Semaine de la musique arabe / Arab music week - 8

Why did I do it, this Arab music week? Until a few days ago, Arab music for me was limited to Fairouz, a Khaled album that I bought on cassette tape years ago and later bought on CD, and Putumayo's Arabic Groove that I discovered a few years ago.
Pourquoi je l'ai fait, cette Semaine de la musique arabe? Jusqu'a la semaine derniere, je ne connaissais rien de la musique arabe sauf que Fairouz, Khaled, et Arabic Groove de Putumayo, que j'ai decouvert il y a quelques annees.

This week has been my exploration of the living, breathing, modern reality of young people in the Arab world. So no traditional wedding songs and Bedouin folk music - I was looking for rai, rap, rock, hip-hop, and reggae. I feel it's too bad that some people know nothing of it beyond Osama, Al Qaeda and the Taliban (yes, I know Pakistanis and Afghans are not Arabs), and am alarmed at how little I myself know of the culture and everyday life of West Asia and North Africa, despite my own country's ancient ties with that region.
Cette semaine a ete mon exploration de la musique contemporaine de la jeunesse arabe. Pas de chansons de mariage traditionelles ou de la musique bedouine. Je cherchais rai, rap, rock, hip-hop et reggae. C'est dommage que quelques gens ne savent rien de cette culture qu'Osama, Al Qaida et les Talibans (oui, je sais que les habitants de Pakistan et Afghanistan ne sont pas arabes). J'ai ete choque de realiser que moi aussi, je sais trop peu de la culture et vie quotidienne d'Asie de l'Ouest et d'Afrique du Nord, malgre les liens anciens de mon pays avec la region.

The songs I've posted, as far as I can tell, are about love and everyday life, just like pop music anywhere. As far as I'm aware, no song advocates violence (if you discover otherwise, please alert me).
Les chansons que j'ai postees parlent, pour autant que je sache, de l'amour et de la vie quotidienne, tout comme la musique pop partout. Je crois qu'aucune chanson exhorte la violence (si vous decouvrez autrement, s'il vous plait me prevenir).

For me, no language crosses barriers as effectively as music, especially contemporary music. I often used it when teaching world history at an American university, discussing how it was the outcome of a particular region's history.
Pour moi, aucune langue traverse les barrieres culturelles aussi bien que la musique, surtout la musique d'aujourd'hui. Je jouais souvent de la musique quand j'enseignais l'histoire du monde dans une universite americaine - on a discute la musique comme un resultat de l'histoire d'une region donnee.

To pick each day's song, I went through several others, and in that process, I made discoveries that
don't show up in the blog, like Tunisian mezoued music. I was surprised, because it sounds to me a bit like Celtic bagpipe music and a bit like the popular folk music from my own ancestral land (where I have never lived, but which is also desert, with lots of tribes and a relatively large proportion of Muslims in the population).
Pour choisir la chanson de la journee, j'en ai ecoute plusieurs. En train de faire cela, j'ai decouvert des choses qui ne sont pas inclus dans les postes - par exemple la musique mezoued tunisienne, qui m'a surpris car elle sonne un peu comme la cornemuse ecossaise, et un peu comme la musique de ma terre ancestrale (je n'y ai jamais habite, mais c'est aussi dans le desert et a une grande population des musulmans).

