Lahore, nor can anybody get off the train here. Those in the train will disembark for customs and immigrations procedures and will board the train again. But no new passengers are to get on at this small station at the India-Pakistan border. Despite the bar, entire families, who are in the same boat as Hussain, have hired taxis to drive them from Lahore through flowering mustard fields and bad roads to Wagah, hoping that the rules will be less tight at a rural station. It does not even have a proper entrance at the moment. No such luck. The Rangers have sealed off the platform at Wagah too. "They will get used to the new system. It's for their own safety. We don't want a repetition of what happened in India," says a railways official at Wagah. When the Samjhauta Express pulls out at 12.30 p.m. on its 15-minute run to Attari, officials have on their list 764 passengers — 531 Pakistanis, 232 Indians, and one `foreigner' — all identified and accounted for, but with the luggage still blocking the doors, passages, and all other available space in the carriages. From jace at pobox.com Sat Mar 3 11:12:43 2007 From: jace at pobox.com (Kiran Jonnalagadda) Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 11:12:43 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Reviving a Researcher's Discussion Forum- in Bangalore In-Reply-To: <31263.63754.qm@web53611.mail.yahoo.com> References: <31263.63754.qm@web53611.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <24EF63B4-9477-4CE8-B1DF-50D307A8E966@pobox.com> Dear Lalitha, Carol, Michael, Zainab and others, We are organising Bangalore Barcamp 3 on March 31st and April 1st, at IIMB, Bangalore. Previous events were held in April and December 2006. The theme for this event is social tech: specific case stories of how technology has impacted society around us. We'd love to have you folks discuss your research. Owing to previous history, the primary audience will be tech oriented, but all are welcome. Barcamp is an open conference format where do not distinguish between speakers and audience. Everyone is just a participant. There is no pre-defined agenda. The schedule is drawn up on post-it notes and changes through the day, based on what people want to discuss. Please see http://barcampbangalore.org/ For more on the Barcamp concept in general, see http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp ~j On 02-Mar-07, at 8:50 AM, lalitha kamath wrote: > > For those in Bangalore who are interested: > > > Dear friends, > > Every day seems to bring new researchers to Bangalore to explore > the rapidly changing urban landscape. So many people doing > interesting and innovative research. Yet we know little of what's > going on. To encourage greater dialogue and sharing, and stimulate > feedback, collaborations, and a peer community, we would like to > revive a Discussion Forum on the lines of the Arrupe Discussion > Forum (ADF). > > > > Several years ago, for those who remember, we used to meet monthly > at the Arrupe Hall (the reason we called ourselves Arrupe > Discussion Forum) in Ashirvad. The ADF was a cross-disciplinary > group who met on the first Saturday of every month in the > afternoon. Participants contributed a nominal amount to cover tea > and the cost of the hall. At the monthly discussions, different > speakers shared their work with the group. People felt free to > contribute ideas, ask for inputs, and even team up to do research > on specific projects. > > > > We would like to propose a first meeting of a Researcher's > Discussion Forum on March 3rd at 2.30pm, at the National Institute > of Advanced Studies, IISc campus, in the new Faculty Block, Seminar > Room (please write to me if you need directions). Subsequent > meetings will be held at Ashirvad or another more convenient location. > > > > At the first meeting, we would like to spend some time discussing > organizational issues, how we would like to proceed as a research/ > discussion forum, and, importantly, what we would like to call > ourselves. > > During the second part of the meeting, Prof Michael Goldman from > the University of Minnesota (Department of Sociology) will share > with us thoughts on his ongoing project in Bangalore, entitled 'The > making of a world city'. > > > > So please come for the first meeting on March 3rd. And talk about > it to those who you think would be interested. > > > > Where : National Institute of Advanced Studies, IISc campus, in the > Seminar Room, new Faculty Block. > > When : Saturday, March 3rd, 2.30-5pm > > > > Coffee/ tea will be served. > > It would be helpful if you could rsvp so that we can figure out how > much coffee to get! Thanks > > > > Looking forward, > > Please forward this mail to others who may be interested. > > > Lalitha and Carol > > > > > > > > > 8 > > Need Mail bonding? > Go to the Yahoo! Mail Q&A for great tips from Yahoo! Answers users. > _______________________________________________ > announcements mailing list > announcements at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From ravig64 at gmail.com Sat Mar 3 10:17:43 2007 From: ravig64 at gmail.com (Ravi Agarwal) Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 10:17:43 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] see the trees to be cut Message-ID: <1BA7DEC3-8C10-40B3-97AA-8E1B11E02EA0@gmail.com> Dear all, this follows my barrage of mails over the past days. I can only photograph so many trees! Every single tree you see in the pictures below are marked for felling. No exception. These pictures from today morning are on the road between Kaka nagar and Sunder Nagar (near zoo), not only on both sides but also the centre of the road.And as I said yesterday this is over 14 kms for a high capacity bus service!!! The felling is from Madangir to Moolchand to Delhi Gate I have been told - the whole length. A friend spoke to a senior Env official delhi yesterday. He said 'we cannot stop progress.' So either rise and shine now dear friends or then like the romans 'have an orgy' of progress. Please spread the word. If we can save anything, anything it will take some effort. Else it is all gone -- over 2500 prime trees - some over 50 years old or older. and if you can please circulate as widely as possible. ravi PICTURES HERE! also my new blogsite www.inturbulenttimes at blogspot.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070303/7b98c531/attachment.html From kj.impulse at gmail.com Sat Mar 3 13:21:33 2007 From: kj.impulse at gmail.com (Kavita Joshi) Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 13:21:33 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [DFA:] Invitation: IAWRT IIC Asian Women's Film Festival 2007 Message-ID: <005d01c75d68$cb62f2f0$0401a8c0@hpc83f06cf59cf> INVITATION:- IAWRT IIC Asian Women's Film Festival 2007 Reflections: Women Imaging Realities March 7th and 8th 2007 10 AM - 8:30 PM at the India International Centre Lodi Estate, New Delhi ENTRY IS FREE. NO PASSES NEEDED. A two-day event, to mark the International Women's Day (on 8th March). This year's festival will present films that explore how women negotiate, resist or document political, social, environmental or other issues. How are women filmmakers widening the frame for issues concerning women? The festival will showcase documentary films by women covering a range of genres. It will also include animation and fiction short films. Among other films, the festival includes Q2P by Paromita Vohra; 7 Islands and a Metro by Madhushree Datta; Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi by Saba Dewan; Tales from the Margins by Kavita Joshi; and Bare by Santana Issar. The festival also features docus and animation from Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Kazakhstan; and films by the Asian diaspora. Download the SCHEDULE (as PDF) here: http://base.google.com/base_media?q=hand-411915045118389357&size=8 Or see the TEXT version below with best wishes Kavita Joshi http://kavitajoshi.blogspot.com [TEXT VERSION OF SCHEDULE] 7TH WED 10:00 AM INAUGURATION followed by Madsong 19 min 2006 India Natasha Mendonca In a nameless timeless place in India, an ordinary woman living an ordinary life wants to plan an extraordinary party in celebration of her lover's return. What happens when he comes home? followed by Call It Slut 14 min 2006 India Nishtha Jain A mini-portrait of a transgender person who is more than a woman. followed by Dedicated to Unicorn 4 min 2006 Taiwan (ROC) Soo You Time turns into a blended state as a simulation of dreams. A woman's unconscious reminisce. 11:00 AM BREAK 11:30 AM Moustaches Unlimited 29 min 2006 India Vasudha Joshi Exploring masculinities and femininities through moustaches. followed by Q2P 53 min 2006 India Paromita Vohra About toilets, gender and the city. Raising questions about male and female; about class, caste, urban development and the twisted myth of the global city. 1:00 PM LUNCH BREAK 2:30 PM Tales from the Margins 23 min 2006 India Kavita Joshi About the fast-to-death of Irom Sharmila, the naked demonstration by Manipuri women activists and the epic protests by the women of Manipur in their fight against the AFSPA. followed by PRESENTATION by Kavita Joshi: on video and gender training material being developed with IAWRT support 3:30 PM BREAK 4:00 PM Story Maker: Story Taker 38 min 1995 India Anjali Monteiro and K P Jayashankar About the stories and paintings of the Warli tribes. followed by Acting Like a Thief 15 min 2005 USA Shashwati Talukdar and P Kerim Friedman Through theater, members of a stigmatized tribal community have found the means to express themselves and to transform their world. followed by Between the Lines 18 min 2006 India Vaidehi Chitre About the filmmaker's search for Dr. Anandi Joshi, India's first woman doctor. 5:30 PM BREAK 6:30 PM National Pudding and Indigenious Salad 11 min 2004 India Pushpamala N A playful look at the modern Indian family as it imagined itself soon after Independence. followed by Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi 63 min 2006 India Saba Dewan Ria, a bar dancer, travels from her home in Delhi to Mumbai where hundreds of working class girls come in search of work and a future. 8:15 CLOSE --------------------------- 8TH THU 10:00 AM When Women Call the Shots 30 min 2001 India Charu Gargi Through the work of three women technicians, the film examines the representation of women in Bollywood films made by women. followed by Sharira 30 min India Ein Lall einlall2004 at yahoo.co.uk On the acclaimed choreographer-dancer Chandralekha and her unwavering faith in her mission to set free the body through dance. 11:00 AM BREAK 11:30 AM The Mall on Top of My House 6 min 2006 India Aditi Chitre On rampant land reclamation and the consequent displacement of the fishing community. followed by Bare 11 min 2006 India Santana Issar A daughter's search to find meaning, if any, in her relationship with her alcoholic father. followed by Their Story 10 min 2005 India Reema Borah A poignant tale about the daily struggles, hope and crisis in the midst of a land and people torn by armed conflict. followed by 6 Yards to Democracy 55 min 2007 India Nishtha Jain and Smriti Nevatia On the lives of poor women in Lucknow in the context of cynical electoral politics. 1:00 PM LUNCH BREAK 2:30 PM PRESENTATION by Giti Thadani: Erasure of the Feminine and New Renewals 3:30 PM BREAK 4:00 PM Crossing Fires - Blurring the Divide 22 min 2006 Sri Lanka Sharmini Boyle Two communities of women in the LTTE controlled Kilinochi district push the frontiers in a patriarchal society. followed by Live Containers 26 min 2002 Kaza-khstan Orzu Sharipov Women ex-prisoners are forced into smuggling heroin in their bodies as a way to get out of poverty and stigma. followed by Assimilation - No, Integration - Yes 24 min 2006 Canada Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy In a housing community in a Swedish town, young second generation Muslim immigrants are adjusting to life in a new country. 5:30 PM BREAK 6:30 PM 7 Islands and a Metro 100 min 2006 India Madhushree Dutta To the seven goddesses who reign over Bom Bahia / Bombay / Mumbai. 8:15 PM CLOSE SCREENINGS WILL BE FOLLOWED BY A DISCUSSION WITH THE DIRECTOR, IF PRESENT. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To UNSUBSCRIBE: send an email to delhifilmarchive-unsubscribe at googlegroups.com More OPTIONS are on the web: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/delhifilmarchive/ Contact the MODERATOR: delhifilmarchive [at] gmail.com Visit our WEBSITE: www.delhifilmarchive.org See the LIST OF FILMS in the Archive: http://www.delhifilmarchive.org/archive.html -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070303/0007492f/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From zainabbawa at yahoo.com Sat Mar 3 10:58:59 2007 From: zainabbawa at yahoo.com (Zainab Bawa) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 21:28:59 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] CSCS Ph.D. Programme in Cultural Studies Message-ID: <20070303052859.47389.qmail@web36108.mail.mud.yahoo.com> CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY Ph.D. in Cultural Studies CSCS is an institution for higher education in the humanities and social sciences, engaged in developing innovative and inter-disciplinary approaches to researching culture in India. We invite applications for our Ph.D. programme in Cultural Studies for the academic year 2007 - 2008. On our faculty are scholars known for their analyses of contemporary culture. Distinguished visiting faculty from India and abroad will also be involved in Ph.D instruction at the Centre. The Ph.D in Cultural Studies includes two semesters of coursework (residence requirement: one year), followed by supervised reading and research. The courses will be reading/writing intensive. Students will learn how to interpret complex texts, to understand intellectual debates that have formed the horizon of interdisciplinary cultural studies, formulate and discuss ideas and questions, and to write research papers. Broad research areas at CSCS include: gender studies, law and culture, education, film and new media, history and philosophy of culture. Applicants with other interests are also encouraged to apply. The Ph.D candidates will be registered either with Manipal University, Karnataka, or with Kuvempu University, Karnataka. Eligibility A Master’s Degree from any recognized university in India or abroad, with a minimum mark of 55% or its grade equivalent. 5% relaxation for SC/ST candidates. Financial Support Selected students will be given fellowships/financial assistance for a period of one year. Application Process Enclose the following documents:  Curriculum Vitae;  Copies of the under-graduate and post-graduate marks sheets (one set);  A sample of writing (no longer than 15 double-spaced pages or approx. 4000 words, e.g. a reworked term paper);  A two-page research proposal. Send your applications and supporting documents in an envelope marked ‘Ph.D. Programme’ to The Administrative Officer, Centre for the Study of Culture & Society, 466, 9th Cross, Madhavan Park, 1st Block Jayanagar, Bangalore 560011, to reach by April 30, 2007. Shortlisted candidates appear for an oral interview in the first week of June. The first semester of coursework begins on August 1. For more information: Write to CSCS or visit our website: www.cscsban.org Zainab Bawa Mumbai www.xanga.com/citybytes --------------------------------- Need Mail bonding? Go to the Yahoo! Mail Q&A for great tips from Yahoo! Answers users. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070302/9d85c9c9/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From pkray11 at gmail.com Sat Mar 3 18:59:38 2007 From: pkray11 at gmail.com (Ray P K) Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 14:29:38 +0100 (CET) Subject: [Reader-list] Ray has Tagged you! :) Message-ID: <20070303132938.3EAC428DA19@mail.sarai.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070303/c3c60e93/attachment.html From taraprakash at gmail.com Sat Mar 3 22:03:01 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 22:03:01 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] an article about media References: <20070301115625.4F271E57.6A28F7B8@192.168.0.4> Message-ID: <028f01c75db1$9cf8e3e0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> (from Hindu) Opening western minds to international crosswinds Ramesh Thakur Why do the major newspapers not organise a reciprocal exchange of columns — we will publish as many of your articles per month as you take of ours? THE TECHNICAL gadget that Americans are most in need of, it's been said, is a hearing aid. Too many of them are prone to lecture, hector, and otherwise pressure much of the rest of the world, in the far from touching belief that the American way is the only way. To be sure, America and Americans do indeed have much to be immodest about. The vibrancy, dynamism, and energy of Americans can be very infectious. The pinnacles of achievements that the United States as a country, society, and people has reached is worthy of great self-pride. Some of the rage against all things American is based on nothing more substantial than envy of the successful, as captured in the protest banner "Yankee go home — and take me with you!" That said, it is just as true that, in most civilisations, humility is a greater social virtue than pride and vanity on constant public display. There must be a good reason why we have one mouth for speaking but two ears for listening. Before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, many other governments were at the receiving end of moralising lectures, from westerners in general and Americans in particular, about the absolute inviolability of human rights, no matter how grave or real the security threats some of them faced. The subsequent trajectory of American practices and discourse shows just how shallow the understanding of and commitment to human rights was. But it also proves the point about world views being grounded in our own experiences, much more so than in any abstract conception. The world view and perspectives of western governments, scholars, and commentators changed dramatically after 9/11 with regard to the proper balance between hard and soft power, force and diplomacy, security and liberty, and unilateralism and multilateralism, compared with what their previous position had been based on — theoretical arguments rather than actual experience. The progress of history rests on the battle for supremacy of competing ideas. The power and wealth of western countries give them a dominant role in shaping the international public discourse. This is a privileged position they have earned, and the rest of us have little claim to object. But imagine if the United States had given a respectful hearing to opinion from around the world in 2002-03 on Iraq: the wasteful spilling of so much American blood and treasure might have been avoided. Yet there is no effort by any of the mainstream U.S. media, as far as I know, to harvest international opinion on the great issues of the day for dissemination to the domestic American audience. Instead the trafficking in the opinions and thoughts of international public intellectuals is almost all one-way. This seems to rest on an implicit racist assumption in both camps. Namely, that when western and non-western values diverge, the latter are in the wrong and it is only a matter of working on them with persuasion and pressure for the problem to be resolved and progress achieved. The cognitive blindness is shown in the statement by scholars Thomas Risse and Stephen C. Ropp that "pressure by western states and international organisations can greatly increase the vulnerability of norm-violating governments to external influences." Self-evidently, only non-western governments can be norm violators; western governments can only be norm setters and enforcers. The philosophical antecedents of such beliefs lie in the 18 th-19th century theory of evolutionary progress through diffusion and acculturation from the west to the rest. Or consider what, in some ways, is a more tragic example. A massive earthquake and tsunami struck the Indian Ocean on December 26. In the three weeks following that, the International Herald Tribune published 16 opinion articles on, or in relation to, the tragedy. Not one was by an Asian. The equally influential Financial Times published six articles, of which again not one was by an Asian. Each by itself was of very high quality, as one would expect from these newspapers. Nevertheless, it would be surprising to find that either paper has ever carried opinion and analytical pieces on a major western tragedy (9/11, the London bombing, the Madrid bombing) written solely by developing country authors. This imbalance of voice in the international discourse has built up a dangerous sense of resentment by the silent majority of the world's peoples. Developing country governments sometimes complain about the activities of international media commentators as interference in their internal affairs and view them suspiciously as instruments of `soft' western intervention. They are surely right in the implied belief that media weight augments foreign policy tools and comprises part of what Harvard University's Joseph Nye has labelled "soft power." The U.S. is indeed a more powerful world actor for being able to draw on a rich civil society, a depth of scholarly knowledge, and a media that has market dominance and reaches into the farthest nook and cranny around the world. Still, this begs two questions. First, should not governments learn how best to strengthen civil society in their own countries and enter into partnership with them in the pursuit of shared international goals? Why is it that non-western governments complain about biased coverage by western media instead of doing something constructive? Journalists are censored, manipulated, harassed, and sometimes even imprisoned and liquidated. To be sure, English is the dominant medium of global communication, and the BBC and CNN are truly global brands in the world of media. Yet today they are being challenged by Al Jazeera, to the point where Washington has had a strained if not antagonistic relationship with the group in relation to its coverage of Afghanistan and Iraq. Of the large and well-established Asian democracies, India and Japan could easily by now have supported the emergence of truly global media brands as well. Quite a few Indian journalists have world recognition but, almost without exception, they work for western print and electronic media. In its desperation to control information, news and analyses, the Indian government has effectively aborted the rise of independent Indian news services with the authority and credibility to command a global following. Not for nothing was AIR known as "All Indira Radio." The BBC provided the model; is it the west's fault that Indians failed to emulate such a positive example? The net result is that India (like China and Japan) does indeed lack a key agent of international influence and a crucial ingredient of soft power in the modern networked world. In this respect, sadly, India is a metaphor for all of Asia. The challenge for enlightened national interest diplomacy is how best to nurture civil society and credible media so that they help to project local values and perspectives to a receptive international audience. Second, western commentators have their columns regularly reprinted in newspapers all over the world, which is good. Readers of The Hindu have regular access to selected opinion articles from The Guardian. Should westerners not make a deliberate effort to read and listen to what the rest of the world might have to say? Should not readers of The Guardian be exposed to The Hindu's columnists? Or do we simply assume that if the rest of the world has a different opinion, it is wrong? It is clear to me, as a professor and as a high-level U. N. official, that the writings of Siddharth Varadarajan, to take just one example from these pages, do not compare unfavourably to the best that The Guardian has to offer on some of the most sensitive contemporary issues like Iran. Hence the final question: why do the major newspapers not organise a reciprocal exchange of columns — we will publish as many of your articles per month as you take of ours? Or do we share the westerners' implicit belief that what they have to say on any and every topic is important for the whole world to know; but what we have to say about our own affairs may perhaps be worth considering, but otherwise we should know our place and stay there. (Ramesh Thakur is senior vice rector of the UN University in Tokyo. These are his personal views.) From ravig64 at gmail.com Sun Mar 4 09:22:26 2007 From: ravig64 at gmail.com (Ravi Agarwal) Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2007 09:22:26 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] last holi for this one? References: Message-ID: <0F667700-DE2C-4C93-B7E9-E2EF0E825535@gmail.com> Aplogies for keeping at it, so please ignore this if you want to... Dear all, Spare a thought for this glorious tree, on holi. it is marked for felling soon for the high capacity bus service, on the road dividing kaka nagar and sunder nagar, in New Delhi! As I have been saying, for a few days now, everything is to go on a 14 km stretch, 2500 prime beautiful trees! All for the 2010 Commonwealth Games! ravi you can see it on, since the list serve does not allow attachments. www.inturbulenttimes.blogspot.com please do circulate and tell people about this. Maybe we will be able to save this one or another? From vrjogi at hotmail.com Sun Mar 4 09:29:15 2007 From: vrjogi at hotmail.com (Vedavati Jogi) Date: Sun, 04 Mar 2007 03:59:15 +0000 Subject: MEDIAS (ir)RESPONSIBILITY Message-ID: MEDIAS� RESPONSIBILITY Where should it be? Date: Jan 12, 2007 11:39 PM By the time you guys read these news excerpts, the body of Major Manish Pitambare, who was shot dead at Anantnag, would have been cremated with full military honors. On Tuesday, this news swept across all the news channels 'Sanjay Dutt relieved by court'. 'Sirf Munna not a bhai' '13 saal ka vanvaas khatam' 'although found guilty for possession of armory, Sanjay can breath sigh of relief as all the TADA charges against him are withdrawn'. Then many personalities like Salman Khan said 'He is a good person. We knew he will come out clean'. Mr. Big B said, "Dutt's family and our family have relations for years he's a good kid. He is like elder brother to Abhishek". His sister Priya Dutt said "we can sleep well tonight. It's a great relief" In other news, Parliament was mad at Indian team for performing bad; Greg Chappell said something; Shah Rukh Khan replaces Amitabh in KBC and other such stuff. But most of the emphasis was given on Sanjay Dutt's "phoenix like" comeback from the ashes of terrorist charges. Surfing through the channels, one news item on BBC startled me. It read, "Hisbul Mujahidin's most wanted terrorist Sohel Faisal killed in Anantnag, India. Indian Major leading the operation lost his life in the process. Four others are injured. It was past midnight, I started visiting the stupid Indian channels, but Sanjay Dutt was still ruling. They were telling how Sanjay pleaded to the court saying 'I'm the sole bread earner for my family', 'I have a daughter who is studying in US' and so on. Then they showed how Sanjay was not wearing his lucky blue shirt while he was hearing the verdict and also how he went to every temple and prayed for the last few months. A suspect in Mumbai bomb blasts, convicted under armory act...was being transformed into a hero. Sure Sanjay Dutt has a daughter; sure he did not do any terrorist activity. Possessing an AK47 is considered too elementary in terrorist community and also one who possesses an AK47 has a right to possess a pistol so that again is not such a big crime; Sure Sanjay Dutt went to all the temples; sure he did a lot of Gandhigiri but then........... Major Manish H Pitambare got the information from his sources about the terrorists' whereabouts. Wasting no time he attacked the camp, killed Hisbul Mujahidin's supremo and in the process lost his life to the bullets fired from an AK47. He is survived by a wife and daughter (just like Sanjay Dutt has) who's only 18 months old. Major Manish never said 'I have a daughter' before he took the decision to attack the terrorists in the darkest of nights. He never thought about having a family and he being the bread earner. No news channel covered this since they were too busy hyping a former drug addict; a suspect who's linked to bomb blasts which killed hundreds. Their aim was to show how he defied the TADA charges and they were so successful that his conviction in possession of armory had no meaning. They also concluded that his parents in heaven must be happy and proud of him. Parents of Major Manish are still living and they have to live rest of their lives without their beloved son. His daughter won't ever see her daddy again. Finally Major Manish, to my generation is a greater hero, someone who laid his life in the name of this great nation. So guys, please forward this message around so that the media knows which news to give importance, as it is a shame for us since this Army Major's death news was given by a foreign TV channel!!! Yet the smallest of aberrations in a 1.5 million strong Army is hyped up and pasted on the front-page news, without so much as a confirmation. Our media men are defence analysts, strategists, lawmakers and judges � all rolled into one BUT are they patriots? _________________________________________________________________ Latest updates from the world of sports http://content.msn.co.in/Sports/Default From yasir.media at gmail.com Sun Mar 4 18:32:30 2007 From: yasir.media at gmail.com (yasir ~) Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2007 05:02:30 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] =?utf-8?q?MEDIAS=EF=BF=BD_=28ir=29RESPONSIBILITY?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5af37bb0703040502h3adb52a7q12bf1990659f75e@mail.gmail.com> thanks for this vedavati. i personally dont know the major or sanjay - i have neither followed the major's career, neither have i watched a single movie of sanjay's. have you? well actually, now that you mention the mix up in the media, maybe manish would have been better off giving auditions in mumbai and trying to make it the movies, (who knows what a major in another life would have done on screen...), rather than being stuck in the army as a major giving exams and putting up with the rest of them... as for sanjay i think he started out when rambo was hot, was it the eighties (one cant escape these media things ..) and so much for mixed up fantasies about guerrilla warfare ak47s and worthwhile causes. cant imagine him in the army though - selection might have been a problem too. i'm just glad sylvester the guido from brooklyn was the most straight headed or just plain duh !! when it came to laundrying hollywood financiers .. anyway, thanks for writing & let me know if you have any movie or media recommendations. y On 3/3/07, Vedavati Jogi wrote again: > > MEDIAS' RESPONSIBILITY > Where should it be? > > > Date: Jan 12, 2007 11:39 PM > > By the time you guys read these news excerpts, the body of Major Manish > Pitambare, who was shot dead at Anantnag, would have been cremated with full > military honors. > > On Tuesday, this news swept across all the news channels 'Sanjay Dutt > relieved by court'. 'Sirf Munna not a bhai' '13 saal ka vanvaas khatam' From taraprakash at gmail.com Sun Mar 4 06:10:40 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2007 06:10:40 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] An article from New York Times (March 3) References: <45E7FEBB.7060403@sarai.net> Message-ID: <001501c75e6e$3ba6a920$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> Evangelical's Focus on Climate Draws Fire of Christian Right By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Leaders of several conservative Christian groups have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals to force its policy director in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming. The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association's vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality. The letter underlines a struggle between established conservative Christian leaders, whose priority has long been sexual morality, and challengers who are pushing to expand the evangelical movement's agenda to include issues like climate change and human rights. 'We have observed,' the letter says, 'that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.' Those issues, the signers say, are a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote 'the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.' The letter, dated Thursday, is signed by leaders like James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; Gary L. Bauer, once a Republican presidential candidate and now president of Coalitions for America; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Paul Weyrich, a longtime political strategist who is chairman of American Values. They acknowledge in the letter that none of their groups belong to the National Association of Evangelicals, a broad coalition that represents 30 million Christians in hundreds of denominations, organizations and academic institutions. But, they say, if Mr. Cizik 'cannot be trusted to articulate the views of American evangelicals,' then he should be encouraged to resign. Mr. Cizik (pronounced SIZE-ik) did not respond to requests for an interview yesterday, and the association's chairman, L. Roy Taylor, was unavailable. But the Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the association, said, 'We're talking about somebody here who's been in Washington for 25 years, has an amazing track record and is highly respected.' 'I'm behind him,' said Mr. Anderson, who was named president in November after the sudden resignation of the Rev. Ted Haggard, the Colorado pastor caught up in a scandal involving a gay prostitute. Mr. Cizik, who is well known on Capitol Hill, has long served as one of the evangelical movement's agenda-setters. He helped put foreign policy on the evangelical agenda in the late 1990s, focusing on the persecution of Christians in other countries. He said in an interview last year that he experienced a profound 'conversion' on the global warming issue in 2002 after listening to scientists at a retreat. Now an emblem for a new breed of evangelical environmentalists, he has been written about in Vanity Fair and Newsweek and has appeared in 'The Great Warming,' a documentary on climate change. Evangelicals have recently become a significant voice in the chorus on global warming. Last year more than 100 prominent pastors, theologians and college presidents signed an 'Evangelical Climate Initiative' calling for action on the issue. Among the signers were several board members of the National Association of Evangelicals; Mr. Anderson, who has since been named its president; and W. Todd Bassett, who was then national commander of the Salvation Army and was appointed executive director of the association in January. Mr. Haggard, then the president, and Mr. Cizik did not sign, after criticism from some of the same leaders who have now sent the letter about Mr. Cizik. In interviews, some signers of this latest letter said they were wary of the global warming issue because they associated it with leftists, limits on free enterprise and population control, which they oppose. 'We're saying what is being done here,' Mr. Perkins said, 'is a concerted effort to shift the focus of evangelical Christians to these issues that draw warm and fuzzies from liberal crusaders.' From arafaat.valiani at gmail.com Sun Mar 4 22:43:35 2007 From: arafaat.valiani at gmail.com (a) Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2007 12:13:35 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] foodradio_network presents "live_feed : Snack City" In-Reply-To: <922fdfef0702262201k77f95f5cj45dd4e8ddbb1d06c@mail.gmail.com> References: <922fdfef0702262201k77f95f5cj45dd4e8ddbb1d06c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Hi, Interesting radio show. Can anyone point me to some free audio news in India that are broadcast via the internet? Thanks, Arafaat On 2/27/07, Kaustubh Srikanth wrote: > foodradio_network presents "live_feed : Snack City" from the MediaWala > Festival as the culmination of a two day workshop with > local/international/remote participants exploring the culture and > politics of streetfood. > > == CALL IN == > > CALL the SNACK CITY OPEN PHONE IN and talk to us about your favorite > street food. Share the taste, smell and the sound of your favorite > neighbourhood street snack joint live. > > Turn your phone into a microphone! > > 1. CALL 9818977450 (DELHI) > 2. Listen to the phone ring twice and go quiet > 3. You are ON AIR! > > == LISTEN LIVE == > > 8pm-10pm IST - Thu, March 1st > free103point9 Online Radio > http://free103point9.org/ > > == ABOUT THE foodradio_network == > > foodradio_network is an open and variable network of broadcasters and > foodsters exploring the culture, politics and creativity of food as a > medium and a metaphor for experiments in participatory and > collaborative live radio. They regularly dish up aural appetisers on > their show live_feed which plays on free103point9 online radio. > live_feed @ MediaWalaFestival includes participants from Australia, > India, Finland, America... and possibly also You! > > http://hybridradio.org/livefeed/ > > Snack City is supported: > http://mediawalafestival.com > http://free103point9.org/images/logo.jpg > http://cmt.siba.fi/c/transp.gif > > -- > Kaustubh Srikanth > http://houndbee.com > http://radioverve.com > http://infinitymag.com > _________________________________________ > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From harilalms at gmail.com Mon Mar 5 12:25:03 2007 From: harilalms at gmail.com (harilal madhavan) Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 12:25:03 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Ayurveda 're-formed' Message-ID: <786e9c3e0703042255i5a922d59scca73e095f5ea3f8@mail.gmail.com> Sarai / Independent Fellow 2007/ M.S Harilal/ First posting 5th March 2007 Hi all, First of all, I would like to thank Sarai for selecting me as one of the independent fellows for this year's roll. Let me introduce my self. I am at present pursuing my PhD in Economics at Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. My topic for research is " Struggle and Growth of a Traditional Sector: Case of Ayurveda in India". My current preference of work is in areas of Modernization of Indian Systems of Medicine, Medicinal Plant sector, IPR and Traditional knowledge etc. Below I have given a brief on my Sarai proposal. I would appreciate all kinds of comments from Sarai family. Regards, M.S Harilal "Adopting Modernization and Negotiating Modernization: Placing Modern and Traditional Ayurvedic Sector in the context of Transformation" The initiation of this study is basically prompted by some of the peripheral but very much intertwined observations of ongoing ayurvedic transformation. If I elaborate; one and most important, today ayurveda is used more for rejuvenation and palliative care rather than as a preventive medicine, two, ayurveda is used for different purposes in its adapted form than in its original form, and hence for short term disease cure than for long-term prevention, three, the new bio-medicalization of indigenous healing system seems to be indirectly influenced individuals subjective experiences with health and illness by transforming the 'traditional' systems of healing to an 'alternative' systems of medicine to the mainstream medicine or modern medicine and hence thoroughly transforming the relation between the two transforms the 'patient' into a 'consumer' who has more choices than ever before. In short, the transformation of the system may be characterized as two-fold. First, a change in the form: from being dispensed to individual patients to becoming available off the shelf, from being made by a Vaidya in a small rasashala to being mass manufactured by a manufacturing company, from being identified with a region or a school to becoming positioned as brands, from traditional modes of transmitting knowledge to becoming a modern profession and corpus of knowledge modeled on modern medicine. Secondly, a change in content: ayurveda is now making inroads in the world market, fuelled by not just a deepened perception of its therapeutic value, but also because of additional values attributed to it, such in health and beauty preservation. But in Kerala, even today, the co-existence of both the sectors- one, organized and modern two, traditional and unorganized side by side make the difference. The present position shows that the consumer brands are completely dominating the Indian Ayurvedic market with the share of 88 percent while classical medicines constitute only 12 Percent. An increased sale of consumer brands, i.e. ayurvedic and health and beauty products, which are marketed straight to public are largely responsible for the growth of this market. Especially in the 1990s when a rather affluent Indian consumer class came into being, large manufacturers like Dabur, Himalaya, Zandu, Pankajakasthuri, and Nagarjuna have spent substantially in advertising and marketing. Firms like Dabur consequently moved into the category of leading firms of FMCG sector. It may be claimed that at present, individual firms and the strategies they devise have a sizeable role in determining the contours of the Ayurvedic industry. Ayurveda, especially in the marketing strategies employed by firms, is fast acquiring a 'global', western look. The advertisements are increasingly making the claim that the ayurvedic medicine is as 'modern' as the western -- the claim, often, is that the proprietary rights for these medicines have been gained after 'clinical trials'. Thus, now accounting the quality of ayurveda in the modern scientific parameters has become common. However, the major players in the ayurvedic industry also claim the halo of being an alternative system free of the ills of modern medicine. In that sense, they cash upon the now-familiar critique of western medicine, which emerged as part of the new social movements. The modern non-curative sector (commodity sector) has got attention in the literature (Banerjee 2002, Bode 2004), but not the manufacturing strategies and performance. Similarly, how the non modern sector negotiates in this transformation sector also hardly explored. Similarly, how the non modern sector negotiates in this transformation sector also hardly explored. Though the interplay of both the production and consumption might have initiated this shift, prima facie, the political economy of consumption making an impact on the former seems to be more dominant. This shift as mentioned earlier, not merely as its influence on the quality and quantity but the way production relations have set and actors have placed. Some economic agents involved in production might have disappeared, new agents might have entered, and existing agents might have redefined themselves by introducing changes in-house, pursued new forms of co-operation with others and diversified their attitudes. The question of survival of traditional Vaidyas has become a major concern in the modern capitalist procedure. Similarly, there seems to have bulk suppliers of raw materials for the larger firms outside the state. These new roles of the same agents and how they deal with the standards set by international institutions need to be studied in the new context. So in brief: The study endeavors to analyze responses of the larger transformation of a traditional medical system namely ayurveda to a more affirmative institutional system and a well developed market. The modern forms of ayurveda seem to be pulled by both pharmaceutical companies and modern practitioners in a direction that flaunts cultural authenticity and tradition as well as scientific efficacy and standardization for its products. It analyses how the stakeholders in this bifurcation - traditional and modern ayurvedic manufacturing, perceive and deal with modernization, which is of two fold, both in form and content. The two specific questions that the study intents to explore, based on selected case analysis and necessary ethnographic works, are: one, How do we explain the recent gains made by many firms operating in the 'modern' sector? Two, what are the ways in which the traditional-informal sector has coped with the processes of transformation? To the gist, we are addressing the question of agential relation in the transformation and to contrast and compare how the two sections deal with the challenge of globalization or negotiate to find their space in the global era. The rationale and relevance is highlighted due to three reasons one, the traditional knowledge systems are increasingly become relevant, two, universal concern over addressing community ownership of traditional knowledge and third, significance attached in understanding the struggle and revival of similarly placed traditional industries. Reference in the text: Banerjee, M(2002) "Power, Culture and Medicine: Ayurvedic Pharmaceuticals in the Modern World Market", Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s) 36,3 Bode, M (2004), "Ayurvedic and Unani Health and Beauty Products: Reworking India's Medical Traditions", PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. --------------------------------- Thanks, Email (alternative) : harims at cds.ac.in From kj.impulse at gmail.com Mon Mar 5 00:00:46 2007 From: kj.impulse at gmail.com (Kavita Joshi) Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 00:00:46 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Invitation: IAWRT IIC Asian Women's Film Festival 2007 Message-ID: <001801c75e8b$3d9ea260$0401a8c0@hpc83f06cf59cf> Forwarding film festival invitation -- Kavita Joshi http://kavitajoshi.blogspot.com ---------- IAWRT IIC Asian Women's Film Festival 2007 Reflections: Women Imaging Realities March 7th and 8th 2007 10 AM - 8:30 PM at the India International Centre Lodi Estate, New Delhi ENTRY IS FREE. NO PASSES NEEDED. A two-day event, to mark the International Women's Day (on 8th March). This year's festival will present films that explore how women negotiate, resist or document political, social, environmental or other issues. How are women filmmakers widening the frame for issues concerning women? The festival will showcase documentary films by women covering a range of genres. It will also include animation and fiction short films. Among other films, the festival includes Q2P by Paromita Vohra; 7 Islands and a Metro by Madhushree Datta; Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi by Saba Dewan; Tales from the Margins by Kavita Joshi; and Bare by Santana Issar. The festival also features docus and animation from Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Kazakhstan; and films by the Asian diaspora. Download the SCHEDULE (as PDF) here: http://base.google.com/base_media?q=hand-411915045118389357&size=8 TEXT VERSION OF THE SCHEDULE: 7TH WED 10:00 AM INAUGURATION followed by Madsong 19 min 2006 India Natasha Mendonca In a nameless timeless place in India, an ordinary woman living an ordinary life wants to plan an extraordinary party in celebration of her lover's return. What happens when he comes home? followed by Call It Slut 14 min 2006 India Nishtha Jain A mini-portrait of a transgender person who is more than a woman. followed by Dedicated to Unicorn 4 min 2006 Taiwan (ROC) Soo You Time turns into a blended state as a simulation of dreams. A woman's unconscious reminisce. 11:00 AM BREAK 11:30 AM Moustaches Unlimited 29 min 2006 India Vasudha Joshi Exploring masculinities and femininities through moustaches. followed by Q2P 53 min 2006 India Paromita Vohra About toilets, gender and the city. Raising questions about male and female; about class, caste, urban development and the twisted myth of the global city. 1:00 PM LUNCH BREAK 2:30 PM Tales from the Margins 23 min 2006 India Kavita Joshi About the fast-to-death of Irom Sharmila, the naked demonstration by Manipuri women activists and the epic protests by the women of Manipur in their fight against the AFSPA. followed by PRESENTATION by Kavita Joshi: on video and gender training material being developed with IAWRT support 3:30 PM BREAK 4:00 PM Story Maker: Story Taker 38 min 1995 India Anjali Monteiro and K P Jayashankar About the stories and paintings of the Warli tribes. followed by Acting Like a Thief 15 min 2005 USA Shashwati Talukdar and P Kerim Friedman Through theater, members of a stigmatized tribal community have found the means to express themselves and to transform their world. followed by Between the Lines 18 min 2006 India Vaidehi Chitre About the filmmaker's search for Dr. Anandi Joshi, India's first woman doctor. 5:30 PM BREAK 6:30 PM National Pudding and Indigenious Salad 11 min 2004 India Pushpamala N A playful look at the modern Indian family as it imagined itself soon after Independence. followed by Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi 63 min 2006 India Saba Dewan Ria, a bar dancer, travels from her home in Delhi to Mumbai where hundreds of working class girls come in search of work and a future. 8:15 CLOSE --------------------------- 8TH THU 10:00 AM When Women Call the Shots 30 min 2001 India Charu Gargi Through the work of three women technicians, the film examines the representation of women in Bollywood films made by women. followed by Sharira 30 min India Ein Lall einlall2004 at yahoo.co.uk On the acclaimed choreographer-dancer Chandralekha and her unwavering faith in her mission to set free the body through dance. 11:00 AM BREAK 11:30 AM The Mall on Top of My House 6 min 2006 India Aditi Chitre On rampant land reclamation and the consequent displacement of the fishing community. followed by Bare 11 min 2006 India Santana Issar A daughter's search to find meaning, if any, in her relationship with her alcoholic father. followed by Their Story 10 min 2005 India Reema Borah A poignant tale about the daily struggles, hope and crisis in the midst of a land and people torn by armed conflict. followed by 6 Yards to Democracy 55 min 2007 India Nishtha Jain and Smriti Nevatia On the lives of poor women in Lucknow in the context of cynical electoral politics. 1:00 PM LUNCH BREAK 2:30 PM PRESENTATION by Giti Thadani: Erasure of the Feminine and New Renewals 3:30 PM BREAK 4:00 PM Crossing Fires - Blurring the Divide 22 min 2006 Sri Lanka Sharmini Boyle Two communities of women in the LTTE controlled Kilinochi district push the frontiers in a patriarchal society. followed by Live Containers 26 min 2002 Kaza-khstan Orzu Sharipov Women ex-prisoners are forced into smuggling heroin in their bodies as a way to get out of poverty and stigma. followed by Assimilation - No, Integration - Yes 24 min 2006 Canada Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy In a housing community in a Swedish town, young second generation Muslim immigrants are adjusting to life in a new country. 5:30 PM BREAK 6:30 PM 7 Islands and a Metro 100 min 2006 India Madhushree Dutta To the seven goddesses who reign over Bom Bahia / Bombay / Mumbai. 8:15 PM CLOSE SCREENINGS WILL BE FOLLOWED BY A DISCUSSION WITH THE DIRECTOR, IF PRESENT. More information about IAWRT is at: www.iawrt.org _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From rmazumdar at vsnl.net Mon Mar 5 09:25:56 2007 From: rmazumdar at vsnl.net (rmazumdar at vsnl.net) Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2007 08:55:56 +0500 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] JNU Call for Admissions - Visual, Cinema, Theatre & Performance Studies Message-ID: The School of Arts and Aesthetics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University is currently offering the following: Integrated M.A in Arts & Aesthetics, which will include courses in Visual Studies, Cinema Studies and Performance and Theatre Studies M.Phil and Ph.D in Visual Studies M.Phil and Ph.D in Theatre & Performance Studies M.Phil and Ph.D in Cinema Studies The School of Arts and Aesthetics is one of the few places in India that offers post-graduate degree courses in the theoretical and critical study of the cinematic, visual and performing arts. Moreover, it is the only place in India where these disciplines are offered in one integrated programme that allows students to understand the individual arts in relation to each other and to place them in the broader context of history, sociology, politics and cultural studies. The teaching here adopts a multidisciplinary approach drawing on insights from the fields of anthropology, history, media and cultural studies. Students are introduced to a range of research methods that combine archival, ethnographic, theoretical and cultural approaches. The School focuses on taught degree programmes. Currently, the School runs MA, MPhil and PhD programmes. While the PhD programme is entirely research-based, the M Phil degree offers specialized instruction in one of three streams, ie, Visual Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies and Cinema Studies. The M.A programme allows for an integrated study of all the three streams. The School benefits from being part of the larger academic community of Jawaharlal Nehru University, as well as the cultural riches of the city of Delhi with its active circuit of exhibitions, theatre and musical performances and film clubs and festivals. Through its programmes, the School hopes to produce a range of cultural critics, theorists and workers in the cultural field who will help to widen and enrich the cultural discourses on both the practice of art and its academic engagement. Last date for issue of Application Form by Cash: 16th March, 2007 Last date for receipt of completed application forms : 16th March, 2007 The School of Arts and Aesthetics Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi 110067 +91.11. 2671 7576 For details visit http://www.jnu.ac.in _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From nc-agricowi at netcologne.de Mon Mar 5 14:20:40 2007 From: nc-agricowi at netcologne.de (netEX) Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2007 09:50:40 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] =?iso-8859-1?q?=5BAnnouncements=5D_netEX_-_media=5F?= =?iso-8859-1?q?art=5Fnews=5Fmarch_2007?= Message-ID: <20070305095040.26A7B1C0.CEF5FCC5@192.168.0.4> March 2007 - NetEx--->:||nmapn||:Cologne ~ networked experience http://netex.nmartproject.net ------------------------------------------- --> NetEX - news contents 1.://selfportrait - a show for Peace - a review 2. more activities 3. three internal call for entries Cinematheque: Slowtime 2007? - Quicktime as an artistic medium extended the deadline --->31 May 2007 4. recent calls ------------------------------------------- 1. ://selfportrait a- show for Peace When one year ago, the hot phase of the organisation of the media art project ://selfportrait - a show for Bethlehem - http://self.engad.org - was starting, nobody could expect that this exhibition could be realized under the political conditions at that time, at all. In July 2006, when the exhibition at Al Kahf Art Gallery in Bethlehem/Palestine was inaugurated, see documentation on http://self.engad.org/blog/?p=12 the conflict in Lebanon was escalating at that time, and most foreigners had the left Palestine. In this very moment, the exhibition got its actual meaning, because the 200 participating artists became real messengers of peace by overcoming the wall which is separating Palestine from Isareli territory when I passed the checkpoint the exhibition material in my luggage. Now, in March 2007, a first phase of exhibitions came to an end which started after Bethlehem, first at Officyna Art Space Szczecin/Poland (October/November 2006) see documentation on http://self.engad.org/blog/?p=21 followed by Casoria Contemporary Art Museum Naples Italy (December 2006 - Janunary 2007), see documentation on http://self.engad.org/blog/?p=27 MAC - Museum of Contemporary Art Sajnta Fe/Argentina (December 2006- February 2007) http://self.engad.org/blog/?p=26 and finally MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art Rosario/Argentina (February/March 2007) a documentation will follow, yet. At this stage, thanks to all participating artists and cooperating art institutes, I hope some more shows can be organised in future. -------------------------------------------------------- 2. more activities Agricola de Cologne's short film "House of Tomorrow" is shown in March 2007 -->Videoformes - International Festival of Video and New Media Clermont-Ferrand/Fr - 13-17 March 2007 -->VidFest07 - Museum of New Art Detroit/USA - 9-30 March 2007 -->FILE - Electronic Language Festival Rio de Janeiro 01 Futuro Cultural Center - 19 March -24 April -->Video Art Screenings Västerås, Sweden 26/27 March, 23/24 April, 21/22 May Agricola de Cologne published a netversion of his film Bareback - serial DIScharge http://bareback.agricola-de-cologne.de More info on http://www.agricola-de-cologne.de -------------------------------------------- 3. Three internal calls for entries -------------------------------------------- 1. Cinematheque - http://cinema.nmartproject.net is currently preparing Cinema_C for hosting a new steaming online show, entitled: "Slowtime 2007? - Quicktime as an artistic medium --->extended deadline 31 May 2007 find all entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=1 2. JavaMuseum - Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art released the call for a new show case to be launched in September 2007, entitled: a + b = ba? - [art + blog = blogart?] Deadline 31 July 2007 find all entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=7 3. CologneOFF - Cologne Online Film Festival http://coff.newmediafest.org - announced recently its 3rd festival edition to be launched in October 2007 --->Theme: Toon! Toon! - art cartoons & animates narratives --->Deadline 1 August 2007 all entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=23 ------------------------------------------------ 4. recent external calls ------------------------------------------------ Deadline 25 March --->Loops for LOOP Pool entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=13 Deadline: 30 March --->FILE - Electronic Languiage Festival Sao Paulo/Brazil entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=18 Deadline 10 April --->Short Film Festival Banja Luka (Bosnia-Hercegowina) entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=11 Deadline 13 April --->Experimental Film Festival Onioncity- Chicago/USA entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=9 Deadline 13 April --->Shortfilm Festival Euganea Movement Padova/Italy entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=14 Deadline 15 May --->Video Art Festival Jakarta/Indonesia http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=12 Deadline 31 May --->Underground Film Festival Lausanne/Switzerland http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=19 Ongoing deadline --->Laisle screenings Rio de Janeiro/Brazil http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=21 Ongoing deadline until 31 December 2007 --->Web Biennial 2007 http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=10 All entry details and more calls can be found on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/ ----------------------------------------------- NetEX - networked experience http://netex.nmartproject.net http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/ # calls in the external section--> http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?cat=3 # calls in the internal section--> http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?cat=1 -------------------------------------------------------------------- # This newsletter is also released on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?cat=9 # NetEx--->:||nmapn||:Cologne ~ networked experiences http://netex.nmartproject.net is a free information service powered by [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne www.nmartproject.net - the experimental platform for Art and New Media from Cologne/Germany # info & contact: info (at) nmartproject.net _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From vedprakash.sharma at gmail.com Mon Mar 5 17:38:30 2007 From: vedprakash.sharma at gmail.com (Vedprakash Sharma) Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 17:38:30 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] MEDIAS (ir)RESPONSIBILITY References: Message-ID: <006d01c75f1f$006b5ed0$6401a8c0@ved6suqbkuh1sf> first let me tell you that all life is precious. having said this, let us accept the fact that most of the media, as all other aspects of our social life, are governed by market forces. we like it or not, media highlights only those activities and events which they think, can attract the viewers or the audience. so if media did not highlight some certain news, howsoever important it might have been, it is not wholly the media's fault. somewhere, we, the viewers, are responsible too. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vedavati Jogi" To: Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2007 9:29 AM Subject: MEDIAS (ir)RESPONSIBILITY > > MEDIAS RESPONSIBILITY > Where should it be? > > > Date: Jan 12, 2007 11:39 PM > > By the time you guys read these news excerpts, the body of Major Manish > Pitambare, who was shot dead at Anantnag, would have been cremated with > full > military honors. > > On Tuesday, this news swept across all the news channels 'Sanjay Dutt > relieved by court'. 'Sirf Munna not a bhai' '13 saal ka vanvaas khatam' > 'although found guilty for possession of armory, Sanjay can breath sigh of > relief as all the TADA charges against him are withdrawn'. Then many > personalities like Salman Khan said 'He is a good person. We knew he will > come out clean'. Mr. Big B said, "Dutt's family and our family have > relations for years he's a good kid. He is like elder brother to > Abhishek". > His sister Priya Dutt said "we can sleep well tonight. It's a great > relief" > > In other news, Parliament was mad at Indian team for performing bad; Greg > Chappell said something; Shah Rukh Khan replaces Amitabh in KBC and other > such stuff. But most of the emphasis was given on Sanjay Dutt's "phoenix > like" comeback from the ashes of terrorist charges. Surfing through the > channels, one news item on BBC startled me. It read, "Hisbul Mujahidin's > most wanted terrorist Sohel Faisal killed in Anantnag, India. Indian Major > leading the operation lost his life in the process. Four others are > injured. > > It was past midnight, I started visiting the stupid Indian channels, but > Sanjay Dutt was still ruling. They were telling how Sanjay pleaded to the > court saying 'I'm the sole bread earner for my family', 'I have a daughter > who is studying in US' and so on. Then they showed how Sanjay was not > wearing his lucky blue shirt while he was hearing the verdict and also how > he went to every temple and prayed for the last few months. A suspect in > Mumbai bomb blasts, convicted under armory act...was being transformed > into > a hero. > > Sure Sanjay Dutt has a daughter; sure he did not do any terrorist > activity. > Possessing an AK47 is considered too elementary in terrorist community and > also one who possesses an AK47 has a right to possess a pistol so that > again > is not such a big crime; Sure Sanjay Dutt went to all the temples; sure he > did a lot of Gandhigiri but then........... > > Major Manish H Pitambare got the information from his sources about the > terrorists' whereabouts. Wasting no time he attacked the camp, killed > Hisbul > Mujahidin's supremo and in the process lost his life to the bullets fired > from an AK47. He is survived by a wife and daughter (just like Sanjay Dutt > has) who's only 18 months old. > > Major Manish never said 'I have a daughter' before he took the decision to > attack the terrorists in the darkest of nights. He never thought about > having a family and he being the bread earner. No news channel covered > this > since they were too busy hyping a former drug addict; a suspect who's > linked > to bomb blasts which killed hundreds. Their aim was to show how he defied > the TADA charges and they were so successful that his conviction in > possession of armory had no meaning. They also concluded that his parents > in > heaven must be happy and proud of him. > > Parents of Major Manish are still living and they have to live rest of > their > lives without their beloved son. His daughter won't ever see her daddy > again. Finally Major Manish, to my generation is a greater hero, someone > who > laid his life in the name of this great nation. > > So guys, please forward this message around so that the media knows which > news to give importance, as it is a shame for us since this Army Major's > death news was given by a foreign TV channel!!! > > Yet the smallest of aberrations in a 1.5 million strong Army is hyped up > and > pasted on the front-page news, without so much as a confirmation. Our > media > men are defence analysts, strategists, lawmakers and judges all rolled > into one BUT are they patriots? > > _________________________________________________________________ > Latest updates from the world of sports > http://content.msn.co.in/Sports/Default > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From yasir.media at gmail.com Mon Mar 5 19:59:59 2007 From: yasir.media at gmail.com (yasir ~) Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 06:29:59 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] MEDIAS (ir)RESPONSIBILITY In-Reply-To: <006d01c75f1f$006b5ed0$6401a8c0@ved6suqbkuh1sf> References: <006d01c75f1f$006b5ed0$6401a8c0@ved6suqbkuh1sf> Message-ID: <5af37bb0703050629od0fae9eyb15d8be436995df@mail.gmail.com> On 3/5/07, Vedprakash Sharma wrote: > first let me tell you that all life is precious. really? that is a very very odd statement of fact. must be an opinion or hope or some such thing. From vivek at sarai.net Tue Mar 6 16:29:48 2007 From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan) Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:29:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First Post In-Reply-To: <231156.80366.qm@web54506.mail.yahoo.com> References: <231156.80366.qm@web54506.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <45ED49A4.4070306@sarai.net> PS-- this is the second post from this year's independent fellows; the first was MS Harilal on the Ayurvedic medicine industry. V anuja ghosalkar wrote: > Hi all, This is my first post for the Sarai I- Fellowship and so far I > don't see any other post. So I guess I am the first one posting. I am > really nervous as I do this but anyway I thought I will get on with it > as there is no escaping it. So here goes: I am Anuja Ghosalkar, I have > been a lecturer and researcher in film in Bombay for the last five > years. I have also been involved with an experimental theatre group in > Mumbai for over half a decade, called The Company Theatre. All of last > year I was a research associate with Rosie Thomas who was writing a > book on early Indian Cinema and the Stunt film. I have also been a > co-curator of /Made By Women/, an international women's film festival. > I am currently working with Breakthrough – a globally active human > rights organization. My research project is on my grand father who I > call *P/apa Ajoba/*/,/ which is also the project title. This project > will chronicle the life of my grand father, as a make up artist in the > Hindi film industry from 1941 to 2000: from his early years at Raj > Kamal studio with V. Shantaram (when they literally made their own > make-up) to his 17 years spent at the Filmistan studio. There will be > a sharper focus on the 1960’s - when he predominantly worked with > Shammi Kapoor, Asha Parekh, Sadhana & Saira Banu. It will also > document film history from the point of view of a technician who might > lacquer it with his own stories. It is finally, a tribute to a > grandfather who narrated stories of his everyday life, not knowing > that stories often become history. The research will primarily be > through interviews, previously published books on the history of > Indian cinema and material from magazines like Film India, > Rangabhoomi, Screen, etc. The presentation will be in an audio-visual > form with a written thesis. *Update on the Research*: I have just > finished recording one, one hour audio tape with my grand father with > some basic information of him and industry. I just realized that even > though I have lived with him all my life, there are so many things > that I did not know, I now need to transcribe the tape and do some > more recording. So that’s where I am at right now… getting started > hesitantly but also with a sense of great excitement. I hope it goes > all well for all of us. Cheers Anu > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > 8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick > in no time > with theYahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut. > From vivek at sarai.net Tue Mar 6 16:38:36 2007 From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan) Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:38:36 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Abstracts for 2007 Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellows Message-ID: <45ED4BB4.30904@sarai.net> Here's a taste of what's to come! This is a long text-- 11,000 words or about 23 printed pages long. It will also soon be available for browsing on the Sarai website. Note also that translations for the abstracts for some of the Hindi projects are not included here, but they will appear on deewan at sarai.net , where the postings for the Hindi projects will be sent. Cheers Vivek ABSTRACTS FOR SELECTED SARAI-CSDS INDEPENDENT FELLOWSHIP PROPOSALS: 2007 (list is alphabetical by last name; please enable Unicode on your computer to read the Devanagiri fonts) 1. Priya Babu, Chennai. Performance and Worship in the Aravani (Transgender) Community in Tamilnadu Aravanis, called Hijrahs in north India, have existed in Tamilnadu for several centuries. Though born biologically as males, they closely identify themselves as girl/woman. By doing so, they undergo a lot of suffering due to the great psychological pressure exerted by different social forces that prevail. Because of lack of understanding among the general public and the society, those who do not behave like boys are often discrimination and even face violence from their own family members. Hence they are forced to leave their family members and later join the Aravani community, which accepts them and provides support. This research will study and document the Tamilnadu Aravani community’s varied musical (household, ceremonial, ritualistic and popular) performance forms as well as their theatrical (theru koothu) tradition. It will try to understand different sects and their hierarchies with a focus on interrelations during public celebrations and private gatherings. In the process, the project will also document their worshipping places, their relation with the god Aravan and the story of how they became linked with mainstream society. Priya Babu is a Chennai-based researcher, journalist and coordinator of the theatre group, ‘Kannadi Kalai Kuzhu’. She is herself a member of the Aravani community. 2. Dwaipayan Banerjee, Delhi. Towards A Postcolonial Code Science and technology studies is a growing inter-disciplinary field of research and within it, the sub-discipline of postcolonial technoscience studies is fast gaining currency. Within this discipline I hope to look at programs and programmers of cryptographic code in India. There has been lot of talk (both commonsensical and specialist) about information as trans-national flow, about the liberating qualities of cyberspace. To provide some balance to these claims, even a cursory glance at recent IT legislation on cryptography provides sobering insights into how completely the State enables itself to control flow by decrypting every kind of communication at will. Cryptographic code and its use is then a fertile area of study, as it emerges at the interstices of law, national security and citizen’s privacy. Methodologically, one would hope to build on insights from science-tech studies and follow engineers (in case this programmers) and their products (cryptographic code) through a process of innovation, use and institutionalisation. It is hoped that the end product for the Sarai archive will be a well-researched paper on the cryptographic practices of programmers, the use of their code and governmental legislation. Dwaipayan Banerjee is an MPhil student of sociology, with particular interests in the anthropology of science, political theory and literature. 3. Smita Banerjee, Delhi. Cinematic City: Kolkata, Modernity, Middle Class and the Urban Woman—A Study of 1950s and 1960s Popular Bangla Cinema I propose to excavate a history of the relationship between popular cinema and the city through the narrative prism of some 1950s and 60s popular Bangla cinema. I would like to focus on the emergence of a specific urban middle class aesthetic that is spatially and cinematically articulated through its location in the city of Kolkata. Films such as Saptapadi (1961), Harano Sur (1951), Saat Pake Bandha (1963), Uttar Phalguni (1966), Abhoyar Biye (1957), Teen Bhuboner Paare (1969), Trijama (1956), Sagarika (1956), Pathey Holo Deri (1957), Agnipariksha (1954), Bipasha (1962), Chaoa Paoa (1959), Deya Neya (1963), Bicharak (1959), etc. negotiate a complex relationship of middle class characters to the city through a narrative investment in foregrounding the themes of work, profession, intercaste, interracial love, interpersonal conflicts, choice of career and new and different focus on the working woman and her identity. I will attempt to show how this cinematic engagement with the urban city and modernity and the woman is not only a fashioning but a self–fashioning of the urban middle class Bengali identity. Through a foregrounding of the representation of the city in cinema, I will attempt to recover a history of the spatial negotiations that help these middle class characters to map, appropriate and articulate their lived experience in urban Kolkata of the 1950s and 60s. I will also attempt to historicise this cinematic articulation as a document/archive of the lived city which can be used to formulate (a) thesis of a specific self fashioning of the Bengali middle class, (b) to locate the imaginary of this of this cinema within the emergence of a new popular engaged in mapping a feminine subjectivity in the modern city. Smita Banerjee is a senior lecturer in English at the Delhi College of Arts & Commerce, Delhi University. 4. Julius Basaiawmoit & Renee C. Lulam, Shillong. The Changing Faces of Democratic Spaces in Urban Cosmopolitan Shillong What is ‘cosmopolitan’ about a small city, hub of the Northeast, with a layered history of having been a colonial capital, then that of undivided Assam in post-independent India, and later, in 1972, the capital of a hill state carved out of Assam? With spurts of communal violence since 1979, the dynamics of public spaces within Shillong have subtly shifted. Violence has been targeted at specific communities, even as prejudices between and across communities continue. Engagement with the past is intensely personal, and a resource for enhancing identity as well as explaining experience. Oral history’s potential for deeply evocative accounts creates innovative avenues for understanding personal events as profoundly social. This allows a broader perception of human interactions that have shaped the past and continue into the present. With this backdrop, the project proposes to investigate if the urban spaces of Shillong truly express a cosmopolitan environment. Through audio-recordings and an interpretative paper of oral testimonies from individuals of various backgrounds, the project enquires into the central question of indigeneity versus the cosmopolitan in public spaces within the city of Shillong. Julius specializes in sound for film and television. Renee works with independent research based projects. Both are from Shillong. 5. Mithun Narayan Bose, Kolkata. Tracing Life from the Stroke: Documenting the Rickshaw-Painting of Kolkata Streets The paintings behind the rickshaws of the city of Calcutta are a unique example of an unnoticed urban folk-art, and the detailed study of the paintings can be an alternative way to know about the life of these people. As most of the Calcutta Rickshaw-pullers have migrated to the city from other places, the paintings’ style reflect the form/ style of art available at the rickshaw-puller’s place of origin. A unique heterogeneity is also observed due to its confluence with the urban style. Thematically, the rickshaw paintings of Calcutta-streets are of different types (e.g. religious, landscape, portrait of near and dear ones, film star etc.). In this proposed project, the painting behind the rickshaws will be documented with the help of both video recording and photography. The mode of presentation will be in the form of a documentary film. It will be supplemented by an academic paper (which will include the interviews with the rickshaw-pullers, owners and painters). Some photographs of the paintings will also be submitted as a part of the archive. Mithun Narayan Bose is a language teacher at a Kolkata school. He contributes regularly to several Kolkata little magazines, and his interests include poetry, folklore, cultural anthropology, art and art criticism. 6. Pritham Chakravarty, Chennai. Urban Sabha Dramas Theatre in Tamilnadu has a long and varied history, ever since Sankaradas Swamigal brought regularity into the running of professional theatre with the Boys Companies. The Dravidian movement had a deep impact on the growth of Tamil theatre, with C. N. Annadurai and M. Karunanidhi being its star writers. Sustaining these groups became financially nonviable after the late 50s with the emergence of cinema as the more popular medium of entertainment. Family entertainment in Madras, now Chennai, in the 60s took a very interesting avatar. With the change in the local political scene and Tamil cinema audience itself largely divided between two loyalties —that of MGR and Sivaji Ganesan— the urban public created a new form of entertainment. In the 60s townships like T. Nagar, Mylapore, Triplicane, Nungambakkam and even the then suburb, Chromepet, with its very large middle-class population, sprang up with a number of Sabhas, which became the water-shed in the growth of art and culture. By the early 70s, the audience had grown in other cities like Bombay, Delhi, and Calcutta. Late 70s television with its weekend quota of films and song-and-dance sequences lured the audience away from the sabhas. While for some time sabhas occupied themselves with bharathnatyam and carnatic music shows this could never promise the once regular members’ return to the halls. Post-Emergency also saw several contemporary theatre groups emerge in the city. Though these groups occasionally hired the sabhas for their performances, the audience was a niche group that could never fill the space. By the late 80s the sabhas were practically empty. The research itself opts to concentrate on the growth of the sabhas and the amateur theatre groups, considering their impact on the larger theatre audience. Many of the agents are still alive and are active elsewhere. Scripts of a few have been published. The audio and DVD market for some of the plays have grown. But none of these have been archived. Reviews of most plays are non-existent. In fact many do not know their plays were reviewed at all. While theatre in Maharashtra and Kolkata receive plenty of state patronage, in Tamilnadu only contemporary forms are able to draw state or corporate support. Thus a form of theatre that even emerged because of the sheer nature of this urban space is today left to die a slow death. Pritham Chakravarthy is a performer and writer based in Chennai. 7. Arnab Chatterjee, Kolkata. Beyond Private and Public: New Perspectives on Personal and Personalist Social Work The key to understanding modernity is the public/private divide and a corresponding failure to find a way beyond the binary. A stream of discourses could be recalled which had proposed, in their desperate will to move beyond this liberal dilemma, alternative versions of the private and the public where the personal appeared as another version of the private. My work argues the personal as a beyond of private/public binary and distinguishes it from the private vis-à-vis the public. Having recuperated the personal as a suppressed narrative using historical and socio-theoretic tools, I interrupt it by thematizing the category ( though not limiting it) through the cultural self understanding of particular communities and deploy it by using the registers of personalist social work. [Deriving its force from social and psychotherapeutic case work, personalist social work denied to be absorbed in either the public (the governmental state) or the private ( resistance to publicity)]. This study will limit itself to exploring how the personal negotiates with the questions of publicity/mediation in the context of colonial Calcutta’s emerging civil society --energized by its claims to have generated modernity; a claim that continues to be examined even today. Embodying a will to become an academic research paper using secondary sources, the study will accumulate texts that range from the Calcutta Neo-Hegelian Hiralal Haldar’s debate with Mactaggart ( in the 1890’s) on whether the absolute or a school club has a personality (even if “the personality is a colony”) to how the personal or personalist social work may engender the first systematic critique of Partha Chatterjee’s revisionist notion of new Political Society ( in the wake of ‘welfare’ of the population) and whose examples are drawn from contemporary Calcutta. Arnab Chatterjee is Doctoral Fellow at the department of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and on the visiting faculty of Ethics and Human Values at the Bengal Institute of Technology, Kolkata. 8. Neelima Chauhan, Delhi. ब्लॉगित हिन्दी जाति का लिंकित मन: ब्लॉगों में हिन्दी हायपरटेक्स्ट का अध्ययन (“The Linked Mind of the Blogged Hindi Jati: A Hypertextual Study of Hindi Blogs”) This research proposes to do an online study of Hindi hyper text on Hindi blogs. It will be an attempt to make a critical appreciation of Language and style of hypertextual prose as it flows through the terminals of Hindi Bloggers. It will be an online study which will take in account the existing blogs, Hindi Networks, Blog Archives, Comments etc. Narratives from the Hindi Online community will be collected. The objective is to identify the construction of the grand narrative of 'Hindi Jati' (Hindi nationality) as described in Hindi literary criticism, especially that by Ram Vilas Sharma. This construction of Hindi Jati where geographical space seemingly becomes meaningless (or less important, at least) will be explored. As the research will be an online study, its progress will be available to all interested in real time. Findings of the work will be shared through a Weblog Publication and will be presented at the final workshop. Neelima's doctoral and Post doctoral work is in Post colonial Hindi Prose. She teaches Hindi at Delhi University's Zakir Husain Post Graduate Evening College. 9. Raman Jit Singh Chima, Bangalore. The Regulation of the Internet by the Indian State through Legal Structures and Mechanisms Though considerable work has been done on exploring how the Internet is capable of being regulated, not much has been done to chart out the exact shape of such regulation of expression on the Internet in India. More importantly, the exact manner in which the Indian State has regulated the Internet through all the structures and mechanisms at its disposal has not been studied, which is important since this affects the flow of speech and expression. In order to attempt to chart out the empirical aspects of Internet regulation in India and its linkages with normative frameworks, the focus of this project is thus on the following two goals; Firstly, to track out and study the manner in which the Indian State regulates the Internet through legal structures and connected mechanism (both through formal legal rules as well as through informal measure such as executive action) Secondly, to analyze how this regulatory framework relates to the constitutional safeguards with respect to the limitations on state action viz. free speech and expression and whether it respects these constraints. The findings obtained from the proposed field work (which will track the form, extent and purported rationale of such regulation) will be processed through the existing theoretical frameworks and the end result will be an paper which will present the manner in which the Indian State has regulated the Internet currently, along with a critical academic understanding of how this connects with constitutional safeguards with respect to freedom of speech and expression. Raman Chima is pursuing the B.A.LL.B. (Hons) program at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and is currently in the 3rd year of this course. 10. Burton Cleetus, Delhi. Urbanisation, Western Medicine and Modernity: The Rockefeller Foundation in Travancore One of the most important interventions made by the “progressive” state of Travancore which later became part of the state of Kerala, was in the field of health care. The reorganization of the public health department with the aid of the Rockefeller Foundation of the United States was aimed at drafting a coherent health care policy for the state, primarily to cater to the needs of the emerging population in the urban centres. The study seeks to argue that the process of reconstituting the health care policy by the princely state in the early twentieth century was a political project of governance aimed at socio-cultural framing. A comparison between activities of the Rockefeller foundation in addressing the spread of Malaria and plague in the early twentieth century with the attempts made by the state of Kerala in tackling similar contagious diseases in recent times would enable to one understand the shifts in the frames of references of the nature of interventions of western medicine over the last century. The study would fundamentally be based on the government documents from the Kerala state archives and on newspaper reports and clippings. The conclusions of the study would be presented as a research paper. Burton Cleetus is a PhD scholar from the Center for Historical Studies, JNU. He did his post graduation and M Phil from JNU. His research on the institutionalization of indigenous medicine in Kerala is an attempt to explore as to how esoteric cultural practices and localized healing techniques were refashioned, revitalized and consequently institutionalized into the broad framework of Ayurveda. 11. Ajit Kr. Dvivedi, Delhi. मीडिया की नज़र में सीलिंग बनाम पुश्ते का विस्थापन ("Media Study: Comparative Reporting on Ceilings and Displacement from Jamuna Pushta”) 12. Anuja Ghoshalkar, Mumbai. Papa Aajoba. The project will chronicle the life of my grand father, who was a make up artist in the Hindi film industry from 1941 to 2000: from his early years at Raj Kamal studio with V. Shantaram (when they literally made their own make-up) to his 17 years spent at the Filmistan studio. There will be a sharper focus on the 1960’s - when he predominantly worked with Shammi Kapoor, Asha Parekh, Sadhana & Saira Banu. It will also document film history from the point of view of a technician who might lacquer it with his own stories. It is finally, a tribute to a grandfather who narrated stories of his everyday life, not knowing that stories often become history. The research will primarily be through interviews, previously published books on the history of Indian cinema and material from magazines like Film India, Rangabhoomi, Screen, etc. The presentation will be in an audio-visual form with a written essay. Anuja Ghosalkar is a lecturer and researcher in film and has been involved with an experimental theatre group in Mumbai for over half a decade. She is currently working with Breakthrough – a globally active human rights organization. 13. Ranu Ghosh, Kolkata. The Changing Industrial Landscape of Kolkata: Jay Engineering Works I have been following the transformation of a productive, half a century old Jay Engineering Works into Kolkata’s South City Project, “Eastern India's largest mixed use real estate development”. Jay Engineering, commonly called Usha Factory, started operations manufacturing electrical consumer durables in the 1950s. The labour force of this reasonably large manufacturing unit was mostly comprised of migrants from Bihar and UP, and refugees from East Pakistan. The Works was closed down, made defunct and the land was handed over to the real estate consortium of five major real estate “magnates” in 2003. The factory buildings were demolished and the construction of the South City Projects comprising three 35-storey and one 28-storey tower, a shopping mall, school, multiplex, club etc, started from February 2004, which included the illegal filling up of one of south Calcutta's largest natural water bodies. The workers of Jay were forced into retirement with little or no compensation and sent into limbo, except for Shambhu Prasad Singh. Shambhu has refused to opt for the meagre handouts and has instead taken his case to court. Against all odds, and withstanding the sustained pressure of the builders, he continues to live in his original quarters, surrounded and dwarfed on all sides by the construction in progress of South City. This brave stand taken by an individual is an example of how such “development” can be challenged. Since the latter half of 2004 I have been documenting in video and still formats, the stages of development at the construction site as the work progressed and the displaced labour force, and out of that, Shambhu Prasad evolved as an outstanding example of the protest against this “development”. I began to follow his everyday life, his improvised strategies of survival in the face of difficult circumstances and his innate zeal to fight for his rights. He has transformed from a character in my film into that of a collaborator, adding a unique dimension to the project. Ranu Ghosh has worked as a freelance camera person and director in the Indian industry for the past eight years. 14. Sukanya Ghosh, Kolkata. Animation and the Development Ideal: The Idea of Nation, the Socialist Impetus and Animation Film Design in India This project seeks to trace the history of Animation film design within India and to find within it a parallel history of the developing nation state. It will look at institutions such as the Doordarshan, Films Division, Lok Seva Sanchar, and The National Institute of Design, meet and interview various people associated with this history, and gather and examine archival material that is available. The nature of this research will be to record, analyse and seek out a definitive historical path for Indian animation, and to locate it within a broader perspective of social and industrial change. The research will be compiled as a visual presentation which can be used as archival material as well as something that can be presented as an exhibit or presentation independently. 15. Rajeev Ranjan Giri, Delhi. सरस्वती की सार्वजनिक दुनिया (“The Public World of the Journal Saraswati, 1900-1920”) 16. M.S. Harilal, Thiruvananthapuram. Adopting Modernisation, Negotiating Modernisation: Modern and Traditional Ayurvedic Sectors in the Context of Transformation The study endeavors to analyze responses of the larger transformation of a traditional medical system, namely Ayurveda, to a more affirmative institutional system and a well developed market. The modern forms of Ayurveda seem to be pulled by both pharmaceutical companies and modern practitioners in a direction that flaunts cultural authenticity and tradition as well as scientific efficacy and standardization for its products. It analyses how the stakeholders in this bifurcation - traditional and modern ayurvedic manufacturing, perceive and deal with modernization, which is two fold, both in form and content. The two specific questions that the study intends to explore, based on selected case analysis and necessary ethnographic works, are: one, How do we explain the recent gains made by many firms operating in the 'modern' sector? Two, what are the ways in which the traditional-informal sector has coped with the processes of transformation? To the gist, we are addressing the question of agential relation in the transformation and want to contrast and compare how the two sections deal with the challenge of globalization or negotiate to find their space in the global era. Three rationales may be given for this study: one, the traditional knowledge systems are increasingly become relevant, two, there is a universal concern to addressing community ownership of traditional knowledge and third, it will help us understand the struggle and revival of similarly placed traditional industries. M.S. Harilal is, at present, a doctoral scholar in Economics at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. His current areas of interests are the modernization of Indian systems of medicine, the medicinal plants sector, IPR and traditional knowledge. 17. Zaigham Imam, Delhi/Allahabad. सपनों की रेल (“Railways of Dreams”) 18. Santana Issar & Aditi Saraf, Delhi. Old Dog, New Tricks: Rethinking Animal Activism in an Urban Context Human-animal relationships have been historically constituted in complex and intimate ways along the economic, the affective, the cultural and ritual, and the metaphoric. As these relationships have receded into an irretrievable past, it has been suggested that animals have been reconfigured in the urban imagination; as household pets, as objects of wonder in zoos and circuses, and as (Kentucky or not) fried chicken. Our question is - does this driving of a wedge between human lives and those of animals inform dominant notions of 'animal welfare'? We will study the relationship between the theory of the human-animal interaction in a post-industrial urban context, and the practices of animal rescue and welfare, in order to understand how, and to what extent, each is shaped by the other. All this in the particular context of our very own urban jungle – Delhi. Our research methodology and documentation will involve the textual as well as the visual. Research will be conducted through participant observation, interviews and questionnaires, and photographic and video documentation. Both Santana and Aditi are graduates of St Stephen's College. Santana is a filmmaker, Aditi works as a research associate at the National Knowledge Commission. 19. Vivek Kumar Jain, Delhi दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय के रेहड़ी खोमचेवालों का ज़िन्दगीनामा (“A Study of Social and Cultural Spaces on the DU Campus”) 20. Deepak Kadyan, Delhi. Popular Musical Traditions and the Configuration of Jat Identity in Haryana This research seeks to examine the relationship between popular musical traditions and the forging of a jat identity in north India in general and in Haryana in particular. The processes of identity formation and self-perceived notions of community will be analyzed and discerned through the prism of popular culture and as to how a 'community' viewed itself, and what its aspirations have been over a period of time. An important aspect of this study would be an analysis of the sites of performance and circulation of this oral tradition. One such site is the akharas (lit. a wrestling arena, but here, it refers to a space for rehearsals and practice), influential until the mid twentieth century. Another such site available to oral tradition for circulation was the colonial army and police. The history of oral tradition is intertwined with the history of prominent performers, and major structural and performative changes, whether in terms of musical instruments, rhythms, intonation, appropriation of symbols or content— in other words, the relationship between performers and performance. Interestingly, the social composition of oral tradition in Haryana is different, as it wasn't dominated by any particular community. This study seeks to use a variety of sources ranging from archival material to oral traditions and personal interviews. This study intends to make use of all the documented oral tradition in the form of text and cassettes as well. A process of documentation of Sufi tradition, which is so strong in this region will be initiated. Amongst other textual sources, diaries, personal letters, memoirs and compositions of prominent political leaders like Chotu Ram, Chajju Ram and others merit analysis. This study also seeks to use the letters received from Pakistani soldiers kept at All India Radio, and a personal collection of correspondence between people who left Haryana and were constantly interacting through letters. 21. Ram Ganesh Kamatham, Bangalore. Vikram and Vetal: A Contemporary Urban Play This research seeks to create a play script which is a modern retelling of the folktale of Vikram and Vetal. The main thrust of the research will seek to create a critical mass of information pertaining to the stories that will be exploited for dramaturgical ends, with a view to re-contextualising the stories within a modern urban space. It will involve gathering material that will eventually inform the creation of the play script – including comic books, photographs, clippings and a travelogue. The dramaturgical concept of polyvocality will permeate the research as well as drive the creative process that will frame the material dramatically. Ram Ganesh Kamatham is a professional writer based in Bangalore. He has created work for stage, film, radio, and video games. 22. Shahnawaz Khan, Srinagar. Entertainment Ghosts in Srinagar: A Tale of Cinema Halls in the City This study aims to analyse the impact of the closure of cinema halls in Srinagar after the outbreak of armed insurgency in early nineties. Most of the closed cinema halls are occupied by paramilitary troopers and have even functioned as torture centres in the nineties. Some others have changed business. Only one is functional, but not in good condition. I will be talking to people associated with the trade, cine goers who have been to these halls when they functioned, and the youth today who do not find a place to go for a movie in the city. The study will also look at the psychological impact of these structures in the city, which stand witness to the times they have gone through. I am a journalist based in Srinagar, associated with the US based Free Speech Radio News. Along with some friends we launched Kashmirnewz.com in 2006. 23. Arvind Kumar, Delhi. Caste Violence in Urban Maharashtra: A Study of the 1974 Worli Riots, a Breaking Point in the Dalit Panthers Movement The proposed study intends to analyse the Worli riots of 1974 when there was a violent clash between the Shiv Sena and the Dalit Panthers. In this riot the main target of communal wrath were dalits who opted out of the oppressive caste-hindu religion and converted to Neo-Buddhism. The riots and the agitation brought to the surface dissensions within the Dalit Panther movement, which ultimately led to its split in 1974. There are enough sources available on Dalit Panther movement. The consciousness of revolt was also expressed in an outburst of poetry by new writers like Namdev Dhasal, Daya Powar, J V Pawar, Waman Nimbalkar, Arun Kamble and many others. The present study will locate the Worli riots in a historical perspective and will try and address new questions as and when they arise through the course of the study. Content analysis as a technique would be adopted whereby making inferences by systematically and objectively identifying specified characteristics of texts will be followed. The researcher would conduct interviews with the survivors of the riots and would record and transcribe them. Apart from this, internet sites would be scoured for photographs and assorted material. Arvind Kumar is pursuing a PhD in American Studies at the School of International Studies, JNU on the topic 'Discrimination and Resistance - A Comparative Study of Black Movements in the U.S and Dalit Movements in India'. 24. Ramesh Kumar, Delhi. Film Exhibition Spaces in Delhi My research would attempt to understand the dynamics of the film viewing experience offered by three different cinema halls belonging to the A, B and C segment each in the city of Delhi. Basing itself on the premise that our film viewing experience is greatly altered by the viewing conditions and other facilities offered by the screening space and its surroundings, the research would seek to understand what marks such difference between the three cinema halls. Through a series of interviews, empirical observation and photo documentation, I would investigate the unique spatial experience offered by each site, study the various facilities offered by them, compare the nature of films screened and the technology used in each hall, examine other mechanisms employed to offer the audience “a novel movie experience” and study the different promotional materials used by each cinema hall. In a final report/ academic paper, I would summarize these empirical findings and locate them in the larger field of cultural production and circulation amidst the heterogeneity of the city space. I am currently enrolled for an MPhil in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. 25. Gyaltsen Lama, Gangtok, Sikkim. Shamans in the City A four part graphic novel exploring the lives of four different shamans in Gangtok, Sikkim. 20 pages of each part with black and white illustrations. Each part is approached with different illustration and narrative styles. ONE This is more of an intimate/personal approach. The shaman, who is a housewife, is interviewed randomly over a period of time. The illustration is realistic. Story line consists of her history, views, aspirations and experiences. TWO This has a humorous approach story wise so the illustration is more free flowing and very much satirical. This is a shaman who has more misses than hits. This narrative will be interviews with the people who interact with him on a daily basis, their opinion of him. THREE This has an experimental approach illustration wise. This deals with more of the shamanistic rituals where the shaman describes them. A collage of illustrations and photographs with non linear inter panel flow. FOUR This is a background research of a shaman who is from a remote part of Sikkim and now resides in Gangtok city. This research includes visiting the village of the shaman and interviewing the village people and getting a better understanding of where the shaman comes from and how he is coping with the city. (Gyaltsen Lama: I received my bachelor of fine arts degree (year 2000) from Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai. I am currently the fine art teacher at Tashi Namgyal Academy, Gangtok. I am working on an art installation; one part of it is a 13 ft sculpture in concrete. The project is in its final stages. I am also a tattoo artist and have been working on tattoos for the last 7 years. I also have a passion for cel animation.) 26. Madhura Lokohare, Pune. Exploring the ‘Vartaphalak’ Culture in Pune City The aim of the study is to explore the role played by notice boards (popularly known as vartaphalak) in formation and articulation of identity in four areas of Pune city, viz. Sadashiv Peth, Narayan Peth, Guruwar Peth and Ghorpade Peth. The study tries to investigate how local, communal and regional identity is constructed and consolidated through these spaces, by looking at the visual organization of these spaces and content and rhetoric used in the notice boards. It also aims at understanding the profile of population whom these spaces are aimed at as well as community perceptions towards these spaces. Whether the spaces reflect a gender-based and caste-based differences would be another point of exploration. Fieldwork would be done through three qualitative methods: photo documentation, interviews and FGDs, and non-participant observation. These methods would focus on specific themes outlined in the objectives. The outcome of the study would be in the form of a photo-essay comprising of maximum 35 photographs, covering the above issues and an essay exploring these issues based upon fieldwork as well as a brief review of literature in the area of public spaces and visual culture. Madhura Lokhare is currently working as a Research Co-ordinator in a mental health research, services and advocacy organization, Bapu Trust, Pune; there she is working on a research project exploring the role of indigenous healing practices in mental health. 27. Nalin Mathur, Delhi. B-Grade Engineering College Culture Being subjected with the experience of studying at an engineering college, I happened to witness the living experiences, aspirations and values that make an 'engineer' beyond all the techy stuff he learns in the classroom. Add to it the different background and identity of students and the acute realization that "This – is- not – IIT", which more often then not looms large in everyone's conscience. Hence, engineering colleges constitute of interesting and fantastical cultural dynamics wherein a mix of identities, cultures and aspirations are played out in non-metropolitan spaces to get an amalgamation of different worlds in one campus. Through this project I aim to study the phase of social and emotional renaissance which unavoidably crops up during one's stay away from his natural locale. The end-product of the research will be in form of a series of essays with illustrations and will cover the following: 1. An ethnographic description of B Grade Engineering college culture and student experience. 2. Mapping out the changing dynamics of this space along with that of its physical location and how the latter contributes to receives and experiences this culture. 3. Hypothetical possibilities of how these might affect the physical and cultural space. 4. How these aspects affect one’s politics, conscience, personhood. 5. How these experiences influence and form the outlook towards the world at large or view points nurtured here during the four years of a students stay. The research methodology shall be qualitative and informal in nature. It will include: - Participant Observation - Photography - Ethnography - Sociometry - Historiography I am Nalin Narain Mathur, working as an Analyst – Systems, with HCL Technologies – Remote Infrastructure Division and have a Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Uttar Pradesh Technical University, Lucknow. 28. Meena Menon, Mumbai. Recovering Lost Histories: Riot Victims and Communal Polarisation in Mumbai Is Mumbai the unbreakable city it is touted to be? As a city, it has changed in obvious and not so obvious ways since the post Babri Masjid demolition riots of December 1992 and January 1993. The main focus of the research will be the families of the riot victims and their lives after more than a decade since the violence. The high profile trial of the 1993 serial blasts case has come to an end and the verdict is being handed out while the Srikrishna commission, which did a detailed report on the riots, has been shelved. The riots clearly intensified the divide between two communities and created a process of further ghettoisation. Many people went to live in extended suburbs and even outside the cities, creating extruded ghettos. The scars over the years have created deeper divisions and tracing the complexities involved may allow some truths to emerge. The research method will be based on interviews first hand visits to places and talking to as wide a spectrum of people as possible— including researchers, journalists, riot affected families, government, police officials, apart from political parties. At the end of the research I would like to use the material for a book. At the moment I am special correspondent with The Hindu. I have been a journalist for 22 years and have worked with The Times of India, Mid-day and the United of News of India. 29. Yateendra Mishra, Allahabad. आत्मीयता के इर्द - गिर्द अयोध्या ("The Intimate Ayodhya”) 30. Sayandeb Mukherjee, Hyderabad. Corridors: The Psycho-Acoustics of Corridor-Like Spaces This project delves into the emotional and acoustic contours of corridors. This contemporary architectural design which may appear simple structurally possesses a complicated and sometimes convoluted auditory space due to reflective and diffractive properties of sound. The project attempts to enlighten the variability of these acoustic qualities/characterestics of corridors integrated in different urban spaces like – hospitals, prisons, libraries, educational institution, courts and many other public spaces which are vibrant in terms of psycho-acoustics. The research would also borrow references from ancient mythological texts, films, paintings and literature to discern the mystic and seemingly improbable destination of corridors and like spaces. The process of research includes a vivid physical involvement and exploration in the corridor like spaces, taking notes in a descriptive way in the spot itself, acquiring photographs and live recordings of the acoustic environments at different spots of the same space. The recording process may also involve time stamps (i.e. recordings of the same space over the different parts of a day) for the analysis of the soundscape in a particular space. The process also includes the collection of films, texts or any other form of art, where one can notice a conscious application of such corridor-like spaces. Sayandeb Mukherjee is a graduate of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata who now works as a professional sound recordist in Ramoji Film City, Hyderabad. 31. Shubhra Nagalia, Allahabad. Representation of Communal Riots in the Hindi Media: The Case of the Mau Riots The proposed research will investigate the reportage of Mau riots by electronic and print media. While there has been extensive documentation and studies on the ‘communalisation’ of media and its role in riot situations, the small town manifestation of this phenomenon in Mau and its resultant repercussions on hegemonic discourses and construction of religious identity will be one of the areas of our study. The images, slogans, language and presentation of Mau riots through the lens of Hindi media; linkages between political influences, capital and communities that shapes the contours of media in general and local news in particular will also be subjects of our research. Mau also has had a history of intermittent riots which have shaped the economy and contours of trade, in particular of the weaving sector. Studying this history and its linkages with the changing fortunes and balance of power of different communities before, after and during the riots will also be an aspect of this research. Another significant aspect of Mau riots is the pre-riot history of mutual ‘pacts’ between both Hindus and Muslims on usage of town space. The changing landscape has participatory histories and is an important register of change and manipulations. Shubhra Nagalia is based in Allahabad and is currently finishing her final year of M.A. (Political Science) from Allahabad University. She has done M.Phil in Russian from JNU and Women’s Studies from Sri Lanka. 32. Sugata Nandi, Kolkata. Eventful Adolescence, Memorable Youth: The Politics of Personal Reminiscences in Kolkata, 1947-67 The first twenty years after Independence and Partition was an extremely eventful phase in the urban history of Calcutta. At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 the city lost its status of Second City of the British Empire and turned into a third world metropolis seeking a new identity being overburdened with problems of overpopulation, refugee influx, steady economic decline and political upheavals. Two decades later Calcutta witnessed the beginning of Non Congress rule by an coalition of Bangla Congress, a regional political outfit constituted by a break away Congress clique and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Between these two moments a vast number of events had given Calcutta the new character that it retains till this day. This study will take up fifteen landmark events of the 1947-67 period that will include among others the turbulence of the Food Movement, the hardships caused by the rice crisis of the 1950s and the ‘60s, the growing radicalization manifest in the general strikes of the period, the beginning of the Naxal Movement in the mid sixties as well as the short-lived instances of celebration like the visit by foreign dignitaries like Queen Elizabeth and the Soviet statesmen Nikita Khrushchev and Bulganin. Personal reminisces of the adolescents and youths of the 1950s and 1960s, of the incidents listed above will be gathered through interviews with them. The oral data thus gathered will constitute the primary source for constructing a collage of remembered experiences. The project will treat the same as texts authored by individuals who endeavour to locate and to interpret through the emotional performance of remembering what may be termed as significant episodes in the recent history of the city. The project, on completion of research, will be given the shape of a academic history paper. At the moment I have fixed the target of writing the paper in about 15 thousand words, which might have to be increased if required. As of now I have planned to record (in audio cassettes) the interviews that will constitute the archival text for the work, if resources permit then I would try to make audio-visual record of the interviews. Sugata Nandi is Lecturer in History, Krishnagar Government College, West Bengal 33. Gauri Paliwal, Indirapuram. क्योंकि हर ब्लॉग कुछ कहता है (“Because Every Blog Has Something to Say”) 34. Bipul Pande, Delhi. Delhi. रेज़ीडेंस प्रूफ (“Proof Of Residence”) 35. Vijay Kumar Pandey, Meerut. मेरठ का प्रकाशन उद्योग (“The Publishing Industry of Meerut”) The publication industry of Meerut is almost 200 years old. During this period the industry has evolved with time and flourished. The present turnover of the industry is nearly Rs. 200 crore per annum and provides employment to approximately one lakh people. The study aims at identifying the factors contributing to the rapid growth and evolution of this industry in Meerut during past 200 years as well as the problems and challenges before it. It will also look into how the industry has changed with time. Research methodology will include interaction with the people associated with the industry. It will also include interviews as well as exploration of old records and manuscripts. The end product will be an academic research paper including photographs & other documents. I would like to introduce myself as a journalist with more than four years of experience. I have worked with SAHARA SAMAY (Hindi weekly) & am at present working with Dainik Jagran Meerut as a sub editor. 36. Zubin Pastakia, Mumbai. A Photographic Study of Bombay’s Cinema Halls as a Cultural Experience of Space The project seeks to photographically examine the cultural experience of different types of cinema halls in Bombay city. In part, this is a meditation on different urban spaces. The photographs will illuminate the inherent sign language of the architecture, posters and signage, hall seats, film reels, tickets, toilets, snack counters, workers' uniforms, patron's clothing, gender break-up etc. of these spaces. More importantly, this is an attempt to illustrate the subjective nature of the film-going experience. From the designer shop - to cinema hall - to chain restaurant mall/multiplex experience, to the still-standing single-screen bastions of the art-deco era, to the musty largely male-dominated "c-grade" halls, the photographs will evoke the unique experience of these different spaces. By examining these spaces photographically, the project aims to provide a rich and detailed socio-visual context to the ever-changing urban cinematic experience -- thus situating film texts within various cultural spaces. The intention is to eventually produce a monograph on Bombay's cinema halls as well as to exhibit the photographs publicly. Zubin Pastakia is a photographer and filmmaker living in Bombay. 37. Gopaljee Pradhan, Silchar, Assam. हिन्दी साहित्य में उत्तर -पूर्व (“The North-East in Hindi Literature”) 38. Alok Puranik, Delhi. बाज़ार -भाव रिपोर्टिंग उर्फ़ मिर्ची भड़की और सुस्त टाटा स्टील (“A Historical Study of Bazaar Reporting in Hindi Newspapers”) 39. Mohit Kumar Ray & Soma Ghosh, Kolkata. Heritage Ponds of Kolkata: A Contemporary History Kolkata is a city of ponds. Job Charnok, the first well-known British merchant, set up his office by the side of a pond called Lal Dighi, which still exists to remind of this city’s colonial past. There are many ponds like this with rich historical linkages. Many streets and places of Kolkata are named after ponds. Even after the onslaught of the real estate sector, the city has more than 3500 ponds. The significance of these urban waterbodies as water resources is being appreciated now as never before. These ponds form a part of the cultural history of the city. Once, it was the place where community people met during bathing; Bengali literature has so many narratives about the ghats of these ponds. The fields by the side of some ponds provide space to hold fairs. However, there is still no proper documentation of such an important city heritage. This study will add to the urban cultural history where the city ponds are not mere past heroes, but active agents of a thriving present. The study will be carried out through field study, oral history and secondary sources. It will produce a report on the history of heritage ponds with photos of the ponds and interviews. Mohit Ray, the principal researcher, is an environmental professional who has a PhD in Chemical Engineering and works for environmental rights. 40. P. Jenny Rowena & Carmel Christy, Hyderabad. ‘Where Some Autorickshaws Run, Others Burn’: Caste, Class and Gender in the Urban Space of Keralam. This proposal is about a Dalit woman married to a Backward Caste man and their struggle to move above caste and gender structures in a moffusil town in Keralam. The story begins when the couple buys an autorickshaw in Chithra Lekha's name and she decides to drive it herself. However, Chithra Lekha's caste and gender identity makes it impossible for her to step into the public sphere of this liberated moffusil town. The leftist trade union (mainly consisting of a dominant BC caste) already angered by her caste violation of marrying above her caste, acts against her by delaying her membership card and continues to harass her till at last her autorickshaw is burned to ashes. In this project we propose to collect and document each and every aspect of this (true) incident by conducting thorough interviews with all the people concerned. Along with this we would also like to produce a theoretical paper which tries to understand how caste, class, gender relations constitute the urban space in Keralam. Here we would examine: > how the dominant Marxist party works to reproduce the caste and gender structure in Keralam; > the important tools of sexual morality which are used against the progress of Dalit and "other" women; > the intricacies of the OBC-Dalit relationship and the reasons that triggers violence between them; > the role of subaltern masculinities in the entire incident. Carmel Christy is at present doing her PhD in Media and Commmunications from the Central University of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradhesh. Jenny Rowena P already has a PhD on Malayalam Cinema, from the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. 41. Inder Salim, Delhi. Towards Maha-Performances Maha Performance: a big festival of performance art. But before this dream festival takes shape, I aim to collect the moods of aspiring performance artists in India. Knowing this genre is new, ( in contemporary sense ) and not market friendly, the challenges are immense. As we know, the mould of an artist in the present is already contemporary, and is hardly unaffected by the issues around. So the task is to approach the young from the art colleges, colleges, universities, NSD and other such non conventional arenas. My role is to identify a potential performance artist and try to do a performance independently along with her/him, or collaborate. I aim to provide a documented file to the participant in the least. I need to enter the marked and unmarked spaces/venues for a good start. I aim to arrange to invite an internationally famous artist to create an ambience for the popularity of this genre. There are already few of us in Delhi and elsewhere who I am sure would support the cause. About the theory of performance art and its significance, I quickly quote Leslie Hill, a noted feminist writer- who begins her essay on performance art, by saying " The genesis of Performance Art is Feminism,". So more than that, I believe, it has a history of politics of defiance and is loaded with history of minds that yearned for a new thinking for a new possible world, besides a floating signifier of a queer/heretic/eccentric/poetic within the form of it. Inder Salim is a performance artist based in Delhi. 42. Abhik Samanta, Kolkata. The Visual Art of the Gita Press The notion of visual art here is indicative of pictographic representation which includes line drawings, watercolour or oil paintings or lithographs. These images can be found in all tracts published by the Gita press as also in the monthly Kalyan and the poster publications. The gamut of these illustrations can be seen as the harbinger of a particular style among other publications of the extensive calendar art industry. The delineation of a style thus constitutes a broad frame in which the work is conceived. However the primary aim is to explore the constitution of this style. Its constitution implies the way in which meanings of these images are conveyed in course of their location in the discursive textual printing done, in the yet emergent language of the nation, Hindi. These images are characterized by the influence of Hanumanprasad Poddar who was one of the two founders and the leading light of the Gita Press Gorakhpur. Hanumanprasad became involved with the discursive mission of the Press owing to a divine vision in which God appeared before him and instructed him to propagate belief in God which had to be expressed through practices like the utterance of God’s name. He saw Him in a series of graphic visions that he had throughout his life and instructed painters to depict accordingly. In the proposed work the national paradigm of ideal existence as embodied in the discursive writings of Hanumanprasad is sought to be understood in juxtaposition between text and image. The renunciating body of the reader as described by the creed of ‘action without desire’ is sought to be reconciled to the apparently contrasting, voluptuous or highly muscular body that occurs in the visual depiction. Abhik Samanta is currently doing independent research on middle class lifestyle and ethics, and is interested in doing future research on medieval ethical economies. 43. Surojit Sen, Chandannagar, Hooghly. Chandannagar and the Displacement of Prostitutes The meta- narrative of the 19th century social history conceals many tales of dispossession and displacement of the marginalized, sometimes with the active agency of the colonial power. One such incident that deserves attention is the exodus of prostitutes from Calcutta to Chandannagar. To go beneath the meta-narrative means that we have to look for new subtexts mostly obscure and now relegated to oblivion. One such forgotten text is Bodmaish Jobdo or Wicked Punished by Prankrishna Dutta. The text is full of authentic details about the trade which flourished along Chitpur Road, which, interestingly, enough not far from the seat Bengali Renaissance. The sprawling. quarters were known as the Sonagachi area extending from Nutanbazar to Fauzdari Balakhana (criminal court ) . The present day crossing of Chitpur Road and Kolutolla marked the lower extreme of the red light area. Another skit writer Hootom ( literally the barn owl) provides us with more information related to the area, the prostitutes, pimps and their clients. The story of the dispossession of the marginalized continues in different form and with a different rationale in Chandannagar in the post colonial period. Ironically here again we find the repetition of the health regime of 1868, though this time in the name of ‘moral garb’! My project will explore the following: A. Impact of Contagious Disease Act 14 on society (both Calcutta and Chandannagar) and contemporary literature at that time. B. Outline history of brothels in Chandannagar and Calcutta( Sonagachi) C. Proposed law on prostitution by Ministry of Women and Child Welfare of government of India and its probable implications as they reflect state regimentation. I will do still-photo documentation of the specific locations at Chandannagar in its current state, which used to be brothels before mid eighties of twentieth century. I will also document (photograph) Chitpur Road, from Nutanbazar to Kolutolla – Chitpur crossing (the red-light area stretched upto this point in 1868). I will translate the text, Bodmaish Jobdo from Bengali to English. Surojit Sen does research for documentary films, writes script for telefilms ( Bengali ), reviews books ( Bengali ), renders editorial service ( Bengali ), writes short prose on literature ( Bengali )and is now working on his first novel named CITY EDITION (Bengali). 44. Yoginder Sikand and Naseemur Rahman, Delhi. The Shaping of Muslim Identities and the Role of Muslim Publishing Houses in Delhi This research project focuses on the Muslim publishing industry in Delhi. It examines various aspects of this industry, including content of publications and linkages between authors, publishers and consumers of the literature produced by these publishing houses. It also looks at how the Muslim publishing industry is responding to the various challenges that Muslims in India today see themselves faced with. The research project will involve interviews with authors and publishers and content analysis of the publications through a survey of catalogues of a representative sample of Muslim publishing houses located in Delhi. The end product of the research project will be a series of articles and interviews, which will be sent to various newspapers and magazines, as well as an academic research paper. The research project is being conducted by two people: Naseem ur Rahman, a Ph.D. student at the Jamia Millia Islamia and presently working with the Markazi Maktaba Islami, a leading Muslim publishing house in Delhi; and Yoginder Sikand, Professor at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. 45. Surya Prakash Upadhyay, Mumbai. Guru on the Air: Televised Hinduism in Contemporary India The project proposes to look at the instrumentality of audio-visual media in the construction and maintenance of the religio-spiritual world in contemporary Hinduism and in the mobilization of people towards “tele-gurus”. The project attempts to look into a recent and interesting addition in the religious sphere, especially in present-day Hinduism, catered to the people by cable television in the urban spaces. It looks at a new-age guru named Asharam Bapu, and at the phenomenon of media playing a vital part in the growth of his organization, in increasing the numbers of followers and devotees, and in propagation as well as spread of religiosity and spirituality among people. There are several gurus and also several devotional channels that are highly influential in urban spaces, transmitting their programmes through television and providing an opportunity for people to listen and watch their favorite guru. It is a matter of great interest and investigation to find out the relationship between religion and media and consequently, its various implications for society. The media ecology, through its various inputs, compositely works for their organizational development. Audio-visual aids such as audio cassettes, MP3, VCDs, DVDs, websites play a major role, but print media also plays a lasting role in such religious mobilization processes. However, if audio aids help in making a long distance contact and visual aids help in transcendence of physicality and facilitate darsan of these gurus before their followers, it is print media that, through booklets and printed material, helps in internalizing the subjects. The visualization of gurus on television gives a sense of attachment and shortens the spatial distance between the guru and his devotee. On the one hand, the televised transmission of religious and spiritual discourses gives a feeling of personal advice and guidance to the devotee (when watching alone); on the other hand when the same thing occurs at the ashram or at some congregation it gives a feeling of group lecture and sense of live sermon in a congregation. This development in the media sector has filled the gap of physical absence of guru and communication between him and his followers. The aim of the research is to give a ‘thick description’ of the whole phenomenon. The proposed research is a qualitative and interpretative. The methods that would be applied to collect data will be interviews with the devotees of the guru. Also a questionnaire will be executed to collect more and varied information. The literature, printed and electronic both, will be analyzed following the content analysis method. Also, focused group discussion would be performed through participation in satsangs and other meetings of the group. A few interviews of the cable networks will also be performed. I am a Research Scholar in Dept of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. I am planning to develop a documentary of the work but I need some guidance and also sufficient amount of money to carry out the task. 46. Shiju Sam Varughese, Delhi. The Public Sphere as a Site of Knowledge Production: Negotiations Over Tremors, Well Collapses and Coloured Rains in the Malayalam Press The proposed study attempts to understand the functioning of the public sphere, constituted through the regional press in Keralam, as a site of knowledge production in the context of scientific controversies. This will be studied by taking a specific scientific controversy as case. In the wake of an earthquake on 12th December 2000, several unusual geophysical incidents including well collapses, coloured rains and micro tremors began appearing in Keralam. These phenomena have been reported in the regional press from every nook and cranny of the region and the deliberations over it continued for almost one year in the regional press, involving a wide range of issues and actors. This case will be studied in detail based on content analysis of five major Malayalam newspapers (Malayala Manorama, Mathrubhumi, Deshabhimani, Madhyamam, and Keralam Kaumudi) as well as interviews with key actors involved in the controversy. This is to demonstrate how the public sphere acts as a site of knowledge production in the context of a scientific controversy. Shiju Sam Varughese is a doctoral candidate at the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. My research is on public understanding of science in Keralam. 47. T. Venkat, Chennai. Building the Indian Dream: Living and Working Conditions of Migrant Workers on Chennai’s IT Corridor My project proposes to study the lives of migrant workers on Chennai’s ‘IT corridor’. The project will be a multi-media exploration of the living and working conditions, the past histories and the dreams of migrant workers and their families who are building the grandiose infrastructure project in the southern suburb of Chennai. The construction activity on the IT corridor which is a 45 km long, six-lane express highway and with numerous, residential, commercial and industrial complexes coming up along side has brought flows of construction workers from Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. This project then, aims to explore and depict the work conditions as well as the hopes and dreams that underpin the building of the large new infrastructure projects that are the fantasies of resurgent modern India. It will use ethnographic methods and video documentation to elicit and depict the narratives, oral histories and future aspirations of workers in this labor camp, juxtaposed against their living conditions as well as against the backdrop of the glamorous corridor they are here to build. This project will be collaborative in nature and includes a trade union organizer, an activist involved in occupational health issues among industrial workers, a filmmaker, an academic specializing in urban anthropology and myself. We propose to focus on one such camp which houses about 5000 families in Chemencheri, a village on the IT corridor. The final presentation would be an audio visual presentation of the material collected in the event the documentary is not complete by then. I am currently engaged in an ethnographic study of collective action in Chennai, through which I am gaining valuable experience in ethnographic methods and documentation. 48. Chitra Venkataramani, Mumbai. Hygiene and the City: A Graphic Novel The fellowship project will look at the way the notion of cleanliness and order operates in the city. In our urban environment, the ideas of disease, personal space, and proximity are changing the way we construct and view our environment. The project will look at these ideas through certain forms in the city such as the transport system where many people travel in a tightly packed condition, the new semi-private gardens where people queue to enter, the naala that cuts across varied landscapes and the slum rehabilitation schemes. These stories will look at our fear of touch and disease, of who inhabits these gardens and how characters within these stories see and draw maps of the city. These are told as stories that connect these forms together. Each story may have a different structure; for example while stories in the trains are collected from personal narratives, the naala cuts through the city in a series of episodic drawings that allow the reader to start at any page in parts of the book. 49. Shafia Wani, Srinagar. Aesthetics of Resistance and Women in Kashmir The central theme of the research is to elaborate the presence of new spaces and initiatives that women in contemporary Kashmir are engaging with. These range from initiatives that are social /civil or just individual/personal. Furthermore to elaborate the productive possibility that these engagements engender for women and the kind of agency that is created in the process. This kind of elaboration will be explored within the historico cultural ethos of Kashmir which has within its history engendered the creative expression of women. This has over centuries, enabled a space of renegotiation and a creative, productive agency that is culturally recognized. The method that will be mainly relied upon for purpose of research will be in-depth and over-time interviews with the main actors of the proposed inquiry. In addition certain useful, common narratives will also be collected from the peripheral areas of the field of inquiry. The proposed end product will be in the form of an academic research paper. Shafia Wani is a development professional and is currently associated with Save the Children UK, an international developmental organization that works for the rights of children worldwide. 50. Ranjan Yumnam, Imphal. Imphalwood: Digital Revolution and the Death of Celluloid The study seeks to trace the transformation of the slow celluloid world of Manipur film industry into a fast-paced, almost assembly-line, center of digital film production. From pre-production planning to exhibition, today, the entire cycle of film production in Manipur rolls in the digital mode, making celluloid history. Probably the first state to achieve this feat, it is debatable whether the medium has co-opted the Manipuri filmmakers, or whether circumstances unique to the trouble-torn state have made the Imphalwood’s dream merchants embrace the digital technology. The industry, however, has been growing phenomenally after the valley-based insurgents banned Hindi films and satellite channels in the state since 2000. It is in this context that the political-economy, demographics and geography of Manipur need to be understood. Extensive interviews with Manipur film fraternity and insurgents (if possible) will form the main basis of the research, supplemented by survey methods. The study will culminate in a series of essays, a PowerPoint presentation, pictures, posters and video clips of archival value. Ranjan Yumnam, formerly a correspondent of the Times of India in New Delhi, is an Imphal-based freelance journalist. From vivek at sarai.net Tue Mar 6 16:54:50 2007 From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan) Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:54:50 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Third post, actually Message-ID: <45ED4F82.7000404@sarai.net> Ah-- I had forgotten that first past the post post was actually Neelima Chauhan on February 23. Neelima's project is in Hindi to the deewan at sarai list, but she will also be posting simultaneous translations in English (see below). There was also a small discussion on this post between Neelima and Taru Prakash, which you can access through the reader list archives. Regards, Vivek -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Reader-list] Research proposal ; An online study of Hindi blogosphere and hindi identity construction "Blogit Hindi jaati ka Linkitt Mann" Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 09:03:22 +0530 From: Neelima Chauhan To: reader-list at sarai.net Following is translation intent of my proposal of a study of Hindi Identity Construction on Hindi Blogs. under Independent Research Fellowship. This research proposes to do an online study of Hindi hyper text on Hindi blogs. It will be an attempt to make a critical appreciation of Language and style of hypertextual prose as it flows through the terminals of Hindi Bloggers. It will be an online study which will take in account the existing blogs, Hindi Networks, Blog Archives, Comments etc. Narratives from Hindi Online community will be collected. Objective is to identify the construction of Grand narrative of 'Hindi Jati' (Hindi nationality) as described in Hindi Literary Criticism especially that by Ram Vilas Sharma. This construction of Hindi Jati with geographical space becoming meaningless (or less important atleast) will be explored. As research will be an online study therefore its progress will be available to all interested in real time. Findings of the work will be shared through a Weblog Publication and same will be presented at final workshop. Please note that original proposal in unicode hindi is available at http://linkitmann.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-post_03.html So far apart from proposal a brief study of names of Hindi blogs is also available at http://linkitmann.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-post_17.html while to newcomers here is a brief introduction to blogs http://linkitmann.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-post_09.html Do send your feedback -- Neelima zakir Husain Post Graduate College -- From lokesh at sarai.net Wed Mar 7 04:34:36 2007 From: lokesh at sarai.net (Lokesh) Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 18:04:36 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] invite for 8 th March Message-ID: <45EDF384.8070105@sarai.net> 8 th March 2007 Invitation for A Joint Programme On International Women’s Day Friends This is an appeal to organisations/ groups/ individuals to join hands to celebrate International Women's Day together on the Delhi University campus.Please come with your banners/posters/programmes and inform as many people as possible to make it a big event. It would not be a cliche to say that the need to strengthen our unity has never been so pressing as it is felt today. Despite our collective struggles to establish ‘Zero Tolerance for Sexual Harassment’ on the campus, everybody knows that there has been no qualitative improvement in the situation. Let us meet at Vivekanand Statue, Delhi University (North Campus) at 12 noon ( Thursday, 8 th March). It will be good if you can just forward the invite to other friends/formations so that they can also join us. In solidarity Anjali Stree Adhikar Sangathan From anujaghosalkar at yahoo.com Tue Mar 6 16:11:17 2007 From: anujaghosalkar at yahoo.com (anuja ghosalkar) Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 02:41:17 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] First Post In-Reply-To: <006d01c75f1f$006b5ed0$6401a8c0@ved6suqbkuh1sf> Message-ID: <231156.80366.qm@web54506.mail.yahoo.com> Hi all, This is my first post for the Sarai I- Fellowship and so far I don't see any other post. So I guess I am the first one posting. I am really nervous as I do this but anyway I thought I will get on with it as there is no escaping it. So here goes: I am Anuja Ghosalkar, I have been a lecturer and researcher in film in Bombay for the last five years. I have also been involved with an experimental theatre group in Mumbai for over half a decade, called The Company Theatre. All of last year I was a research associate with Rosie Thomas who was writing a book on early Indian Cinema and the Stunt film. I have also been a co-curator of Made By Women, an international women's film festival. I am currently working with Breakthrough – a globally active human rights organization. My research project is on my grand father who I call Papa Ajoba, which is also the project title. This project will chronicle the life of my grand father, as a make up artist in the Hindi film industry from 1941 to 2000: from his early years at Raj Kamal studio with V. Shantaram (when they literally made their own make-up) to his 17 years spent at the Filmistan studio. There will be a sharper focus on the 1960’s - when he predominantly worked with Shammi Kapoor, Asha Parekh, Sadhana & Saira Banu. It will also document film history from the point of view of a technician who might lacquer it with his own stories. It is finally, a tribute to a grandfather who narrated stories of his everyday life, not knowing that stories often become history. The research will primarily be through interviews, previously published books on the history of Indian cinema and material from magazines like Film India, Rangabhoomi, Screen, etc. The presentation will be in an audio-visual form with a written thesis. Update on the Research: I have just finished recording one, one hour audio tape with my grand father with some basic information of him and industry. I just realized that even though I have lived with him all my life, there are so many things that I did not know, I now need to transcribe the tape and do some more recording. So that’s where I am at right now getting started hesitantly but also with a sense of great excitement. I hope it goes all well for all of us. Cheers Anu --------------------------------- 8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time with theYahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070306/9dff9965/attachment.html From mail at shivamvij.com Tue Mar 6 12:51:33 2007 From: mail at shivamvij.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 12:51:33 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] taggedmail dot con Message-ID: <9c06aab30703052321p6a00c8a2q734c966981142f13@mail.gmail.com> Dear friends, I have been getting emails, including one via the Reader-List, saying that so-and-so has taged me. That is to promote a service called taggedmail dot com. What's happening is that when you sign up for taggedmail it asks for the username and pasword of you existing webmail acount (Gmail/hotmail/whatever) and automatically sends an email to everyone on your contact list saying that *you* have "tagged" them. Since "tagged" has to do with blogging culture (wherein you 'tag' another blogger to pass on a 'meme'), many might think it's just another harmless tag. But it's instead a clever way of marketing a new service. The reason why I am expending so much energy explaining this is that there are dozens of start-up sites who are doing this. Sms dot ac is one that instantly comes to mind. It may be a good idea to never give your mail account details to these sites. It's a lot of inconvenience to everyone, not least yourself. best s -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070306/16947df5/attachment.html From gitika.talwar at gmail.com Mon Mar 5 16:13:04 2007 From: gitika.talwar at gmail.com (Gitika Talwar) Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 16:13:04 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Any fellowships out there for students of Fine Arts? Message-ID: <9949efb0703050243r1cf756a1t27411f5bd8ddff75@mail.gmail.com> Hi, I recently met an extremely talented someone who has gained admission into an ARTS school in Chicago. Finances is a major issue and I just wanted to know if there are fellowships available out there for Indian students who may want to pursue a degree in Fine Arts in the US. Do let me know. Appreciate it tremendously, Gitika -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070305/5bf5ee32/attachment.html From aarti at sarai.net Mon Mar 5 19:37:23 2007 From: aarti at sarai.net (Aarti Sethi) Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 19:37:23 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Nigah Presents: Richard Fung in Person Message-ID: <5BA3F35D-6FA6-49A9-AA3A-F34F424A31C1@sarai.net> Nigah www.nigahmedia.com presents Richard Fung in Person Award-winning gay activist, artist and cultural critic Richard Fung presents three videos at The Attic. His seminal work on images of desire and homosexual Asian men ha seen very influential in the global discourse around Asian gay men and their sense of self worth. A topic of great relevance in South Asia. Richard Fung was born in Trinidad and Tobago and lives in Toronto,anada. His award-winning videos on the intersection of sexuality and race have been widely screened and collected internationally and his essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. 7:30pm Tuesday, 6th March The Attic 36 Regal Building (above People's Tree) www.theatticdelhi.org Metro: Rajiv Chowk Nearest Parking: Hanuman Mandir, Palika Basement -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070305/ae55bbb9/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From aarti at sarai.net Mon Mar 5 19:33:49 2007 From: aarti at sarai.net (Aarti Sethi) Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 19:33:49 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] OPEN MIKE FOR POETRY IN PERFORMANCE Message-ID: <3CB290ED-A5D1-4692-A398-242DA13EEE1F@sarai.net> OPEN MIKE FOR POETRY IN PERFORMANCE All are welcome to sign up to read or perform! Thursday, March 8, 2007 5.30 PM Basement Cafe of Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road Civil Lines. www.sarai.net Nearby landmarks: Transport Authority (very close, just around the corner), Civil Lines Metro Station, Indraprastha College, Oberoi Maidens. I know no faster or more painless way to get there from South Delhi than to take the metro from Connaught Place, Secretariat, or Patel Chowk (10 minute ride). Rules :) 1) Each reader / performer will get a maximum of 5 minutes. Participants are urged to time themselves before hand so they are not cut off. 2) Poems can be recited in any language. 3) Sign up is first come, first serve. Please send a mail to Aarti Sethi at aarti at sarai.net if you want to sign up. 4) You're welcome to read out prose, as long as it fits within the time limit. 5) What one expects from an open mike: quality may vary, people will be at different stages of their practice, but the view will be varied, panoramic and quite possibly thrilling. _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From turbulence at turbulence.org Mon Mar 5 23:57:29 2007 From: turbulence at turbulence.org (Turbulence) Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 13:27:29 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Comp_07: MIXED REALITIES :: Call for Proposals Message-ID: Comp_07: MIXED REALITIES :: Call for Proposals Juried International Networked Art Competition Proposal Deadline: March 31, 2007 http://www.turbulence.org/comp_07/guidelines.htm MIXED REALITIES: (1) a competition and series of simultaneous exhibitions that engage users in three discrete environments: the Internet (Turbulence), an online 3-D rendered environment (Ars Virtua/Second Life), and physical space (Art Interactive); (2) works that evaluate the concepts "virtual," "simulation", and "real"; (3) a series of experiences in which participants connect with one another and contribute to the creation of the work. Five commissions @ $5,000 (US) each. More >> http://www.turbulence.org/comp_07/guidelines.htm NOTE: While collaborative projects are preferred they are not a requirement. We have set up a FORUM for applicants to ask and answer questions and seek collaborators. GO TO FORUM >> http://transition.turbulence.org/forum/index.php JURORS: MICHAEL FRUMIN, Technical Director Emeritus, Eyebeam; NATASHA KHANDEKAR, Director, Art Interactive; JAMES MORGAN, Director, Ars Virtua; TREBOR SCHOLZ, Founder, Institute for Distributed Creativity; HELEN THORINGTON, Co-Director, Turbulence. See bios >> http://www.turbulence.org/comp_07/guidelines.htm#jurors IMPORTANT DATES: Proposal Deadline: March 31, 2007 Notification: Winners will be contacted after May 15, 2007 Delivery: Works must be completed by February 2008 This project is supported by a generous grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From turbulence at turbulence.org Mon Mar 5 22:44:51 2007 From: turbulence at turbulence.org (Turbulence) Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 12:14:51 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Ars Virtua Artist-in-Residence (AVAIR): Call for Proposals Message-ID: <1BDE231DA2C9456C8E4403A95858E742@joPC> Ars Virtua Artist-in-Residence (AVAIR): Call for Proposals http://www.arsvirtua.com/residence.html Deadline: April 7, 2007 Ars Virtua Gallery and New Media Center in Second Life (http://www.arsvirtua.com) is soliciting proposals for its second artist-in-residence program. Established and emerging artists will work within the 3D rendered environment of Second Life. The 11-week residency will culminate in an exhibition and a community-based event. Residents will also receive a $400 stipend, training and mentorship as necessary. Ars Virtua Artist-in-Residence (AVAIR) is an extended performance that examines what it means to reside in a place that has no physical location. Ars Virtua presents artists with a radical alternative to "real life" galleries: 1) Since it does not physically exist artists are not limited by physics, material budgets, building codes or landlords. Their only constraints are social conventions and (malleable-extensible) software. 2) The gallery is accessible 24 hours a day to an unlimited number of people in every part of the world simultaneously. 3) Because of the ever evolving, flexible nature of Second Life the "audience" is a far less predictable variable than one might find a Real Life gallery. Residents will be encouraged to explore, experiment with and challenge traditional conventions of art making and distribution, value and the art market, artist and audience, space and place. Application Process: Artists are encouraged to log in to Second Life and create an avatar BEFORE applying. Finalists will be contacted for an interview. Interviews will take place in world in April. Applications will be judged based on ideas presented and work executed. We are looking for an artist who is willing to work within what may be a new environment for them and to be prepared to evolve in response to the synthetic world of Second Life. To apply send the following information to avair-at-arsvirtua.com: 1) Name, address, phone number, email, second life name. 2) Link to an online portfolio (expect a 5 minute visit) and a 500 word (two page) proposal. If you do not have an online portfolio please briefly discuss your work. "AVAIR" is a 2006-2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation. Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: http://new-radio.org New York: 917.548.7780 . Boston: 617.522.3856 Turbulence: http://turbulence.org New American Radio: http://somewhere.org Networked_Performance Blog: http://turbulence.org/blog Upgrade! Boston: http://turbulence.org/upgrade _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From hemanginigupta at rediffmail.com Tue Mar 6 13:48:21 2007 From: hemanginigupta at rediffmail.com (Hemangini Gupta) Date: 6 Mar 2007 08:18:21 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Blank Noise Blog-a-Thon Message-ID: <20070306081821.27972.qmail@webmail89.rediffmail.com> Dear all,On March 8 last year (Women\'s Day), the Blank Noise Project asked people to share stories of street sexual harassment. We called it a blog-a-thon since we announced the message on our site (www.blanknoiseproject.blogspot.com) and as bloggers picked the message up, they announced it on their websites, linked to other people and linked back to us. The blog-a-thon was picked up by bloggers both in India, and elsewhere. This year for Women\'s Day we\'re asking you to share experiences of times when you were an ACTION HERO and fought back against harassment. Blog about your experience, and let us know so we can link to you on our blog.When did you flip a situation so you could resist, when did you give back as hard as you got? How did you choose to confront the situation? When did you become an Action Hero?We hope that this response helps us understand the different strategies women (across age groups, cultures, and countries) haveinstinctively created to deal with street sexual harassment.(If you\'re a male blogger, ask your female friends and relatives about their experiences. If you don\'t have a blog, email us.)Here\'s how to participate:1. blog your story (as soon as possible, and definitely before March 8!)2. email the link to your blog post to blurtblanknoise at gmail.com witha subject titled \"Action Heroes Online\"3. we will link to you right away!And don\'t forget your non-blogging friends and family members -- we\'d love to hear stories from your mothers, aunties and grandmothers!Questions? Email blurtblanknoise at gmail.com.-The Blank Noise team -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070306/1a021b14/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From taraprakash at gmail.com Tue Mar 6 20:51:29 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 20:51:29 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Third post, actually References: <45ED4F82.7000404@sarai.net> Message-ID: <01ea01c76003$1e2ca840$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> You mean Taraprakash We met when you came to Dyalsingh college for poetry reading. Regards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vivek Narayanan" To: Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 4:54 PM Subject: [Reader-list] Third post, actually > Ah-- I had forgotten that first past the post post was actually Neelima > Chauhan on February 23. Neelima's project is in Hindi to the > deewan at sarai list, but she will also be posting simultaneous > translations in English (see below). There was also a small discussion > on this post between Neelima and Taru Prakash, which you can access > through the reader list archives. > > Regards, Vivek > > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: [Reader-list] Research proposal ; An online study of Hindi > blogosphere and hindi identity construction "Blogit Hindi jaati ka > Linkitt Mann" > Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 09:03:22 +0530 > From: Neelima Chauhan > To: reader-list at sarai.net > > > > Following is translation intent of my proposal of a study of Hindi > Identity Construction on Hindi Blogs. under Independent Research > Fellowship. This research proposes to do an online study of Hindi > hyper text on Hindi blogs. It will be an attempt to make a critical > appreciation of Language and style of hypertextual prose as it flows > through the terminals of Hindi Bloggers. It will be an online study > which will take in account the existing blogs, Hindi Networks, Blog > Archives, Comments etc. Narratives from Hindi Online community will be > collected. Objective is to identify the construction of Grand narrative > of 'Hindi Jati' (Hindi nationality) as described in Hindi Literary > Criticism especially that by Ram Vilas Sharma. This construction of > Hindi Jati with geographical space becoming meaningless (or less > important atleast) will be explored. As research will be > an online study therefore its progress will be available to all > interested in real time. Findings of the work will be shared through a > Weblog Publication and same will be presented at final workshop. Please > note that original proposal in unicode hindi is available at > http://linkitmann.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-post_03.html So far apart > from proposal a brief study of names of Hindi blogs is also available at > http://linkitmann.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-post_17.html while to > newcomers here is a brief introduction to blogs > http://linkitmann.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-post_09.html Do send > your feedback > -- > Neelima > zakir Husain Post Graduate College > > -- > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From christina112 at earthlink.net Wed Mar 7 02:08:51 2007 From: christina112 at earthlink.net (Christina McPhee) Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 12:38:51 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] architectural landmarks Mumbai query Message-ID: <7681845D-B0B7-4CC1-8A0B-2503CADA97A5@earthlink.net> hi Sarai people, If anyone knows of an opensource, creative commons type image bank on architectural landmarks/cityscapes of Mumbai, could you send me the url? Am working on a photomontage commission, a last minute thing. Brilliant ideas and leads gratefully accepted, all the best, Christina McPhee http://christinamcphee.net http://strikeslip.tv From arafaat.valiani at gmail.com Wed Mar 7 05:16:27 2007 From: arafaat.valiani at gmail.com (a) Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 18:46:27 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] foodradio_network presents "live_feed : Snack City" In-Reply-To: References: <922fdfef0702262201k77f95f5cj45dd4e8ddbb1d06c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Hi, Interesting radio show. Can anyone point me to some free audio news in India that are broadcast via the internet? Thanks, Arafaat > > On 2/27/07, Kaustubh Srikanth wrote: > > foodradio_network presents "live_feed : Snack City" from the MediaWala > > Festival as the culmination of a two day workshop with > > local/international/remote participants exploring the culture and > > politics of streetfood. > > > > == CALL IN == > > > > CALL the SNACK CITY OPEN PHONE IN and talk to us about your favorite > > street food. Share the taste, smell and the sound of your favorite > > neighbourhood street snack joint live. > > > > Turn your phone into a microphone! > > > > 1. CALL 9818977450 (DELHI) > > 2. Listen to the phone ring twice and go quiet > > 3. You are ON AIR! > > > > == LISTEN LIVE == > > > > 8pm-10pm IST - Thu, March 1st > > free103point9 Online Radio > > http://free103point9.org/ > > > > == ABOUT THE foodradio_network == > > > > foodradio_network is an open and variable network of broadcasters and > > foodsters exploring the culture, politics and creativity of food as a > > medium and a metaphor for experiments in participatory and > > collaborative live radio. They regularly dish up aural appetisers on > > their show live_feed which plays on free103point9 online radio. > > live_feed @ MediaWalaFestival includes participants from Australia, > > India, Finland, America... and possibly also You! > > > > http://hybridradio.org/livefeed/ > > > > Snack City is supported: > > http://mediawalafestival.com > > http://free103point9.org/images/logo.jpg > > http://cmt.siba.fi/c/transp.gif > > > > -- > > Kaustubh Srikanth > > http://houndbee.com > > http://radioverve.com > > http://infinitymag.com > > _________________________________________ > > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > > Critiques & Collaborations > > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header. > > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > From smitamitr at gmail.com Tue Mar 6 18:48:28 2007 From: smitamitr at gmail.com (smita mitra) Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 18:48:28 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] 1st posting IFS 2007-- Smita Banerjee Message-ID: Dear Friends, I teach English Literature at Delhi college of Arts and Commerce,Delhi University and am registered for my Phd at SAA ,Film Studies Prog.JNU. I am interested in exploring the relationship between cinema and the city and the urban middle class woman through the narratives emerging in Popular Bangla cinema of the 1950s and 60s. *Cinematic City: Modernity, Middle Class and the* *Urban Woman:Astudy of 1950s and 60s Popular Bangla Cinema.* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070306/fce10194/attachment.html From nalin.mathur at gmail.com Wed Mar 7 02:05:00 2007 From: nalin.mathur at gmail.com (Nalin Mathur) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 02:05:00 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Sarai / Independent Fellow 2007/ Nalin N. Mathur/ First Posting Message-ID: <7c0063460703061235n411df4acq841a85887e45915b@mail.gmail.com> Hello All, Here I am with the first posting for my work, titled "B - Grade Engineering College Culture. I am an engineer with an IT major and am glad to be a part of something that's completely new and exciting. My project deals with Engineering colleges which are often located at random small town suburbs or off a highway milestone. They manifest interesting and fantastical cultural dynamics wherein a mix of identities, cultures and aspirations are played out in non-metropolitan spaces to get an amalgamation of different worlds in one campus. What perhaps remains common right from the start is the collective detachment to small towness and the promise of moving out and making it big in the real big city. I am interested to research and document: a) How these aspects affect ones politics, conscience, personhood. b) How these experiences influence and form the outlook towards the world at large or view points nurtured here during the four years of a students stay. Given below is the abstract which originally was a part of the initial proposal I had mailed to Sarai. "A boy must leave home in order to become a Man". I had been stuck by this saying way before Paulo Coelho's Santiago became a cultural phenomenon. I had no doubt that I would prefer staying away from home during my engineering, another thing about which I was sure I would do. Being unable to secure a decent enough rank in engineering colleges in Delhi further helped the cause. With the limited options that I had, my parents decided upon a college in Mathura, the place was known and was only three hours from Delhi. For a Delhi born and bread, Mathura was another world. A busy highway was the only indication of it being connected to the world outside. Being brought up in the restricted environment of an expensive school, this change in habitat came as a rude shock. The mental preparation for an occurrence like this was my only savior. I was lucky enough to have great room mates, their foremost qualification was them hailing from Delhi. Over all it felt like I was not in Nostradamus's good books and I could easily predict four rough years ahead. By now I realized that I am not at IIT and this is what I call B-GRADE Engineering College culture. It was not long before I realized how wrong I was. My class comprised of an interesting mix of students from Punjab and Delhi. The bulk was from UP. And even though it was a coed college, there was no girl in our class! Inevitably, I came in contact with people from different backgrounds and forged lasting friendships. I started playing for their teams, developed a taste for their kind of music, visited their homes during vacations and upon completion of our degree, joined the same company. The initial skeptic approach towards people with whom I didn't relate transformed into respect. The 'their' became 'my'. By the time the first semester was over and I returned home to meet fellow school mates who had joined different engineering colleges at different places in India and abroad, I had a lot of stories to share. Some experiences we realized were very similar. Claustrophobia turned into liking was the moral of all stories. To my surprise, soon I started looking forward for the college to reopen. There were instances when I did not come home on vacations and stayed in college, bad food withstanding. Not necessarily for the sake of nostalgia, but the last days at college made me look back as to what one has achieved over a period of these four years. >From food habits to dressing sense to outlook towards life, I was a changed man, with a distinctive UP touch, which was only subdued by polished English. On a broader scale my Bengali friends in South religiously celebrated Onam and those in Lucknow didn't drink during Ramzan. This gradual change can only be attributed to a phase of social renaissance which unavoidably crops up and has profound effect on individualism. This is what I aim to study. I am looking forward to your suggestions and comments. Warmly, Nalin N. Mathur -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070307/c26281cd/attachment.html From 125548 at soas.ac.uk Wed Mar 7 15:49:45 2007 From: 125548 at soas.ac.uk (MATTI POHJONEN) Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 10:19:45 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] POLITICS OF CHANGE CONFERENCE Message-ID: <1173262785.aa7e4fc125548@soas.ac.uk> FYI: I attach a call for papers for a one day conference at SOAS. Submission deadline, May 15th. Pls distribute widely SACREDMEDIACOW and the Centre for Media and Film Studies (SOAS) presents: INDIAN MASS MEDIA AND THE POLITICS OF CHANGE One-day conference for Postgraduates & Early Career Researchers, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Saturday, 19 October, 2007 Keynote Speaker: Dr John Hutnyk (Goldsmiths, University of London) Advisors: Prof Annabelle Sreberny (Centre for Media and Film Studies, SOAS) Dr Mark Hobart (Centre for Media and Film Studies, SOAS) Dr Rachel Dwyer (Dept of Languages and Cultures of South Asia, SOAS) Call for Papers India has been the focus of much attention in the international media in the recent years. Rhetoric concerning its rapid economic growth, spearheaded by its IT industry and its burgeoning middle classes, suggest that something new and significant is taking place. Something is changing, we are told: India is shining; the elephant is rising; the 21st century will be an Indian century. Even a recent election campaign was debated around this image. India was/was not shining, with disastrous results for the leading political party in power. What unites many of the debates concerning such re-imaginings of India is the notion of change and its different ramifications. Elections, commentators, drawing room debates and activists all cut their teeth around this complex notion. Who, it is debated, benefits from change? Who is left out from these fantasies of progress and economic growth? Do such re-imaginings really reflect the complex economic reality of large parts of Indian populations 'somewhere out there'? In any case, what is certain is that 'change' has now become the new articulating principle par excellence when we speak about India and its contested future. One of the crucial sites where such debates take place is the Indian mass media: its newspapers, TV channels, advertisements and burgeoning online communities. It is also the loci, we argue, where the politics of change are most visibly played out and that needs to be carefully looked at in order to understand the complex reality of India today. It is important to note here that we believe the nation state is one of categories that needs to be critically investigated when we look at India and change and therefore include the wider Indian diaspora into our definition of what contemporary India is. With this in mind, The Politics of Change conference aims to bring together researchers looking at Indian films and media and interested in the question of change. We therefore now welcome abstract for papers and presentations of 20 minutes each from post-graduate and early career researchers. Specifically, we are inviting papers that would broadly address the following questions: - How is change imagined in different forms of Indian media? How are the press, television, film and online communities involved in this imagining? How do different media differ in how they imagine change? - What kind of day-to-day practices are deployed to articulate these imaginings of change? What kind of verbal and visual images is used towards such imaginings and how do they differ between the media? What are the differences between the English-speaking and the vernacular media? What about the diasporic media? - What are the politics of such imaginings? Who are such articulations thought to benefit? Who in turn do they disarticulate? What is the political economy of imagining change? - How have these articulations changed historically? Can we trace historical precedents to such current imaginings? What are the similarities? What are the differences? - Is there something distinctive about how this change is imagined in (India as opposed to other rapidly-developing countries such as China?)? What do these similarities and differences tell us about Indian media and society? Abstracts, including a brief biography, should be emailed to papers at sacredmediacow.com no later than May 15, 2007. These will then be discussed with our advisors and team, and we will get back to you by the 15th of June. Please do let us know in advance if you would like us to organize projectors, or any other special requirements you might have. The conference is jointly is organized by SACREDMEDIACOW, an independent student-led research centre on Indian media and the Centre for Media and Film Studies at the School Of Oriental and African Studies. Having said that, SACREDMEDIACOW is not really a centre for India media research (perhaps a periphery of Indian media research would be a more appropriate title), but more of a Collective. Either way, being both practitioners as well as academics interested in the India media, one of our key aims to build bridges between academics and media practitioners globally. Therefore, a significant portion of the activities around the conference will also take place on our website http://www.sacredmediacow.com. Our aim is to include the people we talk about when we research Indian media as much as possible in the dialogue and debates through the possibilities allowed by new technologies: by distributing conference material online, by creating an online platform where the questions raised can be debated during the conference and by allowing distance participation as much as possible through teleconferencing, video broadcast and other such means. Please also visit our working space for the conference at http://www.sacredmediacow.com/wikindia) where many of these ideas will be collectively worked out. For further information, please email the SACREDMEDIACOW collective: collective at sacredmediacow.com or: Somnath Batabyal, som at soas.ac.uk Meenu Gaur, meenu at soas.ac.uk Matti Pohjonen, matti.pohjonen at gmail.com Angad Chowdhry, angad.chowdhry at gmail.com From sabitha_tp at yahoo.co.uk Wed Mar 7 16:04:33 2007 From: sabitha_tp at yahoo.co.uk (sabitha t p) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 10:34:33 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Aniket Jaaware's reading at Sarai - Neon Fish Message-ID: <932168.78971.qm@web25411.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> ========================================== Reading @ Sarai: Neon Fish in Dark Water ========================================== Readings from "Neon Fishin Dark Water" by Aniket Jaaware 5:00 P.M., Monday 12 March 2007 Interface Zone, Sarai-CSDS Aniket Jaaware will do an audio-visual reading from his new book of stories and graphics (done by himself), Neon Fish in Dark Water (Mapin,2007). "This is the year 2050. This is the City. Strange things happen here, along with familiar things. There's a man who lives on the N-BAR (the New Bridge Across the River). There's a feisty,unspeaking nurse. There's a pair of lovers, one of them a painter, the other a pharmacist. There's a forever irate Inspector(Crime Branch), and a man who uses a cart to sell a variable fare, a boy who rides his bicycle the whole day, going round and round and round the City. There are new, automated Micro/Ford cars coming in, there are cleaning robots on the streets." These brilliant, disturbing stories speak to us of our own time as well as of a time to come, and they do so in a wholly modern,contemporary accent. Aniket Jaaware's text is a composite of word and image, narrative complemented by graphic art reminiscent of Martin Escher's visual puzzles, while the tales tease us into thinking about urban lives, singularities,obsessions, virtual realities, and the nature of persons. Jaaware's City is made up of eccentrics who are also, in the context of a postmodern urbanity, regulars: recognizably the denizens of the crowded but alienating space in which we all live our lives. There are dying lovers, the abused but self-possessed nurse, the vendor and the bicycle boy, the butterfly collector, the computer hacker, the police Inspector: each fully in command of their own kinds of reality, but ironically at odds with other kinds. The tone of the narration, accessible, easy, contemporary, places us within this brilliantly imagined cityscape, with its blend of the familiar and the disorienting. Jaaware's style combines sympathy, humour and irony, making the act of reading itself an act of affiliation within a new imaginative order. About Aniket Jaaware Aniket Jaaware teaches English at the University of Pune. He is mainly interested in the literary genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, and cinema. His earlier publications include a few poems and essays and an academic book called Simplifications: An Introduction to Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (Orient Longman, 2000). He also translates between English and Marathi. Neon Fish comes after a long gap. More than twenty years ago, he had published a novel in Marathi. His subsequent projects include a fantasy trilogy, which he hopes to start working on soon. __________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Answers: Share what you know. Learn something new http://in.answers.yahoo.com/ From vibhaaurora at gmail.com Wed Mar 7 19:01:44 2007 From: vibhaaurora at gmail.com (Vibha Arora) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 19:01:44 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Threatening Bodies Message-ID: <10d6c6990703070531o5b9d5db7tc540c965383e3202@mail.gmail.com> Dear all ~ It gives me immense pleasure in circulating info about our special issue Threatening Bodies. It is freely accessible: http://reconstruction.eserver.org/071/contents.shtml Threatening Bodies: Capital, State, Sexuality, Race, Family, Terrorism, Gender Colonialism is guest edited by Jennifer Musial and Emily van der Meulen http://reconstruction.eserver.org/071/contents.shtml The NEXT Reconstruction issue on Ecocriticism: Cultural Studies and the Environment is guest edited by Vibha Arora and Alexandra Ganser We look forward to your feedback and comments, if any. warm regards vibha -- Vibha Arora, DPhil (Oxon) http://web.iitd.ac.in/~aurora Assistant Professor in Sociology Dept of Humanities and Social Sciences The Indian Institute of Technology, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016 INDIA aurora at hss.iitd.ac.in; vibhaaurora at yahoo.com From amarkanwar at gmail.com Wed Mar 7 09:29:55 2007 From: amarkanwar at gmail.com (amar kanwar) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 09:29:55 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [DFA:] Fwd: exhibition of films In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Dear Friends This is to invite you to an exhibition of my films. The exhibition will open on *10th March, 2007 at 7 p.m*. at the APJ Gallery New Delhi. The exhibition will continue on *11th March from from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m*. and on *17th and 18th March from 7 p.m - 10 p.m*. A list of the films with synopsis is given at the end of this mail. All the films will be presented simultaneously in different spaces at this venue. A map with directions to APJ Gallery ( B II 40,41,42, Mohan Co-operative Industrial Estate Mathura Road New Delhi ) can be found on www.apeejaymediagallery.com Please do try and come. regards amar FILMS WITH SYNOPSIS *TRILOGY A SEASON OUTSIDE* There is perhaps, no border outpost in the world quite like Wagah, where this film begins its exploration. An outpost where every evening people are drawn to a thin white line and probably anyone in the eye of a conflict could find themselves here. A Season Outside is a personal and philosophical journey through past generations, conflicting positions, borders and time zones. 30 minutes 1997 *A NIGHT OF PROPHECY* Is it possible to understand the passage of time through poetry? And if that were so even for one special moment then would it be possible to see the future? The film travels in the states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Nagaland and Kashmir trying to understand the past, the severity of conflict and the cycles of change. Through poetry you suddenly see where each and all the territories are heading to, where you belong and where to intervene, if you want to . The different poetic narratives merge together, allowing us to see a more universal language of symbols and meanings. The moment when this merger in the mind takes place is the simple moment of prophecy. 77 minutes 2002 *TO REMEMBER* Gandhi was born on the 2nd of October 1869 in the state of Gujarat. He was assassinated on 30th January 1948 in New Delhi. This short silent film is a homage to Gandhi , it is about his assassination and the massacres that happened just a few months ago . To Remember is about a gallery and the smell of death. Silent ,8 minutes 2003 *PORTRAITS (2005)* *THE FACE* We know what Pinochet and Idi Amin looked like but have you seen the face of the Supreme Burmese dictator Senior General Than Shwe ? *THET WIN AUNG* How to remember you Thet ? A life time and fifty nine years in a single moment. *MA WIN MAW OO* And how to bring back your memory Ma Win Maw Oo and that day in 1988 ? *THE BODHI TREE* A short film about an artist's studio under tree . Portraits has four short films – The Face which emerged from the hypocrisy of India's present relationship with the Burmese Military and its very own Gandhi, Ma Win Maw Oo emerged from trying to relate to and experience the military crackdown on Burmese students in August 1988 , through a single photograph that was taken during the military crackdown.Ma Win Maw Oo was killed by the soldiers and the photograph captured that moment. News photographs gain worldwide visibility for a time and then disappear from memory. This film is an attempt to relate to that moment once again and to bring back that image into public memory. Thet Win Aung recalls Thet's courage in resisting the Burmese dictatorship and his 59 year prison sentence. Thet was killed in prison on October 16, 2006. The Bodhi Tree emerged from a moment that reflected the close relationship of art with the lives of people. This film helps us to look at the other films within the exhibition as well as our own work as artists. *SOMEWHERE IN MAY* Somewhere in May traverses normalcy, freedom and claustrophobia in exile in Norway, quietly creating an unease that needs to be explored. The film lies in the intersection of two trajectories that occur on the same day. The two trajectories have been filmed in the same city and their juxtaposition interrogates several issues related to democracy and its simulation, to the holy missions of great national projects and to the individuals relationship with the politics of today. Invoking the self, the film emerges from the 17th of May celebrations of the Norwegian National Day in 2004 which was also the day the Burmese military dictatorship began a sham National Convention for Democracy inside Burma. Through the 'Democratic Voice of Burma' (DVB), a small radio station in Oslo, the Burmese resistance reports on this sham convention as it broadcasts news that is secretly heard by thousands within Burma 37 minutes, 2005 *HENNINGSVAER* Henningsvaer is about being in exile and the thin line that can exist between paradise and prison. Filmed entirely through glass, this film is located on the famous cod fishing island of Henningsvaer in Norway in the Arctic Circle. 15 Minutes, 2006 *KING OF DREAMS* Based on a narrative that integrates several anonymous first person narratives King of Dreams is about creating a passage through the 'stereotypical' terrain's of masculinity and sexuality in India. It's about sex and the violence that can operate in the familiar space where desire meets love. English, 30 minutes, 2001 *SHRINES* (1991-2001) *IN THE MEMORY OF SHANKAR GUHA NIYOGI Part One: The Day After Part Two: The Tape Part Three: Eight Years Later* A short moment to remember Shankar Guha Niyogi . Niyogi was the leader of probably the largest democratic mass movement of workers, peasants and adivasis in post Independent India. He was murdered on 28 th September 1991 while he was leading a strike that was demanding jobs and minimum wages for contract workers in the ancillary industries around the Bhilai steel plant in Bhilai, Chattisgarh. Before he died Niyogi left behind an audio tape recorded statement in which he predicted his assassination. An extract of the tape recording is presented here. In June 1997, the trial court in Durg, Madhya Pradesh convicted two leading industrialists of Bhilai and three others on the charge of the murder of Niyogi and sentenced them to life imprisonment. The court also awarded the death sentence to the hired assassin. In June 1998, the Jabalpur High Court reversed this judgement and acquitted all the accused. In January 2005, the Supreme Court of India acquitted the industrialists and the others accused except for the hired assassin who was sentenced to life imprisonment. The struggle of the workers for enforcement of labour laws and observance of constitutional provisions still continues. *DEATH OF A COLONEL* A short moment to remember Lt. Colonel Pratap Save. A distinguished soldier in the Indian Army , Colonel Save retired in 1995 after 33 years of service in the army. He returned to his ancestral village in Umbergaon , an old fishing village in Gujarat . He was elected President of the Kinara Bachao Sangarsh Samiti ( a village association of the local fisher folk and farmers ) The association was protesting against the construction of a mega port in their village. Lt. Colonel Save was arrested by the Gujarat police and tortured and killed in jail. He died on the 20 th of April 2000. *THE LONG MARCH* A short moment to remember an anti bauxite mining resistance in the Kashipur valley in South Orissa. This resistance began around an old hill called Baphlimalli which contains 173 million tons of bauxite. Baphlimalli was and still is home to an ancient adivasi goddess. The adivasi villagers who lived around the slopes of Baphlimalli began the resistance against powerful international bauxite and aluminium industrial cartels. The resistance has succeeded for over a decade to prevent mining and the destruction of their livelihoods and ancestral lands. *OLD MAN BY THE SHRINE* By the side of a little shrine across the road that passes through a forest and up a hill to a place where they say that at night time the grass glows like neon lights and the water flows with out a source in sight lives an old man with eyes that sparkle like diamonds and a voice that pierces the soul. -- AMAR KANWAR New Delhi India Email : amarkanwar at gmail.com -- AMAR KANWAR New Delhi India Email : amarkanwar at gmail.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To UNSUBSCRIBE: send an email to delhifilmarchive-unsubscribe at googlegroups.com More OPTIONS are on the web: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/delhifilmarchive/ Contact the MODERATOR: delhifilmarchive [at] gmail.com Visit our WEBSITE: www.delhifilmarchive.org See the LIST OF FILMS in the Archive: http://www.delhifilmarchive.org/archive.html -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070307/090a045f/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From apnawritings at yahoo.co.in Wed Mar 7 19:28:46 2007 From: apnawritings at yahoo.co.in (ARNAB CHATTERJEE) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 13:58:46 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Independent Fellowship 2007[First Posting] Message-ID: <280066.4092.qm@web8509.mail.in.yahoo.com> Beyond Private And Public : New Perspectives on Personal and Personalist Social Work ________________________ ARNAB CHATTERJEE [ Doctoral Fellow at dep’t. of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and on the visiting faculty of Ethics and Human Values at Bengal Institute of Technology, Kolkata.] Put in a sentence, my work deal with revising the notion which makes us see the personal as another synonym of the private. But not simply a lexical reordering, the challenge and the interest of this project lies in realizing whether the category could be historically recovered, theoretically 'proved', culturally debated and practically deployed. The horizon of such expectations, not to say more, marks the site and starts the beginning. And as an apprentice-author dedicated to the discourse of social work, let me confess, I would like to situate this study well within the ill defined ( and academically underrated) contours of social work practice. But aims apart, in this introductory posting I shall briefly outline my project, delineate its major themes, locate landmarks and finally offer some examples to make the proposal go live. It should be common knowledge now that the key to understanding modernity is the public/private divide and a corresponding failure to find a way beyond the binary. To understand this somewhat sweeping statement we may recall an example: Marx. Curiously, Marx is a symptom of both, he said for the first--"the state is founded upon the contradiction between public and private life. " and for the second : "if the modern State wished to end the impotence of its administration it would be obliged to abolish the present conditions of private life. And if the State wished to abolish these conditions of private life it would have also to put an end to its own existence, for it exists only in relation to them." Now, throwing in the fact that private property is just a singular and an isolated moment in the discourse of private life, Marx's agenda --I guess- looks readily defamiliarised here. But while Marx had had an effective concern with smashing the liberal divide, there is a long list of other thinkers who have grappled -- being imbibed with --"interpretive" interest--the problem of finding a way beyond the binary. While Hannah Arendt previously had rejected intimacy as a “deep private” , for Habermas it again reappeared as a beyond of private and public. To grasp the sign of our own times--and strongly-- let us reiterate ( without recommending) how --recent researches-- while tracing "the ongoing struggle in Locke, Shafetusbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Smith to find a framework to mediate between the public and private", advocate ( and we shall show --erroneously) the "secret" in Derrida ( and Levinas) to have been the tempting solution. Death ("language about death is nothing but the long history of a secret society, neither public nor private, semi -private, semi-public, on the border between the two”; the postcard ( “half-private half-public neither the one nor the other) and the telephone are Derrida’s three examples of the secret meant to solve the liberal dichotomy. All this is --how ever-- to make a single point--all thinkers who have been pivotal to have found ( western) modernity and also those who were prophets of colonial modernities--could be seen to have been--not always in an informed manner though-- struggling to solve the public/private riddle with an answer of their own : this has been the story since 1767 – and runs amok till 2007. The public/private riddle is the strongest unresolved puzzle in the history of ideas. We are into deadly business therefore. Deadly and this is more significant--that they always ran up to alternative versions or weak synonyms of either the private or the public. While I ( being a humble and lonely apprentice of a social worker) propose the personal as the beyond of the private and public, a stream of discourses could be recalled which had proposed, in their desperate will to move beyond this liberal paradigm, alternative versions of the private and the public where the personal appeared as another version of the private. A ready instance is the slogan 'personal is political' which has been deployed by the feminists as an invitation for all of us to take oppressive private matters for public-political redressal. What was glossed over in this urgency is that the personal has been allowed to coincide with the private! My work argues the personal as a beyond of private/public binary and distinguishes it from the private vis-à-vis the public. Private is opposed to the public and resists public scrutiny and publicity -the stuff by which the public is made. Personal -the way we don’t know what a person is, what his/her real/final intentions are or whether somebody is genuinely aggrieved or not -makes the personal- largely unpredictable and indeterminate in the final instance and not necessarily opposed to the public. Private/public being legal juridical categories have specific indicators. Personal relationships-like love or friendship for this reason remain outside legislation. No wonder that this personal has been suppressed and its autonomy sacrificed to benefit political rigour. I make a thorough attempt at its recovery. But to be attentive to the reader's interest and not only elicit promises to be pursued in subsequent SARAI postings, let me give one instance of this recovery which at the same time would illuminate that what we've been talking through: Marx. Now, notwithstanding the will to go beyond private/public divide, it may rightly be asked, could Marx be used to endorse the personal that I'm proposing? Yes! And choosing only one instance -- love , we may document this flower unfolding in Marx. "Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc... if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. ...If you love without evoking love in return that is, if your loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a living person you do not make yourself a beloved one then your love is impotent -- a misfortune." Isn't this the personal in Marx -- which --I'm sure --he would willingly exclude form the domain of private life he wanted to abolish for history? I think the reader agrees. ( This part will form the substance of my next posting ). At this stage if anybody asks whether there are no precursors prefacing this study, s/he would be wrong. It is to the tradition of what goes by the name of personalism in phenomenology-- that my debt is the most; Max Scheler ( a dark disciple of Husserl and whom the latter distinctly disliked ) should be named as an inspiring instance here. But while transcendental phenomenology teaches us the irreducibility of the person to acts or agency, it rarely engages with other discourses to see the consequences this view entails. The theological gloss often given to personalism derives, I guess, from this not so owned apathy. But the real precursors that the reader should reckon with are Hiralal Haldar, J.E. Mactaggart and Hermann Lotze. I found Lotze's reference first in Haldar's work and then in Mactaggart. I was confirmed in my belief by that brilliant sociologist Gilian Rose—who died of cancer recently. When Rose--with a sad irony-- wrote how Lotze is not read now but once was thought an equal to Kant and all sociological theories are basically neo-Kantian, I was sure-- I would be interested. It was Lotze's and Hiralal Haldar's work --their dusty books ---when I started reading them put into me a psycho-semiotic disorder I should say and everything instrumental to this work was put in place. Summing this up-- my observation for the reader could be : when you deal with 'forgotten' theorists, know you are touching a few forgotten theories too which had gone away with them and it is present with them only. And this reading operation makes it sure that ‘the viewpoints we’ve missed, now find their ways through the trees’. Consider this as forming the theoretical background of this study. Now it is one thing to historically recover and theoretically delineate a category, and quite another thing to thematize and deploy it. Therefore in the third posting, having recuperated the personal as a suppressed narrative using historical and socio-theoretic tools, I’ll interrupt it by thematizing the category ( though not limiting it) through the cultural self understanding of particular communities and deploy it by using the registers of personalist social work. [Deriving its force from social and psychotherapeutic case work, personalist social work as a particular discourse of helping denied to be absorbed in either the public ( the governmental state and far from the now fashionable but brutally mistaken notions of welfare as hegemony or welfare as surveillance) or the private ( resistance to publicity)]. This study will limit itself to exploring how the personal negotiates with the questions of publicity/mediation in the context of colonial Calcutta’s emerging civil society which was energized by its claims to have generated modernity --- a debate which continues even today. In other words, charting the personal as distinguished from the private and therefore not necessarily opposed to the public, contributes generically-and in this sense intrinsically to the debates located around the emergence or recession of the public domain in India. But rarely this can be extricated from its urban moorings and the problems of an emergent public mediation. And because this distinction is aided much by the cultural self understandings of particular communities ( in Bengali in the absence of separate words, byaktigoto stands for both personal and private), the paper would therefore try to chart the elicitation of the personal and personalist social work in terms of Calcutta’s 19th century urban history. The examples of such a personal in this context may be seen in the instances of numerous autobiographies written in the 19th century by educated, city based Bengali housewives and whether these could be classified as private or personal memoirs for public reading would be a matter of arguable contention incited by the findings of the paper. Kolkata based Neo-Hegelian philosophers like Brajen Seal had hinted at the impossibility of “personal emotions”; Hiralal Harldar declared that “the personality is a colony”. The range of this inventory and the topic of mediation could be demonstrated by the fact that even in the early 20th century we find Rajsekhar Basu-the satire scientist-- talking about personal advertisements in the personal column ( “byaktigoto bigyapon”) appearing in public newspapers and giving the Calcutta public a taste of ‘scandalous’ novelty by disclosing private affairs ( "Ghochu! please come back, we'll get you married to your chosen girl."). Now, if these were some nominal examples of the personal, one origin of personalist social work may be seen in the competitive urge of the neo rich babus of Calcutta --who at the bathing ghats distributed huge alms to the poor and the kangalis ( vagrants and destitutes) in order to add an edge to their persona by earning a name as daanvir ( a hero of charity). Prankrishna Dutta’s 19th century classic (and now an urban history primer)---Kolkatar Purabritta documents the appearance of this new-custom with care. This competition resulted in debates on disorganized charity and colonial laws were promulgated for feeding the right number of kangalis. In this context-I would like to engage more with the activities of the Brahmos and other reformers in Calcutta-who while outwardly professing the well wrought ‘organized’ principles of civil society - namely ‘objective’, ‘universal’, ‘intelligent helping’, were oblivious to the fate that their attempts had meekly surrendered to the temptations of the principle of personality. It is evident however--while failing the prospects of colonial civil society, still-the way they contributed to the development of the personalist genre of social service and the way they impacted upon both the private and the public, should be of unfailing and originary interest. [All the above will be episodically covered in serial postings.] But it may be hazarded and with justification that the interest must continue! Put more tersely, the question would be framed in these terms: the interpretive grid that I'm proposing --is it able to intervene in current debates of public/urban mediation ? In response to this provocative expectation let me catalogue that the study will ( apart from those theoretical and historical postings) accumulate texts that range from the Calcutta Neo-Hegelian Hiralal Haldar’s debate with Mactaggart ( in the 1890’s) on whether the absolute or a school club has a personality (even if “the personality is a colony”) to showing how the personal or personalist social work may engender the first systematic critique of Partha Chatterjee’s revisionist notion of new Political Society [ in the wake of ‘welfare’ of the population) -- whose examples he has drawn from contemporary Calcutta. __________________________ The work which is very much a work in progress and forms the content of an upcoming (planned) monograph – is dedicated to my mother Dipali Chatterjee who even months before her death on October 30, 06 was scary about my tryst with Hegel, Lotze et.al and urging me to come to terms with acceptable academia in Kolkata - wished me to put to rest my habit of 'polemicising' which has earned me a team of fierce 'well wishers'. Her unforgettable concern will always remain higher than my unforgivable stubbornness. Higher all the more because she would have been the happiest to know that my work has had such a large and informed audience now at SARAI-CSDS. Wishing you all well and inviting your comments. All responses will be answered with care and scrutiny. ___________________ --------------------------------- Here’s a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070307/7d0ba48b/attachment.html From info at kitabmahal.org Wed Mar 7 10:01:31 2007 From: info at kitabmahal.org (Kitabmahal, The Fourth Floor) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 05:31:31 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Conglomeration an exhibition at Kitab Mahal, Fort from 12th till 15th March 2007 Message-ID: <3f4535ee429b1c18d6c02fd098d1b5fd@frost.yourmailinglistprovider.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070307/937c8435/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From cahen.x at levels9.com Tue Mar 6 22:06:00 2007 From: cahen.x at levels9.com (xavier cahen) Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 17:36:00 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] ))))) radiolist.org ((((( Plate-forme sonore des arts visuels ))))) | ))))) visual arts noise platform ((((( 9 Message-ID: <45ED9870.9000502@levels9.com> RadioList.org Plate-forme sonore des arts visuels / visual arts noise platform (((((((((.)))))))))) # 9 It's time for your french lesson ! .((((( Abonnement RSS : podcast, ipodder, sage, etc... http://radiolist.org/index.php?feed=rss2 .((((( Abonnement à la newsletter http://radiolist.org Miniatures : miniature_1_mars07 )))))))).(((((((((( Les miniatures ont rarement un titre. Elles sont numérotées dans une série elle-même repérée par un mois et une année … Emission réalisée par : Guillaume Loizillon http://www.radiolist.org//?p=121 Interview-Z [6] : rencontre avec Mohamed Rachdi )))))))).(((((((((( Rencontre avec Mohamed Rachdi [vlog-trotter spécial Tanger] Interview#6 : rencontre avec Mohamed Rachdi, artiste et essayiste d’origine marocaine qui interroge l’art notamment son rapport à la tradition de l’Islam. Cette interview a eu lieu au cinéma le RIF de Tanger, le 1 mars 2007. Quatrième émission de [vlog-trotter spécial Tanger], réalisée par Libr-critique en collaboration avec vlog-trotter et radiolist.org. Cette rencontre s’inscrit dans le cadre d’un reportage participatif que l’on pourra suivre sur internet en vidéo voir la vidéo de l’interview sur vlog-trotter.org dans lequel les personnes qui le souhaitent pourront intervenir. Emission réalisée par : Philippe Boisnard http://www.radiolist.org//?p=120 Les Insolvables : X-Propylène )))))))).(((((((((( Grand Corps Sans Organes est un composé plié en trois dont l’échelle intensive parcourt la Bouscarasse, les Monts du Lyonnais, le Schleswig-Holstein, Mulhouse, le living room et les sous-sols de Grand Littéral. Ils interprètent une excipience de racines à effets notoires du nom de X-Propylène. Emission réalisée par : Jean-Pascal Triboulet, Olivier Triboulet et Fernand Fernandez http://www.radiolist.org//?p=119 Interview-Z [5] : rencontre Bernard Collet )))))))).(((((((((( Rencontre avec Bernard Collet à propos des oeuvres de Khalil el Ghrib [vlog-trotter spécial Tanger] Interview#3 : rencontre avec Bernard Collet, cinéaste invité au 11ème salon international du livre de Tanger, qui nous parle de l’oeuvre de Khalil el Ghrib. Cette interview a eu lieu lors du vernissage de l’exposition consacrée à cet artiste marocain atypique, le 28 février à la galerie Delacroix à Tanger. Troisième émission de [vlog-trotter spécial Tanger], réalisée par Libr-critique en collaboration avec vlog-trotter et radiolist.org. Cette rencontre s’inscrit dans le cadre d’un reportage participatif que l’on pourra suivre sur internet en vidéo voir la vidéo de l’interview sur vlog-trotter.org dans lequel les personnes qui le souhaitent pourront intervenir. Emission réalisée par : Philippe Boisnard http://www.radiolist.org//?p=118 Interview-Z [4] : rencontre Hafid Aggoune )))))))).(((((((((( [vlog-trotter spécial Tanger] Interview#2 : rencontre avec Hafid Aggoune, écrivain, qui a publié Les avenirs et Quelle nuit sommes-nous. Cette interview a eu lieu à l’entrée de la Médina. Seconde émission de [vlog-trotter spécial Tanger], réalisée par Libr-critique en collaboration avec vlog-trotter et radiolist.org. Cette quatrième rencontre s’inscrit dans le cadre d’un reportage participatif que l’on pourra suivre sur internet en vidéo (voir la vidéo de l’interview sur vlog-trotter.org) et dans lequel les personnes qui le souhaitent pourront intervenir. Emission réalisée par : Philippe Boisnard http://www.radiolist.org//?p=117 Cuisine sonore : le milshake de légumes )))))))).(((((((((( La cuisine comme un milieu sonore où les enjeux de la cuisine se constituent en même temps que se constitue la cuisine. Emission réalisée par : John Deneuve http://www.radiolist.org//?p=116 Miniatures : miniature_2_fév07 )))))))).(((((((((( Les miniatures ont rarement un titre. Elles sont numérotées dans une série elle-même repérée par un mois et une année… Emission réalisée par : Guillaume Loizillon http://www.radiolist.org//?p=99 The Upgrade! Paris : Antoine Schmitt )))))))).(((((((((( Rencontre avec Antoine Schmitt et Dominique Moulon. Extraits de l’interview qui a eu lieu lors la première Session d’Upgrade! Paris / Incident.net à Ars Longa le 22 septembre 2006. Artiste plasticien et programmeur, Antoine Schmitt se place à la croisée de l’abstraction et de la simulation dynamique. www.gratin.org Emission réalisée par : Marika Dermineur http://www.radiolist.org//?p=68 Miniatures : miniature_5_fév07 )))))))).(((((((((( Les miniatures ont rarement un titre. Elles sont numérotées dans une série elle-même repérée par un mois et une année… Emission réalisée par : Guillaume Loizillon http://www.radiolist.org//?p=98 Sound & Vision # 1 : Peeping Tom vs Blow up )))))))).(((((((((( Un bootleg (parfois appelé mashup ou tout simplement medley) est un détournement musical, l’art de mixer deux chansons pour en faire une troisième. Ici le détournement sonore est cinématographique. Un lieu, un lien. Deux films : une même ville. Ici Londres. Emission réalisée par : Pierre Ménard http://www.radiolist.org//?p=92 Miniatures : miniature_4_fév07 )))))))).(((((((((( Les miniatures ont rarement un titre. Elles sont numérotées dans une série elle-même repérée par un mois et une année … Emission réalisée par : Guillaume Loizillon http://www.radiolist.org//?p=101 -- RadioList.org (((((((.))))))) xavier cahen administrateur xavier.cahen at radiolist.org http://www.radiolist.org _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From yumnam at gmail.com Wed Mar 7 19:10:45 2007 From: yumnam at gmail.com (ranjan yumnam) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 19:10:45 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Imphalwood: Digital revolution and the Death of Celluloid Message-ID: <5fdb855a0703070540l2a3939e6u64022bb83fc77885@mail.gmail.com> This is my first post on the Sarai readerlist as an Independent Fellow, and I hope the topic of my research--*Imphalwood: Digital revolution and the Death of Celluloid*—would be of interest to you. A word before I go on further: Other than the movie culture, I will be even more delighted if I succeed in giving you new insights into the society, culture, politics and economy of Manipur. This is hoped to be achieved by juxtaposing the Manipuri cinema against the larger mainstream media. The mainstream media are either ignorant of the North-East of India or they choose to ignore/ downplay news and views emanating from it for reasons best known to themselves. As much as most will consider this a clichéd refrain of the Manipuris and for that matter people of the North-East in general, the harsh truth is: the impression in the North-East is that a pothole in a road in a Delhi road merits much more extensive coverage by the Delhi-centric media than the parliamentary elections in the regions do. *Media bias* At rare times when the region grabs the attention of the news editors, it is inevitably the news of bomb blasts, ethnic clashes and counter-insurgency operations that get disproportionately played up. There is an unspoken rule- of- thumb that gatekeepers of the Indian media follow when selecting news from the NE. The first one is, if the news is not about violence, then throw it to the dustbin. The second rule is, if the copy is not laced with bloodshed, it should tell exotic facts (mostly narratives remotely related to reality) about the bewildered region and its people. It's not uncommon to find features on the North-East in the Indian media that reek of condescension and stupidity (most of the times) on the part of the writer. Features with headlines like "Nagas eat dogs", "Is casual sex a way of life in Mizoram?" and myriad such tasteless fictions of mind of lazy reporters find their way in print. What's worse, editors seem to prefer these drivels over the more pressing issues of the region like insurgency, underdevelopment, corruption, education and many others. And this in turn creates a further incentive for the dumbos to write more of the same, because they *sell*. Media like any industry is a commercial entity that is hypersensitive to the market. Feel pity for those people who still believe that journalism has a mission and responsibility towards society. Then imagine the frustration that people of Manipur might face when they seek to let out their genuine concerns and voices in the media. Sharmila Irom had to be on fast for six years to demand the scrapping of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act before the media felt its conscience pricked. Her supporters say, and with much truth, that Medha Patkar or a Arundhati Roy or for that matter Mamata Bannerjee or Narendra Modi would have taken just two hours at the Jantar Mantar to create a media storm more effective than six years of Irom's agony for justice could ever achieve. And you thought Indian media was skin blind. People of the North-East are not black, but they are Blacks of India. So don't be surprised when some brave Manipuri women had to take the desperate step of baring themselves in full glare of the cameras to attract the mercy of the Indian media. They knew that the only means of getting coverage is by playing to the gallery of stereotypes held by the Indian media. The utter lack of knowledge about the region might also have fuelled the secessionist movement in the region and feelings of alienation. There is also some truth in the criticism that Indian education selectively promotes the ideologies, history and moorings of the dominant groups while failing to educate the masses about its other citizens living in the moffusil areas. So what do you do? *Here comes cinema* Cinema is a powerful tool that marginalized people can employ to counter the mainstream historical narrative and reorient the incumbent political, socio-economic and cultural order and discourse. Conversely, it is one of the most effective means of getting to know a society in an entertaining and sometimes provocative manner. For instance, if you have watched some of the Manipuri films, by any chance, then you have known more about the aspirations, conflicts and tensions of the small state more than you would have ever gleaned from reading ten books on the state. Before giving a chronological introduction on the Manipuri cinema, here are some FAQs. They are intended to prepare you, the distant readers, (figuratively and literally) to a journey of discovery of the Manipur film industry. *How many Manipuri films are produced in a year? * Not 5 or 10. A conservative estimate is 70-80. Not bad for a young industry. *Have any Manipuri films won National and International awards? * Most of the films made on celluloid before the advent of the digital facilities were either award winners or award nominees though they were fewer in number compared to the current output of digital films. *Why are Manipuri films not much heard about nowadays or screened at film festivals?* Blame the entry rule of most of the popular film festivals which allows only movies made on film. No one in Manipur is interested in using celluloid medium because of its prohibitive cost. As these festivals are set to open to digital films in the future, one will get to see a surfeit of Manipuri films in the near future. And hopefully winning accolades as well. *Are there songs and dances in the Manipuri films? * Yes, they form an important ingredient of popular films in Manipuri films. But they are more realistic and devoid of melodrama overdose, unlike the Bollywood. Item numbers have not made an appearance in these films. *Are there playback singers? * Besides the homegrown singers, Bollywood artistes like Lata Mangeshkar, Kumar Shanu, Shaan, Kavita Krishnamurthi, Alka Yagnik, Anuradha Paudwal and many others have sung for the Manipuri film background scores. *What is the average cost of making a Manipuri digital film?* Anything between 2-20 lakhs. Some films have shooting done outside the state or in foreign locations in which case the budget can almost quadruple. Popular Mumbai based TV actors are paid to make guest appearances *ala*Bollywood item numbers. *Is Bollywood popular in Manipur?* It used to be but after the ban imposed by the militants on all Hindi movies and channels, Manipuris have started turning their gaze elsewhere. South Korean movies and soaps which are beamed through cable are lapped up like the Indian Saas bahu serials. DVDs of South Korean movies flood the market and they are qualitatively better than most of the Bollywood potboilers (sorry to say this). One can see some influence of the Korean films on the narrative and production values of the Manipuri cinema. *Are there adequate post production facilities in Manipur?* Earlier post production work used to be done at Kolkata, Mumbai, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati and Delhi. With digitalization, pop-and-mom studios have sprung up giving the sophisticated big studios a run for their money. With nothing more than a few desktops and a clutch of editing softwares, local talent has bloomed in these small facilities enabling the filmmakers to cut costs. *Why is Manipur film Industry called Imphalwood, not Manipurwood or Mollywood?* Imphal is the nerve centre --or Mumbai-- of filmmaking in Manipur. In fact, the films are made by the valley based Meiteis (non-tribe Hindu population) for the Meiteis in Manipuri language. Meiteis are the Kapoors, Khans, Bachhans, Ram Gopal Vermas and Ajai Bijlis all rolled into one. *Is there a market for Manipuri films outside the state?* There are already ambitious filmmakers in Manipur who are trying to carve out a niche for themselves as crossover filmmakers. South Korean films are a great inspiration as they echo the realism of the earlier celluloid Manipuri films. Subtitling film dialogues is being considered as one of the techniques to expand the audience base across the boundaries of Manipur. Baring Assam, other northeastern states do not have as robust filmmaking tradition as the Manipuris do, a fact that is being seen with great commercial interest. Manipuri diaspora in Bangladesh and Assam, filmmakers contend, could become consumers of the Manipuri films in the years to come if helped by a little promotional blitz. After sports and theatre, movies are billed as the next big export from Manipur. Quite a possibility. *Which is the first state in India (perhaps in the world) to fully digitalize film production, post production, distribution and exhibition?* Manipur. It has never been highlighted in the mainstream media. While the Hollywood talks about the Grand Digital Future where all films can be viewed in any platforms--iPods, mobile phones, internet, multiplex, home theatres--as the YouTube generation has increasingly become 'platform agnostic', that scenario is already unfolding in Manipur. Music video and movie clips are swapped religiously among the tech-savvy teenagers. Trailers are uploaded on the internet. There is no costly format conversion to be made, as everything is in bits and bytes and they are convenient for distribution and sharing. *Is piracy an issue?* Definitely. Digital format is the most fertile creature that can reproduce its own clones at a neck breaking speed. They spread faster among the cinema loving populace of Manipur more than the other formidable contender: HIV/AIDS. In response to this menace, producers have innovated local mechanisms to curb it. And they are effective. It would be an understatement to say that Manipur has a rich tradition of film appreciation and filmmaking which dates back to the dawn of the last century. The first cinema screening in Manipur took place in the year 1920, only about two decades after the first world screening at Paris by the Lumiere brothers. The films shown were mainly the foreign films as during this period, any organized effort to make films in Manipur was absent. It was only after the World War II that the Manipur's first film company, Shree Govindajee Film Company, was established. Its first attempted feature film was *Mainu Pemcha* in 1948. However, the first full-fledged feature film *Matamgee Manipur* (Today's Manipur) was screened on 9th April, 1972 at Usha Cinema, Friends Talkies in Imphal and Azad Cinema. Post independence, the cinema movement got strengthened further with the establishment of Film Society in 1966, Imphal Cine Club in 1979 and Manipur Film Development Council in 1980. The big moment for the Manipuri cinema came in 1982 when Aribam Shyam Sharma's *Imagee Ningthem* (My Child, My Precious) won the GRAND PRIX at the NANTE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, the first Indian film to achieve the distinction. Since then many Manipuri films have won National Film awards, and of late a trend is emerging of young filmmakers fresh out of the filmmaking schools who have gone on to make experimental, yet hugely popular, films and documentaries. Last year, Pavan Kumar, an AAFT graduate won the applause of the audience and jury with his heart wrenching and brutally honest documentary that brought to the screen images of paramilitary forces' excesses perpetrated on civilians in Manipur under the shield of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). The documentary won the Critic's award at the Mumbai International Film Festival and was also critically acclaimed at the Toronto Film Festival, Karachi Film Festival and a slew of other international platforms. Technology has a big role in giving a big boost to the Manipur film industry. The digital format is a boon for the filmmakers in the state which has a tiny market that is confined in the valley. The film production cost has drastically gone down and as a result Manipur churns out more films in a year than it used to produce in decades before the turn of the 21st century. Though the audience is small, the returns on investment are almost assured, albeit over a long period of time, due to the digitalization of the post production, distribution and exhibition. Very few people know that Manipur is the first state in India to go the whole hog in digitalization of all the stages of filmmaking right to the exhibition. In fact there is no hall in Manipur any more that screen celluloid movies. The old film projectors have become an antique piece destined to land up in museums, and owners have replaced them with digital projectors. This writer proposes to study how this transformation from the analog to the digital format has affected the content and form of the Manipuri films. Has it encouraged the producers, directors, cinematographers and writers to take risks and experiment with new forms of storytelling and visual language? Most importantly, is there a distinctive cinema called *Manipuri Cinema* in the sense of a unique theme, form and content? If Hollywood can be identified with big budget, technical wizardry and studio-cum-star driven industry, Bollywood with song and dance extravaganza, Bhojpuri cinema with vulgarity and songs, songs and songs, Italian cinema with neo-realism and French cinema with New Wave cinema, what is Manipuri Cinema then? That's a question that this study seeks to explore, with spotlights trained on other aspects of the Manipur cinema as well--its inspirations, prospects, economics, the cultural impact and its place in the pantheon of world cinema. Which I will attempt to elaborate in my forthcoming postings with empirical data and extensive interviews with the film fraternity in Manipur. Comments, questions, suggestions, brickbats and bouquets are welcome any time. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070307/63576bb4/attachment.html From pukar at pukar.org.in Tue Mar 6 17:35:52 2007 From: pukar at pukar.org.in (PUKAR) Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 17:35:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [announcements] March 16: Lecture & panel discussion on 'The Art of Making Great Creative Cities' Message-ID: <004d01c75fe7$cbcb4950$5b66c2cb@freeda> British Council, PUKAR and Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) cordially invite you to a lecture and panel discussion on The Art of Making Great Creative Cities by Charles Landry An international authority on creativity and city futures Panelists: Rahul daCunha, Theatre person Kiran Nagarkar, Author Sudhir Patwardhan, Painter K Sridhar, Physicist Date: Friday, March 16th, 2007 Time: 6:30 - 8:00 PM Venue: British Council Auditorium, Mittal Tower, C Wing, 2nd Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400 021 PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research) Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001 Telephone:: +91 (22) 6574 8152 Fax:: +91 (22) 6664 0561 Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in Website:: www.pukar.org.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070306/53a5636c/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From vedprakash.sharma at gmail.com Wed Mar 7 18:12:32 2007 From: vedprakash.sharma at gmail.com (Vedprakash Sharma) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 18:12:32 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Sarai / Independent Fellow 2007/ Nalin N. Mathur/First Posting References: <7c0063460703061235n411df4acq841a85887e45915b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <009a01c760b6$15f52450$6401a8c0@ved6suqbkuh1sf> The same happens with those too, who come to big Metros from small towns or villages in order to make a career. it is vice versa. some times, the superiority/inferiority complexes also result out of the so-called different circumstances. I have also been a hosteller who cane from a very little town and landed at North campus hostel in Delhi. initially, I was afraid of the new surroundings, but as I made new friends, the nervousness evaporated. ----- Original Message ----- From: Nalin Mathur To: reader-list at sarai.net Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 2:05 AM Subject: [Reader-list] Sarai / Independent Fellow 2007/ Nalin N. Mathur/First Posting Hello All, Here I am with the first posting for my work, titled "B - Grade Engineering College Culture. I am an engineer with an IT major and am glad to be a part of something that's completely new and exciting. My project deals with Engineering colleges which are often located at random small town suburbs or off a highway milestone. They manifest interesting and fantastical cultural dynamics wherein a mix of identities, cultures and aspirations are played out in non-metropolitan spaces to get an amalgamation of different worlds in one campus. What perhaps remains common right from the start is the collective detachment to small towness and the promise of moving out and making it big in the real big city. I am interested to research and document: a) How these aspects affect ones politics, conscience, personhood. b) How these experiences influence and form the outlook towards the world at large or view points nurtured here during the four years of a students stay. Given below is the abstract which originally was a part of the initial proposal I had mailed to Sarai. "A boy must leave home in order to become a Man". I had been stuck by this saying way before Paulo Coelho's Santiago became a cultural phenomenon. I had no doubt that I would prefer staying away from home during my engineering, another thing about which I was sure I would do. Being unable to secure a decent enough rank in engineering colleges in Delhi further helped the cause. With the limited options that I had, my parents decided upon a college in Mathura, the place was known and was only three hours from Delhi. For a Delhi born and bread, Mathura was another world. A busy highway was the only indication of it being connected to the world outside. Being brought up in the restricted environment of an expensive school, this change in habitat came as a rude shock. The mental preparation for an occurrence like this was my only savior. I was lucky enough to have great room mates, their foremost qualification was them hailing from Delhi. Over all it felt like I was not in Nostradamus's good books and I could easily predict four rough years ahead. By now I realized that I am not at IIT and this is what I call B-GRADE Engineering College culture. It was not long before I realized how wrong I was. My class comprised of an interesting mix of students from Punjab and Delhi. The bulk was from UP. And even though it was a coed college, there was no girl in our class! Inevitably, I came in contact with people from different backgrounds and forged lasting friendships. I started playing for their teams, developed a taste for their kind of music, visited their homes during vacations and upon completion of our degree, joined the same company. The initial skeptic approach towards people with whom I didn't relate transformed into respect. The 'their' became 'my'. By the time the first semester was over and I returned home to meet fellow school mates who had joined different engineering colleges at different places in India and abroad, I had a lot of stories to share. Some experiences we realized were very similar. Claustrophobia turned into liking was the moral of all stories. To my surprise, soon I started looking forward for the college to reopen. There were instances when I did not come home on vacations and stayed in college, bad food withstanding. Not necessarily for the sake of nostalgia, but the last days at college made me look back as to what one has achieved over a period of these four years. From food habits to dressing sense to outlook towards life, I was a changed man, with a distinctive UP touch, which was only subdued by polished English. On a broader scale my Bengali friends in South religiously celebrated Onam and those in Lucknow didn't drink during Ramzan. This gradual change can only be attributed to a phase of social renaissance which unavoidably crops up and has profound effect on individualism. This is what I aim to study. I am looking forward to your suggestions and comments. Warmly, Nalin N. Mathur ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070307/19360bc4/attachment.html From yasir.media at gmail.com Thu Mar 8 12:07:53 2007 From: yasir.media at gmail.com (yasir ~) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 22:37:53 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: The Spirit of Jean Baudrillard In-Reply-To: <45F106A5@wm2.uvic.ca> References: <45F106A5@wm2.uvic.ca> Message-ID: <5af37bb0703072237g16a9ea51nef070fa18826c9ed@mail.gmail.com> fwd From: Theory, Technology and Culture The Spirit of Jean Baudrillard In Memoriam: 1929-2007 ================================ ~Arthur Kroker~ Like his intellectual predecessors -- Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille -- Jean Baudrillard was that rarity of a cultural philosopher, a thinker whose reflections, refusing to be simply culturally mimetic, actually became a complex sign of the social reality of the postmodern century. In his thought there was always something simultaneously futuristic and ancient: futuristic because his theorization of the culture of simulation ran parallel to the great scientific discoveries of our time, specifically the radical transformation of culture and society under the impact of the speed of light-time and light-space; and ancient because Baudrillard was haunted by the enigma of pataphysics, namely the magical ascent of the reality-principle itself into the language of artifice, seduction and terror. Not since Nietzsche's _The Gay Science_ has the secret of reality itself been so fully exposed. Neither referent nor signifier, social reality from Baudrillard's perspective always had about it the hint of a "referential illusion," a "fatal strategy," a "mirror of production," a "spirit of terrorism," a "desert of the real." Refusing the political closures of political economy as much as the social strictures of sociology, Baudrillard made of his thought a theatre of the medieval artistic practice of anamorphosis. Here, the desert of the real would be spun all the more wildly in order to draw out in reverse image the trace of its always hidden qualities of seduction and terror. Neither a skeptic nor an apologist, Baudrillard the theorist, Baudrillard the artist, approached the delirium of contemporary reality with the delirious methods of art, with the always topological language of perspectival illusion. Which is why Baudrillard's thought was always fated to tease out the furies of Nietzsche's "last man." To read his thought was to enter directly into the complexity and indeterminacy of reality as a game of anamorphic perspective. While the last man would always prefer to take his comforts in the solidity of the reality-principle, Baudrillard actually completed Nietzsche by so clearly demonstrating in a life of the mind that thought as a "dancing star" was still possible, that in his practice of Arendt's "life of the mind" thought could once again rise to a greater fealty, namely to make of the referential illusion at the disappearing centre of everything -- sex, consciousness, culture, economy, bodies, terror -- a sure and certain sign of the indeterminacy that haunts life itself. If we now mourn the death of Jean Baudrillard, it is also with the knowledge that his intellectual presence in the world always was in the way of an early announcement that the twenty-first century will surely unwind precisely in the way he envisioned -- a political conflagration of mutually antagonistic, equally fascinating, reality-principles. When reality is exposed as simulation, theory as artifice, the sign as terror, and bodies as only apparent perspectives, then we can finally know that Baudrillard's thought had about it that certain pataphysical quality of always descending to the heights of the void, always, as Virilio would say, "falling upwards" into the desert of the real. In thought as in life, it is only the slow passage of great historical events which permits the spectacle of fiction which is social reality to be fully experienced. Our likely fate is to live out the premises of Baudrillard's _Seduction_ and _Symbolic Exchange and Death_ with all their abiding melancholy and brilliant fascination less as literature than as the theoretical storm-centers of twenty-first century politics, society, and culture. An intellectual friend, a pathway, a theorist who made of thought itself a faithful illusion of the sorcery of hyperreality, I mourn his death on this sad day by honoring the spirit of Jean Baudrillard. _____________________________________________________________________ * * CTHEORY is an international peer-reviewed journal of theory, * technology and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book * reviews in contemporary discourse are published weekly as * well as theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the * mediascape. * * Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker * * Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Paul Virilio (Paris), * Bruce Sterling (Austin), Siegfried Zielinski (Koeln), Stelarc * (Melbourne), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (NYC), Timothy Murray * (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen * Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross (NYC), Andrew Wernick (Peterborough), * Maurice Charland (Montreal), Gad Horowitz (Toronto), Shannon Bell * (Toronto), R.U. Sirius (San Francisco). * * In Memory: Kathy Acker * * Editorial Assistant: Ted Hiebert * WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET) * WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman _____________________________________________________________________ To view CTHEORY online please visit: http://www.ctheory.net/ To view CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA online please visit: http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/ _____________________________________________________________________ * CTHEORY includes: * * 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory. * * 2. Electronic articles on theory, technology and culture. * * 3. Event-scenes in politics, culture and the mediascape. * * 4. Interviews with significant theorists, artists, and writers. * * 5. Multimedia theme issues and projects. * * * The Editors would like the thank the University of Victoria for * financial and intellectual support of CTheory. In particular, the * Editors would like to thank the Dean of Social Sciences, Dr. C. * Peter Keller, the Department of Political Science, the Dean of * Engineering, Dr. D. Michael Miller and Dr. Jon Muzio, Department * of Computer Science. * _____________________________________________________________________ * * (C) Copyright Information: * * All articles published in this journal are protected by * copyright, which covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and * distribute the article. No material published in this journal * may be translated, reproduced, photographed or stored on * microfilm, in electronic databases, video disks, etc., without * first obtaining written permission from CTheory. * Email ctheory at uvic.ca for more information. * _____________________________________________________________________ * * Mailing address: CTHEORY, University of Victoria, PO Box 3050, * Victoria, BC, Canada, V8W 3P5. * * Full text and microform versions are available from UMI, Ann Arbor, * Michigan; and Canadian Periodical Index/Gale Canada, Toronto. * * Indexed in: International Political Science Abstracts/ * Documentation politique international; Sociological Abstract * Inc.; Advance Bibliography of Contents: Political Science and * Government; Canadian Periodical Index; Film and Literature Index. * _____________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ ctheory mailing list ctheory at lists.uvic.ca https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ctheory From elkamath at yahoo.com Thu Mar 8 09:36:06 2007 From: elkamath at yahoo.com (lalitha kamath) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 20:06:06 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] A Look at American Consumption... Message-ID: <386794.83541.qm@web53613.mail.yahoo.com> and the Indian middle classes? Check out Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers An American Self-Portrait http://www.chrisjordan.com/ This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics tend to feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or $12.5 million spent every hour on the Iraq war. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is still in its early stages, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned. ~cj, January 2007 Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast with theYahoo! Search weather shortcut. ____________________________________________________________________________________ We won't tell. Get more on shows you hate to love (and love to hate): Yahoo! TV's Guilty Pleasures list. http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/265 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070307/7727e8f3/attachment.html From ravikant at sarai.net Wed Mar 7 19:25:33 2007 From: ravikant at sarai.net (Ravikant) Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 19:25:33 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Fwd: Conference Postponed Message-ID: <200703071925.33682.ravikant@sarai.net> ---------- आगे भेजे गए संदेश ---------- Subject: Conference Postponed Date: बुधवार 07 मार्च 2007 17:50 From: "dipti" To: ravikant at sarai.net (Dear Mr. Ravikant, please could you put this on the SARAI Reader list, Many Thanks, Dipti) Dear Colleagues, Thank you for the wonderful response and enthusiasm for the CMS conference on “Communication for Social Development: Discourse & Practice” scheduled to be held in Hyderabad in April 2007. Based on the feedback and suggestions made by many of you, our collaborators (SN School of Communication) and us (CMS), we regret to inform you that we have decided to postpone the conference to November 1-3, 2007. Kindly block these dates in your calendar for the same. Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused to anybody due to this postponement. All the papers received for the conference will still be valid. Also, those who have sent in their registration and fee can either use the same for the November conference or can email us to ask for a return. Please do visit the conference website www.cmsindia/csd/ for regular updates on the conference program. Best wishes and regards, Dipti ============================== Dipti Kulkarni Researcher Centre for Media Studies, New Delhi www.cmsindia.org Phone Nos: 011-26522244/55 ============================== ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ravikant" To: ; "dipti" Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2007 3:32 PM Subject: Fwd: Conference on Communication for Social Development: Discourse and Practice > Dear All, > > Greetings from CMS! > I am writing to inform you of CMS Conference on "Communication for Social > Development: Discourse & Practice" scheduled for April 12-14, 2007 at > University of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. > > This is a three-day event for exploring the role and relevance of social, > development, public service communication in increasingly market oriented, > globalizing developing countries, with focus on in South Asia. Invitees > include academicians, practitioners of social and development communication, > international development funding agencies, representatives of civil society > organizations, government policy makers, communication practitioners drawn > from conventional media, advertising and business and industry sectors. > > We are proposing to forge a South Asia forum on social communication for > serving as a clearinghouse for information on development and social > communication research and create a platform for developing a south Asian > perspective on social communication. > > The 3-day deliberations will focus on the politics of communication; research > and evaluation in communication for social change and development; issues of > access, copyright & patenting; ICT & new media for development; evolution > and future of the discipline of 'development communication'; and sectors > specifically to be taken up are environment, health, human rights, > governance, and education. > > The conference registeration and 'call for papers' (extended abstracts) is > open now. Please see our conference website www.cmsindia.org/csd for further > details. > > Look forward to your participation in this conference and forum. > > best wishes & regards > > P N Vasanti > > Director > > CMS > > RESEARCH HOUSE > > Saket Community Centre, New Delhi 110 017, India > > P: 91-11-26522244/55 F: 91-11-26968282 > > www.cmsindia.org > > ============================== > Dipti Kulkarni > > > Researcher > Centre for Media Studies, New Delhi > www.cmsindia.org > Phone Nos: 011-26522244/55 > ============================== > > ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From jaideepkharub at yahoo.com Thu Mar 8 15:25:16 2007 From: jaideepkharub at yahoo.com (jaideep kharub) Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 01:55:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] IP Law News (2) - Bahrain Message-ID: <751908.41207.qm@web56706.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Dear Friends: This is the second part of my article. This gives you information about the patent protection available in Bahrain. Hope this may be useful to you. II. PATENTS 1. LEGAL BASIS 2. MEMBERSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS 3. FILING 4. EXAMINATION, PROTECTION 5. SUMMARY OF NEW LAW 1. LEGAL BASIS - Patents, Designs and Trade Marks Regulations, 1955, effective June 15, 1955 (54 Pat. and T.M. Rev. 23) and subsequent amendments. A new Patents Law was issued on January 29, 2004 under No. (1) of 2004, which supersedes the Patents Law issued in 1955. The Implementing Regulations for said Law have not yet been issued. (At present, the Patent Office is not entertaining any new applications). 2. MEMBERSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS - WTO/TRIPS Agreement, since January 1995. - WIPO Convention, since June, 1995. - Paris Convention, since October, 1997. - Patent Cooperation Treaty, acceded on December 18, 2006 (will come into force on March 18, 2007) 3. FILING (Under Old Law) Anyone who is the owner of a prior patent registration from any country (except from Israel) may apply. An application filed has to be accompanied with its complete documents. Registration of Patents needs either a home registration or any corresponding foreign registration. No other document is acceptable. The following documents are required at the time of filing: I. A power of attorney simply signed by the applicant II. A certified copy of the letters patent accompanied by the specification, claims and three sets of the formal drawings. All documents should be translated into Arabic. III. Two sets of drawings IV. Full particulars of the applicant V. The title of the patent and a summary description of the invention. 4. EXAMINATION, PROTECTION Examination for the grant of patents is not applicable under the existing system. There is a 30-day period open for filing opposition by any interested party. In the absence of opposition, a published patent is registered and the certificate of registration is issued. The validity of a patent is for 15 years only, but it can be renewed for extra 5 years if the patent is of special significance and has not brought in a return proportional to the expenditure incurred by the inventor. The old law does not provide for the working requirement or compulsory licensing. 5. SUMMARY OF NEW PATENTS & UTILITY MODELS LAW The Law specifies that a patent shall be granted in accordance with the provisions of this law for every invention which is new, involves an inventive step, and is capable of industrial application. Such invention may relate to a new industrial product, whether imported or produced locally; an industrial method; or a novel application of a known industrial method. An application should be filed in Bahrain within six months as from the date of filing of the priority document in order to claim priority. A novelty examination takes into consideration any specification previously lodged with the Patent Office or any patent/utility model previously registered. The Patent Office may require whatever amendments it deems necessary to bring the application into conformity with the law. In case the applicant does not comply with the requirements of the Patent Office as authorized by the Registrar of patents, the Registrar will reject the application. Approved applications are published in the Official Gazette and are rendered open to public inspection. Any party may oppose the grant of a patent/utility model within 60 days as from the date of publication. The opposition notice is submitted to the Registrar of Patents. If no opposition against the grant of a patent/utility model is filed, the letters patent/utility certificate is granted after payment of the prescribed fee. Under the new law, a patent is valid for twenty years and a utility model is valid for ten years from the date of filing the application or from the priority date in case of claiming priority. The application is subject to payment of the prescribed annuity fees due, after issuance of letters patent/utility certificate, from the date of filing in Bahrain or the convention filing date in the case of priority applications. A grace period of six months, from the due date, is granted to the owners of the registered patents/utility models to pay the due fees. If this is the case, late annuity fees will be applicable. Working of patents/utility models is an official requirement. In case the owner of a patented invention/utility model in Bahrain fails to satisfy the stipulated working requirements of the country within three years, as from the date of grant, or within four years, as from the date of application, whichever is longer, the patent/utility model will be subject to compulsory licensing under the provisions of the law. You are invited for your invaluable comments. Thank you with regards, jai Jaideep Kharub IP Officer - AGIP PO Box - 990, Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain. Phone : 00973-39187539 (M) E-mail: jaideepkharub at yahoo.com jaideep.kharub at gmail.com "If it is not right..do not do it; if it is not true..do not say it" ____________________________________________________________________________________ Expecting? Get great news right away with email Auto-Check. Try the Yahoo! Mail Beta. http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/newmail_tools.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070308/372b5db2/attachment.html From 125548 at soas.ac.uk Fri Mar 9 03:43:46 2007 From: 125548 at soas.ac.uk (MATTI POHJONEN) Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 22:13:46 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Elephantasma? FILM SHOWING Message-ID: <1173392026.b90e3f4125548@soas.ac.uk> Friends, SACREDMEDIACOW, an independent media collective at SOAS is having its second film showing in London. We aim to present a series of films that are intellectually-stimulating, thought-provoking and you get a chance meet the weird directors afterwards. If in London, come see the first ever public showing of "Elephantasma?" in the UK. "Elephantasma?" is an experimental documentary that looks at Indian economic growth from a series of, say, rather unorthdox angles, such as street dogs and self-help books in Mumbai. In its rather short lifespan, it has already managed to get censored from one seminar on Indian Economy in Finland. The showing will be on Monday, the 13th of March at 6pm, in room G60 at the School of Oriental and African Studies (main campus, Russel Square). Best Wishes, www.sacredmediacow.com From christina112 at earthlink.net Fri Mar 9 12:30:38 2007 From: christina112 at earthlink.net (Christina McPhee) Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 23:00:38 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] =?iso-8859-1?q?March_on_-empyre-_soft-skinned_space?= =?iso-8859-1?q?=3A_Baudrillard_Enonc=E9=2C_or=2C_The_Future_of_Theory?= Message-ID: <19361296-3A0F-4BDD-9774-B5D62B00703B@earthlink.net> Baudrillard Enoncé, or, The Future of Theory with Aliette Guibert Certhoux and McKenzie Wark http://www.subtle.net/empyre Moderated by Nicholas Ruiz III (US) editor, intertheory.org and Christina McPhee (US), artist with special guests Aliette Guibert Certhoux (FR), editor, editions critical secret, Paris http://wwwcriticalsecret.com and McKenzie Wark (AU/US) Associate Professor of Media Studies, Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research, New York énoncer : to convey 'in a particular manner of speaking or presentation,' quite similar to English 'enuciation,' perhaps with more subtle depth.. With the passing of Baudrillard, it seems timely and important to reflect on how philosophy matters, how it is énoncé, in our lives. The conversation will be bilingual in French and English, translations included. Please join us! contribute your writing, exchange ideas and observations. Subscribe at http://www.subtle.net/empyre our guests: ------------------------------------------------------->Aliette Guibert Certhoux: De l’enfance -- qui lui a donné à apprendre l'enfance de ses parents, celle de ses grand-parents, celle de ses arrière-grand-parents, à celle de ses propres enfants et petits-enfants, et d'autre part, de l’environnement de leurs amis et partenaires jusqu'à l'environnement divers des siens, aimés, amis, alliés, et rencontres, elle imagine trois siècles de diversité sociale en même temps, sans diplôme et sans parti sinon celui de l'insoumission légitime au troisième millénaire, ce qui fait la complexité insolente, mais sans complexe, de l’actualité de la directrice des publications, de la revue criticalsecret.com --, toutes disciplines confondues y font le lit de l'indiscipline féconde. --------------------------------------------------------->McKenzie Wark is the author of Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press, 2007), A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press 2004) and other things. He teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City. http://www.ludiccrew.org/wark/ moderators: ------------------------------------------------->Nicholas Ruiz III was born in New York City in 1970. He teaches in the Humanities Program in the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is the author of The Metaphysics of Capital, (Intertheory Press, 2006). He is also the editor of Kritikos. http://intertheory.org/kritikos ------------------------------------------------>Christina McPhee is a media artist in California. Forthcoming 2007 exhibitions include "Carrizo Parkfield Diaries" at the American University Katzen Art Center Museum, Washington DC; and "La Conchita N=Amour" at Thresholds Artspace, Horsecross, Perth, Scotland. Her work is represented by Sara Tecchia Roma New York http://saratecchia.com http://christinamcphee.net From apnawritings at yahoo.co.in Thu Mar 8 17:09:09 2007 From: apnawritings at yahoo.co.in (ARNAB CHATTERJEE) Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 11:39:09 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Beyond Private And Public - Posting by Arnab Chatterjee Message-ID: The work which is very much a work in progress and forms the content of an upcoming (planned) monograph – is dedicated to my mother Dipali Chatterjee who even months before her death on October 30, 06 was scary about my tryst with Hegel, Lotze et.al and urging me to come to terms with acceptable academia in Kolkata - wished me to put to rest my habit of 'polemicising' which has earned me a team of fierce 'well wishers'. Her unforgettable concern will always remain higher than my unforgivable stubbornness. Higher all the more because she would have been the happiest to know that my work has had such a large and informed audience now at SARAI-CSDS. Wishing you all well and inviting your comments. All responses will be answered with care and scrutiny. BEYOND PRIVATE AND PUBLIC: PERSPECTIVES ON PERSONAL AND PERSONALIST SOCIAL WORK By ARNAB CHATTERJEE [Doctoral Fellow at dep’t. of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and on the visiting faculty of Ethics and Human Values at Bengal Institute of Technology, Kolkata.] Put in a sentence, my work deals with revising the notion which makes us see the personal as another synonym of the private. But not simply a lexical reordering, the challenge and the interest of this project lies in realizing whether the category could be historically recovered, theoretically 'proved', culturally debated and practically deployed. The horizon of such expectations, not to say more, marks the site and starts the beginning. And as an apprentice-author dedicated to the discourse of social work, let me confess, I would like to situate this study well within the ill defined ( and academically underrated) contours of social work practice. But aims apart, in this introductory posting I shall briefly outline my project, delineate its major themes, locate landmarks and finally offer some examples to make the proposal go live. It should be common knowledge now that the key to understanding modernity is the public/private divide and a corresponding failure to find a way beyond the binary. To understand this somewhat sweeping statement we may recall an example: Marx. Curiously, Marx is a symptom of both, he said for the first--"the state is founded upon the contradiction between public and private life." and for the second : "if the modern State wished to end the impotence of its administration it would be obliged to abolish the present conditions of private life. And if the State wished to abolish these conditions of private life it would have also to put an end to its own existence, for it exists only in relation to them." Now, throwing in the fact that private property is just a singular and an isolated moment in the discourse of private life, Marx's agenda --I guess- looks readily defamiliarised here. But while Marx had had an effective concern with smashing the liberal divide, there is a long list of other thinkers who have grappled -- being imbibed with an "interpretive" interest--the problem of finding a way beyond the binary. While Hannah Arendt previously had rejected intimacy as a “deep private”, for Habermas it again reappeared as a beyond of private and public. To grasp the sign of our own times--and strongly so-- let us reiterate (without recommending) how --recent researches-- while tracing "the ongoing struggle in Locke, Shafetusbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Smith to find a framework to mediate between the public and private", advocate (and we shall show --erroneously) the "secret" in Derrida (and Levinas) as the tempting solution. Death ("language about death is nothing but the long history of a secret society, neither public nor private, semi - private, semi-public, on the border between the two”); the postcard (“half-private half-public neither the one nor the other) and the telephone are Derrida’s three examples of the secret meant to dissolve the liberal dichotomy. All this is --how ever-- to make a single point--all thinkers who have been pivotal to have found (western) modernity and also those who were prophets of colonial modernities--could be seen to have been--not always in an informed manner though-- struggling to solve the public/private riddle with an answer of their own : this has been the story since 1767 – and runs amok till 2007. The public/private riddle is the strongest unresolved puzzle in the history of ideas. We are into deadly business therefore. Deadly and this is more significant--that they always ran up to alternative versions or weak synonyms of either the private or the public. While I ( being a humble and lonely apprentice of social work theory) propose the personal as the beyond of the private and public, a stream of discourses could be recalled which had proposed, in their desperate will to move beyond this liberal paradigm, alternative versions of the private and the public where the personal appeared as another version of the private. A ready instance is the slogan 'personal is political' which has been deployed by the feminists as an invitation for all of us to take oppressive private matters for public-political redressal. What was glossed over in this urgency is that the personal has been allowed to coincide with the private! My work argues the personal as a beyond of private/public binary and distinguishes it from the private vis-à-vis the public. Private is opposed to the public and resists public scrutiny and publicity -the stuff by which the public is made. Personal -the way we don’t know what a person is, what his/her real/final intentions are or whether somebody is genuinely aggrieved or not -makes the personal- largely unpredictable and indeterminate in the final instance and not necessarily opposed to the public. Private/public being legal juridical categories have specific indicators. Personal relationships- like love or friendship for this reason remain outside legislation. No wonder that this personal has been suppressed and its autonomy sacrificed to benefit political rigour. I make a thorough attempt at its recovery. But to be attentive to the reader's interest and not only elicit promises to be pursued in subsequent SARAI postings, let me give one instance of this recovery which at the same time would illuminate that what we've been talking through: Marx. Now, notwithstanding the will to go beyond private/public divide, it may rightly be asked, could Marx be used to endorse the personal that I'm proposing? Yes! And choosing only one instance -- love, we may document this flower unfolding in Marx. "Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc... if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. ...If you love without evoking love in return that is, if your loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a living person you do not make yourself a beloved one then your love is impotent -- a misfortune." Isn't this the personal in Marx -- which --I'm sure --he would willingly exclude form the domain of private life he wanted to abolish for history? I think the reader agrees. (This part will form the substance of my next posting ). At this stage if anybody asks if there are no precursors prefacing this study, s/he would be right in doing so . It is to the tradition of what goes by the name of personalism in phenomenology-- that my debt is the most; Max Scheler ( a dark disciple of Husserl and whom the latter distinctly disliked ) should be named as an inspiring instance here. But while transcendental phenomenology teaches us the irreducibility of the person to acts or agency, it rarely engages with other discourses to see the consequences this view entails. The theological gloss often given to personalism derives, I guess, from this not so owned apathy. But the real precursors that the reader should reckon with are Hiralal Haldar, J.E. Mactaggart and Hermann Lotze. I found Lotze's reference first in Haldar's work and then in Mactaggart. I was confirmed in my belief by that brilliant sociologist Gilian Rose—who died of cancer recently. When Rose--with a sad irony-- wrote how Lotze is not read now but once was thought an equal to Kant and all sociological theories are basically neo- Kantian, I was sure-- I would be interested. It was Lotze's and Hiralal Haldar's work --their dusty books ---when I started reading them put into me a psycho-semiotic disorder I should say and everything instrumental to this work was put in place. Summing this up-- my observation for the reader could be: when you deal with 'forgotten' theorists, know you are touching a few forgotten theories too which had gone away with them and it is present with them only. And this reading operation makes it sure that ‘the viewpoints we’ve missed, now find their ways through the trees’. Consider this as forming the theoretical background of this study. Now it is one thing to historically recover and theoretically delineate a category, and quite another thing to thematize and deploy it. Therefore in the third posting, having recuperated the personal as a suppressed narrative using historical and socio-theoretic tools, I’ll interrupt it by thematizing the category (though not limiting it) through the cultural self understanding of particular communities and deploy it by using the registers of personalist social work. [Deriving its force from social and psychotherapeutic case work, personalist social work as a particular discourse of helping denied to be absorbed in either the public (the governmental state and far from the now fashionable but brutally mistaken notions of welfare as hegemony or welfare as surveillance) or the private (resistance to publicity)]. This study will limit itself to exploring how the personal negotiates with the questions of publicity/mediation in the context of colonial Calcutta’s emerging civil society which was energized by its claims to have generated modernity --- a debate which continues even today. In other words, charting the personal as distinguished from the private and therefore not necessarily opposed to the public, contributes generically-and in this sense intrinsically to the debates located around the emergence or recession of the public domain in India. But rarely this can be extricated from its urban moorings and the problems of an emergent public mediation. And because this distinction is aided much by the cultural self understandings of particular communities (in Bengali in the absence of separate words, byaktigoto stands for both personal and private), the paper would therefore try to chart the elicitation of the personal and personalist social work in terms of Calcutta’s 19th century urban history. To illustrate, the examples of such a personal in this context may be seen in the instances of numerous autobiographies written in the 19th century by educated, city based Bengali housewives and whether these could be classified as private or personal memoirs for public reading would be a matter of arguable contention incited by the findings of the paper. Kolkata based Neo-Hegelian philosophers like Brajen Seal had hinted at the impossibility of “personal emotions”; Hiralal Harldar declared, “the personality is a colony”. The range of this inventory and the topic of mediation could be demonstrated by the fact that even in the early 20th century we find Rajsekhar Basu- the satire scientist-- talking about personal advertisements in the personal column (“byaktigoto bigyapon”) appearing in public newspapers and giving the Calcutta public a taste of ‘scandalous’ novelty by disclosing private affairs ("Ghochu! please come back, we'll get you married to your chosen girl."). Now, if these were some nominal examples of the personal, one origin of personalist social work may be seen in the competitive urge of the neo rich babus of Calcutta --who at the bathing ghats distributed huge alms to the poor and the kangalis (vagrants and destitutes) in order to add an edge to their persona by earning a name as daanvir ( a hero of charity). Prankrishna Dutta’s 19th century classic (and now an urban history primer)---Kolkatar Purabritta documents the appearance of this new custom with care. This competition resulted in debates on disorganized charity and colonial laws were promulgated for feeding the right number of kangalis. In this context-I would like to engage more with the activities of the Brahmos and other reformers in Calcutta-who while outwardly professing the well wrought ‘organized’ principles of civil society - namely ‘objective’, ‘universal’, ‘intelligent helping’, were oblivious to the fate that their attempts had meekly surrendered to the temptations of the principle of personality. It is evident however--while failing the prospects of colonial civil society, still-the way they contributed to the development of the personalist genre of social service and the way they impacted upon both the private and the public, should be of unfailing and originary interest. [All the above will be episodically covered in serial postings.] But it may be hazarded and with justification that the interest must continue! Put more tersely, the question would be framed in these terms: the interpretive grid that I'm proposing --is it able to intervene in current debates of public/urban mediation? In response to this provocative expectation let me catalogue that the study will (apart from those theoretical and historical postings) accumulate texts that range from the Calcutta Neo-Hegelian Hiralal Haldar’s debate with Mactaggart (in the 1890’s) on whether the absolute or a school club has a personality (even if “the personality is a colony”) to showing how the personal or personalist social work may engender the first systematic critique of Partha Chatterjee’s revisionist notion of new Political Society [in the wake of ‘welfare’ of the population) -- whose examples he has drawn from contemporary Calcutta. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070308/5fd417a5/attachment.html From avinashcold at gmail.com Fri Mar 9 10:46:29 2007 From: avinashcold at gmail.com (Avinash Kumar) Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 10:46:29 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] The other side of terrorism Message-ID: * Terrorism: Biased Investigation * * Ram Puniyani * One more act of blast took place on 10th Feb 2007 in Nanded, city in the remote interiors of Mahrashtra, in the wee of hours of the morning. On the day next, the initial media reports did describe it as a blast. It took place in a biscuit shop, Amol Biscuits. It was a low key reporting in the media. In this blast one person, Pandurang Amilkanthwar, died instantly and another, Dyaneshwar Manikkwar, suffered 70% of burns and succumbed to his injuries on sixth day. In the initial statement, Manikwar said that it was an electric short-circuit. The next day he retracted his statement to say that he and Pandurang had deliberately put fire by using petrol to claim the insurance money as they were having financial problems. Police and a section of media promptly accepted this version and stated that there was no political angle involved in the case, overlooking the fact that Pandurang was a Shiv Sena Shakha Pramukh, who was close to Bajrang Dal also. Just to recapitulate a year ago (April 6, 2006), in Nanded, in a blast two Bajrang Dal workers were killed while making a bomb. The police explained it as a burst of crackers. But the impact of the blast was too strong and the police version stood exposed. The blast shattered the windows in the surrounding area of over a Kilometer. The house search revealed the powerful bomb, with timer and remote control, after which the Inspector General of police conceded that it was a bomb blast and that those involved in the blast are the members of Bajrang Dal. Local papers reported that a diary has been found at the spot, which has the details of bomb making techniques and other relevant information. The local BJP MP stated that it was a minor incident. Meanwhile all the top leadership of RSS, VHP visited the hospital to see the injured and mourn the dead. The police did arrest some fourteen people, who were close associates of the one's who died. But they were all released, as the charges under which they were arrested related to minor offense only. Also the police/state pleader had no objections if the bail was granted to the arrested ones. The Bajrang Dal chief and other activists of the dal were left untouched despite the correlation of blasts with this RSS affiliate. Anti Terrorist Squad Inspector General K.P.Raghuvanshi stated that the explosives and other weapons seized on the spot indicate that they were being trained in making bombs and operating firearms. They also started investigating the possible involvement of Bajrang Dal, a RSS affiliate, in a blast outside a mosque in Parbhani, two years ago. One recalls that there were series of episodes and blasts in Maharashtra in Parbhani, Purna, Jalna, Mumbai and Malegaon. The most disturbing of these was the train blast in Mumbai, July 11 2006 and Malegaon September 8, 2006. The timing of blasts shows a clear pattern, barring in Mumbai, it was outside the mosques and in the afternoons. In the aftermath of Mumbai train blasts hundreds of Muslim youth were recklessly arrested in the Malvani area of Mumbai. In other places also many youth were put behind the bars on the slightest suspicion. This bias in police attitude was so blatant that in Malvani, the local people took the procession to the police station to get the innocent youth released. In Malegaon blast also, which took place on the day of Shab-e-Barat out side the Mosque near Bada kabristan, police acted on the ground that Muslim groups are involved in the process. Here also the arrests were mostly of those who had minority identity. Some of those with previous SIMI connection were the easy target. The local Muslim community was so disgusted with the attitude of the state and the police that it refused to accept the relief offered by the Chief Minister of the state under whose nose the biased attitude of police is clearly discernible. Interestingly in Malegaon police had been on high alert during the Ganapati festival, and dropped guards when it was Shab-e-Barat. The premise being that it is Muslims who create problem during Hindu festivals, else all is heavenly peace. The police had failed to take adequate precautions on a day prior to Shab-e-barat. They also expressed their frustration by boycotting the meeting called by minority commission and the panel which went to study the situation in the city. The brain mapping and narco test of Nanded blast accused of 2006, (* http://communalism.blogspot.com/search/label/Maharashtra*) revealed that Nanded was acting as the Bomb Nirmiti Kendra (Center for Making Bombs), guided and supported by the state level VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders. The plan was to make explosions in front of mosques on Friday Afternoons around 2 PM, when the attendance in the mosques is maximum. Himanshu Panse the one who died while making a bomb is known to have stated that unless, Hindus do the blasts near Mosques, it will be perceived as if Hindus are Hijras. The blasts are the only way to stop the attacks like the one in Varanasi and Delhi. Coming on the heels of this Malegaon episode, the explanation given for the current, 2007, Nanded incident was very puzzling. The Citizens Committee ( * http://www.sabrang.com/nanded/nanded.htm*), which investigated the incident points out that the deceased changed his statement within hours. In the current event, a scooter parked on the side of the road at some distance got burnt, the presence of nails and blades, gas cylinder in the room remaining unaffected and some food items not catching fire, indicated that there is a possibility of blasts. The committee amongst others comprised of the retired High Court judge of Mahrashtra, Justice Kolse Patil and noted social worker, Teesta Setalvad. The committee with the help of on sight inspections, interviews and opinions of forensic experts concludes that it was not a short circuit fire. The available evidence leads it to opine that it might have been an explosion caused due to an accident during the preparation of liquid bomb. It might have been due to combination of liquid inflammable substances. Surprisingly similar techniques have also been used in causing the blast in Samjhauta Express, in which most of those killed were poor Muslims. One wonders what is happening to the investigations in such matters of serious concern. The contrast in the treatment of accused of two religious communities is glaringly obvious. We know the attitude and high handedness of state and police authorities in dealing with Mumbai and Malegaon blasts, one has seen the 'promptness' of the authorities in apprehending any body from the Muslim minority even on the slightest pretext and to keep such a person in the custody on one ground or other. There are too many gory tales about the lock up deaths and the type of treatment meted out to some of the accused. In the case, of Nanded blasts, the one of 2006 and the one of 2007, despite the narco test report and brain mapping the inaction shown by authorities concerned is totally baffling. The new police commissioner of Mumbai, Dhananjay Jadhav, has stated that tackling terrorism will be on the top of his priority list. What does he mean? Will he at least try to look at all the evidence in an impartial way to punish the guilty and protect the innocent? Will he break the shackles of prejudices binding the police force while dealing with the minorities? If that's what he means, it is a welcome sign for the state riddled with so many acts of terror. There needs a turn around in the policy of the state government and police officials who have been taking a blind partisan view and attitude in the investigation of the events like this. The conclusions reached by the committee, more so in the wake of earlier similar blast in Nanded, and the efforts to present sop stories to cover up the incidents point to the deeper conspiracy hatched by groups equally insane and fanatic as the one's belonging to Al Qaeda are. What is surprising is that the so called secular government of Maharashtra which got elected on the secular ground, on the ground that it will implement the Shrikrishna commission report which it never did of course, has been very biased in its policies as reflected in the investigations done in the cases of Mumbai and Malegaon blasts. It has failed to connect up the Nanded blasts of April 2006 and has treated these incidents with jaundiced vision. None of the functionaries of Bajarang Dal have been taken to task, and the parent organization of Bajrang Dal, RSS sits pretty. Its time Central government intervenes, and inquiry of all the terror incidents in Maharashtra is handed over to CBI or preferably to the committee headed by a judge of impeccable credentials. Are Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh listening? Issues in Secular Politics March 2007 I For circulation/Translation/ hosting on Web sites * www.pluralindia.com * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070309/3a25c434/attachment.html From senpriya at gmail.com Fri Mar 9 09:00:46 2007 From: senpriya at gmail.com (Priya Sen) Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 09:00:46 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Shack settlements in Durban & 2010 Message-ID: <8c9003440703081930w417a2a10w78b7f482b9cf8d07@mail.gmail.com> Relocation Elsewhere. Also 2010 is when Durban will host the FIFA Soccer World Cup. Best, Priya Dear All The article in this morning's *Mercury* (most of which is typed in below) is quite significant. For years Abahlali have been told by Mlaba, Sutcliffe etc that they have no right to protest because houses are being built and the 'slums will be cleared by 2010'. Sutcliffe has often gone on to state that 'nowhere else in the world are governments building houses for their people' ignoring the fact that his housing policy is strikingly similar to that of the apartheid government which also moved people out of shacks in and near the cities and dumped them in formal townships outside the cities…. Abahlali has always said that basic maths shows the city's claim that it will eradicate shacks by 2010 to be wildly impossible. For pointing out that the Emperor is naked they have been called liars and subject to all kinds of threats. In one instance the top officials in the Dept of MEC for Housing interrupted a meeting to allege that someone who had pointed out in a newspaper article that the city could not 'clear the slums by 2010' was therefore a 'spy' working for a 'foreign government bent on destabilizing the ANC'. That kind of language, along with all the paranoid and often racist third force language, has justified the (illegal) banning of Abahlali marches, arrests, beatings and even, twice, having the police physically prevent them from appearing in the media. Not to mention the police murder in Siyanda late last year. Now the state has admitted that it cannot, at the rate at which it is building houses, 'clear the slums' by either the national target of 2014 or the eThekwini target of 2010. The Municipality are now finally admitting what Abahlali have always said – which is something which any primary school child with a knowledge of basic arithmetic or a calculator could have worked out in a minute - is in fact the truth. The city's admission is hardly news in the sense that everybody except them who cared to think about this matter knew it already. But this public break with their previously fanatical denialism and hubris with regard to their housing policy is important in one crucial respect. That is that since Abahlali began its struggle in March 2005 they have been told that there can be no investment in any of the settlements in Durban because it will be a waste as they will 'all be cleared by 2010'. This hasn't been much comfort to people who, like Nonhlanhla Mzobe from Kennedy Road, have lived their whole lives (in her case more than 30 years) in 'temporary' settlements. Just two weeks ago the notorious Councillor Yakoob Baig was using this very line to try and stop a tiny step forward in Kennedy Road. Claiming that there can be no development in temporary settlements to excuse the abandonment of the poor by the left arm of the municipality (the right arm, in the form of the police, is of course there to enforces Sutcliffe's illegal march bans etc) has enabled the city authorities to cease the provision of electricity altogether (in 2002), to radically reduce access to water and sanitation, to withhold refuse removal and to refrain from other kinds of investments - roads, paths, halls, fields, creches, clinics, gardens, telephone lines, drains etc. This absolute and brutal refusal to invest in shack settlements while simultaneously investing in all kinds of ridiculous projects like the themepark, casinos, the stadium etc has led to enormous suffering and, very often, avoidable deaths with regular shack fires being the most dramatic instance of the human costs of this abandonment of the actually existing poor in the name of future development. The city can no longer use the excuse that 'the slums will be cleared by 2010' to justify their more or less complete exclusion of shack dwellers from access to the most basic services that the state provides to make city life viable for the rest of us. Now that they have admitted that their policy will not deliver the poor out of shack settlements and into formal townships by 2010 or even 2014 they have no excuse for refusing to develop new services in shack settlements and for scaling back existing services. They need to account for situations where a thousand people share one tap or one toilet etc, etc, etc. They can no longer dismiss this as 'temporary' and claim that the poor will inherit in the earth, or at least a leaking cracking matchbox house in a new township, in 2010. Of course there are other obvious problems with the city's statements as recorded here. Firstly, as the journalist notes, the issue is not only whether or not houses are being built but also, crucially, where those houses are being built. The city are, as they note here, now sometimes upgrading instead of always relocating, but upgrades happen in Umlazi. They don't happen in Pinetown or Reservoir Hills or Clare Estate. If your shack is in a former township it may be upgraded. If it is in a former white or Indian suburb you still face relocation. There is very little willingness to oppose the racial and class prejudices of the rich and zero willingness to oppose the interests of big landowners like Moreland. Secondly there is the issue of the quality of the houses which is often so abysmal that people call them formal jondolos. Thirdly there is the fact that the city's housing list is developed on the basis of 'one house for one shack' ignoring the fact that in many instances people from 2, 3 or 4 families occupy one shack. Currently when they relocate the people on the list are moved out and the rest, in casual violation of South African law, are just left homeless on the side of the road. The number of people needing housing is actually far, far larger than the number that they estimate with their 'one shack – one house' policy and it is growing all the time. Fourthly there is the fact that they are still building townships – apartheid housing policy is hardly the model to be emulated. And there is the rampant corruption in the allocation of housing and in the building…. But all this has been noted before. Read the article. It is a step forward. Sutcliffe, Mlaba, Naidoo, Gumede etc have had to let the cloak of their denialism drop a little. It's not the prettiest sight but at least they'll now have to engage with reality a little more. * Mercury, page 5, March 6, 2006 'Building 2.4m Units By 2014 Will Need a Miracle'* *HOUSING TARGET IS UNREALISTIC, SAY OFFICIALS* Carvin Goldstone South Africa would have to build 2.4 million houses - or about 30 000 started homes a month - if it wanted to complete its low-cost housing programme by the target date of 2014. However government officials are now admitting that this target is unrealistic. S'bu Gumede, Chariman of the eThekwini Municipality's housing subcommittee, said yesterday that South Africa was not doing enough to meet its goal of housing the country's poorer communities by 2014. He told politicians and officials at a housing subcommittee meeting that the city Housing Department might need to build twice as many houses every year if it planned to meet its goal in the next seven years. He said that, nationally, 2.2 million houses had been built over the last 14 years at 200 000 a year but that there was still a backlog of 2.4 million. "If we have built 2.2 million in 14 years, then we will need another 14 years to build the next 2.4 million houses. But out target is only seven years away, so we will need nationally to double our performance to about 400 000 or 500 000 houses a year," he said. The council is building 16 000 homes a year but may now be required to build 32 000 a year. eThekweni had set its own housing goal at 2010 but, Gumede said, this also seemed "far-fetched" and it would "require a miracle" to fulfil this target. Department head Cogie Pather said...the department would also be under pressure to build bigger houses for the poor. Presently, the municipality builds 30 square meter houses but might have to increase this to between 32 and 40 square meter houses. ......... Councillors inspected some of 1 330 new houses that had been built in Umlazi among the shacks. The campaign, which began in 2005, aims to replace informal housing with basic starter homes without unduly displacing communities and families. In previous years, shack dwellers have complained that although they received new homes they were often so far away from their work and schools that they were forced to almost start their lives over again. The shack dwellers movement now has a website: http://abahlali.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070309/38d2a6c2/attachment.html From meenamenon at gmail.com Fri Mar 9 09:27:14 2007 From: meenamenon at gmail.com (meena menon) Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 09:27:14 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First posting on Sarai fellowships from Meena Menon Message-ID: <57ad49a60703081957t1844a1b8te8a4778a7bd02a33@mail.gmail.com> Hi Vivek Here is my first posting. will you send it to the list. thanks meena Hi all This is my first posting on the list. I work with The Hindu in Mumbai and have been a journalist for over 20 years. My research for the SARAI fellowship is titled "Recovering Lost Histories Riot victims, communal polarisation of Mumbai, its impact on people and perceptions about communities". The main focus will be the city of Mumbai, which I feel has changed in obvious and not so obvious ways since the post Babri Masjid demolition riots of December 1992 and January 1993. Divisions between Hindus and Muslims have become deeper and ghettos have sprung up in new places. I would like to spend some time looking at how the city has changed and how people have lived through difficult times since the riots. The main focus of the research will be the families of the victims of riots in Mumbai in 1992-93 after the Babri Masjid demolition. Mumbai was one of the worst affected cities and very little has been done to punish the people guilty of many crimes in those two months. The high profile trial of the 1993 serial blasts has come to an end and the verdict is being handed out, while the Srikrishna commission, which did a detailed report on the riots, has been shelved. Over a 1000 people were killed in mob rioting and by the police and hundreds of people were forced to move out to relief camps that were mostly run by individuals and NGOs. The riots clearly intensified the divide between two communities and created a process of further ghettoisation. I traced some families and many of them have moved from their original houses at the time of the riots and are now living in other areas. The riots also led to many people going to live in the extended suburbs of Mumbai or in the neighbouring Thane district. New colonies were created by this migration, which developed their own identity and culture. These now are the same areas, which are labelled "terrorist" hotbeds, and many of the people accused of "anti-national" crimes are picked up from these areas like Mumbra in Thane district and Naya Nagar outside the city. Mumbai already has areas, which are ghettos in parts of South, Central, Western and Eastern Mumbai. Post riots, there has been a major sense of insecurity among the victims and their decision to move out of "mixed" localities has been influenced by this fear. Much of the root of this division lies in the riots of 1992-93, which created displacement of an unprecedented scale. The sad part is that most of this went unnoticed and people were forced to quietly search for alternatives and continue with their lives. Many of them were helped by journalists or NGOs and the government really played a pathetic role in all this. I think to go back and find out how people have lived since the riots will be an important part of understanding how they coped with so much trauma and injustice. It will also lead to an understanding of the new equations between communities that were created, whether positive or negative. Along with many others, I covered the riots and bomb blasts in 1992-93 and at that time met many of the victims and travelled to the riot affected areas in the city. For journalists who covered the riots, it was a terrible experience in many ways. A lot of what happened then has stayed with many of us and we feel the need to revisit some of those events in the past and the people it affected. These events cannot be allowed to hang loose as a fragment of history. I feel they have to be recovered and represented in a way that helps people make important linkages with the past and present. While I am used to the written word, I could present the research in the form of oral history, recordings of interviews, photographs and any other material that I think will suitably illustrate the stories. I usually prefer the rather staid narrative or photographs but I would also like to explore other options. The riots and the serial blasts changed perceptions and reinforced stereotypes about communities. The roots of public perception about Muslims largely changed so much after the riots.This is another area I want to concentrate on in the research. Politicians who indulged in the worst kind of propaganda were responsible in a large part for the murder and mayhem. Yet these people were let off mildly. It may be useful to record their perceptions after so many years. The police too played a role that cannot be forgotten during the riots. So many cases against policemen were never dealt with properly. Few were actually punished for some really heinous crimes. The serial blasts which were perceived as a "revenge" for the riots, added to the polarisation. I met some victims of the blasts and they too are left high and dry. Few have got compensation and many just get by. The city has so many of these scars, which it bears seemingly lightly. That is a misconception that needs to be corrected. The scars of those years have created deeper divisions and in tracing the complexities involved some important truths may emerge. Progress so far: Interviews with lawyers dealing with riot cases which are still in the court. Visit to Behrampada in Bandra which was affected very badly in the riots and interviews with families. Regards Meena Menon -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070309/d79bb48a/attachment.html From nc-agricowi at netcologne.de Thu Mar 8 13:46:16 2007 From: nc-agricowi at netcologne.de (cinemaNET) Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 09:16:16 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] =?iso-8859-1?q?=5BAnnouncements=5D_deadline_extende?= =?iso-8859-1?q?d=3A_Quicktime_as_an_artistic_medium?= Message-ID: <20070308091616.50D7D89B.84C7AB0C@192.168.0.4> Call for entries extended deadline 31 May 2007 Theme: Slowtime 2007? - Quicktime as an artistic medium _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From cahen.x at levels9.com Thu Mar 8 16:42:48 2007 From: cahen.x at levels9.com (xavier cahen) Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 12:12:48 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Newsletter / 03-07 to 03-14-2007 Message-ID: <45EFEFB0.5000902@levels9.com> pourinfos.org l'actualité du monde de l'art / daily Art news ----------------------------------------------------------------------- >From Wenesday March 07, 2006 to Wenesday March 14 2007 (included) ------------------------------------------------------------------- (mostly in french) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ NOTRE ÉLECTION PRÉSIDENTIELLE 2007 / OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 2007 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://pourinfos.org/fichiers/_elections_04311_pourinfos_candidats.pdf Pourinfos.org is coming into the presidential campaign to whom it may concern : Antoine Waechter, Arlette Laguiller, Dominique Voynet, France Gamerre, François Bayrou, Jean-Marie Le Pen, José Bové, Marie-Georges Buffet, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Nicolas Sarkozy, Olivier Besancenot, Philippe de Villiers, Ségolène Royal. Write your comments ! http://pourinfos.org/index.php?commentaires=34302&categorie=elections @ 001 (07/03/2007) Meetings: Fred Forest, Wednesday March 7, 2007, Bachelard Lecture theater, Sorbonne University, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34498-tit--Fred-Forest-mercredi-7-mars-2007-Amphi -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 002 (07/03/2007) Meetings: Dorkbot Paris #2, Wednesday March 7, 2007, La Pêche, Montreuil, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34500-tit--Dorkbot-Paris-2-mercredi-7-mars-2007- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 003 (07/03/2007) Screening : Sad In Country, Catherine Vertige & Kosten Koper , Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels, Belgium. http://pourinfos.org/art-34512-tit--Sad-In-Country-Catherine-Vertige- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 004 (07/03/2007) Screening: The Sun, Alexandre Sokurov, écrans psy, movie theater Georges-Melies, Montreuil, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34513-tit--Le-soleil-Alexandre-Sokurov-ecrans-psy- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 005 (07/03/2007) Performance : "Speech Act" Olivier Babin, Lilian Bourgeat, March 7, 2007 Ecole municipale des beaux-arts-galerie Edouard Manet, Gennevillier, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34518-tit--Speech-Act-Olivier-Babin-Lilian -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 006 (07/03/2007) Exhibition : Impermeables, Genevieve Quebriac, S.E.P.A., Rennes, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34520-tit--Impermeables-Genevieve-Quebriac- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 007 (07/03/2007) RadioList.org Plate-forme sonore des arts visuels / visual arts noise platform (((((((((.))))))))))# 9 http://pourinfos.org/art-34539-tit-RadioList-org-Plate-forme-sonore-des -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 008 (07/03/2007) Residency : Summer Residencies 2007, Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34540-tit--Summer-Residencies-2007-Scottish -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 009 (07/03/2007) Residency: visual artists, association 2ANGLES, Flers de L'Orne, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34541-tit--d-artistes-association-2ANGLES-Flers-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 010 (07/03/2007) Residency : AVAIR, Ars Virtua Artist-in-Residence, Ars Virtua Galley and New Media Center, Second Life, San Jose, Usa. http://pourinfos.org/art-34542-tit--AVAIR-Ars-Virtua-Artist-in-Residence- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 011 (07/03/2007) Meetings : Cycle Malaise dans la democratie : Axel Honneth, Wednesday March 7, 2007, Wallonia-Brussels Center, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34549-tit--Cycle-Malaise-dans-la-democratie-Axel -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 012 (07/03/2007) Publication : La mécanique de l'imprévisible, Art et hasard autour de 1960, (The mechanics of unforeseeable, Art and chance around 1960) Pierre Saurisse, L'harmattan éditions, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34558-tit--La-mecanique-de-l-imprevisible-Art-et -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 013 (07/03/2007) Publication : 15th editions, catalogues of XV Biennial of Paris, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34559-tit--15-eme-editions-catalogue-de-la-XV -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 014 (07/03/2007) Publication : Le Peintre et le Philosophe ou Rembrandt et Spinoza à Amsterdam, (The Painter and the Philosopher or Rembrandt and Spinoza in Amsterdam) Bruno Streiff, éditions Complicités, Grignan, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34560-tit--Le-Peintre-et-le-Philosophe-ou-Rembrandt -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 015 (07/03/2007) JOb : Curator in residence, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienne, Austria. http://pourinfos.org/art-34564-tit--Curator-in-residence-Academy-of-Fine -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 016 (07/03/2007) Formation : summer seminars for art curators, Between Exposition and Mediation, NAAC The National Association of Art Critics, AICA Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia. http://pourinfos.org/art-34566-tit-Formation-summer-seminars-for-art -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 017 (07/03/2007) Various : Damned Raidio n°91, Info Damned Raidio, Nantes, Montpellier, Grenoble, Vienne, France, Namur, Belgium. http://pourinfos.org/art-34571-tit-Divers-Damned-Raidio-n-91-Info-Damned -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 018 (07/03/2007) Call : Festival Filmer la musique, Point Ephemere, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34572-tit--Festival-Filmer-la-musique-Point -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 019 (07/03/2007) Call : VideoDance2007 , 7th International festival on Movement and the Moving Image, Athens, Greece. http://pourinfos.org/art-34573-tit--VideoDance2007-7th-International -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 020 (07/03/2007) Call : Presentation of Projection#1, FetArt, Galerie Univer, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34575-tit--Presentation-de-1-FetArt-Galerie -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 021 (07/03/2007) Call : collective work “Reflection”, collective OTRA, La Charite sur Loire, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34576-tit--oeuvre-collective-Reflet-collectif -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 022 (07/03/2007) Call : : The expenses, burning it… you are reader or you write, you can take part in Ogresse reads, Ogresse, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34577-tit--Le-frais-le-brulant-vous-etes-lecteur -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 023 (07/03/2007) Call : submitters and has extended the deadline for the online registration until March 16, 2007, 21st Prix Ars Electronica 2007, Linz, Austria. http://pourinfos.org/art-34578-tit--submitters-and-has-extended-the-deadline -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 024 (07/03/2007) Call : La Bourse du Talent 2007 (Prize of Talent), Photographie.com Magazine, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34579-tit--La-Bourse-du-Talent-2007-Magazine -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 025 (07/03/2007) Call : Comp_07: MIXED REALITIES, Turbulence, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., New York, Usa. http://pourinfos.org/art-34580-tit--Comp-07-MIXED-REALITIES-Turbulence-New -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 026 (07/03/2007) Call : 5th edition, Tabor Film Festival, Zabok, Croatia. http://pourinfos.org/art-34582-tit-Appel-a-Candidature-5th-edition-Tabor -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 027 (07/03/2007) Call : Production of multiples of artists, Asterides - Ateliers d'Artistes, Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34584-tit-Appel-a-candiature-Production-de-multiples -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 028 (08/03/2007) Rencontres : Press conference: Hospitalities, Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts de Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34335-tit--Conference-de-presse-Hospitalites- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 029 (08/03/2007) Meetings : Thursday' s at the Museum, Conferences/DEBATEs, Thursday March 8, 2007, Center George Pompidou, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34505-tit--Les-Jeudi-s-au-Musee-Conferences- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 030 (08/03/2007) Meetings : Rainer Oldendorf, Seminar, screenings, meetings, Cac Bretigny, Bretigny-sur-Orge, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34546-tit--Rainer-Oldendorf-Seminaire-projections- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 031 (08/03/2007) Meetings : Meetings: press conference of the demonstration Hospitalities, Thursday March 8, Esnba, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34550-tit--conference-de-presse-de-la-manifestation -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 032 (08/03/2007) Meetings : Bernard Lafargue, L'art de l'ephemere, i>Medias, Thursday March 8, 2007, ECM des Carres, Annecy-le-Vieux, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34552-tit--Bernard-Lafargue-L-art-de-l-ephemere- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 033 (08/03/2007) Publication : Johanna Vaude, Dvd-hybrid, Thursday March 8, 2007, Cinematheque française, Lowave, Paris France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34556-tit--Johanna-Vaude-Dvd-hybride-jeudi-8-mars -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 034 (08/03/2007) Screening : Evening dedicated to Bernard Gesbert, Thursday March 8, 2007, Scam, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34561-tit--Soiree-dediee-a-Bernard-Gesbert-Jeudi-8 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 035 (08/03/2007) Job : missions of education to digital Arts, L’Espace Culture Multimedia Kawenga, Montpellier, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34565-tit--un-e-charge-e-de-missions-d-education -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 036 (08/03/2007) Formation : Master of Arts in Media Cultures, The School of Creative Media of City University of Hong Kong, China. http://pourinfos.org/art-34567-tit-Formation-Master-of-Arts-in-Media -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 037 (08/03/2007) Various : Opening of the Parallel Stock Exchange of Work, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34569-tit-Divers-Vernissage-du-site-de-la-Bourse-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 038 (08/03/2007) Various : Printemps des poetes 2007, art school of Calais, Calais, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34570-tit-Divers-Printemps-des-poetes-2007-Ecole -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 039 (08/03/2007) Call : SIMULTAN, video and new media art festival, Timisoara, Romania. http://pourinfos.org/art-34574-tit--SIMULTAN-video-and-new-media-art -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 040 (08/03/2007) Call : curatorial project, la box _bourges, Ecole nationale superieure d'art de Bourges, Bourges, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34581-tit--Appel-a-projet-curatorial-la-box -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 041 (09/03/2007) Screening : Cinema du Réel will take place of the 9 at March 18, 2007, retrospective Germany, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34376-tit--Cinema-du-Reel-qui-aura-lieu-du-9-au-18 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 042 (09/03/2007) Meetings : Etienne Mineur, Friday March 9, 2007, University Paris 8, Saint Denis, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34499-tit--Etienne-Mineur-vendredi-9-mars-2007- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 043 (09/03/2007) Publication : Essai sur la Mode dans les societes modernes, (Essai on the Fashion in the modern societies) Eric Sommier, L'harmattan éditions, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34557-tit--Essai-sur-la-Mode-dans-les-societes -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 044 (10/03/2007) Screening : Cremaster 5, Matthew Barney, Saturday March 10, 2007, imagespassages, Annecy, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34416-tit--Cremaster-5-Matthew-Barney-samedi-10 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 045 (10/03/2007) Meetings : signature of Peter Downsbrough Saturday March 10, 2007, Florence loewy, books by artists, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34544-tit--signature-avec-Peter-Downsbrough-samedi -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 046 (10/03/2007) Exhibition : Adam Avikainen, Catherine Sullivan, Francesco Bernardelli, Beauty Unrealized, Public Space With A Roof, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. http://pourinfos.org/art-34568-tit--Adam-Avikainen-Catherine-Sullivan- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 047 (14/03/2007) Meetings : Sculpture and urban space, Wednesday March 14, 2007, Auditorium of Louvre, Louvre, Paris, France http://pourinfos.org/art-34496-tit--La-sculpture-et-l-espace-urbain-mercredi -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 048 (14/03/2007) Meetings : “Urban experimental Visions” Nathalie Junod Ponsard, Observatoire des nouveaux medias, Mercredi 14 mars 2007, Ensad, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34554-tit--Visions-experimentales-urbaines- -------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From xavier.cahen at pourinfos.org Thu Mar 8 17:44:50 2007 From: xavier.cahen at pourinfos.org (xavier cahen pourinfos.org) Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 13:14:50 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] 00-00-0000 International Women's Day 0 Journee Internationale de la femme 00-00-0000 Message-ID: <45EFFE3A.80803@pourinfos.org> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070308/65d63f46/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From turbulence at turbulence.org Fri Mar 9 03:26:15 2007 From: turbulence at turbulence.org (Turbulence) Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 16:56:15 -0500 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] UPGRADE! BOSTON: Eric Gordon + Show-n-tell Message-ID: <6AF359537BDE459F8B553A2E85F0E6B5@joPC> UPGRADE! BOSTON: Eric Gordon + Show-n-tell http://www.turbulence.org/upgrade/ WHEN: March 22, 7 pm WHERE: Art Interactive, 130 Bishop Allen Drive, at the corner of Prospect Street, Cambridge. Free parking in the lot on the corner or take the T to Central Square and walk 1 block. < Eric Gordon > http://www.turbulence.org/upgrade/archives/03_22_07EG.html Eric Gordon will present "The Digital Possessive: Private Spaces in Public Space." Gordon is an assistant professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College in Boston. His work focuses on technology in public space, perceptions of place in synthetic worlds, and social software in teaching and learning. His book "The Urban Spectator: Emerging Media and the Consumption of the American City" is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press. << Show-n-tell >> http://www.turbulence.org/upgrade/archives/03_22_07CZ.html Show-n-tell will present "webAffairs," her book about an adult video web community and her story of being both an observer and a performer. Show-n-tell was trained as a graphic designer and artist. She has been designing personal work for the Web practically since its inception the early '90s. She grew up in Turkey and upon graduation from high school came to the U.S. to continue her studies. She currently teaches and resides in the Boston area. Upgrade! Boston (http://www.turbulence.org/upgrade/about.html) is curated by Jo-Anne Green for Turbulence.org (http://turbulence.org) in partnership with Art Interactive (http://artinteractive.org). It is one of 22 nodes currently active in Upgrade! International (http://theupgrade.net), an emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. If you would like to present your work or get involved, please email jo at turbulence.org. If you no longer wish to receive these notices, please reply to this email with "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line. Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: http://new-radio.org New York: 917.548.7780 . Boston: 617.522.3856 Turbulence: http://turbulence.org New American Radio: http://somewhere.org Networked_Performance Blog: http://turbulence.org/blog Upgrade! Boston: http://turbulence.org/upgrade _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From smitamitr at gmail.com Thu Mar 8 18:35:43 2007 From: smitamitr at gmail.com (smita mitra) Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 18:35:43 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First posting--IFS-2007 Message-ID: Dear Friends OK this is the first posting for my project on *Cinematic City:Kolkata, Modernity, Middle class and* *the Urban Woman-- A study of 1950s and 60s Popular Bangla Cinema*.I am interested in exploring the relationship between cinema and the city and the urban middle class woman's identity that is spatially and cinematically located in the city of Kolkata in some Popular Bangla Films of the 1950s and 60s such as *Teen Bhuvoner Paare*,*Saat Paake Bandha, Uttar Phalguni, Harano Sur, Agnipariksha ,Bipasha* etc. I will attempt to explore issues of work , profession, intercaste, interracial love , choice of career, interpersonal conflicts and new and different focus on the working woman and her identity. I would like to historicize this cinematic articulation as adocument/archive of the lived city which can be used to formulate(a) tesis of a specific self -fashioning of the Bengali middle class,(b)to locate the imaginary of this cinema within the emergence of a new popular engaged in mapping a feminine subjectivity in the modern city.I am drawing on Moinak Biswas's work on the 1950S Bengali and Hindi Popular cinema's engagement with the urban as a cinematic story of the male citizen's career and rhetoric of love as a creative interface of the cinema and the city. I want to see how these films are formulating new conceptions of the modern city as an empowering space for the educated middle class urban woman as a)professinal space and b) new emotive space for a different configuration of love and the couple.I would also like to focus on issues of female desire--- both transgressive and conformist and the relationship between this woman and the city that she inhabits. At present I am enrolled in the Film Studies PHD programme at SAA, JNU. I teach English Literature at Delhi college of Arts and Commerce, DU. Looking forward to engaged responses from you guys. Bye Smita -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070308/c0f20e7a/attachment.html From burtoncleetus at yahoo.co.uk Fri Mar 9 11:47:33 2007 From: burtoncleetus at yahoo.co.uk (burton cleetus) Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 06:17:33 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Sarai / Independent Fellow 2007/ Burton Cleetus/First Posting Message-ID: <20070309061733.77631.qmail@web27107.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Dear Friends, I am Burton Cleetus, research scholar at the Center for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi, working on the topic “Indigenous Traditions and Practices in Medicine and the impact of Colonialism in Kerala”. My thesis is an attempt to figure out as to how esoteric and localized healing techniques were refashioned, revitalized and consequently institutionalized into the broad framework of Ayurveda, through various forms of exclusion and integration. Here I would like to address the arrival of Rockefeller Foundation of the United States, in the formulation of a health care policy for Travancore. Urbanisation, Western Medicine and Modernity: The Rockefeller Foundation in Travancore This is to provide a synoptic presentation of the proposal as well as to draw upon the historical factors on which a sanitary policy was formulated in Travancore with the support of the Rockefeller foundation of the United States in 1929. The erstwhile state of Travancore, which later became part of Kerala, was termed as ‘progressive’ for the high human development indices of its subject population, recorded through the official periodical statistics. The term “progressive” had a definite meaning in the lexicon of colonial modernity. It signified the rates at which indigenous societies and groups responded to the ideological apparatuses of western science, and thereby re-formulated its contemporary cultural practices on the basis of the instrumentalist rationalist of the west. The transformation of the Travancore state from a largely pre-modern principality to a modern one was accompanied by the ‘reorganization’ of its branches of administration at various historical junctures. The disbandling of the private forces of the Nayar chieftains and the subsequent raising of a professional army under the guidance of a Belgium officer in the late eighteen hundreds, to the formulation and implementation of a health care policy, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation of the United States in 1929 is a long history. In its nineteenth century political agenda, while an organized bureaucracy and the police became visual manifestations of state power, public instruction functioned as a pedagogical act in the means towards generating ideological consent for governance. However the state from early nineteenth century, to mention, was concerned about providing western forms of medical care to the people, as a superior form of therapeutic practice. And hence, in turn, established government dispensaries under state patronage, or aided the Christian missionaries in their medical mission. However as a state policy, it overlooked the importance of health care as an important medium of exercising hegemony and control over the population, which it had to exercise control. This was because medicine as an ideology, unlike education, remained on the fringes of the dominant societal discourses under modernity. The fact that the restructuring of the department of health care took place almost one hundred and fifty years after the initiation of the state to western epistemic paradigms, points out that various frames of state power, under modernity, emerged and took shape over a long spell of time. Thus public health as a sphere of governance remained the most neglected arena of reform. It was by the early decades of the twentieth century that the state realized that, though not closely linked to governance, indirectly it constituted an important constituent of state power. This lethargy towards framing a coherent health care policy for the state under went rapid change by the early decades of the twentieth century. The establishment of the regional press, the movement of population towards the urban centres, and the emergence of a social elite mainly in the urban sites, materialised a new form of discourse between the political authority and the social elites in Travancore. The press informed the public on the arrival and the prevalence of the new diseases, like dysentery, cholera, plague, malaria, elephantiasis, etc. Thus diseases came to be perceived mainly as a result of unhygienic conditions, infected through water, air, or originated from the breeding of mosquitoes or spread rats etc. Thus the fear of the outburst and the spread of contagious diseases, rather than its actual spread, raised deep concern among the urban population. More than ever it was the fear of the lack of knowledge of the contagious diseases and the failure to conceptualize them generated the social crisis. The state thus had to assure the urban population that micro-level interventions in the human body through the aid of western clinical equipments and medicines would redeem the society and the individual from its ailments. This was because the government realized that under the new socio-economic and political conditions the urban populace became the main stay of the generation of political sovereignty for the state of Travancore. A transformation in the nature of societal bond between the social elites was manifested when the government closed down the ootupura (free feeding houses) for the Brahmins and in its place opened up dispensaries for the inhabitants of the cities. The engagement of the Rockefeller foundation in Travancore is attempted on this socio-political backdrop. Thus medicine more than as a method of cure functioned as an ideological tool; both as an assurance from the state to the emerging social elites in the urban centres, as well as provided an opportunity for the political authority to re-inscribe its commitment to its subject population as being a progressive one; the hall mark of state power under modernity. Comments for the paper are cordially invited and appreciated. --------------------------------- New Yahoo! Mail is the ultimate force in competitive emailing. Find out more at the Yahoo! Mail Championships. Plus: play games and win prizes. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070309/7cf24027/attachment.html From hpp at vsnl.com Fri Mar 9 15:12:23 2007 From: hpp at vsnl.com (hpp at vsnl.com) Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 09:42:23 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] for Sugata Nandi, Kolkata Message-ID: Dear Sugata I read the abstract of your proposal, on "Eventful Adolescence, Memorable Youth: The Politics of Personal Reminiscences in Kolkata, 1947-67". This is a subject I am personally interested in. Through my associations with activists in Calcutta, whose public activism spanned the period from pre-Independence days to the early 70s, I have some awareness and memories. I have thought in terms of the continuing stream of civic activism in the city. I look forward to reading your posts. Best regards V Ramaswamy Calcutta From shuddha at sarai.net Fri Mar 9 23:26:42 2007 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 23:26:42 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Screening of 'How We Celebrate Freedom'/'Jashn-e-Azadi' by Sanjay Kak Message-ID: <45F19FDA.2060308@sarai.net> Dear Friends, This is to announce two screenings of Sanjay Kak's new documentary film on Kashmir - 'Jashn-e-Azadi'/'How We Celebrate Freedom' 1. on Tuesday, March 13, 2007 at 7 PM, at the Stein Auditorium the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi 2. and on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 5 PM at Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road A brief synopsis is placed below, but if you would like to know more about the film, do take a look at the lively and frequently updated blog of the film at warm regards, and do pass the word around. Shuddha ------------------------------ Jashn-e-Azadi < how we celebrate freedom > written and directed by sanjay kak photography ranjan palit edited by tarun bhartiya It's 15th August, India's Independence day, and the Indian flag ritually goes up at Lal Chowk in the heart of Srinagar, Kashmir. The normally bustling square is eerily empty– a handful of soldiers on parade, some more guarding them, and except for the attendant media crews, no Kashmiris. For more than a decade, such sullen acts of protest have marked 15th August in Kashmir, and this is the point from where Jashn-e-Azadi begins to explore the many meanings of Freedom–of Azadi–in Kashmir. In India, the real contours of the conflict in Kashmir are invariably buried under the facile depiction of an Innocent Population, trapped between the Terrorist's Gun and the Army's Boot. But after 18 years of a bloody armed struggle, after 60,000 civilians dead (and almost 7,000 enforced disappearances), what really is contained in the sentiment for Azadi–for freedom? Amidst the everyday violence and ever-present fear in Kashmir, there are no easy answers to such questions. Where truth has been an early victim, all language–speech, poetry, even cinema–becomes inadequate to describe what we know and feel here. So we reshape our curiousity, and point ourselves at what we can see, what we are allowed to see. The film then combines several forms and modes of expression to evoke the past as well as unravel the present: We are witness to an ageing father in the Martyr's Graveyard; we are with a group of men as they survey the dead in the mountain villages of Bandipora; we sit quietly in the Out Patients Ward of the Govt Psychiatric Hospital in Srinagar. But we look elsewhere too, in the satirical farce of Bhand folk performers as they play in a village square; in the tense undercurrents of an Army Sadhbhavna (Goodwill) camp in north Kashmir; and in the images conjured up by the work of contemporary Kashmiri poets. Shot and edited between August 2004-2006 Jashn-e-Azadi engages us with the idea of Azadi in Kashmir. In 2007, as India celebrates it's 60th anniversary of Independence, this is also a conversation about Freedom in India. 138 mins / Digital Video Kashmiri/Urdu/English (English subtitles) 2007 (under production) _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From mrsg at vsnl.com Sat Mar 10 08:56:06 2007 From: mrsg at vsnl.com (MRSG) Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 08:56:06 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First posting--IFS-2007 References: Message-ID: <005601c762c7$8eb578a0$6097fea9@Main> Posting 1 This is the Posting # 1 for the SARAI Independent Fellowship Programme, 2005-06 from Mohit Ray and Soma Ghosh. Our project is Heritage Ponds Of Kolkata: A Contemporary History. Soma Ghosh is involved in performing arts and social research. I (Mohit Ray) am an environmental engineer by profession, guest faculty in School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University and involved in human rights movement including environment for more than two decades. It may be interesting to know, even to a Kolkatan, that Kolkata is a city of ponds. When Job Charnok, the first well-known British merchant, came in search of a place suitable to embark on the first signs of British mercantile capital, he set up his office by the side of a big pond called Lal Dighi, which still exists to remind of this city's colonial past. There are many ponds like this Lal Dighi with rich historical linkages. More than 50 streets and places of Kolkata are named officially after ponds, such as Shyampukur, Manoharpukur, etc. Even after the continuous onslaught of the real estate sector, a large number of ponds still survive in the city. Still the city has more than 3,000 ponds within its municipal area. I have been working on these urban waterbodies for quite sometime both as an environmental researcher and activist. The significance of these urban and peri-urban waterbodies (ponds) as water resources is being appreciated recently. While working on different aspects of these waterbodies, it was also evident that these ponds form a part of the cultural history of the city. Many of these ponds are there for several centuries. However there is still no proper documentation of such important city heritages. While Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has initiated steps to enlist and protect heritage buildings and places, the heritage ponds have not been thought of. This study will add to the urban cultural history where the city ponds are not mere past heroes, but active and embedded agents of a thriving present. We appeal to all Kolkatans in the Readers List to inform us about any old pond in their locality. By 'old' we prefer at least the waterbody should be there for more than 75 years. If you know any senior person in your locality who can enlighten us on this matter, kindly inform. You can ring me at 9831085215 / 2416 5389 or mail in this list. Your contribution will be duly acknowledged. Thanks Mohit Ray -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070310/76b0e0fb/attachment.html From jace at pobox.com Fri Mar 9 17:27:21 2007 From: jace at pobox.com (Kiran Jonnalagadda) Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 17:27:21 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Announcement: Barcamp Bangalore 3: SocialTech Message-ID: <2B69E7F3-7724-4BCC-9286-E8F6744A32D0@pobox.com> Barcamp Bangalore 3: SocialTech, where technology meets society at large. At this event, we intend to share stories of technology implementations that affected society around us, and social norms that affected the course of technology. We have stories of e-governance, electronic record keeping, and what it means for those without access; Indian copyright law and innovation in music; and celluloid, movies and the resultant shaping of society and culture. We’d love to hear more, perhaps on the application of technology to understand the human condition, or perhaps on the growing spread of personal communication technologies and the unexpected but undeniable shift in the landscape of mass media and governance. Surely you’ve got a tale to narrate? A tale that escaped popular attention and deserves to be brought out and shared? A cautionary tale of how things may not always get better? Bring it to Barcamp. Help your fellow campers understand what it really means, beneath the surface of the narrative, and of how it affects our lives and what we should be prepared for. For the regular Barcampers: this event may be somewhat different from what you may have come to expect. This time we’re not as interested in the tech itself as in what it means to the society that receives it. You’re welcome to continue to use the space for what you’re comfortable with, but requested to participate in expanding the presence and social impact of Barcamp, while retaining its technology flavour. March 31st and April 1st, at the campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. More about Barcamp Bangalore at http://barcampbangalore.org/ Discussion of this theme at http://jace.seacrow.com/archive/ 2007/03/09/barcampbangalore3 -- Kiran Jonnalagadda http://jace.seacrow.com/ _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From suresh at hserus.net Fri Mar 9 17:36:38 2007 From: suresh at hserus.net (Suresh Ramasubramanian) Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:36:38 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [silk] Announcement: Barcamp Bangalore 3: SocialTech In-Reply-To: <2B69E7F3-7724-4BCC-9286-E8F6744A32D0@pobox.com> References: <2B69E7F3-7724-4BCC-9286-E8F6744A32D0@pobox.com> Message-ID: <45F14DCE.50501@hserus.net> Kiran Jonnalagadda wrote: > For the regular Barcampers: this event may be somewhat different from > what you may have come to expect. This time we’re not as interested in Anything at all you can do to stop it from sounding like a six month old edition of PC Quest would be a very good thing indeed Every other talk at the previous barcamps was ajax, web 2.0, web 2.0, ajax.. add to it all the fun (!) politics trying to get them organized srs _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From pukar at pukar.org.in Fri Mar 9 16:49:12 2007 From: pukar at pukar.org.in (PUKAR) Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 16:49:12 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [announcements] Vacancy: Project Coordinator for PUKAR Youth Fellowship Programme Message-ID: <002301c7623c$c53f0570$5b66c2cb@freeda> PUKAR Seeks Project Coordinators for Empowering Youth PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action & Research) is an independent research-action organisation which hopes to contribute to the global debate on urbanization and globalization. Founded in 2001 by Professor Arjun Appadurai, PUKAR makes constant efforts to create a common forum for debate over the issues that impact the lives of the citizens. In these debates, PUKAR makes every effort to seek active participation of Mumbai's citizens in imagining and planning the future of this vibrant mega-city. Youth Fellowship Programme This Unique and innovative programme helps the youth in Mumbai Metropolitan Region to: 1 Explore social, cultural, economic and political aspects of their neighbourhoods 2 Develop innovative research techniques with PUKAR's assistance 3 Generate research-action projects that in turn, will change the paradigm of knowledge production and create new knowledge anchored in the city 4 Develop critical analysis and new perspective regarding their locality and community and help them to negotiate the city on their own terms Position: Project Coordinator Primary Responsibilities: Conceptual Contributions: Contribute ideas, methods and other contextual designs to create a programme which is more befitting to the demands of the youth and the current times. Administrative Contributions: 1) Selection Process As a member of the selection committee, consisting of the Executive Director of PUKAR, Director of the Y.F. Programme and the Coordinator, dialogue with prospective applicants and assist them in developing their proposals to meet the requirements 2) Orientation Workshops In collaboration with the PUKAR Team, design and implement the orientation workshop and act as a resource person depending upon one's own individual skills 3) Group Meetings: As one of the two Project Coordinators, work with, mentor and monitor 10 - 12 youth groups spread throughout the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Conduct two meetings with each group per month, discussing the status of the project. Assist groups in their research, conceptualizing community events and any workshops that the group may benefit from 4) Fellowship meetings Conduct meetings with the catalysts and the PUKAR Team every other Saturday afternoon at the PUKAR Office 5) Assist groups with research report and public documentation 6) Design and implement the final exhibition / graduation of all the Youth Fellows in collaboration with the PUKAR Team 7) Submit quarterly reports (oral and written) of the Fellowship programme, to the Advisory Committee, the funding organisation, to PUKAR Trustees and Associates 8) Occasionally represent PUKAR and the Youth Fellowship Programme at conferences and seminars 9) Publicity, Networking Develop a larger profile for the programme and the organisation through interaction with the media, institutions - educational, non-profits, corporates - and individuals. Skill Set Required: Strong communication, negotiation and mentoring skills. Enthusiasm, creativity and innovative ideas will be given a strong preference. Physical endurance and ability to travel by public transport in the metropolitan region is a must. Relevant Experience: One to two years of work experience either with youth or a developmental organisation will be valued. Fresh graduates can apply. Educational Qualifications: Masters or equivalent education in any branch Remuneration Package: Rs. 15,000/- per month Travel allowance for field work upto Rs. 1000/- (actual) Telephone allowance for field work upto Rs. 500/- (actual) Yearly renewable contract Please apply by April 10, 2007, with your CV. Please provide contact information of two people who could act as your reference. (Fresh graduates can give names of their professors) Candidates shortlisted for an interview will be notified. Please send your application to: pukar at pukar.org.in or mail it to: Dr. Anita Patil-Deshmukh Executive Director, PUKAR 1-4 Kamanwala Chambers, Sir PM Road, Fort, Mumbai, 400 001 T: 022- 6574-8152 F: 022- 6664-0561 PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research) Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001 Telephone:: +91 (22) 6574 8152 Fax:: +91 (22) 6664 0561 Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in Website:: www.pukar.org.