Fragmented Rainbows

An act of Cowardice

2011-10-31T13:54:00.000+05:30

The scholar and poet, A.K. Ramanujan wrote an essay called, “Three hundred Ramayanas”.
No educated, sane person can question the erudition and the scholarly credentials of Ramanujan. The essay looks at different ways the great epic has been retold in various contexts. The different versions do not in any way diminish the importance of the epic. Rather, they enrich it.

But half-baked bigots who believe that there is only one version of the Ramayana fail to comprehend this. What is denied by these chauvinists is the richness embedded in the plurality.

It is not the views of the bigots but the views of an academic community that are at issue here.

Now, isn’t it very strange that the vice-chancellor and the academic council of Delhi University took the decision to remove this essay from the university’s undergraduate history syllabus, and that there has been no outcry from those ‘big names’ who swear they are safeguarding India’s democracy?

The poet, philosopher, essayist, late AK Ramanujan

Come to think of it, that there has been too much of an outcry from those who should be concerned with the preservation of academic standards and values, either.

As one writer put it, ‘this piece of’ history’ is no more and no less appalling than its ‘pre- history’.

In 2008, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad ‘activists’ attacked the history department of Delhi University for including this particular essay in the syllabus, and then beat up the head of the department. No record of any action taken against the hooligans who bashed up a professor.

But, perhaps not so strangely, this act of violence was followed up by a ‘complaint’ filed in the subdivisional magistrate’s court in Dera Bassi. The complainant said that the essay, inter alia, ‘hurt’ Hindu sentiments because it contained ‘libellous comments ‘about Hindu deities.

The matter ended up in the Supreme Court, which appointed a four-member expert committee to look into it.

Three members of this committee completely endorsed the essay and the fourth had no comments on the essay’s contents but noted that it would be a difficult essay to teach, especially for teachers who were not Hindus.

In spite of all this, the vice-chancellor and members of the academic council, in their wisdom, decided to strike off the essay from the syllabus.

One would have thought that core idea behind any institution of higher education is to open up the minds of students. This means, especially in a subject like history, making them aware of the different views that exist and the different texts that historians have to read and interpret. Ramanujan’s essay , I believe, demonstrates this in the case of one very important text.

Quite a few members of the academic council may not be knowledgeable about history and the concerned text. Yet they passed an opinion. This is a transgression of the norms of scholarship. The decision of the Delhi University vice-chancellor and the academic council is an act of cowardice.

Less noise this Diwali?

2011-10-28T12:22:00.000+05:30

Newspaper reports say that this year Patna experienced a less noisy and slightly cleaner Diwali than last year.
I suppose it's because the prices of fireworks have sky-rocketed, and the rupee has less buying power.
It's also because, thanks to rising prices, I've heard several youngsters aged 18 and above say that it's not a good thing to burn money on crackers.
The prices of fireworks also got steeper thanks to the welcome dwindling of child labour employed in the business.
Even so, I did enjoy my free-fireworks show lounging on my terrace with a tall glass of something cool while I watched several other wealthy people in the apartments around lighting up the skies. The rising prices did one thing... the number of kids sneaking around with dangerous 'atom bombs' has gone down considerably.

It was, indeed a sparkling Diwali night. There were less toxic chemicals flying around in the air this year, according to the pollution control board... ABSOLUT good news. Cheers!

Ram Dayal Munda

2011-10-24T06:14:00.005+05:30

This morning, almost a month after it happened, I learned of that Dr Ram Dayal Munda is no more.

He can be seen singing and dancing on Meghnath's memorable documentary 'Gaadi Lohardaga Mail'.

"Dance to survive!" was Ram Dayal Munda's personal slogan. He is Jharkhand's only Padma Shree, awarded the honour in 2010.

He was born in 1939 in the village of Diuri near Ranchi. He studied in Khuti, near Ranchi.

After gaining his Master's in Anthropology at Ranchi University, he moved to Chicago University, for his PhD. He joined the university's Department of South Asian Studies and pioneered the teaching of tribal and regional Languages. He also taught South-East Asian languages at Minnesota University.

It was in the US that he came into contact with native-American activists and his commitment to the political emancipation of India's 100m indigenous people – much the largest indigenous population in the world – began to grow, says an obit in the Independent.

He returned to India and became the Vice-Chancellor of Ranchi University in 1985. After retiring from teaching in 1999, he focused on international efforts to improve the status and prospects of Adivasis.

He took part in the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples in Geneva and other forums. He was nominated to the Rajya Sabha.

He was sceptical of the new, fast-growth India from the Adivasi perspective. "All this hype, what does it represent for our country? – just a tiny minority is touched by all that, nothing in comparison with the millions and millions of jobless. There is no comparison with what we are losing, without compensation.

In the mean time, millions of people will simply have to disappear. One-fifth of our tribal population is already on the street, nearly 20 million people lost, uprooted, displaced, wandering around..."

Satyagraha March reaches Motihari today

2011-10-18T07:40:00.000+05:30

Motihari: The Gandhi Ashram and memorial at Motihari in East Champaran today welcomed eleven intrepid walkers led by Birendra Soni, who have retraced the steps of Mahatma Gandhi’s journey across this backward region almost a century ago. The walk covered a route of approximately 650 kilometres, and about 5,000 people participated in the various activities organized by the walkers.

Thirty walkers from various places, as well as local residents retraced the steps of the Mahatma, starting 2nd October, [Gandhi’s birth anniversary and World non- violence day] from Bihtarwa and culminating on 18th October in Motihari. The significance of 18th October is that on this day in 1918, the Champaran Agrarian Ordinance was repealed, thus signifying the effectiveness of Gandhi’s first Satyagraha.

A ‘Padyatra’ [journey-on-foot] to draw attention to Gandhian values and development took place in Champaran on the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti: the birth anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi. The walk retraced the footsteps of Gandhiji on his struggle for the indigo cultivators. The walk symbolised a call for local development, and sought to focus on the need for a workable and sustainable development pattern for the villages of Champaran.

The route covered by the walkers was Bhitiharwa , Murli Bharwan , Narkatiyaganj , Kathari , Chanpatiya , Brindvan , Bettiah, Singacharpar , maujhaliya , Bhakhariya Chowk ,Karmwa Bazar , Sugauli , Dumri , Ramgadrwa , Andhra , Chauradano, kodarkat , Bhelwa Koti, Dhaka, Madhubani , Barharwa Lakhansen ,Chorma , Madhuban , Piprakothi , Chand Sariiya , Chandhariya , Turkauliya, Bhishanpurwa , and Motihari.

The Mahila Samakhya, local District Administration, and Panchayats of the villages provided whole-hearted support to the walk, says Birendra Soni , representing the proposed Gandhi College of Social Work,[GCSW] the main organizer of the event.

Most of this places visited by Mahatma Gandhi during Champaran Satyagrah ( Indigo Movement ) in 1917 and 1918 were covered in the walk. The GCSW, to be opened shortly intends to set up special study centres in the villages that have Gandhi memorials. The Gandhi Satyagraha Walk was to draw attention to the relevance of Gandhian-based social work, which is expected to be the focus of the GCSW, located at Bhitarwa village in East Champaran. The walkers also promoted Gandhian thoughts for promotion of Peace and Non-Violence.

Birendra Soni, says “It is a call for the young people to come forward and think of working towards the development of their own village, contributing their bit to the community, in the way that Gandhi spoke about. Panchayat Raj in its true sense is whole-hearted participation in village affairs, participation in the decision making process, and transparency. A second revolution is needed in Champaran, and our attempt is to focus on a Sathyagraha... a walk for truth that has the potential to energize the people, young and old.”

The Satyagraha Padyatra programme consisted of of inter-religious prayer meetings, Prabhat Pheri, village cleaning campaigns, distribution of books and screening of films on Gandhi. Hand cranked spinning wheels weree part of the event: the participants demonstrated the carding and spinning of cotton into thread. It is said that Gandhi advocated an hour of spinning a day, and this exercise could produce enough yarn to make a set of clothes every year.

Birendra Soni said, “This event is taking place under the blessing and guidance of Padmshree Bhanrlal Jain - Founder Gandhi Research Foundation , Dr. Sudarshan Aynger - Vice Chancellor, Dr.Rajendra Khinmani - Registrar , Gujarat Vidhyapith , Shri Brajkishor Singh - Secretary , Gandhi Memorial Museum, Motihari and Frank Krishner - AASRA , Shri Arvind Chauhan and Shek Saffudin - Gandhi Shodh Sansthan.”

The main walkers for the event were Birendra Kumar Soni , Ashok Chaubey , Rafi Ahmed , Sanjay Namdev , Akhilesh Raikwar , Madan Kumar , Dinesh Shah ,Rajendra Kumar, Lalbabu , Rajendra Kumar,Chandrakishor Mahto , Shivkaran, and many more participated by accompanying the team from one village to another.

Hope for the third sex

2011-10-17T05:34:00.001+05:30

'If society is not accepting transgenders, we have to change its mindset, at least now,’ - Kabir

And this Kabir is a Supreme Court Justice.

The National Legal Services Authority is working on a law to safeguard the interests and welfare of transgenders on the lines of Special Marriage Act, Supreme Court judge Altamas Kabir said. This was at a seminar organised by the Karnataka State Legal Services Authority and the Karnataka High Court Legal Services Committee. The seminar threw light on social, medical, emotional and legal issues relating to the community

'Transgenders are in a most disadvantageous position, not of their own making. Some of them are rejected not just by society, but even by their parents,' said Kabir . Referrring to discrimination against transgenders, he spoke of a transgender doctor was not allowed to practice in hospital and as patients refused to be treated by her.

'We have public toilets for men and women but not transgenders, and they are not allowed to use either. Where should they go? Do you want them to eke-out their livelihood by begging, dancing or by sex work?' Kabir asked, saying it was high time for providing a public toilet for the third sex.

Transgender people have the right to live with dignity

Similarly, for admission to schools/colleges or employment, application forms have only two columns for male and female but not for transgenders. 'It's not only male and female, but we have to provide one more category - 'Others' to include transgenders,' he said.

Describing transgenders as men wrapped up in women's body and vice-versa, the executive chairman of the National Legal Services Authority said it was both a physical and psychological condition.

Karnataka High Court Acting Chief Justice Vikramajit Sen said that the social stigma attached to transgenders should be eradicated.

'They should also be recognised and respected. They should be provided a means for their livelihood and should be treated on par with others,' he said.

The transgenders population is about 1.2 million in the country. About 250 transgenders from 11 districts across the state attended the seminar.

Preoccupied

2011-10-16T09:12:00.000+05:30

There's a lot to talk about
There's a lot to share
So many things are happening
It's not that I don't care ...

There's a Royal Wedding in Bhutan
That's very close to heart
And Baichung's brand new Footbball team
I don't know where to start

So I'll just take a rain check now

And blog another day

There's too much blah there on the net

For you to read anyway!

-verse or worse by Frank Krishner

A byte from the e-mail 'forward' pool

2011-10-13T05:40:00.000+05:30

Why IndiaWorks - written by internationally acclaimed film director Shekhar Kapoor.

A greater ‘hole in the wall’you cannot imagine. A small fading sign on the top saying “Cellphoon reapars”barely visible through the street vendors crowding the Juhu Market in Mumbai.On my way to buy a new Blackberry, my innate sense of adventure made me stop my car and investigate. A shop not more than 6 feet by 6 feet. Grimy and uncleaned.

‘Can you fix a Blackberry ?”

‘Of course, show me”

”How old are you” ‘Sixteen’

Bullshit. He was no more than 10. Not handing my precious blackberry to a 10 year old in unwashed and torn T shirt and pyjamas! At least if I buy a new one, they would extract the data for me. Something I have been meaning to do for a

year now.

‘What’s wrong with it?”

‘Well, the roller track ball does not respond. It’s kind of stuck and I cannot operate it”

He grabs it from my hand and looks at it

“You should wash your hands. Many customers have same problem. Roller ball get

greasy and dirty, then no working’

Look who was telling me to wash my hands. He probably has not bathed for 10 days, I leaned out to snatch my useless blackberry back..

” You come back in one hour and I fix it’.

I am not leaving all my precious data in this unwashed kid’s hands for an hour.

No way.

“Who will fix it?”

‘Big brother’

‘How big is ‘big brother?’

‘big …. Umm ..thirty’

Then suddenly big brother walks in. 30 ??? He is no more than 19.

‘What problem?’ He says grabbing the phone from my greasy hand into his greasier hand. Obviously not trained in etiquette by an upmarket retail store manager.

‘Normal blackberry problem. I replace with original part now. You must wash your hand before you use this’. What is this about me washing my hands suddenly??

19 year old big brother rummages through a dubious drawer full of junk and fishes out a spare roller ball packed in cheap cellophane wrapper. Original part? I doubt it. But by now I am in the lap of the real India and there is no escape as he fishes out a couple of screwdrivers and sets about opening my Blackberry.

“How long will this take?”

”Six minutes”

This I have to see. After spending the whole morning trying to find a Blackberry service centre and getting vague answers about sending the phone in for an assessment that might take a week, I settle down next to his grubby cramped work space. At least I am going to be able to watch all my stored data vanish into virtual space. People crowd around to see what’s happening. I am not breathing easy anyway.

I tell myself this is an adventure and literally have to stop myself grabbing my precious Blackberry back and making a quick escape. But in exactly six minutes this kid handed my Blackberry back. He had changed the part and cleaned and serviced the whole phone. Taken it apart, and put it together. As I turned the phone on there was a horrific 2 minutes where the phone would not come on. I looked at him with such hostility that he stepped back.

‘you have more than thousand phone numbers ?”

‘yes’.

‘backed up?’

‘no’

‘Must back up. I do it for you. Never open phone before backing up’

‘You tell me that now?’

But then the phone came on and my data was still there. Everyone watching laughed and clapped. This was becoming a show. A six minute show. I asked him how much.

‘500 rupees’ He ventured uncertainly. People around watched in glee expecting a negotiation.

That’s $10 dollars as against the Rs 30,000 ($ 600) I was about to spend on a new Blackberry or a couple of weeks without my phone. I looked suitably shocked at his ‘high price’ but calmly paid him. Much to the disappointment of the expectant crowd

‘Do you have an I-Phone ? Even the new ‘4D one ?

‘no, why?”

‘I break the code for you and load any ‘app’ or film you want. I give you 10 film on your memory stick on this one, and change every week for small fee’

I went home having discovered the true entrepreneurship that lies at what we call the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. Some may call it piracy, which of course it is, but what can you say about two uneducated and untrained brothers aged 10 and 19 that set up a ‘hole in the wall’ shop and can fix any technology that the greatest technologists in the world can throw at them.

I smiled at the future of our country. If only we could learn to harness this potential.

‘Please wash your hands before use’ were his last words to me. Now I am feeling seriously unclean.

Live Poets' and Society

2011-10-08T23:26:00.004+05:30

A few writers of verse [or worse] got together at the AASRA Resource Centre to share their lines at the Patna edition of The Poetry Meet initiated by Nihal Parasher.

Now I have been one of Nihal's fans and critics ever since he would pen verse when he was in high school, and he was quite under the influence of the Hindi poet Dinkar at the time.

It was a pleasant one and a half hour programme, and we were treated to poetry in English, Hindustani, Urdu, Hindi and Maithili. It was amazing how some of the young people who read out their poems were able to write with precision in English as well as Hindi/ Urdu. At the meet was a young lawyer who's a terrific poet and lyricist, and what a good singing vice!

NIHAL READING HIS POETRY AT THE 2008 AIDS CANDLELIGHT MEMORIAL

Well, I wasn't so sure about love at first sight, until I experienced the poetry of a certain young man called Piyush Mishra ... his simple and lyrical renditions in Hindustani absolutely bowled us over.

Patna Catholic Church recognises Transgenders

2011-10-07T06:52:00.002+05:30

It's a heartening development, and one that may raise eyebrows among 'conservative Christians', but in this years 'Mega-Youth Festival' being organised by the Youth Commission of Patna Archdiocese, the entry forms have THREE options: Male, Female or Transgender.

The Youth Convention hopes to have about 100 Transgender delegates, according to the invitation.

The Convention is to have representation from High schools, Colleges, Youth groups, and also from the unorganised youth segment.

Now this is what I call real progress towards inclusion.

The Gandhi Satyagraha March

2011-10-05T07:11:00.001+05:30

Cleaning Campaign in a village in Champaran

A few doughty people are trying to retrace Gandhi's footsteps in a pad-yatra from Bhitarwa in West Champaran to Motihari in East Champaran. The purpose.. to see how many in post-modern India are still enthused by the spirit of Gandhi.
Good luck to them.

Mother Teresa to inspire Regent Cinema children’s club

2011-08-27T23:24:00.000+05:30

Patna: The Regent Cinema is playing host to the Mother Teresa International Film festival, with a special show of the acclaimed feature film “In the Name of God’s Poor” starring Geraldine Chaplin in the lead role. MTIFF 2011 is Patna’s way of celebrating the birth centenary of Nobel laureate Mother Teresa with screenings in schools, colleges, and other venues.

Suman Sinha, owner of the Regent Cinema, indicated that the film would be the first in a series of value-based free screenings, soon to take the form of a CSR venture “Children’s Cinema Club”. The proposed club, a joint initiative by Regent Cinema and AASRA Charitable Trust, [ACT, Patna] would screen at least one good movie free of cost for children and young people every month, in an attempt to have young people access wholesome and value-based international and regional cinema.

“Mother Teresa is a role model for young and old alike. After Rabindranath Tagore, she is India’s other Nobel laureate, and a symbol of peace and compassion,” he said. “This beautiful film based on the life of a great soul will inspire many, and the Regent is proud to be a part of the initiative by AASRA to bring to Patna so many films on Mother.”

Regent Cinema completed its 83^rd anniversary this year. Frank Krishner, managing trustee of ACT and festival director of MTIFF 2011, said that the festival offered a unique opportunity to bring to fruition an idea that has been in gestation for a long time. “For almost two years now, Suman has been planning to develop something beautiful for children in Patna – an initiative that will help parents and teachers strengthen the moral fibre of youngsters, and the Children’s Cinema Club is the outcome.” The film on Mother Teresa would be the first in a series of ‘free shows’ that aimed at bringing meaningful cinema to young people.

Besides the Regent Cinema, screenings of different films will take place at various venues between 2^nd and 5^th September: Patna Women’s College, Government Art College, Rose Bud School, Don Bosco Academy, St Xavier’s, Nav Jyoti Niketan, Notre Dame Academy, etc.

[HT Patna Saturday 26 Aug]

STUDENTS SAY MOTHER TERESA IS ROLE MODEL

2011-08-27T08:19:00.000+05:30

India can’t be shining if there is poverty and sickness, and Mother Teresa didn’t search for intellectual solutions to remove the cause of poverty, she just reached out and took the hand of the most shunned humans. This is what Priyanshu Dikshit, a third year student from Patna Women’s College says.