When I started out on the Arabic Music Week project, it was just to explore a contemporary culture that I knew was out there. As an Indian and a graduate student in the US, I've read, heard and experienced enough stereotypes to know how devastating they can be at worst, hurtful and dangerous very often, and annoying at best. I once wore an everyday cotton shalwaar-kameez to campus (in the US) on a day off and got asked if it was a "ceremonial dress" - does everything that's different from the western norm have to be special and steeped in tradition? Can't it just be another everyday reality? Western men make jokes about women and violence all the time (and they are frequently offensive). If an Arab makes such jokes, should that be perceived as religious politics, then? I think most people are ordinary people in their culture(s), and their thoughts and behavior are for the most part ordinary reactions to the things around them.
Quand j'ai commence ce projet sur la musique arabe, je voulais seulement explorer une culture contemporaine dont l'existence j'etais sure. Comme indienne qui a etudie dans une universite americaine, j'ai lu, entendu et vecu assez de stereotypes qui sont blessant, dangereux, et a tout le moins genant. Une fois, j'ai porte un shalwaar-kameez ordinaire au campus (c'etait le weekend), et quelqu'un m'a demande si c'etait de vetements ceremoniales. Est-ce que tout ce qui est different de la norme de l'Ouest doit etre special ou de la tradition sacree? N'est-il pas possible que ce n'est qu'une realite quotidienne? Les hommes americains, britanniques et europeens font souvent des blagues sexistes, par exemple, ou sur la violence. Ces plaisenteries sont parfois blessants ou de mauvais gout. Quand un Arabe fait une telle blague, est-ce qu'elle est ancree donc dans une politique religieuse? Je pense que la pluspart des gens est ordinaire dans leur culture, et ses pensees et ses manieres sont generalement des reactions ordinaires a leur environnement.

In the middle of my exploration, I discovered that almost at the same time that I posted a Tunisian rap song, CNN posted this report, about the important role of rap in Tunisia:
Pendant mon exploration, j'ai decouvert que quand j'ai poste le rap tunisien, CNN a poste au meme temps un report sur la role politique de rap en Tunisie:



And in my search, I discovered the astonishingly cool MaliKah (sorry, embedding is disabled, but please watch the AFP video!). Below I'm posting another song, just for you to sample - the person who posted it says she's singing about a group that doesn't even understand Islam is spoiling the image of the faith by killing in the name of religion:
Et dans mes recherches, j'ai decouvert la super-cool MaliKah (integration m alheureusement desactivee par YouTube, mais s'il vous plait regardez cette video de l'AFP!). Dessous j'ai poste une chanson ou elle chante d'un groupe qui gate l'image de l'Islam en tuant au nom de la religion:



I've never been a fan of rap, but I'm a little closer to being one after Arab Music Week :)

Je n'ai jamais ete un fan de rap, mais peut-etre mais la semaine de la musique arabe m'a apporté un peu plus près :)

And lastly, an interview with the Palestinian rap group DAM:

Et enfin, une entrevue avec les rappeurs palestiniens de DAM:

Arab music week / semaine de la musique arabe - 6

Today, a political song. This is the Palestinian group DAM.

Aujourd'hui, une chanson politique, par un groupe Palestinienne qui s'appelle DAM.

A sad song for the festive season, by Joni Mitchell

Bhopal verdict - justice delayed AND denied

Skulls discarded after research at Hamidia Hospital. Medical experts believe the methyl isocyanate gas inhaled by people in Bhopal may have affected the brain. Photo: Raghu Rai.

Referring to the compensation to Bhopal gas victims, Dow Chemical's public affairs specialist Kathy Hunt said in public in 2002 that “$500 is plenty good for an Indian." The explanation for this may be that Hunt and Dow are racist. But what is wrong with us?

From The Times of India, June 8, 2010:

Appearing for CBI, then additional solicitor general Altaf Ahmed had argued before the SC that the accused knew about the potential danger of the lethal gas escaping and hence should be tried under the stringent provision.

"There was ample material produced by the prosecution in support of the chargesheet which indicated that all the accused shared common criminal knowledge about potential danger of escape of the lethal gas — MIC — both on account of the defective plant which was operated under their control and supervision at Bhopal and also on account of the operational shortcomings detected by the Varadarajan expert committee," Ahmed had said in court.

However, a bench comprising then Chief Justice A M Ahmedi and Justice S B Majmudar disagreed. "On our finding that the material pressed in service by the prosecution does not indicate even prima facie that the accused were guilty of an offence of culpable homicide and, therefore, Section 304-II was out of the picture, Section 304-A on this very finding can straightaway get attracted at least prima facie," the bench said. It then quashed the charge framed against the accused under Section 304-II.