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070309/3646523b/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com Sat Mar 10 14:23:19 2007 From: rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com (rehan ansari) Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:53:19 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Reader-list] On Liberty (?) Message-ID: <20070310085319.96644.qmail@web51110.mail.re2.yahoo.com> I wrote this piece on civil liberties recently for a mumbai paper, would be happy to have comments. rehan ansari Of this war on terror that has gone on for as long as it has, and commentators all over are parsing what has been won and lost, it is worth noting that the clear victories for the liberal values of the west are not in Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on. They occur in the courts, parliaments and other institutions of the west, including within the US Justice Department, where the great western value of habeas corpus has won occasionally. What I regard as true victories in the war on terror happened last week. The Canadian parliament let lapse two draconian laws that were put in the books post 9/11 (one allowed police to arrest people suspected of planning an imminent terrorist attack and hold them for three days without charge) and Canada's supreme court struck down a law that the government used to detain foreign-born terrorism suspects indefinitely—employing secret evidence and not filing charges. That the real victories of this war on terror are on the side of civil liberties is not an anti-war argument, or based on non-violence. Looking cold-bloodedly at the last five years the war has only created more war to the detriment of the west—even Republicans are disheartened. If the central aim of the war, as Rumsfeld himself would put it, was winning hearts and minds to the values of the liberal west, then the physical war has not done that but the opposite. It is worth underlining that among those to be won over are the immigrant populations in the west as well. In the hyper aggressive conduct of the war Bush, Blair and the leadership of some other liberal democracies came up with laws that undermine habeas corpus. New Delhi too was tempted, post the parliamentary attack of 2002, to beat war drums and champion POTA. Such a garrisoning by the state is seen by an increasing number of law enforcement officials as unnecessary in capturing real terrorists, and horrible in its relationship to the innocent. I suggest we look for the truer fight for western values, which at times feels like clutching at straws, than the staccato news of drones, troop surges or numbers arrested in terror raids. We win in the war when I see news like on Jan 24th . As the British Parliament debated the war on terror for the first time (sic), Sir Ken McDonald, head of the Crown Prosecution, said that the "fear-driven and inappropriate" response to the terror threat could make Britons abandon respect for fair trials and the due process of law. He said, " London is not a battlefield. Those innocents murdered on 7 July 2005 were not victims of war. And the killers were not 'soldiers'. They were criminals." He said that our response should not be to wage war but to catch criminals. Similiarly heartening: on Feb 15th, rebuking surveillance practice greatly expanded by the New York Police Department after 9/11, a federal judge ruled that the NYPD must stop routine videotaping of people at gatherings. Four years ago, at the request of the city, the same judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., gave the police greater authority to investigate political, social and religious groups. Here's the experience that won my heart and mind, call it a secular 'conversion.' Soon after 9/11, as Editor of Independent Press Association-New York , I was at a meeting of lawyers looking at law enforcement. At issue was a Justice Department request from the N.Y Mayor's office to share the data of drivers' license registrations. My blood ran cold, what were they going to do with that information.., when a senior lawyer spoke with a passion that seemed out of place. From his ring finger, his accent, his name, it would be understandable if this family man, from Brooklyn, Jewish, feared the idea of terrorists. For all he knew there may be one in that database. But then he said, 'It's just not right, not right that they search for certain kinds of names. I will fight this." The garrisoning of the state by liberal democracies goes on: UK detains and deports people it has insufficient evidence against (under its Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005). As for the Canadian decisions last week, the contrast with the US is shocking. Last week a US federal appeals court in Washington ruled that Congress can deny Guantànamo prisoners the right to a court challenge. Keeping the faith in the ancient value of habeas corpus should not be as difficult as this. Appeared in DNA somewhat differently. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a PS3 game guru. Get your game face on with the latest PS3 news and previews at Yahoo! Games. http://videogames.yahoo.com/platform?platform=120121 From fouadbajwa at gmail.com Sat Mar 10 17:59:03 2007 From: fouadbajwa at gmail.com (Fouad Riaz Bajwa) Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 17:29:03 +0500 Subject: [Reader-list] Towards an Open Information Society in Pakistan Message-ID: <45f2a4a5.2f2f8001.03ba.ffff99b1@mx.google.com> Towards an Open Agenda! Members of BytesForAll Pakistan (http://pakistanictpolicy.bytesforall.net) are leading concrete steps towards formulating an "Open Information Society” in Pakistan by building partnerships and organizing activities to sensitize stakeholders on information society issues and challenges as well as impart the relevance of Open FOSSophy at national and regional levels. This includes events that encourage debates on ICT Policies, open content and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) policies and practices in Pakistan. These steps tend to formulate a regional knowledge sharing platform and strengthening a common understanding amongst civil society, IT professionals and Government agencies. Involving these stakeholders will outline the future direction towards an Open Information Society, evolving research collaborations taking the Information Society debate out from government circles only to stakeholders and community. An International Workshop Such a workshop is being organized by South Asia Partnership-Pakistan and Bytesforall in collaboration with South Asia Partnership International (SAP-I), Bellanet, Bella SAP on the theme, “Emergence of Open Information Society in Pakistan” from March 21 – 22, 2007, at the National Secretariat of SAP-PK in Lahore, the capital of Punjab, Pakistan. It is expected that the activity will be attended by renowned ICT experts, social scientist and policy makers from across Pakistan and Nepal. This workshop is aimed to build a true Information Society in the country, which creates and discuss possibilities and scope of Information Communication Technology among all the stakeholders on matters of common interest. Initiating the Debate Key themes of the activity include People friendly ICT Policies, Civil Society and Open FOSSophy. The activity will enable debate and discussions issues such as the WSIS process, Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005 proceedings, Civil Society's role in the WSIS Process and expected challenges with respect to the future. How Civil Society can contribute to people friendly ICT Policies and how important it is that open information society is collaborative and based on multi-stakeholder partnership. Sharing the concepts of an open FOSSophy and how the Civil Society can be involved to effectively contribute to it in light of its similarities strengthening the efficiency and competency of Civil Society. This would also bring into context how FOSSophy can support collaboration in Pakistan through the various collaborative models of Open FOSSophy and how this process should be advanced to promote collaboration. Group Dynamics & Methodology The activity will involve both presentations and encourage group dynamics with a great deal of interaction and involvement from its participation enabling collaboration, knowledge creation and recording through employing various methodologies promoting openness and inclusiveness within the process including but not limited to Open Space Technology, World Café, Speed Geeking, Wikis, Blogs, Podcasts and After Action Review. The event will be attended by over 45 participants from various civil society and organizations working in relevance to the themes of the workshop including but not limited to members from Government agencies, NGOs, Development Activists, Media, Academicians, IT professionals and Content developers. Expected Participation The activity involves participation from the South Asia Partnership - SAP Pakistan, SAP Nepal, BytesForAll, PEMRA, PAN Localization, International Free and Open Source Software Foundation, DAMEN, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Shirkatgah, Caritas, SPO, Aurat Foundation, ActionAid, National University, Insan Foundation, Interactive Resource Centre, Responsible Business Initiative, CIDA, Idara-e-Taleem-o-Agahi (ITA), Techno-Ed, SMEDA, Industrial Information Network IIN, FiveRivers Technologies, Buniyad, YHCR, Daily News, Associated Press of Pakistan (APP),National ICT R&D Fund, PSEB, OSRC, Ministry of IT, Govt. of Pakistan, PTA, Spider Magazine, P at SHA, Jamil & Jamil, HD Net, British Council, KADO. Partners & Organizers A brief introduction about the organizers and partners for these events in the region is given below. Bytesforall B4A is a networked space for citizens in South Asia. It experiments, highlights and organizes debate on the relevance of ICTs to development activities. B4A is the most significant network of ICTs professional and practitioners in the whole south Asia region with a reasonably significant presence in Pakistan. Being and active member of Association for Progressive Communications (APC), B4A is involved in various ICT4D related activities. The most significant in Pakistan is Pakistan ICT Policy Monitors Network (http://pakistanictpolicy.bytesforall.net/) and various research projects on different key issues of concern in ICT4D regime in the country. SAP International (SAP I) SAP is an international non-governmental organization with its Secretariat in Kathmandu, Nepal. SAP I was created in 1995 by its constituent national SAP organizations in six countries - including Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Canada - that had worked together since the early 1980s. SAP I's purpose is to focus the aggregate SAP work in the region, strengthen and support the SAP organizations, and promote regional programming (www.sapint.org). BellSAP It was established in Nepal with the objective of promoting and facilitating effective collaboration among development communities within South East and South Asia. Bellsap is a joint initiation of Bellanet and the SAP system. Bellanet is an organization committed to promoting cooperation among development stakeholders by a strategic use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). (www.bellenet.org). South Asia Partnership Pakistan SAP Pakistan is a non-sectarian organization founded by a group of leading Pakistani development and social activists in 1987. SAP-PK holds the mandate to facilitate community groups, NGOs and other civil society networks in embarking upon the path of self-reliant, sustainable and participatory development and facilitate the strengthening of a vibrant and actively mobilized civil society. SAP-PK believes that people's organizations are the most effective instruments to address community problems and bring about a positive change in the society. Through its pioneering capacity building, policy dialogue and advocacy activities SAP Pakistan has built a national leadership position among close to two thousand development NGOs and CSOs in the country. In this position, the organization has worked with others on public mobilization for a wide range of vital issues, including governance, human rights, gender and peace. (http://www.sappk.org) By Fouad Riaz Bajwa For BytesForAll Pakistan -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.446 / Virus Database: 268.18.8/716 - Release Date: 3/9/2007 6:53 PM From geert at desk.nl Mon Mar 12 13:44:18 2007 From: geert at desk.nl (geert lovink) Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 09:14:18 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] X|Media|Lab 2007 : Mumbai, London, Melbourne, Singapore, Beijing Message-ID: > From: "Brendan Harkin" > Date: 12 March 2007 6:45:53 AM > To: > Subject: X|Media|Lab 2007 : Mumbai, London, Melbourne, Singapore, > Beijing > > X|Media|Lab's will be staged in Mumbai, London, Melbourne, Singapore, > and Beijing, in partnership with some of the world's great creative > media events and institutions. > 1. Mumbai – March 26th – 28th  – “Digital Entertainment” >   > The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry’s (FICCI) > FRAMES conference is India’s largest entertainment business event with > over 1,500 delegates - it's the 'who's who' of Indian film, > television, animation, interactive, and mobile content. X|Media|Lab is > an official partner of the FRAMES event and focuses on the theme of > “Digital Entertainment”. > > International mentors at the Mumbai Lab include: > > - world renowned film-maker Shekhar Kapur (Director of “Elizabeth” > starring Cate Blanchett) > - Priya Prakash, the head of the BBC's interactive media player > project (iMP) > - Matt Costello, writer of best-selling computer games “DOOM 3” and > “Pirates of the Caribbean 3” > - Mark Ollila, Nokia Multimedia’s worldwide Director of Strategy and > Technology > - Marcelino Ford-Livene, general manager of consumer strategy for > Intel's Digital Home Group > - Isaac Kerlow, film-maker and Board member of the Media Development > Authority and the National Research Foundation in Singapore > - Madhavan, the CEO of India's largest animation company > - Hong Kong interactive TV pioneer, Robert Chua > - Dale Herigstad, 4-time Emmy Award winner including the very first > Interactive Emmy > - Tom Kennedy, Board Member Australian Film Commission >   > Accreditation at FRAMES is included for all Lab participants as well > as participation in all FRAMES VIP events. Project nominations > are still open for X|Media|Lab at FRAMES, the most important event of > the India entertainment industry calendar, held in India’s “Maximum > City” - Bombay. > > Media partners include CNBC Asia, Animation 'XPress, and India > Television.com. > > Project teams have already been selected from India, the UK, Hong > Kong, Singapore and Australia. You can still nominate your project > idea and team to participate in the Lab at the website: www [dot] > xmedialab [dot] com. Existing FRAMES delegates are particularly > welcome to apply as there is no additional fee for Lab participation > if you are registered for FRAMES. > > 2. 2007 X|Media|Lab's > As well as Mumbai, in 2007 X|Media|Lab will also hold Labs in London, > Melbourne, Singapore, and Beijing. >   > London           June                 “Sounds Interactive” > Melbourne      August             “Digital Film-making” > Singapore       October           “ART&D” > Beijing            December        “Animation and Computer Games” >   > Please check out the site for the full details as they are released. >   > X|Media|Lab will continue to build on its success by 1) contributing > to the development of great digital media project ideas; 2) creating > high-value international networks of digital media professionals; and > 3) circulating these people and projects throughout our international > events and partners. >   > As we always say, “write yourself into the script”! These are > tremendously valuable opportunities to make use of X|Media|Lab's > impeccable network of people, events, and partners. >   > 3. Partners >   > X|Media|Lab would like to thank our No. 1 international partner, Nokia > Multimedia, for helping make this amazing line-up possible. We also > thank our international supporters: the Victorian State Government and > the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI); the British > Council; the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry > (FICCI); the Media Development Authority of Singapore; LASALLE College > of the Arts Singapore; the Beijing Film Academy and Tsinghua > University, China. >   > Best wishes, > > Brendan Harkin From tripta at gmail.com Mon Mar 12 12:29:01 2007 From: tripta at gmail.com (Tripta B Chandola) Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:29:01 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] The Ecstasy of Influence Message-ID: Titillating essay, both in idea and form, on copyright issues. It offers a roller coaster ride connecting disjointed ideas, popular cultures and 'plagiarism'. http://www.harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html Cheers Tripta PhD Researcher Creative Industries Research Centre Queensland University of Technology Victoria Park Road, Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059 Australia From mail at shivamvij.com Mon Mar 12 23:23:33 2007 From: mail at shivamvij.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:23:33 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] =?utf-8?q?2_top_cops_had_faked_=E2=80=98Modi_plot?= =?utf-8?b?4oCZIGtpbGxpbmcgb2Yg4oCYTGVUIG1hbuKAmQ==?= Message-ID: <9c06aab30703121053o319f9affu403434beb306f191@mail.gmail.com> 2 top cops had faked 'Modi plot' killing of 'LeT man' By Deepal Trevedie Asian Age, 12 March 2007 http://www.asianage.com/presentation/leftnavigation/news/top-story/2-top-cops-had-faked-%E2%80%98modi-plot%E2%80%99-killing-of-%E2%80%98let-man%E2%80%99.aspx Ahmedabad, March 11: Two top IPS officers of Gujarat earlier lauded for their role in foiling an alleged Lashkar attempt to kill chief minister Narendra Modi are now under the scanner of the Supreme Court for having faked the encounter. Police officers from Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan's Special Task Force (STF) are also alleged to have supported the Gujarat police in this matter. Sohrabuddin Sheikh, suspected to be a Lashkar-e-Tayyaba operative, was shot dead at 5 am on November 26, 2005 in Ahmedabad by Gujarat and Rajasthan policemen while he was speeding on a motorcycle. The "terrorist" was stopped by the police and he opened fire. The police fired back and killed him. The incident had earned accolades for then anti-terrorist squad chief D.G. Vanzara and superintendent of police Rajkumar Pandian. Now a year later, following the intervention of the Supreme Court, investigations have revealed serious discrepancies, indicating that this was a fake encounter. Sohrabuddin's wife Kausar Bibi has been missing since the incident. The Supreme Court stepped in on a habeas corpus petition by Kausar Bibi's Ruba-nbuddin. The court directed the Centre to submit a report in two weeks, and it also forwarded Rubabuddin's petition to the Gujarat police, which asked the state CID (crime) to look into it. IGP Geetha Johri constituted a team of upright police officers, who went to Hyderabad, Sangli, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and came back with shocking evidence indicating a fake encounter. The interim report submitted to the Supreme Court, a copy of which is with this newspaper, states that top ATS (anti-terrorist squad) officers, including senior IPS officer Rajkumar Pandian, had gone to Hyderabad and spent a couple of days interacting with the local police there. Two fake numberplates starting with the series AP-11 were made in Hyderabad by the Gujarat police. The Gujarat and Andhra police personnel then travelled in private cars with fake numberplates. Sohrabuddin and Kausar Bibi were travelling in a M.J. Travels bus (# KA05 AF5051) from Hyderabad to Sangli on November 23, 2005 The bus was intercepted at Tandola village at around 1.30 am. At least six bus passengers as well as the driver have testified, on the basis of pictures shown to them, that Sohrabuddin and Kausar Bibi were co-travellers and had been picked up by the policemen. All the passengers, however, said that three people were picked up from the bus. The Andhra Pradesh police left Ahmedabad soon after. The Sheikhs were kept confined at a private farmhouse in Ahmedabad. A day later, Sohrabuddin was taken from the farmhouse to a flat near Vishalla Tolnaka Road, where one Tulsiram Prajapati was reportedly called by the Gujarat police to identify him. Tulsiram and Sohrabuddin had been together in Ujjain jail. Soon after the identification, Sohrabuddin was brought to the main road at around 5 am on November 26. A police sub-inspector from Rajasthan drove the motorcycle for a while, jumped from it in filmi style, and Sohrabuddin was taken out from the Maruti car and pushed on to the road. Four policemen fired a total of eight rounds on the suspected Lashkar operative, who was later pronounced dead sat the government hospital. The Gujarat police then announced the encounter, and showered itself with praise for killing "a terrorist who was in Gujarat to assassinate chief minister Narendra Modi." ATS chief D.G. Vanzara and Rajkumar Pandian were present when the encounter took place. The interim report says the motorcycle used by the police for the encounter could have been stolen, probably by the policemen themselves for its "Save the CM" operation. A policeman has testified that his boss instructed him to take a motorcycle lying in the office compound and drive it down to Vishalla Tolnaka, the venue of the fake encounter. A citizen, Shloksingh Ramsingh Yadav, had filed an FIR hours ago stating that his motorcycle had been stolen from his residence. He later on saw his bike in the newspapers when the encounter pictures were splashed, and came to claim it three days later. "Lots of senior names will crop up in this case. Terrorists in khaki are likely to be nailed, but now the Gujarat government is working hard to save them," a senior Gujarat government bureaucrat said. Ms Johri has already submitted three interim reports to the Supreme Court clearly indicating that serious offences should be registered against Mr Vanzara and Mr Pandian and all other Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh policemen involved in this case. Unhappy with her stance, an embarrassed Gujarat government has overnight taken the investigation away from her. Mr Keshav Kumar, an IPS officer believed to be close to the ruling BJP government, has now been asked to carry it forward. A police officer's statement recorded by the CID says that Kausar Bibi was moved to another place by the Gujarat police after the encounter. This police officer, who is a deputy superintendent of police, has claimed that two-three days after Sohrabuddin's encounter, an ATS driver told him that Kausar Bibi had been burnt and killed in the hills near Hillol village of Sabarkantha district. Incidentally, senior IPS officer Vanzara, who is involved in this case, hails from Hillol village in Sabarkantha. Tomorrow: The relevance of Tulsiram Prajapati with the Sohrabuddin case. Tulsiram was killed recently in an encounter at Banaskantha, which is under the jurisdiction of Mr D.G. Vanzara, now DIG, border range, Gujarat. From cahen.x at levels9.com Sat Mar 10 16:52:15 2007 From: cahen.x at levels9.com (xavier cahen) Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 12:22:15 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Pourinfos/ Today is Shanghai Time #6 Message-ID: <45F294E7.5060700@levels9.com> pourinfos.org l'actualité du monde de l'art / daily Art news ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Today is Shanghai Time #6 ! http://pourinfos.org/art-34592-tit-Today-is-Shanghai-Time-6- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1. MOCA Shanghai Remote Control Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai 231, West Nanjing Road, Gate 7, People's Park, Shanghai Date: March 4, 2007- April 18, 2007 REMOTE/CONTROL, the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai's 10th exhibition, is an investigation of the presence of technology in contemporary art today, and the fraught encounter between these art objects and today's 'multi-medial' spectator. The use of multi-media technologies is now an international art phenomenon, at once dazzling, seductive, subversive and above all accessible. These art works have not only profoundly changed the nature of aesthetic practice and display, but have also engendered a new means of perceiving and experiencing art. Interactive and video installations put into crises the distance between the work of art and ourselves, both interactive as well as interpersonal, creating an ambivalence of intimacy and alienation that is in itself a paradox of technological development in the global community. Featuring the work of both international and local artists, REMOTE/CONTROL is an examination of various perceptual systems, processes, narrative structures, and aesthetic strategies that focus on the question of agency. As the spectator is kinesthetically and sensorially engaged with multimedia objects, the space of the museum is altered, as is the role of the artist. The artist, artwork and spectator are caught in a complex ambit of fantasy and control, inviting us to re-examine the place of art in a technological world, and our place in relation to it. Curators: Wenny Teo, Ella Liao Artists: Allard van Hoorn (Holland) Alterazione Video (Italy) Sheldon Brown (US) David Cotterrell (UK) Danakil (France) Du Zhenjun (China) Alexander Brandt (Germany) Dieter Jung (Germany) Hu Jieming (China) Gong Yan (China) Jin Jiangbo (China) Peng Huang-chih (Taiwan China) Ku Shih-Yung (Taiwan China) Andy Cameron & Oriol Ferrer Mesa (FABRICA Italia) Stephane Sednaoui (France) Song Tao & B6 (China) Thomas Chaverait (France) Rose Tang (China) Frank Plant(US) Heidi Voet(Belgium) more information http://www.mocashanghai.org more information http://www.aujourdhuilachine.com/article.asp?IdArticle=2461 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2. Duolun Museum of Modern Art "Diversity in Form & Thought" the Status and Prospect of Korean Contemporary Art Opening: March 7th, 2007,19:00 Date: From March 7th to16th, 2007 Venue: 1-3 F, No.27 Duolun Road, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art Produced by: Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art Beijing Art Gallery of Imperial City Curator: Zhao Shulin Art Director: Zoe ZHANG Bing Administrative Director: Zhao Song Media: Vivi QIN Xiaoyan Design: Wang Taocheng Public Relations: Eva FENG Ruoyu Project Director: Bao Zhengyuan The "Diversity in Forms & Thoughts–the Status and Prospect of Korean Contemporary Art" exhibition offers a glimpse of the stream of contemporary Korean art since the 1980's. The tendency of Korean art in this era shows respect for creative individuality and multifarious visual perceptions, breaking away from any ideologies in cultural diverse, multiple world. This kind of art, due to its diversity, seems different from the mainstream of 60's and 70's Korean art, which traditional (conventional) pattern or the experimental (avant-garde) spirit respectively. Its angle also differs from an art from the 1980's which sought to establish individual identity through the reinforcement of reality perception and critical awareness from the glass roots' point of view. Among 100 participating artists, most of them are in their late twenties or in their early thirties, and through the exhibition, one could sense the creative flow which links the group of the artists in their forties to the new generation artists. Moreover, as show by realistic life, surrealistic colors and space, optical illusion and visionary imagery, and inexplicably diverse themes, although most of the works on display are two-dimensional paintings, we see these paintings work in harmony with this pluralistic society through non-identical and diverse perspectives. This exhibition to be held in Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art offers a good opportunity for Chinese artists and art lovers as well to appreciate the works of Korean artists full of creativity and freedom. As these artists clearly show the attitude we have to take in a rapidly growing industrial society through their works, this exchange art show between Korea and China, which spurs its industrial society in a tremendous speed, would be an invaluable cultural event. more information http://www.duolunart.com/ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 3. Zhu Qizhan Art Museum Blind Date Sino German Exhibition of Contemporary Art Date: March 2, 2007 to April 1, 2007 Venue: F2,3, Zhu Qizhan Art Museum 580 Ouyang Road, Hongkou District, Shanghai Presented by: Zhu Qizhan Art Museum Kunststiftung NRW Supported by: Kloster Bentlage gGmbH GWK Galerie Münsterland Kunsthaus Kloster Gravenhorst Special thanks to: prime minister of Northrhein-Westfalia(Ministerpresident NRW) Museum hours: 10:00-17:00（Last entry 16:30）Closed on Monday Ticket: 10 Yuan/Person Tel: 56710741, 56710742, 56710743 Email: mary27art at yahoo.com.cn In China, "Blind date" means "date strangers". In another word, it means the date between people who have never seen each other. Undoubtedly, the organizer will not arrange a kind of circumstance which looks like a TV program in China called "the romantic date", but a kind of dialogue between six Chinese artists and the other six from Germany who come from different cultures and languages. As far as the form of exhibition, all the artists are supposed to build a kind of in-pair communication in each specific space. As a result, zero-distance- interaction laboratory environment should be reflected from their works. The Chinese and German artists are not familiar with each other's art style and professional level. In this case, the organizer definitely is arbitrary to put this display together. Therefore, the organizer uses a way of draw lots which is full of game fun. The works in this exhibition will be presented through media with contemporary art characteristics, such as installment, videos, pictures, and multimedia interactions. The visual effect, which is built on the form of "blind date", will probably be an unusual culture dialogue between Chinese and Germany artists. Certainly, it is not culture competition. Because it will be the first time to put the arts from two totally different cultures, there must be some cultural resistance and conflict. In this case, the artists are supposed to keep their personal opinions temporarily and communicate positively through learning from each other, understanding each other. As a result, an ultimate art difference which happens from different art attributes and society will be completely presented during this exhibition. The "Fortress and Eggs Plan" is the works of The Chinese artist Wong Peijun. From the name, it seems that there isn't any relation among fragile eggs, tough weapon and firm building. But the artist combines these totally different elements well. This combination of combative and fragile natures is not teases, but the serious concern about whether the world we are living in are as strong as it presents. But the work of German artist Carsten Gliese, which names "boxes", presents a dialogue among pictures, buildings, sculpture and space. The connection between real 3D space world and 2D space of pictures presents us an unreal like carpet phantom, projecting on white ground, the road side cornerstone an encircled lawn. The secret light shot makes the whole space full of mystery. Huang Xuebin produces "thousands of feet rays" with the night vision technique photography. There is only a lonely girl in his former works. This time, he adds a spaceman to present us a dreamland in which there is lonely girl, spaceman, weird picture and empty avenue. Guo shujun produces "Shopping Mall" with wide- angle photography. A space which seems to be busy and crowded discloses one kind of inexplicable loneliness and emptiness. "Fashion Man" from Xie Xianwen. What are the most up-to-date topics: Super girl? Social insurance? Kids education? All these questions can be answered by a cartoon toy. Money, brand, and idol present the uncertainty of our society and Chinese culture is going nowhere under all these kinds of entertainments. What should we do to protect our culture? What should we pursue? In the work "What happened to the planes?" of Wang Xiaofei, 2000 small planes line up and start the formation change in the picture. In a short while, a slogan comes up. But a huge plane follows up closely. Airplane hides the combative nature, but appears with a irrelevant slogan which says "what happened to the planes?" . The small planes lining up look like the airplane game in the earliest Red and White Game. But they present a kind of stressful feeling through the massive stacks. Is that weapon or game? "The aviation high speed Yacht on the Pacific Ocean" of Anja Jensen is about a container which is checked with X light. The X light shows us every detail inside of the box. How about the privacy of our society? No privacy! Anything under the X light is no longer mysterious. The participants constitute a dual structure during the whole display, which is exactly the representation of two cultures difference. The dual structure of "Blind Date" not only shows the real situation of the global communication environment, but the dedicate relation among the influence of the different cultures in the international art system. Once the exhibition occurs, an interesting, meaningful and equal dialogue will be performed vividly with the "blind date" of two countries' artists. However, can each artist find his own audience? Will his audience just being sitting and showing his own works in the same exhibition hall? Or ordinary audience? Will the communication be processed from watching, to appreciating, even to exchange opinions and thoughts? This is precisely what the exhibition for. more information http://www.zmuseum.org/ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 4.SHiNE Art Space Mao Tongqiang - A perpetual Mirage 06th March to 08th April 2007 Venue: SHiNE Art Space (Block 9, No. 50 Moganshan Lu, Shanghai) Opening Hours: 10am-6pm (Tuesday to Sunday) Website: http://www.shineartspace.com Email: enquiry at shineartspace.com Tel: +86 21 62660605 Fax: +86 21 62660607 "What is in vogue today is no more than mere history tomorrow." - Mao Tongqiang Mao Tongqiang has continually shown concern for the facile nature of modern society, this being intertwined with an acute awareness of passing time and the manner in which it renders everything insignificant. In the Mirage series the artist depicts mountain scenes that would be traditional Chinese landscape paintings were it not for the psychedelic colours that he uses. Then, rising from the atmospheric mist of the foreground, the artist depicts a discordant mix of characters that differ greatly in their pursuits and date of origin. They appear to belong in the nonsensical imagery of a dream; a concept which relates to the title of the series. Living in the far flung city of Yinchuan, a province of extreme temperatures and a hostile desert landscape, Mao Tongqiang is familiar with the visual trickery of the mirage and has adopted it as a metaphor for the idealised façade that he sees developing in contemporary society. To him, the visible surface of society, the image of order and happiness that is portrayed, does not reflect the reality that lies beneath. It is for this reason that Mao depicts the fashions, the frippery, the daring deeds, the politicians full of empty promises, the Christmas trees and the fire works that are all 'gloss'; the successful, progressive and happy image of China that people wish to project. Mao reflects in these works upon a society that has moved incredibly fast and made gargantuan efforts to attain certain levels and signifiers of progress. As this has been a forced and not a natural development however, there remains a lack of cultural substance behind the adopted amiable surface, fewer ties to the past and no reliable social infrastructure to hold it in place. Mao sees it as a mere mirage; a fleeting inconsequential facade which will in time be washed away and replaced by another prevailing ideal. Mao Tongqiang was born in 1960 in Yinchuan where he lives today. He graduated in 1980 from the Fine Arts Department of Ning Xia University and continued his advanced training at Zhe Jiang Fine Arts Academy. The artist has exhibited in France, Austria and Indonesia with his most recent solo exhibition being Mirage in Singapore last year. more information http://www.shineartspace.com +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 5. Zendai Museum Stop 30 Seconds" Contemporary Art Exhibiton Organised by: Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Artbank Exhibition Venue: Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art 2/F Building 28, 199 Fang Dian Rd, Pudong New Area, Shanghai Opening Reception: 10th March 2007, 3.30pm Exhibition Dates: 10th-24th March 2007, 10am-6pm (closed Mondays) Curator: Dong Hong Tao Participating Artists: Duan Dong Tao Du Jun Min Du Yi Yao Feng Jing Lu YongLei Jiang Kun Kang ShiWei Qiao ShouHui Song Zhi Qiang Zhang Da Chuan Zhang Qi Zhang Xiao Tong The art exhibition STOP 30 seconds will open March 7th at 7:00pm, at Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, located on the Big Thumb Square in Pudong district. The diverse style of work exhibited covers plants, landscape, figures, kissing, walls, water and even short cartoons by interpreting painting, oil, sculpture, installation and videos etc. All of participating young artists belong to post-1980's generation who just graduated or are still in school. All the problems they meet are more real and sensitive. Therefore, the solution they take are more direct and sharper. They received traditional education but attempts to express themselves by their own art. These young men with hesitation inside who lives in metropolises take art as a part of their lives in spite of its influence. Undoubtedly their art is an expression of their real thinking and present their value and confidence no matter if they hesitate or doubt or are confident. The common state of city people's life is busy from which increasing pressure comes. Reality is not the ideal. Materiel possessions are all required right now. Fortunately, They own their skill to express. Ok, now let's have a stop without any city life but only focus on the creating with an ideal spirit. Therefore, everyone is consciously or unconsciously seeking a little while far away from the reality to fulfill their own ideal space. Even if you are not working on art, watching is adequate as it's only related with spirit itself. Stop, 30 seconds are adequate to taste pure happiness. 30 seconds may cover a lot and it's delightful to steep you in art as modern art is not a selfish ego-show. more information http://www.zendaiart.com/en/artbank/events/070307_30s/index.html Selected by: Jérémie Thircuir for pourinfos.org -- pourinfos.org -------------- XAVIER CAHEN Direction de la publication xavier.cahen at pourinfos.org http://www.pourinfos.org _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From priyababu_sudar at yahoo.co.in Mon Mar 12 10:01:36 2007 From: priyababu_sudar at yahoo.co.in (priya babu) Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:31:36 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Sarai / Independent Fellow 2007/ Priyababu/First Posting Message-ID: <409557.25240.qm@web7811.mail.in.yahoo.com> First Posting- Sarai Independent Research Fellowship As an Aravani, founder member of Suder Foundation, a non-profit organization working for the rights of Aravanis [Transgender, henceforth referred to as TG] in Tamil Nadu, first TG reporter for ‘Youth India Magazine’, research staff in Indian Network for People Living with HIV+, part of Kannadi Kalai Kuzhu [TG Theatre group], and research collaborator with National Folklore Support Center [NFSC], I aim to create awareness and share positive information about my community within the mainstream society. Aravanis take Aravan, the son of Arjun, to be their soul mate and husband. Every year they wed him on Chitra Pournami at Koothandavar [Aravan] Temple at Koovagam village in Tamil Nadu. Besides this very famous temple, there are other temples for Aravan in Tamil Nadu and in other Indian states, where Aravan is worshipped by diffrent names. The existence of these temples elicits the presence of Aravanis through out ancient Tamil history and culture. A study of this part of cultural linkage will provide proof of the coexistence of Aravanis and mainstream society. Strangely enough though we as a community opt to move out of biological definition of gender, we reciprocate a similar heterosexual pattern for emotional support through our own pseudo family adoptions of husband and daughter. We also seem to counter our birth caster hierarchy among ourselves even after our shift into the TG community. I intend to collate this information besides other traditions and worship practices through interviews, documenting worship patterns, community festivities, performance methods, and. sects and hierarchy amongst the community. As the geography of this existence is large, I propose to limit my study to the city of Madurai which has an active worship practice at the Aravan Temple there, a full-fledged Jamaadh, with still practiced hierarchical patterns amongst the senior most Aravanis, exclusive to this community. It has long been rooted belief among the mainstream community that the only income generation of an Aravani is through begging in the bazaar and sex trade. As against this myth about us, Aravanis in Madurai have always been cooks or professional performing artistes in Karakaattam, Oppari, Mayilaattam, and Therukoothu [all traditional folk art forms]. Priyababu --------------------------------- Here’s a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070312/dded62db/attachment.html From lokesh at sarai.net Tue Mar 13 22:28:48 2007 From: lokesh at sarai.net (Lokesh) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:58:48 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Does Science Education Blunt Social Consciousness ? Message-ID: <45F6D848.3040407@sarai.net> on the occasion of /124th Death Anniversary of Karl Marx & 128th Birth Anniversary of Albert Einstien/ Marx Club /Invite you to/ a Discussion on *Does Science Education Blunt Social Consciousness ?** * Lead Speakers : RAVI SINHA (Physicist & Political activist) VIKRAM VYAS (Lecturer, Deptt. of Physics, St. Stephens) Student Panel : Awanish (KMC), Saumya (KMC), Ishira (St. Stephens), Vaibhav Raj (Ramjas), Shiekha (Ramjas), Nayanjyoti (Ramjas) Venue : Seminar Room, Kirori Mal College Time : 11.00 A.M. Date : 14th March, Wednesday. E-mail : marxclub at gmail.com From bawree at yahoo.com Tue Mar 13 12:30:17 2007 From: bawree at yahoo.com (mamta mantri) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:00:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] we owe 15 years to kashmir Message-ID: <472792.68298.qm@web33105.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Kashmir magnificently holds its epithet of the ‘Heaven on Earth’ in the barrenness of the winter, is the impression that I took home when I visited Srinagar and Gulmarg in February. After passing through the Jawahar tunnel, my first glimpse of snow and snow clad mountains were a marvel, since I had never seen snow in my life time. Well, scenic beauty apart, I was keen to explore the other facets of Kashmir, of the turmoil that the ‘Kashmiris’ faced, and the same old story. Anyways, every story was what we have heard in the popular lore. But want to write what I found more striking. Fed on the Nehruvian concept of India, I always thought and felt that Kashmir was always a part of India, in spite of its geographical and cultural differences. But the first thing that you become aware of there, is that we are ‘Indians’ and they are ‘Kashmiris’. India is a land of plenty (population, in this context), and Indians are good for them as tourists, since the Kashmiri economy thrives on tourism. So it is better that way. Indians must come as tourists and spend money in all possible forms(house boats, guides, cars, sledges, skiing, shopping, and pay tips to all of them, in the bargain) and go back home with pleasant memories. The most that I remembered of Kashmir was the bargaining with every possible person I interacted with. The best was a conversation with a tourist guide in Gulmarg. While bargaining for a tip, he made a passing comment, which kept growing in me for quite some time. He said (to the effect), “Kashmir was closed for tourism for the past 18-20 years. Now that things are better, India owes all those years to Kashmir. 15 saal ka hisaab baaki hai.” I reacted instantly, “Will you take all of that from me? How is the onus on me? For God’s sake, I am a tourist wanting to enjoy the natural beauty of the valley. Poor me!!!” The statement has larger dimensions. Apart from the burdens of the taxes, heavy traffic, pollution, high disparity between rich and poor, poor health care facilities, and the never ending list of woes, which we shoulder as Indians, the debt of Kashmir is also on us. Is the government listening ( a clichéd question, perhaps, but want to still ask it?) ____________________________________________________________________________________ We won't tell. Get more on shows you hate to love (and love to hate): Yahoo! TV's Guilty Pleasures list. http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/265 From vrjogi at hotmail.com Tue Mar 13 13:17:04 2007 From: vrjogi at hotmail.com (Vedavati Jogi) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 07:47:04 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] we owe 15 years to kashmir In-Reply-To: <472792.68298.qm@web33105.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: 15 saal ka hisaab baaki hai. wonderful! I think, kashmiri pandits should also tell the same thing to Indian govt. as well as kashmiris like that tourist guide. Because the former are the worst hit. They lost their homes, their property, their near & dear ones and most importantly, their 'future'. I will not dare to ask anybody 'are you listening?' I know it is falling on deaf ear! Talking about Kashmiri Hindu's plight means spoiling one's secular credetials...nobody will do that. Vedavati >From: mamta mantri >To: reader-list at sarai.net, readerlist at sarai.et >Subject: [Reader-list] we owe 15 years to kashmir >Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:00:17 -0700 (PDT) > >Kashmir magnificently holds its epithet of the ‘Heaven >on Earth’ in the barrenness of the winter, is the >impression that I took home when I visited Srinagar >and Gulmarg in February. After passing through the >Jawahar tunnel, my first glimpse of snow and snow clad >mountains were a marvel, since I had never seen snow >in my life time. >Well, scenic beauty apart, I was keen to explore the >other facets of Kashmir, of the turmoil that the >‘Kashmiris’ faced, and the same old story. Anyways, >every story was what we have heard in the popular >lore. But want to write what I found more striking. >Fed on the Nehruvian concept of India, I always >thought and felt that Kashmir was always a part of >India, in spite of its geographical and cultural >differences. But the first thing that you become aware >of there, is that we are ‘Indians’ and they are >‘Kashmiris’. India is a land of plenty (population, in >this context), and Indians are good for them as >tourists, since the Kashmiri economy thrives on >tourism. So it is better that way. Indians must come >as tourists and spend money in all possible >forms(house boats, guides, cars, sledges, skiing, >shopping, and pay tips to all of them, in the bargain) >and go back home with pleasant memories. The most that >I remembered of Kashmir was the bargaining with every >possible person I interacted with. The best was a >conversation with a tourist guide in Gulmarg. While >bargaining for a tip, he made a passing comment, which >kept growing in me for quite some time. He said (to >the effect), “Kashmir was closed for tourism for the >past 18-20 years. Now that things are better, India >owes all those years to Kashmir. 15 saal ka hisaab >baaki hai.” I reacted instantly, “Will you take all of >that from me? How is the onus on me? For God’s sake, I >am a tourist wanting to enjoy the natural beauty of >the valley. Poor me!!!” >The statement has larger dimensions. Apart from the >burdens of the taxes, heavy traffic, pollution, high >disparity between rich and poor, poor health care >facilities, and the never ending list of woes, which >we shoulder as Indians, the debt of Kashmir is also on >us. Is the government listening ( a clichéd question, >perhaps, but want to still ask it?) > > > > >____________________________________________________________________________________ >We won't tell. Get more on shows you hate to love >(and love to hate): Yahoo! TV's Guilty Pleasures list. >http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/265 >_________________________________________ >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. >To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list >List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> _________________________________________________________________ Voice your questions and our experts will answer them http://content.msn.co.in/Lifestyle/AskExpert/Default01.htm From mail at shivamvij.com Tue Mar 13 19:44:37 2007 From: mail at shivamvij.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:44:37 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] ACJ offers full scholarships for 4 Dalit students In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9c06aab30703130714x2fcecac2xb88827b1eb2b12b1@mail.gmail.com> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: S. Anand Date: Mar 13, 2007 6:53 PM Subject: ACJ offers full scholarships for 4 Dalit students To: Ravikumar , Shiva Shankar Dear friends, Over the last few years some of us in Chennai have been lobbying with the premier journalism institute based in Chennai, Asian College of Journalism, to admit Dalit students. They admitted 3 students in 2006-07 with full tuition fee waiver and a scholarship; applications from Dalits were solicited via an email that was circulated by me. This year we have managed to get ACJ to formalise this. ACJ has announced on its website that four Dalit students shall be admitted to its 2008 courses -- in print, television, radio and new media -- and the selected students can avail full fee subsidy and also a stipend to meet living expenses in Chennai during the 10-month diploma course. Please circulate this email widely and encourage Dalit graduates and postgraduates to apply. At the end of this email please find listed the names and email ids of the three Dalit students who benefited by this course in 2006--07. Aspirants may wish to contact them. For further details, see: ACJ offers full scholarships for Dalit students http://www.asianmedia.org/ Chennai-based Asian College of Journalism offers full scholarships for up to 4 Dalit students in the Class of 2008. The scholarships cover tuition fees, accommodation expenses and a living allowance per month. Aspiring candidates may apply and take the entrance test at one of the locations specified. ACJ will invite successful candidates for an interview at the college. ACJ will reimburse candidates shortlisted for interview second class train fare from their places of residence to Chennai and back. Candidates seeking this scholarship must produce proof of their caste and economic status. ASIAN COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM Kasturi Centre, 124, Wallajah Road, Chennai - 600002 India Telephone: 91-44-28418254/55 91-44-28526227/49 Fax: 91-44-28418253 Email: asian_media at vsnl.com Dalit students, ACJ-2007: Chittibabu Padavala: Priyadarshini: Karthikeyan: < karthik_guevara at hotmail.com> ============= S. Anand Navayana Publishing 54, Ist Floor Savarirayalu Street Pondicherry 605001 Ph: 0413-2223337 Cell: 91-94440-61256 www.navayana.org Join Navayana Book Club and avail free books and special discounts! http://www.navayana.org/content/bookclub.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070313/87674eaf/attachment.html From dwaipayanbanerjee at yahoo.co.in Wed Mar 14 00:34:38 2007 From: dwaipayanbanerjee at yahoo.co.in (Dwaipayan Banerjee) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:04:38 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] First Post - IFS 2007 Message-ID: <172053.54640.qm@web8903.mail.in.yahoo.com> I want to look at cryptography as a technological artefact; I want to also explore it as a metaphor to understand symbolic languages and the construction of the universal and the local in science. This will be done in three stages. The first will involve understanding mathematics as a symbolic language. I will begin to see it as a semiotic system and understand what kind of referential relationship it shares with the material. This will be done with specific emphasis on symbolic algebra and its development around the 16th century by cryptographers and cryptanalysts. This development was to have profound implications for cryptography specifically, and continues to be foundational for modern science and mathematics up to today. Specifically here, I will look at two different styles of cryptography employed by two French mathematicians – Blaise Vigenere and Francois Viete. The former devalued code-breaking, denied systems and structure while the latter developed symbolic algebra to provide universal and rule-bound decryption for all kinds of ciphers. What interest me here are the different cosmologies that the two worked within. For Vigenere, the world was not meant to be deciphered, essentially hidden by the will of God and there were no universal answers that science could base itself on. For Viete the universal answer was the key, and the method was that of a new kind of mathematical semiotics: symbolic algebra. Before entering the Vigenere and Viete debate however, it is clear that one will have to review the literature on the philosophy of mathematics and understand what kind of notions of referentiality between the system of mathematics and the material world have been imagined historically. The second stage will be to follow the debate on the search of universal languages and a new understanding of the world that was inaugurated through the 16-18th centuries by scientists and thinkers such as Bacon, Lull, Wilkins, Liebniz and Descartes. Sharing a relationship with both theology and science, the quest for universal languages and keys carries on from the previous chapter in thinking of the world of nature as an encrypted book meant to be decoded by scientists (Bacon). The interesting and rewarding thing here would be to be able to make a correspondence between the semiotic characteristic of mathematics (its notions of referentiality) and link it to this larger thinking about science as the universal systematic answer to all questions of the world that we live in. One will imagine that system-making of this kind – one that posits a unitary universal involves a break from context of some kind. One will also ask questions of the notions of singularity and plurality and see how these debates were negotiated around the quest for universal scientific languages. These debates are also the precursor to modern computing – and that will also be examined in this section. The third stage will take a slightly different tack and explore the literature on secrecy and secrets in science. With its roots in religion, magic and cryptography through the centuries, one will try and examine the notion of the secret and the lie in science and see what implications this has for the first two sections (that dealt with the universal). In Science, does this constitute a local of some kind? Is modern day scientific thinking about chaos and disorder some kind of movement away from previous centuries of universalism? In a sense, this will be the conclusion of thinking about cryptography – interestingly so because quantum theory is widely heralded as the new cryptographic paradigm. I do all this because I am interested in the postcolonial moment of science studies. By this I mean that I hope to spatialise and understand scientific practice and understand how it creates its own economy of universality and locality. Universality and locality in science have been understood in several ways, I hope to find a newer and perhaps more interesting theoretical entry into the same game. --------------------------------- Here’s a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070313/29f59367/attachment.html From ramganeshk at gmail.com Tue Mar 13 21:01:40 2007 From: ramganeshk at gmail.com (Ram Ganesh Kamatham) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:01:40 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First posting - IFS 2007 Message-ID: Hi everyone! The story of Vikram and Betal has fascinated me ever since I first encountered it, either in the Amar Chitra Katha comics or the Chandamama magazine, where I eagerly read it with a mixture of fascination, awe and horror. The story has called to me again and I will be spending the rest of the year searching for a way to tell the story as I see it, within a dramaturgical context. Before the words reinterpretation and retelling become leveled at this venture, I must say that it is only mildly involved in an archeological effort to exhume a set of medieval folktales. I prefer to view the whole process as a re-imagining of the myth within a modern urban context – the end product being a play script. Much of my initial efforts have been to immerse myself in the world that the original text evokes with a view to finding useful points of departure. Once this immersion begins the writing process has kicked off and that's where I hope I can share all the excitement the process has to offer. This is primarily a creative venture, an extremely personal one, but I hope to be as inclusive as possible on this journey. I'll be documenting most of the physical journeys with photos and will share notes that inform the creation of the text. At the outset I'll be looking to explore a few core issues. The relationship between Vikran and Betal lies at the heart of the story. It sets up the primary frame for the rest of the twenty five tales that follow. This essentially antagonistic dynamic seems to me the engine that will drive the entire content of the piece. Personally I always thought that the two characters were twin sides of the same coin - dual personalities forming one entity. One is the king – the one who sits on the seat of all knowledge and as a consequence must grapple with morality to ascertain his fitness to the throne. The other is the ghoul – the undead force that teeters on the brink of insanity and is above all moral considerations, but subjects the more temporal aspect to its constant self-defeating inquiry. This duality is fascinating when applied to larger systems and contexts, where so called forward movement has stalled into cyclic degenerative patterns. Drawing the appropriate parallels, with due regard to the suggested philosophic import, at the same time keeping the aesthetic in mind, will be the challenge. Additionally I'll be consciously exploring the form of the play and toying with a dramaturgical technique known as polyvocality. Polyvocality uses multiple linguistics strategies which simultaneously co-exist within a single play. This form resists the notion of a single authorial voice in a narrative, supplanting it with a number of variable discourses. This is an attempt to resist categorization into a particular genre and at the same time foreground the dramaturgical form as not merely a carrier of content. The resultant piece I hope will do justice to the cyclic narrative of this ancient frame within a frame story. I'm really looking forward to it! More about me at http://www.addledbraindump.blogspot.com/ (And for those of you in Mumbai, do come see the play I've just written, showing at the NCPA - Experimental. Details on the link provided.) Warm regards Ram -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070313/2356e997/attachment.html From amitabh at sarai.net Tue Mar 13 14:10:53 2007 From: amitabh at sarai.net (Amitabh Kumar) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:40:53 +0800 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Co-mix/Comics : Workshop on Comics and Graphic Novels Message-ID: <7A575685-2D44-4F03-97CD-FFF8944A8FC1@sarai.net> Co-mix/Comics : Workshop on Comics and Graphic Novels with Sarnath Bannerjee and Parismita Singh 10:30 A.M. - 6:00 P.M., Saturday and Sunday, 17 and 18 March 2007 "Are you now, or have you ever been guilty of reading comics when you should have been doing more important things, such as homework? Have you ever dreamt of being a comic book artist or a graphic novelist yourself?" If so, this intensive and hands on introductory workshop is for you. You will learn story boarding and characterization, think about researching comic books, get a crash course in comic book culture, and get to meet and interact with graphic novelists Sarnath Bannerjee and Parismita Singh. The workshop will also feature a screening of Kokaku Kidotai on the 17th afternoon. Limited places available. To register for participation in this workshop, send a mail to amitabh at sarai.net No previous experience required but a passion for comics and comic book culture is mandatory! The workshop is free. (A special request: Since we try and not charge for our workshops and we reserve seats on a first-asked-first-booked basis, please register only if you intend on attending both days. This way people who really wish to attend are not denied space on account of being full up. :) _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From ayonadatta at hotmail.com Tue Mar 13 16:08:21 2007 From: ayonadatta at hotmail.com (Ayona Datta) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 10:38:21 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] CFP- Home, Migration, and the City Message-ID: OPEN HOUSE INTERNATIONAL SPECIAL ISSUE CALL FOR PAPERS Home, Migration, and the City: Spatial forms and practices in a Globalising world The study of globalisation as the increasing interconnectedness between all aspects of social, cultural, economic, and political space has seen an unprecedented interest across social and political sciences, humanities, and urban studies. Seen as the direct result of globalisation, migration is now at the forefront of this investigation of cross-border connections, but this interest has predominately focussed on poor migrants’ experiences in their host countries. Studies of globalisation have been silent on the connections between migration and built environments. On the one hand, it is suggested that the unprecedented movement of people in a globalising world will put particular emphasis on cities (in ways that they seek to attract particular types of people); and on the other hand it is argued that such movement has led to a death of ‘home’ as a fixed place. Can cities be understood as dense agglomerations of built forms, which are also ‘home’ to those who live there? If so, what does the death of ‘home’ in a globalising world mean for the future of place, of built forms, and of cities? In this call for papers, we would like to invite a range of interdisciplinary explorations from academics and practitioners alike, who can offer new perspectives and new insights, explore alternative theoretical models, and offer proposals that construct new meanings of ‘home’, migration, and the city in a globalising world. For this special issue, we lay particular emphasis on globalising cities of the South that are undergoing rapid social, cultural, and economic changes and can no longer be seen simply as the ‘lands of origin’ of migrants but increasingly as destinations. Similarly, there are those elite transnationals in the global South, whose mobilities challenge migration as a linear movement, and whose presence is increasingly felt in cities through the rise in luxury housing. On the other hand, the recent expansion of the European Union has meant the increased presence of post-socialist subjects in the global North, which has led to changes in the geographies and identities of public space in Northern cities. We want to ask how the everyday lives and subjectivities of such migrant subjects are represented in the cities through built forms. How are places and built forms re-appropriated, re-negotiated, and transgressed through such diverse forms of mobility? How does mobility produce spatialised struggles for migrant identities in cities? What are the various ways that built forms and spatial practices become new markers of a globalising world? We are interested in fostering dialogue between academics and practitioners and in spatialising the notion of home and migration in both the North and the South. Our goal is to contribute to a new articulation of theory, practice, and ethics that help us better understand and deal with the conditions of globalisation and mobility through an examination of place, built forms, and spatial practice in cities across the world. The full length of the manuscripts is 4000 words. The Special Issue guest editor is Dr Ayona Datta, Lecturer, London School of Economics, UK. Please submit a 1000 word abstract and a 150 word author bio by 31st July 2007 in the first instance by email to a.datta2 at lse.ac.uk. Open House International is a refereed scholarly journal concerned with housing, design, and development in the built environment. It is interested in articles on theories, tools, and practices with special emphasis on the local scale. Since 2006, Open House International has been selected for coverage in Thomson’s ISI Citation index products- The Social Science Citation Index, The Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Social Scisearch, Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences, Current Contents/Arts & Humanities and Journal Citation Reports / Social Sciences Edition. _________________________________________________________________ Invite your mail contacts to join your friends list with Windows Live Spaces. It's easy! http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=/friends.aspx&mkt=en-us -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070313/2084ff64/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From chiarapassa at gmail.com Tue Mar 13 18:06:17 2007 From: chiarapassa at gmail.com (Chiara Passa) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 13:36:17 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] ART TECH MEDIA 07, Madrid, May 2007 - art call Message-ID: ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. International Artist Call Art Tech M e d i a 0 7 T h e F i r s t I n t e r n a t i o n a l A r t T e c h M e d i a C o n g r e s s www.artechmedia.net Calling on all creatives of the world to participate. Submissions will be accepted from the following categories: A - Video art - Net-art - 2D & 3D Computer Animation - Blog, videoblog - Creation for mobile platforms - Digital Music - Videodance B - Digital Communities - Geospatial storytelling - Artificial Life, Software art, Transgenic art, Generative art ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... In a globalised world, dominated by communication technologies, with countless questions concerning a future that affects our everyday life, it is essential to make this analysis and to consider, from different perspectives, how our polyhedral, altered reality is being effected by the widespread use of new technology as a support for new ideas and possibilities that are almost infinite. We need to investigate how this occurs in different societies and cultures and to propose models that may go beyond what has been known until now. The First International Art Tech Media Congress has been set up in order to reflect upon and analyse questions currently being raised about art and new technological media within an international context. Within this context, an intensive debate needs to take place on the influence and transformations that new media is producing in art, there needs to be a greater understanding of the foundations for more effective cooperation between the different sectors linked to digital art, and proposals need to be devised for the development of national and international collaborative networks in order to improve production, research, exhibition and promotion. Last year, Art Tech Media 06 encounters had been held at nine Spanish museums, and given the great participation and the opinions collected, its seems clear that this is an ideal time to celebrate the First International Art Tech Media Conference. It represents a great opportunity to hold a transversal debate in order to devise proposals that will lead to greater and better coordination among the different sectors of art, aimed at strengthening its development. www.artechmedia.net/artechmedia06.htm Art Tech Media 06 headquaters: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Unión Fenosa, Presidencia Gobierno de Canarias, Museo Domus Artium 2002, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo Artium, Fundación BilbaoArte, Centro Párraga, Museo de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo EsBaluard, Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona. ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... <<<registration form> enter artechmedia at artechmedia.net ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 1st International Congress Art Tech Media www.artechmedia.net 8-9-10-11 th may . Madrid. Spain -- Chiara Passa chiarapassa at gmail.com http://www.chiarapassa.it http://www.ideasonair.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070313/66fa45f2/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From keshvani at leoalmanac.org Tue Mar 13 22:15:45 2007 From: keshvani at leoalmanac.org (Nisar Keshvani, LEA) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:45:45 +0800 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Leonardo Electronic Almanac Supplement - Vol 14 No 3 - 4 Message-ID: <5d60ab0c0703130945p8454978p82d5db36e417bbf3@mail.gmail.com> ________________________________________________________________ Leonardo Electronic Almanac e-digest Volume 15, Number 3 - 4, 2007 http://leoalmanac.org ISSN #1071-4391 ________________________________________________________________ LEONARDO REVIEWS ---------------- < Aesthetic Computing, Paul Fishwick, Editor > reviewed by Michael Kelly < John Cage Performs James Joyce > and < Fluxus Replayed > reviewed by Mike Leggett < SC06 Nov. 11-17, 2006, Tampa, Florida, U.S.A. > reviewed by Jack Ox < New Review Titles – February 2007 > LEONARDO -------- < Contents: Leonardo Vol. 40, No. 1 (2007) > LEONARDO NETWORK NEWS --------------------- < Happy 40th Birthday Leonardo > < MutaMorphosis: Challenging Arts and Sciences > < Leonardo/OLATS Awards the Leonardo-EMS Prize to criticalartware > < New Intern Carolina Dabbah Ceballos Joins Leonardo > < Special Thanks to Amy Ione for Leadership of Leonardo Education Forum > ______________________________________________________ Leonardo Reviews February 2007 ______________________________________________________ ISSN: 1559-0429 This month in Leonardo Reviews we have the usual range of commentary on recent publications, films and music germane to the art/science/technology community. Unusually we are able to offer a digest of a very long review of Paul Fishewick's book Aesthetic Computing by a new member of the pane Michael Kelly. I also include a review of two pieces by Takahiko Iimura by Mike Leggett who has been an avid follower of his work in the Leonardo Review columns. Both reviews are well referenced and provide a useful resource for research. Finally I have included Jack Ox's reflections on Super Computing 2006 held at Tampa. For all the rest of the work by the Leonardo Reviews Panel and a longer version of Kelly's Review please go to our main site at Michael Punt Editor in Chief Leonardo Reviews < Aesthetic Computing > Paul Fishwick, Editor Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006 Reviewed by Michael Kelly, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina Let me start with two brief disclaimers to make it clear what aesthetic computing is not, since it is a new field and there is naturally some unclarity about its identity. Aesthetic computing is not the application of computer artifacts – models, programs, data, codes, interfaces, and the like – to art or aesthetics. There is such a field and it's called computer art or computer aesthetics. Also, aesthetic computing is not directly concerned with the development of new art mediums such as interactive art, software art, internet art, and the like, though these mediums may enter the discussion because they embody some of the results of aesthetic computing. Rather, aesthetic computing is about the application of the arts and aesthetics to computing. According to Paul Fishwick, aesthetic computing takes the computing discipline itself as its raw material and explores how aesthetics might productively shape computing (including programming languages, AI, HCI, graphics, visualization) (pp. 7-8)? Or in the words of Roger Malina, the aim of aesthetic computing is "to transfer ideas and techniques from the arts to computer science and engineering" (p. 44). In elaborating on the impact and scope of this transfer, Malina highlights a dichotomy within aesthetic computing, or indeed within computing as a whole: Is the computer to be understood as a transparent "information appliance" or as a "medium for reshaping perception and cognition" (p. 44). If the computer is an appliance, aesthetic computing is a matter of design aimed at making the computer as transparent as possible so that we can achieve the desired results, such as effective communication or legible visualization. But if the computer is capable of shaping perception and cognition, aesthetic computing is a way to understand how perception and cognition can be shaped by and, in turn, shape, technology. Following the structure of this dichotomy, Malina outlines two kinds of claim, weak or strong, that can be made on behalf of aesthetic computing, depending on whether we're talking about the design of the finished products of computer technology or the codes underlying computer software. "The weak claim is that by stimulating the flow of ideas and methods from the arts to computing, computer scientists and engineers will achieve their objectives more easily, quickly, or elegantly" (p. 47; italics added). For example, artists can demonstrate how computing devices are more likely to be adopted by the public if they are found aesthetically appealing; these insights might, in turn, inspire innovation in future research projects (with the Apple iMac or iPod often sited as exemplary success stories). By contrast, the strong claim about aesthetic computing is "that by introducing ideas and methods from art and design into computing, new practices and approaches will emerge responding to new objectives that would not naturally have evolved within the computing sciences and engineering" (p. 48). Here, the claim is that aesthetic insights gained from artistic practice do not merely allow computer scientists to achieve ends formed without taking aesthetic considerations into account but that these insights actually shape the objectives of computing enough "to redirect the future development of computing, provoking new developments and inventions that would otherwise have been impossible. A different computer science and engineering may emerge" (p. 50). This is a strong claim indeed, which Fishwick corroborates by claiming that one of the "core goals" of aesthetic computing is "to modify computer science through the catalysis of aesthetics" (p. 11). To answer which, if either, claim about aesthetic computing can be supported, we first need to clarify what aesthetics is. Fishwick offers some clarification by dividing aesthetics into three concerns: modality, or "ways in which we interface and interact with objects"; culture, meaning genres, movements, and such in the history of the arts; and quality, referring to symmetry, complexity, parsimony, beauty, etc. (pp. 12-13). Although this division is helpful, the inclusion of "quality" (or, better, "property") requires some clarification because it determines how we approach modality and culture. So let me add yet another disclaimer. Aesthetics is not merely about symmetry, harmony, elegance, optimality, and other similar properties of the artifacts of computing, whether they are used in computing or created by it. It's not that these properties aren't relevant in aesthetic computing; it's just that aesthetics is a philosophical discipline and these properties are not, by themselves, philosophical issues. In fact, aesthetics is not about the specific properties of any particular objects, whether works of art, natural objects, or artifacts of computing. If I can use the term 'Beauty" with a big 'B' to stand for the set of all such properties, including the particular property of beauty with a small 'b', Beauty is not a property of any object. This does not mean, intentionally or unwittingly, that aesthetics is subjective or that, as we often hear, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Aesthetics isn't subjective any more than it's objective, since beauty is not in the subject any more than it's in the object. Then what is aesthetics, or, where is Beauty? In the language of eighteenth-century aesthetics, Beauty is a relational property, that is, a property resulting from relations between human subjects and certain objects in art or nature. Or, in the language of contemporary computing, Beauty is an interactive property between human subjects and the artifacts of computing. What this means is that when aestheticians take up the question of Beauty, they concern themselves with the nature and structure of the cognitive and affective relationships between human subjects and certain objects in the world, to which we can now add computers. The objects here are at the same time occasions for interactions not only between humans and objects but among humans. To take a simple example that does not necessarily involve computers, when several people take pleasure in a painting, opera, or pop song, the artwork is an occasion for these individuals to discover something they have in common. The philosophical issue this discovery provokes is what, at a deeper level, makes it possible for people to have a work of art in common. This deeper level involves human emotions, passions, and the like, as well as their effects on human perception and cognition. Insofar as aesthetics is the interdisciplinary study of the complex commonality that underlies our shared experiences of art, it is necessarily connected to other disciplines that are also concerned with human emotions, perception, and their interactions. In contrast to this account of aesthetics, many contributors to this volume seem to attribute Beauty to artworks and thus to computers. For example, Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer emphasize complexity, diversity, and emergence as the properties in HCI, with a special focus on "users' interaction input" (pp.169-183); Jonas Löwgren identifies a set of nineteen qualities tied to HCI (pp. 383-403); Stephan Diehl and Carsten Görg understand beauty in terms of the sum of elementary properties (pp. 229-37); and, finally, Michael Leyton develops aesthetic rules: maximization of transfer and maximization of recoverability (pp. 289-313). But this focus on Beauty as a property is what I'm claiming is problematic. Beauty is a property of relations or interactions among humans (which may very well be what the above authors have in mind) rather than of the works that occasion such relations or interactions. Aesthetics is the understanding of what makes such relations or interactions possible, not just what makes them more effective, more pleasurable, and the like, though by understanding what makes them possible, we'll presumably be in a better position to address these other concerns. Aesthetic computing is the same type of understanding connected directly to computers. In a word, if aestheticians now work with computer scientists, as I now expect they will, it will be a natural extension of what they've been doing all along. Now, to return to the weak and strong claims for aesthetic computing, it's helpful, following Fishwick, to narrow computer science to three areas and to identify what aesthetic computing might involve in each case. First, on the level of computer programming, there are questions about whether and, if so, how to represent programs and data structures with "customized, culturally specific notations." Second, there are issues about how to incorporate "artistic methods in typically computing-intensive activities." And third, in connection with HCI, there are issues about how to improve "the emotional and cultural level of interaction with the computer" (p. 6). Fishwick provides a good example of the first case, for he argues that aesthetics will alter not only the design of computer software at the point that users begin to interface with it, but also the very programming that makes software possible (pp. 9, 13-20). The rationale for this strong claim is that programming will change as computer scientists alter their objectives as a result of attaining a better understanding of the aesthetics of HCI. Put simply, programming will have to change to create the desired interface – an obvious point, but one that is now coming with an aesthetic imperative attached. Norm Tractinsky's and Dror Zmiri's research on "skinnability" (alternate interfaces to commonly used applications) is a good example here because they focus on interaction, while taking consumers' interest in skinnability as evidence of their interest in the aesthetics of computing (pp. 405-22). Concerning visualization, there are two types which fall under the general heading of data visualization: scientific visualization, which is the creation of visual representations of scientific data from physics, biology, or any of the natural or social sciences; and information visualization, which involves visual models of information from all sorts of sources: business, government, the sciences, or elsewhere. Both types involve aesthetics since visualization is, in Donna Cox's words, "the creative translation of data into visual representation" (p. 94). She provides a systematic and clear analysis of the aesthetics of visualization by explaining the basic metaphorical structure of the translation of data into visual models (pp. 89- 114). Now, some people also speak of knowledge visualization, which, if I understand it, is a meta-level of visualization that articulates the epistemological implications of the two types. For in knowledge visualization the claim is that you're not just visualizing or illustrating what is already known; rather, in the words of Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, "artistic works in the area of aesthetic computing must lead to a synthesis of sensory perception and cognitive insight, yielding new ways of thinking and models of experience" (p. 131). How this perceptual/cognitive interface works is a basic subject matter of aesthetics. For example, Aaron Quigley uses the expression "relational information," which is very similar to the idea of beauty as a "relational property" or "interactive property" (pp. 316-33). So there's a natural role for aesthetic computing in visualization. Finally, in the third area of computer science, HCI, we have the following picture, to quote from Frieder Nake and Susanne Grabowski: "Interface aesthetics is different from the aesthetics of packaging," the design approach to aesthetic computing, "in that the interface to software belongs to the software. Software never appears without its interface. The human-computer interface is, first of all, the face of its software" (p. 67). In this light, the weak and strong claims about aesthetic computing would be better characterized, as they are by Jay Bolter and Diane Gromala, as the inside and outside of computers, meaning the code and the interface (pp. 369-82). So we don't have to choose between the weak or strong claims any more than we have to choose between the code and the interface. Rather, the interaction between the code and the interface is the basis of HCI and, in turn, the basis of aesthetic computing. At the end of his introductory essay, Fishwick asks whether aesthetic computing is something new or whether it just "rehashed old material." He and his expert contributors argue that technology has developed to the point today where it is not only possible to pay attention to aesthetics, but there is now a sense of urgency coming from computing. In Fishwick's words: "We have had to wait for the technology to become available to leverage the arts" (p. 13). If this is accurate, what we have here is a new field called aesthetic computing. And what we have in this collection is an excellent contribution to aesthetic computing, an extremely valuable text for aestheticians and computer scientists alike. References and Notes: 1. Fishwick claims that computer interface "should be as much about quality as it is about quantitative performance" (p. 21). My turn away from "quality" seems at odds with this claim. But I think we are proposing something very similar because he seems interested in quality only as it relates to the affective as well as cognitive dimensions of HCI rather than to the properties of artifacts (e.g., a computer or a graphic user interface) that would occasion such interaction. 2. Frieder Nake and Susanne Grabowski (pp. 53-70) add semiotics to the aesthetics and computing mix, apparently on the belief that aesthetics is subjective (p. 55) and needs to be offset by the more objective semiotics. As I understand aesthetics, however, semiotics does not add anything that couldn't be included within aesthetics. Umberto Eco's combination of aesthetics and semiotics is an example of what I have in mind here. 3. Jane Prophet and Mark d'Inverno (pp. 185-96) prefer to use the term "transdisciplinarity" in place of "interdisciplinarity" or "multidisciplinarity," because they think the first term emphasizes that something new emerges from the interactions among these disciplines. 4. Elsewhere [e.g., in my Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) or Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)], I characterize aesthetics as critical reflection on art, culture, and nature. In this light, aesthetic computing is critical reflection on – or philosophical analysis of – the aesthetic theories, principles, beliefs, ideas, and the like underlying computing once it is governed not only by technological concerns but by artistic practices. < John Cage Performs James Joyce > by Takahiko Iimura Takahiko iimura Media Art Institute, Tokyo, Japan, 1985/2005 DVD, 15 mins., B&W Sales, $US100 (personal); $US400 (institutions) (No ISBN) < Fluxus Replayed > by Takahiko Iimura Takahiko iimura Media Art Institute, Tokyo, Japan, 1991/2005 DVD, 30 mins., B&W Sales, $US100 (personal); $US400 (institutions) ISBN 4-901181-24-6. Distributor's website: http://www.takaiimura.com/home.html Reviewed by Mike Leggett Creativity & Cognition Studios University of Technology Sydney legart [at} ozemail [dot] com [dot] au Taka Iimura is a senior figure among contemporary Japanese artists and has been working with film, sound and video since the 1960s. He was one of several Japanese who, coming from a 20th Century tradition of avant-garde intervention,1 contributed to the Fluxus group in the 60s. Like many media artists, Iimura made recordings of contemporaries and their work. Alongside his film and video artworks, (the video Observer/Observed reviewed in Leonardo 35.1), portable video enabled documentation, (and general note making), more economically than film. As the cycle of experimentation moves through another generation, glimpses of precursors through archive recordings of this kind help ground artists' surviving words and artworks. John Cage (1912-1992) as the senior figure of Fluxus (NYC), active experimentally since the late 30s, is the subject of a video portrait shot by Iimura in 1985, released in 1991 and made available on DVD in 2005. Cage had a long-standing fascination with the work of James Joyce, in particular Finnegans Wake, the book becoming the basis of many works, the best known of which is the Roaratorio — an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake. Commissioned by German radio and IRCAM in Paris the sound recording was completed in 1979, lasted about an hour and was a 62 track mix of the sounds referred to in the text, the text itself as prepared (using a mesostic system), and read by Cage, together with music played by the Irish traditional music players of the day. Roaratorio is one of the classics of Cage's oeuvre 2 and in Iimura's 15-minute recording, John Cage Performs James Joyce, Cage presents the core of the spoken part of the work. Its composition, like many of his other works, is aided by the I-Ching. Here he briefly explains that none of the sentences (sic) in Finnegans Wake are selected, only words, syllables and letters, from different pages according to the chance decisions made by consulting the I-Ching and its representational hexagrams. In this way the 624 pages of the book are compressed into 12 pages of text, and it is one of these pages that we see him holding. He reads from it, sings it, and then, hustling close to the camera and its microphone, whispers it. At the bottom of the screen are superimposed each time, two lines of sub-titling synchronised with the text he is using. Iimura's presence is felt but not seen, though we hear him responding to Cage's explanations at the outset. Cage's voice is not strong; he is in his seventies, and we strain to hear him against the noise of New York traffic coming through the window in the background of a sunlit room. His demeanour remains buoyant, at one point making light of a fumble he makes with a watch he is holding, an event incorporated into the flow of the tape. Like so many of his initiatives, the line between the artwork and its making is blurred, a statement aided and amplified by Iimura's collaboration in its making. In Fluxus Replayed also released in 2005, Iimura documents an event in 1991 held to reproduce historical performances by NYC-based Fluxus artists of the 1960s. The S.E.M Ensemble together with some of the Fluxus artists themselves, perform works by Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Allison Knowles, Ben Patterson, Jackson Mac Low and Emett Williams. Iimura has edited together the sounds and images captured by two cameras as raw evidence of the goings-on, with scant regard for the conventions of continuity editing, thus maintaining the document in the space between the moment of recording and that of viewing. Time compression is only obvious in Ono's Sky Piece for Jesus Christ (1965) as the baroque instrumental ensemble are wound around with white paper, accumulating as a series of jump cuts to the point where their music is reduced to a series of bumps and scrapes, before the musicians are man-handled off the stage, still attached to their chairs and instruments. Again, Iimura gives some idea to younger generations of how these early precursors to contemporary performance art appeared to audiences, in a setting typical of the genre — church hall ecclesiastical architecture, painted walls, wooden floor. Though much of this work was sound-based, produced collaboratively for group performance using chance determinations and framed with a sense of the aesthetics of noise, the written scores or instructions for each piece may well have satisfied many members of the audience. Glimpsed in the background, some walking around, others squirming in their seats, the probably overlong evening has been bravely foreshortened into a useful 30-minute document by the artist with the video camera. Notes: 1. Two publications on this subject: Into Performance: Japanese women artists in New York, by Midori Yoshimoto, Rutgers University Press, 2005; Dada in Japan: Japanische avant-garde 1920-1970, by Stephan von Wiese, Jutta Hulsewig and Yoshio Shirakawa, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, 1983. 2. An extensive discography now exists for Cage and other sound artists, together with collected reviews, samples and the means to buy recordings at http://www.moderecords.com/main.html. < SC06: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis > Reviewed by Jack Ox Jackox [at] Comcast [dot] net How relevant is Supercomputing to artists? What kind of artist would want to go there, either to learn or to demonstrate their work to this audience? I admit that we are not yet a sizable population within the conference attendees, but would like to make a case for an expanded participation. Consider the areas of research that are engaged in utilizing super computing technology: biology and genomics, networking and telepresence with the LambaRail, chemistry and the rational design of drugs, reverse engineering of the brain with studies on the limits of human ability. Leonardo's community including artist and scientists have been working in these areas in a very serious way for a relatively long period of time. Ray Kurzweil, the keynote speaker, asked, "Is it possible to understand our own brains?" As usual he was philosophical, and he speaks to artists as well as scientists, speaking copiously on the exponentially accelerating rate of progress, of which supercomputing is a major ingredient. Donna Cox, with her wonderful team of scientific visualization specialists (Robert Patterson and Stuart Levy) are regulars at this conference. Their artistry is actually part of the scientific world far more than of the art world. They were at the NCSA booth showing HD, stereoscopic visualizations of galaxies and weather systems. But there were also artists producing performances that operate more in the traditional area of the performing arts, although using high performance networking technology for both the collaborators and the dispersed audiences. This group is lead by Jimmy Miklavcic, a multimedia specialist at the University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing, with artistic direction by Beth Miklavcic. The group, called Another Language Performing Arts Company, re-presented their fourth InterPlay performance called Dancing on the Banks of Packet Creek during Supercomputing. Because the group is working over Internet2 they have had to choose faster communication over high resolution, employing serious video compression. But Miklavcic has made this work to his artistic advantage. The various streams, coming in from Boston University, Purdue University , the University of Maryland, and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, all to the University of Utah, are mixed by Jimmy Miklavcic and look astonishingly like paintings with very beautifully applied surfaces and muted colors. All of the performers work in tandem with the sound, which is mostly improvised, and in return is influenced by the choices of the performers and the visual of the main mix. It was very impressive how the performers dealt with the considerable, irregular delay, known as jitter, on the still packet driven Internet2. Miklavcic uses AccessGrid Video (Cassette) Recorder (AGVCR) to capture and record the video streams from all of the players. These files can them be played back at a later time (as they were at Supercomputing), and they can be edited via a built-in editor. This is how they are interwoven into such fascinating, painting like images. The result is not "visual music" but rather music with image. The video was compressed with H.261 compression, a standard video conference method used in the Access Grid system. The concept behind the performance is an exploration into the "inundating wave of digital information and non-experiential knowledge" that we are subjected to during our digital lives. Each of the participants created parts on their own while thinking about the same concept. Each site contributed at least two video streams, with the music performed and transmitted from the Fairbanks and Boston locations. The performers involved in "Packet Creek" are all quite proficient in areas such as film, radio broadcasting, and dance, and also have extensive scientific and technological backgrounds including mathematics, computer engineering, biomedical engineering, digital art, and 3-D animation. My question is how would this performance change if it were to be on the National Lambda Rail (NLR) instead of Internet2? All of sudden the video compression would not be necessary, and the sound would have little delay, with a regularity that can easily be overcome by musicians. I believe that the whole aesthetic quality would change dramatically. Of course the NLR also had a great presence at SC06. One could sit at their booth for hours, taking in one great half hour talk after another. Tom West, the President and CEO of NLR, gave several introductions to the technology throughout the conference. We were also treated to presentations by Larry Smarr (Calit2 at UCSD)on genomic and oceanographic research over Optiputer, a member of NLR, Jason Leigh (Electronic Visualization Lab at UIC) about SAGE wall immersive technology , and Maxine Brown (UIC) on TransLight/StarLight and TranLight/Pacific Wave , the complementary efforts funded by the Nation Science Foundation (NSF) that provides the infrastructure connecting US, European and Pacific Rim research and education networks. All of this information is extremely useful to any member of our community who desires to be dancing on the very exciting edge of high performance computing and networking technology. New Reviews, February 2007 < Cartographies of Tsardom. The Land and its Meanings in Seventeenth Century Russia> by Valerie Kivelson Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen < Our Daily Bread > by Nikolaus Geyrhalter Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg < Inside Out HYPERLINK " http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/feb2007/inside_harle.html" > by Zohreh Shayesteh Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia) < John Cage Performs James Joyce > by Takahiko Iimura and < Fluxus Replayed > by Takahiko Iimura Reviewed by Mike Leggett < King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry > by Siobhan Roberts Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen < Playing the News > by Jeff Plunkett and Jigar Mehta, Directors Reviewed by Amy Ione < SC06: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis > Reviewed by Jack Ox < Seeing High & Low. Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture > by Patricia Johnston, Editor Reviewed by Jan Baetens < Technology Matters: Questions to Live With > by David Nye Reviewed by Michael Punt < Transitio_mx. Festival Internacional de Artes Electrónicas y Video > by Amanda Lemus, Adriana Casas, and Lilia Pérez, Eds. Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen To read all reviews, visit: ______________________________________________________ Leonardo Table of Contents 40:1 ______________________________________________________ Editorial < A Disturbance in the Flow > By Meredith Tromble After Midnight < @Joburg > By Nathaniel Stern The Leonardo Gallery < The Dream of Reason > Curated by Elysa Lozano and Inês Rebelo Including work by Tom Dale, Anthony Discenza, Frederick Loomis, Lauren Kirkman, Elysa Lozano, Inês Rebelo, Alexander Ugay and Roman Maskalev Artists' Statements < Himalaya's Head: Disturbed Visual Feedback in an Interactive Multi-User Installation > By Sarita Dev and Maurits Kelder: < The Genetic Creation of Bioluminescent Plants for Urban and Domestic Use > By Alberto Estévez: Historical Perspective < 1970s Iran > By Robert Gluck ABSTRACT: Iran in the 1970s was host to an array of electronic music and avant-garde arts. In the decade prior to the Islamic revolution, the Shiraz Arts Festival provided a showcase for composers, performers, dancers and theater directors from Iran and abroad, among them Iannis Xenakis, Peter Brook, John Cage, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Merce Cunningham. A significant arts center, which was to include electronic music and recording studios, was planned as an outgrowth of the festival. While the complex politics of the Shah's regime and the approaching revolution brought these developments to an end, a younger generation of artists continued the festival's legacy. Special Section: Live Art and Science on the Internet < Recipe for a Google"! Party > By Adam Overton < ELIZA REDUX: A Mutable Iteration > By Adrianne Wortzel ABSTRACT: The author discusses her on-line interactive telerobotic work ELIZA REDUX, its sources and the emblematic use of the psychoanalyst/analysand relationship as a performative vehicle. < Wigglism: A Philosophoid Entity Turns Ten > By Ebon Fisher ABSTRACT: The author describes The Wigglism Manifesto, a work authored amidst the fury of early exchange on the World Wide Web. The term Wigglism refers to a quality shared by biological and artificial life forms alike. The manifesto has taken an open-source approach to its cultivation, allowing numerous voices to nurture the entity into being. This collective approach to truth cultivation embodied by the manifesto was inspired, in part, by the author's experiences with community-based media rituals in the North Brooklyn community before it gentrified in the mid-1990s. The project has affirmed its initiator's sense that cultivating a living system can be a vital alternative to traditional creative practices more aligned with manufacturing and commerce. Color Plates General Articles < Formulating Abstraction: Conceptual Art and the Architectural Object > By Therese Tierney ABSTRACT: Digital techniques, primarily software appropriated from the entertainment and industrial design sectors, have destabilized the essential status of the architectural image-object formulated in classical philosophical thought. Western European art experienced a similar crisis when conceptual art movements of the 1960s challenged Clement Greenberg s notion of medium specificity. The author examines work by conceptual artists whose theories posit alternative views of spatial and social relations based on open-ended systems and indeterminacy. An examination of the relationship between materiality and abstraction as exemplified in new media s reformulation of architectural design processes, indicates how a more inclusive and mutable profession has been realized. < A Taxonomy of Abstract Form Using Studies of Synesthesia and Hallucinations > By Michael Betancourt ABSTRACT: The author proposes a taxonomy of abstract form anchored in an examination of the history and theory of synesthesia and abstract art. The foundations of this taxonomy lie in empirical psychological studies of "form-constants" found in cross-modal synesthetic visions and hallucinatory states, specifically the work of Heinrich Klüver in his examinations of mescaline and the mechanisms producing visual hallucinations. While the proposed taxonomy is limited only to synesthesia-inspired abstraction, it has suggestive possibilities when considered in relation to other forms of non-synesthetic abstraction such as Islamic Art, the geometric forms found on classical Greek vases, and other kinds of decorative abstract patterns. Special Section: ArtScience: The Essential Connection < Niko Tinbergen's Visual Arts > By Robert Root-Bernstein ABSTRACT: Dolores Hangan Steinman and David Steinman: The Art and Science of Visualizing Simulated Blood-Flow Dynamics The increasing use of computer enhancement and simulation to reveal the unseen human body brings with it challenges, opportunities and responsibilities at the interface of art and science. Here they are presented and discussed in the context of efforts to understand the role of blood-flow dynamics in vascular disease. < A New Art Form: Exploring Nature's Creativity with a Self-Organizing Medium > By Robert Steinberg ABSTRACT: The author describes a new art form that uses the self-organizing potential of a water-based medium to provide an ever-changing environment for interpretation and elaboration. The medium allows for little separation between plan and execution. The artist, nature and science interact on the "canvas" to create an art rich in novelty and surprise. From the Leonardo Archive < Kinetic Painting: The Lumidyne System > By Frank J. Malina < The Cybernetic Stance: My Process and Purpose > By Roy Ascott Leonardo Reviews Reviews by Jan Baetens, Roy R. Behrens, Martha Blassnigg, Dene Grigar, Rob Harle, Amy Ione, Michael R. Mosher, Michael Punt, Aparna Sharma Endnote < Vita Lona, Ars Longa: Aging, Longevity Extension Technology and the Arts > By Stephen Wilson Leonardo Network News ______________________________________________________ Leonardo Network News February 2007 ______________________________________________________ The Newsletter of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology and of l'Observatoire Leonardo des Arts et Technosciences CELEBRATING THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the LEONARDO NETWORK Leonardo Network News Coordinator: Kathleen Quillian. E-mail: . < Happy 40th Birthday Leonardo! > Forty years ago in Paris, a group of artists, scientists and engineers got together and decried the lack of professional venues where emerging work bridging the two cultures could be presented, debated and promoted. Frank Malina, himself a research engineer and a professional artist, convinced publisher Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press to take on the challenge of publishing a peer-reviewed scholarly art-science-technology journal, the first time such a project had been attempted. To date we have published the work of 5,538 artists, researchers and scholars. We wish we could bring this community together for a celebration, but in keeping with our networked times, we are collaborating with groups around the world on a variety of events: Leonardo Celebrates Leonardo da Vinci Special Section of Leonardo, 2007--2008, edited by David Carrier What, building upon Leonardo's ways of thinking, can artists and scientists tell each other today? Full call for papers: Inquiries and proposals: . Leonardo in New York (February 2007) Panels, events and exhibition organized by the Leonardo Education Forum at the 2007 College Art Association meeting: < leonardo.info/isast/educators.html>. MutaMorphosis: Challenging Arts and Sciences (Prague, Czech Republic, 7-10 November 2007): . Leonardo co-sponsors a conference and exhibitions in Prague, organized by the International Centre for Art and New Technologies (CIANT): . Lovely Weather in Ireland We have initiated a three-year collaboration with Regional Cultural Centre Letterkenny, Donegal County, Republic of Ireland, to host a Leonardo 40th Anniversary exhibition and collaborate on an Art and Climate Change Project, "Lovely Weather": . Leonardo in India The Leonardo/OLATS is working with groups in Bangalore, India, for a symposium and workshop. We welcome contact with Indian artists and scientists who might wish to be involved. Leonardo in North America (2008) We are planning a final 40th anniversary symposium and celebration in North America. Further details will be announced on . Leonardo in Spain: Expanding the Space (October 2006) We were pleased to co-sponsor Expanding the Space, a conference and workshop on space exploration and the arts: . All 40 years of Leonardo Articles Now Available On-Line Volumes 1-33 available through JSTOR: . Volumes 34-39 available through MIT Press: . If you are interested in being involved, or have ideas on how we can celebrate the work of the new Leonardos, send e-mail to rmalina [at] prontomail [dot] com WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY We know what Leonardo da Vinci could have used for his 40th birthday in Milan: a gift membership in the Leonardo organization and subscription to the Leonardo journal. If you know any budding Leonardos, buy them a gift at . < MutaMorphosis: Challenging Arts and Sciences, International Conference > 8-10 November 2007, Prague, Czech Republic Conference website: < www.mutamorphosis.org> MutaMorphosis is an international conference organized by CIANT as part of the ENTER festival in the framework of the Leonardo 40th anniversary celebrations. The festival will also feature the first retrospective exhibition of the work of Leonardo Founding Editor Frank J. Malina. The conference will explore the major mutations that are affecting the future of our world. Papers will be presented by artists, scientists and researchers on the evolution of life and the societies they constitute, and on the modes of knowledge, expression and communication of humans, animals and other forms of life. The conference will concentrate on the growing interest within the worlds of the arts, sciences and technologies in extreme and hostile environments. These environments appear as symptomatic indicators of the mutations that are taking place. They are potential vectors for an awareness of the different problems at the origin of the disturbances that threaten the ensemble of the Earth's eco-systems. Conference Steering Committee: Alban Asselin, Louis Bec, Annick Bureaud, Don Foresta, Denisa Kera, Roger F. Malina (co-chair: rfm [dot] mutamorphosis [at] gmail [dot] com), Louise Poissant, Pavel Sedlák (co-chair: sedlak [at] ciant [dot] cz), Pavel Smetana. Organizer: CIANT – International Centre for Art and New Technologies in Prague, Czech Republic . Co-Organizers: Leonardo, U.S.A. , France ; Hexagram, Canada ; Pépinières européenes pour jeunes artistes, France . Partners: Centre for Global Studies at Charles University, Czech Republic < cgs.flu.cas.cz>; CYPRES Arts Sciences Technologies Cultures, France < www.cypres-artech.org>; Czech Academy of Sciences – Week of Science and Technology; ; French Institute in Prague, Czech Republic ; MARCEL, U.K. ; UQAM, Canada < www.uqam.ca>. < Leonardo/OLATS Awards the Leonardo-EMS Prize to criticalartware > We are pleased to announce that Leonardo/OLATS and the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network have awarded a special prize to criticalartware (Jon Cates, Ben Syverson and Jon Satrom) for their paper "likn: A Flexible Platform for Information and Metadata Exchange," which they presented at the Electroacoustic Music Studies Conference in Beijing, China, October 2006. criticalartware's project likn is an artware application that addresses the nature of knowledge, ideas and language in the era of globalization. More specifically, likn is a functional online collaborative environment that wages a persistent critique of the desire to standardize and universalize meaning, and offers an alternative by applying postmodern and postcolonial theories to the challenge of organizing discourse and media. The paper can be accessed online at . The Leonardo-EMS jury, consisting of Marc Battier, Kenneth Fields and Ricardo dal Farra, convened on Thursday 26 October after the official closure of the third Electroacoustic Music Studies Conference. The Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS Network) has been organized to focus on the better understanding of the various manifestations of electroacoustic music. Areas related to the study of electroacoustic music range from the musicological to more interdisciplinary approaches, from studies concerning the impact of technology on musical creativity to the investigation of the ubiquitous nature of electroacoustic sounds today. The choice of the word "network" is of fundamental importance, as one of the goals of the EMS Network is to make relevant initiatives more widely available. More about the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network can be found at . Leonardo/OLATS has established a collaboration with the EMS network through which annual Leonardo-EMS Awards for Excellence will be made for the best contributions to the EMS symposium as decided by a joint jury. < New Intern Carolina Dabbah Ceballos Joins Leonardo > In early 2007 Carolina Dabbah Ceballos joined Leonardo as an intern to work on the YASMIN project. Carolina is a 24-year-old graphic/web designer. She was born in Jordan and comes from a Greek and Colombian background. She obtained her bachelor's degree in computer science at Al-Ahliyya Amman University in Amman, Jordan. She attained grade 5 status as a piano player from ABRSM (Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music), U.K. She is also fluent in four languages: Arabic, English, Spanish and French. Carolina is now working on her masters of fine arts at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research concentrates on game therapy for post-traumatic stress patients by creating a virtual environment around the 9/11 tragedy in New York City. She is also employed at UTD as a teaching assistant to Thomas Linehan, the director of the Arts and Technology program. < Special Thanks to Amy Ione for Leadership of Leonardo Education Forum > Leonardo would like to recognize the outstanding leadership by Amy Ione of Leonardo Education Forum (LEF). Ione was first voted in as a co-chair of LEF in 2005 and in 2006 rotated to the position of Chair, helping to organize all activities surrounding the 2007 College Art Association Conference in New York City. During this time, Ione was also instrumental in initiating relations with the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). In November 2006, LEF presented "New Media Futures: The Artist as Researcher and Research as Art in the 21st Century" at the 2006 SLSA meeting in New York City. In February 2007, Ione completed her rotation as Chair of LEF and was replaced by incoming Chair Eddie Shanken. ________________________________________________________________ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * LEA PUBLISHING INFORMATION * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ________________________________________________________________ Editorial Address: Leonardo Electronic Almanac PO Box 850 Robinson Road Singapore 901650 keshvani [at] leoalmanac [dot] org ________________________________________________________________ Copyright (2007), Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology All Rights Reserved. Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published by: The MIT Press Journals, 238 Main Street, Suite 500, Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, U.S.A. Re-posting of the content of this journal is prohibited without permission of Leonardo/ISAST, except for the posting of news and events listings that have been independently received. Leonardo/ISAST and the MIT Press give institutions permission to offer access to LEA within the organization through such resources as restricted local gopher and mosaic services. Open access to other individuals and organizations is not permitted. ________________________________________________________________ < Ordering Information > Leonardo Electronic Almanac is a free supplement to subscribers of Leonardo and Leonardo Music Journal. To subscribe to Leonardo, visit: To subscribe to Leonardo Music Journal, visit: < www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/LMJ> For Leonardo and LMJ subscription queries contact: journals-orders [at] mit [dot] edu ________________________________________________________________ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ADVERTISING * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ________________________________________________________________ Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published monthly -- individuals and institutions interested in advertising in LEA, either in the distributed text version or on the World Wide Web site should contact: Leonardo - Advertising 211 Sutter St., suite 501 San Francisco, CA 94108 phone: (415) 391-1110 fax: (415) 391-2385 E-mail: kq [at] leonardo [dot] info More Info: ________________________________________________________________ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ________________________________________________________________ LEA acknowledges with thanks the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations for their support to Leonardo/ISAST and its projects. ________________________________________________________________ < End of Leonardo Electronic Almanac 15:2-3 > ________________________________________________________________ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leonardo electronic almanac alerts list" group. 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URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070313/530842cf/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From pukar at pukar.org.in Tue Mar 13 13:54:52 2007 From: pukar at pukar.org.in (PUKAR) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 13:54:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [announcements] March 16: The Art of Making Great Creative Cities Message-ID: <00ec01c76549$19245d20$5b66c2cb@freeda> British Council, PUKAR and Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) cordially invite you to a lecture and panel discussion on The Art of Making Great Creative Cities by Charles Landry An international authority on creativity and city futures Panelists: Rahul daCunha, Theatre person Kiran Nagarkar, Author Sudhir Patwardhan, Painter K Sridhar, Physicist Date: Friday, March 16th, 2007 Time: 6:30 - 8:00 PM Venue: British Council Auditorium, Mittal Tower, C Wing, 2nd Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400 021 Visit the following link for details: http://www.pukar.org.in/pukar/newsevents.html PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research) Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001 Telephone:: +91 (22) 6574 8152 Fax:: +91 (22) 6664 0561 Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in Website:: www.pukar.org.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070313/dc1fba9f/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From turbulence at turbulence.org Tue Mar 13 21:16:06 2007 From: turbulence at turbulence.org (Turbulence) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:46:06 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Turbulence Artist's Studio: "Continuum." by Michael Takeo Magruder Message-ID: <875706AD7FD04274A4B9CF45E3BA7A7B@joPC> March 13, 2007 Turbulence Artist's Studio: "Continuum." by Michael Takeo Magruder http://www.turbulence.org/studios/takeo/index.htm Needs Flash Player 8+ plugin and stereo audio "Continuum." reflects upon the evolution of our collective history through the real-time analysis of global news information networks. As no event transpires in isolation, each moment of our existence is defined by the sum of an infinite number of interconnected occurrences. Given that no individual can absorb and process the totality of this information, how can we obtain an informed notion of the present? "Continuum." was commissioned by Oog online (http://volkskrant.nl/oog/), a commentary and opinion platform for the online edition of De Volkskrant (http://www.volkskrant.nl/) a major Dutch daily national newspaper. BIOGRAPHY Michael Takeo Magruder is an American artist based in the UK deploying New and Technological Media within Contemporary Art contexts. He is a long-standing member of King's Visualization Lab located in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London. His artworks have been showcased in over 150 exhibitions and 30 countries. Artistically, his interests concern the simultaneous utilization and dissection of new technology as a means to explore the formal structures and conceptual paradigms of the digital realm. He seeks to create artworks in which there are no divisions between technologies, aesthetics, and concepts. For more Turbulence Artists' Studios, please visit http://turbulence.org/studios Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: http://new-radio.org New York: 917.548.7780 . Boston: 617.522.3856 Turbulence: http://turbulence.org New American Radio: http://somewhere.org Networked_Performance Blog: http://turbulence.org/blog Upgrade! Boston: http://turbulence.org/upgrade _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From apnawritings at yahoo.co.in Wed Mar 14 13:07:44 2007 From: apnawritings at yahoo.co.in (ARNAB CHATTERJEE) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:37:44 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Response to comments on 1st Posting Independent fellowship 2007 Message-ID: <302340.90196.qm@web8507.mail.in.yahoo.com> Dear Readers, thank you for that small but significant feedback that I've received from some of you. While I thank Jeebesh Bagchi for his quick encouraging chip and Amit Ranjan Basu's anticipation of a work to come in EMI, I cannot but thank a few others for their 'intriguing' ( I've learnt the merits of this word very recently from a writer I admire) feedback. One of them (Namrata Kakkar ), to start with, has asked very rightly for the References to back up the quotations in my piece ( with a hunch perhaps that I've invented some! ) and the first thing I've done is to do that and therefore below you have the piece now complete with references for quotes ( in Bold). Sorry for not having done so at the first go ! I'm grateful to Namrata for this well placed reminder. I'm also grateful to Monica Nerula for reposting the draft on the 9th, on my keen request, in the right format so that it became more readable; while the former was hazy, lazy, hazardous and projected a kind of visual octopus gloom, this one was pure cereal. Thanks! After this I'm left with three more responses, two of which seem to be a bit intolerant but I'm still ready to answer them and I find the phenomenon better then bitter self consumption : this is a public discussion forum and so far as argumentation is concerned, I think, we should never forget that we are accountable ( answerable) and therfore questions ( so far as they fulfill the propositional form of arguments) should not be suppressed, edited or ignored ( a royal practice these days). And therefore the operational character of SARAI, I guess, even in the face of temporary deviations, should not be forsaken ( You know what I'm talking about). Not that I'll be able to answer all queries; I'll try and if I fail, your questions falling in more worthy hands-- the interlocutors will be answered any way--I guess; this is the benefit of a public discussion forum. And further more, I'll have many more questions to ask as well and I hope I'll bag some answers on my way. This is a forum, it seems, and many will agree, we've been missing throughout our years. Now to the intriguing feedback! One of them,presupposing an intellectual poverty for the discipline questions the claims made for social work in the piece ; another questions my background competence to vouch for social work and the last one in a definitely resonable strain has asked for a starter's bibliography to undertake exploring social work. In response to One, I may just add that social work holds the key to understanding a number of things including modernity and mentioning only one will suffice here : In contemporary rights-thinking it is T.H Marshall who is a pivotal thinker; and those who are more updated ( and why not) they do refer to Foucault's work on governmentality. The point is, it can be shown that much of what Foucault was arguing in terms of productivity of power and not its coercive-negativity --- if not borrowed - was influenced-- or could be said to have been anticipated - by T.H Marshall. (And if anybody has a hunch that this is an odd sandwich, let us put on record that such a social theorist as Partha Chatterjee, interestingly, mentions both of them in a single article (in The Politics of the Governed) -- though not in this vein and his claim that Foucault was correct and Marshall was wrong so far as welfare is concerned ( in terms of the progress of governmentality and not equality or citizenship) remains to be examined in one of my proposed postings; however, the point about the importance of Marshall and that bringing them together is not unwarranted is perhaps established by this example.Partha Chatterjee mentions, but Does Foucault mention Marshall anywhere? I would be glad to be informed on this. ) But the person whom I'm trying to pose as Foucault's unacknowledged (?) advisory guru and his importance now well acknowledged, takes nearly all of his major materials from the accounts of social workers. A cursory attention to Marshall's ' Endnotes' in several of his books is adequate to prove this. Now, despite all this if somebody still thinks social work is "bull shit", I've nothing to offer. In response to the second query, let me clarify and I think many will agree that in a pluridisciplinary age such as ours, it is not necessary to have a degree ( or textual pedigree) in all the subjects and topics that are brought forth in the wake of a discussion. What matters is to 'win a standpoint' and if one fails in that, no amount of Degrees or the politics of pedigree will help. Fortunately though --I do have degrees and disciplinary training in social work and also taught social work in two universities of repute in West Bengal backed by 5 to 6 years of institutional and field 'work' experience. Does that qualify me to speak for social work? I feel sad if it does so. I didn't mention these details-- assuming 'unnecessity'--in the auto-biogrpahical part of the post and limited myself to the current designation only. But, this objection is a pointer to all of us. Is everybody learning? Thirdly, I feel obliged that after a decade of hard labour, disappointments and struggles of all sorts ( that which continues)--such a nominal piece of mine has evoked interest in somebody to the extent of wanting to read some social work tracts. For the moment I'll just mention one : a novel by George Konrad, The Case Worker. Once one has read this, I guess, s/he will be able to etch a bibliography on her/his own. Lastly, thanks and a final reminder for my question, Does Foucault mention T.H Marshall anywhere? Somebody please inform and here is the first post whose quotations now have references against them and more a month later.Thanks, Arnab. The work which is very much a work in progress and forms the content of an upcoming (planned) monograph - is dedicated to my mother Dipali Chatterjee who even months before her death on October 30, 06 was scary about my tryst with Hegel, Lotze et.al and urging me to come to terms with acceptable academia in Kolkata - wished me to put to rest my habit of 'polemicising' which has earned me a team of fierce 'well wishers'. Her unforgettable concern will always remain higher than my unforgivable stubbornness. Higher all the more because she would have been the happiest to know that my work has had such a large and informed audience now at SARAI-CSDS--the SARAI Reader list). Wishing you all well and inviting your comments. Each and every response will be answered with care and scrutiny. Put in a sentence, my work ("Beyond Private And Public : New Perspectives on Personal and Personalist Social Work")deals with revising the notion which makes us see the personal as another synonym of the private. But not simply a lexical reordering, the challenge and the interest of this project lies in realizing whether the category could be historically recovered, theoretically 'proved', culturally debated and practically deployed. The horizon of such expectations, not to say more, marks the site and starts the beginning. And as an apprentice-author dedicated to the discourse of social work, let me confess, I would like to situate this study well within the ill defined ( and academically underrated) contours of social work practice. But aims apart, in this introductory posting I shall briefly outline my project, delineate its major themes, locate landmarks and finally offer some examples to make the proposal go live. It should be common knowledge now that the key to understanding modernity is the public/private divide and a corresponding failure to find a way beyond the binary. To understand this somewhat sweeping statement we may recall an example: Marx. Curiously, Marx is a symptom of both, he said for the first--"the state is founded upon the contradiction between public and private life" ( Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Eds. T.B. Bottomore and M.Rubel, Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1961, p.222) and for the second : "if the modern State wished to end the impotence of its administration it would be obliged to abolish the present conditions of private life. And if the State wished to abolish these conditions of private life it would have also to put an end to its own existence, for it exists only in relation to them." (Ibid., p.223) Now, throwing in the fact that private property is just a singular and an isolated moment in the discourse of private life, Marx's agenda --I guess- looks readily defamiliarised here. But while Marx had had an effective concern with smashing the liberal divide, there is a long list of other thinkers who have grappled -- being imbibed with an "interpretive" interest--the problem of finding a way beyond the binary. While Hannah Arendt previously had rejected intimacy as a “deep private” , for Habermas it again reappeared as a beyond of private and public. To grasp the sign of our own times--and strongly so-- let us reiterate ( without recommending) how --recent researches (Sean Gaston, Derrida and Disinterest, London: Continuum, 2005) -- while tracing "the ongoing struggle in Locke, Shafetusbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Smith to find a framework to mediate between the public and private", advocate ( and we shall show --erroneously) the "secret" in Derrida ( and Levinas) to have been the tempting solution. Death ("language about death is nothing but the long history of a secret society, neither public nor private, semi -private, semi-public, on the border between the two”; the postcard ( “half-private half-public neither the one nor the other) and the telephone ( Ibid., pp.vii--8) are Derrida’s three examples of the secret meant to solve the liberal dichotomy. All this is --how ever-- to make a single point--all thinkers who have been pivotal to have found ( western) modernity and also those who were prophets of colonial modernities--could be seen to have been--not always in an informed manner though-- struggling to solve the public/private riddle with an answer of their own : this has been the story since 1767 - and runs amok till 2007. The public/private riddle is the strongest unresolved puzzle in the history of ideas. We are into deadly business therefore. Deadly and this is more significant--that they always ran up to alternative versions or weak synonyms of either the private or the public. While I ( being a humble and lonely apprentice of a social worker) propose the personal as the beyond of the private and public, a stream of discourses could be recalled which had proposed, in their desperate will to move beyond this liberal paradigm, alternative versions of the private and the public where the personal appeared as another version of the private. A ready instance is the slogan 'personal is political' which has been deployed by the feminists as an invitation for all of us to take oppressive private matters for public-political redressal. What was glossed over in this urgency is that the personal has been allowed to coincide with the private! My work argues the personal as a beyond of private/public binary and distinguishes it from the private vis-à-vis the public. Private is opposed to the public and resists public scrutiny and publicity -the stuff by which the public is made. Personal -the way we don’t know what a person is, what his/her real/final intentions are or whether somebody is genuinely aggrieved or not -makes the personal- largely unpredictable and indeterminate in the final instance and not necessarily opposed to the public. Private/public being legal juridical categories have specific indicators. Personal relationships-like love or friendship for this reason remain outside legislation. No wonder that this personal has been suppressed and its autonomy sacrificed to benefit political rigour. I make a thorough attempt at its recovery. But to be attentive to the reader's interest and not only elicit promises to be pursued in subsequent SARAI postings, let me give one instance of this recovery which at the same time would illuminate that what we've been talking through: Marx. Now, notwithstanding the will to go beyond private/public divide, it may rightly be asked, could Marx be used to endorse the personal that I'm proposing? Yes! And choosing only one instance -- love , we may document this flower unfolding in Marx. "Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc... if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. ...If you love without evoking love in return that is, if your loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a living person you do not make yourself a beloved one then your love is impotent -- a misfortune." ( Cited in Norman Geras, 'Seven types of Obloquy: Travesties of Marxism' in Socialist register, Eds. Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch & John Saville, pp.1-34, The Merlin Press : London, 1990, p.14.) Isn't this the personal in Marx -- which --I'm sure --he would willingly exclude from the domain of private life he wanted to abolish for history. I think the reader agrees. ( This part will form the substance of my next posting ). At this stage if anybody intends to know the precursors prefacing this study, his/her questions would be well placed. It is to the tradition of what goes by the name of personalism in phenomenology-- that my debt is the most; Max Scheler ( a dark disciple of Husserl and whom the latter distinctly disliked ) should be named as an inspiring instance here. But while transcendental phenomenology teaches us the irreducibility of the person to acts or agency, it rarely engages with other discourses to see the consequences this view entails. The theological gloss often attributed to personalism derives, I guess, from this not so unclear apathy. But the real precursors that the reader should reckon with are Hiralal Haldar, J.E. Mactaggart and Hermann Lotze. I found Lotze's reference first in Haldar's work and then in Mactaggart. I was confirmed in my belief by that brilliant sociologist Gilian Rose-who died of cancer recently. When Rose--with a sad irony-- wrote how Lotze is not read now but once was thought an equal to Kant and all sociological theories are basically neo-Kantian, I was sure-- I would be interested. It was Lotze's and Hiralal Haldar's work --their dusty tomes ---when I started reading them put into me a psycho-semiotic disorder I should say and everything instrumental to this work was put in place. Summing this up-- my observation for the reader could be : when you deal with 'forgotten' theorists, know you are touching a few forgotten theories too which had gone away with them and now present with them only. And this reading operation makes it sure that ‘the viewpoints we’ve missed, now find their ways through the trees’. Consider this as forming the theoretical background of this study. Now it is one thing to historically recover and theoretically delineate a category, and quite another thing to thematize and deploy it. Therefore in the third posting, having recuperated the personal as a suppressed narrative using historical and socio-theoretic tools, I’ll interrupt it by thematizing the category ( though not limiting it) through the cultural self understanding of particular communities and deploy it by using the registers of personalist social work. [Deriving its force from social and psychotherapeutic case work, personalist social work as a particular discourse of helping denied to be absorbed in either the public ( the governmental state and with those now fashionable but brutally mistaken notions of welfare as hegemony or welfare as surveillance) or the private ( resistance to publicity)]. This study will limit itself to exploring how the personal negotiates with the questions of publicity/mediation in the context of colonial Calcutta’s emerging civil society which was energized by its claims to have generated modernity --- a debate which continues even today. In other words, charting the personal as distinguished from the private and therefore not necessarily opposed to the public, contributes generically-and in this sense intrinsically to the debates located around the emergence or recession of the public domain in India. But rarely this can be extricated from its urban moorings and the problems of an emergent public mediation. And because this distinction is aided much by the cultural self understandings of particular communities ( in Bengali in the absence of separate words, byaktigoto stands for both personal and private), the paper would therefore try to chart the elicitation of the personal and personalist social work in terms of Calcutta’s 19th century urban history. Now because this is very much specific to the programme that occasions this posting, few more words are offered below. The examples of such a personal in this context may be seen in the instances of numerous autobiographies written in the 19th century by educated, city based Bengali housewives and whether these could be classified as private or personal memoirs for public reading would be a matter of arguable contention incited by the findings of the paper. Kolkata based Neo-Hegelian philosophers like Brajen Seal had hinted at the impossibility of “personal emotions”; Hiralal Harldar declared that “the personality is a colony”. The range of this inventory and the topic of mediation could be demonstrated by the fact that even in the early 20th century we find Rajsekhar Basu-the satire scientist-- talking about personal advertisements in the personal column ( “byaktigoto bigyapon”) appearing in public newspapers and giving the Calcutta public a taste of ‘scandalous’ novelty by disclosing private affairs ( "Ghochu! please come back, we'll get you married to your chosen girl."). Now, if these were some nominal examples of the personal, one origin of personalist social work may be seen in the competitive urge of the neo rich babus of Calcutta --who at the bathing ghats distributed huge alms to the poor and the kangalis ( vagrants and destitutes) in order to add an edge to their persona by earning a name as daanvir ( a hero of charity). Prankrishna Dutta’s 19th century classic (and now an urban history primer)---Kolkatar Purabritta documents the appearance of this new-custom with care. This competition resulted in debates on disorganized charity and colonial laws were promulgated for feeding the right number of kangalis. In this context-I would like to engage more with the activities of the Brahmos and other reformers in Calcutta-who while outwardly professing the well wrought ‘organized’ principles of Hegelian civil society - namely ‘objective’, ‘universal’, ‘intelligent helping’, were oblivious to the fate that their attempts had meekly surrendered to the temptations of the principle of personality. It is evident however--while failing the prospects of colonial civil society, still-the way they contributed to the development of the personalist genre of social service and the way they impacted upon both the private and the public, should be of unfailing and originary interest. [All the above will be episodically covered in serial postings.] But it may be hazarded and with justification that the interest must continue! Put more tersely, the question would be framed in these terms: the interpretive grid that I'm proposing --is it able to intervene in current debates of public/urban mediation ? In response to this provocative expectation let me catalogue that the study will ( apart from those theoretical and historical postings) accumulate texts that range from the Calcutta Neo-Hegelian Hiralal Haldar’s debate with Mactaggart ( in the 1890’s) on whether the absolute or a school club has a personality (even if “the personality is a colony”) to showing how the personal or personalist social work may engender the first systematic critique of Partha Chatterjee’s revisionist notion of new Political Society [ in the wake of ‘welfare’ of the population) -- whose examples he has drawn from contemporary Calcutta ( the Calcutta of the 80 and 90’s). --------------------------------- Here’s a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/54bbb7f9/attachment.html From renee75 at gmail.com Wed Mar 14 14:46:11 2007 From: renee75 at gmail.com (Renee Lulam) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:46:11 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First Post Message-ID: Hi all, We are Renee Lulam and Julius Basaiawmoit both based in and working out of Shillong. Jules specialises in sound for films and television and has just started up his own audio post-production studio. Renee moves from one research based project to another which includes research for the audio-visual media. Our project attempts to explore the common person's notion of democratic spaces and history through an exploration of the cosmopolitan and the indigenous in Urban cosmopolitan Shillong.Through audio recordings of testimonies from people of various backgrounds, we hope to garner their Oral Histories of the urban spaces in and around Shillong. The spaces referred to include both abstract and physical spaces. We have begun the preliminary process of meeting and talking with individuals, briefing them on the project and our intentions, a necessary and crucial stage before we can introduce any recording equipment into these conversations. The response has been really exciting, and we look forward to really getting into the process. We have also started collecting printed materials and articles to compare and contrast the testimonies with that of the established histories of Shillong. Cheers! Jules and Renee -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/a513ec5e/attachment.html From jp at kapoorlampshades.com Wed Mar 14 14:11:25 2007 From: jp at kapoorlampshades.com (Kapoor light life style) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:11:25 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Sealing in Delhi. Message-ID: Hi, I am Ankur Working on the Title Enforcement of Mixed Land use pattern and impact on retailers in delhi. I was unable to find an answer to question what kind of benefit will MCD get by doing sealing and also where I can find the Master plan 2021 of delhi so as to continue with my work. Thanks. Ankur -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/2e991847/attachment.html From shafiawani at gmail.com Wed Mar 14 15:07:22 2007 From: shafiawani at gmail.com (Shafia Wani) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 15:07:22 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First posting - IFS 2007 Message-ID: <41eea6080703140237i7daa1bffv1d7109c4d466ee1c@mail.gmail.com> Hello Everyone, Here is my first posting for the SARAI Independent Fellowship, titled 'The Aesthetic of Resistance and Women in Kashmir' First Posting Sarai Independent Fellowships. The valley of Kashmir was for long a synonym for the picturesque and the enchanting. Though much of this has been lost to the vagaries of time and the work of humans, Kashmir retains its touch with the enchanting, with its centuries old blend of Buddhism, Shaivaite Hinduism and an Islamic culture rooted in deep mysticism. Its pagoda like shrines often perched precariously on hillsides overlooking the valley with a panoptican and benevolent gaze. Rishi Vaer or Pir Vaer is how the Kashmiris refer to this land if they are asked to point to its quintessence. This phrase loosely translates as "abode of saints". This characterization has survived even the grim realities of life and death that has been a part of daily life in Kashmir since past seventeen years or so. Since 1988 the state of Jammu and Kashmir has been seeing a low intensity and violent conflict which has its antecedents in the historical events that occurred in the region after the partition of subcontinent into the two independent nation states of India and Pakistan. This conflict has taken a severe toll on life and property over the years. Around 35000 -80000 people have variously been estimated to have lost their lives in this conflict in the past over 16 years. The conflict of the past years has brought suffering upon almost everyone who lives in the valley and in many ways women have been at the receiving end of the violence with the loss of sons, brothers and husbands to bear. Apart from those who have been killed there is the continuing story of loss of those who are missing or have disappeared. Amidst this suffering there are many stories and narratives of fortitude and forbearance and a determination to not only overcome odds but also to make an effort to actively contribute to the construction of the self and the society. It is these narratives that this study seeks to engage with and plot across time and space A focus of the study will be women and the initiative taken/ fostered by women, whether as individuals or as members of institution /organizations that have sought to address the conditions arising out of this general circumstance of continued violence. In doing this, the study will traverse various individual /organizational initiatives that have been taken up by women and in turn have changed affected their own lives in various ways. One of these is an association that fights for the rights of those who have disappeared in the state during the past many years. The story of this association is also the story of the determination and fortitude of a group of women who have found strength in their own suffering. It is thus that the Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) was born. The Association of the Parents of the Disappeared Persons (APDP) a constituent of the Coalition of Civil Society (CCS) was formed in1994. It was formed primarily to offer legal assistance to those whose relatives had been subject to what is termed as enforced involuntary disappearance. Since the founding of the APDP, it has been taken under the aegis of an umbrella organization called the Coalition of Civil Society (CCS). The CCS is an umbrella organization of many civil society groups that seek to coordinate efforts to revitalize a battered civil society in Kashmir. The APDP in itself apart from the CCS is not a human rights organization it is simply an association of the persons of the people who have disappeared, in many cases in state custody and have not been heard of since by their relatives. The rule for membership is simple, any person whose relative, brother, father, son has disappeared can join the Association. The association is an independent entity and during its early years moved ahead with an independent agenda that was not affiliated to any political agenda. The APDP believes that 8000-10,000 people have been subject to enforced disappearances since the start of the unrest in 1988. The main objectives of the APDP therefore are to document cases of the disappeared and provision of legal aid for the relatives of those who have been subject to enforced disappearances. The general profile of the people who have disappeared is of the young male between the ages of 20 to 50. This is a group that perhaps tends to be seen as being the more likely to comprise the category of the militant or insurgent or simply combatant, hence their large representation in the list of those who have disappeared. In consequence to this an interesting fact emerges; that a significant number of the members of the association are mothers of those young men who have disappeared. It is the story of these women and their journey and fight for justice that will be explored within the scope of this fellowship. The patron of APDP Mr. Pervez Imroz was instrumental in shaping the discourse within the APDP. Mr Imroz is a prominent human rights advocate and activist of the state. It is through his effort that the association acquired the reputation of being a van guard group of people in the forefront of a fight for justice. A constant and persistent commitment for its agenda has meant that the APDP has acquired not only a reputation in the state but internationally as well. Over the past ten years the association has formed active and sustained interaction and links with other similar organizations and associations across the globe that share or have a similar agenda as the APDP. The Association has linked up with organizations in the Thailand; in Philippines and in Sri Lanka and is a founding member of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD). Another parallel initiative that this study seeks to engage with is the Kashmiri Women's Initiative for Peace and Development (KWIPD); this is an associate organization that works under the broad umbrella of the CCS. In 2000 a group of students from the Kashmir University launched the KWIPD. It was formed in great part as a result of the contribution and initiative of a young lady named Asiya Jeelani who along with a group of university students started an initiative that started out with the effort to 'create a space for the betterment of society in general and women in particular'. This effort emphasized the self-reliance of women and fittingly was started and managed largely by women with an active support and facilitation of the CCS. The members of the KWIPD represented a wide range from teachers to doctors, academics, and journalist to students. The KWIPD had the avowed mandate of fighting for he rights of women by first raising the awareness of these rights and then to produce efforts at organizing women to claim these rights. To provide a voice to the issues that were central to this initiative KWIPD launched a quarterly newsletter " Voices Unheard". Aasiya Jeelani who had ably provided the initial impetus to the KWIPD died tragically in the April of 2004 at Chandigam in the frontier district of Kupwara when the vehicle carrying her and a few others hit an explosive device. Aasiya and a team from the CCS were going as a part of an election monitoring team to this frontier area. Since then KWIPD went on to become an effective forum that sought to engage young women in areas that offer the opportunity to raise their concern as also offering them opportunities to engage with issues of their concern in various national and international fora. In this manner this study will seek to include certain other narratives of women who by dint of their determination have changed not only their own lives but also the lives of others in a productive and positive manner. This has been accomplished against great odds in a context that is volatile and adverse in many a way. These accomplishments have been possible in great part because the cultural ethos of this place, though generally referred to as patr iarchal and traditional is one that is appreciative and positive towards the active and productive agency that women are capable of. This then will form the central theme and the connecting thread that will bring together these diverse individuals and initiatives into a narrative that is local and traditional and yet global and modern. This will enables us as well, to elaborate and understand a position in which tradition and modernity are not necessarily contraries. Neither so the local and the global. It is then, towards a contextual and organic understanding of these current initiatives and the lives they touch that the focus of this study tends to. In doing so certain other sub themes that will necessarily emerge as the study progresses in scope will also be looked into. Current engagements: With the primary actors and organizations, collecting primary materials and building rapport with actors concerned. Regards, Shafia Wani. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/611093b5/attachment.html From ravig64 at gmail.com Wed Mar 14 14:16:11 2007 From: ravig64 at gmail.com (ravi agarwal) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:16:11 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Pl Sign on and HELP Save a Tree Message-ID: <0F19CA34E8F0400BBBD91E1CBE4FD1D3@ToxicsLink.local> Aplogies for Cross Postings: Dear all Please read and hopefully sign the petition to the Honble Chief Minister of Delhi to not cut trees in Delhi and to find alternative methods of solving the traffic problems. The petition is also as text below. Signing on: 1. You may click online on http://www.gopetition.com/online/11474.html. Please put your name/contact and profession (in the comments field) OR 2. Send me your name/contact / profession by email and I will add it on. Your action may help to save a few beautiful and glorious trees from the immenent axe they are facing over the next few days! Best ravi ================================================================================ Save Delhi's Trees, Do Not Sacrifice this heritage for transport Open Appeal to the Hon'ble Chief Minister of Delhi Delhi without Roadside and Colony Trees is Unacceptable to its Citizens March 12, 2007 Dear Hon'ble Chief Minister As citizens of Delhi who have a long-term stake in the future of this city, we are writing to you to help save Delhi's green heritage - its age-old trees that give the city its character and identity. Delhi's famed green lungs, the hundreds of thousands of trees that line the city's roads, are today under brutal assault. Old trees, flowering trees, trees which provide shade to walkers and hawkers, children and adults, which protect the residents of colonies from noisy roads and polluting vehicles, trees which bloom in glorious colours in winter, summer, autumn and spring, which bring birds and their nests to our neighbourhoods, are being cut and hacked for transport corridors. People find that the trees they have grown up with have suddenly vanished one fine morning. 