For Madhup Madhumita, a Mass Media Graduate, “Mother Teresa is this awesome woman. Her approach to unwanted female babies was don’t kill them, give them to me. I will look after them with love. And hundreds of unwanted baby girls have been left at Mother Teresa’s homes. And they are living in an atmosphere of love.”

Priyanshu and Madhup are among a growing number of young volunteers who are lending their support to a unique film festival that will be unveiled in several schools and other locations in Patna between 2 and 5 September 2011. The Mother Teresa International Film Festival with 12 films on the theme of Nobel laureate and Bharat Ratna will tour the city thanks to the initiative of a group of determined citizens led by AASRA Charitable Trust.

Patna YMCA Chief Christopher Bachmann hoped the festival and the life of Mother Teresa would inspire youngsters to look beyond consumerism, and challenge them to be more considerate and caring.

The venues of the festival are Notre Dame Academy, Don Bosco, St. Xavier’s School, Patna Women’s College, Navjyoti Niketan and the Government College of Arts and Crafts. There will be special screenings in schools in Patna City and Hajipur as well, it is learnt.

[ACT PATNA PRESS RELEASE]

MTIFF 2011 - Fragmented Journal 4

2011-08-19T14:47:00.000+05:30

Visibility

The Message is out there... the festival is on ... but miles to go

You'll see them on the Patliputra- Railway station segment of the Auto route... sent off today ... a small beginning ...

MTIFF 2011 - Fragmented Journal 3

2011-08-18T08:02:00.000+05:30

The rain does play spoilsport for people who move about on two-wheelers.

The festival is taking shape: perhaps not in the mould of the traditional film festivals - cinema halls, big auditoriums and all the razzmatazz - but in a more meaningful manner: the increasing number of schools and educational institutions that want their students to know about Mother Teresa.

Mrs Rizvi, Founder Principal of Rose Bud Academy said she was most interested that her school become a part of the MTIFF. "My students need to know about Mother Teresa. My only regrets is that the festival clashes with Teacher's Day, otherwise I would have orgaised it on a big scale on campus."

The nursing students at Kurji Holy Family will also watch some of the films in their auditorium on the 2nd and 3rd of September.

Mother Teresa is an icon of charity and love that transcends religious belief or lack of it. The great communist Jyoti Basu and the great catholic Mother Teresa were the best of friends- because they shared one thing - concern for the poor of this country. That is why her life story and the effect she has had on thousands of people is important to all of us whether we are Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, baha'is, Sikhs, Agnostics, or Athiests.

I believe that this is only film festival in Patna to be happening almost simultaneously in venues across the city!

Now that's something to go down in the annals of Film Festivals!

MTIFF 2011- Fragmented Journal 2

2011-08-15T09:21:00.002+05:30

This fragmented journal on the Mother Teresa Film Festival, that we’re trying to organize in Patna. So much to do, and so little time.

Some great experiences: Dr Diwakar Tejaswi coming on board immediately and narrating to us how inspired he was by Mother Teresa’s service. Manoj Kumar, a camera-man, said he couldn’t contribute much, but has arranged for a projector free of cost that could be used in the first week of September. Amitabh Pandey, who has offered his designing skills. Dr Atul Pandey saying that his students in Art College may not know much about Mother Teresa, but that they should be given that knowledge through film. After an orientation, they would be ready to produce an art exhibition on her, he said. Ajit Chouhan relaying the information on MTIFF 2011 via Cool Bihari and urging his friends to try and help out, saying that this is a celebration that the whole of Patna should join.

And then the sadness and disappointment: There is this ‘friend’, who was once the Press Secretary in what is now Archbishop’s House. He has resources, he has educational institutions. He fills my mailbox [and those of his numerous other contacts] each day with ‘inspirational’ messages, lauding works of charity and spirituality. One of the steering committee members, urged me to contact him. “He will definitely be a part of this event, and it would be good if we can involve the lesser known schools as well.” So I sent him an email. He declined to be a part of the event. That was okay. But, what made me sad and disappointed was what he wrote back:

“The kids in St. Mary's are not hifi kids like in DPS and Don Bosco etc...they are very poor people. They hardly know much about Mother Teeresa. The teachers are Hindus...they are also middle class and not interested in anything else but their fixed...that's the situation, O wise one.”

I leave it to my readers to assess the import of this statement.

Our venues have grown in number: Art College, Don Bosco, Notre Dame, Patna Women’s College, Nav Jyoti Niketan. Students from other schools and colleges and film lovers will be invited to special screenings.

MTIFF 2011 -fragmented journal

2011-08-04T20:44:00.001+05:30

SEVEN days ago.... I started the ball rolling. Thursday, 28th July- 4pm. It's raining cats and dogs. The filthy water from the street is pouring into the resource centre driveway. It's getting flooded. It's an hour before the steering committee meeting. I've invited several important people to this small house - most will be stepping in for the first time... and into ankle deep water in the driveway!

I sigh and look at the Church across the street and tell the Man upstairs - It's your saint we're talking about here, so can't you turn off the waterworks for a couple of hours to let people to the meeting?

Fifteen minutes later, there's no rain, and the ankle deep water has actually seeped out without leaving a trace of mud!

People start arriving... Dr Shanker Dutt [Chairperson Sangeet Natak Academy] Fr Nishaant vice-principal St Xavier's College, Alan Cowell represnting the Anglo Indian community, Ejya Yadav on behalf of Women's College ... by 5:15 Namrata from The Hindustan Times, Fr Premlal from SIGNIS, Ravi Bharati are here ... I start a video to explain the background of MTIFF [am disappointed that there's no sign of the VG, when the phone rings - The Vicar General and the local Superior of the Missionaries of Charity are fifteen minutes away.

So our first steering committee meeting takes place. And as the guests start leaving, a few warning drops of water fall from the heavens. As the last one leaves, the rain is back ...

Song of Praise

2011-06-25T22:47:00.000+05:30

All in a day's work

2011-06-23T17:30:00.000+05:30

Some photographs from my travels around Bihar.
I leave it to you to comment, if you wish....

Outside a roadside dhaba near Begusarai

Shot in passing from a car window near Motihari, East Champaran

In a school compound, in Muzaffarpur District

Shot from passing car window, East Champaran

Swami Nigamananda: Salute to a Satyagrahi

2011-06-17T13:59:00.001+05:30

After four months of fasting for saving river Ganga, Swami Nigamananda Saraswati died at around 2 pm on June 13, 2011 at Jolly Grant Himalayan Institute Hospital in Dehradun. Swami Nigamanand, 34, had been fasting for 115 days in Haridwar.
The 34-year-old Swami, a member of Matri Sadan, was protesting against the illegal mining that is polluting the river Ganges. He had started his fasting on February 19 this year. On April 27, his health started deteriorating and forced the authorities to admit him at the district hospital. The Swami went into coma and had to be admitted in a very critical condition to the Jolly Grant Hospital in Dehradun on April 27, 2011.

After 115 days without food, Nigamanand had to die to be noticed, briefly, by the national media

In contrast with the fuss over Ramdev, it's a terrifying revelation of how lop-sided India’s priorities have become.

Against the background of the Anna and Ramdev 'fasting' tamsahas, somebody commented that a culture addicted to cheap thrills is always self-destructive, for it cannot focus its mind on anything that lacks a circus.

'The cleaning of the River Ganga' is a much-flogged horse, and doesn't have much 'sensational value'. A clean Ganga is of fundamental importance to the life of a large part of India. Chief ministers sign agreements over this, just as the Uttarakhand chief minister did. It's just lip service: 'clean' the river without interrupting ongoing polluting activity or try to change anything.

So when Swami Nigamanand, to whom the cleanliness of the Ganga was really equal to godliness, began to fast to draw attention to the illegal mining, sand-quarrying and stone-crushing that pollutes a stretch flowing to Rishikesh, no one wanted to take notice. The wannabe Mahatma and the crossdressing Yogi were hogging mediaspace.

Mining and stone-crushing companies are too good a source of funds for a government. And why should anyone pay attention to a sadhu with neither political connections nor media presence? Nigamanand was innocent [and foolhardy] enough to think that fasting for a good cause would bring about change.

The politicians who turned deaf ears to the Supreme Court’s directives on clearing the banks of polluting industries were really not interested, and were busy 'pleading' with Ramdev to end his fast, to score political points.

A man fasting to make a point, any point, must be looked after. In this case the point was of overwhelming importance. What happened to the local and national media on this one? Nigamanand’s courage in taking on powerful mining bosses and indifferent or greedy politicians should have been recognized and given space in print and on the electronic media.

Post his death, the slanging match between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party is shameful. Instead of humility and shame, each side is using Nigamanand's death to score a point against the other. They have an eye on the forthcoming assembly elections in Uttarakhand, they care for neither Nigamanand nor the Ganga.

Illegal activity: stone-crushing polluting the Ganga

The accusations — the Congress gave the stone-crushers their licence, the BJP allows the mining to continue and so on — include one of poisoning the sadhu. This sordid drama proves that politicians and governments are least interested in the good of the people, or the improvement and preservation of the environment.

Will 'civil society' response be such that the death of this real Satyagrahi doesn't go in vain?

Only you, dear reader, can answer this one!

Judas

2011-06-13T11:58:00.000+05:30

Then

There was the time

I gave my friend a crystal ball

Of trust

And returned

To find

Its fragments

Shattered

On the kitchen floor.

Frank Krishner 1984, Published in Friends Magazine.

Alvida McBull Fida Hussain

2011-06-09T20:53:00.000+05:30

India's amazing artist and barefoot billionaire is to be buried in Britain tomorrow.

Today, after his death has been announced, everyone in India is teary-eyed and sentimental. Hypocrites! The Shiv Senas and the BJP who used zombie gangs to attack the artist, ruin his paintings and scream death threats in order to to stifle his artistic expression, are suddenly dripping honey from their fangs, and saying things like "Hussein should be buried in India. What a load of BS!

And as for Pratibha Patel and the Congresswallahs and all the so-called liberal noise-makers: in over six years of their tenure in government, they couldn't create conditions in which the great liberal artist could return to his motherland: he was in self-imposed exile because for all our posturing, there's really no rule of law - the government couldn't guarantee protection to one of India's illustrious sons.

It's fitting that MF Hussain's final resting place will be England. To bring him back and bury him in India would be nothing short of a mockery.

A passing thought: if the tomb of one of India's best known Sufi saints could be smashed and turned into a highway overnight by a gang of thugs who haven't even been identified yet, I shudder to think of what desecrations would be planned for Hussain's tomb if he were to be laid to rest in Maharashtra!

Shedding the Baba Suit

2011-06-07T08:22:00.004+05:30

Ramdev is , at best, a shrewd businessman who started his own brand of yoga and 'herbal' concoctions and has played upon the sentiments of a several thousand gullible folks to achieve his own selfish ends.
Any rational and scientific minded person would have seen through him as he made claims for curing HIV and Homosexuality, but of course, in the true spirit of Indian democracy, we do let quacks of all kinds build their duckponds. And now all this noise on TV, trying to turn this fellow into some sort of a hero!

This chap Ramdev is solely responsible for the so-called crackdown at Ramlila Grounds. You take permission for a yoga camp for 3,000 people and turn it into a political rally with 30,000 supporters, and then act surprised that the district administration wants to shut you down? The pack of wolves baying at Rajghat are an insult to the memory of the Mahatma... and to equate Ramdev's tricks with satyagraha, and the Ramlila ground incident with Jalliamwalla Bagh is absurd in the extreme.

It is Ramdev who should be held morally responsible for the Ramlila grounds incident, and the injuries to his people. If he really had nothing to hide, then why leap from the stage like a thief and a thug, and try to sneak away in women's clothes while his supporters engaged the police?

The Puri Shankaracharya is right when he says that Ramdev is a blot on the sadhu saffron.
A 'holy man' would have met the cops with dignity, accepted the warrant, told his followers to disperse with calm and urged the police to show resraint ... that is how a person with character and leadership is expected to be. A true leader's first thought would be the welfare of his followers. Here Ramdev showed how small he really is. Had Ramdev displayed true courage and dignity, he would have gained so much more respect, even from those who oppose him. But no, the so-called 'peaceful guru' actually willed violence to be done, so that he could claim 'martyrdom', and so this very obvious ploy - let your supporters sacrifice their lives towards your selfish cause.

Ramdev has shown that he is courageous only when surrounded by 'supporters'. There is far more to it than meets the eye, he was really afraid of being arrested, which brings to mind all those other accusations that Digvijay Singh has been making about 'disappearences' of key people in Ramdev's career path.

Manmohan Singh and his ministers had no business meeting Ramdev and giving him such importance in the first place. The man's 'demands' that 'people with black money should be given the death sentence' and such were absurd anyway, why appease him?

India doesn't need a psuedo- ramdev revolution. If the Government is really serious about bringing back the black money stashed away overseas, they will have to do something about it, or they'll be kicked out anyway through the ballot box.

Also, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, so here's a proposal. Let's have Ramdev investigated and let's find out whether he and his gang of 'followers' have no black money and have paid their taxes... Let's conduct scientific medical research and have Ramdev's claims of 'curing' HIV through ayurveda tested ...

It's a pity that the man didn't stick to Yoga and asans ... I know some people who believe that Ramdev's very good at Yoga, but now after watching their macho Guru running away in women's clothing, they're not very comfortable being advocates of Ramdev Baba's Salwar Suits.

Is Democracy dying in Darjeeling?

2011-05-20T08:45:00.000+05:30

Bimal Gurung, chief of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha,has ‘exiled’ Mr Subash Ghishing. As a senior journalist puts it, Subash Ghisingh’s departure from Darjeeling captures all that is wrong with politics in the hills.

For more than two decades, the ruling party or group in Darjeeling has, mostly through violence and coercion, left no space for any opponent. For one, I cannot forget the brutal murder of Madan Tamang, an astute politician, and a gentleman, by Gurung's 'supporters'.

Ironically, it was Ghisingh himself, who started this trend. Ghishing, a popular leader in the 80's, slowlyfashioned himself into the dictator of Darjeeling, silencing opponents with violence and coercion.

Nevertheless, Bimal Gurung’s ‘diktat’ is unfair and undemocratic. Two wrongs don't make a right.

The elections in North Bengal have shown that the candidates of Gurung’s party, the GJM is popular. The election results also show that Ghisingh’s party, the Gorkha National Liberation Front, does not enjoy the kind of popular support that the GJM does. o isn’t it unethical and unnecessary for Gurung to serve a ‘ quit notice’ on Ghisingh?

This demonstrates, the collapse of the rule of law in Darjeeling during the Left regime in West Bengal. The argument that Mr Ghisingh’s presence in Darjeeling is a threat to its peace holds no water. In fact, it’s anti-democratic.

Madan Tamang fatally wounded

There’s a vacuum in democratic politics in Darjeeling, that has to be addressed by the new West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. There has been no local administration of any kind in the hills since the expiry of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council’s term three years ago. Mamta-di will have to find a solution to the GJM’s demand for a special political status for the hills. She has always opposed the creation of a separate state of Gorkhaland, and we’ll be watching how she uses the GJM’s friendly equations with her to find a political resolution to this issue that’s been hanging fire for over thirty years.

The talks over a new political or administrative status for Darjeeling will take time, but civic and economic issues in the hills need the new government’s urgent attention.

Invitation for 15th May 2011

2011-05-12T22:09:00.000+05:30

Breaking Gender Walls

2011-05-09T07:21:00.001+05:30

All over India, sex change surgery remains a traumatic experience because it is done secretly and unprofessionally.

Castration is illegal in India, and Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) is legally ambiguous. Therefore, those who wish to undergo a sex change operation have to go to private clinics, and suffer physical and mental trauma. The cost of the operation is very high there (around 45 lakhs).

Christy Raj is intimately acquainted with the sufferings and difficulties attached to SRS. Numerous friends of his have been through it, and he himself hopes to be able to undergo the operation one day, however hazardous it is.

Christy Raj

The transgender community is still discriminated against massively in India, and there is total ignorance amongst the public of their needs.

A female to male transgender, Christy was forced out of his home, beaten, bruised and left on the highway, to be crushed to death by speeding vehicles, by her own family six years back, when he was 17.The reason: Christy has just confessed to her people that he was a man trapped in a woman’s body and that he wanted to be complete by undergoing a sex change.

‘I confessed because I thought if anyone could be taken into confidence and could be counted on to help me, it would be my family, the one I was born into’, he says with a wry smile. ‘Instead, I was beaten like an animal.’

Christy, however, didn’t get run over. Instead he was found, of course unconscious and bleeding, by a Hijra who was human enough to take into her house this strange who, for her, was just another human being.

A proper SRS not only consists of a surgical operation. It also includes counselling, before and after the operation, hormonal treatment to enhance the physical changes, and a medical follow-up, to prevent the risks attached to the surgical intervention. But when the intervention is carried out in private clinics, transgender patients hardly receive any of these, and are left vulnerable to various infections, medical complications, and post-intervention psychological distress.

To improve his community’s situation, Christy Raj is engaged in Sangama, an NGO that provides support for the counselling process. He also belongs to an activist network that lobbies the government to susbsidise the surgery, as is the case in Tamil Nadu. He has numerous friends who have undergone SRS and now lead happy lives, utlimately at peace with their gender identity.

International Aids Candlelight Memorial 2011

2011-04-18T08:20:00.000+05:30

AASRA Charitable Trust is coordinating this year's IACM 2011 with partners Kurji Holy Family Hospital {Navjeevan Community Helath Centre}, Bihar network of Positive people [BNP+], Patna Network of Positive People [PNP+] and other organisations and individuas.

A week-long chain of events to be undertaken by various partners at different locations each according to its capacity.

Local networking with different groups will be the key element, and involving as many people as possible. So please join us.

15th May, Sunday : IACM to be observed in Patna and as many districts as possible with the Positive People's Networks holding a candle-lighting ceremony at their district headquarters.

The time for lighting the candles will be uniformly at 7 pm throughout the state.

16th May Nukkad performances at Rly Station

17th May Nukkad at Mithapur Bus stand

18th May Awareness + IEC distribution at Bithpur

19th May Awareness + IEC distribution at Digha

2oth May Awareness + IEC distribution at Paliganj and Dulhan Bazar

Film: Dominic D'Souza's last speech + English Poetry Reading and Singalong session at AASRA Charitable Trust, New Patliputra

21st May Film: Phir se ashiyana Banayenge Hum by Timothy Gaikwad at Holy Family Hospital Auditorium [60 minutes]

Air-conditioned saloon

2011-04-14T07:02:00.000+05:30

While on a road trip to Purnea this week, I came across this 'air-conditioned saloon' in a village along the highway - the village was called Hajpur-Bochaha

Children persecuted in Karnataka

2011-04-12T20:43:00.000+05:30

Lent is a time when Christians contemplate on the ‘Passion of the Christ’ and in Karnataka, Christians are at the receiving end of persecution this Lenten season.

