Kindle Magazine February '12 by Kindle Magazine

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INDIA

THE KINDLE

LEFT ISSUE

1st February 2012 `30

Comrades… here is the issue... here are the issues... stare on... towards the red sky... try to understand why is the young one from Kashmir, Syria, Jangalmahal, Koraput, Bahrain, Haiti angry… also why aren’t you angry... Read on. Left is not ofﬁcial left but all that is left to pick up and set things right. And that “right” is why a hundred years later… we would be still compiling this issue and still failing to get it “right.” Laal salaam...

KINDLE Critical Reflective Journalism

INDIA

Editor in Chief: Pritha Kejriwal Managing Editor: Maitreyi Kandoi Senior Editor: Sayantan Neogi Assistant Editor: Sayan Bhattacharya Roving Editor: Mukherjee P Feature Writers: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Novy Kapadia, Raza Rumi, Abhishek Chatterjee, Nitasha Kaul, Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, Shubham Nag, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia Columnists: Amit Sengupta, Teresa Rehman, Thomas Crowley, Abhijit Gupta, Aditya Bidikar, Aishwarya Subramanian, Mainak Bhaumik, Subir Ghosh, Rohit Roy, Shabbir Akhtar, Agniva Chowdhury Art Director: Sagnik Gangopadhyay Art Executive: Soumik Lahiri Marketing Manager: Priyanka Khandelia Marketing Executive: Souvik Sen Finance Manager: Binoy K Jana Finance Executives: Dibyendu Chakraborty, Vishal K Thakur Co-ordinator: Priyanka Mullick Head - Logistics: Arindam Sarkar Printed at: CDC Printers Pvt Ltd, Tangra Industrial Estate - II (Bengal Pottery), 45 Radhanath Chowdhury Road, Kolkata - 700 015. Distribution: Kolkata: Vishal Book Centre Jamshedpur: Prasad Magazine Centre Pune, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, Chennai, Lucknow, Vadodara, Hyderabad: Outlook Publishing Pvt Ltd North East: M P Book Stall, Durga News Agency Vol 2 Issue 11 February 2012 For subscription queries: SMS kindle (space) sub to 575756 or write to info@kindlemag.in For advertising, write to us at: advertising@kindlemag.in For marketing alliances, write to us at: alliances@kindlemag.in Owned, printed and published by Pritha Kejriwal on behalf of Ink Publications Pvt Ltd. Printed at CDC Printers Pvt Ltd and published from Kolkata. Ink Publications Pvt Ltd is not responsible for the statements and opinions expressed by authors in their articles/writeups published in ‘Kindle’. ‘Kindle’ does not take any responsibility for returning unsolicited publishing material. Visit: www.kindlemag.in RNI NO. WBENG/2010/36111 Regd. No. KOL RMS/429/2011-2013

Editor’s Note

here we are. With the forty second issue of our magazine. And that grumpy old (and young) Jean Paul Sartre utterance hammering inside our heads: “Everything has been figured out except how to live.” That there is a sharp economic divide between the haves and the have-nots is not new. What is new and what is even graver than this schism, is that there are more efforts to increase the gap than to arrest the slide. We must confront the implications crafted by a society driven by consumerism, one that operates on the premise that the environmental side-effects(read gashes, scars, wounds, stab-marks) of industrial growth can be rationalised (read externalized) indefinitely... with some carbon credit exchange (emit some, omit some more, give, take, buy, acquire, merge, submerge, disseminate). In a nation with 1.21 billion people and a workforce of 405 million (growing 2.5 per cent annually), these assumptions must be questioned. And these questions cannot be answered by productivity parameters alone. Let us pose five questions to ourselves... let each question be an aching finger in our five fingered hand and a palm that can cup the universe as much as it can be dazzled by gripping a Blackberry handset(as if that is our last outpost of ever-flowing data exchange).

Q1: What would be the true nature of this unavoidable beast called globalisation... the foregone conclusion of the existence of two cities inside a city (whether you take it physically or metaphorically)... a city where there is a sense of elite affluence or a middle class drift and another city where there is a ghetto, a slum, a drifting shifting populace… Hang on, Isn’t it is easy to categorise this as “us” and “them” and even more easier to have some designed outreach methods or the so-called funding-driver social work programmes and some apparently wholesome sales pitches masking themselves as projects? But that would go nowhere till we understand the desperation of poverty, the smell of the ghetto and of course till we have regular programmes for the urban schools and colleges to understand the poverty beyond the economics lesson Q2: What then is inclusivity....as opposed to exclusivity...how do you include more and more people than create the so-called niche? Q3: How to dispel the notion of “being educated” as opposed to learn “all our lives” that is the whole notion of unlearning to understand a tribal ethos… standing up to acknowledge that a local auto driver can understand consumer behaviour in his own way as much as a MBA can... and this “own way” of the driver... of the farmer must be treated as an alternative methodology... as skill literacy in this all pervading text literacy,

degree eating nirvana Q4: In this crossroad; are we then clear about the everevolving between the glut-glitz versus the gap-ghetto? Q5: How to go beyond dogmas, marks, CGPA (grade point average marking scheme), degree slavery of colleges, so-called ambitions of I-me-myself ... and be a part of the larger social structure that helps us to build social bridges, as opposed to social empathy and sympathy. And then we have to unlock our left secrets beyond clever constructs of neo-cons, sub-altern mandarins, dialectic spouting academia... to this zebra crossing… Here stands Marx with his necessary notions of lived equality, Hegel with his third way key to conflict where intervention cycles take over the isolation loops, here sits Gramsci and Giddens hand in hand, questioning the basic fabric of the concept of “ideology.” Squatting in the footpath near the zebra crossing is Felix Guattari. He talks about the fringe groups who are left out by the mainstream discourse and even at times by progressive groups.There are others who are constantly crossing the road, coming back, crossing again... not as escapists but as benchmarks to direct and re-direct the traffic. M.N. Roy, Howard Fast. Jangal Santhal. Muzaffar Ahmed, Nirmal Verma and O.V. Vijayan (so what if they turned spiritualists), Habermas (please go beyond the parameters of Frankfurt school), Ritwik Ghtak, Julius Fuchik, Jean Luc Godard, Leo Tolstoy, Federico Garcia Lorca, Shishunala Sharif, Leonardo Boff (amongst others) paving way for liberation theologists, Kabir, Tukaram, Engels, Eknath, Gandhi, Periyar and the ORIGINAL Marxist much before Marx, called Gautama, the Buddha

Our Left issue includes diverse point-of-views with head on collisions, negations, assertions, tangents, interpretations, loneliness, radical contours, red, off-red, semi-red, blurred red, reddish tinge, blood-red, hope, despair but yes like fatfree food... we tried to be a dogma-free left issue, Yes, we probably failed. Failed magnificiently. But that’s okay. You can’t succeed with a Left issue till the last hungry eyeball from that deep socket stares at you with this helpless angst... has stopped staring. And we are far far away from that. Comrades… here is the issue... here are the issues... stare on... towards the red sky...try to understand why is the young one from Kashmir, Syria, Jangalmahal, Koraput, Bahrain, Haiti angry… also why aren’t you angry... Read on. Left is not official left but all that is left to pick up and set things right. And that “right” is why a hundred years later… we would be still compiling this issue and still failing to get it “right.” Right, And still wanting to compile another issue… another thousand years later... and another thousand years later... still wanting to do a ... Laal salaam...

Parnab Mukherjee Roving Editor, Kindle Magazine

CONTENTS

Volume II Issue 11

Cover Story:

Five Finger Salute: A Letter By Mukherjee P.

In Defence of Stalin

Irf

Int

erv

an iew: Ha bib

By Saswat Pattanayak

ain

st the o By f Id Sta Am eo lin it S log ism en ie g s up

Beyond the Polity By Gautam Navlakha

Another Real Estate Maﬁa

The Other Side

By Thomas Crowley

By Subir Ghosh

Why this Hullaballoo? By Paranjoy Guhathakurta

Half the Sky

By Teresa Rehman

SNtials

62 09

Times they are a changin’ Stories from around the world

Thoughts that kindle Rajat Kapoor

Write to us at: Kindle, Ink Publications Pvt Ltd, DN 37, Sector V, Salt Lake City, Kolkata - 700 091 or email your response to us at feedback@kindlemag.in or, post on our facebook group wall: Kindle Magazine (group)

Dear Editor, P.Mukherjee’s book review ‘Lucknow Boy’ was delightful to read though it missed many important points. Vinod Mehta’s revelation in the autobiography that he has a daughter is a bit too late and an unwarranted confession with some hidden purpose. Does he want to prove that he is not infertile or he is an irresponsible and uncaring father? The autobiography is an exercise in self-promotion. He considers himself a great editor while many stalwarts are described as mediocre. Yours truly, S. Raghunatha Prabhu

Dear Editor, Congratulation ! I was introduced to your magazine just two days ago. It was your December 2011 issue. In fact I was sifting through a large pile of glitzy techno and film journals being sold at a Book Shop inPatna. Your Journal was at the bottom of the pile. While browsing through the pages of Kindle, I realized that there are still a handful of writers who have refused to sell their soul to the popular readership of gossip, sensationalism and garbage. In me, you have found a regular reader who would like to subscribe to Kindle as long as I am living or you continue to publish it. I do look forward to your forthcoming issues, Regards, Anagarika Dhamma Priya

Dear Editor, I was taking a close look at all the magazines in the stands, as everyone came up with their 2012 predictions or people to watch out for during this new year. I must say your choice of the small independent media as the person of the year stands out as no media platform looks beyond the obvious. Keep up the good work. Regards, Sunaina Pande 8

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Times they are a changin’ MUMIA ABU JAMAL STILL

TORTURED BY HANS BENNET, dailykos.com

n December 7, following the US Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the Philadelphia District Attorney’s final avenue of appeal, current DA Seth Williams announced that he would no longer be seeking a death sentence for the world-renowned death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal– on death row following his conviction at a 1982 trial deemed unfair by Amnesty International, the European Parliament, the Japanese Diet, Nelson Mandela, and many others. Abu-Jamal’s sentence of execution was first “overturned” by a federal court in December, 2001, and during the next ten years, he was never transferred from death row at the level five supermax prison, SCI Greene, in rural western Pennsylvania. Shortly after the DA’s announcement in early December, Mumia Abu-Jamal, now 57 years old, was transferred to SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, PA, 100 miles from Philadelphia. Once there, it was expected that he would be released from solitary confinement and transferred into general population where he would finally have contact visits and generally less onerous conditions. However, he was immediately placed in “Administrative Custody,” in SCI Mahanoy’s “Restrictive Housing Unit” where his conditions of isolation and repression are now in many ways more extreme than they were on death row. Presently at SCI Mahanoy, Mumia Abu-Jamal is shackled around his ankles and wrists whenever he is outside his cell, even to the shower and during already restricted visits– where he is already behind Plexiglas; Before going to the yard he is subject to strip searches before and after the visit; He is only allowed bits of paper to write notes on, with a rubber flex pen, and

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four books (no shelves); No access to news reports; Letters delayed; Glaring lights on 24 hours a day; Only one brief phone call to his wife and one to an attorney; No access to adequate food or commissary, and more. In the first week of January, at Abu-Jamal’s request, supporters began a campaign directed at the PA Secretary of Corrections, SCI Mahanoy, and DA Seth Williams, demanding that AbuJamal be immediately transferred to the general population. The National Lawyers Guild (for whom Abu-Jamal serves as the Vice President) has released a statement and created an online petition demanding his transfer to general population. Furthermore, Abu-Jamal has asked for supporters to not

just call for his release from the hole, but to challenge the very practice of solitary confinement and what are called in Pennsylvania “Restricted Housing Units.” Supporting AbuJamal’s call to action, the Pennsylvania-based prison-activist organization called Human Rights Coalition explains that “Mumia may be in solitary, but he is not alone. The PA Department of Corrections holds approximately 2,500 people in solitary confinement on any given day, many of them for years at a time.” Hans Bennett is an independent multi-media journalist and co-founder of Journalists for Mumia ( www.abu-jamal-news. com ).

SPORTS BILL: A YEAR AND STILL COUNTING

he current situation of the Indian cricket team holds resemblance to any public company that has delivered consistently under its current leadership, but has witnessed an embarrassing reversal of fortunes over the last couple of quarters. The stock market has run out of patience and share holders want a complete overhaul of the organization. But there ends the similarities with a professionally run public company. After all, how can you expect professionalism in the day-to-day workings of BCCI? Sports Minister, Ajay Maken, has been digging his heels over bringing professionalism and transparency in the entire sporting system in the country for a year now. His proposed Sports Bill, which is yet to find takers from all sports quarters will complete a year in the pipeline in February. While the BCCI has found support from the IOA and other federations in its rejection of the bill, the bill has been backed by top athletes such as Saina Nehwal, Jeev Milkha Singh, Vijender Singh among others. Welcoming provisions in the bill include

CURRENT AFFAIRS

bringing the National Sport Federations under the ambit of the RTI and limiting the age and tenure of the office bearers, 25% quota for sportspersons in the National Federations. Former athletes like PT Usha and Pullela Gopichand have constantly voiced their concern over the sporting administration in the country which has forever resembled a ‘friends and family’ business. The bill

was initially rejected in the cabinet of ministers by the likes of Sharad Pawar, Farooq Abdullah, Vilasrao Deshmukh among others. Need we say more? With a year having already passed and in present circumstances, it seems highly unlikely that the bill shall be passed any time soon or passed at all. And as for the Indian fans, just keep praying.

Etta James ( 1 9 3 8 - 2 0 1 2 )

ART POPULI

ome February, the month of the 84th Academy Awards, and Hollywood will be all about its stars, their expectations, anxieties and of course, the red carpet. As the who’s who of Screenland get ready with their predictions for the most prestigious awards in the industry, it’s just nearly impossible to look beyond Michel Hazanavicius’s ‘The Artist’. In times when the Scorseses, the Speilburgs and the Camerons are welcoming the three dimensional future, Hazanavicius has remarkably reversed the motion to embrace the golden past. In ‘The Artist’, Michel has created a black and white, largely silent comedy that’s unlike anything audiences will find outside of Classic Turner movies. It’s undoubtedly

Farewell

one of the most entertaining movies of 2011, and a brave one too. ‘The Artist’ has picked up audience awards in almost every festival it has been played. And the key to its success so far has been the story’s lightheartedness. ‘The Artist’ should not be mistaken to be just a mere nostalgia even though it is set in Hollywood of the 20s. It is actually a contemporary tale of how a dedicated employee of the industry is squeezed out by technological advances. Jean Dujardin stands out as the silent star, George Valentin, using every tool except voice to express and convey a wealth of emotions. As critics are debating how high ‘The Artist’ can climb in the Oscars race, one analyst tweeted, “Hazanavicius’s love letter to Old Hollywood should play to the Academy the way milk plays to kittens.”

Famous for hits such as “At Last”, “Tell Mama”, Etta James is fondly remembered as having bridged the void between rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Winner of six Grammys.

Nikhat Kazmi ( 1 9 5 8 - 2 0 1 2 )

Popularly remembered for her Saturday film reviews in The Times of India, Nikhat Kazmi was a senior correspondent and a respected film critic who also penned five books including the ‘Times Movie Guide’.

Homai Vyarawalla ( 1 9 1 3 - 2 0 1 2 )

Commonly known as “Dalda 13”, Homai Vyarawalla is remembered as India’s first lady photojournalist. The Padma Vibhushan awardee was a Gandhian at heart and her favourite subject was Jawaharlal Nehru.

Johnny Otis ( 1 9 2 1 - 2 0 1 2 )

Singer, musician, composer, percussionist… Johnny Otis was a jack of all trades and arguably, master of all. He was commonly referred to as the “Godfather of Rhythm and Blues”.

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COLUMN: THE TAKE

WHERE THE WISHES WERE HORSES… By Sayan Bhattacharya

t was November last year that India witnessed its first flash mob in Mumbai at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Station. A group suddenly broke into a jig and in no time hundreds were dancing to oh mohe rang de basanti. Someone uploaded it on YouTube and it started trending on twitter thanks to Beti B’s father and soon the video went viral. Fun it was! A welcome break from the sameness of the daily grind! Now every city worth its name (that is to live upto expectations of being the next Singapore) has its flash mob! A fad it is but not just fun anymore. From promoting films (read ‘Don 2’ to Dhanush’s ‘Three’) to reality shows like ‘Dance India Dance’, the marketing wizards are milking the flash mob craze dry! Soon products will be launched in malls using this-and let’s use the word finally- gimmick! And that’s where the oft asked question begs attention… Is today’s popular medium or culture for that matter, only meant for instant gratification, either for light hearted entertainment or for self promotion? Some might talk of the Jan Lokpal campaign and how effectively it used the social networking sites to drum up support but amping up support by feeding on the middle class’s apathy with anything political is not same as negotiating the multiple realities of a plural society. And that’s the lament! What are our causes, our motivations? Well the questions will keep mounting with more Youtube videos and with every new fad that catches on and so no questions for now! Rather some wishful thinking…

What if a flash mob comprising school kids, enter any of the roll call sessions of Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee? Imagine Didi hauling up sundry industrialists and invoking the “potentiality” of Bengal and how it is the gateway of the “northeastern” and suddenly these school kids rush to the front of the podium and start laughing in unison…their hands bearing posters that say, “We want to live” or “Will our hospitals only remain mortuaries for babies?” Or a group of farmers suddenly dance to Indian Ocean’s Des mera rang rez re babu from ‘Peepli Live’ at any of the election rallies of Rahul Gandhi in Uttar Pradesh, the moment he starts on how foreign investment in retail will do a whale of a good for farmers. Or a group of tribals

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break into a five star hotel seminar on hunger and do their routine. Ok, granted the idea is absurd! Why should children be allowed into an economic summit or why will the Z plus security of India’s PM in waiting allow some ‘deranged’ farmers to dance when a hapless thousand are waiting for pearls of wisdom from their leader? But isn’t this wishful? And isn’t it absurd when a CM goes for film premieres while scores of babies die in hospitals? Or the Election Commission spends public money to cover up grotesque statues to prove that they were never there! If Coke can talk of ummeed wali asha, then why not some wistful flash dancing? The point is, amid so much pointlessness, will we learn to engage with our reality and produce works that question the status quo? Nothing’s wrong with Kolaveri Di or the millions of hits it has got but when you see a Beygairat Brigade (Shameless Brigade), a little known pop band in Pakistan produce a song like ‘Meri Maa ne pakaay aalu aande” that lampoons everyone from the military establishment to the zealots, from Nawaz Sharif to Imran Khan and all that not in the garb of convoluted lyrics but using a catchy tune and simple everyday words, you wonder what’s amiss in our seemingly free society! And yes this song is a Youtube rage too. But this is not to say interesting works do not happen here. Great journals are produced, songs informed with our sociopolitical realities are written but the point is where is mainstream acceptance? Political need not be boring! Need that be reiterated in the country of Balraj Sahni, Sombhu Mitra, Rittick Ghatak and so many others?