Racism is alive and well in the age of Obama

Image: Gillian Laub for The New York Times

From today's NYT:

Racially segregated proms...are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change. When the actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for last year’s first-of-its-kind integrated prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi, his home state, the idea was quickly embraced by students — and rejected by a group of white parents, who held a competing “private” prom. (The effort is the subject of a documentary, “Prom Night in Mississippi,” which will be shown on HBO in July.) The senior proms held by Montgomery County High School students — referred to by many students as “the black-folks prom” and “the white-folks prom” — are organized outside school through student committees with the help of parents. All students are welcome at the black prom, though generally few if any white students show up. The white prom, students say, remains governed by a largely unspoken set of rules about who may come. Black members of the student council say they have asked school administrators about holding a single school-sponsored prom, but that, along with efforts to collaborate with white prom planners, has failed.

Full story

'Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era'

From a thought-provoking post in the Guardian by Avi Shlaim, Oxford professor of international relations:

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line...

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development... Israel turned the people of Gaza into... a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day...

Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace...

In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.

America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.

As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes.

Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.

It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals...

The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party...

The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and...the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness.

Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim... The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".

To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government... The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.

Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral...

A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict... The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.

This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state... A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination.

Muntazer al-Zaidi threw those shoes at Bush on behalf of millions of us

Mumbai protests: Vision of peace? Or vituperation on vinyl?

At the best of times, I hate forwarded email by supposedly "concerned" people who have often not even Googled whatever the fuck they're forwarding. Nor do they particularly care about whether it has an effect, or what kind of effect it has. Nor will they follow up -- it's a one-off, directionless, trajectory-less endorsement of some fleeting sentiment. Such mouse-clicking "slacktivism" (isn't that an absolutely delightful epithet for when the vision-less, feckless Indian middle class believes it's "doing" something!) does serious harm when it peddles notions of revenge and hate. Here's a response to an uncle of mine, long-time Mumbai resident who now divides his year between Oceania and North America:

I can understand that people's feelings run strong at a time like this. I know what it feels like to be so frightened and helpless, because I was in the middle of it all. I was at work in ____, across from CST station and behind Cama Hospital, and between the BMC (where the attackers lobbed a grenade) and the lane next to Anjuman-e-Islam school (which they took to escape to Metro). We saw the attacks with our own eyes, outside our office windows. The terrorists fired at our building... and tried to enter it (as our security camera footage shows). And I was more fortunate than ____ [my cousin], who couldn't leave the Oberoi for two days.

Even so, I oppose the sentiments in some of the photos you forwarded. I don't think anything good is achieved by using vulgar language (the obscene pun on the Kerala CM's name), spontaneous calls for revenge (grabbing AK-47s, attacking Pakistan), and using womanhood as an insult (giving someone bangles??? I believe a woman is a human being, not an insult to masculinity).

I am also skeptical of "reform movements" that are spawned overnight with poorly thought out vision, and that may vanish within a week. In fact, people who have made solid difference in making politicians more accountable started doing so long before a terrorist attack, and they did it at the risk of their lives, too (Satyendra Dubey is no more). The true leaders and nationalists who deserve our attention are people like Aruna Roy, Sandeep Pandey and Arvind Kejriwal, and those who support them. Why not give their organizations a donation, if you feel strongly about reforming India?

With all due respect, I request that you kindly not forward me such photos or messages. I hope you will understand.

Below are some of the pix attached to my uncle's email, sent from Oceania. As of now, the URL www.reformindiamovement.org is parked with GoDaddy and contains only random links like all parked domains.

Jon Stewart & John Oliver on the Mumbai terror attacks

"When you're a bankrupt ideology pursuing a bankrupt strategy, the only move you've got is the dick one."

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mumbai Tragedy

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Terrorist attack on Mumbai

I took the above photo in Mumbai about 5:30 pm on Wednesday, November 26, 2008 -- about four hours before the terrorist attacks began. They are Mahatma Gandhi's words, in his own writing. The quote above bears a Dandi dateline, and says, "I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might." The quote below says, "Be truthful, gentle and fearless." Gandhi and his followers walked maybe 145 miles from Sabarmati Ashram, near Ahmedabad, to Dandi, near Surat, to "illegally" make salt as an act of non-violent civil disobedience.