Since the beginning of April, many children from Christian-run shelters for poor returning home after exams have been stopped by Bajrang Dal activists and harassed. These included children from Ebenezer Mercy Hall, a charitable home run by a Pentecostal Christian group, the Ashraya home run by a Catholic leader, and the Stella Maris Orphanage run by Apostolic Carmel nuns.

It’s only after I read the news that thirty-seven groups belonging to all faiths have publicly condemned Bajrang Dal attacks on Christian-run homes for poor children in Karnataka, that I realised how ineffective the media is when it comes to covering news. The news-log has been overshadowed by Cricket, Anna Hazare, the Japan Earthquake, and new scams, so one got to read about this protest on a news website.

These fanatics, in the name of ‘protecting Hinduism’ have now begun to “train their guns” on students, especially those from these poor homes, alleging proselytization. It has been observed that since 2008 when the BJP started ruling the southern state, lunatic fringe groups affiliated to the Sangh Parivar have become bolder. There have been at least 24 attacks on Christians and their institutions. When Christians protested the attacks, the police harassed the victims instead, and did nothing to safeguard them, say members from the community.

Dalit leader Krishnananda D said Christians have donated their houses to establish schools but now the fundamentalists are stopping them from even imparting knowledge. There are more than 80,000 students studying in Christian schools in Mangalore. If every student was made a ‘Christian’ by now India would have become a nation full of Christians.

“We may be Muslims or Christians but before that we are Indians,” said Muslim leader Ali Hasan, addressing nearly 4,000 people assembled on April 11 in front of the local district commissioner’s office in Mangalore..

“The children were shocked and depressed when the fundamentalists threatened and questioned them. They even threatened the children with murder and removal of their kidneys”, said Sister Premalatha, one of the caretakers of Stella Maris Orphanage.

“Whatever the provocation, we will not stop working for the poor children,” said Sister Agatha Mary, Superior General of the Apostolic Carmel Congregation.

Mariamma Thomas, a Christian social activist, alleged that the police as well as child-welfare committees have joined hands with the fundamentalists in attacking children’s homes.

Asha Nayak, president of South Kanara District Child Welfare Committee said: ‘We inspect the records, registers, official permissions and files of the poor children homes as to protect them and their rights. That is our official duty.

The Stella Maris orphanage has been functioning for the past 60 years, and on demand by the child welfare committee, the nun in charge produced relevant legal documents in this regard to prove that the orphanage was registered and the children were not illegally confined.

Asha Nayak and assistant commissioner Prabhulinga Kavalikatte visited the orphanage to verify the documents. After a thorough discussion, they concluded that all the documents were in place and decided to send the children back to the orphanage.

Silver Jubilee: Street Theatre at Ravi

2011-04-03T07:54:00.002+05:30

Here is a post on the All Bihar Street Theatre festival of Ravi Bharati, Patna
Twenty-five years and still counting. Benny Moolan SJ, the current director of Ravi Bharati has started a blog, and its inaugural post is on the festival: The report on:
Communication: Benny Moolan's Blog
My own association with the Nukkad Natak festival goes back several years. In 2000, I had the privilege of giving away the mementos at the festival. In 2003, I remember, I designed the memento. That year, Professor Shanker Dutt was the Chief Guest on the final day and gave away the prizes.
Manoj Patel, commonly known as Raj, performed on behalf of AASRA Chartiable Trust. Here are some pitures I unearthed.

Arun Ignatius SJ, then director of Ravi Bharati and Prof. Shanker Dutt at the Festival

Action at the All Bihar Street Theatre Festival, 2003

Raj [in Kurta] with the memento, in the picture are AASRA members and kids

Let the Music Play

2011-03-31T12:50:00.001+05:30

Who can stop the music?

No-one can stop the music!

Thus goes a song that had a lot of radio-play in the seventies and eighties, over the SLBC, and Musical Bandbox. The SLBC, is of course, the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, and 'Musical Bandbox was that very famous western music lunchtime slot on All India Radio, Calcutta.

The All Asia Service of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation has fizzled out, in the same way as Short Wave Radio stations have, all over the world. Since the introduction of FM, and the phasing out of SW receiver production, Short Wave music programmes have suufered, simply because you can't match FM radio quality.

AIR Calcutta B and the SLBC would receive an immense amount of requests from the Anglo-Indian community, the Goan community, and both these radio stations and their announcers were part of the family early morning and lunch-time rituals. In Delhi, what is now AIR FM Rainbow, used to receive a lot of requests from the North-eastern Student community. Whenever I'm in Delhi I never fail to tune in to AIR FM Rainbow, and I really enjoy the afternoon and late night shows.

It's a shame tha one cannot access AIR FM Rainbow in a radio-link via AIR patna, though AIR stations in Dehradun and elsewhere have linked with AIR FM Rrainbow to provide their listeners with a third AIR channel.

One can receive Radio SriLanka, the English Services of SLBC via the website on the internet.

The Pasar Bharati, or AIR website doesn't have such streaming links. If it did, a lot of fans of the Western Music Services of Al India Radio would keep in touch with AIR FM Rainbow.

Bihar Pride?

2011-03-28T06:59:00.012+05:30

On the heels of the 'glorious' celebration of Bihar Day, comes the news that 'irate' citizens at Bhagalpur torched Mozhidpur power station and vandalised Vikramshila Express at Bhagalpur railway station to 'protest' the acute power crisis in the city on Saturday.

Evidently, these 'protests' are instigated by local politicians and goons. You set fire to a power station, damaging equipment and property to protest power shortage? How the blazes is power going to be restored if you, 'proud Biharis' shoot yourselves in the foot by burning down your own power sub-station, causing loss of property, and putting a hole in your own government's pocket?

What sort of 'patriotism' or'sub-nationalism' is an act of venting your 'anger' on a train at a railway station? Over the past few days, I have met several Biharis who called the State day celebrations a 'joke' and a waste of government money.

The city witnessed several incidents in which peeved residents torched public vehicles, I read. Normal life was completely disrupted after residents, which included a sizeable number of women and children, blocked roads in every locality since last evening. They vent their ire by burning tyres, squatting on the roads and blocking them with household items to protest the power crisis.

What happened to non-violent, positive protests, or is all this Gandhian stuff just manufactured history?

Is this the kind of violent and destructive 'protest' that goes with the hype 'Proud Bihar', 'Hamara Bihar', 'Bihar land of Buddha', Bihar from where Gandhiji launched his satyagraha movement?

ON THE OTHER HAND

People living in the capital of Bihar (Patna) are fortunate to receive almost 20 hours of electricity a day. In Bhagalpur, the situation is grim. According to BSEB sources, of the total requirement of 60MW, Bhagalpur has been receiving only 1-7MW for the past one-and-a-half months.

The power crisis has hampered operations in the silk industry. JLNMC Hospital superintendent Binod Prasad expressed serious concern over the ongoing power crisis. “Due to the horrible situation, we have decided to close the hospital because patients have become the worst sufferers,” he said.

It's only after the town went ballistic that the state government has 'ordered' that 30 MW per day should be provided to Bhagalpur.

So the message is: if you want the Bihar Government to act, then cause a riot, destroy public property, endanger lives?

Kilkari Kidfest

2011-03-24T14:23:00.000+05:30

Bihar's 99th State day has been celebrated with an enthusiasm like never before, and it was interesting to see various organisations synchronize activities to make the week interesting and enjoyable.

Kilkari, the Bihar Bal Bhawan has organised three days of children's theatre. This is the first 'national' festival of drama for children. There were theatre and puppet groups from different states, as well as children's groups performing.

It has been a fascinating experience with a good response from adults, teenagers and of course, from the kids who watched the plays.

Congratulations and best wishes to Jyoti Parihar and the Kilkari staff, who constantly come up with innovative interventions and activities for kids, especially those in government schools.

Holi Kids

2011-03-20T11:07:00.000+05:30

Kids and Holi: none of the images below are my work. I salute those intrepid photographers who brave paint bombs, and water jets, and enamel paint, exposing themselves and their cameras to a lot of er... colour. I merely am a vehicle to bring you some of the images that I wish I had the courage to take. So enjoy!

Colour me cute: kids at a playschool celebrate holi

Beautiful pose, such a careful portriat that the sparkle is missing

Now here's a slice of life, straight from the streets

Snail Mail

2011-03-19T14:03:00.001+05:30

Indiapost may have had a glorious past, but it has an ignominous present and a bleak future.
The Patliputra Post Office -[pincode 800013] and its delivery system is inefficient, and unethical to boot.
Speed Post : delivery to any part of the country within 24 or 36 hours, isn't that what they say.
A packet was booked at Ethiraj Salai Post Office and given an elaborate tracking code ET068067884IN.
The time 16:22 :18 on 11th March 20011
7 days later here's what we found on tracking the packet
article bagged and sent to Chennai Office at 16:52:32
bagged opened at Chennai Office 19:15 :59 and sent to Patna via Mumbai at 20:03:04
On 13th March, the article was despatched from Mumbai to Patna through IT3571, scheduled departure 13th March at 11:40:00 hours.
On 17th March... no further details.
On 18th March, Destination post office says, we have no idea... it's not our problem!
Speed Post Centre Bihar circle: Mr O P Singh's mobile number 9430935498 appears constantly switched off, and the office number 2230082 ... well, it's never picked up it seems.

JAI HO! India continues to shine...

BBC Hindi: Someone still loves you!

2011-03-13T09:52:00.000+05:30

Thankfully, The BBC Hindi radio service has won a temporary reprieve after a lakhs of people wrote in to offer support and to appeal to the BBC to keep the service on air. The campaign was supported by writers such as Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and broadcaster Sir Mark Tully.

A listener from Bihar actually said, ‘I have five cows. I will gladly sell one of them and send the money to the BBC so that it continues its MW service.’ However, the BBC charter prohibits the service from accepting donations.

The BBC World Service says it has been approached by a number of commercial parties about alternative funding.

It has now agreed to keep a one hour evening broadcast in Hindi for another year while it explores these options.

That’s a bit sad, because evening broadcasts tend to be overshadowed by television. Lots of people usually listen to the early morning BBC half hour broadcast at 6:30 am

Campaigners said BBC Hindi broadcasts, which were scheduled to end on 31 March, have 10 million listeners, many of them in rural areas.

Launched in May 1940 in the midst of World War II and the freedom struggle, the BBC Hindi service was religiously followed by generations of listeners, who considered it the most credible source of news. Listeners still remember that the BBC Hindi was the first to announce Indira Gandhi's assassination to both India and the world, even before the government broadcasters made the announcement. Reports suggest that even Maoists in the isolated jungles of eastern India tune in for the BBC Hindi.

However, from an estimated listener base of 30 million a decade ago, the BBC Hindi has seen its audience decline to just over nine million today, hit by the poor reception of short and medium wave radio and the rising popularity of television and FM.

“We are considering the option of some radio programming on the website as well,” said BBC Hindi Editor Amit Baruah. Of course, we can listen to BBC over the internet, but how many people actually have internet connections at home. How many students and young people can afford this? BBC on internet is little consolation for the vast majority of rural listeners who are the real audience and the biggest fans of the BBC.

The BBC would jump at the chance to set up an FM channel of its own, to continue providing radio services in the same way as it is doing in several other countries where short and medium wave services are being cut.

India is the only South Asian nation that does not allow private FM news channels. In fact, the BBC launched its preliminary FM initiative, providing entertainment and non-news content to partner channels reaching 52 cities, in the hope that the government would soon agree to allow news content as well.

BBC Hindi has been beaming to India for 70 years

While the BBC continues to provide short-wave services in India in Tamil, Urdu, Bengali and Nepali, sources suggest that all short wave services will ultimately be shut down. Unless they are allowed to broadcast news on FM, The BBC radio's era in India may soon be over.

Can you imagine how self-centred the local print media are?

BBC Hindi, which has a huge following in rural Bihar, was slated to shut down by March 31, 2011, but did we see this anywhere as a major news item in our self-important English language newspapers?

The aftermath of the Tsumani

2011-03-13T09:19:00.000+05:30

One of the most striking things about the aftermath of Japan’s huge tragedy- earthquake followed by Tsunami is this: there are no reports of looting, lawlessness, police having to protect property from gangs, and other negative anti-social behaviour.

Another striking thing is the report I heard over the BBC about people calmly standing in the streets of Tokyo and elsewhere, busy texting on facebook and twitter, while the world rocked about them.

Now, herein lies the seeds of a 600 page article… or two.

Japan remains ‘the Land of the Rising Sun’

Homecoming

2011-03-10T09:57:00.001+05:30

Here I come again
With arms of lead
And lacerated feet.
Too many treadmills trod,
Too many burdens borne.
Too many mutilated milestones
Strewn across the bridle path.

Here I come again

With a limp in my stride

From chasing neon rainbows,

Seeking salvation in sandstorms,

Stretching out for tinsel stars
Painted on a plastic skyline.

Here I come again
Like salmon to the source –

To the circle of your arms

To the warmth of your smile

To the haven of your embrace.

Until a new moon rises

And waiting windmills call …

Frank Krishner 12 January 1994, Ranipul, Sikkim.

Note: Waiting windmills: reference to ‘tilting at windmills a la the Man of la Mancha , Don Quixote. Salmon to the source: salmon swim upstream, hundreds of miles to ‘home’ spawning season.

I recommend Queer Ink

2011-02-25T08:22:00.002+05:30

Queer Literature is finally coming out of the closet in India, but it's still very difficult to access books in 'mainstream' shops, more so in small town India.

A decade or so ago, one of my short stories appeared in 'Yaarana' - a Penguin Anthology, and the first time I got to read it was when journalist Vikram Doctor graciously presented me a copy [via courier]. The book was unavailable in bookstores in Patna, at the time.

A recent assignment for me - a talk on Queer Literature in India at Patna University - evidently meant a certain amount of research and reading, and that is where I discovered Queer Ink - a repository, a storehouse .. of excellent material: academic discourses, novels, poetry collections. Queer Ink is an e-store that specialises in Queer Literature.

I recently acquired Mahesh Natrajan's The Pink Sheep, and other books that I wanted to own, just by excercising the mouse and a few clicks - and delivery was fantastically fast.

Service is efficient, personalised, and professional.

Shobna S Kumar, whose photograph appears here, runs Queer Ink.

She said in an interview,"There are younger, newer writers coming on the scene, and publishers too are taking a chance. More queer fiction has come out in the last two years than ever before. It shows society is changing and that there is a market for such books."

Amen to That!

Before the Sandstorm

2011-02-20T17:52:00.003+05:30

Silence.

The desert at dead of night
Immense,
Empty,

Eternal

Stretching away
Dune after black dune

Shrouding dead emotions
Lying entombed in the dark.

Silence.

But for the whisper
Like a ghost of a smile

That rides the chill blackness

Resquiscat in Pace
Not dead, but sleeping.

Silence.
Tread softly here

Lest the long forgotten taste of wine
Sunshine and laughter

Passion and pain

The feel of your body
The sting of my tears

Those long buried phantoms
Awake

And arise

And live
And shriek

And storm

And rend the placid stillness of the night.

Silence!

I am the desert,
The sand dune,
The graveyard,

The night

What care I for the tinkle of camel bells
Or the flame burning in your makeshift little tent?

- Frank Krishner, Gangtok, Sikkim, 1 October 1991
Note: one of several poems between 1989 and 1991 with the desert motif, coming out from travels in Rajasthan and along the Sind border.

To the Object of my Affection

2011-02-14T07:09:00.000+05:30

Valentine's day is on a Blue Monday, and most of us people who have to get out there and earn a living may not have time to take the day off and be with the object of one's affection.

The evening would be a good time to have a Valentine Day's bash, call a load of attractive couples over and have a party celebrating your togetherness. It sure beats the hell out of eating in an overpriced, overcrowded restaurant any day.

When the object of your affection isn't in the same town as you are, well, 'the telephone can take the place of his smile' as the song goes, and with all the doo-dads on your smart mobile phones, a long distance date isn't entirely impossible, is it?

Of course those of you, who like me ,are in love with the idea of love, and for those who are in non-commital relationships,[ like a couple of dozen persons of varying ages, sexes, proclivities whom I know, and who regularly drop in to read this blog.. nudge nudge], here's an idea: spend the evening with some great love stories on celluloid.

Here's my list:
Mamma Mia [it's a party every time I watch this flick]
The Bird Cage [It's all about what love really is, underneath the campiness of the characters]
An Affair to Remember [You know why]
Rent [Love isn't all about mush and happy endings]
Love Story [It's about mush and lots of wet handkerchiefs]
The Object of my Affection [we love it, this one]

The Fiddler on the Roof [yes, this is a love flick, three love stories and the classic songs, 'Golde... do you love me?', Matchmaker, Sunrise Sunset... and most of all this is a story about a man's love relationship with his Maker ....]

Happy Valentine's Day

Discussions on Education 2

2011-02-12T05:52:00.003+05:30

The arguments that private schools have against the 25 percent free quota for underpriviliged kids [the Right to Education Act in India stipulates that private elementary schools enrol neighbourhood kids from the underbelly of society, so to speak] are all made with the 'best interests' of the poor kids at 'heart'.
Here are some objections:

1- The kids will never be able to cope with the 'English Medium' background of the school, and the parents will not be able to help the child with homework at home.
This doesn't seem a problem when middle class non-speakers of angrezi seek admission for the child.
How do the other non-English speaking kids pick up the lingo within a span of a year? Presumably by practicising the language within the school, isn't it?
What are first graders doing with loads of homework anyway? Hello, they're six year olds!

The underpriviliged kids will not be able to afford the uniforms.
Then why have expensive uniforms and designer school satchels with your school emblem all over? Ensure that all kids wear cheap and easily affordable uniforms. That should bring about uniformity and do away with dress code discrimination.

The real questions, the bothersome ones, remain unasked.

First, the draft Bihar rules under the ACT, have subverted the spirit of the Law.

Under the Act, the NCPCR [the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights] is the final arbiter for matters of infringement on matters of admissions, facilities, and recognition/ de-recognition of schools.

In Bihar, the SCPCR [the state commission] has been sidelined, with the State Rules placing powers in the hand of the bureaucrats and Education Department functionaries.

This will lead to even more corruption and drag private schools into the great government inefficiency net.

This is what should really bother private citizens, educators, and school principals.

Why have civil society organisations been ignored and sidelined in the Rules?
What about government schools that do not follow the norms, will they be closed down and derecognised? Why aren't there penalities for government schools in the Rules?
Will this 25 percent free education quota include the already existing SC/ST quotas?

Why hasn't the issue of child safety been clearly defined in the rules and made applicable to all schools including the government ones?

If there is a government school and two private schools within the same one kilometre range, how will 'neighbourhood' be defined? Or will the government school offload its kids into the private schools?

In the above example, who decides where to have the kids enrolled and what are the guidelines?