'Someone' is making decisions about our neighbourhoods, but those who live in those neighbourhoods are neither consulted about those decisions, nor informed about them. In recent months thousands of healthy trees have been cut or dug out in the name of traffic de-congestion and projects such as the Metro and the High Bus Capacity Corridor. But this is not just another story of urbanization in conflict with the environment. It is also the story of the loss of voice that people feel - people who have called this city their home for generations. It is a brute reminder of the disenfranchising and top-down way that policy is being implemented by those at the helm. More specifically: 1.. Delhi's entire landscape is changing at a mad pace and on an unprecedented scale with multiple types of constructions About 30,000 trees have already been cut for Metro Phase-I, National Highway Project, High Capacity Bus Service (HCBS), flyovers, underpasses, subways, and general road widening.The Metro has three more phases and the HCBS five more routes planned. For the HCBS, some 2500 trees will be removed in phase one alone, and many more in the subsequent five phases 1.. By the time the 2010 Commonwealth Games start, a significant part of Delhi's green cover will have disappeared from its current locations, and many thousand trees would have died. 2.. The city's parks are being converted into manicured spaces with no space for birds and other life forms. Some parks have been converted into tree-less parking lots. 3.. In Sunder Nursery alone the city will lose 1000 trees if the planned high-speed tunnel is constructed. The nursery is home to 114 tree species, many found nowhere else in Delhi. Trees are not an "add on" to the city's design. They are intrinsic to Delhi's very identity and history. They are our children's heritage. They provide nesting spaces for diverse bird life including black kites which perform critical functions earlier performed by vultures that have now disappeared. The house sparrow is also no longer to be seen. What will Delhi be without birds and birdsongs? Indeed, trees should be treated like the elderly in families - they need to be cherished and placed at the centre of all designs for the city. In fact many old trees need to be given a heritage status since they are irreplaceable, no matter how many new trees may be planted in lieu. Yet in the blind march of so-called progress, trees are being uprooted, shunted out, old species allowed to die, replaced at best by decorative fast growing varieties or not at all. Many areas where the trees are being cut resemble a war zone with hundreds of trees on any stretch of road being tagged for death. The people living in these areas have been caught unawares and are in a state of shock. Suddenly, the trees that they and their children have lived with for decades are disappearing. Shouldn't they be consulted before their green cover is destroyed? Procedurally, an infrastructure development project needs an environment impact assessment. This should involve an assessment of all environmental costs, including the number of trees to be cut for the project. Was this done for the Metro, or the HCBS, or other ongoing and proposed transport corridors? If so, these assessments need to be made public. As citizens we would also like to ask: where trees were cut, was compensatory afforestation done? If so how many trees were planted, of what species, at what locations? What was their survival rate? We believe afforestation done in some remote corner of the city cannot substitute for the loss of tree cover in the locations where people live. Were the residents compensated when the trees were cut? Undeniably we need some solution for all those who commute long distances, including many of us. But we believe this does not have to be at the cost of these trees. We need more sane, less environmentally costly solutions. We would welcome alternatives which could accommodate the other legitimate needs of the city along with maintaining its tree lines. We the citizens of Delhi, strongly object to the mindless cutting of trees without due consultation or consideration. We object not only on environmental grounds but also because trees define Delhi's heritage, its historic identity, and our children's common future. In a constructive spirit we would like to help find solutions. But these solutions need to fit the context and location. They cannot be in terms of one-solution-fits-all, decided unilaterally and imposed top-down. We urge the government to: a) Bring to an immediate halt all tree felling in the name of progress and development. Stop all felling of trees for the first HCBS corridor, from Ambedkar Stadium (Delhi Gate) to Ambedkar Nagar, till a transparent and participatory review taking on board the concerns raised in this letter takes place. b) Propose alternatives that marry the city's legitimate needs with the preservation of trees. c) Set in place consultation mechanisms which involve local residents, planners, and other concerned citizens, so that any tree cutting is subject to prior review. d) Make a full disclosure of the trees which have been cut over the past three years, the locations of compensatory afforestation, their species, and their year-wise survival rate. e) Make a full disclosure of the trees slated to be cut now, the location specific justification for this for any transport corridor or road widening, and the efforts planned to avoid the cutting. f) Have clear guidelines for leaving adequate space around trees to allow them to breathe and take in rain, where new roads are built. g) Avoid the cutting of roadside and colony trees for other utilities in the city, and ensure that such plans accommodate and not destroy existing trees h) Ensure that all future infrastructure development integrates existing trees, and more generally enhances Delhi's greenery and natural topography. Designs must be also friendly for pedestrians, cyclists and children, the disabled and the elderly. i) Ensure accountable and transparent processes in designing and executing projects like the Metro, HCBS, flyovers, etc. Citizen participation must be integrated into the decision-making process from the project's inception. Signed by the Citizens of Delhi and by "Trees for Delhi" (a network of 50 Delhi-based NGOs and citizens) New Delhi -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/211ed9ce/attachment.html From geert at desk.nl Wed Mar 14 17:01:49 2007 From: geert at desk.nl (geert lovink) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:31:49 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] first posting Message-ID: <8dbcddd2d3756e733557d865244eea06@desk.nl> Dear Sarai fellows, maybe Monica Narula has already explained this to you, if not I'll do it again. It would be useful for the many subscribers (1000-2000?) if you could stop naming your posting first post, second post etc. and give your story a proper title in the subject line. This is a basic rule in list cultures. In this way readers can quickly get an idea what the topic of the posting is all about. It's also good to repeat the title and sub title in the body of the email. Also it is most helpful for readers if you create paragraphs and put in hard breaks (empty lines) every now and then. Your stories are fascinating and deserve a wide readership. There is one trick if you're not sure how your posting will look like: send it first to yourself and then copy-paste it again into your mail reader and put in some more white (or take out the double lines, in case you've copy-pasted the text out of a Word document). Yours, Geert Lovink From sbreitsameter at snafu.de Wed Mar 14 19:01:51 2007 From: sbreitsameter at snafu.de (sbreitsameter at snafu.de) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:31:51 GMT Subject: [Reader-list] Indian politician and podcasting Message-ID: Hello, which Indian (and/or Pakistani) politicians has a podcast on his or her website where he or she talks in her own voice? If yes, when did it start first? Thanks for your hints! Herzlich Sabine Breitsameter From zubinpastakia at gmail.com Wed Mar 14 20:05:59 2007 From: zubinpastakia at gmail.com (Zubin Pastakia) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:05:59 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Photographic Study of Bombay's Cinema Halls Message-ID: <379173b10703140735h3f3ccf9fr46be92597c888c94@mail.gmail.com> Hi All, I am a freelance photographer living in Bombay. I also have worked in various capacities from pre to post-production in documentary films and advertisements. My project, "A Photographic Study of Bombay's Cinema Halls as a Cultural Experience of Space" seeks to photographically examine the cultural experience of different types of cinema halls in Bombay city. In part, this is a semiological meditation on different urban spaces. The photographs will illuminate the inherent sign-language in the architecture, posters and other signage, hall seats, film reels, tickets, toilets, snack counters, workers' uniforms, patron's clothing, gender break-up etc. of these spaces. More importantly, this is an attempt to illustrate the subjective nature of the film-going experience. From the designer shop - to cinema hall - to chain restaurant mall/multiplex experience, to the still-standing single-screen bastions of the art-deco era, to the musty largely male-dominated "c-grade" halls, the photographs will evoke the unique experience of these different spaces. By examining these spaces photographically, the project aims to provide a rich and detailed socio-visual context to the ever-changing urban cinematic experience -- thus situating film texts within various cultural spaces. The intention is to eventually produce a monograph on Bombay's cinema halls as well as to exhibit the photographs publicly. Recent Activity: I have begun photographing New Empire opposite C.S.T station, Palace Talkies near Byculla station,and Moti Talkies, which is off Falkland Rd. So far my pictures have been a mix of worker portraits and spaces. At this early stage in the project, I would like to know if there are any SARAI people with any connections to any cinema hall owners/managers etc. Alternatively, if someone has already conducted research on any of Bombay's cinema halls, it would be nice to hear your experiences and maybe even get some contacts that may help me gain access to halls you have visited. Best, Zubin From shuddha at sarai.net Thu Mar 15 01:12:10 2007 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:12:10 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] This is Not Fusion: Music by Amit Chaudhuri Message-ID: <45F85012.4090101@sarai.net> Dear All, People who enjoy music and literaturem, or both, might find this of interest. Today (Thursday, 15th March) at 8:00 pm, India Habitat Centre, Auditorium regards Shuddha ------------------------------ This Is Not Fusion: Amit Chaudhuri Experimental Vocal Music Thursday, 15th March, 8:00 pm, Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre Lodhi Road A concert of this internationally acclaimed musical experiment will take place at the Stein Theatre, India Habitat Centre, at 8 pm on 15th March, when Amit Chaudhuri will also be in conversation with Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The occasion also marks the release the Times Music CD. "Chaudhuri's 'non-fusion' music creates a striking metaphor for the urban sensibility." Ivan Hewett, Daily Telegraph, London "Chaudhuri is a wonderful singer-- without any qualification such as 'considering his distinction as a writer.' There is a sense of calm, a simplicity, an inwardness to his singing which deeply appeals to me." Vikram Seth "Sublime music...' Wall Street Journal, Asia "Universally appealing... both the melodies and the lyrics are slyly parodic." Time Out Bombay This Is Not Fusion is a project in experimental music conceptualised by Amit Chaudhuri, bringing together the raga with jazz, rock, and the blues. Besides open, experimental structures, it also has an increasing number of songs composed by Chaudhuri in its repertoire. After its huge and acclaimed opening at the Gyan Manch, Calcutta on 15 January 2005, when both the audience and critics applauded its conceptual and musical originality, it travelled to Delhi for the 'Building Bridges: 60 Years of the UN' concerts. Then, to great acclaim, it went to Berlin, the theatreschauspiele at Frankfurt, the Lille 3000 Festival in France, the School of Music, Norwich, the British Museum, London, and to the Palais de Bozar in Brussels. Ivan Hewett, one of Britain's foremost music critics, said in the Daily Telegraph, London, 'Chaudhuri's 'non-fusion' music creates a striking metaphor for the urban sensibility, which today is increasingly the condition of everybody, even those who stay at home.' Amit Chaudhuri is one of India's leading writers and novelists. He has won major awards in Britain, the US, and India for his fiction, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Sahitya Akademi Award. His work is translated into several languages. He's been Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, Leverhulme Fellow at Cambridge, Visiting Professor at Columbia University, Samuel Fischer Guest Professor at Freie University, Berlin, and now spends part of the year at the University of East Anglia as Professor of Contemporary Literature. He is also an acclaimed vocalist in the Hindustani classical tradition who has performed all over the world, with two HMV recordings to his credit, one of which has just been released on CD by HMV. _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From conference at responsenet.org Wed Mar 14 12:10:27 2007 From: conference at responsenet.org (Conferences Responsenet) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:10:27 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Registration Call For Conference on Facilitation of Supply Chains for Disaster Management, March 19th, New Delhi Message-ID: <0042f64f6c70a30263081dd200102b73@responsenet.org> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/02dd848a/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From bangali_mnb at yahoo.com Wed Mar 14 18:56:27 2007 From: bangali_mnb at yahoo.com (bangali_ mnb) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:26:27 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] First Posting, Mithun Narayan Bose, I-Fellow, Kolkata Message-ID: <496389.94167.qm@web35709.mail.mud.yahoo.com> First Posting Mithun Narayan Bose, I-Fellow,Kolkata: Folklorists usually venture towards the remotest end of this planet to do their research, but they often forget the living and tangible existence of urban folklore in our day-to-day city-life. Hence, this field of culture mapping is yet to be properly scaled down, academically. In the course of history, it has been seen that, the city and the urban space is constantly devouring up the rural life, space and culture and folklore is such an everlasting process that it had adapted the changing of time and the shift in lifestyle. That is why, the term ‘Urban Folklore’ has been coined and presently it is prominent among the different branches of urban studies. The pictures drawn on the exterior part of the public transport (e.g., bus, truck, matador van, auto rickshaw etc.) are such instances that can be taken as unexplored examples of Urban Folk Art. The pictures drawn mainly on the backside of a cycle rickshaw and its other decorations are also included in this genre. Unlike the rickshaws of Allahabad or Dhaka, the rickshaws of Calcutta have certain urban features in the form and content of the pictures depicted on it. The themes and motifs are less traditional, the art form is more urban, and values and significance are more contemporary. Thus, the pictures represent the expectations, ambitions, collective memories and realizations of the rickshaw-dwellers. Henceforth, these pictures can be taken as a fine example of Urban Folk Art, which is inserting its roots into the tradition on one hand, and, is open to grab the newer dimensions as it come to these people naturally in course of time on the other hand and this two-faced process is being continued simultaneously. Another important feature of this art form is its dual nature in which the individuality of a rickshaw-dweller can be traced through the pictures, as well as his identity of being a part of a particular community. That is why; I was compelled to document this unique art form as an inquisitive researcher. I am grateful to Sarai for giving me a chance to make my dream true. I am Mithun Narayn Bose, a language-teacher from a Calcutta-school. I am interested in Poetry, Visual Arts and Urban Studies, particularly, in Urban Folk Art. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/49544206/attachment.html From dwaibanerjee at gmail.com Wed Mar 14 19:08:45 2007 From: dwaibanerjee at gmail.com (Dwai Banerjee) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:08:45 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] IFS 2007 Post - Cryptography Message-ID: <8e8b33ba0703140638t7c09dc8lb0c60dd7b36a2b7c@mail.gmail.com> Hi, After reading Geert Lovink's post, I went through some of the 'first posts' and realised that all sent from yahoo servers for some mysterious reason had their pagination and formatting removed. Posts sent from Gmail servers survive this mutation. So I'm re-sending mine from a gmail account in the hope that it will now be readable, and urge fellow IFS posters to do the same from now on. Thanks, Dwai *Cryptography, Symbolic Languages and the Universal/Local in Science * I want to look at cryptography as a technological artefact; I want to also explore it as a metaphor to understand symbolic languages and the construction of the universal and the local in science. This will be done in three stages. The first will involve understanding mathematics as a symbolic language. I will begin to see it as a semiotic system and understand what kind of referential relationship it shares with the material. This will be done with specific emphasis on symbolic algebra and its development around the 16th century by cryptographers and cryptanalysts. This development was to have profound implications for cryptography specifically, and continues to be foundational for modern science and mathematics up to today. Specifically here, I will look at two different styles of cryptography employed by two French mathematicians – Blaise Vigenere and Francois Viete. The former devalued code-breaking, denied systems and structure while the latter developed symbolic algebra to provide universal and rule-bound decryption for all kinds of ciphers. What interest me here are the different cosmologies that the two worked within. For Vigenere, the world was not meant to be deciphered, essentially hidden by the will of God and there were no universal answers that science could base itself on. For Viete the universal answer was the key, and the method was that of a new kind of mathematical semiotics: symbolic algebra. Before entering the Vigenere and Viete debate however, it is clear that one will have to review the literature on the philosophy of mathematics and understand what kind of notions of referentiality between the system of mathematics and the material world have been imagined historically. The second stage will be to follow the debate on the search of universal languages and a new understanding of the world that was inaugurated through the 16-18th centuries by scientists and thinkers such as Bacon, Lull, Wilkins, Liebniz and Descartes. Sharing a relationship with both theology and science, the quest for universal languages and keys carries on from the previous chapter in thinking of the world of nature as an encrypted book meant to be decoded by scientists (Bacon). The interesting and rewarding thing here would be to be able to make a correspondence between the semiotic characteristic of mathematics (its notions of referentiality) and link it to this larger thinking about science as the universal systematic answer to all questions of the world that we live in. One will imagine that system-making of this kind – one that posits a unitary universal involves a break from context of some kind. One will also ask questions of the notions of singularity and plurality and see how these debates were negotiated around the quest for universal scientific languages. These debates are also the precursor to modern computing – and that will also be examined in this section. The third stage will take a slightly different tack and explore the literature on secrecy and secrets in science. With its roots in religion, magic and cryptography through the centuries, one will try and examine the notion of the secret and the lie in science and see what implications this has for the first two sections (that dealt with the universal). In Science, does this constitute a local of some kind? Is modern day scientific thinking about chaos and disorder some kind of movement away from previous centuries of universalism? In a sense, this will be the conclusion of thinking about cryptography – interestingly so because quantum theory is widely heralded as the new cryptographic paradigm. I do all this because I am interested in the postcolonial moment of science studies. By this I mean that I hope to spatialise and understand scientific practice and understand how it creates its own economy of universality and locality. Universality and locality in science have been understood in several ways, I hope to find a newer and perhaps more interesting theoretical entry into the same game. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/7fdd2d22/attachment.html From billy0602 at yahoo.com Thu Mar 15 11:23:37 2007 From: billy0602 at yahoo.com (kj) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:53:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] ViBGYOR Film Festival: call for entries Message-ID: <323109.40283.qm@web55603.mail.re4.yahoo.com> ----- Forwarded Message ---- ViBGYOR International Film Festival 2007 -Celebrating Identities and Diversity Thrissur, Kerala May 10-13 CALL FOR ENTRIES Dear Friends, ViBGYOR Film Festival celebrates the vagaries of identity and the richness of its embodied diversity in the festival of short and documentary films held every year in Thrissur, Kerala. The Second Edition of ViBGYOR will be held from 10th to 13th of May 2007. The four-day Film festival invests not just in the banquet of films of value and sense but strive to make the event a rich visual and intellectual experience in interfacing with filmmakers, activists, peoples’ movement leaders and academicians from as divergent streams of life and activities. The marked difference from the last year is the absence of competition section. Instead, we are introducing the 'Festival to the People', creating an additional venue in a rural area next to Thrissur town, where screenings and interaction with the filmmakers will be interspersed. ViBGYOR Package will have seven themes like `Indigenous People', `Dalit Reality', `Gender & Sexuality', `Fundamentalism v/s Diversity', `Nation State', `Globalization' and Country/Region focus. Seven films each will be selected for each catagory. `Earth’ will be the theme for the Focus of the Year 2007. The festival will start with a national conference on the same theme. Apart from the above two packages, there will be Short Fiction, Music Videos, Animations and Spots, a `Kerala Spectrum’ and as usual the Retrospectives. The other features include Open Forum every day, a film market etc. We invite short and documentary films, music videos, animations and spots from around the world for screening at ViBGYOR 2007 in the categories mentioned above and works from Kerala for the `Kerala Spectrum’. There will be a selection process to include films in appropriate themes as per available screening time. Films made in 2005 and 2006 can participate. We also invite filmmakers, activists and film lovers from every corner of the world to participate in this celebration of ideas, art, struggles and dreams. ViBGYOR-2007 is organized by Chetana Media Institute (Thrissur) along with Nottam(Cochin), GAIA (Thrissur), Abhivyakti (Nasik), Visual search (Bangalore) and Marupakkam (Madurai), with the support of Governmental and Non-Governmental institutions. Contact us at vibgyorfest at gmail.com for further details. K.P. Sasi Fr. Benny Benedict K.C.Santhosh Kumar Festival Director Executive Director Joint Executive Director ____________________________________________________________________________________ The fish are biting. Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing. http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/sponsoredsearch_v2.php _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From ysaeed7 at yahoo.com Wed Mar 14 19:44:26 2007 From: ysaeed7 at yahoo.com (Yousuf) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:14:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] Indian politician and podcasting In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20070314141426.15263.qmail@web51404.mail.re2.yahoo.com> I don't know if you would call it a podcast, but 3-4 years ago when the Bharatiya Janata Party was in power in India, their website (www.bjp.org) included an audio file where the then prime minister Atal Bihar Vajpayee spoke to the nation in Hindi about what great things his party has done and how they deserve to be voted back to power. Incidentally, the same audio speach was also broadcast to millions of helpless cell-phone owners in India, which started as "Namaskar, mein Atal Bihar Vajpayee bol raha hoon..." (greetings, this is ABV speaking...). In fact these websites of the political parties are bound to have some audio and videos even now. Yousuf sbreitsameter at snafu.de wrote: Hello, which Indian (and/or Pakistani) politicians has a podcast on his or her website where he or she talks in her own voice? If yes, when did it start first? Thanks for your hints! Herzlich Sabine Breitsameter _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: --------------------------------- No need to miss a message. Get email on-the-go with Yahoo! Mail for Mobile. Get started. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/cc94b681/attachment.html From mail at shivamvij.com Wed Mar 14 19:07:49 2007 From: mail at shivamvij.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:07:49 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Indian politician and podcasting In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9c06aab30703140637v26cd05d6w3e8283b6d2304fb6@mail.gmail.com> There is no Indian politician with a podcast online. Very few Indian podcasts online for that matter! On 3/14/07, sbreitsameter at snafu.de wrote: > > Hello, > > which Indian (and/or Pakistani) politicians has a podcast on his or her > website where he or she talks in her own voice? If yes, when did it start > first? > > Thanks for your hints! > > Herzlich > Sabine > Breitsameter > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> -- sms Tehelka to 3636 http://www.shivamvij.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/2668b84c/attachment.html From tk259704 at ohio.edu Wed Mar 14 23:03:13 2007 From: tk259704 at ohio.edu (Tabassum Khan) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:33:13 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] independent fellowship-proposal Message-ID: This is in response to a proposal for the Independent Fellowship Proposal posted by Khadeeja and Ambarien. I am a Phd student at Ohio University and I am very keen to meet with these 2 young women. I think they have an excellent study idea and I would like to collaborate them. I just came across this proposal on the net. The page gives me no indication as to when this proposal was posted or if it has been funded by your organisation. I would appreciate it if someone at the organisation would communicate to me about this. Yours truly, Tabassum Ruhi Khan From ysikand at gmail.com Thu Mar 15 11:41:45 2007 From: ysikand at gmail.com (Yogi Sikand) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:41:45 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First Posting: From Naseem ur-Rahman and Yoginder Sikand Message-ID: <48097acc0703142311h1464312bw5b0073a8713e5670@mail.gmail.com> *Hello All!* *Our project is titled: "The Shaping of Muslim Identities and the Role of Muslim Publishing Houses: The Delhi Case ". This is our first posting. * Look forward to your suggestions! * * *–Naseem ur Rahman and Yoginder Sikand* Delhi is the single largest centre of the Muslim publishing industry in India. A large number of Muslim publishing houses are located in Delhi. Most of these are based in the Muslim-dominated parts of Old Delhi and in Basti Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya and Okhla in New Delhi. Books published by these publishing houses are found in Muslim bookshops all over India and even abroad. Several of these publishing houses are leading exporters of Islamic books in a range of languages, including Urdu, Arabic and English. Our project looks at the role that these publishing houses play in shaping Muslim identities in contemporary India. It also examines their role in sustaining, nurturing and further developing the tradition of Islamic learning, focusing particularly on how this tradition comes to be expressed in diverse ways, reflecting sectarian, political and other differences. Most of these publishing houses produce literature geared essentially to a Muslim, Urdu-reading public. The vast majority of these publishing houses specialize in producing literature on Islamic themes, including rituals, beliefs ('*aqaid*) and jurisprudential issues (*fiqh*). This reflects both the marginalisation of Urdu and Muslims in post-1947 India as well as the relegation of Urdu to the status of an almost exclusively 'Muslim' language, principally as a result of discriminatory state policies, market forces as well as the politics of communalism. The overwhelming focus of the literary production of these publishing houses on specifically religious themes in Urdu also reflects the fact that Urdu scholarship has, as a result of whole host of factors, been relegated to the portals of the *madrasa*s. This represents what could be called a radical 'de-secularisation' of Urdu in post-1947 India, primarily as a result of discriminatory state policy and the rapid abandonment of Urdu by non-Muslims, because of which Urdu is now generally associated as a language of the *madrasa*s. Few *madrasa*s teach anything other than specifically Islamic 'religious' subjects beyond a certain basic level. Consequently, '*ulama*, Islamic clerics trained in the *madrasa*s, are not generally equipped to write on such themes. A large proportion of the authors whose works are published by the Delhi-based Muslim publishing houses are '*ulama* or *madrasa* graduates. The overwhelming focus of these publishing houses on specifically Islamic issues is thus, in part, a reflection of the social background of a majority of the authors whose works they publish. In addition to specifically Islamic religious themes, many Delhi-based Muslim publishing houses also produce texts about Muslim historical personages, including the Prophet Muhammad, his companions (*sahaba*), Muslim scholars ('*ulama*), rulers, Sufi mystics and reformers, as well as various Muslim and Islamic movements. This again reflects the fact that in post-1947 India Urdu has come to be treated by the state and society as a specifically Muslim language, something that was not the case in pre-Partition India. The Islamic and Muslim focus of the publications of these houses, in turn, reflects the role of the Muslim publishing industry in shaping notions of what it means to be Muslim in contemporary India as well as providing normative guidelines for Muslim readers to sustain their Islamic faith and identity in the specific context of minority-ness that they are placed in. Exploring this aspect is another crucial component of our project. The Muslim identity as well as the Islamic religious tradition that these publishing houses seek to construct, sustain and promote is, however, not homogenous or internally undifferentiated. There are a number of different schools of thought (*maktab-i fikr*), sect (*maslak*) and jurisprudence (* fiqh*, *mazhab*) among the Indian Muslims and most of them have their own particular publishing houses. Most Indian Muslims are Sunnis and several publishing houses that are associated in some way or the other with each of the major Sunni groups (Ahl-i Hadith, Deobandis, Barelvis, Jamaat-i Islami etc.) are located in Delhi. In the Shia case, although there are different groups (Ithna Ashari, Mustalia Ismaili and Nizari Ismaili), only the Ithna Asharis have a few publishing houses in Delhi. In this context, these publishing houses play an important role in sustaining internal, particularly sectarian, differences among Muslims. This is another important aspect that we wish to study. Few Muslim publishing houses have produced any sort of social science literature on empirical issues related to Muslim communities in contemporary India. These issues are generally referred to only obliquely, most often in the context of Islam and Islamic injunctions. Understanding why this is so is one of our crucial research questions. How do demand and supply factors relate to this phenomenon is something that we seek to understand through in-depth interviews with the owners of the publishing houses. A final aspect of our project is the role that some Muslim publishing houses are now seeking to play to engage with a host of issues that Muslims, not just in India but elsewhere, too, are today faced with, such as the need to offer creative responses to the challenges of religious pluralism and secularism, demands for social and economic justice, the phenomenon of religious radicalism and the growing influence of Islamophobic discourses and so on. We would seek to examine the extent and the efficacy or otherwise of these efforts. ============================================================ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070315/94aed44a/attachment.html From info at pavilionmagazine.org Wed Mar 14 21:40:04 2007 From: info at pavilionmagazine.org (PAVILION [contemporary art & culture magazine]) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:10:04 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Breakfast At Pavilion Message-ID: BREAKFAST AT PAVILION (A PROJECT INITIATED BY PAVILION MAGAZINE IN THE FRAME OF BUCHAREST BIENNALE) http://blogs.pavilionmagazine.org WHAT`S BREAKFAST The breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Breakfast means reading the newspapers. What if we could get not just mere information but also reactions to those events, could we react ourselves and would we have the opportunity to find new means of interference-different to the usual ones? BREAKFAST seeks to transcend the traditional borders between research, education and presentation and looks for new ways of expression and communication trying to find new answers to some old questions related to politics, aesthetics and content and to reevaluate the conventions of everyday life. Considering all these, BREAKFAST investigates subjects like rhetoric, populism, technology, humanism, politics, relativism, solidarity, post colonialism or inclusion by means of curatorial, artistic and educational projects. BREAKFAST is a platform of debates on contemporary issues that involves proposals, debates, analyses of the contemporary art scene and the international context in which it operates, almost like analytic-(re)productive foucaultian dublet. The project encourages communication, consulting and different forms of collaboration between artists, curators and theoreticians involved in this process by exchanging knowledge and practices about the production of knowledge. INSTRUMENTS BREAKFAST (online) is a series of blogs kept by theoreticians, political analysts, anthropologists, artists and curators. BREAKFAST online series explores on a theoretical level the political and social mission of artistic practice with its necessity of being contextualized. The blogs are written in English or Romanian depending on each participant`s option. The project has also a live form that includes public debates and conferences on the same issues within social political and aesthetic discourses as discussed online. The bloggers The first bloggers involved in BREAKFAST are Catalin Avramescu (Professor of Political Science, journalist and political analist), Eugen Radescu (theoretician, curator and co-director of Bucharest Biennale), Felix Vogel (theoretician and curator) and Razvan Ion (theoretician, artist and co-editor of PAVILION magazine). PAVILION magazine is developing its own blog as an informative platform/structure. The project director of BREAKFAST is Andreea Manolache and the online version is technical designed by Alexandru Enachioaie (alexandru.e at gmail.com)453F,453F,453F.4C46,4C46,4C46 Blogs available at http://blogs.pavilionmagazine.org WHAT IS PAVILION PAVILION is an international contemporary art& culture magazine whose name alludes to the relative temporary structure of contemporary art. PAVILION`s content varies from articles to essays, interviews and projects` presentations. It is not just a descriptive magazine, its mission is to intervene in cultural and socio-political life. PAVILION is the producer of BUCHAREST BIENNALE. www.bucharestbiennale.org www.pavilionmagazine.org ______ PAVILION, BUCHAREST BIENNALE & BREAKFAST are projects of artphoto asc. office: +4 031 103 4131 mobile: +4 0726 789 426 | 0723 033 330 ym: artphotoro skype: artphotoro address: PO Box 26-0390 Bucharest 14800 Romania -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/6e8d53ae/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From shuddha at sarai.net Thu Mar 15 14:04:32 2007 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:04:32 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram Message-ID: <45F90518.8010900@sarai.net> Dear Friends, The incident of the brutal armed police attack in order to 're-take' Nandigram in West Bengal yesterday is yet another milestone in the relationship between police and people in that state. According to newspaper reports, 14 people have died and more than 75 people have been injured in yesterday's violence. The injured include around 12 policemen. However, estimates of the dead and the injured vary. A brief and incomplete history of police violence in West Bengal would have to include police attacks on agitating Calcutta tram workers in 1954, on the general population during the food riots of 1954, on striking school teachers in 1954-56, on protesting students on August 31, 1959, which resulted in the death of 80 students, on 2nd September 1959, when several others were killed (bringing the August-September 1959, total of deaths up to 102). Again, in 1966, students agitating on issues to do with the rising prices of essential commodities were brutally repressed by police action, leading to the death of several young people. In all these conflicts, it was very often militants and activists belonging to the Communist Parties, and since 1965, the CPI (M) that faced police violence. However, with the election of the first (and then the second) United Front ministries (1967-69) (which included the CPI and the CPI(M) , the pattern of victims and patrons of violence had to undergo a subtle shift. And while the CPI (M) did continue to enjoy a degree of respect for having borne the brunt of police violence through successive erstwhile Congress administrations, it became equally clear that the party was not by any means hesitant to use the repressive machinery of the state to further its own ends. This became abundantly clear when, in the wake of the Naxalbari uprising, the then home minister Jyoti Basu (later to be Chief Minister of West Bengal), sanctioned the use of CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) to quell dissident peasant activists from what had once been his own party in North Bengal. Hence, the popular slogan of the late 1960s "Jyoti Babu doley, CRP er koley" (Jyoti Babu Swings in the Lap of the CRP) After the fall of the United Front government and the Congress's return to power police terror gripped West Bengal in the wake of the Naxalbari movement, and the state terror unleashed in Calcutta and several districts of West Bengal by the Siddhartha Shankar Ray led Congress ministry left several hundreds dead, and imprisoned. Many people disappeared. Since the CPI (M) dominated Left Front government came to power in 1977, clashes within the left front, within the CPI(M) and with an array of electoral and extra-parliamentary opponents (on the left and the right) as well as confrontations with ordinary people have left many more dead in West Bengal. Violence has been routinely used by the CITU, the CPI(M)'s trade union to enforce its writ in Industrial areas. When the suffocating tactics of consensus have failed, the Left Front government has routinely used official as well as unofficial forms of violence. This is a part of everyday life in West Bengal, and anyone with any links to the state is very well aware of the micro-managerial stranglehold that zonal, block and para committees of the CPI (M) have on most aspects of life in that state. The current conflict in Nandigram, which pits well armed police and CPI (M) cadre, acting directly in the interests of Capital against villagers and their sympathisers (politically organized as well as those who are not necessarily part of organized political formations) is just a reminder that in the more than three decades that it has enjoyed power in West Bengal, the CPI (M) has become the clone of the Congress. The same imperial arrogance, the same intemperate use of armed police, the same combination of urbane Kolkata sophistication and suburban, mofussil, para thuggery. The identical lethal combination of sleaze, rhetoric, money, muscle and humbug. The CPI (M) of today, is the perfect inheritor of the legacy of the Congress Party in West Bengal. Many people in families with a link to the history of the Communist Parties in West Bengal would no doubt find themselves waking up to the disturbing conclusion that the party that they have had an unthinking, emotional relationship with, through good days and bad, has in fact become that arrogant, belligerent, hypocritical other that they had grown up to despise. The metamorphosis of the CPI (M) into its own terrible alterity (as manifest in Nandigram) is an occasion for all those who remember 1954, 1956, 1959 and 1966 to enter into some introspection. What is tragic is not just the fact that 14 people have died terrible deaths, but also that those ordering the police firing, including Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya might have actually been once on the other side of the barricades. Three decades after 1977, the CPI (M) in West Bengal is a party without a moral backbone, bloated, sad, bankrupt and eager to be in bed with an enterprise (the Salim Group) that is itself implicated (historically) in bankrolling the masterminds of the genocide of Communists in 1965 in Indonesia. Those of us who continue to consider ourselves claimants to the legacy of the International Communist movement (in whichever form) have to add another notch on our long list of events and processes that should cause introspection. Kronstadt 1921 The Show Trials of the 1930s in the USSR The Gulag Experience in the USSR Berlin 1953 Hungary 1956 Mao's repression of Chinese Communists Czeckoslovakia 1968 The Declaration of Martial Law in Poland The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan Pol Pot The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia The Continued Romance of Bankrupt Authoritarianism in Cuba and North Korea Tienanmen Square 1989 Nandigram and the Left Front Government in West Bengal (Everyone can add to this list) Let us take stock of all this, and then salvage what we can from our history for the twenty first century. In sorrow and solidarity with the people of Nandigram. I am forwarding below several fragments of reports (from the Telegraph, the BBC) and emails that have come my way this morning, sent by Moinak Biswas in Kolkata. Shuddha --------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Red-hand Buddha 14 killed in Nandigram re-entry bid Telegraph, Kolkata, March 15, 2007 http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070315/asp/frontpage/story_7519166.asp March 14: The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government’s armed attempt to reclaim Nandigram ran into waves of resistance fronted by women, leading to the deaths of at least 14 people in police firing. The police succeeded in entering Nandigram, which villagers opposed to land acquisition had turned into a no-entry zone for the administration for over two months, but left deep bloodstains on the chief minister’s industrialisation campaign. The police action also gave Mamata Banerjee an opportunity to call a 12-hour Bengal bandh on Friday, disrupting examination schedules. The killings drew widespread condemnation, including a grim statement from governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi that “the news has filled me with a sense of cold horror”. “What is the public purpose served by the use of force that we have witnessed today?” he asked. A huge contingent of police, amassed over the last few days, mounted the mission to recapture Nandigram around 10 am today. Over 1,000 policemen, split into two groups, raced towards Sonachura — the theatre of the main battle, around 170 km from Calcutta — from two flanks . A 2,000-strong reserve force stood by, waiting to move in once the advance party smashed its way though the hurdles. However, one of the thrust arms came face to face with a wall of 400-500 women, behind whom stood around 2,000 villagers armed with spears, rods, lathis and scythes. Pipe guns, muskets and country-made pistols were also in the arsenal. A convoy of officials and labourers with excavators, road-rollers and sandbags trailed the police. One of the objectives of the raid was to repair roads dug up by villagers, the ditch becoming a symbol of protest against land acquisition. A bomb squad and ambulances made up the rest of the caravan. With the force advancing, a chant rose from the villagers, asking the police to “go back”. The police, led by deputy inspector-general (Midnapore range) N. Ramesh Babu, told the villagers over the public address system to move back but were greeted by crude bombs and brickbats. Sound of shots was also heard. Teargas shells were burst and rubber bullets fired but the villagers regrouped and surged back, this time without the chain of women shielding them. The police then opened fire, using live ammunition. “We found the teargas and rubber bullets had little impact on the aggressive villagers. They fled but regrouped and started firing at us. We had no alternative but to open fire,” an officer said. Besides the fatalities, at least 75 people were injured — among them a dozen policemen. The number of the dead fluctuated through the day — ranging from six to 20 — but there was no official word till the evening. Chief minister Bhattacharjee reached the Assembly to make a statement, without realising that the House had adjourned five minutes ago. “Whatever I have to say, I will say it in the Assembly tomorrow,” he said later. The onus fell on home secretary Prasad Ranjan Ray to confirm 11 deaths. Late tonight, East Midnapore district magistrate Anup Agarwal put the toll at 14 and other officials said the figure could rise. Ward master of the Tamluk hospital, Atal Behari Jana, said 11 bodies, including that of a woman, bore bullet injuries. Most injuries were either in the stomach or chest. “The police had to open fire in self-defence. Our force had guns not to fight the enemy but to restore peace in Nandigram,” director-general of police A.B. Vohra said. The stated goals — regaining control of Nandigram and ensuring the return of CPM families that fled in January — were only partially met till late this evening. The police have established their writ in four of the six villages and a part of Sonachura but the CPM supporters are yet to return. After calling the bandh, Mamata proceeded towards Nandigram but was blocked by CPM supporters. Long-distance private buses were parked diagonally on the road. 2. From Nilanjan Hajra In addition to the protests listed below against Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee-led CPI(M) government's well planned (for over two months) and calculated murder (the police IG was constantly in touch with the Chief Minister) of at least 20 farmers in Nandigram, the following leading theater personalities (as far as I know, there may be some more) of West Bengal have resigned from the West Bengal Natya Academy, refusing to have any connection with the killers: Mr. Bibhas Chakraborty Mr. Monoj Mitra Mr. Ashoke Mukhopadhyay Mr. Kaushik Sen Mr. Bratya Basu Bratya Basu has written a moving piece in Bengali daily Ek Din on farmer Haradhan Bag's suicide after losing his land in Singur to the TATA MOTORS. EK DIN Editor Suman Chattopadhyay in a signed front page Editorial has compared the Nandigram murder to Jaliwanala Bagh. West Bengal's Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi in his reaction has said, "the news has filled me with cold horror" (reproted in all major channels and dailies). Lawyers in large numbers, irrespective of party affiliations, have taken to the streets across West Bengal in protest. CPI(M) Politbureau Members Biman Bose, Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury have justified the police action. We appeal to all human beings to join the protest in whatever possible form. Please also forward these mails to as many as you can especially outside West Bengal. In Solidarity, Nilanjan Hajra. Kolkata. - ------------------------------------------------------ 3. A Petition from Sudipta Moitra, Samar Das, Sumit Chowdhury, Rifat Mumtaz and Mansi Asher Dear All, A situation of terror has been created by the ruling C.P.M Government and party in Nandigram over the past few days. The matter reached a head as a huge contingent of 4000-5000 comprising the Police Force along with Para-Military, Rapid Action Force and Combat Commando Force attacked Nandigram in the name of "Operation Nandigram". This has come as a repressive measure in the face of protest and local movement (Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (Committee to Prevent Farmland Eviction)) by the people of Nandigram against the forceful land acquisition for proposed SEZs (Salim Group, Indonesia) in the area. This is the second instance of violence in the area, the first being in early January when 6 people were killed. The last instance was provoked in the wake of the local adminsitration serving notices for land acquistion. After country wide crticism and protests againt the state government, the Chief Minister had issued a statement that no land would be acquired in Nandigram if the people are not willing. Despite this statement government has continued to maintain pressure in the area through deployment of armed forces. This clearly shows on whose side the Fascist West Bengal Government is. Today, on Wednesday morning the armed forces broke fire on the people as a result of which 20 people have been killed and over 200 injured. The State Government and West Bengal police are still not declaring the numbers dead and injured. A huge protest movement has spread accross West Bengal. In every district rallies,demonstrations, road-blockages are being organised.In Kolkata a protest in the Rajya-sabha and other places is going on. National Hawker Federation and Hawker Sangram Committee is also strongly condemning this barbaric fascist action of West Bengal government and organizing rallies all over Kolkata. Reporters from all the major media institutions are also being forcefully stopped from covering and reporting the reality. Two reporters of TARA BANGLA News were threatened by CPM party caders and are now missing. WE APPEAL TO ALL THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY TO CONDEMN THIS FASCIST MOVE BY THE GOVERNMENT TO PRESSURISE LOCAL COMMUNITIES TO GIVE UP THEIR ONLY SOURCES OF LIVELIHOODS. WE SEE THIS NANDIGRAM POLICE FIRING AS A MASS KILLING LED BY THE GOVERNMENT WHO STANDS ONLY IN SUPPORT OF CAPITALISTS AND ITS OWN SELFISH INTERESTS. WE APPEAL TO ALL CONCERNED TO SEND LETTERS TO THE PRIME MINISTER, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF MINISTER OF WEST BENGAL CONDEMNING 'OPERATION NANDIGRAM' ORGANISE PROTEST MEETINGS AND DEMONSTRATIONS IN OUR RESPECTIVE CITIES AND REGIONS SPREAD THE NEWS OF THIS HENIOUS ACT OF THE GOVERNMENT IN WEST BENGAL WRITE TO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION FOR IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT Sudipta Moitra International Federation of Hawkers and Urban Poor National Hawker Federation Hawker Sangram Committee 16/17 College Street, Kolkata-700012, West Bengal, India. Tele/Fax: 91-22196688 Mob: 09433972662. E-mails: ifhup.secretariat at gmail.com , nationalhawkerfederation at gmail.com , hawkersangramcommittee at gmail.com , sudipta.y2k at gmail.com , saktimghosh at yahoo.com Samar Das, NAPM - 0943335946 Sumit Chowdhury, NAPM - 09830249430 sumit_chowdhary at yahoo.com In Solidarity Rifat Mumtaz and Manshi Asher PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS MAIL WIDELY ---------------------------------- 4. BBC News Report http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6448749.stm 'Seven die' in India farm clash At least seven people have died after police in eastern India fired at farmers protesting at industrial plans. Riot police were sent to Nandigram in West Bengal after protests against land being used for a planned chemical hub. Police confirm two deaths. Doctors say five others died of bullet wounds. Unrest in January claimed six lives. Protests have gone on despite the state government pledging to move the plant elsewhere. New economic zones are a hugely contentious issue in India. 'Regain control' Farmers in Nandigram have fiercely resisted the West Bengal government's plan to acquire farms for a hub for chemical industries by an Indonesian company. Six people, including a policemen, died during protests in the area in January. Earlier this week, the Communist-led state government promised to shift the proposed chemical industry hub out of Nandigram if locals continued to oppose it. But Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya said the administration would have to "regain control" over the area and plans to send in riot police were announced. Angry farmers along with political workers, belonging to the state's governing Communist party and the opposition Trinamul Congress, have dug up roads, burnt down wooden bridges and attacked government officials and policemen trying to enter Nandigram during the past two months. The BBC's Subir Bhaumik in Calcutta says it is not clear why Wednesday's clash happened inspite of government assurances to the local farmers about their land. On Wednesday morning, nearly 5,000 policemen set out to take control in Nandigram when protesting farmers prevented government and the police from entering the area. Police officials say they ran into fierce resistance from thousands of farmers, both men and women, at the village of Bankaberia. 'Lawlessness' Senior West Bengal official Prasad Ranjan Roy said the police fired tear gas shells to break up the protests, and then fired and charged through the protesting crowd when they came under attack. "Nandigram has descended into lawlessness and no government can simply be inactive," he said. Eyewitnesses say the local hospital is teeming with injured persons, many of them with bullet wounds. The Trinamul Congress has called for a statewide strike on Friday to protest against the police firing. Two allies of the Communist party have said the police action was "most unfortunate". The issue of farm land acquisition has generated much emotion in West Bengal in the past few months. The government's move to allot 1,000 acres of land to industrial giant, Tata Motors, to build a car factory in the Singur area in Hooghly district generated widespread protests. State governments in India are acquiring large tracts of land to set up special economic zones (SEZs) to push up employment and earnings. The federal government reckons that SEZs will bring in $13.5bn in investment and create 890,000 jobs by 2009 if the ambitious plan is allowed to proceed. Critics say this is destined to become the biggest land grab in post-colonial India, given the lack of transparency and rampant corruption in government. Are you a farmer in West Bengal? Do you have relatives or friends who are affected by the industrialisation there? Use the form below to send us your experiences and reaction: You can send pictures and video to: yourpics at bbc.co.uk or to send via MMS please dial +44 (0)7725 100 100. Name Your E-mail address Town & Country Phone number (optional): Comments --------------------------------------------- 4. From shuddha at sarai.net Thu Mar 15 14:09:01 2007 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:09:01 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Mukul Kesavan on Sanjay Kak's 'Jashn-e-Azadi' Message-ID: <45F90625.7050800@sarai.net> Dear Friends, Many on this list in Delhi would probably have been present at the screening of Sanjay Kak's new film at the Habitat Centre on the 13th of March. Here (below) is a brief text about the film by historian and writer Mukul Kesavan that appeared today in the Telegraph. For those of you who have missed the Habitat Centre screening, there will be another screenign on Friday, 23 March 2007, at Sarai-CSDS, at 5:00 pm best Shuddha ---------------------------- CELEBRATING FREEDOM - Jashn-e-Azadi and what Kashmiris think about the occupation Mukul Kesavan The Telegraph, Thursday, March 15, 2007 http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070315/asp/opinion/story_7516679.asp It often happens that you judge the world by yardsticks that you don’t apply to your own country. Sometimes that inconsistency is brought home to you. This happened to me yesterday after I watched the first screening of Jashn-e-Azadi (How We Celebrate Freedom), a long documentary film on Kashmir, directed by Sanjay Kak. The ‘present’ of the film is the period between 2004 and 2006, the time in which it was shot. From this present, it makes forays into its past, which is the period between 2004 and 1989, the year that the violent struggle for self-determination/ secession/azadi began in Kashmir. The film travels backwards by incorporating within itself footage shot by unnamed Kashmiri cameramen. This footage is formally marked out from the rest of the film with the help of subtitles: it also looks grainier and less finished. For a long, complex film, the film’s editorial position isn’t hard to summarize. The military occupation of Kashmir is sketched in with voice-overs, subtitles, interviews and grim vignettes from Kashmiri life. You learn, for example, that India has seven hundred thousand soldiers in Kashmir, or one soldier for every fifteen civilians. Right through the film, the figure of a hundred thousand Kashmiri dead comes up in conversations and political speeches. Spread evenly through the film like a chorus is footage from a longstanding attempt to systematically verify the number and provenance of the dead. The film doesn’t endorse the figure — the one subtitle that refers to the subject speaks of disputed and wildly fluctuating totals — but nor does it take issue with it. The implication is that the total, by any reckoning, is so large that the moral culpability of the Indian state and its occupying army for the killing is unlikely to be diminished by a correction. The subject of the film is the response of Kashmiris to the occupation: their defiance, their rage, their suffering, their trauma, their resignation, their irony and, occasionally, their acquiescence. But the acquiescence is rare and temporary: this film has a moral and it is spelt out by the director of the film (who is also its narrator). In the middle of the film he says (and I paraphrase from memory), “The lesson from the most militarized region in the world is that domination doesn’t mean victory.” Bereaved women, schoolchildren, politicians, old men, poets, alive and dead, ulema and a travelling troupe of players demand freedom and simultaneously count its cost. On the other side, the ‘Indian’ side, tourists, sadhus, ‘renegades’ (turncoat militants) and be-goggled army officers are variously loutish, strident, deluded and murderously violent, all in the cause of claiming Kashmir for India. Kashmir’s inhabitants in this film, the protagonists of azadi, are the Valley’s Muslims. The film does not apologize for this. It refers to the exodus of Kashmir’s Pandit population and gives us two figures: two hundred were brutally killed by militants and, as a result of these murders, a hundred and sixty thousand left the Valley for refugee camps in Jammu and the plains. No Kashmiri Pandits figure in the frame. The film’s cameras don’t visit their homes or refugee camps. Two telephone conversations with a Pandit poet, his poem about the lost intimacy of winter nights, and shots of abandoned Pandit homes sum up their exile. They are present as a hole in the film, as an absence. The film’s treatment of this issue caused a stir in the cinema hall as angry Kashmiri Pandits heckled the director (a Kashmiri Pandit himself), disputed the facts of the film and asked with some anguish why a film that bore such scrupulous witness to the suffering of Kashmiri Muslims couldn’t find a single Pandit to talk to. Kak stood his ground; he acknowledged the tragedy of the Pandits, but insisted upon his right as a film-maker to tell his story in the way he thought fit. He was not, he said, making an encyclopedic film on Kashmir, but a personal one. Similarly, the role of Pakistan in stoking the insurgency isn’t directly addressed by the film; it happens offstage. There are references to foreign militants but they occur in passing. The film insists that the viewer, especially the Indian viewer, should attend to its central truth before reaching for nuance or qualification, and the truth is this: the Indian state occupies Kashmir against the will of its inhabitants and is primarily responsible for the violence and death that follow from the occupation. Not to acknowledge this, the film suggests, is to remain in an indefensible state of denial. After the screening and the question-and-answer session that followed, the conversation touched upon the film’s formal qualities and defects, but finally settled into a debate about the film’s ‘simplifications’. The film’s critics thought that it had collapsed several political projects into one struggle for azadi. It had, by default, fore-grounded the ‘jihadi’ definition of the struggle for self-determination. Its treatment of the Kashmiri Pandit predicament was criticized as tokenism, naïveté, even self-hatred. In the middle of all this, a friend observed that in Iraq, a country of twenty five million people, the American army of occupation was a hundred and fifty thousand strong. In Kashmir, a place with a third of Iraq’s population, the military presence was four-and-a-half times as large. It’s the kind of comparison that I’m generally hard-wired to reject, because it seems so facile, so blithely heedless of time, place and context, but with the film still buzzing in my head and arguments about it swirling around me, it seemed plausible. Someone made the point that the film was wrong-headed in simplifying the Indian presence into an occupation because Kashmir had had democratic governments constituted by monitored elections for years. Didn’t those governments count for something? This suddenly sounded quite a lot like American arguments about the democratic legitimacy of the present Iraqi government. Then I heard myself argue that not all the killing in the Valley had been done by security forces: some of it, surely, was the handiwork of jihadis, whose conception of freedom was theocratic tyranny. Even as I made the argument, it seemed to bear a family resemblance to Dick Cheney’s argument that those who argued for American withdrawal were, in fact, endorsing a ‘free’ state based on fundamentalist prescriptions. A day afterwards, as I try to reconstruct the discussion from memory, the correspondences between the American occupation of Iraq (which I unequivocally condemn) and the Indian ‘presence’ in Kashmir (about which I am more ambivalent) don’t seem as compelling as they did immediately after the film. But the scale of the military presence, the tens of thousands dead, the justificatory arguments in the two cases seem uncomfortably similar. An account of the struggle for azadi that skates over the purge of the Pandits or the role of Pakistan must invite scepticism, but so must an intellectual position that makes an acknowledgement of the suffering of Kashmiri Muslims contingent upon equal time for Pandits. Good documentaries don’t necessarily change your mind; they do, however, prompt you to take your opinions out of mothballs and give them an airing. Jashn-e-Azadi is that sort of a film. From sastry at cs.wisc.edu Thu Mar 15 14:21:56 2007 From: sastry at cs.wisc.edu (Subramanya Sastry) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:21:56 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <45F9092C.8000505@cs.wisc.edu> > In sorrow and solidarity with the people of Nandigram. I am forwarding > below several fragments of reports (from the Telegraph, the BBC) and > emails that have come my way this morning, sent by Moinak Biswas in Kolkata. > News about the Nandigram SEZ issue can be tracked at: http://newsrack.in/Browse.do?owner=subbu&issue=Land+Issues&catID=4 Subbu. From jeebesh at sarai.net Thu Mar 15 14:50:32 2007 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:50:32 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: [foil] Press Release: Savage State Terror in Nandigram! Message-ID: ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: nilanjan hajra Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 9:59:03 AM Subject: FW: Fwd: [foil] Press Release: Savage State Terror in Nandigram! Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:28:59 +0000 In addition to the protests listed below against Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee-led CPI(M) government's well planned (for over two months) and calculated murder (the police IG was constantly in touch with the Chief Minister) of at least 20 farmers in Nandigram, the following leading theater personalities (as far as I know, there may be some more) of West Bengal have resigned from the West Bengal Natya Academy, refusing to have any connection with the killers: Mr. Bibhas Chakraborty Mr. Monoj Mitra Mr. Ashoke Mukhopadhyay Mr. Kaushik Sen Mr. Bratya Basu Bratya Basu has written a moving piece in Bengali daily Ek Din on farmer Haradhan Bag's suicide after losing his land in Singur to the TATA MOTORS. EK DIN Editor Suman Chattopadhyay in a signed front page Editorial has compared the Nandigram murder to Jaliwanala Bagh. West Bengal's Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi in his reaction has said, "the news has filled me with cold horror" (reproted in all major channels and dailies). Lawyers in large numbers, irrespective of party affiliations, have taken to the streets across West Bengal in protest. CPI(M) Politbureau Members Biman Bose, Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury have justified the police action. We appeal to all human beings to join the protest in whatever possible form. Please also forward these mails to as many as you can especially outside West Bengal. In Solidarity, Nilanjan Hajra. Kolkata. - ------------------------------------------------------ Dear All, A situation of terror has been created by the ruling C.P.M Government and party in Nandigram over the past few days. The matter reached a head as a huge contingent of 4000-5000 comprising the Police Force along with Para-Military, Rapid Action Force and Combat Commando Force attacked Nandigram in the name of "Operation Nandigram". This has come as a repressive measure in the face of protest and local movement (Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (Committee to Prevent Farmland Eviction)) by the people of Nandigram against the forceful land acquisition for proposed SEZs (Salim Group, Indonesia) in the area. This is the second instance of violence in the area, the first being in early January when 6 people were killed. The last instance was provoked in the wake of the local adminsitration serving notices for land acquistion. After country wide crticism and protests againt the state government, the Chief Minister had issued a statement that no land would be acquired in Nandigram if the people are not willing. Despite this statement government has continued to maintain pressure in the area through deployment of armed forces. This clearly shows on whose side the Fascist West Bengal Government is. Today, on Wednesday morning the armed forces broke fire on the people as a result of which 20 people have been killed and over 200 injured. The State Government and West Bengal police are still not declaring the numbers dead and injured. A huge protest movement has spread accross West Bengal. In every district rallies,demonstrations, road-blockages are being organised.In Kolkata a protest in the Rajya-sabha and other places is going on. National Hawker Federation and Hawker Sangram Committee is also strongly condemning this barbaric fascist action of West Bengal government and organizing rallies all over Kolkata. Reporters from all the major media institutions are also being forcefully stopped from covering and reporting the reality. Two reporters of TARA BANGLA News were threatened by CPM party caders and are now missing. WE APPEAL TO ALL THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY TO CONDEMN THIS FASCIST MOVE BY THE GOVERNMENT TO PRESSURISE LOCAL COMMUNITIES TO GIVE UP THEIR ONLY SOURCES OF LIVELIHOODS. WE SEE THIS NANDIGRAM POLICE FIRING AS A MASS KILLING LED BY THE GOVERNMENT WHO STANDS ONLY IN SUPPORT OF CAPITALISTS AND ITS OWN SELFISH INTERESTS. WE APPEAL TO ALL CONCERNED TO SEND LETTERS TO THE PRIME MINISTER, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF MINISTER OF WEST BENGAL CONDEMNING 'OPERATION NANDIGRAM' ORGANISE PROTEST MEETINGS AND DEMONSTRATIONS IN OUR RESPECTIVE CITIES AND REGIONS SPREAD THE NEWS OF THIS HENIOUS ACT OF THE GOVERNMENT IN WEST BENGAL WRITE TO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION FOR IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT Sudipta Moitra International Federation of Hawkers and Urban Poor National Hawker Federation Hawker Sangram Committee 16/17 College Street, Kolkata-700012, West Bengal, India. Tele/Fax: 91-22196688 Mob: 09433972662. E-mails: ifhup.secretariat at gmail.com , nationalhawkerfederation at gmail.com , hawkersangramcommittee at gmail.com , sudipta.y2k at gmail.com , saktimghosh at yahoo.com Samar Das, NAPM - 0943335946 Sumit Chowdhury, NAPM - 09830249430 sumit_chowdhary at yahoo.com In Solidarity Rifat Mumtaz and Manshi Asher PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS MAIL WIDELY II. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6448749.stm 'Seven die' in India farm clash At least seven people have died after police in eastern India fired at farmers protesting at industrial plans. Riot police were sent to Nandigram in West Bengal after protests against land being used for a planned chemical hub. Police confirm two deaths. Doctors say five others died of bullet wounds. Unrest in January claimed six lives. Protests have gone on despite the state government pledging to move the plant elsewhere. New economic zones are a hugely contentious issue in India. 'Regain control' Farmers in Nandigram have fiercely resisted the West Bengal government's plan to acquire farms for a hub for chemical industries by an Indonesian company. Six people, including a policemen, died during protests in the area in January. Earlier this week, the Communist-led state government promised to shift the proposed chemical industry hub out of Nandigram if locals continued to oppose it. But Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya said the administration would have to "regain control" over the area and plans to send in riot police were announced. Angry farmers along with political workers, belonging to the state's governing Communist party and the opposition Trinamul Congress, have dug up roads, burnt down wooden bridges and attacked government officials and policemen trying to enter Nandigram during the past two months. The BBC's Subir Bhaumik in Calcutta says it is not clear why Wednesday's clash happened inspite of government assurances to the local farmers about their land. On Wednesday morning, nearly 5,000 policemen set out to take control in Nandigram when protesting farmers prevented government and the police from entering the area. Police officials say they ran into fierce resistance from thousands of farmers, both men and women, at the village of Bankaberia. 'Lawlessness' Senior West Bengal official Prasad Ranjan Roy said the police fired tear gas shells to break up the protests, and then fired and charged through the protesting crowd when they came under attack. "Nandigram has descended into lawlessness and no government can simply be inactive," he said. Eyewitnesses say the local hospital is teeming with injured persons, many of them with bullet wounds. The Trinamul Congress has called for a statewide strike on Friday to protest against the police firing. Two allies of the Communist party have said the police action was "most unfortunate". The issue of farm land acquisition has generated much emotion in West Bengal in the past few months. The government's move to allot 1,000 acres of land to industrial giant, Tata Motors, to build a car factory in the Singur area in Hooghly district generated widespread protests. State governments in India are acquiring large tracts of land to set up special economic zones (SEZs) to push up employment and earnings. The federal government reckons that SEZs will bring in $13.5bn in investment and create 890,000 jobs by 2009 if the ambitious plan is allowed to proceed. Critics say this is destined to become the biggest land grab in post-colonial India, given the lack of transparency and rampant corruption in government. Are you a farmer in West Bengal? Do you have relatives or friends who are affected by the industrialisation there? Use the form below to send us your experiences and reaction: You can send pictures and video to: yourpics at bbc.co.uk or to send via MMS please dial +44 (0)7725 100 100. Name Your E-mail address Town & Country Phone number (optional): Comments _________________________________________________________________ Voice your questions and our experts will answer them http://content.msn.co.in/Lifestyle/AskExpert/Default01.htm The fish are biting. Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing. From preetunair at yahoo.com Thu Mar 15 16:37:05 2007 From: preetunair at yahoo.com (PREETU NAIR) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:07:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] Vacancies in Goa University Message-ID: <741196.44059.qm@web31713.mail.mud.yahoo.com> GOA UNIVERSITY Sub Post Office Goa University Taleigao Plateau, Goa - 403 206 INDIA Phone: 0832-2451375,2451346-48, Fax: 0832-2454184. Gram: UNIGOA GU/IV/Advt/29/2007/ /03/2007 NOTIFICATION Goa University invites applications for the following posts. Application forms can be downloaded from University website www.unigoa.ac.in Fees: Rs. 300/- US $ 25 for candidates abroad Rs.125/- for SC/ST candidates by crossed Demand Draft drawn in favour of Registrar, Goa University payable at Panaji, Goa. Details of qualifications/experience etc. are given in the Brochure accompanying the application form. Applications duly completed in all respects along with the prescribed application fee may be submitted to the Registrar, Goa University within 21 days of publication of this advertisement. Sr.. Post No. of posts Scale of Pay No 1 Professor 4 Rs. 16400-450-20900-500-22400 2 Reader 2 Rs. 12000-420-18300 3 Lecturer 24 Rs. 8000-275-13500 4 Assistant Registrar 1 Rs. 8000-275-13500 (Public Relations) Place: Taleigao Plateau (Dr. M. M. Sangodkar) Date: 08/03/2007. REGISTRAR GOA UNIVERSITY Sub Post Office Goa University Taleigao Plateau, Goa – 403 206 INDIA Information Brochure for applicants to the posts of Professor, Reader Lecturer, and Assistant Registrar(Public Relations) Applications are invited in the prescribed form for the posts of Professor, Reader and Lecturer together with copies of certificate Application forms can be downloaded from University website www. unigoa.ac.in Fees: Rs. 300/- US $ 25 for candidates abroad Rs.125/- for SC/ST candidates by crossed Demand Draft drawn in favour of Registrar, Goa University payable Panaji, Goa 403206. Details of qualifications/experience etc. are given in the Brochure accompanying the application form. Applications duly completed in all respects alongwith the prescribed application fee may be submitted to the Registrar, Goa University within 21 days of publication of this advertisement. The University reserves the right of accepting/rejecting applications received after the last date specified above. The minimum qualification and the scale of pay for this post are as prescribed in the Goa University Statute/UGC from time to time. The essential and desirable qualifications prescribed for the post are given below. The posts also carry allowances as admissible to the Goa State Government employees. A higher starting pay may be allowed to the exceptionally qualified candidates. PROFESSOR The minimum qualification for appointment to the post of Professor in the scale of pay of Rs.16400-22400 shall be an eminent scholar with published work of high quality, actively engaged in research, with 10 years of experience in postgraduate teaching, and/or experience in research at the University/National Level institutions, including experience of guiding research at doctoral level. OR An outstanding scholar with established reputation who has made significant contribution to knowledge. In exceptional cases, the teachers with 15 years of undergraduate teaching/research experience shall also be considered. READER The minimum qualifications for appointment to the post of Reader in the scale of Pay of Rs. 12000-18300 shall be Good academic record with a doctoral degree and published work. In addition to these, candidates who join from outside the University system, shall also possess at least 55% of the marks Or an equivalent grade of B in the 7 point scale with latter grades O, A, B, C, D, E & F at the Master’s degree level. Five years of experience of teaching and/or research excluding the period spent for obtaining the research degree and has made some mark in the areas of scholarship as evidenced by quality of publications, contribution to educational innovation, design of new courses and curricula. LECTURER The minimum qualifications required for appointment to the post of Lecturers in the scale of pay of Rs. 8000-275-13500 shall be Good academic record with at least 55% of marks OR , an equivalent grade of B in the 7 point scale with latter grades O, A, B, C, D, E & F at the Master’s degree in the relevant subject from an Indian University or an equivalent degree from a foreign University, and have passed NET/SET eligibility test or Ph.D. 1) Department of English Lecturer: (One Post) Reserved for OBC Specialisation: Linguistics/Film, Media & Communication Studies 2) Department of Portuguese Lecturer: (One Post) Reserved for Children of Freedom Fighter Specialisation: 3) Department of Economics Professor (One Post) Lecturer: (One Post) Reserved for ST Specialisation: Quantitative techniques, Growth and Environmental Economics. 4) Department of Political Science Professor: (One Post) Specialization: Political Theory/or Public Administration Rural Governance/or Political Sociology. Lecturer: (One Post) Specialisation: Constitutional Government or Gender Studies or Urban Studies 5) Department of Sociology Lecturer: (One Post) Specialisation: Indian Society/ Social Theory/Sociology of Religion. 6) Department of History Lecturer: (One Post) Reserved for OBC Specialisation: Maritime History of pre-colonial Konkan and Goa” with M.Phil in Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology. 7) Centre for Latin American Studies Lecturer: (One Post) Specialisation: 8) Centre for Women Studies Lecturer : (One Post) Specialisation: M.A. in Social work with at least 5 years experience in Women’s Studies ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Preetu Nair Senior Reporter Gomantak Times St.Inez, Panaji Goa-403 001 India http://goadourada.blogspot.com/ "Freedom of mind is the real freedom" Babasaheb Ambedkar ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ____________________________________________________________________________________ Now that's room service! Choose from over 150,000 hotels in 45,000 destinations on Yahoo! Travel to find your fit. http://farechase.yahoo.com/promo-generic-14795097 From mare at easynet.co.uk Thu Mar 15 19:44:53 2007 From: mare at easynet.co.uk (Mare Tralla) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:14:53 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram In-Reply-To: <45F90518.8010900@sarai.net> References: <45F90518.8010900@sarai.net> Message-ID: Dear Shuddha, > >Those of us who continue to consider ourselves claimants to the legacy >of the International Communist movement (in whichever form) have to add >another notch on our long list of events and processes that should cause >introspection. > >Kronstadt 1921 >The Show Trials of the 1930s in the USSR >The Gulag Experience in the USSR >Berlin 1953 >Hungary 1956 >Mao's repression of Chinese Communists >Czeckoslovakia 1968 >The Declaration of Martial Law in Poland >The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan >Pol Pot >The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia >The Continued Romance of Bankrupt Authoritarianism in Cuba and North Korea >Tienanmen Square 1989 >Nandigram and the Left Front Government in West Bengal > >(Everyone can add to this list) > >Let us take stock of all this, and then salvage what we can from our >history for the twenty first century. I would like to add to that list the occupation of Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940 by the USSR and the preceding secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between USSR and Nazy Germany, which effectively lead to the Soviet occupation of Baltic states and other neighbouring territories of Poland and Romania. For more info on that look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact It also allowed the Nazy Germany to get on with its' occupation of other parts of Europe. It is important to remember those secret pacts and point to them as often as possible as they illustrate how big powers operate and how they have in history and sure also at present moment divide territories of interest and how those pacts are used to 'shape' the world and the knowledge about the events taking place. I just want to point out that some parts of the USSR, where hundreds of thousands of people were sent to Gulag or simply murdered were occupied territories and not simply just USSR. We should not forget that part of the history. Far too often the occupation of Baltic states is not mentioned in this kind of lists. Somehow the official version of Soviet history still seems to be most remembered, when it comes to Baltic States. As the political situation between Baltic States and Russia is very 'hot' at present. Really bad with Estonia. On my recent trip to Moscow, I did not feel always very comfortable as Estonian. Even lied to people from time to time about where I come from, especially after rather unpleasant conversation with one artist, who truly believed what the Russian media was telling about Estonians and became rather aggressive when he learned, that I was Estonian. At the same time most of my Russian connections were very positive, especially with people who have visited Estonia in recent years and experienced by themselves that the picture portrayed by Russian media is not quite accurate. In Russia most of people still do not know anything about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and they do not believe that the Baltic States were occupied by the USSR, rather they still think that there was a revolution in Baltic states and the people wanted to be part of USSR, never mind the Soviet Army, which was marching in. In the current political situation between Estonia and Russia local nationalistic ideologies determine the reactions and media coverage in both sides. Estonians also have managed to fuel the situation as more nationalistic forces in Estonia want solution to the unresolved historical issues with Russia. And as one reaction those forces want to erase from history anything to do with the soviet period and in looking at that period only glorifying events and movements, which were in resistance with the Soviet occupiers. In this light the Estonians who fought against USSR in German army during the WW II are now heroes and the Estonians who were in Red Army are seen either as part of the occupying forces or victims of the situation. Sorry for the history lesson, after my visit to Russia, it became again clearer that this history is still a cause for so many current events and continuous lies. best, Mare From taraprakash at gmail.com Thu Mar 15 20:15:36 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 10:45:36 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram References: <45F90518.8010900@sarai.net> Message-ID: <013c01c76710$9b311010$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> First CPM's sitting on the lap of Congress and now this massacre, time for CPM to change their name to Capitalist Party of Murders. If there is anyone supporting CPM on the list, please persuade your leaders to give up the red flag and go saffron openly. I have decided to boycott any activity by CPM, DTF and SFI (the teachers' and students wings of Capitalist Party of Murderers). Anyone who has anything to do with the left cause must distance oneself from the right hand of the Congress and BJP. They seem to made a pact for land acquisition, you kill in Orisa, you in UP and Hriyana and let me kill in Bengal. shame on them ----- Original Message ----- From: "Shuddhabrata Sengupta" To: "sarai list" Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 4:34 AM Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram > Dear Friends, > > The incident of the brutal armed police attack in order to 're-take' > Nandigram in West Bengal yesterday is yet another milestone in the > relationship between police and people in that state. According to > newspaper reports, 14 people have died and more than 75 people have been > injured in yesterday's violence. The injured include around 12 > policemen. However, estimates of the dead and the injured vary. > > A brief and incomplete history of police violence in West Bengal would > have to include police attacks on agitating Calcutta tram workers in > 1954, on the general population during the food riots of 1954, on > striking school teachers in 1954-56, on protesting students on August > 31, 1959, which resulted in the death of 80 students, on 2nd September > 1959, when several others were killed (bringing the August-September > 1959, total of deaths up to 102). Again, in 1966, students agitating on > issues to do with the rising prices of essential commodities were > brutally repressed by police action, leading to the death of several > young people. > > In all these conflicts, it was very often militants and activists > belonging to the Communist Parties, and since 1965, the CPI (M) that > faced police violence. However, with the election of the first (and then > the second) United Front ministries (1967-69) (which included the CPI > and the CPI(M) , the pattern of victims and patrons of violence had to > undergo a subtle shift. And while the CPI (M) did continue to enjoy a > degree of respect for having borne the brunt of police violence through > successive erstwhile Congress administrations, it became equally clear > that the party was not by any means hesitant to use the repressive > machinery of the state to further its own ends. This became abundantly > clear when, in the wake of the Naxalbari uprising, the then home > minister Jyoti Basu (later to be Chief Minister of West Bengal), > sanctioned the use of CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) to quell > dissident peasant activists from what had once been his own party in > North Bengal. Hence, the popular slogan of the late 1960s "Jyoti Babu > doley, CRP er koley" (Jyoti Babu Swings in the Lap of the CRP) > > After the fall of the United Front government and the Congress's return > to power police terror gripped West Bengal in the wake of the Naxalbari > movement, and the state terror unleashed in Calcutta and several > districts of West Bengal by the Siddhartha Shankar Ray led Congress > ministry left several hundreds dead, and imprisoned. Many people > disappeared. > > Since the CPI (M) dominated Left Front government came to power in 1977, > clashes within the left front, within the CPI(M) and with an array of > electoral and extra-parliamentary opponents (on the left and the right) > as well as confrontations with ordinary people have left many more dead > in West Bengal. Violence has been routinely used by the CITU, the > CPI(M)'s trade union to enforce its writ in Industrial areas. When the > suffocating tactics of consensus have failed, the Left Front government > has routinely used official as well as unofficial forms of violence. > This is a part of everyday life in West Bengal, and anyone with any > links to the state is very well aware of the micro-managerial > stranglehold that zonal, block and para committees of the CPI (M) have > on most aspects of life in that state. > > The current conflict in Nandigram, which pits well armed police and CPI > (M) cadre, acting directly in the interests of Capital against villagers > and their sympathisers (politically organized as well as those who are > not necessarily part of organized political formations) is just a > reminder that in the more than three decades that it has enjoyed power > in West Bengal, the CPI (M) has become the clone of the Congress. > > The same imperial arrogance, the same intemperate use of armed police, > the same combination of urbane Kolkata sophistication and suburban, > mofussil, para thuggery. The identical lethal combination of sleaze, > rhetoric, money, muscle and humbug. The CPI (M) of today, is the perfect > inheritor of the legacy of the Congress Party in West Bengal. Many > people in families with a link to the history of the Communist Parties > in West Bengal would no doubt find themselves waking up to the > disturbing conclusion that the party that they have had an unthinking, > emotional relationship with, through good days and bad, has in fact > become that arrogant, belligerent, hypocritical other that they had > grown up to despise. > > The metamorphosis of the CPI (M) into its own terrible alterity (as > manifest in Nandigram) is an occasion for all those who remember 1954, > 1956, 1959 and 1966 to enter into some introspection. What is tragic is > not just the fact that 14 people have died terrible deaths, but also > that those ordering the police firing, including Chief Minister > Buddhadeb Bhattacharya might have actually been once on the other side > of the barricades. > > Three decades after 1977, the CPI (M) in West Bengal is a party without > a moral backbone, bloated, sad, bankrupt and eager to be in bed with an > enterprise (the Salim Group) that is itself implicated (historically) in > bankrolling the masterminds of the genocide of Communists in 1965 in > Indonesia. > > Those of us who continue to consider ourselves claimants to the legacy > of the International Communist movement (in whichever form) have to add > another notch on our long list of events and processes that should cause > introspection. > > Kronstadt 1921 > The Show Trials of the 1930s in the USSR > The Gulag Experience in the USSR > Berlin 1953 > Hungary 1956 > Mao's repression of Chinese Communists > Czeckoslovakia 1968 > The Declaration of Martial Law in Poland > The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan > Pol Pot > The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia > The Continued Romance of Bankrupt Authoritarianism in Cuba and North Korea > Tienanmen Square 1989 > Nandigram and the Left Front Government in West Bengal > > (Everyone can add to this list) > > Let us take stock of all this, and then salvage what we can from our > history for the twenty first century. > > In sorrow and solidarity with the people of Nandigram. I am forwarding > below several fragments of reports (from the Telegraph, the BBC) and > emails that have come my way this morning, sent by Moinak Biswas in > Kolkata. > > Shuddha > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > 1. Red-hand Buddha > 14 killed in Nandigram re-entry bid > Telegraph, Kolkata, March 15, 2007 > > http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070315/asp/frontpage/story_7519166.asp > > March 14: The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government’s armed attempt to > reclaim Nandigram ran into waves of resistance fronted by women, leading > to the deaths of at least 14 people in police firing. > > The police succeeded in entering Nandigram, which villagers opposed to > land acquisition had turned into a no-entry zone for the administration > for over two months, but left deep bloodstains on the chief minister’s > industrialisation campaign. > > The police action also gave Mamata Banerjee an opportunity to call a > 12-hour Bengal bandh on Friday, disrupting examination schedules. > > The killings drew widespread condemnation, including a grim statement > from governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi that “the news has filled me with a > sense of cold horror”. “What is the public purpose served by the use of > force that we have witnessed today?” he asked. > > A huge contingent of police, amassed over the last few days, mounted the > mission to recapture Nandigram around 10 am today. > > Over 1,000 policemen, split into two groups, raced towards Sonachura — > the theatre of the main battle, around 170 km from Calcutta — from two > flanks . A 2,000-strong reserve force stood by, waiting to move in once > the advance party smashed its way though the hurdles. > > However, one of the thrust arms came face to face with a wall of 400-500 > women, behind whom stood around 2,000 villagers armed with spears, rods, > lathis and scythes. Pipe guns, muskets and country-made pistols were > also in the arsenal. > > A convoy of officials and labourers with excavators, road-rollers and > sandbags trailed the police. One of the objectives of the raid was to > repair roads dug up by villagers, the ditch becoming a symbol of protest > against land acquisition. A bomb squad and ambulances made up the rest > of the caravan. > > With the force advancing, a chant rose from the villagers, asking the > police to “go back”. > > The police, led by deputy inspector-general (Midnapore range) N. Ramesh > Babu, told the villagers over the public address system to move back but > were greeted by crude bombs and brickbats. Sound of shots was also heard. > > Teargas shells were burst and rubber bullets fired but the villagers > regrouped and surged back, this time without the chain of women > shielding them. > > The police then opened fire, using live ammunition. > > “We found the teargas and rubber bullets had little impact on the > aggressive villagers. They fled but regrouped and started firing at us. > We had no alternative but to open fire,” an officer said. > > Besides the fatalities, at least 75 people were injured — among them a > dozen policemen. > > The number of the dead fluctuated through the day — ranging from six to > 20 — but there was no official word till the evening. > > Chief minister Bhattacharjee reached the Assembly to make a statement, > without realising that the House had adjourned five minutes ago. > “Whatever I have to say, I will say it in the Assembly tomorrow,” he > said later. > > The onus fell on home secretary Prasad Ranjan Ray to confirm 11 deaths. > Late tonight, East Midnapore district magistrate Anup Agarwal put the > toll at 14 and other officials said the figure could rise. > > Ward master of the Tamluk hospital, Atal Behari Jana, said 11 bodies, > including that of a woman, bore bullet injuries. Most injuries were > either in the stomach or chest. > > “The police had to open fire in self-defence. Our force had guns not to > fight the enemy but to restore peace in Nandigram,” director-general of > police A.B. Vohra said. > > The stated goals — regaining control of Nandigram and ensuring the > return of CPM families that fled in January — were only partially met > till late this evening. The police have established their writ in four > of the six villages and a part of Sonachura but the CPM supporters are > yet to return. > > After calling the bandh, Mamata proceeded towards Nandigram but was > blocked by CPM supporters. Long-distance private buses were parked > diagonally on the road. > > > > > > > > > 2. From Nilanjan Hajra > > In addition to the protests listed below against Buddhadeb > Bhattacharjee-led CPI(M) government's well planned (for over two > months) and calculated murder (the police IG was constantly in touch > with the Chief Minister) of at least 20 farmers in Nandigram, the > following leading theater personalities (as far as I know, there may be > some more) of West Bengal have resigned from the West Bengal Natya > Academy, refusing to have any connection with the killers: > > Mr. Bibhas Chakraborty > Mr. Monoj Mitra > Mr. Ashoke Mukhopadhyay > Mr. Kaushik Sen > Mr. Bratya Basu > > Bratya Basu has written a moving piece in Bengali daily Ek Din on farmer > Haradhan Bag's suicide after losing his land in Singur to the TATA MOTORS. > > EK DIN Editor Suman Chattopadhyay in a signed front page Editorial has > compared the Nandigram murder to Jaliwanala Bagh. West Bengal's > Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi in his reaction has said, "the news has > filled me with cold horror" (reproted in all major channels and dailies). > > Lawyers in large numbers, irrespective of party affiliations, have taken > to the streets across West Bengal in protest. > > CPI(M) Politbureau Members Biman Bose, Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury > have justified the police action. > > We appeal to all human beings to join the protest in whatever possible > form. Please also forward these mails to as many as you can especially > outside > West Bengal. > > In Solidarity, > Nilanjan Hajra. > Kolkata. > - ------------------------------------------------------ > 3. A Petition from Sudipta Moitra, Samar Das, Sumit Chowdhury, Rifat > Mumtaz and Mansi Asher > > Dear All, > > A situation of terror has been created by the ruling > C.P.M Government and party in Nandigram over the past > few days. The matter reached a head as a huge > contingent of 4000-5000 comprising the Police Force > along with Para-Military, Rapid Action Force and > Combat Commando Force attacked Nandigram in the name > of "Operation Nandigram". This has come as a > repressive measure in the face of protest and local > movement (Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (Committee > to Prevent Farmland Eviction)) by the people of > Nandigram against the forceful land acquisition for > proposed SEZs (Salim Group, Indonesia) in the area. > > This is the second instance of violence in the area, > the first being in early January when 6 people were > killed. The last instance was provoked in the wake of > the local adminsitration serving notices for land > acquistion. After country wide crticism and protests > againt the state government, the Chief Minister had > issued a statement that no land would be acquired in > Nandigram if the people are not willing. Despite this > statement government has continued to maintain > pressure in the area through deployment of armed > forces. This clearly shows on whose side the Fascist > West Bengal Government is. > > Today, on Wednesday morning the armed forces broke > fire on the people as a result of which 20 people have > been killed and over 200 injured. The State Government > and West Bengal police are still not declaring the > numbers dead and injured. A huge protest movement has > spread accross West Bengal. In every district > rallies,demonstrations, road-blockages are being > organised.In Kolkata a protest in the Rajya-sabha and > other places is going on. National Hawker Federation > and > Hawker Sangram Committee is also strongly condemning > this barbaric fascist action of West Bengal government > and organizing rallies all over Kolkata. Reporters > from all the major media institutions are also being > forcefully stopped from covering and reporting the > reality. Two reporters of TARA BANGLA News were > threatened by CPM party caders and are now missing. > > WE APPEAL TO ALL THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY TO > CONDEMN THIS FASCIST MOVE BY THE GOVERNMENT TO > PRESSURISE LOCAL COMMUNITIES TO GIVE UP THEIR ONLY > SOURCES OF LIVELIHOODS. WE SEE THIS NANDIGRAM POLICE > FIRING AS A MASS KILLING LED BY THE GOVERNMENT WHO > STANDS ONLY IN SUPPORT OF CAPITALISTS AND ITS OWN > SELFISH INTERESTS. > > WE APPEAL TO ALL CONCERNED TO > SEND LETTERS TO THE PRIME MINISTER, PRESIDENT AND > CHIEF MINISTER OF WEST BENGAL CONDEMNING 'OPERATION > NANDIGRAM' > ORGANISE PROTEST MEETINGS AND DEMONSTRATIONS IN OUR > RESPECTIVE CITIES AND REGIONS > SPREAD THE NEWS OF THIS HENIOUS ACT OF THE GOVERNMENT > IN WEST BENGAL > WRITE TO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION FOR IMMEDIATE > INTERVENTION > FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT > > Sudipta Moitra > International Federation of Hawkers and Urban Poor > National Hawker Federation > Hawker Sangram Committee > 16/17 College Street, Kolkata-700012, West Bengal, > India. > Tele/Fax: 91-22196688 > Mob: 09433972662. > E-mails: ifhup.secretariat at gmail.com , > nationalhawkerfederation at gmail.com , > hawkersangramcommittee at gmail.com , > sudipta.y2k at gmail.com , saktimghosh at yahoo.com > > Samar Das, NAPM - 0943335946 > > Sumit Chowdhury, NAPM - 09830249430 > sumit_chowdhary at yahoo.com > > In Solidarity > Rifat Mumtaz and Manshi Asher > > PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS MAIL WIDELY > > ---------------------------------- > > 4. BBC News Report > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6448749.stm > > 'Seven die' in India farm clash > > At least seven people have died after police in > eastern India fired at farmers protesting at > industrial plans. > > Riot police were sent to Nandigram in West Bengal > after protests against land being used for a planned > chemical hub. > > Police confirm two deaths. Doctors say five others > died of bullet wounds. Unrest in January claimed six > lives. > > Protests have gone on despite the state government > pledging to move the plant elsewhere. New economic > zones are a hugely contentious issue in India. > > 'Regain control' > > Farmers in Nandigram have fiercely resisted the West > Bengal government's plan to acquire farms for a hub > for chemical industries by an Indonesian company. > > > Six people, including a policemen, died during > protests in the area in January. > > Earlier this week, the Communist-led state government > promised to shift the proposed chemical industry hub > out of Nandigram if locals continued to oppose it. > > But Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya said the > administration would have to "regain control" over the > area and plans to send in riot police were announced. > > Angry farmers along with political workers, belonging > to the state's governing Communist party and the > opposition Trinamul Congress, have dug up roads, burnt > down wooden bridges and attacked government officials > and policemen trying to enter Nandigram during the > past two months. > > The BBC's Subir Bhaumik in Calcutta says it is not > clear why Wednesday's clash happened inspite of > government assurances to the local farmers about their > land. > > On Wednesday morning, nearly 5,000 policemen set out > to take control in Nandigram when protesting farmers > prevented government and the police from entering the > area. > > Police officials say they ran into fierce resistance > from thousands of farmers, both men and women, at the > village of Bankaberia. > > > > 'Lawlessness' > > Senior West Bengal official Prasad Ranjan Roy said the > police fired tear gas shells to break up the protests, > and then fired and charged through the protesting > crowd when they came under attack. > > > "Nandigram has descended into lawlessness and no > government can simply be inactive," he said. > > Eyewitnesses say the local hospital is teeming with > injured persons, many of them with bullet wounds. > > The Trinamul Congress has called for a statewide > strike on Friday to protest against the police firing. > > > Two allies of the Communist party have said the police > action was "most unfortunate". > > The issue of farm land acquisition has generated much > emotion in West Bengal in the past few months. > > The government's move to allot 1,000 acres of land to > industrial giant, Tata Motors, to build a car factory > in the Singur area in Hooghly district generated > widespread protests. > > State governments in India are acquiring large tracts > of land to set up special economic zones (SEZs) to > push up employment and earnings. > > The federal government reckons that SEZs will bring in > $13.5bn in investment and create 890,000 jobs by 2009 > if the ambitious plan is allowed to proceed. > > Critics say this is destined to become the biggest > land grab in post-colonial India, given the lack of > transparency and rampant corruption in government. > > > > Are you a farmer in West Bengal? Do you have relatives > or friends who are affected by the industrialisation > there? Use the form below to send us your experiences > and reaction: > > > > You can send pictures and video to: yourpics at bbc.co.uk > or to send via MMS please dial +44 (0)7725 100 100. > > > Name > Your E-mail address > Town & Country > Phone number (optional): > Comments > --------------------------------------------- > 4. > > _________________________________________ > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with > subscribe in the subject header. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From taraprakash at gmail.com Thu Mar 15 20:24:32 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 10:54:32 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: [foil] Press Release: Savage State Terror inNandigram! References: Message-ID: <022201c76711$dad70ca0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> I was wondering if it was merely coincidental that Bush, Blaire and Bhrashtacharya (sorry for spelling mistake) have their surname beginning letter b. The letter B also starts some abusive words I feel so tempted to use for these *3* but for the list... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeebesh Bagchi" To: Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 5:20 AM Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: [foil] Press Release: Savage State Terror inNandigram! > ----- Forwarded Message ---- > From: nilanjan hajra > Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 9:59:03 AM > Subject: FW: Fwd: [foil] Press Release: Savage State Terror in > Nandigram! > Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:28:59 +0000 > > In addition to the protests listed below against Buddhadeb > Bhattacharjee-led > CPI(M) government's well planned (for over two months) and calculated > murder > (the police IG was constantly in touch with the Chief Minister) of at > least > 20 farmers in Nandigram, the following leading theater personalities > (as far > as I know, there may be some more) of West Bengal have resigned from the > West Bengal Natya Academy, refusing to have any connection with the > killers: > > Mr. Bibhas Chakraborty > Mr. Monoj Mitra > Mr. Ashoke Mukhopadhyay > Mr. Kaushik Sen > Mr. Bratya Basu > > Bratya Basu has written a moving piece in Bengali daily Ek Din on farmer > Haradhan Bag's suicide after losing his land in Singur to the TATA > MOTORS. > > EK DIN Editor Suman Chattopadhyay in a signed front page Editorial has > compared the Nandigram murder to Jaliwanala Bagh. West Bengal's > Governor > Gopal Krishna Gandhi in his reaction has said, "the news has filled > me with > cold horror" (reproted in all major channels and dailies). > > Lawyers in large numbers, irrespective of party affiliations, have > taken to > the streets across West Bengal in protest. > > CPI(M) Politbureau Members Biman Bose, Brinda Karat and Sitaram > Yechury have > justified the police action. > > We appeal to all human beings to join the protest in whatever > possible form. > Please also forward these mails to as many as you can especially > outside > West Bengal. > > In Solidarity, > Nilanjan Hajra. > Kolkata. > - ------------------------------------------------------ > Dear All, > > A situation of terror has been created by the ruling > C.P.M Government and party in Nandigram over the past > few days. The matter reached a head as a huge > contingent of 4000-5000 comprising the Police Force > along with Para-Military, Rapid Action Force and > Combat Commando Force attacked Nandigram in the name > of "Operation Nandigram". This has come as a > repressive measure in the face of protest and local > movement (Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (Committee > to Prevent Farmland Eviction)) by the people of > Nandigram against the forceful land acquisition for > proposed SEZs (Salim Group, Indonesia) in the area. > > This is the second instance of violence in the area, > the first being in early January when 6 people were > killed. The last instance was provoked in the wake of > the local adminsitration serving notices for land > acquistion. After country wide crticism and protests > againt the state government, the Chief Minister had > issued a statement that no land would be acquired in > Nandigram if the people are not willing. Despite this > statement government has continued to maintain > pressure in the area through deployment of armed > forces. This clearly shows on whose side the Fascist > West Bengal Government is. > > Today, on Wednesday morning the armed forces broke > fire on the people as a result of which 20 people have > been killed and over 200 injured. The State Government > and West Bengal police are still not declaring the > numbers dead and injured. A huge protest movement has > spread accross West Bengal. In every district > rallies,demonstrations, road-blockages are being > organised.In Kolkata a protest in the Rajya-sabha and > other places is going on. National Hawker Federation > and > Hawker Sangram Committee is also strongly condemning > this barbaric fascist action of West Bengal government > and organizing rallies all over Kolkata. Reporters > from all the major media institutions are also being > forcefully stopped from covering and reporting the > reality. Two reporters of TARA BANGLA News were > threatened by CPM party caders and are now missing. > > WE APPEAL TO ALL THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY TO > CONDEMN THIS FASCIST MOVE BY THE GOVERNMENT TO > PRESSURISE LOCAL COMMUNITIES TO GIVE UP THEIR ONLY > SOURCES OF LIVELIHOODS. WE SEE THIS NANDIGRAM POLICE > FIRING AS A MASS KILLING LED BY THE GOVERNMENT WHO > STANDS ONLY IN SUPPORT OF CAPITALISTS AND ITS OWN > SELFISH INTERESTS. > > WE APPEAL TO ALL CONCERNED TO > SEND LETTERS TO THE PRIME MINISTER, PRESIDENT AND > CHIEF MINISTER OF WEST BENGAL CONDEMNING 'OPERATION > NANDIGRAM' > ORGANISE PROTEST MEETINGS AND DEMONSTRATIONS IN OUR > RESPECTIVE CITIES AND REGIONS > SPREAD THE NEWS OF THIS HENIOUS ACT OF THE GOVERNMENT > IN WEST BENGAL > WRITE TO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION FOR IMMEDIATE > INTERVENTION > FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT > > Sudipta Moitra > International Federation of Hawkers and Urban Poor > National Hawker Federation > Hawker Sangram Committee > 16/17 College Street, Kolkata-700012, West Bengal, > India. > Tele/Fax: 91-22196688 > Mob: 09433972662. > E-mails: ifhup.secretariat at gmail.com , > nationalhawkerfederation at gmail.com , > hawkersangramcommittee at gmail.com , > sudipta.y2k at gmail.com , saktimghosh at yahoo.com > > Samar Das, NAPM - 0943335946 > > Sumit Chowdhury, NAPM - 09830249430 > sumit_chowdhary at yahoo.com > > In Solidarity > Rifat Mumtaz and Manshi Asher > > PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS MAIL WIDELY > > II. > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6448749.stm > > 'Seven die' in India farm clash > > At least seven people have died after police in > eastern India fired at farmers protesting at > industrial plans. > > Riot police were sent to Nandigram in West Bengal > after protests against land being used for a planned > chemical hub. > > Police confirm two deaths. Doctors say five others > died of bullet wounds. Unrest in January claimed six > lives. > > Protests have gone on despite the state government > pledging to move the plant elsewhere. New economic > zones are a hugely contentious issue in India. > > > > 'Regain control' > > Farmers in Nandigram have fiercely resisted the West > Bengal government's plan to acquire farms for a hub > for chemical industries by an Indonesian company. > > > Six people, including a policemen, died during > protests in the area in January. > > Earlier this week, the Communist-led state government > promised to shift the proposed chemical industry hub > out of Nandigram if locals continued to oppose it. > > But Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya said the > administration would have to "regain control" over the > area and plans to send in riot police were announced. > > Angry farmers along with political workers, belonging > to the state's governing Communist party and the > opposition Trinamul Congress, have dug up roads, burnt > down wooden bridges and attacked government officials > and policemen trying to enter Nandigram during the > past two months. > > The BBC's Subir Bhaumik in Calcutta says it is not > clear why Wednesday's clash happened inspite of > government assurances to the local farmers about their > land. > > On Wednesday morning, nearly 5,000 policemen set out > to take control in Nandigram when protesting farmers > prevented government and the police from entering the > area. > > Police officials say they ran into fierce resistance > from thousands of farmers, both men and women, at the > village of Bankaberia. > > > > 'Lawlessness' > > Senior West Bengal official Prasad Ranjan Roy said the > police fired tear gas shells to break up the protests, > and then fired and charged through the protesting > crowd when they came under attack. > > > "Nandigram has descended into lawlessness and no > government can simply be inactive," he said. > > Eyewitnesses say the local hospital is teeming with > injured persons, many of them with bullet wounds. > > The Trinamul Congress has called for a statewide > strike on Friday to protest against the police firing. > > > Two allies of the Communist party have said the police > action was "most unfortunate". > > The issue of farm land acquisition has generated much > emotion in West Bengal in the past few months. > > The government's move to allot 1,000 acres of land to > industrial giant, Tata Motors, to build a car factory > in the Singur area in Hooghly district generated > widespread protests. > > State governments in India are acquiring large tracts > of land to set up special economic zones (SEZs) to > push up employment and earnings. > > The federal government reckons that SEZs will bring in > $13.5bn in investment and create 890,000 jobs by 2009 > if the ambitious plan is allowed to proceed. > > Critics say this is destined to become the biggest > land grab in post-colonial India, given the lack of > transparency and rampant corruption in government. > > > > Are you a farmer in West Bengal? Do you have relatives > or friends who are affected by the industrialisation > there? Use the form below to send us your experiences > and reaction: > > > > You can send pictures and video to: yourpics at bbc.co.uk > or to send via MMS please dial +44 (0)7725 100 100. > > > Name > Your E-mail address > Town & Country > Phone number (optional): > Comments > > _________________________________________________________________ > Voice your questions and our experts will answer them > http://content.msn.co.in/Lifestyle/AskExpert/Default01.htm > > > > The fish are biting. > Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing. > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From taraprakash at gmail.com Thu Mar 15 22:31:22 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:01:22 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: [foil] Press Release: Savage State Terror inNandigram! References: Message-ID: <030901c76723$8fab4130$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> CNNIBN discussed the issue in their face the nation program. I felt that Sagarika was trying to trivialize and may be sabotage the real issue. Is it enough, to be able to read news, to get a job in a news channel? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeebesh Bagchi" To: Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 5:20 AM Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: [foil] Press Release: Savage State Terror inNandigram! > ----- Forwarded Message ---- > From: nilanjan hajra > Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 9:59:03 AM > Subject: FW: Fwd: [foil] Press Release: Savage State Terror in > Nandigram! > Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:28:59 +0000 > > In addition to the protests listed below against Buddhadeb > Bhattacharjee-led > CPI(M) government's well planned (for over two months) and calculated > murder > (the police IG was constantly in touch with the Chief Minister) of at > least > 20 farmers in Nandigram, the following leading theater personalities > (as far > as I know, there may be some more) of West Bengal have resigned from the > West Bengal Natya Academy, refusing to have any connection with the > killers: > > Mr. Bibhas Chakraborty > Mr. Monoj Mitra > Mr. Ashoke Mukhopadhyay > Mr. Kaushik Sen > Mr. Bratya Basu > > Bratya Basu has written a moving piece in Bengali daily Ek Din on farmer > Haradhan Bag's suicide after losing his land in Singur to the TATA > MOTORS. > > EK DIN Editor Suman Chattopadhyay in a signed front page Editorial has > compared the Nandigram murder to Jaliwanala Bagh. West Bengal's > Governor > Gopal Krishna Gandhi in his reaction has said, "the news has filled > me with > cold horror" (reproted in all major channels and dailies). > > Lawyers in large numbers, irrespective of party affiliations, have > taken to > the streets across West Bengal in protest. > > CPI(M) Politbureau Members Biman Bose, Brinda Karat and Sitaram > Yechury have > justified the police action. > > We appeal to all human beings to join the protest in whatever > possible form. > Please also forward these mails to as many as you can especially > outside > West Bengal. > > In Solidarity, > Nilanjan Hajra. > Kolkata. > - ------------------------------------------------------ > Dear All, > > A situation of terror has been created by the ruling > C.P.M Government and party in Nandigram over the past > few days. The matter reached a head as a huge > contingent of 4000-5000 comprising the Police Force > along with Para-Military, Rapid Action Force and > Combat Commando Force attacked Nandigram in the name > of "Operation Nandigram". This has come as a > repressive measure in the face of protest and local > movement (Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (Committee > to Prevent Farmland Eviction)) by the people of > Nandigram against the forceful land acquisition for > proposed SEZs (Salim Group, Indonesia) in the area. > > This is the second instance of violence in the area, > the first being in early January when 6 people were > killed. The last instance was provoked in the wake of > the local adminsitration serving notices for land > acquistion. After country wide crticism and protests > againt the state government, the Chief Minister had > issued a statement that no land would be acquired in > Nandigram if the people are not willing. Despite this > statement government has continued to maintain > pressure in the area through deployment of armed > forces. This clearly shows on whose side the Fascist > West Bengal Government is. > > Today, on Wednesday morning the armed forces broke > fire on the people as a result of which 20 people have > been killed and over 200 injured. The State Government > and West Bengal police are still not declaring the > numbers dead and injured. A huge protest movement has > spread accross West Bengal. In every district > rallies,demonstrations, road-blockages are being > organised.In Kolkata a protest in the Rajya-sabha and > other places is going on. National Hawker Federation > and > Hawker Sangram Committee is also strongly condemning > this barbaric fascist action of West Bengal government > and organizing rallies all over Kolkata. Reporters > from all the major media institutions are also being > forcefully stopped from covering and reporting the > reality. Two reporters of TARA BANGLA News were > threatened by CPM party caders and are now missing. > > WE APPEAL TO ALL THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY TO > CONDEMN THIS FASCIST MOVE BY THE GOVERNMENT TO > PRESSURISE LOCAL COMMUNITIES TO GIVE UP THEIR ONLY > SOURCES OF LIVELIHOODS. WE SEE THIS NANDIGRAM POLICE > FIRING AS A MASS KILLING LED BY THE GOVERNMENT WHO > STANDS ONLY IN SUPPORT OF CAPITALISTS AND ITS OWN > SELFISH INTERESTS. > > WE APPEAL TO ALL CONCERNED TO > SEND LETTERS TO THE PRIME MINISTER, PRESIDENT AND > CHIEF MINISTER OF WEST BENGAL CONDEMNING 'OPERATION > NANDIGRAM' > ORGANISE PROTEST MEETINGS AND DEMONSTRATIONS IN OUR > RESPECTIVE CITIES AND REGIONS > SPREAD THE NEWS OF THIS HENIOUS ACT OF THE GOVERNMENT > IN WEST BENGAL > WRITE TO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION FOR IMMEDIATE > INTERVENTION > FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT > > Sudipta Moitra > International Federation of Hawkers and Urban Poor > National Hawker Federation > Hawker Sangram Committee > 16/17 College Street, Kolkata-700012, West Bengal, > India. > Tele/Fax: 91-22196688 > Mob: 09433972662. > E-mails: ifhup.secretariat at gmail.com , > nationalhawkerfederation at gmail.com , > hawkersangramcommittee at gmail.com , > sudipta.y2k at gmail.com , saktimghosh at yahoo.com > > Samar Das, NAPM - 0943335946 > > Sumit Chowdhury, NAPM - 09830249430 > sumit_chowdhary at yahoo.com > > In Solidarity > Rifat Mumtaz and Manshi Asher > > PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS MAIL WIDELY > > II. > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6448749.stm > > 'Seven die' in India farm clash > > At least seven people have died after police in > eastern India fired at farmers protesting at > industrial plans. > > Riot police were sent to Nandigram in West Bengal > after protests against land being used for a planned > chemical hub. > > Police confirm two deaths. Doctors say five others > died of bullet wounds. Unrest in January claimed six > lives. > > Protests have gone on despite the state government > pledging to move the plant elsewhere. New economic > zones are a hugely contentious issue in India. > > > > 'Regain control' > > Farmers in Nandigram have fiercely resisted the West > Bengal government's plan to acquire farms for a hub > for chemical industries by an Indonesian company. > > > Six people, including a policemen, died during > protests in the area in January. > > Earlier this week, the Communist-led state government > promised to shift the proposed chemical industry hub > out of Nandigram if locals continued to oppose it. > > But Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya said the > administration would have to "regain control" over the > area and plans to send in riot police were announced. > > Angry farmers along with political workers, belonging > to the state's governing Communist party and the > opposition Trinamul Congress, have dug up roads, burnt > down wooden bridges and attacked government officials > and policemen trying to enter Nandigram during the > past two months. > > The BBC's Subir Bhaumik in Calcutta says it is not > clear why Wednesday's clash happened inspite of > government assurances to the local farmers about their > land. > > On Wednesday morning, nearly 5,000 policemen set out > to take control in Nandigram when protesting farmers > prevented government and the police from entering the > area. > > Police officials say they ran into fierce resistance > from thousands of farmers, both men and women, at the > village of Bankaberia. > > > > 'Lawlessness' > > Senior West Bengal official Prasad Ranjan Roy said the > police fired tear gas shells to break up the protests, > and then fired and charged through the protesting > crowd when they came under attack. > > > "Nandigram has descended into lawlessness and no > government can simply be inactive," he said. > > Eyewitnesses say the local hospital is teeming with > injured persons, many of them with bullet wounds. > > The Trinamul Congress has called for a statewide > strike on Friday to protest against the police firing. > > > Two allies of the Communist party have said the police > action was "most unfortunate". > > The issue of farm land acquisition has generated much > emotion in West Bengal in the past few months. > > The government's move to allot 1,000 acres of land to > industrial giant, Tata Motors, to build a car factory > in the Singur area in Hooghly district generated > widespread protests. > > State governments in India are acquiring large tracts > of land to set up special economic zones (SEZs) to > push up employment and earnings. > > The federal government reckons that SEZs will bring in > $13.5bn in investment and create 890,000 jobs by 2009 > if the ambitious plan is allowed to proceed. > > Critics say this is destined to become the biggest > land grab in post-colonial India, given the lack of > transparency and rampant corruption in government. > > > > Are you a farmer in West Bengal? Do you have relatives > or friends who are affected by the industrialisation > there? Use the form below to send us your experiences > and reaction: > > > > You can send pictures and video to: yourpics at bbc.co.uk > or to send via MMS please dial +44 (0)7725 100 100. > > > Name > Your E-mail address > Town & Country > Phone number (optional): > Comments > > _________________________________________________________________ > Voice your questions and our experts will answer them > http://content.msn.co.in/Lifestyle/AskExpert/Default01.htm > > > > The fish are biting. > Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing. > _________________________________________ > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with > subscribe in the subject header. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From taraprakash at gmail.com Thu Mar 15 23:30:42 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:00:42 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram References: <45F90518.8010900@sarai.net> Message-ID: <034601c7672b$da154470$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> The following is from New York times. Even though one might question the reporter for using "Indian police" on technical ground but she is better than people like Sagarika, who restrict the issue to Nandi Gram and have no idea of a larger nexus. At least in the following article, Orisa and Singur are also mentioned. Indian Police Kill 11 at Protest Over Economic Zone By SOMINI SENGUPTA NEW DELHI, March 14 The police fired on protesters in eastern India early Wednesday, killing at least 11 people at a demonstration against one of the new Chinese-style economic zones. Indian Police Kill 11 at Protest Over Economic Zone By SOMINI SENGUPTA NEW DELHI, March 14 The police fired on protesters in eastern India early Wednesday, killing at least 11 people at a demonstration against one of the new Chinese-style economic zones. The violence erupted when the police tried to enter Nandigram, a rural area in West Bengal State, where the Salim Group of Indonesia has proposed building a vast chemical hub. Protesters had blockaded the area for several weeks, and it was effectively off limits to state law enforcement. The Nandigram strife has become a parable of a larger debate roiling India over whether and how the government acquires agricultural land and hands it over for industrial development. The central government announced in January that it would temporarily suspend the approval of new zones and review rules for acquiring land and compensating landowners and farmers. The Special Economic Zones at issue are especially attractive to companies because they offer long-term tax breaks. Applications are pending in India for zones devoted to development as varied as technology companies and power plants. Roughly two-thirds of Indians rely on agriculture for their livelihood, and farmland conversion is an emotional and politically charged issue. West Bengal, which is governed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), has emerged as the center of that debate. The state's government has faced protests in another area, Singur, over converting nearly 1,000 acres of agricultural land into an automobile factory. Last year, 11 people were killed in protests over the building of a steel plant in another eastern state, Orissa. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Shuddhabrata Sengupta" To: "sarai list" Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 4:34 AM Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram > Dear Friends, > > The incident of the brutal armed police attack in order to 're-take' > Nandigram in West Bengal yesterday is yet another milestone in the > relationship between police and people in that state. According to > newspaper reports, 14 people have died and more than 75 people have been > injured in yesterday's violence. The injured include around 12 > policemen. However, estimates of the dead and the injured vary. > > A brief and incomplete history of police violence in West Bengal would > have to include police attacks on agitating Calcutta tram workers in > 1954, on the general population during the food riots of 1954, on > striking school teachers in 1954-56, on protesting students on August > 31, 1959, which resulted in the death of 80 students, on 2nd September > 1959, when several others were killed (bringing the August-September > 1959, total of deaths up to 102). Again, in 1966, students agitating on > issues to do with the rising prices of essential commodities were > brutally repressed by police action, leading to the death of several > young people. > > In all these conflicts, it was very often militants and activists > belonging to the Communist Parties, and since 1965, the CPI (M) that > faced police violence. However, with the election of the first (and then > the second) United Front ministries (1967-69) (which included the CPI > and the CPI(M) , the pattern of victims and patrons of violence had to > undergo a subtle shift. And while the CPI (M) did continue to enjoy a > degree of respect for having borne the brunt of police violence through > successive erstwhile Congress administrations, it became equally clear > that the party was not by any means hesitant to use the repressive > machinery of the state to further its own ends. This became abundantly > clear when, in the wake of the Naxalbari uprising, the then home > minister Jyoti Basu (later to be Chief Minister of West Bengal), > sanctioned the use of CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) to quell > dissident peasant activists from what had once been his own party in > North Bengal. Hence, the popular slogan of the late 1960s "Jyoti Babu > doley, CRP er koley" (Jyoti Babu Swings in the Lap of the CRP) > > After the fall of the United Front government and the Congress's return > to power police terror gripped West Bengal in the wake of the Naxalbari > movement, and the state terror unleashed in Calcutta and several > districts of West Bengal by the Siddhartha Shankar Ray led Congress > ministry left several hundreds dead, and imprisoned. Many people > disappeared. > > Since the CPI (M) dominated Left Front government came to power in 1977, > clashes within the left front, within the CPI(M) and with an array of > electoral and extra-parliamentary opponents (on the left and the right) > as well as confrontations with ordinary people have left many more dead > in West Bengal. Violence has been routinely used by the CITU, the > CPI(M)'s trade union to enforce its writ in Industrial areas. When the > suffocating tactics of consensus have failed, the Left Front government > has routinely used official as well as unofficial forms of violence. > This is a part of everyday life in West Bengal, and anyone with any > links to the state is very well aware of the micro-managerial > stranglehold that zonal, block and para committees of the CPI (M) have > on most aspects of life in that state. > > The current conflict in Nandigram, which pits well armed police and CPI > (M) cadre, acting directly in the interests of Capital against villagers > and their sympathisers (politically organized as well as those who are > not necessarily part of organized political formations) is just a > reminder that in the more than three decades that it has enjoyed power > in West Bengal, the CPI (M) has become the clone of the Congress. > > The same imperial arrogance, the same intemperate use of armed police, > the same combination of urbane Kolkata sophistication and suburban, > mofussil, para thuggery. The identical lethal combination of sleaze, > rhetoric, money, muscle and humbug. The CPI (M) of today, is the perfect > inheritor of the legacy of the Congress Party in West Bengal. Many > people in families with a link to the history of the Communist Parties > in West Bengal would no doubt find themselves waking up to the > disturbing conclusion that the party that they have had an unthinking, > emotional relationship with, through good days and bad, has in fact > become that arrogant, belligerent, hypocritical other that they had > grown up to despise. > > The metamorphosis of the CPI (M) into its own terrible alterity (as > manifest in Nandigram) is an occasion for all those who remember 1954, > 1956, 1959 and 1966 to enter into some introspection. What is tragic is > not just the fact that 14 people have died terrible deaths, but also > that those ordering the police firing, including Chief Minister > Buddhadeb Bhattacharya might have actually been once on the other side > of the barricades. > > Three decades after 1977, the CPI (M) in West Bengal is a party without > a moral backbone, bloated, sad, bankrupt and eager to be in bed with an > enterprise (the Salim Group) that is itself implicated (historically) in > bankrolling the masterminds of the genocide of Communists in 1965 in > Indonesia. > > Those of us who continue to consider ourselves claimants to the legacy > of the International Communist movement (in whichever form) have to add > another notch on our long list of events and processes that should cause > introspection. > > Kronstadt 1921 > The Show Trials of the 1930s in the USSR > The Gulag Experience in the USSR > Berlin 1953 > Hungary 1956 > Mao's repression of Chinese Communists > Czeckoslovakia 1968 > The Declaration of Martial Law in Poland > The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan > Pol Pot > The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia > The Continued Romance of Bankrupt Authoritarianism in Cuba and North Korea > Tienanmen Square 1989 > Nandigram and the Left Front Government in West Bengal > > (Everyone can add to this list) > > Let us take stock of all this, and then salvage what we can from our > history for the twenty first century. > > In sorrow and solidarity with the people of Nandigram. I am forwarding > below several fragments of reports (from the Telegraph, the BBC) and > emails that have come my way this morning, sent by Moinak Biswas in > Kolkata. > > Shuddha > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > 1. Red-hand Buddha > 14 killed in Nandigram re-entry bid > Telegraph, Kolkata, March 15, 2007 > > http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070315/asp/frontpage/story_7519166.asp > > March 14: The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government’s armed attempt to > reclaim Nandigram ran into waves of resistance fronted by women, leading > to the deaths of at least 14 people in police firing. > > The police succeeded in entering Nandigram, which villagers opposed to > land acquisition had turned into a no-entry zone for the administration > for over two months, but left deep bloodstains on the chief minister’s > industrialisation campaign. > > The police action also gave Mamata Banerjee an opportunity to call a > 12-hour Bengal bandh on Friday, disrupting examination schedules. > > The killings drew widespread condemnation, including a grim statement > from governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi that “the news has filled me with a > sense of cold horror”. “What is the public purpose served by the use of > force that we have witnessed today?” he asked. > > A huge contingent of police, amassed over the last few days, mounted the > mission to recapture Nandigram around 10 am today. > > Over 1,000 policemen, split into two groups, raced towards Sonachura — > the theatre of the main battle, around 170 km from Calcutta — from two > flanks . A 2,000-strong reserve force stood by, waiting to move in once > the advance party smashed its way though the hurdles. > > However, one of the thrust arms came face to face with a wall of 400-500 > women, behind whom stood around 2,000 villagers armed with spears, rods, > lathis and scythes. Pipe guns, muskets and country-made pistols were > also in the arsenal. > > A convoy of officials and labourers with excavators, road-rollers and > sandbags trailed the police. One of the objectives of the raid was to > repair roads dug up by villagers, the ditch becoming a symbol of protest > against land acquisition. A bomb squad and ambulances made up the rest > of the caravan. > > With the force advancing, a chant rose from the villagers, asking the > police to “go back”. > > The police, led by deputy inspector-general (Midnapore range) N. Ramesh > Babu, told the villagers over the public address system to move back but > were greeted by crude bombs and brickbats. Sound of shots was also heard. > > Teargas shells were burst and rubber bullets fired but the villagers > regrouped and surged back, this time without the chain of women > shielding them. > > The police then opened fire, using live ammunition. > > “We found the teargas and rubber bullets had little impact on the > aggressive villagers. They fled but regrouped and started firing at us. > We had no alternative but to open fire,” an officer said. > > Besides the fatalities, at least 75 people were injured — among them a > dozen policemen. > > The number of the dead fluctuated through the day — ranging from six to > 20 — but there was no official word till the evening. > > Chief minister Bhattacharjee reached the Assembly to make a statement, > without realising that the House had adjourned five minutes ago. > “Whatever I have to say, I will say it in the Assembly tomorrow,” he > said later. > > The onus fell on home secretary Prasad Ranjan Ray to confirm 11 deaths. > Late tonight, East Midnapore district magistrate Anup Agarwal put the > toll at 14 and other officials said the figure could rise. > > Ward master of the Tamluk hospital, Atal Behari Jana, said 11 bodies, > including that of a woman, bore bullet injuries. Most injuries were > either in the stomach or chest. > > “The police had to open fire in self-defence. Our force had guns not to > fight the enemy but to restore peace in Nandigram,” director-general of > police A.B. Vohra said. > > The stated goals — regaining control of Nandigram and ensuring the > return of CPM families that fled in January — were only partially met > till late this evening. The police have established their writ in four > of the six villages and a part of Sonachura but the CPM supporters are > yet to return. > > After calling the bandh, Mamata proceeded towards Nandigram but was > blocked by CPM supporters. Long-distance private buses were parked > diagonally on the road. > > > > > > > > > 2. From Nilanjan Hajra > > In addition to the protests listed below against Buddhadeb > Bhattacharjee-led CPI(M) government's well planned (for over two > months) and calculated murder (the police IG was constantly in touch > with the Chief Minister) of at least 20 farmers in Nandigram, the > following leading theater personalities (as far as I know, there may be > some more) of West Bengal have resigned from the West Bengal Natya > Academy, refusing to have any connection with the killers: > > Mr. Bibhas Chakraborty > Mr. Monoj Mitra > Mr. Ashoke Mukhopadhyay > Mr. Kaushik Sen > Mr. Bratya Basu > > Bratya Basu has written a moving piece in Bengali daily Ek Din on farmer > Haradhan Bag's suicide after losing his land in Singur to the TATA MOTORS. > > EK DIN Editor Suman Chattopadhyay in a signed front page Editorial has > compared the Nandigram murder to Jaliwanala Bagh. West Bengal's > Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi in his reaction has said, "the news has > filled me with cold horror" (reproted in all major channels and dailies). > > Lawyers in large numbers, irrespective of party affiliations, have taken > to the streets across West Bengal in protest. > > CPI(M) Politbureau Members Biman Bose, Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury > have justified the police action. > > We appeal to all human beings to join the protest in whatever possible > form. Please also forward these mails to as many as you can especially > outside > West Bengal. > > In Solidarity, > Nilanjan Hajra. > Kolkata. > - ------------------------------------------------------ > 3. A Petition from Sudipta Moitra, Samar Das, Sumit Chowdhury, Rifat > Mumtaz and Mansi Asher > > Dear All, > > A situation of terror has been created by the ruling > C.P.M Government and party in Nandigram over the past > few days. The matter reached a head as a huge > contingent of 4000-5000 comprising the Police Force > along with Para-Military, Rapid Action Force and > Combat Commando Force attacked Nandigram in the name > of "Operation Nandigram". This has come as a > repressive measure in the face of protest and local > movement (Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (Committee > to Prevent Farmland Eviction)) by the people of > Nandigram against the forceful land acquisition for > proposed SEZs (Salim Group, Indonesia) in the area. > > This is the second instance of violence in the area, > the first being in early January when 6 people were > killed. The last instance was provoked in the wake of > the local adminsitration serving notices for land > acquistion. After country wide crticism and protests > againt the state government, the Chief Minister had > issued a statement that no land would be acquired in > Nandigram if the people are not willing. Despite this > statement government has continued to maintain > pressure in the area through deployment of armed > forces. This clearly shows on whose side the Fascist > West Bengal Government is. > > Today, on Wednesday morning the armed forces broke > fire on the people as a result of which 20 people have > been killed and over 200 injured. The State Government > and West Bengal police are still not declaring the > numbers dead and injured. A huge protest movement has > spread accross West Bengal. In every district > rallies,demonstrations, road-blockages are being > organised.In Kolkata a protest in the Rajya-sabha and > other places is going on. National Hawker Federation > and > Hawker Sangram Committee is also strongly condemning > this barbaric fascist action of West Bengal government > and organizing rallies all over Kolkata. Reporters > from all the major media institutions are also being > forcefully stopped from covering and reporting the > reality. Two reporters of TARA BANGLA News were > threatened by CPM party caders and are now missing. > > WE APPEAL TO ALL THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY TO > CONDEMN THIS FASCIST MOVE BY THE GOVERNMENT TO > PRESSURISE LOCAL COMMUNITIES TO GIVE UP THEIR ONLY > SOURCES OF LIVELIHOODS. WE SEE THIS NANDIGRAM POLICE > FIRING AS A MASS KILLING LED BY THE GOVERNMENT WHO > STANDS ONLY IN SUPPORT OF CAPITALISTS AND ITS OWN > SELFISH INTERESTS. > > WE APPEAL TO ALL CONCERNED TO > SEND LETTERS TO THE PRIME MINISTER, PRESIDENT AND > CHIEF MINISTER OF WEST BENGAL CONDEMNING 'OPERATION > NANDIGRAM' > ORGANISE PROTEST MEETINGS AND DEMONSTRATIONS IN OUR > RESPECTIVE CITIES AND REGIONS > SPREAD THE NEWS OF THIS HENIOUS ACT OF THE GOVERNMENT > IN WEST BENGAL > WRITE TO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION FOR IMMEDIATE > INTERVENTION > FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT > > Sudipta Moitra > International Federation of Hawkers and Urban Poor > National Hawker Federation > Hawker Sangram Committee > 16/17 College Street, Kolkata-700012, West Bengal, > India. > Tele/Fax: 91-22196688 > Mob: 09433972662. > E-mails: ifhup.secretariat at gmail.com , > nationalhawkerfederation at gmail.com , > hawkersangramcommittee at gmail.com , > sudipta.y2k at gmail.com , saktimghosh at yahoo.com > > Samar Das, NAPM - 0943335946 > > Sumit Chowdhury, NAPM - 09830249430 > sumit_chowdhary at yahoo.com > > In Solidarity > Rifat Mumtaz and Manshi Asher > > PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS MAIL WIDELY > > ---------------------------------- > > 4. BBC News Report > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6448749.stm > > 'Seven die' in India farm clash > > At least seven people have died after police in > eastern India fired at farmers protesting at > industrial plans. > > Riot police were sent to Nandigram in West Bengal > after protests against land being used for a planned > chemical hub. > > Police confirm two deaths. Doctors say five others > died of bullet wounds. Unrest in January claimed six > lives. > > Protests have gone on despite the state government > pledging to move the plant elsewhere. New economic > zones are a hugely contentious issue in India. > > 'Regain control' > > Farmers in Nandigram have fiercely resisted the West > Bengal government's plan to acquire farms for a hub > for chemical industries by an Indonesian company. > > > Six people, including a policemen, died during > protests in the area in January. > > Earlier this week, the Communist-led state government > promised to shift the proposed chemical industry hub > out of Nandigram if locals continued to oppose it. > > But Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya said the > administration would have to "regain control" over the > area and plans to send in riot police were announced. > > Angry farmers along with political workers, belonging > to the state's governing Communist party and the > opposition Trinamul Congress, have dug up roads, burnt > down wooden bridges and attacked government officials > and policemen trying to enter Nandigram during the > past two months. > > The BBC's Subir Bhaumik in Calcutta says it is not > clear why Wednesday's clash happened inspite of > government assurances to the local farmers about their > land. > > On Wednesday morning, nearly 5,000 policemen set out > to take control in Nandigram when protesting farmers > prevented government and the police from entering the > area. > > Police officials say they ran into fierce resistance > from thousands of farmers, both men and women, at the > village of Bankaberia. > > > > 'Lawlessness' > > Senior West Bengal official Prasad Ranjan Roy said the > police fired tear gas shells to break up the protests, > and then fired and charged through the protesting > crowd when they came under attack. > > > "Nandigram has descended into lawlessness and no > government can simply be inactive," he said. > > Eyewitnesses say the local hospital is teeming with > injured persons, many of them with bullet wounds. > > The Trinamul Congress has called for a statewide > strike on Friday to protest against the police firing. > > > Two allies of the Communist party have said the police > action was "most unfortunate". > > The issue of farm land acquisition has generated much > emotion in West Bengal in the past few months. > > The government's move to allot 1,000 acres of land to > industrial giant, Tata Motors, to build a car factory > in the Singur area in Hooghly district generated > widespread protests. > > State governments in India are acquiring large tracts > of land to set up special economic zones (SEZs) to > push up employment and earnings. > > The federal government reckons that SEZs will bring in > $13.5bn in investment and create 890,000 jobs by 2009 > if the ambitious plan is allowed to proceed. > > Critics say this is destined to become the biggest > land grab in post-colonial India, given the lack of > transparency and rampant corruption in government. > > > > Are you a farmer in West Bengal? Do you have relatives > or friends who are affected by the industrialisation > there? Use the form below to send us your experiences > and reaction: > > > > You can send pictures and video to: yourpics at bbc.co.uk > or to send via MMS please dial +44 (0)7725 100 100. > > > Name > Your E-mail address > Town & Country > Phone number (optional): > Comments > --------------------------------------------- > 4. > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From habersacksarah at gmx.at Thu Mar 15 23:35:26 2007 From: habersacksarah at gmx.at (Sarah Habersack) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:05:26 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] urban space Pune In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20070315180526.318850@gmx.net> Hello! My name is Sarah and I'm a student of Development Science from Austria. Right now I'm in Pune for MA research on the production of urban space. I'll work with qualitative interviews and sensescapes to figure out the perception young students in Pune have of urban space, of their living space. the Idea behind that is to analyze critically discourses on development and cultural globalisation by taking subjectice liferealities as main ressource. As I have never lived in Pune, I would be glad about any support. So if you are student in Pune and live there or have any Contacts, I would really appreciate your help. If you first want to know more about the project, just go ahead and ask. Thanks a lot for your interest Sarah Habersack University of Vienna -- Ist Ihr Browser Vista-kompatibel? Jetzt die neuesten Browser-Versionen downloaden: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/browser From habersacksarah at gmx.at Thu Mar 15 23:35:26 2007 From: habersacksarah at gmx.at (Sarah Habersack) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:05:26 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] urban space Pune In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20070315180526.318850@gmx.net> Hello! My name is Sarah and I'm a student of Development Science from Austria. Right now I'm in Pune for MA research on the production of urban space. I'll work with qualitative interviews and sensescapes to figure out the perception young students in Pune have of urban space, of their living space. the Idea behind that is to analyze critically discourses on development and cultural globalisation by taking subjectice liferealities as main ressource. As I have never lived in Pune, I would be glad about any support. So if you are student in Pune and live there or have any Contacts, I would really appreciate your help. If you first want to know more about the project, just go ahead and ask. Thanks a lot for your interest Sarah Habersack University of Vienna -- Ist Ihr Browser Vista-kompatibel? Jetzt die neuesten Browser-Versionen downloaden: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/browser From tapasrayx at gmail.com Fri Mar 16 05:50:53 2007 From: tapasrayx at gmail.com (Tapas Ray) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 20:20:53 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram In-Reply-To: <45F90518.8010900@sarai.net> References: <45F90518.8010900@sarai.net> Message-ID: <45F9E2E5.2030402@googlemail.com> Those who have some familiarity with West Bengal will probably agree with Shuddhabrata's deeply anguished description of the state of affairs prevailing there today. The Nandigram tragedy is - or should be - yet another occasion for some introspection on the part of the Left Front in general and the CPI-M in particular. But it is more than that. It should be an occasion for thinking about the broader context within which this culture has come into being, namely the ideology of "development". Although they have some very revolutionary-sounding things to say about the political economy of the Indian state (while playing obediently by its rules) the Left parties and the Left Front government do not seem to have engaged in any serious assessment of the technical development paradigm adopted by the country. In fact, they have swallowed it hook, line and sinker. If West Bengal was what it is today when the "Green Revolution" arrived in India, in all probability it would have been chosen rather than Punjab as the site of that experiment. All that matters today in West Bengal as much as in other states, one supposes, is investment. Anyone who is against any investment or any aspect of any investment, whatever the reason, is seen as an enemy of the state. One should say "enemy of the people". Tapas Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: > Dear Friends, > > The incident of the brutal armed police attack in order to 're-take' > Nandigram in West Bengal yesterday is yet another milestone in the From lmadhura77 at gmail.com Thu Mar 15 17:05:38 2007 From: lmadhura77 at gmail.com (madhura l) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:05:38 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Urban spaces and identity formation: IFS posting Message-ID: <4dea04310703150435k2cfb6b59wf994c8d1e35b7257@mail.gmail.com> Hi all! I'm Madhura and I'm writing from Pune. My study is titled, *'**Urban Spaces and Identity Formation: exploring the 'vartaphalak' culture in Pune city'*. It revolves around a particular 'genre' of public space that is a result of a popular practice among the various collectives in Pune city. The practice is that of putting up '*vartaphalak*' or notice boards, which serve as visual markers of the collective that exists in the precincts of that notice board. In many cases, these notice boards are not 'stand alone' markers, but are a part of an entire set of accoutrements, which the collective uses to declare its presence in that space. Most commonly, the additional accoutrements are in the form of a small covered space, like a bus stop, which serves as a place where people can sit and read daily newspapers provided in a rack. Or there could be a couple of benches, adjacent to the notice board, again meant for sitting. Sometimes there is an additional provision of space where drinking water is made available to the pedestrians during summers in huge earthen pots (*pan poi*). It is also not uncommon to find a small temple in this same space. These notice boards are put up by collectives which are constituted by political as well as non-political organizations in the city, including local, branches of all the political parties, collectives like Ganesh mandals, '*Yuva mitra mandals'*, residential collectives, auto rickshaw drivers' unions etc. The content of the notice boards ranges from local, collective-specific concerns to commentary on current regional or national issues. These spaces become the centre point around which many local celebrations like '*Satyanarayan Puja'*, Ganesh festival, Independence Day and so on are organized. The remarkable feature of these spaces is that they have extremely rich visual content. Firstly, there are the various comments, notices, announcements written on the boards for local community members to read. Examples of this include notice offering condolences to the family of the deceased, who was the local resident, announcement of a blood donation camp organized in the locality, congratulatory message on the occasion of Independence Day, comments on some current issue, like the financial budget or Samjhauta blasts and so on. At the same time, the various symbols and imagery that is inscribed in and around these spaces, though ubiquitous, are significant visual markers of identity, local, regional or even national. These range from the symbols of political parties, displayed prominently on the boards or the newspaper stands, colour of the newspaper stand itself, photographs or pictures of prominent national leaders/ icons like Gandhi, Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule, Shivaji etc. Similarly, the content of the boards itself also is a clear indicator of the political/ ideological alignments of the collective that the boards represent. These identity signifiers are particularly underlined during a local celebration, which centers around that space. In many places occasions like Gudi Padwaa, Ambedkar Jayanti, and Independence Day are celebrated with great pomp, with the enthusiastic participation of the local community members in the organization of the events. These hubs thus serve to weave in multiple levels of concerns for the local community members. By reflecting interests and happenings within the local community, it serves to consolidate the local communal fabric. At the same time, articulation of the regional or national identity makes it possible to extend and strengthen this sense of solidarity to include the larger regional or national 'community'. Identity building and consolidation of the same is a major area of study in the context of these spaces. As already mentioned, several of the notice board spaces are sponsored by local branches of political parties. Notably, all of the newspaper racks are also financed by various corporators' ward development funds. The political link is obvious in many places, while it is obscured, though present in several others. Based upon the assumption that these spaces do play a considerable role in strengthening community identities through activities couched in religious or social service sphere, they also become a convenient strategy for political mobilization and political activity in the local areas. In this light, what kind of population are these spaces aimed at, would be another point of inquiry. Who makes use of these spaces, who takes initiative in maintenance and organization of the spaces and celebrations around it, what is the class, gender, and age profile of people who access these spaces; these are some of the questions that the study would seek to explore. Another significant aspect of the '*varta phalak*' culture is the spatial distribution of these hubs in the city. One can safely say that the network of the hubs is definitely denser in the older parts (*peths)* of the city than those, which have been recently developed. This is not a coincidence, given the fact that it is largely the older parts of the city, which participate in the political identity formation of the city. A crude caste-based division is evident across the older *peths *as some areas have a predominantly lower caste/ artisan caste populations as opposed to some others, which are inhabited by upper caste populace, notably Brahmins. The question is whether there is a difference in the rhetoric used in the notice-boards here, based upon the differential caste population in the respective *peths*. A primary level hypothesis is that the rhetoric used in the areas inhabited by lower/ artisan castes is directed more towards strengthening local level community and regional identity, while the rhetoric used in upper caste areas is at a different level, appealing to identity linked to cultural heritage and nationalism. Given the nature of these spaces, the study would be inadequate without a gender analysis of the same. Analyzing the users as well as the composition of these spaces from a gender point of view would be interesting, especially since these spaces constitute sites for articulation and consolidation of identities as well as political mobilization. I plan to construct a photo-essay comprising of maximum 35 photographs, covering the above issues. The outcome of the study also includes a review paper exploring these issues in detail; it would be based upon the fieldwork done during this study as well as a review of literature in the area of public spaces, visual culture and identity formation. * * *Work completed till now* I've managed to finalize my 'field areas' so to say, as well the specific * vartaphalak* in those locations. I would be including a maximum of 15 such * vartaphalaks*, spanning the four areas of Sadashiv Peth, Narayan Peth, Guruwar Peth and Ghorpade Peth. The first two areas are almost exclusively Brahmin populated areas, while the latter two display a high proportion of lower caste communities and Muslim population. The *vartaphalaks *belong to a variety of collectives, including political parties, local *yuva mandals*or 'friend circles' and religious trusts. Majority of them are Hindu collectives, though there are two Muslim collectives from Guruwar and Ghorpade Peth. The exercise of building rapport with people who are associated with these spaces was a huge learning, to say the least. Let me locate myself as a researcher here: I'm a middle class Maharashtrian Brahmin woman, who has always inhabited the 'progressive' 'modern' part of the city. Sadashiv Peth and Narayan Peth are the kind of areas with which I'm familiar; but in my growing years, areas like Guruwar and Ghorpade Peth, people there, were definitely the 'other': lower middle class, non-Brahmin communities. This study gives me the opportunity to deconstruct my own notions of class and community as I interact with this very group of people to understand what these spaces mean to them. Till now I have gotten an enthusiastic response to my venture, with members of local collectives promising earnest co-operation. My brief interaction with people who actually write the content on the * varaphalak* led me to concretize my intention to profile these persons, their backgrounds and their political aspirations. But it's hardly a homogenous group and developing some kind of an interview guide requires much thinking through and some more interaction, I think. Brevity was never a skill with me, as is obvious now. But any comments, questions and feedback on the study are most welcome! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070315/adcf3e23/attachment.html From kumaramesh at gmail.com Thu Mar 15 18:24:32 2007 From: kumaramesh at gmail.com (Ramesh Kumar) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:24:32 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Film exhibition spaces in Delhi (Proposed research for Independent Fellowships 2007) Message-ID: <8122bc0b0703150554j1d511b81td6198b91fd52d564@mail.gmail.com> *Film exhibition spaces in Delhi* My proposed research would seek to understand the dynamics of the film viewing experience offered by three specific cinema halls (belonging to the A, B and C segment each) in the city of Delhi . The research would base itself on a basic assumption that the film viewing experience is greatly altered by the viewing conditions and other facilities offered by the screening space and its surroundings. My attempt would be to understand the different spatial experiences being offered by each cinema hall, to examine the mechanisms that are employed in each hall to offer the audience "a novel movie experience", to identify how these mechanisms differ over the three cinema halls belonging to three separate segments, and to locate such an empirical understanding in the larger fabric of cultural production and circulation amidst the heterogeneity of the city space. The first level of investigation would seek to understand each of the cinema halls as offering a unique spatial experience (similar to others in its segment), in the process attempting to answer the following questions:- • Where is the cinema hall located, and how does its location impact the identity of the cinema hall? This would also involve a general investigation of the entire neighborhood, examining the general nature of other facilities in the immediate neighborhood and studying the approach to the cinema hall. • How is the façade and the outside area of each cinema hall designed, and how does this design contribute in marking and announcing the cinema hall in the neighborhood. The design of the parking facilities would also contribute to such an investigation. • What is the relationship of the cinema hall with peripheral businesses and other facilities being offered near it? Do the cinema hall owners and managers exercise any direct or indirect control over these smaller businesses in order to create or reinforce their identity, and do such businesses and other facilities have a direct or indirect impact on the identity of the cinema hall (as perceived by the exhibitors)? • What is the architecture and spatial design of each cinema hall, and how does the design contribute towards offering a unique spatial experience? In addition to the design of the building and its interior spaces, such an investigation would also entail examining the lighting, the air circulation, the design and structure of the lobby, the music played in the lobby, the design of the toilet facilities, the kind of vending joints operating inside the cinema hall, the nature of entryways, exits and emergency exits and the maintenance of the hall. Wherever possible, this would also involve obtaining the floor plans and architectural designs of the sites. • Is the experience of approaching the hall and entering its space regulated? What are the tools employed to regulate the visitors' movements (design of the architecture/ signage/ ushers and security guards), and what is the relationship of the architectural regulation with the other modes employed to regulate movement? The nature of security measures such as metal detectors and frisking would also be a part of such observations. The second level of investigation would examine the nature of film viewing experience offered by each of the cinema halls, attempting to answer the following questions:- • What is the nature of films being screened in each hall? What are the factors that go into deciding the films to be screened, and who takes the decisions? • What is the nature of fillers, advertisements, trailers and music played in each screening space? • What is the nature of projection technology employed in each of the cinema halls, and how does it shape the viewing experience? • How do the other facilities offered by the cinema hall affect the experience of watching a film? The third level of investigation would specifically deal with the nature of promotional material employed by each of the halls, and would seek to answer the following:- • What are the kinds of promotional material used by each hall (posters/ lobby cards/ displays outside the hall/ hoardings/ leaflets/ mailers/ email newsletters)? • What is the nature of alterations made to the original poster designs and other promotional material at the distributor level and at the level of the cinema hall keeping the target audience in mind? • How are the promotional campaigns conceived and designed for each space, who takes the decisions and what are the factors that are taken into account while (re)designing the material? • How are the promotional materials finally used in and around the hall? All three levels of investigation would entail establishing close contacts with cinema hall owners, managers, sales representatives, technical operators of equipment in each hall and support staff working at each of the venues, as well as with film distributors and promotional material designers who form an integral part of the business of film exhibition. A series of planned semi-formal interviews would be conducted with them and with other people having direct or indirect links with the exhibition business (such as owners of tea stalls and paan shops outside the hall) in order to systematically cover the thematic heads under consideration while giving the respondents enough flexibility to lead me into other areas of investigation. This would be backed by empirical observation and documentation (through digital photographs) of the venues under consideration, and collection of samples of promotional material. Additionally, I propose to combine the empirical findings of the research with my understanding of cultural studies and write a final report/ academic paper which would summarize these findings and locate them in the larger field of cultural production and circulation. I am currently registered for an MPhil in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. Please feel free to email me directly with any suggestions and comments that you may have. -- Ramesh Kumar -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070315/44fbb3ab/attachment.html From madhuja_m at yahoo.co.in Thu Mar 15 16:23:13 2007 From: madhuja_m at yahoo.co.in (madhuja mukherjee) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 10:53:13 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] reader-list Digest, Vol 44, Issue 48 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <154729.39558.qm@web8803.mail.in.yahoo.com> Dear Shuddha, Nilanjan and all, just wanted to share - today about 800 or more students, teachers and staff of JU marched with a heavy heart and in solidarity for the people dying in Nandigram. While most of us are still deeply shocked to make meaning of yesterday's incident, we hope we are able to intervene in whatever way. Madhuja. reader-list-request at sarai.net wrote: Send reader-list mailing list submissions to reader-list at sarai.net To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to reader-list-request at sarai.net You can reach the person managing the list at reader-list-owner at sarai.net When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of reader-list digest..." Today's Topics: 1. The Tragedy of Nandigram (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) 2. Mukul Kesavan on Sanjay Kak's 'Jashn-e-Azadi' (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:04:32 +0530 From: Shuddhabrata Sengupta Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram To: sarai list Message-ID: <45F90518.8010900 at sarai.