Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Religion shouldn't be an excuse for Gay bashing

In brief, that's the main message of Ban Ki Moon, and because I endorse it, it's carried here:
 
Following is the text of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s video message to the International Conference on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, in Oslo on 15-16 April:


Your Excellency, Espen Barth Eide, Foreign Minister of Norway, Your Excellency, Minister for Women’s Rights of the French Republic, [Najat] Vallaud-Belkacem, Excellencies, distinguished friends,


I am pleased to greet the participants in this important Conference.


We should all be outraged when people suffer discrimination, assault and even murder simply because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. We should all speak out when someone is arrested and imprisoned because of who they love or how they look. This is one of the great neglected human rights challenges of our time. We must right these wrongs.


Governments have a legal duty to protect everyone. But far too many still refuse to acknowledge the injustice of homophobic violence and discrimination. We need to document this problem and share information with States on a regular basis for discussion and action.


We must institutionalize our efforts to address discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. We need public education to change popular attitudes.


Some will oppose change. They may invoke culture, tradition or religion to defend the status quo. Such arguments have been used to try to justify slavery, child marriage, rape in marriage and female genital mutilation. I respect culture, tradition and religion — but they can never justify the denial of basic rights.


My promise to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender members of the human family is this: I am with you. I promise that as Secretary-General of the United Nations, I will denounce attacks against you and I will keep pressing leaders for progress.


I am committed to leading a global campaign in partnership with the United Nations human rights office. I count on others to join us.


Together, we can make the world safer, freer and more equal for everyone.


Thank you.

Saturday, April 06, 2013

Just a review

Purely by accident, I came across this review of one of my short stories published in an anthology....
if you want to read it in full, here's the link
No Ying for This Yang  
Here's an extract...

This anthology tells their story. It's an unrelenting gaze writers as diverse as Vikram Seth, Rakesh Ratti, R. Raja Rao, Bhupen Khakhar and Frank Krishner fix on the meetings and the matings, the horror and the hypocrisy, the sadness and the sensuality, the abandon and the absence that in forms gay lives. Not prettified soft focus Chien Win Lee. This is brutally direct, merciless no-holds-barred Sebastio Salgado vision that destroys artifice, disallows subterfuge. Khakhar throws open the Pages from a Diary: men meet and mate here. But amidst all that meat is a mind that somehow ennobles, infuses with dignity, even tenderness, what is essentially a primal carnal rite. There are sexual schizoids like sexy, silly, willing-to-wound but fearing-to-strike Khalid, who Rao delineates with bemused pen in Moonlight Tandoori. Unforgettable Khalid! One orifice spouts the scriptures, the other begs entry into Saturnalia. The old professor waits, watches, wins and leaves resigned, indifferent, as the inevitable denouement unfolds. Khalid clings to his "unknowing", the departing older lover to cherished moment that will soon be memory. The doomed emotional dialectic of Gay Eden.


It's the same vision, call it harsh, direct, even wistful but never cloying, that writers like Krishner bring to their stories. His The Sweetest of All is about the best document of the rollercoaster bittersweet ride that's the average gay boy's life. Beautiful boy head over heels in love seeking sex change in response to if-only-you-were-a-girl refrain of macho lover being cautioned by surgeon—" If he's so keen on women what's he doing in your bed?" He loves on. Learns about double-dealing, self-deceiving lovers. Some leave troubled by religious guilt, others with equally cavalier nonchalance to sire children to whom they want him to be uncle. Mark, the protagonist , emotionally wise and old, knows, accepts, plays along. He'll keep old memories. And new men. After all, isn't the next man and moment "the sweetest of them all"?

[By the way, that's not the reason why the story was titled - the sweetest of all - but, well, a review is a review....]

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Packaging confusion!

The revenue -driven model of 'private' television channels has fashioned 'news  as commodity'. News has to have a glitzy, colourful 'package', and for most of the vernacular 'news' channels, ethics has been thrown out with yesterday's garbage.. News is being peddled in orer to 'improve viewer ratings'.



WHAT'S IN THE PACKAGE? THAT'S THE QUESTION. BY THE WAY, THIS PHOTOGRAPH HAS NOTHING TO ADD TO THIS POST, SO THERE....

So, this means that you, the viewer are a passive witness to the shrill and boisterous sparring between panellists, [sound and fury signifying, alas, nothing!]. At the end of the session, the hapless viewer is left confused, bewildered and struggling to make sense of the story and to form a considered opinion.

What the public needs isn't the biased views of the so-called experts, but the drect and balanced reports of journalists on the ground, who have the advantage of first-hand experience.

High decibel TV debates can entertain, but fail to educate or enlighten, which is what news reporting is all about.

We are dependent on the newspapers and the print media like never before... the paradox is that only a fraction of today's so-called literate young adults spend time to read.
Go figure!

If it's playing at my place, it's BBC 2

Ah! Radio... someone still loves you, and that's yours truly!

After the untimely and much-mourned demise of Worldspace Radio, I turned to the internet.

FM Radio stations in India, especially small town India are a load of doggy poop, with a few rare exceptions, such as AIR FM Rainbow... but only the feed beamed by the Delhi station that has decent western music, and some very tolerable Radio Jockeying.

Why can't we have a good FM station which beams at least a few hours of decent western music? Narrow minded Desi politicians to blame, obviously, huh?


My current favourite is BBC Radio 2, which a fellow radio listener put it, has 'age appropriate' music and programming.

I listen to BBC Radio 2 every morning, and of course, i catch their late late night shows and their very early morning programming... but that's alright.

So here's a toast and morning chai to the great team at Beeb 2.
Listen here...

Monday, April 01, 2013

April Fool Salute

Oh for Heaven's sake! Cut out the practical jokes already!

It's the first of April, the start of a New financial Year for taxpaying indians and other rare entities.

Well the joke is on you folks, railway fares are up, and you're paying more than you did yesterday for jostling along rickety tracks that were mostly left behind by the Brits when they left for Blighty some 60 years ago.

LET'S DRINK TO THE HEALTH OF THE CHOO-CHOO TRAINS!

The railway system in India, is a hopeless tangle, any way you look at it. Its an unsafe, unhygenic, unpunctual, uneconomic, ill-run, behemoth that moans its pain with every wailing train that pulls into its plethora of platforms. By all accounts it should have breathed its last a long time ago. Yet, year after year, more unviable, financially suicidal projects are added on to its payload.

On this day of Fools, let's salute the Indian Railways, it's India's longest running Miracle!