La Marteniere Ruckus

2011-02-09T06:56:00.004+05:30

For quite some time now, friends have been asking me about my views on the La Marteniere case in Calcutta.
A boy, Rouvanjit, was found hanging at his Alipore home, four days after being caned.
The father, an influential fellow [after all, many La Mart's parents are from the upper crust], lodged a complaint with Shakespeare Sarani police station, accusing the teachers of abetting his son’s suicide.

While I hold no brief for caning, [and it's become so bloody politically incorrect in certain circles to even suggest that a kid may actually benifit from a firm whack or two on his behind administered judiciously] may I say that the case should have been thrown out of the window in the first place.
If caning led to kids committing suicide, then over the past 100 years, there should have been hundreds of kids who ended up hanging from trees, rooftops, lavatories and what not.

I remember that when we were in school, and didn't do our mathematics homework, the teacher had this habit of sending offenders straight to the principal's office, school diary in hand. Dear old Father Tucker would give us two whacks with his jaipur sugar cane, one on each hand, and send us off. When he left to become Principal of the Tashi Namgyal Academy, on the specuial invtation of the Chogyal, to instil discipline in Sikkim's premier school, another priest, named George Karakunnel SJ became principal at St Xavier's Doranda. The kids enthusiastically called him 'Georgie Porgie' -- now this principal believed in the six-of-the-best remedy. You bend down and he whacked you on your sitting apparatus, and you left his office with a warm afterglow. He whacked the boys large and small, first-time offenders and seasoned rogues, alike.

No doubt, for us so-called 'good students', it was a frightful and shameful thing... going to the principal's office and getting a whack, and we tried our best to avoid such occurances. Our parents, thankfully had their heads screwed on in the right way, and if they came to know that we'd been whacked, they'd just say we deserved it, and would withold our pocket money as well.

Well, in the seven years I was in the school, and for several years after that, we didn't have a single suicide! Ergo, caning doesn't lead to suicide... and certainly not four days after the fact.
It's a load of poppycock.

[This in no way is to condone inhuman treatment of students by teachers, such as hitting them with dusters, whacking them over the head, and such .. but to blame this particular kid's suicide on a caning incident that's four days old is a load of hogwash.]

News Flash

2011-01-12T08:13:00.001+05:30

There's such a lot happening around that it's difficult to keep track of the news, and to really digest the import of a lot of the headlines.

There's some rotten weather rampaging through Australia, and the pictures of what looked like a huge brown flood of destruction just a hunderd kilometres or so from Brisbane, was certainly not good news for me. They said on the news that the people of Brisbane may be asked to evacuate, and right now, this is the news that is more important to me than the cold wave sweeping though the town where I am at or the onion dealers in Delhi going on strike, or the MLAs in Karnataka misbehaving in the House. It's because there are a whole lot of people I care about in Brisbane.
Ergo, lesson in News value: News of those closest to your heart has the greatest value of all

Discussions on Education 1

2011-01-07T07:24:00.000+05:30

I was privileged to attend a consultation on the Draft Rules being prepared by the Education Department in December. The Draft Rules are for the implementation of the Right to Education Act in the State of Bihar.

Here is an extract from my notes. Vinod Raina , member of the National Advisory Council on RTE replies to a few questions.

Principal Patna Central School: Due to RTE Act, will an estimated 18.9 percent private schools of 1.5 million will shut down?

Reply: Unaided elementary [age group 6 to 14] schools are only 8 percent of the total primary schools. 80 percent are government schools and 12 percent are aided primary schools, and 8 percent are unaided. It is not only private schools will be shut down, but government schools which do not fulfil these norms and conditions after three years cannot continue.
This Act has given a right to the child to an education where it defines what will be the minimum conditions for giving that education.
And this is the right of an Indian child, and the Act says no matter who is giving education they have to give this minimum standard. We cannot look at the rights of the child in a differentiated manner, as a matter between private and public.
The question that needs to be asked is whether the Indian child deserves this minimum right or not? The question is not what will happen to the private schools. The law says that the government must provide neighbourhood schools to every child by 2013, because article 21 A says that the state shall provide free and equitable education to every child.

Question: What is the concept of ‘common education system’?

Reply: Though not relevant to the present consultation which is to discuss the rules, briefly, the answer is common school system was based on the premise of access of equitable education for all and advocated that all schools, including private ones, would not charge fees of any kind.

Does every Indian Child, including the Dalits, Musahars, and marginalised have the right to quality education?

The Kothari commission mentioned Common school system in section 1.36, placed the concept of common school, but in section 10.77, dealing with implementation, it mentions a constitutional problem: under Article 19E and G which is a fundamental Right, private schools have a right to exist. Therefore private schools would have to be kept out of the common school system.

Onion Flakes

2011-01-03T08:33:00.001+05:30

Several years ago,I authored a column in the Times of India called 'Onion Flakes'.
Onions have several layers, as you very well know.

And the prices of onions have recently made many people cry -- and cry foul!

I was browsing through my friend Thomas Lim's paper, The Meghalaya Times, the other day.

I was surprised to learn that the Shillong administration actually slapped notices on traders for selling onions for seventy rupees a kilo, more than the 'stipulated price of Rs 63 for white onions and Rs 68 for red onions'.

And here we were cribbing that onions are selling at an all time high of forty rupees in Patna!

The District Monitoring Committee in Shillong has fixed retail onion prices at Rs 46 to 60 for the first week of this year. How about that?

New Day in the Morning

2011-01-01T11:32:00.000+05:30

Everybody talks about a new day in the morning
New Day in the morning so they say
I myself don't talk about a new day in the morning
New day in the morning... that's today.

Mother Earth has completed yet another revolution around the sun
and we've probably made enough noise and have executed thousands of rituals
to mark the event.
So, in theory, today, we're back at the same spot we were a year ago.
Except that with the universe expanding,

and the glaciers melting,

and the sun cooling,

and the earth warming,

and the rivers drying up

we're not really sure where we are at all.

Lest auld aquaintaince be forgot
and never brought to mind
Let's drink a cup o' kindness yet for Auld lang Syne
For Old Times' Sake
There's a lot of doin' to be done
And that's a thought I begin the New Year with.

Peace to all ye creatures of good will .....

Basic Information

2010-12-22T09:37:00.001+05:30

Testicular cancer is an issue that will probably scare the s*** out of a lot of men, and NOBODY wants to even THINK about it. A friend sent me the rushes of a new HOT campaign that's hitting shivering Britain this Christmas.

"Checkum" is the name of a hot new campaign in the United Kingdom of Great Britain that is using images of famous nude males to encourage men to examine their balls and become aware of testicular cancer.

The campaign, sponsored by Macmillan Cancer Support, is now getting dished beyond the UK and is fast becoming an international media sensation. Male celebrities all across Europe in sports, television, film, theater, ballet and entertainment have volunteered to participate. Participation only requires being snapped completely nude by famed photographer Ian Thraves.

However, the full-monty package is covered in the completed posters, in most cases by the text wording “Embarrassed?”.

Checkum’s slogan reads: ‘Embarrassed? The only person embarrassed by this is you. 2000 men in the UK are diagnosed with testicular cancer every year. Don’t be one of them - Checkum.’

Songs of Joy 2010

2010-12-18T20:54:00.000+05:30

In 2007, we launched the very first 'Songs of Joy' event in the tiny RAVI Bharati campus. The main objective was to have another event on Patna's very slim Christmas calendar, but an event with a difference.
Songs of Joy would be an evening of Christmas songs and carols, away from the glare of big sponsors and commercialism. It would be basically about carolling under an open sky on a chilly December night.
Today, the 18th December, 2010, marked the fourth year, with 17 carol choirs registering for the contest, and some 250 singers turning up.

This year, there appeared to be too much on my plate, [and there is], and I was not in a very good mood this morning when I realised that I had to write out some 250 certificates, coordinate a lot of the little details that go into making the programme flow.

'Why on earth did I ever get myself into this mess?' I wailed.This morning, I realised that not a single person had received a formal invite for the show! Four years ago, it was I who thought up the event in the first place!
Yet in the evening, as dusk gathered and a three-quarter winter moon rose in the sky, when the first strains of music wafted over the cold air... 'Silent Night... Holy Night', the warmth that enveloped me , and the peace I felt made it all worthwhilee.

The children, young folk, and their families who turned up at the show, and the hard work by the technicians and staff of Ravi Bharati made it an evening to remember.

Christmas Card Memories

2010-12-07T18:44:00.004+05:30

There's a song, first sung by Gentleman Jim (Jm Reeves) that has been the favourite in most English speaking homes in Goa, Shillong, and Calcutta. It's called "Memory of an old Christmas Card".

[Indian Postage Stamps on Christmas]

Christmas Cards are definitely among my most enduring memories of the Holiday Season. The Season that stretches from the third week of November till the 6th of January.

In the days when there were 'book post' rates of 50 paise per card, and the postman still pedalled up faithfully to your front door, sending and receiving Greeting Cards for Christmas and the New Year was by far one of the most exciting tasks of the season.

Every card received would be displayed in living rooms, strung up on twine. Sometimes the twine and the cards ran around the entire room, and envious guests would go around admiring them.

When we were teenagers, and letter-writing and stamp collection were respectable hobbies that were passionately followed by the old and young, what joy Christmas Season brought!

We'd troop down to the card shops looking for the appropriate cards to send for Christmas and the New Year - traditional ones, naughty ones, cute ones, and of course the romantic ones to send to people near and far.

The Christmas Card, to many of us, was the way we told our 'long lost' friends, classmates, and relatives that we still remembered them at this wonderful time of the year.

We wrote inside each card neatly, trying out our calligraphy, and we sat up for hours, burning the midnight oil.

I remember going down to the post office to make sure that we got the special stamps from the philately counter, and not the ordinary postage stamps.

And oh, the sheer ecstasy of receiving these envelopes filled with warmth and love, often discovered slipped under the door, with the postman playing a sort of Santa Claus.

Today, the bookstore around the corner keeps a limited amount of cards...the SMS has killed the card industry, the shopkeeper lamented.

Sadly, the cards received today are few. The postman is a stranger.

An SMS can never ever be a substitute for a gift of love that you open up and hold in your hands, colourful, catchy, with a verse chosen specially for you... a gift of love that you can take out of an old shoebox a quarter of a century from now ... and you will relive moments and see the faces and feel the warmth of years gone by flooding your cold heart till your eyes feel moist.

No SMS my friends, can ever match up to the good old Christmas Card!

Tonight, I'm listening to the sounds of forgotten music, as I leaf through a hundred memories.

In the quiet of the night, I'm looking through your old, precious, Christmas cards, and I'm breathing a silent and heartfelt 'Thankyou' for your having been a part of my life's journey.

I hold your love in my hand in these old Christmas Cards.

Expession, Sedition, Repression?

2010-12-05T11:30:00.001+05:30

Freedom of expression is the first thing that fascists want to curb.

The State that calls itself India and proclaims itself the largest democracy in the world, is fast developing into a nasty nanny state wth frightening fascist tendencies. I firmly believe that in a mature democracy one should be able to say absolutely anything without fear of intimidation or reprisal.

As you must have read in the newspapers, and in the news, an FIR has been filed against Arundhati Roy and other speakers at a recent discussion on Kashmir, charging them with 'sedition'.

Responding to a complaint made by one Mr. Sushil Pandit (who, I believe, is a former campaign manager for BJP stalwart Arun Jaitley) the Police filed (PS Tilak Marg) a Status Report in which they submitted that nothing that had been said at the meeting could be deemed seditious. Despite the police report, the Metropolitan Magistrate Nivita Kumari Bagga instructed the police to file an FIR based on complaints made by Mr. Pandit.

For your convenience, I am reproducing the speech by Ms Arundhati Roy, as forwarded by Dr Anjali Monteiro, a documentary film maker whom I respect a lot.

READ THIS AND LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK BELOW:

TRANSCRIPT OF ARUNDHATI ROY’S SPEECH AT SEMINAR CALLED “AZADI—THE ONLY WAY” IN DELHI ON OCTOBER 21st 2010

SAR GEELANI: now I request Arundhati Roy to come and speak.

Arundhati Roy : If anybody has any shoes to throw, please throw them now ..

Some PPl in the audience: we’re cultured…etc..etc

AR: Good, I’m glad. I’m glad to hear that. Though being cultured is not necessarily a good thing. But anyway..
[interruption from some ppl in the audience (inaudible in the video)]

SAR GEELANI: please will you talk afterwards. Now prove that you are cultured.

AR: About a week or 10 days ago, I was in Ranchi where there was a Peoples’ Tribunal against Operation Green Hunt— which is the Indian state’s war against the poorest people in this country—and at that tribunal, just as I was leaving, a TV journalist stuck a mic in my face and very aggressively said “Madam, is Kashmir an integral part of India or not? Is Kashmir an integral part of India or not?” about 5 times. So I said, look Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. However aggressively and however often you want to ask me that.

Even the Indian government has accepted, in the UN that it’s not an integral part of India. So why are we trying to change that narrative now. See in 1947, we were told that India became a sovereign nation and a sovereign democracy, but if you look at what the Indian state did from midnight of 1947 onwards, that colonized country, that country that became a country because of the imagination of its colonizer—the British drew the map of India in 1899— so that country became a colonizing power the moment it became independent, and the Indian state has militarily intervened in Manipur, in Nagaland, in Mizoram.. (Someone’s phone rings here).. in Mizoram, in Kashmir, in Telangana, during the Naxalbari uprising, in Punjab, in Hyderabad, in Goa, in Junagarh. So often the Indian government, the Indian state, the Indian elite, they accuse the Naxalites of believing in protracted war, but actually you see a State—the Indian State—that has waged protracted war against its own people or what it calls its own people relentlessly since 1947, and when you look at who are those people that it has waged war against— the Nagas, the Mizos, the Manipuris, people in Assam, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Punjab—it’s always a minority, the Muslims, the Tribals, the Christians, the Dalits, the Adivasis, endless war by an upper caste Hindu state, this is what is the modern history of our country.

Now, in 2007, at the time of the uprising in Kashmir against that whole acquisition of land for the Amarnath Yatra, I was in Srinagar and I was walking down the road and I met a young journalist, I think he was from Times of India, and he said to me—he couldn’t believe that he saw some Indian person—walking alone on the road— and he said, “can I have a quote?”, so I said, “yes, do you have a pen? Because I don’t want to be misquoted” and I said, “write down—India needs azaadi from Kashmir just as much as Kashmir needs azaadi from India”, and when I said India, I did not mean the Indian state, I meant the Indian people because I think that the occupation of Kashmir— today there are 700,000 security personnel manning that valley of 12 million people— it is the most militarized zone in the world— and for us, the people of India, to tolerate that occupation is like allowing a kind of moral corrosion to drip into our blood stream.

So for me it’s an intolerable situation to try and pretend that it isn’t happening even if the media blanks it out, all of us know…..or maybe all of us don’t know….but any of us who’ve visited Kashmir know—that Kashmiris cannot inhale and exhale without their breath going through the barrel of an AK-47. So, so many things have been done there, every time there’s an election and people come out to vote, the Indian government goes and says—“Why do you want a referendum? There was a vote and the people have voted for India.” Now, I actually think that we need to deepen our thinking a little bit because I too am very proud of this meeting today, I think it’s a historic meeting in some ways, it’s a historic meeting taking place in the capital of this very hollow superpower, a superpower where 830 million people live on less than 20 rupees a day. Now, sometimes it’s very difficult to know from what place one stands on as formally a citizen of India, what can one say, what is one allowed to say, because when India was fighting for independence from British colonization— every argument that people now use to problematize the problems of azaadi in Kashmir were certainly used against Indians.

Crudely put, “the natives are not ready for freedom, the natives are not ready for democracy”, but every kind of complication was also true, I mean the great debates between Ambedkar and Gandhi and Nehru – they were also real debates and over these last 60 years whatever the Indian State has done, people in this country have argued and debated and deepened the meaning of freedom.

We have also lost a lot of ground because we’ve come to a stage today where India a country that once called itself Non Aligned , that once held its head up in pride has today totally lain down prostrate on the floor at the feet of the USA. So we are a slave nation today, our economy is completely—however much the Sensex may be growing, the fact is the reason that the Indian police, the paramilitary and soon perhaps the army will be deployed in the whole of central India is because it’s an extractive colonial economy that’s being foisted on us. But the reason that I said what we need to do is to deepen this conversation is because it’s also very easy for us to continue to pat ourselves on the backs as great fighters for resistance for anything whether it’s the Maoists in the forests or whether it’s the stone pelters on the streets— but actually we must understand that we are up against something very serious and I’m afraid that the bows and arrows of the Adivasis and the stones in the hands of the young people are absolutely essential but they are not the only thing that’s going to win us freedom, and for that we need to be tactical, we need to question ourselves, we need to make alliances, serious alliances….

Because… I often say that in 1986 when capitalism won its jihad against soviet communism in the mountains of Afghanistan, the whole world changed and India realigned itself in the unipolar world and in that realignment it did two things, it opened two locks , one was the lock of the Babri Masjid and one was the lock of the Indian markets and it ushered in two kinds of totalitarianism- Hindu fascism, Hindutva fascism and economic totalitarianism and both these manufactured their own kinds of terrorism —so you have Islamist “terrorists” and the Maoist “terrorists”— and this process has made 80% of this country live on 20 rupees a day but it has divided us all up and we spend all our time fighting with each other when in fact there should be deep solidarity. There should be deep solidarity between the struggles in Manipur, the struggles in Nagaland, the struggle in Kashmir, the struggle in central India and in all the poor, squatters, the vendors , all the slum dwellers and so on.

But what is it that should link these struggles? It’s the idea of Justice because there can be struggles which are not struggles for justice, there are peoples movements like the VHP is a peoples movement—but it’s a struggle for fascism, it’s a struggle for injustice, we don’t align ourselves with that. So every movement, every person on the street, every slogan is not a slogan for justice. So when I was in Kashmir on the streets during the Amarnath Yatra time, and even today— I haven’t been to Kashmir recently— but I’ve seen and my heart is filled with appreciation for the struggle that people are waging, the fight that young people are fighting and I don’t want them to be let down. I don’t want them to be let down even by their own leaders because I want to believe that this fight is a fight for justice. Not a fight in which you pick and choose your justices—“we want justice but it’s ok if the other chap is squashed”. That’s not right.

So I remember when I wrote in 2007, I said the one thing that broke my heart on the streets of Srinagar, was when I heard people say “Nanga Bhooka Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan”. I said “No. Because the Nanga Bhooka Hindustan is with you. And if you’re fighting for a just society then you must align yourselves with the powerless”, the Indian people here today are people who have spent their lives opposing the Indian state. I have, as many of you may know, been associated for a long time with the struggle in the Narmada valley against big dams and I always say that I think so much about these two valleys - the Kashmir valley and the Narmada valley. In the Narmada valley, they speak of repression, but perhaps the people don’t really know what repression is because they’ve not experienced the kind of repression that there is in the Kashmir valley. But they have a very very very sophisticated understanding of the economic structures of the world of imperialism and of the earth and what it does and how those big dams create an inequality that you cannot get away from. And in the Kashmir valley you have such a sophisticated understanding of repression, 60 years of repression of secret operations, of spying, of intelligence operations, of death, of killing. But have you insulated yourself from that other understanding, of what the world is today? What these economic structures are? What kind of Kashmir are you going to fight for? Because we are with you in that fight, we are with you. But we want, we hope that it’ll be a fight for justice.

