Photos I regret not taking

We all see beautiful or moving moments that we couldn't photograph for some reason. In my case, more often than not, it's because I was too lazy or disorganized to take my camera along. I created this new tag so I can share the images that now exist only in my head.

To start off, a really old image, and one from last night.

Sometime in April/May 1990. Beach on the Andhra coast, somewhere near the estuary of the Godavari and the town of Narasapur. Blue sky, empty beach, quite barren - just a little bit of scrub - and scores of iridescent red crabs teeming astonishingly on clean white sand. Sarojamma breaks off from our little group of women who had briefly stopped there, and, in a moment of exuberance, runs towards the crabs, sending them scurrying in all directions in a panic. Just remembering Sarojamma's impulsive joy gives me a sense of freedom.

Sunday, January 20, 2008. Mumbai Festival event in the amphitheater on the Carter Road promenade, Khar/Bandra. An Australian hip-hop band called Downsyde is playing on
the stage, egging the audience on to sing along, raise their hands in the air, and dance. During the last couple of songs, the little area near the stage is packed with dancers. Two little kids, a girl of around four, with a cloud of curls, and a younger boy appropriately sporting a wool beanie, are up on the stage with the four hip-hoppants, three of whose names I remember as Shabazz, Armee, and Dazaztah (sp?). The little girl, especially, had a great sense of rhythm, and even improvised in time to the music improvisations, hurling her little arms in the air with abandon. Joy!

Just realized as I typed the last full stop - they're both seaside moments of joy...

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:

Remembering Benazir Bhutto

Photo source: http://www.ppp.org.pk/photographs/picture6.jpg

Only a naive person would believe Benazir Bhutto stood for a truly liberal democracy in Pakistan. Even liberals and left-wingers in India, which has historically had a larger and politically more active middle class, are frequently utterly elitist. A journalist widely revered for his concern about India's poorest casually and gratuitously advised me in 1997 not to buy a laptop as my first computer. It was 1997, when only rich people had computers, and even they didn't have two. And this guy had only just met me, and couldn't possibly have any idea whether I was from a wealthy background or not (the answer is NOT).

Anyhow, back to Benazir, whose election campaign in the late '80s gave a great fillip to our piracy industry - I remember seeing pirate tapes of her election songs selling real cheap on the railway bridge in the Mumbai suburb where I lived then. I remember her accent, all Anglicized like any number of people I can think of, who did their A Levels in Pakistan, or went to one of the schools here in India that the Brits built to hide their bastards from the eyes of "the natives", and where rich Indians have been sending their Coca-Cola-drinking kids ever since. The kind of change that those kids have grown up to support is the kind of change Benazir stood for - the outer husk was liberal, but the kernel, well, the kernel was nothing, so long as they wouldn't have less than they had now. You couldn't really say the kernel was status quoist - it wanted more for the poor, but more than that, it wanted not-less for the A Level types.

Far more eloquent than anything I could write is this piece by William Dalrymple in The Guardian. Of course, he also knew Benazir better than I!

A failure of the imagination

I just had to respond to a somewhat naive post on Wonkette, arguing (thoughtfully, not crassly) that seeing graphic images of the carnage around Benazir Bhutto's assassination would make the event seem more real to people. In terms of media exposure and how literally we take what we see on screen, we're way past My Lai. Here's my response to the Wonkette article:

Interesting and thoughtfully written. But I disagree that seeing graphic photos makes Pakistan's situation more real. Human beings do possess the mental faculties to imagine, without having everything spelled out or depicted literally. Mere jpegs of blood and entrails strewn in a Rawalpindi street are unlikely to make American individuals understand better what their votes, jokes, "aid", consumption of goods, etc. have brought to bear on Pakistan, much less help mitigate the crushing damage done over decades to the struggle for democracy in Pakistan. Revelations and epiphanies upon seeing jpeg "icons" are the stuff of religious stories, not global geopolitics and political empathy.

I think one reason we have this schizophrenia you describe so eloquently (watching fake violence, but avoiding watching real violence) in the first place is the absence of empathy. And we lack empathy at least in part because we don't take the time to read fiction. I've no great sociological thesis here, but I know that in my life, reading about characters, caring about what happens to them, imagining the constraints they are feeling, was and still is a tremendously formative influence. I also know that Hannah Arendt partly attributed the banality of evil to the failure of the imagination.

Are we all Eichmanns, that we fail to imagine, and "need" graphic images to bludgeon into our brains the effects our actions have on others? Frightening thought.

Sorry, no image this time. Only words.