COLUMN: COUNTRY COUSINS

THE OTHER SIDE...

The transition from shahtoosh to pashmina has been one ﬁlled with grinding poverty, lack of funds and lots more for Taufeeq and thousands like him. Subir Ghosh reports.

he dark, dingy room from which weaver Taufeeq Ahmed operates is tell-tale. It is crammed to the last inch. There’s barely any leg space for him, leave alone his occasional visitors. The room is poorly lit, and will never provide you with a whiff of fresh air. Taufeeq’s weather-beaten face belies his age. The thick glasses wear heavy as he leans into his loom, and he does not have to make up a face to brood. He looks every bit a man resigned to his fate. Taufeeq does not look impoverished, but he’s not making hay either. He’s subsisting. There’s another loom in the room, one that stays squeezed in the space bang opposite Taufeeq. But this one’s deserted. No one’s used this loom for months, maybe years. Downstairs, Taufeeq’s sibling Tariq runs a grocery shop from a room that opens out into the narrow lane outside in Srinagar’s Downtown area. Their family is one of weavers

– ones who wove shahtoosh shawls. Today, Taufeeq weaves pashminas. Tariq has given up. It’s been close to 10 years since the life of this family, like many others, was thrown out of gear. In May 2002, the Jammu and Kashmir government outlawed shahtoosh production, bringing its laws at par with Indian and international laws that prohibited trade in shahtoosh products. The Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), which had lobbied hard for the ban on shahtoosh, notes on its website, “The ban however came at a price. Overnight, about 15000 shahtoosh workers who depended on shahtoosh production for their livelihood, were turned into criminals. About 70 per cent of this workforce comprised women, many of them conflict widows in a state affected by civil and political unrest. They either faced unemployment or had to illegally continue their respective roles in the tiered production process of making shahtoosh fabric.” February 2012

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WTI launched a rehabilitation project aimed at providing the alternative livelihood of weaving pashminas to the skilled workers in order to prevent illegal shahtoosh production and trade. There are some workers who have benefited. And there are those like our siblings who haven’t. Tariq gave up weaving pashmina shawls after a while because the investments were high and the returns paltry and far too spread out. Almost all houses in the locality are directly or indirectly into pashmina weaving. And they all have the same litany of woes. Not far away, Ghulam Mohammad Shaikh and two of his family members work on sifting pashmina wool. “We can’t even make Rs 150 a day,” he cribs. Ghulam has a point there. On an average, he needs 3.5 kg of pashmina wool that comes from Ladakh. He has to ferret out Rs 15,000 for a kilo. This has to be paid up in cash, upfront. There are no loans from any quarter, and workers need to buy the wool if they want to make a living. Depending on the intricacy of the weaving, a shawl can take anything between a few weeks and a number of months to complete. And only then do the returns trickle in. Tariq thought this was not worth the trouble. He looks only slightly less morose than his elder brother, and yet his eyes light up when you speak to him. “Yes, there’s probably not that much money to be made from my shop. But, at least, something keeps flowing into the household.” The soft-spoken Taufeeq, however, carries on. But he has a reason for doing this. “There’s nothing else that I am good at,” he simply mutters, taking that rare break from his weaving.

He has already paid a heavy price. Shawl-weaving is not just an art, it is also exacting labour. The craft needs utmost concentration, and the work cannot be left midway through. A phase of the shawl has to be complete before you can even heave a sigh. This held true for shahtoosh, this is equally true of pashmina. It’s little wonder that Taufeeq has failing eyesight. For all pashmina weavers who still practice the craft, it is a story of being caught between the devil and the deep sea. On one hand you can barely eke out a living with no helping hand being offered by the government, and on the other your health takes a beating. The lanky, spirited Showkat who takes this writer through the maze of lanes in Downtown, is a producer of shawls, and has many weavers working with him. “It can’t possibly go on like this, for ever,” he shakes his head. “Workers have been left in the lurch, left to fend for themselves.” If the state of workers is not bad enough, worse news comes in the form of the fake pashmina shawls that are manufactured in the Punjab towns of Ludhiana and Jalandhar. Genuine pashmina shawls are expensive, and the cheap ones rake in the moolah elsewhere in India. Kashmir’s handmade pashmina was awarded the Geographical Indication (GI) of Origin label in 2008. But this means nothing unless the government pursues it. In other words, not only is pashmina-weaving an expensive and exacting process, selling them is a pain as well. As of now, for those who weaved shahtoosh yesterday and do pashmina today, there seems no way out.

Overnight, about 15000 shahtoosh workers who depended on shahtoosh production for their livelihood, were turned into criminals. About 70 per cent of this workforce comprised women, many of them conﬂict widows in a state affected by civil and political unrest. They either faced unemployment or had to illegally continue their respective roles in the tiered production process of making shahtoosh fabric

Tariq at his store, (Right) Taufeeq at his loom. All photos by the columnist. 14 kindle india

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WHY THIS HULLABALOO? In spite of the fact that so many politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats have been or are cooling their heels in jail, corruption continues to remain the foremost issue on the country’s imagination. Paranjoy Guhathakurta explains the apparent contradiction.

ever before in the history of independent India have so many once-influential politicians, businesspersons and bureaucrats spent – in certain cases, still spending - time behind bars on corruption charges. Yet, the current United Progressive Alliance government is widely perceived as being packed with people with flexible ethics. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s personal integrity has never been questioned, but he is also perceived as the head of a government, who chose to turn a blind eye to the corrupt practices of many, including some of his Cabinet colleagues. Corruption in India is as old as corruption itself. Why then has a succession of stories on corruption in high places been hogging headlines in newspapers and magazines, determining topics tackled by television anchors, paralyzing Parliament, and dominating discourse in political circles? Why is 16 kindle india

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corruption suddenly the favourite subject of discussions across the length and breadth of the world’s largest democracy – in the rarified confines of cocktail parties to the bustle of bazaars and street-corners, in the air-conditioned homes of the affluent to the hovels of the proletariat working in factories and farms? The demand for the expeditious enactment of a new law to set up an effective anti-graft authority in the form of a Lok Pal gained ground precisely on account of the perception that the government was not doing enough to curb corruption in high places. This demand for a Lok Pal will continue to attract the imagination of large sections of Indians although our MPs have dilly-dallied and the movement led by Anna Hazare has evidently lost a lot of momentum. The Lok Pal bill that was passed by Lok Sabha may meet a fate similar to the bill to reserve seats for women in legislatures which was passed by

OPINION

the Rajya Sabha in March 2010. Here’s a roll call of some of the more important politicians who are currently in jail or have spent time in jail in recent months: Andimuthu Raja, former Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, three Rajya Sabha MPs, K. Kanimozhi (DMK), Suresh Kalmadi (Congress) and Amar Singh (formerly with the Samajwadi Party), former Chief Minister of Karnataka, B.S. Yeddyurappa of the Bharatiya Janata Party and former Chief Minister of Jharkhand, Madhu Koda, not to mention former Karantaka Minister for Tourism, Youth Affairs and Infrastructure Development, Gali Janardhana Reddy. A glance at the names of those accused in the second generation (2G) telecommunications spectrum scam would add to the list of luminaries who are or have been in judicial custody: Siddharth Behura, former Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, R.K. Chandolia, former Private Secretary to A. Raja, Swan Telecom promoters, directors and their associates Shahid Usman Balwa, Asif Balwa and Rajeev Agarwal, DB Realty promoter Vinod Goenka, Unitech’s Managing Director, Sanjay Chandra, Sharad Kumar of Kalaignar Television and Bollywood film producer, Karim Morani. The nexus between business and politics was never out in the open as it is in this scam. It is being grudgingly acknowledged by even the most ardent votaries of the policies of economic liberalization that the country has followed over the last two decades that crony capitalism has become rampant. An important reason why Indian-style oligarchs – yes, that’s how one prominent head of a multinational corporation based in Mumbai publicly describes some prominent Indian industrialists – have flourished is on account of poor regulatory mechanisms that have been manipulated by the politician-businesspersonbureaucrat nexus. Corruption has not spared any section of Indian society: the military, the judiciary and even the media which is (ironically) supposed to be exposing corruption. The government has dragged its feet in combating corruption. While the BJP has been harping about bringing back the wealth illegally stashed away in Swiss bank accounts by Indians, the government has deliberately kept the Mauritius

route wide open to facilitate the laundering of black money. The government has also consciously allowed participatory notes to be used in stock-exchange transactions by foreign institutional investors which help conceal the source of funds coming into the country. Indians in general – and perhaps Hindus in particular – have a rather nuanced view of corruption. Most Indians readily distinguish between the “more corrupt” and the “less corrupt”, between the one who steals a carrot or a radish (by uprooting the entire plant) and one who steals a brinjal (after leaving a few behind hanging on the plant for its owner) and especially between the “corrupt and efficient” and the “corrupt and inefficient”. Consider an example from the recordings of phone conversations of corporate lobbyist Nira Radia that were made by the Income Tax Department and recently leaked to the media. In one particular conversation, Tarun Das, the former executive head of the Confederation of Indian Industry, one of the most powerful associations of businesspersons in the country, after describing Kamal Nath, the former Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways as “Mr Fifteen Per Cent”, was heard saying that he was preferable to his predecessor who took as much as his successor but did not ensure that highways were built on time. Mr Das, of course, profusely apologized to Mr Nath subsequently for the “loose talk” he had indulged in during an interview. But the overall scenario is not uniformly bleak. The Right to Information Act is proving to be an important tool in the hands of sections of the media and civil society activists who are fighting against corruption. Within the judiciary as well, there are many upright judges who are concerned about corruption in their midst and are firmly of the view that the criminal justice system in the country can – and should - be reformed expeditiously. Corruption is a phenomenon that goes way beyond individual greed. It has much to do with transparency and accountability in the political, economic and social life of a nation. A small outfit like Wikileaks has shaken the might of the most powerful establishment on the planet, the government of the United States of America. The democratic uprising against corrupt regimes in North Africa and West Asia hold the promise of becoming defining moments in contemporary human history. India cannot be isolated from these winds of change. February 2012

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HALF THE SKY A writers’ forum for women has come as a beacon of hope for thousands of unheard voices in Assam. It’s not only a platform for unpublished works but for celebrating womanhood. Discovers Teresa Rehman.

rue, a writer cannot be created but an atmosphere for intellectual development can be. On what has been an exceptionally arduous journey, a petite lady Sheela Barthakur has been spearheading a “silent cultural revolution” among women in Assam. When she had initiated the Sadou Asom Lekhika Samaroh Samiti (a women’s literary forum) several years ago, few people understood what she was up to. She recalls how, in the early 70s, she was turned down when she had requested the Asom Sahitya Sabha for a berth for women in a youth programme it was organising. Shortly thereafter, in 1974, Barthakur, then a lecturer at Darrang College, made a proposal to a 18 kindle india

small gathering at Tezpur for a separate literary organisation for women. This was the germ from which the Samiti evolved, going on to become the pioneering organisation it is today, with a long list of accomplishments to its credit. The movement, which had started with just two members, now has more than 60,000 members in over 208 branches of the organisation all over Assam. It also has branches in Calcutta, Shillong, Delhi and Dimapur. The Samiti has attained immense popularity because it has not confined itself only to the women writers who have already carved a niche for themselves. The forum encourages women even in remote villages to express themselves, be it through a

February 2012

poem, a letter, a story or a small speech at a public gathering. It’s more a forum where a woman can discover herself. The Samiti has motivated women in the different branches to initiate their own publications with local financial support. The various units of the Samiti work in a democratic manner, which is a unique phenomenon in the country. The common meeting grounds for its members have been its more than 21 state-level conferences held so far. In each of these sessions, they try to deal with the socio-economic problems of the women of the area. At each of these, hundreds of women camp in local schools and colleges and participate in the reading sessions, seminars and book fairs, the Samiti organises. In what can

COLUMN: THE SEVENTH SISTER

be called a rare sense of sisterhood, these women throng the annual sessions and engage in lively discussions, debates and deliberations. Jaya Choudhury, a member said, “I seem to have imbibed a new sense of empowerment and discovered a new self by participating in these sessions. Earlier, I was very reticent and could never mix with people. I used to write poems but never had the guts to acknowledge them in public. Now I have started giving public lectures and even read out my poems in front of a group of interested readers.” During these annual sessions, the Forum also tries to usher in social changes in the lives of women. Barthakur recalls an unpleasant incident during their session at Barpeta in 1988. “We had gone to the satradhikar of Barpeta satra with a petition to allow women to enter the main temple premises which had been banned to us for ages. But, the temple authorities incited a group of women to physically assault us,” she says. Lekhika, the mouthpiece of the samiti, has helped create many new women

writers. The Samiti has edited 15 editions of the Lekhika, and has carried biographies of several women writers who have almost sunk into oblivion. The Samiti also has to its credit the editing and compilation of the complete works of three eminent women writers — Nalini Bala Devi, Dharmeswari Devi Baruani and Sneha Devi. However, the Samiti’s landmark publication is the four-volume ‘Lekhikar Jibani’, chronicling Assam’s women writers from the 15th century to the present. Gathering the material for this was often an uphill task because, as Barthakur points out, “people till the 19th and even the 20th centuries did not think it worthwhile to chronicle the lives and preserve the works of these writers.” They often had to ravage through old trunks and boxes to find the writings by the prolific women writers of that era. The family members of these women were oblivious to the hidden talent of these women writers and did not seem to show keen interest in preserving their works either.

The Samiti has also been actively involved in campaigns for women’s rights, and its members actively react to the state’s social and political problems. Says Leena Deka, who is the Vice President of the Samiti’s Nalbari chapter, “We hold monthly meetings where we organise reading sessions for budding writers. We also provide flood relief and organise protest rallies against atrocities on women.” The Forum has also been trying to usher in peace through the power of the pen. After a horrific bomb blast triggered by the banned outfit United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), killed 10 school children and 3 women on Independence Day in Dhemaji in 2004, the town’s branch of the Samiti brought out a volume of writings in tribute to the slain. Samiti member Binita Garodia, who is the principal of the Dhemaji Girls’ High School says, “It was our way of finding solace, both for ourselves as well as for others. We have tried to discover a new way of talking about non-violence.”

The movement, which had started with just two members, now has more than 60,000 members in over 208 branches of the organisation all over Assam. It also has branches in Calcutta, Shillong, Delhi and Dimapur. The forum encourages women even in remote villages to express themselves, be it through a poem, a letter, a story or a small speech at a public gathering February 2012

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Valleeward

A WHITER SHADE OF PALE

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Power disruption despite mega hydel projects, unaccounted for deaths and to add to that the bitter coldâ&#x20AC;Ś Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal charts out yet another saga of darkness.

COLUMN: VALLEEWARD

“Don’t tell my father I have died,” he says, and I follow him through blood on the road and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners left behind, as they ran from the funeral, victims of the firing. From windows we hear grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall on us, like ash. Black on edges of flames, it cannot extinguish the neighbourhoods, the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers. Kashmir is burning…” (Agha Shahid Ali in ‘I see Kashmir from Delhi at midnight’)

en years after Kashmir’s world famous poet Agha Shahid Ali died, and almost two decades after he penned down these lines, snow in his Valley continues to fall on its people like ash… white like the lies, black like the despair… Amidst covers of snow and layers of official lies, the anger stemming from killing of a teenager in the Valley’s remote Boniyar town by CISF (Central Industrial Security Force) refuses to get buried. The dazzling snow which has halted everything in its cruel spurt, coupled with power black outs, may have quieted down the voices for a while in terms of street protests and strike calls but statements, discussions and the internet remain abuzz with everything that went into the making of the killing and its unjustifiable defence.

In the first week of January, Altaf Ahmed Sood, a 12th class student, was shot dead by CISF personnel guarding the Uri hydro-electric project, when he came out to join protests in the area against frequent power curtailments in the face of bitter cold weather in a period known in local parlance as Chilla-iKalan (grandman frost). The incident exposed two things and also resulted in protests at two levels. One is the usual fare of demand for action against uniformed killers, juxtaposed against the official side of confusion and concocted stories. The second is the demand for better power system and a fairer share for Jammu and Kashmir in all power agreements. In recent months, a debate is fast assuming importance in both the civil society and the political circles that Jammu and Kashmir stands disadvantaged in all the power sharing agreements with the Centre, prompting even the government of the state to rake up the demand with the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) of re-takeover of the power projects by the state. The Boniyar killing has brought to spotlight the agreements inked by successive state governments, deemed unfair. Bearing the brunt of this disaffection and anger is the NHPC as the main villain, almost as villainous as the CISF men who gunned down Altaf. Of its generation capacity of 5,295 MW, the NHPC draws 1,680 MW from Jammu and Kashmir alone, which is believed by many to be a case of exploitation, prompting even the power minister Taj Mohi-u-Din to recently equate NHPC with East India Company. The debate had begun building up months before Altaf was shot down. The NHPC has begun to be painted as the Enemy Number 1, as far as the power woes of the people of the state go, though for years power shortage has inspired politicians to invoke a sense of victimhood on basis of the unfair Indus Water Treaty, by which Pakistan has exclusive

rights over J&K’s three rivers - Jhelum, Chenab and Indus, while India got the right for the exclusive use of Punjab’s Sutlej, Beas and Ravi. Under the treaty, J&K has only limited rights to build projects to fulfill its energy needs. The debate has been sparked in civil society by NGOs like the Kashmir Centre for Social and Development Studies (KCSDS), which holds frequent seminars and programmes to generate awareness about the injustice to J&K due to power sharing agreements with NHPC, which offers a royalty of 12 to 24 percent of the generation to J&K, as against the 50:50 sharing basis in many other states of the country. J&K is dependent on the Centre for funding the construction of the hydro-electric projects, and that is why NHPC comes into picture. However, after the projects are completed, NHPC bags a lion’s share of the power generated, leaving J&K poorer and exploited, J&K’s share having trickled down from some of the earlier projects like Uri I, giving the state a 33 percent share, to only 12 percent from Baglihar. A major chunk of the Prime Minister’s J&K reconstruction economic plan package of Rs 23,000 crores is allocated to the construction of more power projects. But after their completion, it remains to be seen how much share J&K would eventually get. The gradually building up hype against NHPC, especially after Altaf ’s killing, seems to resemble the familiar story of campaigns against central security forces accused of large scale human rights abuse. The Boniyar killing is a glaring example. It is the first time that CISF, a non counter insurgency related security agency, has been accused of the killing. The CISF officers, however, have begun trying to take cover under Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which does not include it. The state’s politicians, including the chief minister, have sounded promising and have been quick in condemning the Boniyar killing and ensuring justice, as they always do when the violators are central security forces as the onus of protecting the accused lies with New Delhi, and not the state government. Compare this to the 130 killings during the five month long public agitation of 2010. Most of the killings were at the hands of the Jammu and Kashmir police personnel, against whom, more than a year later, cases have not even been registered. The twin protests for justice in Boniyar killing and the other for reconsidering power sharing agreements with NHPC expose how both can be used within the state to create a popular jargon against New Delhi and its agencies. But they also demonstrate how the real control comes from political authority in Delhi itself – whether it comes to ensuring human protection or providing basic amenities. A visibly controlled political authority in the state and its equally controlled mainstream opposition may be quick in joining the bandwagon of campaigns for justice or a better deal in basic amenities. But is New Delhi willing to even seriously consider? In this freezing cold, while the snow gets bloodied with the killing of boys like Altaf, will this blood allow the resurrection of a more purposeful and result oriented campaign? As Agha Shahid writes, “… and when we – as if from ash – ascend/ into the cold.”