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"; format=flowed Dear Friends, The incident of the brutal armed police attack in order to 're-take' Nandigram in West Bengal yesterday is yet another milestone in the relationship between police and people in that state. According to newspaper reports, 14 people have died and more than 75 people have been injured in yesterday's violence. The injured include around 12 policemen. However, estimates of the dead and the injured vary. A brief and incomplete history of police violence in West Bengal would have to include police attacks on agitating Calcutta tram workers in 1954, on the general population during the food riots of 1954, on striking school teachers in 1954-56, on protesting students on August 31, 1959, which resulted in the death of 80 students, on 2nd September 1959, when several others were killed (bringing the August-September 1959, total of deaths up to 102). Again, in 1966, students agitating on issues to do with the rising prices of essential commodities were brutally repressed by police action, leading to the death of several young people. In all these conflicts, it was very often militants and activists belonging to the Communist Parties, and since 1965, the CPI (M) that faced police violence. However, with the election of the first (and then the second) United Front ministries (1967-69) (which included the CPI and the CPI(M) , the pattern of victims and patrons of violence had to undergo a subtle shift. And while the CPI (M) did continue to enjoy a degree of respect for having borne the brunt of police violence through successive erstwhile Congress administrations, it became equally clear that the party was not by any means hesitant to use the repressive machinery of the state to further its own ends. This became abundantly clear when, in the wake of the Naxalbari uprising, the then home minister Jyoti Basu (later to be Chief Minister of West Bengal), sanctioned the use of CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) to quell dissident peasant activists from what had once been his own party in North Bengal. Hence, the popular slogan of the late 1960s "Jyoti Babu doley, CRP er koley" (Jyoti Babu Swings in the Lap of the CRP) After the fall of the United Front government and the Congress's return to power police terror gripped West Bengal in the wake of the Naxalbari movement, and the state terror unleashed in Calcutta and several districts of West Bengal by the Siddhartha Shankar Ray led Congress ministry left several hundreds dead, and imprisoned. Many people disappeared. Since the CPI (M) dominated Left Front government came to power in 1977, clashes within the left front, within the CPI(M) and with an array of electoral and extra-parliamentary opponents (on the left and the right) as well as confrontations with ordinary people have left many more dead in West Bengal. Violence has been routinely used by the CITU, the CPI(M)'s trade union to enforce its writ in Industrial areas. When the suffocating tactics of consensus have failed, the Left Front government has routinely used official as well as unofficial forms of violence. This is a part of everyday life in West Bengal, and anyone with any links to the state is very well aware of the micro-managerial stranglehold that zonal, block and para committees of the CPI (M) have on most aspects of life in that state. The current conflict in Nandigram, which pits well armed police and CPI (M) cadre, acting directly in the interests of Capital against villagers and their sympathisers (politically organized as well as those who are not necessarily part of organized political formations) is just a reminder that in the more than three decades that it has enjoyed power in West Bengal, the CPI (M) has become the clone of the Congress. The same imperial arrogance, the same intemperate use of armed police, the same combination of urbane Kolkata sophistication and suburban, mofussil, para thuggery. The identical lethal combination of sleaze, rhetoric, money, muscle and humbug. The CPI (M) of today, is the perfect inheritor of the legacy of the Congress Party in West Bengal. Many people in families with a link to the history of the Communist Parties in West Bengal would no doubt find themselves waking up to the disturbing conclusion that the party that they have had an unthinking, emotional relationship with, through good days and bad, has in fact become that arrogant, belligerent, hypocritical other that they had grown up to despise. The metamorphosis of the CPI (M) into its own terrible alterity (as manifest in Nandigram) is an occasion for all those who remember 1954, 1956, 1959 and 1966 to enter into some introspection. What is tragic is not just the fact that 14 people have died terrible deaths, but also that those ordering the police firing, including Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya might have actually been once on the other side of the barricades. Three decades after 1977, the CPI (M) in West Bengal is a party without a moral backbone, bloated, sad, bankrupt and eager to be in bed with an enterprise (the Salim Group) that is itself implicated (historically) in bankrolling the masterminds of the genocide of Communists in 1965 in Indonesia. Those of us who continue to consider ourselves claimants to the legacy of the International Communist movement (in whichever form) have to add another notch on our long list of events and processes that should cause introspection. Kronstadt 1921 The Show Trials of the 1930s in the USSR The Gulag Experience in the USSR Berlin 1953 Hungary 1956 Mao's repression of Chinese Communists Czeckoslovakia 1968 The Declaration of Martial Law in Poland The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan Pol Pot The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia The Continued Romance of Bankrupt Authoritarianism in Cuba and North Korea Tienanmen Square 1989 Nandigram and the Left Front Government in West Bengal (Everyone can add to this list) Let us take stock of all this, and then salvage what we can from our history for the twenty first century. In sorrow and solidarity with the people of Nandigram. I am forwarding below several fragments of reports (from the Telegraph, the BBC) and emails that have come my way this morning, sent by Moinak Biswas in Kolkata. Shuddha --------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Red-hand Buddha 14 killed in Nandigram re-entry bid Telegraph, Kolkata, March 15, 2007 http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070315/asp/frontpage/story_7519166.asp March 14: The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government’s armed attempt to reclaim Nandigram ran into waves of resistance fronted by women, leading to the deaths of at least 14 people in police firing. The police succeeded in entering Nandigram, which villagers opposed to land acquisition had turned into a no-entry zone for the administration for over two months, but left deep bloodstains on the chief minister’s industrialisation campaign. The police action also gave Mamata Banerjee an opportunity to call a 12-hour Bengal bandh on Friday, disrupting examination schedules. The killings drew widespread condemnation, including a grim statement from governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi that “the news has filled me with a sense of cold horror”. “What is the public purpose served by the use of force that we have witnessed today?” he asked. A huge contingent of police, amassed over the last few days, mounted the mission to recapture Nandigram around 10 am today. Over 1,000 policemen, split into two groups, raced towards Sonachura — the theatre of the main battle, around 170 km from Calcutta — from two flanks . A 2,000-strong reserve force stood by, waiting to move in once the advance party smashed its way though the hurdles. However, one of the thrust arms came face to face with a wall of 400-500 women, behind whom stood around 2,000 villagers armed with spears, rods, lathis and scythes. Pipe guns, muskets and country-made pistols were also in the arsenal. A convoy of officials and labourers with excavators, road-rollers and sandbags trailed the police. One of the objectives of the raid was to repair roads dug up by villagers, the ditch becoming a symbol of protest against land acquisition. A bomb squad and ambulances made up the rest of the caravan. With the force advancing, a chant rose from the villagers, asking the police to “go back”. The police, led by deputy inspector-general (Midnapore range) N. Ramesh Babu, told the villagers over the public address system to move back but were greeted by crude bombs and brickbats. Sound of shots was also heard. Teargas shells were burst and rubber bullets fired but the villagers regrouped and surged back, this time without the chain of women shielding them. The police then opened fire, using live ammunition. “We found the teargas and rubber bullets had little impact on the aggressive villagers. They fled but regrouped and started firing at us. We had no alternative but to open fire,” an officer said. Besides the fatalities, at least 75 people were injured — among them a dozen policemen. The number of the dead fluctuated through the day — ranging from six to 20 — but there was no official word till the evening. Chief minister Bhattacharjee reached the Assembly to make a statement, without realising that the House had adjourned five minutes ago. “Whatever I have to say, I will say it in the Assembly tomorrow,” he said later. The onus fell on home secretary Prasad Ranjan Ray to confirm 11 deaths. Late tonight, East Midnapore district magistrate Anup Agarwal put the toll at 14 and other officials said the figure could rise. Ward master of the Tamluk hospital, Atal Behari Jana, said 11 bodies, including that of a woman, bore bullet injuries. Most injuries were either in the stomach or chest. “The police had to open fire in self-defence. Our force had guns not to fight the enemy but to restore peace in Nandigram,” director-general of police A.B. Vohra said. The stated goals — regaining control of Nandigram and ensuring the return of CPM families that fled in January — were only partially met till late this evening. The police have established their writ in four of the six villages and a part of Sonachura but the CPM supporters are yet to return. After calling the bandh, Mamata proceeded towards Nandigram but was blocked by CPM supporters. Long-distance private buses were parked diagonally on the road. 2. From Nilanjan Hajra In addition to the protests listed below against Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee-led CPI(M) government's well planned (for over two months) and calculated murder (the police IG was constantly in touch with the Chief Minister) of at least 20 farmers in Nandigram, the following leading theater personalities (as far as I know, there may be some more) of West Bengal have resigned from the West Bengal Natya Academy, refusing to have any connection with the killers: Mr. Bibhas Chakraborty Mr. Monoj Mitra Mr. Ashoke Mukhopadhyay Mr. Kaushik Sen Mr. Bratya Basu Bratya Basu has written a moving piece in Bengali daily Ek Din on farmer Haradhan Bag's suicide after losing his land in Singur to the TATA MOTORS. EK DIN Editor Suman Chattopadhyay in a signed front page Editorial has compared the Nandigram murder to Jaliwanala Bagh. West Bengal's Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi in his reaction has said, "the news has filled me with cold horror" (reproted in all major channels and dailies). Lawyers in large numbers, irrespective of party affiliations, have taken to the streets across West Bengal in protest. CPI(M) Politbureau Members Biman Bose, Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury have justified the police action. We appeal to all human beings to join the protest in whatever possible form. Please also forward these mails to as many as you can especially outside West Bengal. In Solidarity, Nilanjan Hajra. Kolkata. - ------------------------------------------------------ 3. A Petition from Sudipta Moitra, Samar Das, Sumit Chowdhury, Rifat Mumtaz and Mansi Asher Dear All, A situation of terror has been created by the ruling C.P.M Government and party in Nandigram over the past few days. The matter reached a head as a huge contingent of 4000-5000 comprising the Police Force along with Para-Military, Rapid Action Force and Combat Commando Force attacked Nandigram in the name of "Operation Nandigram". This has come as a repressive measure in the face of protest and local movement (Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (Committee to Prevent Farmland Eviction)) by the people of Nandigram against the forceful land acquisition for proposed SEZs (Salim Group, Indonesia) in the area. This is the second instance of violence in the area, the first being in early January when 6 people were killed. The last instance was provoked in the wake of the local adminsitration serving notices for land acquistion. After country wide crticism and protests againt the state government, the Chief Minister had issued a statement that no land would be acquired in Nandigram if the people are not willing. Despite this statement government has continued to maintain pressure in the area through deployment of armed forces. This clearly shows on whose side the Fascist West Bengal Government is. Today, on Wednesday morning the armed forces broke fire on the people as a result of which 20 people have been killed and over 200 injured. The State Government and West Bengal police are still not declaring the numbers dead and injured. A huge protest movement has spread accross West Bengal. In every district rallies,demonstrations, road-blockages are being organised.In Kolkata a protest in the Rajya-sabha and other places is going on. National Hawker Federation and Hawker Sangram Committee is also strongly condemning this barbaric fascist action of West Bengal government and organizing rallies all over Kolkata. Reporters from all the major media institutions are also being forcefully stopped from covering and reporting the reality. Two reporters of TARA BANGLA News were threatened by CPM party caders and are now missing. WE APPEAL TO ALL THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY TO CONDEMN THIS FASCIST MOVE BY THE GOVERNMENT TO PRESSURISE LOCAL COMMUNITIES TO GIVE UP THEIR ONLY SOURCES OF LIVELIHOODS. WE SEE THIS NANDIGRAM POLICE FIRING AS A MASS KILLING LED BY THE GOVERNMENT WHO STANDS ONLY IN SUPPORT OF CAPITALISTS AND ITS OWN SELFISH INTERESTS. WE APPEAL TO ALL CONCERNED TO SEND LETTERS TO THE PRIME MINISTER, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF MINISTER OF WEST BENGAL CONDEMNING 'OPERATION NANDIGRAM' ORGANISE PROTEST MEETINGS AND DEMONSTRATIONS IN OUR RESPECTIVE CITIES AND REGIONS SPREAD THE NEWS OF THIS HENIOUS ACT OF THE GOVERNMENT IN WEST BENGAL WRITE TO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION FOR IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT Sudipta Moitra International Federation of Hawkers and Urban Poor National Hawker Federation Hawker Sangram Committee 16/17 College Street, Kolkata-700012, West Bengal, India. Tele/Fax: 91-22196688 Mob: 09433972662. E-mails: ifhup.secretariat at gmail.com , nationalhawkerfederation at gmail.com , hawkersangramcommittee at gmail.com , sudipta.y2k at gmail.com , saktimghosh at yahoo.com Samar Das, NAPM - 0943335946 Sumit Chowdhury, NAPM - 09830249430 sumit_chowdhary at yahoo.com In Solidarity Rifat Mumtaz and Manshi Asher PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS MAIL WIDELY ---------------------------------- 4. BBC News Report http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6448749.stm 'Seven die' in India farm clash At least seven people have died after police in eastern India fired at farmers protesting at industrial plans. Riot police were sent to Nandigram in West Bengal after protests against land being used for a planned chemical hub. Police confirm two deaths. Doctors say five others died of bullet wounds. Unrest in January claimed six lives. Protests have gone on despite the state government pledging to move the plant elsewhere. New economic zones are a hugely contentious issue in India. 'Regain control' Farmers in Nandigram have fiercely resisted the West Bengal government's plan to acquire farms for a hub for chemical industries by an Indonesian company. Six people, including a policemen, died during protests in the area in January. Earlier this week, the Communist-led state government promised to shift the proposed chemical industry hub out of Nandigram if locals continued to oppose it. But Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya said the administration would have to "regain control" over the area and plans to send in riot police were announced. Angry farmers along with political workers, belonging to the state's governing Communist party and the opposition Trinamul Congress, have dug up roads, burnt down wooden bridges and attacked government officials and policemen trying to enter Nandigram during the past two months. The BBC's Subir Bhaumik in Calcutta says it is not clear why Wednesday's clash happened inspite of government assurances to the local farmers about their land. On Wednesday morning, nearly 5,000 policemen set out to take control in Nandigram when protesting farmers prevented government and the police from entering the area. Police officials say they ran into fierce resistance from thousands of farmers, both men and women, at the village of Bankaberia. 'Lawlessness' Senior West Bengal official Prasad Ranjan Roy said the police fired tear gas shells to break up the protests, and then fired and charged through the protesting crowd when they came under attack. "Nandigram has descended into lawlessness and no government can simply be inactive," he said. Eyewitnesses say the local hospital is teeming with injured persons, many of them with bullet wounds. The Trinamul Congress has called for a statewide strike on Friday to protest against the police firing. Two allies of the Communist party have said the police action was "most unfortunate". The issue of farm land acquisition has generated much emotion in West Bengal in the past few months. The government's move to allot 1,000 acres of land to industrial giant, Tata Motors, to build a car factory in the Singur area in Hooghly district generated widespread protests. State governments in India are acquiring large tracts of land to set up special economic zones (SEZs) to push up employment and earnings. The federal government reckons that SEZs will bring in $13.5bn in investment and create 890,000 jobs by 2009 if the ambitious plan is allowed to proceed. Critics say this is destined to become the biggest land grab in post-colonial India, given the lack of transparency and rampant corruption in government. Are you a farmer in West Bengal? Do you have relatives or friends who are affected by the industrialisation there? Use the form below to send us your experiences and reaction: You can send pictures and video to: yourpics at bbc.co.uk or to send via MMS please dial +44 (0)7725 100 100. Name Your E-mail address Town & Country Phone number (optional): Comments --------------------------------------------- 4. ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:09:01 +0530 From: Shuddhabrata Sengupta Subject: [Reader-list] Mukul Kesavan on Sanjay Kak's 'Jashn-e-Azadi' === message truncated === --------------------------------- Here’s a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070315/7107b0e6/attachment.html From cahen.x at levels9.com Thu Mar 15 16:54:10 2007 From: cahen.x at levels9.com (xavier cahen) Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 12:24:10 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] pourinfos Newsletter / 03-14 to 03-21-2007 Message-ID: <45F92CDA.8070006@levels9.com> pourinfos.org l'actualité du monde de l'art / daily Art news ----------------------------------------------------------------------- >From Wenesday March 14, 2006 to Wenesday March 21 2007 (included) ------------------------------------------------------------------- (mostly in french) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ NOTRE ÉLECTION PRÉSIDENTIELLE 2007 / OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 2007 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://pourinfos.org/fichiers/_elections_04311_pourinfos_candidats.pdf Pourinfos.org is coming into the presidential campaign Listen to their headquarters (audio files in french - first part) - Antoine Waechter http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionswaechter-tit-Antoine-Waechter-reponses- - Arlette Laguiller http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionslaguiller-tit-Arlette-Laguiller-reponses- - Dominique Voynet http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsvoynet-tit-Dominique-Voynet-reponses- - France Gamerre http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsgamerre-tit-France-Gamerre-reponses- - François Bayrou http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsbayrou-tit-Francois-Bayrou-reponses- - Jean-Marie Le Pen http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionslepen-tit-Jean-Marie-Le-Pen-reponses- Write your comments ! http://pourinfos.org/index.php?commentaires=34302&categorie=elections @ 001 (14/03/2007) Meetings: Sculpture and urban space, Wednesday March 14, 2007, Auditorium of Louvre, Louvre, Paris, France http://pourinfos.org/art-34496-tit--La-sculpture-et-l-espace-urbain-mercredi -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 002 (14/03/2007) Meetings: « Visions experimentales urbaines » (Urban experimental Visions) Nathalie Junod Ponsard, Observatoire des nouveaux medias, Wednesday March 14, 2007, Ensad, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34554-tit--Visions-experimentales-urbaines- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 003 (14/03/2007) Residency: 2 Residency Opportunities - National and International artists working in all media, Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Allenheads, United Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34602-tit--2-Residency-Opportunities-National-and -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 004 (14/03/2007) Résidence: UNIDEE is an International Program '07, Cittadellarte, Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italie. http://pourinfos.org/art-34603-tit-Residence-UNIDEE-is-an-International -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 005 (14/03/2007) Residency: Call for Residency 07/08: the box _Bourges, Ensa of Bourges, Bourges, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34604-tit--Appel-candidature-07-08-la-box -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 006 (14/03/2007) Meetings: Press Conference for the 52 ième Biennial di Venezia, March 14, 2007, 14 mars 2007, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34605-tit--Invitation-a-la-Conference-de-Presse-pour -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 007 (14/03/2007) Meetings: Dominique Blais et Daniele Balit, La Vitrine of l'Ecole Nationale d'Arts de Paris-Cergy, Wednesday March 14, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34610-tit--Dominique-Blais-et-Daniele-Balit-La -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 008 (14/03/2007) Publication: DERNIERE PUBLICATION / VIP !, association POLART, Strasbourg, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34620-tit--DERNIERE-PUBLICATION-VIP-association -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 009 (14/03/2007) Exhibition: Semaine Internationale des Arts Numériques et Alternatifs (International week of Numerical and Alternative Arts,), Evry, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34628-tit--Semaine-Internationale-des-Arts -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 010 (14/03/2007) Call : To film work, film and work, international Conference transdisciplinaire, University of Provence, Aix in Provence, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34634-tit--Filmer-le-travail-film-et-travail- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 011 (14/03/2007) Call : WEB3DART 2007, University of Perugia, Umbria, Italiy. http://pourinfos.org/art-34635-tit--WEB3DART-2007-University-of-Perugia- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 012 (14/03/2007) Call : 1st International Congress Art Tech Media, Madrid, Spain. http://pourinfos.org/art-34641-tit--1st-International-Congress-Art-Tech -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 013 (15/03/2007) Meetings: Miguel Benasayag, philosopher and psychoanalyst, cycle of meetings organized by the artistic collective Echolalia Echolalie, jeudi 15 mars 2007, La Générale, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34547-tit--Miguel-Benasayag-philosophe-et -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 014 (15/03/2007) Meetings: with artists in Frac, on March 15, 2007, Frac Nord - Pas de Calais, Dunkerque, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34553-tit--avec-des-artistes-au-Frac-le-15-mars -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 015 (15/03/2007) Today is Shanghai Time #6 ! China. http://pourinfos.org/art-34592-tit-Today-is-Shanghai-Time-6 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 016 (15/03/2007) Meetings: "work, place of memory", Conferences of history of the contemporary art, Frac Basse-Normandie, Thursday March 15, 2007, Auditorium du musee des Beaux-Arts de Caen, Caen, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34611-tit--Conferences-d-histoire-de-l-art -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 017 (15/03/2007) Publication: new publications, MIX editions R-diffusion, Strasbourg, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34619-tit--nouvelles-parutions-MIX-editions- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 018 (15/03/2007) Publication: Archifiction : quelques rapports entre les arts visuels et la fiction, (some relationship between visual arts and the fiction) Bernard Guelton, Collection Arts et monde contemporain, Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34621-tit--Archifiction-quelques-rapports-entre -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 019 (15/03/2007) Publication: Semaine 09.07, sébastien Vonier et Raphaël Zarka, weekly review for the contemporary art, editions Analogues, Arles, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34622-tit--Semaine-09-07-sebastien-Vonier-et -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 020 (15/03/2007) Performance: Indiscipines Scene 1 : la Poesie, pornoise #2, Thursday March 15, 2007, le Dojo, Nice, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34625-tit--Indiscipines-Scene-1-la-Poesie- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 021 (15/03/2007) Various: Opening of a new space for the Gallery Magda Danysz, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34631-tit-Divers-Ouverture-d-un-nouvel-espace-pour -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 022 (15/03/2007) Call: video pour http://tank.tv, London, United Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34633-tit--video-pour-http-tank-tv-London- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 023 (15/03/2007) Call: Scam Roger Pic 2007 Prize, Scam, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34636-tit--Prix-Scam-Roger-Pic-2007-Scam-Paris- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 024 (15/03/2007) Call: Competition "Only a game?", Europe of football and the European Union, royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels, Belgium. http://pourinfos.org/art-34638-tit--Concours-Only-a-game-l-Europe-du -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 025 (15/03/2007) Call: biomedical science, call for applications, Arts Awards Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34639-tit--biomedical-science-call-for -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 026 (15/03/2007) Call: 2007 EAF, Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34640-tit--2007-EAF-Edinburgh-Art-Festival- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 027 (16/03/2007) Meetings: The Digital Aesthetic, 16th - 17th March 2007, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34267-tit--The-Digital-Aesthetic-16th-17th-March -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 028 (16/03/2007) Screening: 2nd Festival de cinema Queer, 16 au 21 mars 2007, movie theater entrepot, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34514-tit--2nd-Festival-de-cinema-Queer-16-au-21 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 029 (16/03/2007) Meetings: Seminar "TERRITOIRES DU SONORE" (TERRITORIES OF SOUND) Daniel Deshays, the 16 in March 18, 2007, Iselp, Argos, Brussels, Belgium. http://pourinfos.org/art-34545-tit--Seminaire-TERRITOIRES-DU-SONORE-Daniel -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 030 (16/03/2007) Exhibition: DAYS OF BIOART_ Opening: 16th March, Capsula, Centre d'Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, Spain. http://pourinfos.org/art-34583-tit--DAYS-OF-BIOART-Opening-16th-March- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 031 (16/03/2007) Call: 12th Biennial of the moving Image- International Competion - Centre pour l'image contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland. http://pourinfos.org/art-34626-tit--12e-Biennale-de-l-Image-en-Mouvement- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 032 (16/03/2007) Exhibition: "She gave her hands to callosity..." Jeroen Brouwer & Berndnaut Smilde, MediumGallery, Groningen, the Netherlands. http://pourinfos.org/art-34627-tit--She-gave-her-hands-to-callosity- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 033 (16/03/2007) Exhibition: Raphael Isdant, WARP ZONE - Inter#CAB - 16> March 18, St Ouen, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34629-tit--Raphael-Isdant-WARP-ZONE-Inter-CAB- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 034 (16/03/2007) Various: Radio WNE Show #1 - Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34630-tit-Divers-Radio-WNE-Show-1-Paris- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 035 (17/03/2007) Screening: Les hommes le dimanche (Men on Sunday) de Robert Siodmak et Edgar G. Ulmer, "creativity, a stake of social transformation? ”, March 17, 2007, European City of Récollets, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34562-tit--Les-hommes-le-dimanche-de-Robert-Siodmak -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 036 (17/03/2007) Meetings: Benoit Durandin, The Upgrade! Paris #7, Ars Longa, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34613-tit--Benoit-Durandin-The-Upgrade-Paris-7- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 037 (17/03/2007) Publication: new box DVD "Diary", David Perlov, editions Re:Voir Video, Saturday March 17, 2007, Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34618-tit--sortie-du-coffret-DVD-Diary-David -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 038 (17/03/2007) Call: Optica 2007, International Festival of Video Art, Giron, Spain. http://pourinfos.org/art-34637-tit--Optica-2007-International-Festival-of -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 039 (19/03/2007) Meetings: Christoph Draeger and the image of the deaster, art and conference, Monday March 19, 2007, imagespassages, IMUS département communication et hypermedia, Annecy le Vieux, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34612-tit--Christoph-Draeger-et-l-image-du-deastre- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 040 (20/03/2007) Exhibition: Articule 3, 3, young Suisse creation in the field of visual arts, Bonlieu nationale Scene, Annecy, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34521-tit--Articule-3-jeune-creation-Suisse-dans-le -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 041 (20/03/2007) Meetings: Contemporary approaches 20, 21 and March 22, 2007, Le College /Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Palais du Tau, Reims, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34614-tit--Approches-Contemporaines-20-21-et-22 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 042 (21/03/2007) Meetings: To reconsider esthetics for a new time of sensitive, conferences of Aesthetic, March 21, 2007, Alphabetville, Friche Belle de Mai , Marseille, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34551-tit--Bernard-Stiegler-Repenser-l-esthetique -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 043 (21/03/2007) Meetings: "Tout ça pour rien" (All that for nothing) signatures of Jean-Daniel Berclaz for his catalogue, Wednesday March 21, 2007, imagespassages, artothèque bibliothèque Bonlieu, Annecy, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34616-tit--Tout-ca-pour-rien-Seance-de-signatures -------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From billy0602 at yahoo.com Thu Mar 15 11:27:32 2007 From: billy0602 at yahoo.com (kj) Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:57:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [infosouth] ViBGYOR Film Festival: call for entries Message-ID: <919591.96373.qm@web55614.mail.re4.yahoo.com> ----- Forwarded Message ---- ViBGYOR International Film Festival 2007 -Celebrating Identities and Diversity Thrissur, Kerala May 10-13 CALL FOR ENTRIES Dear Friends, ViBGYOR Film Festival celebrates the vagaries of identity and the richness of its embodied diversity in the festival of short and documentary films held every year in Thrissur, Kerala. The Second Edition of ViBGYOR will be held from 10th to 13th of May 2007. The four-day Film festival invests not just in the banquet of films of value and sense but strive to make the event a rich visual and intellectual experience in interfacing with filmmakers, activists, peoples’ movement leaders and academicians from as divergent streams of life and activities. The marked difference from the last year is the absence of competition section. Instead, we are introducing the 'Festival to the People', creating an additional venue in a rural area next to Thrissur town, where screenings and interaction with the filmmakers will be interspersed. ViBGYOR Package will have seven themes like `Indigenous People', `Dalit Reality', `Gender & Sexuality', `Fundamentalism v/s Diversity', `Nation State', `Globalization' and Country/Region focus. Seven films each will be selected for each catagory. `Earth’ will be the theme for the Focus of the Year 2007. The festival will start with a national conference on the same theme. Apart from the above two packages, there will be Short Fiction, Music Videos, Animations and Spots, a `Kerala Spectrum’ and as usual the Retrospectives. The other features include Open Forum every day, a film market etc. We invite short and documentary films, music videos, animations and spots from around the world for screening at ViBGYOR 2007 in the categories mentioned above and works from Kerala for the `Kerala Spectrum’. There will be a selection process to include films in appropriate themes as per available screening time. Films made in 2005 and 2006 can participate. We also invite filmmakers, activists and film lovers from every corner of the world to participate in this celebration of ideas, art, struggles and dreams. ViBGYOR-2007 is organized by Chetana Media Institute (Thrissur) along with Nottam(Cochin), GAIA (Thrissur), Abhivyakti (Nasik), Visual search (Bangalore) and Marupakkam (Madurai), with the support of Governmental and Non-Governmental institutions. Contact us at vibgyorfest at gmail.com for further details. K.P. Sasi Fr. Benny Benedict K.C.Santhosh Kumar Festival Director Executive Director Joint Executive Director ____________________________________________________________________________________ The fish are biting. Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing. http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/sponsoredsearch_v2.php ____________________________________________________________________________________ The fish are biting. Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing. http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/sponsoredsearch_v2.php -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070314/bca048aa/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From viveknarayanan_2000 at yahoo.com Fri Mar 16 15:04:24 2007 From: viveknarayanan_2000 at yahoo.com (Narayanan Vivek) Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 02:34:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] what to do about formatting issues on the reader list: please read carefully Message-ID: <580141.11288.qm@web50707.mail.re2.yahoo.com> THIS IS A TEST MAIL Hi all, Some of you have had formatting issues when posting to the reader list from yahoo and rediff accounts. WHAT WENT WRONG? The problem, most likely, is this: the reader list is set up only for plain text messages, not for any messages with html coding in them. This reduces many risks, including security risks posed by viruses, etc. So, when your messages contains any html formatting (that is, any formatting at all besides capitals) then the message automatically gets held up by the server (not any human being!) for "moderator approval". By the time Iram Ghufran has approved your message, it will come stripped of any html tags that would format it. What might be going wrong is: your email account is sending the messages in html format. WHAT TO DO (POSSIBLY) In your yahoo account, go into "Mail Options" and then, "General Preferences". There will be an option between messages with formatting and "plain text only". Click on "plain text only", and make sure that it is set to this option whenever you are posting to the list. ALSO, if you are writing your posts first in MS Word or other word processing program, and then cutting and pasting into the mail window, then some html tags may creep in. SO, while you are still in Word, save the document as "plain text only", check that the formatting is clear, then cut and paste into the mail window. WHAT YOU CANNOT DO IN PLAIN TEXT FORMAT In "plain text format", you cannot do any bold, italics, underlining, colour, or different fonts. If your post has any of those things then you already know it is not in plain text. What you can do, hopefully is breaks between paragraphs, and Capital Letters, which can be used for emphasis and also for headings if you wish: YOU CAN PUT Your Headings IN CAPITAL LETTERS Now some will argue that it is not polite to use capital letters on the net, but you decide for yourself what you want to do. ARE WE SURE THIS WILL WORK? Not yet. But this is a test mail sent from my yahoo account, and we will shortly find out if this will solve the problem. Thanks Vivek ____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#loc_weather From vivek at sarai.net Fri Mar 16 15:12:15 2007 From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan) Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 15:12:15 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Formatting Issues for Yahoo and Rediff Accounts: Please Read Message-ID: <45FA6677.9010808@sarai.net> Yes-- indeed it worked. The only thing that went slightly wonky is that there was no "wraparound" in the text, which means that the sentences were broken they way they had been in my yahoo mail window. But that is not such a big problem. So Yahoo account holders, PLEASE follow ALL the guidelines below to ensure that your mail arrives clearly-- if not sexily-- formatted. If you really want all the formatting fireworks, start a blog, post to the blog, and just send the link to the reader list. Now can anyone give guidelines as to how to set rediff accounts to "plain text format"? Thankses, Vivek THIS IS A TEST MAIL Hi all, Some of you have had formatting issues when posting to the reader list from yahoo and rediff accounts. WHAT WENT WRONG? The problem, most likely, is this: the reader list is set up only for plain text messages, not for any messages with html coding in them. This reduces many risks, including security risks posed by viruses, etc. So, when your messages contains any html formatting (that is, any formatting at all besides capitals) then the message automatically gets held up by the server (not any human being!) for "moderator approval". By the time Iram Ghufran has approved your message, it will come stripped of any html tags that would format it. What might be going wrong is: your email account is sending the messages in html format. WHAT TO DO (POSSIBLY) In your yahoo account, go into "Mail Options" and then, "General Preferences". There will be an option between messages with formatting and "plain text only". Click on "plain text only", and make sure that it is set to this option whenever you are posting to the list. ALSO, if you are writing your posts first in MS Word or other word processing program, and then cutting and pasting into the mail window, then some html tags may creep in. SO, while you are still in Word, save the document as "plain text only", check that the formatting is clear, then cut and paste into the mail window. WHAT YOU CANNOT DO IN PLAIN TEXT FORMAT In "plain text format", you cannot do any bold, italics, underlining, colour, or different fonts. If your post has any of those things then you already know it is not in plain text. What you can do, hopefully is breaks between paragraphs, and Capital Letters, which can be used for emphasis and also for headings if you wish: YOU CAN PUT Your Headings IN CAPITAL LETTERS Now some will argue that it is not polite to use capital letters on the net, but you decide for yourself what you want to do. ARE WE SURE THIS WILL WORK? Not yet. But this is a test mail sent from my yahoo account, and we will shortly find out if this will solve the problem. Thanks Vivek From vivek at sarai.net Fri Mar 16 15:36:37 2007 From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan) Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 15:36:37 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Formatting for Rediff Accounts Message-ID: <45FA6C2D.90207@sarai.net> FOR REDIFF ACCOUNTS: As Karunakar says below, make sure to click on "Plain text" on the toolbar just above the text box each time you send a message. Old rediff interface seems to send plain text only.. the new one sports rich text... typically one has to click Plain text (on the toolbar just above text box) & compose a mail to send a text only mail.... & its to be done every time when you want to send a text only mail... could not find any option to preset it forever! Karunakar From mail at shivamvij.com Fri Mar 16 15:37:52 2007 From: mail at shivamvij.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 15:37:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] what to do about formatting issues on the reader list: please read carefully In-Reply-To: <580141.11288.qm@web50707.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <580141.11288.qm@web50707.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <9c06aab30703160307l4d66d470kbb43f610cda26062@mail.gmail.com> > In your yahoo account, go into "Mail Options" and > then, "General Preferences". There will be an > option between messages with formatting and > "plain text only". Click on "plain text only", > and make sure that it is set to this option > whenever you are posting to the list. Those of you who want to see an illustration of this difference may see these two images: HTML: http://www.shivamvij.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/html.jpg Plain text: http://www.shivamvij.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/plaintext.jpg best s From tapasrayx at gmail.com Fri Mar 16 18:22:42 2007 From: tapasrayx at gmail.com (Tapas Ray) Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:52:42 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram Message-ID: Those who have some familiarity with West Bengal will probably agree with Shuddhabrata's deeply anguished description of the state of affairs prevailing there today. The Nandigram tragedy is - or should be - yet another occasion for some introspection on the part of the Left Front in general and the CPI-M in particular. But it is more than that. It should be an occasion for thinking about the broader context within which this culture has come into being, namely the ideology of "development". Although they have some very revolutionary-sounding things to say about the political economy of the Indian state (while playing obediently by its rules) the Left parties and the Left Front government do not seem to have engaged in any serious assessment of the technical development paradigm adopted by the country. In fact, they have swallowed it hook, line and sinker. If West Bengal was what it is today when the "Green Revolution" arrived in India, in all probability it would have been chosen rather than Punjab as the site of that experiment. All that matters today in West Bengal as much as in other states, one supposes, is investment. Anyone who is against any investment or any aspect of any investment, whatever the reason, is seen as an enemy of the state. One should say "enemy of the people". Tapas Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: > Dear Friends, > The incident of the brutal armed police attack in order to 're- > take' Nandigram in West Bengal yesterday is yet another milestone > in the From gaurigill at yahoo.co.in Sat Mar 17 11:43:46 2007 From: gaurigill at yahoo.co.in (gaurigill at yahoo.co.in) Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2007 06:13:46 GMT Subject: [Reader-list] Guardian Unlimited Books: Pay attention to the world Message-ID: <20070317061346.E58DF3AFCE@mx01.guardian.co.uk> gauri spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited Books site and thought you should see it. ------- Note from gauri: Hello, thought this might be of interest to some. Even dead she's one of the most compelling voices around. ------- To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited Books site, go to http://books.guardian.co.uk Pay attention to the world In a previously unpublished essay, written just before her death in 2004, Susan Sontag makes a passionate case for the moral superiority of the novel in a mass-media age Susan Sontag Saturday March 17 2007 The Guardian Long ago - it was the 18th century - a great and eccentric defender of literature and the English language - it was Doctor Johnson - wrote, in the preface to his Dictionary: "The chief glory of every people arises from its authors." An unconventional proposition, I suspect, even then. And far more unconventional now, though I think it's still true. Even at the beginning of the 21st century. Of course, I am speaking of the glory that is permanent, not transitory. I'm often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: "Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world." Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer's virtue. For instance: "Be serious." By which I meant: never be cynical. And which doesn't preclude being funny. And ... if you'll allow me one more: "Take care to be born at a time when it was likely that you would be definitively exalted and influenced by Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, and Turgenev, and Chekhov." A great writer of fiction both creates - through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms - a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will. But of course, the primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) To write is to know something. What a pleasure to read a writer who knows a great deal. (Not a common experience these days ... ) Literature, I would argue, is knowledge - albeit, even at its greatest, imperfect knowledge. Like all knowledge. Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate - and, therefore, improve - our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment. When I say the fiction writer narrates, I mean that the story has a shape: a beginning, a middle (properly called a development), and an end or resolution. Every writer of fiction wants to tell many stories, but we know that we can't tell all the stories - certainly not simultaneously. We know we must pick one story, well, one central story; we have to be selective. The art of the writer is to find as much as one can in that story, in that sequence ... in that time (the timeline of the story), in that space (the concrete geography of the story). "There are so many stories to tell," muses the alter ego voice in the monologue that opens my last novel, In America. "There are so many stories to tell, it's hard to say why it's one rather than another, it must be because with this story you feel you can tell many stories, that there will be a necessity in it; I see I am explaining badly ... It has to be something like falling in love. Whatever explains why you chose this story hasn 't explained much. A story, I mean a long story, a novel, is like an around-the-world-in-eightydays: you can barely recall the beginning when it comes to an end." A novelist, then, is someone who takes you on a journey. Through space. Through time. A novelist leads the reader over a gap, makes something go where it was not. There is an old riff I've always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student of philosophy (as I was once myself), late one night, who had been struggling through Kant's abstruse account in his Critique of Pure Reason of the barely comprehensible categories of time and space, and decided that all of this could be put much more simply. It goes as follows: "Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once ... and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you." By this standard, the novel is an ideal vehicle both of space and of time. The novel shows us time: that is, everything doesn't happen at once. (It is a sequence, it is a line.) It shows us space: that is, what happens doesn't happen to one person only. In other words, a novel is the creation not simply of a voice but of a world. It mimics the essential structures by which we experience ourselves as living in time, and inhabiting a world, and attempting to make sense of our experience. But it does what lives (the lives that are lived) cannot offer, except after they are over. It confers - and withdraws - meaning or sense upon a life. This is possible because narration is possible, because there are norms of narration that are as constitutive of thinking and feeling and experiencing as are, in the Kantian account, the mental categories of space and time. In other words - and once again - the novel tells a story. I don't mean only that the story is the content of the novel, which is then deployed or organized into a literary narrative according to various ideas of form. I am arguing that having a story to tell is the chief formal property of a novel; and that the novelist, whatever the complexity of his or her means, is bound by - liberated by - the fundamental logic of storytelling. The essential scheme of storytelling is linear (even when it is antichronological). It proceeds from a "before" (or: "at first") to a "during" to a "finally" or "after". But this is much more than mere causal sequence, just as lived time - which distends with feeling and contracts with the deadening of feeling - is not uniform, clock time. The work of the novelist is to enliven time, as it is to animate space. The dimension of time is essential for prose fiction, but not, if I may invoke the old idea of the two-party system in literature, for poetry (that is, lyric poetry). Poetry is situated in the present. Poems, even when they tell stories, are not like stories. One difference lies in the role of metaphor, which, I would argue, is necessary in poetry. Indeed, in my view, it is the task - one of the tasks - of the poet to invent metaphors. One of the fundamental resources of human understanding is what could be called the "pictural" sense, which is secured by comparing one thing with another. Here are some venerable examples, familiar (and plausible) to everyone: time as river flowing life as dream death as sleep love as illness life as play/stage wisdom as light eyes as stars book as world human being as tree music as food etc, etc A great poet is one who refines and elaborates the great historical store of metaphors and adds to our stock of metaphors. Metaphors offer a profound form of understanding, and many - but hardly all - novelists have recourse to metaphor. The grasp of experience through metaphor is not the distinctive understanding that is offered by the great novelists. Virginia Woolf is not a greater novelist than Thomas Bernhard because she uses metaphors and he does not. The understanding of the novelist is temporal, rather than spatial or pictural. Its medium is a rendered sense of time - time experienced as an arena of struggle or conflict or choice. All stories are about battles, struggles of one kind or another, that terminate in victory and in defeat. Everything moves toward the end, when the outcome will be known. "The modern" is an idea, a very radical idea, that continues to evolve. We are now in a second phase of the ideology of the modern (which has been given the presumptuous name of "the postmodern"). This beginning of "the modern" in literature took place in the 1850s. A century and a half is a long time. Many of the attitudes and scruples and refusals associated with "the modern" in literature - as well as in the other arts - have begun to seem conventional or even sterile. And, to some extent, this judgment is justified. Every notion of literature, even the most exacting and liberating, can become a form of spiritual complacency or self-congratulation. Most notions about literature are reactive - in the hands of lesser talents, merely reactive. But what is happening in the repudiations advanced in the current debate about the novel goes far beyond the usual process whereby new talents need to repudiate older ideas of literary excellence. In North America and in Europe, we are living now, I think it fair to say, in a period of reaction. In the arts, it takes the form of a bullying reaction against the high modernist achievement, which is thought to be too difficult, too demanding of audiences, not accessible (or "user-friendly") enough. And in politics, it takes the form of a dismissal of all attempts to measure public life by what are disparaged as mere ideals. In the modern era, the call for a return to realism in the arts often goes hand in hand with the strengthening of cynical realism in political discourse. The greatest offense now, in matters both of the arts and of culture generally, not to mention political life, is to seem to be upholding some better, more exigent standard, which is attacked, both from the left and the right, as either naive or (a new banner for the philistines) "elitist". Proclamations about the death of the novel - or in its newer form, the end of books - have, of course, been a staple of the debate about literature for almost a century. But they have recently attained a new virulence and theoretical persuasiveness. Ever since word-processing programs became common place tools for most writers - including me - there have been those who assert that there is now a brave new future for fiction. The argument goes as follows. The novel, as we know it, has come to its end. However, there is no cause for lament. Something better (and more democratic) is going to replace it: the hypernovel, which will be written in the nonlinear or nonsequential space made possible by the computer. This new model for fiction proposes to liberate the reader from the two mainstays of the traditional novel: linear narrative and the author. The reader, cruelly forced to read one word after another to reach the end of a sentence, one paragraph after another to reach the end of a scene, will rejoice to learn that, according to one account, "true freedom" for the reader is now possible, thanks to the advent of the computer: "freedom from the tyranny of the line ". A hypernovel "has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one ". Instead of following a linear story dictated by the author, the reader can now navigate at will through an "endless expansion of words ". I think most readers - surely, virtually all readers - will be surprised to learn that structured storytelling, from the most basic beginning-middle- end scheme of traditional tales to more elaborately constructed, nonchronological and multi-voiced narratives, is actually a form of oppression rather than a source of delight. In fact, what interests most readers about fiction is precisely the story - whether in fairy tales, in murder mysteries, or in the complex narratives of Cervantes and Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen and Proust and Italo Calvino. Story - the idea that events happen in a specific causal order - is both the way we see the world and what interests us most about it. People who read for nothing else will read for plot. Yet hyperfiction's advocates maintain that we find plot "confining" and chafe against its limitations. That we resent and long to be liberated from the age-old tyranny of the author, who dictates how the story will turn out, and wish to be truly active readers, who at any moment in reading the text can choose between various alternative continuations or outcomes of the story by rearranging its blocks of text. Hyper fiction is sometimes said to mimic real life, with its myriad opportunities and surprising outcomes, so I suppose it is being touted as a kind of ultimate realism. To this, I would answer that, while it is true that we expect to organize and make sense of our lives, we do not expect to write other people's novels for them. And one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experience of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies and defends the glories of language (that is, expands the basic instrument of consciousness): namely, literature. These proclamations that the book and the novel in particular are ending can't simply be ascribed to the mischief wreaked by the ideology that has come to dominate departments of literature in many major universities in the United States, Britain and western Europe. The real force behind the argument against literature, against the book, comes, I think, from the hegemony of the narrative model proposed by television. A novel is not a set of proposals, or a list, or a collection of agendas, or an (open-ended, revisable) itinerary. It is the journey itself - made, experienced and completed. Completion does not mean that everything has been told. Henry James, as he was coming to the end of writing one of his greatest novels, The Portrait of a Lady, confided to himself in his notebook his worry that his readers would think that the novel was not really finished, that he had "not seen the heroine to the end of her situation". (As you will remember, James leaves his heroine, the brilliant and idealistic Isabel Archer, resolved not to leave her husband, whom she has discovered to be a mercenary scoundrel, though there is a former suitor, the aptly named Caspar Goodwood, who, still in love with her, hopes she will change her mind.) But, James argued to himself, his novel would be rightly finished on this note. As he wrote: "The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together. What I have done has that unity - it groups together. It is complete in itself." We, James's readers, may wish that Isabel Archer would leave her dreadful husband for happiness with loving, faithful, honorable Caspar Goodwood: I certainly wish she would. But James is telling us she will not. Every fictional plot contains hints and traces of the stories it has excluded or resisted in order to assume its present shape. Alternatives to the plot ought to be felt up to the last moment. These alternatives constitute the potential for disorder (and therefore of suspense) in the story's unfolding. The pleasure of fiction is precisely that it moves to an ending. A novel is a world with borders. For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take within those borders. One could describe the story's end as a point of magical convergence for the shifting preparatory views: a fixed position from which the reader sees how initially disparate things finally belong together. There is an essential - as I see it - distinction between stories, on the one hand, which have, as their goal, an end, completeness, closure, and, on the other hand, information, which is always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary. This parallels the contrasting narrative models proposed by literature and by television. Literature tells stories. Television gives information. Literature involves. It is the recreation of human solidarity. Television (with its illusion of immediacy) distances - immures us in our own indifference. The so-called stories that we are told on television satisfy our appetite for anecdote and offer us mutually canceling models of understanding. (This is reinforced by the practice of punctuating television narratives with advertising.) They implicitly affirm the idea that all information is potentially relevant (or "interesting"), that all stories are endless - or if they do stop, it is not because they have come to an end but, rather, because they have been upstaged by a fresher or more lurid or eccentric story. By presenting us with a limitless number of nonstopped stories, the narratives that the media relate - the consumption of which has so dramatically cut into the time the educated public once devoted to reading - offer a lesson in amorality and detachment that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel. In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always - as I have argued - an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution - which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our mediadisseminated glut of unending stories. Television gives us, in an extremely debased and un-truthful form, a truth that the novelist is obliged to suppress in the interest of the ethical model of understanding peculiar to the enterprise of fiction: namely, that the characteristic feature of our universe is that many things are happening at the same time. ("Time exists in order that it doesn't happen all at once ... space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you.") To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path. To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention. When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world. The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention - a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched. But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one's head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding - which is also the understanding of the novelist - to take this in. Perhaps this is an awareness that comes more easily to poets, who don't fully believe in storytelling. The supremely great early-20th-century Portuguese poet and prose writer, Fernando Pessoa, wrote in his prose summum, The Book of Disquiet: I've discovered that I'm always attentive to, and always thinking about two things at the same time. I suppose everyone is a bit like that ... In my case the two realities that hold my attention are equally vivid. This is what constitutes my originality. This, perhaps, is what constitutes my tragedy, and what makes it comic. Yes, everyone is a bit like that ... but the awareness of the doubleness of thinking is an uncomfortable position, very uncomfortable if held for long. It seems normal for people to reduce the complexity of what they are feeling and thinking, and to close down the awareness of what lies outside their immediate experience. Is this refusal of an extended awareness, which takes in more than is happening right now, right here, not at the heart of our ever-confused awareness of human evil, and of the immense capacity of human beings to commit evil? Because there are, incontestably, zones of experience that are not distressing, that give joy, it becomes, perennially, a puzzle that there is so much misery and wickedness. A great deal of narrative, and the speculation that tries to free itself from narrative and become purely abstract, inquires: why does evil exist? Why do people betray and kill each other? Why do the innocent suffer? But perhaps the problem ought to be rephrased: why is evil not everywhere? More precisely, why is it somewhere - but not everywhere? And what are we to do when it doesn't befall us? When the pain that is endured is the pain of others? Hearing the shattering news of the great earthquake that leveled Lisbon on November 1, 1755, and (if historians are to be believed) took with it a whole society's optimism (but obviously, I don't believe that any society has only one basic attitude), the great Voltaire was struck by the inability to take in what happened elsewhere. "Lisbon lies in ruins," Voltaire wrote, "and here in Paris we dance." One might suppose that in the 20th century, in the age of genocide, people would not find it either paradoxical or surprising that one can be so indifferent to what is happening simultaneously, elsewhere. Is it not part of the fundamental structure of experience that "now" refers to both "here" and "there"? And yet, I venture to assert, we are just as capable of being surprised - and frustrated by the inadequacy of our response - by the simultaneity of wildly contrasting human fates as was Voltaire two and a half centuries ago. Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events - by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That here we are here, now prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening ... while elsewhere in the world, right now ... in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio ... To be a traveler - and novelists are often travelers - is to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very diff erent world you have visited and from which you have returned "home". It is a beginning of a response to this painful awareness to say: it's a question of sympathy ... of the limits of the imagination. You can also say that it's not "natural" to keep remembering that the world is so ... extended. That while this is happening, that is also happening. True. But that, I would respond, is why we need fiction: to stretch our world. Novelists, then, perform their necessary ethical task based on their right to a stipulated shrinking of the world as it really is - both in space and in time. Characters in a novel act within a time that is already complete, where everything worth saving has been preserved - "washed free ", as Henry James puts it in his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, "of awkward accretion" and aimless succession. All real stories are stories of someone's fate. Characters in a novel have intensely legible fates. The fate of literature itself is something else. Literature as a story is full of awkward accretions, irrelevant demands, unpurposeful activities, uneconomical attention. Habent sua fata fabulae, as the Latin phrase goes. Tales, stories, have their own fate. Because they are disseminated, transcribed, misremembered, translated. Of course, one would not wish it otherwise. The writing of fiction, an activity that is necessarily solitary, has a destination that is necessarily public, communal. Traditionally, all cultures are local. Culture implies barriers (for example, linguistic), distance, nontranslatability. Whereas what "the modern" means is, above all, the abolition of barriers, of distance; instant access; the leveling of culture - and, by its own inexorable logic the abolition, or revocation, of culture. What serves "the modern" is standardization, homogenization. (Indeed, "the modern" is homogenization, standardization. The quintessential site of the modern is an airport; and all airports are alike, as all new modern cities, from Seoul to S�Paulo, tend to look alike.) This pull toward homogenization cannot fail to affect the project of literature. The novel, which is marked by singularity, can only enter this system of maximum diff usion through the agency of translation, which, however necessary, entails a built-in distortion of what the novel is at the deepest level - which is not the communication of information, or even the telling of engaging stories, but the perpetuation of the project of literature itself, with its invitation to develop the kind of inwardness that resists the modern satieties. To translate is to pass something across borders. But more and more the lesson of this society, a society that is "modern", is that there are no borders - which means, of course, no more or less than: no borders for the privileged sectors of society, which are more mobile geographically than ever before in human history. And the lesson of the hegemony of the mass media - television, MTV, the internet - is that there is only one culture, that what lies beyond borders everywhere is - or one day will be - just more of the same, with everyone on the planet feeding at the same trough of standardized entertainments and fantasies of eros and violence manufactured in the United States, Japan, wherever; with everyone enlightened by the same open-ended flow of bits of unfiltered (if, in fact, often censored) information and opinion. That some pleasure, and some enlightenment, may be derived from these media is not to be denied. But I would argue that the mindset they foster and the appetites they feed are entirely inimical to the writing (production) and reading (consumption) of serious literature. Every novelist hopes to reach the widest possible audience, to pass as many borders as possible. But it is the novelist's job to keep in mind the spurious cultural geography that is being installed at the beginning of the 21st century. On the one hand, we have, through translation and through recycling in the media, the possibility of a greater and greater diffusion of our work. On the other hand, the ideology behind these unprecedented opportunities for diff usion, for translation - the ideology now dominant in what passes for culture in modern societies - is designed to render obsolete the novelist's prophetic and critical, even subversive, task, and that is to deepen and sometimes, as needed, to oppose the common understandings of our fate. Long live the novelist's task. · At the Same Time by Susan Sontag will be published by Hamish Hamilton on April 5 Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited From rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com Sat Mar 17 14:52:59 2007 From: rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com (rehan ansari) Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2007 02:22:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] Bilal Minto: Why no lawyer is willing to represent Pak govt in judge's case Message-ID: <518611.36834.qm@web51104.mail.re2.yahoo.com> http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1085328 ____________________________________________________________________________________ 8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time with the Yahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#news From ravis at sarai.net Sat Mar 17 15:13:13 2007 From: ravis at sarai.net (Ravi Sundaram) Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2007 15:13:13 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: Chavez ,Clowns and Empires Message-ID: <50906.59.176.115.235.1174124593.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> I have mixed feelings about Chavez, but this is a good read below. It captures the complexity of Latin American responses to him Ravi What We See in Hugo Chávez By LUISA VALENZUELA Buenos Aires THE fervent welcome that greeted President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela during his visit to Argentina a week ago was inexplicable to some Argentines and left others indignant. Many here tend to mistrust populism and demagoguery, finding them redolent of Peronism. But even among the wary, a window of hope has opened, with Mr. Chávez as its symbol. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since Juan Perón’s time. And it was the expansive waters of our own broad river that defined the vectors of force last weekend. For once, the tensions in the American hemisphere flowed on an east-west axis along the Río de la Plata — which means “River of Silver” and by extension, very appropriately in this case, “River of Money.” The struggle was about energy, both concrete and metaphorical, and equally combustible in both forms. Across the river in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, the presence of President George W. Bush caused red-hot passions to flare, along with sizable protests like those he faced in Brazil. In Buenos Aires, my city, on the opposite bank of that river of money, red abounded as well, though in our case it had a very different connotation. Red was the color of President Chávez’s jacket and of many of the flags brought by the masses who flooded into a stadium to hear the president of Venezuela speak. Unlike the homogenous rallies of Peronist times, the 30,000 people in this crowd came from very diverse backgrounds. In Argentina, the economic crisis of December 2001 significantly altered not only our social dynamic but our semantics. We no longer talk about the “pueblo” — which means town or village as well as people. Now we talk about the “gente,” which also means people, but with a different nuance, derived as it is from the Latin gens meaning race, clan or breed. The new vocabulary transcends distinctions of class: the middle classes have now merged with the poor to demand their rights. Hence many students and professionals were in attendance that day, not necessarily attracted by the figure of President Chávez himself so much as by the anti-imperialist opportunity he symbolized. We Argentines, who once imagined ourselves more sophisticated, or more European, than the citizens of neighboring states, were brought closer to the rest of the continent by our impoverishment, and we find ourselves more open to the idea of pan-Latin American solidarity. Perhaps last week’s crowd also recognized the part that President Chávez’s monetary aid played in our recuperation of that illusion known as “national identity.” For Argentina had virtually disappeared as an autonomous country during the presidency of Carlos Menem from 1989 to 1999, the era of our “carnal relations” with the United States, which took the form of spurious privatizations and a fictitious exchange rate. While many in Argentina would, nevertheless, not hesitate to call the Venezuelan president a clown or a madman, it’s worth keeping in mind that a very heady dose of megalomania is a prerequisite for even dreaming of confronting a rival as overwhelmingly powerful as the United States — which is also led by a president viewed, in many quarters, as a clown and a madman. President Chávez’s weapons of seduction are his superabundance of petrodollars and his obsession with a shared Latin American project. His plan is to realize the dream of Simón Bolívar, the old utopian vision of Latin American integration that today seems more viable than ever before. It may be that President Bush chose to venture into these forgotten Southern latitudes to counter that vision. In Brazil, he tried to draw attention to the production of ethanol, an ecologically correct rival to petroleum that nonetheless depletes the earth. And in Uruguay, all Mr. Bush seemed to be trying to do was irritate the other governments of South America by promoting a Free Trade Area of the Americas project in opposition to Mercosur, the southern common market formed in 1991 by Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and, somewhat later, Venezuela. These things sometimes backfire. President Bush found himself repudiated on one bank of the Plata while President Chávez was getting ovations on the opposite one: each contender in his corner and the moral triumph to the last man left standing, as in a boxing ring. Some Argentines severely criticized President Nestor Kirchner for providing his Venezuelan counterpart with such a platform, complaining that President Chávez bought and paid for his visit by showering Argentina with dollars and benefits. Not so. The bargain seems fair — oil in exchange for agricultural technology and experts — and since he came to power, President Kirchner has made his country the platform for several other presidents from the Americas: Fidel Castro, Michelle Bachelet, Evo Morales and President Chávez himself, on previous occasions. Two major Argentine characteristics are in play here: intrinsic distrust and the need for immediate gratification. Mr. Chávez awakens both of these inclinations, and it’s interesting to see them balance each other out. The dream of a single-currency Latin American Union, modeled on the European Union, to create, insofar as possible, a buffer against the hegemony of the United States no longer seems so impossible. I’m no political analyst; I have delved into politics only as a fiction writer. But I’m an optimist by nature, and the feeling of empowerment that President Chávez instills, and that various South American governments are endorsing, strikes me as a good engine for further progress — a means of upgrading ourselves from the status of someone’s backyard into that of a truly autonomous region, beyond Mr. Chávez, Mr. Bush and every other form of demagoguery. Luisa Valenzuela is the author of “Black Novel With Argentines” and “The Lizard’s Tail.” This article was translated by Esther Allen from the Spanish.NYtimes 17/3/07 From sayandebmukherjee at yahoo.co.in Sun Mar 18 11:33:11 2007 From: sayandebmukherjee at yahoo.co.in (sayandeb mukherjee) Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 06:03:11 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] resending my first posting Message-ID: <653592.83846.qm@web7715.mail.in.yahoo.com> Dear friends, I am Shri Sayandeb Mukherjee. I hail from Kolkata, West Bengal . Having graduated in science stream with Mathematics Hons from Kolkata University I completed 3yrs post graduate diploma in sound recording from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata. I have special interests in evolution of sound - an introduction to soundscape, psychological acoustics, soundtrack designing and film & music appreciation. Professionally I am a sound recordist presently working as a recording engineer in Mix Facility1 ( a Dolby Digital/SR and DTS film Re-recording set up ) in a recording studio complex - Symphony, Ramoji Film City . Passionately, I practise paintings,scriptwriting, penning down my observations, photography and ambience recordings. For a long time I have been passing through corridors of different places. Sometimes while consciously walking through these spaces I thought about the differences in my social conditioning. In an architecturally similar space this subconscious transformation of the 'self' interested me immensely. And as a sound recordist, everyday I am handling with the aesthetics of sound in my studio. I have gone through many pre-recorded sound files in our Fx-library. Sometimes while using this library, I have listened to the long reverberated sound of huge elevators recorded by some sound recordist in a big corridor. These sounds synthesizes in my mind as a musical expression. Next is the vivid application of these spaces in many films. My research will also gaze into the intricate properties of the corridor-like spaces to rationalize their application in this media. Name of the project: CORRIDORS - THE NEW PATHWAY An abstract: The project is about the contemporary symbiotic relationship between the urban individual and various kinds of corridor spaces s/he encounters in everyday life. Corridors are the 'natural caves' of modern civilization. With decreasing individual space of existence and increasing pressure of influx on cities...corridors or vestibular constructions have become more and more indispensable thus providing a common pathway/interface to the multitude of flats, offices and know-not-what. As one walks down the corridor, s/he finds the sense of owning a familial/familiar space gradually dwindling and fading away along the length of the long corridor. The project delves into the psychological domain, plotting the emotional contours of an individual and will try to envelop the dynamics of consciousness ranging from the pleasure of anticipation to the anxieties of uncertainty. Another important aspect lies alongside - the acoustics of corridors. This contemporary architectural design which may appear simple structurally possesses a complicated and sometimes convoluted auditory space due to reflective and diffractive properties of sound. The project attempts to enlighten the variability of these acoustic qualities/characterestics of corridors integrated in different urban spaces like - hospitals, prisons, libraries, educational institution, courts and many other public spaces which are vibrant in terms of psycho-acoustics. The research would also borrow references from ancient mythological texts, films, paintings and literature to discern the mystic and seemingly improbable destination of corridors and like spaces. Methodology, work procedure The process of research includes a vivid physical involvement and exploration in the corridor like spaces, taking notes in a descriptive way in the spot itself, acquiring photographs and live recordings of the acoustic environments at different spots of the same space. The recording process may also involve time stamps (i.e. recordings of the same space over the different parts of a day) for the analysis of the soundscape in a particular space. The process also includes the collection of films, texts or any other form of art, where one can notice a conscious application of such corridor-like spaces. A critical analysis of these texts and footages would be attempted to find its role in building up the emotional contours of the narrative characters and the contribution of those spaces to the narrative trajectory of these films or texts. Visuals from VIDEOGAMES (where the stalker intruding through endless geometry of corridors) also would be incorporated for analysis and reflection. The Formulation of postings: I would like to split each posting into three columns for a better formulation. They will be continued throughout the project with some new/added informations, developments and analysis. 1. THE MAINFRAME: This includes the main content, the thematic writings, the derivations, the historical outline/references and the phenomenology. 2. THE INTERFACE: The interviews/ the interactive sessions with theoreticians, educationists, artists, psychologists or any person experienced in this field. It will also include feedback/responses to the project-concept and its progress. 3. THE DATABASE: This will be including all references drawn from journals, articles, discourses, websites and media. The end product As the end product, this project would generate the following materials for archiving in Sarai. 1. Images of the new urban buildings and the integrated corridor-like spaces. 2. Some data about the acoustic behavior and response of such structures. 3. A body of audio recordings in the corridor-like spaces under the scrutiny. 4. Textual interviews of some corridor users. 5. An audio CD containing specially designed ambience tracks using the audio recordings in the corridor-spaces. The first posting: This is a very brief outline of the reconnaissance I did for the past few weeks. As I have mentioned above, I will present the posting in three columns followed below: THE MAINFRAME: Evolution of urban spaces For the past two centuries, every city throughout the world has seen a gradual remodeling of the SPACE concept. The utilization, manipulation and multi-occupation of space has got an immense impact on the changing façade of urban civilization. In earlier days, cities were meant mainly for the well-to-do especially for Rajas, Maharajas, Zamindars, high-posted Government officials and also for commuters who used to diurnally arrive at their working space located in the city and return to the outskirts. These people were very few in count in comparison to the land mass; if the dwellings or work-spaces in an urban domain are mapped as elements in a matrix of the city-scape, one could notice the dispersed, unclustered spatial distribution of these elements. Explicitly speaking, a topographic map of the city in olden days would feature the quantity of space that used to remain uninhabited. For this abundance, space was never thought to be consolidated. On the contrary, it was considered to be horizontally extensible. This property was always exploited for the exhibition of the dwellers' hierarchical position in the society. They used to stretch their living space to the highest extent making an establishment for a lavish-livelihood. Within an allocated space, the dwellers through their authority, power or position in the society would always get an opportunity to give an individualistic expression in the architecture of their houses (this exhibition of architectural splendor is rarely visible today). These factors rendered the emergence of Palaces, Havelis, Kuthris, Mansions, Bungalows in the early period of urban civilization... (continued) THE INTERFACE: Regardless of its omnipresent nature, corridor or like spaces evoke a numerous shade of emotions in human mind. Flickers of which we came across, when we visited the Osmania University 's psychology department. Mrs. Beena, the head of the department had few experiences/informations to share with us. She emphasizes on the fact that corridors are like built-in-spaces --- and she generally feels deserted in them. Long and vacant hotel or hospital corridors are suffocating for her. She reasons it out with very interesting explanation --- human beings like other animals are essentially related to nature. Proximity with nature gives them a sense of re-assurance. That is why the concept of windows opening outside a house has come in. whenever one is shut off from nature, the link gets snapped and the sense of time vanishes. Parallely, she provides a counter-point. Corridors of universities and colleges which are vibrant with the noise of teachers, students and illuminated with bright sunlight give a positive vibe to her. Temple corridors which have three sides enclosed and the other side opening to the temple courtyard or surroundings are also very charming. They endow an onlooker with a close contact with nature as well as with beautiful paintings, murals and sculptures on the other three sides. While summing up her views, Mrs. Beena says that this sense of suffocation is a resultant phenomenon of the general traumatic experience of human birth. Every human baby undergoing this struggle in the birth canal gets an immediate relief when it is out of the womb. The birth-cry is the self-assertion of a new human in the outer world. The birth canal which is similar to that of a dark corridor threatens the life of a human baby at the time of its birth and s/he inherits this experience for the subsequent period of his/her life. German psychologist Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud has told a great deal about the birth experience. It is also noted that human beings are more confident to top and bottom perspective than to their left and right orientation giving a general creeping sense to human beings. THE DATABSE: I would like to share the following treatise that I received from a close friend, Debkamal Ganguly, who's also interested in the project. http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/jameson_futurecity.htm http://www.blackjelly.com/Mag2/features/planetporn.htm Modern urban life is increasingly experienced within the non-spaces of (to use a cringe-inducing term) "supermodernism." Examples include not only elevators, airports, corridors, subway stations and hotel rooms, but also the invisible architectures of the information economy: the digital realms which lie on the other side of the modem. Hong Kong is a perfect example of a metropolitan node comprised of many layers, folding back onto itself like a moebius strip. Bricks and mortar provide the skeleton, fibre-optical cables the nerves, and people the bits of data moving around the system. Which explains my recurrent dream in which I become a figure of "incessant circulation" (to use a favourite phrase of Jean Baudrillard's). A figure who hasn't actually been anywhere at all. Not in a tangible sense, anyway. Hong Kong 's amnesiacal momentum is less a case of an imaginary community than an imaged community: a technotopian megalopolis which understands the pornographic logic of advanced capitalism. While Australia passes laws to ban pornography on the Internet (making itself the "village idiot of the global village" in the process), and Giuliani's Brave New York cleans up Times Square, Hong Kong thrives in the ambiguous spaces obscured behind digital pixelation. I will be continuing the discourses in the next posting. Thanking you and keeping in touch with you yours sincerely sayandeb mukherjee __________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Answers: Share what you know. Learn something new http://in.answers.yahoo.com/ From shuddha at sarai.net Sun Mar 18 11:34:48 2007 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 11:34:48 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram Killings Message-ID: <45FCD680.2050709@sarai.net> Dear All (Especially those on the list who live in Delhi) There will be a rally to protest the killings in Nandigram at Jantar Mantar (Parliament Street/Sansad Marg, New Delhi, tomorrow, Monday, 19th March at 3:00 PM in the afternoon. Please come and circulate this notice widely. best Shuddha _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From jeebesh at sarai.net Sun Mar 18 18:42:05 2007 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 18:42:05 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Reflections on Sanjay Kak's Jashn-e-Azadi Message-ID: <750E7511-E6D0-48C5-8C39-54C53E8BF244@sarai.net> Reflections on Sanjay Kak's Jashn-e-Azadi A father stutters in remembering the name of his son in an ice covered martyr's graveyard. He is looking for his son's grave. In a found video footage from the 90s, a girl in her late teens passionately, but viscerally, describes the body of a young man in the neighbourhood, killed during an army operation. The body is lying in the crossroad amidst the houses; no one is allowed to approach. "Even the dog did not go near it," she says flatly. In an OPD ward of the post-trauma centre, the doctor listens to the story of a woman. In her dreams, figures in white shrouds appear - and never reveal their faces. Sanjay's film is a cautionary tale to not make light the depth of the feelings around the word "Azadi" in today's Kashmir. The feeling is deep and resonant with halted lives of 100,000 dead over the last 18 years. The film discovers this latent, almost volcanic, subterranean layer by entering the journey through the dead. It uncovers video archives of the dead, moves with a team that is trying to ascertain the count of dead and disappeared, stands in at doctors' chambers in a post trauma therapy center, moves with a funeral procession, visits a camp where orphans sing Iqbal's 'Sare Jahan se acha' and records the ashes left behind by relentless military operations (highest and unimaginable civilian to military ratio anywhere in the world.) *** To recall the dead and to make it speak, is at all times a difficult existential and philosophical task. It is to the filmmaker's credit that he attempts this and we will try to understand how he does so and what are the conceptual difficulties he is working with. Hopefully through this we may achieve a vantage point to think with and beyond the film, into the landscape of the unsayable, incomprehensible terror that the film wants us all to wake up to. The conceptual axis is built around understanding of the reverberating word 'Shahid'. The martyr. The one who has given his or her life for a defense of a conception of life. The word Shahid vibrates at all corners of the landscape of the film. It is the mute, troubled figure that links Zulm (oppression) and Azaadi (freedom). The film tries to give a new entry point to this given conceptual structure by bringing in the latent meaning hidden in Shahid - that of a witness in its Arabic etymological roots (and we may add also in its Greek etymological roots). So martyr is no longer just the dead, but a person who has a testimony. Agambem in his commentary (Remnants of Auschwitz) on testimony and the archive opens out an internal tension in the concept of witness and the martyr. One meaning of witness could be one who is brought into the trial as a third party and the other is one who has been a part of the event from the beginning and therefore bears witness to it. The second sense of the term is not concerned with the trial or the judgement, but opens us to the gray zones of life, questions that law or juridical reason do not or cannot exhaust. Martyr could be seen as someone who bears witness to a destruction. A martyr cannot but remember. It is she who remembers to keep alive a conception of life. But, martyr is also someone who is a sufferer or felled by that which is horrible, terrifying, without a life giving form, without sustenance. A martyr death is also a senseless death, a death that its perpetrators or executioners visit upon people without an understanding of what has been undertaken. A death visited, that halts a life, it is without purpose. A death that a future must abjure. *** The film tries to organise our relationship to the years of terror and mutilation by a repetitive visit to sites and images of violence in more or less similar ways. The reoccurring shots of the walk back of army contingents after an assault on a settlement creates an overwhelming spiral with no end in sight. An inchoate weight of senselessness is produced. Shot over two years, the filmmaker communicates over each journey a sense of life that is perpetually halted. An emptiness soaks into the way it renders landscapes and places. Death roams around loud. This repetition is sought to be balanced by poetry and metaphors from poetry. Only popular performers/jesters (bhands), poets and silent nature can speak the unspeakable. The possibility of language to think can be found in an unblinking look at the lyrical beauty of nature, a poet's anguish and popular performers' indomitable spirit to produce meaning and a sense of what it means to live in these times. These are also the few remaining bleak signs of life in the film. Within these two threads - one relentless, overwhelming and the other fragmentary, fragile - nests the archive of the dead and the testimony of the one who bears witness. The images that we referred to in the beginning appear here. They are a stutter, a visceral detail, a nightmare, difficult accounts that refuse to slip into settled frameworks of knowing. It is here that the film starts encountering its problem. The idea of martyr as dead, fixed and organized in a language of politics, mobilized for judgement collides with the martyr who bears witness. The film does not allow this collision to take shape and grow. The collision gets further frozen by the stance of the filmmaker who produces the account of a third party in his voice-overs. A fall back on the idea of witness as "outside". The two classical documentary modes - a disembodied voice that contextualises and a juxtapositional play to comment and draw meaning - are deployed by the filmmaker to cohere the various trajectories that his journey had opened out. It is here that the films weakens itself and lends itself to simpler ideological readings. These ideological readings will play on the inclusion and exclusion that any narrative will need to produce to cohere. But, the crucial vector, as to why these aesthetic modes were deployed, would remain unthought. The filmmaker is there in the film in its very grain. But the structure that is built on repetition and fragments creates a problem of stance. The voice tries to intervene. The unease of not achieving a stance is mediated by the voice and juxtapositional commentary. For example, the rapid "cut performance" with tourism industry's vulgarity and tourists' ennui is an extremely weak ground to stand on when the ambition of the film is to engage with the deepest dilemmas of today. Similarly the voice takes an authority to comment on ghost figures. One wonders what in the encounter or the material is this authority being drawn from. It is in these moments that one misses most the "diary" of the filmmaker during his journeys. If the landscape and the archive is barely audible, one would have thought that the filmmaker would let us enter this space of silence, this space of death through his attempts to listen to this inaudibility. The urge to comment thwarts the process of making sense in a trying journey. The logical impossibility of various meanings of witness and martyr ever meeting remains unacknowledged. **** The way the film captures the feeble and shabby attempts by the armed forces to produce for itself an image of also being a carrier of signs of life is moving. The images of the school, the orphanage, the donation of portable radio sets mark a total depletion of the signs of "development". A hollowness that is haunting. A retired army-man now counts, names and locates the dead. A battle with his' and others memories to keep alive atleast a faint recollection through "just the name". He acknowledges that a few could have been left unnamed. A witness who cannot do anything else but try to remember. A fire in a building that refuses to die out. The electric wires keeps burning. The mounting debris of ash and wood remains. Also remains an unfulfilled promise of the deeper acknowledgment of the materials and the notes. We would make a comradely request to the filmmaker to not see the film as the end of this specific journey. The materials and the notes need to appear in other forms, and then maybe over a longer period we will learn and educate ourselves, as to what it means to live in the now that the film opens for us. **** From venkatt2k at gmail.com Sun Mar 18 20:01:38 2007 From: venkatt2k at gmail.com (venkat t) Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 20:01:38 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] first posting: Migrant workers in Chennai's IT corridor Message-ID: <388da81f0703180731m6ec79a3eg88d04cb8009a1a87@mail.gmail.com> hello all, At the outset let me thank the Sarai community for maintaining this level of informality. It is really helpful for young Fellows like me and eases communication flow. I am Venkat, a post graduate in sociology from the University of Madras. I am currently working as a research assistant to an assistant professor in MIDS Chennai. My proposal for this fellowship at Sarai aims to study the migrant workers employed in the IT corridor in Chennai. Indian has been pushed into the high growth trajectory. There is phenomenal economic activity all around us. At the forefront of this economic boom is the service sector, more precisely the Information Technology (IT) and the IT enabled services (ITES) sectors. There has been an inflow of huge foreign capital as well as a high degree Indian investment into these sectors in order to tap the advantages of a large, 'cheap', English educated, skilled workforce. In order to sustain this growth and to facilitate a constant inflow of capital into this sector the southern states of India have been racing against each other to provide international standard infrastructure facilities to the companies. While Bangalore is recognised as the cyber capital of India, Hyderabad and Chennai have been fasting growing IT hubs keenly contesting for the title. In Chennai the driving force for attracting investments into the IT sector is the IT expressway been constructed by TNRDC (Tamil Nadu Road Development Company). This is a 22 Km stretch of the Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR) which is being developed into a world class, state of the art, 6 lane express way. Along side this express way numerous companies as well as entertainment zones, eat outs and residential complexes are being developed. This space is called the IT Corridor. The grandiose project has meant that there has been feverish construction activity not just on the 6 lane expressway, more so on the lands adjoining the expressway. There has been a large inflow of migrant workers from the states of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, and even some central Indian states like Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Bihar. The agrarian crisis in these states and the lack of employment has pushed these people to travel hundreds of miles in search of work. The migrant workers are vulnerable groups, who have little social or cultural security, not to speak of economic security. The low rates of literacy and the ignorance of the local language also makes them easy prey to exploitation. It is these people who are building the sky scrappers and glass houses that is driving the Indian Dream. This study looks at the lifestyles of these migrant workers. In what conditions do the migrant workers work and live? How do they survive in the alien places far away from home? What is the condition of the children of the workers? What do they envision for themselves as the jobs on the IT corridor drains up leaving them as part of the urban unemployed poor? International conventions and Indian legislations strive to protect migrant workers from exploitation. Regulations and guidelines govern the movement of migrant workers requiring registration by contractors. Minimum wages laws and other social security measures are extended to the migrant workers. How effective are these laws? What are the terms in which they are contracted? What is the web of interrelationships between the workers, contractors, business houses and the state? These are some of the questions this research aims to unravel. The study would use ethnographic methods and juxtapose the condition of the migrant labour against the national dream that they are building. Apart from interviews with the migrant workers, the study would include interviews with the officials of TNRDC, contractors, and NGOs working among the migrant workers. Please write to me for clarifications and provide me with your suggestions and comments to make it more meaningful and relevant. Thank you T.venkat From joy at sarai.net Mon Mar 19 09:07:32 2007 From: joy at sarai.net (Mrityunjay Chatterjee) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 09:07:32 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram Killings In-Reply-To: <45FCD680.2050709@sarai.net> References: <45FCD680.2050709@sarai.net> Message-ID: <45FE057C.1010902@sarai.net> Dear all, I had been following the postings and the news on nandigram. Let me condemn the act of violence in nandigram. But when we go for protest, we tend to look through the language of victim and culprit. To complicate the situation I would like to say we don’t have any clear victim or culprit. Police is surely responsible for the firing, but at the same time, oppositions and other political parties are equally responsible for the instigating the people of nandigram and making them scapegoat. So let us not just get into senseless lazy activism of protest, rather think deeper. This is my request. Best Joy From sayyadain2000 at yahoo.co.in Fri Mar 16 15:13:24 2007 From: sayyadain2000 at yahoo.co.in (faizan ahmed) Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 09:43:24 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Need help - Film(s) on football Message-ID: <175795.61274.qm@web7709.mail.in.yahoo.com> Dear Members of this list I am looking for a copy of an old (thogh not that old) film called "Football Champion". It's from 1973 and it's made by A.B.Raj from Madras. Does any one have any idea??? how can i acquire this one??? Or any other Indian film on football... please let me know. Thanks S. M. Faizan Ahmed --------------------------------- Here’s a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070316/40b182c4/attachment.html From ramganeshk at gmail.com Fri Mar 16 17:56:01 2007 From: ramganeshk at gmail.com (Ram Ganesh Kamatham) Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 17:56:01 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Vikram and Betal re-imagined Message-ID: Hi everyone! The story of Vikram and Betal has fascinated me ever since I first encountered it, either in the Amar Chitra Katha comics or the Chandamama magazine, where I eagerly read it with a mixture of fascination, awe and horror. The story has called to me again and I will be spending the rest of the year searching for a way to tell the story as I see it, within a dramaturgical context. Before the words reinterpretation and retelling become leveled at this venture, I must say that it is only mildly involved in an archaeological effort to exhume a set of medieval folktales. I prefer to view the whole process as a re-imagining of the myth within a modern urban context – the end product being a play script. Much of my initial efforts have been to immerse myself in the world that the original text evokes with a view to finding useful points of departure. Once this immersion begins the writing process has kicked off and that's where I hope I can share all the excitement the process has to offer. This is primarily a creative venture, an extremely personal one, but I hope to be as inclusive as possible on this journey. I'll be documenting most of the physical journeys with photos and will share notes that inform the creation of the text. At the outset I'll be looking to explore a few core issues. The relationship between Vikram and Betal lies at the heart of the story. It sets up the primary frame for the rest of the twenty five tales that follow. This essentially antagonistic dynamic seems to me the engine that will drive the entire content of the piece. Personally I always thought that the two characters were twin sides of the same coin - dual personalities forming one entity. One is the king – the one who sits on the seat of all knowledge and as a consequence must grapple with morality to ascertain his fitness to the throne. The other is the ghoul – the undead force that teeters on the brink of insanity and is above all moral considerations, but subjects the more temporal aspect to its constant self-defeating inquiry. This duality is fascinating when applied to larger systems and contexts, where so called forward movement has stalled into cyclic degenerative patterns. Drawing the appropriate parallels, with due regard to the suggested philosophic import, at the same time keeping the aesthetic in mind, will be the challenge. Additionally I'll be consciously exploring the form of the play and toying with a dramaturgical technique known as polyvocality. Polyvocality uses multiple linguistics strategies which simultaneously co-exist within a single play. This form resists the notion of a single authorial voice in a narrative, supplanting it with a number of variable discourses. This is an attempt to resist categorization into a particular genre and at the same time foreground the dramaturgical form as not merely a carrier of content. The resultant piece I hope will do justice to the cyclic narrative of this ancient frame within a frame story. I'm really looking forward to it! More about me at http://www.addledbraindump.blogspot.com/ (And for those of you in Mumbai, do come see the play I've just written, showing at the NCPA - Experimental. Details on the link provided.) Warm regards Ram -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070316/362f283d/attachment.html From pkray11 at gmail.com Sat Mar 17 14:41:04 2007 From: pkray11 at gmail.com (prakash ray) Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2007 14:41:04 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] The Tragedy of Nandigram Message-ID: <98f331e00703170211m2d0dfdc7w2dd852d7ed55f1aa@mail.gmail.com> Dear Friends, 14 people have died in Nandigram due to the confrontation between the Police and violent agitators. One person (out of that 14) died because a bomb that he was trying to throw at the Police burst in his hands. Nearly 70 persons have been injured. One more person, Abhijit Samanta (relative of Panchayat Pradhan from CPI (M), Sankar Samanta, who was killled in the earlier phase of violence in January) has also died because he was brutally attacked with a chopper for refusing to join the "resistance" against entry of police into the area. The incident is unfortunate and highly regrettable because poor people have lost their lives. It is particularly disturbing because it has happened under a Left Front regime, which is committed to the cause of the working people, particularly the rural poor. However, the vitriolic campaign launched against the CPI(M) and the Left Front by the entire opposition ranging from the BJP, Trinamul Congress, Congress, SUCI and naxalite outfits stands as a testimony to their culpability in this entire episode. They were not only waiting for something like this to happen but have actively worked to create this situation. On 3rd February 2007 the CM had announced that no land would be acquired in Nandigram. Since then he has repeated this announcement several times. Several all-Party meetings were convened both at the district as well as the state level to discuss and resolve the issue. The opposition deliberately stayed away, because they wanted to precipitate the situation. This is a hallmark of right-reactionary politics (which the ultra-Left also indulges in); to indulge in mindless violence and create a situation of lawlessness, provoke retaliation by the state machinery and then indulge in cheap and destructive politics over dead bodies to perpetuate the cycle of violence and counter-violence. Those who are criticizing the Left Front Government or the CPI (M) may have some legitimate grounds for criticism. But joining in the anti-CPI (M) tirade without for once recognizing, let alone condemning, the total anarchy and lawlessness created by the entire opposition under the leadership of Trinamul and naxalites, only contributes to further deterioration of the situation on the ground. Over 2500 CPI (M) sympathisers, all poor villagers, have been staying in makeshift relief camps over the past two and a half months since they were forcibly evicted from the villages. The area was declared out of bounds for the district administration and all communication links and roads were cut off. This was surely not a democratic form of protest. Moreover, the demand on the basis of which the protest had started was accepted by the State Government a month ago. What was continuing in Nandigram after the CM's announcement was a violent spectacle over a non-issue. A police personnel was lynched by the protestors inside Nandigram without any provocation. Houses of CPI (M) supporters were torched. There was an incident of murder of a young girl followed by gang rape of another woman. In none of these cases was the Police allowed to enter the villages and investigate the crimes/alleged crimes. The State government is fully justified in taking action to restore normalcy since no elected Government can allow such absolute anarchy and lawlessness to prevail. The degree or intensity of police action can of course be questioned. Any loss of life is certainly avoidable. However, if one choses to look at the case from an objective point of view, the Government was clearly pushed into this situation. It is our appeal to progressive and democratic minded people to take a more balanced and reasoned view of the two and a half month long series of incidents in Nandigram rather than get swayed by the concerted campaign launched by the anti-Communist gang up from the ultra-right to the ultra-left aided by sections of the media. *Nandigram: A Statement of Facts** * The trouble in Nandigram began with attacks on Panchayat members, administrative officials and police on 3rd January, 2007. The following is a brief of what happened thereafter. 1. East Midnapur was poised to be declared as "Nirmal" district, for excellent achievements in sanitation. A central team was scheduled to visit Nandigram on 13th and 14th January for this purpose. In fact, the central team has already visited other areas of the district and watched the noteworthy success in this regard. On 3rd January, the preparatory meeting for the visit was taking place in Kalicharanpur Gram Panchayat office. Some activists of Trinamool Congress gathered there at around 11-30 in the morning. They demanded that the land acquisition notice, served by Haldia Development Authority be scrapped and the Panchayat declare that there would be no such acquisition. Samerun Bibi, the Panchayat pradhan, refused to heed their demand. They were violent and abusive. They ransacked the Panchayat office. The Panchayat secretary was injured in the attack. The mob also pelted stones on the health sub-centre. It was only after this that the Panchayat pradhan informed the Nandigram police station. As the police vehicle was proceeding towards the village, they were attacked by an armed mob. 11policemen including 2 ASIs were seriously injured. The police vehicle was torched. A rifle was also looted which was later returned to police station by TMC MLA Subhendu Adhikary. After some time another mob attacked a police car of Khejuri police station about five kilometers away and attempted to burn it. The police have not entered the area since then. 2. The miscreants started moving with arms and began to destroy bridges and culverts linking roads. They created an atmosphere of terror. On 4th and 5th January, they virtually destroyed every link road and bridge connecting Nandigram and Khejuri to the outside world. They also burnt a 25KV electric sub-station. An armed gang equipped with firearms attacked the CPI(M) local committee office in Rajaramchawk and burnt it. Cadres of TMC and other forces roamed around and threatened CPI(M) leaders and sympathizers with dire consequences. On both these days many houses of CPI(M) workers and sympathizers were looted. A large number of CPI(M) workers were forced to leave the villages and take shelter in a nearby camp. That the mob was armed could be seen in the photographs published in newspapers. The entire incident was meticulously planned. 3. The ousted CPI(M) workers and their families took shelter in a camp in the southern side of the Bhangabera bridge in Khejuri area. On 6th January miscreants of the so-called Jami Rakkha Committee (a conglomeration of TMC, Congress, SUCI, Naxalite groups, Jamiat ulema-e-Hind) attacked the camp at about 3 a.m. They even prepared bunkers for the attack. There was resistance from the camp and in the ensuing conflict three of the attackers died. One of them, Seikh Salim was a resident of South Kendemari, about 12 Kms away from the spot. It was evident that they gathered there to attack the camp in a planned manner. 4. On 7th January morning, the miscreants attacked the house of Sankar Samanta, CPI(M) Panchayat member, looted his house and burnt it. They dragged Samanta to Shitpara and burnt him alive in a haystack. 5. Bhudeb Mandal, another CPI(M) supporter was seriously injured in the attack. The miscreants left him, assuming that he was dead. He however, regained consciousness and somehow reached a relative's house. Later he was hospitalized. In all 153 houses were looted. The houses and shops of Lakhman Mandal, Sonachura Panchayat pradhan, Samerun Bibi, Kalicharanpur Panchayat pradhan, Arjun Maity, Dr, Pratap Paul, Rabiul, Annapurna Das -- all CPI(M) workers -- were burnt. 6. Among those evicted from the villages are 2 district Committee members of CPI(M), 2 local committee secretaries, 6 zonal committee members, 16 local committee members and 56 Party members. More than 200 families were forced to stay in relief camp or relatives' houses. Later, the number surged and more than 2000 people were ousted from the village. Their houses were looted and their lands were forcefully occupied. Hundreds of people were forced to pay ransom. 7. The attack spread to adjoining Khejuri and some parts of rural Haldia. On 7th February, 2007 a police party went to the village to discuss the issues. They were brutally attacked without any provocation. The local OC was seriously injured. Despite this, the police did not retaliate and returned back. The miscreants dragged Sadhucharan Chatterjee, an elderly police person and killed him. His body was found in the river after a three day search. 8. On 10th February, Sunita Mondal, a student of class ten, was brutally murdered after torture. Her body was found on a tree, with rope tied to her neck. Her father was ousted earlier by miscreants. The police could not enter into the village to collect information even after such an incident. Members of the State Women Commission were also faced resistance when they tried to investigate the matter. 9. On 17th and 18th February, another 22 houses were burnt by the TMC miscreants. Many more families were forced to flee from the villages. 10. On 3rd March, one housewife (name withheld) was mass raped by a gang of TMC miscreants led by Srihari Samanta, a local TMC leader. The victim is from a CPI(M) sympathizer's family and refused to join the programme of Bhumi Rakkha Committee. The victim was hospitalized and her entire statement has been recorded. 11. The Chief Minister has stated categorically that there will be no forced land acquisition in Nandigram. On 9th February the CM pointedly told in a public meeting in Khejuri that without the consent of the people of Nandigram nothing will be done. Later, on a number of occasions during the last one month, the CM has repeatedly stated in very clear terms that the proposed Chemical Hub would be shifted if the people of Nandigram did not accept the proposal. Even after that, there was no respite from the atrocities perpetrated by the Bhumi Rakkha Committee, making it amply clear that the question is not at all that of "land acquisition" but a political strategy to maintain a forced acquisition of Nandigram by a combination of political forces. 12. The district administration, meanwhile called a series of all Party meetings and peace meetings, mostly boycotted by TMC, Congress and Bhumi Rakkha Committee. The last such meeting was organized on 10th March where representatives from Left Front partners and BJP were present. TMC, Congress and Bhumi Rakkha Committee declined the invitation. It was decided in the meeting that the administration would move to restore reconstruction work and normalcy in the area and anyone resisting the constitutional duties would be legally dealt with. 13. On 14th March, the police entered the area after prior announcements through loudspeaker. When they reached Sonachura, they were attacked with bombs and guns. In the ensuing confrontation 13 people were killed. One more person was killed due to bomb injury. Regards Prakash -- Prakash K Ray 254, Sutlej, JNU, New Delhi-67 www.cinemela.org (available soon) cinemela.blogspot.com (0) 9811450214 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070317/778d1422/attachment.html From indersalim at gmail.com Sun Mar 18 10:41:52 2007 From: indersalim at gmail.com (inder salim) Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2007 17:11:52 -1200 Subject: [Reader-list] first post: this indersalim stuff from Kashmir... with love Message-ID: <47e122a70703172211n51494d68s5d308e3f208e3175@mail.gmail.com> Hi I am: *This indersalim stuff from Kashmir*. I am a performance artist. ( please include the 'theater performances' here, though I am not strictly in the practice of doing things on stage. ) The art-in-public- space, yes, I do, but the definition is quite vast, so no big claims. I try to conceptualize my action ( performance ) with ongoing conflicts (both political and otherwise ) in mind, but as you know, the form incorporated changes the dynamics of ' the action' even. So, I believe the the unpredictability of doing a performance… I enclose three poem pieces, the second one I ended with a little performance at Performance poetry thing organized by Vivek Naranyan at Sarai some days back. My project is to organize performance art, to collaborate and initiate performances anywhere in India or abroad. So I am myself waiting for a surprise or so. But meanwhile : ** *YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI* * Men keep on pissing near the wall Till a graffiti grows: YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI And if men keep on pissing near the wall They imagine reading a line YEH PADNA MANA HAI** Next to the line YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI. And if the fermentation of the absorbed piss begins to emit those nose wrenching fumes, the complacent administrator's nose comes closer to it to arrange an alternative in the nearby vicinity. And if a money generating toilet structure comes up a little away from the disgraced wall, The text: YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI Becomes idle and meaningless Till some poorly paid workers of different Political parties paste glossy Posters of their masters underneath. And once the colourful posters of Politicians and their children politicians Appear underneath the line YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI The artist-in-public-space Inserts a word *NAHEE**** In the line *YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI* At an appropriate place. For some real men to impart some real meaning, To their age old habit Of pissing in the public space. * Yahan mootna manah hai = pissing is prohibited here. ** Yeh panda manah hai= reading this is prohibited *** Nahee= not *……………………………………………………………………………….* * * *Teri to lal hai ( yours is red )* * * The more you climb the more it will grow;- On a magical tree, This particular species of monkeys in their own jolly great mood, they simply kept on Jumping and climbing Climbing and jumping, Till they decided to look down To see the earth from above. It was a point, less than the tree, But quite far from below. That a two of the species Happened to bend on their knees To see each other as well. It just happened that one was above the other, And had a chance to see the *Downing Back* of his brother. * Aray, teri to lal hai, (yours is red) Screamed the-one-below-the-above-one. Heard by the wind, and by the leaves And thousands of his own species, The one-above-the-below-one, without fun, Felt humiliated, stooped low, first inwardly then outwardly, to identify… But the-one-below-the-above-one Kept on jumping and climbing, And climbing and jumping, Till it was air which supported his feet, And his belief that he was different, than the-one-above-the-below-one. But, one day a return Would make him understand The meaning of ** Laet tulith chi sari gaeb. **( in Kashmiri = Lift the tail of any sheep, all of them are female.) The performance ended with the exposure of my buttocks, painted with red through my pant torn from behind. ............................................................................................................. *Cockroach * Trapped I was, Not too exhausted in the toilet sink, In which he was about to piss… Periplaneta Americana Orientalis, Perhaps, this is how a Zoologist Would define me By the length and breadth of my delicate antenna. I was suffering: And when he held in his hand A melancholy, nozzle like thing That was behind the zip, I thought of a rescue operation….. But a shimmering rope like thing, Which fell next-near to me Was only a mirage,-- Because the more I tried to catch hold of it The more I was on a difficult ground. Now what I was floating upon, Was quite a blow to my hope, Otherwise a usual thing to smell and taste: I was aghast. The shadow like thing stood there, Watched my swimming abilities Or perhaps, pitied my fate. And when suddenly he pulled the chain Again and again: ' O shit , this city is really dry ' I heard him saying before The lights went off - please visit: http://indersalim.livejournal.com to navigate, press EARLIER at page's bottom. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070317/dd886abd/attachment.html From miyaa_mihir at yahoo.com Sun Mar 18 16:17:04 2007 From: miyaa_mihir at yahoo.com (mihir pandya) Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 03:47:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] on indian defeat in world cup Message-ID: <20070318104704.49520.qmail@web52002.mail.re2.yahoo.com> “Legends of the Fall” It looks like In team India they all are trying to match their performance on the ground with their bank balance: - lots of zeros in account, lots of zeros on scoreboard! But it’s disturbing to watch Pakistan knocked out from the world cup in that manner. Is this world cup going on the last year’s champion’s trophy path? With none of the subcontinent team in semis? Is this a changing world of cricket? Are we going to see the same what we witness in the game of hockey years ago? The west dominating the sport with his professionalism and the rawness of subcontinent gone down and down and down… It’s time for India to show some guts on the ground. They learn a lesson from B’desh. Boys still in their teens hitting Indian pace attack, as they are playing a club match. Wonderful to watch. Sheer delight. They are new hope for a crumbling subcontinent. But with all that happen. I am still with windies. And the world cup is on for me… …miHir 18/03/07 --------------------------------- Be a PS3 game guru. Get your game face on with the latest PS3 news and previews at Yahoo! Games. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070318/bff0a748/attachment.html From chauhan.vijender at gmail.com Mon Mar 19 09:58:30 2007 From: chauhan.vijender at gmail.com (Vijender chauhan) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 09:58:30 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] reader-list Digest, Vol 44, Issue 58 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8bdde4540703182128na1325bfs29d65ac23faffb23@mail.gmail.com> Oh welcome Mrityunjay, Strange simplification. we should not protest because those who died wer NOT victims, they were either "goons" or simply instigated, scape goated individualsm they don need support. I thank you for not saying that it is Budha who is teh victim. Have shame man. Why is that when some one get political affilliation his/her empathy too get that muchh politicised? We don protest only to support victim, instead whenever I attend a protest it is more to assure myself that I'm not dead, to assure myself that look there are so many peoples who have not sold themselves to parties. BTW Mrtuanjay, what is the party brief? Are you going to shoot at this protest rally or just have mercy with "mild" lathi charge. best Vijender On 3/18/07, reader-list-request at sarai.net wrote: > > Send reader-list mailing list submissions to > reader-list at sarai.net > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > reader-list-request at sarai.net > > You can reach the person managing the list at > reader-list-owner at sarai.net > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of reader-list digest..." > > Today's Topics: > > 1. resending my first posting (sayandeb mukherjee) > 2. [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram Killings > (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: sayandeb mukherjee > To: reader-list at sarai.net > Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 06:03:11 +0000 (GMT) > Subject: [Reader-list] resending my first posting > Dear friends, > > I am Shri Sayandeb Mukherjee. I hail from Kolkata, > West Bengal . Having graduated in science stream with > Mathematics Hons from Kolkata University I completed > 3yrs post graduate diploma in sound recording from > Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata. I > have special interests in evolution of sound - an > introduction to soundscape, psychological acoustics, > soundtrack designing and film & music appreciation. > Professionally I am a sound recordist presently > working as a recording engineer in Mix Facility1 ( a > Dolby Digital/SR and DTS film Re-recording set up ) in > a recording studio complex - Symphony, Ramoji Film > City . Passionately, I practise > paintings,scriptwriting, penning down my observations, > photography and ambience recordings. > > For a long time I have been passing through corridors > of different places. Sometimes while consciously > walking through these spaces I thought about the > differences in my social conditioning. In an > architecturally similar space this subconscious > transformation of the 'self' interested me immensely. > And as a sound recordist, everyday I am handling with > the aesthetics of sound in my studio. I have gone > through many pre-recorded sound files in our > Fx-library. Sometimes while using this library, I > have listened to the long reverberated sound of huge > elevators recorded by some sound recordist in a big > corridor. These sounds synthesizes in my mind as a > musical expression. Next is the vivid application of > these spaces in many films. My research will also > gaze into the intricate properties of the > corridor-like spaces to rationalize their application > in this media. > > > Name of the project: CORRIDORS - THE NEW PATHWAY > > An abstract: > > The project is about the contemporary symbiotic > relationship between the urban individual and various > kinds of corridor spaces s/he encounters in everyday > life. > Corridors are the 'natural caves' of modern > civilization. With decreasing individual space of > existence and increasing pressure of influx on > cities...corridors or vestibular constructions have > become more and more indispensable thus providing a > common pathway/interface to the multitude of flats, > offices and know-not-what. As one walks down the > corridor, s/he finds the sense of owning a > familial/familiar space gradually dwindling and fading > away along the length of the long corridor. The > project delves into the psychological domain, plotting > the emotional contours of an individual and will try > to envelop the dynamics of consciousness ranging from > the pleasure of anticipation to the anxieties of > uncertainty. Another important aspect lies alongside - > the acoustics of corridors. This contemporary > architectural design which may appear simple > structurally possesses a complicated and sometimes > convoluted auditory space due to reflective and > diffractive properties of sound. The project attempts > to enlighten the variability of these acoustic > qualities/characterestics of corridors integrated in > different urban spaces like - hospitals, prisons, > libraries, educational institution, courts and many > other public spaces which are vibrant in terms of > psycho-acoustics. The research would also borrow > references from ancient mythological texts, films, > paintings and literature to discern the mystic and > seemingly improbable destination of corridors and like > spaces. > > Methodology, work procedure > > The process of research includes a vivid physical > involvement and exploration in the corridor like > spaces, taking notes in a descriptive way in the spot > itself, acquiring photographs and live recordings of > the acoustic environments at different spots of the > same space. The recording process may also involve > time stamps (i.e. recordings of the same space over > the different parts of a day) for the analysis of the > soundscape in a particular space. > > The process also includes the collection of films, > texts or any other form of art, where one can notice a > conscious application of such corridor-like spaces. A > critical analysis of these texts and footages would be > attempted to find its role in building up the > emotional contours of the narrative characters and the > contribution of those spaces to the narrative > trajectory of these films or texts. > > Visuals from VIDEOGAMES (where the stalker intruding > through endless geometry of corridors) also would be > incorporated for analysis and reflection. > > The Formulation of postings: > > I would like to split each posting into three columns > for a better formulation. They will be continued > throughout the project with some new/added > informations, developments and analysis. > > 1. THE MAINFRAME: > This includes the main content, the thematic writings, > the derivations, the historical outline/references and > the phenomenology. > > 2. THE INTERFACE: > The interviews/ the interactive sessions with > theoreticians, educationists, artists, psychologists > or any person experienced in this field. It will also > include feedback/responses to the project-concept and > its progress. > > 3. THE DATABASE: > This will be including all references drawn from > journals, articles, discourses, websites and media. > > The end product > > As the end product, this project would generate the > following materials for archiving in Sarai. > 1. Images of the new urban buildings and the > integrated corridor-like spaces. > 2. Some data about the acoustic behavior and response > of such structures. > 3. A body of audio recordings in the corridor-like > spaces under the scrutiny. > 4. Textual interviews of some corridor users. > 5. An audio CD containing specially designed ambience > tracks using the audio recordings in the > corridor-spaces. > > > The first posting: > > This is a very brief outline of the reconnaissance I > did for the past few weeks. As I have mentioned above, > I will present the posting in three columns followed > below: > > THE MAINFRAME: > > Evolution of urban spaces > > For the past two centuries, every city throughout the > world has seen a gradual remodeling of the SPACE > concept. The utilization, manipulation and > multi-occupation of space has got an immense impact on > the changing façade of urban civilization. > In earlier days, cities were meant mainly for the > well-to-do especially for Rajas, Maharajas, Zamindars, > high-posted Government officials and also for > commuters who used to diurnally arrive at their > working space located in the city and return to the > outskirts. These people were very few in count in > comparison to the land mass; if the dwellings or > work-spaces in an urban domain are mapped as elements > in a matrix of the city-scape, one could notice the > dispersed, unclustered spatial distribution of these > elements. Explicitly speaking, a topographic map of > the city in olden days would feature the quantity of > space that used to remain uninhabited. For this > abundance, space was never thought to be consolidated. > On the contrary, it was considered to be horizontally > extensible. This property was always exploited for the > exhibition of the dwellers' hierarchical position in > the society. They used to stretch their living space > to the highest extent making an establishment for a > lavish-livelihood. Within an allocated space, the > dwellers through their authority, power or position in > the society would always get an opportunity to give an > individualistic expression in the architecture of > their houses (this exhibition of architectural > splendor is rarely visible today). These factors > rendered the emergence of Palaces, Havelis, Kuthris, > Mansions, Bungalows in the early period of urban > civilization... (continued) > > THE INTERFACE: > > Regardless of its omnipresent nature, corridor or like > spaces evoke a numerous shade of emotions in human > mind. Flickers of which we came across, when we > visited the Osmania University 's psychology > department. Mrs. Beena, the head of the department had > few experiences/informations to share with us. > She emphasizes on the fact that corridors are like > built-in-spaces --- and she generally feels deserted > in them. Long and vacant hotel or hospital corridors > are suffocating for her. She reasons it out with very > interesting explanation --- human beings like other > animals are essentially related to nature. Proximity > with nature gives them a sense of re-assurance. That > is why the concept of windows opening outside a house > has come in. whenever one is shut off from nature, the > link gets snapped and the sense of time vanishes. > Parallely, she provides a counter-point. Corridors of > universities and colleges which are vibrant with the > noise of teachers, students and illuminated with > bright sunlight give a positive vibe to her. Temple > corridors which have three sides enclosed and the > other side opening to the temple courtyard or > surroundings are also very charming. They endow an > onlooker with a close contact with nature as well as > with beautiful paintings, murals and sculptures on the > other three sides. > While summing up her views, Mrs. Beena says that this > sense of suffocation is a resultant phenomenon of the > general traumatic experience of human birth. Every > human baby undergoing this struggle in the birth canal > gets an immediate relief when it is out of the womb. > The birth-cry is the self-assertion of a new human in > the outer world. The birth canal which is similar to > that of a dark corridor threatens the life of a human > baby at the time of its birth and s/he inherits this > experience for the subsequent period of his/her life. > German psychologist Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud has > told a great deal about the birth experience. It is > also noted that human beings are more confident to top > and bottom perspective than to their left and right > orientation giving a general creeping sense to human > beings. > > THE DATABSE: > > I would like to share the following treatise that I > received from a close friend, Debkamal Ganguly, who's > also interested in the project. > http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/jameson_futurecity.htm > > http://www.blackjelly.com/Mag2/features/planetporn.htm > Modern urban life is increasingly experienced within > the non-spaces of (to use a cringe-inducing term) > "supermodernism." Examples include not only elevators, > airports, corridors, subway stations and hotel rooms, > but also the invisible architectures of the > information economy: the digital realms which lie on > the other side of the modem. Hong Kong is a perfect > example of a metropolitan node comprised of many > layers, folding back onto itself like a moebius strip. > Bricks and mortar provide the skeleton, fibre-optical > cables the nerves, and people the bits of data moving > around the system. Which explains my recurrent dream > in which I become a figure of "incessant circulation" > (to use a favourite phrase of Jean Baudrillard's). A > figure who hasn't actually been anywhere at all. Not > in a tangible sense, anyway. Hong Kong 's amnesiacal > momentum is less a case of an imaginary community than > an imaged community: a technotopian megalopolis which > understands the pornographic logic of advanced > capitalism. While Australia passes laws to ban > pornography on the Internet (making itself the > "village idiot of the global village" in the process), > and Giuliani's Brave New York cleans up Times Square, > Hong Kong thrives in the ambiguous spaces obscured > behind digital pixelation. > > I will be continuing the discourses in the next > posting. > > Thanking you and keeping in touch with you > > yours sincerely > sayandeb mukherjee > > > > > > > > > __________________________________________________________ > Yahoo! India Answers: Share what you know. Learn something new > http://in.answers.yahoo.com/ > > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Shuddhabrata Sengupta > To: announcements at sarai.net > Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 11:34:48 +0530 > Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram Killings > Dear All (Especially those on the list who live in Delhi) > > There will be a rally to protest the killings in Nandigram at Jantar > Mantar (Parliament Street/Sansad Marg, New Delhi, tomorrow, Monday, 19th > March at 3:00 PM in the afternoon. Please come and circulate this notice > widely. > > best > > Shuddha > _______________________________________________ > announcements mailing list > announcements at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements > > _______________________________________________ > reader-list mailing list > reader-list at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070319/cfe16c3d/attachment.html From vivek at sarai.net Mon Mar 19 11:57:46 2007 From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:57:46 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Mumbai P.E.N.: Girish Karnad/ 21 March + Vivek Narayanan/ 22 March 2007 Message-ID: <45FE2D62.5060605@sarai.net> SAVE THE DATES: (1) Girish Karnad/ 21 March at Prithvi Theatre (2) Vivek Narayanan/ 22 March at Theosophy Hall * THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE invites you, with your friends, to (1) 'Meet the Playwright': GIRISH KARNAD in conversation with Shanta Gokhale Date: Wednesday, 21 March 2007 Time: 11 am Place: Prithvi Theatre (Janki Kutir, Juhu) ALL ARE WELCOME: ENTRY FREE * The distinguished playwright Girish Karnad's new play, 'Flowers', is based on a folktale from Chitradurga. It revolves around a priest whose life has become a balancing act between his passionate love for God and his equally passionate love for his courtesan; he is caught off-guard when, one day, they collide. This dramatic monologue is produced by Ranga Shankara, and will be shown at Prithvi Theatre from 20 through 25 March. Rajit Kapur, who won the National Award for his performance, plays the central character. The play is directed by Roysten Abel, who won the Best Play award at Edinburgh for his interpretation of 'Othello'. - &&& - (2) A Poetry Reading by VIVEK NARAYANAN Date: Thursday, 22 March 2007 Time: 6.15 pm Place: Theosophy Hall (3rd floor), 40 New Marine Lines, Churchgate, Bombay 400 020 ALL ARE WELCOME: ENTRY FREE * Vivek Narayanan will read from his new collection of poems, Universal Beach (2006), his reading conducted in the mode of performance with which he has come to be associated in literary circles. His presentation will weave together three elements: his own reading/ performance; a reflection on the practice of performance in the context of poetry; and recordings from other poets, which Narayanan will annotate. Vivek Narayanan was born in Ranchi in 1972, grew up in Zambia, studied in the USA, and is currently based in New Delhi, where he works with SARAI, a new-media initiative of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). His poems have appeared in Indian and international journals and anthologies since 1994. Universal Beach is his first collection. Ranjit Hoskote Hon. Secretary-Treasurer The PEN All-India Centre Theosophy Hall (2nd floor) 40 New Marine Lines Bombay 400 020 *** Enquiries: PEN All-India Centre: india.pen at gmail.com Prithvi Theatre (Janki Kutir, Juhu Church Road, Bombay 400 049) Box Office: 2614 9546 Fax: 2617 5775 www.prithvitheatre.org ----------------------------------- -- Vivek Narayanan Sarai: The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 110 054 Phone: (91-11) 2396 0040, ext. 22 Mobile: 98109 36654 From anu at mz9.net Mon Mar 19 12:18:06 2007 From: anu at mz9.net (Anupama Sekhar) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 12:18:06 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] Arts Management Internship Diploma Program Message-ID: <20070319064810.2A96228D76D@mail.sarai.net> The DakshinaChitra Heritage Museum (Muttukadu, Tamil Nadu) and the Madras Craft Foundation Institute of Arts Management (Chennai) offer an Arts Management Internship Diploma Program. Applications from are now being invited for admission to the third batch of the program (which will commence in end-June 2007 and end in late May 2008). The eleven-month multidisciplinary Internship Diploma program aims to create professional managers with a deep and real understanding of culture to take on leadership roles in cultural & arts organizations in India. The program specially prepares candidates for careers in museums, art galleries, arts & crafts promotional bodies, Indian & international cultural centers and the tourism & hospitality industries. Taught over three trimesters in Chennai, this full-time program includes courses in cultural studies, art appreciation, management, mass communication and design. Courses taught include Approaches to Cultural Studies, Appreciation of Indian and Western Art, Performing Arts, Cultural Tourism, Changing Notions of Museums, Media & Communication, Video Documentation (with Field Studies), Design Movements, Graphic Design and Management. The course is project work oriented. Interns will be expected to assist with and work on projects at the DakshinaChitra Heritage Museum concurrently with their course work. Fellowships (comprising of full tuition waiver plus a stipend) are available to meritorious applicants. Scholarships covering full and partial costs of tuition are also offered. Prospective students must: be Indian nationals; hold a Bachelor�s degree in any subject; be under 35 years of age; and, and possess deep interest in art and culture. The Madras Craft Foundation Institute of Arts Management is an initiative of the Madras Craft Foundation, a Chennai-based registered non-profit organization established in 1984 for the preservation and promotion of the arts with special emphasis on the culture of south India. Established in 1996, DakshinaChitra is a heritage museum and contemporary cultural centre for the living traditions of art, folk performing arts, crafts, contemporary art and architecture of India with an emphasis on the traditions of south India. Showcased at DakshinaChitra are 17 heritage homes from the four states of south India, each of which has been relocated to its present location from its original site. A project of the Madras Craft Foundation, DakshinaChitra occupies ten undulating acres overlooking the Bay of Bengal at Muttukadu, Tamil Nadu (approx. 25 km. south of Chennai on the East Coast Road to Mamallapuram). For more details & application forms, visit http://www.dakshinachitra.net/scripts/internshipdiploma.asp Deadline for receipt of application is 15 April 2007 Anupama Sekhar Program Officer, DakshinaChitra DakshinaChitra Heritage Museum East Coast Road, Muttukadu, Tamil Nadu 603 118 +91.44.2747 2603 Madras Craft Foundation G-3, No. 6, Urur Olcott Road, Besant Nagar, Chennai 600090 +91.44.2491 8943 E: mcfdak at md3.vsnl.net.in W: http://www.dakshinachitra.net From hpp at vsnl.com Mon Mar 19 13:57:38 2007 From: hpp at vsnl.com (hpp at vsnl.com) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 08:27:38 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] apologist for Nandigram Message-ID: Dear Shri Ray Thank you for your post on Nandigram. It is very illuminating. It is good to know how the CPI(M0 and its friends are thinking. Please try to communicate this to the people of West Bengal. In that process, you might learn a thing or two about reality, that is if you really want to or care to know. Every perspective that you have aired can be irrefutably countered. But that would only be a waste of time, and naive. CPI(M), any of the other Left Front members, or Trinamul or Congress or BJP - none of them are needed by the people of West Bengal. No amount of attribution of blame to "outsiders", or "Naxalites" or "Maoists" is going to mask the reality - of what CPM is and has done and is now doing in West Bengal. There is no political opposition in the state. Hence the option people all over India have, of booting out parties from office, is not available here. So one can only foresee terrible instalibity and violence in the coming days, as people's opposition takes on a frustrated, destructive form. But the blame for this would lie squarely on the CPM, for their corruption, for their distortion of civic life, for their fascist make-up. West Bengal today faces an immense challenge - of establishing a new political front that can offer an alternative to the people. A very basic common minimum programme is imperative - e.g. rebuilding the shattered primary education and healthcare system; providing civic amenities; eliminating the corruption, extortion and thuggery that has seeped into the very pores of the society; socio-economic inclusion of the minorities, Dalits and adivasis. The CPM is not going to be able to train its guns and rain its bombs on the lakhs and lakhs of people from all walks of life, whose blood is boiling as each day brings new scams and deals, and reveals the arrogance and fascist actions of the party. Those like you who supposedly are concerned about the common people, and even more about the CPM - should try to tell your friends that their days of ugly power are nearing an end; and to act accordingly. Hypothetically speaking, if at all anything can save the situation for the party - drastic reform is needed, towards de-criminalising the party and restoring the rule of law and the Constitution of India. But that is never going to happen. For what the CPM is totally to blame for - the people of West Bengal are going to suffer in the immediate future, as instability and violence grow. To hate a ruling party for its corruptions, to want to eject them, to plan and act on this - all within the framework of non-violent, Constititionally valid methods - is perfectly legitimate in a democratic polity, and a citizen has a right to do this. Thank you. Yours sincerely V Ramaswamy Calcutta cuckooscall.blogspot.com From shuddha at sarai.net Mon Mar 19 14:17:50 2007 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 14:17:50 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Invite to Action 2007 Launch Message-ID: <45FE4E36.6030707@sarai.net> Dear All, (especially those in Delhi) This is in continuation of the earlier announcement of the protest against Nandigram and other SEZs later this afternoon. Please see below a programme of activities in the coming days in relation to this and other issues. This was forwarded to me earlier this morning with a request for circulation. best Shuddha ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Vijayan MJ Date: 18-Mar-2007 18:45 Subject: Invite to Action 2007 Launch For mass circulation *Invite to Launch of Action/Sangharsh 2007 and the Jan Sansad * * * *17th March 2007* Dear Friends, Many of us are aware of the people's movements' collective struggle front named Action 2007. Some of us have been actively part of it with many others being supporters helping in many ways. But now time has come for all of us, activists, movement supporters, those from the academia, journalists, NGOs, students, professionals so on and so forth to come out in the open and actively support and take part in this indefinite action phase of Sangharsh 2007, in Delhi. Action 2007's indefinite Delhi phase starts tomorrow, the 19th afternoon at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi. Having decided to keep indefinite struggle in Delhi, the movements and mass orgnisations have mobilized thousands of people to come and stay on in Delhi till our demands and aspirations are negotiated with and agreed upon by the different state agencies. From the planning stage itself, it was also decided that this struggle is not just a struggle against the state or its agencies, but a powerful attempt by the people's movements to challenge the militarized and imperialist state craft of the ruling classes. Land acquisitions all over the country, ruined lives and livelihoods of urban and rural poor, agricultural crisis, demolition of people's shelters and dignity, issues are many… Action 2007 has no one leader, no one spokesperson, no one demand… Yes, this struggle is not about one demand, it is about many demands, many aspirations and many more issues. They cut across the different sectors of our lives. Those friends who have not had time to look at the details like 'Call of Actions 2007' and the list of mass organizations that are part of the struggle, kindly have a look at the website; www.action2007.net Given below are some details about the programmes under the banner, especially the Lok Haat, the Jan Sansad, etc. *Kindly look at the details and the programmes planned under Sangharsh and do make sure that you join us tomorrow (the 19 th March 2007) for the launch of Action 2007, the inaugural Jan Sansad at Jantar Mantar from 2 pm onwards and thereafter for all the activities…* The first Jan Sansad will be on "People's Politics and Democratic Governance"… With warm regards and in solidarity, Arun Khote, Medha Patkar, Saktiman Ghosh, Rajendra Ravi, Ajit Jha, Mukta Srivastava, Ghanshyam, Geetanjali Chavan, Simpreet Singh, Ashok Chaudhury, Vijayan MJ and others from the National Coordination Committee Kindly note the following: *Registration Desk and Office at Jantar Mantar: **011-64119581** * Media Coordination: Manshi Asher-9910345405, Joe Athialy-9868114470 Logistics Coordination: (General) Rajendra Ravi-9868200316, Ashok-9968292301, Shreeprakash-9871880686 Food & Sanitation team: Dhananjay-9899937487 Volunteers Coordination: Bipin-9999046469, Madhuresh-9818905316 Jan Sansad Coordination: Sridevi-9868099304, Mukta Srivastava-26680914/883 Cultural Activities Coordination: Ramendra-9868815915, Anita-9868204834 Delhi mobilization coordination: Sanjeev-9350183809, Bijulal-9968161012 Lok Haat: Saktiman Ghosh-9212607945, Prabhakar-09226494838 * PROGRAMMES AT A GLANCE* * Main Venue – Jantar Mantar, New Delhi* * * *19th March 2007* *Launch of Action 2007 and Jan Sansad from 2 pm onwards * People's movements and mass organisations from across the country reach Delhi on 19 th March to launch Action 2007** *19th March till end of indefinite action * *Lok Haat (Peoples' Market)* Lok Haat / Peoples' Market has been planned essentially to showcase the alternatives that have been developed by struggling movements and people at various levels, also including the handloom, handicraft and khadi sectors. However it will also be a public space where the vendors, hawkers and small traders who are being denied their livelihood by the monopoly market and government, will perform actual trade. The Lok Haat will be set up in the Central Delhi areas, near Jantar Mantar. *19th Mar—24th Mar (day-long)** * *Jan Sansad (Peoples' Parliament)** * Jan Sansad will be held on the streets of Delhi where selected issues from the "Call for Action 2007" will be raised and debated in presence of senior politicians, legislatures, representatives of ministries as well as bureaucrats. People's decisions from these will be taken ahead in to dialogue and action, the next week. *23rd Mar * *(evening) * *Sankalp Divas* 23rd of March is Shahadat Divas (day of martyrdom) of Shaheed Bhagat Singh and comrades. Action 2007 will mark this day as Sankalp Divas by taking a pledge for social change and by celebrating it by various means of cultural protest. *25th March * *1st & 8th April* *Days of Cultural resistance* Theatre and cultural activities are not only tools for struggle but part of the struggle itself. To affirm this, Action 2007 will celebrate these days as days of cultural resistance various cultural activities that have been used by groups across the country as a means of struggle* * *26th Mar—1st Apr * *Dialogue with Ministries and Authorities * During these days, organizations belonging to different Sectors will take actions pressurizing Ministries concerned, holding dialogues, submitting demands etc. *2nd Apr—8th Apr** * *Dialogue with various Commissions * 2nd April onwards till 8th April* * organizations belonging to different Sectors will take actions pressurizing various Constitutional Authorities, mainly Planning Commission and other Commissions on Human Rights, Women, ST/SC, and Minorities etc to assert our demands and rights. *14th Apr* *Constitutional Rights Day and Dalit Rights Day* Action 2007 will mark 14th April, the birth anniversary of Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar by celebrating it as the Constitutional Rights Day as well as Dalit Rights Day. * * *Free Zone Days* Spaces for democratic dissent have been shrinking in the national capital city of Delhi, as well as in different states. In the midst of all sorts of 'zones' being created by the government to cater to industry and corporations, these days will be celebrated as Peoples' Zone days, where Action 2007 will organise programmes to free different zones for peoples' action and demonstration of dissent *The Jan Sansad (People's Parliament) * in *ACTION 2007 / SANGHARSH 2007** * 19th March'07 3pm-6.30pm * * *Assertion of people's politics and democratic governance: inauguration of Jan Sansad * * * *Day 1:* 20th March '07 10 am – 1 pm *Unorganized sector workers and labour issues * 20th March '07 2 pm – 6.30 pm *Development, Displacement & Right to Natural Resources (Jal, Jameen) * * * *Day 2: * 21st March '07 10 am – 1 pm *Special Economic Zones – Agrarian Crisis * * * * *21st March '07 2 pm – 6.30pm *Right to; Information, Work, Education, Health & Food * * * *Day 3:* * *22th March '07 10 am – 1 pm *Dalits and Minorities: right to life with dignity ** * * * 22th March '07 2 pm – 5 pm *Adivasis,* *Forests & Forest Rights* * * *Day 4:* 23nd March '07 10 am – 1 pm *Urban Development and Dispossession * * * 23nd March '07 1.30 pm – 4 pm *WTO & IFIs: Issues of sovereignty* *Day 5:* 24th March '07 10am-1pm * * *Women's Rights and issues * * * 24th March '07 1pm-5pm *State repression and Militarisation * *Participants at the * Jan Sansad: i) Mass movements and representatives participating in Sangharsh 2007 ii) Ministers in charge of relevant Ministries iii) Bureaucrats from relevant departments iv) Independent experts on the respective issue v) Journalists who have worked on the respective issue - -- Regards, Vijayan MJ Delhi Forum F-10/12 (GF), Malviya Nagar, New Delhi INDIA - 110017 Phones: 91-11-26671556 (Direct), 26680914/883 Fax:26687724 Emails: dforum at bol.net.in, delforum at vsnl.net "We hear that governance now will have a different cadence Tyranny will now be the protector; cities will be without walls or doors Innocence will now be a punishable crime Judges will profess ignorance of criminal deeds… Executioners will be in charge of funerals, killers will organize mourning… If this be the realization of India's ancient dreams Then soon, there will neither be India, nor any of its connoisseurs…" (By Ali Sardar Jafri) - -- Lesley A. Esteves Associate Editor Outlook Traveller Getaways Outlook Publishing (India) Pvt Ltd AB10 Safdarjung Enclave, New Delhi-110029 Tel: 01141650184 (direct) 01126191421, ext 317 Cell: +919810297743 Fax: 01126191420 Email: lesley at outlookindia.com I blog at www.mumbaikarindelhi.blogspot.com From najibanwar2003 at yahoo.co.in Mon Mar 19 15:46:02 2007 From: najibanwar2003 at yahoo.co.in (najib anwar) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:16:02 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram Message-ID: <27408.23606.qm@web8407.mail.in.yahoo.com> Yes, I agree with Joy's view point. While condemning the action of the Police in Nandigram, we should condemn the filthy politics of the opposition led by Trinamool Congress. They are instigating people to destablize the Left Front government. The "so called" intellectuals must work hard to see the bigger picture here. Best, Najib __________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Answers: Share what you know. Learn something new http://in.answers.yahoo.com/ From hpp at vsnl.com Mon Mar 19 17:25:50 2007 From: hpp at vsnl.com (hpp at vsnl.com) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:55:50 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Another apologist Message-ID: Dear Mr Najib I wish a fraction of your ire against the filthy politics of Trinamool was directed towards the utterly evil CPM! The Trinamool is utterly marginal to the people's movement against the CPM gathering force now. For their own survival, they are trying very hard to be in the picture. And your protest against "destabilisation" is really hilarious! When the CPM was asking for the Rajiv govt to be pulled down - during 1987-89 - was that not destabilisation?! As I wrote in an earlier post, a citizen has the right to hate a party for its atrocities and corruption, he has a right to want an end to their rule, and to do all he can - within the framework of the law - to bring them down. And no one has to instigate anyone to bring down the CPM. They were ruling with muscle-power all these years. Now that demon has been pulled down in people's consciousness, following the example of the revolt of the masses threatened with land appropriation, and now following the barbaric massacre indul ged in by the CPM in Nandigram on 14 March. Someone told me yesterday that a vendor of pyjama tapes on a local train was chanting loudly "CPM kore jara, jounokormir sontan tara", i.e. those who do CPM, are offspring of sex-workers. (My wife retorted: "why demean sex-workers".) Its going to become very difficult for the party boys to move about in the open very soon, they might be lynched anytime, anywhere. And even that will only be a tiny recompense for all the atrocities committed by the CPM over 3 decades. Not everyone is committed to peaceful resistance. As Kabir Suman challenged in Calcutta last week, "four of you will be taken out for every one you target." Or as others expressed: "we have to fight armed hoodlums with arms". I am afraid that even with a lot of hard work, you are never going to see the truth. Yours sincerely V Ramaswamy Calcutta cuckooscall.blogspot.com From tapasrayx at gmail.com Mon Mar 19 17:54:35 2007 From: tapasrayx at gmail.com (Tapas Ray) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 08:24:35 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram In-Reply-To: <27408.23606.qm@web8407.mail.in.yahoo.com> References: <27408.23606.qm@web8407.