We know today that this word ‘secularism’ that the Indian state flings at us is a hollow word because you can’t kill 68,000 Kashmiri Muslims and then call yourself a secular state. You cannot allow the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat and call yourself a secular state and yet you can’t then turn around and say that “we are allowed to treat our minorities badly “—so what kind of justice are you fighting for?

I hope that the young people will deepen their idea of Azaadi, it is something that the State and your enemies that you’re fighting uses to divide you. That’s true.

[Some ppl in theAudience: “Do you know what happened to the pundits?(not very audible)..etc ..etc..]

AR: I know the story of the Kashmiri pundits. I also know that the story that these Panun Kashmir pundits put out is false. However, this does not mean that injustice was not done.

[Ppl in Audience: interrupting and inaudible, all taking at the same time… “do you know how many hindus were killed?”… commotion.. no one hear anyone].

AR: I think…ok let me continue.. [part of the crowd arguing loudly]..

SAR GEELANI: I request everyone to please sit.

AR: Alright, I want to say that, I think this disturbance is based on a misunderstanding, because I was beginning to talk about justice and in that conversation about justice, I was just about to say that what

happened with the Kashmiri pundits is a tragedy, so I don’t know why you all started shouting, I think it’s a tragedy because when we stand here and talk about justice, it is justice for everybody, and those of us who stand here and talk about their being a place for everybody whether there’s a minority whether it’s an ethnic minority or a religious minority or minority in terms of caste, we don’t believe in majoritarianism so that’s why I was talking about the fact that everybody in Kashmir should have a very deep discussion about what kind of society you’re fighting for because Kashmir is a very diverse community and that discussion does not have to come from critics or people who are against azaadi trying to divide this struggle , it has to come from within you so it is not the place of people outside to say “they don’t know what they mean by azaadi, do they mean Gilgit and Baltistan, what about Jammu? What about Laddakh?” These are debates that people within the state of J&K are quite capable of having by themselves and I think they understand that. So, to just try and derail things by shouting at people is completely pointless because I think that people, the pundits in Kashmir, all the time I’ve spent in Kashmir, have only heard people say they are welcome back and I know people who live there, who believe that too, so all I want to say is that when we are having these political debates, I feel I have watched and have been listening to and following the recent uprising in Kashmir, the fact that unarmed people, young people armed with stones, women, even children are out on the streets facing down this massive army with guns is something that nobody in the world cannot help but salute. However it is up to the people who are leading this struggle, it is up to the people who are thinking to take it further, because you cannot just leave it there— because the Indian state, you know what its greatest art is— it’s not killing people – that’s its second greatest art, the first greatest art is to wait, to wait and wait and wait and hope that everybody’s energies will just go down.

Crisis management, sometimes it’s an election, sometimes it’s something else, but the point is that people have to look at more than a direct confrontation on the streets. You have to ask yourselves why—the

people of Nagaland must ask themselves why there’s a Naga battalion committing the most unbelievable atrocities in Chhatisgarh. After spending so much time in Kashmir watching the CRPF and the BSF and the Rashtriya Rifles lock down that valley, the firat time I went to Chhattisgarh, on the way I saw Kashmiri BSF, Kashmiri CRPF on the way to kill people in Chhatisgarh. You’ve got to ask yourself— there’s more to resistance than throwing stones— these things can’t be allowed to happen— “how is the state using people?”

The colonial state whether it was the British State in India or whether it’s the Indian State in Kashmir or Nagaland or in Chattisgarh, they are in the business of creating elites to manage their occupations, so you have to know your enemy and you have to be able to respond in ways where you’re tactical, where you’re intelligent, where you’re political— internationally, locally and in every other way— you have to make your alliances, because otherwise you’ll be like fish swimming furiously around a fish tank bombing the walls and getting tired in the end because those walls are very very strong. So I’ll just leave with this: Think about justice and don’t pick and choose your injustices, don’t say that “I want justice but it’s ok if the next guy doesn’t have it, or the next woman doesn’t have it”.

Because justice is the keystone to integrity and integrity is the key stone to real resistance.

Thank you.

Festival of Lights

2010-12-03T21:58:00.000+05:30

Yesterday, December 2, was tha Jewish Festival of Lights: Hannkkah or Chanukah. There is a small Jewsih Community in Calcutta, Bombay, and Mizoaram who celebrate this festival.

History Of Jewish Hanukkah Holiday

The history of Hanukah can be traced back to 165 BC, the rededication of the holy temple of Jerusalem by the Jews, after their victory over the Hellenist Syrians in 165 BC. The Greek god- king of Syria, Antiochus, ordered the Jews to worship the Greek gods and stopped the Jews from practicing their faith. Even their holy temple was seized in 168 BC and was dedicated to Zeus. Not much later, the angry Jews decided to fight back and restore the dignity of their holy temple. The fighting began in a village close to Jerusalem, known as Modiin.

The seeds for Jewish revolt were planted when Jews asked by a Greek officer to bow to an idol and eat pork which is forbidden by the Jewish religion. This enraged one of the Jews who killed the officer and went into hiding with his family. There, he was joined by more Jews, who were willing to fight against the Greeks. This group of Jewish warriors ambushed the Greeks whenever they sensed opportunity. Soon, Judah Maccabee, the third son of Jewish priest Mattathias and the leader of the Jewish revolt; went to the holy temple with his soldiers.

In the temple, Judah found many things broken or missing. The temple was cleaned and repaired by Maccabee and his soldiers and then, a big dedication ceremony was held there. The Maccabees also wanted to light the golden menorah in the temple, but they could only find a small flask containing oil, which was enough to light the menorah for a day. However, the oil lasted in the menorah for eight days, quite miraculously. This led to the tradition of lighting menorah on Hanukkah, for eight days.

Candle Lighting Blessings

Hanukkah is the Jewish festival of lights, which is celebrated for eight days, by lighting a special candelabrum called menorah. The festival commemorates the victory of Maccabees, over the Hellenistic Syrians. As per the Jewish tradition, the number of candles to be lit depends on the day of the festival, proceeding to eight lights on the last i.e. eighth night. People also light an extra light throughout the festival, called the shamash.
The eight days recall the eight day miracle of the original temple lamp.

Brighter, Better, Bling-filled

2010-11-02T16:49:00.002+05:30

It’s another Diwali, and they tell me it’s going to be better, brighter, and bangier than usual. Brand Bihar is probably all mixed up with the election fireworks, and as the khadi types tell me, the real celebrations will erupt after the 24th.

Nevertheless, my heart goes out to all the harried males who are hard-pressed to find the right amount of glitter, whether it’s to light up the eyes of their duly wedded spouses, or to ‘keep’ their fair ladies amusant if you get my drift.

Dhanteras is enough to drive the average person absolutely bonkers. It’s an excuse for a shopping and splurging spree that cuts across boundaries of caste, creed, sex, and political affiliation. The hapless hubby next door knows that all he can do is bite the bullet as the bibi and the brats merrily blast a crater through his bonus and next month’s paycheck.

“What gets my goat is the @#$%@@# traffic!,” fumes my friend- with- the- luxury Fiat, (FWLF], “as he throws up his hands while rickshaws shrill, autos rev, SUVs honk, holy cows park themselves on the divider and chew the cud, and the policeman at the Mandir crossing does a Bihari-style salsa. Everyone’s out to shop and drop, and in the new look Bihar, with so many glitzy shopping destinations, they’ve forgotten about wide roads and parking spaces.

Sidewalks, or pavements – those that have not yet become open air loos for incontinent and inconsiderate Bihari boys of all ages – have no space to walk on, because they’re now vending stations for fancy terracotta lamps, ritual squares of shiny fabric, idols, and what-not. “That’s the fun of Diwali shopping,” screams a not-so middle-aged Mama over the din, as she swats an errant cyclist over the ear with her shopping bag.

“Dhanteras is great”, mumbles a sweaty cycle-cart puller, struggling through the traffic, loaded with a fridge, a washing machine, and the brat from paragraph three above, whose just keeping an eye on things. “I manage to charge thrice the fare, and that helps me through the long winter of no-more-goods to ferry.”

Diwali comes once a year, so it’s time to celebrate, says a quiet man in the corner. Amidst all the fireworks, and shiny new cars and bikes, the clothes, and food and the bling, do spare a passing thought for those whose lamps will not be lit this season; those whose huts are cold and plates empty; those who have lost their jobs and are struggling to survive with dignity. We all know someone just like that, someone who could do with a little shine to this Dhanteras.

Let’s go. Let’s reach out. Let’s light up, not just a lamp, but a life.

May you bask in the glow of a good deed done this Diwali.

An open letter

2010-10-26T07:10:00.002+05:30

I haven't had time to update my blog recently.

But I've been sharing my thoiughts elsewhere.

Here's something I wrote for a website called Bihardays:

Open Letter

Kolabau: Banana symbol

2010-10-13T10:23:00.000+05:30

The banana leaf is regarded as auspicious throughout the South Asia: guests of honour are traditionally served on banana leaves from Bengal to Bangkok and beyond.

This puja, be sure to try out one of those delicately cooked flavoursome cooked-in-a banana leaf delicacies. Being a carnivore, this may sound a bit heretical to all you dear ‘proper Bengalee’ friends, but I can’t resist it: Why can’t we serve the whole range of wonderful fish and meat dishes cooked-in-banana leaf on all nine days of the Pooja?

Getting back to the base topic, One of the most interesting things about the Poojo Rituals is dressing up a young, slender, lissom banana plant in a white sari with a red border early on Saptami morning. At dawn, just as the first light of the sun peeps sleepily through whatever remaining foliage is left on the planet, the intrepid bongs and their priests are already performing the Kolabau or Kola Bou rituals. ‘Pran Prathishta’, or life, is breathed into this symbolic banana plant wrapped in the saree, an image of the Goddess Durga. The ritual is performed on the Ghats of a river or the edge of a pond. At the water’s edge, instead life is symbolically transferred from water to the plantain tree.

This is really beautiful, because even the most sceptic atheist will agree that scientifically, it is believed that all life started from water.

The Kolabau ritual is an elaborate one, and quite complicated. Sometimes special priests are imported all the way from specific villages in Bengal to ensure that the rituial is perfectly performed, because, one friend told me, Durga is a very liberated goddess, and you don’t fool around with her. You’re very careful not to get a lady on a lion with eight arms holding sharp instruments in a pique! The stem of the banana tree is draped in a new red and white saree and the leaves are left uncovered. The ‘kolabau’ is brought back in a procession, with solemnity and pomp. It is placed near Lord Ganesha in the Durga Puja Pandal, to the beat of traditional drums.

Leading children to school

2010-09-01T20:06:00.001+05:30

Of all the manifestations of extreme poverty that assault children and youth, it is the denial of access to basic education that has the most far-reaching adverse consequences. It endangers the success and sustainability of efforts in other aspects of human development and therefore mortgages the future of nations

-James Grant [Address to the Education for all Summit, New Delhi 1994]

2007-2008:

Thirty year old Bainkunth Manjhi has never heard of James Grant, nor has he read Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. What he does understand is that the children from his community, known as the Musahar, must have access to basic education if they have to climb up the social ladder and that they are among those at the lowest rung.

Baikunth’s realisation of this basic truth has resulted in an upheaval of sorts in 48 Musahar neighbourhoods [each one known as a ‘tola’ in Bihar] of Naubatpur block of Patna district. Over the past one year, all 1057 boys and 894 girls in Naubatpur block between the ages of 6 and 14 from this Dalit community have been enrolled in school, thanks to the Bihar Education Project Council and UNICEF support to Baikunth’s efforts that inspired literate Musahar youth to become education volunteers in their own environs.

Five Pioneers: Baikunth in the middle

“Intellectuals have analysed and written so many reports on why the Musahars are outside the pale of society. There is a lot of noise and ‘Dalit human rights issues’ are focussed on. All this is good, but the fact remains that these intellectuals and activists have been carrying on for decades, and still average the Musahar boy and Musahar girl is left standing outside the classroom,” says Baikunth.

Baikunth Manjhi and his group of volunteers realised the importance of working with the government school system, and the Bihar Education Project Council, along with ‘Sankalp’ partners UNICEF and Pratham supported the initiative.

The basic reason why the Dalit children from the most impoverished sections shy away from school is that their parents do not insist on their enrolment. When a man and his wife are scrabbling out an existence at subsistence level, there is no energy left for the luxury of thinking beyond where the next meal will come from. It is an existence that is difficult for the middle class mind to comprehend: an existence devoid of a permanent shelter, two square meals, or even access to basic sanitation facilities.

Volunteers from the local Musahar community or from a neighbouring ‘Mushari’ undertook a house to house survey of the out of school children aged 6 to 14 years. Through numerous interactions with the children’s parents, and with a lot of persuasion, they brought the children to school. It was no one time exercise, but part of the daily routine: rounding up the children, taking them to school, and teaching them for a couple of hours.

For one year, these young people worked conscientiously without any sort of salary or honorarium.

“Sure, it was really tough,” admits Dularchand Manjhi, the ‘tola sevak’ for Jitu Chak primary school. “Our families accused us of being idle and useless. A man who would earn at least something in a factory or as a hired agricultural worker in Punjab, chose to stay at home and reach children to school for no salary. It is natural that our families called us ‘nikamma’ or ‘good-for-nothing’. But we didn’t lose hope.”

From October 2007, the ‘Tola Sevaks’ were integrated into the Sankalp Programme as part of the ‘innovative learning’ components, and they receive a monthly honorarium of Rs 2000 routed through the VSS: the School Education Committee at the local level.

The programme has been so successful that the Bihar Education Project Council has decided to replicate it in other districts as well.

2010 :This was the beginning of what has become the Utthan Programme -- and it's so diluted that it's lost its soul. This is part of a UNICEF report I did in May 2008.

Photos by Frank Krishner :

1- Baikunth Manjhi [centre] with volunteers at the site of their first meeting: Mukhtapur Mushari.

2- Volunteer or ‘Tola Sevak’ with children at ‘Navachar Kendra’ Purushottampur.

Indian Christian Martyr's Day

2010-08-29T07:48:00.001+05:30

Bhopal : Ecumenical Commission of the Catholic Conference of Bishops of India,(CCBI),has appealed to all Christian community members to remember the Indian Christian Martyrs on 29th August,(Last Sunday of the month).

In 2008, communal violence broke out in Orissa, that claimed the lives of many Christians. The Catholic Church in India wants to observe a "Martyrs' day". The violence against the affected Christians still takes place, and there may be some unscrouplous people within the Christian community who are joining hands with criminals.

This is a story that was put forward by Compass Direct News on August 25 , shortened by me.

Christians displaced by Kandhamal violence in 2008 sold for coerced labour or sex.

Nearly two years after large-scale anti-Christian violence broke out in India’s Kandhamal district, Orissa state, a team working against human trafficking on Aug. 9 rescued a 16-year-old Christian girl – one of at least 60 people sold into slavery after being displaced by the 2008 attacks.

A network has trafficked Christian girls and women from Orissa to the national capital, sources said.

“Human trafficking agents operating in the tribal belt of Orissa have targeted the Christian girls who are displaced by the Kandhamal communal violence – we have been receiving complaints of missing girls from Kandhamal after the violence broke out in 2008,” said attorney Lansinglu Rongmei, one of the rescue team members.

The girl, whose name is withheld, is a tribal Christian who was sold into slavery along with her 19-year-old sister and two other girls, all victims of the 2008 violence; they were trafficked from the Daringbadi block of Kandhamal district to the capital in December 2009, according to the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN). Her sister and the other two girls remain missing.

The mother of the girl accompanied the rescue team the evening of Aug. 9 in the Rohini area of Delhi, said a source from the HRLN Anti-Human Trafficking department.

“It was only the joint efforts of the All India Christian Council [AICC], HRLN Anti-Human Trafficking and the area police that made this rescue possible,” the source said.

The rescue team took action after the minor’s mother approached the HRLN of Kandhamal for help, which in turn called the Delhi office. Team members said they were disappointed by the reaction of police, who were initially cooperative but later “just unwilling to help,” in the words of one member.

Rongmei told Compass that police refused to file a First Information Report, telling rescue team members, “No rape of the victim took place as per the medical examination, and there was no need for a case registration against anyone.”

The rescue team was not given a copy of the report of a medical examination at Bhagwan Mahavir Hospital, Pitampura, in Delhi, but they were told it indicated no sign of rape.

“It is confirmed that she was not raped,” said Madhu Chandra, spokesperson of the AICC and part of the rescue team. “She was physically abused, with teeth bite marks and bruises on her body – her neck, leg and right hand.”

Tricked

The girl stated that a well-known woman from their village in Kandhamal district gave her and her sister a false promise of safe and secure work in Delhi as gardeners.

Instead, operatives brought the sisters and the two other girls to a placement agency in Ratala village in Delhi, Sakhi Maid Bureau, which was run by a man identified only as Montu.

The HRLN source told Compass that the girl was with the placement agency for six days as the owner, Montu, attempted to rape her on several occasions. She was threatened, beaten, drugged with alcohol and sexually molested, the source said. The girl said her sister and the other two girls were treated the same way.

She was placed in a home in Rohini, Sector 11, as domestic help beginning in January. Until July, she said, she was treated relatively well there, except for a few instances of being slapped by the lady of the house. Then the family’s 10-year-old son began to hit her and their 14-year-old son tried to assault her sexually, and she tried to flee earlier this month.

The girl told the rescue team that she informed the lady of the house about the elder son’s misbehavior, but that the woman stated that she could do nothing about it.

“She bears marks from being beaten on her right hand by the younger boy,” said Chandra.

He told Compass that the owner of the placement agency collected the girl’s wages from the family who employed her, promising to send the money to her mother in Kandhamal district, but that he failed to do so.

Compass was unable to meet with the girl as she was still traumatized and undergoing counselling sessions. The girl’s mother sobbed for her other daughter, grieved that no one knew what condition she was in.

Montu, the placement agency operator, has absconded, according to police.

Passive Police

Prasant Vihar Police Station House Officer Sudhir Kumar confirmed the rescue team’s accusation that he refused to register a complaint in the girl’s case.

“The victim is from Kandhamal, let her go back to Kandhamal and register her complaint there,” Kumar told Compass. “No rape of the victim took place as per the medical examination, and thus there is no need for registering a case against anyone.”

Assistant Commissioner of Police Sukhvir Singh told Compass he had no explanation why the girl’s complaint was not registered, but he insisted on having her and the rescue team return.