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COVER STORY

L E F T ALIGNED A N D JUSTIFIED

CONTRIBUTORS

Gautam Navlakha Amit Sengupta Saswat Pattanayak Mukherjee P

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At this juncture when the CPI(M) has solicited the public’s opinion on the future policy formulation of the party and how it tackles democratic politics in India, we assess and re-assess the ‘left’ in the present idiom. What follows is not a discourse in semantics, dogma and jargon but sharp shards of a lived truth.

INTERVIEWS

Irfan Habib, historian Ashis Nandy, social theorist

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Accompanying photographs of Debabrata Mukherjee - the legendary artiste who remained a silent activist towards promoting a world where Marx is a practising worldview, not a theoritical discourse. The photographs are from the archives of Suvendu Chatterjee.

FIVE FINGER SALUTE WITH MY LEFT HAND: ONE LETTER, A POEM, AN ADMISSION, AN OBIT AND A POSTSCRIPT

By Mukherjee P.

Letter to Chandrasekhar Prasad. Chandu, as he was popularly called, was gunned down in Siwan-March 31, 1997 with another activist Shyam Narayan Yadav.

Dear Chandu, It was difficult to remember that day-March 31, 1997. It is difficult to remember such days. Or maybe it is easy to remember. Every bullet has a secret name. Every bullet has a secret composition and a fairly predictable destination dissenter’s stomach protestor’s legs talking too much is a crime… talking too much Siwan was a bigger crime. On July 11, 1997 at the Ramabai Colony in Ghatkopar-the bullets found the stomach and the legs. But on March 31, it found a new kind of destination. I knew you. Like many. How much did I know you? Lesser than comrades who moved on to their usual business of “managing” revolution and their “revolutionary lives.” 24 kindle india

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Remember Chandu. We had a common topic of discussion. Gorakh Pandey. Those last tortured days of the poet who took his own life. Was Gorakh’s mental landscape the result of a misplaced ideology or misplaced faith in comrades who used ideology more as a shield and less as a tool to engage with people? You had your logic. That all of us are torn like Gorakh. All of us have this moth-eaten conscience that more often than not malfunctions. All of us are this Kafkaesque character turning to giant beetle. And inspite and despite this churn, we are committed to a basic ideology that power to the people is different from power to the elites. I know how the steak knife is sharpened and how the little blood clot forms at the tip of this knife I know how blasts rip apart our consciousness how bodies fall like nine-pins how dead bodies roll on the floor get collected in a heap before you throw a white sheet over them I know how we die how we eat splinters as they explode and implode how bombs enter and change the nature of our gullet I know that’s why I bleed We all know that’s why we all bleed But there was one thing that lit up those cold winters. Those endless chais of Ganga dhaba. The commonality of sharing the fact that activism is now more of a bio-data, more of a sixth pay commission nirvana, more of a marketing of one’s subaltern-ness and less people-centric. Even your worst critics (let me hazard a guess) would admit that here was someone to whom campus activism was not filling up A-4 size printouts that would be attested with post-doc proposals. That… here was a guy who wanted to build that elusive bridge between the marginalised of his state and the so-called educated elite who would market that marginalisation to write a 600-page book but would never do anything more than that. Remember that debate… yes the one about that eternal dilemma about communism-of-the-pamphlet which was so different than the communism-of-the-field. About the real Marxist debates and the surreal Marxist diatribes. About our collective agreement how the so-called Marxist coalitions in power can be so anti-people and of how at times they co-opt the same forces of globalization who they vehemently oppose. Chandu, This was a little before the Special Economic Zone, and a little before Nandigram, and a little before complex realities becoming multiplex realties this death is not another death let’s call it killing raw skin brushes against the sky open wounds does not want to be covered I know how the steak knife is sharpened how the edge drips with blood how blood takes its own shape how we realise that we bleed that I bleed why hot blood is hot and cold blood is cold Chandu, what do we do now we are a divided house... on one hand there is this classic question about Marxist patriarchs talking about inevitable “capital” realities, on the other hand is a national newspaper with a card-holding editor trying every trick in the book to justify Nandigram, about ministers who justify state-sponsored-silence-as-the-partymen-run-amok-by-saying-that-for-every-tit-there-is-a-tat we are a divided house Chandu, because the representatives of a classless society are so steeped into their own hierarchy constructs that we know that their February 2012

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Hegel-Chomsky-Chaosophy-Adorno-Fuchik-Muzaffar Ahmed-Bankim Mukherjee-Trilochan’s poetry spouting lips pay no real tribute to these brilliant minds...these are merely chutzpah-type-banter to digress from the issue …..and out there somebodies become some bodies... motionless... still... of stone tablets that proclaim that you once lived. Tell me Chandu, tell me what should I do as a theatre person? After Nellie, sentences were never straight, after 1984 they became curved, after Gujarat they became crooked, after Khairlanji they became grammatically incorrect with disorienting imageries and a clutch of orphaned sentences that float mid-air. Yes Chandu, I am helpless...the sentences don’t talk to me anymore... the sentences that rebel... each phrase slugging it out with another... and there are these other errant ones... those sentences that fight the spell-check, those ones that rebel against the dictionary and the lost ones... the hacked ones... the sentences that meander, the sentences that become rant, primitive shouts, post-modern posturings, sociologists speaking about the nature of violence without seeing how a riot-hit colony looks, behaves, and dies. Chandu, remember those days of 1996... numerous evenings were spent discussing those days... that moth eating you inside when you left National Defence Academy, your Jhumri Talaiyya days... your tryst with Patna University, those vice-president/ president years at JNUSU. Your numerous campus anecdotes of the 1993-95 period, that brief romance with Seoul and that conviction that Siwan cannot remain Shahabuddin’s fiefdom… that Siwan deserves more... Chandu, you were getting restless… like Gorakh did... he chose death... you chose life... blood bandage; bandaged blood. At the relative anonymity of the drawing rooms and virtual chat-rooms we still shed crocodile tears, smile crocodile smiles and write small cheques for crocodile solidarity funds. Chandu, I am just about to raise a silent toast to my shamelessness... that Maybelline-Marxists’ or Revlon evolution is in that, beyond their theoretical bullshit they don’t know why Prakash Jadav writes (in his poem ‘Under Dadar Bridge’): “ ...I piss in the bastard gutter which has links with high class sewage water.” Newer graves are being found… Haren Pramaniks’s mangled body. The number of Indian millionaires stood at 83000 in 2005 and increased by 20.5 per cent to 100015 in 2006 and during 1995-2003, the volume of Foreign Direct Investment in the world economy amounted to $5.8 trillion and of the cross border business mergers and coming together to the tune of $4.5 trillion and that male fairness cream market in India is growing. Chandu, there are many of us walking in Sangrur, Kalinganagar and Nandigram and you are walking with us... beyond partylines... beyond campus bio-data politcs and beyond those unending power-points of air-conditioned offices and worthless paper activism... of these so-called elite Marxists. Chandu, real Marx says question... and we are still ringing lost chimes of lost bells of a lost freedom It was difficult to remember that day-March 31, 1997. It is difficult to remember such days. Or maybe it is easy to remember. With warm revolutionary regards. Mukherjee.P

A Cheran poem: You can write on a wall with fish heart, because of the phosphorous. They eat it. There are shacks like that down along the river. I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you. Replace the door when you leave, it says. Now you tell me how wrong that is, how long it glows. Tell me He arose laden with doubt as to how he should begin. He looked back at the bed where the grindstone lay. He looked out at the world, the most famous experimental prison of its time. Beyond the torture stakes, he could see nothing. Yet he could see. ‘Short Talk On Shelter’ (From the book ‘Short Talks’ by Anne Carson, published by Brick Books-Ontario) A few years back for a Hamara Shakespeare festival, I was exploring Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ with students of the English department and felt that Caliban is a manifestation 26 kindle india

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of your yearning (mind you, not nostalgia). Not that I felt any different before that or will feel different in future (in many cases, yes, I will, but in case of Caliban, I am fixated with the yearning bit). And in the course of looking at the word “eelam” with a cast that spoke Tamil, we discussed and incorporated Cheran’s poetry in our improvised performance text. As we rehearsed we dipped into more of his works… some were transcreated impromptu by cast members from original Tamil and of course read far more immediate than literal and faithful translations (the whole idea of translation as an act of recovery versus translation as an act of charting out a verbal roadmap of the poem-I would go for the latter). There this one poem that stayed with me. The poem that tries to understand that difference between nostalgia and yearning,

COVER STORY

between the idea of freedom and freedom itself, between that thin membrane that separates secession with self-rule, between a political ravaged landscape and the natural ravaged landscape, between fables of fear and the climate of fear, between the bloated bleached body and the baked, barbecued body, between some clever academic shit peddled by notions of a western pedagogy and the fashionable sub-altern, secular, marginalized peddling mafia who cherry pick their causes… This short performance… keeps the poem in its epicentre and explores the idea of a performer asking questions to the poem… fragments of Epitaph (Kalvettu… 1994) and Meeting and Parting (Uravum pirivum-1989) have also been used in the performance.

As I read the poem, and re-read the lines, the topography and its evocation were overwhelming. Much more than the ideas of freedom or the confines of claustrophobia (the more obvious academic reading of Cheran’s poems), what is missed is the idea of breaking free and reconnecting to the lived joys and the lived sorrows. Unfortunately, in a world of fellowship junkies, cause mongers, festival and seminar tourism… lived joy and lived sorrow seems to be neither utopia nor dystopia. Just redundant. This poem questions that redundancy. And let’s imagine in an empty space… a performer reading out…

...From those three paths ...three worlds were born From three worlds Three hundred perspectives From three hundred perspectives Three million faces (Cheran… Three paths… ‘Muundru terukkal’...2004) Let us imagine… because in this imagination wounds, womb, scars, snow flakes, faces… they all converge. They all question. Oh by the way , the poem… I am talking about. It is called ‘War’-a very short introduction (Yutham pattriya oru migach churukkamaana arimugam-1996). The poem (translated from Tamil by Sascha Ebeling) says: When you are oppressed You see the blood of tears When you are the oppressor You see the tears of blood

The admission: In a civil war the frontline is invisible, because it runs through the hearts of men. -Antoine de Saint-Exupèry Who or what is Caliban? Is he this cross between a human and an animal or a manifestation of a desire? What is that desire? It is the desire of the “other” to be counted. It is the desire of the fringe to be a part of the mainstream policy-making and the so-called mainstream sensitivity. We are identifying “traitors” all over the place. Traitors like people who legally question the government on the murder of Lasantha Wickeramatunge (in Colombo); like people who question the years of developmental apathy that led to the multiple flashpoints in Orissa, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh… and the fire that rages all along the mountains and the forests; like editors operating in the print-media who are shot dead in the north-east of India with an alarming regularity; like a marginal voice of a human rights activist arguing about the internment of 280,000 Tamils in relief camps in the north and east of Serendip, like people who question the wrist-cutting barbarity in Kalinganagar, like those who are speaking up against the plundering of the Niyamgiri mountains, like the poets who were waging war against aesthetics of the moral police, like the musicians who operate in claustrophobic set-ups where religion is invoked February 2012

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as a convenience to shoot down any possibility of artistic dissent, like an average Timorese street-fighting against the ghosts of the past... like the survivors of forgotten genocides in Malom, Mokokchung... Isn’t freedom always a story of diverse Calibans waging their own battles in south-east of Asia and trying to reclaim their narratives? Their monologues dissect; shred and slash open the super-structure and excavate the sub-text from the debris of a sponsorship-driven rhetoric. In such times, Caliban is not merely a character from William Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’. He/She/It is almost a talisman to

understand the difference between the rule of the law and the rule by the law. And in that process, even if it is wishful thinking, maybe we would finally recognise the “other” as a part of the whole and not the usual whole of the part... memories of the body grappling with the distractions of the text... memories of May 31, 1981 when more than 97,000 rare volumes and manuscripts were torched in the Jaffna Public Library and it was burnt down. Almost signalling what A. Jeyaratnam Wilson said was “the begining of systematic cultural genocide.” Memories of charred books and alphabets that fight back. In such times.

Obituary: An 86-year old blues singer passed away today. My blues riff assembly election victory, a parliamentary election defeat, a playback recording for Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s ‘Indramalati’ at died a bit with his exit. Each one of us has that one “blues” moment in our lives. For the age of 12, a seminal study in Colombia University to look some it would be a grandmother’s lullaby that permeates at the prospect of audio-visual techniques in the field of basic back into consciousness. For some it would be the shrill education, directing an interesting feature film ‘Shakuntala’ whistle of the train that brings back the bluesy feel in their in 1960, singing a range of borgeets and goalpariya folk urban heartless soundscape. For many in north-east of India with equal aplomb and when you think that this is all... he and Bangladesh and Bengal and I am sure for some others surprises you with a heart-breakingly direct english version of elsewhere, that moment of blues madness came when they Old Man River. encountered Bhupen Hazarika for the first time. Oh yes! I forgot about the blues moment. Don’t look How would you otherwise explain a life that spans an further… very recently in a film called ‘Gandhi to Hitler’ (a 28 kindle india

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COVER STORY

Hindi film), the legend sang Narsi Mehta’s Vaishanava Jana to. Personally, I have never seen a song tinged with equal measures of bhakti and blues. The voice coaxes and cajoles the notes… turns the Gujarati grand-narrative into an Assamese milieu and yet there is a south Asian feel to the melody and the improvisation (mind you not the type that needlessly showcases…) was just enough to make you think that this is Miles Davis meets Sachin Dev Burman. I am sure; we all have our list of Bhupen Hazarika favourites. Maybe Manush Masnusher jonyo or maybe Ganga or maybe the ‘Rudaali’ soundtrack. Irrespective, of your choice dip into his range and look at the melancholy in his most vibrant songs. Yes, there was a moment of madness. Fighting an election on a rightist party ticket. And losing. An avowed Left changing guard. But his return was not through the backdoor. He came back, yes, he did, more Marxist than ever. Don’t question Nirmal Verma, Howard Fast, O.V. Vijayan….what you call floundering… they call it a voyage.

rare political voices is no more. Hemanga Biswas, Kali Dasgupta have passed away, you do not get a Sahir, Maqdoom, Jan Nissar Akhtar to write lyrics for films anymore... Kabir Suman fights with ill-health, the rest of India may not even know of a brilliant Tapta album called ‘AFSPA’, the so-called alternative bands are peddling mundane lyrics… the political inside the melody has never been so wafer thin... at this crossroad, Bhupen Hazarika passing away reminds us of the near-death of political music. In some emergency ward somewhere in the country, political music is on a saline drip... breathlessly waiting to die or to fade out...or to extinguish itself soundlessly… Bhupen Hazarika’s passing away hastens the process. It still aches. It’s still the blues.