I took the picture for my blog, but never imagined it would be prefacing this:

At about 10:25 pm, when I was at work in my fourth-floor office right across from CST station, we heard commotion in the street below -- explosions and gunfire. From our windows, we heard screams and saw dozens of people running along the kerb and in the suburban platform # 1 (where my train pulls in from Bandra/Andheri every day). One man was running on Platform 1 while carrying another over his shoulders. This may or may not be the same guy. The gunmen were on the foot bridge at the north end of the station that I take every day to cross D. N. Road. After maybe 40 minutes, the attacks ceased.

By this time we knew, of course, that there had been blasts or firing in Colaba, near the Leopold Cafe and the Taj. No one was sure what was going on, though. I went downstairs to check if our security would let in colleagues who were stranded in Colaba, but they chose to go home to the suburbs. I was really really scared for their safety, because there was no telling at 11:30 pm how many terrorists there were, and where they may attack next. As it turned out, my colleagues made the right decision, under the circumstances.

I myself, along with 80-100 others, was stuck in my workplace until daybreak. All night long we watched the horrendous news unfold on TV, but at least we were safe and had food, water, bathrooms, and access to news. Others were not so lucky.

At 5 am, we trooped downstairs to take the early trains home. Some of our company drivers had left in fear, but a few cars and drivers were still there, so I got a ride home. Was home by 6 a.m.

The next day, I heard that the terrorists had tried to enter our building on Wednesday night. It figures -- the railway bridge leads from the platform almost to our side entrance. Our security cameras recorded footage of a man with a gun pointing straight ahead, walking towards the camera/entrance. The sharpest weapon our mostly unarmed security guards have is alertness -- they saw the terrorists approaching the building and immediately closed both entrances.Their quick thinking surely saved our lives -- the terrorists then headed for the Cama and Albless Hospital. Otherwise, I'm afraid we'd have been "hostages". After all, our building is the ideal terrorist target: a historic landmark in a busy part of town, near four major bus stops, CST station, the city administration headquarters, major markets. As far as I'm aware, my company has received at least two threats since May 2008. On Wednesday night, instead of us, the patients at Cama Hospital became targets.

It's all a matter of fate, who remained alive and who didn't.

Now, as we emerge from the shock, there's a sick churning feeling in the pit of my stomach at all the opportunistic politicking and the future of South Asia. Who could have imagined Gandhi's words would ring so loud 78 years later, in so different a context! I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.

Why Indra Sinha is on hunger strike

I don't usually copy entire articles here, but I'm making an exception this time. The following is from the Guardian online.

Why I'm going on hunger strike for Bhopal

Victims of the Union Carbide gas leak continue to suffer, their injuries and deaths uncompensated. We must support them

By Indra Sinha, author of Animal's People, which was short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize

On July 26 2006, my friend Sathyu Sarangi called me in tears from Bhopal to tell me that our mutual friend, Sunil Kumar, had taken his life. Sathyu said that when they lifted Sunil down from the ceiling fan from which he had hanged himself, he was wearing a T-shirt that said, "No More Bhopals".

Sunil was an orphan of the Union Carbide mass-gassing of Bhopal, losing his parents and three siblings on that night of terror. Aged 12, he began doing two jobs a day to bring up his surviving sister and baby brother Sanjay. He became a leader of the survivors' struggle for justice and was one of the people I loved most in Bhopal.

The BBC reported, wrongly, that Sunil was the inspiration for Animal in my novel Animal's People, but Animal certainly benefited from Sunil's courage, sense of humour and ability to live on 4 rupees (£0.05) a day. Like Animal, Sunil heard voices in his head, and suffered nightmarish visions. You can read his story here.

On the day that Sunil died, Dow Chemical's CEO Andrew Liveris visited the UN to deliver a much-publicised speech. Fireboats hired by Dow's public relations agency jetted huge sprays aloft over the Hudson River as Liveris told the assembled diplomats "Lack of clean water is the single largest cause of disease in the world and more than 4,500 children die each day because of it … We are determined to win a victory over the problem of access to clean water for every person on earth … we need to bring to the fight the kinds of things companies like Dow do best."