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <45FE8103.7080103@googlemail.com> Najib, First, the condemnation, in my understanding, is not directed only at the action of the police but at the West Bengal government, since the police force is merely an arm of the government. To phrase it the way you have done has the effect of separating the police from the government. This might be a rhetorical ploy of the government and the Left Front parties, but is not likely to be accepted by the people at large. Second, are you suggesting that political parties opposed to the Left Front do not have the right to come to the aid of the people of Nandigram, or the people of Nandigram do not have the right to seek the help of political parties? If you are, then you are seeking some kind of totalitarian rule in West Bengal, under which the government has the right to do whatever it pleases without facing any opposition from political parties. Lastly, since when did "destabilizing" a government become a crime? I was under the impression that West Bengal is still, nominally at least, part of a democratic order in which parties are expected to vie for power, and in doing so agitate on the basis of people's grievances. In fact, this is how the people's grievances find place on the political agenda. Has the rule of the game changed in West Bengal? Has the state adopted a political system in which the Left Front is the only legitimate player? Tapas najib anwar wrote: > Yes, I agree with Joy's view point. While condemning > the action of the Police in Nandigram, we should > condemn the filthy politics of the opposition led by > Trinamool Congress. They are instigating people to > destablize the Left Front government. The "so called" > intellectuals must work hard to see the bigger picture > here. > > Best, > > Najib From taraprakash at gmail.com Mon Mar 19 19:33:19 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:03:19 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest NandigramKillings References: <45FCD680.2050709@sarai.net> <45FE057C.1010902@sarai.net> Message-ID: <008d01c76a2f$5f42d0d0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> It is the duty of every responsible citizen to outst, as soon as possible, this right wing CPM government, that is now leftist only in the name. Don't forget the brutalization in Bengal of those who do not support CPM and those who know that CPM is actually misusing the letters 'c' and 'm' in their name. Whatever little difference was left between Congress and CPM has been done away with after Singur and Nandi Gram. Too much power has already corrupted them. The High court has already ruled that the deal in Singur was not transparent. It is only 2 days back, that the government has declared not to go ahead with land acquisition in Nandi Gram, what if they could do it before killing more than 30 people. (many hundreds are still missing). The height of shamelessness was defending the West Bengal government after whatever happened in Nandi Gram, by the CPM leadership; the height of shamelessness, they have massacred the innocent people and not a word of apology. The height of shamelessness when people justify killing and abduction of hundreds of people in the name of defending few people, not because they are innocent citizens of the state, but because they are CPM activists. Let us not forget what happened recently in Singur and Nandi Gram, and those who know what happens in West Bengal to those who dare to oppose CPM, no matter leftist or otherwise, let us not forget. CPM in West Bengal is as bad as any sectarian repressive government is, time for them to give up the red flag and time for them to look for fresh nexus with congress and BJP. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mrityunjay Chatterjee" To: Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2007 11:37 PM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest NandigramKillings > Dear all, > > I had been following the postings and the news on nandigram. Let me > condemn the act of violence in nandigram. But when we go for protest, we > tend to look through the language of victim and culprit. To complicate > the situation I would like to say we don’t have any clear victim or > culprit. Police is surely responsible for the firing, but at the same > time, oppositions and other political parties are equally responsible > for the instigating the people of nandigram and making them scapegoat. > So let us not just get into senseless lazy activism of protest, rather > think deeper. This is my request. > > Best > > Joy > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From taraprakash at gmail.com Mon Mar 19 20:40:58 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:10:58 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Mumbai P.E.N.: Girish Karnad/ 21 March + Vivek Narayanan/ 22 March 2007 References: <45FE2D62.5060605@sarai.net> Message-ID: <000b01c76a38$cfab2080$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> Are you planning to record the proceedings? I wish you did. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vivek Narayanan" To: Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 2:27 AM Subject: [Reader-list] Mumbai P.E.N.: Girish Karnad/ 21 March + Vivek Narayanan/ 22 March 2007 > > > SAVE THE DATES: > (1) Girish Karnad/ 21 March at Prithvi Theatre > (2) Vivek Narayanan/ 22 March at Theosophy Hall > > * > > > THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE > > invites you, with your friends, to > > > (1) 'Meet the Playwright': GIRISH KARNAD > > in conversation with Shanta Gokhale > > Date: Wednesday, 21 March 2007 > Time: 11 am > Place: Prithvi Theatre (Janki Kutir, Juhu) > > > ALL ARE WELCOME: ENTRY FREE > > * > > The distinguished playwright Girish Karnad's new play, 'Flowers', is > based on a folktale from Chitradurga. It revolves around a priest whose > life has become a balancing act between his passionate love for God and > his equally passionate love for his courtesan; he is caught off-guard > when, one day, they collide. > > This dramatic monologue is produced by Ranga Shankara, and will be shown > at Prithvi Theatre from 20 through 25 March. Rajit Kapur, who won the > National Award for his performance, plays the central character. The > play is directed by Roysten Abel, who won the Best Play award at > Edinburgh for his interpretation of 'Othello'. > > > - &&& - > > > (2) A Poetry Reading by VIVEK NARAYANAN > > Date: Thursday, 22 March 2007 > Time: 6.15 pm > Place: Theosophy Hall (3rd floor), 40 New Marine Lines, Churchgate, > Bombay 400 020 > > > ALL ARE WELCOME: ENTRY FREE > > * > > Vivek Narayanan will read from his new collection of poems, Universal > Beach (2006), his reading conducted in the mode of performance with > which he has come to be associated in literary circles. His presentation > will weave together three elements: his own reading/ performance; a > reflection on the practice of performance in the context of poetry; and > recordings from other poets, which Narayanan will annotate. > > Vivek Narayanan was born in Ranchi in 1972, grew up in Zambia, studied > in the USA, and is currently based in New Delhi, where he works with > SARAI, a new-media initiative of the Centre for the Study of Developing > Societies (CSDS). His poems have appeared in Indian and international > journals and anthologies since 1994. Universal Beach is his first > collection. > > > > Ranjit Hoskote > Hon. Secretary-Treasurer > The PEN All-India Centre > Theosophy Hall (2nd floor) > 40 New Marine Lines > Bombay 400 020 > > *** > > > Enquiries: > > PEN All-India Centre: india.pen at gmail.com > > Prithvi Theatre (Janki Kutir, Juhu Church Road, Bombay 400 049) > Box Office: 2614 9546 > Fax: 2617 5775 > www.prithvitheatre.org > > > ----------------------------------- > > > > -- > Vivek Narayanan > Sarai: The New Media Initiative > Centre for the Study of Developing Societies > 29 Rajpur Road > Delhi 110 054 > Phone: (91-11) 2396 0040, ext. 22 > Mobile: 98109 36654 > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From arshad.mcrc at gmail.com Mon Mar 19 22:39:14 2007 From: arshad.mcrc at gmail.com (arshad amanullah) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:39:14 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] performances by 300 cultural activists Message-ID: <2076f31d0703191009s57d4d1c3qde79bb0cac8f2484@mail.gmail.com> > > > Aj shahidon ne hai tumhein, ahle watan lalkara. > Todo ghulami ki zanjeerein, barsao angara… > > (Today the martyrs call out to you, the people of this land, > Break the shackles of slavery, rain fiery embers…) > > Azimullah Khan, 1857 > > > > To consolidate the spirit of resistance that comes with the 150th anniversary of the Great Indian Revolt of 1857, the birth Centenary of Shahid-e-Azam Bhagat Singh and 40 years of of Naxalbari… > > > > You are invited to performances by 300 cultural activists from across the country, representing the glorious history of struggles, on 21st and 22nd of March 2007 at Ambedkar Stadium . > > > > 21st March: 5.00 p.m. onwards > > > > Songs of Protest, 1857 and protest poetry in Bhojpuri Hirawal, Patna > > A Peasant's life, dance-drama troupe Karbi Anglong > > Songs of Tebhaga and Naxalbari, Paschim Banga Gana Sanskritik Parishad > > Life of Bhagat Singh, a drama by Gursharan Singh and group > > Tribal Rebellion in Songs, Jharkhand > > Songs by K. Nirmohi (Bhojpuri), Loknath Goswami and group (Assamese), theatre by Yuvaniti( Arrah) and Ala by Caravan, Patna > > > > 22nd March: 3.30 p.m. > > Theatre from Begusarai and by Yuvaniti, Arrah, > > Ballads in Bhopuri.. Ala by Caravan, Patna > > Bihu , Assam Gana Sanskritik Parishad > > A dance drama in Chau, Jharkhand > > Ballad of struggle, performers from Andhra and Telangana > > Rebellion in Tea Estates: A Drama in Mime, Paschim Banga Gana Sanskritik Parishad > > Duniya Roz Badalti Hai: A Musical Play, Hirawal, Patna > > A theatrical presentation of poetry by Faiz and Brecht, Asmita > > Songs of resistance in Punjabi, Bant Singh > > A Woman Peasant's Life, dance troupe Karbi Anglong > > Assamese Songs of resistance, Loknath Goswami > > > > Several groups will also be putting up cultural performances throughout the day on 21 st and 22nd March at Parade Ground where several thousand people are arriving for the rally. > > > > On 23rd March , we also invite you to join the rally moving towards Delhi and reaching Ramlila Maidan at 12.00 p.m . > > > > And let us call for > > • Scrapping of the SEZ policy and the SEZ Act 2005 and guaranteeing cultivable > > land for peasants. > > • An end to peasant suicides and starvation deaths and put in place a pro-poor > > peasant agrarian policy. > > • Strict implementation of NREGA and its extension to the whole country. > > • Legal guarantee of the Right to Education, Right to Work, Right to Health > > • Restoration of alienated tribal land and rehabilitation of all (project) displaced > > people > > • An end to indiscriminate foreign investment, especially in education and retail > > trade. > > • Regularisation of Unorganised workers and a guaranteeing their basic rights. > > • An end to all violence and discrimination against dalits, adivasis, women and > > minorities and ensure greater opportunities for all disadvantaged sections. > > • Scrap Black laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act and an end to State sponsored terror like Salwa Judum in Chhatisgarh. Freeing the people's leaders > > held and victimized under TADA, POTA and other draconian Acts. > > • Scrapping the Indo-US Nuclear deal and reversing the pro-US foreign policy. > > > > Revolutionary Greetings, > > CPI-ML, Central Committee From geert at desk.nl Tue Mar 20 01:54:37 2007 From: geert at desk.nl (geert lovink) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:24:37 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] Fellowships available for Summer Art Theory Institute, Chicago Message-ID: <513d3cf42465927071333dfa202704a3@desk.nl> Date: March 17, 2007 8:47:29 PM GMT+01:00 Subject: Fellowships available for Summer Art Theory Institute, Chicago Dear colleagues, This is to announce the first annual Stone Summer Theory Institute, with the subject "Globalism in Art": one week of intensive seminars, lectures, and panel discussions, July 16-21, School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Faculty include Fredric Jameson, Susan Buck-Morss, Shigemi Inaga, Harry Harootunian, and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. The event is co-organized by James Elkins and Zhivka Valiavicharska. Fifteen Fellows will be admitted on a competitive basis; full tuition remission, travel, and accommodation grants are available. Faculty and advanced graduate students are invited to apply; send a two-page letter describing your research interests, along with a CV and any relevant texts, published or unpublished, to conferences at imagehistory.org. Deadline May 15. Full information, including a brochure, schedule, and posters, is on http://www.imagehistory.org Many thanks, Jim Elkins -- www.jameselkins.com www.imagehistory.org Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism Department of Visual and Critical Studies School of the Art Institute of Chicago 112 South Michigan Avenue Chicago IL 60603 USA fax 312 345 3789 phone (for FedEx only: no messages) 312 345 3788 From taraprakash at gmail.com Tue Mar 20 02:59:02 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:29:02 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram References: <27408.23606.qm@web8407.mail.in.yahoo.com> <45FE8103.7080103@googlemail.com> Message-ID: <032001c76a6d$9e5e2ce0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> It seems the rules have indeed changed. In the Orwelian sense, the pig has changed another commandment. "some state/parties/men are more equal than others." Remove the mask, whatever is left of it. Back to "4 legs", unless CPM wants to remain with none. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tapas Ray" Cc: Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 8:24 AM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram > Najib, > > First, the condemnation, in my understanding, is not directed only at > the action of the police but at the West Bengal government, since the > police force is merely an arm of the government. To phrase it the way > you have done has the effect of separating the police from the > government. This might be a rhetorical ploy of the government and the > Left Front parties, but is not likely to be accepted by the people at > large. > > Second, are you suggesting that political parties opposed to the Left > Front do not have the right to come to the aid of the people of > Nandigram, or the people of Nandigram do not have the right to seek the > help of political parties? If you are, then you are seeking some kind of > totalitarian rule in West Bengal, under which the government has the > right to do whatever it pleases without facing any opposition from > political parties. > > Lastly, since when did "destabilizing" a government become a crime? I > was under the impression that West Bengal is still, nominally at least, > part of a democratic order in which parties are expected to vie for > power, and in doing so agitate on the basis of people's grievances. In > fact, this is how the people's grievances find place on the political > agenda. > > Has the rule of the game changed in West Bengal? Has the state adopted a > political system in which the Left Front is the only legitimate player? > > Tapas > > > > najib anwar wrote: >> Yes, I agree with Joy's view point. While condemning >> the action of the Police in Nandigram, we should >> condemn the filthy politics of the opposition led by >> Trinamool Congress. They are instigating people to >> destablize the Left Front government. The "so called" >> intellectuals must work hard to see the bigger picture >> here. >> >> Best, >> >> Najib > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From paagol at gmail.com Tue Mar 20 07:11:25 2007 From: paagol at gmail.com (dipankar das) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:11:25 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram In-Reply-To: <032001c76a6d$9e5e2ce0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> References: <27408.23606.qm@web8407.mail.in.yahoo.com> <45FE8103.7080103@googlemail.com> <032001c76a6d$9e5e2ce0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> Message-ID: <276e22e50703191841xecd86b2of47fbb3ae0ce59e3@mail.gmail.com> On 3/20/07, Taraprakash wrote: > It seems the rules have indeed changed. In the Orwelian sense, the pig has > changed another commandment. "some state/parties/men are more equal than > others." > Remove the mask, whatever is left of it. > Back to "4 legs", unless CPM wants to remain with none. > The problem is that Trinamool and the opposition are not efficient/adequate to destabilize it sufficiently. Buddha has become the epitome of the process called CPIM, that has rendered all people numb. People within it numb with lack of thought, because thought may hamper the process of enjoying the power, and people outside it numb with terror. And this process of terror, on the other side of the coin, trickles down different kinds of flows, and it has trickled really. These flows include not just rewards and opportunities, some morbid peace too, for some people. Or, even, for quite a few people, some kind of seduction too. The infantile ego that was always already there in Buddha, as it got expressed when he returned from 'Bilet' and the first comment on the airport was, 'Why there is so much ringing of horns in the cars of our country?', or, when he resigned from the LF ministry, by sending a mail to ABP, the same infantile ego here that refuses to bow down to any discipline, that ego disorder coming to its lofty height when he shouted like a mad man, "...these people are all evil ...", infants can hardly take it for granted that their chocolates have been taken away. Though this was some welcome change, after the relative lull during Jyoti Basu. And this infantile kind of personality disorder, infested with a lot of colonial inconfidence, was a good choice for the Power too. JB could never be such a good puppet. At least he had some confidence. He knew English adequately, had been some years in 'Bilet'. And, unfortunately, this is quite a common disorder among the intellectual workers in a third world country like us. So, this identification factor and that trickle down thing are the points that some people are trying to drive home here, in guise of their prudence logic? Please destabilize, please, Trinamool with all its inefficiencies cant do it adequately. In whatever way one can, do destabilize it please. When order is injustice, disorder is .... From joy at sarai.net Tue Mar 20 11:59:38 2007 From: joy at sarai.net (Mrityunjay Chatterjee) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:59:38 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest NandigramKillings In-Reply-To: <008d01c76a2f$5f42d0d0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> References: <45FCD680.2050709@sarai.net> <45FE057C.1010902@sarai.net> <008d01c76a2f$5f42d0d0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> Message-ID: <45FF7F52.2090602@sarai.net> Dear all, I seroulsy don't think that CPIM is responsible for what ever happening. It is us who are responsible. Because neither CPIM not the Trinamool or naxalites or congress or BJP or any other organisation is outside us and our desire and lethargy. I just wonder who would 'outst' 'self-rightious' us? When communists were communists? Shuddha's lists shows its demise much before any one us took birth. But we still believe in the religion called communism. It is not the problem of CPIM, it is our problem. Which political practice was ever transparent? Millions have died in history due to political callousness who had ever asked for apology? Your last line is the death nail for all of us, as we all know Congress or BJP is no better than CPIM. Finally my problem with protests is exactly that, it jumps into binary oppositions. And this binary opposition was never there. Let us not run after mirage. Best wishes Joy Taraprakash wrote: > It is the duty of every responsible citizen to outst, as soon as possible, > this right wing CPM government, that is now leftist only in the name. Don't > forget the brutalization in Bengal of those who do not support CPM and those > who know that CPM is actually misusing the letters 'c' and 'm' in their > name. > Whatever little difference was left between Congress and CPM has been done > away with after Singur and Nandi Gram. Too much power has already corrupted > them. The High court has already ruled that the deal in Singur was not > transparent. > It is only 2 days back, that the government has declared not to go ahead > with land acquisition in Nandi Gram, what if they could do it before killing > more than 30 people. (many hundreds are still missing). The height of > shamelessness was defending the West Bengal government after whatever > happened in Nandi Gram, by the CPM leadership; the height of shamelessness, > they have massacred the innocent people and not a word of apology. The > height of shamelessness when people justify killing and abduction of > hundreds of people in the name of defending few people, not because they are > innocent citizens of the state, but because they are CPM activists. > Let us not forget what happened recently in Singur and Nandi Gram, and those > who know what happens in West Bengal to those who dare to oppose CPM, no > matter leftist or otherwise, let us not forget. CPM in West Bengal is as bad > as any sectarian repressive government is, time for them to give up the red > flag and time for them to look for fresh nexus with congress and BJP. > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Mrityunjay Chatterjee" > To: > Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2007 11:37 PM > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest > NandigramKillings > > > >> Dear all, >> >> I had been following the postings and the news on nandigram. Let me >> condemn the act of violence in nandigram. But when we go for protest, we >> tend to look through the language of victim and culprit. To complicate >> the situation I would like to say we don’t have any clear victim or >> culprit. Police is surely responsible for the firing, but at the same >> time, oppositions and other political parties are equally responsible >> for the instigating the people of nandigram and making them scapegoat. >> So let us not just get into senseless lazy activism of protest, rather >> think deeper. This is my request. >> >> Best >> >> Joy >> _________________________________________ >> 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. >> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list >> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> >> > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From komalm at himalmag.com Mon Mar 19 11:49:49 2007 From: komalm at himalmag.com (Komal More) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 12:04:49 +0545 Subject: [Reader-list] =?iso-8859-1?q?=5BAnnouncements=5D_Himal_Southasian?= =?iso-8859-1?q?=27s_March_2007_issue_is_out!?= Message-ID: <001001c769ee$9a8e79f0$1900a8c0@komal> Himal Southasian's March 2007 issue is out! www.himalmag.com COVER PACKAGE: INDIA DISCOVERS SOUTHASIA It has taken two long decades following the establishment of SAARC, but India finally seems to have boarded the Southasian train. As New Delhi prepares to take over from Dhaka as chair of SAARC during the first week of April, the managers of Indian foreign policy are giving out enthusiastic sound bites on Southasian regionalism. They say that it is in India's self-interest to make peace with its neighbours. All of which is great news for those of us who believe that regionalism's dividend is not only a safer Southasia, but also a more prosperous one. This issue, we take the opportunity to present five looks at this emerging regionalism: . India realising Southasia - Kanak Mani Dixit . India's new regionalism - C Raja Mohan . Pakistan-India roadblocks to regional peace - Moeed Yusuf . The Indo-Bangla SAARC puzzle - Imtiaz Ahmed . Sri Lanka's win-win FTA - Paranjoy Guha Thakurta The March issue also includes updates from: * Bangladesh . Pseudo-innovation in Dhaka, by Asif Saleh * Sri Lanka . The wages of Muslim passivity, by Dilrukshi Handunnetti * Nepal . A country in interim, commentary * Andaman Islands . Moving on from a cataclysm, by Pankaj Sekhsaria In addition: * Exhuming accountability - conference on transitional justice in Southasia * Nepal's culture of art theft - Ted Riccardi * Singur and the rural bourgeoisie - Mritiunjoy Mohanty * The Bagmati's final sealing - Dinesh Kumar Mishra * The shackling of India's community radio - Sukumar Muralidharan * Parzania and the dictator of Gujarat - Urvish Kothari * The Ganderbal exhumations - Patrick Hoenig Plus: Commentaries, reflections, reviews and much more! Continuing this month, Himal's Development Classifieds section offers a convenient bulletin board for vacancies in the development sector and related fields. While you are at www.himalmag.com, check out our extensive, fully searchable archive of back issues, as well as a daily selection of editorials from major Southasian news sources, and a weekly round-up of the issues that are making waves throughout the region. Himal is also available at fine bookstores throughout Southasia. For subscriptions, go to our website, leftmost column. Or write to subscription at himalmag.com. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Komal More Marketing Manager Himal Southasian Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur Nepal Phone : +977 1 5547279 Fax : +977 1 5552141 Email : komalm at himalmag.com URL : www.himalmag.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070319/c0415b0d/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From nalaka at tveap.org Sun Mar 18 17:12:32 2007 From: nalaka at tveap.org (Nalaka Gunawardene, TVE Asia Pacific) Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:12:32 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [infosouth] Living Labs: A global TV series probing how to grow more food with less water Message-ID: <6.0.0.22.2.20070318170515.01d280c0@mail.tveap.org> Announcing 'Living Labs': A global TV series probing how to grow more food with less water Dedicated to the International Decade for Action: Water for Life (2005 – 2015) 15 March 2007; Colombo, Sri Lanka and Washington DC, USA: Between 70 and 90 per cent of all freshwater drawn in the developing world is used for growing crops. But this needs to change fast: with water scarcity emerging as a global concern, agriculture cannot afford to remain so hooked on water. Today’s crowded world needs to produce more food using both less water and land. This calls for smarter, thriftier methods of increasing water’s productivity in agriculture. And it must be achieved without damaging the environment, or threatening people’s food security, health and jobs. TVE Asia Pacific’s new global TV series Living Labs looks at efforts by researchers, farmers and local communities in different parts of the world to respond to this challenge. It profiles a major global effort looking for solutions through action research. Produced in partnership with the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF), it was filmed in late 2006 in nine countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America. As the research initiative started synthesizing its findings after three years of field work, we visited eight of its benchmark river basins, to find out what has been accomplished – and what remains to be done. Living Labs series comprises: - 1 x 29 min global documentary, providing an overview of the problem and solutions, presented under five thematic areas - 8 x 5 min short videos, containing stories from different river basins - ‘living labs’ where the Challenge Program’s research happens The series was filmed in 9 countries on four continents, viz: - Africa: Limpopo River Basin (South Africa); Nile River Basin (Uganda); Volta River Basin (Ghana) - Asia: Indo-Gangetic River Basin (India); Mekong River Basin (Thailand); Yellow River Basin (China) - Latin America: Andean System of River Basins (Colombia); Sao Francisco River Basin (Brazil) - Europe: Additional filming was done during the World Water Week 2006 in Stockholm, Sweden –- a leading annual gathering of experts and activists engaged in freshwater management issues. The series reflects the spirit of the Challenge Program: researchers working with each other, as well as with farmers, officials and others having a stake in water management, land use or food production. Interviews bring in the views of men and women from different backgrounds, who speak over a dozen local languages. Filmed on DV Cam (PAL) and produced to international broadcast standards, the series comes with an English narration. Non-English interviews have been sub-titled. Supervised by TVEAP’s location filming director, all filming was done by locally-based and internationally credentialed camera crews in each country –- an important element in TVEAP’s policy of engaging local talent. The series was edited in Melbourne, Australia. “This was one of the most ambitious and challenging video production we have undertaken,” says Nalaka Gunawardene, TVEAP’s Director and CEO, who wrote and executive produced the series. “We immediately recognized the scientific, survival and development value of these stories. But we wanted to tell these stories in a way that everyone can understand and relate to.” In conceptualizing and producing Living Labs, TVEAP applied its tried-and-tested approach: be informed by science, but not immersed in it. The Living Labs series was premiered at the International Forum on Water and Food, held in Vientiane, Laos, on 12 - 17 November 2006, hosted by the Mekong River Commission (MRC). It brought together 300 top researchers and policy makers from all over the world. Background A regionally operating non-profit foundation, TVE Asia Pacific has a decade’s experience in documenting the Asia Pacific’s quest for environmentally and socially sustainable development. It taps the power of moving images to tell factual, authentic stories drawn from the ground level and ‘ground zero’. All TVEAP films are produced journalistically to suit non-technical, public audiences, and are distributed without copyright restrictions worldwide. www.tveap.org The Challenge Program on Water and Food is a worldwide research initiative under the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, or CGIAR -- a strategic alliance of members, partners and international agricultural centres that mobilizes science to benefit the poor. Ultimately, the Program seeks to reduce poverty and enhance food security –- two of the most important international development priorities. http://www.waterandfood.org/ This series is available to broadcast, educational and civil society users everywhere without licence fee or copyright restrictions. For broadcast interest, please contact: sales at tveap.org Video and DVD copies may be ordered directly, at cost-recovery (duplication & dispatch) prices from TVEAP’s online e-shop at: http://www.tveap.org/shopping/search.php The shorter films in this series can now be viewed on TVEAP's channel on You Tube at: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=tveapfilms Note: Living Labs Series Executive Producer and script writer Nalaka Gunawardene is available for contact and interviews in Washington DC, USA, until 22 March 2007. Mobile phone: + 1 571 265 7998 ................................................................... Nalaka Gunawardene Director and CEO Television for Education - Asia Pacific (TVE Asia Pacific) 9/3, Gemunu Mawatha, Nawala Road, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka. Phone: +94 11 4412 195; Fax: +94 11 4403 443 Email: www.tveap.org | www.digits4change.net | www.childrenoftsunami.info | www.savingtheplanet.tv Moving images, moving people -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070318/86fd7ab1/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From taraprakash at gmail.com Mon Mar 19 20:35:18 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:05:18 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] on indian defeat in world cup References: <20070318104704.49520.qmail@web52002.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <012101c76a38$02d736c0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> I wrote the following letter on the issue to BBC Hindi and the letter was included in today's program. What is cricket doing to us? I am listening to your reporting of the world cup with great interest. I learnt from the broadcast of Vishv Bharati about sad demise of Pakistani coach. It was a very depressing news. (I was really impressed with Shafi Naqi Jamai's knowledge of Hindi words. I have always liked his reporting for BBC Urdu service. He is really great.) Another shocking news I heard was the vandalism of Dhoni's under-construction house after India's defeat against Bangladesh. I can't really understand what could Dhoni do, when 5 established batsmen including 3 best batsmen (supposedly) of the world failed. The blame should primarily go to the captain who said that he is not taking Bangladesh lightly, but did not mean it. When the morning conditions were in favor of bowlers he should not have elected to bat. He included out of form Sehvag, of course, behind these decisions was an arrogance which media has filled in the Indian team, by chanting the names of Sehvag, Tendulkar, Dravid and Ganguly as a mantra. India is a great team and Bangladesh, no matter what it does, will never be able to beat our strong team. But whatever, happened it is just a game. Victory and defeat are part of it. We should not be so rash in our reactions. The irony is that if Dhoni was involved in some kind of corruption, the people wouldn't have even bothered to express their opinion against him. Do people ever vandalized the house of a person who was proved guilty of accepting bribes of one crore? Do people vandalize of a person who is involved in murders of many people? Do people react in the same fashion against corrupt politicians? What has cricket done to the Indians? They have lost all sense of fairness. Did those who are shouting slogans against Indian players and damaging their property, admired, Even for a moment the positive game of Bangladeshi team? Taraprakash ----- Original Message ----- From: mihir pandya To: sarai Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2007 6:47 AM Subject: [Reader-list] on indian defeat in world cup â?oLegends of the Fallâ? It looks like In team India they all are trying to match their performance on the ground with their bank balance: - lots of zeros in account, lots of zeros on scoreboard! But itâ?Ts disturbing to watch Pakistan knocked out from the world cup in that manner. Is this world cup going on the last yearâ?Ts championâ?Ts trophy path? With none of the subcontinent team in semis? Is this a changing world of cricket? Are we going to see the same what we witness in the game of hockey years ago? The west dominating the sport with his professionalism and the rawness of subcontinent gone down and down and downâ?¦ Itâ?Ts time for India to show some guts on the ground. They learn a lesson from Bâ?Tdesh. Boys still in their teens hitting Indian pace attack, as they are playing a club match. Wonderful to watch. Sheer delight. They are new hope for a crumbling subcontinent. But with all that happen. I am still with windies. And the world cup is on for meâ?¦ â?¦miHir 18/03/07 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Be a PS3 game guru. Get your game face on with the latest PS3 news and previews at Yahoo! Games. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070319/25871853/attachment.html From venkatt2k at gmail.com Tue Mar 20 06:16:27 2007 From: venkatt2k at gmail.com (venkat t) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 06:16:27 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram In-Reply-To: <032001c76a6d$9e5e2ce0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> References: <27408.23606.qm@web8407.mail.in.yahoo.com> <45FE8103.7080103@googlemail.com> <032001c76a6d$9e5e2ce0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> Message-ID: <388da81f0703191746s4a1b5328n860985abec20f749@mail.gmail.com> thats a nice analogy, it is important to make it to. CPM and thier counterparts across the workld, in russia and china cry down every one else as a petty bourgeoise revisionist, but here is a CM, who is endorsed by the entire spectrum of left in india (ofcourse not the MLs), who dares to openly commit himself to an non communist social order. "I cannot grow communism in this part of the country"- buddha, in an interveiw to HINDU. what hypocracy, what betrayal.................. On 3/20/07, Taraprakash wrote: > > It seems the rules have indeed changed. In the Orwelian sense, the pig has > changed another commandment. "some state/parties/men are more equal than > others." > Remove the mask, whatever is left of it. > Back to "4 legs", unless CPM wants to remain with none. > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Tapas Ray" > Cc: > Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 8:24 AM > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest Nandigram > > > > Najib, > > > > First, the condemnation, in my understanding, is not directed only at > > the action of the police but at the West Bengal government, since the > > police force is merely an arm of the government. To phrase it the way > > you have done has the effect of separating the police from the > > government. This might be a rhetorical ploy of the government and the > > Left Front parties, but is not likely to be accepted by the people at > > large. > > > > Second, are you suggesting that political parties opposed to the Left > > Front do not have the right to come to the aid of the people of > > Nandigram, or the people of Nandigram do not have the right to seek the > > help of political parties? If you are, then you are seeking some kind of > > totalitarian rule in West Bengal, under which the government has the > > right to do whatever it pleases without facing any opposition from > > political parties. > > > > Lastly, since when did "destabilizing" a government become a crime? I > > was under the impression that West Bengal is still, nominally at least, > > part of a democratic order in which parties are expected to vie for > > power, and in doing so agitate on the basis of people's grievances. In > > fact, this is how the people's grievances find place on the political > > agenda. > > > > Has the rule of the game changed in West Bengal? Has the state adopted a > > political system in which the Left Front is the only legitimate player? > > > > Tapas > > > > > > > > najib anwar wrote: > >> Yes, I agree with Joy's view point. While condemning > >> the action of the Police in Nandigram, we should > >> condemn the filthy politics of the opposition led by > >> Trinamool Congress. They are instigating people to > >> destablize the Left Front government. The "so called" > >> intellectuals must work hard to see the bigger picture > >> here. > >> > >> Best, > >> > >> Najib > > _________________________________________ > > 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. > > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070320/bd2d8e34/attachment.html From liav.lists at gmail.com Tue Mar 20 04:27:48 2007 From: liav.lists at gmail.com (l k) Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 18:57:48 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] firstpost: introduction and invitation Message-ID: Hello. I've been skimming reader-list for the past week or so, and have been really excited and impressed -- the discuss and postings here are uniformly intriguing and excellent. I came across reader-list as part of preliminary research into establishing a new online forum devoted to the examination of issues surrounding open-source media tools and installation/media art. I believe these issues might be of interest to some of the posters of this list, and I hope some of you will subscribe. Yours, Liav Koren. www.beige-box.org There is an exciting niche to be filled. The development of open-source platforms, applications and methodologies mean that there are now unprecedented options available to those working with interactive art, media, and design. However, to make use of these tools effectively entire skill sets often must be acquired, communities must be found and joined, and a wide range of technical and theoretical issues must be confronted. There is no centralized forum devoted to examining the full spectrum of issues surrounding interactive media tools from the perspective of artists, designers, and theorists. The tool-discuss forum seeks to fill this niche. Currently the forum exists as a mailing list -- appropriate topics examine issue surrounding open-source software, hardware and methodologies from technical, artistic, critical, and sociological perspectives. Some of the potential issues we feel worth exploring include: Begin to question definitions. The idea of "open source" has already been pushed itself outside the world of software. How far can it be taken? Collage work from the early 20th century and sampling/appropriation in music both seem to be significant precedents for a kind of open methodology. Begin to expand the range of discussion: a huge number of interesting software packages are out there. But what about hardware? How can we begin to make physical things and start to interface them with computers, software, people, institutions, stuff? How do we choose what to work with, and how do our tools affect us? How do people join communities of practice based around various tools, and how can connections be made between different communities? Some resources, like Processing, for example, have very healthy and active communities. How does something like this evolve? How can we begin to provide a forum for people to present and discuss their work in interesting ways, and begin to make contact with others? Tool-discuss is intend to be only a first step: in the summer we'll begin work on a web-based forum. What should that forum look like? We look forward to lively and active discussion, and further developing tool-discuss in the near future into a robust clearinghouse devoted to the intersection of open-source issues and media arts. Subscription: www.beige-box.org Liav Koren, tool-discuss list owner, liav at beige-box.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070319/29a367a4/attachment.html From ysikand at gmail.com Tue Mar 20 11:59:01 2007 From: ysikand at gmail.com (Yogi Sikand) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:59:01 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Indian Muslim Education Bibliography Message-ID: <48097acc0703192329p4d0ff02eoc3cb2bf6dbad45d2@mail.gmail.com> Dear Friend, I have prepared a selected and annotated bibliography of writings in Urdu and English on contemporary Indian Muslim education. It runs into more than 200 pages. If you wish to procure it [free of cost] please email me on ysikand at yahoo.com OR ysikand at gmail.com Regards Yoginder Sikand (Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi) From tapasrayx at gmail.com Tue Mar 20 18:11:31 2007 From: tapasrayx at gmail.com (Tapas Ray) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 08:41:31 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest NandigramKillings In-Reply-To: <45FF7F52.2090602@sarai.net> References: <45FCD680.2050709@sarai.net> <45FE057C.1010902@sarai.net> <008d01c76a2f$5f42d0d0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> <45FF7F52.2090602@sarai.net> Message-ID: <45FFD67B.7070306@googlemail.com> Joy, I think there is some truth in what you say. Yes, the people's ("our") lethargy is partly to blame. But that is part of the picture. What about the other part, namely the active, non-lethargic methods adopted by the Left Front to continue in power and to continuously consolidate its stranglehold on every institution of society? It may be true that Congress and BJP are no better than the CPI-M. (I say this about the specific issue of Nandigram and Singur - see what has happened in Sardar Sarovar.) But to refrain from protesting on that ground would be to give the ruling Left Front a walk-over. Finally, I do think it is time to look beyond the violence and corruption - in which Congress, BJP and CPI-M seem to be competing for a photo-finish - at the development philosophy many of us share with them uncritically, and which is at the root of the conflict not only in Nandigram and Singur but also in Sardar Sarovar and many other places. Tapas Mrityunjay Chatterjee wrote: > Dear all, > > I seroulsy don't think that CPIM is responsible for what ever happening. > It is us who are responsible. Because neither CPIM not the Trinamool or > naxalites or congress or BJP or any other organisation is outside us and > our desire and lethargy. I just wonder who would 'outst' > 'self-rightious' us? > > When communists were communists? Shuddha's lists shows its demise much > before any one us took birth. But we still believe in the religion > called communism. It is not the problem of CPIM, it is our problem. > > Which political practice was ever transparent? Millions have died in > history due to political callousness who had ever asked for apology? > > Your last line is the death nail for all of us, as we all know Congress > or BJP is no better than CPIM. > > > Finally my problem with protests is exactly that, it jumps into binary > oppositions. And this binary opposition was never there. Let us not run > after mirage. > > Best wishes > Joy From taraprakash at gmail.com Tue Mar 20 20:44:17 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:14:17 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest NandigramKillings References: <45FCD680.2050709@sarai.net> <45FE057C.1010902@sarai.net><008d01c76a2f$5f42d0d0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> <45FF7F52.2090602@sarai.net> Message-ID: <01e501c76b02$70cd5540$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> There would be protests if BJP, TMC or Congress or any other government had massacred people in Nandi Gram. In fact CPIM activists perhaps be shouting the loudest, and using their threat of BJP's cleansing of Muslims from the country. Some newspaper editorials have in fact suggested that Atal Bihari wants to be soft on the issue of killings in Nandi Gram, whatever may the reasons be. RSS seems to be supporting it, I had a long argument with an RSS ideologue on another list on this issue, before I left that list, and that guy was in support of the land acquisition in Nandi Gram. Even in parliament when NDA is asking for a discussion, they are focusing on the failure of the Central government in preventing the crisis, and not really on the government that lead to it. For me there is only one binary opposition at present, those who have power and misuse it and those who want to check the power being misused. Just because massacres have taken place in the history and nobody was held responsible for it, or nobody apologized for it, doesn't mean that CPM should be allowed to get away with the brutalities perpetrated on the weak and innocent people. I reject the cynicism expressed in the below mail. Even if it is a mirage or a dream that there will be a time when people will be able to understand and resist the machinations for/of power, I would like to nurture it. As Pash said Sab se khatarnaak hai sapnon ka mar jana. (Death of dreams is the most dangerous.) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mrityunjay Chatterjee" To: Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 2:29 AM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest NandigramKillings > Dear all, > > I seroulsy don't think that CPIM is responsible for what ever happening. > It is us who are responsible. Because neither CPIM not the Trinamool or > naxalites or congress or BJP or any other organisation is outside us and > our desire and lethargy. I just wonder who would 'outst' > 'self-rightious' us? > > When communists were communists? Shuddha's lists shows its demise much > before any one us took birth. But we still believe in the religion > called communism. It is not the problem of CPIM, it is our problem. > > Which political practice was ever transparent? Millions have died in > history due to political callousness who had ever asked for apology? > > Your last line is the death nail for all of us, as we all know Congress > or BJP is no better than CPIM. > > > Finally my problem with protests is exactly that, it jumps into binary > oppositions. And this binary opposition was never there. Let us not run > after mirage. > > Best wishes > Joy > > Taraprakash wrote: >> It is the duty of every responsible citizen to outst, as soon as >> possible, >> this right wing CPM government, that is now leftist only in the name. >> Don't >> forget the brutalization in Bengal of those who do not support CPM and >> those >> who know that CPM is actually misusing the letters 'c' and 'm' in their >> name. >> Whatever little difference was left between Congress and CPM has been >> done >> away with after Singur and Nandi Gram. Too much power has already >> corrupted >> them. The High court has already ruled that the deal in Singur was not >> transparent. >> It is only 2 days back, that the government has declared not to go ahead >> with land acquisition in Nandi Gram, what if they could do it before >> killing >> more than 30 people. (many hundreds are still missing). The height of >> shamelessness was defending the West Bengal government after whatever >> happened in Nandi Gram, by the CPM leadership; the height of >> shamelessness, >> they have massacred the innocent people and not a word of apology. The >> height of shamelessness when people justify killing and abduction of >> hundreds of people in the name of defending few people, not because they >> are >> innocent citizens of the state, but because they are CPM activists. >> Let us not forget what happened recently in Singur and Nandi Gram, and >> those >> who know what happens in West Bengal to those who dare to oppose CPM, no >> matter leftist or otherwise, let us not forget. CPM in West Bengal is as >> bad >> as any sectarian repressive government is, time for them to give up the >> red >> flag and time for them to look for fresh nexus with congress and BJP. >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Mrityunjay Chatterjee" >> To: >> Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2007 11:37 PM >> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest >> NandigramKillings >> >> >> >>> Dear all, >>> >>> I had been following the postings and the news on nandigram. Let me >>> condemn the act of violence in nandigram. But when we go for protest, we >>> tend to look through the language of victim and culprit. To complicate >>> the situation I would like to say we don’t have any clear victim or >>> culprit. Police is surely responsible for the firing, but at the same >>> time, oppositions and other political parties are equally responsible >>> for the instigating the people of nandigram and making them scapegoat. >>> So let us not just get into senseless lazy activism of protest, rather >>> think deeper. This is my request. >>> >>> Best >>> >>> Joy >>> _________________________________________ >>> 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. >>> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list >>> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> >>> >> >> _________________________________________ >> 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. >> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list >> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From deelited at gmail.com Tue Mar 20 12:58:47 2007 From: deelited at gmail.com (deepti) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:58:47 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Nigah Presents - Tipping the Velvet, Saturday 24th March 2007 at 5.30 pm In-Reply-To: <2617ab630703182035pa5213afw850d9fa5fa2b1cde@mail.gmail.com> References: <2617ab630703182035pa5213afw850d9fa5fa2b1cde@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <2617ab630703200028o3afe49bfyf5a31a3aa492e0d6@mail.gmail.com> Nigah *www.nigahmedia.com * presents *Tipping the Velvet * Saturday, 24th March 2007 5.30 pm - 08.30 pm (in three parts of one hour each) 3 Windmill Place, Khirkee Extension a.k.s the yellow door next to Khoj Studios Tea and munchies will be served! Do come and bring your friends too for this delicious and inspiring film! *Tipping the Velvet :* Set in the 1890s, it tells the story of Nancy Astley, an oyster girl from the English town of Whitstable , who falls in love with a male impersonator and stage performer named Kitty Butler and begins to undergo a complete life transformation. The story deals with the topic of lesbian sex and desire along with the role that economic class can play in oppression. The title is a Victorian-era euphemism for cunnilingus. This 2002 BBC television drama serial is based on the bestselling debut novel by Sarah Waters of the same name. It stars Rachael Stirling, Keeley Hawes , and Jodhi May . Directed by Geoffrey Sax, the novel was adapted by acclaimed screenwriter Andrew Davies. *Directions:* Coming from Saket, come on Press Enclave Road past the right turn for PVR Saket. You pass Max hospital and the Marriot. Then the giant construction of the DDA city centre comes on your right -- look for the Hauz Rani bus stop. When you see the bus stop, on your left is Nandini Restaurant. Walk into Khirki through the dirt lane next to Nandini. You'll come to a red temple in about thirty seconds. Take a left at the temple and walk till you see a yellow door on your right. If coming from Chirag Delhi, take a right onto Press Enclave Road, and just as the DDA mall construction begins, look for Nandini restaurant on your right. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070320/38bbfbc6/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From pukar at pukar.org.in Tue Mar 20 11:18:46 2007 From: pukar at pukar.org.in (PUKAR) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:18:46 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] [announcements] Reminder: Vacancy at PUKAR Message-ID: <025601c76ab3$6fcb1960$5b66c2cb@freeda> PUKAR Seeks Project Coordinators for Empowering Youth PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action & Research) is an independent research-action organisation which hopes to contribute to the global debate on urbanization and globalization. Founded in 2001 by Professor Arjun Appadurai, PUKAR makes constant efforts to create a common forum for debate over the issues that impact the lives of the citizens. In these debates, PUKAR makes every effort to seek active participation of Mumbai's citizens in imagining and planning the future of this vibrant mega-city. Youth Fellowship Programme This Unique and innovative programme helps the youth in Mumbai Metropolitan Region to: 1 Explore social, cultural, economic and political aspects of their neighbourhoods 2 Develop innovative research techniques with PUKAR's assistance 3 Generate research-action projects that in turn, will change the paradigm of knowledge production and create new knowledge anchored in the city 4 Develop critical analysis and new perspective regarding their locality and community and help them to negotiate the city on their own terms Please ignore if you have already applied. Position: Project Coordinator Primary Responsibilities: Conceptual Contributions: Contribute ideas, methods and other contextual designs to create a programme which is more befitting to the demands of the youth and the current times. Administrative Contributions: 1) Selection Process As a member of the selection committee, consisting of the Executive Director of PUKAR, Director of the Y.F. Programme and the Coordinator, dialogue with prospective applicants and assist them in developing their proposals to meet the requirements 2) Orientation Workshops In collaboration with the PUKAR Team, design and implement the orientation workshop and act as a resource person depending upon one's own individual skills 3) Group Meetings: As one of the two Project Coordinators, work with, mentor and monitor 10 - 12 youth groups spread throughout the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Conduct two meetings with each group per month, discussing the status of the project. Assist groups in their research, conceptualizing community events and any workshops that the group may benefit from 4) Fellowship meetings Conduct meetings with the catalysts and the PUKAR Team every other Saturday afternoon at the PUKAR Office 5) Assist groups with research report and public documentation 6) Design and implement the final exhibition / graduation of all the Youth Fellows in collaboration with the PUKAR Team 7) Submit quarterly reports (oral and written) of the Fellowship programme, to the Advisory Committee, the funding organisation, to PUKAR Trustees and Associates 8) Occasionally represent PUKAR and the Youth Fellowship Programme at conferences and seminars 9) Publicity, Networking Develop a larger profile for the programme and the organisation through interaction with the media, institutions - educational, non-profits, corporates - and individuals. Skill Set Required: Strong communication, negotiation and mentoring skills. Enthusiasm, creativity and innovative ideas will be given a strong preference. Physical endurance and ability to travel by public transport in the metropolitan region is a must. Relevant Experience: One to two years of work experience either with youth or a developmental organisation will be valued. Fresh graduates can apply. Educational Qualifications: Masters or equivalent education in any branch Remuneration Package: Rs. 15,000/- per month Travel allowance for field work upto Rs. 1000/- (actual) Telephone allowance for field work upto Rs. 500/- (actual) Yearly renewable contract Please apply by April 10, 2007, with your CV. Please provide contact information of two people who could act as your reference. (Fresh graduates can give names of their professors) Candidates shortlisted for an interview will be notified. Please send your application to: pukar at pukar.org.in or mail it to: Dr. Anita Patil-Deshmukh Executive Director, PUKAR 1-4 Kamanwala Chambers, Sir PM Road, Fort, Mumbai, 400 001 T: 022- 6574-8152 F: 022- 6664-0561 PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research) Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001 Telephone:: +91 (22) 6574 8152 Fax:: +91 (22) 6664 0561 Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in Website:: www.pukar.org.in -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070320/c447bf3c/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From turbulence at turbulence.org Tue Mar 20 23:14:41 2007 From: turbulence at turbulence.org (Turbulence) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:44:41 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Turbulence Commission: "DISCO-NNECT: An Experimental Video Podcast" by Abe Linkoln, with guest remixers Jimpunk and Subculture Message-ID: <77A020A7E26B4EB6ABD8318F93423F06@joPC> March 20, 2007 Turbulence Commission: "DISCO-NNECT: An Experimental Video Podcast" by Abe Linkoln, with guest remixers Jimpunk and Subculture http://turbulence.org/Works/disco-nnect/ Needs Quicktime plugin "DISCO-NNECT" is an experimental video podcast that will broadcast weekly from March 20 to September 23. "DISCO-NNECT" is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the National Endowment of the Arts. BIOGRAPHIES Abe Linkoln 2001 Born on the Internet. Lives and works on the Internet. linkoln.net screenfull.net universalacid.net Jimpunk (jimpunk.com) http://www.jimpunk.com/info/jimpunk_bio.txt Subculture (subculture.com) is artist Antonio Mendoza. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, two children and five working computers. He is younger than Mouchette, sexier than Olia Lialina and more hermetic than jodi.org. For more Turbulence commissions, please visit http://turbulence.org Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: http://new-radio.org New York: 917.548.7780 . Boston: 617.522.3856 Turbulence: http://turbulence.org New American Radio: http://somewhere.org Networked_Performance Blog: http://turbulence.org/blog Upgrade! Boston: http://turbulence.org/upgrade _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From sudeshna.kca at gmail.com Wed Mar 21 11:38:21 2007 From: sudeshna.kca at gmail.com (Sudeshna Chatterjee) Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:38:21 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Nandigram In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3ef603b70703202308r2b571966s1f932fcd39a3942d@mail.gmail.com> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Subrata Ghosh Date: Mar 21, 2007 6:10 AM Subject: Nandigram To: from.subrata at gmail.com Dear Friend, These days I try to think more of the plants and the animals and less of the last to evolve on the planet Earth. It is not that I do or contribute much. Neither am I an activist nor do I pose to be a reformer. I have my fear and limitations and I am well aware of that. Having said this, however, I always try to be of help in whatever little way I can, as and when needed. What prompted me to write this letter is a programme that I saw on a local TV channel tonight. My journalist friend Mr. Kabir Suman had physician Dr. Debapriya Mallik as his guest in a talk show and it was from Dr. Mallik that I came to know in details the aftermath of the March 14, 2007 mass killings in Nandigram, West Bengal. What I heard left me dumbfounded. I have heard of what Suman has seen at the Tamluk Hospital. What the first hand account of Dr. Mallik revealed added to the scale of brutality of the massacre. His first impression of the area was like a place ravaged by war. The injured he met told their stories. So did the trauma stricken village people. The bullet wounds were mostly in the chests and abdomens (much above the knee height clearly indicating the intention to kill and not just to disperse the crowd). Other weapons and instruments were used to strike the people too. Apart from the police force, there were people in uniform but in slippers who led the attack on the villagers. These dresses, as reported, were supplied by a local tailoring shop. There were women as young as 20 and as old as 50, gangraped. The doctor spoke to a couple of these ladies. Women were molested, and young girls too. Piles of inner wears were found at different places. Children were butchered, mercilessly, legs torn apart, beheaded, tortured to death. An unborn was killed too. Even the trees in the vicinity were not spared, the doctor said. Dr. Mallik has photographic evidence. What else could he bring back? Around 800 people are still missing in the area. The media and the West Bengal Government still stick to 14 people being killed on that fateful day. At 6:00 in the morning after spending a sleepless night locked in my secured room on a secured land in a privileged metropolitan city, I feel helpless. Do I condemn the brutality and killings? Or do I sit idle and watch the protests fade and wither? I do not really know. I wish I was never born. I was never asked, anyways. Subrata Salt Lake, Kolkata March 21, 2007 _________________________________________________ Note: I have signed the online petition: "Denounce State Terror in Nandigram, West Bengal" hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com at: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/nandigra/ . If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider signing yourself. - -- Sudeshna Chatterjee, PhD Partner, Kaimal Chatterjee & Associates New Delhi, India -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070321/29024f76/attachment.html From surya_rajan21 at yahoo.com Tue Mar 20 14:53:06 2007 From: surya_rajan21 at yahoo.com (surya upadhyay) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:23:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] I-Fellowship Ist Posting Message-ID: <598231.31677.qm@web32108.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Dear All! This is Surya Prakash Upadhyay, Research Scholar, IIT Bombay. This is my first posting on Sarai, Reader-List. I am also an Independent Fellow with Sarai for year 2007. The work with Sarai is titled: "Guru on the Air: Televised Hinduism in contemporary India". Looking forward for more ideas and suggestions. The work is looking at the contemporary religious and spiritual gurus in contemporary Hinduism. Though, this is a case study of one such guru named Asaram Bapu but it supposes that some general characteristics about these gurus could be formed through the study. However, there was no dearth of religious personalities in Hinduism since very ancient times but the recent gurus are somewhat different in many ways. They are not only religious figures but they are also personal counselor, healers, soothsayers, and medicine man at the same time. They suggest ways to live life healthy, happily, and prosperously. They have rejuvenated Ayurveda, and herbal medicines along with the keep-fit meritorious value of Yoga. Also, this particular guru stresses more on the ideal of self-restraint and achievement of self-realization. The modern gurus are not based at any established religious centres or pilgrimages such as Varanasi, or Allahabad. Rather, they have their own local ashrams where their followers come together and instead of praying to god they prey their guru. Also, they are not attached to temples, so they are different from the temple priests. They have their own way of interpreting Hindu philosophy and these gurus propagate through various kinds of amendments in them. As far as this guru is concerned and whatever information, I have, gathered through his literature survey it comes out that he is more inclined towards the Upanishads rather than Veda. It does not mean to say that he discards Vedas but he puts more emphasis on the Upanishads and other puranic scriptures. Also, he includes Buddhist philosophy and treaties on Jainism and Sikhism. From my point, it gives a more broader audience and follower to this guru. One interesting point that is coming out that they readily talk in scientific language and for that they use scientific terms and scientific researches that endorse their view; irrespective of the value placed to that particular research work in the scientific community. Basically, all of these practices are going through the telecast of satsang programs through television cable channels, and therefore, I prefer to call these modern god-people as "Tele-guru". A preliminary survey done among his followers shows that almost 80% of his followers came in his contact through listening his sermons on Sony channel and Sanskara Channel. I am looking at the instrumentality of audio-visual media in the construction and maintenance of religio-spiritual world in contemporary Hinduism and at the process of mobilization of people, particularly, towards this tele-guru. The project is an ethnographic work and would likely to be conducted through interviews, and questionnaire among the devotes and followers of Asaram Bapu, living in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Lucknow. The reason for keeping three different locations is that I want to see the difference between the responses of the devotees of these three cities. Mumbai is a cosmopolitan city and Ahmedabad is the main ashram. Lucknow is a peripheral ashram. In this way, the study will throw more light on the varieties of contemporary religiosity. However, the study looks at the media practice, both old and new and will involve the analysis of print media as well as electronic media and how media is playing its role in the propagation of his organisation in terms of increasing his followers. Till now, I have formed a questionnaire that I will send on the reader-list for your valuable suggestions. Cheers Surya Prakash Upadhyay Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, I.I.T. Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076 surya_rajan21 at yahoo.com surya.upadhyay at gmail.com --------------------------------- Now that's room service! Choose from over 150,000 hotels in 45,000 destinations on Yahoo! Travel to find your fit. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070320/fcc5ee88/attachment.html From amitrbasu50 at yahoo.co.in Tue Mar 20 15:25:44 2007 From: amitrbasu50 at yahoo.co.in (Amit Basu) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 09:55:44 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest NandigramKillings In-Reply-To: <45FF7F52.2090602@sarai.net> Message-ID: <176819.61744.qm@web8514.mail.in.yahoo.com> I agree with Mritunjay that much of our wishful thinking and political imaginations are still sectarian in many senses. In politics, which I consider very much a public practice can not remain such if the claim is to be pluralistic. Also in this turn of the situation in West Bengal we need to be OPEN because this is a BREAK. So previous categories of analyses will hardly be of much use, because this NOT in continuity with the evolutionary history of militant mass movements in West Bengal. If I feel moved by the actions of resisting people of Nandigram, then I ned to ask myself first what kind of engagement I am making and with what kind of prejudices? More than a planned, sustained movement to achieve some goal in the near/distant future, Nandigram has already successfully raised the crucial questions to act upon. Even if the law and order damage is controlled and the movement subsumes into banal parliamentarism, the questions will just not evaporate. People who actively resisted will be different in their thinking with the impact of this new discourse. In solidarity, Amit Mrityunjay Chatterjee wrote: Dear all, I seroulsy don't think that CPIM is responsible for what ever happening. It is us who are responsible. Because neither CPIM not the Trinamool or naxalites or congress or BJP or any other organisation is outside us and our desire and lethargy. I just wonder who would 'outst' 'self-rightious' us? When communists were communists? Shuddha's lists shows its demise much before any one us took birth. But we still believe in the religion called communism. It is not the problem of CPIM, it is our problem. Which political practice was ever transparent? Millions have died in history due to political callousness who had ever asked for apology? Your last line is the death nail for all of us, as we all know Congress or BJP is no better than CPIM. Finally my problem with protests is exactly that, it jumps into binary oppositions. And this binary opposition was never there. Let us not run after mirage. Best wishes Joy Taraprakash wrote: > It is the duty of every responsible citizen to outst, as soon as possible, > this right wing CPM government, that is now leftist only in the name. Don't > forget the brutalization in Bengal of those who do not support CPM and those > who know that CPM is actually misusing the letters 'c' and 'm' in their > name. > Whatever little difference was left between Congress and CPM has been done > away with after Singur and Nandi Gram. Too much power has already corrupted > them. The High court has already ruled that the deal in Singur was not > transparent. > It is only 2 days back, that the government has declared not to go ahead > with land acquisition in Nandi Gram, what if they could do it before killing > more than 30 people. (many hundreds are still missing). The height of > shamelessness was defending the West Bengal government after whatever > happened in Nandi Gram, by the CPM leadership; the height of shamelessness, > they have massacred the innocent people and not a word of apology. The > height of shamelessness when people justify killing and abduction of > hundreds of people in the name of defending few people, not because they are > innocent citizens of the state, but because they are CPM activists. > Let us not forget what happened recently in Singur and Nandi Gram, and those > who know what happens in West Bengal to those who dare to oppose CPM, no > matter leftist or otherwise, let us not forget. CPM in West Bengal is as bad > as any sectarian repressive government is, time for them to give up the red > flag and time for them to look for fresh nexus with congress and BJP. > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Mrityunjay Chatterjee" > To: > Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2007 11:37 PM > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Rally to Protest > NandigramKillings > > > >> Dear all, >> >> I had been following the postings and the news on nandigram. Let me >> condemn the act of violence in nandigram. But when we go for protest, we >> tend to look through the language of victim and culprit. To complicate >> the situation I would like to say we don’t have any clear victim or >> culprit. Police is surely responsible for the firing, but at the same >> time, oppositions and other political parties are equally responsible >> for the instigating the people of nandigram and making them scapegoat. >> So let us not just get into senseless lazy activism of protest, rather >> think deeper. This is my request. >> >> Best >> >> Joy >> _________________________________________ >> 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. >> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list >> 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: --------------------------------- Here’s a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070320/7da555bb/attachment.html From ayushdelhi at yahoo.co.uk Wed Mar 21 09:32:08 2007 From: ayushdelhi at yahoo.co.uk (ayush) Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 04:02:08 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Need help - Film(s) on football Message-ID: <50305.2934.qm@web25403.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Dear Faizan, Hip Hip Hurray made somewhere in 1980s is a film on football. Talks about a coach and how he transforms a school football team into champions. It has Raj Kiran as the coach. thanks ayush. ----- Original Message ---- From: faizan ahmed To: Sent: Friday, 16 March, 2007 3:13:24 PM Subject: [Reader-list] Need help - Film(s) on football Dear Members of this list I am looking for a copy of an old (thogh not that old) film called "Football Champion". It's from 1973 and it's made by A.B.Raj from Madras . Does any one have any idea??? how can i acquire this one??? Or any other Indian film on football... please let me know. Thanks S. M. Faizan Ahmed Here’s a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> ___________________________________________________________ What kind of emailer are you? Find out today - get a free analysis of your email personality. Take the quiz at the Yahoo! Mail Championship. http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070321/8bb5465a/attachment.html From kaustubh at houndbee.com Thu Mar 22 01:05:57 2007 From: kaustubh at houndbee.com (Kaustubh Srikanth) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:05:57 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Sealing in Delhi. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <922fdfef0703211235y1bc10928s26bddc92cebf0ff2@mail.gmail.com> On 3/14/07, Kapoor light life style wrote: > get by doing sealing and also where I can find the Master plan 2021 of delhi > so as to continue with my work. http://inrnews.com/indianrealestate/reports/delhi_master_plan_2021.pdf -- Kaustubh Srikanth http://houndbee.com http://radioverve.com http://infinitymag.com From gyaltsenlama at gmail.com Wed Mar 21 16:53:55 2007 From: gyaltsenlama at gmail.com (e lama) Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:53:55 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shaman in the city - first posting Message-ID: <9943513f0703210423v467ddba8s79fb6723afe145c3@mail.gmail.com> hello everybody i am gyaltsen lama, fine art teacher, Tashi Namgyal Academy, Gangtok Sikkim. SHAMAN IN THE CITY This is my first posting for my project titled: Shaman in the city. This project aims at documenting the lives of Shamans in Gangtok. Shamans are known by many names "Bijuwa" "Jhakri" "Dhami", and were a part of everyday life in Gangtok. They were the medicine men, soothsayers, protectors of clans, binders of malignant spirits and counteracted harmful magic. With the ever increasing popularity of modern technology shamanism faces a slow but certain extinction. Shamans are still around in Gangtok, some work as labourers, others find some kind of odd jobs to earn their keep. They survive disguised yet proud of the heritage they carry. Research will include interviews with shamans, their relatives and friends. Local anthropologists will be consulted to verify the researched materials. An hour long interview has been recorded with a Shaman from Sichey area. Arjun Rai is a 36 year old Shaman who hails from Darjeeling. He works as a labourer and heals people in his spare time. Here is a short description of a shaman communicating with the spirit of a departed soul. The shaman begins chanting, accompanying himself with a little drum or bell. He dances, first slowly, then faster and faster, and, finally, trembles convulsively. A being of another world, god, demon or spirit of a dead person, has taken possession of him. In a kind of frenzy he utters broken sentences, which are supposed to convey that which the invisible being wishes to communicate. What the departed soul usually communicates is a long list of sufferings and misfortunes in the next world. Often the spirit of the dead person cries out that he or she has been taken captive by a demon, and pleads to be set free. At this point another practitioner, the sorcerer, steps in. He enters a trance, and his "double" sets out on a long, arduous journey to the dwelling place of the demon. The bystanders see the shaman struggling, panting and screaming, and know that he is wrestling with the demon in his attempts to free the captive spirit The final product will be a graphic novel with a total of 80 pages. 4 Shamans will be documented and 20 pages ill be dedicated to each individual. suggestions are welcome Gyaltsen Lama Fine art teacher Tashi Namgyal Academy Gangtok, Sikkim 737101 gyaltsenlama at yahoo.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070321/cd4a99e7/attachment.html From thinksaurabh at gmail.com Thu Mar 22 01:05:25 2007 From: thinksaurabh at gmail.com (Saurabh TewARi) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:05:25 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Urban Research Message-ID: <7eb1f35b0703211235v43f66ff5o946a5725dbd5ecbf@mail.gmail.com> Sir, I am an Art and Architecture student from Gurgaon. Currently i am doing an urban research which is part of my academic curriculum. The research is "Informal in Formal: A case exapmle of Mushrooming of Dhabas next to the BPOs in Gurgaon", focuses on a new phenomena which can be seen in night-life of Gurgaon city.This research has been selected for a Paper+Presentation in ASIA LINK URBAN DESIGN CONFERENCE, 07th, 08th June 2007 @ CHPB, Battaramulla, Colombo, Sri Lanka, link( http://www.unic.lk/Asia%20Link%20Conference/Asia%20Link%20Conference.htm ). Now, I am looking for Sponsership to travel and present the paper in Sri Lanka. Sir, i want to know about Sarai's interest in sponsering the research in a different term here. If interested i can send u the initial abstract of my research, as still it is under construction and process. Waiting for a positive reply Saurabh Tewari -- \\\/// / \ | \\ // | ( | (.) (.) |) ---o00o--(_)--o00o----------------- "thinkSaurabh" Saurabh Tewari Fourth Year, Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Gurgaon, India thinksaurabh at gmail.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/thinksaurabh ------ooo0------------------------------- ( ) 0ooo \ ( ( ) \_) ) / (_/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070322/fd65e997/attachment.html From joechrismyles at gmail.com Wed Mar 21 19:40:52 2007 From: joechrismyles at gmail.com (joe chris) Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:40:52 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Need help - Film(s) on football In-Reply-To: <175795.61274.qm@web7709.mail.in.yahoo.com> References: <175795.61274.qm@web7709.mail.in.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6165c5a80703210710k3b44f1afmccd0d4e3cdcfbc95@mail.gmail.com> Dear Faizan, Geetha Arts made a film Vijetha in 1985. This Telugu film was directed by Kodanda Rami Reddy, and has Chiranjeevi, and Bhanu Priya acting in it. This film was a success at the box office. For more details on this film click on this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijetha Regards, joe On 3/16/07, faizan ahmed wrote: > > Dear Members of this list I am looking for a copy of an old (thogh not > that old) film called *"Football Champion"*. It's from 1973 and it's made > by A.B.Raj from Madras. Does any one have any idea??? how can i acquire > this one??? Or any other Indian film on football... please let me know. > Thanks S. M. Faizan Ahmed > > ------------------------------ > Here's a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers > > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070321/5af1fe98/attachment.html From turbulence at turbulence.org Wed Mar 21 22:29:15 2007 From: turbulence at turbulence.org (Turbulence) Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 12:59:15 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] OurFloatingPoints 4: Participatory Media: McKenzie Wark and David Weinberger Message-ID: <8D55D9FC5D844083950A82ACAE4B9343@joPC> Emerson College and New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc./Turbulence.org present OurFloatingPoints 4: Participatory Media: McKenzie Wark and David Weinberger http://institute.emerson.edu/floatingpoints/ DATE: March 28, 7 pm VENUE: Emerson College, Bordy Theater, 216 Tremont Street, Boston STREAMED LIVE: http://institute.emerson.edu/floatingpoints/2007/live.php BROADCAST TO SECOND LIFE: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Emerson%20Island/153/109/24 FREE AND OPEN TO ALL! McKenzie Wark: "Gamer Theory from Screen to Page" GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 / "Gamer Theory" was created to investigate new approaches to writing in the networked environment, and to see what happens when authors and readers are brought into conversation over an evolving text. Wark will discuss the issues and questions that came up in the process of designing, writing and publishing the book, due out this month from Harvard University Press. MCKENZIE WARK is an Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City. He is the author of several books, including A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press) and Dispositions (Salt Publishing). David Weinberger: "Everything is Miscellaneous" The digital revolution has created billions of shards of knowledge and information. Now we are inventing processes and techniques for pulling them together, unconstrained by the physical limitations that have silently guided our traditional principles of organizing ideas. From Britannica to Wikipedia, news media to blogs, the Dewey Decimal system to "folksonomies," we are overturning the old assumptions about who is an authority, who is an expert, and who gets to decide what's worth knowing. DAVID WEINBERGER, Ph.D. is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is a co-author of the best-selling "Cluetrain Manifesto", and the author of "Small Pieces Loosely Joined." Weinberger has written for Wired, Salon, The Guardian, The NY Times, USA Today, Harvard Business Review and many others. His new book, "Everything Is Miscellaneous," will be published in May by Times Books. For more information about the series, please visit http://institute.emerson.edu/floatingpoints/ Contact: jo at turbulence dot org Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: http://new-radio.org New York: 917.548.7780 . Boston: 617.522.3856 Turbulence: http://turbulence.org New American Radio: http://somewhere.org Networked_Performance Blog: http://turbulence.org/blog Upgrade! Boston: http://turbulence.org/upgrade _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From shuddha at sarai.net Thu Mar 22 16:58:05 2007 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 16:58:05 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] CPI (M) and West Bengal CM's Statements on Nandigram Message-ID: <46026845.2040401@sarai.net> Dear All, Even as reports of how DYFI (CPI-M Youth Mass Organization) cadre were involved in the violence at Nandigram are coming in, the official party line on the events at Nandigram is beginning to circulate on the internet. See Economic Times, March 21, Nandigram Battle Now Veering Towards Courts (Gives a report on the involvement of DYFI cadre in the Nandigram Violence) (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/Nandigram_battle_now_veering_towards_courts/articleshow/1785742.cms) This morning, I received an e mail forwarded by Gayatri Chatterjee (from Pune) simply saying that point of view had not as yet been articulated on the Reader List. In the interests of the record and the ongoing debate on this list, I am now posting this on the Reader List. I neither endorse, nor vouch for the contents of the CPI (M)'s official statements, nor do I claim to speak for the Chief Minister of West Bengal. My position on the culpability of the CPI (M), and the police and the government of West Bengal in the massacre at Nandigram remain unchanged, and those interested in knowing what my position is, need only to read my last posting on the matter on this list. However, since these are public documents, I think it is only fair that they have a public life, and be publicly scrutinized, and if need be, interrogated. regards Shuddha ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. CPI (M) Official Statement on Events in Nandigram COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MARXIST) Central Committee A.K. Gopalan Bhawan, 27-29, Bhai Vir Singh Marg New Delhi 110 001 Website: http://www.cpim.org email: cpim at vsnl.com March 19, 2007 What Happened in Nandigram? The trouble in Nandigram began with attacks on Panchayat members, administrative officials and police on 3rd January, 2007. The following is a brief of what happened thereafter. 1. East Midnapur was poised to be declared as “Nirmal” district, for excellent achievements in sanitation. A central team was scheduled to visit Nandigram on 13th and 14th January for this purpose. In fact, the central team has already visited other areas of the district and watched the noteworthy success in this regard. On 3rd January, the preparatory meeting for the visit was taking place in Kalicharanpur Gram Panchayat office. Some activists of Trinamool Congress gathered there at around 11-30 in the morning. They demanded that the land acquisition notice, served by Haldia Development Authority be scrapped and the Panchayat declare that there would be no such acquisition. Samerun Bibi, the Panchayat pradhan, refused to heed their demand. They were violent and abusive. They ransacked the Panchayat office. The Panchayat secretary was injured in the attack. The mob also pelted stones on the health sub-centre. It was only after this that the Panchayat pradhan informed the Nandigram police station. As the police vehicle was proceeding towards the village, they were attacked by an armed mob. 11policemen including 2 ASIs were seriously injured. The police vehicle was torched. A rifle was also looted which was later returned to police station by TMC MLA Subhendu Adhikary. After some time another mob attacked a police car of Khejuri police station about five kilometers away and attempted to burn it. The police have not entered the area since then. 2. The miscreants started moving with arms and began to destroy bridges and culverts linking roads. They created an atmosphere of terror. On 4th and 5th January, they virtually destroyed every link road and bridge connecting Nandigram and Khejuri to the outside world. They also burnt a 25KV electric sub-station. An armed gang equipped with firearms attacked the CPI(M) local committee office in Rajaramchawk and burnt it. Cadres of TMC and other forces roamed around and threatened CPI(M) leaders and sympathizers with dire consequences. On both these days many houses of CPI(M) workers and sympathizers were looted. A large number of CPI(M) workers were forced to leave the villages and take shelter in a nearby camp. That the mob was armed could be seen in the photographs published in newspapers. The entire incident was meticulously planned. 3. The ousted CPI(M) workers and their families took shelter in a camp in the southern side of the Bhangabera bridge in Khejuri area. On 6th January miscreants of the so-called Jami Rakkha Committee (a conglomeration of TMC, Congress, SUCI, Naxalite groups, Jamiat ulema-e-Hind) attacked the camp at about 3 a.m. They even prepared bunkers for the attack. There was resistance from the camp and in the ensuing conflict three of the attackers died. One of them, Seikh Salim was a resident of South Kendemari, about 12 Kms away from the spot. It was evident that they gathered there to attack the camp in a planned manner. 4. On 7th January morning, the miscreants attacked the house of Sankar Samanta, CPI(M) Panchayat member, looted his house and burnt it. They dragged Samanta to Shitpara and burnt him alive in a haystack. 5. Bhudeb Mandal, another CPI(M) supporter was seriously injured in the attack. The miscreants left him, assuming that he was dead. He however, regained consciousness and somehow reached a relative’s house. Later he was hospitalized. In all 153 houses were looted. The houses and shops of Lakhman Mandal, Sonachura Panchayat pradhan, Samerun Bibi, Kalicharanpur Panchayat pradhan, Arjun Maity, Dr, Pratap Paul, Rabiul, Annapurna Das -- all CPI(M) workers -- were burnt. 6. Among those evicted from the villages are 2 district Committee members of CPI(M), 2 local committee secretaries, 6 zonal committee members, 16 local committee members and 56 Party members. More than 200 families were forced to stay in relief camp or relatives’ houses. Later, the number surged and more than 2000 people were ousted from the village. Their houses were looted and their lands were forcefully occupied. Hundreds of people were forced to pay ransom. 7. The attack spread to adjoining Khejuri and some parts of rural Haldia. On 7th February, 2007 a police party went to the village to discuss the issues. They were brutally attacked without any provocation. The local OC was seriously injured. Despite this, the police did not retaliate and returned back. The miscreants dragged Sadhucharan Chatterjee, an elderly police person and killed him. His body was found in the river after a three day search. 8. On 10th February, Sunita Mondal, a student of class ten, was brutally murdered after torture. Her body was found on a tree, with rope tied to her neck. Her father was ousted earlier by miscreants. The police could not enter into the village to collect information even after such an incident. Members of the State Women Commission were also faced resistance when they tried to investigate the matter. 9. On 17th and 18th February, another 22 houses were burnt by the TMC miscreants. Many more families were forced to flee from the villages. 10. On 3rd March, one housewife (name withheld) was mass raped by a gang of TMC miscreants led by Srihari Samanta, a local TMC leader. The victim is from a CPI(M) sympathizer’s family and refused to join the programme of Bhumi Rakkha Committee. The victim was hospitalized and her entire statement has been recorded. 11. The Chief Minister has stated categorically that there will be no forced land acquisition in Nandigram. On 9th February the CM pointedly told in a public meeting in Khejuri that without the consent of the people of Nandigram nothing will be done. Later, on a number of occasions during the last one month, the CM has repeatedly stated in very clear terms that the proposed Chemical Hub would be shifted if the people of Nandigram did not accept the proposal. Even after that, there was no respite from the atrocities perpetrated by the Bhumi Rakkha Committee, making it amply clear that the question is not at all that of “land acquisition” but a political strategy to maintain a forced acquisition of Nandigram by a combination of political forces. 12. The district administration, meanwhile called a series of all Party meetings and peace meetings, mostly boycotted by TMC, Congress and Bhumi Rakkha Committee. The last such meeting was organized on 10th March where representatives from Left Front partners and BJP were present. TMC, Congress and Bhumi Rakkha Committee declined the invitation. It was decided in the meeting that the administration would move to restore reconstruction work and normalcy in the area and anyone resisting the constitutional duties would be legally dealt with. 13. On 14th March, the police entered the area after prior announcements through loudspeaker. When they reached Sonachura, they were attacked with bombs and guns. In the ensuing confrontation 13 people were killed. One more person was killed due to bomb injury. ------------------------------------ 2. Statement by Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya in the West Bengal Assembly on March 15, 2007 On Incidents At Nandigram A proposal for setting up a mega-chemical hub and a multi-product Special Economic Zone (SEZ) over about 10,000 acres of land in Nandigram Police Station of Purba Medinipur district was under consideration of the state government. Though no final decision has yet been taken about the exact location of the projects, on December 29, 2006 an informal notice for public information regarding likely location of this project was circulated by the Haldia Development Authority to all blocks and Gram Panchayat offices of the area. This notice was by way of information only. No specific location of the project had yet been decided by the state government. Once this notice reached various block offices, there was massive resentment among those people who feared that their land would be acquired. A number of political organizations and parties formed a Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee. On January 3, 2007, an unruly mob of about 3,000 people attacked a police party under the charge of officer-in-charge, Nandigram police station and set fire to a police jeep. In another incident on the same day, another police jeep was set on fire at Garchakraberia Bazar. 23 police personnel also received injuries in these clashes. Three cases were registered in Nandigram police station over these incidents. These incidents were followed by several meetings between the administration and the opposition parties in which it was clarified by the district administration that no notification for acquisition of land had yet been finalized. In spite of that, local feelings ran very high and a bandh was declared in Nandigram police station area on January 4, 2007. Following this, peace meetings were held in several places of Nandigram police station on January 6, 2007, but even after the meetings, the situation turned violent. In the night of January 6/ January 7, 2007 there was a major clash between two groups – one owing allegiance to the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee and the other owing allegiance to the ruling Left Front. In this clash, four people, who were residents of various villages of Nandigram police station, were killed and two separate cases were started over this incident. This was followed by ransacking of CPI(M) Party Offices at several places and incidents of violence and arson at the residence of several local leaders of the CPI(M). The agitators also damaged many bridges and culverts and dug up several roads as a result of which, the movement of vehicles became impossible after January 7, 2007. In a series of peace meetings convened by the district Magistrate, Purba Medinipur over this issue starting from January 8, 2007 it was unanimously decided that all parties would take necessary steps to restore peace in the locality and police camps would be set up at the disturbed places. Despite these resolutions, however, it was not possible to repair the damaged roads, culverts and bridges and it was also not possible to deploy the state police within the affected parts of the Nandigram police station. Despite several measures initiated by the district administration to restore peace, execution of all government projects and schemes came to a standstill since no government officer was allowed to enter the affected areas. Gradually, a number of people owing allegiance to CPI(M) had to move their places of normal residence in Nandigaram police station and take shelter in several temporary camps at Khejuri. Tension between the two rival groups kept on mounting. There were several incidents of violence between February 03, and February 06, 2007 in which fire was exchanged or bombs exploded between the rival groups. On February 07, 2007 a sub-inspector of police, Shri Sadhu Chatterji had gone to investigate a report received about destruction of road communication. He was waylaid by an unruly mob and killed. His dead body was recovered only on February 10, 2007. Over this incident also, a case was started but all these cases could not be investigated properly because the police was not able to enter the affected areas. On February 11, 2007, the chief minister in a public meeting at a place close to the affected area made an open commitment that no land for setting up the chemical hub and SEZ would be acquired at Nandigram if the people of Nandigram were against such acquisition. However, sporadic incidents of violence involving displaced people in the camps at Khejuri and the people of Bhangaberia and Sonachura areas of Nandigram police station continued. It was resolved in one of the peace meetings that both parties would maintain peace during the Madhyamik Pariksha (Class-X) which was going on. The Madhyamik Pariksha was over on March 5, 2007. The district magistrate, Purba Medinipur again convened an all-party peace meeting. In this meeting he proposed that peace should be restored, police should enter the affected areas of Nandigram police station, damaged bridges and roads should be repaired and normalcy restored to the entire affected areas. However, the representatives of the Trinamool Congress and the Indian National Congress did not attend this meeting. It was decided that this law-less situation in Nandigram and its surroundings should not be allowed to continue, the damaged roads, bridges and culverts should be repaired without any further delay and police should take up the investigations in the cases of murder. Thereafter, police force was mobilized and it was decided that the force would enter Nandigarm through three separate routes under the leadership of senior offices. The police force was asked to exercise utmost restraint. They were further directed to use loud hailers to explain the purpose of the movement of the police party to the people of that locality which is to establish peace and restore normalcy. Ultimately, the police movement started about 10.00 a.m in the morning of March 14, 2007. While one of the police parties could move into Nandigaram without any resistance two other police parties were confronted by large gatherings of hostile people. When the police asked them to disperse, they paid no heed and resorted to heavy brick-batting causing injury to some policemen. To disperse the mob, police lobbed tear gas shells. The mob them became more agitated and started hurling bombs followed by opening of fire. A few policemen sustained splinter injuries. To control the situation, police initially fired rubber bullets, but this, again, yielded no results. Ultimately, the police had to open fire in self-defence causing dispersal of the mob. This incident took place near Bhangaberia bridge. Another police party also met with violent resistance at Adhikaripara where heavy brick batting, bomb throwing took place. As a result, some policemen were injured. In both the incidents, 12 policemen including Additional S.P, Tamluk and Assistant S.P. (Probationer) received splinter injuries and injuries due to brick batting. Serious and extensive injuries could be avoided as all the policemen were in protective gear. However, a number of people were injured in the police firing and it is believed that some of the agitators were also injured by the bombs that they were hurling. Till 8.00 p.m on March 14, 2007, according to the report received at the State Headquarters, 14 people died including some critically injured people who succumbed to injuries. In addition, there were 63 injured people of whom 29 were shifted to Tamluk district hospital for treatment. 5 people were released after treatment to minor injuries and the rest were still at Nandigarm Rural Hospital to receive treatment or awaiting transfer to Tamluk Sub-divisional hospital. This is in addition to the 12 policemen injured in the incident who received medical attention separately. Following the above incidents, there was no further organized resistance to the movement of the police party who were now able to move to Sonachura and establish a temporary camp there. Police was also able to reach a few other neighbouring villages. In course of police search, 8 illegal fire-arms were recovered which had probably been used against the police party. There is high tension prevailing in the area but the situation is currently under control. Police camps have been set up in the disturbed area. Senior police officers are also camping and making efforts to restore peace. ------ END From hpp at vsnl.com Thu Mar 22 17:51:22 2007 From: hpp at vsnl.com (hpp at vsnl.com) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:21:22 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] CPM's lying position Message-ID: Surely this merits a prize for comic art, or in the fairy tale category? V Ramaswamy Calcutta cuckooscall.blogspot.com From 125548 at soas.ac.uk Thu Mar 22 20:07:35 2007 From: 125548 at soas.ac.uk (MATTI POHJONEN) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:37:35 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Remix Republic Message-ID: <1174574255.9af113c125548@soas.ac.uk> Dear Friends, SACREDMEDIACOW is collaborating with DJ Fadereu in the online launch of his book Remix Republic on the Indian media and more. From the blurb: "India is predicted by many as a rising star in the global village nightsky, but only one book describes the new zodiac. In the dark theatre of DJ Fadereu’s mind, Google Earth and binary computation copulate with Hindu avatars and Vedic timekeeping, Nietzsche necks with nadabrahma, and Baudrillard blows apart Bollywood.This cybernetic ride flickers uneasily through the vast landscape of Indian and Western techno-philosophy. Meanwhile, the murder of reality is imminent. The media are converting each street into a studio, masses into extras, and life itself into the new movie. The dynamics of these phenomenon are mediated by a new logic of speed, and a new movement determines the games of territorial power. The present, the past and the future have become exceedingly intertwined in the instantaneous (and yet ancient) society we live in - we are the remixed republic. The state of siege now remains poised at the most dramatic point in our history since the Partition of 1947. The world’s oldest civilization, the author hopes, will rise to the challenge with befitting ingenuity…." For the first chapter, please head over to this link http://sacredmediacow.com/?page_id=413 or go to http://algomantra.blogspot.com Best wishes, Matti From taraprakash at gmail.com Thu Mar 22 20:46:15 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 11:16:15 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] CPI (M) and West Bengal CM's Statements on Nandigram References: <46026845.2040401@sarai.net> Message-ID: <01fb01c76c95$0b9d17c0$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> The Squealers are misleading again. But they must remember they are addressing people outside the Animal Farm. Who is accountable for the intentional killings of the 14, perhaps, actually many more, people? Whatever circumstances, and if they feel shooting was inevitable, couldn't they shoot in a way that did not lead to deaths? The first thing that needs to be done is unqualified apology. Prakash Karath, after returning from his visit to West Bengal, did admit "mistakes have been made." Interestingly the people in Bush government and also in Blaire government say the same thing about their invasion of Iraq 4 years back. The question remains who is paying for your mistakes. They should be ready to apologise and face the consequences, I wish someone could punish these brutes. As about the CPM's view being put on this list, it has been expressed by some apologists in the past, I don't think someone who is hurt by the events in Singur and Nandi Gram, should be a carrier of the message of the perpetrators. I wouldn't forward any message from RSS activists if they say please help us, our views are not being sufficiently represented on the list. Oh, that reminds me, Md Salim yesterday said on BBC Hindi yesterday that BJP, RSS, Maoists and Jamait-e Ulema-e Hind were working together in Nandi Gram. Isn't it interesting? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Shuddhabrata Sengupta" To: "sarai list" Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007 7:28 AM Subject: [Reader-list] CPI (M) and West Bengal CM's Statements on Nandigram > Dear All, > > Even as reports of how DYFI (CPI-M Youth Mass Organization) cadre were > involved in the violence at Nandigram are coming in, the official party > line on the events at Nandigram is beginning to circulate on the internet. > > See Economic Times, March 21, Nandigram Battle Now Veering Towards > Courts (Gives a report on the involvement of DYFI cadre in the Nandigram > Violence) > (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/Nandigram_battle_now_veering_towards_courts/articleshow/1785742.cms) > > This morning, I received an e mail forwarded by Gayatri Chatterjee (from > Pune) simply saying that point of view had not as yet been articulated > on the Reader List. In the interests of the record and the ongoing > debate on this list, I am now posting this on the Reader List. > > I neither endorse, nor vouch for the contents of the CPI (M)'s official > statements, nor do I claim to speak for the Chief Minister of West > Bengal. My position on the culpability of the CPI (M), and the police > and the government of West Bengal in the massacre at Nandigram remain > unchanged, and those interested in knowing what my position is, need > only to read my last posting on the matter on this list. > > However, since these are public documents, I think it is only fair that > they have a public life, and be publicly scrutinized, and if need be, > interrogated. > > regards > > Shuddha > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > 1. CPI (M) Official Statement on Events in Nandigram > > > COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MARXIST) > Central Committee > A.K. Gopalan Bhawan, 27-29, Bhai Vir Singh Marg New Delhi 110 001 > Website: http://www.cpim.org email: cpim at vsnl.com > > March 19, 2007 > > > What Happened in Nandigram? > > > > The trouble in Nandigram began with attacks on Panchayat members, > administrative officials and police on 3rd January, 2007. The following > is a brief of what happened thereafter. > > 1. East Midnapur was poised to be declared as “Nirmal” district, for > excellent achievements in sanitation. A central team was scheduled to > visit Nandigram on 13th and 14th January for this purpose. In fact, > the central team has already visited other areas of the district and > watched the noteworthy success in this regard. On 3rd January, the > preparatory meeting for the visit was taking place in Kalicharanpur Gram > Panchayat office. Some activists of Trinamool Congress gathered there > at around 11-30 in the morning. They demanded that the land acquisition > notice, served by Haldia Development Authority be scrapped and the > Panchayat declare that there would be no such acquisition. Samerun Bibi, > the Panchayat pradhan, refused to heed their demand. They were violent > and abusive. They ransacked the Panchayat office. The Panchayat > secretary was injured in the attack. The mob also pelted stones on the > health sub-centre. It was only after this that the Panchayat pradhan > informed the Nandigram police station. As the police vehicle was > proceeding towards the village, they were attacked by an armed mob. > 11policemen including 2 ASIs were seriously injured. The police vehicle > was torched. A rifle was also looted which was later returned to police > station by TMC MLA Subhendu Adhikary. After some time another mob > attacked a police car of Khejuri police station about five kilometers > away and attempted to burn it. The police have not entered the area > since then. > > 2. The miscreants started moving with arms and began to destroy bridges > and culverts linking roads. They created an atmosphere of terror. On 4th > and 5th January, they virtually destroyed every link road and bridge > connecting Nandigram and Khejuri to the outside world. They also burnt a > 25KV electric sub-station. An armed gang equipped with firearms attacked > the CPI(M) local committee office in Rajaramchawk and burnt it. Cadres > of TMC and other forces roamed around and threatened CPI(M) leaders and > sympathizers with dire consequences. On both these days many houses of > CPI(M) workers and sympathizers were looted. A large number of CPI(M) > workers were forced to leave the villages and take shelter in a nearby > camp. That the mob was armed could be seen in the photographs published > in newspapers. The entire incident was meticulously planned. > > 3. The ousted CPI(M) workers and their families took shelter in a camp > in the southern side of the Bhangabera bridge in Khejuri area. On 6th > January miscreants of the so-called Jami Rakkha Committee (a > conglomeration of TMC, Congress, SUCI, Naxalite groups, Jamiat > ulema-e-Hind) attacked the camp at about 3 a.m. They even prepared > bunkers for the attack. There was resistance from the camp and in the > ensuing conflict three of the attackers died. One of them, Seikh Salim > was a resident of South Kendemari, about 12 Kms away from the spot. It > was evident that they gathered there to attack the camp in a planned > manner. > > 4. On 7th January morning, the miscreants attacked the house of Sankar > Samanta, CPI(M) Panchayat member, looted his house and burnt it. They > dragged Samanta to Shitpara and burnt him alive in a haystack. > > 5. Bhudeb Mandal, another CPI(M) supporter was seriously injured in the > attack. The miscreants left him, assuming that he was dead. He however, > regained consciousness and somehow reached a relative’s house. Later he > was hospitalized. In all 153 houses were looted. The houses and shops of > Lakhman Mandal, Sonachura Panchayat pradhan, Samerun Bibi, Kalicharanpur > Panchayat pradhan, Arjun Maity, Dr, Pratap Paul, Rabiul, Annapurna Das > -- all CPI(M) workers -- were burnt. > > 6. Among those evicted from the villages are 2 district Committee > members of CPI(M), 2 local committee secretaries, 6 zonal committee > members, 16 local committee members and 56 Party members. More than 200 > families were forced to stay in relief camp or relatives’ houses. Later, > the number surged and more than 2000 people were ousted from the > village. Their houses were looted and their lands were forcefully > occupied. Hundreds of people were forced to pay ransom. > > 7. The attack spread to adjoining Khejuri and some parts of rural > Haldia. On 7th February, 2007 a police party went to the village to > discuss the issues. They were brutally attacked without any provocation. > The local OC was seriously injured. Despite this, the police did not > retaliate and returned back. The miscreants dragged Sadhucharan > Chatterjee, an elderly police person and killed him. His body was found > in the river after a three day search. > > 8. On 10th February, Sunita Mondal, a student of class ten, was brutally > murdered after torture. Her body was found on a tree, with rope tied to > her neck. Her father was ousted earlier by miscreants. The police could > not enter into the village to collect information even after such an > incident. Members of the State Women Commission were also faced > resistance when they tried to investigate the matter. > > 9. On 17th and 18th February, another 22 houses were burnt by the TMC > miscreants. Many more families were forced to flee from the villages. > > 10. On 3rd March, one housewife (name withheld) was mass raped by a gang > of TMC miscreants led by Srihari Samanta, a local TMC leader. The victim > is from a CPI(M) sympathizer’s family and refused to join the > programme of Bhumi Rakkha Committee. The victim was hospitalized and her > entire statement has been recorded. > > 11. The Chief Minister has stated categorically that there will be no > forced land acquisition in Nandigram. On 9th February the CM pointedly > told in a public meeting in Khejuri that without the consent of the > people of Nandigram nothing will be done. Later, on a number of > occasions during the last one month, the CM has repeatedly stated in > very clear terms that the proposed Chemical Hub would be shifted if the > people of Nandigram did not accept the proposal. Even after that, there > was no respite from the atrocities perpetrated by the Bhumi Rakkha > Committee, making it amply clear that the question is not at all that of > “land acquisition” but a political strategy to maintain a forced > acquisition of Nandigram by a combination of political forces. > > 12. The district administration, meanwhile called a series of all > Party meetings and peace meetings, mostly boycotted by TMC, Congress and > Bhumi Rakkha Committee. The last such meeting was organized on 10th > March where representatives from Left Front partners and BJP were > present. TMC, Congress and Bhumi Rakkha Committee declined the > invitation. It was decided in the meeting that the administration would > move to restore reconstruction work and normalcy in the area and anyone > resisting the constitutional duties would be legally dealt with. > > 13. On 14th March, the police entered the area after prior announcements > through loudspeaker. When they reached Sonachura, they were attacked > with bombs and guns. In the ensuing confrontation 13 people were killed. > One more person was killed due to bomb injury. > > ------------------------------------ > > 2. Statement by Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya > in the West Bengal Assembly on March 15, 2007 > On Incidents At Nandigram > > A proposal for setting up a mega-chemical hub and a multi-product > Special Economic Zone (SEZ) over about 10,000 acres of land in Nandigram > Police Station of Purba Medinipur district was under consideration of > the state government. Though no final decision has yet been taken about > the exact location of the projects, on December 29, 2006 an informal > notice for public information regarding likely location of this project > was circulated by the Haldia Development Authority to all blocks and > Gram Panchayat offices of the area. This notice was by way of > information only. No specific location of the project had yet been > decided by the state government. Once this notice reached various block > offices, there was massive resentment among those people who feared that > their land would be acquired. A number of political organizations and > parties formed a Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee. On January 3, 2007, > an unruly mob of about 3,000 people attacked a police party under the > charge of officer-in-charge, Nandigram police station and set fire to a > police jeep. In another incident on the same day, another police jeep > was set on fire at Garchakraberia Bazar. 23 police personnel also > received injuries in these clashes. Three cases were registered in > Nandigram police station over these incidents. > > These incidents were followed by several meetings between the > administration and the opposition parties in which it was clarified by > the district administration that no notification for acquisition of land > had yet been finalized. In spite of that, local feelings ran very high > and a bandh was declared in Nandigram police station area on January 4, > 2007. Following this, peace meetings were held in several places of > Nandigram police station on January 6, 2007, but even after the > meetings, the situation turned violent. In the night of January 6/ > January 7, 2007 there was a major clash between two groups – one owing > allegiance to the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee and the other owing > allegiance to the ruling Left Front. In this clash, four people, who > were residents of various villages of Nandigram police station, were > killed and two separate cases were started over this incident. This was > followed by ransacking of CPI(M) Party Offices at several places and > incidents of violence and arson at the residence of several local > leaders of the CPI(M). The agitators also damaged many bridges and > culverts and dug up several roads as a result of which, the movement of > vehicles became impossible after January 7, 2007. > > In a series of peace meetings convened by the district Magistrate, Purba > Medinipur over this issue starting from January 8, 2007 it was > unanimously decided that all parties would take necessary steps to > restore peace in the locality and police camps would be set up at the > disturbed places. Despite these resolutions, however, it was not > possible to repair the damaged roads, culverts and bridges and it was > also not possible to deploy the state police within the affected parts > of the Nandigram police station. Despite several measures initiated by > the district administration to restore peace, execution of all > government projects and schemes came to a standstill since no government > officer was allowed to enter the affected areas. Gradually, a number of > people owing allegiance to CPI(M) had to move their places of normal > residence in Nandigaram police station and take shelter in several > temporary camps at Khejuri. Tension between the two rival groups kept on > mounting. There were several incidents of violence between February 03, > and February 06, 2007 in which fire was exchanged or bombs exploded > between the rival groups. On February 07, 2007 a sub-inspector of > police, Shri Sadhu Chatterji had gone to investigate a report received > about destruction of road communication. He was waylaid by an unruly mob > and killed. His dead body was recovered only on February 10, 2007. Over > this incident also, a case was started but all these cases could not be > investigated properly because the police was not able to enter the > affected areas. > > On February 11, 2007, the chief minister in a public meeting at a place > close to the affected area made an open commitment that no land for > setting up the chemical hub and SEZ would be acquired at Nandigram if > the people of Nandigram were against such acquisition. > However, sporadic incidents of violence involving displaced people in > the camps at Khejuri and the people of Bhangaberia and Sonachura areas > of Nandigram police station continued. It was resolved in one of the > peace meetings that both parties would maintain peace during the > Madhyamik Pariksha (Class-X) which was going on. The Madhyamik Pariksha > was over on March 5, 2007. The district magistrate, Purba Medinipur > again convened an all-party peace meeting. In this meeting he proposed > that peace should be restored, police should enter the affected areas of > Nandigram police station, damaged bridges and roads should be repaired > and normalcy restored to the entire affected areas. However, the > representatives of the Trinamool Congress and the Indian National > Congress did not attend this meeting. > > It was decided that this law-less situation in Nandigram and its > surroundings should not be allowed to continue, the damaged roads, > bridges and culverts should be repaired without any further delay and > police should take up the investigations in the cases of murder. > Thereafter, police force was mobilized and it was decided that the force > would enter Nandigarm through three separate routes under the leadership > of senior offices. The police force was asked to exercise utmost > restraint. They were further directed to use loud hailers to explain the > purpose of the movement of the police party to the people of that > locality which is to establish peace and restore normalcy. Ultimately, > the police movement started about 10.00 a.m in the morning of March 14, > 2007. While one of the police parties could move into Nandigaram without > any resistance two other police parties were confronted by large > gatherings of hostile people. When the police asked them to disperse, > they paid no heed and resorted to heavy brick-batting causing injury to > some policemen. To disperse the mob, police lobbed tear gas shells. The > mob them became more agitated and started hurling bombs followed by > opening of fire. A few policemen sustained splinter injuries. To control > the situation, police initially fired rubber bullets, but this, again, > yielded no results. Ultimately, the police had to open fire in > self-defence causing dispersal of the mob. This incident took place near > Bhangaberia bridge. Another police party also met with violent > resistance at Adhikaripara where heavy brick batting, bomb throwing took > place. As a result, some policemen were injured. In both the incidents, > 12 policemen including Additional S.P, Tamluk and Assistant S.P. > (Probationer) received splinter injuries and injuries due to brick > batting. Serious and extensive injuries could be avoided as all the > policemen were in protective gear. However, a number of people were > injured in the police firing and it is believed that some of the > agitators were also injured by the bombs that they were hurling. Till > 8.00 p.m on March 14, 2007, according to the report received at the > State Headquarters, 14 people died including some critically injured > people who succumbed to injuries. In addition, there were 63 injured > people of whom 29 were shifted to Tamluk district hospital for > treatment. 5 people were released after treatment to minor injuries and > the rest were still at Nandigarm Rural Hospital to receive treatment or > awaiting transfer to Tamluk Sub-divisional hospital. This is in addition > to the 12 policemen injured in the incident who received medical > attention separately. > > Following the above incidents, there was no further organized resistance > to the movement of the police party who were now able to move to > Sonachura and establish a temporary camp there. Police was also able to > reach a few other neighbouring villages. In course of police search, 8 > illegal fire-arms were recovered which had probably been used against > the police party. > > There is high tension prevailing in the area but the situation is > currently under control. Police camps have been set up in the disturbed > area. Senior police officers are also camping and making efforts to > restore peace. > > > ------ > END > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From tapasrayx at gmail.com Fri Mar 23 05:18:04 2007 From: tapasrayx at gmail.com (Tapas Ray) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:48:04 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] CPI (M) and West Bengal CM's Statements on Nandigram In-Reply-To: <46026845.2040401@sarai.net> References: <46026845.2040401@sarai.net> Message-ID: <460315B4.8080009@googlemail.com> A few thoughts, for whatever they are worth: 1. As Taraprakash points out, the CPI-M line has indeed been articulated on this list by some members. 2. In my understanding, the list is under no obligation to carry the CPI-M's, the West Bengal CM's, the Prime Minister's, the President's, the UN Secretary General's, or anybody else's views, unless he/she/they are list members. Even members' rights are of a limited nature, circumscribed by the laws of the land and the list's own rules. 3. Therefore, it is a magnanimous gesture on the part of Shuddhabrata and the list to post and to carry, respectively, statements issued by the CPI-M and the Chief Minister, and one can only hope that those who asked for that favour, will appreciate the democratic values expressed through this gesture. At the same time, one wonders if any person or organization affiliated to the CPI-M or other Left Front partners would oblige if a statement criticising the CPI-M or the Chief Minister were sought to be posted on a forum administered by or accessible to them. 4. The official statements have some curiosity value, and I enjoyed reading them. 5. The CPI-M statement seems to suggest, without stating this directly, that the agitation was aimed at disrupting the process related to conferral of "Nirmal" status on East Midnapur. The only thing surprising about this is its crudity. Otherwise, this line - any disturbance is the opposition's conspiracy to show the working people's paradise in a poor light - is well-worn. Incidentally, if memory serves one right, some years ago the then undivided district of Midnapore became a "fully literate" state. It would be interesting to know the present level of its literacy. Tapas Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: > Dear All, > > Even as reports of how DYFI (CPI-M Youth Mass Organization) cadre were > involved in the violence at Nandigram are coming in, the official party > line on the events at Nandigram is beginning to circulate on the internet. > > See Economic Times, March 21, Nandigram Battle Now Veering Towards > Courts (Gives a report on the involvement of DYFI cadre in the Nandigram > Violence) > (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/Nandigram_battle_now_veering_towards_courts/articleshow/1785742.cms) > > This morning, I received an e mail forwarded by Gayatri Chatterjee (from > Pune) simply saying that point of view had not as yet been articulated > on the Reader List. In the interests of the record and the ongoing > debate on this list, I am now posting this on the Reader List. > > I neither endorse, nor vouch for the contents of the CPI (M)'s official > statements, nor do I claim to speak for the Chief Minister of West > Bengal. My position on the culpability of the CPI (M), and the police > and the government of West Bengal in the massacre at Nandigram remain > unchanged, and those interested in knowing what my position is, need > only to read my last posting on the matter on this list. > > However, since these are public documents, I think it is only fair that > they have a public life, and be publicly scrutinized, and if need be, > interrogated. > > regards > > Shuddha > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > 1. CPI (M) Official Statement on Events in Nandigram > > > COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MARXIST) > Central Committee > A.K. Gopalan Bhawan, 27-29, Bhai Vir Singh Marg New Delhi 110 001 > Website: http://www.cpim.org email: cpim at vsnl.com > > March 19, 2007 > > > What Happened in Nandigram? > > > > The trouble in Nandigram began with attacks on Panchayat members, > administrative officials and police on 3rd January, 2007. The following > is a brief of what happened thereafter. > > 1. East Midnapur was poised to be declared as “Nirmal” district, for > excellent achievements in sanitation. A central team was scheduled to > visit Nandigram on 13th and 14th January for this purpose. In fact, > the central team has already visited other areas of the district and > watched the noteworthy success in this regard. On 3rd January, the > preparatory meeting for the visit was taking place in Kalicharanpur Gram > Panchayat office. Some activists of Trinamool Congress gathered there > at around 11-30 in the morning. They demanded that the land acquisition > notice, served by Haldia Development Authority be scrapped and the > Panchayat declare that there would be no such acquisition. Samerun Bibi, > the Panchayat pradhan, refused to heed their demand. They were violent > and abusive. They ransacked the Panchayat office. The Panchayat > secretary was injured in the attack. The mob also pelted stones on the > health sub-centre. It was only after this that the Panchayat pradhan > informed the Nandigram police station. As the police vehicle was > proceeding towards the village, they were attacked by an armed mob. > 11policemen including 2 ASIs were seriously injured. The police vehicle > was torched. A rifle was also looted which was later returned to police > station by TMC MLA Subhendu Adhikary. After some time another mob > attacked a police car of Khejuri police station about five kilometers > away and attempted to burn it. The police have not entered the area > since then. > > 2. The miscreants started moving with arms and began to destroy bridges > and culverts linking roads. They created an atmosphere of terror. On 4th > and 5th January, they virtually destroyed every link road and bridge > connecting Nandigram and Khejuri to the outside world. They also burnt a > 25KV electric sub-station. An armed gang equipped with firearms attacked > the CPI(M) local committee office in Rajaramchawk and burnt it. Cadres > of TMC and other forces roamed around and threatened CPI(M) leaders and > sympathizers with dire consequences. On both these days many houses of > CPI(M) workers and sympathizers were looted. A large number of CPI(M) > workers were forced to leave the villages and take shelter in a nearby > camp. That the mob was armed could be seen in the photographs published > in newspapers. The entire incident was meticulously planned. > > 3. The ousted CPI(M) workers and their families took shelter in a camp > in the southern side of the Bhangabera bridge in Khejuri area. On 6th > January miscreants of the so-called Jami Rakkha Committee (a > conglomeration of TMC, Congress, SUCI, Naxalite groups, Jamiat > ulema-e-Hind) attacked the camp at about 3 a.m. They even prepared > bunkers for the attack. There was resistance from the camp and in the > ensuing conflict three of the attackers died. One of them, Seikh Salim > was a resident of South Kendemari, about 12 Kms away from the spot. It > was evident that they gathered there to attack the camp in a planned > manner. > > 4. On 7th January morning, the miscreants attacked the house of Sankar > Samanta, CPI(M) Panchayat member, looted his house and burnt it. They > dragged Samanta to Shitpara and burnt him alive in a haystack. > > 5. Bhudeb Mandal, another CPI(M) supporter was seriously injured in the > attack. The miscreants left him, assuming that he was dead. He however, > regained consciousness and somehow reached a relative’s house. Later he > was hospitalized. In all 153 houses were looted. The houses and shops of > Lakhman Mandal, Sonachura Panchayat pradhan, Samerun Bibi, Kalicharanpur > Panchayat pradhan, Arjun Maity, Dr, Pratap Paul, Rabiul, Annapurna Das > -- all CPI(M) workers -- were burnt. > > 6. Among those evicted from the villages are 2 district Committee > members of CPI(M), 2 local committee secretaries, 6 zonal committee > members, 16 local committee members and 56 Party members. More than 200 > families were forced to stay in relief camp or relatives’ houses. Later, > the number surged and more than 2000 people were ousted from the > village. Their houses were looted and their lands were forcefully > occupied. Hundreds of people were forced to pay ransom. > > 7. The attack spread to adjoining Khejuri and some parts of rural > Haldia. On 7th February, 2007 a police party went to the village to > discuss the issues. They were brutally attacked without any provocation. > The local OC was seriously injured. Despite this, the police did not > retaliate and returned back. The miscreants dragged Sadhucharan > Chatterjee, an elderly police person and killed him. His body was found > in the river after a three day search. > > 8. On 10th February, Sunita Mondal, a student of class ten, was brutally > murdered after torture. Her body was found on a tree, with rope tied to > her neck. Her father was ousted earlier by miscreants. The police could > not enter into the village to collect information even after such an > incident. Members of the State Women Commission were also faced > resistance when they tried to investigate the matter. > > 9. On 17th and 18th February, another 22 houses were burnt by the TMC > miscreants. Many more families were forced to flee from the villages. > > 10. On 3rd March, one housewife (name withheld) was mass raped by a gang > of TMC miscreants led by Srihari Samanta, a local TMC leader. The victim > is from a CPI(M) sympathizer’s family and refused to join the > programme of Bhumi Rakkha Committee. The victim was hospitalized and her > entire statement has been recorded. > > 11. The Chief Minister has stated categorically that there will be no > forced land acquisition in Nandigram. On 9th February the CM pointedly > told in a public meeting in Khejuri that without the consent of the > people of Nandigram nothing will be done. Later, on a number of > occasions during the last one month, the CM has repeatedly stated in > very clear terms that the proposed Chemical Hub would be shifted if the > people of Nandigram did not accept the proposal. Even after that, there > was no respite from the atrocities perpetrated by the Bhumi Rakkha > Committee, making it amply clear that the question is not at all that of > “land acquisition” but a political strategy to maintain a forced > acquisition of Nandigram by a combination of political forces. > > 12. The district administration, meanwhile called a series of all > Party meetings and peace meetings, mostly boycotted by TMC, Congress and > Bhumi Rakkha Committee. The last such meeting was organized on 10th > March where representatives from Left Front partners and BJP were > present. TMC, Congress and Bhumi Rakkha Committee declined the > invitation. It was decided in the meeting that the administration would > move to restore reconstruction work and normalcy in the area and anyone > resisting the constitutional duties would be legally dealt with. > > 13. On 14th March, the police entered the area after prior announcements > through loudspeaker. When they reached Sonachura, they were attacked > with bombs and guns. In the ensuing confrontation 13 people were killed. > One more person was killed due to bomb injury. > > ------------------------------------ > > 2. Statement by Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya > in the West Bengal Assembly on March 15, 2007 > On Incidents At Nandigram > > A proposal for setting up a mega-chemical hub and a multi-product > Special Economic Zone (SEZ) over about 10,000 acres of land in Nandigram > Police Station of Purba Medinipur district was under consideration of > the state government. Though no final decision has yet been taken about > the exact location of the projects, on December 29, 2006 an informal > notice for public information regarding likely location of this project > was circulated by the Haldia Development Authority to all blocks and > Gram Panchayat offices of the area. This notice was by way of > information only. No specific location of the project had yet been > decided by the state government. Once this notice reached various block > offices, there was massive resentment among those people who feared that > their land would be acquired. A number of political organizations and > parties formed a Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee. On January 3, 2007, > an unruly mob of about 3,000 people attacked a police party under the > charge of officer-in-charge, Nandigram police station and set fire to a > police jeep. In another incident on the same day, another police jeep > was set on fire at Garchakraberia Bazar. 23 police personnel also > received injuries in these clashes. Three cases were registered in > Nandigram police station over these incidents. > > These incidents were followed by several meetings between the > administration and the opposition parties in which it was clarified by > the district administration that no notification for acquisition of land > had yet been finalized. In spite of that, local feelings ran very high > and a bandh was declared in Nandigram police station area on January 4, > 2007. Following this, peace meetings were held in several places of > Nandigram police station on January 6, 2007, but even after the > meetings, the situation turned violent. In the night of January 6/ > January 7, 2007 there was a major clash between two groups – one owing > allegiance to the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee and the other owing > allegiance to the ruling Left Front. In this clash, four people, who > were residents of various villages of Nandigram police station, were > killed and two separate cases were started over this incident. This was > followed by ransacking of CPI(M) Party Offices at several places and > incidents of violence and arson at the residence of several local > leaders of the CPI(M). The agitators also damaged many bridges and > culverts and dug up several roads as a result of which, the movement of > vehicles became impossible after January 7, 2007. > > In a series of peace meetings convened by the district Magistrate, Purba > Medinipur over this issue starting from January 8, 2007 it was > unanimously decided that all parties would take necessary steps to > restore peace in the locality and police camps would be set up at the > disturbed places. Despite these resolutions, however, it was not > possible to repair the damaged roads, culverts and bridges and it was > also not possible to deploy the state police within the affected parts > of the Nandigram police station. Despite several measures initiated by > the district administration to restore peace, execution of all > government projects and schemes came to a standstill since no government > officer was allowed to enter the affected areas. Gradually, a number of > people owing allegiance to CPI(M) had to move their places of normal > residence in Nandigaram police station and take shelter in several > temporary camps at Khejuri. Tension between the two rival groups kept on > mounting. There were several incidents of violence between February 03, > and February 06, 2007 in which fire was exchanged or bombs exploded > between the rival groups. On February 07, 2007 a sub-inspector of > police, Shri Sadhu Chatterji had gone to investigate a report received > about destruction of road communication. He was waylaid by an unruly mob > and killed. His dead body was recovered only on February 10, 2007. Over > this incident also, a case was started but all these cases could not be > investigated properly because the police was not able to enter the > affected areas. > > On February 11, 2007, the chief minister in a public meeting at a place > close to the affected area made an open commitment that no land for > setting up the chemical hub and SEZ would be acquired at Nandigram if > the people of Nandigram were against such acquisition. > However, sporadic incidents of violence involving displaced people in > the camps at Khejuri and the people of Bhangaberia and Sonachura areas > of Nandigram police station continued. It was resolved in one of the > peace meetings that both parties would maintain peace during the > Madhyamik Pariksha (Class-X) which was going on. The Madhyamik Pariksha > was over on March 5, 2007. The district magistrate, Purba Medinipur > again convened an all-party peace meeting. In this meeting he proposed > that peace should be restored, police should enter the affected areas of > Nandigram police station, damaged bridges and roads should be repaired > and normalcy restored to the entire affected areas. However, the > representatives of the Trinamool Congress and the Indian National > Congress did not attend this meeting. > > It was decided that this law-less situation in Nandigram and its > surroundings should not be allowed to continue, the damaged roads, > bridges and culverts should be repaired without any further delay and > police should take up the investigations in the cases of murder. > Thereafter, police force was mobilized and it was decided that the force > would enter Nandigarm through three separate routes under the leadership > of senior offices. The police force was asked to exercise utmost > restraint. They were further directed to use loud hailers to explain the > purpose of the movement of the police party to the people of that > locality which is to establish peace and restore normalcy. Ultimately, > the police movement started about 10.00 a.m in the morning of March 14, > 2007. While one of the police parties could move into Nandigaram without > any resistance two other police parties were confronted by large > gatherings of hostile people. When the police asked them to disperse, > they paid no heed and resorted to heavy brick-batting causing injury to > some policemen. To disperse the mob, police lobbed tear gas shells. The > mob them became more agitated and started hurling bombs followed by > opening of fire. A few policemen sustained splinter injuries. To control > the situation, police initially fired rubber bullets, but this, again, > yielded no results. Ultimately, the police had to open fire in > self-defence causing dispersal of the mob. This incident took place near > Bhangaberia bridge. Another police party also met with violent > resistance at Adhikaripara where heavy brick batting, bomb throwing took > place. As a result, some policemen were injured. In both the incidents, > 12 policemen including Additional S.P, Tamluk and Assistant S.P. > (Probationer) received splinter injuries and injuries due to brick > batting. Serious and extensive injuries could be avoided as all the > policemen were in protective gear. However, a number of people were > injured in the police firing and it is believed that some of the > agitators were also injured by the bombs that they were hurling. Till > 8.00 p.m on March 14, 2007, according to the report received at the > State Headquarters, 14 people died including some critically injured > people who succumbed to injuries. In addition, there were 63 injured > people of whom 29 were shifted to Tamluk district hospital for > treatment. 5 people were released after treatment to minor injuries and > the rest were still at Nandigarm Rural Hospital to receive treatment or > awaiting transfer to Tamluk Sub-divisional hospital. This is in addition > to the 12 policemen injured in the incident who received medical > attention separately. > > Following the above incidents, there was no further organized resistance > to the movement of the police party who were now able to move to > Sonachura and establish a temporary camp there. Police was also able to > reach a few other neighbouring villages. In course of police search, 8 > illegal fire-arms were recovered which had probably been used against > the police party. > > There is high tension prevailing in the area but the situation is > currently under control. Police camps have been set up in the disturbed > area. Senior police officers are also camping and making efforts to > restore peace. > > > ------ > END > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From shuddha at sarai.net Fri Mar 23 12:17:08 2007 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:17:08 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] CPI (M) and West Bengal CM's Statements on Nandigram In-Reply-To: <460315B4.8080009@googlemail.com> References: <46026845.2040401@sarai.net> <460315B4.8080009@googlemail.com> Message-ID: <460377EC.8020107@sarai.net> Dear Tapas, and Taraprakash, Many thanks for your posts. I am sorry that I did not notice that the official CPI(M) position had in fact been carried earlier on the Reader List already. Thank you for pointing that out. But I am glad that the redundant act of re-posting old material has provoked an interesting conversation. And apologies in advance for a post that I think will be somewhat rambling. I agree with Tapas. It would be interesting to politely request the ladies and gentlemen who publish 'Peoples Democracy' or even 'Janashakti' to carry articles, reports and texts about Singur, Nandigram, West Bengal, or Joseph Stalin that are not necessarily in consonance with the official line of the CPI(M) - entirely in the interests of CPI(M) cadres being exposed to the diversity of positions that can and indeed are being taken on the left today. So that our comrades in the CPI (M) can be better informed about the way that others think about their party's actions and policies. Perhaps PD could carry a 'How They See Us' Box. I am skeptical as to whether such a demand would be assented to, but I would welcome it if it were to happen, and since I am aware that there are CPI(M) members and sympathizers on this list, I would be happy if they were in fact to take this request to the party HQ, just as this list has unhesitatingly carried their point of view. Of course, a mailing list is not a party, and should never become one, or even pretend to be one, ('just as a 'revolution is not a dinner party':) ). But a party can occasionally find something of use in the manner in which discussions are carried out in a mailing list. Maybe? Having said that, I would like to add that an authoritarian political culture is not necessarily the monopoly of the CPI(M). It is present, as far as my understanding goes, in almost the entire parliamentary and extra-parliamentary left, not only in India, but elsewhere as well. Of course it is a central feature of all political currents in India, and no formation, neither ML, nor Gandhian, nor Socialist, nor of course the Congress or the regional parties, not even Dalit formations, can claim immunity from the malaise of a deeply hierarchical, patriarchal and authoritarian style of politics. I am not even discussing the inner political culture of the RSS and the Sangh Parivar. I am also aware that this runs deep in the voluntary and NGO sector. As far as I am concerned, in the matter of the ethos and style of politics, it does not really matter as to whether you are Gandhian, or Maoist, or CPI(M) or Congress or BJP or a functionary of an NGO. Perhaps this is because the objective of seizing power (or a thin slice of power) or of holding on to power (or a thin slice of power) is all that motivates us all on the left. Social transformation, the work of creating and sustaining different ways of acting, producing, relating to others is seen as a secondary activity - somethign to be left for generations to come. This is what we are told can happen in the sunrise that follows the sunset of Capital. Notice, that I am deliberately saying 'us', rather than creating a purist distinction between - them - the CPI (M) and others ('us'? - affilated, or unaffiliated) on the left. For now, we are told, the important task is the seizure, (not the dismantling, but the seizure) of the organs of political power. Having done that, all that needs to be done is the 'nationalization', or 'statization' of production, all else can be as it was before. In the 1930s - factory in the erstwhile USSR was never very different from a factory in the USA. The Leninist enthusiasm for Fordist assembly line production techniques is an indication of actually how similar they were. The rhetoric of 'Peoples Armies', 'Peoples Polices', 'Liberated Zones', 'Parallel States', 'New Democracies' et al, only replicates the institutional mechanisms and mores of the state and capital. The tranformation that occurs is more nomnclatural (or Nomenklautural?) then substantive. It is interesting to reminisce at this point of time that one of the forgotten central demands of the revolutionary working class movement in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centruy was the abolition of standing armies. This is a demand that was actualized in the Paris Commune and in the heady early days of Soviet power. This demand was made based on an understanding that the attempt at forming a new form of social organization required a departure from earlier forms of control in politics and society. It was not seen as a peripheral, or marginal part of the programme of revolutionary politics, but was seen as central. It is interesting to speculate as to what shape the legacy of the communist movement would have taken if the insistence on not having standing armies had won the day. The police action in West Bengal, and the actions of 'Armed Cadres' by the parliamentary and the extra-parliamentary left in West Bengal, or a day later in Chattisgarh, are the acts of the 'standing armies' of the left, or in the service of the left in India. They are both signals of the distance that the imagination of the left in our milieu has travelled from the originary revolutionary impulses that sustained the international movements for the emancipation of working peoples everywhere. All that the left wants now is power. The consequences of this desire are thattoo little attention is being paid or has been paid on how we might live and act in the present in a manner that corresponds to our desires for a million revolutionary transformations in every sphere of life. In a manner that runs counter to the logic of power. Perhaps if we pay some attention to these un-named and un-namable areas of life, perhaps if the left were as attentive, or more attentive to the task of creating libraries, attending to and thinking about health, thiking about the relationships between men and women and generations, thinking about and actually becoming active in the sphere of production, experimenting with technology and knowledge, than it were to the task of amassing either money, or arms, or votes - then situations such as Nandigram would be fewer. Doing this does not necessarily mean that the entire left rediscovers itself as a bunch of NGOs. Because NGOs do not aim at the revolutionary transformation of life, they aim at making life as it is, more bearable, and most often they act at the interstices of failed state action, and there is nothing wrong or right with that, it is just not a fundamentally political objective. What I am hinting at means a rethinking of what it means to be political on an everyday basis. For instance, (to give a small example) it means thinking about the nature of work and work spaces, about whether or not offices have creches for workers with children. When was the last time you heard a trade union make a demand for creches for workers in India? And as far as I know the vast majority of working people in India, especially, but not only working women, do have some responsibility for the care of their young. When was the last time you heard about an organized trade union think about the state of toilets in factories. When did you last see a library run by a left organization for workers, students, the general public, that did not only have party or 'progressive' literature? The heritage of the first international, (which Marx was a key part of) actually envisaged a direct intervention in the fabric of social and cultural life - hence the fundamental transformations in the everyday life of working peoples that took place in the nineteenth century - were the left were more busy thinking about food, day care, libraries, transport, pedagogy, health and even sexuality than they were about winning elections, making loud noises in parliaments and courts, protecting SEZs or killing police constables (I am deliberately talking about Dantewara, in the same breath as I am about Nandigram), then we might actually see the formation of a different kind of politics I am trying to invoke a kind of politics that requires patience and care, not glamorous revolutionary rhetoric and spectacles of action and staged resistance or martyrdom. But I do believe that it is a kind of poltics that is fundamentally more revolutionary. Perhaps, the events of Nandigram can focus some thought in this direction. regards Shuddha Tapas Ray wrote: > A few thoughts, for whatever they are worth: > > 1. As Taraprakash points out, the CPI-M line has indeed been articulated > on this list by some members. > > 2. In my understanding, the list is under no obligation to carry the > CPI-M's, the West Bengal CM's, the Prime Minister's, the President's, > the UN Secretary General's, or anybody else's views, unless he/she/they > are list members. Even members' rights are of a limited nature, > circumscribed by the laws of the land and the list's own rules. > > 3. Therefore, it is a magnanimous gesture on the part of Shuddhabrata > and the list to post and to carry, respectively, statements issued by > the CPI-M and the Chief Minister, and one can only hope that those who > asked for that favour, will appreciate the democratic values expressed > through this gesture. > > At the same time, one wonders if any person or organization affiliated > to the CPI-M or other Left Front partners would oblige if a statement > criticising the CPI-M or the Chief Minister were sought to be posted on > a forum administered by or accessible to them. > > 4. The official statements have some curiosity value, and I enjoyed > reading them. > > 5. The CPI-M statement seems to suggest, without stating this directly, > that the agitation was aimed at disrupting the process related to > conferral of "Nirmal" status on East Midnapur. The only thing surprising > about this is its crudity. Otherwise, this line - any disturbance is the > opposition's conspiracy to show the working people's paradise in a poor > light - is well-worn. > > Incidentally, if memory serves one right, some years ago the then > undivided district of Midnapore became a "fully literate" state. It > would be interesting to know the present level of its literacy. > > Tapas > > > > Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: > >>Dear All, >> >>Even as reports of how DYFI (CPI-M Youth Mass Organization) cadre were >>involved in the violence at Nandigram are coming in, the official party >>line on the events at Nandigram is beginning to circulate on the internet. >> >>See Economic Times, March 21, Nandigram Battle Now Veering Towards >>Courts (Gives a report on the involvement of DYFI cadre in the Nandigram >> Violence) >>(http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/Nandigram_battle_now_veering_towards_courts/articleshow/1785742.cms) >> >>This morning, I received an e mail forwarded by Gayatri Chatterjee (from >>Pune) simply saying that point of view had not as yet been articulated >>on the Reader List. In the interests of the record and the ongoing >>debate on this list, I am now posting this on the Reader List. >> >>I neither endorse, nor vouch for the contents of the CPI (M)'s official >>statements, nor do I claim to speak for the Chief Minister of West >>Bengal. My position on the culpability of the CPI (M), and the police >>and the government of West Bengal in the massacre at Nandigram remain >>unchanged, and those interested in knowing what my position is, need >>only to read my last posting on the matter on this list. >> >>However, since these are public documents, I think it is only fair that >>they have a public life, and be publicly scrutinized, and if need be, >>interrogated. >> >>regards >> >>Shuddha >>------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >> >>1. CPI (M) Official Statement on Events in Nandigram >> >> >>COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MARXIST) >>Central Committee >>A.K. Gopalan Bhawan, 27-29, Bhai Vir Singh Marg New Delhi 110 001 >>Website: http://www.cpim.org email: cpim at vsnl.com >> >>March 19, 2007 >> >> >>What Happened in Nandigram? >> >> >> >>The trouble in Nandigram began with attacks on Panchayat members, >>administrative officials and police on 3rd January, 2007. The following >>is a brief of what happened thereafter. >> >>1. East Midnapur was poised to be declared as “Nirmal” district, for >>excellent achievements in sanitation. A central team was scheduled to >>visit Nandigram on 13th and 14th January for this purpose. In fact, >>the central team has already visited other areas of the district and >>watched the noteworthy success in this regard. On 3rd January, the >>preparatory meeting for the visit was taking place in Kalicharanpur Gram >> Panchayat office. Some activists of Trinamool Congress gathered there >>at around 11-30 in the morning. They demanded that the land acquisition >>notice, served by Haldia Development Authority be scrapped and the >>Panchayat declare that there would be no such acquisition. Samerun Bibi, >>the Panchayat pradhan, refused to heed their demand. They were violent >>and abusive. They ransacked the Panchayat office. The Panchayat >>secretary was injured in the attack. The mob also pelted stones on the >>health sub-centre. It was only after this that the Panchayat pradhan >>informed the Nandigram police station. As the police vehicle was >>proceeding towards the village, they were attacked by an armed mob. >>11policemen including 2 ASIs were seriously injured. The police vehicle >>was torched. A rifle was also looted which was later returned to police >>station by TMC MLA Subhendu Adhikary. After some time another mob >>attacked a police car of Khejuri police station about five kilometers >>away and attempted to burn it. The police have not entered the area >>since then. >> >>2. The miscreants started moving with arms and began to destroy bridges >>and culverts linking roads. They created an atmosphere of terror. On 4th >>and 5th January, they virtually destroyed every link road and bridge >>connecting Nandigram and Khejuri to the outside world. They also burnt a >>25KV electric sub-station. An armed gang equipped with firearms attacked >>the CPI(M) local committee office in Rajaramchawk and burnt it. Cadres >>of TMC and other forces roamed around and threatened CPI(M) leaders and >>sympathizers with dire consequences. On both these days many houses of >>CPI(M) workers and sympathizers were looted. A large number of CPI(M) >>workers were forced to leave the villages and take shelter in a nearby >>camp. That the mob was armed could be seen in the photographs published >>in newspapers. The entire incident was meticulously planned. >> >>3. The ousted CPI(M) workers and their families took shelter in a camp >>in the southern side of the Bhangabera bridge in Khejuri area. On 6th >>January miscreants of the so-called Jami Rakkha Committee (a >>conglomeration of TMC, Congress, SUCI, Naxalite groups, Jamiat >>ulema-e-Hind) attacked the camp at about 3 a.m. They even prepared >>bunkers for the attack. There was resistance from the camp and in the >>ensuing conflict three of the attackers died. One of them, Seikh Salim >>was a resident of South Kendemari, about 12 Kms away from the spot. It >>was evident that they gathered there to attack the camp in a planned >>manner. >> >>4. On 7th January morning, the miscreants attacked the house of Sankar >>Samanta, CPI(M) Panchayat member, looted his house and burnt it. They >>dragged Samanta to Shitpara and burnt him alive in a haystack. >> >>5. Bhudeb Mandal, another CPI(M) supporter was seriously injured in the >>attack. The miscreants left him, assuming that he was dead. He however, >>regained consciousness and somehow reached a relative’s house. Later he >>was hospitalized. In all 153 houses were looted. The houses and shops of >>Lakhman Mandal, Sonachura Panchayat pradhan, Samerun Bibi, Kalicharanpur >>Panchayat pradhan, Arjun Maity, Dr, Pratap Paul, Rabiul, Annapurna Das >>-- all CPI(M) workers -- were burnt. >> >>6. Among those evicted from the villages are 2 district Committee >>members of CPI(M), 2 local committee secretaries, 6 zonal committee >>members, 16 local committee members and 56 Party members. More than 200 >>families were forced to stay in relief camp or relatives’ houses. Later, >>the number surged and more than 2000 people were ousted from the >>village. Their houses were looted and their lands were forcefully >>occupied. Hundreds of people were forced to pay ransom. >> >>7. The attack spread to adjoining Khejuri and some parts of rural >>Haldia. On 7th February, 2007 a police party went to the village to >>discuss the issues. They were brutally attacked without any provocation. >>The local OC was seriously injured. Despite this, the police did not >>retaliate and returned back. The miscreants dragged Sadhucharan >>Chatterjee, an elderly police person and killed him. His body was found >>in the river after a three day search. >> >>8. On 10th February, Sunita Mondal, a student of class ten, was brutally >>murdered after torture. Her body was found on a tree, with rope tied to >>her neck. Her father was ousted earlier by miscreants. The police could >>not enter into the village to collect information even after such an >>incident. Members of the State Women Commission were also faced >>resistance when they tried to investigate the matter. >> >>9. On 17th and 18th February, another 22 houses were burnt by the TMC >>miscreants. Many more families were forced to flee from the villages. >> >>10. On 3rd March, one housewife (name withheld) was mass raped by a gang >>of TMC miscreants led by Srihari Samanta, a local TMC leader. The victim >>is from a CPI(M) sympathizer’s family and refused to join the >>programme of Bhumi Rakkha Committee. The victim was hospitalized and her >>entire statement has been recorded. >> >>11. The Chief Minister has stated categorically that there will be no >>forced land acquisition in Nandigram. On 9th February the CM pointedly >>told in a public meeting in Khejuri that without the consent of the >>people of Nandigram nothing will be done. Later, on a number of >>occasions during the last one month, the CM has repeatedly stated in >>very clear terms that the proposed Chemical Hub would be shifted if the >>people of Nandigram did not accept the proposal. Even after that, there >>was no respite from the atrocities perpetrated by the Bhumi Rakkha >>Committee, making it amply clear that the question is not at all that of >>“land acquisition” but a political strategy to maintain a forced >>acquisition of Nandigram by a combination of political forces. >> >>12. The district administration, meanwhile called a series of all >>Party meetings and peace meetings, mostly boycotted by TMC, Congress and >>Bhumi Rakkha Committee. The last such meeting was organized on 10th >>March where representatives from Left Front partners and BJP were >>present. TMC, Congress and Bhumi Rakkha Committee declined the >>invitation. It was decided in the meeting that the administration would >>move to restore reconstruction work and normalcy in the area and anyone >>resisting the constitutional duties would be legally dealt with. >> >>13. On 14th March, the police entered the area after prior announcements >>through loudspeaker. When they reached Sonachura, they were attacked >>with bombs and guns. In the ensuing confrontation 13 people were killed. >>One more person was killed due to bomb injury. >> >>------------------------------------ >> >>2. Statement by Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya >>in the West Bengal Assembly on March 15, 2007 >>On Incidents At Nandigram >> >>A proposal for setting up a mega-chemical hub and a multi-product >>Special Economic Zone (SEZ) over about 10,000 acres of land in Nandigram >>Police Station of Purba Medinipur district was under consideration of >>the state government. Though no final decision has yet been taken about >>the exact location of the projects, on December 29, 2006 an informal >>notice for public information regarding likely location of this project >>was circulated by the Haldia Development Authority to all blocks and >>Gram Panchayat offices of the area. This notice was by way of >>information only. No specific location of the project had yet been >>decided by the state government. Once this notice reached various block >>offices, there was massive resentment among those people who feared that >>their land would be acquired. A number of political organizations and >>parties formed a Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee. On January 3, 2007, >>an unruly mob of about 3,000 people attacked a police party under the >>charge of officer-in-charge, Nandigram police station and set fire to a >>police jeep. In another incident on the same day, another police jeep >>was set on fire at Garchakraberia Bazar. 