In a factory line of one hit wonders and download heroes, between musicology theories and popular taste... one of the

Postscript: My left hand is giving a five finger salute. As Marx would have said in the manifesto: …All that is solid melts into air all that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense, his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. February 2012 kindle india 29

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COVER STORY

The progressive tradition of debate and disceptation over the years, has been discouraged and subdued by the institutional left in India. Reviving this progressive discipline, a debate ensues in the next pages between comrades Saswat Pattanayak and Amit Sengupta about a ‘stalwart’ and ‘ism’ within the leftist DNA

IN DEFENCE OF STALIN By Saswat Pattanayak

he fact that Stalin needs to be defended at all is reason enough to analyze the dominant intellectual climate pervading today. He was the chief architect of the first socialist state in the world, he was the bravest general who prevented Hitler’s racist expansions, he was the primary implementor of Leninist policies aimed at empowering the masses into becoming active participants in nation-building, he was the biggest anti-capitalist voice the world has ever witnessed, the greatest anti-colonial force, and in the words of Paul Robeson, he was the “shaper of humanity’s richest future while labouring for peace and ever increasing abundance, with deep kindliness and wisdom”. For these factors alone, in this current climate of hostile capitalism reaching its highest peak, Stalin’s legacies should have been providing inspiration to the communists world over. And yet, more than the advocates of global capitalism, the prominent progressives today dissociate themselves from Stalin’s legacies. Stalin has emerged as the untouchable, the wretched, and the hated - among majority of politically aware. How did such a transformation come about? What values did he exercise during his lifetime? What threats did Stalin pose after his death? Why does he need to be defended? Was something really wrong with Stalin? Or is something really wrong with some of us in the progressive movements who refuse to identify with ‘Stalinism’? Probably an ideal starting point of analysis would be ‘Stalinism’ itself, and how it irks the orthodoxies across the political spectrum. Although he staunchly opposed this word, it becomes conveniently necessary for us as a phrase that explains two specific elements manifested in Stalin: the theoretician and the revolutionary. Political Thought: Challenging Eurocentric Marxism Orthodoxy demands strict adherence to the canonical texts, or the dominant interpretations of those. It is often argued that according to Marx, capitalistic contradictions were to pave the economic grounds for enabling socialism as the first step towards a communistic future in advanced industrialized societies world over. For such a theory to validate itself, the industrialized Germany was predicted by Marx, as the imminent battleground to cement the first communist victory. Russia, a peasant society, clearly was not a candidate. Marxists in the western world instead drew inspirations from and considered Germany’s mere

potentials in the 1920s as more revolutionary than the actual Russian working class takeover of the Czardom. And yet the dominant interpretations of Marx in our times may have too often committed the fallacies of treating humanity as a sea of static/passive subjects tuned to respond to political systems in predictable manners. Worse, for those holding the texts immutable, bringing to fore the issues of culture, media, gender, colonialism and racism might appear improbable. In the quest to theorize “true traditions of Marxism”, such interpreters might have actually overlooked the possibility that political theories are progressive only in the sense that they can be applied uniquely. For politically progressive theories to emerge effectively, it is crucial that they acknowledge the existing cultural status quo; for human compositions are diverse, their social locations are unique, and their political needs are circumstantial. While the leadership goals may be deeply rooted within the contexts of overarching ideologies, the means and tactics need to be carefully devised. Whereas Marxism as the emancipatory philosophy remains unparalleled, its usability may depend on how it is improved upon through distinctive adaptations. Detractors allege Stalin’s “Socialism in One Country” was a clear departure from Marxism. Socialism could not be established without world revolution, they say. However, such an assertion remains deeply problematic and possibly becomes anti-Marxist by virtue of its dogmatism, if at all. After all, the “world”, historically of course, meant the educated “advanced” societies of Germany and England. During 1930s, it meant that the Germans and the English were superior races even if it was to enable communism. When Stalin reiterated that Russia did not require any foreign support, he was also alluding to the racist world order that had been treating Russia as a backward peasant society. Being “lowly born” to a cobbler father in an oppressed Georgia, Stalin was an organic revolutionary. Among all the 1917 leaders, he came from the lowest strata of social hierarchy, had been educated in a racist institution that segregated the likes of him, an atheist from the start, a railroad workers organizer living dangerously, and as the one who worked the hardest among the original Bolsheviks, Stalin knew more than any of his comrades, about the state of being oppressed. “I became a Marxist because of my social position and the harsh intolerance aimed at crushing me mercilessly,” he once said. February 2012

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The ability of the colonizer to wage psychic violence requires the ability to maintain levels of poverty among the colonized while also maintaining order over their communicative potential. Stalin’s assertion that Russia, overwhelmingly a peasant society, could build socialism on her own, was drawn from his lived experiences. Condescending overtures from the western socialists he could not accept, not just from a racial location, but also because Stalin, an ardent student of nationalism and colonialism, simply could not trust those who desired for western interventions/cooperation irrespective of their leftist tendencies. If Trotsky, hailing from a privileged background, formerly a Menshevik critic of Lenin, and forever the friend of the western liberals, was in charge of defending Bolshevism from the civil wars, he was clearly not doing the best. And Stalin, as Trotsky’s nemesis, and as head of the Party, he technically organized and enabled into being, demanded - and realized - not just military autonomy, but also economic autonomy for Russia. Stalin’s theory for a socialist country was only as much of a deviation as Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” from Marxist canons. And yet, why Stalin has been derided as a theorist is precisely because his deviation resulted in a pronounced antagonism towards the imperial powers of the West. His revolutionary patriotism challenged the colonial world order. His imposition of sanctions against the warmongering foreign powers posed an unprecedented dynamic. Just when his detractors wished to court the so-called educated advanced classes from across the borders in wishful thinking for a world revolution, Stalin ruthlessly succeeded in establishing socialism that embraced the lowest social strata at par, or as higher than the traditionally privileged. When Stalin’s Red Army engaged in continuous battles with the reactionary White Army, merely the names did not differ; it was destined to be the victory of the indigenous working poor against the racist coalitions. Stalin’s surge of power was not simply a Soviet affair of communist progress; it marked the beginning of a new era for oppressed people world over, a defining moment in history when the colonized subjects for the first time demonstrated to the world they could build a society free of either racist or patronizing interventions. Those who attack Stalin for “Socialism in One Country” should as well recall that if Marx proposed a theory for the working class to claim power in Germany, and if Lenin applied it uniquely to Russian situation, it was Stalin who vastly improvised upon both, and made it possible for socialism to materialize in over two-thirds of the world. It was Stalin who brought life to Marxism, made it feasible for, applicable to, and acceptable in the realms of freedom struggles, fought on behalf of communists world over against colonizing master classes in formerly enslaved continents of Asia and Africa. If Marx is relevant to this day and if communism is duly recognized as the most potent weapon against the colonialists and imperialists, it was because Stalin 32 kindle india

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exemplified Marxism as a liberating force, salvaged it from philosophical quagmires, freed it from theoretical dogmas, various determinisms, and saved it from being reduced into purely elitist academia indulgences at the Frankfurt School. Organic Revolutionary: Tackling the Imperialistic Threats Precisely because Stalin made Marx relevant for the majority of working poor in the world, he invited the unforgiving wrath of big business interests and the intellectuals alike. Anti-communism remained the prevalent ideology in the West with “Red Scare” repercussions. Any historical analysis of Stalin’s revolutionary career presents before us two contradictory schools of thoughts. Predictably enough, the accounts which exist today as “facts” are the ones that were commissioned by the Nazis, the British and the American administrations to incite anticommunism. Whether we choose to believe global capitalism’s narratives or we believe in the accounts of those that witnessed Russia through progressive lenses squarely falls within our own levels of consciousness, inquisitiveness, and political ethics; quite independent of Stalin’s life and legacies. World’s most credible journalist of the age, Walter Duranty, who represented New York Times from Moscow, won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Stalin’s Russia and yet succumbing to enormous pressure for revocation of the award. Pulitzer committee had to reevaluate his case. Turned out, there was no fraudulent reporting done by Duranty. His chief critic, Gareth Jones, circulated myths about the “Ukraine Famine” as the first major assault on Stalin’s economic policies. Jone’s version continues to be instructed world over, despite the fact he has been revealed as the Foreign Affairs Advisor to British PM, David Lloyd George, who in turn was Hitler’s admirer and collaborator. For his fictitious claims, Jones also relied upon the reports by Malcolm Muggeridge, a catholic campaigner who - only as recent as in 2010 - has also been exposed as a British spy operating for MI6. The man who validated Jones and Muggeridge happened to be world’s media baron of the day, Randolph Hearst, a former mining heir, a staunch capitalist, a devout warmonger and Hitler’s formidable supporter who claimed “Hitler was going to bring a century of peace to Europe.” Hearst’s journalism policies were so dubious that Upton Sinclair described his staffers to be “willing, by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous wars.” And yet Hearst went on to publish a series of anticommunist articles and a bogus famine photo submitted to him by Robert Green. Louis Fischer exposed Green’s identity as an absconder from Colorado prison, who never visited Ukraine to begin with. ‘The Nation’ weekly published “Hearst’s Russian ‘Famine’” caricaturing Green, Jones and Hearst in March of 1935, which finally ended the debate. Despite all evidence to the contrary, why Walter Duranty’s works today lies in rubbles, while “Ukraine Famine” continues to demand recognition as a premeditated Stalinist genocide is because of a book written by a political conservative Robert Conquest 15 years after Stalin’s death. Conquest documented the “Great Purge” of 1936-38 from publicly available, but limited materials in the only book of its kind, and his interpretations are today widely endorsed. As a virulent anticommunist, (a speechwriter for Thatcher, admirer of Reagan, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W Bush),

COVER STORY

Conquest interpreted Stalin’s legacy as a mere continuation of Lenin’s communism and denounced both as engaging in violent premeditated murders. Similarly in ‘Gulag Archipelago’, the only work discussing the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn, a Cossack religious elite, who condemned communism from his class position, organized against the Party, and was predictably rewarded with Nobel Prize by the West, described Stalinism as merely a consequence of Lenin’s policies of planned economy, secret services and labor camps. For Conquest, the starting point was the “Show Trials” following Sergei Kirov’s assassination. A theory was developed claiming that Germany had no role in the murder of Kirov, Stalin’s closest associate, and that he was killed by Stalin himself so that Stalin could further kill his other colleagues to consolidate power. Such absurdities were popularized as facts by none other than George Orwell who dramatized the sequences in his widely acclaimed ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’.

aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a way to discredit Stalin, while conveniently overlooking the preceding treaty of worse dimension signed by Britain with Germany as a Nazi-appeasing Munich Agreement. In matters of postwar divisions on sphere of influence, submitting to American and British dominations were quite welcomed by the West and NATO continues to flagrantly violate the UN to this day. But continuous Cold War tactics needed to be employed in fomenting dissent in the countries within Soviet Sphere. After an emphatic victory over the Nazi forces, which resulted in enormous sacrifices on part of the Soviet Union, whose 27 million communists laid down their lives (as opposed to less than half a million Americans), an ingrate West (with FDR no longer alive) refused to credit Stalin adequately. Not once during the 30 years of Civil Wars and Second World War did any “advanced society” come forward to aid the Soviet Union.

Although the “Show Trials” were meticulously recorded, and were actually attended by foreign journalists and independent observers who have attested to the acts of treason as Nazi’s “Fifth Column” interventions, Orwell was initially perceived to have simplistically treated them as secretive Stalinist purges. However, recently in 2003, Orwell was exposed as having been a motivated spy for British McCarthyism, engaging in creating a list of communists he used to befriend, with the sole aim of turning them over to the government. Orwell was the Big Brother himself and the condemnation of Stalin’s justice system needed to be declared as “Show Trials” to further his anticommunist agendas. Why Orwell’s imagination of the trials takes precedence today over firsthand accounts by American Ambassador Joseph Davies, British parliamentarian D.N. Pritt, and IPR Secretary, Edward C Carter should be no surprise.

Revolutions of the proletariat against the capitalists, as Marx predicted were not going to be romantic, idealistic, or reformist. Stalin duly inspired his successors Mao Zedong, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh to develop communism as an anti-colonial force that eventually led to replace much of the old world order. Most societies that adopted Stalinism were probably not quite capitalistic, but all of them were quite ripe for anti-colonial revolutions nonetheless. China, Vietnam, North Korea, Lao, Cuba, Egypt, Algeria, Angola, Congo, Mozambique, Czech Republic, Albania, East Germany among scores of others chose communistic futures for themselves adopting Stalinism’s strongest asset: an ability to creatively apply revolutionary tactics with an aim to ensure socialistic progress; a philosophy whose resurgence is more relevant today than ever before in history, considering the colossal oppressive world hegemony which has succeeded in sabotaging progressive imaginations.

Likewise, selective historical highlights include the non-

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AGAINST THE STALINISM OF IDEOLOGIES by Amit Sengupta 34 kindle india

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Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, The ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, The huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meows, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom. He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home. The Stalin Epigram, Osip Mandelstam Translated by WS Merwin

andelstam also wrote: “Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed.” Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder? Sent into multiple exiles and finally condemned to the concentration camps and hard labour of frozen Siberia, with Stalin taking ‘personal interest’ in his fate, poet Mandelstam sneaked out a note to his wife Nadezhda, asking for warm clothes. No one knows what happened to the note. He never got anything. Mandelstam, literally, disappeared. He died, perhaps impoverished, invisible, tortured and brutalised, cold to the bone of his skin, invisible and suffering from an unspecified illness, on December 27, 1938, without a pen to write four lines. Perhaps he was killed in cold blood. This was the fate meted out to one of the greatest Russian poets of all time, once an ardent supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, later a critic of Stalin’s totalitarianism, a legend across the literary and political spectrum and a friend of another great poet, Anna Akhmatova, who was equally hounded, exiled, demonised, with repeated attacks of character assassination; but she survived, unlike the man who died in Stalin’s Siberia. Young Bolshevik and then non-conformist, futuristic poet and icon, Vladimir Mayakovski, committed suicide, completely disillusioned by the Kafkasque nightmare of the Stalinist bureaucracy. When he was younger, he would write about the revolution in flying, luminescent prose. For him, dying and death was part of the resistance and the revolution, it was not a metaphor for suicide. Later, he was asked to write about tractors, wheels and agriculture, the great progress under Stalin’s purges, his freedom of conscience and imagination shackled, compelled to be trapped in a rat trap of censored terror. In his suicide note, he wrote in the ‘Unfinished Poem’:

And so they say “the incident dissolved” the love boat smashed up on the dreary routine. I’m through with life and [we] should absolve from mutual hurts, afflictions and spleen… There were others too. Writers and poets, their heart and soul with the revolution, embedded with eternal sacrifices and dreams, crafting new verse and prose of a new idealism, a new society carved by a new manifesto of equality, freedom, justice. But they only found a different dispensation, a negation of the Communist Manifesto, where comrades kill comrades without a moment of remorse, and the night of long knives is forever. Poet Yesenin committed suicide. Boris A Pilnyak (18941942) defied the organised terror of the Stalinist regime. He wrote a novel: the covert story of a Red Army leader who was murdered – ‘Tale of the Unextinguished Moon’. Pilnyak was picked up in 1937, falsely charged with being a spy working for the Japanese. This was a brazen lie, part of a pattern. He was shot dead in April 1938, one of the many Soviet writers and poets who were systematically eliminated in Stalin’s Great Terror of 1938-39. The Great Terror was not restricted to these two peak years only. It transcended all logic of inhumanity, time and space, geography, ideology, demography and ethnicity. Top commanders of the Red Army, top leaders of the communist party, veteran Bolshevik revolutionaries, including close comrades of Lenin, key catalysts who were in the vanguard of the October revolution, Stalin’s closest aides, ordinary members, wives, sisters and relatives, regional leaders, communists in East Europe, soldiers and members of ethnic communities, Poles and Jews, even those who returned after the great victory against fascism and the capture of Berlin, were killed en masse. Sometimes thousands were massacred in one collective exercise. Dissidents disappeared. Otherwise, they would be taken to Stalin’s personal auditorium and then eliminated after a movie show. Others were accused of being conspirators against the party, against Communism and Soviet Russia, a Trotsky loyalist, including those who killed and conspired for Stalin himself. All walls had ears. All whispers had sinister forebodings. All eliminations were inevitable. The man who would preside over a massacre would be eliminated. The army commander who lost in a front, would be eliminated. The poet who wrote a subversive poem, was also eliminated. So much so, Marshal Zukov, the legendary commander who led from the front and won several epic battles for the Red Army, the man who was the leader of the forces which defended Leningrad against Hitler’s forces, and captured Hitler’s Berlin, after defeating the fascists; the man who rode a white stallion at the Red Square in Moscow to mark the celebrations of the great victory against fascism; a close confidant of Stalin, Zukov met a ghastly fate. He was hounded, humiliated and banished, under the sinister gaze of Beria, the head of Stalin’s February 2012

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multiple octopus machinery, falsely accused of theft, ideological confusion, betrayal. This was because Stalin feared his popularity, and saw him as a rival. Several of Zukov’s top commanders were jailed, tortured, killed.

They banned or censored Dostoevysky, Akhmatova, Pushkin and Tolstoy, books written for children, ﬁlms of Eisenstein, later Tarkovsky, the writings of Bakhtin, western classical music, but the ban only resurrected all the ‘bad ideas’ into the domain of the underground, across eternity.

Even those outside Soviet Russia were not spared. Leon Trotsky, the great, non-dogmatic organiser of the Russian revolution with Lenin, in forced exile, was murdered in Mexico. And this spate of organised terror was always done in the ‘defence of Communism’. They thought if they could kill a man, they could kill the idea also. Elimination of comrades or intellectuals, of a body of work in politics or aesthetics, became the elimination of a certain history, a moment of truth, a revelation, a note of dissent. This, often, does not work. Because, ideas cannot be killed by the elimination of human beings or ideas. They will be born again, in strange, unpredictable circumstances, across the full moon, on a full tide night. Like a banned poem rolling under the tongue. They banned or censored Dostoevysky, Akhmatova, Pushkin and Tolstoy, books written for children, films of Eisenstein, later Tarkovsky, the writings of Bakhtin, western classical music, but the ban only resurrected all the ‘bad ideas’ into the domain of the underground, across eternity. It never worked in Russia or in China during the Cultural Revolution. If they had a chance, indeed, they would ban Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin also, if not Mao himself in China, as they did with Beethhoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ at Tiananmen Square in June 1984. As they do with writers, artists, bloggers, filmmakers, human rights activists in contemporary, totalitarian, capitalistcommunist China; they disappear, or are shot in cold blood, or vanish into torture chambers of Chinese prisons, their screams unheard, their ideas blocked. Exactly like the Guantanamo Bay. Exactly like Ahmednijad’s Islamistfundamentalists’ society, with hundreds tortured, jailed, raped in prisons. Like great filmmaker and pro-democracy activist Jafar Panahi, still in jail, despite international outrage. More than Stalin, this is the Stalinism

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of ideologies which share an uncanny chord. This becomes a universal principle. There is no self criticism, no collective awareness, no stream of consiousness. There is no tolerance of dissent, no alternative world-views, no difference of opinion or paradigm shifts. There is no flight of imagination. Everything is one-dimensional and dogmatic. The dialectic is dead. There is no movement of the opposites. All contrary opinions are conjectures for declaring you as an enemy. If there is no enemy, you create one. If there is no dissidence, you create dissidence. If there is life, create death. If this is not a negation of Marxism and humanism, what is? If this is not a reductionist perversion of Communism, what is? If this is the utopia for a revolution, we don’t want this revolution. That 22 million Russians died in the war against fascism, is forgotten. Great sacrifices of great revolutionaries are buried to the ground. The imagined idealism of an utopian world of equality, justice and freedom, and the infinite struggles and sufferings to achieve that, are lost in the twilight zone. What remains is this new dictatorship of terror, where a whispered word, or an imagined idea, or a note of symphony, can lead you to the gallows, or simply, with a bullet between your eyes. This is the legacy of all totalitarian regimes. And yet, this is not the legacy of true, authentic, meaningful Communism. This is not the legacy of Karl Marx or Che Guevara. This is a perversion in the name of Communism. This is the black hole of Marxism-Leninism. This is anti-Marx, anti-Lenin, anti-Che. This is Pol Pot’s poetry against the poetry of Mayakovsky and Mandelstam. These are the killing fields, against the wild meadows of beautiful Russia. This is the counter revolution against the original revolution. The destruction of a dream. Or else, the history of the world would have been written with a different colour of revolution. Not like Orhan Pamuk’s snow turning ‘Red’. But like the great communist song, Internationale, sung in a chorus, lifting into the sunshine and smell of summer, full of hope and possibilities, becoming the song of liberation, struggle and joy, on a typical May Day.