Stirring words. But when asked if he would clean up Bhopal, where the drinking wells of 20,000 people have been poisoned by chemicals abandoned by Dow's subsidiary Union Carbide, causing an epidemic of cancers and hundreds of children to be born malformed and with brain damage, Liveris replied, "We don't feel this is our responsibility".

Liveris couldn't be more wrong. Under the "polluter pays" principle enshrined in both Indian and US law, Union Carbide is responsible for cleaning up the contamination and compensating the thousands whose lives have been ruined. In buying Union Carbide's assets, Dow also acquired its liabilities. Dow set aside $2.3bn to settle Union Carbide's US asbestos liabilities. How then can it refuse to accept Union Carbide's Indian liabilities?

The hard answer is that Indians are not quite as human as Americans. Dow paid $10m to settle out-of-court with an American child damaged by Dursban, a pesticide so dangerous that it has been banned for domestic use in the US. But Dow employees were found to have bribed Indian Ministry of Agriculture officials to license Dursban as safe for home use in India. If an Indian child dies I doubt if there'll be $10m or even $10,000. As a Dow public affairs chief famously remarked of the paltry compensation paid to Union Carbide's victims, "$500 is plenty good for an Indian".

Why doesn't the Indian government force Dow to clean up Bhopal? The Indian law ministry has advised Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that Dow is indeed liable for Union Carbide's misdeeds in Bhopal. It's exactly what he doesn't wish to hear. He and his ministers are in contortions to appease Dow, which has offered to invest $1bn in India if freed from its Bhopal liabilities. When news broke of this sordid backroom hustling, 280 legal professionals, among them retired judges and eminent lawyers, said the attempts to exculpate Dow were unconstitutional and illegal.

Earlier this year, 50 Bhopali survivors, many old and sick, walked 500 miles to Delhi to ask the prime minister for safe drinking water and to make Dow clean the factory. For two months Manmohan Singh left them camped on a sweltering pavement without a reply. When Bhopali women brought their damaged children to his house and chained themselves to his railings, he had them arrested. The policewomen who led them away wept.

When India's prime minister finally gave a reply, it was all prevarication, no substance. The Bhopalis then declared that they would launch an indefinite hunger strike until their demand for justice was met.

On the eve of the fast, police beat up women and children as young as six years old who had gone to protest outside the prime minister's office. The police said they'd been told to get tough. Many of us around the world rang to protest and I asked a Mr Muthukumaran of the prime minister's office if Manmohan Singh had ordered the beatings. "Are you joking?" he replied. On the contrary, I had rarely been more serious.

As I write this the Bhopalis are still in jail, and we hear that Dow Chemical is sponsoring an exhibition called The Gallery of Good at the Cannes advertising festival. Next Monday, Dow will present The Chemistry of Socially Responsible Marketing, which is presumably the advertising campaign on which it has lavished upwards of $100m. But telling lies beautifully does not make them true. Wouldn't it have more socially responsible to use the money for cleaning up Bhopal?

I have spent much of the last five years writing a novel in which victims of a chemical disaster caused by a rogue corporation are sold out by their own politicians, triggering a desperate hunger strike. Animal's People is set in the fictional city of Khaufpur, but whatever success it has had, it owes to the inspiring courage and spirit of the Bhopalis, and the descriptions of the hunger strike were drawn directly from the experiences of my friends.

Sunil is dead, but on their small stretch of pavement in Delhi, now battered by monsoon rain, nine others have sat down to begin an indefinite fast for justice. Among them are my old friend Sathyu and, grown up into a fine young man, Sunil's baby brother, Sanjay.

How can I not join them? How can we all not support them?