23 police personnel also >>received injuries in these clashes. Three cases were registered in >>Nandigram police station over these incidents. >> >>These incidents were followed by several meetings between the >>administration and the opposition parties in which it was clarified by >>the district administration that no notification for acquisition of land >>had yet been finalized. In spite of that, local feelings ran very high >>and a bandh was declared in Nandigram police station area on January 4, >>2007. Following this, peace meetings were held in several places of >>Nandigram police station on January 6, 2007, but even after the >>meetings, the situation turned violent. In the night of January 6/ >>January 7, 2007 there was a major clash between two groups – one owing >>allegiance to the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee and the other owing >>allegiance to the ruling Left Front. In this clash, four people, who >>were residents of various villages of Nandigram police station, were >>killed and two separate cases were started over this incident. This was >>followed by ransacking of CPI(M) Party Offices at several places and >>incidents of violence and arson at the residence of several local >>leaders of the CPI(M). The agitators also damaged many bridges and >>culverts and dug up several roads as a result of which, the movement of >>vehicles became impossible after January 7, 2007. >> >>In a series of peace meetings convened by the district Magistrate, Purba >>Medinipur over this issue starting from January 8, 2007 it was >>unanimously decided that all parties would take necessary steps to >>restore peace in the locality and police camps would be set up at the >>disturbed places. Despite these resolutions, however, it was not >>possible to repair the damaged roads, culverts and bridges and it was >>also not possible to deploy the state police within the affected parts >>of the Nandigram police station. Despite several measures initiated by >>the district administration to restore peace, execution of all >>government projects and schemes came to a standstill since no government >>officer was allowed to enter the affected areas. Gradually, a number of >>people owing allegiance to CPI(M) had to move their places of normal >>residence in Nandigaram police station and take shelter in several >>temporary camps at Khejuri. Tension between the two rival groups kept on >>mounting. There were several incidents of violence between February 03, >>and February 06, 2007 in which fire was exchanged or bombs exploded >>between the rival groups. On February 07, 2007 a sub-inspector of >>police, Shri Sadhu Chatterji had gone to investigate a report received >>about destruction of road communication. He was waylaid by an unruly mob >>and killed. His dead body was recovered only on February 10, 2007. Over >>this incident also, a case was started but all these cases could not be >>investigated properly because the police was not able to enter the >>affected areas. >> >>On February 11, 2007, the chief minister in a public meeting at a place >>close to the affected area made an open commitment that no land for >>setting up the chemical hub and SEZ would be acquired at Nandigram if >>the people of Nandigram were against such acquisition. >>However, sporadic incidents of violence involving displaced people in >>the camps at Khejuri and the people of Bhangaberia and Sonachura areas >>of Nandigram police station continued. It was resolved in one of the >>peace meetings that both parties would maintain peace during the >>Madhyamik Pariksha (Class-X) which was going on. The Madhyamik Pariksha >>was over on March 5, 2007. The district magistrate, Purba Medinipur >>again convened an all-party peace meeting. In this meeting he proposed >>that peace should be restored, police should enter the affected areas of >>Nandigram police station, damaged bridges and roads should be repaired >>and normalcy restored to the entire affected areas. However, the >>representatives of the Trinamool Congress and the Indian National >>Congress did not attend this meeting. >> >>It was decided that this law-less situation in Nandigram and its >>surroundings should not be allowed to continue, the damaged roads, >>bridges and culverts should be repaired without any further delay and >>police should take up the investigations in the cases of murder. >>Thereafter, police force was mobilized and it was decided that the force >>would enter Nandigarm through three separate routes under the leadership >>of senior offices. The police force was asked to exercise utmost >>restraint. They were further directed to use loud hailers to explain the >>purpose of the movement of the police party to the people of that >>locality which is to establish peace and restore normalcy. Ultimately, >>the police movement started about 10.00 a.m in the morning of March 14, >>2007. While one of the police parties could move into Nandigaram without >>any resistance two other police parties were confronted by large >>gatherings of hostile people. When the police asked them to disperse, >>they paid no heed and resorted to heavy brick-batting causing injury to >>some policemen. To disperse the mob, police lobbed tear gas shells. The >>mob them became more agitated and started hurling bombs followed by >>opening of fire. A few policemen sustained splinter injuries. To control >>the situation, police initially fired rubber bullets, but this, again, >>yielded no results. Ultimately, the police had to open fire in >>self-defence causing dispersal of the mob. This incident took place near >>Bhangaberia bridge. Another police party also met with violent >>resistance at Adhikaripara where heavy brick batting, bomb throwing took >>place. As a result, some policemen were injured. In both the incidents, >>12 policemen including Additional S.P, Tamluk and Assistant S.P. >>(Probationer) received splinter injuries and injuries due to brick >>batting. Serious and extensive injuries could be avoided as all the >>policemen were in protective gear. However, a number of people were >>injured in the police firing and it is believed that some of the >>agitators were also injured by the bombs that they were hurling. Till >>8.00 p.m on March 14, 2007, according to the report received at the >>State Headquarters, 14 people died including some critically injured >>people who succumbed to injuries. In addition, there were 63 injured >>people of whom 29 were shifted to Tamluk district hospital for >>treatment. 5 people were released after treatment to minor injuries and >>the rest were still at Nandigarm Rural Hospital to receive treatment or >>awaiting transfer to Tamluk Sub-divisional hospital. This is in addition >>to the 12 policemen injured in the incident who received medical >>attention separately. >> >>Following the above incidents, there was no further organized resistance >>to the movement of the police party who were now able to move to >>Sonachura and establish a temporary camp there. Police was also able to >>reach a few other neighbouring villages. In course of police search, 8 >>illegal fire-arms were recovered which had probably been used against >>the police party. >> >>There is high tension prevailing in the area but the situation is >>currently under control. Police camps have been set up in the disturbed >>area. Senior police officers are also camping and making efforts to >>restore peace. >> >> >>------ >>END >>_________________________________________ >>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. >>To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list >>List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From hpp at vsnl.com Fri Mar 23 12:42:20 2007 From: hpp at vsnl.com (hpp at vsnl.com) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:12:20 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Nandigram protest rallies in Calcutta Message-ID: There will be two citizen rallies in Calcutta tomorrow, i.e. Saturday 24 March 2007, in protest against the Nandigram massacre by the shameless and murderous CPI(M). One is a "Walk for Democracy", from Deshbandhu Park (near Shyambazar 5-point crossing) to Esplanade, beginning at 2 pm. The other is a rally from Nandan to Esplanade, at 2 30 pm. Be there and make your conscience count. And remember, in order for us to be able to play our role as citizens in a democracy, the rally organisers who have taken the initiative also have to bear the organising costs. So make sure you express your appreciation and reciprocate by making a contribution. Read "What really happened in Nandigram" here: http://www.countercurrents.org/nandigram-cpiml230307.htm V Ramaswamy cuckooscall.blogspot.com From cahen.x at levels9.com Thu Mar 22 17:59:52 2007 From: cahen.x at levels9.com (xavier cahen) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 13:29:52 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] pourinfos Newsletter / 03-21 to 03-28-2007 Message-ID: <460276C0.5@levels9.com> pourinfos.org l'actualité du monde de l'art / daily Art news ----------------------------------------------------------------------- >From Wenesday March 21, 2006 to Wenesday March 28 2007 (included) ------------------------------------------------------------------- (mostly in french) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ NOTRE ELECTION PRESIDENTIELLE 2007 / OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 2007 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://pourinfos.org/fichiers/_elections_04311_pourinfos_candidats.pdf Pourinfos.org is coming into the presidential campaign Listen to their headquarters (audio files in french - second part) - José Bové http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsbove-tit-Jose-Bove-reponses- - Marie-Georges Buffet http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsbuffet-tit-Marie-Georges-Buffet-reponses- - Nicolas Dupont-Aignan http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsdupont-aignan-tit-Nicolas-Dupont-Aignan-reponses- - Nicolas Sarkozy http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionssarko-tit-Nicolas-Sarkozy-reponses- - Olivier Besancenot http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsbesancenot-tit-Olivier-Besancenot-reponses- - Philippe de Villiers http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsvilliers-tit-Philippe-de-Villiers-reponses- - Ségolène Royal http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionssego-tit-Segolene-Royal-reponses- Nicolas Sarkozy answer, march 15 2007: "Together everything is possible" http://pourinfos.org/art-34643-tit-Reception-du-courrier Write your comments ! http://pourinfos.org/index.php?commentaires=34302&categorie=elections @ 001 (21/03/2007) Meetings: Bernard Stiegler, To reconsider esthetics for a new time of sensitive, conferences of "Esthetique et sociéte" (Aesthetic and society), March 21, 2007, Alphabetville, Friche Belle de Mai , Marseille, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34551-tit--Bernard-Stiegler-Repenser-l-esthetique -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 002 (21/03/2007) Meetings: “All that for nothing” Meeting signatures of Jean-Daniel Berclaz for his catalogue, Wednesday March 21, 2007, imagespassages, Bonlieu artotheque and Library , Annecy, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34616-tit--Tout-ca-pour-rien-Seance-de-signatures -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 003 (21/03/2007) Residence: Call to candidature, seeks artists women, residence, artiste studio, Miss China, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34648-tit-Residence-Appel-a-candidature- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 005 (21/03/2007) Meetings: Stembogen, Samon Takahashi, Wednesday March 21, 2007, Bookshop En Marge, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34649-tit--Stembogen-Samon-Takahashi-mercredi-21 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 006 (21/03/2007) Meetings: Roland Barthes and Wikipédia? Participative debate, Wednesday March 21, 2007, Au Progres, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34650-tit--Roland-Barthes-et-Wikipedia-Debat -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 007 (21/03/2007) Publication: DVD, editions VOuÏR, Fontaines, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34664-tit--DVD-les-editions-VOuIR-Fontaines- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 008 (21/03/2007) Exhibition: Free party 2, ecole superieure d’art de la ville de Grenoble, Grenoble, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34670-tit--Free-party-2-ecole-superieure-d-art-de-la -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 009 (21/03/2007) Exhibition: "extrapolation verte", Vincent+Feria, contemporary art museum of Caracas, Venezuela, la Galerie, University Paris 8, Saint Denis, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34672-tit--extrapolation-verte-Vincent-Feria- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 010 (21/03/2007) Various: presentation of The Gallery Film, editions RE:VOIR, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34678-tit-Divers-presentation-de-The-Film-Gallery- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 011 (21/03/2007) Various: Open day, Wednesday March 21, 2007, Ecole superieure des beaux-arts de Tours, Tours, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34682-tit-Divers-Journee-portes-ouvertes-mercredi -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 012 (21/03/2007) Call : ViBGYOR International Film Festival 2007, Chetana Media Institut, Thrissur, India. http://pourinfos.org/art-34683-tit--ViBGYOR-International-Film-Festival-2007- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 013 (22/03/2007) Meetings: Residences of artists: where does engagement reside? Thursdays of the Sorbonne, Thursday March 22, 2007, University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34606-tit--d-artistes-ou-reside-l-engagement- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 014 (22/03/2007) Performance: Suspended, performance of Carole Douillard, March 22, 2007, Lieu Unique, Nantes, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34624-tit--Suspended-performance-de-Carole -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 015 (22/03/2007) Meetings: Dany Robert Dufour, Cycle: Malaise dans la democratie (Faintness in the democracy) Thursday March 22, 2007, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34657-tit--Dany-Robert-Dufour-Cycle-Malaise-dans -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 016 (22/03/2007) Publication: Use of the images, Varied Philippe Jacquin-Ravot, Fage editions, Lyon, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34665-tit--De-l-usage-des-images-Varia-Philippe -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 017 (22/03/2007) Publication: “Industries” N# 77, ETC review quarterly of current art, Montreal, Canada. http://pourinfos.org/art-34667-tit--Industries-no-77-ETC-revue -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 018 (22/03/2007) Exhibiton : 1st Salon du dessin contemporain (show of contemporary drawing), 22 at March 26, 2007, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34671-tit--1er-Salon-du-dessin-contemporain-22-au -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 019 (22/03/2007) Formation: Call for worshop, Maxwell City, Atelier Nord, Oslo, Norway. http://pourinfos.org/art-34673-tit-Formation-Call-for-worshop-Maxwell-City- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 020 (22/03/2007) Formation: Master of Art in Public, INTERFACE, School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, Belfast, United Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34674-tit-Formation-Master-of-Art-in-Public- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 021 (22/03/2007) Formation: What radiophonic art? Sound workshops, documentary of creation in the radio, Phonurgia Nova, Arles, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34676-tit-Formation-Qu-est-ce-que-l-art -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 022 (22/03/2007) Job: Graphic designer, webmaster assistance, Lmx, Marseille, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34677-tit--Graphiste-aide-webmaster-Lmx- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 023 (22/03/2007) Various: Petition: A “ministry for Immigration and national Identity”? , Hermes, History in network of Mediterranean , University Paris 7-Denis Diderot et Tunis 1-La Manouba. http://pourinfos.org/art-34679-tit-Divers-Petition-Un-ministere-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 024 (22/03/2007) Various: Prize list Videoformes 2007, Clermont-Ferrand, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34680-tit-Divers-Palmares-Videoformes-2007- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 025 (22/03/2007) Call: unDEAF: Call for participation, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. http://pourinfos.org/art-34684-tit--unDEAF-Call-for-participation- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 026 (22/03/2007) Call: res-qualia.net, on line, Barcelona, Spain. http://pourinfos.org/art-34685-tit--res-qualia-net-on-line-Barcelona- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 027 (22/03/2007) Call: Dislocate 07 - Exhibition and Symposium , Ginza Art Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan. http://pourinfos.org/art-34687-tit--Dislocate-07-Exhibition-and-Symposium- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 028 (22/03/2007) Call: Vectors Summer Fellowships 2007, Institute for Multimedia Literacy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Usa. http://pourinfos.org/art-34688-tit--Vectors-Summer-Fellowships-2007- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 029 (22/03/2007) Call: opening of a new space, luxbox gallery, Rennes, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34689-tit--ouverture-d-un-nouvel-espace-luxbox -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 030 (22/03/2007) Call: CAPE 07 NOTEbook - Cultural Soup Afrique !, Cape Town , South Africa. http://pourinfos.org/art-34690-tit--CAPE-07-NOTEbook-Cultural-Soup-Afrique -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 031 (22/03/2007) Call: Le livre et l'art, 7 ième édition, r-diffusion (The book and art, 7th edition), Lieu Unique, Nantes, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34691-tit-Appel-participation-Le-livre-et-l-art-7 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 032 (23/03/2007) Meeting: presentation of the 7 new editions MIX, Friday March 23, 2007, Bookshop Michèle Ignazi, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34651-tit--presentation-des-7-nouveautes-aux -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 033 (23/03/2007) Meetings: Artists and collective memory: to remember challenges, cycle art in public spaces, March 23, 2007, University Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34659-tit--Artistes-et-memoire-collective-se -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 034 (23/03/2007) Meetings: Events off - Show of the book, 23 & March 24, 2007, Point Ephemere, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34663-tit--Evenements-off-Salon-du-livre-23-24 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 035 (24/03/2007) Meetings: Transfer, Charles Kalt, Saturday 24 Sunday March 25, 2007, rhinoceros, Strasbourg, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34543-tit--Transfert-Charles-Kalt-samedi-24-et -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 036 (24/03/2007) Meetings: "L'époque des appareils" of Jean-Louis Déotte, on March 24, 2007, international College of philosophy, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34652-tit--L-epoque-des-appareils-de-Jean-Louis -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 037 (24/03/2007) Meetings: Debats Festival BD Bulles en Hauts de Garonne, 24 and March 25, 2007, Cenon, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34655-tit--Debats-Festival-BD-Bulles-en-Hauts-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 038 (25/03/2007) Publication: Cosmic Wonder, Mark DeLong/Jason McLean, editions nieves, Zürich, Switzerland http://pourinfos.org/art-34666-tit--Cosmic-Wonder-Mark-DeLong-Jason -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 039 (26/03/2007) Meetings: Art in my company: why () invest? Mondays of the Culture, on March 26, 2007, Mondays of the Sorbonne, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34656-tit--De-l-art-dans-mon-entreprise-pourquoi -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 040 (26/03/2007) Meetings: “Can the culture change the life? ”, debate, Monday March 26, 2007, La salle de Flaterville, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34662-tit--La-culture-peut-elle-changer-la-vie- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 041 (27/03/2007) Meetings: Meetings on Virtual Reality and Numerical Arts, on Tuesday April 3, 2007, Auditorium of Centre des Arts d’Enghien, Enghien-les Bains, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34607-tit--sur-la-Realite-Virtuelle-et-les-Arts -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 042 (27/03/2007) Screening: 16th edition of Festival Cote court, Ciné 104, Pantin, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34669-tit--16eme-edition-du-Festival-Cote-court- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 043 (27/03/2007) Formation: Workshop Arduino at hangar, Hangar Lab", Barcelona, Spain. http://pourinfos.org/art-34675-tit-Formation-Workshop-Arduino-hangar-Hangar -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 044 (28/03/2007) Exhibition: "Même heure, même endroit" (“Same hour, same place”) , abbey of Maubuisson, Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-33838-tit--Meme-heure-meme-endroit-abbaye-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 045 (28/03/2007) Screening:“Dialogue (S)”, festival of short film, 5th edition, on Wednesday March 28, 2007, Courts toujours, University Paris-Dauphine, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34623-tit--Dialogue-s-festival-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 046 (28/03/2007) Meetings: «Etre un citoyen critique à l’heure d’internet et des flux médiatiques» (“To be a critical citizen at the time of Internet and media flux”, Ecm carre de la Jalles, Saint-Medard-en-Jalles, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34660-tit--Etre-un-citoyen-critique-a-l-heure _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From vedprakash.sharma at gmail.com Thu Mar 22 15:41:15 2007 From: vedprakash.sharma at gmail.com (Vedprakash Sharma) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:41:15 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] I-Fellowship Ist Posting References: <598231.31677.qm@web32108.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <003b01c76c6a$70a80060$6401a8c0@ved6suqbkuh1sf> it may prove to be very exciting debate. the authentisity of such tel Gurus has always been under suspicion. would you think to include Tantriks like Chandraswami too? there have been and are many Guru who give Diksha to very influential persons like the leaders, the industrillists etc. what about them? ----- Original Message ----- From: surya upadhyay To: reader-list at sarai.net ; Surya Prakash Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 2:53 PM Subject: [Reader-list] I-Fellowship Ist Posting Dear All! This is Surya Prakash Upadhyay, Research Scholar, IIT Bombay. This is my first posting on Sarai, Reader-List. I am also an Independent Fellow with Sarai for year 2007. The work with Sarai is titled: "Guru on the Air: Televised Hinduism in contemporary India". Looking forward for more ideas and suggestions. The work is looking at the contemporary religious and spiritual gurus in contemporary Hinduism. Though, this is a case study of one such guru named Asaram Bapu but it supposes that some general characteristics about these gurus could be formed through the study. However, there was no dearth of religious personalities in Hinduism since very ancient times but the recent gurus are somewhat different in many ways. They are not only religious figures but they are also personal counselor, healers, soothsayers, and medicine man at the same time. They suggest ways to live life healthy, happily, and prosperously. They have rejuvenated Ayurveda, and herbal medicines along with the keep-fit meritorious value of Yoga. Also, this particular guru stresses more on the ideal of self-restraint and achievement of self-realization. The modern gurus are not based at any established religious centres or pilgrimages such as Varanasi, or Allahabad. Rather, they have their own local ashrams where their followers come together and instead of praying to god they prey their guru. Also, they are not attached to temples, so they are different from the temple priests. They have their own way of interpreting Hindu philosophy and these gurus propagate through various kinds of amendments in them. As far as this guru is concerned and whatever information, I have, gathered through his literature survey it comes out that he is more inclined towards the Upanishads rather than Veda. It does not mean to say that he discards Vedas but he puts more emphasis on the Upanishads and other puranic scriptures. Also, he includes Buddhist philosophy and treaties on Jainism and Sikhism. From my point, it gives a more broader audience and follower to this guru. One interesting point that is coming out that they readily talk in scientific language and for that they use scientific terms and scientific researches that endorse their view; irrespective of the value placed to that particular research work in the scientific community. Basically, all of these practices are going through the telecast of satsang programs through television cable channels, and therefore, I prefer to call these modern god-people as "Tele-guru". A preliminary survey done among his followers shows that almost 80% of his followers came in his contact through listening his sermons on Sony channel and Sanskara Channel. I am looking at the instrumentality of audio-visual media in the construction and maintenance of religio-spiritual world in contemporary Hinduism and at the process of mobilization of people, particularly, towards this tele-guru. The project is an ethnographic work and would likely to be conducted through interviews, and questionnaire among the devotes and followers of Asaram Bapu, living in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Lucknow. The reason for keeping three different locations is that I want to see the difference between the responses of the devotees of these three cities. Mumbai is a cosmopolitan city and Ahmedabad is the main ashram. Lucknow is a peripheral ashram. In this way, the study will throw more light on the varieties of contemporary religiosity. However, the study looks at the media practice, both old and new and will involve the analysis of print media as well as electronic media and how media is playing its role in the propagation of his organisation in terms of increasing his followers. Till now, I have formed a questionnaire that I will send on the reader-list for your valuable suggestions. Cheers Surya Prakash Upadhyay Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, I.I.T. Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076 surya_rajan21 at yahoo.com surya.upadhyay at gmail.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Now that's room service! Choose from over 150,000 hotels in 45,000 destinations on Yahoo! Travel to find your fit. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070322/6327f2e6/attachment.html From fsrnkashmir at gmail.com Thu Mar 22 21:07:11 2007 From: fsrnkashmir at gmail.com (Shahnawaz Khan) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:07:11 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First Posting Message-ID: <2ad82fd30703220837m4e2abe70l644474c55f155967@mail.gmail.com> *Entertainment Ghosts in Srinagar* Hi everybody, This is my first posting. My name is Shahnawaz Khan, and not Mohd Shahnawaz Khan as it has appeared on the SARAI. I am a journalist based in Srinagar. Associated with KashmirNewz.com and the US based Free Speech Radio News (Pacifica Radio Network) As a SARAI fellow I will be doing a study titled, *Entertainment ghosts in * *Srinagar**: A tale of cinema halls in the city * * * Cinema halls in Srinagar present a sorry tale since they came first under attack, in 1989, right with the outbreak of armed insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir. Radical militant groups were quick to ban the cinema halls, which they saw as promoters of obscenity in the region. With the show business off, the out of business cinema halls became homes to the contingents of para military forces that arrived in unimaginable numbers to fight the insurgency. Some halls like the Palladium in the heart of Srinagar fell to arson. The remains of the hall greet the visitors to the city even today telling the tale of its ilk. 17 years into the insurgency a lot of things have changed in Kashmir. A lot of things that went off the line came back on rails in spite of the insurgency. The education system in Kashmir, for example shot back form a temporary phase of anarchy in early nineties to get back in line. The cable television was introduced during the insurgency. Cable television had hiccups many a times. Radical outfits banned forced their closure many times but system survived and even grew, as there are today even a few local cable channels that go on to beam current affairs too. The hiccups are still there. But for the cinema halls it has been almost a closed chapter. Out of the nine odd cinema halls in Srinagar only one is operational today. Four of these are occupied by the Central Reserve Police Force. The centrally located Palladium Cinema overlooking the historical Ghanta Ghar (Clock tower) stands like a ghost in Lal Chowk area reflecting the tale of its ilk. Cinema owners did make attempts at reopening. With claims of normalcy sounded by successive governments, Broadway cinema located in the high security zone of Sonwar was the first to reopen in 1997. For some years the Boradway was more or less a successful reopening story and others tried to follow. Like the Neelam cinema which is operational even today. For some reasons the Broadway was closed again in 2005. Stringent security measures and a high priced insured ticked attracted little customers. Neelam though operational even today hasn't even undergone renovation. The shows attract very few customers and at times the shows are abandoned for want of customers. Understandably the cinema relies on older or cheaper films. No fresh premiers. One more halls that tried to resume business is the centrally located *Regal *. On the first day of its reopening attempt, the second show had to be abandoned after a grenade attack. The other halls are either occupied by the troops, and have acted also as interrogations centres. For some people these halls occupied by troops sent shivers down the spine. For they signify the terror they have to face. A few others have changed business making the future of cinema bleaker in Kashmir. Ends ----------------------------------------------------------- Are you a publisher interested in indepth news features from Kashmir? Go to www.kashmirnewz.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070322/ab63ab17/attachment.html From pkray11 at gmail.com Fri Mar 23 12:26:24 2007 From: pkray11 at gmail.com (prakash ray) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:26:24 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] CPI (M) and West Bengal CM's Statements on Nandigram Message-ID: <98f331e00703222356k1e1be330v49bd6601dc4fa333@mail.gmail.com> *March 19, 2007 * * CPI (M) Press Release * *I. No Land Acquisition in Nandigram* *There was continuing false propaganda that land is going to be acquired in Nandigram for the chemical hub SEZ. After the January 3 incident and protests by the local people, the Chief Minister of West Bengal had made it clear that there will be no land acquisition if the people do not want it. Following are the facts.* *1. There was no notification for land acquisition in Nandigram. There was only a notice issued by the Haldia Development Authority announcing the intention to acquire land in certain areas.* *2. On February 9, the Chief Minister announced that no land will be acquired without the consent of the people of Nandigram.* *3. Repeatedly in the last few weeks, the Chief Minister has categorically stated that the proposed chemical hub would be shifted if the people do not want it.* *4. The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) after its meeting held on February 17-18 in a press statement announced the following: "The CPI(M) leadership of West Bengal has informed the Polit Bureau that the SEZ proposals for Bengal will be finalized after the changes in the SEZ Act and Rules are brought about at the Central level. The Left parties are already engaged in seeking changes in the SEZ Act. There is no question of any land being acquired for the SEZ projects, as in Nandigram, against the wishes of the people. " * *5. Because all the CPI(M) members and supporters were driven out and the local police and administration have been absent since January 3, 2007 the mischievous propaganda that land will be taken away continued without being countered among the people.* *II. What has been happening in Nandigram Since January 3, 2007* *CPI(M) members and supporters and their families numbering around 2500 were driven out of Nandigram Block I. A thousand of them are staying in relief camps in adjoining areas.* *1. On January 6, armed men of the Jami Rakkha Committee attacked the relief camp on the southern side of the Bhangabera bridge in Khejuri area. There was resistance from the camp and in the ensuing conflict three of the attackers died.* *2. On January 7, Sankar Samanta, a CPI(M) panchayat member was burnt alive in a hay stack.* *3. On February 7, policeman Sadhucharan Chatterjee was attacked and killed near Khejuri. His body was thrown into the river.* *4. On February 10, Sunita Mandal, a class X student was brutally murdered after torture.* *5. On March 3, a woman (name withheld) who is from a CPI(M) sympathiser's family was gang raped by miscreants led by a local TMC leader.* -- Prakash K Ray 254, Sutlej, JNU, New Delhi-67 www.cinemela.org (available soon) cinemela.blogspot.com (0) 9811450214 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070323/44d2d1d9/attachment.html From prithu7 at hotmail.com Fri Mar 23 16:22:13 2007 From: prithu7 at hotmail.com (pritham k chakravarthy) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:22:13 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] 1st posting Message-ID: 30. 1. 2007 Today I am theatre professional/activist with over twenty years of experience. Nevertheless my beginning was when I was six years old in a form of theatre existing [I did not know that then] exclusively in Madras, �Sabha Drama�. After seven years of acting with various groups, I was pulled out to concentrate on my Matriculation. Years passed with me completely forgetting their existence for I had moved on to more �political� forms of expression. Over the years watching spaces in which I had performed as a child either pulled down or modified to accommodate other forms of elite entertainment, groups that once thrived as star performers now non-existent, tapes and cds of plays that I had heard as a child suddenly flooding the audio/video market, yet the practitioners of the same never admitted as having provided a vibrant form cultural exchange for crores is what prompts this research. The study is not only about the spaces lost, but active agents who engaged with this space. More and more spaces are being converted into state-of-art performance spaces that can house multi-entertainment like talks, music, dance and theatre. The import of NRI talent means these spaces become homes for �festivals�. Therefore for the last ten years alternative festivals like The Other Festival and Metro Theatre Festivals are more sought after by the younger generation who otherwise replace this older form of entertainment with television serials. And, this is form of entertainment, which was never to be blessed as �theatre� both by practitioners and theoreticians, sadly! Largely I will be approaching primary sources like sabha owners, former members [as many as I can], playwrights, actors and troupe members and scripts and reviews. Also I would like to see what Kristien Rudsill, a doctorate student of theatre from University of Texas whom I guided three years back in her reading of S. Vee. Shekar, one such practitioner. Do I think of theorizing what I do gather? I hope to, not immediately though for it seems to be more important to archive this first. I am not sure what I am going to come up with. This is because some wonderful thoughts like a play, Flight no. 172, a play focusing on Madras being opened to international flights, in sadly lost. This is only one of the lost scripts. I am going to be rebuilding largely from memory. _________________________________________________________________ The idiot box is no longer pass�it's making news and how! http://content.msn.co.in/Entertainment/TV/Default.aspx From hpp at vsnl.com Fri Mar 23 16:24:28 2007 From: hpp at vsnl.com (hpp at vsnl.com) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 10:54:28 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Washed tulsi leaf Message-ID: Com Prakash Ray would have us believe that the CPI(M) is like "dhowa tulshi pata" (i.e. as clean as washed tulsi leaves). Unfortunately this cuts no ice. The CPI(M) is despised and hated by the people of West Bengal. People feel "ghenna" (revulsion) for the party, its leaders, its members and its supporters. The CPI(M) is a pariah dog, just like M/S Narendra Modi, VHP, RSS, Bajrang Dal etc. I wonder about the psyche of such apologists, who are so engrossed with and enamoured of power-lust, that they can be immune to such a barbaric massacre as happened in Nandigram. V Ramaswamy cuckooscall.blogspot.ocm From tapasrayx at gmail.com Fri Mar 23 18:21:28 2007 From: tapasrayx at gmail.com (Tapas Ray) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 08:51:28 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] Nandigram and the Icon In-Reply-To: <460377EC.8020107@sarai.net> References: <46026845.2040401@sarai.net> <460315B4.8080009@googlemail.com> <460377EC.8020107@sarai.net> Message-ID: <4603CD50.9030302@googlemail.com> Shuddha, A quick response: When I said the CPI-M line had been articulated on this list, I meant that some members had put forward arguments in keeping with the CPI-M position, not that official statements had been posted. I apologise if I have been misunderstood. I now find that Prakash Ray has forwarded a CPI-M press release dated March 19. So it seems that from now on, we will have The Word itself, not its interpretation by Prakash Ray and others. It seems to me that Ray is withdrawing from the debate as a person who inevitably interprets (party-generated) texts in articulating it, and is putting in his own place the frozen Word, the icon of his god. I think we should consider whether this list should be a sanctum sanctorum where gods speak in their metallic voices and humans then discuss The Word among themselves, or a commons where people speak to one another in human voices. Tapas Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: > Dear Tapas, and Taraprakash, > > Many thanks for your posts. I am sorry that I did not notice that the > official CPI(M) position had in fact been carried earlier on the Reader > List already. Thank you for pointing that out. But I am glad that the > redundant act of re-posting old material has provoked an interesting > conversation. And apologies in advance for a post that I think will be > somewhat rambling. From p.hatzopoulos-alumni at lse.ac.uk Fri Mar 23 20:02:09 2007 From: p.hatzopoulos-alumni at lse.ac.uk (p.hatzopoulos-alumni at lse.ac.uk) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:32:09 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Time and politics - special issue, part 2 Message-ID: New online journal Re-public < www.republic.gr/en > has just published the second part of its special issue "Time and governace". The issue explores the multiple intersections between time and politics in the attempt to rethink democratic theory and practice. Articles include: Bruno Latour – We are all reactionary today ( http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=129 ) An interview with the vanguard contemporary thinker, Bruno Latour, on the end of progressivism, the limits of representation, the irrelevance of parliaments, the politics of things… _____ Richard Dawkins - About time (http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=125 ) Leading evolutionary biologist Dawkins, on the paradoxes of the notion of time. _____ Jason del Gandio - The coming-temporality ( http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=122 ) Del Gandio outlines a mode of temporality that establishes conditions for the possibility of political revolution, taking cue from Giorgio Agamben's work. _____ Gaynor Macdonald - Temporalising the Indigenous Other ( http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=128 ) Indigenous rights were once denied because Indigenous peoples were not considered modern: now they are denied if they are, argues Gaynor Macdonald, _____ All articles of Re-public are published with a Creative Commons license and can be re-printed freely, by acknowledging their source. From hight at 34n118w.net Sat Mar 24 01:06:50 2007 From: hight at 34n118w.net (hight at 34n118w.net) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:36:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] forward: call for work:CONTRIBUTIONS FOR AMORPHOUS ARCHIVE Message-ID: <3320.76.173.54.91.1174678610.squirrel@webmail.34n118w.net> CONTRIBUTIONS FOR AMORPHOUS ARCHIVE WHAT: Please send an image, jpeg format, of an object that has significant meaning or importance to you. Together with one keyword: it can be descriptive, evocative or abstract. WHY: To explore an archive as a place for secondary information derived from activities­ The presentation of image and text will cause the viewer to conjure the individual’s world and being- thematically, visually, and structurally. It is incomplete, but there is no desire for clarity and completion, as the simulation of thought is rewarding enough. The system of this archive exists without similarity; it exists as a collective through disconnection, through tension and incompletion. What then is a system without order, strategy, method, and classification? SUBMISSIONS: formationrecall at googlemail.com LEGAL NOTICE By submitting to this project, you grant Formation Recall a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to the information provided, at its sole discretion, including storing it on servers and incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed including without limitation published books." From hight at 34n118w.net Sat Mar 24 01:08:36 2007 From: hight at 34n118w.net (hight at 34n118w.net) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:38:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] forward: call for work:CONTRIBUTIONS FOR AMORPHOUS ARCHIVE Message-ID: <3348.76.173.54.91.1174678716.squirrel@webmail.34n118w.net> CONTRIBUTIONS FOR AMORPHOUS ARCHIVE WHAT: Please send an image, jpeg format, of an object that has significant meaning or importance to you. Together with one keyword: it can be descriptive, evocative or abstract. WHY: To explore an archive as a place for secondary information derived from activities­ The presentation of image and text will cause the viewer to conjure the individual’s world and being- thematically, visually, and structurally. It is incomplete, but there is no desire for clarity and completion, as the simulation of thought is rewarding enough. The system of this archive exists without similarity; it exists as a collective through disconnection, through tension and incompletion. What then is a system without order, strategy, method, and classification? SUBMISSIONS: formationrecall at googlemail.com LEGAL NOTICE By submitting to this project, you grant Formation Recall a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to the information provided, at its sole discretion, including storing it on servers and incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed including without limitation published books." From tapasrayx at gmail.com Sat Mar 24 03:56:38 2007 From: tapasrayx at gmail.com (Tapas Ray) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:26:38 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] CPI (M) and West Bengal CM's Statements on Nandigram In-Reply-To: <460377EC.8020107@sarai.net> References: <46026845.2040401@sarai.net> <460315B4.8080009@googlemail.com> <460377EC.8020107@sarai.net> Message-ID: <4604541E.7080900@googlemail.com> Shuddha, Here are one or two more thoughts in addition to my earlier note in response to your post. These are nowhere near your arguments in depth, but I hope they will still add some value to the discussion. I think your call for a million transformations, for "pay(ing) some attention to these un-named and un-namable areas of life", is, sadly, "aronye rodan" (crying in the wilderness). Our political parties, including the CPI-M, are deeply suspicious of, if not openly hostile towards, anything decentralised. This has to do with their authoritarian psychology and commitment to hierarchy, which you have noted. I would say that they have firmly positioned themselves within what can be called the machine ("technique" in Ellul's terms) and are unable and unwilling to leave its security. The Leninist enthusiasm for Fordist production is an obvious manifestations of the technical nature of that politics, and of parties like the CPI-M, which draw inspiration from that era. With their deep-going links with capital, one cannot even expect parties like Congress, BJP or CPI-M to take an alternative approach. Trinamul, with its sporadic protest actions against such things as land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram, and the removal of squatter colonies, seems to be operating at least partly outside that paradigm. However, one wonders whether, or to what extent, its actions are driven by opportunities that present themselves - such as Nandigram - and to what extent by any well-thought-out policy against the model of development exemplified by Nandiram and Singur. (For the benefit of those who draw their sustenance principally from party literature and would like to jump in with comments to the effect that West Bengal is a model of "decentralised governance" - a claim we have heard ad nauseum - I wish to point out that: a) the decentralisation I am referring to is of an order different from panchayati raj, and could be referred to as decentring if that term with its postmodern association were not anathema to parties like the CPI-M. And b) It is known that West Bengal's "decentralised" panchayat system is riddled with inequities and worse, and is a model of centralisation in the hands of "the Party", i.e., the CPI-M. Had this not been the case, West Bengal would not have faced Naxalite violence in West Midnapore, Bankura, Purulia and some other areas, and the CPI-M would not have faced a Trinamul challenge in East Midnapore.) Finally, you have offered some examples of areas in which the CPI-M could have intervened or experimented for the sake of a new way of life, but has not. Let me add one or two of my own. I am not aware of any campaign undertaken by the CPI-M, during its three decades as a ruling party in West Bengal, against petty corruption in day-to-day dealings in government offices, the casteism openly flaunted in matrimonial advertisements, or the immense expenses incurred and considerable public inconvenience caused by "Sharbojanin Pujas" (community pujas). If there have been such campaigns, I would appreciate some information on these. Tapas Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote: > Dear Tapas, and Taraprakash, > > Many thanks for your posts. I am sorry that I did not notice that the > official CPI(M) position had in fact been carried earlier on the Reader > List already. Thank you for pointing that out. But I am glad that the > redundant act of re-posting old material has provoked an interesting > conversation. And apologies in advance for a post that I think will be > somewhat rambling. > > I agree with Tapas. It would be interesting to politely request the > ladies and gentlemen who publish 'Peoples Democracy' or even > 'Janashakti' to carry articles, reports and texts about Singur, > Nandigram, West Bengal, or Joseph Stalin that are not necessarily in > consonance with the official line of the CPI(M) - entirely in the > interests of CPI(M) cadres being exposed to the diversity of positions > that can and indeed are being taken on the left today. So that our > comrades in the CPI (M) can be better informed about the way that others > think about their party's actions and policies. Perhaps PD could carry a > 'How They See Us' Box. > > I am skeptical as to whether such a demand would be assented to, but I > would welcome it if it were to happen, and since I am aware that there > are CPI(M) members and sympathizers on this list, I would be happy if > they were in fact to take this request to the party HQ, just as this > list has unhesitatingly carried their point of view. Of course, a > mailing list is not a party, and should never become one, or even > pretend to be one, ('just as a 'revolution is not a dinner party':) ). > But a party can occasionally find something of use in the manner in > which discussions are carried out in a mailing list. Maybe? > > Having said that, I would like to add that an authoritarian political > culture is not necessarily the monopoly of the CPI(M). It is present, as > far as my understanding goes, in almost the entire parliamentary and > extra-parliamentary left, not only in India, but elsewhere as well. Of > course it is a central feature of all political currents in India, and > no formation, neither ML, nor Gandhian, nor Socialist, nor of course the > Congress or the regional parties, not even Dalit formations, can claim > immunity from the malaise of a deeply hierarchical, patriarchal and > authoritarian style of politics. I am not even discussing the inner > political culture of the RSS and the Sangh Parivar. I am also aware that > this runs deep in the voluntary and NGO sector. As far as I am > concerned, in the matter of the ethos and style of politics, it does not > really matter as to whether you are Gandhian, or Maoist, or CPI(M) or > Congress or BJP or a functionary of an NGO. > > Perhaps this is because the objective of seizing power (or a thin slice > of power) or of holding on to power (or a thin slice of power) is all > that motivates us all on the left. Social transformation, the work of > creating and sustaining different ways of acting, producing, relating to > others is seen as a secondary activity - somethign to be left for > generations to come. This is what we are told can happen in the sunrise > that follows the sunset of Capital. > > Notice, that I am deliberately saying 'us', rather than creating a > purist distinction between - them - the CPI (M) and others ('us'? - > affilated, or unaffiliated) on the left. > > For now, we are told, the important task is the seizure, (not the > dismantling, but the seizure) of the organs of political power. Having > done that, all that needs to be done is the 'nationalization', or > 'statization' of production, all else can be as it was before. In the > 1930s - factory in the erstwhile USSR was never very different from a > factory in the USA. The Leninist enthusiasm for Fordist assembly line > production techniques is an indication of actually how similar they were. > > The rhetoric of 'Peoples Armies', 'Peoples Polices', 'Liberated Zones', > 'Parallel States', 'New Democracies' et al, only replicates the > institutional mechanisms and mores of the state and capital. The > tranformation that occurs is more nomnclatural (or Nomenklautural?) then > substantive. > > It is interesting to reminisce at this point of time that one of the > forgotten central demands of the revolutionary working class movement in > the nineteenth and the early twentieth centruy was the abolition of > standing armies. > > This is a demand that was actualized in the Paris Commune and in the > heady early days of Soviet power. This demand was made based on an > understanding that the attempt at forming a new form of social > organization required a departure from earlier forms of control in > politics and society. It was not seen as a peripheral, or marginal part > of the programme of revolutionary politics, but was seen as central. It > is interesting to speculate as to what shape the legacy of the communist > movement would have taken if the insistence on not having standing > armies had won the day. The police action in West Bengal, and the > actions of 'Armed Cadres' by the parliamentary and the > extra-parliamentary left in West Bengal, or a day later in Chattisgarh, > are the acts of the 'standing armies' of the left, or in the service of > the left in India. They are both signals of the distance that the > imagination of the left in our milieu has travelled from the originary > revolutionary impulses that sustained the international movements for > the emancipation of working peoples everywhere. > > All that the left wants now is power. The consequences of this desire > are thattoo little attention is being paid or has been paid on how we > might live and act in the present in a manner that corresponds to our > desires for a million revolutionary transformations in every sphere of > life. In a manner that runs counter to the logic of power. > > Perhaps if we pay some attention to these un-named and un-namable areas > of life, perhaps if the left were as attentive, or more attentive to the > task of creating libraries, attending to and thinking about health, > thiking about the relationships between men and women and generations, > thinking about and actually becoming active in the sphere of production, > experimenting with technology and knowledge, than it were to the task of > amassing either money, or arms, or votes - then situations such as > Nandigram would be fewer. Doing this does not necessarily mean that the > entire left rediscovers itself as a bunch of NGOs. Because NGOs do not > aim at the revolutionary transformation of life, they aim at making life > as it is, more bearable, and most often they act at the interstices of > failed state action, and there is nothing wrong or right with that, it > is just not a fundamentally political objective. What I am hinting at > means a rethinking of what it means to be political on an everyday > basis. For instance, (to give a small example) it means thinking about > the nature of work and work spaces, about whether or not offices have > creches for workers with children. When was the last time you heard a > trade union make a demand for creches for workers in India? And as far > as I know the vast majority of working people in India, especially, but > not only working women, do have some responsibility for the care of > their young. When was the last time you heard about an organized trade > union think about the state of toilets in factories. When did you last > see a library run by a left organization for workers, students, the > general public, that did not only have party or 'progressive' literature? > > The heritage of the first international, (which Marx was a key part of) > actually envisaged a direct intervention in the fabric of social and > cultural life - hence the fundamental transformations in the everyday > life of working peoples that took place in the nineteenth century - were > the left were more busy thinking about food, day care, libraries, > transport, pedagogy, health and even sexuality than they were about > winning elections, making loud noises in parliaments and courts, > protecting SEZs or killing police constables (I am deliberately talking > about Dantewara, in the same breath as I am about Nandigram), then we > might actually see the formation of a different kind of politics > > I am trying to invoke a kind of politics that requires patience and > care, not glamorous revolutionary rhetoric and spectacles of action and > staged resistance or martyrdom. But I do believe that it is a kind of > poltics that is fundamentally more revolutionary. > > Perhaps, the events of Nandigram can focus some thought in this direction. > > regards > > Shuddha From junglejaya at gmail.com Fri Mar 23 22:54:31 2007 From: junglejaya at gmail.com (jaya iyer) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:54:31 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] trees of delhi Message-ID: <1c53f7ad0703231024m5096cb47o266b94e9e7c1d960@mail.gmail.com> Dear friends, with trees all around delhi disappearing or marked for felling , the very prospect of grey synthetic landscapes and scary endless summers await and then the sheer pain of watching one of natures most magnificient creations - trees - being cut mindlessly for metro, high capacity buses, road widening, commonwealth games village, tunnel road, signature bridge and other "development" projects what is the city going to be like -? urge you to share thoughts, feelings and energy for action - please join us and to begin with can you sign this petition ? http://www.gopetition.com/online/11474.html *ACTION DETAILS:* Date: *Saturday, 24 March* Venue: In front of *Sheikh Sarai* *(PHASE 2) *Local Shopping Centre, Bus Stop, on *J.B Tito marg , just before the turning to Press Enclave Road, to Saket. * *Time 10 am to 12.00 noon* ** *Actvities at the action:* - Signatures for petition - Standing/ walking.... with protest banners/posters - Interactions with people: At market / commuters/ bus passengers, local residents... - Many trees around the place have been tarred upto their trunks due to HCBS. It is proposed that we break the ground around as a symbolic gesture. We need to get tools and perhaps help to do this. - At the end of the action give a copy of the petition to office of the State Transport Authority located at the adjacent shopping centre. *State transport authority is part of Department of Transport which has planned this entire project * - 1. *Mobilise people- we need people , strength and need to come together ...* 2. Bring in banners, posters, slogans, songs anything we can use . Big fonts- written in in colurs like red, green, dark blue will standout./ Prepare big placards with slogans that can be worn around the neck can be even blank we can finalise it later. 3. Please also wear some, any Green colour... or something that is symbolic of trees like a green laurel/wreath...! 4. any kind of support for media / design etc,. is very welcome *Some suggested slogans* - Cut down on cars Not trees - Rise! stop felling trees - STOP: felling trees, RELAX : with trees , GO: green Looking forward to seeing you on Saturday and your ideas..... Trees for Delhi is a network of individuals and organsitions who care for the city and all it's being - join the list serve - treesfordelhi at yahoogroups.com we also have a small group looking at delhi's environmental issues as a whole called- zinda dilli, let us know if you are interested - write to us at zinda.dilli at gmail.com or zinda-dilli at googlegroups.com or http://groups.google.com/group/zinda-dilli?hl=en peace and trees ajay On 3/21/07, reader-list-request at sarai.net wrote: > > Send reader-list mailing list submissions to > reader-list at sarai.net > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > reader-list-request at sarai.net > > You can reach the person managing the list at > reader-list-owner at sarai.net > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of reader-list digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Re: Need help - Film(s) on football (ayush) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 04:02:08 +0000 (GMT) > From: ayush > Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Need help - Film(s) on football > To: faizan ahmed > Cc: reader-list at sarai.net > Message-ID: <50305.2934.qm at web25403.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-7" > > Dear Faizan, > > Hip Hip Hurray made somewhere in 1980s is a film on football. Talks about > a coach and how he transforms a school football team into champions. It has > Raj Kiran as the coach. > > thanks > > ayush. > > > ----- Original Message ---- > From: faizan ahmed > To: Sent: Friday, 16 March, 2007 3:13:24 PM > Subject: [Reader-list] Need help - Film(s) on football > > Dear Members of this list I am looking for a copy of an old (thogh not > that old) film called "Football Champion". It's from 1973 and it's made by > A.B.Raj from Madras . Does any one have any idea??? how can i acquire this > one??? Or any other Indian film on football... please let me know. > Thanks S. M. Faizan Ahmed > > > Here's a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > > > > ___________________________________________________________ > What kind of emailer are you? Find out today - get a free analysis of your > email personality. Take the quiz at the Yahoo! Mail Championship. > http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: > http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070321/8bb5465a/attachment.html > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > reader-list mailing list > reader-list at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > > > End of reader-list Digest, Vol 44, Issue 70 > ******************************************* > -- shanti shalom peace .... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070323/0862a51d/attachment.html From indersalim at gmail.com Fri Mar 23 23:16:23 2007 From: indersalim at gmail.com (inder salim) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 23:16:23 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] ifs-07, first posting Message-ID: <47e122a70703231046t80238ccqa0e8262619bd8545@mail.gmail.com> Hi I am: *This indersalim stuff from Kashmir*. I am a performance artist. ( please include the 'theater performances' here, though I am not strictly in the practice of doing things on stage. ) The art-in-public- space, yes, I do, but the definition is quite vast, so no big claims. I try to conceptualize my action ( performance ) with ongoing conflicts (both political and otherwise ) in mind, but as you know, the form incorporated changes the dynamics of ' the action' even. So, I believe the the unpredictability of doing a performance… I enclose three poem pieces, the second one I ended with a little performance at Performance poetry thing organized by Vivek Naranyan at Sarai some days back. My project is to organize performance art, to collaborate and initiate performances anywhere in India or abroad. So I am myself waiting for a surprise or so. But meanwhile : * * *YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI* * Men keep on pissing near the wall Till a graffiti grows: YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI And if men keep on pissing near the wall They imagine reading a line YEH PADNA MANA HAI** Next to the line YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI. And if the fermentation of the absorbed piss begins to emit those nose wrenching fumes, the complacent administrator's nose comes closer to it to arrange an alternative in the nearby vicinity. And if a money generating toilet structure comes up a little away from the disgraced wall, The text: YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI Becomes idle and meaningless Till some poorly paid workers of different Political parties paste glossy Posters of their masters underneath. And once the colourful posters of Politicians and their children politicians Appear underneath the line YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI The artist-in-public-space Inserts a word *NAHEE**** In the line *YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI* At an appropriate place. For some real men to impart some real meaning, To their age old habit Of pissing in the public space. * Yahan mootna manah hai = pissing is prohibited here. ** Yeh panda manah hai= reading this is prohibited *** Nahee= not *……………………………………………………………………………….* * * * * *Teri to lal hai ( yours is red )* * * The more you climb the more it will grow;- On a magical tree, This particular species of monkeys in their own jolly great mood, they simply kept on Jumping and climbing Climbing and jumping, Till they decided to look down To see the earth from above. It was a point, less than the tree, But quite far from below. That a two of the species Happened to bend on their knees To see each other as well. It just happened that one was above the other, And had a chance to see the *Downing Back* of his brother. * Aray, teri to lal hai, (yours is red) Screamed the-one-below-the-above-one. Heard by the wind, and by the leaves And thousands of his own species, The one-above-the-below-one, without fun, Felt humiliated, stooped low, first inwardly then outwardly, to identify… But the-one-below-the-above-one Kept on jumping and climbing, And climbing and jumping, Till it was air which supported his feet, And his belief that he was different, than the-one-above-the-below-one. But, one day a return Would make him understand The meaning of Laet tulith chi sari gaeb. ( Laet tulith chi sari gaeb mean in Kashmiri = Lift the tail of any sheep, all of them are female.) The performance ended with the exposure of my buttocks, painted with red through my pant torn from behind. *Cockroach * Trapped I was, Not too exhausted in the toilet sink, In which he was about to piss… Periplaneta Americana Orientalis, Perhaps, this is how a Zoologist Would define me By the length and breadth of my delicate antenna. I was suffering: And when he held in his hand A melancholy, nozzle like thing That was behind the zip, I thought of a rescue operation….. But a shimmering rope like thing, Which fell next-near to me Was only a mirage,-- Because the more I tried to catch hold of it The more I was on a difficult ground. Now what I was floating upon, Was quite a blow to my hope, Otherwise a usual thing to smell and taste: I was aghast. The shadow like thing stood there, Watched my swimming abilities Or perhaps, pitied my fate. And when suddenly he pulled the chain Again and again: ' O shit , this city is really dry ' I heard him saying before The lights went off -- please visit: http://indersalim.livejournal.com to navigate, press EARLIER at page's bottom. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070323/b0024254/attachment.html From taraprakash at gmail.com Sat Mar 24 07:30:51 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:00:51 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] CPI (M) and West Bengal CM's Statements onNandigram References: <98f331e00703222356k1e1be330v49bd6601dc4fa333@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <00f501c76db8$42f12b20$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> Thank heavens I took care to read till the end. I initially thought this message was coming from CPM, but it was coming from something more dangerous, more fascist, more sectarian, (there is no dearth of adjectives for this wonderful dying (at least in JNU) institution, SFI, (suppliers of fraudulent information). Before I continue, I would like to admit that someone related to me is part of JNU Student Union from this institution. And also that never in my life I formally joined any organisation active in election related politics. So there is no reason for me to be unreasonably biased against SFI, or any other organization for that matter. My first disillusionment with the student wing of the concerned party was caused in my very first year at JNU. On the morning of the election day, a very senior and devoted member of SFI, he stopped considering me his friend after I started openly denouncing SFI on various issues, *informed* me that All India Student Association and ABVP (student wings of ML and BJP respectively) reached a compromise the previous night. I was told that if I voted for Aisa, it would be akin to voting for ABVP. I still fail to follow the logic, but few votes I was considering for SFI, I "wasted" on AISA, in the view of SFI, on ABVP. The way this organization functions in JNU, I really used to sympathise with some sensible friends associated with SFI. A classmate once made some suggestion and she was told to join AISA if that was how she thought. Many of Those who join SFI considering it to be a leftist intellectual movement, get so disillusioned with the left politics that they join some right wing party. 95 % of the people who leave SFI in JNU join NSUI, the student wing of Congress. I will not start narrating the horror stories some people from West Bengal told me about the fate of those who did not join SFI, just because someone sitting in JNU can tell what actually happened in Nandi Gram, I don't think it will be proper for me to narrate from outside the state what happens to those who do not join SFI in West Bengal. I was really naive when I used to sympathize with CPM for having such a great student wing. But I did not remain *innocent* for long. And what reminded me of all this was the message below and Md. Salim's statement on BBC Hindi that Nuxulites, RSS and Jamait-e Ulema-e Hind were all working together to disrupt the *normal life* in nandi Gram and I was instantly reminded of the SFI guy on the election day. I wish the message below should also have clarified what did Prakash Karath mean when he said , "The mistakes were made in Nandi Gram", if all that the below message says is true. In fact, Before CPM lumpins massacred 14 or more people in Nandi Gram, Sita Ram Yachuri, the most available person for SFI in JNU, in an interview on a TV channel said that district administration had no authority to send any notice about land acquisition, why wasn't any action taken against whoever caused that problem. Well, since CPM cannot have any answer for many such questions, they are not better not asked here. ----- Original Message ----- From: prakash ray To: reader-list at sarai.net Sent: Friday, March 23, 2007 2:56 AM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] CPI (M) and West Bengal CM's Statements onNandigram March 19, 2007 CPI (M) Press Release I. No Land Acquisition in Nandigram There was continuing false propaganda that land is going to be acquired in Nandigram for the chemical hub SEZ. After the January 3 incident and protests by the local people, the Chief Minister of West Bengal had made it clear that there will be no land acquisition if the people do not want it. Following are the facts. 1. There was no notification for land acquisition in Nandigram. There was only a notice issued by the Haldia Development Authority announcing the intention to acquire land in certain areas. 2. On February 9, the Chief Minister announced that no land will be acquired without the consent of the people of Nandigram. 3. Repeatedly in the last few weeks, the Chief Minister has categorically stated that the proposed chemical hub would be shifted if the people do not want it. 4. The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) after its meeting held on February 17-18 in a press statement announced the following: "The CPI(M) leadership of West Bengal has informed the Polit Bureau that the SEZ proposals for Bengal will be finalized after the changes in the SEZ Act and Rules are brought about at the Central level. The Left parties are already engaged in seeking changes in the SEZ Act. There is no question of any land being acquired for the SEZ projects, as in Nandigram, against the wishes of the people. " 5. Because all the CPI(M) members and supporters were driven out and the local police and administration have been absent since January 3, 2007 the mischievous propaganda that land will be taken away continued without being countered among the people. II. What has been happening in Nandigram Since January 3, 2007 CPI(M) members and supporters and their families numbering around 2500 were driven out of Nandigram Block I. A thousand of them are staying in relief camps in adjoining areas. 1. On January 6, armed men of the Jami Rakkha Committee attacked the relief camp on the southern side of the Bhangabera bridge in Khejuri area. There was resistance from the camp and in the ensuing conflict three of the attackers died. 2. On January 7, Sankar Samanta, a CPI(M) panchayat member was burnt alive in a hay stack. 3. On February 7, policeman Sadhucharan Chatterjee was attacked and killed near Khejuri. His body was thrown into the river. 4. On February 10, Sunita Mandal, a class X student was brutally murdered after torture. 5. On March 3, a woman (name withheld) who is from a CPI(M) sympathiser's family was gang raped by miscreants led by a local TMC leader. -- Prakash K Ray 254, Sutlej, JNU, New Delhi-67 www.cinemela.org (available soon) cinemela.blogspot.com (0) 9811450214 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _________________________________________ 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070323/c4f2ccc3/attachment.html From surya_rajan21 at yahoo.com Sun Mar 25 12:43:58 2007 From: surya_rajan21 at yahoo.com (surya upadhyay) Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2007 00:13:58 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] From Surya; Guru on the Air: Ist I-Fellowship Posting Message-ID: <611087.49785.qm@web32105.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Dear All! This is Surya Prakash Upadhyay, Research Scholar, IIT Bombay. This is my first posting on Sarai, Reader-List. I am also an Independent Fellow with Sarai for year 2007. The work with Sarai is titled: "Guru on the Air: Televised Hinduism in contemporary India". Looking forward for more ideas and suggestions. The work is looking at the contemporary religious and spiritual gurus in contemporary Hinduism. Though, this is a case study of one such guru named Asaram Bapu but it supposes that some general characteristics about these gurus could be formed through the study. However, there was no dearth of religious personalities in Hinduism since very ancient times but the recent gurus are somewhat different in many ways. They are not only religious figures but they are also personal counselor,healers, soothsayers, and medicine man at the same time. They suggest ways to live life healthy, happily, and prosperously. They have rejuvenated Ayurveda, and herbal medicines along with the keep-fit meritorious value of Yoga. Also, this particular guru stresses more on the ideal of self-restraint and achievement of self-realization. The modern gurus are not based at any established religious centres or pilgrimages such as Varanasi, or Allahabad. Rather, they have their own local ashrams where their followers come together and instead of praying to god they prey their guru. Also, they are not attached to temples, so they are different from the temple priests. They have their own way of interpreting Hindu philosophy and these gurus propagate through various kinds of amendments in them. As far as this guru is concerned and whatever information, I have, gathered through his literature survey it comes out that he is more inclined towards the Upanishads rather than Veda. It does not mean to say that he discards Vedas but he puts more emphasis on the Upanishads and other puranic scriptures. Also, he includes Buddhist philosophy and treaties on Jainism and Sikhism. From my point, it gives a more broader audience and follower to this guru. One interesting point that is coming out that they readily talk in scientific language and for that they use scientific terms and scientific researches that endorse their view; irrespective of the value placed to that particular research work in the scientific community. Basically, all of these practices are going through the telecast of satsang programs through television cable channels, and therefore, I prefer to call these modern god-people as "Tele-guru". A preliminary survey done among his followers shows that almost 80% of his followers came in his contact through listening his sermons on Sony channel and Sanskara Channel. I am looking at the instrumentality of audio-visual media in the construction and maintenance of religio-spiritual world in contemporary Hinduism and at the process of mobilization of people, particularly, towards this tele-guru. The project is an ethnographic work and would likely to be conducted through interviews, and questionnaire among the devotes and followers of Asaram Bapu, living in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Lucknow. The reason for keeping three different locations is that I want to see the difference between the responses of the devotees of these three cities. Mumbai is a cosmopolitan city and Ahmedabad is the main ashram. Lucknow is a peripheral ashram. In this way, the study will throw more light on the varieties of contemporary religiosity. However, the study looks at the media practice, both old and new and will involve the analysis of print media as well as electronic media and how media is playing its role in the propagation of his organisation in terms of increasing his followers. Till now, I have formed a questionnaire that I will send on the reader-list for your valuable suggestions. Cheers Surya Prakash Upadhyay Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, I.I.T. Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076 surya_rajan21 at yahoo.com surya.upadhyay at gmail.com ____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#loc_weather From 125548 at soas.ac.uk Sun Mar 25 20:31:46 2007 From: 125548 at soas.ac.uk (MATTI POHJONEN) Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2007 15:01:46 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] DIRECT JOURNALISM @ SMC Message-ID: <1174834906.9561bbc125548@soas.ac.uk> Friends, If interested, we are launching a new experiment in Direct Journalism at SACREDMEDIACOW. Check the description below and/or find more about it at http://sacredmediacow.com/?p=446. "Don’t trust the Indian news media? Then stop buying the newspapers and 24X7 channels. Hire your own embedded journalist to do the job for you, a private eye. If you pay for the trip and expenses as a collective donation, I will go out and report directly to you, on this website and your cellphone by SMS. You will also have control (within reason), via sms or comments, on what I should do next. 75% of what you pay will be spent on the job at hand, and the rest are my earnings. State your choice of place and amount donated below in comments. Your three choices this week: 1. Nandigram, West Bengal 2. Jantar Mantar, New Delhi 3. Choose a destination From ajai_c at yahoo.com Sun Mar 25 23:21:36 2007 From: ajai_c at yahoo.com (ajai chawla) Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2007 18:51:36 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] FW: Save the life of Ishaq Blouch In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <730517.66931.qm@web53903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> --- hirrak development center wrote: > > > > >From: "Nasir Arain" > >To: hirrak_devcen at hotmail.com > >CC: zilund at yahoo.com > >Subject: Save the life of Ishaq Blouch > >Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 11:16:42 +0000 > > > > > > > >>> Save the life of Isaq Blouch > >>> Please forward this appeal to as many of your > contacts as possible > >>> > >>> Ishaq Blouch, a well-known social and > political activist, Ex-Chairmen > >>>of the Democratic Student’ Federation (Karachi) & > leader of Karachi > >>>Naujawan Thareek, aged now 42, has been suffering > from last 3 years by > >>>cancer (lymphoma /leukemia). He has six times > gone through the > >>>Chemotherapy process & is now in a very serious > condition. After the > >>>final medical cheek, the experts at Aga Khan > Medical University, has > >>>suggested that Ishq must go through bone marrow > transplantation, which > >>>will cost Rs.2millions. Ishq’s family has > collected Rs.500,000 after > >>>selling their assets but still there remains an > amount of Rs.1.5millions. > >>>The same operation will cost cheaper than in Aga > Khan Hospital facility, > >>> If someone extends help to Ishaq and his > family to arrange / > >>>facilitate the operation in India, the act will > be highly appreciated. > >>> > >>> Social Services of Ishaq and Ruksana Blouch: > >>> > >>> They are residing in Sharafi Goth nearby > Korangi Industrial Area. > >>>Ishaq was brought up in a very poor family; his > wife Ruksana Blouch was > >>>counselor in 2002 in Karachi city government. > They have two children, a > >>>son Zainulabdin, aged 10, and a daughter Qurat > –ul- Aain, aged 8. As a > >>>result of Isaq and Ruksana Blouch’s struggle, > beginning in 1985, against > >>>the land mafia and for the empowerment of the > local population, today > >>>the are has a girls secondary school, boys > secondary school, girls degree > >>>collage, basic health center, community center, > children park, maternity > >>>home, football stadium, and girls and boys > primary schools at > >>>surrounding localities. Earlier the Sharafi Goth > has just one middle > >>>school. > >>> > >>> > > >>>APPEAL > >>> > >>> Save the smiles of Ishaq’s family > >>> > >>> We request all human loving people, groups and > organizations to extend > >>>their all-out support for saving Ishaq’s life, > and send their money > >>>contributions for his bone marrow aspirate > operation in the following > >>>bank account, all other help and assistance will > also be appreciated. > >>> > >>> Joint A/c title: Isaq & Ruksana > >>> No: 9949.0 > >>> Allied Bank Ltd > >>> Korangi .K.Area Branch. Karachi, Pakistan > >>> > >>> > >>Prof: Jamal Naqvi, Hasil Bezinjo, Harris Gazdar, > Asad Sayed, Ramzan Memon > >>, Azhar Jamel , Nasir Arain , Nadeem Ahmad , > Afshan Subohi, Seema Rizvi, > >>Samina Geti, Moin Qureshi, & other friends. > >> > >> > > > >_________________________________________________________________ > >Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! > Download today it's FREE! > >http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/ > > > > _________________________________________________________________ > Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! > Download today it's FREE! > http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/ > > > > Home of more than 40 million seraikis around the > world. > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/seraiki/ > > <*> Your email settings: > Individual Email | Traditional > > <*> To change settings online go to: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/seraiki/join > (Yahoo! ID required) > > <*> To change settings via email: > mailto:seraiki-digest at yahoogroups.com > mailto:seraiki-fullfeatured at yahoogroups.com > > <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email > to: > seraiki-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com > > <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: > http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ > > Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com From shijusam at gmail.com Sat Mar 24 11:30:15 2007 From: shijusam at gmail.com (Shiju Sam Varughese) Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 11:30:15 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shiju first posting: Public Sphere as a Site of Knowledge Production: Negotiations over Tremors, Well Collapses and Coloured Rains in the Malayalam Press Message-ID: <345848710703232300j1d807de9sc39b4470e5a4a315@mail.gmail.com> Dear friends, I am Shiju Sam Varughese, currently doing PhD in Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. My research is on the role of the publics in democratizing modern science. This is my first posting to the SARAI reader-list. My research project for Sarai independent fellowship is titled, "Public Sphere as a Site of Knowledge Production: Negotiations over Tremors, Well Collapses and Coloured Rains in the Malayalam Press". The objective of the proposed study is to understand the functioning of the public sphere as a site of knowledge production in Kerala in the context of scientific controversies. A scientific controversy is defined here as a polemic regarding any aspect of science, which is deliberated upon by the public. The scientific community loses its control over the issue while it erupts out into the public sphere and thereafter several players participate in the negotiation. A scientific controversy can therefore be considered as a special occasion that brings out the internal ambivalences of scientific knowledge production into full public view. The scientific controversy that will be analysed in the proposed study erupted out in the regional press when an earthquake of low intensity occurred in Kerala on 12th December 2000. Malayalam newspapers drew public attention into the contradictory explanations to the earthquake provided by scientists. Many tremors of lower intensity continued striking the region from then on and the controversy grew up into multiple dimensions. The issue became intensified after the Gujarat earthquake on 26th January 2001 when reports appeared in the press linking it with the tremors in Kerala. Questions on whether Kerala becomes prone to earth quakes and a serious criticism of scientists' incapability in providing convincing answers have been raised. The second episode of the controversy began when several extraordinary geophysical events appeared all over the state. Well collapses, oscillations and rise in water levels, changing colour of water in wells, cracks on buildings, appearance of ground fissures, leaf fall and so on have been reported from various parts of the region. Newspapers brought together similar incidents from the nuke and corner of the state and once again scientists failed to give satisfactory explanation. The third phase of the issue started followed by a report of red rain from Changanacherry on 26th July 2001, a major town near Kottayam. Incidents of coloured rain have been reported subsequently from other parts of Kerala also. Scientists from Centre for Earth Science Studies (Thiruvananthapuram) after studying the incident argued that it was due to a meteor explosion, and it triggered off a big controversy. Scientific explanations of a wide range were offered thereafter, and the controversy got a new lease of life when a group of microbiologists came out with evidences for the existence of large quantities of biological cells in coloured rainwater samples. Questions regarding the interconnectedness of different phenomena also have been raised in this context. Although I have separated out the deliberations into three consecutive phases, the inception of a new phase never stopped the controversies generated in the previous phases. In each phase the debate became multifaceted by the inclusion of more and more actors such as journalists, readers, members of civil society initiatives, political parties, policy makers and spokespersons of government and research institutes. Scientists from a wide array of disciplines and institutions all over India participated in the controversy, and the role of newspapers was crucial in preparing ground for negotiations about the content of science. The controversy continues in the regional press even today. The latest episode started in 2006 June, when two physicists claimed that the cells found in coloured rain was not fungal spores as suggested earlier, but 'cells of extraterrestrial origin'. The study involves empirical research on the scientific controversy. The news reports on the scientific controversy that appeared in five major newspapers of the region (Malayala Manorama, Mathrubhumi, Deshabhimani, Madhyamam and Kerala Kaumudi) will be analysed. News reports, special science articles, editorials, letters to the editor, and visual images (photographs, maps and diagrams) appeared in them will be examined in detail. Also the key actors in the controversy including scientists and journalists will be interviewed in order to understand the process of negotiation. In a nutshell this is what I intend to do. The outcome of the research will be an academic article. Since the project is in its initial phase, your feedback is very much crucial for taking it further. Therefore I am eagerly waiting to hear from you all…… With regards, Shiju Sam. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070324/01a134f9/attachment.html From abhikauliya at googlemail.com Mon Mar 26 10:55:48 2007 From: abhikauliya at googlemail.com (Abhik Samanta) Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 01:25:48 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] ifs-07, first posting In-Reply-To: <47e122a70703231046t80238ccqa0e8262619bd8545@mail.gmail.com> References: <47e122a70703231046t80238ccqa0e8262619bd8545@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <83253d810703252225i36e2e5ayab69b321b9d918a9@mail.gmail.com> Hello everyone this is my first posting, extremely sorry i am so late, hope its not too late. The project that i suggested would involve an exploration of the printed matter of the Gita Press as media. An exploration of an act of communication, which in this case, is designed as a commodity that is priced at the range of basic necessities. For instance, when they first came out, the editions were called 'gutkha' otherwise used for alight intoxicant. In a world where expressions are demanded, so that their conformity can be had, the poignant moment when the object of expression is configured becomes very precious. This is well realized by global agencies who feel the need to generate demand. What remains is the expression itself with the urgency to retain its partiality or overcome it with the object it is meant for. This choice, the realization of which is crucial in resisting demands on expression, is also the site on which banality, which must accompany a claim on expression, can be found. This is because expression is essentially a choice , but not the absence of it. Understanding being important in such a situation, one could explore the history of banality itself as found in the cheap pamphlets of the Gita Press. The Gita Press commodities became an expression when Hanumanprasad , on the advice of Gandhi, declared in the first issue of his journal* Kalyan*(though not yet a part of the press but later on its chief organ) that no advertisements would occur, to which he added his own idea that this would include books and hence no literary criticism. It was thus exclusively a part of a language of need as the image of a commodity. An expression of nationalism. The denial of other commodities belied its banal character(pricing) while on display with them on bookshelves in stations or large market areas. However the expression, as being that of nationalism, becomes complete only when it explains itself as being the words of God as articulated by Hanumanprasad primarily as also by his preceptor Jayadayal Goyandaka and occasionally his friend Radhababa and later on by Swami Ramsukhdas who died recently. This is why it is part of the language of need, which remains even today as a language of nationalism. But, this is the site where the products become banal. Denial of nationalism or itself is how it becomes national just as it is a commodity that denies others. This was how Hanuman thought his commodity would be sold. Meaning how it would be exchanged. The act of exchange being an expression of nationalism. The commodity would then be consumed. This separation is another inversion of the order of demand where the moment of exchange moves closer and closer to the moment of consumption. Exchange here is rather a disjuncture. For what is consumed does not relate only to the nation. As a commodity it seeks the body of the reader located amidst colonial journeys of work and travel. This was the marketing strategy of Hanuman, better described as a strategy of distribution for it sought to reach or capture at the moment of fatigue in course of engagement in the time of work. The word fatigue stumbles into the way spiritual categories are described in corporeal language. The preoccupations of the world are very bad; therefore he must deal with them and not leave anything behind… Just as a man gets ready for a railway journey by buying a ticket and preparing to board the train, so must a man deal with his commitments, then there will be nothing to worry about. (*Kalyan* August 1926,p.52.) Consumption is a corporeal act which can only be described as training for the real thing. Reading is akin to an act of hearing or an act of seeing. For the major portion of tracts like *Shriramchintan* are printed in question answer form where answers are long and made wit reference to a central text like the Ramcharitmanas or anywhere from the corpus of sacred words of Hinduism. Hanumanprasad describes what he sees in an act of elaborated translation. He is merely a guide hwo wirtes short essays on the historicity of the Ramayana. Excerpts from letters to people asking questions s also included making the tract a documentary or testimony of the corporeality that he claims. The reason why he has to make it so is the real claim that Hanuman makes in his confessed location in the transmission of the message. The claim which is the source of and solution to fatigue is the existence or flow of dark or bad times. The colour of the images on the cover which attract the buyer becomes meaningful only with the darkness described inside. Considering that Hanuman was the designer and not the painter blackness can be seen as coeval to blindness. The Gita Press pictures can perhaps be seen as emerging from the 'blackness of Allah' to borrow a picturesque phrase from the otherwise bland Orhan Pamuk novel *My Name is Red*. Here again the viewer becomes becomes introduced to darkness only when he or she becomes a buyer. This puts off the earlier denial of being a commodity into an ironical existence which is another source of colour. The aim of this project would be to see how these pictures come into being or attain colour and light in their location as commodities. Two examples will be shown in the follow up. An expression is more of a denial and farthest from a demand for conformity. Hence when there is an explanation of demand , on its rejection , it is not an expression but a means of perpetuating conformity. The object of expression is absent all the same. In which case expression can only seek to unite the body of the speaker from which the demand was made. part of the language On 3/23/07, inder salim wrote: > > Hi > > I am: > > > > *This indersalim stuff from Kashmir* . > > > > I am a performance artist. ( please include the 'theater performances' > here, though I am not strictly in the practice of doing things on stage. ) > The art-in-public- space, yes, I do, but the definition is quite vast, so no > big claims. I try to conceptualize my action ( performance ) with ongoing > conflicts (both political and otherwise ) in mind, but as you know, the > form incorporated changes the dynamics of ' the action' even. So, I believe > the the unpredictability of doing a performance… > > > > I enclose three poem pieces, the second one I ended with a little > performance at Performance poetry thing organized by Vivek Naranyan at Sarai > some days back. > > > > My project is to organize performance art, to collaborate and initiate > performances anywhere in India or abroad. So I am myself waiting for a > surprise or so. But meanwhile : > > > > * * > > *YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI* > * > Men keep on pissing near the wall > Till a graffiti grows: > YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI > > And if men keep on pissing near the wall > They imagine reading a line > YEH PADNA MANA HAI** > Next to the line > YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI. > > And if the fermentation of the > absorbed piss begins to > emit those nose wrenching fumes, > the complacent administrator's nose > comes closer to it > to arrange > an alternative in the > nearby vicinity. > > And if a money generating > toilet structure > comes up a little away from the disgraced wall, > The text: YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI > Becomes idle and meaningless > Till some poorly paid workers of different > Political parties paste glossy > Posters of their masters underneath. > > And once the colourful posters of > Politicians and their children politicians > Appear underneath the line > YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI > The artist-in-public-space > Inserts a word *NAHEE**** > In the line > *YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI* > At an appropriate place. > > For some real men > to impart some real meaning, > To their age old habit > Of pissing in the public space. > > * Yahan mootna manah hai = pissing is prohibited here. > > ** Yeh panda manah hai= reading this is prohibited > > *** Nahee= not > > > > *……………………………………………………………………………….* > > * * > > * * > > *Teri to lal hai ( yours is red )* > > * * > > The more you climb the more it will grow;- > > On a magical tree, > > This particular species of monkeys > > in their own jolly great mood, > > they simply kept on > > Jumping and climbing > > Climbing and jumping, > > Till they decided to look down > > To see the earth from above. > > > > It was a point, less than the tree, > > But quite far from below. > > That a two of the species > > Happened to bend on their knees > > To see each other as well. > > > > It just happened that one was above the other, > > And had a chance to see the > > *Downing Back* of his brother. > > > > * Aray, teri to lal hai, (yours is red) > > Screamed the-one-below-the-above-one. > > > > Heard by the wind, and by the leaves > > And thousands of his own species, > > The one-above-the-below-one, without fun, > > Felt humiliated, stooped low, first inwardly > > then outwardly, to identify… > > > > But the-one-below-the-above-one > > Kept on jumping and climbing, > > And climbing and jumping, > > Till it was air which supported his feet, > > And his belief that he was different, > > than the-one-above-the-below-one. > > > > But, one day a return > > Would make him understand > > The meaning of > > Laet tulith chi sari gaeb. > ( Laet tulith chi sari gaeb mean in Kashmiri = Lift the tail of any > sheep, all of them are female.) > > > > The performance ended with the exposure of my buttocks, painted with red > through my pant torn from behind. > > > > > > *Cockroach > * > Trapped I was, > Not too exhausted in the toilet sink, > In which he was about to piss… > > Periplaneta Americana Orientalis, > Perhaps, this is how a Zoologist > Would define me > By the length and breadth of my delicate antenna. > > I was suffering: > > And when he held in his hand > A melancholy, nozzle like thing > That was behind the zip, > I thought of a rescue operation….. > > But a shimmering rope like thing, > Which fell next-near to me > Was only a mirage,-- > Because the more I tried to catch hold of it > The more I was on a difficult ground. > > Now what I was floating upon, > Was quite a blow to my hope, > Otherwise a usual thing to smell and taste: > > I was aghast. > > The shadow like thing stood there, > Watched my swimming abilities > Or perhaps, pitied my fate. > > And when suddenly he pulled the chain > Again and again: > > ' O shit , this city is really dry ' > I heard him saying before > The lights went off > > > > > -- > > please visit: > http://indersalim.livejournal.com > to navigate, press EARLIER at page's bottom. > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070326/1855b4a1/attachment.html From deelited at gmail.com Mon Mar 26 09:42:25 2007 From: deelited at gmail.com (deepti) Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:42:25 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] The Nigah QueerFest'07, 25th May to 3rd June 2007, New Delhi Message-ID: <2617ab630703252112t388fde01qc2dc59806e17d6e4@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, In anticipation of Pride Month this June, Nigah ( www.nigahmedia.com ) is happy to announce The NigahQueerFest'07! The NigahQueerFest'07 is a celebration of sexuality and queerness. Part of emerging voices that question dominant norms of gender and sexuality, the festival will showcase films, photography, workshops, talks and performances in venues across the city from May 25th to June 3rd in New Delhi. Calls for entry to the Film and Photography parts of the festival can also be downloaded from our website at www.nigahmedia.com/queerfest.html. We encourage you all to participate, submit, volunteer and be part of the festival! Keep checking the site for updates as we get closer to festival dates. best, The Nigah Team -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070326/bd5dbaa8/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From keshvani at leoalmanac.org Mon Mar 26 05:27:02 2007 From: keshvani at leoalmanac.org (Nisar Keshvani, LEA) Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 07:57:02 +0800 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Leonardo Electronic Almanac - CFP: Dispersive Anatomies Special Message-ID: <5d60ab0c0703251657o2395d61fhe924fbae9b0d500f@mail.gmail.com> - Apologies for cross-posting. Please distribute widely - ** *Dispersive Anatomies* http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/calls.asp#dispersive ** *Guest Editors:* Sandy Baldwin, Alan Sondheim and Mez Breeze leadispersive at astn.net ** *Editorial Guidelines:* http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp *Discussion Group: *leadispersive-subscribe at googlegroups.com *Deadline: *31 May 2007 *Call for papers - LEA Dispersive Anatomies* *------------------------------------------------------------------- *The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting papers and artworks that address dispersion - dispersion of bodies, objects, landscapes, networks, virtual and real worlds. A fundamental shift in the way we view the world is underway: the abandonment of discrete objects, and objecthood itself. The world is now plural, and the distinction between real and virtual is becoming increasingly blurred, with troubling consequences within the geopolitical register. This shift is related to a cultural change that emphasizes digital deconstruction over analog construction: a photograph for example can be accessed and transformed, pixel by pixel, cities can be taken apart by gerrymandering or eminent domain, and our social networks are replete with names and images that problematize friendship, sexuality, and culture itself. One issue that emerges here: Are we networking or are we networked? Are we networks ourselves? LEA is interested in texts and works that deal with this fundamental shift in new and illuminating ways. Specifically, anything from essays through multimedia through networks themselves may be considered. We're particularly interested in submissions that deal with the incoherency of the world, and how to address it. *Key topics of interest --------------------------------- *Topics of interest might include (but are not limited to): - Networked warfare in real and virtual worlds. - The wounded/altered body in real and virtual worlds. - Transgressive sexualities across borders, sexualities among body-parts, dismemberments and groups, both real and virtual. - Critical texts on the transformation of classical narrative - from its emphasis on an omniscient narrator and coherent plots/characters, to literatures of incoherency, dispersed narrations, and the jump-cut exigencies of everyday life. - Deleuze/Guattari, TAZ, and other phenomena at the border of networking. - Internet visions and their abandonment or fulfillment. - The haunting of the world by ghosts, virtual beings, dreams and nightmares that never resolve. - The geopolitical collapse of geopolitics. - Military empires as scattershot entrepreneurial corporations. Dispersion has two vectors: the breakup or breakdown of coherent objects; and the subsequent attempt to corral, curtail, or recuperate from this breakdown. How do we deal with networks that are constantly coalescing and disappearing? Where are we in the midst of this? In an era of pre-emptive culture, is guerilla warfare to be accompanied by guerilla culture as the order of the day? *Want to be kept informed?* *------------------------------------------* For the latest news, updates and discussions, join the LEA Dispersive Anatomies Mailing List. Email: leadispersive-subscribe at googlegroups.com ** *Publishing Opportunities ---------------------------------------* ** As part of this special, LEA is looking to publish: - Critical Essays - Artist Statement/works in the LEA Gallery - Bibliographies (a peer reviewed bibliography with key texts/references in Dispersive Anatomies) - Academic Curriculum (LEA encourages academics conducting course programmes in this area to contact us) LEA encourages international artists / academics / researchers / students / practitioners / theorists to submit their proposals for consideration. We particularly encourage authors outside North America and Europe to submit essays / artists statements. Proposals should include: - A brief description of proposed text (200-300 words) - A brief author biography - Any related URLs - Contact details In the subject heading of the email message, please use *Name of Artist/Project Title: LEA Dispersive Anatomies Special - Date Submitted.* Please cut and paste all text into body of email (without attachments). Editorial Guidelines: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp Deadline for proposals: May 31, 2007 Please send proposals or queries to: Sandy Baldwin, Alan Sondheim, Mez Breeze leadispersive at astn.net and Nisar Keshvani LEA Editor-in-Chief lea at mitpress.mit.edu --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leonardo electronic almanac alerts list" group. To post to this group, send email to LEAalerts at googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to LEAalerts-unsubscribe at googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/LEAalerts -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070326/c5361f09/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From gorakhpurfilmfestival at gmail.com Mon Mar 26 11:36:22 2007 From: gorakhpurfilmfestival at gmail.com (Gorakhpur Film Festival) Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:36:22 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] SECOND GORAKHPUR FILM FESTYIVAL-March 30 to April 2, 2007, Samvad Bhavan, Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur Message-ID: <61b597060703252306w4cbd986bkec2e9765ff9dce4d@mail.gmail.com> * SECOND GORAKHPUR FILM FESTYIVAL IN MEMORY OF 1857 March 30 to April 2, 2007, Samvad Bhavan, Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur Dear Friend, Last year for the very first time in the history of Gorakhpur we made an attempt to organise a festival of films from peoples' contribution. And some how we reached some where. We showed almost 20 films including short films, animation, documentaries and full length feature films. After screening of Anand Patwardhan's film "War and Peace" we conducted a discussion session anchored by a panel of 4 people. More than 100 people participated in the discussion which lasted for 45 minutes. Around 1500 people enjoyed the screenings in the festival. At least 50-75 people from surrounding small towns participated in the festival. Last year we dedicated our festival to the theme of Resistance in Cinema and clubbed it with 75 martyrdom of Bhagat Singh. Jan Sanskriti Manch, Expression- Gorakhpur Film Society, Peoples' Forum and PUHR (Peoples Union for Human Rights) were the main organizers of the festival. It was solely financed by individual contributions. We also released a festival brochure which I'm sending to you through courier. Friend, This year we are dedicating our festival to the revolutionary memory of 1857. This year we are inviting documentary filmmakers from various regions. Anand Patwardhan, Meghnath, Ajay Bhardwaj, Sanjay Kak, Surubhi Sharma, Rajula Shah to name a few. We are also planning to have special focus on cinema of Iran, in this regard we opening festival with Behman Ghobadi's Turtules Can Fly and screening trilogy of Majid Majidi. Apart from films we are also planning to organize film seminar, theatre seminar, poetry recitation session, an exhibition on revolutionary history of 1857, book exhibition, theatrical and song performances by Yugmanch, Nainital and Hiraval, Patna. Jan Sanskriti Manch has decided to develop this as a central film festival and then make it a traveling festival for the rest of the year. The festival dates are March 30 to April 2, 2007. Venue is Samvad Bhawan, Gorakhpur University Campus, Gorakhpur. Gorakhpur is very well connected to the network of Indian Railways. There are few flights from New Delhi and Mumbai. Other important cities close to Gorakhpur are Lucknow (6hr taxi drive) and Varanasi ( 5 hr taxi drive). Kindly forward this mail to film buffs and mail me your postal address. Please intimate me how many invitation cards you require for the distribution. With warm regards, Sanjay Joshi Convener 2nd Gorakhpur Film Festival Contact Address: C- 303 Jansatta Apartments, Sector 9, Vasundhara, Ghaziabad-201012 9811577426, 0120-2885017 E mail id: gorakhpurfilmfestival at gmail.com joproductions at gmail.com Expression address: Shri Manoj Singh Convener, Expression MIG- 15, Rapti Nagar, First Phase, Gorakhpur 273003 Mobile: 9415282206 Email id: gorakhpurfilmfestival at gmail.com mk_12 at rediffmail.com Schedule of the 2nd Gorakhpur Film Festival Theme: In memory of martyrs of 1857 Pratirodh Ka Cinema Day one March 30, 2007 Friday 1st session Segment 1 Convener: Ashutosh Kumar Chief Guest: Ramji Rai, Chief Editor Samkalin Janmat and Manglesh Dabral, Renowned Hindi Poet Details of the sessions Time Subject Name of the person 5.30 pm to 5.35 pm Welcome address Dr. Ashutosh Kumar Secretary, UP JSM (Introduction of the theme of the festival and inviting dignitaries for opening of festival) 5.35 pm to 5.45 pm Opening of festival VC, Prof. RK Tripathi, President UP JSM and Chief Guest ( Manglesh/Veeren) 5.45 pm to 6 pm Release of brochure and CD Chief guest 6 pm to 6.10 pm Opening speech Pranay Krishna General Secretary, JSM 6.10 pm to 6.15 pm About the festival Sanjay Joshi Convener, GFF 07 6.15 pm to 7.15 Dunia Roz Badalti Hai Hiraval ,Patna 7.15 pm to 7.25pm Felicitation of Hiraval Ismriti Chinah and Bouquet 7.25 pm to 7.30 pm Introduction of film Ashutosh Kumar 7.30 pm to 9 pm Turtles Can Fly 1 Behman Ghobadi 9 pm to 9.10 pm Next day announcements and appeal for registration Ashutosh Kumar Day Two March 31, 2007 Saturday Details of the sessions 1st session Time Subject Name of the person 10.30 am to 11am Song Hiraval team 11 am to 01 pm Indian Cinema Ganga Maiya Tohare Piari Charibo 1 to 1.30 pm B R E A K 2nd Session 1.30 pm to 2.45 pm Ek Minute Ka Maun (72min) Ajay Bhardwaj 2.45 pm to 3.02 pm Still Life (translation of the text) (17 min)Cynthia Madansky 3.02 pm to 3.05 pm Color ( 2.52 min) translation -do- 3.05 pm to 3.30 Baul from Bengal Performance from Kolkata 3.30 pm 5.10 pm Special focus on Iran Children of Heaven (89 min) Majid Majidi 5.10 to 5.30 pm B R E A K 3rd session 5.30 pm to 6.50 pm AFSPA 1958 (77min) Haobam Paban Kumar 6.50 pm to 7.35 pm Nata (45 min) KP Jaishankar/ Anjali 7.35 pm to 8.10 pm Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the " War on Terror" Gillian Caldwell, WITNESS 8.10 pm to 8.30 pm B R E A K 4th session 8.30 pm to 9.15 pm Felicitation and Presenter's note Har Dil Jo Pyar Karega Woh Gana Gayega (A listening session of film songs and it's aesthetics) Irfan 9.15 pm to 9.30 pm Discussion Day Three April 1, 2007 Sunday Details of the sessions Time Subject Name of the person 1st session 10.30 am to 11am Song Hiraval team 11 am to 1.25 pm Indian Cinema Pyasa (140 min) Gurudutt 1.25 pm to 2 pm B R E A K 2nd session 2pm to 3.40 pm 400 Blows (100 min) Trruffout 3.30 pm to 3.45 pm B R E A K 3rd session 3.45 pm 5.20 pm Special focus on Iran Colour of Paradise (90 min) Majid Majidi 5.20 pm to 5.30 pm B R E A K 4th session 5.30 pm to 5.40 pm Felicitation Yusuf and director's note 5.40 pm to 7.25 pm Khyal Darpan ( 105 min) 7.25 pm to 7.45 pm Discussion with Yusuf 7.45 pm to 7.55 pm B R E A K 7.55 pm to 9 pm Naye Bharat Ki Khoj (60 min) Nitin/ JSM 9 pm to 9.15 pm Discussion with Director Day Four April 2, 2007 Monday Details of the sessions 1st session 11 am to 1 pm Pita, Putra aur Dharmyudh (120 min) Anand Patwardhan 1 pm to 1.30 pm B R E A K 1.30 pm to 3.10 pm Special focus on Iran Baran (94 min ) Majid Majidi 3.10 pm to 4.10 pm Man v/s Man Shashi Anand 4.10 pm to 4.22 pm Happy Anniversary Pierre Etaix/ JC Carriere 4.25 to 4.45 pm B R E A K 4.45 pm to 7.20 pm Lime Light (147 min) 7.20 pm to 7.30 B R E A K 7.30 pm to 8.15 pm Who Land It Is Anyway Ladli Majumdar 8.15 pm to 8.45 pm Revolutionary Songs Hiraval, Patna 8.45 pm to 9.15 pm concluding performance Team GFF * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070326/8a73fead/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From abhishek.hazra at gmail.com Mon Mar 26 12:39:05 2007 From: abhishek.hazra at gmail.com (Abhishek Hazra) Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:39:05 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] shiju first posting: Public Sphere as a Site of Knowledge Production: Negotiations over Tremors, Well Collapses and Coloured Rains in the Malayalam Press In-Reply-To: <345848710703232300j1d807de9sc39b4470e5a4a315@mail.gmail.com> References: <345848710703232300j1d807de9sc39b4470e5a4a315@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <6deae8300703260009t39e1b8c0j32f1e1feef1d486f@mail.gmail.com> sounds very interesting and looking forward to your paper (or early drafts of it). i would be interested to know how was the anti-superstition camp (with its obvious left party affiliations) responding to and negotiating the controversies that you have outlined. on an entirely different context, i am also quite interested in the malayali discourse around George Sudarshan and the tropes of 'lament' and 'missed opportunity' (the nobel prize that was so tantalizingly close) that recurr in discussions about Sudarshan. and yes, i am obviously reminded of the J C Bose and Marconi 'controversy' about the wireless patent. in the preface to "Abyakto" (the unsaid/un-expressed) his collection of popular essays in bengali on science, Bose talks about setting up a special science court (byagnanik adalat) in the country where deliberations on science can happen in indian languages. cheers, abhishek On 3/24/07, Shiju Sam Varughese wrote: > Dear friends, I am Shiju Sam Varughese, currently doing PhD in Zakir Husain > Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. My > research is on the role of the publics in democratizing modern science. This > is my first posting to the SARAI reader-list. > My research project for Sarai independent fellowship is titled, "Public > Sphere as a Site of Knowledge Production: Negotiations over Tremors, Well > Collapses and Coloured Rains in the Malayalam Press". The objective of the > proposed study is to understand the functioning of the public sphere as a > site of knowledge production in Kerala in the context of scientific > controversies. A scientific controversy is defined here as a polemic > regarding any aspect of science, which is deliberated upon by the public. > The scientific community loses its control over the issue while it erupts > out into the public sphere and thereafter several players participate in the > negotiation. A scientific controversy can therefore be considered as a > special occasion that brings out the internal ambivalences of scientific > knowledge production into full public view. > > The scientific controversy that will be analysed in the proposed study > erupted out in the regional press when an earthquake of low intensity > occurred in Kerala on 12th December 2000. Malayalam newspapers drew public > attention into the contradictory explanations to the earthquake provided by > scientists. Many tremors of lower intensity continued striking the region > from then on and the controversy grew up into multiple dimensions. The issue > became intensified after the Gujarat earthquake on 26th January 2001 when > reports appeared in the press linking it with the tremors in Kerala. > Questions on whether Kerala becomes prone to earth quakes and a serious > criticism of scientists' incapability in providing convincing answers have > been raised. The second episode of the controversy began when several > extraordinary geophysical events appeared all over the state. Well > collapses, oscillations and rise in water levels, changing colour of water > in wells, cracks on buildings, appearance of ground fissures, leaf fall and > so on have been reported from various parts of the region. Newspapers > brought together similar incidents from the nuke and corner of the state and > once again scientists failed to give satisfactory explanation. The third > phase of the issue started followed by a report of red rain from > Changanacherry on 26th July 2001, a major town near Kottayam. Incidents of > coloured rain have been reported subsequently from other parts of Kerala > also. Scientists from Centre for Earth Science Studies (Thiruvananthapuram) > after studying the incident argued that it was due to a meteor explosion, > and it triggered off a big controversy. Scientific explanations of a wide > range were offered thereafter, and the controversy got a new lease of life > when a group of microbiologists came out with evidences for the existence of > large quantities of biological cells in coloured rainwater samples. > Questions regarding the interconnectedness of different phenomena also have > been raised in this context. > > Although I have separated out the deliberations into three consecutive > phases, the inception of a new phase never stopped the controversies > generated in the previous phases. In each phase the debate became > multifaceted by the inclusion of more and more actors such as journalists, > readers, members of civil society initiatives, political parties, policy > makers and spokespersons of government and research institutes. Scientists > from a wide array of disciplines and institutions all over India > participated in the controversy, and the role of newspapers was crucial in > preparing ground for negotiations about the content of science. The > controversy continues in the regional press even today. The latest episode > started in 2006 June, when two physicists claimed that the cells found in > coloured rain was not fungal spores as suggested earlier, but 'cells of > extraterrestrial origin'. > > The study involves empirical research on the scientific controversy. The > news reports on the scientific controversy that appeared in five major > newspapers of the region (Malayala Manorama, Mathrubhumi, Deshabhimani, > Madhyamam and Kerala Kaumudi) will be analysed. News reports, special > science articles, editorials, letters to the editor, and visual images > (photographs, maps and diagrams) appeared in them will be examined in > detail. Also the key actors in the controversy including scientists and > journalists will be interviewed in order to understand the process of > negotiation. > > In a nutshell this is what I intend to do. The outcome of the research will > be an academic article. Since the project is in its initial phase, your > feedback is very much crucial for taking it further. Therefore I am eagerly > waiting to hear from you all…… > > With regards, > > Shiju Sam. > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: > <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> > -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - does the frog know it has a latin name? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From meetnandi at hotmail.com Mon Mar 26 14:21:52 2007 From: meetnandi at hotmail.com (Sugata Nandi) Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 08:51:52 +0000 Subject: [Reader-list] First posting...Sugata Nandi Message-ID: Hi, My posting got delayed due to my tranfer from my former college to a new one, which is thankfully in Calcutta. Please accept my apologies (specially to Vivek, I am really sorry that things were such due to transfer in the last three weeks that I found it difficult to do the needful on due time)for the inconvenience that it caused. My Independent Felowships sponsors a project of writing an oral history of Calcutta of 1947-67, in the form of knowing the politics of personal reminisces of a number of people who grew up during the said period in a very violence prone Calcutta. The following is my first posting. Regards, Sugata Nandi Address: BJ 69, SALT LAKE, SECTOR II, KOLKATA 700091 Phone : 9831487237, 033 2334 1552 Title: Events Violent, Moments Siginificant By Sugata Nandi. Independent Fellow 2007, Lecturer in History, Presidency College, Kolkata Calcutta marched into Independence with problems that seemed to foretell doom. In the opinion of Rajat Kanta Ray onwards from the mid forties �blow upon blow� fell on the city in shape of the food scarcity, famine and the demoralization of 1943, the communal riots of 1946-7, the partition of the province and finally the refugee problem. Ray remarks that by the time Calcutta was independent, the city�s days of glory was definitely and only a part of its history. The project I have taken up as an independent fellow starts from that point. Calcutta was no longer the city of the palaces and the city of unlimited opportunities; it was an urban disaster that was the termed by the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, as a dead city. From the vantage point of the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century when the city is, as can be gathered from media reports, is trying to remodel itself after the twin models of Singapore and Shanghai, the past does seem to be an uninterrupted story of proverbial urban decay and political unrest and militancy. As we enter a time when that period is on the threshold of being enshrined into official and unorthodox histories as a chapter in the life of Calcutta, there is genuine necessity of looking into ways of remembering the city that will eventually influence the writing of such histories. At the outset, before going into the realms of memory it is pertinent to take stock of the events that standout in the city history as poignant moments as well as occasions of self assertion of sections of city populace. The events are protest movements against the state Government with demands ranging from authorization to that of ensuring food grain supply at low prices had served as reasons behind what turned into extremely violent episodes in urban history of Calcutta. The two events that I have not included in this essay are the beginning of the Naxal Movement in 1965 and the formation of the United Front Ministry in 1967, which was the first non Congress Government of West Bengal since August 15, 1947. The first of these two events needs to be seen as the culmination of developments taking place outside the city, and the second event deserves to be treated separately as the cumulative effect of the developments of the city between 1947 and 1966. The most observable trend in city life of Calcutta soon after independence was the continuation of erstwhile colonial policy of brutal repression of popular protests and movements. A mere three months after Independence a procession of students and youths commemorating the Azad Hind Fouj day was disrupted by a lathi-charge by Calcutta police. In September 1948, the police fired on protesting dock labourers. In April 1949 four women taking part in rally were shot dead on the street by the police. The rally was organized to demand freedom for the Communist political prisoners by a women�s organization called �Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti� (or Women�s Association for Self Defence�). In the same year ten lives were lost in police firing in the procession of the Refugees demanding rehabilitation. Refugees who were streaming into Calcutta registered their first protest in January 14, 1949. Their procession was halted and disrupted by the police who attacked the processionists with tear gas shells and lathi charge. This was the initial spurt of more serious and aggressive urban movement that was to come. Onwards from 1950 the refugee population settled in Calcutta and its surroundings organized a powerful movement on the demand of legalization of refugee squatters� colonies. The foundation of United Central Refugee Committee in January 1950 was an important step in this direction. On February 18 1951 a massive rally organized by the UCRC drew hundred and fifty thousand refugees. On April 7, 1953 the UCRC organized a sit in at the gateway of the Bengal legislative assembly building as part of the then ongoing agitation for the authorization of the squatter colonies. In 1954 the Government of West Bengal declared squatters� colonies legal. In 1953 alongside the agitation of the refugees, there was a sudden mass upsurge in the city against a hike of one paisa in second class tram-fares. A very high degree of violence characterized the protest against the hike right from the first day. The protesters took to burning tramcars on the busy roads of the city and hurling bombs at bulbs filled with acid at the police. A summarily formed body called the �Trambhara Briddhi Pratirodh Committee� or Committee Against the Hike in Tram-fare led the protest to a certain extent, beyond which the movement gathered momentum and spread from one part of the city to the other on its own. Between July 8 and 18, 1953 parts of the city were virtually made inaccessible to the police. Small groups of youths armed with bombs guarded intersections of the streets of thoroughfare and fought ferouciously against the police. During this movement shops were and slums were set fire to. A report in the Statesman claimed that South Calcutta was in the hands of the mob and that part of the city had become inaccessible for the police as well as the public. The movement came to close on July 30, 1953 when Bidhan Chandra Ray, the illustrious Chief Minister of West Bengal decided to roll back the fare hike. It is interesting to note Ray arrived in Calcutta on that very day from Vienna. He had gone there for ocular surgery and was forced to get back without having undergone it due to the movement in Calcutta. In February 1954 a peaceful protest of school teachers demanding a higher pay turned into another episode of extreme, though short-lived in comparison to the resistance movement against tram fare hike. School teachers had raised the demand for a higher basic salary and a marginal increase in dearness allowance from the Government of West Bengal while the assembly was in session on 15 February 1954. Sections of the students and workers of the city supported the demand of the teachers and they joined the movement. A procession of the teachers and their sympathizers marching to the Governor�s residence or the Raj Bhawan, was stopped by the police within close vicinity of the building. The police allegedly roughed up two teachers taking part in the procession and this sparked off a pitched battle among the police and the processionists. While the police opened fire the protesters retaliated hurling stones and soda water bottles at them. Ironically while violence was on in the streets the Assembly had ratified the decision to increase teachers� pay and dearness allowance as demanded. The most significant movement that the city experienced took place in 1959. In August that year Calcutta played host to the Food Movement. Scarcity of foodgrains, particularly that of rice, and the availability of the same in the black market for high prices had been the cause of concern in Bengal since Independence. in the late 1950s demand for foodgrains at low prices was taken up by the left and socialist parties as a plank for launching attacks on the Congress Government under Chief Minister Bidhan Chandra Ray. On August 31, 1959 a massive procession marched towards the Writers� Buildings, the seat of the Ministry offices of the Bengal Government, to voice the demand for immediate supply of food-grains at Government controlled prices. Police lathi-charged and finally opened fire on the procession resulting in 80 to 130 deaths and several hundreds injured. Following this incident a section of the youth fought a pitched battle with the police in close vicinity of the Chief Minister�s residence, resulting in at least 37 deaths. During the fight with the police the youths erected barricades across the streets. The barricades represented the battle lines and were a pre-cursor of the things to come in 1966. In March 1966, the second Food Movement flared up as collective action aimed at completely paralyzing the state. In Calcutta movement took the shape of a situation comparable with guerrilla warfare in the serpentine by-lanes. In place of the clashes between the police and the protesters in the highways and the large open public space bands of youth organized themselves as small units in localities. Usually the clashes took place in the evenings. Street lights were switched off, bombs and acid bulbs were hurled at police parties patrolling the narrow by-lanes. In most cases the identity of the attackers could not be established. The police counter offensive against such attacks took the form of sudden and unwarranted the raids on households of the disturbed areas. These raids often translated into acts of unauthorized brutal repression. The answer to such action came in the form of hurling stones and broken glass on the police parties. The second Food Movement left over 40 dead in five days and several thousands were badly injured. The data on those who succumbed to their injuries are still not available. The most visible and remarkable characteristic of political and social movements of Calcutta was the high degree of violence that accompanied it. Urban violence had been endemic to the city since the beginning of the twentieth century. From the 1940s urban movements/ protest had been increasingly violent. Following Independence urban movements tended to turn violent almost always. The composition of these participants in these movements, as can be gathered from the body of diverse sources, included a vast number of students and youths. The participation of students and the youth had as is obvious left its mark on the movement. Evidence suggests that the state government�s attempt at removing the students by terming them unruly and turbulent contributed only in ensuring in their turning up in larger number in the movements to come. The other remarkable aspect of the movement was the gathering of large crowds of protestors. In all the movements mentioned above the overwhelming of crowds present had been made the pretext for brutal police action. The participation of the large crowds in the movements were often the determinant of the success of those, e.g. the anti �tram -fare �hike movement. From the late 1950s onwards the dispersal of the crowds from the streets of thoroughfare as a result of police action posed in effect a more difficult challenge for the administration. The participants onwards from the late 1950s organized themselves into small Bands armed with bombs and firmly entrenched in their own localities where the police had little chance of crushing their resistance. Overall the main trend of the urban movements was that a new political energy had come to be in the city after Independence, which gained strength in the face of the brutal repression and tended to express itself every time in the rhetoric of an increasing degree of violence. _________________________________________________________________ Catch the complete World Cup coverage with MSN http://content.msn.co.in/Sports/Cricket/Default.aspx From rakesh at sarai.net Mon Mar 26 16:03:23 2007 From: rakesh at sarai.net (rakesh at sarai.net) Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:33:23 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] From Surya; Guru on the Air: Ist I-Fellowship Posting In-Reply-To: <611087.49785.qm@web32105.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <611087.49785.qm@web32105.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <9cb53b36ea927b6488c4b1b9cd43e563@sarai.net> Dear Surya Prakash Your project seems interesting. Since you have proposed to do the field work in Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Mumbai, may I suggest you to visit one more place, Haridwar. This is because Haridwar is an ancient pilgrimage and almost all the new age gurus have their ashrams there. Just some conversations with old pandas and mandirs' pujaris and some of the tirthyatris, may be that brings some more angles about this gurugiri. best wishes rakesh On March 25, 9:13 am surya upadhyay wrote: > Dear All! > > This is Surya Prakash Upadhyay, Research Scholar, IIT > Bombay. This is my first posting on Sarai, > Reader-List. I am also an Independent Fellow with > Sarai for year 2007. > > The work with Sarai is titled: "Guru on the Air: > Televised Hinduism in contemporary India". > > Looking forward for more ideas and suggestions. > > The work is looking at the contemporary religious and > spiritual gurus in contemporary Hinduism. Though, this > is a case study of one such guru named Asaram Bapu but > it supposes that some general characteristics about > these gurus could be formed through the study. > However, there was no dearth of religious > personalities in Hinduism since very ancient times but > the recent gurus are somewhat different in many ways. > They are not only religious figures but they are also > personal counselor,healers, soothsayers, and medicine > man at the same time. They suggest ways to live life > healthy, happily, and prosperously. They have > rejuvenated Ayurveda, and herbal medicines along with > the keep-fit meritorious value of Yoga. Also, this > particular guru stresses more on the ideal of > self-restraint and achievement of > self-realization. The modern gurus are not based at > any established religious centres or pilgrimages such > as Varanasi, or Allahabad. Rather, they have their own > local ashrams where their followers come together and > instead of praying to god they prey their guru. > > Also, they are not attached to temples, so they are > different from the temple priests. They have their own > way of interpreting Hindu philosophy and these gurus > propagate through various kinds of amendments in > them. As far as this guru is concerned and whatever > information, I have, gathered through his literature > survey it comes out that he is more inclined towards > the Upanishads rather than Veda. It > does not mean to say that he discards Vedas but he > puts more emphasis on the Upanishads and other puranic > scriptures. Also, he includes Buddhist philosophy and > treaties on Jainism and Sikhism. From my point, it > gives a more broader audience and follower to this > guru. One interesting point that is coming out that > they readily talk in scientific language and for that > they use scientific terms and > scientific researches that endorse their view; > irrespective of the value placed to that particular > research work in the scientific community. > > Basically, all of these practices are going through > the telecast of satsang programs through television > cable channels, and therefore, I prefer to call these > modern god-people as "Tele-guru". A preliminary survey > done among his followers shows that almost 80% of his > followers came in his contact through listening his > sermons on Sony channel and Sanskara Channel. I am > looking at the instrumentality of > audio-visual media in the construction and maintenance > of religio-spiritual world in contemporary Hinduism > and at the process of mobilization of people, > particularly, towards this tele-guru. > > The project is an ethnographic work and would likely > to be conducted through interviews, and questionnaire > among the devotes and followers of Asaram Bapu, living > in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Lucknow. The reason for > keeping three different locations is that I want to > see the difference between the responses of the > devotees of these three cities. Mumbai is a > cosmopolitan city and Ahmedabad is the main ashram. > Lucknow is a peripheral ashram. In this way, the study > will throw more light on the varieties of contemporary > religiosity. > > However, the study looks at the media practice, both > old and new and will involve the analysis of print > media as well as electronic media and how media is > playing its role in the propagation of his > organisation in terms of increasing his followers. > Till now, I have formed a questionnaire that I will > send on the reader-list for your > valuable suggestions. > > Cheers > > Surya Prakash Upadhyay > Research Scholar, > Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, > I.I.T. Bombay, > Powai, Mumbai 400076 > surya_rajan21 at yahoo.com > surya.upadhyay at gmail.com > > > > > > > ______________________________________________________________________ > ______________ > Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast > with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut. > http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#loc_weather > _________________________________________ > 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. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.ne > t/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From indersalim at gmail.com Mon Mar 26 22:46:54 2007 From: indersalim at gmail.com (inder salim) Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:46:54 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] this indersalim STUFF from KASHMIR: IFS- post-Ist. Message-ID: <47e122a70703261016i2efa8340vd6ef9ffd3a3acb4b@mail.gmail.com> Hi I am: This indersalim stuff from Kashmir. I am a performance artist. ( please include the 'theater performances' here, though I am not strictly in the practice of doing things on stage. ) The art-in-public- space, yes, I do, but the definition is quite vast, so no big claims. I try to conceptualize my action ( performance ) with ongoing conflicts (both political and otherwise ) in mind, but as you know, the form incorporated changes the dynamics of ' the action' even. So, I believe the the unpredictability of doing a performance… I enclose three poem pieces, the second one I ended with a little performance at Performance poetry thing organized by Vivek Naranyan at Sarai some days back. My project is to organize performance art, to collaborate and initiate performances anywhere in India or abroad. So I am myself waiting for a surprise or so. But meanwhile : YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI* Men keep on pissing near the wall Till a graffiti grows: YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI And if men keep on pissing near the wall They imagine reading a line YEH PADNA MANA HAI** Next to the line YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI. And if the fermentation of the absorbed piss begins to emit those nose wrenching fumes, the complacent administrator's nose comes closer to it to arrange an alternative in the nearby vicinity. And if a money generating toilet structure comes up a little away from the disgraced wall, The text: YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI Becomes idle and meaningless Till some poorly paid workers of different Political parties paste glossy Posters of their masters underneath. And once the colourful posters of Politicians and their children politicians Appear underneath the line YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI The artist-in-public-space Inserts a word NAHEE*** In the line YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI At an appropriate place. For some real men to impart some real meaning, To their age old habit Of pissing in the public space. * Yahan mootna manah hai = pissing is prohibited here. ** Yeh panda manah hai= reading this is prohibited *** Nahee= not ………………………………………………………………………………. Teri to lal hai ( Yours is Red ) The more you climb the more it will grow;- On a magical tree, This particular species of monkeys in their own jolly great mood, they simply kept on Jumping and climbing Climbing and jumping, Till they decided to look down To see the earth from above. It was a point, less than the tree, But quite far from below. That a two of the species Happened to bend on their knees To see each other as well. It just happened that one was above the other, And had a chance to see the Downing Back of his brother. * Aray, teri to lal hai, (yours is red) Screamed the-one-below-the-above-one. Heard by the wind, and by the leaves And thousands of his own species, The one-above-the-below-one, without fun, Felt humiliated, stooped low, first inwardly then outwardly, to identify… But the-one-below-the-above-one Kept on jumping and climbing, And climbing and jumping, Till it was air which supported his feet, And his belief that he was different, than the-one-above-the-below-one. But, one day a return Would make him understand The meaning of ** Laet tulith chi sari gaeb. ( in Kashmiri = Lift the tail of any sheep, all of them are female.) The performance ended with the exposure of my buttocks, painted with red through my pant torn from behind. ..................................................................................................................... Cockroach Trapped I was, Not too exhausted in the toilet sink, In which he was about to piss… Periplaneta Americana Orientalis, Perhaps, this is how a Zoologist Would define me By the length and breadth of my delicate antenna. I was suffering: And when he held in his hand A melancholy, nozzle like thing That was behind the zip, I thought of a rescue operation….. But a shimmering rope like thing, Which fell next-near to me Was only a mirage,-- Because the more I tried to catch hold of it The more I was on a difficult ground. Now what I was floating upon, Was quite a blow to my hope, Otherwise a usual thing to smell and taste: I was aghast. The shadow like thing stood there, Watched my swimming abilities Or perhaps, pitied my fate. And when suddenly he pulled the chain Again and again: ' O shit , this city is really dry ' I heard him saying before The lights went off .................................................................................................. ................................................................................................. please visit: http://indersalim.livejournal.com to navigate, press EARLIER at page's bottom. From arshad.mcrc at gmail.com Tue Mar 27 15:10:14 2007 From: arshad.mcrc at gmail.com (arshad amanullah) Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:10:14 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Insights into Madrasa Media Message-ID: <2076f31d0703270240r1a194d8fw56b0466b07748c36@mail.gmail.com> Maulana Khushtar Noorani Aligh is the editor-in-chief of the Jaam-e-Noor, a monthly madrasa magazine from Delhi. He, in this interview with Arshad Amanullah, provides insights into the domain of the madrasa media and while critiquing it, he speaks of his vision for introducing professional ethos in this sector. The discussion situated within the post September 11 context, lays bare how the mainstream media is perceived in the space of this lesser known media. Q: When you started Jaam-e-Noor? A: It is not me who started Jaam-e-Noor. My grandfather Allama Arshadul Qadari (d: 2002) founded a magazine with the same name in Kolkata in 1963. It had to shut down in 1964 due to his increasing preoccupations with other projects. Thus, Jaam-e-Noor is not a new magazine in the circle of madrasa journalism, though it is new in its present avatar. Q: How did you get the idea to revive it? A: During my academic soujorn (1996-1998) to Libya, I've closely observed how the journalism is practiced in the Arab world. My Diploma in Print Journalism (2001) from Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, New Delhi helped me in developing my own vision of quality journalism. My sensibility got bruised when I used to see the way the madrasa journals were brought out. That is why I was very eagerly looking for an opportunity to translate my vision into reality. On the occasion of chahlum (a ceremony held on the 40th day from the date of a person's demise) of my grandfather in 2002, I announced that I would revive Jaam-e-Noor as a monthly magazine in his memoriam. Q: Would you like to elaborate your views on the way journalism is practiced in the madrasa journals? A: In madrasas, journalism per se has never been taken seriously. The motive behind these journals has either been to raise funds or to keep the community informed of the activities of the institution. The editors send to the press whatever articles they get without going through them. Lessons from the Qur'an, Lessons from the Hadees, the Chapter of Fatwas, etc are 4-5 archaic columns which you find almost every madrasa magazine. Their editors simply do not think on issues, like what are the present socio-economic realities of the Indian Muslims, what they need, what ails them and what they can offer to the community through these magazines. The reason is that they are not the professional ones. Whoever has a certain amount of mastery on the language of Urdu, is considered to be eligible for the post of editor. Thus, every editor of a madrasa journal simultaneously happens to be either a teacher, or an imam, or a principal, etc. So it is not difficult to imagine the standard of the journalism they practice. They just keep on reproducing stuffs relating to namaz, fasting, miracles and prophecies. One can find them in the religious books available in the market. What new things you are offering through your journal to the readers? Besides all these, the editors lament of their low circulation. Obviously, if you are not a professional editor, the reading material you are providing are not upto the expectations of the readers, why should they buy your magazine? Q: What are you aiming at through the publication of this magazine? A: With the help of this magazine, first, I wanted to show how journalism is practiced and why it should be attuned to the contemporary time. Second, the ulama have been exercising a sort of control on the society. There is an unstated rule that none could utter or write a single word against the mistakes they make. They use these magazines as a tool to perpetuate their sway over the masses. I want to break this hegemony of the ulama. In editorials, I write against them without paying any heed to their status or age. Many people said, "It was very courageous on your part that you have written publicly on the issues people were afraid of mentioning them in their private chambers. We wonder how they have spared you from the fatwa yet". As a number of people have now started writing on these, once considered to be untouchable, issues, I've, I think, achieved my goal. Q: How people reacted to it? A: A lot of debate and hullabaloo followed it. But as I never wrote against a particular individual, I remained untargeted. None can target you or reply back to you if you write on issues. Q: Apart from this, how your magazine is different from the rest of the pack? A: I have introduced a number of innovations in it: selected headlines on the cover-page, suggesting what the magazine has to offer, visual representation of the themes of the articles in the cover-design, and to get it laminated. All these are brand new in the circle of madarasa journalism of Ahl-e-Sunnat sect. For example, the cover page of the special issue on Jihad carries the image of globe wrapped in the national flag of the USA and a hand which has a sleeve made of the flag of Israel. All these symbols have been put in a manner which suggests that Israel, with the help of the USA, is trying to capture the entire world. Q: How do you plan the content of your magazine? A: The magazine which contains 64 pages, is divided into regular columns and it strictly adheres to this column design. Its editorial, being a full-fledged article on an important current issue, runs into 6-8 pages. For Tahriri Mobahasa (debate), a regular column, I select a theme and invite experts to express their opinions on the same in 2-3 pages. This concept I have actually borrowed from the Sunday edition of The Times of India which provides diverse views by experts on a chosen theme. The next column is Fikr-o-Nazar (Views).This column is devoted to the views of those readers who are not columnists or scribes but they have some important issue to share with others, though in brief, say only in 10 lines. You can sense a sort of democracy in this column. The magazine has a regular column of the interviews which is very popular among the readers. As it is a religious magazine, interviews of only eminent Muslim personalities or of renowned literary persons get published in it. Khama Talashi (academic interrogation) is another interesting column. A columnist, under the pen name of Abul Faiz Moinee, critically analyses every issue of Jaam-e-Noor. He even does not spare me and I publish his scathing remarks because I want to spread the message that democracy and the freedom of expression are two key components of journalism. Q: Does your magazine have a special column for fatwas? A: Yes, the magazine has a regular column called "Shar'I Adalat" (In the Court of Sharia) devoted to the publication of fatwas. Readers send their queries by postal service, telephony or email whatever means they are comfortable with, to the Mufti of Jaam-e-Noor who is based in the qasba of Ghosi, Mau. The column publishes the question, full address and the full text of the fatwa every month. Normally, only 2-3 fatwas get printed in the column.Most of the fatwas are about the moa'mlat (practical issues), rather than, idabaat (prayers). This is in complete contrast to the norm within the madrasa journalism circle regarding the fatwa column, i.e., reproduction of fatwas in the magazine from the register of Darul Ifta of a madrasa without considering how old they are. Q: Do papers based on empirical studies appear in your journal? A: If someone sends such a piece, I welcome it. But the magazine, on its own, does not have the resources to conduct survey and fieldwork, inseparable ingredients of the empirical studies. Q: The madrasa magazines are full of repetitions. Does it, in your views, put a question mark on the intellectual output and originality of the ulama? A: Of course, it does. The reason is that the madrasa people have confined themselves within the boundary of madrasas. That is why I've, through this magazine, raised the voice that besides the religious subjects, secular subjects should also be taught in madrasas.This does not mean that the madrasa boys should attain mastery over modern sciences, however the knowledge of their basic concepts is a must. Madrasa students, after the completion of their religious studies, should enroll themselves into the government universities and observe the world. All this will contribute in broadening their intellectual horizon. Q: Which kind of scribes contribute in your magazine? A: Mostly I engage the young generation of the ulama, especially those who are exposed to the modern education as well. They usually are free to write whatever they fancy to write about. However, sometimes I brief them regarding the content and the perspective. Q: Do the non-ulama also contribute to your magazine? A: Quite often. They constitute about 50 % of the contributors. Q: How writings of the ulama are different from those of the non-ulama? A: Writings of the ulama are marked with artificiality, difficult words, unwanted phrases and a plenty of synonyms. They lack in easiness (barjastagi). However, the newcomers assiduously avoid these shortcomings in their writings. Q: Do women also contribute to your magazine? A: In the religious circle, there is almost a dearth of those women who take to the writing. Earlier there were no madrasas for girls but now a number of them have come up and began producing alimas and fazilas (women ulama). Women scribes constitute around 5% of the contributors. The issue of February, 2006 carries piece of Yasmin Zaidi who is based in the US. Likewise, the special issue on Jihad itself opens with an article of Dr.Shagufta Ne'mat who is from the Aligarh Muslim University. Women contributors generally happen to be the teacher in a university or a college. . Q: Do you have any editorial board? A: No. I only have an assistant who helps me in putting the magazine together. Q: Do you pay the contributors? A: No. Their contribution is completely voluntary. Q: What is the circulation pattern of your magazine? A: Total circulation of the magazine stands at 8000.This is the only madrasa journal whose 2000 copies are consumed in Pakistan. A madrasa magazine usually has its total circulation lower than it. Every copy of my magazine, according to an estimate, is read by at least four persons. Thus, my readership is placed at 30000. In India, UP has the biggest number of subscribers which is 2000. Apart form it, a good number of copies are sold in Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Rajsthan, Maharashtra, J&K and Gujarat. In the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Uttranchal, Goa, etc subscription is very low. The madrasa students and the ulama, especially the younger lots form the 70 % of my readers. University teachers, literary persons and intellectuals also buy the magazine. Around 50 imams of the mosques from the UK are among the subscribers of the monthly. Q: What is the rate of growth in your readership? A: Though it's difficult to find readers for a quality magazine in Urdu, Jaam-e-Noor gets around 150-200 new customers every month, out of them, 90 % are from India. Q: Do you also get all those government facilities which a mainstream magazine avails? A: I've never tried to avail the government facilities. This is a shortcoming on my part. Q: What is the monthly printing cost? A: The printing business cost me something around Rs.30-35000.The situation is that the magazine is not incurring any loss and we manage to get a very meager amount as profit. Q: Do you accept all kinds of ads? A: I can not accept those ads which are antithesis to the teachings of Islam. For example, I can not advertise for alcohol. However, I get a lot of other kind of ads as the magazine is very popular. Q: What is your marketing strategy? A: To speak the truth, I am yet to develop any marketing technique. On the occasion of the urs of A'ala Hazrat Fazile Barailvi which is held in Bareilly, this year I offered an attractive subscription marketing scheme for which I had advertised in my magazine only. I made it a point that though the lucky participants got the subscription for free, rest of them also benefited from the scheme in a way or another. Consequently, I ended up making 350 new subscribers to the magazine. Q: Did you ever try to make your magazine available at the newsstands? A: As the magazine is religious in nature, I don't think I need to introduce it at newsstands. Q: Do you publish human photographs also? A: No. But I've begun to put blurred human images. It also sparked a heated discussion in the pages of Jaam-e-Noor. A lot of writings appeared in favour of my stand. So, I keep on publishing them. Q: What do you think of the way madrasas are projected in the mainstream media? A: Mainstream media is not honest in its portrayal of the madrasas. This can be attributed to mainly two reasons: those who do so, don't have any knowledge of madrasas.They are fed with staple diet of rumours regarding madrasas.Drawing on these hearsays, they come up with superficial analysis of the phenomena, lacking any documentary evidence to support their own arguments; there are others who consciously do so.Thus, media is totally against madrasas. It's always alleged that madrasas are the breeding grounds for terrorism. After all, I am also from madrasa and there are thousands like me who, in their own individual capacities, are contributing towards the making of a developed and prosperous nation. Q: Is a communication gap between the madrasa community and the media persons is responsible for this negative portrayal? A: I don't think so. How can one accept that communication gap is proving a deterrent for those media persons who managed to discover the hideouts of Nirbhay Gujjar, Phoolan Devi, Veerappan, etc and to do interviews with them, while the forces of 2-3 states were biting dust in search of these dreaded criminals? The main issue is lack of the will. They simply don't want to do it. Q: How did you as the editor of a monthly journal reacted to the anti-madrasa propaganda in the wake of September 11? A: My reaction to it got many manifestations. I have published several pieces. Also, I brought out a special issue on Jihad and provided a range of reading materials on the theme so that misconception regarding it could be allayed. Through another special publication on the Cartoon controversy, I have again tried to present all dimensions of the issue, hoping that it will help in clearing the muddied climate regarding Islam and Muslims. Q: Why did you prefer to bring out your magazine in the language of Urdu? A: As Urdu is the language of the religious circle and my magazine is also a religious one, it is in Urdu. Though hardly 1% of the circle is familiar with English, I'm very soon launching an English magazine as well. It will cater to the policy makers and media persons. General masses are good for nothing. If I manage to convey the real message of Islam to these chosen few, the situation can be ameliorated to a certain extent. It is only the religious elites, I have targeted through Jaam-e-Noor. .. From saran_mohit at hotmail.com Thu Mar 29 07:32:35 2007 From: saran_mohit at hotmail.com (rajneesh saran) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 07:32:35 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] The promise of the commons - part II References: Message-ID: u ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2007 1:37 AM Subject: [Reader-list] The promise of the commons - part II > New online journal Re-public (www.republic.gr/en > ) > > has just published the second part of its special issue "The promise of > the commons ". The issue explores the openings that the concept of the > 'commons' presents for democratic theory and practice . Articles include: > > > > Lawrence Lessig – Creative Commons: 4 years on > (http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=96 ) > > One of the founders of Creative Commons reviews the success of the > licences that have become a simple way for authors and artists to express > the freedoms they want their creativity to carry. > > _____ > > Gunther Teubner - The private/public dichotomy: After the critique? > (http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=99 ) > > Gunther Teubner proposes that the originary distinction of public/private > should be replaced by the notion of polycontexturality. > > _____ > > Diomidis Spinellis - Open source as a paradigm for evolving complex > systems (http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=97 > ) > Τhough the open source development model is not a panacea, it opens > exciting new possibilities for expanding our society's commons, argues > Diomidis Spinellis. > _____ > > Tom Steinberg - Public data, the commons, and democracy in the UK ( > http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=98 ) > Freeing access to public data is a step towards a better functioning > democracy, argues Tom Steinberg. > > _____ > > All articles of Re-public are published with a Creative Commons license > and can be re-printed freely, by acknowledging their source. > > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From yasir.media at gmail.com Wed Mar 28 08:17:54 2007 From: yasir.media at gmail.com (yasir ~) Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:47:54 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] Hameed Haroons woeful Email Message-ID: <5af37bb0703271947q2387323ka9f36b4aaaa50a7a@mail.gmail.com> I would like to know what you think of this. http://pakistaniat.com/2007/03/27/pakistan-dawn-newspaper-pressure-letter-email-hameed-haroon/ Email + 4 appendices (pdf) significant in the appendices are the exchange re mqm & the court ruling in favour I find myself equally in support and criticism y From hight at 34n118w.net Wed Mar 28 10:53:06 2007 From: hight at 34n118w.net (hight at 34n118w.net) Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:23:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] vague terrain 06 online Message-ID: <2980.76.173.54.91.1175059386.squirrel@webmail.34n118w.net> Vagueterrain.net the Toronto-based digital arts quarterly, has just launched its sixth issue, vague terrain 06: locative. This issue is an exploration of locative technology and creative practice. The issue was guest curated by David McCallum and features work by: evamaria trischak, jeremy hight, knifeandfork, marc tuters, patricia rodriguez, sawako, ssim-el, an interview with michael lenczner, and an overview of the context photography project. To view the journal please visit http://www.vagueterrain.net From jaideepkharub at yahoo.com Tue Mar 27 10:45:11 2007 From: jaideepkharub at yahoo.com (jaideep kharub) Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:15:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] IP Law News (3) - Bahrain Message-ID: <397176.89094.qm@web56703.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Dear Friends: This is third part of my article. This part gives you information on industrial designs protection available in Bahrain. III. INDUSTRIAL DESIGNS 1. LEGAL BASIS 2. MEMBERSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS 3. GENERAL 4. FILING 5. EXAMINATION, PROTECTION DURATION 6. INFRINGEMENT PROCEEDINGS 1. LEGAL BASIS - Patents, Designs and Trade Marks/Service Marks Regulations, 1955, effective June 15, 1955, and subsequent amendments. New legislation Industrial Drawings & Designs Law No. 6 of year 2006 (Published in Official Gazette No. 2737 dated May 3, 2006) has been enacted but not implemented as yet. 2. MEMBERSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS - WTO/TRIPS Agreement, since January 1995. - WIPO Convention, since June, 1995. - Paris Convention, since October, 1997. 3. GENERAL Bahrain has been a member of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property since 29 October 1997. However, claiming priority is not possible at the present moment and will not be possible until enforcement of the new law. Even the international specification of designs is not followed. 4. FILING Any person who is the proprietor of a design (model) registered in any country except Israel or any person deriving his right from such registered proprietor by assignment or other mode of transfer, may apply. Multiple application i.e. one application covering more than one variance of the design is not possible. In such cases a separate application covering each variance of the design must be filed. Filing Requirements Applications in Bahrain are to be filed with complete documentation. In order to proceed with an industrial design application, the following documents are required: I. A power of attorney signed by an authorized signatory of the applicant. It is not necessary to have the document notarized or legalized. II. A certified copy of a corresponding registration in the home country or in any foreign country. III. Full particulars of the applicant. IV. Three representations of the design. 