“We will file their complaint if they come back to us now,” he said.

Karuna Dayal, coordinator of Anti-Human Trafficking Initiatives at HRLN, led the rescue team, which also included AICC Legal Secretary Advocate Rongmei, Chandra and Ashis Kumar Subodh of the AICC, and three others from the HRLN – Afsar Ahmed, attorney Diviya Jyoti Jaipuria and one identified only as Sangram.

Dr. John Dayal, secretary general of the AICC, said large-scale human trafficking in Christian tribal and Dalit women of Kandhamal district is one of the worst problems in the aftermath of the Kandhamal violence.

“Police have made arrests in the nearby Andhra Pradesh and other states,” he said. “Because of the displacement due to the violence, they lost their future, and it is very easy for strangers to come and lure them. Community and family life has been disrupted; the children do not have the normal security that growing children must have. Trauma, unemployment and desperate measures have resulted in the loss of childhood, forcing many to grow up before their age.”

The AICC is calling on the National Commission for Women, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes to investigate.

It's pouring and no TataSky

2010-08-24T18:25:00.000+05:30

After weeks of heat and dust and fears of drought, the skies have finally opened around Patna, the Bihar capital, and its wet, flooded, and afloat with rubbish.

All TataSky subscribers have come to know the bitter truth, that life isn't at all Jhing-a la la, when it rains. Your DTH receiver doesn't receive signals in the rain. Now I wonder how they forgot to part with that little bit of information in their ads? So, in effect, I'm going to miss the TV news, the evening serials, and whatever else I want to watch, because it's raining steadily, and Tata Sky services will remain on the blink.

What's gonna happen at Masterchef Australia? The Tatasky services were screwed during 'Moment of Truth' as well.

I'd like to get one of these TataSky vendors to Ancient Egypt and feed him to the lions. End of story.

Indians to sweep medal tally at CWG Games

2010-08-17T18:30:00.000+05:30

Indians to sweep medal tally at CWG Games

Patriotism in India

2010-08-13T08:51:00.002+05:30

Just wave the flag

Don’t wear it

Love your country

Shit on its streets

Pollute its rivers

Poison its earth with pesticides
Suck up its ground water , don’t bother to replace it

Turn sidewalks into public urinals
Throw garbage on the road
Choke its sewers with illegal plastic

Ignore rules and laws at will
Bribe and be bribed : after all, Gandhiji's smiling on the bank-note , Honestly!!

Promote unscientific and superstitious practices: mystical India!
[No matter if thousands of babies and women die from unhygenic rituals]

Smash and break up public property in the name of democratic protests

Lie, cheat, steal, murder- to keep your ‘seats’ in the Assembly and Parliament
Lie, cheat, burn, pillage, murder in the name of religion and its protection
Loot and scam away public funds: that’s the the Common-wealth game

Kill and evacuate all the forest dwellers to get your hands on minerals for export

That’s the way that you love your country

‘Tiranga’ : the name for the Indian flag is also the name of a cancer-causing chewing tobacco
-- the fix of the masses
Aha , Aha That’s the way I like it
Jai Ho

Enjoy Independence Day,
The way you’ve loved your country for the past sixty years
You deserve it!

HUNGER

2010-08-04T13:44:00.002+05:30

Hunger is infinity more than feeling peckish between breakfast and lunch.
It is the acute absence of any sort of relief from that emptiness in your breadbasket.
It’s gone beyond the dull ache stage, past the symptomatic headaches and dizziness, way beyond.
It’s the absence of means to gather food.
It’s the absence of the ability to procure a single grain or a drop of gruel to put into the parched mouth of an offspring.
It’s the absence of hope.

And in this country, where there is so much hunger in so many places, where people are starving, there are mountains of grain that is just lying around. It’s not being distributed. It’s not being sold. It’s waiting to be eaten by rats and worms. It’s going to lie there and rot, while hundreds of people die of slow starvation.

Instead of sitting on our fannies and staring at TV stories of hunger in our country, it’s time we did something to urge our government to move those surplus stocks of food to alleviate people’s misery, to bring to them a ray of hope. Instead of letting that food eventually rot, why not sell it to the starving at rates they can afford?

Why not spend a couple of minutes and click this link to do something about hunger, even if it's symbolic!

Click here and sign up

The Philanthropist

2010-07-27T17:53:00.001+05:30

This man from the Musahar community, gave away his only bit of land for a government school building.

The self-effacing Harikesh Rawat has made a contribution to the cause of elementary education that is a rare example of philanthropy. He gave away the tiny piece of land he had, his only possession, so that a government school could be built to enable the children of his habitation with access to education. The Primary School Indira Awas, Kariya in Bihar's Gopalganj district, is built on this land. It's not much of a school, some stones held together with plaster, a dash of paint, but it's right next to the basti

Harikesh belongs to the traditionally landless Musahar [literally: rat eater] caste.

“I don’t have any land now,” he says, “I did this five years ago so that the Dalit kids would be able to have a school within the habitation, to stop them dropping out before they reaches the fifth class.”

Forty six year old Harikesh completed his secondary school in 1984 and went on to earn his living as a skilled mason. His income until recently was an average of Rs 250 a day on city construction sites. He’s given that up for a time to serve his community as a Tola Sevak. [ A kind of nanny in a goverment of Bihar programme. See my earlier post for an explanation] Why give up an occupation that fetched him around five thousand rupees a month for one that pays practically nothing? Why not leave it for a younger man to handle?

The answer comes for the people, young and old, who are present. “He has given his land to build a school. Who else can be more interested in our children’s welfare? Can there be a better person to see that the our kids are on the right track?” they say. Harikesh has been TS for since 2009.

“One of my sons is in Ladakh, working for the Border Roads. I put all my sons in school, but they didn’t complete their education, because of the circumstances at the time. There is much more hope that these children will make it to secondary school. Now schools provide a midday meal. There are uniforms supplied. And for the Mahadalit children who join the Utthan programme, there are learning materials and a place to study that their parents cannot afford. I am a tola sevak because I want to play a role in this. Also, in my neighbourhood, I am, in a way, a community leader.”

Unfortunately, say the people of the habitation, the teachers assigned to the primary school are irregular, the headmaster is prejudiced against the lower castes and flaunts his political connections. The VSS is dominated by the headmaster here, they say. The neighbourhood expressed their fear. They said, ‘if we raise issues or file a complaint, the powerful vested interests, file false reports in police stations and terrorise us.’

Harikesh has a different opinion. “The midday meal is fairly regular. If the officers of the Bihar education department and others come for monitoring regularly, most of the problems will be sorted out. Proper checks and balances could be put in place without favouring the empowered people, then things will improve.

“I am hopeful. Even if the Tola Sevak programme is closed down. People will continue to send their kids to school and demand the benefits for their children.”

Beating the Sambodhi Retreat

2010-07-19T05:57:00.000+05:30

[The Igloo: one room and bath cottage - airconditioning was fine - 24 hour service despite Bodh gaya's errtic power supply]

The Sambodhi Resort, the local yokels of Bodh Gaya will tell you, with a sense of awe, has been put up by Bhojpuri actor Manoj Tiwari. It ‘s an awfully kitschy place, and you would probably forgive the man [or his architect, if he had one] for overdoing things, if only the service had been half as decent as the other, rather ordinary hotels, in Bihar’s number one spot for Buddhist tourism.

If you intend to put up at the ‘resort’, as I did, then here’s a list of things you might have to put up with. My ‘hut’ was 301, a sort of igloo shaped structure, comfortably air-conditioned, and fairly neat at first glance. A 29 inch LCD TV set with tataSky service, a mini-bar if only stocked with mineral water, and the bathroom reasonably clean, except for the creepy crawlies that let themselves in from the garden outside. So far, so good. Considering that the igloo hut comes @ Rs 4,000 a night!

[Faulty plumbing]

First jolt: the toilet didn’t flush. Second jolt: the flush mechanism was stuck, Third jolt: you try to turn on a tap and find that the fancy lever comes off in your hand. So you send for housekeeping. While Housekeeping takes its time to get to igloo 301, you discover that the usual ‘complimentary’ toiletry stuff is kept on a ledge, and that the little plastic bottles look used (which they are). [I’m not going to bore you with the nit-picking details, but let’s say I recently stayed at a middle range hotel in Darbhanga, (Bihar) and paid less that Rs 1,000 a night and they had a better sense of quality]. Anyway, while waiting for Housekeeping to make its appearance, you discover that the bathroom doesn’t have a single towel rack, or any sort of contraption that one can hang clothes on. There are no shelves or storage spaces, so one has to plonk one’s toothbrush in a glass tumbler and prop it up on the ledge.

[no egronomics, no planning, no design, dehati style: note the old bottles, the comb with no wrapper, etc.]

Housekeeping finally makes its appearance 25 minutes after you’ve made the call, and when they leave, the flush works stiffly, the tap knobs are placed back in their sockets, so that they come off in your hands the next time you use the basin, and the little plastic bottles with ‘body lotion’ and something that looks like oil, have been … not replaced, but refilled (!)

[and finally... room service!]

Room service moves at the pace of the legendary snail. Telephone room service. Wait ten minutes. Boy in ill-fitting uniform appears. Send him back for a menu. Wait another ten minutes. Place an order: one lemon tea, one cold drink, two plates of pakoras. Twenty minutes later, house phone rings. Room service tells you that, the only thing that’s available is Coke. You shrug, okay bring it over. Then room service tells you that the only thing available is a two litre bottle of coke. You tell them, forget it. It’s now seven thirty five. You placed the order at six fifteen. The clock inches towards eight pm. At seven fifty five you’re about to pick up the phone and give room service bloody hell. The door opens at that moment. One lemon tea and two plates of pakoras, delivered after an hour and a half. Pay the bill. Two hundred and ten rupees.

[exteriors are kitschy in the extreme, but colourful]

At ten PM you discover that you’re not going to be able to watch your favourite serial on Star World. Nor can you watch NDTV 24X7. He reason: the fancy TV and TataSky will stubbornly show the basic Hindi and local programmes. No English channels. ‘You have subscribed for the ‘popular pack’. These channels are not available, says the TataSky legend. You thrust a middle finger in its face, and switch off in disgust. It dawns on you. This so-called resort is for Bhojpuri types only, else, they expect their foreign guests [if they have any] to take a crash course in the local lingo!

[The retreat has a swimming pool, a 'gym' and a riverfront.. all gaudily constructed, but not built to last. The place is falling apart already]

Ten minutes later, you’re in for another ‘surprise’. The mini-bar isn’t cool, it doesn’t work. It’s a glorified storage cupboard. The ice-trays hold water. And the mineral water bottles – they are actually refilled with tap water. You’re too tired to complain. You switch on your laptop and watch videos on BBC. The next morning, Room service will perform a jig in front of the mini-bar. To no effect. He will mutter that it’s not working, and will slink out of the room. Anyway, you have a session of the conference to prepare for and that will keep you busy for the day.

It’s time to leave for Patna, 6 pm. Out of curiosity, you open the mini-bar. It’s as dead as ever. Housekeeping never got around to fixing it!

How much would you sell your mother for?

2010-06-26T20:05:00.000+05:30

That's a question that Priyanka Borpujari asks in her blog that's detailing her journey through the dark land of Chattisgarh. In a situation that's becoming highly polarised, it's time for all we 'right thinking' folks to peel off the purple shades and see for ourselves what's happening in broad daylight.
Read on with a click:
How much would you sell your mother for?

Shaken n stirred

2010-06-12T21:46:00.001+05:30

We sang, “The future’s in the air, can feel it everywhere, it’s blowing with the winds of change.”

One might say that could be Bihar’s theme of the moment, but after two weeks of being on the road, in the opposite direction of the Bihar Chief Minister’s ‘Chariot of Development’, I am beginning to wonder. Are we really getting excited about the window dressing, while most of the dirt is being hastily swept under the carpet?

True, I’ve been travelling on fairly smooth roads that actually lead somewhere for a change. Travel by road is no longer the nightmare it once was. There have been scores of populist programmes and schemes that have seen the light of day in recent times, but half-baked and hastily implemented schemes don’t hold water in the long run.

I’d like to believe that things are changing for the better, but I’m not so sure. The way the administration and vested interests work in tandem is amazing. I was in the Rohtas and Kaimur area recently, where illegal stone quarrying happens in broad daylight, and where the stone quarrying Mafia murdered an upright forest officer not many years ago. A week before the Chief Minister’s visit in his ‘Chariot of Development’, these illegal mines have been ‘shut down’ by the administration. This was achieved by clearing the area of the poor disposed daily labourers who are practically the slaves of the illegal quarry bosses, and telling the Mafia to put a hold on destroying the hills until the much touted ‘Nitish Chariot’ disappears into the distance. Neat job. The CM will see evil, hear no evil, and of course won’t speak about evil. Neat job.

Sigh. A gin and tonic. Single malt. Bloody Mary. Unlike James Bond’s famous Martini, I’m shaken. And Stirred. Take me to the magic of the moment on the glory night where the children of tomorrow dream away, in the wind of change.

No kitchen boy here

2010-06-11T07:05:00.001+05:30

Travelling through Bihar and looking at how our education system actually serves the poorest in India, I wonder whether this ‘Right to Education Act’ will ever get off the ground.

With the caste system still firmly in place in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, crafty headmasters and upper caste Panchayats find ingenious ways to keep the lowest castes out of school.

The lower castes aren’t cute little innocents either. Visit their habitations and if you’re a first time visitor, you’ll be appalled. They’re smelly, unhygienic, indolent, grasping, vulgar, violent, often piss-drunk, and sometimes unfriendly. If you think that the Musahars, Doms, Mesthars, and Nats are the ‘gentle unwashed’, it’s time to lift up your head from the poppy fields forever.

If you have been brought up in the Western tradition, or have had the benefit of good ol’ Christian schooling [and I mean good OLD Christian schooling] that planted stuff like cricket, Old Bailey, and that peculiar notion of fair play in your hyperactive sub-conscious, you’ll say, “Chaps, these poor buggers have been given a raw deal for centuries. All that they’ve been allowed to do is to clean other’s shit, carry corpses, and scavenge. They’ve been social outcastes for a thousand years, and it’s time to be a bit more accommodating. Teach them to clean up, and probably move them from the outhouse to the vegetable garden.

One of my favourite Black poets, Langston Hughes, spoke about a beautiful black boy being relegated to the kitchen and not being allowed to the dining room. These four kinds of Dalits would never be allowed anywhere near a staunch Brahmin’s kitchen, for Crispen’s sake. Before you call me racist, take a walk to the centre of a Musahar Tola in any of Bihar’s rural districts, and surrounded by the sights and sounds of destitution and degradation, amidst the shit and piss and snorting pigs, stark naked kids, unwashed men smelling of cheap arrack unashamedly scratching their crotches and toothless women with lice-filled hair scratching their emaciated rumps, drink from a pitcher of water offered to you by one of the inhabitants. Let me tell you, if you drink the water, you either have great faith, or great foolishness.

I probably get by because my patron saint is Francis of Assisi.

Kaimur visited

2010-06-05T07:13:00.000+05:30

[That's me in front of Bhabua's impressive administrative centre]

The heat wave rolls on in the southern reaches of the Republic of Bihar. In Bhabua, the district headquarters of Kaimur, named for a hilly range, one gets to see a spanking new District Collectorate, very impressive, with all the important departments within a stone’s throw of each other. It was clean, with a well tended garden, and no litter in sight. Let’s hope it stays that way.

[Roads have brought improvement in communication and markets, but we want more]

Roads in Bihar hadn’t existed five years ago. Roads linking the towns of Bihar were riddled with potholes and strewn with the carcasses of damaged vehicles of all breeds. Today, brand new roads make for smooth rides. Nitish Kumar, like Obama promised change when he came to power five years ago. In just five years, at least he has shown Bihar the ‘roads’ to development. What we got from 15 years of RJD was the bitumen scam.

[Are we teaching our children well by example, or are we perpetuating discrimination and corruption?]

Of course, in the past five things have become smoother and shinier on the surface. Poverty and caste-based discrimination remain stolid and unmoved. Corruption is the noxious weed that continues to strangle the life out of the system, and it appears to have become a way of life in Bihar. Pilferage and embezzlement appear to be the order of the day. The officials from the Bihar Pradesh Service Commission appear to be uncouth, loudmouthed, rustic louts, who wear their lack of social graces as a badge of honour. It’s appalling to see and hear the way government teachers, block education officers, and even district superintendents of education behave and speak. They’re rude to their subordinates, butt-lick their superiors, and don’t seem to have any ethics at all. The small minority of government teachers who cling to the tradition of honesty and integrity are harassed, abused, and actually implicated in trumped up cases that take years to fight, and when they are finally acquitted by the courts, they are too old or beaten to give a damn about the system.

Rohtas Rant

2010-06-02T06:03:00.001+05:30

[dalit kids at the local Utthan kendra- tuition facilities]

Sitting down early in the morning after a night that’s been particularly difficult – power cuts, hot stillness at 46 degrees Celsius, mosquitoes – that’s what Sasaram, the district headquarters of Rohtas has to offer to its ordinary citizens. I’m housed in the comparatively better quarters. The guest rooms at the local parish which has a Catholic church, a social work centre, and three enterprising Jesuits who are part of a team that has brought immense positive change to the poor. More about this later.

[No longer in a mood to take things lying down, three men shot from my moving vehicle]

I’m continuing my study of the impact of the Bihar Government’s ‘Utthan’ programme, and the first day at Rohtas has been a let down. The Bihar Education Project Council office appears to be the epicenter of utter chaos. A defective filing system, missing records, lower officials in a constant state of being shuffled around, and a distinctive aura that indicates that the ancient caste diktats of Manu run in the veins of the local Rajput population.

[Social attitudes don't change as dalits continue to live in squalor]

This is the place where the confrontation between the Reds [the ‘Maoist’ combine that presumably protects the lower castes] and the Private Upper caste ‘armies’ [funded by contractors many of whom belong to the illegal stone quarrying mafia] is continual. Ergo, the efforts of the Nitish Kumar government to provide special educational inputs to the Dalits is seen as a betrayal of sorts, and the local Rajputs in the teaching cadre, while paying lip service to the programme, are ideologically opposed to it. Hence, one comes across chaos.

A District programme officer whose helpless because the financial and logistic records are a mess. A school where the headmaster refused to allow the low caste children into the school. Some of the high caste teachers with political connections openly ridicule the idea of elevating the labouring castes.

Such is life in the dry hills of Rohtas.

Beyond Bread 'n' Butter

2010-05-30T11:22:00.007+05:30

Like the little boy in the Charles Dickens novel, when the object of my affection is 'vittles' I'm always on the look out for more, and Mr Bumble be drowned in goose's gravy for all I care.

I don't remember if I've mentioned this before, but the epicurean capital of Bihar is actually Bodh Gaya. I'm not into shameless promotions of all things Bihari yet, and I'm no great fan of the ubiquitous litti and chokha that most Biharis usually want to stuff down unsuspecting tourists' throats.