• To join the fast for a period, or to register your support, please visit www.bhopal.net. Donations for medical care in Bhopal may be made at www.bhopal.org/donations/

Photos: Indra Sinha image from http://indrasinha.com, and hunger strike image and Dirty Dow logo from www.studentsforbhopal.org

New York through the muckraker's lens

"Five cents a spot", by Jacob Riis, 1889. Image source: The New York Times

When I was about 16 or 17, the brother of a girl in my college (I think she was called Deepa), who went to Brandeis, brought back a book on one of his visits home. That book was called American Pictures, by Jacob Holdt. A friend of mine borrowed that book from Deepa, and I borrowed it from her (Jacob Holdt touched many lives in India with that one much-borrowed copy of his book!). And so I learned that there was poverty in America. And I learned that another Dane, Jacob Riis, had recorded alarmingly similar wrenching poverty a century before Holdt. Thanks, Deepa's brother!

The New York Times today has a review of a new book on Jacob Riis, titled Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Daniel Czitrom, professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, co-author of the book with Bonnie Yochelson, art historian at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, is quoted in the NYT as saying:

“I’ve always been struck by the tension between the empathy and sympathy that’s powerfully depicted in many of those images, and the kind of stereotypes, racial language, that he uses in the text... There’s a tension between the text and the photographs. Today, no one really reads Riis anymore, and yet the photographs remain incredibly moving.”

The NYT reviewer, Sewell Chan, writes:

The commonly held view of Riis is that of the muckraking police reporter, whose seminal 1890 work, “How the Other Half Lives,” prompted legislative reforms, focused attention on the desperate lives of poor urban immigrants and left an enduring mark on the history of documentary photography.

Less well-known are the contradictory elements of Riis’s life and work. He was an entertainer, a self-promoter, an evangelical, and a political conservative who had little faith in the power of government to correct social ills, arguing instead for Christian charity. He held views on race and ethnicity that would be considered offensive today. Though he is now heralded as a major figure in photographic history, he declared in his 1901 autobiography that he was “downright sorry to confess here that I am no good at all as a photographer.”

"The Baby's Playground", by Jacob Riis, c. 1890. Image source: The New York Times

Shifting the dream

Here's an old favorite REM song, from New Adventures in Hi-Fi. It always reminds me of Geraldine Page's character in Interiors walking into the sea until she disappears.

Leave

Nothing could be bring me closer.
Nothing could be bring me near.
Where is the road I follow
To leave it, leave?

It's under, under, under my feet.
The sea spread out there before me.
Where do I go when the land touches sea?
There is my trust in what I believe.

That's what keeps me,
That's what keeps me,
That's what keeps me down,
To leave it, believe it,
Leave it all behind.

Shifting the dream
Nothing could bring me further from my old friend time.
Shifting the dream
It's charging the scene
I know where I marked the signs.

I suffer the dreams of a world gone mad
I like it like that and I know it
I know it well, ugly and sweet,
I temper madness with an even extreme.

That's what keeps me
That's what keeps me
That's what keeps me down
I say that I'm a lightweight
I say that I'm a airplane
That never left the ground.

That's what keeps me,
That's what keeps me,
That's what keeps me down,
To leave it, believe it.
Leave it all behind.

Lift me, lift me,
I attain my dream.
I lost myself, I lost the
Heartache calling me.
I lost myself in sorrow
I lost myself in pain.
I lost myself in clarity,
Memory, leave, leave.

That's what keeps me,
That's what keeps me,
That's what keeps me down,
To leave it, believe it,
Leave it all behind.

That's what keeps me,
That's what keeps me,
That's what keeps me down,
To leave it, believe it,
Leave it all behind.

Lift my hands, my eyes are still,
I'll walk into the sea
Shoot myself in a different place
And leave it

I've longed for this to take me,
I've longed for my release
I've waited for the callin'
To leave, leave.

Leave, leave.
Leavin', leavin'

Rich and poor, men and women: dark contrasts in India

Jaguar logo image source: http://www.thelightisgreen.com

Two sets of strikingly contrasting stories in the last couple of days. What all four stories have in common, though, is that they are all dark:

On Wednesday, March 26, 2008:
(a) An Indian company bought the very British Jaguar and Land Rover. Many may celebrate this as the empire striking back (this is not striking back!), or India's triumphal economic growth. I just think those attitudes reflect little besides the fact that corporate and middle-class India have bought into a received notion of success that has been only very questionably successful for a couple of decades now (try a Google News search for "Ford layoffs" or "GM layoffs"). And do I need to remind anyone that crude oil is has been at $100-111 a barrel. Gas retails for over $3/gallon now, and I seem to recall it at around $1.25 in the year 2000.