5. EXAMINATION, PROTECTION DURATION Novelty of the design is not the requirement for registration of the design. However, Issuance of the registration certificate in Bahrain stipulates the existence of a home registration or any other foreign registration of the design. The specifications shall be exactly as shown in the basic registration. It can be either in the form of drawings or photographs and should show at least three views of the design. As per Article 9 of the Law, a design may be denied to registration where the Registrar is of the opinion that if the registration were granted as applied for would: (a) be injurious to public order, morality or the interests of the community as a whole; (b) be contrary to law or public policy; (c) be inconsistent with the provisions of this law; (d) deceive the public; (e) hurt or rouse religious susceptibilities of any part of the community. Design applications accepted by the Registrar are published in the Official Gazette. There is a 30-day period open for filing an opposition by any interested party. In the absence of an opposition, a published design is registered, and the certificate of registration is issued. A design registration in Bahrain is valid for 5 years from the filing date renewable for two additional terms of 5 years each (15 years in total). 6. INFRINGEMENT PROCEEDINGS Part V of the Law provides for the institution of legal proceedings and the remedies available to the registered owner on instance of infringement of his registered design. Article 45 says that any person, who without the consent of the registered owner makes, uses, puts into trade any articles of the registered design, deemed to be an infringer under the Law and shall be liable to the proceedings for infringement. Article 47 of the Law empowers the Court to grant / award such remedies and such other relief as it may deem fit. The Court is empowered to make such orders for an injunction or inspection of accounts and impose such terms and issue such directions as it may deem fit. Hope this information may be useful to you. Should you require further information, feel free to contact me. Best Regards Jaideep Kharub IP Officer - AGIP PO Box - 990, Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain. Phone : 00973-39187539 (M) E-mail: jaideepkharub at yahoo.com jaideep.kharub at gmail.com "If it is not right..do not do it; if it is not true..do not say it" ____________________________________________________________________________________ TV dinner still cooling? Check out "Tonight's Picks" on Yahoo! TV. http://tv.yahoo.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070326/73a75a49/attachment.html From abhikauliya at googlemail.com Tue Mar 27 12:10:35 2007 From: abhikauliya at googlemail.com (Abhik Samanta) Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 02:40:35 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] first posting Message-ID: <83253d810703262340t872c479ye1568b52d57a704e@mail.gmail.com> Hello everyone this is my first posting, extremely sorry i am so late, hope its not too late. The project that i suggested would involve an exploration of the printed matter of the Gita Press as media. An exploration of an act of communication, which in this case, is designed as a commodity that is priced at the range of basic necessities. For instance, when they first came out, the editions were called 'gutkha' otherwise used for alight intoxicant. In a world where expressions are demanded, so that their conformity can be had, the poignant moment when the object of expression is configured becomes very precious. This is well realized by global agencies who feel the need to generate demand. What remains is the expression itself with the urgency to retain its partiality or overcome it with the object it is meant for. This choice, the realization of which is crucial in resisting demands on expression, is also the site on which banality, which must accompany a claim on expression, can be found. This is because expression is essentially a choice , but not the absence of it. Understanding being important in such a situation, one could explore the history of banality itself as found in the cheap pamphlets of the Gita Press. The Gita Press commodities became an expression when Hanumanprasad , on the advice of Gandhi, declared in the first issue of his journal* Kalyan*(though not yet a part of the press but later on its chief organ) that no advertisements would occur, to which he added his own idea that this would include books and hence no literary criticism. It was thus exclusively a part of a language of need as the image of a commodity. An expression of nationalism. The denial of other commodities belied its banal character(pricing) while on display with them on bookshelves in stations or large market areas. However the expression, as being that of nationalism, becomes complete only when it explains itself as being the words of God as articulated by Hanumanprasad primarily as also by his preceptor Jayadayal Goyandaka and occasionally his friend Radhababa and later on by Swami Ramsukhdas who died recently. This is why it is part of the language of need, which remains even today as a language of nationalism. But, this is the site where the products become banal. Denial of nationalism or iself is how it becomes national just as it is a commodity that denies others. This was how Hanuman thought his commodity would be sold. Meaning how it would be exchanged. The act of exchange being an expression of nationalism. The commodity would then be consumed. This separation is another inversion of the order of demand where the moment of exchange moves closer and closer to the moment of consumption. Exchange here is rather a disjuncture. For what is consumed does not relate only to the nation. As a commodity it seeks the body of the reader located amidst colonial journeys of work and travel. This was the marketing strategy of Hanuman, better described as a strategy of distribution for it sought to reach or capture at the moment of fatigue in course of engagement in the time of work. The word fatigue stumbles into the way spiritual categories are described in corporeal language in the idiom of the Press. The preoccupations of the world are very bad, therefore he must deal with them and not leave anything behind… Just as a man gets ready for a railway journey by buying a ticket and preparing to board the train , so must a man deal with his commitments, then there will be nothing to worry about. (*Kalyan* August 1926,p.52.) Consumption is a corporeal act, which can only be described as training for the real thing. Reading is akin to an act of hearing or an act of seeing. For, the major portion of tracts like *Shriramchintan* are printed in question answer form where answers are long and made with reference to a central text like the Ramcharitmanas or anywhere from the corpus of sacred words of Hinduism. Hanumanprasad describes what he sees in an act of elaborated translation. He is merely a guide who writes short essays on the historicity of the Ramayana. Excerpts from letters to people asking questions also included making the tract a documentary or testimony of the corporeality that he claims. The reason why he has to make it so is the real claim that Hanuman makes in his confessed location in the transmission of the message. The claim which is the source of and solution to fatigue is the existence or flow of dark or bad times. The colour of the images on the cover which attract the buyer become meaningful only with the darkness described inside. Considering that Hanuman was the designer and not the painter blackness can be seen as coeval to blindness. The Gita Press pictures can perhaps be seen as emerging from 'the blackness of Allah' to borrow a picturesque phrase from the otherwise bland Orhan Pamuk novel *My* *Name* *is* *Red*. Here again the viewer becomes becomes introduced to darkness only when he or she becomes a buyer. This puts off the earlier denial of being a commodity into an ironical existence which is another source of colour. The aim of this project would be to see how these pictures come into being or attain colour and light in their location as commodities. An expression is more of denial, and farthest from a demand for conformity. Hence when there is an explanation of demand, on its rejection, it is not an expression but a means of perpetuating conformity. The object of expression is absent all the same. In which case expression can only seek to unite with the body of the speaker from which the demand was made. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070327/570fc939/attachment.html From clinicalexam at gmail.com Tue Mar 27 23:38:08 2007 From: clinicalexam at gmail.com (Chitra Venkataramani) Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:38:08 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Hygiene and the City: IFS Post 1 Message-ID: Hygiene and the City (The idea of clutter) Hi, My name is Chitra Venkataramani and this is my first post. I am looking at the changing idea of hygiene in the city and how it gets associated with the idea of clutter. I primarily work with graphic books and am interested in how the city can be mapped through drawings and stories. Having finished my masters degree in visual communication from IIT Bombay, I am working as a freelance designer form a small studio space in Bombay. The Structure of the book: The book looks at the idea of clutter at various levels of zoom such as domestic clutter and at clutter in the city. Each part has smaller narratives within it. Like the idea of personal clutter is explained through how some people assiduously clean before they start a new project (like me); and how some clean their homes yearly and also looks at how ads tell us to buy things that will keep our homes clean, and cockroaches off our tooth brushes and so on. The story moves out into the city, where the idea of de-cluttering has become related to giving more space. Like widening roads to accommodate more vehicles, adding carriages to trains and cleaning the natural water drains of the city. The narrative weaves through each of these parts- of doctors who travel to Grant Medical School who worry about what all they may catch in the crowded train; compounded by medical posters that warn you of all contagious diseases spread by touch. How I plan to work: I have started working on my personal narrative while I am collecting data. The data includes devices designed by people to negotiate crowded trains, reports on cleaning the drains and projects where people have designed loos in trains that can be easily cleaned. I am also talking to people who commute and collecting their stories and downloading advertisements for cleaning products. I plan to keep painting and posting images as and when I finish them The first image can be found here: http://flipsearch.blogspot.com/2007/03/sarai-first-post-image.html This is a painting of the studio space where I and my friends work. From here, the narrative moves out into the locality (which will be redeveloped in 3 months time) and to other parts of the book. I plan to regularly make image posts as and when I finish drawing them. Regards, Chitra -- Chitra Venkataramani 7B, Orchard Avenue, Powai Mumbai 400076 9819 474375 www.flipsearch.blogspot.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070327/e38ca62b/attachment.html From sumit at tarshi.net Tue Mar 27 13:02:23 2007 From: sumit at tarshi.net (Sumit Baudh) Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 13:02:23 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Invitation /12 Apr 07 (Thur) 3-4:30pm, Prostitutes and Politics: the Tolerated Brothels Debate in Colonial India Message-ID: <20070327073225.17DD428DA0F@mail.sarai.net> The South and Southeast Asia Resource Centre on Sexuality is hosting a discussion on Prostitutes and Politics: the Tolerated Brothels Debate in Colonial India 12 April 2007 (Thursday), 3:00 - 4:30 pm TARSHI, 11, Mathura Road, First Floor, Jangpura B, New Delhi In 19th century colonial India the reaction to the threat (both social and biological) of the prostitute was to forcibly confine infected women in "lock hospitals". An international backlash against these measures left the government in need of a method of regulating prostitutes without seeming to impinge upon their liberty. Steve Legg, PhD will make a presentation for 45 minutes, tracing the 20th century evolution of the legislative machinery that allowed the state to exert some authority over female prostitutes. This involved a shift from initial policies of segregating women into certain quarters of a town, to the later targeting of brothels under the Suppression of Immoral Traffic Acts, both of which the prostitutes resisted and challenged in various ways. Steve attained BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge and spent three following years as a Research Fellow. He is now a Lecturer in cultural and historical geography at the University of Nottingham and has a book out in March/April entitled Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities to be published by Blackwells (in the UK, America and Australia) and Rawat Publishers (in India). He is currently expanding this work on urban politics to look at the regulatory policies applied to prostitutes in 20th century colonial India. This entails situating the local history of Delhi's prostitutes in the national politics of the Suppression of Immoral Traffic Acts and the international politics of social hygiene campaigners and the League of Nations. The presentation will be followed by an open discussion. Please stay for tea /coffee and biscuits from 4:30 - 5:00pm. RSVP: Sumit Baudh Senior Programme Associate The South and Southeast Asia Resource Centre on Sexuality TARSHI, 11 Mathura Road, 1st Floor, Jangpura B, New Delhi-110014 tel: +91 11 2437 9070, +91 11 2437 9071 fax: +91 11 2437 4022 eml: sumit at tarshi.net web: www.asiasrc.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070327/88d5f819/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From gaurigill at yahoo.co.in Wed Mar 28 19:49:34 2007 From: gaurigill at yahoo.co.in (Gauri Gill) Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:19:34 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] Camerawork Delhi presents Anna Fox Message-ID: <615886.38876.qm@web8503.mail.in.yahoo.com> Camerawork Delhi * presents an illustrated talk and discussion led by photographer and educator Anna Fox 8 PM Friday 30th March S-17/3 Khirkee Village Malviya Nagar New Delhi 110017 (aka Yellow Door next to Khoj, turn into the vilage next to Nandini Restaurant on the Press Enclave Road go down the lane next to the Sai Baba Mandir For further information call Sunil Gupta on 9810327332) Anna Fox has been working in photography for over 20 years exhibiting and publishing her work worldwide. Fox works using vivid colour and satire in her image making, she deals with the narration of stories combining documentary with fiction and has worked on stories that are both biographical and autobiographical as well as looking at everyday subjects such as London office life or English village life. Her work has recently been exhibited at Tate Modern and The Pompidou Centre in Paris. It is currently on show at Tate Liverpool and in Tate Britain, her new monograph will be published by Photoworks later this year. Anna Fox is Head of Photography at the University College for the Creative Arts at Farnham, England and is currently developing a collaborative MA course in Photography with NID in Ahmedabad. Camerawork Delhi is a quarterly publication devoted to Independent photography, co-edited by Gauri Gill, Sunil Gupta and Radika Singh. Funded in part by Khoj. (Apologies for cross posting.) __________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Answers: Share what you know. Learn something new http://in.answers.yahoo.com/ From mail at shivamvij.com Thu Mar 29 00:51:06 2007 From: mail at shivamvij.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:51:06 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Language in Pakistan Message-ID: <9c06aab30703281221n3e5f8507yc519e64187ed10bd@mail.gmail.com> Pakistan and the battle for English http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6500227.stm The BBC Urdu service's MASUD ALAM, back living in Pakistan after 15 years, reflects on his countrymen's use of English. There are only a few video clips of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, in the archives of state-run television in Pakistan and they are aired with unfailing regularity on occasions of national import. One excerpt is from a speech in which the father of the nation says a few lines in Urdu, to rapturous applause from the crowd, followed by the disclaimer in English "my Urdu is tangawala Urdu". (For those not familiar with Mr Jinnah, the man was as westernised in his lifestyle as any Lincolns Inn-educated Indian barrister at the start of 20th Century could be.) Tangawala means coachman, and perhaps in the early days of Pakistan's independence, they didn't speak Urdu very well. They still don't. The same goes for leaders - politicians and army generals alike - who succeeded Mr Jinnah. A good majority of them couldn't speak the country's national language fluently. >From Jinnah to the current leader, President Pervez Musharraf, the preferred language of Pakistani rulers has been English. The masses, by general inclination keen to follow the ruling class, have honestly tried to keep pace. But after 60 years of excruciating practice, they have managed only half the linguistic excellence: they've learnt to speak bad Urdu but constructing a grammatically correct sentence in English remains a challenge. 'Chips in isle' The language of the urban Pakistani is now a hotchpotch of Urdu, Punjabi and a few words of English spoken with an accent that can be understood only by someone who speaks the same way. My daughter is learning this cocktail language and having fun with it. The other day she had a conversation with the man who runs the canteen at her school, that went something like this: "Can I have chips?" (In Urdu) "Finish." "You must have some left?" "All finish." "This is not fair. You want us to bring our own potatoes to school?" "And isle." "Sorry?" "Isle? Isle... for frying." When her friends elbowed her into recognising that it was "oil" the man was talking about, they all had a good laugh. 'No assess' But things can get a little more complicated when such cryptic talk is done over the phone, with a complete stranger. At a friend's place of work I overheard a man calling up the computer help desk. "I can't assess the drive," he complained. "But that's my job, what exactly is your problem?" is what I assume the person on the other end must have said. Our man kept repeating that his inability to "assess the drive" was the problem. After a few minutes of totally incoherent exchanges, the poor helper finally realised the problem was "access". The first generation of Pakistani bureaucrats and military officers had derived their entire English vocabulary from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, the booklets of Standard Operating Procedures found in military and bureaucratic circles, and the official correspondence with lowly functionaries of the British Raj. On social occasions, this word bank was embellished with phrases like "jolly good" and "old chap" to sound authentic - often to the amusement of the gora sahib (foreign master). But after 1947, in this brand new country of Pakistan, there was no white-skinned patronising colonist to frown or frolic at the sight and sound of a subject trying too hard to speak like the master. This emboldened the native no end. He was now free to choose English over his mother tongue. And he did so with relish. However his vocabulary was limited to the world of officialdom, as it existed in 1940s British India. To overcome this handicap he took to improvisation, and in the process, made valuable additions to the English language. Manufacturing phrases Gen Musharraf, the army chief, is the epitome of this creative trend. He deposed an elected prime minister and installed himself as the "chief executive" rather than the old-fashioned "chief martial law administrator" - the epithet preferred by three generals and for some time, by a civilian prime minister, before him. He is also the proud manufacturer of the term "enlightened moderation", the meaning of which is being debated years after it was coined. He showed his flair for linguistic innovation more recently when he suspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, by making him "non-functional". He is now very disappointed that the flourish is lost on the country's lawyers who are engaging in mass protests against the chief justice's "suspension". Lower down the order, the government functionaries continue to show the same zest at modernising English language in their day to day business. The Capital Development Authority is on a binge of road-making these days. One such project is the upgrading of a two-lane road into a dual carriageway. It is labelled "dualisation" - a word three online dictionaries I consulted, have yet to recognise. Long arm To the common man, English is still a wild horse he'd like to mount every now and then but one he cannot tame. Year after year English remains the single most likely subject students at all levels flunk. Even those who passed their English exams and made it to the present parliament - for which university education was mandatory - are not always known to have a comfortable relationship with English. Punjab province's Chief Minister, Pervez Elahi, is among those few who seem to correctly guess Gen Musharraf's profound ideas like enlightened moderation. His most recent demonstration of this talent was seen last month when he lifted a court-imposed ban on kite flying to celebrate the festival of Basant. (The kites, with glass shards glued to the string, are notoriously dangerous.) It was pure enlightenment. But when the move resulted in killing several people in Lahore - as the court had cautioned against - Mr Elahi refused to extend the permission to other cities. That was moderation. But not all ministers have the same level of perception when it comes to expressions in English language. When the law minister, Wasi Zafar, was recently described as the "long arm of law" by a local journalist, the minister mistook it for an expression in his native Punjabi which roughly translates into "up yours". His apt response, on national TV, was: "If anyone gives me the long arm, my long arm to his whole family." From hight at 34n118w.net Thu Mar 29 09:17:54 2007 From: hight at 34n118w.net (hight at 34n118w.net) Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:47:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] lea special issue:Creative Data: Visualisation, Augmentation, Telepresence And Immersion call for abstracts Message-ID: <3241.76.173.54.91.1175140074.squirrel@webmail.34n118w.net> *Creative Data: Visualisation, Augmentation, Telepresence And Immersion* http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/calls.asp#cd Guest Editors: *Jack Ox, Jeremy Hight, and Erik Champion * LEACreativeData at astn.net Editorial Guidelines: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp Discussion Group: leacreativedata-subscribe at googlegroups.com Deadline: *8 July 2007 * ** *Call for papers - LEA Creative Data Special* *------------------------------------------------------------------* The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting papers and artworks that deal with the emerging practice of data visualization as an immersive experience. Data has long been the property and domain of screen based collection, archiving, processing and interaction. The emergence of new processes, functionality and ways of interacting with information is opening up several new areas of great possibility in which the data allows newfound thematic and engaging forms of immersion, as well as innovative and perception-reshaping interaction. ** *Introduction -------------------* Consider a simple analogy; to swim in a pool is to understand three dimensionality, interaction, spatial relationships and a macro-micro view, as well as contextual and embodied interaction. Can we swim with data? How do we build, debate and discuss the future and shape of immersivity in its relation to data? Can the representation of data as an immersive environment be considered a creative accomplishment or support creativity in action or as spectacle? How does this change the way we collect and archive information? How does it relate to our ways of interacting with information in study and analysis? How can this enhance or fuse key aspects of image projection, virtual reality, augmented reality, new media and even locative media? We are looking for essays, interviews, reports and other forms of writing that look at spatialization and layering of information, a greater sense of immersion, new forms of visualization and depth of field, precedents, future applications and connotations, our relationship to immersion and information inherently as how this applies to this new area. Topics of interest may include (but are not limited to): case study related analysis, historical context and related precedents, future and new applications of the technology, spatial relationship analysis and analysis of immersive interaction, screen based graphic visualization, project and concepts of augmentation, relationship to augmented reality, virtual reality, locative media and spatial interaction, data visualization, creativity and the drawn line between "science" and "art", applications to spatial interpretation of architecture (from buildings to architecture of data, form, etc.), or new paradigms of the kinesthetic and proprioception applied to multi leveled or layered data and information processing (data/and/or human) in ways that creates or enhances immersivity. There is a nexus point of technology, information, creativity and interaction that connects back to essential concepts of seeing, ordering, interacting and interpreting. This call invites papers that explore the myriad ways this is now possible. *Key topics of interest * *---------------------------------* *** CREATIVE DATA VISUALISATION: * How can scientific data be streamlined and filtered to immerse the public in an intuitive and explorative yet also educational manner? Or allow them to explore their neighborhood, world or even universe at vastly varying scales and detail without cognitive overload? *** AUGMENTED AND INTERMEDIAL REALITIES: * How can various fields and disciplines and areas of artistic endeavor take advantage of new digital technologies to mediate new spatial experiences and perspectives? *** STREAMED EXPERIENCE, SOCIAL PRESENCE AND TELEPRESENCE:* Which networking and distributed technologies and systems have and can be creatively used to share the thoughts, actions and feelings of artists, scientists, actors and/or participants? Immersive environments are not standing alone today. They are more often part of a network of immersive environments. For instance, the OptiPuter consortium ( http://www.optiputer.net/) has developed and distributed "OptiPortals" to many of its members. An OptiPortal is an immersive SAGE WALL that is connected to the LambdaRail ( http://www.glif.is/). Huge data sets do not have to be stored at more than one site as it is less expensive to communicate them over optical networking that has a capacity of up to 10Gb per second. *** THEMATIC IMMERSION AND INTERACTION:* How can virtual reality technology and thematic interaction combine to create immersive and engaging digitally mediated experiences? For example, what new types of audience participation, setting, interfaces, interaction devices and metaphors, background story etc can help add to a specific sense of space place or time in order to enhance engagement and a sense of immersion in a virtual environment? While case study based analysis and critical analysis are highly desired we are also very interested in larger contextualization(s) and personal entry points. It is often observed that although we live in a society of escalating specialization and stratification, creative use of newer technology often begets a hybrid skill set and background. As creative practitioners, what brings you to this topic and field? What areas and specialties have already benefited from this field of technology and interaction? What new areas of potential are as yet untouched or waiting to be utilized? What is the line between art and science here; do the boundaries blur or crystallize? *Want to be kept informed? ------------------------------------------ * For the latest news, updates and discussions, join the LEA Creative Data Mailing List. LEA encourages international artists /academics /researchers/ students /practitioners /theorists to submit their proposals for consideration. We particularly encourage authors outside North America and Europe to send their proposals for essays/artist statements. ** *Publishing Opportunities ----------------------------------------* ** As part of this special, LEA is looking to publish: - Critical Essays - Artist Statements/works in the LEA gallery - Bibliographies (a peer reviewed bibliography with key texts / references in Immersive Data). - Academic Curriculum (LEA encourages academics conducting course programs in this area to contact us) Expressions of interest and outline should include: - A brief description of proposed text (300 words) - A brief author biography Short Author Bio (150-300 words) - Any related URLs Contact Details: In the subject heading of the email message, please use "Name of Artist/Project Title: LEA Immersive Data Visualization-Date Submitted". Please cut and paste all text into body of email (without attachments). *Deadlines* *---------------- * 8 July 2007 - submission of abstracts 22 July 2007 - short-listed candidates informed 2 September 2007 - contributors to submit full papers for peer review Editorial Guidelines: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp Please send proposals or queries to: Jack Ox, Jeremy Hight, and Erik Champion LEACreativeData at astn.net or Nisar Keshvani LEA Editor-in-Chief lea at mitpress.mit.edu *********************************************************************** *Useful URLs* ----------------- LEA Current Issue: http://leoalmanac.org/ Gallery: http://leoalmanac.org/gallery/index.aspArchives : http://leoalmanac.org/journal/index.asp Resources: http://leoalmanac.org/resources/index.asp Contributor Guide: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp About: http://leoalmanac.org/about/index.asp *What is LEA? -----------------* Established in 1993, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is the electronic arm of the pioneer art journal, Leonardo - Journal of Art, Science & Technology. Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), jointly produced by Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST), and published by MIT Press, is an electronic journal dedicated to providing a forum for those who are interested in the realm where art, science and technology converge. For over a decade, LEA has thrived as an *international peer reviewed electronic journal *and web archive covering the interaction of the arts, sciences, and technology. *On average 5 - 10% of manuscripts received are eventually published. *LEA emphasizes rapid publication of recent work and critical discussion on topics of current excitement with a slant on shorter, less academic texts. Many contributors are younger scholars, artists, scientists, educators and developers of new technological resources in the media arts. Contents include profiles of media arts facilities and projects, insights of artists using new media and feature articles comprising theoretical and technical perspectives. Curated galleries of current new media artwork are also a regular feature, and occasionally, LEA publishes special issues on topics such as locative media, new media poetics, and wild nature and the digital life. From hight at 34n118w.net Thu Mar 29 09:18:44 2007 From: hight at 34n118w.net (hight at 34n118w.net) Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:48:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] lea special issue:Creative Data: Visualisation, Augmentation, Telepresence And Immersion call for abstracts Message-ID: <3243.76.173.54.91.1175140124.squirrel@webmail.34n118w.net> *Creative Data: Visualisation, Augmentation, Telepresence And Immersion* http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/calls.asp#cd Guest Editors: *Jack Ox, Jeremy Hight, and Erik Champion * LEACreativeData at astn.net Editorial Guidelines: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp Discussion Group: leacreativedata-subscribe at googlegroups.com Deadline: *8 July 2007 * ** *Call for papers - LEA Creative Data Special* *------------------------------------------------------------------* The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting papers and artworks that deal with the emerging practice of data visualization as an immersive experience. Data has long been the property and domain of screen based collection, archiving, processing and interaction. The emergence of new processes, functionality and ways of interacting with information is opening up several new areas of great possibility in which the data allows newfound thematic and engaging forms of immersion, as well as innovative and perception-reshaping interaction. ** *Introduction -------------------* Consider a simple analogy; to swim in a pool is to understand three dimensionality, interaction, spatial relationships and a macro-micro view, as well as contextual and embodied interaction. Can we swim with data? How do we build, debate and discuss the future and shape of immersivity in its relation to data? Can the representation of data as an immersive environment be considered a creative accomplishment or support creativity in action or as spectacle? How does this change the way we collect and archive information? How does it relate to our ways of interacting with information in study and analysis? How can this enhance or fuse key aspects of image projection, virtual reality, augmented reality, new media and even locative media? We are looking for essays, interviews, reports and other forms of writing that look at spatialization and layering of information, a greater sense of immersion, new forms of visualization and depth of field, precedents, future applications and connotations, our relationship to immersion and information inherently as how this applies to this new area. Topics of interest may include (but are not limited to): case study related analysis, historical context and related precedents, future and new applications of the technology, spatial relationship analysis and analysis of immersive interaction, screen based graphic visualization, project and concepts of augmentation, relationship to augmented reality, virtual reality, locative media and spatial interaction, data visualization, creativity and the drawn line between "science" and "art", applications to spatial interpretation of architecture (from buildings to architecture of data, form, etc.), or new paradigms of the kinesthetic and proprioception applied to multi leveled or layered data and information processing (data/and/or human) in ways that creates or enhances immersivity. There is a nexus point of technology, information, creativity and interaction that connects back to essential concepts of seeing, ordering, interacting and interpreting. This call invites papers that explore the myriad ways this is now possible. *Key topics of interest * *---------------------------------* *** CREATIVE DATA VISUALISATION: * How can scientific data be streamlined and filtered to immerse the public in an intuitive and explorative yet also educational manner? Or allow them to explore their neighborhood, world or even universe at vastly varying scales and detail without cognitive overload? *** AUGMENTED AND INTERMEDIAL REALITIES: * How can various fields and disciplines and areas of artistic endeavor take advantage of new digital technologies to mediate new spatial experiences and perspectives? *** STREAMED EXPERIENCE, SOCIAL PRESENCE AND TELEPRESENCE:* Which networking and distributed technologies and systems have and can be creatively used to share the thoughts, actions and feelings of artists, scientists, actors and/or participants? Immersive environments are not standing alone today. They are more often part of a network of immersive environments. For instance, the OptiPuter consortium ( http://www.optiputer.net/) has developed and distributed "OptiPortals" to many of its members. An OptiPortal is an immersive SAGE WALL that is connected to the LambdaRail ( http://www.glif.is/). Huge data sets do not have to be stored at more than one site as it is less expensive to communicate them over optical networking that has a capacity of up to 10Gb per second. *** THEMATIC IMMERSION AND INTERACTION:* How can virtual reality technology and thematic interaction combine to create immersive and engaging digitally mediated experiences? For example, what new types of audience participation, setting, interfaces, interaction devices and metaphors, background story etc can help add to a specific sense of space place or time in order to enhance engagement and a sense of immersion in a virtual environment? While case study based analysis and critical analysis are highly desired we are also very interested in larger contextualization(s) and personal entry points. It is often observed that although we live in a society of escalating specialization and stratification, creative use of newer technology often begets a hybrid skill set and background. As creative practitioners, what brings you to this topic and field? What areas and specialties have already benefited from this field of technology and interaction? What new areas of potential are as yet untouched or waiting to be utilized? What is the line between art and science here; do the boundaries blur or crystallize? *Want to be kept informed? ------------------------------------------ * For the latest news, updates and discussions, join the LEA Creative Data Mailing List. LEA encourages international artists /academics /researchers/ students /practitioners /theorists to submit their proposals for consideration. We particularly encourage authors outside North America and Europe to send their proposals for essays/artist statements. ** *Publishing Opportunities ----------------------------------------* ** As part of this special, LEA is looking to publish: - Critical Essays - Artist Statements/works in the LEA gallery - Bibliographies (a peer reviewed bibliography with key texts / references in Immersive Data). - Academic Curriculum (LEA encourages academics conducting course programs in this area to contact us) Expressions of interest and outline should include: - A brief description of proposed text (300 words) - A brief author biography Short Author Bio (150-300 words) - Any related URLs Contact Details: In the subject heading of the email message, please use "Name of Artist/Project Title: LEA Immersive Data Visualization-Date Submitted". Please cut and paste all text into body of email (without attachments). *Deadlines* *---------------- * 8 July 2007 - submission of abstracts 22 July 2007 - short-listed candidates informed 2 September 2007 - contributors to submit full papers for peer review Editorial Guidelines: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp Please send proposals or queries to: Jack Ox, Jeremy Hight, and Erik Champion LEACreativeData at astn.net or Nisar Keshvani LEA Editor-in-Chief lea at mitpress.mit.edu *********************************************************************** *Useful URLs* ----------------- LEA Current Issue: http://leoalmanac.org/ Gallery: http://leoalmanac.org/gallery/index.aspArchives : http://leoalmanac.org/journal/index.asp Resources: http://leoalmanac.org/resources/index.asp Contributor Guide: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp About: http://leoalmanac.org/about/index.asp *What is LEA? -----------------* Established in 1993, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is the electronic arm of the pioneer art journal, Leonardo - Journal of Art, Science & Technology. Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), jointly produced by Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST), and published by MIT Press, is an electronic journal dedicated to providing a forum for those who are interested in the realm where art, science and technology converge. For over a decade, LEA has thrived as an *international peer reviewed electronic journal *and web archive covering the interaction of the arts, sciences, and technology. *On average 5 - 10% of manuscripts received are eventually published. *LEA emphasizes rapid publication of recent work and critical discussion on topics of current excitement with a slant on shorter, less academic texts. Many contributors are younger scholars, artists, scientists, educators and developers of new technological resources in the media arts. Contents include profiles of media arts facilities and projects, insights of artists using new media and feature articles comprising theoretical and technical perspectives. Curated galleries of current new media artwork are also a regular feature, and occasionally, LEA publishes special issues on topics such as locative media, new media poetics, and wild nature and the digital life. From hpp at vsnl.com Thu Mar 29 09:45:41 2007 From: hpp at vsnl.com (hpp at vsnl.com) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 04:15:41 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Reader-list] Lessons from the graveyard Message-ID: Lessons from the graveyard V Ramaswamy cuckooscall.blogspot.com I first visited the South Park Street Cemetery thirty years ago, soon after I joined St Xavier’s College in Calcutta. I had wandered in just out of curiosity. This lay on the way between the college and the bus stop. The cemetery had been opened in 1767 and was in use for the next century or so. I was immediately struck by the large number of graves of infants, children and young people, all British of course. The marble tablets on the tombs and monuments of different sizes and shapes, bore the grieving lamentations of their family members. I remember coming across the sequential testimony to a whole family being wiped out - young father, younger mother and a couple of infant children, one following the other. I was moved. It was many years later that I remembered this cemetery and its sad legacy. But, in between I was exposed to another aspect of the city - its labouring poor, and the bastis, where they resided. I had come to learn that this section had, historically, always had to struggle for survival in the city, for a place to live. The bastis were a makeshift arrangement to provide habitation to the workers and servant classes. They were also a part of a clever strategy on the part of landowners to profit through appreciation in land value as the colonial city grew. These settlements were entirely unserviced, as the question of whose responsibility this was – municipal or landowner’s – was never resolved. Nineteenth century Calcutta frequently saw demolition of the bastis, as landlords sold off bastis for construction of mansions, or city authorities intervened in the interest of public health and civic amenities. I discovered that city improvement in the colonial Calcutta was always a response to a perceived public health panic. The nineteenth century was distinguished for the various ‘theories’ on public health - such at the ‘miasmic theory of contagion’, the ‘foul water the source of cholera’ theory, or the ‘air pollution theory of disease’. And, their inevitable consequence was the demolition of these bastis. The British officials deplored these as centres of disease, inhabited by people who apparently delighted in filth and dirt. Perhaps it did not strike them that these people were also humans like themselves, suffering the horrid living conditions in their unserviced settlements, and ultimately enabling the wealthy and luxurious lives of the Europeans and Indian elite. That was colonial Calcutta, and obviously through schooling one had been conditioned into viewing the British as the despised colonists against whom the freedom struggle had been waged, and who had finally been ejected. But, through my work I had begun to discern only a smooth continuity between the pre- and post-Independence situation in regard to public policy in Calcutta. One began despising contemporary rulers and authorities as well. Later, digging through documents on old Calcutta, I learnt that April to November were the ‘killer’ months for the English. Every year, on 15 November, they would celebrate their survival at a gathering called ‘the reunion’. Capt Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1710 that of the 1,200 Englishmen in the city in August, 462 had been buried by the end of the year. That rang a bell. I recalled that the Park Street Cemetery bore testimony to the devastation and trauma that visited the lives of the British who were in early Calcutta, with many young civil and military officers, their women-folk and children dying, even whole young families dying, and the despairing, sad elegies inscribed by their grieving family members. So many succumbed to cholera, dysentery, malaria and other fevers. The precise number of few days and months that the infants had lived were recorded on their tombs, as if every day and month of this short life were etched on the heart of a grieving soul. That helped me to understand the frantic public health syndrome, and the ruthless way in which the authorities intervened. Calcutta represented tropical heat and smells, contaminated water, alien surroundings, people and culture, all of which appeared ominous and hateful and assailed the peace of the foreigner. The vulnerability of the foreigners to a range of tropical diseases served to harden such an attitude. They had to be here, like it or not, as part of the grand imperial project. Perhaps this experience led to a terror of tropical nature, and ultimately, the people, and created the nature-controlling, order-bringing fetish, the sanitary approach to city improvement - and that too only for the benefit of the European town, when tens of thousands of native labourers who sustained the city lived and suffered in the bastis. It began to look as if Calcutta had been a testing and preparing ground for the colonists, instilling in them an attitude, which then coloured the entire colonial administration. It produced a hard-heartedness that is the real ‘black hole of Calcutta’. And, which persists even today, with enormous disparities in living conditions, rooted in people’s insensitivity to the plight of the less privileged sections. We still have class and ethnic prejudice writ large on the city - akin to the ‘geological fault in the human psyche’, spoken of by the American thinker Lewis Mumford. But, surely this city also has, within its system, the seeds of that enlightened sensibility or consciousness that would seek to redress such injustice? Having experienced fatherhood, I knew how precious a beloved infant child is to the parents. It was in the middle of a crisis situation when my son was a year old that for the first time in my life I turned to prayer. Fatherhood has also made me sensitive to the suffering of other children, especially the poor. Through my work I found that even today, just across the river from Calcutta, in the squalid, poverty-ridden and crime-infested the bastis of Howrah, large numbers of infants are dying, principally because of poverty and environmental degradation. One cannot for very long be moved and yet not move. I was also glad to discover that India was fortunate to have had a number of British, who genuinely loved this land and its people, and devoted their lives to serving us. ’Of the ways that lead to the high city, none is more fair than the road of filial devotion, but there has spread out a fog so obliterating all sight of that road as to make one suppose that it is not there; although ever it lies infallibly tracing on, whatever may cause it to be overlooked’. Thus ran a Buddhist teaching I came across. ’In this world, those with filial devotion, such, whatever may befall, in everything remain steadfast.’ In Bangla, a mayor is referred to as poura pita or city father. That is most appropriate. City fathers have to protect the lives of their city’s children, all the children. And, because the mayor of Hamelin failed in this duty, the children of that ill-fated town went away with the Pied Piper. The city of civic fatherhood shall indeed be a fair city, and that eludes us today as much as it did early Calcutta. ’A visit to the Park Street Cemetery should be a part of the self-education of all Calcuttans. The city is like one vast library, of knowledge, values and sensibilities, which exists only to enable even further advances at any point of time. We should learn to read our cities. So that we can also write, through our life and work, the story of the city of tomorrow. From ramanchima at gmail.com Thu Mar 29 14:16:18 2007 From: ramanchima at gmail.com (Raman Chima) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 14:16:18 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Internet Censorship and the Indian State - Sarai Independent Fellowship 2007 (First post) In-Reply-To: <2fbb8fe0703280902y7eea070eh627d613d75a8588a@mail.gmail.com> References: <2fbb8fe0703280902y7eea070eh627d613d75a8588a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <2fbb8fe0703290146hd70f665l3d47ef04c6142673@mail.gmail.com> Hello all, I'm Raman Jit Singh Chima, and I'm currently a B.A.LL.B. (Hons) student at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. This my first post regarding the Sarai Independent Fellowship project that I'm working on this year, which deals with the subject of he regulation of the Internet by the Indian State through legal structures and mechanisms. I've attempted to chart out below a rough outline of my project in terms of its objectives and methodology along with its current status. (I'll tried to keep it a bit short here in this post; if anyone wants a detailed look at my project outline I'll be more than happy to mail it to you at your request):- The Internet may seem to be a rather radically free and chaotic space/medium of expression, but what most scholars (and indeed recent experiences) have shown that is far from immune to regulation. While there are indeed many forms of regulation and by different actors, its the role of the State that I want to examine here. The main reason behind that is that the regulation of areas connected with speech and expression by authority in the form of the State is supposed to be restricted so as to protect the right of freedom of speech and expression. In order to protect anything though, you need to clearly establish the manner in which the State is engaging with it currently and it this point that underscores my project. I'm trying to to chart out the empirical aspects of Internet regulation in India and its linkages with normative frameworks. The focus of this project is thus on the following two goals; FIRSTLY, to track out and study the manner in which the Indian State regulates the Internet through legal structures and connected mechanism (both through formal legal rules as well as through informal measure such as police regulation of cyber-cafes, control over Internet Service Providers etc). SECONDLY, to analyze how this regulatory framework relates to the constitutional safeguards with respect to the limitations on state action viz. free speech and expression and whether it respects these constraints. I'm currently in the stage of examining textual sources for information about censorship law and practice in general in India as well as information about Internet regulation overall. I'd be really interested in comments and ideas, especially with regards sources of information that any of you might think may be useful. I'm specifically interested in knowing about instances of regulation of the Internet by the Indian State which any of you might have instanced happening at a lower level (like in terms of cyber-cafes, city police notices and raids etc) and not only nation wide censorship instances such as the blocking of blogs and yahoogroups (though if you know of instances other than the most recent blog ban and the earlier Kyunhun group case it would be of tremendous use). Also, I planned out my project with the idea of basing any findings and analysis on clear evidence about actual instances of the Indian State regulating or at least seeking to regulate the Internet in everyday life in a manner prejudicial to freedom of speech. Thus suggestions as to people who would be good to interview in this regard would be really useful, though I'm currently limited to physical meetings/field work being possible only in Bangalore (or in Delhi during June or October). Looking forward to any comments or other input, Sincerely, Raman. From jenny.chithra at gmail.com Thu Mar 29 01:57:43 2007 From: jenny.chithra at gmail.com (jenny chithra) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 01:57:43 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First posting: Caste, Class and Gender in the Urban Space of Keralam Message-ID: Hi everybody! This is Carmel Christy and Jenny Rowena and here is our first posting which is a reworked and detailed version of our initial proposal. ** *The Title*: *Where some autorickshaws run, others burn: Caste, Class and Gender in the Urban Space of Keralam * Our project stems from a deep dissatisfaction with the ways in which the politics of gender, caste and community has been articulated in the present academic situation. Usually conclusions are arrived at based on the un-problematized subjectivities (often upper caste and/or male) of the researchers. Always the question of gender leaves out the question of caste or community and vice versa. This research is an attempt to look at ways in which we can talk about the contemporary in terms of complex "overlapping cultural contexts" such as caste, class, gender, religion and sexual orientation. (Patricia Hill Collins, *Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.* Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.) Similarly, we also are restlessness with regard to the whole project of progressive politics in Keralam today, which is focused only on the deconstruction of the secular, modern and often leftist notion of a progressive and enlightened Keralam. Agreeing fully with the need for this political project we still feel that it is not enough to talk about gender, caste and community as categories that were excluded by the modern imagination and its by product, the Kerala model of development. (T T Sreekumar and S Sanjeev, Katha Ithuvare: Kerala Vikasana Samvadangal (The story thus far: Debates on Kerala's Development) Kottayam, DC books, 2003.) We feel that we need to move forward theoretically so as to think about how the modern cultural forces and Left politics in Keralam have not only excluded certain categories, but has also worked to formulate the way they are experienced, recognized and lived out in the contemporary situation. For this we have chosen to look at a highly complex case of violence against a Dalit woman, Chithra Lekha, which happened in an urban space in Keralam. Here the attempt is not to narrate, for a waiting public, a sensational story of caste and gender atrocity. Neither do we seek to think about our own gendered selves through the Dalit figure of Chithra Lekha. (Both of us are OBC women, Carmel Christy is a Latin Catholic Christian woman from a lower middle class background and Jenny Rowena is a Thiyya woman who has lived in lower and middle class urban spaces) The attempt instead is a theoretical and academic one which would be based on our own documentation of the entire event. In fact, by documenting and re-examining this case our attempt is to move away from the usual ethnographic accounts with which such subjects are treated. Instead we want to foreground this case of violence - which involves issues of caste, gender and class, all staged in an urbanized and yet highly Dalitbahujan space - as a central point in a move towards rethinking contemporary inquiries about cultural hegemonies in Keralam. *The Incident* Chithra Lekha was born into a Pulaya family, which is a Dalit caste in Keralam. Chithra Lekha's husband Shreeshanth is a Thiyya (an OBC caste). Both his family and the dominant left party (CPM) structure were against Shreeshanth marrying Chithra Lekha as she is a Dalit. Yet the couple went ahead and got legally married. In their attempt to make a better living, they resorted to what many Dalitbahujans of moffusil towns easily choose: an autorickshaw. The autorickshaw was bought in Chithra Lekha's name in October 2004 and she decided to drive it herself. Chithra Lekha also decided to operate from within the ambit of the Payyannur college stand itself. Payyannur, one should understand is a busy town in a district which has witnessed some of the most glorious moments in the communist and Naxal struggles against human oppression. However, Chithra Lekha's caste and gender identity made it impossible for her to fit into the scheme of this liberated moffusil town. The CITU (the leftist trade union, already angered by her caste violation of marrying above her caste) acted against her by delaying her membership card in the auto stand. In January 2005, she was given the card and she started riding the auto. However, her fellow drivers (mainly from the Maniyani OBC caste) started creating problems just within one week of her public career on the city roads. They broke the glass of the autorickshaw and beat her up. When Chithra Lekha complained to the police, they gave a counter complaint against her saying that she drinks, uses drugs and parks the vehicle near college in vacant places implying that she is a sex-worker. A few days later, the final blow was dealt when Chithra Lekha's autorickshaw was burned to ashes in the middle of the night. She was also threatened that she would also be similarly burned. It is highly significant to note that this is the second such incident of a Dalit woman's auto rickshaw being burned in that town, only further enquiry will reveal more cases of caste-gender oppression. Our project is divided into two parts. One involves the documentation of the incident and its repurcussions and the other is the theorization that we would attempt based on the texts before us *Documentation* We start with the notion that any ethnographic documentation of an event is not value free and is marked by the initial questions and urges that frame the project. We would not then claim to put forward the "true" story or the "real" incident as it happened. Instead our documentation would be influenced and structured by the following questions and interests: First of all we would like to capture the differences in the way the same incident is put forward by all those narrating it– the police, the involved parties, the NGOs involved, the mainstream press, the mainstream intellectuals and the various Dalit and feminist intellectuals who have involved in the issue. Here we know that we are starting off with the notion that most people involved in this issue such as the police, the auto rickshaw drivers involved and the people of the town would see this as just a case of law and order, caused by the aberrant ways of a rebellious woman. We hope to find critical and political analysis of the events only from Dalitbahujan intellectuals and from our given experience of Kerala culture, we are highly skeptical about mainstream intellectuals. We are also quite prejudiced against the mainstream press and media in Keralam. In spite of/or because of this knowledge we hope that we would be able to capture moments that are totally unexpected and unprepared for. Our second major concern in the documentation of the event is about what would be our relationship to the central person in the story, Chithra Lekha, and her family members. We know that what has happened must have been highly traumatic for Chithra Lekha, and we already have heard stories about certain individuals and institutions making away with funds meant to help her. We would surely like to bring out these aspects in our documentation. However, we do not want to comment on anything more at this point and we would allow Chithra Lekha to decide the terms of her relationship with us as researchers - whether she would want to talk to us or not and in what terms and under what condition. If it becomes possible for us to share with her our research concerns and listen to her perspective, we hope to be as non-interfering as possible in our listening. We would also do our part in maintaining or reviving the projects already at place that seeks to address her past and present situation. We are also aware of the differences that exist between us and Chithra Lekha and we hope to sharply foreground this in all our documenation. Most importantly, in our documentation of her voice we would also like to bring out Chithra Lekha, not only as a victim but also as someone who politically resisted the hegemonic structures around her. *Theorization* Critically analyzing our documentation, we would try to think about how discourses of gender, sexuality and community are being formulated in contemporary Keralam. We will then look at how these discourses work towards coding the progressive urban space of Keralam as upper caste and/or male. We will try to show how a Dalit woman like Chithra Lekha have to encounter another kind of day-to-day reality vis-à-vis middle-class, upper-caste women, as she negotiates both her community and gender identity in the modern space. We will use this understanding to re-examine the issues of gender as articulated by mainstream feminists both in Keralam and outside. In this context, it must be mentioned that, using already available Dalit feminist works (such as, J. Indira, *"Study of Sexual Violence: A Case of Rape against Dalit Women*." M.Phil. dissertation, University of Hyderabad, 1997) and supplanting it with our own findings, we want to re-think the current feminist conceptualization of sexual harassment and the working place. Usually, as J Indira points out in her work, women's workplace is imagined around a middle class, comfortable office space. But when we think of lakhs of "other" women who are doing "other" and not so "feminine" jobs as in the case of Chithra Lekha, there is a need to rethink the women's workplace and the problems they encounter there. We start with the already available theorization that such women, who are thrust into the public sphere for work, are considered as 'bad, deviant' women in the dominant imagination. We would also look at how the coding of the work place as middle class in feminist theorization helps to further de-legitimize the problems of most Dalitbahujan and minority working women in Keralam. The next important question would be to look at the dominant Marxist party as an important institution in maintaining the hegemonic structure of caste, class, community and gender in Keralam. We would begin by searching for the roots of such a process in the history of modern Keralam, the rise and spread of the Left movement and the imagination and production of the Kerala model of development. We would then move on to map this on to the case in question. Here the attempt would not stop with showing the Marxist party in Kerala as male (as in J Devika, and Praveena Kodoth ("Sexual Violence and Predicament of Feminist Politics in Kerala", *Economic and Political Weekly *Vol.36, No.33, 2001). We would also want to think about the caste and religion of the Male Marxist party in Kerala. Does it have one particular caste all over Keralam or does it take on the religious and caste colors of local dominant groups to sustain itself? We would try to see how such a process is carried out locally. We will surely examine the self-presentation of the Left as progressive, modern and caste and gender neutral and show how this contradicts with the situation at hand. Here the question would be to see how the dominant Marxist institution engages with these contradictions. This engagement or negotiation, we will argue, is constantly reworking and re-articulating (not excluding or ignoring as suggested in many studies) cultural categories such as that of caste and gender, with immense consequences for Keralam. Another major area of interest would be the intricacies of the OBC-Dalit relationship which is crucial in this whole incident and which often goes unnoticed in any discussion on caste in Kerala. All over India, caste/gender violence is increasing between OBCs and Dalits. Being a progressive enlightened state, Keralam claims to be outside this with less number of atrocities. The Chithra Lekha case proves this wrong. From the outside this only looks like a case where there is a struggle between a woman and a trade union. However, we would try to show how the trade union is peopled by a distinct OBC community and how their objections to Chithra Lekha is based on notions of untouchability and gender made in the name of maintaining caste hegemony. Lastly we would look at the role of subaltern masculinities (as many OBC men are involved in this incident) and the pressures that trigger violence in them, which then spills on to the city space. Here we would *not *want to pin point to the subaltern male – in this case, the OBC male - as the only violent creature existing in Keralam. Instead we would try to read his maleness with regard to the institution of Marxism and also in contrast to the invisible violence of men of hegemonic communities. Doing this, we will try to look at the historical caste/gender pressures that work both from within the community and the outside towards throwing the OBC man into the ambit of violence and caste and gender oppression. Along with passing on our documentation to SARAI, we would also like to widely circulate this material in the mainstream press in Keralam. In doing this, we want to reformulate the way in which Chithra Lekha's case has received attention. So far it has only captured attention as a human interest story, with vague and unfocused reflections on the problem of caste. Gender is not even talked about in most narratives about Chithra Lekha, the whole issue being presented as a case of blatant caste violence. Therefore we would like to imbibe this story with our own peculiar theorization of it which we hope will re-start the debate all over again, inviting Keralam to engage with this crucial issue in a much more complex, nuanced and political manner. Looking forward to your responses Warm Regards, Carmel Christy and Jenny Rowena -- (All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070329/e491297d/attachment.html From mail at shivamvij.com Thu Mar 29 14:56:53 2007 From: mail at shivamvij.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 14:56:53 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Internet Censorship and the Indian State - Sarai Independent Fellowship 2007 (First post) In-Reply-To: <2fbb8fe0703290146hd70f665l3d47ef04c6142673@mail.gmail.com> References: <2fbb8fe0703280902y7eea070eh627d613d75a8588a@mail.gmail.com> <2fbb8fe0703290146hd70f665l3d47ef04c6142673@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <9c06aab30703290226g77d0ac74t69a468473cea26bb@mail.gmail.com> > I'd be really > interested in comments and ideas, especially with regards sources of > information that any of you might think may be useful. Dear Raman, I have worked on internet censorship off and on. You can find some of my articles here: http://del.icio.us/goalduniya/censorship There have been other Sarai Fellows in the past who have worked on the subject but your proposal is a relief to me insofar as it seems to want to go beyond what is already documented. A lot of the focus on internet censorship is shifting to Orkut. You might want to consider Orkut in Maharashtra - Google says it has now condescended to opening a direct line of communication with the Mumbai Police. The first case against Orkut was filed by a law student like you against I-Hate-India communities on Orkut, put up by Pakistanis. All the media reported it, and some had the sense to search Orkut for anti-Pak communities put up by Indians - and these outnumbered the ones Pakistanis had put up against India! I searched Orkut for the petitioner's name and tracked him down. I asked him: so what about anti-Pak communities? He said that if Pakistan had appropriate law, Pakistanis are free to go to their courts against Orkut. I couldn't believe it: the guy was just playing with the bare acts. A lot of the reaction against this in the blogosphere was the typical oh-we-are-becoming-China hysteria. Hopefully, the courts will throw out these cases against Orkut. You may also want to consider difficult cases where users demand censorship or some kind of moderation - identity theft for instance. At some point cyber crime and internet censorship do come in conflict. best shivam From deelited at gmail.com Wed Mar 28 14:50:18 2007 From: deelited at gmail.com (deepti) Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:50:18 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Autoportraits: photography at The Nigah QueerFest '07 Message-ID: <2617ab630703280220i305f492cp8205496db45a62c2@mail.gmail.com> *** Please Forward Widely*** Dear All, Photography's power of visual documentation has been used since its invention to create an iconography of the "other". As part of that project, queer sexualities have been defined, labelled and, eventually, criminalised. However, a parallel hidden history has recorded our lives, becoming public only when society and the law allows. Photography shows us what we look like. The media and entertainment industries have tended to portray us as hysterical victims or monstrous child molesters. However, we have become quite expert at presenting ourselves on our own terms, even under the pressure of living double lives. In this exhibition we are calling for photographic self-portraits by a wide variety of queer women and men as a way of reaffirming our actual presence in the world. Our photographs are a *momento mori*, asserting our right and desire to be made visible on our own terms. * *We invite you to be part of Autopotraits. Part of The Nigah QueerFest '07, this is, above all, an exhibition for and by queer communities. We understand the different circumstances that may cause many to hesitate before sending identifying self-portraits to the exhibit. We encourage all of you, however, to consider submitting any kind of portrait that you are comfortable with and which you feel is an expression of your sexuality. Anonymous entries are accepted, and the confidentiality of all entrants and submissions will be respected. No identifying information shall be shared with any individual or entity outside Nigah. * *To download the Call for Entries and see Submission Guidelines, go to www.nigahmedia.com/queerfest.html Nigah www.nigahmedia.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070328/f40d66d1/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From keshvani at leoalmanac.org Thu Mar 29 07:21:15 2007 From: keshvani at leoalmanac.org (Nisar Keshvani, LEA) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 09:51:15 +0800 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Leonardo Electronic Almanac CFP - Creative Data: Visualisation, Augmentation, Telepresence And Immersion In-Reply-To: <5d60ab0c0703281847q3758abf4gf708cdaa0fe313e4@mail.gmail.com> References: <5d60ab0c0703281847q3758abf4gf708cdaa0fe313e4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5d60ab0c0703281851u3af4c771j731aeb737668769d@mail.gmail.com> *-- Apologies for cross-posting. Please distribute widely --* ** *Creative Data: Visualisation, Augmentation, Telepresence And Immersion* http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/calls.asp#cd Guest Editors: *Jack Ox, Jeremy Hight, and Erik Champion * LEACreativeData at astn.net Editorial Guidelines: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp Discussion Group: leacreativedata-subscribe at googlegroups.com Deadline: *8 July 2007 * ** *Call for papers - LEA Creative Data Special* *------------------------------------------------------------------* The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting papers and artworks that deal with the emerging practice of data visualization as an immersive experience. Data has long been the property and domain of screen based collection, archiving, processing and interaction. The emergence of new processes, functionality and ways of interacting with information is opening up several new areas of great possibility in which the data allows newfound thematic and engaging forms of immersion, as well as innovative and perception-reshaping interaction. ** *Introduction -------------------* Consider a simple analogy; to swim in a pool is to understand three dimensionality, interaction, spatial relationships and a macro-micro view, as well as contextual and embodied interaction. Can we swim with data? How do we build, debate and discuss the future and shape of immersivity in its relation to data? Can the representation of data as an immersive environment be considered a creative accomplishment or support creativity in action or as spectacle? How does this change the way we collect and archive information? How does it relate to our ways of interacting with information in study and analysis? How can this enhance or fuse key aspects of image projection, virtual reality, augmented reality, new media and even locative media? We are looking for essays, interviews, reports and other forms of writing that look at spatialization and layering of information, a greater sense of immersion, new forms of visualization and depth of field, precedents, future applications and connotations, our relationship to immersion and information inherently as how this applies to this new area. Topics of interest may include (but are not limited to): case study related analysis, historical context and related precedents, future and new applications of the technology, spatial relationship analysis and analysis of immersive interaction, screen based graphic visualization, project and concepts of augmentation, relationship to augmented reality, virtual reality, locative media and spatial interaction, data visualization, creativity and the drawn line between "science" and "art", applications to spatial interpretation of architecture (from buildings to architecture of data, form, etc.), or new paradigms of the kinesthetic and proprioception applied to multi leveled or layered data and information processing (data/and/or human) in ways that creates or enhances immersivity. There is a nexus point of technology, information, creativity and interaction that connects back to essential concepts of seeing, ordering, interacting and interpreting. This call invites papers that explore the myriad ways this is now possible. *Key topics of interest * *---------------------------------* *** CREATIVE DATA VISUALISATION: * How can scientific data be streamlined and filtered to immerse the public in an intuitive and explorative yet also educational manner? Or allow them to explore their neighborhood, world or even universe at vastly varying scales and detail without cognitive overload? *** AUGMENTED AND INTERMEDIAL REALITIES: * How can various fields and disciplines and areas of artistic endeavor take advantage of new digital technologies to mediate new spatial experiences and perspectives? *** STREAMED EXPERIENCE, SOCIAL PRESENCE AND TELEPRESENCE:* Which networking and distributed technologies and systems have and can be creatively used to share the thoughts, actions and feelings of artists, scientists, actors and/or participants? Immersive environments are not standing alone today. They are more often part of a network of immersive environments. For instance, the OptiPuter consortium ( http://www.optiputer.net/) has developed and distributed "OptiPortals" to many of its members. An OptiPortal is an immersive SAGE WALL that is connected to the LambdaRail ( http://www.glif.is/). Huge data sets do not have to be stored at more than one site as it is less expensive to communicate them over optical networking that has a capacity of up to 10Gb per second. *** THEMATIC IMMERSION AND INTERACTION:* How can virtual reality technology and thematic interaction combine to create immersive and engaging digitally mediated experiences? For example, what new types of audience participation, setting, interfaces, interaction devices and metaphors, background story etc can help add to a specific sense of space place or time in order to enhance engagement and a sense of immersion in a virtual environment? While case study based analysis and critical analysis are highly desired we are also very interested in larger contextualization(s) and personal entry points. It is often observed that although we live in a society of escalating specialization and stratification, creative use of newer technology often begets a hybrid skill set and background. As creative practitioners, what brings you to this topic and field? What areas and specialties have already benefited from this field of technology and interaction? What new areas of potential are as yet untouched or waiting to be utilized? What is the line between art and science here; do the boundaries blur or crystallize? *Want to be kept informed? ------------------------------------------ * For the latest news, updates and discussions, join the LEA Creative Data Mailing List. LEA encourages international artists /academics /researchers/ students /practitioners /theorists to submit their proposals for consideration. We particularly encourage authors outside North America and Europe to send their proposals for essays/artist statements. ** *Publishing Opportunities ----------------------------------------* ** As part of this special, LEA is looking to publish: - Critical Essays - Artist Statements/works in the LEA gallery - Bibliographies (a peer reviewed bibliography with key texts / references in Immersive Data). - Academic Curriculum (LEA encourages academics conducting course programs in this area to contact us) Expressions of interest and outline should include: - A brief description of proposed text (300 words) - A brief author biography Short Author Bio (150-300 words) - Any related URLs Contact Details: In the subject heading of the email message, please use "Name of Artist/Project Title: LEA Immersive Data Visualization-Date Submitted". Please cut and paste all text into body of email (without attachments). *Deadlines* *---------------- * 8 July 2007 - submission of abstracts 22 July 2007 - short-listed candidates informed 2 September 2007 - contributors to submit full papers for peer review Editorial Guidelines: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp Please send proposals or queries to: Jack Ox, Jeremy Hight, and Erik Champion LEACreativeData at astn.net or Nisar Keshvani LEA Editor-in-Chief lea at mitpress.mit.edu *********************************************************************** *Useful URLs* ----------------- LEA Current Issue: http://leoalmanac.org/ Gallery: http://leoalmanac.org/gallery/index.aspArchives : http://leoalmanac.org/journal/index.asp Resources: http://leoalmanac.org/resources/index.asp Contributor Guide: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/submit/index.asp About: http://leoalmanac.org/about/index.asp *What is LEA? -----------------* Established in 1993, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is the electronic arm of the pioneer art journal, Leonardo - Journal of Art, Science & Technology. Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), jointly produced by Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST), and published by MIT Press, is an electronic journal dedicated to providing a forum for those who are interested in the realm where art, science and technology converge. For over a decade, LEA has thrived as an *international peer reviewed electronic journal *and web archive covering the interaction of the arts, sciences, and technology. *On average 5 - 10% of manuscripts received are eventually published. *LEA emphasizes rapid publication of recent work and critical discussion on topics of current excitement with a slant on shorter, less academic texts. Many contributors are younger scholars, artists, scientists, educators and developers of new technological resources in the media arts. Contents include profiles of media arts facilities and projects, insights of artists using new media and feature articles comprising theoretical and technical perspectives. Curated galleries of current new media artwork are also a regular feature, and occasionally, LEA publishes special issues on topics such as locative media, new media poetics, and wild nature and the digital life. *********************************************************************** --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leonardo electronic almanac alerts list" group. To post to this group, send email to LEAalerts at googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to LEAalerts-unsubscribe at googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/LEAalerts -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070329/195bc77d/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From yasir.media at gmail.com Thu Mar 29 15:46:12 2007 From: yasir.media at gmail.com (yasir ~) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:16:12 -0800 Subject: [Reader-list] Language in Pakistan In-Reply-To: <9c06aab30703281221n3e5f8507yc519e64187ed10bd@mail.gmail.com> References: <9c06aab30703281221n3e5f8507yc519e64187ed10bd@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5af37bb0703290316s55d1aadfmab85b00dad4ba9f9@mail.gmail.com> On 3/28/07, Shivam Vij wrote: > Pakistan and the battle for English > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6500227.stm I dont know why the battle is for 'English' when it is about power. As opposed to this language, would be the myriad *languages* and and associated ethnicities which now regulate much politics at micro and larger levels. All of this is global. Tariq Rehman's 'Language and Ethnicity in Pakistan' is a good survey of this although still cursory given the huge populations and little study. From indersalim at gmail.com Thu Mar 29 23:56:18 2007 From: indersalim at gmail.com (inder salim) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:56:18 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] this indersalim STUFF from KASHMIR Message-ID: <47e122a70703291126s67a34bap7e505227ff4639d6@mail.gmail.com> Hi I am: This indersalim stuff from Kashmir. I am a performance artist. ( please include the 'theater performances' here, though I am not strictly in the practice of doing things on stage. ) The art-in-public- space, yes, I do, but the definition is quite vast, so no big claims. I try to conceptualize my action ( performance ) with ongoing conflicts (both political and otherwise ) in mind, but as you know, the form incorporated changes the dynamics of ' the action' even. So, I believe the the unpredictability of doing a performance… I enclose three poem pieces, the second one I ended with a little performance at Performance poetry thing organized by Vivek Naranyan at Sarai some days back. My project is to organize performance art, to collaborate and initiate performances anywhere in India or abroad. So I am myself waiting for a surprise or so. But meanwhile : YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI* Men keep on pissing near the wall Till a graffiti grows: YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI And if men keep on pissing near the wall They imagine reading a line YEH PADNA MANA HAI** Next to the line YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI. And if the fermentation of the absorbed piss begins to emit those nose wrenching fumes, the complacent administrator's nose comes closer to it to arrange an alternative in the nearby vicinity. And if a money generating toilet structure comes up a little away from the disgraced wall, The text: YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI Becomes idle and meaningless Till some poorly paid workers of different Political parties paste glossy Posters of their masters underneath. And once the colourful posters of Politicians and their children politicians Appear underneath the line YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI The artist-in-public-space Inserts a word NAHEE*** In the line YAHAN MOOTNA MANA HAI At an appropriate place. For some real men to impart some real meaning, To their age old habit Of pissing in the public space. * Yahan mootna manah hai = pissing is prohibited here. ** Yeh panda manah hai= reading this is prohibited *** Nahee= not ………………………………………………………………………………. Teri to lal hai * ( Yours is red ) The more you climb the more it will grow;- On a magical tree, This particular species of monkeys in their own jolly great mood, they simply kept on Jumping and climbing Climbing and jumping, Till they decided to look down To see the earth from above. It was a point, less than the tree, But quite far from below. That a two of the species Happened to bend on their knees To see each other as well. It just happened that one was above the other, And had a chance to see the Downing Back of his brother. * Aray, teri to lal hai, (yours is red) Screamed the-one-below-the-above-one. Heard by the wind, and by the leaves And thousands of his own species, The one-above-the-below-one, without fun, Felt humiliated, stooped low, first inwardly then outwardly, to identify… But the-one-below-the-above-one Kept on jumping and climbing, And climbing and jumping, Till it was air which supported his feet, And his belief that he was different, than the-one-above-the-below-one. But, one day a return Would make him understand The meaning of ** Laet tulith chi sari gaeb. **( in Kashmiri = Lift the tail of any sheep, all of them are female.) The performance ended with the exposure of my buttocks, painted with red through my pant torn from behind. .................................................................................................................................... Cockroach Trapped I was, Not too exhausted in the toilet sink, In which he was about to piss… Periplaneta Americana Orientalis, Perhaps, this is how a Zoologist Would define me By the length and breadth of my delicate antenna. I was suffering: And when he held in his hand A melancholy, nozzle like thing That was behind the zip, I thought of a rescue operation….. But a shimmering rope like thing, Which fell next-near to me Was only a mirage,-- Because the more I tried to catch hold of it The more I was on a difficult ground. Now what I was floating upon, Was quite a blow to my hope, Otherwise a usual thing to smell and taste: I was aghast. The shadow like thing stood there, Watched my swimming abilities Or perhaps, pitied my fate. And when suddenly he pulled the chain Again and again: ' O shit , this city is really dry ' I heard him saying before The lights went off ..................................................- please visit: http://indersalim.livejournal.com to navigate, press EARLIER at page's bottom. From cahen.x at levels9.com Thu Mar 29 17:38:12 2007 From: cahen.x at levels9.com (xavier cahen) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 14:08:12 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] pourinfos Newsletter / 03-28 to 04-04-2007 Message-ID: <460BAC2C.6090906@levels9.com> pourinfos.org l'actualité du monde de l'art / daily Art news ----------------------------------------------------------------------- >From Wenesday March 28, 2007 to Wenesday April 04 2007 (included) ------------------------------------------------------------------- (mostly in french) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ NOTRE ÉLECTION PRÉSIDENTIELLE 2007 / OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 2007 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://pourinfos.org/fichiers/_elections_04311_pourinfos_candidats.pdf Pourinfos.org is coming into the presidential campaign Jean-Marie Le Pen's answer, march 21 2007: http://pourinfos.org/art-34692-tit-Reponse-de-Philippe-Herlin-responsable-du-CAP- Personal page : Write your comments ! http://pourinfos.org/index.php?commentaires=34692&categorie=electionslepen Nicolas Sarkoz's answer, march 15 2007: - Nicolas Sarkozy "ensemble tout devient possible" "Together everything is possible" http://pourinfos.org/art-34643-tit-Reception-du-courrier Personal page : Write your comments ! http://pourinfos.org/index.php?commentaires=34643&categorie=electionssarko ++++++++++++++++ Listen to their headquarters from 22 mars 2007: - Dominique Voynet http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsvoynet-tit-Dominique-Voynet-reponses- - François Bayrou http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsbayrou-tit-Francois-Bayrou-reponses- - Marie-Georges Buffet http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsbuffet-tit-Marie-Georges-Buffet-reponses- - Olivier Besancenot http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionsbesancenot-tit-Olivier-Besancenot-reponses- - Ségolène Royal http://pourinfos.org/cat-electionssego-tit-Segolene-Royal-reponses- General page : Write your comments ! http://pourinfos.org/index.php?commentaires=34302&categorie=elections @ 001 (28/03/2007) Exhibition: “Even hour, even place”, abbey of de Maubuisson, Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-33838-tit--Meme-heure-meme-endroit-abbaye-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 002 (28/03/2007) Screening:« Dialogue(s)», short film festival, 5th edition, on Wednesday March 28, 2007, Courts toujours, University Paris-Dauphine, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34623-tit--Dialogue-s-festival-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 003 (28/03/2007) Rencontres: «Etre un citoyen critique à l’heure d’internet et des flux médiatiques» (“To be a critical citizen at the time of Internet and media flux”, Ecm carré de la Jalles, Saint-Médard-en-Jalles, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34660-tit--Etre-un-citoyen-critique-a-l-heure -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 004 (28/03/2007) Formation: Initiation with Pure Dated, Niveau 1, Saturday April 28, Art Sensitif, Saint-Ouen, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34723-tit-Formation-Initiation-a-Pure-Data-Niveau -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 005 (28/03/2007) Various: Petition for the vote paper, mandelieu, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34730-tit-Divers-Petition-pour-le-maintien-du-vote -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 006 (28/03/2007) Various: new Internet site of art school Gerard Jacot Belfort, Belfort, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34731-tit-Divers-overture-du-site-internet-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 007 (28/03/2007) Call: PLOT zine calls for submissions, Le Petit Versailles, New York, Usa. http://pourinfos.org/art-34734-tit--PLOT-zine-calls-for-submissions-Le-Petit -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 008 (28/03/2007) Call: Sound and Visual Artist’s are invited to contribute to Snd:arc, Canterbury Christ Church University, Broadstairs, United Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34735-tit--Sound-and-Visual-Artist-s-are-invited-to -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 009 (28/03/2007) Call: Video Art Festival Miden, Kalamata, Greece. http://pourinfos.org/art-34740-tit--Video-Art-Festival-Miden-Kalamata- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 010 (28/03/2007) Call: Call fo project - Production of multiples of artists, Asterides - Ateliers d'Artistes, Marseille, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34742-tit--Appel-a-projet-Production-de-multiples -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 011 (29/03/2007) Meetings: Le numérique permet-il d’articuler, d’une façon nouvelle, la culture savante et le savoir profane ?, The numeric does it make it possible to articulate, in a new way, the erudite culture and the profane knowledge? , Thursday March 29, 2007, Inha, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34366-tit--Le-numerique-permet-il-d-articuler-d-une -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 012 (29/03/2007) Meetings: La Era de la Imagen Electrónica, Ciclo de conferencias dirigido por José Luis Brea, 29 and March 30, 2007, Laboral, Gijón, Spain. http://pourinfos.org/art-34609-tit--La-Era-de-la-Imagen-Electronica-Ciclo-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 013 (29/03/2007) Meetings: Forum of the Cinema 3D Relief, Cinéma Publicis, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34654-tit--Forum-du-Cinema-3D-Relief-Cinema -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 014 (29/03/2007) Various: The sentinel of the end of the world, fête de l'Internet 2007, Ushuaia, Argentina. http://pourinfos.org/art-34681-tit-Divers-La-sentinelle-du-bout-du-monde- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 015 (29/03/2007) Meetings: Per Hüttner by the collective Echolalia, Thursday March 29, Centre Culturel Suedois (Swedish Arts centre), France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34705-tit--Per-Huttner-organisee-par-le-collectif -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 016 (29/03/2007) Meetings: HEAVEN#28, Mouvement Review, Thursday March 29, 2007, OpA, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34706-tit--HEAVEN-28-la-Revue-Mouvement-Jeudi-29 -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 017 (29/03/2007) Meetings: press conference artparis abu-dhabi, Thursday March 29, Grand Palais, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34708-tit--conference-de-presse-artparis-abu-dhabi- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 018 (29/03/2007) Meetings: Contemporary art and new uses of institutional criticism, Thursday March 29, L'INHA, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34711-tit--Art-contemporain-et-nouveaux-usages-de-la -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 019 (29/03/2007) Meetings: “Emergent Writings/Editions”, Thursday March 29, 2007, University Blaise Pascal of Clermont-Ferrand, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34716-tit--Ecritures-Editions-emergentes-Jeudi -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 020 (29/03/2007) Meetings: Does television make the election? Thursday March 29, 2007, librairie Tekhnê, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34717-tit--La-television-fait-elle-l-election- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 021 (29/03/2007) Publication: SPIKE ART QUARTERLY, Issue 11 out now! , Vienna, Austria. http://pourinfos.org/art-34718-tit--SPIKE-ART-QUARTERLY-Issue-11-out-now- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 022 (29/03/2007) Publication: Les mondes possibles et l’esprit utopique selon Charles Fourier( Publication: Possible worlds and the utopian spirit according to Charles Fourier), Les presses du réel, Les presses du réel, Dijon, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34720-tit--Les-mondes-possibles-et-l-esprit-utopique -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 023 (29/03/2007) Publication: Catalogue launch: Les Formes du délai: la box, Ecole nationale superieure d'Art de Bourges, Bourges, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34721-tit--Lancement-du-catalogue-Les-Formes-du -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 024 (29/03/2007) Exhibiton: Formation, la box _bourges, Ecole nationale superieure d'art de Bourges, Bourges, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34726-tit--Formation-la-box-bourges-ecole -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 025 (29/03/2007) Various: Upgrade! Lisbon in April featuring Adriana Sá, Lisbon, Portugal. http://pourinfos.org/art-34729-tit-Divers-Upgrade-Lisbon-in-April-featuring -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 026 (29/03/2007) Various:new site for art catalogues editions, lelivredart.com, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34732-tit-Divers-Ouverture-du-site-d-edition-et-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 027 (29/03/2007) Various: New artistic direction of Champ Libre, Montreal, Canada. http://pourinfos.org/art-34733-tit-Divers-Nouvelle-direction-artistique-de -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 028 (29/03/2007) Call: ARTRADIO Open Call, ARTRADIO, Manchester, UNited Kingdom. http://pourinfos.org/art-34736-tit--ARTRADIO-Open-Call-ARTRADIO-Manchester- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 029 (29/03/2007) Call: Conflux 2007 Call for Proposals, Brooklyn, Usa. http://pourinfos.org/art-34737-tit--Conflux-2007-Call-for-Proposals- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 030 (29/03/2007) Call: foreign artists, review cheap 3, Nantes, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34738-tit--artistes-etrangers-revue-cheap-3- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 031 (29/03/2007) Call : d/Art/07 Festival, Sydney, Australia. http://pourinfos.org/art-34739-tit--d-Art-07-Festival-Sydney- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 032 (29/03/2007) Call: Light and contemporary creation in urban space, Art Sponsor association, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34741-tit--Lumiere-et-creation-contemporaine-dans -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 033 (30/03/2007) Meetings: “Europe, between system of signs and effects of network” March 30, 2007,Sciences Politique, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34715-tit--L-Europe-entre-systeme-de-signes-et -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 034 (30/03/2007) Publication: Semaines no.04 mars 2007, Semaines, editions Analogues, Arles, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34719-tit--Semaines-no-04-mars-2007-Semaines- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 035 (31/03/2007) Meetings: catalogue of XVe Biennale de Paris, March 31, 2007, Bookshop Florence Loewy, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34704-tit--presentation-du-catalogue-de-la-XVe -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 036 (31/03/2007) Meetings: ACTE 2, Avis d’art en Aravis, March 31, 2007, Au Showroom Mobalpa, Thônes, France http://pourinfos.org/art-34712-tit--ACTE-2-Avis-d-art-en-Aravis-31-mars -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 037 (01/04/2007) Meetings: Qu'est-ce que ça change, Give change a change ! citizen meeting of the numerical generations, , La Generale, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34703-tit--Qu-est-ce-que-ca-change-Give-change-a -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 038 (01/04/2007) Meetings: "particulier à particulier" (“particular with private individual” ) of the book of art, April 1, 2007, Cneai, Chatou, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34714-tit--particulier-a-particulier-du-livre -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 039 (01/04/2007) Publication: To seek the variation, n°43, Movement review, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34722-tit--Chercher-l-ecart-n-43-Mouvement-Paris- -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 040 (03/04/2007) Meetings: Le travail au miroir de l’art, cycle: la créativité, un enjeu de transformation sociale ?, (creativity, a stake of social transformation?) , Tuesday April 3, 2007, Maison de l'architecture, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34653-tit--Le-travail-au-miroir-de-l-art-cycle-la -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 041 (03/04/2007) Meetings: “Skin of heart”, can one live with the skin of another and at which price? April 3, 2007, philosophical Coffee on the body and its images, Coffee Le Bastille, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34713-tit--Peau-d-ame-Peut-on-vivre-avec-la-peau -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 042 (04/04/2007) Meetings: Francesca Caruana di Malta, Fabrice Béghin, April 4, 2007, Isidore Krapo, Studio, Bordeaux, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34707-tit--Francesca-Caruana-di-Malta-Fabrice -------------------------------------------------------------------- @ 043 (04/04/2007) Meetings: Art-Artist-State: which prospects after the presidential ? arearevue)s(, April 4, 2007, Senat, Paris, France. http://pourinfos.org/art-34709-tit--Art-Artistes-Etat-quelles-perspectives ----------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From scherazade.k at gmail.com Fri Mar 30 08:53:09 2007 From: scherazade.k at gmail.com (Scherazade Kaikobad) Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:53:09 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Retellings + workshop - at Prithvi Message-ID: The play 'Retellings' is having shows at Prithvi Theatre on 3rd and 4th April at 9.00pm. Please do try and come, and spread the word to anyone who may be interested. There's also a playwriting workshop on 'Myth and Structure' conducted by Ram Ganesh Kamathan at 4.00 pm on both days, and a platform performnace at 8.00pm . Thanks Scherazade Kaikobad RETELLINGS Shakuntala, Sita, Surpanakha. Three women trapped in mythology find their voice… Shakuntala takes on Kalidasa, accusing the master playwright of legitimizing her lover's betrayal, even as she celebrates the season of her love. As Lanka erupts in the flames of the Aryan invasion, Sita and Surpanakha find their stories intertwining. A performance based on 'An Afternoon With Shakuntala' by Vaidehi, 'Asoka' and 'Mother Clan' by Sarah Joseph. Directed by: Scherazade Kaikobad Adapted by: Shivani Tibrewala Cast: Amrita Puri, Vandita Vasa Light Design: Sananda Mukhopadhyaya Poster Design: Siddharth Kumar Based on the English translations of Jaswant Jadav and Vasanthi Sankanarayanan Venue: Prithvi Theatre Date: 3rd, 4th April, 2007 Time: 9 pm Tickets: Rs 50/- Duration: 1hr Bookings: 9821163832 Workshop: Playwriting - Myth and Structure Conducted by: Ram Ganesh Kamathan Venue: Prithvi House Date: 3rd, 4th April Time: 4.00pm Entry is free Registration: 9820356150 Platform performance at 8.00pm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070330/5031a718/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From jaideepkharub at yahoo.com Thu Mar 29 15:28:18 2007 From: jaideepkharub at yahoo.com (jaideep kharub) Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:58:18 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] International IP Systems (3) - Bahrain Message-ID: <89875.53488.qm@web56713.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Dear Friends: This is third part of my article. This part gives you information on industrial designs protection available in Bahrain. III. INDUSTRIAL DESIGNS 1. LEGAL BASIS 2. MEMBERSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS 3. GENERAL 4. FILING 5. EXAMINATION, PROTECTION DURATION 6. INFRINGEMENT PROCEEDINGS 1. LEGAL BASIS - Patents, Designs and Trade Marks/Service Marks Regulations, 1955, effective June 15, 1955, and subsequent amendments. New legislation Industrial Drawings & Designs Law No. 6 of year 2006 (Published in Official Gazette No. 2737 dated May 3, 2006) has been enacted but not implemented as yet. 2. MEMBERSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS - WTO/TRIPS Agreement, since January 1995. - WIPO Convention, since June, 1995. - Paris Convention, since October, 1997. 3. GENERAL Bahrain has been a member of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property since 29 October 1997. However, claiming priority is not possible at the present moment and will not be possible until enforcement of the new law. Even the international specification of designs is not followed. 4. FILING Any person who is the proprietor of a design (model) registered in any country except Israel or any person deriving his right from such registered proprietor by assignment or other mode of transfer, may apply. Multiple application i.e. one application covering more than one variance of the design is not possible. In such cases a separate application covering each variance of the design must be filed. Filing Requirements Applications in Bahrain are to be filed with complete documentation. In order to proceed with an industrial design application, the following documents are required: I. A power of attorney signed by an authorized signatory of the applicant. It is not necessary to have the document notarized or legalized. II. A certified copy of a corresponding registration in the home country or in any foreign country. III. Full particulars of the applicant. IV. Three representations of the design. 5. EXAMINATION, PROTECTION DURATION Novelty of the design is not the requirement for registration of the design. However, Issuance of the registration certificate in Bahrain stipulates the existence of a home registration or any other foreign registration of the design. The specifications shall be exactly as shown in the basic registration. It can be either in the form of drawings or photographs and should show at least three views of the design. As per Article 9 of the Law, a design may be denied to registration where the Registrar is of the opinion that if the registration were granted as applied for would: (a) be injurious to public order, morality or the interests of the community as a whole; (b) be contrary to law or public policy; (c) be inconsistent with the provisions of this law; (d) deceive the public; (e) hurt or rouse religious susceptibilities of any part of the community. Design applications accepted by the Registrar are published in the Official Gazette. There is a 30-day period open for filing an opposition by any interested party. In the absence of an opposition, a published design is registered, and the certificate of registration is issued. A design registration in Bahrain is valid for 5 years from the filing date renewable for two additional terms of 5 years each (15 years in total). 6. INFRINGEMENT PROCEEDINGS Part V of the Law provides for the institution of legal proceedings and the remedies available to the registered owner on instance of infringement of his registered design. Article 45 says that any person, who without the consent of the registered owner makes, uses, puts into trade any articles of the registered design, deemed to be an infringer under the Law and shall be liable to the proceedings for infringement. Article 47 of the Law empowers the Court to grant / award such remedies and such other relief as it may deem fit. The Court is empowered to make such orders for an injunction or inspection of accounts and impose such terms and issue such directions as it may deem fit. Hope this information may be useful to you. Should you require further information, feel free to contact me. Best Regards Jaideep Kharub IP Officer - AGIP PO Box - 990, Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain. Phone : 00973-39187539 (M) E-mail: jaideepkharub at yahoo.com jaideep.kharub at gmail.com "If it is not right..do not do it; if it is not true..do not say it" Get your own web address. Have a HUGE year through Yahoo! Small Business. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Bored stiff? Loosen up... Download and play hundreds of games for free on Yahoo! Games. http://games.yahoo.com/games/front -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070329/e23776ec/attachment.html From ghosh.ranu at gmail.com Fri Mar 30 00:33:46 2007 From: ghosh.ranu at gmail.com (ranu ghosh) Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:33:46 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] The Changing Industrial Landscape of Kolkata/ 1st posting/Ranu Ghosh Message-ID: <80ea5720703291203u2bfe36femf38847ed438d97d@mail.gmail.com> *The Changing Industrial Landscape of Kolkata: documenting the transformation of a half a century old factory, Jay Engineering Works into * *South** **City** Project, "**Eastern India**'s largest mixed use real estate development".* *Posting: 1* In 1995, I was living in rented accommodation in the locality right behind the erstwhile Usha Factory on Prince Anwar Shah Road, the site of the present mammoth real estate development known as South City. The Joint Engineering factory (a unit of Usha Industries) which occupied most of the industrial enclave was still partly functional and had not yet been shut down. The smaller workshops and sheds of ancillary manufacturers and vendors abutted the factory and I could see a lot of them from the rooftop of my house. In 2004 I heard that the Usha factory land had been sold to the consortium developing the high-rise South City complex. This was completely contrary to what the then chief minister Jyoti Basu had declared in '94 when he said that the Usha Factory land would be used for the construction of Apollo Hospital and that a pharmaceutical factory would also come up there, providing employment and other benefits to the local population. I visited the Usha factory location soon and talked with the residents who lived around it. From them I learned that the employees of Usha factory still living in their allocated staff quarters were to be evicted very soon. I also heard that CITU, the CPI(M)'s labour union, had taken over the negotiations with the factory owners, depriving the affected workers of a large portion of their deserved compensation. Most of the workers had quietly accepted whatever handout came their way and had left the quarters. As soon as they vacated their premises, the housing was dismantled, making it inhabitable. I saw many of the workers and their families trying to cope with the drastic degradation in their lifestyles. Lack of employment opportunities leaded to penury. Even then they were unwilling to take leave of the area, opting to live in crude hutments and shacks beside the high wall that now enclosed their former place of residence, without the benefit of basic amenities. This is when I firmly decided that I would devote my time, energy and limited personal funds to highlight their plight. Soon I came back with my video camera to interview the women and migrant workers most affected by the strong-arm tactics of the developers, documented my findings, and saw the last vestiges of two generations of a community on the brink of oblivion. I recorded their stories and disbelief at their reduced status, how they were trying to adjust to the vicious change in their lives. Skilled workers were now caretakers of private property; running tiny shops; plying cycle rickshaws; itinerant vendors; or simply sitting by the blocked gates despondently watching what is touted as the one of the tallest constructions in this part of the world, growing skywards in leaps and bounds every day. *The Milieu: a resurgent Bengal-* 55,000 registered factories and more are closed / sick / shut down in West Bengal as of date. Over one million workers have lost their jobs, or have been displaced with no foreseeable future. In the last two years the 30-year old, democratically elected Communist government has a new slogan: "Farming is our base, industry is our future." In keeping with this thinking, production based industries are being replaced by the service sectors, mainly catering to big capital and foreign investments. Apparently the government wants a "revival" which is happening by acquiring agricultural land to set up large-scale industries mostly with the support of private investors, both Indian and international. At the same time, especially in Calcutta, it is observed that operational factories are being sold off to provide high value real estate "development". However, what is evident is that this so-called development is of benefit to only the real estate moguls. Because of this drastic change in the industrial mode, we clearly see that in Calcutta a huge army of unemployed / displaced workers are being created. Apart from that these destructive developments in the name of economic and industrial revival have had adverse effects on the city's social structure and ecology. *END of Posting 1.* ** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070330/da3edb97/attachment.html From taraprakash at gmail.com Fri Mar 30 22:37:19 2007 From: taraprakash at gmail.com (Taraprakash) Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:07:19 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] America is preparing to attack Iran References: <2fbb8fe0703280902y7eea070eh627d613d75a8588a@mail.gmail.com><2fbb8fe0703290146hd70f665l3d47ef04c6142673@mail.gmail.com> <9c06aab30703290226g77d0ac74t69a468473cea26bb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <03c801c772ed$e8b37880$0201a8c0@IBM61525879EE4> The reports are coming from Russia that America is planning to attack Iran on Good Friday. After Democrats have done the lip service by telling Bush government that America is not ready for attack, they are now busy defending their budget provisions. Sending 15 British people to Irani waters to be arrested must be another ploy to attack iran. Bush government is not talking much about Iran these days. But perhaps people in American media are doing the job of building a public opinion in favour of strikes on iran. Here is a sample article from Wall Street Journal. Iran Escalates. Iran Escalates. By Thomas G. McInerney. President Reagan once famously quipped that his strategy in confronting the Soviet Union was "We win, they lose." Today, we need a similarly clear strategy to confront Iran, if we are to successfully counter its aim to drive the U.S. from the Middle East and -- as we see with the 15 British sailors the Iranians have taken hostage -- attempts to intimidate Western powers into inaction. That strategy begins not with the Kabuki dance now underway at the United Nations. Turtle Bay is usually, and seems destined to be again in this case, a diplomatic sideshow meant more to distract us than to disarm a rogue regime. While we dither the Iranians will acquire nuclear weapons, give support to our enemies in Iraq and undermine our credibility with our European allies. We need to demonstrate now that there are viable military options in dealing with a rogue regime in Tehran and that not all of those options will leave us embroiled in a shooting war with yet another large, sprawling nation in the Middle East. I believe that our options for dealing with Iran are more numerous and could be more productive than many Washington policy makers have heretofore argued. Let us remember that Iran is a very diverse nation whose population is only 51% Persian. The rest is Azari (24%), Kurdish (10%) and a mix of other ethnic minorities including Turkman, Arab and others. This is a rich environment for unrest and one reason why there were an estimated 4,300 protest demonstrations in 2005 alone. In recent weeks, we may have benefited from another form of protest. Former Iranian deputy defense minister Ali Reza Asgari appears to have used a trip to Turkey to defect with his family. If he is now talking to Western intelligence officials, we'll soon know a lot more about the inner workings of the Iranian regime. And the Middle East itself is no monolithic bloc of support for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Israel, of course, is a natural ally in gaining intelligence and lining up support against the Iranian regime. But Iran is bent on destabilizing and dominating the Arabian Peninsula from Lebanon through Gaza into Iraq with a stopover in Bahrain. That makes Saudi Arabia as well as Jordan potentially strong -- if not overt -- allies in countering Iranian influence. The situation has gotten so serious that King Abdullah of Jordan called it a Shia crescent sweeping across the Arabian Peninsula and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia summoned Vice President Cheney to Riyadh last fall. If we demonstrate that we are sufficiently serious in countering Iran, we could form a coalition of the willing with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf States, Turkey, Australia and those European allies with the courage to consider what their future will look like with a nuclear-armed Iran within missile range. No more denial or hoping Iran will negotiate their nuclear weapons development away. The criteria for joining this coalition would be to join in making the following demands of Iran: Stop developing fissile material, submit to unambiguous International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, turn over all al Qaeda operatives within your borders and stop supporting Hezbollah. The hard part, of course, of forming any meaningful coalition is the consequences of noncompliance. And this case is no different. The obvious punishment for a defiant Iran could be an air strike that aims to destroy its nuclear development facilities and overt support for Iranians working to overthrow their government. This is where the discussion of taking stringent actions against Iran usually breaks down. Few people believe Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern nations would join a coalition that carried out a military strike and there is little reason to believe many European nations would either. This is where President Reagan in confronting the Soviets is instructive. The Gipper was elected in 1980 at a time when it appeared inevitable that the Soviet Union would dominate world affairs and just as inevitably that the U.S. was unable to do anything about it short of waging a bloody, military campaign that would have few allies in fighting and not every chance of success. In the end, as they say, Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. We have similar options now. One of which is to enact drastic economic sanctions that, oddly, would involve forcing a gasoline crisis in Iran. Tehran is kept afloat on oil revenues, but it has done so at the expense of its oil industry. While it exports large quantities of crude oil, Iran imports 40% of its domestically consumed gasoline, and each gallon at the pump is heavily subsidized. Shutting off or even restricting the supply of gasoline flowing into the country would put the regime in a crunch and drive up public discontent without creating a corresponding humanitarian crisis. We could also apply minimal military pressure without straining our relations with our allies. To date Iran is responsible for killing more than 200 American soldiers and wounding over 635 through the introduction of what the U.S. military calls Explosively Formed Penetrators. These EFPs are shaped charges specifically designed to pierce the hulls of our armored vehicles and are much deadlier than what al Qaeda and run-of-the-mill insurgents could have come up with on their own in Iraq. Enough is enough. We could develop a tit-for-tat strategy for each EFP that is detonated in Iraq that could target nuclear support facilities or Iranian leadership or other targets calculated to put heat on the regime without endangering civilians. Many of these responses may be written off as mere happenstance or accidents in a dangerous part of the world. But even as Iran becomes the unluckiest country in the world, our allies in the region could hardly blame us for a calculated response. The U.S. can also assemble a large-scale force capable of an air offensive. This would serve a similar role to Reagan's military buildup, forcing the Soviets into an arms race that they ultimately couldn't maintain. The immediate strike force could be composed of some 75 stealth attack aircraft -- B2s, F117s and the F22s -- and some 250 nonstealth F15s, F16s, B52s, B1s and three carrier battle groups. These carrier battle groups are composed of over 120 F18s and cruise missiles galore. We also have over 750 UAVs for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in Iraq today. There is more than enough to support a campaign aimed at demonstrating to the Iranian regime that with 48 hours we could hit its nuclear development facilities, command and control facilities, integrated air defenses, Air Force and Navy units and the Shahab 3 missiles using over 2,500 aim points. Back in Washington, Congress also needs to exercise its responsibility and fund missile defenses, bunker busters and other technologies specifically designed to counter the Iranian regime. Tehran has the world scrambling to respond as it sets about assembling a nuclear weapon that may be more advanced than Fat Man and Little Boy, but which is still far less technologically advanced than the weapons systems we trust 20-somethings to operate every day in our military. Forcing Iran to expend its resources to keep pace with our technological advances is central to any strategy of defeating them. We don't need to drop leaflets from the air spelling it out for the regime in Tehran that, if we were to carry out an air campaign, it would probably unleash a new Iranian revolution. But the leadership in Iran has to first come to understand that we neither fear a Hezbollah uprising over such a strike -- as Hezbollah is already carrying out terrorist attacks, we'd welcome an open fight on our terms -- nor would we need the main-line coalition ground forces we used in Iraq. Instead, we could simply use the Afghan model of precision airpower supporting covert and indigenous forces. We're the United States of America. We don't threaten any nation. What Iran must come to realize -- and we must now decide for ourselves -- is that we are in this confrontation to win it. From mail at shivamvij.com Sat Mar 31 12:30:03 2007 From: mail at shivamvij.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 12:30:03 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Protest (on April 1st) SC's stay on OBC reservation and brainstorm about how to furtherr Social Justice! In-Reply-To: <235634.27186.qm@web53006.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <235634.27186.qm@web53006.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <9c06aab30703310000h18cd698ewc82a80cdd2c62571@mail.gmail.com> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Satinath Choudhary Dear friends from Delhi and close by, I am sorry for this late call! However, Emergency situation created by our upper caste Supreme Court does not give us the luxury of planning with plenty of time in our hands. Let us meet this Sunday, April 1st, 2007, at Jantar Mantar, Delhi, between 11 am to 1 pm, and accomplish a number of objectives in one shot! (a) Demo on Sunday, April 1st, 2007, at Jantar Mantar, Delhi, between 11 am to 1 pm against Supreme Court's stay OBC's reservation in higher education; (b) Brainstorm about declaring the month of April as Social Justice month. Social Justice month may attract participation and organizing on the part of STs, OBCs, and minorities, not many of whom have been organizing Ambedkar's birth anniversary; (c) Brainstorm about how to further the cause of social justice; in particular, how to democratize the court, especially the Supreme Autocratic Upper Caste. (d) Brainstorm about a bigger event by the end of April to further the cause of social justice If you have any suggestion with regard to any of the above mentioned things, please feel free to call me (at 9350041088) or write to me at satichou2 at yahoo.com. Dalit Voice Silver Jubilee Celebration Committee, Delhi invites you to join a daylong discussion and debate to mark the occasion of 25 glorious years of Dalit Voice. Those of us who feel that Dalit Voice has contributed immensely to develop a new dynamic Ambedkarite movement would like to take this debate further. On April 8th, 2006, from 10 am to 5:30 pm, we all join hand to facilitate Dalit Voice for its wonderful journey. The daylong programme is organized at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg, Near ITO, New Delhi. Dalit Voice Silver Jubilee Celebration Committee: Rajni Tilak, Vidya Bhushan Rawat, Ashok Bharati, Satinath Choudhary, Abhimook Nayak, Contacts: vbrawat at gmail.com, rajni.nacdor at gmail.com, satichou2 at yahoo.com Telephone nos: 9871441261, 011-65902846, 22462528 (V.B.Rawat), 9871514040 ( Rajni Tilak) and 9350041088 (Satinath). Regards, Satinath From surojit369 at yahoo.co.in Fri Mar 30 11:49:05 2007 From: surojit369 at yahoo.co.in (SUROJIT SEN) Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 07:19:05 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Reader-list] IFS-'07 Displacement of Prostitute-A tale of two cities in two centuries-First posting Message-ID: <626504.78067.qm@web8613.mail.in.yahoo.com> Hi All, This is my first posting. I'm Surajit Sen, residing at Chandannagar, 33Km away from Calcutta towords north.I do research for documentary film, write script for TV, review book and presently working on my first novel titled CITY EDITION. My project is displacement of Prostitute - A tale of two cities in two centuries. Last four years I have been reading thoroughly 19th century Bengali text( non fiction - prose). Bodmayesh Jobdo or Wicked Punished by Prankrishna Dattais such a text (1869) where we see prostitutes of Sonagachi (north calcutta) fled to French Chandannagar from British Calcutta, because of a law named CDA14 or Contagious Disease Act 14. In my project I will analyse the politics of British government in the name of hygine, behind the enactment of the law. In mid- eighties of twentieth century in Chandannagar onehundred fifty years old prostitute settlement was demolished in the name of social pollution. It is like a repitation of Bodmayesh Jobdo. I will analyse the politics of State. Ministry of women and Child welfare of Central government is planning to put a bill on Loksabha to abolish prostitution again which sounds like Bodmayesh Jobdo. Displacement of Prostitutes A Tale of two Cities In two Centuries Surajit Sen Prostitutes have always been a marginalized section of society earning a precarious livelihood under the conditions of patriarchy and all the time being reviled by the moral police. While the nouveau-riche made it a status symbol to visit prostitutes of fame and wealth, the conservatives as well as newly educated middle class portrayed them in the deepest dye as a source of moral pollution and contamination. Innumerable pieces of skits and lampoons were written vilifying the prostitutes. The meta- narrative of the 19th century social history conceals many tales of dispossession and displacement of the marginalized, sometimes with the active agency of the colonial power. One such incident that deserves attention is the exodus of prostitutes from Calcutta to Chandannagar. To go beneath the meta-narrative means that we have to look for new subtexts mostly obscure and now relegated to oblivion One such forgotten text is Bodmaish Jobdo or Wicked Punished by Prankrishna Dutta. The text is Full of authentic details about the trade which flourished along Chitpur Road, which, interestingly, enough not far from the seat Bengali Renaissance. The sprawling. quarters were known as the Sonagachi area extending from Nutanbazar to Fauzdari Balakhana (criminal court ) . The present day crossing of Chitpur Road and Kolutolla marked the lower extreme of the red light area. Another skit writer Hootom ( literally the barn owl ) provides us with more information related to the area, the prostitutes, pimps and their clients. The colonial authorities informed by the new sense of hygiene and health sought to impose new restrictions on the thriving flesh trade. In 1868, the colonial authorities enacted a law better known as Chaudda Ayin (Contiguous Disease Act !4) which enjoined that all the prostitutes as well as their clients will be brought under health check ups to determine if they were suffering from venereal disease like syphilis, which was wrecking havoc. The enactment also stated that if any prostitute or her client was found suffering from any such disease, he / she would have to be admitted to hospital ( Lock Hospital ) and treated. Those who would not willingly submit themselves to this new health regime were liable to be arrested. One of the reasons why the government went for such harsh measures was its anxiety about the health of the British soldiers, many of whom frequented the red-light area. Further, we have to consider that the great mutiny which had badly shaken the foundations of the Empire, only 11years ago was enough to warrant such a measure to ensure the health and efficiency of the British civilians and soldiers. The regulation created panic among the prostitutes were not homogenous community but rather a fragmented one . Those who had rich patrons naturally enjoyed protection but the poor were unprotected and vulnerable. There clientele mostly came from the working class and small professionals. As a consequence prostitutes began to flee their traditional haven and started flocking to Chandannagar, only 30 Kilometers upstream. As it was a French enclave, the British rules could not be enforced there. The restrictions were operative for twenty years. When it was relaxed and finally withdrawn the prostitutes heaved a sigh of relief. However, it is not known whether they were living at Chandannagar during the whole period or their journey home started earlier. The story of the dispossession of the marginalized continues in different form and with a different rationale in Chandannagar in the post colonial period. The red-light area of Chandannagar along G. T. Road was the source of civic annoyance, as a thorn in the flesh. After the independence Chandannagar had lost much of it’s former glory. The flesh trade therefore no longer thriving. The clientele now consisted mainly of small traders, factory workers, vendors and rickshaw pullers, for the prostitutes it was an uncertain and precarious existence. In the mid eighties the prostitutes were evicted by a combination of civic organization, the ruling party and of course , with the generous help of the realtors. Ironically here again we find the repetition of the health regime of 1868, though this time in the name of ‘moral grab’! The eviction process was quick and ruthless and as prostitutes did not meet with any protest or opposition. The house of ‘ill-fame’ soon changed hands, were pulled down to make expensive apartment blocks, shopping plaza and car parking area. The whole exercise must have been well planned and the chief beneficiaries were the ruling party and the realtors. We can easily see the connection that how leftist government of West Bengal has espoused the popular brand of ‘development’ sponsored by the capital and the state and the prostitutes has become the victim of their widespread vested interests. As recent as this year the government of India has brought in a law(suppose to get approval of Loksabha) which proposes to impose strong restrictions on the prostitutes and their clients. It almost looks like a reinforcement of the Contagious Disease Act 14 to serve state’s own interest.It sounds like state is going to write a twenty first century version of Bodmaish Jobdo -------------- --------------------------------- Here’s a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070330/f6a48e1c/attachment.html From mahmood.farooqui at gmail.com Sat Mar 31 11:47:31 2007 From: mahmood.farooqui at gmail.com (mahmood farooqui) Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 11:47:31 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Dastangoi in Pakistan Message-ID: Dear All, We are taking Dastangoi to Pakistan next week, come along if you happen to be there... Karachi Performance at Mohatta Palace Museum on April 3rd at 7:30 PM Performance at FTC (Finance & Trade Centre) on April 4th at 7:30 PM Lahore 7th and 8th of April at Bagh-e-Jinnah open air theatre Islamabad Also at Islamabad on the 5th April.. Best Danish, Mahmood and Anusha.... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070331/15c3913f/attachment.html From nc-agricowi at netcologne.de Fri Mar 30 14:34:23 2007 From: nc-agricowi at netcologne.de (netEX) Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:04:23 +0200 Subject: [Reader-list] =?iso-8859-1?q?=5BAnnouncements=5D_netEX=3A_calls_a?= =?iso-8859-1?q?nd_deadlines__-_April_2007?= Message-ID: <20070330110423.E77377EC.367F8BA1@192.168.0.3> netEX - calls & deadlines - April 2007 -------------------------------------------- [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne www.nmartproject.net published 2007 calls for four major projects -------------------------------------------- 1. Cinematheque - http://cinema.nmartproject.net is currently preparing Cinema_C for hosting a new streaming online show, entitled: "Slowtime 2007? - Quicktime as an artistic medium --->extended deadline 31 May 2007 find all entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=1 2. JavaMuseum - Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art released the call for a new show case to be launched in September 2007, entitled: a + b = ba? - [art + blog = blogart?] extended deadline 31 July 2007 find all entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=7 3. CologneOFF - Cologne Online Film Festival http://coff.newmediafest.org - announced recently its 3rd festival edition to be launched in October 2007 --->Theme: Toon! Toon! - art cartoons & animates narratives --->Deadline 1 August 2007 all entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=23 4. SoundLAB - sonic art project environments http://soundlab.newmedifest.org realease a call for SoundLAB - Edition V to be launched in October 2007 online --->theme: soundSTORY - sound& music as tools for narrating --->Deadline 1 August 2007 all entry details on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=24 ------------------------------------------------ April deadlines ------------------------------------------------ April 30 April Xenophobia Redux (Norway) - Art and critical writing on European exclusionism http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=47 30 April Short Film Festival Euganea Movement Padova(Italy) http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=14 30 April d/art Festival Sydney/Australia http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=39 30 April AVANCA Film Festival (Portugal) http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=38 20 April Izolenta - Digital Film Festival St. Petersburg/Russia http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=40 17 April Edinburgh Film Fest 2007 http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=44 13 April Experimental Film Festival Onioncity - Chicago (USA) http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=9 10 April Short Film Festival Banja Luka (Bosnia-Hercegowina) http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=11 ----------------------------------------------- more deadlines on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?page_id=4 ----------------------------------------------- NetEX - networked experience http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/ # calls in the external section--> http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?cat=3 # calls in the internal section--> http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?cat=1 -------------------------------------------------------------------- # This newsletter is also released on http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?cat=9 # NetEx--->:||nmapn||:Cologne ~ networked experiences http://netex.nmartproject.net is a free information service powered by [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne www.nmartproject.net - the experimental platform for Art and New Media from Cologne/Germany # info & contact: info (at) nmartproject.net _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From mail at responsenet.in Sat Mar 31 05:17:49 2007 From: mail at responsenet.in (Conferences Responsenet) Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 05:17:49 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Consolidated Papers and Synopsis, Supply Chain for Disaster Management Message-ID: <294499d31f328d3f73006a74001f3296@responsenet.in> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070331/9b0d772d/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ announcements mailing list announcements at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements From vedprakash.sharma at gmail.com Sat Mar 31 20:53:51 2007 From: vedprakash.sharma at gmail.com (Vedprakash Sharma) Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 20:53:51 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Protest (on April 1st) SC's stay on OBC reservationand brainstorm about how to furtherr Social Justice! References: <235634.27186.qm@web53006.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <9c06aab30703310000h18cd698ewc82a80cdd2c62571@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <00b501c773a8$98fd1010$6401a8c0@ved6suqbkuh1sf> it looks as if I went through the mail of a political leader. in my humble opinion, the SC has raised some very genuine objections. without a scientific analysis of the problem of reservation, one should not draw conclusions. we may have different views over it but the logic must prevail and the same should decide the criterion of the reservation. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Shivam Vij" To: "sarai list" Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2007 12:30 PM Subject: [Reader-list] Protest (on April 1st) SC's stay on OBC reservationand brainstorm about how to furtherr Social Justice! > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Satinath Choudhary > > Dear friends from Delhi and close by, > > I am sorry for this late call! However, Emergency situation created > by our upper caste Supreme Court does not give us the luxury of > planning with plenty of time in our hands. Let us meet this Sunday, > April 1st, 2007, at Jantar Mantar, Delhi, between 11 am to 1 pm, and > accomplish a number of objectives in one shot! > > (a) Demo on Sunday, April 1st, 2007, at Jantar Mantar, Delhi, > between 11 am to 1 pm against Supreme Court's stay OBC's reservation > in higher education; > > (b) Brainstorm about declaring the month of April as Social Justice > month. Social Justice month may attract participation and organizing > on the part of STs, OBCs, and minorities, not many of whom have been > organizing Ambedkar's birth anniversary; > > (c) Brainstorm about how to further the cause of social justice; > in particular, how to democratize the court, especially the Supreme > Autocratic Upper Caste. > > (d) Brainstorm about a bigger event by the end of April to further > the cause of social justice > > If you have any suggestion with regard to any of the above > mentioned things, please feel free to call me (at 9350041088) or write > to me at satichou2 at yahoo.com. > > Dalit Voice Silver Jubilee Celebration Committee, Delhi invites you > to join a daylong discussion and debate to mark the occasion of 25 > glorious years of Dalit Voice. Those of us who feel that Dalit Voice > has contributed immensely to develop a new dynamic Ambedkarite > movement would like to take this debate further. > > On April 8th, 2006, from 10 am to 5:30 pm, we all join hand to > facilitate Dalit Voice for its wonderful journey. The daylong > programme is organized at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, Deen Dayal > Upadhyay Marg, Near ITO, New Delhi. > > Dalit Voice Silver Jubilee Celebration Committee: Rajni Tilak, > Vidya Bhushan Rawat, Ashok Bharati, Satinath Choudhary, Abhimook > Nayak, > > Contacts: vbrawat at gmail.com, rajni.nacdor at gmail.com, satichou2 at yahoo.com > Telephone nos: 9871441261, 011-65902846, 22462528 (V.B.Rawat), > 9871514040 ( Rajni Tilak) and 9350041088 (Satinath). > > Regards, > Satinath > _________________________________________ > 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. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> From arvind.access at gmail.com Sat Mar 31 22:37:39 2007 From: arvind.access at gmail.com (Arvind Kumar) Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 22:37:39 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] First Posting - Caste Violence in Urban Maharashtra: A Study of Worli Riots of Mumbai 1974 - A Breaking Point in Dalit Panthers Movement Message-ID: <364872690703311007u7b72c77ck1c58e6879f2b4c6b@mail.gmail.com> First Posting: Caste Violence in Urban Maharashtra: A Study of Worli Riots of Mumbai 1974 - A Breaking Point in Dalit Panthers Movement The Dalit Panther manifesto suggests that the Panther leadership believed the British gave up their rule because of the seamen's mutiny, emergence of the Azad Hind Fauz, and due to the struggle of the peasants, workers and Dalits. Because of these they could no longer remain in power. Giving independence to Gandhi and Gandhians meant that the British wanted their own interests in the country to be looked after. According to the Dalit leadership, this was the sort of borrowed independence we got. True independence is won, i.e., snatched forcibly from the hands of the enemy. One, i.e., like bits thrown to a helpless beggar is no independence. In every house and every mind the flame of true independence has to be ignited. This did not happen however. That is why the Dalit, the worker, the landless and poor peasantry did not become free; the muck at the bottom of the pond remained where it was and, in fact, the government that retained the status quo kept on telling bigger and bigger lies to the Dalits. While blaming the Congress and the Gandhians, as the Dalit Panthers did, one should not, however, forget that there were other parties within this struggle who were equally guilty of sweeping the issue of caste under the carpet. The left parties, having fought five elections, appeared to have grown ideologically bankrupt. They are seemed interested in moving from election to election. In 1967, the left parties united against the Congress. There was such opportunism in the United Front that the parties like Communists joined hands with communalist parties like Jan Sangh and Muslim League. In some states, Left United Front came to power. But the absence of a clear-cut program made the anti-Congress stand useless. In the task of putting some alternatives before the people, of solving the problems of the Dalits, of establishing the rule of the poor in the country, all left parties proved powerless. As a result, revolutionary people's group lost faith in electoral democracy. Uprisings like Naxalbari took place and the spark spread around the country. The Congress continued its policy and sat like a beast on the heads of the Dalits; famine struck and the very livelihoods of crores of people were uprooted, their animals perished. Factories were shut down, workers faced unemployment, and everyone was harassed by the mounting price-rise. The full eclipse that Congress rule represents for the life of the country has not yet terminated. But Left parties, playing the politics of parliamentary seats, were still wasting time trying to get recognition from the Congress. No one dared to turn revolutionary to take up the problems of the people. All the Left parties who did not possess political power ignored the question of a social revolution. They did not combine the class struggle with the struggle against untouchability, nor did the raise a voice against cultural and social domination along with economic exploitation. With the industrial revolution machines came into being. Dalits were harnessed to the machines. But in the minds of upper castes, feudalism survived. Because the owners of the machines could make a profit only by keeping the social structure intact. Only if a social revolution grips the minds of the Dalits and the landless poor, can there be a political revolution. If this takes place, the upper castes, the upper class, will lose the powers they possesses. The stand taken by the Left parties prevented the spread of revolutionary ideologies among the people. Because struggles really and truly meaningful to the Dalits were not conducted, Dalits grew poorer. They have had to face innumerable atrocities. With the defeat in the 1952 general elections Dr. Ambedkar realized that the problems of Dalits, be it social, political, or ethical, could not be solved within the framework of religion and caste. A scientific outlook, class consciousness and a completely atheist approach alone could add an edge to the struggles of the Dalits. Ambedkar for this purpose therefore wanted to transfer the then existing Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF) into a broad-based party. However, this did not happen during his life time. After his death, his followers simply renamed SCF as the Republican Party which subsequently started to pursue casteist politics. They never united all the Dalits and all the oppressed. Above all, they conducted the politics of a revolutionary community like the Dalits in a legalistic manner. The Party got enmeshed in the web of courts, demands, select places for a handful of Dalits. So the Dalit population scattered all over the country, in many villages, remained politically disunited. The leadership of the party went to the middle class within the community. The Dalit Panthers, therefore, emerged in an atmosphere where there seemed to be no group or party that seemed to be genuinely involved with the problems of the Dalits. The country had seen, by the time of the Dalit Panthers, the rise and demise of several parties professing to fight for the cause of the Dalits. It was in this atmosphere of disenchantment with the politics of these parties that the radical, and sometimes violent, program of the Dalit Panthers emerged. From nagraj.adve at gmail.com Fri Mar 30 19:48:21 2007 From: nagraj.adve at gmail.com (Nagraj Adve) Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 19:48:21 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] The Urgency of Global Warming Message-ID: The Urgency of Global Warming Never has there been a clearer case of Nero fiddling while Rome burnt. Only in the case of global warming, it's the Earth that's burning and we are not merely fiddling, we are stoking the flames. The recently released Summary by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2007, The Physical Science Basis: Summary for Policymakers, makes it clear how bad the situation is and that it will worsen. It says there has been a sharp increase in carbon emissions just in recent times, from 6.4 billion tons per annum in the 1990s to about 7.2 billion tons per annum in the years 2000-2005. This is an increase of 12.5 per cent in just a few years and that too at a time when the Kyoto Protocol was in effect. This has resulted in carbon emissions increasing to 26.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. [1] Consequently, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 280 parts per million (ppm) around the time of the Industrial Revolution to 379 ppm currently. To this if one were to add other greenhouse gases, primarily methane, we reach carbon-equivalent levels of roughly 440 ppm at present. As a result of these greenhouse gases hampering the Earth's heat from escaping, the average temperature over the Earth has increased by 0.76 degrees celsius.from what it was at the time of the Industrial Revolution. The Summary also concludes beyond normal doubt that human activity is responsible. This has, incredibly enough, been a bone of contention, with some arguing that changes in solar radiation is primarily responsible, hence any effort to mitigate global warming is not just a waste of time, it is actually detrimental since it would hamper economic growth. But the latest Summary states that the influence of "changes in solar irradiation since 1750 .. are less than half the estimate in the TAR" (the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC published in 2001.) Based on late 20th century experience and trends, the report says it is 'virtually certain' (99 per cent certainty) there will be warmer and more frequent hot days and nights over most land areas. It is 'very likely' (90 per cent certainty) there will be heat waves more frequently, and heavier rain as a part of total rainfall in a season. It is 'likely' (66 per cent) that intense cyclonic activity will increase as will areas affected by droughts and extreme high sea levels, but excluding tsunamis (p. 7). Not merely are these changes based on late 20th century trends, many of these observations and freak weather events have become part of people's regular conversations. What is not part of common sense is that the time to act is very short, a matter of barely a few years, because beyond a certain point, climate change becomes irreversible. One of the reasons for that indifference is not just because most people already have their hands full with immediate problems of sustenance but perhaps because the scientists' dire predictions seem very far away. For instance, much of the press reportage, though dire, mentions predictions of 2090-2099, little under a hundred years away. The best case scenario, one that hypothetically includes a population decline after 2050, the wide adoption of clean technologies, and equity in social and economic relations, models an increase of 1.8 degrees over the year 2000 and hence of 2.4 degrees since the Industrial Revolution. A more plausible scenario, and one that has been widely quoted, is what the Summary calls a "best estimate", an increase of 3 degrees celsius, and "likely to be in the range of 2-4.5 degrees C (p. 9). Why Acting Now is so Urgent What's missing in the press reportage is the damage that will be caused by much lesser levels of warming. The Summary says that effectively a rise of 0.2 degrees per decade is unavoidable. George Monbiot, in his remarkable book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning (Allen Lane, 2006) makes clear what will happen at a rise of 1 degree C: "At less than 1 degree above pre-industrial levels, crop yields begin to decline, droughts spread in the Sahel region of Africa, water quality falls and coral reefs start to die ( Heat, p. 15). Since we are already at 0.76 above pre-industrial levels, we should get there in little over a decade. In fact, the IPCC report already states that that "drying has been observed in the Sahel, the Mediterranean, southern Africa and parts of southern Asia". With 1.4 degrees of warming, the coral reefs in the Indian Ocean may become extinct. Quoting various official reports and peer-reviewed science journals Monbiot writes, "At 1.5 degrees or less, an extra 400 million people are exposed to water stress, 5 million to hunger, 18 per cent of the world's species will be lost and the onset of complete melting of Greenland ice is triggered." (Heat, pp. 9,15). The urgency to act also comes from something else, what the IPCC Summary calls "positive feedbacks". These work in two simultaneous ways: currently the land and sea absorb at least half the carbon dioxide emissions. As the Earth gets warmer, the capacity of the land and sea to absorb carbon dioxide will reduce, hence more remains in the atmosphere, warming the Earth even further. The second element of positive feedbacks is actually the Earth itself contributing to warming. In 2005, researchers discovered that a vast expanse of ice in Western Siberia was thawing, which could release over time the 70 billion tons of methane in the soil underneath, [2] and methane, mind you, is 23 times more potent as a warming gas than carbon dioxide. In general, as trees burn or plants die, microbes in the soil will process them faster, emitting carbon dioxide rather than soaking it up, One paper has argued that in little over three decades, living systems will actually emit more carbon dioxide than they absorb. At some critical point, warming will trigger off feedback on a huge scale, effectively making global warming irreversible. That point is widely accepted as a 2 degree rise [3], or just 1.25 degrees from the present. According the recent UK government report authored by Nicholas Stern, that level or even exceeding that could well be reached by 2035. Some put that date as near as 2030 Its Class Effects The second element missing in much of the coverage is class, of how the effects of climate change will be felt differentially and will exacerbate existing inequalities, and food and water scarcity, particularly in India. Agriculture in India will be hit for a multiplicity of reasons. Rising sea levels due to warming will mean flooding in coastal areas – which are often the most fertile – and over time salty sea water entering groundwater sources, upon which agriculture partially depends. Monsoons will become more intense and heavy rains former a greater proportion of rainfall in a given season, hence affecting agriculture patterns. Dryland farmers will be badly hit. A rise of 2 degrees will result in falling rice yields, says a study by scientists at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute. Also, according to the glaciologist Anil Kulkarni, a study of 466 Himalayan glaciers revealed that their surface area had receded from 2,077 sq km in 1962 to 1,628 sq km at present, a 21 per cent decline. If the recent news report on submissions made by Indian scientists to the IPCC is to be believed, Himalayan glaciers will shrink further to one-fifth their present area, from five lakh sq km to 1,00,000 sq km. This will mean increased water (or even floods) for a while followed by even greater water scarcity than at present. This report suggests that agriculture yields could decline by over a quarter. [4] These levels are projections but the fact of significant decline in yield is not in doubt. This in a country where thanks to other man-made policies, agriculture is already in deep crisis. Due to the agrarian crisis, operational holdings have declined by 4 million between 1993 and 2003. The number of operational holdings below one acre has lessened by nearly 5 million because for these poor households, it is simply not worth their while. [5] In a country that already has the highest number of malnutritioned children in the world, in which per capita consumption of foodgrains has declined in recent years, the impact on the rural poor of agriculture and water supply being hit by climate change can barely be imagined. Flawed Responses Yet, the Indian government's response has been akin to Nero's. It has merely been saying that the developed world is primarily responsible for global warming and that India will not forsake growth for the environment. As a recent article argued, "Besides activity in the market for 'clean development mechanism' projects, which will have little impact on emission trends, India is practically silent on the international stage." [6] There is no doubt that the First World and capitalism are primarily responsible for the plight we are in – America alone emits almost a quarter of the world's carbon emissions – but given the little time to act and given that all scientific studies indicate that South Asian and Indian water sources, forests, biodiversity, shorelines, and agriculture, are already getting and going to be get worse hit, the Indian government needs to move fast. Unfortunately – and this is ironically tragic – since issues of survival, employment, food security are so much at stake and on people's minds, one major cause that will make these more precarious seems a faraway fancy of the environmental fringe, and far removed from immediate concerns. Among many Left friends, mention global warming and one gets a blank look. It's hardly surprising the government is doing little; there is hardly any popular pressure on it to do so. There needs to be far more research funding and subsidies for cleaner technologies like wind and solar power. The Indian government has been exploring two avenues, nuclear power and biofuels – more due to concern about the growing demand for power, and the rising prices of conventional fuels rather than to tackle global warming. Both these avenues are being explored outside India even more and both have their associated hazards. From the current production of merely 2,720 MW, the Indian government is planning 24,000 MW of nuclear power by 2020, and President Kalam has been urging a target of 50,000 MW by 2030. Elsewhere too, governments have begun to look at nuclear power much more fondly. The US, which has not built a nuclear plant for over two decades, is having a rethink. To nudge the construction of new plants, the US Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides tax credits to new potential nuclear plants for the first eight years of their operation. More than 20,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity have become operative globally since 2000, much of it in East Asia. [7] Whereas nuclear power certainly deals with the problem of carbon emissions, it is deeply flawed for three obvious reasons. One, the lack of safety associated with generating nuclear power (the effects of Chernobyl are still being felt as far afield as Western Europe). Two, the problem of storing spent fuel and as Deutch and Moniz have argued, "no country in the world has yet implemented a system for permanently disposing of the spent fuel and other radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants". Given that nuclear waste remains hazardous for several millenia, current practices seem not very convincing. Additionally, plutonium leaks both accidental and intentional, have been unearthed in England and in Scotland; whether companies will be any more careful in the Third World where regulation tends to be less carefully ensured is anybody's guess. As it is, these are considered security matters in India and out of the domain of public knowledge. Three, the question of linkages between nuclear power and nuclear arms and the possible dual uses of enriched uranium. The greater spread of nuclear fuel simply means the greater possibility of nuclear arms proliferation. Regarding biofuels, the planting of jatropha has begun in many Indian states. Ethanol, made from corn, has been blended with petrol and the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation recently announced a new plan to blend ethanol with diesel. [8] Biodiesel-run buses ply in Haryana and Pune as well. In the US, companies sold 16 billion litres of ethanol in 2005, But this again can do more harm than good. One, because of the environmental impact of fertilizer used, its gains regarding global warming are suspect. Daniel Kammen, Distinguished Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, concluded that ethanol may reduce US dependence on foreign oil, but "it will probably not do much to slow global warming unless the production of the biofuel becomes cleaner". [9] Second, biofuels have actually contributed to global warming by forests being felled to grow palm oil instead in Malaysia and Indonesia, and ethanol in Brazil. Palm oil plantations were responsible for 87 per cent of the deforestation in Malaysia between 1985 and 2000. The cutting of rainforest to grow palm has led to forest fires in Indonesia that released enormous carbon emissions. [10] Third, above all else, though state governments in India claim that biofuels will be grown on 'wasteland', it will impact livelihoods adversely. There have been bitter protests recently in Rajasthan against transferring land to companies for planting jatropha. These 'wastelands', people say, are used by communities for fuel and fodder, and as catchment areas for water bodies. [11] Additionally, some amount of irrigation is needed for biofuels when grown on a large scale, and there is the danger of using forestland or land that could potentially be used for foodcrops. Already, according to the FAO website, the growth of biofuels has led to a rise in the prices of essential food items. Rather than having fewer cars, we are now actually taking over vast tracts of land to grow cleaner fuels for them! This in a country where already, according to Utsa Patnaik, per capita calorie intake is declining among rural households in most states and where an average family of five consumed 114 kgs less of foodgrains in 2001 than it did in the early 1990s, [12] This is bizarre, but as long as cars proliferate at the rate they are and markets are allowed to dictate what is grown, this will only unfold and intensify. There needs to be the understanding that the problem lies with unchecked capitalism. It's not for nothing that in IPCC's reports and other literature carbon emission values are presented relative to what they were at the start of the Industrial Revolution. In passing, much of the recent alarm over China contributing to global warming omits to consider that it is capitalism's drive for cheap production that has contributed to so much manufacturing shifting to China. Whether sustainable solutions can be found under capitalism is moot, and some have persuasively argued that "a plethora of blueprints for an ecologically sustainable world fail … because they do not accept that capitalism is incapable of bringing them into being." [13] There's a problem though. Even if we disregard Left experience of the 20th century – which was scarcely inspiring in this respect – the fact of the matter is that socialism on a meaningful scale to be able to tackle climate change is nowhere on the horizon and even small levels of warming from the present will have huge impacts. Since greenhouses gases stay in the atmosphere for decades, what we do now will be felt decades into the future, and differences of degree, say through the wide promotion of clean technologies, would buy us time. But the window of opportunity before climate change becomes a runaway process is closing fast. That urgency of climate change needs to be underlined, governments pressured to act to mitigate some of its impacts, even as we incorporate the inevitable environmental destruction that capitalism causes in our understanding and our quest for a sane society. Nagraj Adve Email: naga2 at vsnl.com [1] IPCC report, pp. 2-3. The multiplier between carbon and CO2 is 3.67. [2] Ian Sample, 'Why the News About Warming is Worse Than We Thought: Feeback', Guardian, 3 February 2007. [3] Heat, pp. 15-16. [4] Quoted in the Hindustan Times, 2 Feb 2007; Sonu Jain, 'Warning in New Report, Indian Express, 12 February 2007. [5] J. P. Singh, "Changing Agrarian Relationships in Rural India', Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Jan-March 2006, p. 43. [6] Clive L. Spash, 'Climate Change: Need for New Economic Thought', EPW, 10 February 2007, p. 483. [7] John Deutch and Ernest Moniz, 'The Nuclear Option', Scientific American, September 2006. [8] The Hindu, 31 January 2007. [9] 'The Rise of Renewable Energy', Scientiifc American , September 2006, p. 58. [10] Heat, pp. 157-161. [11] Ruksan Bose, 'Wasteful Plan', Down To Earth, 18 February 2007 [12] Utsa Patnaik, 'Food Stocks and Hunger in India, www.macroscan.com, 3 August 2002. [13] Norm Dixon, Change the System, Not the Climate, monthlyreview.org, 10 February 2007. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070330/e1a52dd6/attachment.html