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INTERVIEW

IRFAN HABIB Amid the hurried obits of the Left in the media, Left historian Irfan Habib brings in some perspective. An interview.

If you were to chart out 3 major watershed events in the history of the Left in post independent India, what would they be? In the post-Independence history of the Communist movement, the three important events I would mark are the following: First, in 1950-51, it came to terms with how the Communist Party should work when opportunities were at last being provided for the functioning of a broadly parliamentary regime. Though the characterization of the Indian situation was still faulty, the tactics worked out were largely appropriate, and resulted in the Communists’ emergence as the leading Opposition group in the Parliament in the fifties and sixties. The second was the formation in 1964 of the CPI(M), under the confidence, in effect, that Indian Communists could combine independence of orientation with internationalism,

and should continue on path of opposition to the broadly bourgeois-landlord regime in the country. The correctness of this position was illustrated by CPI(M)’s opposition to the Emergency (1975-77), unlike the CPI. The third, I would suppose, is the determination shown in early 1990s when Indian Communists refused to bow down to the onslaught of “Globalisation”, after the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), unlike Communists in many other countries, and continued to maintain the pace of their struggle in the interests of workers and peasants, and for the defence of independence of all countries threatened by imperialism. The correctness of this decision has been confirmed by the world economic crisis, which since 2008 has gripped the advanced capitalist world. In a sense, validation of the Left is always linked with its fate February 2012 kindle india 37

in electoral politics in India. How do you analyse the Indian Left’s troubled history with parliamentary democracy? And what about the Left that is outside the ring of electoral politics? There is no “troubled history” of Communists with Parliamentary politics. Participation in parliamentary elections is an essential element of all political action, where such a mechanism is available. Communists, perhaps, are exceptional in that, for them, this is not the only field of political action. Organizing workers and peasants and other sections of society (women, Dalits, etc.) are, for them, equally or even more important. There is also the issue of the propagation of Marxism. As for the “Left” that is outside “the ring of electoral politics”, you probably mean those who now call themselves Maoists, though, I must say that in my own reading of Mao Zedong, there is no room for the kind of methods they adopt. With the decimation of the Left in West Bengal, the media almost wrote an obituary of the left in India. What led to the rout? What would be the roadmap for its resurgence? I do not see any “decimation” of the Left in West Bengal. It is an electoral reverse, in which nevertheless 4 out of 10 voters voted for the Left. In a Parliamentary system, such a reverse is not an unexpected event. A person aged 34 years or less in West Bengal had seen no other state government and could be swayed by a slogan of “change”. I am sure Communist tradition in West Bengal, as in Kerala and Tripura, has come to stay. The main point for Communists, it would seem to me, is to make their presence felt in other areas, especially the Hindi belt. How should the Left reconcile with the need for economic reforms, industrialisation needs... in short, 21st century compulsions, and at the same time, staying true to its ideological core? There is always a problem between long-term objectives and short-term necessities. Whether it was a Communistrun municipality in France in the 1950s or the Left Front Government of West Bengal before 2011, they had equally attracted industry (which under the current circumstances could only be capitalist-owned industry) to create employment. There is no problem with this as far as Marxist ideology is concerned, even where, as in France in the 1950s. Communists were directly aspiring to bring about a socialist revolution. In India, indeed, both CPI(M) and CPI have been committed to visions of an intermediate stage of “People’s /National Democracy” where elements of capitalism would continue to be permitted. The “21st century” does not by itself create any new sanctions for capitalism. You have authored several volumes of the very important series “A People’s History of India”. Was the title or content influenced by Howard Zinn’s classic? Even if they were not, how do you view the major differences between Zinn’s accounts and yours? “People’s History” has, indeed, been the part of a title of many Marxist-oriented works on history, like ‘The People’s History 38 kindle india

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of England” by Morton, with which we as students in the late 1940s were most familiar. An earlier ‘People’s History of Germany’ had apparently inspired Morton’s own work. Howard Zinn’s ‘People’s History of USA’, by its title, I think in turn, refers to this tradition, but its style is very different though, indeed, very effective. As far as our ‘People’s History of India’ series is concerned, it makes no attempt to provide a Marxist interpretation of Indian history; rather it aspires to set out a description of aspects of polity, economy, society and culture that could be relevant to the formation of such an interpretation. It is also an attempt to provide the people of India with a general history written on scientific and non-chauvinistic lines. On a different note, much of Indian history narratives rely heavily on archeological discoveries, carefully preserved by the ruling classes. Not a whole lot is devoted to people’s struggles, for example, in India’s case, the indigenous people’s historical narratives. After independence, why was this important task not carried out, to document our own oppressive histories, rather than reflecting upon our “golden ages”? Why do we constantly feel the need to fall back on the usual suspects? Why are our children rarely exposed to Dalit histories, not as a community-based approach, but really as more of a quintessential people’s history? If Gandhi’s talisman looked out for the poorest among the poor, when are we going to teach history that will look out for our poorest? History can be built up only on the basis of facts that we know. Since long ages in the past our knowledge only comes from the written word, i.e. what is left by men of literate classes, who naturally belonged to the upper layers of society, such information is one-sided. Such a distortion can be corrected partly by concentrating on information supplied however scantily, on what happened to those placed lower in society. R.S. Sharma’s seminal ‘Sudras in Ancient India’ (1959) is an example of such work: I do not think, therefore, that you are right in stating that we have failed to “document our own oppressive histories”. What one cannot do is to invent history, such as is now being done by some castes, including high castes (e.g. the cult of Raja Agrasen in Northern India). The history of exploited classes, women and Dalits needs to go on being constructed, but only on the basis of authentic materials. Incidentally, the NCERT textbooks on Indian history which were removed by the BJP Govt. and not reinstated by its successor, had tried precisely to do so, as can be seen especially in the textbooks on Ancient and Modern India by R.S. Sharma and Bipan Chandra.

COVER STORY

BEYOND THE POLITYâ&#x20AC;Ś More often than not, the discourse on Maoism in India is seen either through the prism of violence or woolly eyed romanticism. Yet it is one reality that we cannot shy away from. Gautam Navlakha looks for a reality, more complex and nuanced.

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nyone who is troubled by the deep social cleavage, the relentless struggle to survive, the recurrent nightmare of depending on an officious and arrogant administration, corrupt and powerful ruling the roost… cannot but wish for a social change which lifts India’s billion people out of their degrading existence, to be makers of their own destiny and become sovereign which they are. To continue to believe that this predatory State can still be made to work for the benefit of the people maybe the opinion of some. But there are many who believe that this system is incapable of delivering without its overhaul because it is loaded in favour of the rich, privileged and powerful who do not hesitate to take recourse to tyranny to maintain this system. Yes individuals do at times get justice. People’s pressure does push political parties to enact welfare legislation. Elections do throw out a corrupt or repressive party from government. But this does not end the cycle of oppression or exploitation. From making of law to its implementation and from preventing its subversion to empowering people, shows how well entrenched are the oppressors. In this sense it is good that Maoists refuse to resile from their goal of social transformation which keeps the fire of rebellion smouldering, because for them the issue is of which class exercises control over political power. Those who decry armed struggle claim that peaceful movements can make existing institutions responsive to people’s needs. The fact of the matter is that such efforts were being made even when Maoists had not emerged as the single biggest threat to the Indian ruling classes, and these efforts have not ceased because of Maoist rebellion. So what prevented these groups from stopping Narmada Sarovar Project, POSCO project, illegal mining, loot of public funds, relentless wars in North East and Kashmir… What stopped them on their own steam from raising their voice against the brutal military suppression of our people for over 64 years? Indeed why did they keep mute 40 kindle india

when thousands were being killed, tortured and disappeared in Kashmir, when aerial bombings were launched against Mizos and Naga people… How much did they contribute in raising the consciousness of the people by campaigning against the ‘dirty wars’ being fought in India for all their protestations about non-violence? On the other hand, if truth be told, these non-violent struggles have actually gained leverage thanks to the presence of the Maoist movement. They leverage the armed struggle of the Maoists to extract concessions from the State. In this sense the catalytic role played by the CPI (Maoist) is quite remarkable because in 2004-05 they were dealt a grievous blow in Andhra Pradesh and soon thereafter it was followed by Salwa Judum type repression in Chattisgarh. No one believed that they would come out strong from this double blow. Well they did. So much so that almost all the contemporary social welfare legislations, be it NREGA, Forest Act, enforcement of PESA, proposal to make joint forest management committees managed by the gram sabha… have all been inspired or advocated by referring to the need to wean away the poorest among the poor from the Maoists/ Naxalites! Consider that the Union Tribal Affairs Minister pointed out to the CMs, at a Conference on Forest Rights Act in November 2009 that tribals were taking the “route of Naxalism” as hundreds of them were harassed under the Forest Act 1927 for collecting minor forest produce. At the same conference the Prime Minister had drawn attention to the need to withdraw lakhs of cases filed against the tribals for petty crimes, since 1980, lest such persecution drive them to join Maoists/Naxalites. The Union Law Minister had opined that “(t)here is a feeling among the common citizens, especially the poor, women, the elderly and the weaker sections, that the legal and judicial process is far removed from them.” He added that common man’s disenchantment was manifesting itself in “new form of violence and strife – civil unrest, armed peasant and tribal movement, Naxalite and Maoist rebellion.” (HT

February 2012

25/10/2009). When the Planning Commission now complains against the Union Cabinet decision to make the district collector, superintendent of police and district forest officer incharge of Integrated Action Plan they invoke the fear of Maoists to drive home their argument. Thus the Planning Commission claimed in the letter to the Indian PM that “more money without reform is in danger of landing in the hands of Maoists themselves” (The Indian Express, 12 January, 2011). The Minister of Environment and Forest recently claimed that “(o) ver 250 million people depend on forest for their livelihood and a major amendment of the Indian Forest Act 1927 will prevent the harassment of tribals by local forest officials… In Naxal affected areas a large number of cases are registered against the tribals so we are amending the Forest Act.” (The Asian Age 4th January 2011) And the latest in the series of such moves, comes the statement from the Planning Commission that “(a)s desired by the Prime Minister, the (Central India Tribal Development) plan would essentially cover all those areas where Naxals either have influence or can have influence in future because of development deficit” (The Indian Express, 17 May, 2011). Apart from this, other studies show how Maoists encourage rural poor to avail of the various welfare schemes. Institute of Rural Management, Anand (Gujarat) was given the task of looking into local governance issues by the Union Ministry of Panchayati Raj. However when the report was released on April 24, 2010 by the Indian PM, the Chapter on “PESA, Militarisation, and Governance” was dropped because the report had talked of tribals turning to the Maoists and praised “the good work done by the (Maoist) party” like mobilising community labour for farm ponds, rain water harvesting and land conservation works. Thus for all the fury directed against the Maoists the fact remains that but for them hundreds of millions of the most oppressed and exploited would not have figured in the scheme of things of

COVER STORY

India’s rulers. And even less would have been done for them. Social activists had been fighting for a Forest Rights Bill for years. It took the war against Maoists to force the UPA government to decide in favour of the Act as a means to appease the enraged tribals. It was also the Maoist presence which forced the UPA government, much against the wishes of PMO, Finance Ministry and the Planning Commission, to find resources to fund the NREGA. Thus Maoists presence has goaded rulers towards propagating, even if hypocritically, “inclusive” growth, lest the most oppressed gravitate towards Maoists. This becomes all the more glaring if we keep in mind the course of reform. Every reform promised as a result of pressure from below has always had a chequered journey; from fighting dilution of the legislation, to resisting subversion by manipulating Framing of Rules governing the actual working of the law, to struggling against its nonimplementation. History of PESA enacted in 1996 or the rearguard battle for FRA 2009 are examples of this. Therefore, forcing the government to become sensitive to people’s concerns, even if hypocritical is important, because somewhere it represents recognition of a problem. Thus by far the biggest contribution of the Maoist movement lies in establishing that rebellion against oppression is necessary and possible and is an intrinsic part of search for an alternative than what the existing system offers. After all the failure of the Indian rulers after 64 years to, let alone reduce inequalities, even provide basic minimum needs to nearly 80 per cent of Indian people to lead a life of dignity, speaks for itself. In this sense, Maoists break the circularity of argument which tries to convince us that alternative to current system is unthinkable and that all that we should do is to work to persuade the government to carry out reforms. For sure Maoists are not the only one engaged in this task. There are vast number of groups and parties engaged in resisting oppression. But Maoists are a formidable and integral part of

this resistance and actually bear the brunt of ruling class’s wrath because their presence enables transformative perspective to remain valid. In this sense if they have to break out of their role as the catalytic agent i.e. forcing the present State to reform itself, they have to seriously do some re-thinking. Granted that banning them robs them of the possibility to organize and mobilize working people peacefully. But precisely, therefore, antagonising those who oppose ‘operation greenhunt’, or champion various reforms, or are engaged in a variety of people’s struggles, is a senseless approach. Maoists can ill afford to be disrespectful of those with whom they differ. While armed resistance is legitimate in the face of oppression, it does not confer carte blanche to resistance forces to fight any which way. War in some circumstance is just. But what ensures its justness is also how the war is fought. Were Indians civilisationally against violence, we would not have the sorry spectacle of India’s ‘good’ people remaining mute when military suppression was being carried out in the North East and J&K as well as the conspicuous absence of a demand for ‘no to war against our own people’. We would not have acquiesced in the genocidal policies which leave 42% of our children malnourished after 64 years of transfer of power. Non-violence is, therefore, an ideological construction to blunt opposition to a state which has been at war against its own people since 1947. It comes in handy to keep the oppressed subdued and compliant. All this makes it necessary to take the Maoists seriously, because they defy imposed manufactured rule and question conventional wisdom.

Social activists had been ﬁghting for a Forest Rights Bill for years. It took the war against Maoists to force the UPA government to decide in favour of the Act as a means to appease the enraged tribals.

But for alternative to become credible it must rise above surface manifestation of wrong and address the underlying causes and processes which account for skewed, unequal and stunted growth and social conflicts. Regrettably, Parliamentary Left despite 59 years of open politics and despite holding government power at a provincial level, has not offered an alternate vision with its indifferent record of implementing February 2012

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even centrally funded social welfare schemes in the three states where they rule (Tripura by far the best, followed by Kerala with West Bengal lagging far behind). It is undeniable that the Left Front has some achievement to their credit but why is it that these are not of the kind which fired the imagination of the oppressed to flock to their side in East or South India? While their failure does not cancel out open over ground mass mobilisation politics, what it does is to remind us of where we fail and what we lack. Biggest failure of the left parties, which had come overground at various junctures, is their marked absence from extra-parliamentary forms of struggle, which is what they had pledged to do when they came overground! They have neither initiated nor led any

major struggle despite the persistence of unequal exchange, low priority given to interests of small and marginal landholders, low wage economy ushered in by neo-liberal reforms, genocidal reach of child malnutrition in India, against price rise, corruption, bloody repression of people’s struggles, or even countrywide movement against the communal-fascism of Hindutva groups. So wedded have they been to the parliamentary system, with its pronounced wheeling-dealing, that they have forgotten virtually the issue of political power which forms the core of Marxism. Nevertheless, for Maoists to make their mark or expand politically they have to recognise that political plurality has

become a hallmark of India just as its much talked of cultural diversity. While this political plurality gets enhanced by their presence and provides us a refreshing break from status-quoist and pro-state mumbo-jumbo, they will have to respect the fact that they may become a leading force but not the only force spearheading change. Isolation will strangulate them materially and intellectually. They have to respect difference and learn to accept that emancipation of our people in a country like India will perhaps not come from a single source but more likely a coalition of multiple perspectives and ideological persuasion in which they can play a central role.

“MARXISM: THE NEW MANTRA OF THE UPPER CASTE...” In a conversation with India’s foremost public intellectual Ashis Nandy, a lot was revealed from IPL cricket to the Anna Movement. An excerpt from the interview on the Indian Left. Read the whole interview next month. As told to Sayantan Neogi.

Did the Left movement in India understand the social, radical way of looking at religion in India and the diversity in this country? No, it never understood that. In fact, all 19th century models of social engineering from the utilitarians to the Marxists and socalists had this ambition of one world, one dream, one vision of a good society. It had no clue to the enormous diversity of India, its cultural imperatives and its way of conceptualising the vision of a good society. And in some ways, India’s traditional culture is more in tune with the needs of contemporary times than 19th century social theories. What do you think about Bengali Marxism? I think it has become basically an anti-people, uppercaste ploy, because Marxism has become the new mantra of the upper caste, to push under the carpet the deep social divisions that exist in Bengal. Bengali casteism is probably the sharpest in India, because they never talk of caste, and they think it’s not civilized to talk of it. But in the Bengali imagination, there is no place for Mayawati even 50 years from now also, because that will be seen as a very crude, vulgar form of populism. I have never seen a really important Bengali Dalit leader who has exercised any serious power in Bengal, or is a serious contestant for power. I mean, the most important Bengali Dalit leader was the first law minister of Pakistan, whereas Ambedkar is remembered proudly as the first law minister of India. No Bengali, even by mistake mentions Jogen Mondal’s name, when talking of Dalit leaders.

INDIA AND THE OLYMPICS This month, a lowdown of India’s tryst with Olympics as the countdown to the world’s greatest sporting show begins. By Novy Kapadia.

he postcolonial ideology of the nation invests heavily in sport as a means of national selfprojection. For decades, the Olympics were seen as an extension of the Cold War between USA and USSR, a clash of ideologies between communism and capitalism. The Olympics were often considered as a War without Weapons as the competition between USA and USSR and later East Germany (German Democratic Republic) was intense. In the last few decades, globalisation and multinational capital have created a huge sports industry where highly-paid athletes compete in profit-making spectacles, like the Olympics and World Cup football tournaments, for a global audience. In 2012, as the world’s athletes prepare for yet another Olympic Games, it is to be seen how India has fared in the greatest sporting show on earth. In India, sports have often been acknowledged as a means of national self-construction, a focus of hope but also of disappointment. Cricket is the only sport, with slick marketing and massive TV income that has become self sufficient. All the Olympic sports in India are still in the doldrums, dependant on government handouts and with limited global influence. For successive governments beset by problems of a rapidly increasing population, improving infrastructure in the country, and providing adequate food, water and electricity, Olympic sports were a low governmental priority. Most of the National Sports Federations (NSFs) are still feudalistic in outlook and more interested in self-perpetuation, so have done little to improve standards of play.

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Considering these factors, it is not surprising that India has not fared well in the Olympics since their first participation in the 1920 Antwerp Games. India, the first colonised Asian nation to participate in the Olympic Games hurriedly put together a six-member contingent which went to Antwerp and made little impact. The bulk of the Rs. 35,000 budget was met by the philanthropic Sir Dorab Tata, the first President of the fledgling All India Olympic Association which later became the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) in 1927. The nine-member team for the 1924 Paris Olympics was selected after a national effort. In the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, the IOA selected the Indian contingent, which included the gold medal winning hockey team. From Antwerp 1920 till Beijing 2008, India has won a total of 18 medals in 25 Olympics. 11of the 18 have come in hockey, 8 gold, 1 silver and 2 bronze medals. Overall India has won nine gold, two silver and seven bronze medals. An Anglo-Indian from Calcutta, though some claim he was an Englishman residing in India, Norman Pritchard also secured two silver medals in athletics, in the 1900 Olympics at Paris. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) records do not shed light on his antecedents and as there is considerable debate on Pritchard’s identity, his medals are omitted from India’s overall tally in the Olympics. In the colonial era, it was the Olympic sport, hockey and not cricket which gave India an identity and the game became a

SPORTS

In London 1948, the 19-year-old triple jumper Henry Rebello was distinctly unlucky not to win a medal. He tore his muscle during his first jump in the final and left the field in agony, never to jump again. Two losses which still rankle are that of Milkha Singh (1960 Rome) and P.T. Usha (1984 Los Angeles). Both finished fourth in their favourite events, 400 metres and 400 metres hurdles, losing the bronze medal, due to inexperience, in a photo-finish.

symbol of nationalist sentiment. India won three successive hockey gold medals in Amsterdam 1928, Los Angeles 1932 and Berlin 1936 playing stylish, attacking hockey. The playing eleven reflected the diversity of cultures as it consisted of eight Anglo Indians, two Muslims, Feroze Khan and Shaukat Ali and the legendary Dhyan Chand. The role of Anglo Indians (many of whom migrated to Australia after Independence) in India’s Olympic hockey successes deserves greater sociological analysis. India’s seven individual medal successes in the Olympics were confined to shooting, tennis, boxing, women’s weightlifting and wrestling. The only individual gold medal for India in the Olympics was won by shooter Abhinav Bindra in the 10 metres air rifle event in Beijing 2008. Four years earlier in Athens, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore kissing the silver medal he won in the double trap event is an iconic moment in Indian sports.

Women’s hockey, introduced in the Olympics for the first time in Moscow 1980, was affected by a boycott of top teams from Australia, Germany and Netherlands. India was one of the six nations that contested for honours, along with USSR, Zimbabwe, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria. India were favourites for a medal but got upset 1-2 by Czechoslovakia due to some umpiring errors and finished fourth.

After Independence, the late K.D. Jadhav of Maharashtra bagged a bronze medal in the 57 kilogram freestyle wrestling category in Helsinki 1952. Leander Paes got a bronze medal in men’s singles tennis in Atlanta 1996 and four years later, Karnam Malleswari got a bronze medal in weightlifting. In Beijing, pugilist Vijender Singh and grappler Sushil Kumar both got bronze medals.

Boxer Gurcharan Singh became the first Indian to reach the quarter- finals of his weight category at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. In the quarter -finals against Ukraine’s Andrei Fedtchouk, he was eight seconds away from a 12-11 points win. However, the Ukrainian boxer leveled the scores and then was declared the winner for being more offensive and throwing more punches on a count back by the judges. Shooters Ronjon Sodhi, Gagan Narang and Abhinav Bindra, boxer Vikas Krishnan, teenaged archer Deepika Kumari and badminton ace Saina Nehwal are India’s best prospects for medals in the 2012 London Olympics.

DEEPIKA KUMARI

INTERVIEW

In terms of population and land mass, India alone is one-sixth of the Earth, yet in three successive Olympics--1984, 1988 and 1992 and in Montreal 1976 it finished without a medal. Statistics indicate that India’s Olympic record is quite mediocre but the tally could have increased considerably as there were several heartbreaks of missing a medal narrowly.

rom being the most successful Indian archer in Commonwealth Games to being the youngest Indian at London Olympics 2012, Deepika Kumari has come a long way. ‘A child prodigy’, ‘A powerhouse of talent’the teenager owes a lot to her parents who fought dire state-of-affairs to get her this far. An auto rickshaw driver in the tiny village of Ratu, Jharkhand; Shivnarayan Mahato wanted his daughter to study and become ‘big’ someday. Little did he know that Deepika would go on to achieve astonishing heights at the young age of 15. Three years ago, Deepika Kumari picked up a bow for the first time, encouraged by an archer cousin. Today she competes in recurve, a sport that relies entirely on the acuteness of the eye and strong trapezius muscles. Deepika has done the nation proud in the World championship at Mérida and the Youth World Archery Championship and of course, the epic win at Delhi 2010 where she won two gold medals, one in the individual event and the other in the women’s team recurve event. “My parents were hesitant when my cousin first suggested I try archery”, says Deepika. “It’s just a game, they’d said, back then.” Thinking beyond the paradigm, Shivnarayan and Geeta Devi February 2012

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cut down household expenses to buy Deepika her the expensive archery gear. “My mother made sure I gave my 100% to it.” Deepika got her first breakthrough in 2005 when scouts from Arjun Archery Academy, an institute set up by Meera Munda, picked her up for further training. She then quickly moved on to Tata Steel Sports Academy in Jamshedpur and within months, made her debut in Antalya, Turkey. “That was my first trip abroad and Istanbul remains my favourite city in the world, thus far. It felt like I had arrived… made my mark in the world” Contemporary archery may not necessitate hitting apples sitting atop your maid’s head but still requires equivalent accuracy. Aiming for the bull’s eye for eight hours, seven days a week is not everyone’s cup of tea. “I hate going back home. There isn’t much to do there. The hostel here in Tata Archery Centre is my home,” says the impassive Deepika. Her trainer, Poornima Mahto says, “Deepika is brimming with confidence and has determination of steel, makes sure her shoots

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are recorded on the video cameras and watches them until she has corrected her mistakes. She spends a lot of time developing her own techniques. I sometimes wonder how she fits it all in 24 hours of the day. I know she will not give up until she wins.” A short training stint in South Korea in March will mark the next part of her preparations for London 2012. “Deepika’s performance is at par with top Korean archers and it will be a suitable venue for her to undergo training there”, says Lim Chae Wong, her current South Korean trainer. Deepika is aware of the 1.2 billion hopes pinned on her after the commendable performance at the Commonwealth Games. “I know everyone is hoping for medals from me at the Olympics,” says the teenager, who seems to have seen her career’s biggest highs and lows in the most fragile years of her life. “The Koreans and Chinese are my biggest competitions. I don’t know their names. But I know enough to beat them at the game. I think I will win a few, going by the form I am in,” Deepika concludes.

ENVIRONMENT

CONTEMPORARY

Nidhi Dugar Kundalia unravels the perils of our urban life and dwindling biodiversity

POISON

NICOTINE PATCH AND GUMS CONTEMPORARY POISONS: Nicotine and Nornicotine

uitting smoking is ‘cold turkey’ hard. With a plethora of marketing wonders like Nicotine gums, Nicotine patches available out there, we come to the question of the safety of these products. Like any other chemical drug, the Nicotine patch has a long list of side effects such as headaches, drowsiness, and nausea. Some patients have also reported racing heartbeat, dizziness, and insomnia. Widely believed to be safe, the patches deliver Nicotine, the essential component of cigarettes, to the system to quell the body’s craving for it. But new reports suggest that a breakdown product of Nicotine, called Nornicotine, is not an innocent bystander: it catalyses certain reactions that play major roles in processing chemicals that circulate in the body and has the potential to trigger adverse health effects. Also, due to the solvent properties of nicotine, the drug will attack or dissolve many of the materials used to make patch components such as bisabolol, chamazulene, D-panthenol, corticosteroids. The Verdict? If you use the patch, you are still feeding your body nicotine. Nicotine products may be the lesser of the two evils but your body will be a slave forever until you truly quit smoking, and quit entirely.

Solutions: 1. Use Nicotine constituting products only after consulting your doctor 2. Read the labels carefully. Pack a day smokers generally need an entire patch at once whereas those who smoke only ten cigarettes a day (or less) and apply an entire patch, might get sick.

ENDANGERED

INDIA 101

ASIATIC BLACK BEAR Scientiﬁc Name: Ursus Thibetanu Population: Approx 7000 Status: Vulnerable

hen Kipling’s character, Baloo- the endearing freewheeling bear, dies face down in that big old puddle, it just about tears your heart apart. With widespread poaching and destruction of the natural habitat of bears, the children’s tale might just come true. The Asiatic Black Bear, also known as the Moon Bear or the white-chested bear, is in the danger of becoming extinct. Mostly hunted for its gall bladder and the skin for its medicinal and trophy purposes, it is also killed often as it can be aggressive towards humans and attack, mostly on provocation. Although the black bear is supposed to be protected in India ,being listed by the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, it has been difficult to prosecute those accused of poaching as it is found mostly in the foothills of the Himalayas and near boundaries of India with Pakistan, Tibet, China, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh , making policing in these regions difficult. Mountainous terrain, lack of witnesses and lack of Wildlife Forensic Labs to detect the originality of confiscated animal parts further add to the problems.

COLUMN: KEEP OFF THE GRASS

MONEY TREE: CREDIT HIMACHAL

The World Bank Biocarbon Fund afforestation project in Himachal Pradesh is one of its kind. Rohit Roy examines it, warts and all.

t is a little difficult to highlight the subliminal negatives of a project that has such obvious positives on the face of it. For some time now a massive World Bank project has been doing the rounds of the hallowed grounds of India and UN bureaucracy, and finally it looks set to fly. Around 4000 hectares of land in the Siwalik Hills in Himachal Pradesh has been earmarked for reforestation. The intention behind the project is laudable, not least because of the sheer magnitude of it. The objective is that over next two decades, over 839,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents are likely to be sequestered into the reforested land. It is literally the largest project of its kind on the planet (there are 18 such World Bank projects around the world).

Under the conditions of the project, the tree density must not be less than 1100 plants per hectare. Felling or diversion of the trees will not be permitted for non-forestry purposes and land owners will not have rights to the timber of the trees during the period of the project. In return, the fiscal benefits for land owners would average around 2500 per hectare per year. The benefits for such a project are unquestionable. Reforesting degraded forest and agricultural areas is, firstly, a clever use of land that is starting to lose some of its commercial sheen. This will be welcome news for the land owners/ farmers of these areas. More importantly, the environmental benefits are massive. Reduction in atmospheric carbon as well as growth in forest areas is always a good thing. The resulting carbon credits accrued from the afforestation will be bought off by the World Bank thereby potentially earning landowners of approximately 177 panchayats anywhere from 4000 to 7000 per year per family. Replenished forests and confirmed income for rural families turns this into

a win-win for everyone. Yet there are certain niggling doubts worth mentioning. As part of the deal, 10 per cent of the total carbon revenue will be redirected to the Forest Department as overhead charges. This is not necessarily bad. After all, much needed revenue is heading into a largely ignored department. However, this also means that, vast amounts of international revenue, that should, by right, be reaching poor, rural farmers, are now being diverted through a corrupt bureaucracy. Surely we all know the precedent set by the Indian administration in such matters.

project and in essence the World Bank has merely brokered a deal between the Himachal Pradesh government and the Spanish company. Yet, for this particular project it might be prudent to turn a blind eye to the ethical grey area that is carbon trading and converted rates of payment, for the sake of the environment and the people of Himachal Pradesh. The benefits may be too great not to.

Moreover, although to these farmers the sum may seem high, the actual international converted payment boils down to around US $5 per ton of carbon dioxide sequestered – tuppenceha’penny compensation for cleaning up the massive emissions from the extravagant consumption patterns of the West. And this brings us to a final point of contention – that of the farcical nature of carbon trading. Too easily, is the wasteful consumption of the West forgiven in exchange for payment. By virtue of the Kyoto Protocol, to reduce carbon emissions, the Carbon credit system was introduced, yet developing countries were exempted from such restrictions. This has therefore opened up an opportunity for developing countries to sell the carbon credits they do not require. Although the positive effect is, this economic opportunity provides an incentive for developing countries to be greener; the flip side is that rich conglomerates who find it cheaper to buy carbon credits than reduce their own emissions do exactly that. And that seems to be the case with the World Bank project as well. It is already known that DNA of Spain is buying of the carbon credits accruing from the February 2012

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COLUMN: UNLETTERED

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Arts & Culture

CINEMA · MUSIC · BOOKS · SCIENCE · TECHNOLOGY

ANOTHER COUNTRY,

ANOTHER REAL ESTATE MAFIA Back from a Christmas holiday, this month Thomas Crowley takes a short detour… But detour is it? 54 kindle india

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COLUMN: POP GOES THE CULTURE

2011 was a momentous year for fans of ‘Arrested Development’, an American TV comedy series with a small but devoted following. First, the series, which was cancelled by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Empire in 2006, was resurrected by Netflix, the DVD rental and online media streaming company that is now expanding into original programming (the triumph of new media!). New ‘Arrested Development’ episodes are in the works, along with the long-rumored movie. Second, the year saw the “end” of the Iraq War, a conflict that provided fodder for some of ‘Arrested Development’s sharpest satire. A couple of explanations before I proceed. Yes, I know this is already the February issue of Kindle, and that the magazine already published a 2011 retrospective. But this is the first column I am actually writing in 2012, and it seems as good a time as any to look back at the past year through the absurdist lens of one of my favourite TV shows. Also, yes, I have devoted this column to Indian pop culture, so the celebration of an American series is a bit off-topic. But I’ve just returned from a trip home to the United States, and a high dosage of ‘Arrested Development’ has become a standard part of my Christmas-time, reverse-culture-shock therapy. Plus, the themes of the show – the epic corruption of real estate developers, the quirks and feuds of an extended family living together – should not be so foreign to Indian viewers (although mismanaged military campaigns seem to be a particular specialty of the US). And if I can introduce this intricately layered, endlessly rewarding comic farce to new viewers, I will consider my mission as pop culture raconteur accomplished. Ahem. With that throat-clearing aside, I can turn my attention to the show itself. (SPOILER ALERT: some significant plot details follow, though I’ve tried my best to circumvent them.) ‘Arrested Development’ follows the (mis)fortunes of the Bluth family, whose real estate development company is in big trouble for embezzlement, fraud, and – possibly – “light treason.” Critical commentary on the show often focuses on its dense web of references, with jokes building

on tag-lines from previous episodes, and multiple allusions to other shows and Hollywood culture. But all this postmodern intertextuality is used in the service of a much older genre, political satire. A chief inspiration for the show was the Enron scandal, one of the biggest cases of U.S. corporate corruption to date. Throughout its three seasons, the show skewers corporate greed, the materialistic lifestyle it supports and the collusion of big business in the wars waged by neoliberal states. One of the funniest running jokes in a show filled with running jokes is the flimsiness and fakeness of the model home in which the Bluth family lives. The minimansion is supposed to be a marketing gimmick, encouraging buyers to purchase similar houses, and is not intended for actual use. The Bluths, though, have made it into their real home as they try to rebuild their family and their company. Wall hangings crash to the ground if there is the slightest disturbance; refrigerators fall into holes in the wall; windows break with little provocation; and – in the later episodes – the living room develops a sink hole. The home is filled with fake furniture and products made by the company Homefill, which apparently specialized in model home paraphernalia like fake fruit. As the show unfolds, it becomes clear that the Bluth home is a metaphor for the criminal negligence and crony capitalism that underlay the reconstruction efforts in Iraq. The Bluth family, like the Bush administration, creates photo ops with gloating, overly-optimistic banners to create the façade of success and disguise the crumbling situation off stage. Making the connection even more direct, it is eventually revealed that George Bluth, the patriarch of the family, (spoiler!) had built mini-mansions in Iraq on the same design as the model home. It also turns out the Homefill has made fake weapons of mass destruction, although their political purpose is not exactly what you think it might be.

The Bluth family, like the Bush administration, creates photo ops with gloating, overlyoptimistic banners to create the façade of success and disguise the crumbling situation off stage taxi driver tells them that “the Cheney Expressway was backed up all the way to Halliburton Drive,” a reference to the then-Vice President Dick Cheney, whose former company, Halliburton had been given lucrative contracts in Iraq. “Expressway” is a bit of irony; all the roads shown in the episode are unpaved, dusty messes. The boys visit one of the homes their father has built, and find it filled with Saddam Hussein impersonators; the theme of doubles and switched identities only adds to the sense that the war – like the Bluth company – is built on a web of deception. The name of the episode is “Exit Strategy,” a reference to the attempts by the architects of the war to cut their losses, put a good face on the debacle, and get out while they still can. Surely the writers of ‘Arrested Development’ would have some pointed commentary about the recent “end” of the Iraq War, as U.S. troops at last withdrew from the country; perhaps we can look forward to this in the upcoming episodes and the movie. Of course, U.S. involvement in Iraq (including corporate involvement) is far from over. Obama, of course, knows enough to avoid arrogant Bush-style photo ops (and to be fair, he was left to deal with a war he opposed in the first place), but the symbolic end of the war serves to create only the appearance of finality (and to remove Iraq even further from the American public consciousness). Image overtakes reality – how Bluth-like!

As I head back to Delhi – no stranger to morally dubious real estate developers and corruption scandals, and, as the recent In the second-to-last episode of the FDI decision shows, still enthralled by series, G.O.B., Buster and Michael Bluth neo-liberal notions of development (all sons of patriarch George) end up in – I can’t help thinking that ‘Arrested Iraq. While the Bluth boys are travelling Development’ is an apt name for the state around the country, their American of the city. February 2012 kindle india 55

By Aditya Bidikar

Adapted and Illustrated byy Darw wyn Cooke Based on the novel by Rich harrd Sta ark Published by IDW Comics

arwyn Cooke, writer/ artist of the wonderful ‘New Frontier’ from DC comics, has always been an aficionado of noir crime stories. The theme has often cropped up in his work (especially in his excellent run on Catwoman alongside Ed Brubaker). With his adaptations of the Parker novels by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake), he plunged straight into the grimy world of hardboiled crime, and brought his unique styling to the hard-boiled world of Parker, already a legend of crime fiction. There are four graphic novels planned in the series, the first of which is ‘Parker:The Hunter’. The plot is simple. New York City, 1962. An escaped criminal called Parker tracks down his old partners who double-crossed him, including his ex-wife, and looks for payback. It’s a fairly straightforward crime story about a hard man who messes with anyone who dares mess with him. Parker, as a character, is interesting because he’s so closed up. This, of course, led to a thousand imitations, but Parker remains fascinating after all these years. He is brutal, seemingly emotionless, and willing to do anything to get what he wants. Cooke remains extremely faithful to the story, keeping most of the dialogue true to the original while paring down the descriptions and letting the images speak in their place. He adds quite a few flourishes of his own. For example, we don’t see Parker’s face for the first 11 pages, which is an interesting touch, because we get to see him through the reactions of the others. In general, the adaptation itself is perfectly fine, but it’s the artwork that truly shines. Cooke has always excelled at expressive character designs and clean linework that pops from the page. With this

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book, he brings all of that to the canvas, aided by a lush monochrome wash and a beautifully complementary style of lettering. The style is exaggerated, somewhat cartoony, but it fits perfectly with the slightly over-egged ‘hypermasculine’ feel of the story. Each and every character is dealt with individually, recognisably distinct and phenomenally expressive. Cooke’s background in animation gives him an advantage when it comes to design, and he hasn’t let the conveyor-belt world of superhero comics dull this talent. For the flashbacks, he uses halftone rendering, which is integrated into every aspect of the layouts of these pages. Even if you don’t like the story, the book is something to be stared at in awe. Darwyn Cooke is a stalwart of modern comics, and with every book, he keeps surpassing himself (the Parker series, in fact, has kept getting better with each successive graphic novel). ‘Parker: The Hunter’, recreated by a fan of the original, is a beautifully produced book which conveys not only Cooke’s talents, but also his love for the story.

February 2012

THE KINDLE LIBRARY: BOOKS

By Aishwarya Subramanian

Bram Stoker

hen the Nineteenth century turned into the Twentieth, the British empire was still going strong. This makes it all the more interesting that this period should have seen a trend of “invasion” fiction, in which Britain was the colonised, rather than the colonising country. Some of these would-be colonisers came from the actual colonised countries (the “yellow peril” novels, for example, used the threat of an expanding Chinese population); others were of a supernatural nature. Bulwer-Lytton wrote of a subterranean “Coming Race”. H.G. Wells had England invaded by Martians in ‘The War of the Worlds’, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula arrived from Eastern Europe. ‘Dracula’ is hardly obscure; it is the definitive vampire novel. The character has entered pop culture in a vast range of iterations, from the cartoon “Count Duckula” to the magnificently awful Hindi film (available on YouTube!) ‘Shaitani Dracula’. Fewer people are acquainted with another invasion novel which Stoker wrote a few years later ‘The Jewel of Seven Stars’. ‘The Jewel of Seven Stars’ is in part a product of late Victorian (and early20th Century) England’s fascination with Egypt. In it, an English scholar, Mr Trelawney, comes into the possession of the preserved or mummified body of an Ancient Egyptian queen and attempts to resurrect her. Malcolm Ross, the narrator, is in love with Trelawney’s daughter Margaret. Everyone is a little surprised to discover that the spectacularly beautiful mummified queen and the spectacularly beautiful Miss Trelawney are physically identical. Naturally (as in most books about reanimated corpses)

things go horribly wrong. In many ways ‘The Jewel of Seven Stars’ is a weaker novel than ‘Dracula’, but a few things make it stand out. One is the way in which it dramatizes the sheer discomfort around various aspects of Egyptology and the colonial enterprise. It’s clearest of all in a scene where the mummified body is unveiled – mummy unveilings often turned into public events. Here, Mr Trelawney and his associates stand gloating at the body of the woman they have stripped while in the presence of a woman physically identical to her, whom they have sworn to protect. The book is also notable for having two endings. Stoker’s original ending had Tera victorious – the narrator enters the room to discover that not only has she reawakened, but that all the witnesses to her resurrection are lying around petrified and glassy-eyed. When the novel was republished in 1912, Stoker was told to give it a less gruesome ending. He managed, magnificently, to give it one that (to me at least) seems even more ominous. What looks like a traditional, happily-ever-after wedding is undercut by Margaret’s decision to dress herself as the dead queen. I am tempted to read this as a sign that the two women have changed places – that the narrator is now sharing his bed not with the woman he loves, but with a centuries-old impostor. Perhaps even more disturbing is another explanation, that Tera has in some way possessed Margaret’s mind. Either way, Stoker’s ability to amp up the creepiness of his book while pretending to tone it down is something to be lauded.

February 2012

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TOWARDS 150 YEARS-

REMEMBERED FRAGMENTS REMEMBERED LOITERING: A BOOK AND A PERFORMANCE TREK ON SWAMI VIVEKANANDA By Mukherjee P. It is imagination which has taught man the moral values of colour, shape, sound and perfumes. At the begining of the world, imagination created analogy and metaphor. Imagination dissolves all creation. Remassing and reordering her materials by principles which come out of the depths of the human soul, imagination makes a new world, even a new realm of sensory experience. And as imagination has created this world (one may say this, I think even in a religious sense), it is appropriate that the same faculty should govern it.....Alan Resnais

How does it feel to go back to Swami Vivekananda’s political writings and perform them as a spoken word piece (In Transit: a meditation on Swami Vivekananda’s writings, his political musings, thoughts on ecology and the necessary idea of loitering), amongst different school and colleges in Chennai as a part of Prakriti Foundation’s Tree of Life festival-2012? As my second commissioned piece for this festival, it was like both going back to and starting a fresh journey. To pay tribute to one of the greatest socialists and Marxists of such times, anywhere in the world… I think the idea of taking a spoken word performance centred around the political and ecological underpinnings of Swami Vivekananda to campuses as a part of an outreach programme was spot on and a very important intervention by the curatorial instinct of Ranvir Shah. Spot on at a time, when the chief minister of a state in India (read Narendra Modi in Gujarat) decides to wear a Swami Vivekananda-like dress and mimic a pose in a vernacular daily. Or even the widespread feeling in various liberal (and not-so-liberal) spaces about Vivekananda as a Hindutva icon. It is important to re-discover the rebel inside Vivekananda. And like the rebel in Gandhi (though both were politically and tactically different), we tend to mix up Hindutva as a right-wing idea and Hindu being a philosophical discourse (yes, discourse and a state-of-mind much more than being ritual, religion or ritualistic religion). As an artist, I think theatre is the only religion that I know (would like to know and choose to know)... but I also see no reason in not calling Bhakti poet or Sufi composers as important political thinkers… sometimes... and maybe all the time... much more political than avowed Marxists, socialists, atheists, non-believers, nihilists and many other such of similar tribe. For me, Tukaram, Kabir, Bulle Shah, Lalon Fakir is up there with Marx, Julius Fuchik, M.N.Roy and Antonio Gramsci... all of them jostling for a mindspace that has to be inclusively owned and not exclusively controlled. Whosoever exercises that control: the majority or the fringe or the fashionable in-between.

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The seventh edition of Tree of Life festival (with Swami Vivekananda as one of the fulcrums along with a series of events on recycling), is an important pointer as to why untiring efforts like this to explore different shades of great minds must continue. Unabated. All the time. “...Common possession of the necessaries for production implies the common enjoyment of the fruits of common production; and we consider that an equitable organisation of society can only arise when every wage system is abandoned, and when everybody, contributing for the common well being to the full extent of his capacities, shall enjoy also from the common stock of the society as to the fullest possible extent of his needs...” Pyotr Kroptokin’s ‘Anarchist communism: It’s Basis and Principles’ A few years back, while walking along Chennai’s Marina Beach, I had this great surprise in store. On my walk towards the Madras University (founded in 1857), I came across this building with an unusual name: Ice House. Inside the house, to my surprise (and delight) was an important exhibition on Swamiji’s life and times. This was the place, where he stayed between February 6 to February 14, 1897, after his return from the West, Europe and Sri Lanka (where he spoke in Colombo, Anuradhapura and Jaffna) sojourns. During this 9-day stay in Chennai, Swamiji gave five major public lectures (Victoria Hall-two lectures, Pachaiyappa Hall, Circus Pavilion and Triplicane Literary Society) before he set sail for Kolkata, aboard SS Mombasa. These five lectures, constitute, some of the most important dialectical flow of understanding Swamiji’s philosophy. According to Romain Rolland, these were the most important lectures given in India. One may or may not agree with his ideas about inundating a land with spiritual ideas before importing the idea of socialism but we have to understand that the same person said: Look upon every man, woman and everyone as God. And the crux can’t be simpler. To put it in one word: Serve. Apart from institutions that are related to him, there is also the unsung contribution of the legendary Alasinga Perumal. Without Alasinga Perumal, Swamiji may not have made the trip. Alasinga, literally, begged door to door to raise money for the trip. One of the finest publications on the ideas of Swamiji, ‘The Vedanta Kesari’ (began as ‘The Brahmavadin’ in September 1895) owes it origins to the untiring efforts of Alasinga Perumal. Why are we discussing Swami Vivekananda in Chennai in such detail? Simply, because, the entire Chicago addresses and Swamiji’s subsequent stay in the West for the next three-and-a-half years including America, England, France, Italy and Egypt

would not have been possible if the Triplicane Literary Society (a place where he came back and gave another landmark address titled ‘The Work Before Us’) had not nominated him as their representative to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. One of my earliest memories of reading Swami Vivekananda’s collected works is page 505 of the volume 8 of the tome. He says: “I was Jesus and I was Judas Iscariot...” For a moment you are dumbfounded. Standing near the edge of his mortal life, he can still take life with a pinch of salt. He can still rebel and not take his rebellion too seriously... and still admit that much needs to be done. After his stay in the West and Europe, when he came back to India, Swamiji faced severe barbs. Attacks on his personal integrity, attacks on his intentions, attacks on his conduct, attacks on his world view, attacks on his philosophical stance... yet he remained steadfast. He replied to each of this insinuation with service and continued to attract disciples from all over. Not through knee jerk reactions or to go on a clarifying binge, but through silently continuing his activities with an unmatched dignity and a sense of unwavering commitment towards the poor. Why? Because he rose above dogmas and debated on the state of the world more as a philosopher who wanted the political meaning of spiritual and the spiritual meaning to the political and as a result kept building a bridge between these two apparently opposite polarities. “So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor, who having educated at their expense pays not the least heed to them... I am a socialist, not because it is a perfect system, but because I believe that half a loaf is better than no bread.” These two sentences were not said one after another. Yet at different times, they reveal a lesser discussed, yet a much important aspect of one of the most important political theorists of any time. Swamiji, was, is and will never be only about religion and figureheads. He would be a man remembered for his practical approach to spirituality and for instilling a rationale that would constantly look at the humane cost of a human problem. February 2012

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Parliament of Religions took place in Chicago between September 11 and September 27, 1893. During this period, he gave a number of lectures both at the Main section and also at the Scientific section, three of these landmark lectures were on the dates of 9/11(opening session), 9/19, 9/20 and 9/27 (final session). If one were to compile, every recorded word that he spoke during this fortnight, what would emerge is a collage of thoughts that talks about a kind of spirituality which is interlinked with issues of need, greed, poverty and upliftment. His speech on 9/20 clearly stated that it was bread and not religion which Indians stood more in need.

Much like Tagore’s meeting with Narayana Guru in Kerala (at the Sivagiri Mutt in Varkala in 1922); Swami Vivekananda’s meeting with Pyotr Kropotkin in Paris in 1900 is hardly discussed. The core of these meetings, I would like to believe (and believe) is to explore the distinctiveness of different shades of opinion, however, diverse they are or they might look to be. Look at these lines by Kropotkin written as the concluding observation in ‘Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution’ in 1902: “In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.” And now let us examine these lines from Swami Vivekananda’s oeuvre: “Our aristocratic ancestors went on treading the common masses of our country under foot, till they became helpless… till under this torment the poor, poor people nearly forgot they were human beings....Our mission is for the destitute, the poor, and the illiterate peasantry and labouring classes; and if after everything has been done for them first, there is spare time, then only for the gentry.” I would find a sense of convergence in these lines. The former by one of the founding fathers of the political praxis of anarchism and the latter by a lifelong spiritualist who refused being pigeonholed as a marketable exotic Hindu saint by reaffirming: “Do you mean to say I am born to live and die as a caste-ridden, superstitious, merciless, hypocritical, theistic coward that you find only amongst the educated Hindus?” Infact, what we constantly gloss over is the fact that The 60 kindle india

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And this is the point that we purposely overlook, so as to paint, Swamiji, as a convenient Hindu icon. We forget to read (or choose not to read) his concluding lines in ‘State, Society and Socialism’ where he says: “The difficulty is not that one body of men are naturally more important than another, but whether this body of men, because they have the advantage of intelligence, should take away even physical advantage from those who do not possess that advantage. The fight is to destroy that privilege.” Neither spirituality nor socialism can be boxed into easy paradigms. Or even be separated that easily. They are not even antonyms or colliding pieces of idea-fragments. These facets always work hand-in-hand across the lowest common economic platforms where the have-nots, have-beens, yetto-be, have-been-dismissed and the have-been-glossed. They work concurrently amongst those who are trying to retrieve the last remain morsels from the dustbin of the supermarket perched at one end of the parking lot or maybe at the pavement outside. And that is the core of this discussion, Swamiji as a political rebel. As a practical spiritualist. Both at the same time. Even if your political reading and spiritual understanding is at loggerheads with one another. As a person who pops up in a discussion between Leo Tolstoy and Czech revolutionary, Jan Massyryk and was referred to by the former as one of the greatest philosophers of modern India. We would like you to look at Swamiji as a revolutionary of ideas, as a brilliant travel writer (try his book ‘Memories of European travel’), an important theorist try (‘Caste, Culture and Socialism’) or a public speaker of rare candour (‘Lectures from Colombo to Almora’) and of course, a pioneering ecological thinker who kept invoking the basic central idea of compassion... that encompasses the trees, the roots, the branches, the animal planet and the human beings trying to make sense of both the scientific and spiritual multi-verse (‘Living at the Source’, ‘Karma Yoga’ and ‘Thoughts on the Gita’). It is in that realm of ideas we need to discover the re-discovery of Swami Vivekananda.

THE KINDLE LIBRARY: MUSIC

SNtials

By Sayantan Neogi

ALI’S ‘I’M THE GREATEST’:,

A RARE DOCUMENT

A HILARIOUS MUST-HAVE

“You know what? Skinny little me started to struggle Ten years old, suddenly bold ‘Cause I resolved to live like my hero in the ring Be smart; never give an inch, no retreating And I racked up Respect from teachers, Red Necks And creatures who attack in a pack like insects, Never seen the like, not before or since a young prince And I remain convinced of his invincibility, athletic agility, virility, Still a free spirit, forever through eternity, Stingin’ like a bee, Mr. Muhammad Ali.” - From ‘Muhammad Ali’, the 2001 single by the UK based trip-hop band ‘Faithless’

any young men and women through the generations, including Maxi Jazz of ‘Faithless’, have been inspired by ‘the greatest’ sportsman of all time; even, at times without the knowledge of how he impacted the socio-politics, pop culture and iconography of America and the world. That’s the magic of the lip and fist of Muhammad Ali, the El Paso of inspiration for so many around the world. But even when Ali inspired, he entertained at every single moment pushing the limits of bragging, mockery, confidence and greatness. It was 1963, when a young man called Cassius Clay, (who wasn’t the heavyweight champion yet, nor was he Muhammad Ali yet) who had the world in a ‘spin’ when he recorded a once-rare-LP-now-common-torrent called ‘I’m the Greatest’. As you might have figured, I’m a huge Ali fan and if you are one, this album is a must have. Incredibly young sounding, Ali is at his best here when making swipe after verbal swipe at Sonny Liston, both in verse and in (scripted?) answers to audience questions. One silly sketch (“I Have Written a Drama,” He said playfully) isn’t up to the solo spots, but even that hardly disrupts the record’s giddy tone. ‘I’m the Greatest’ is an amazing collection of standup, poetry and rapping, the brash young Ali is as hilarious, insightful, and wise as ever; a moment of history captured forever! As a

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bonus, this CD includes the stunning take on Ben E. King’s ‘Stand By Me’, an idea conceived by the great Sam Cooke, where Ali shows he could have been a contender in the charts too (In a Jack Black sort of way). His attempt to sing the song in his incredibly hoarse voice and poor timing is hilarious. The same goes for his Beatle-esque, raucous version of ‘The Gang’s All Here’, celebrating his victory over Sonny Liston (notice the McCartney-like WHOOOO! in the background on this one). Even those unfamiliar with boxing or the topical events of the time cannot help but roar at most of the humor in this as the former Mr. Clay delivers a series of hilarious rhymes about his modesty (or lack thereof ) and likelihood of beating thenchamp Sonny Liston. In the famous title track, Clay predicts that he’s destined to be the champ: “I’m the man this poem is about/I’ll be champ of the world; there isn’t a doubt/Here I predict Mr. Liston’s dismemberment/I’ll hit him so hard he’ll wonder where October and November went.” On one of the CD’s funniest cuts, Clay begins with a parody of the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech from Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ and then proceeds to demolish Sonny Liston rhetorically – something he’d do for real in the ring soon enough. Okay, now on a slight diluting diversion. WWE and the former WWF stars like Bret Hart, The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin have all used Ali’s unabashed boastful style to marquee their personas and we lap it up every night on ten sports. However, their lips have probably been stronger than their fists. In 1978, DC Comics came up with a story arc titled ‘Muhammad Ali Vs. Superman’, where Ali teams up with Supe to save the world from alien invasion portraying his against-the-ropes-but-will-not-drop attitude. Anyway, the point is that pop culture today is almost reflective of Ali’s persona and the seed of that persona is documented in this LP/torrent of ‘poetry for public consumption’. The LP/torrent comes highly recommended and if you can’t buy it, download it.

THE KINDLE LIBRARY: CINEMA

50 directors

Sayan Bhattacharya recommends

must-watch movies es

from around the world Film: Leaving (2011) Dir: Vaclav Havel Country: Czech Republic

ow does one let go of all that one has earned, accumulated through time? Power, fame, prestige and all the ego thumping paraphernalia that accompany it…how does one give it all up and then dissolve into the forgotten map of the general mindscape? Leaving isn’t easy… yet inevitable it is! The question is how graceful can you be during your exit! Vaclav Havel, former President of Czech Republic, the chief architect of the Velvet Revolution (overthrowing the Soviet Communists from erstwhile Czechoslovakia) and a noted playwright makes his silver screen debut as a director and actor in an adaptation of his play by the same name, at the ripe age of 74. And takes just 94 minutes to present a quirky little gem that talks of letting go and so much more. In an unnamed country, a chancellor, Vilem Rieger is widely respected. Newspapers want to carry long interviews with him;

petite beauties uties want to write thesis papers rs on his policies, he even has a devoted girlfriend. But as with everything, power is transient and soon he has to resign. It’s time to vacate the palatial villa. The daughter thinks it’s a bad idea to bring a decrepit father home and that to with a girlfriend. The long interview for the newspaper ultimately boils down to a salacious story on Rieger’s love interests. And to top it all, his opponent makes him an offer to either support him or vacate the villa. So on one hand is a life of oblivion and on the other an ignominious understanding with the future President, just for the sake of holding onto the last vestige of authority. What will Rieger do? What makes ‘Leaving’ special is not just its central theme but also the absurd, off kilter treatment of the text. So the performances are all melodramatic and the dialogue delivery high pitched. Little quirks, peculiar eating habits and the placement of props add heft to an otherwise politically loaded screenplay. So themes of economic reforms, the changing fundamentals of politics… it’s all there but all in the garb of self deprecating humour. Self deprecating because it’s Havel who plays Reiger and placed against the context of his stepping down from power, ‘Leaving’ gets a new dimension. Here’s one leader who could still take life with a pinch of salt. Vaclav Havel is no more but in a country where 86 year olds embark on rath yatras to make a last stab at power, one wonders when would we stop taking ourselves too seriously?

to watch before you die

#32 ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU

He has made just 4 feature films in a span of a decade and certainly has got many more left in him. So in a way featuring him on this list may be blasphemous for many. Yet in a globalised world, if we talk of cinema that marry contemporary realities of migration, rootlessness, economic disjunct with visual metaphors and a rare aesthetic sparsity; then you can’t not take note of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. Multiple tracks, hand held camera, non linear narrative, searing drama have been the recurring motifs in his first three films. Yet these elements do not overwhelm the texts because Iñárritu invests his characters with a lot of humanness and presents fractured realities in ways that tease and provoke. His latest ‘Biutiful’ follows a linear structure and we get a sense that Iñárritu can also go against his grain. But what remains is his empathy for his characters. Chinese migrants dying in subhuman conditions in a flashy metropolis, Senegalese smugglers trying to eke out a living, a young mother trying to cope with bipolar disorder and last but not the least Javier Bardem as Uxbal, terminally ill and trying to provide for his children… here are characters with ambiguous moralities, whose lives are on the edge but who continue to hold on… there are no easy answers and the politics of these lives, these realities is always an undertone. But what is important is the discomfort that these films evoke, the questions they raise. And in the words of Iñárritu himself, the purpose of his art is to provoke. You may like or not like his cinema but here’s one force you cannot ignore. Recommended viewing: Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) Babel (2006), Biutiful (2011) February 2012

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By Mainak Bhaumik

HOW FINCHER DELIVERED AGAIN 64 kindle india

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THE KINDLE LIBRARY: CINEMA

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he “feel-bad movie of the season” – that’s how one of the early trailers accurately advertised he “feel-bad movie of the season” – that’s how the movie: ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ one of the early trailers accurately advertised (2011), Hollywood director David Fincher’s the movie: ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ finely honed drama-thriller adaptation of the (2011), Hollywood director David Fincher’s award-winning crime novel by Stieg Larsson. David Fincher’s finely honed drama-thriller adaptation of the impressive repertoire includes films like ‘Seven’, ‘Fight Club’, award-winning crime novel by Stieg Larsson. David Fincher’s ‘Panic Room’, ‘Zodiac’, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin impressive repertoire includes films like ‘Seven’, ‘Fight Club’, Button’ and ‘The Social Network’. Now his 2011 offering, ‘Panic Room’,’ Zodiac’, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, gives audiences another Button’ and ‘The Social Network’. Now his 2011 offering, big-flick to relish. ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, gives audiences another big-flick to relish. The original Swedish title of the novel translates to “Men Who Hate Women”, theme of sexualto violence The original Swedishwhich title reveals of the its novel translates “Men against women, stemming from itsantheme incident when Stieg Who Hate Women”, which reveals of sexual violence Larsson, at the agestemming of 15, hadfrom to helplessly witness the Stieg gang against women, an incident when rape of a at young girl,ofLisbeth. the young Larsson, the age 15, hadHe to christened helplessly witness the main gang character of his books, Lisbeth,He who is a victimthe of young rape herself. rape of a young girl, Lisbeth. christened main Th e crimeofnovel, ‘The Lisbeth, Girl With Tattoo’ , is the character his books, whothe is aDragon victim of rape herself. fi rste crime of the novel, immensely popular ‘Millennium’ . ,Before Th ‘The Girl With the Dragontrilogy’ Tattoo’ is the his as aimmensely fiction writer, the author was a journalist, which fi rststint of the popular ‘Millennium’ trilogy. Before is journalistic as he each chapter hisevident stint asin a fihis ction writer, thestyle, author wasbegins a journalist, which with statistics about violence style, against in Sweden. This is evident in his journalistic as women he begins each chapter compelling taleabout transports theagainst readerwomen to ruralinSweden, with statistics violence Sweden.where This they plungetale intotransports the depthsthe of areader gripping crimeSweden, story. where compelling to rural they plunge into the depths of a gripping crime story. There has also been another Swedish film adaptation of the There has also been another Swedish film adaptation of the book in 2009 by director Niels Arden Oplev. However, in book in 2009 by director Niels Arden Oplev. However, in no way is Fincher’s adaptation a copy of the earlier Swedish no way is Fincher’s adaptation a copy of the earlier Swedish movie, or the book. It goes without saying that its roots are movie, or the book. It goes without saying that its roots are firmly grounded in the source material but the film stands firmly grounded in the source material but the film stands strong on its own merit. Perhaps one can even go further to strong on its own merit. Perhaps one can even go further to argue that thanks to a bigger budget and an auteur behind argue that thanks to a bigger budget and an auteur behind the camera, the 2011 film over-takes its predecessor a little. the camera, the 2011 film over-takes its predecessor a little. Also, Fincher’s characters are more fleshed out as emotionally Also, Fincher’s characters are more fleshed out as emotionally complex individuals, while the 2009 film’s characterisation complex individuals, while the 2009 film’s characterisation was more straightforward. was more straightforward. Fincher’s 2011 film adaptation of the internationally bestselling novel explores a man’s mission to find out what happened to a girl who has been missing for the last 40 years, with the distinct possibility that she might have been murdered. Financial reporter, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is engaged by Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), a wealthy Swedish industrialist, to investigate the disappearance of his beloved sixteen year old niece, Harriet. Vanger suspects that his niece might have been murdered by a family member. The investigation leads the journalist to remote, wintry Hedeby, an island on the coast of Sweden. Before offering Blomkvist the job, Vanger has the writer’s background checked by Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), an expert computer hacker. Eventually, Blomkvist finds out

that Lisbeth was investigating him and joins forces with her to help dig up the dirt on the Vanger family. An attraction that Lisbeth was investigating him and joins forces with her between the lead pair forms as he admires her computer to help dig up the dirt on the Vanger family. An attraction skills and photographic memory; and she is impressed by between the lead pair forms as he admires her computer his forthrightness and style of investigation. What’s more, skills and photographic memory; and she is impressed by this unusual pairing seems somehow right as both their his forthrightness and style of investigation. What’s more, moral codes are strong, especially regarding their stand on this unusual pairing seems somehow right as both their the subject of violence against women. But they don’t come moral codes are strong, especially regarding their stand on together until the movie is well underway, and the dense plot the subject of violence against women. But they don’t come alternates the two characters’ individual converging storylines. together until the movie is well underway, and the dense plot As the two of them begin to trace a chain of homicides from alternates the two characters’ individual converging storylines. the past into the present, they find themselves pupil deep in a As the two of them begin to trace a chain of homicides from dark, toxic world in a cold bleak Scandinavian setting. the past into the present, they find themselves pupil deep in a dark, toxic world in a cold bleak Scandinavian setting. Screenwriter Steve Zaillian adapts Larsson’s novel deftly Screenwriter Larsson’s deftly by condensingSteve a six Zaillian hundred adapts page book into anovel two-and-aby condensing a six hundred page some book small into aand two-and-ahalf hour motion picture, making perhaps half hour changes motion picture, making small and necessary in the plot andsome characters. Oneperhaps would necessaryhischanges the plotwould and characters. would assume biggest in challenge have been One to translate assume hisasbiggest have been to translate something cerebralchallenge as solvingwould a puzzle to the visual medium something cerebralinasthis solving a puzzle towith the visual medium of film. Heassucceeds daunting task the clever use lm. He succeeds in this daunting taskflwith the clever use of fiphotographs, paperwork, voiceovers, ashbacks and even of photographs, paperwork, voiceovers, flashbacks even an effective soundtrack that allows the audience toand come to an eff ective soundtrack thatsame allows thealong audience to the same conclusions at the time with to thecome leading the same conclusions at the same time along with the leading pair Mikael and Lisbeth. pair Mikael and Lisbeth. Although Mikael Blomkvist, played by the biggest star in the Although Mikael Blomkvist, played by the biggest star in the film, ie the famous James Bond, Daniel Craig, is the central film, ie the famous James Bond, Daniel Craig, is the central character and has the most screen time, he is by no means the character and has the most screen time, he is by no means the scene stealer of the film. That mantel undoubtedly belongs to scene stealer of the film. That mantel undoubtedly belongs to Lisbeth Salander, ie Rooney Mara and her close-to-the-bone Lisbeth Salander, ie Rooney Mara and her close-to-the-bone portrayal of the tiny, brilliant, pierced and tattooed hacker. portrayal of the tiny, brilliant, pierced and tattooed hacker. A ward of the state due to a violent childhood spent in and A ward of the state due to a violent childhood spent in and out of mental institutions, Lisbeth gets a new guardian who out of mental institutions, Lisbeth gets a new guardian who controls her finances and demands sexual favors in exchange controls her finances and demands sexual favors in exchange for her money. However Salander, far from being a victim, for her money. However Salander, far from being a victim, regains total control over her finances and sexuality in a regains total control over her finances and sexuality in a couple of memorable graphic scenes. She draws the audience’s couple of memorable graphic scenes. She draws the audience’s attention with her underlying vulnerability as a little girl attention with her underlying vulnerability as a little girl trapped in a woman’s body. While being hard, cold and trapped in a woman’s body. While being hard, cold and merciless, she also conveys a fragility that wins your sympathy merciless, she also conveys a fragility that wins your sympathy and your vote. and your vote. The film conveys an extremely suffocating air of danger and dread, while keeping you riveted, as you travel into the sinister darkness of a chamber of horrors. David Fincher reminds one of David Lynch who seems to share his belief that there is rot and corruption hidden in society breeding evil at every corner. From the flashy opening credits to Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’, and plenty of suspense and tension, the film delivers what it promises. February 2012

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THE KINDLE LIBRARY: SCIENCE

THE YETI DIARY By Agniva Chowdhury

here is no sunshine on ‘their’ shoulders to make them happy. Neither is there any medium inbetween that can capture ‘their’ regular status updates. But very recently, ‘their’ untold stories have started to get published under the heading ‘discovery of a new world’ as a group of British scientists have tracked an entire community of species from the sea floor of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. The findings, made by teams led by the University of Oxford, University of Southampton and British Antarctic Survey, include new species of crab, starfish, barnacles, sea anemones, and potentially an octopus clustered around the hydrothermal vents. The team has used a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) called ‘Isis’ to explore the East Scotia Ridge deep beneath the Southern Ocean where the vents create a unique environment that lacks sunlight but is rich in certain chemicals. The ridge, around 2500 metres deep, is dotted with those vents where geothermally-heated water forces its way to the surface through cracks or fissures in the sea floor. The temperature of the sea water around these hydrothermal vents reaches 3820C. Added to their depth, this makes exploring them without an ROV virtually impossible. According to Professor Alex Rogers of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, who led the research, hydrothermal vents are home to animals found nowhere else on the planet, that get their energy not from the Sun but from breaking down chemicals, such as hydrogen sulphide. The first survey of these particular vents has revealed a hot, dark, ‘lost world’ in which whole communities of previously unknown marine organisms thrive. Highlights from the ROV dives include images showing huge colonies of the new species of blond, furry-legged yeti crab 66 kindle india

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(formally known as ‘Kiwa hirsuta’) which are found in the form of clusters around the vent chimneys. They are expected to be the most in number, among all the two dozen new species found. Unlike other crabs it has a dense mat of hair on its chest. Elsewhere the ROV spotted numbers of an undescribed predatory sea star with seven arms crawling across fields of stalked barnacles and found an unidentified pale octopus nearly 2,400 metres down on the seafloor. Fish were uncommon, and only seen on the peripheries of the hot zones. Researchers were equally intrigued by what they did not find -- including many of the giant worms, vent mussels, crabs, clams and shrimp that have been found before at other deep sea vents in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Ocean. This was quite surprising for the team as some researchers have suggested the Southern Ocean vents could act as a gateway connecting other vents in other oceans, allowing creatures to slowly disperse across the oceans over thousands or millions of years. But the new discovery suggests the extreme conditions of the Southern Ocean could instead act as a barrier to dispersal. Perhaps that is why there is such a difference between vent animals underneath the Southern Ocean and those elsewhere. The researchers also believe that the unique species discovered at the East Scotia Ridge hydrothermal vents suggest that vent ecosystems may be much more diverse globally than had been previously thought. Although the introduction has appeared as a very common script that tells a story about some socially awkward and neglected class, it is always a mind-pleaser to watch that at least there is some corner in this endangered earth-space where somebody is enjoying the ‘bliss of solitude’.

READING REINCARNATED

The physical warmth of books or a more convenient digitized way of reading… the debate may rage on but the constant factor is love for the written word. Shabbir Akhtar on e-readers. he debate about the web being a and Kindle Touch are as different as they are cause of decline in reading has been similar. If your goal is to read long novels and raging for the past few years. Of spend hours with your e-reader, Kindle Touch is course, there are still a lot of fiction probably the better device for you. novel lovers out there, but there Amazon Kindle Touch: are less and less people reading fiction as times Amazon finally entered the post-keyboard world goes by. It’s not that people don’t desire to escape of e-readers with Kindle Touch. The Kindle reality and indulge in a pastime which takes Touch is lightweight, compact and affordable. It them into a fantasy world, but the big problem has divided the screen into regions. A 0.5-inchis time and the fast paced lifestyle which most of wide strip running the length of the left-hand us are trying to keep up. The media is throwing side is set aside for tapping to return to the up so much real life information that many previous page. The larger region to the right – people who would have once sat up late at night effectively stretching from the centre of the page reading their favourite Agatha Christie novel are to the right edge – is reserved for moving to the now huddled around a computer. next page. The device offers access to a massive Although it’s technology that is the cause of catalog of books, magazines, newspapers, and decline in reading, it’s technology again that’s audiobooks via Amazon.com’s familiar online responsible for its reincarnation. We’re living in store. The most compelling aspect of the Kindle the age of “Lean Back 2.0,” according to Andrew Touch is its inclusion of 3G along with the WiRashbass, CEO of The Economist Group. The Fi-only model. concept of Lean Back 2.0 is relatively simple Barnes & Noble Nook Color: – it is the use of tablets and e-readers at the To put it in simple words, the Nook Color is a expense of print and web. Unlike reading a print stripped-down tablet focused on reading or a newspaper or magazine, you can access whatever very fancy e-reader. The Nook Color sports a you like, and unlike reading on a laptop, reading 7-inch LCD touch screen and comes with builton a tablet or e-reader is a leisure activity. in Wi-Fi and browser which allows you to surf Tablets do allow us to read e-books, but if you the web, send email and do a lot more. The LCD are looking to read novels, or even magazines, screen is backlit and you can read it without a it’s best to pick an e-reader. E-readers, with light. The screen is also touch sensitive, so you e-ink, don’t have backlit screen and require an can navigate menus and turn pages with a swipe external light source for reading, but it’s easier of your finger. It also supports Microsoft Office on the eyes and causes less eye strain for readers and lots of multi-media content. If you’re not than tablets with LCD screens. There are many satisfied with an e-ink reader and don’t want e-reader brands in the market but it’s only something as pricey and as heavy as the iPad, the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook Nook Color is your best bet. which are worth any investment. Nook Color

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THE KINDLE LIBRARY: TECHNOLOGY

WEBSITE OF THE MONTH

here do professionals go when they are looking for a date? The answer to this has been provided by Naveed Nadir when he launched his website, Hitch.me. You can sign into the website using your LinkedIn account which then automatically transfers your professional information, including your LinkedIn photo to your profile. Once logged in, you can â&#x20AC;&#x153;browse through the profiles of hundreds of professionals all over the world, send them private smiles, pitches and even presentations.â&#x20AC;?

INTERVIEW

Directing movies or directing plays? Would never want to be in a situation where I have to choose between the two. Delhi or Mumbai? Mumbai is home. Delhi is nostalgia. Critical applause or commercial awards? (Smirks)Over and above both of them, and doing exactly what I enjoy doing. Your take on: The world ending in 2012: Well if I die tomorrow, the world ends for me tomorrow. Indian theatre festivals vs. International theatre festivals I would like to see more International theatre. And more talent in Indian theatre festivals. Small cinema revolution in India Floundering at the moment. It had a good start but has to reinvent itself. Three work habits I finish what I start. Stickler for time. Deadlines always work. Favourite adda to see a play Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai. Where do you practice your lines? Nowhere apart from the stage. Favourite Twitterati: My brother Rajneesh Kapoor Books on your wish list: A bunch of books by Italo Calvino which I bought a few weeks ago but have no time to read. Music that gets you grooving: I can’t dance. And music that can get me to dance has not been written yet. But I enjoy listening to everything apart from techno and trance. Future Projects: Just finished finalising the cast for ‘Ankho Dekhi’. The Footlights would be focusing this year on a fun adaption of King Lear.

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THOUGHTS THAT KINDLE

RAJAT KAPOOR

RNI NO. WBENG/2010/36111 Regd. No. KOL RMS/429/2011-2013