(b) While Indians are so gung-ho that their roaring economy is allowing "them" (yeah, I am personally rich, now that "we" own Jaguar!) to buy big foreign companies like Corus, Arcelor, blablablablabla, the finance minister is angry that rich countries, greedy for energy, are threatening poor ones where people starve, like.... um... India by diverting food crops to biofuels.

Photo source: http://www.unicef.org/india/resources_3018.htm

And on Thursday, March 27, 2008:

These are the two items that are on BBC's front page right now, one below the other, under "South Asia":

(a) Indian villagers 'killed witch'

(b) Indian men in US 'slave' protest

The former news item is about a woman being hunted and killed. The latter is about a protest in DC by about 100 men who came all the way from New Orleans, following news that Indian men were working in slave-like conditions in a Mississippi shipyard.

Hopefully a day will come when men won't fight against the abuse of just men, and women, just women. Currently, that's how it seems to happen nearly all the time. I think there's no disputing that women are by far more often victims of violence, murder, rape, and sexual assault as compared to men. For heaven's sake, we don't even allow millions of women to be born. Yet Indian men love to hate the laws that protecting Indian women from domestic violence, on the grounds that the laws are abused by women to harass their husbands. The view that rape or assault victims "got what they were asking for" remains horrifyingly central. Even self-styled "radical" Indian men who volunteer with well-known "progressive" movements in the US are arguing vigorously and insistently that women's clothing provokes rape, and discussing how women can dress culturally appropriately in various settings, rather than clearly saying or supporting the statement that "women deserve safety and respect". The very few women who joined the discussion briefly have withdrawn altogether, and the men don't even seem to have noticed their absence. I can't post the link, or name the people or organization here, because the message board where this is playing out is members-only, and naming anyone would possibly get me into trouble, and probably cause inordinate harm to the organization concerned (which does, sometimes, do good work). Still, message me if you're really curious or want to share a guess (although I do reserve the right to remain silent!)

Yay capitalism :\

Capitalism is as much an ideology as communism, and no more or less of an economic system. Isn't it amazing that we have not only avoided questioning it, but seem to find it more and more impossible to do (even in India! If anyone should be able to see the dark side of capitalism, it should be the erstwhile jewel in the imperial crown. Even Adam Smith questioned the functioning of the British East India Company!) Probably we haven't doubted it seriously just because it hasn't completely collapsed thus far (yeah, why not wait till it does, and then figure out what was wrong with it). But it really isn't working, and has never worked. Its "success" would not exist without the things most of its votaries consider illegitimate (and therefore, illogically, not even associated with its success, as if they were exceptions to rules that otherwise work smoothly), but which are nevertheless crucial industrial and also post-industrial capitalism: slavery and colonization/imperialism (good head start there, with the free labor and raw materials), unemployment (keeps wages in check), neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism, outsourcing (pits rich countries' poor against poor countries' poor, and relies heavily on informal labor and environmental recklessness, at least in manufacturing), wartime profiteering and enslavement (IBM, Dow Chemical, Benz, Halliburton, Blackwater), environmental devastation (dear Dow Chemical again), all that good stuff.

IN SPITE of it all, it hasn't done well. (How stupid do you have to be to cheat on an exam...and flunk!) Far too many "respected" companies have done themselves -- and investors -- in with their financial roulette (Enron, Tyco, Adelphia). And now the "most trusted" names in capitalism are being bailed out by governments (Northern Rock, Bear Stearns). I think this is a good question: why is the Fed putting retirees' incomes at risk by cutting interest rates and spurring inflation, in order to bail out irresponsible investment bankers?