The praises of the litti I shall sing elsewhere, on a blog that is still in experimental mode. This post is unashamedly reserved for the promotion of Bodh Gaya as the best place to sample the food of the world at absolutely rock bottom prices.

I'm handing out five full stars to a small little glorified dhaba called the Fujiya Green Restaurant . Here is where you'll get an impressive bill of fare. So I ordered Macaroni and cheese, Macaroni with Mushrooms, and was amazed at the quality.. for as little as 45 rupees a plate. The Varieties of Thukpa, my favourite Sikkimese / Tibetan food [mutton, chicken, egg, vegetable], flavoursome, fragrant and with the right amount of soup comes for under Rs 50 a bowl, and the helpings are generous. I recommend the Thai Fried Rice at a mere Rs 45. It can compare with what a fancy restaurant dishes out for Rs 125!

A breakfast with toast and butter, an omlette and lemon tea for two cost us a mere sixty rupees. Compare that with what my hotel was going to charge me: two slices of toast and a sliver of butter at Rs 40. The same menu at Shashi International would have cost us Rs 180 plus taxes.

The Green has Japanese food, Thai food, Tibetan food, Continental food, and even serves its South Indian customers with well prepared dosas! I counted about eight varieties of teas, six varieties of porridge. If you're a nostalgic Naga, or a frazzled Frenchman, a befuddled Brit or a suspicious Scandinavian, a luscious Latino or an ornery Outlander looking for something that remotely tastes like home, this is it. It's a backpacker's delight. The food is well prepared. It's an eatery, and not a fancy restaurant.

When you enter, the waiter will hand you the menu and a writing pad. You have to jot down your own order. After the meal, the pad comes back to you, this time with the amount to be paid written beside your order. Absolutely no confusion. When in Bodh Gaya, go Fujiya Green. You'll be sure to do an Oliver!

Working Men

2010-05-28T22:11:00.000+05:30

A photo-post on the Malhar - the fisherman of Bihar, one of the Maha Dalit groups. I came upon a group of these fishermen while travelling through Muzaffarpur.

Dalits and Education

2010-05-27T16:43:00.001+05:30

The term Dalit is synonymous with 'downtrodden' in India. The former 'untouchables', the lowest on the caste rung, haven't earned a great deal of social acceptance yet, even though there have been brilliant chaps like the late Dr. Jagjivan Ram, whose birth centenary passed by unnoticed.

[Dalit Man enjoys something cool in a Gaya village]

The Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar and his government came up with the concept of Maha-Dalit - a brand new term that at first included the seven castes which were the dregs in the social teacup. These 'most downtrodden people' were earmarked for quick injections of development schemes: free textbooks, clothes, even scholarships and so on. But the ink hadn't properly dried on Doctor Nitish's populist prescription, when the crafty politicians got other castes in the dalit recipe book all shaken and stirred, and the poor man had to stretch the envelope to include 20 of the 21 listed scheduled castes.

[The grandmother says that kids have become regular schoolgoers thanks to the young 'community volunteer' who helps them with studies]

As a result of this adjustment, certain schemes which seemed a very good idea at first have simply started flounedring, partly because of the sheer increase in the cost. A very innovative idea, thought up by the bright sparks in the Musahar Community, was to have their own literate youth engage in community service and ensure that the children of their impoverished labouring communities get access to school. A young person, who had attained at least secondary schooling, would donate four hours everyday to collect the kids from the neighbourhood and lead them to the neighbourhood government school, ensure that they were seated with the other students, and later on, in the evening, teach these groups of twenty children, helping them with their homework. This was found to work well and had excellent results.

[Most dalit kids feel school is an unwelcoming place, like a prison]

That was when the Bihar Government took over the activity, began appointing 'tola sevaks', paying them a small honorarium. The scheme was called 'Utthan' and extended to 'Maha-dalit' habitations. Right now, the scheme has run into financial and administrative roadblocks, partly because the Nitish Kumar government , try as it might, cannot feed the multitudes with a loaf and a couple of fishes. Even though loafing and fishing are common traits specially within the government school fraternity.

These women were resting under a tree, they said that teachers in government schools still shun lower caste kids, and that Dalit kids are often deprived of benefits

The dalits themselves -- at least most of those who have had a taste of the Utthan scheme -- say that it is the one constructive action that had been offered to them since Indian Independence. Those left out blame the government for dividing the lower castes for political gains and vow vengeance in the coming elections.

Madan Tamang - His was A Life

2010-05-23T15:48:00.001+05:30

This Sunday afternoon, back from a tour of some of Bihar's impoverisehed areas, I am just beginning to adjust to the world around me, and the news that an old friend of my Aunt Janet Ranger, was brutally murdered in Darjeeling two days ago.

Madan Tamang was a man with a hearty laugh, a love for good grog, and of the finer things of life. The Ranger Family of Kurseong, to whom I am related, was one of the old planter's families, those who had tea gardens of their own, and Madan Tamang was one of the Circle. He was also president of the All India Gorkha League — one of the oldest political outfits in Darjeeling — a fearless and principled man. In fact,a number of hill leaders will say that Tamang is the one who had the guts to treat GNLF lrader Subash Ghisingh’s diktats with utter contempt. His was a dissenting voice that could not be when Subhash Ghisingh was a virtual dictator at the helm of affairs.

In 1977, he was made the district secretary of the League but resigned in 1980 to join a new outfit called Pranta Parishad. His exit from the League was largely because of differences with senior leaders. Pranta Parishad spearheaded a campaign along with apolitical organisations like the Nepali Bhasa Manyata Samiti to include the Nepali language in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. In 1981, as a youngster training with BD Basnet's 'Himalayan Observer', I was priviliged to be present at several meetings and press conferences. Madan Tamang impressed me no end. The Pranta Parishad spoke of Gorkhaland- full staehood for the Darjeelings Hills.

Tamang worked closely with Subash Ghisingh during the early days of Pranta Parishad. The Ghishing floated the GNLF in 1980 and stole the Parishad thunder. By 1986, the hills were mesmerised with Ghisingh but Tamang refused to join him. Even at the height of the Gorkhaland agitation, between 1986 and 1988, Tamang never shied away from criticising Ghisingh and the violence he had unleashed. Tamang was then the only hill resident who openly spoke against the GNLF.

The GNLF did not take things lying down. They burnt his ancestral house at Meghma near Sandakphu.

Madan did not stop criticising Gurung. He publicly described the proposed interim council which the GJM was negotiating with the Centre as a “sell-off”. He crossed swords with Ghishing, when he supported the move ( also echoed by the then Sikkim Chief Minister Nar Bahadur Bhandari) to incllude Nepali [not Gorkhali as proposed by Ghishing] for recognition as one of Indias's official languages. At a public meeting at Chowk Bazaar, hordes of khukuri-wielding GNLF supporters surrounded Tamang. But he stood his ground and continued with his speech. In the end, the language was incorporated as Nepali in the Constitution.

After his success with the language agitation, Madan Tamang rejoined the League the League in 2004.

He defied GNLF-sponsored strikes to address public meetings against the inclusion of the hills in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. His vehicle was attacked in Kalimpong, his meeting was stoned in Bijanbari but he never lived in fear. Instead, he headed an anti-Ghisingh conglomeration called the People’s Democratic Front.

When the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha came into being in 2007, he supported it at first. Animosity started to set when The GJM disregarded his call for collective action to demand a separate State. Morcha supporters attacked his house, burnt a League office and prevented him from holding public meetings, but nothing could stop him from voicing his views.

Barely three days before his assassination, Madan Tamang, had met West Bengal Governor M K Narayanan in a deputation, urging him to do everything to restore the rule of law in Darjeeling.

“The issue at the moment is not a separate state, but to safeguard the fundamental rights of the people and to allow them to live freely and fearlessly,” Tamang had told the Governor on May 18.

On the road again

2010-05-18T23:51:00.005+05:30

Yesterday I toured 'Utthan' Kendras' instead of sampling the famed Muzaffarpur Litchis. These ' uplift centres' have nothing to do with what you're thinking right now, [ even if you're reading this with a tall glass in one hand and a tall Bahama mama in the other]. 'Uplift Centres' are in fact, places where Bihari kids from what we now term the 'deprived sections' are made to sit and study after school hours.

The idea is to encourage those communities who, unlike some of us, are forced live like there's no tomorrow: no job security, no bank accounts, no food in the fridge, no fridge, no electricity, no electric wiring, no roof, no crockery, no anything but their bare hands, bare backs, bare labour and mostly bare children to call their own - to start recognising that the local government school is in fact, the beginning of the rainbow beyond which lies a pot of gold, a pot belly, or just plain pot [whatever takes your fancy].

The scheme goes like this: a 'tola sevak' [translation: servant of the habitation], who is a local resident sporting the same spots that the rest of that particular 'deprived section' are supposed to show [ probably after a day of toddy tapping, rat hunting, shit carrying, or corpse removal] is appointed by the community [but not paid by them] to round up their dirty kids and to shove them under the shower or duck them under water or whatever serves to wash the grime off the kids' snot streaked noses, and then pack them off to the nearest government school.

These 'tola sevaks' then attend the school with the kids, to make sure that they are not 'discriminated against' and that the kids get their fair share of the mid-day meal whenever it is served to them. At the end of the school day, the 'tola sevaks' accompany the kids back to their village, to see that no harm befalls them on the way.

As the afternoon stretches on, the kids come over to the 'uplift centre' to get help with their lessons.

The tola sevaks, are in fact nannies, from the previously untouchable - now acceptable 'segment', [or PUNA ]; of the PUNA placed there on behalf of the PUNA by the Government of Bihar.

It's a matter of Maha-Dalit pride, the twice-born and very touchy Government officers in charge of the Utthan programme insist.

The 'proud servants' recite words like 'mainstreaming' and 'intellectual poverty' and are beholden to the chaps who pay them their two thousand rupees a month.

Sure, says one, he could earn more at a construction site, but the nanny's job is far easier, and it earns the gratitude of the community as well because they are just too occupied making ends meet to worry about high class things such as child rearing. Jai Ho!
But does UTTHAN stand for Un -Touchable-Then-How- Acceptable Now?

Muslim Televangelists – a film by Thierry Derouet

2010-05-14T06:41:00.001+05:30

They’re young, charismatic and they bring the word of Allah, straight to your TV, computer, or mobile phone. These superstar preachers are as accessible as a click of a button and are rocking the image of extremism that Islam struggles to shrug off. Get up close and personal with the evangelist preachers hailed as the future of Islam itself.

‘Islamic religious discourse has stagnated in the last 200 years’ Amr Khaled cries to a captivated crowd ‘It has failed to respond to current issues in society’. He speaks for an hour, with no pauses and no notes and he leaves his audience of mostly young and female Muslims, in tears. ‘It’s mass hypnosis on a satellite television scale’ argues Wael Lofti.

‘Look’ beams Amr Khaled gesturing to his mobile phone ‘I received 1170 calls last week’. But fearing the power of Amr’s celebrity, the Egyptian government gave him little option but to flee to London, from where he continues to preach. Amr’s phone is open to everyone, a modern answer to the Egyptian government’s attempts to silence him. ‘In Egypt I could speak nowhere’ Amr confides, ‘I couldn't even speak with individuals’.

Witty and soft-spoken, Khaled is sometimes described as the "anti–bin Laden," a tolerant accountant turned televangelist whose feel-good brand of Islam calls for dialogue over destruction. His sermons are broadcast worldwide—on YouTube and four Arab satellite stations—and his message of self-improvement through hard work and prayer is more Joel Osteen than Moqtada al-Sadr. But the same Western-friendly style that has endeared him to millions of liberal Muslims has angered hard-liners, who forced Khaled into exile in Britain in 2002. There he has reinvented himself as, in the words of one Arab newspaper, a "Pied Piper" for young European Muslims who are following his conciliatory tune

In London he found a new understanding of the relationship between Islam and the West. ‘If you do things for non-Muslims, it will generate respect for Islam’ Amr tells the crowd. His message of community has inspired millions of young Muslims, sending his talk show ratings above those of Oprah Winfrey herself.

In the cosy living-room setting of his talk show, Amr talks freely with women about Islam today. ‘One day I will be before God and be accountable’ one guest declares ‘I do not like the veil’. ‘We’re not here to judge’ Amr responds but he has inspired many of the women in the audience to take the veil. ‘I know very well that such programmes are made especially to convince Arab women to wear the hijab’ the guest reveals after the applause dies down.

The wave of female televangelists is giving women in Islam power. Lutfia Sungkar earns a month’s average salary for every television appearance and on the hit show ‘The Star Academy’, women and men preach alongside each other for a prize.

‘Look my friends, do not fear technology, send me a text and, God willing, I will be here next week’ jokes one contestant. But it doesn’t stop at text-voting, Muslims can now receive the Qu’ran by SMS. ‘A lot of people in Islam read the Qu’ran in Arabic just to have read it, they don’t understand it’ explains the founder of the subscription service.

‘It’s an insult to Islam’ argues an orthodox preacher. Whilst for Lutfia it’s a fact that ‘good preachers aren’t recognised any more unless they’re on TV’. With ‘Time’ magazine voting Amr Khaled the 13th 'most influential person in the world' this documentary charts a phenomenon which is finally bringing Islam up to speed with the modern world.

This documentary will be aired by NDTV 24x7 on May 15 [3 to 4 pm] and May 16 [1 to 2 pm]

Yes Minister, my Sympathies

2010-05-11T17:10:00.000+05:30

Sympathy • noun (pl. sympathies) 1 feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune. 2 understanding between people; common feeling.3 support for or approval of something. 4 (in sympathy) relating harmoniously to something else; in keeping. 5 the state or fact of responding in a way corresponding to an action elsewhere.

— ORIGIN Greek sumpatheia, from sun- ‘with’ + pathos ‘feeling’.

Mahasweta Devi challenged Chidambaram to put her in jail for 10 years, in response to the centre’s newly found enthusiasm for using the UAPA to arrest so-called Maoists sympathizers. As of now, I truly sympathize with the home minister for being humiliated by a gutsy 84 year-old woman.

Yet sympathy is a thought-crime thanks to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, and accordingly, ‘any person who commits the offence of supporting such a terrorist organization with inter alia intention to further the activities of such terrorist organizations would be liable to be punished with imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years or with fine or with both.’

I like to place some emphasis on ‘intention to further the activities’ of the Maoists. Since we have brought public debate on Operation Green Hunt down to the ludicrous and the farcical, I’d like to ask one question: who has really furthered the activities of the Maoist any more than the exploitive economic policies of the state and their counter-insurgency tactics? I mean, what’s more useful to the Maoists, a Writ Petition filed by activists for the adivasis, or the state’s security apparatus that terrorizes the population on mere suspicion and suppresses dissent and civil society?

Maoist sympathizers, or supporters, according to the state, are simply anyone who stands up for the rights of the adivasi. Not long ago in the Supreme Court, an accusation was hurled at just-another-activist who was fighting for the rights of the adivasi, for being a Maoist supporter. The response by the judges was fitting. ‘Suppose somebody fights their (victims) case, so what does that imply? First you say they are Naxals, then you say they are sympathisers, then you say they are sympathisers of sympathisers… Why all these innuendos?’

‘Sympathy is fighting for their cause (victims). Nobody is advocating their cause. They are not saying their action should be condoned.
And who is really advocating the Maoist cause? Anyone with even half a brain would know that even if the Maoists do capture state power, we’d merely be dealing with a whole bunch of clowns, who’d merely shoot the students at JNU, if there was even a single squeak of dissent.

And unfortunately I need to have yet another fashionable pot-shot at Mr. Chidambaram whose policies are single-handedly the greatest support for the Maoists to help ‘further their activities’. First, let’s start with the Salwa Judum, that was given unbridled freedom to do as it pleases – burn, rape, loot and murder in every place that was known to have a strong Maoist presence, and the Maoists had the last laugh – as recruitment was an all-time high. How much did the Salwa Judum help to ‘further the activities’ of the Maoists? Does the centre now know that the Salwa Judum had even burnt down villages that had no Maoist links? And killed people who had no grudge against the state?

No, I didn't write this post. I wish I had. Visit the original blog by clicking on the link.
Read more of this excellent article here

Teen din ka Mela - Abhivyakti 2010

2010-05-03T08:18:00.006+05:30

[Abhivyakti 2010 : Reaching out to Bihar's Youngsters]

The Third day of Abhivyakti 2010, the 9th Bihar Low Cost Video festival featured ‘Do din ka Mela’ by Ankjali Monteiro and KP Jayashankar, as well as a selection of student films and films made by children. Certificates and mementoes were presented at the closing ceremony. While the Abhivyakti festival does not have a ‘competition’ section, awards are announced to encourage student productions.

352: Remembering Emergency [Director, Camera work, Script: Sanjay Pratap, Ashwani Falnikar, Nandita Thomas, Nikhil Titus TISS, Mumbai] won the ACT-UCP Sarnet award of Rs 1,000 for best student film under 20 minutes on a Human Rights issue.

Banjar Mann [Director : Tanushri University Of Allahabad] won the ACT-UCP Sarnet award of Rs 1,000 for best student film under 10 minutes on a Human Rights / Development issue. the film showed that women work as hard as men in Indian society, but aren’t valued as much.

Beautiful People [Film by: Manoj Kumar Class XI Mass Media student, Open School , Patna ]won the ACT-UCP Sarnet award of Rs 1,000 for best student film under 5 minutes on a Human Rights / Development issue. The film shown on the third day, drew admiration from the house because of its simple , yet unique treatment of inclusion in education.

The Ravi Bharati Abhivyakti 2010 Convener’s Choice awards for the best student or Amateur work from Bihar were announced.

[Anupam and Ashwini answer questions and comments on their production]

The first prize went to Mera Astitva [ 2 mins 9 secs; Director, Camera work, Script: Anupam , Shivani, Ashwini, Advantage Media Academy]. The short film was an appeal for conservation from a tree’s point of view, and was widely appreciated by the audience for its simplicity and clarity of approach. The second prize went to Children’s show , a programme made up of eleven films by 24 children aged 9 to 16 from Bihar Bal Bhavan. The third prize went to Dowry ‘Heavier Than Life’ [ 5 mins; Director : Mehrazun Neesa Haque Patna Women’s College Department of Communicative English] The film was about malpractice and ‘the dowry harassment’ in India.

[Young directors face the audience at Abhivyakti 2010]

Present on the occasion were students and film buffs, including Dr Shanker Ashish Dutt, Chairman Sangeet Natak Academy; Ms Vibha Sinha, Asst Secretary, Bihar Sangeet Natak Academy; Mr Rajender Dash, President Patna Cine Society; Ms Jyoti Parihar, Director Bihar Bal Bhawan, Ms Neerja Lal, Dean of Studies , Advantage Media Academy; Mr Gautam Dasgupta, Secretary Patna Cine Society, Dr Muniba Sami from Patna University.

[ Mr RN Dash, Ms Jyoti Parihar, Ms Vibha Sinha.]

Above: Ms Neerja Lal, Dr Shanker Dutt, Mr Gautam Dasgupta, Mr Frank Krishner]

The three day grassroots video festival screened a total of 23 films, of which three were invited films, 7 were regular entries, and 13 were student films.

[ A section of the audience .. Young directors interact wth the audience]

Ravi Bharat Director, Fr Benny Moolan SJ proposed the vote of thanks to all those who contributed to the festival, especially the film-makers who sent their films.

As Convenor, I would like to thank Yashna, Nihal, Alok, Chandan, Ravi, and all the young people who volunteered to help with the arrangements. Yashna, Nihal, and Manoj did a good job with the announcements and introduction of movies and guests. Alok Kumar looked after guests, and handled on the ground coordination of hospitality.

Abhivyakti: Second day ka Manohar Kahani

2010-05-02T07:15:00.006+05:30

The second day of Abhivyakti – the 9th Ravi Bharati Bihar Low Cost Videofest – saw animated discussions, questions and answers from the very first session. The sweltering afternoon heat didn’t deter the seminar participants, who countered the heat with ‘cool’ discussions.

[Prof. Shanker Dutt, Chairperson Bihar Sangeet Natak Academy, makes a point. Also in the picture - seated- are Dr Muniba Sami and Ms Neerja Lal]

The mini-seminar ‘Broadcast Yourself’ on citizen journalism featured a selection of films downloaded from the Net with samples from the One world project [Just a piece of cloth], and WAVE enthusing the student audience. ‘Just a Piece of Cloth’ a six minute film on the Goonj project, stirred the young audience. Mughda Singh, a media student, expressed her mixed feelings of shock, sadness and guilt – “I hate to part with my old clothes, and out there, there are thousands of women in need of a simple piece of cloth to lead a more hygienic life. This film is a wake up call to me.”

[A student from Patna Women's College responds to a film]

Pranav Motion Pictures’ Bhagalpuri Silk ki Kahani was an informative documentary on the Tussar silk industry at Bhagalpur in Bihar. The subject was introduced through the ‘eyes’ of a young man invited to Bhagalpur by his friend. The film was appreciated for its informational content, but criticized for its rather ham-handed handling of the docu-drama angle, and the wooden acting of the two characters who playing college going men. The film was produced by the department of Arts and Culture, Governent of Bihar.

Khadaan, a film by Soeb Mohammed, produced by the MGO REAP in Sasaram spoke of the conditions of the people working in the illegal quarries of the area, and filmed through the interwoven narratives of three children. The participants praised the aesthetic beauty of the film. Dr Muniba Sami said that such films remind urban people that horrific conditions continue to be a part of the lives of many children, and prompt us to get involved in social causes. Dr Shanker Dutt said that the pity is that films such as these are confined to festivals.

Manoj Kumar, student, NIOS, introduces a film at Abhivyakti

Arzoo, the story of a young Muslim woman, post Gujarat Communal Riots of 2002, captivated the audience with its simplicity of narrative and the persona of real life protagonist Sulekha Ali, an ‘ordinary’ girl with extraordinary perception, willpower and the overriding desire to heal the psychological wounds that fascism masquerading as religious bigotry has inflicted on the children of Gujarat. Definitely the most significant and hope-filled documentary of the evening, echoed the young audience.

Still from Arzoo
“If the film From Hindu to Hindutva shown yesterday left us dismal and depressed, Arzoo fills us with hope, because it shows us that there is a way to heal the rifts, to go beyond ‘religion’ and evolve towards humanism and spirituality,” said a participant.

[Nehal says that if we don't look out, we'll find ourselves sitting in the middle of a Police State]

Paromita Vohra’s Morality TV aur Loving Jehad — Ek Manohar Kahani, raised more than a few hackles, and brought about much confusion and questions. A member of the audience objected to the title of the film, and said that while the film attempted to make a point about issues touching the media, women, and morality, it ended up saying nothing much. Nihal Prasher, a student, said that the film showed how fascism was creeping up all over India, and if we sat still doing nothing, we’d be sitting in the middle of a police state. Yashnashree, a media student from Patna Women’s College said that the film raised questions about the way women and girls continued to be controlled within the patriarchal system. The media and its hunger for TRP over ethics stood exposed, said Sudhir from Advantage Media Academy.

Frank Krishner, summing up the discussions, remarked that the title ‘Loving Jehad’ was based on the ridiculous rumour being spread by the Right Wing in Meerut [as shown in the film] that Muslim boys are being sent out to woo and ‘convert’ Hindu girls to Islam. The pity is that not just the simple-minded, but the media, our so-called guardians of democracy and human rights promote such dangerous folly.

Student films shown were: Where is Kishore? [ Nikhil Titus, Shaira Shetty, Sneha Anand, TISS] The film explored the various spaces in Koliwada, Dharavi through the photographs taken by a young resident named Kishore who attended a photography workshop but did not attend the final workshop of the works. Through these pictures the film tries to put together a child’s image of little fishing village now surrounded by the city. The film was well received, and generated some lively discussion on content, form, and on who Kishore really was!

Banjar Mann [Tanushri, University Of Allahabad] This music video represented the life of those Indian women who struggle for livelihood. Though they perform all the tough tasks, they are always considered less then men. Everything is barren (banjar) for them but even knowing they perform their duties with full dedication. It was widely appreciated.

The film which captivated one and all was 352: Remembering Emergency, [Sanjay Pratap, Ashwani Falnikar, Nandita Thomas, Nikhil Titus TISS]. In the largest democracy, ironically a period of 19 months is missing from public memory. It was during this period that internal emergency was instituted in India. The film was enjoyed by the audience, partly because of the skilful use of collage, cartoons, and images, and more imporatantly for the information that it contained for the younger generation.

Abhivyakti 2010 : first day at Ravi Bharati

2010-04-30T22:19:00.006+05:30

“Gaon Chodab Nahin!” [We will not leave our villages] was the lilting tune that set the mood for Abhivyakti 2010 – the grassroots documentary festival from Bihar that celebrates subaltern expression. The short music based video by Meghnath and associates covered the core issues of displacement versus politically motivated development: the message was ‘we will not let go our villages, our forests, our mother earth or our struggle’ – a potent and poignant reflection on the harsh realities of our times, that made the students present at the festival sit up and think. The Seminar Whose Right? [supported by ACT India] kicked off the day's events, with Arundhati Roy's interview to CNN-IBN set he tone for debate, followed by the film Mine: Story of a Mountain.The formal inauguration of the festival followed.

Photo shows Vivek Singh addressing the participants at Abhivyakti 2010

“Films must be made to go beyond the obvious, and have relevance for the large body of ordinary viewers,” said Bihar Secretary of Arts, Culture and Youth Affairs Vivek Singh to a relatively young audience of college-going media students on Thursday. He was speaking at the inauguration of Abhivyakti 2010, the 9th Bihar Low Cost Videofest organized at Ravi Bharati Institute of Communication, Patna. He urged the filmmakers of tomorrow to make documentaries that stimulate and speak to audiences.

Director Ravi Bharati Fr Benny Moolan SJ said that one of the main objectives of the video festival was to encourage people of all ages, especially students who are interested in the media to become participatory, critical, and intelligent viewers of media messages. The grassroots videofestival therefore focusses on an exploration of various value systems in contemporary India. The festival has been organised since 1995, and was earlier known as the 'All Bihar VHS Videofest.'

[Students participated actively in the festival seminars and discussions]

The opening film was Mithila Sanskar Geet , directed by Shaker Dutt [producer Bihar Sangeet Natak Academy] which documented the traditional songs that accompany birth and marriage rituals in the Mithilanchal region of the state, several of these colourful practices have begun to disappear, gradually becoming extinct because of rapid urbanisation and migration which are unchecked demographic movements of our times.

[Patna Cine Society President and Director Bihar Film Development Corporation Rajendra Narayan Dash]

Debranjan Sarangi’s film on the Kandhamal carnage and its aftermath “From Hindu to Hindutva” presented the complex cultural, caste based, historical, political, religious and ideological divide in that remote region of Orissa, with tribals, non-tribals, Christians, Militant Hindus, Nature worshipping Tribals, stark poverty, and land rights issues.

[Young people questioned, debated, and critiqued issues - session on Whose Right? - featured Arundhati Roy's interview on CNN - The students expressed a general agrement that India has begun to look and act like a 'fake democracy']

The student films making the most impact on the first evening were Bridging The Gap [Shilpi Gulati and Shranaya Gautam, Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai] – a film with animated symbols that made an appeal for holistic primary education, and Inside Out (Edited Version),[ Divya Cowasji, Shilpi Gulati] – which asked the question: How thin is the line of acceptable conduct for a woman in public, can she ever cross the line? Can a woman ever access public spaces as freely as a man? Other films shown and appreciated in the very short film category (under five minutes) were Dowry ‘Heavier Then Life’ , [Mehrazun Neesa Haque, Patna Women’s College], Hamara Adhikar [Kunal Kumar and Vikram Kumar, Advantage Media Academy, Patna] and Kisse Kahu, [Pankaj Kumar Jha, Manish Kumar, Samdarshi Priyam, Harikesh, AMA, Patna].

Abhivyakti 2010 Update

2010-04-30T06:38:00.001+05:30

Abhivyakti 2010: Student Section

Films @ 5:45 pm on 30 April

Dowry ‘Heavier Then Life’ , English/Hindi, 5 mins, student project Patna Women’s College, Department of Communicative English with Media studies.
Director : Mehrazun Neesa Haque
This is a film about most important mal-practice ‘the dowry harassment’ in India.

Hamara Adhikar, Hindi, 2:30 mins, Post graduate student workshop project, Advantage Media Academy, Patna
Director, Camera Work, Editing, Script: Kunal Kumar and Vikram Kumar
This film raises the question about children, some who are getting everything at right time and the others who want education, but are left out.

Bridging The Gap, English/ Hindi, 3: 43 min, final group assessment for the M. A. degree in Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai.

Director: Shilpi Gulati and Shranaya Gautam

The film looks at the importance of universal primary education as a part of millennium development goals. It stresses the importance of not just universal primary education but necessity of expanding the definition of primary education to include different kind of knowledge building processes. This should include assuring equal opportunities for all children according to their needs, capacity and ability.

Kisse Kahu, Hindi 2 min 16 sec, Post graduate student workshop project, Advantage Media Academy, Patna
Director, Camera Work, Editing, Script: Pankaj Kumar Jha, Manish Kumar, Samdarshi Priyam, Harikesh

Synopsis: The film focuses on the life of landless people and wishes to draw attention public towards this.

Inside Out (Edited Version),English, Hindi, 14:45 min, final group assessment for the M. A. degree in Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai.
Director: Divya Cowasji, Shilpi Gulati

The film was born out of angst that even in the 21st century in a city as liberal and safe as Mumbai, women’s access to public space is limited and largely regulated to the sphere of purposefulness. But what happens when she just wants to be and how does she negotiate the patriarchal norms that constantly confine her. How thin is the line of acceptable conducts in public, can she ever cross the line? Can a woman ever access public spaces as freely as a man? The film also pleads for a need to experience the city purposelessly and in doing so, the need to reclaim the unfettered access to public space.

Films @ 5:45 pm on 1 May

Anmol Jeevan , Hindi, 2:30min, Post graduate student workshop project, Advantage Media Academy, Patna

Director, Camera Work, Editing, Script: Shilpi Kumari, Siya Mishra, Puja Kumari, Vidya, Ashutosh Kr

Human life is very precious, don’t waste it.

Where is Kishore?, English/Hindi, 6:30 min, final group assessment for the M. A. degree in Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai.

Director, Camera Work, Editing, Script: Nikhil Titus, Shaira Shetty, Sneha Anand

Dharavi is often termed as Asia’s largest ‘slum’. The area is now slated for ‘redevelopment’ in an attempt to transform this valuable and large piece of real estate into high towers. The film explores the various spaces in Koliwada, Dharavi through the photographs taken by a young resident named Kishore who attended a photography workshop but did not attend the final workshop of the works. Through these pictures the film tries to put together a child’s image of little fishing village now surrounded by the city.

BANJAR MANN, Hindi, 5 Mins, Post Graduate student production, University Of Allahabad, Allahabad

Director : Tanushri

This music video represents the life of those women of Indian Society who are confronting with very hard struggle for lively hood. Though they perform all the tough tasks, they are always considered less then women. Everything is barren(banjar) for them but even knowing they perform their duties with full dedication.

352: Remembering Emergency, English/ Hindi, 17 min, final group assessment for the M. A. degree in Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai.

Director, Camera work, Script: Sanjay Pratap, Ashwani Falnikar, Nandita Thomas, Nikhil Titus

In the largest democracy, ironically a period of 19 years is missing from public memory. It was during this period that internal emergency was instituted in India. The 17 minutes long film is critical look at this place that suspended fundamental rights for the common man and imposed harsh laws upon the media. Today, many of those measures are still looked upon as important for the development of the nation. The film is bundle of questions put across cartoons, archival materials and interviews.

Films @ 5:00 pm on 2 May

Suvarna, Hindi, 17min 40 sec, Student film post graduate production of National Institute of Design

Director: Rudro Bhandari,

Suvarna tells the story of a woman and her relentless pursuit of innocent desires. Set in the sleepy town of 1980’s Patna, a lonely lower middle class housewife, takes solace in her desire for fake jewellery. Her husband trying to make ends meet doesn’t mind his wife’s fetish until a series of unfortunate events reveals a bitter truth.

Unfulfilled Dreams, English, 2 mins, Post graduate student workshop project, Advantage Media Academy, Patna

Director, Camera work, Script: Nilima Mitra, Kehkashna Kuraishi, Shadab Mallick, Saurabh kumar, Dilkash

The film shows scenario of child labour how they are struggling and striving for food and shelter.

Mera Astitva, Hindi, 2 mins 9 sec, Post graduate student workshop project, Advantage Media Academy, Patna

Director, Camera work, Script: Anupam , Shivani, Ashwini

Synopsis: This is story of trees as told by them. This shows the importance of trees in our lives and how we have been destroying our saviors.

Beautiful People, Hindi, 3 :45 min, Amateur film, Class XI Mass Media student, Open School.

Film by: Manoj Kumar
Amateur music based video. It is an appeal to include all children including the disabled under the umbrella of education.

Children’s Show, Hindi, 22 mins, children’s workshop film by 24 kids aged 9 to 16 from Bihar Bal Bhawan, Kilkari.

This is a collection of short films made by children during a 10 day video workshop at Kilkari.

Abhivyakti 2010 : April 30 - May 2

2010-04-22T06:32:00.004+05:30

The 9th Bihar low cost videofest at Ravi Bharati, Patna encourages students and young people to express themselves on various aspects of life with a focus on Human rights. Apart from some 20 videos by students and children on exhibit, Abhivyakti 2010 also features the following films:
.

Film: Mithila Sanskar Geet

A Film by Shankar Dutt, produced by Sangeet Natak Akedemi, Bihar

Mithila Sanskar Geet documents the geets and traditional cultural practices of Mithilanchal. These intangible practices are gradually becoming extinct because of rapid urbanisation and migration which are unchecked demographic movements of our times. The security of community life, bonding and togetherness of these cultural practices at birth and marriage are recreated in this documentary film produced by Bihar Sangeet Natak Akademi. [Duration 30 minutes, Language Hindi]

Film: From Hindu to Hindutva

Debaranjan Sarangi,

Pedestrian Pictures Language: Oriya with English Subtitles

Kandhmal violence has been the most ghastly communal violence in the Adivasi areas in India . Close to two years after the violence the tragedy of the area continues, the victims of violence, the rehabilitation, the justice to victims, most of these are no where close to what they should be.

Debaranjan Sarangi, a social activist and writer has effectively caught the Kandhamal carnage in his short but comprehensive film with great amount of sensitivity and objectivity. He presents the whole event with the help of field interviews, the shots of burning of houses and churches and the pathetic condition of the refugee camps. His subtitling and comments not only make the theme more understandable to non-Oriya audience but also connect up different aspects of the material presented by him. The commentary in the form of text is very coherent making the film a powerful analysis of the events of Orrisa. The director weaves the picture with great precision without intruding into the flow of events as told by the perpetrators of the crime and the victims of the same. [Oriya with English Subtitles Duration- 44 Minutes]

Film: ‘Morality TV aur Loving Jehad — Ek Manohar Kahani”, Paromita Vohra’s latest documentary, makes us laugh at our cultural hang-ups and horrified and angry at the same time. The film looks at the idea of love in the Hindi heartland from three different angles, and what we take home is a rueful smile and a head full of questions.

In December 2005, Hindi TV channels “broke” the story of police action against couples in Meerut’s Gandhi Baug. Meerut is known as a TRP city. In December 2005, when the police invited TV channels to the Gandhi Baug party to see how they ferreted out, slapped, abused and humiliated couples sitting or walking in the park, the channels came with pleasure, tongues hanging out.

Who makes the police the arbiters of morality? Who is on their side — politicians? Parents? What do young people think of love and romance? Where does the phrase “Loving Jehad” come from? [Language: Hindi duration 29 minutes]

film: Do Din ka Mela

“Nothing in the world will last – it is but a two-day fair,” sings Mura Lala Fafal, drawing inspiration from the Sufi traditions of Sant Kabir and Abdul Lateef Bhita'i. He is accompanied on the jodiya pava (double flute) by his nephew, Kanji Rana Sanjot. Kanji taught himself to play and make his own flutes after hearing the music on the radio. Mura and Kanji are Meghwals, a pastoral Dalit community that lives on the edge of the Great Rann of Kutch, in the Western Indian state of Gujarat. They are daily wage labourers and subsistence farmers in an arid zone. Do Din Ka Mela, which the filmmakers describe as “an attempt to represent and interpret the rich musical traditions of Kutch and their connection to the rhythms and textures of everyday life”, is a two-day journey into the music and everyday life of this uncle-nephew duo, set against the backdrop of the Rann.

Filmmakers Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar are Professors at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. [Language Kutchi and Gujarati with English subtitles. Duration 60 minutes]

Film: Arzoo

Arzoo is the story of a young woman, compelled by circumstances to go to the Shah Alam Refugee Camp in Ahmedabad for six months post Gujarat Communal Riots of 2002. There she works as a volunteer and soon discovers the emotional wounds that lie buried below the surface. The film depicts the struggle and resilience of a young woman fighting for her beliefs against all odds. The film maker Shashi Ghosh Gupta is an alminus of XIC, Bombay. Over the years she has assisted in many film and television projects. [language Hindi, Gujarati, subtitles: English. Duration 26 minutes]

Film: Khadaan

Children’s stories from the stone quarries of Bihar. A film by Blaise Pascal , Produced by REAP. [Hindi, 26 minutes]