Oh, here's an amusing clip of Jim Cramer (CNBC dude in the video clip above) "reflecting" on his comment about how "silly" it was to take your money out of Bear Stearns. Not so funny for investors who were desperately trying to get out of the stock and couldn't, of course.

The mean Indian middle class

Photo source: Bloomberg News, by way of Business Week

I'm sick of hearing outrage from people in Mumbai who earn at least 5-10 lakh rupees (US$12,500-25,000 @ Rs40=US$1) a year, which is considered a decent income here depending on your housing situation. At any rate, it's the upper end of the Indian income spectrum, and the highest income tax bracket. These people are outraged that the 2008 Budget proposes to waive Rs60,000 crore (US$15 billion) worth of loans to poor farmers. Now, there are problems with the Budget proposal in terms of implementation -- how to reach the farmers who need the loan waiver the most. But resentment on account of it being a populist move in an election year, and on account of it being too huge a sum to give away, is yet another reflection (as if we need one) of the mean-spiritedness of the Indian middle class.

Here's an excerpt from the editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly, March 1, 2008, pp. 5-6:

If there is a group that the union finance minister has always been to keen to please, it is the increasingly vocal urban middle and upper-income classes. They were showered with benefits in the so-called “dream budget” of 1997-98 and this has been repeated in 2008-09. It is incredible that Budget 2008 has made such a major change in the effective tax rates that the individual annual tax savings will range from Rs 4,100 to as much as Rs 50,000 a year for the 32 million income tax assessees. This will certainly further boost consumption demand (and growth), but there was little justification for such a restructuring of income tax slabs. On a conservative estimate, this must surely mean an annual giveaway of Rs 30,000 crore of revenue (at an average of Rs 10,000 for the 32 million assessees) that is far larger than the one-time Rs 60,000 crore farm loan waiver. Only the finance ministry knows how the budget can yet project a 22 per cent growth in income tax collections in 2008-09.

The aggressive urban middle/upper-income classes have been an important force in the Indian growth story and are increasingly strident in their demands and protests. They should be celebrating Budget 2008. No wonder the headline in one major newspaper the morning after screamed: “A second car, or a holiday abroad...What’ll you take?”.

To people who should not exist!

This one goes out specially to Sally, Nan, Meanie, Markus, and Grima, you sons of a silly person! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!!

Image source: icanhascheezburger, what else!

Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time! XD

I'm not the biggest Monty Python fan, but I find this scene funny!

Desiderata

Today I had occasion to visit a lawyer's office. The last thing I expected was for it to be a pleasant experience. The office was in a beautiful (and beautifully kept) building that smelt wonderfully of coffee, on an arterial road in Mumbai's Fort district. On the textured white walls were framed paintings and engravings of lawyers, courtrooms, and judges, all very nineteenth-century-British-looking in a grave and quiet way. They fit the context, since it was a British building in the Fort, and the partners all belong to communities that comprised Bombay's genteel elites even during the Raj. The high-ceilinged office reflected the genteelness (is that a word?), and was calming. I saw no art there that I could call modern-looking. But right inside the door was a poem - soothing thoughts that were not at all what I expected to find in a law office. It was Max Ehrmann's "Desiderata":

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

What we need to learn from MLK today

Image source: http://nobelprize.org/

Below is an excerpt from an Associated Press story by Deepti Hajela:

While there has been scholarly study of King and everything he did, that knowledge hasn't translated into the popular culture perception of him and the civil rights movement, said Richard Greenwald, professor of history at Drew University.

"We're living increasingly in a culture of top 10 lists, of celebrity biopics which simplify the past as entertainment or mythology," he said. "We lose a view on what real leadership is by compressing him down to one window."

That does a disservice to both King and society, said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University.

By freezing him at that point, by putting him on a pedestal of perfection that doesn't acknowledge his complex views, "it makes it impossible both for us to find to new leaders and for us to aspire to leadership," Harris-Lacewell said.

She believes it's important for Americans in 2008 to remember how disliked King was in 1968.

A wish for the new year

Photo source: www.icanhascheezburger.com

...and a song, too, featuring another Cat: