Kindle Magazine December Edition by Kindle Magazine

KINDLE INDIA

Ideas

Imagination

Dialectics

“The Year End Issue should bear a comma” www.kindlemag.in

Pause and Reﬂect -Images 2013

December 2013

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KINDLE Ideas

Imagination

Dialectics

Editor in Chief: Pritha Kejriwal Managing Editor: Maitreyi Kandoi Senior Editor: Sayan Bhattacharya Web Editor: Shubham Nag Sub Editor: Nidhi Dugar Kundalia Features Editor: Koli Mitra Feature Writers: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Rimi B. Chatterjee, Saswat Pattanayak, Poornima Joshi, Manash Bhattacharjee, Dipa Sinha, Nitesh Mohanty, Nitasha Kaul Columnists: Amit Sengupta, Thomas Crowley, Rohit Roy, Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, Deepa Bhasthi, Neel Adhikari, Monidipa Mondal Art Director: Soumik Lahiri Marketing Manager: Priyanka Khandelia Assistant Manager-Marketing: Souvik Sen Finance Executives: Dibyendu Chakraborty, Vishal K Thakur Head - Logistics: Arindam Sarkar Printed at: CDC Printers Pvt Ltd, Tangra Industrial Estate - II (Bengal Pottery), 45 Radhanath Chowdhury Road, Kolkata - 700 015. Distribution: IBH Books & Magazines Distributors Pvt. Ltd. Phone # 022 4049 7401 /02 Email: contact@ibhworld.com A. H. Wheeler & Co. Pvt. Ltd. Phone # 91-532-2261385-8 Email: wheeler_ip@rediffmail.com Vol 4 Issue 09 December 2013 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.

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FUTURE PERFECT

mages and stories burnt like shooting stars in the night sky of the passing year…momentarily ablaze with new narratives of changing times. Burnt out stories, survived by their footnotes. Their references and contexts stretching far and beyond the obvious. Incandescent, ephemeral theatre. Its argument and message to be found somewhere in the future perfect– “that point, where things land, are finished, over, and gone but not yet”. (Lia Purpura – ‘Future Perfect’) This year, scientists at Cornell University were able to “print” a proto-type human ear through a 3-D printer and with it, it seems we have truly entered the post-human/ trans-human age, and it is perhaps time to confront existentialism in a renewed light. Leon Kass, a prominent bio-ethicist, in his book, ‘Life, Liberty and Defense of Dignity’ says, “Homogenization, mediocrity, pacification, drug-induced contentment, debasement of taste, souls without loves and longings—these are the inevitable results of making the essence of human nature the last project of technical mastery. In his moment of triumph, Promethean man will become a contented cow.” Alongside, Google announced its Calico project – an enterprise “that will focus on health and well being, in particular the challenge of ageing and associated diseases”. In its report on the project, Time Magazine wrote, “The unavoidable question this raises is why a company built on finding information and serving ads next to it is spending untold amounts on a project that flies in the face of the basic fact of the human condition, the existential certainty of aging and death? To which the unavoidable answer is another question: Who the hell else is going to do it?” The pompous cover framed it in red – no one else could solve death, but Google - an organization, which has made its vast fortunes by parasitically feeding on all our private lives; The new frameworks from which we are to wrench-out the “future perfect”. During the same time, the Chinese government built a new road to connect one of the most isolated corners of the earth with the rest of humanity – the road that stretched from Metog County in the Tibetan autonomous region to the Chinese

Editor’s Note

mainland. A road that wound through the snow-capped hills – could be just like the first train line that wound through difficult terrains to reach Marquez’s Macondo – only to bring with it, the banana company hurricane, turning the town into a “fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble”... Also simultaneously, in another part of the world – people were protesting the building of new stadiums – the Brazilian people didn’t want their money to be spent on building megasporting infrastructure before their state could build better schools and hospitals. Meanwhile another “constructionmovement” began in our own backyard – one to build the tallest statue in the world of “Iron Man”, Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujrat. “Sacred soil” from all temples and Hindu religious places is being collected to build the grand statue of the latest icon who is to push India towards the grand dream of becoming a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. What lies in Metog’s or Brazil’s or India’s future, are deeply political questions, whose dialectics shape the fundamental ideas of how states build or destroy, include or exclude their people. The year gave us many such grand new ‘structures’ to deal with –which we would be de-constructing in the years to come – for now, we just pause and reflect… The line on the cover is taken from American artiste Krystle Warren’s song, ‘Year End Issue’… And on that note, we wish you a happy new year… let the music begin.

Pritha Kejriwal,

Editor-in-Chief, Kindle Magazine pritha@kindlemag.in

Write to us at:

Kindle Magazine, Ink Publications Pvt Ltd, DN 37, Sector V, Salt Lake City, Kolkata - 700 091 www.kindlemag.in facebook.com/kindlemag123 @kindlemag

Dear Editor, Your fashion issue cover was what brilliant things are made of. Burkha acting as a cape of superwoman- that’s the power of cartoon. One image can talk so much. Enjoyed reading all the cover stories as well. Keep up the good work! Nikita Jha, Delhi

Dear Editor Kallol Datta’s clothes have always fascinated me as much as they have perplexed me. I’m so glad you carried that interview. I can understand his aesthetics so much better. Your magazine has grown so much with time, and helped me widen my perspective with each issue. Glad to see a publication that doesn’t succumb itself at the altar of commercial gains and interests. Suhasini Mitra, Noida

Dear Editor, Keep up the great work you are doing on your Facebook page. My Home Feed is so full of good reads from your website. Kindle has carved its niche and so well. PJ Fabros, Goa

Sachin the opiate

By Shamya Dasgupta

Seeing Red

By Thomas Crowley

Otherworldly

47 By Koli Mitra

Mard

By Sayan Bhattacharya

Post Miley Feminism

By Saswat Pattanaik

The Fall of the Domestic Goddess 30

By Deepa Bhasti

Contents

Sachin THE OPIATE

“T

he medals don’t mean anything and the glory doesn’t last. It’s all about your happiness.” – Jackie JoynerKersee I wonder if those words wouldn’t sit better on Sachin Tendulkar or his fans. Indeed, Tendulkar’s retirement was as much about all of us as it was about him. Some things just become a habit.

A nation of damp eyes greeted the arguably biggest watershed moment, in Indian sports when the mic replaced the bat in Sachin Tendulkar’s hands on 16th November, 2013. Can we cope with this late goodbye, wonders Shamya Dasgupta…

Why else would those Facebook redesigns annoy us so much? There are things you should be able to do without having to think about it too much, like watching cricket and expecting Tendulkar to score a few runs. We need not always do these things well, mind you, but just to do them; we need the familiar, to just reassuringly be there. We’ve made Tendulkar a habit, the way Milan – and all of Italy – would have made Paolo Maldini a habit. We feel about Tendulkar what the Old Trafford faithful would have

felt about Alex Ferguson or, maybe more about, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes. And oh yes, Indian cricket and Tendulkar. We all knew the end was nigh. If anything, it came a couple of years late. I was not alone in willing him to take his last bow – after the World Cup win, after the hundredth international hundred. I felt that the selectors were in the unenviable position of not being able to force his hand, and said as much. He was too big. Bigger than the selectors, perhaps even the BCCI. A few critics said he is staying in the game for more personal glory; some– and I am not among them – even suggested, off the record, that he stayed for more money. I have no idea why he played on. My instinct tells me that he just wanted to play as long as he could. The man hadn’t done much else from the time he was a little boy and he just didn’t know why, or how, he could stop doing it. There might just have been a couple of more challenges he wanted to throw at himself. Also, if you think about it, there weren’t readymade No. 4 batsmen arriving on a conveyor belt. All the same, it was hard to stomach getting bowled so often. It didn’t make sense. Like it wouldn’t have made sense if Felix Savon went to the Olympics and came back empty handed. Ferguson left United after 27 years in charge. He left because he had done everything he felt he could do at the club and because, at 70, he wanted to do other things with his life, primarily adding to his collection of vintage wines and reading. Tendulkar said, a day after walking away, “I think my body requires a rest. It isn’t able to consistently take the load any more. I think this is right time to leave.” Giggs still hasn’t found the ‘right time’ for himself, while Scholes thought he had found it but then realised he was wrong. Some people quit too early – Bjorn Borg is an example – while some refuse to go away. But that’s sport. Not a corporate job with a fixed retirement age. Common sense suggests that one should go out with a bang. Tendulkar was all set for a sub-par exit. But, as Muhammad Ali once said, “It’s the lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges; I believe in myself.” Tendulkar believed in himself. The 74 he scored in his final innings, after getting a rough umpiring decision in his previous outing, wasn’t the best he has ever played, but it was a fairly good bang. But then again, the bang afterwards, with mic replacing bat, was even better. Not one person watching – at the ground, many more on TV and some more online –could have held on to a single grudge against this man, this legend. We know he is out of the picture; they have stopped

supplying us with the coke. But have we kicked the habit? What if some of the stuff comes by? What about when India plays South Africa in Johannesburg from December 18 and at some stage, the second Indian wicket falls? That’s when the emptiness deep inside will really register. That’s when we will know if the habit’s gone or not.

We all knew the end was nigh. If anything, it came a couple of years late. I was not alone in willing him to take his last bow – after the World Cup win, after the hundredth international hundred. I felt that the selectors were in the unenviable position of not being able to force his hand, and said as much. He was too big. Bigger than the selectors, perhaps even the BCCI. A few critics said he is staying in the game for more personal glory; some– and I am not among them – even suggested, off the record, that he stayed for more money.

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History

IN THE REMAKING BJP invokes a mythologised Sardar Patel to give itself legitimacy. Poornima Joshi reads between the lines.

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then minister of state for home Amit Shah, are sought to be submerged in a dominant discourse of the era of development and progress that Mr Modi promises to herald once he takes over as Prime Minister. In his journey, the new-age charioteer needs a more contemporary mythological/historical icon to stoke the imagination of his twitter-brigade and social media fan club. Bhagwan Ram is so last century and in any case, the God suffers from the law of diminishing returns. So the search for a contemporary icon has led to the most obvious choice – the ‘Iron Man’ Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. A Gujarati, a man on the right side of the Congress who started the construction of the Somnath temple and of course, a nationalist without the trappings of Nehru’s Bolshevism, colonial life-style and absolute contempt for the RSS. In this quest, the other international icon from Gujarat, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, had to be overlooked for obvious considerations. Besides the fact that the invocation of Gandhi’s name would have naturally rekindled the unfortunate memories about the RSS’s connections with his assassins and the ban that was subsequently imposed on the Sangh by none other than Sardar Patel, the Mahatma is too secular, eccentric, frugal and austere a figure to match the razzle-dazzle of Mr Modi’s ongoing campaign. So, with the determination and characteristically scant regard for historical facts that the RSS routinely displays, its most famous pracharak, the Gujarat Chief Minister, has invoked Sardar Patel in his battle to wrest Delhi from the Congress’s evil clutches. In the good-versus-evil Ramlila that is currently being staged to enthrone Mr Modi in the Red Fort, Patel is to be his guardian angel.

or a political force without a glorious past, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) derives its historical legitimacy by manufacturing a legacy that cobbles together myths, fables and imagined grievances which their present warriors seek to address through political mobilisation. Ramjanmabhoomi was one such myth that the saffron joint family successfully trumped up to create a mass movement. Having established the BJP as force to reckon with, the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS), which is the BJP’s ideological mother, is presently engaged in the task of creating the second wave of Hindutva to shake its political progeny from

its decade-long state of being out of power in the Centre. The Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has been hand-picked to be Mr Advani’s replacement as the newage charioteer with his claims of having converted the state he has ruled for three terms as a land of milk and honey, where Lord Krishna’s Dwarka was once established and where the Hindutva laboratory has clearly done successful experiments in relegating the minorities permanently to second class citizen status. The flurry of staged and fake encounters, the silencing of critics and dissenters with jail terms and trumped up charges, and, in the latest sensational expose`, the stalking of a woman by the ATS, the CID and the Crime Branch in the state, on the orders of the

The movement is so identical to the years preceding the demolition of the mosque that it is difficult not to confuse the ‘Iron Man’ with Shri Ram; the two icons ostensibly pushing India on the dream journey towards Hindu Rashtra. A perceived grievance, that Nehru denied Patel’s rightful claim over India’s premiership, is carefully trumped up through the RSS’s minions in the media. Celebrity anchors have gleefully embraced the meaningless controversy and the rent-a-quote intellectuals are frequently busy debating the Nehru-versus- Patel issue on prime time TV. Meanwhile, several units of the BJP have started a movement reminiscent of the collection of bricks bearing Lord Ram’s name in the early 90’s by the RSS’s storm-troopers before they collected in Ayodhya to demolish the mosque. The Himachal Pradesh state unit of the BJP, for instance, has declared it has formed a coordination committee for an “iron collection drive”. Former party president and senior MLA Jairam Thakur, who will head the coordination committee, is reported to have asserted that efforts are being made to spread the party cadre network to all 20,118 villages and 3243 panchayats of the State. “We will collect iron and soil from all these villages and give it (Sardar Patel

statue in Gujarat) a Himachal flavour. We will also collect sacred soil from all the famous temples and religious places of the hill State,” Mr. Thakur is believed to have said. The process to make the construction a “movement” began after the Bhoomi Pujan for the memorial on October 31, the birth anniversary of Sardar Patel by Mr. Advani and Mr. Modi, both of whom have fashioned themselves in the image of the ‘Iron Man’. It may not be a particularly original trick; the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany having successfully experimented with it in the past. But it is a tried and tested tryst with trumped up history that has unfailingly yielded political dividends for the BJP. In the process of creation of a mythology around Patel, a couple of riots can always be engineered to keep the heat on. The Congress, thanks to its devotion to the Nehru-Gandhis to the exclusion of all other icons from the freedom struggle and their legacies, is out of depth in the ongoing chaos. History is once again rewritten to promote the mythology of the Hindu Rashtra.

In this quest, the other international icon from Gujarat, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, had to be overlooked for obvious considerations. Besides the fact that the invocation of Gandhi’s name would have naturally rekindled the unfortunate memories about the RSS’s connections with his assassins and the ban that was subsequently imposed on the Sangh by none other than Sardar Patel, the Mahatma is too secular, eccentric, frugal and austere a ﬁgure to match the razzle-dazzle of Mr Modi’s ongoing campaign.

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they will force you to have an extra sweet cup of tea with a handful of sweeter laddoos or barfis cooked in desi ghee. In its simplicity and its rough stillness, this is a timeless kind of change, itself unchanged, where the open gutter on the street, or the rotting pile of banana skins next to a jalebi cart with a buzzing collective of flies, or an ancient film hoarding featuring a buxom female together work out an anti-cathartic kaleidoscope – even as the long caravan of bullock carts carrying stacked sugar canes move into their long nocturnal journeys through agricultural fields towards crisis-ridden sugar factories.

West

WILD

TAMAS

Amid the green-revolution-borne extractionist abundance of Western UP, local life remained steeped in stagnant, rotting inertia… until the fascists of the Sangh Parivar decided this was fertile ground for breeding and harvesting the communal hostility they needed to fuel their insurgency…. Amit Sengupta writes…

his is Omkara territory, the wild west of Western UP, where sensuality ends… only to never begin. A coarse quagmire of life’s stasis moves in eternal stagnation, often barren despite the lush green fields and the mustard blossoms of the green revolution belt. Here, the twilight zone moves into the sudden criminality of unexpected dangers lurking in the evening, as the dry, dusty sun sets over puddles of dirty, lingering, rotting waters on the streets lined with solid brick homes with no windows or doors. The complex trajectories of crime, petty power struggles, caste politics and muscle power moves unchallenged after dusk in parts of this landscape; those who must pass on the highway or through the zigzaging, primitive, muddy

by-lanes, must reach their destination before sunset. Not that mornings or afternoons are always full of absolute security or peace; the diabolical and the deadly can re-fix their gaze even in cold daylight. But the dark much worse. This is truly Omkara territory, where the time and space spiral moves in repetitive retrograde motions, suspended between a feudal and patriarchal Bahubali body clock, almost removed from the ceaseless motions of modernity’s insatiable desires. The closed doors of perception. The rigid architecture of stasis. The staccato soliloquy of words, silences and hookahs, hiding the moistness and sweet smell of the sugar cane fields and the first liquid jiggery whose perfume fill the air. The simplicity of ordinary folk; if they like you,

If you travel through the Baghpat-Baraut-MuzaffarnagarShamli belt of Western UP as a traveler, you’d be reminded of a story Ruskin Bond had written in a daily paper in the 1990s. His bus once stopped at the sad Shamli bus stand, with rotting garbage and the stink of piss all over. He went to the small book shop piled with colourful Hindi pulp fiction. He saw a sexy Shobha De bestseller and Khushwant Singh’s book of jokes on top of a pile of books. He also saw, miraculously, a book written by Ruskin Bond down below, hidden in the heap. Clandestinely, he picked up his own book and placed it on top of the pile of books, above that of Shobha De’s books and the book of jokes. On his way back, he once again stopped at the Shamli bus stand and casually walked across to the same book shop. And what did he find? The Ruskin Bond book was once again placed at the bottom of the heap, tucked into its original domain of obscurity. Indeed, not much has changed in this part of the world since this Bond episode at Shamli. And life would have gone on in its own insipid, arid, effortless bullock cart space, if the Sangh Parivar had not systematically and willfully engineered the riots in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli and beyond – to the lush green hinterland, across the architecture of stasis and stagnation. Indeed, for more than two decades, there has been not one single act of violence enacted as a spectacle in this twilight zone dominated by the Jat community, with strong populations of Muslims, Gujjars, Brahmins and Dalits all making up parts of the ethnic mapping. The caste and community divide was incipient, but there was no open hostility, no discernable bad blood, not even a struggle for land or territory. In its own manner of retreat and reconciliation, this slow zone of feudal patriarchy enacted its daily ritualism without an iota of recrimination or violence. And yet, when the sinister, diabolical and xenophobic forces entered, everything changed, and so rapidly, that between one village and another, between Jats and Muslims – the conflict has never been between all Hindus and Muslims nor between Muslims and any other communities– that the old, ritualistic architecture collapsed in a moment and all the dark memories of Partition came alive like a film in sepia rewind.

Thousands were displaced, moving from one sugarcane field to another, from villages to open air camps,– most of them Muslims, contrary to the RSS/VHP/BJP goons and leaders activated their time-tested and vicious propaganda models based on communal polarizations and social engineering. That they got tacit and tangential backing from a rudderless regime in UP, and a clueless district administration, only added to the divisions, the mass exodus, the murders, and the unwritten stories of rapes which stalked the land, even while many of the rapists, till this day, roam free for all to see. The bustling moffusil town of Muzaffarnagar and the filthy bus stand at Shamli are now full of stories of division and hatred. The xenophobes led by Amit Shah as strategist have succeeded and the entire State apparatus and its police and intelligence agencies knew much in advance, that communal polarization is the ultimate electoral trump card of that fascists who want to enter Delhi via UP. If they have a chance, they will do it all over UP and all over India. That they succeeded here, and yet again got away, even as the alleged criminals were felicitated in Narendra Modi’s rally, is an indication that the Indian State and civil society has decisively lost even this battle with the fascists. Surely, for the thousands displaced who still live in the open in this early, cruel winter of Western UP, and those who mourn their dead, and those women whose bodies have been ravaged, this will mark a defining moment in the history of India’s pseudo secular democracy. This is because once again, it was Tamas, written all over the landscape, in this mass tragedy of our times.

The bustling moffusil town of Muzaffarnagar and the ﬁlthy bus stand at Shamli are now full of stories of division and hatred. The xenophobes led by Amit Shah as strategist have succeeded and the entire State apparatus and its police and intelligence agencies knew much in advance, that communal polarization is the ultimate electoral trump card of that fascists who want to enter Delhi via UP. If they have a chance, they will do it all over UP and all over India.

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SOME DARK HUMOUR…

The accompanying image might elicit varied reactions…from giggles to utter disbelief at the sheer “stupidity” of the journalist. But the questions it raises are far from comfortable for any of us. Monidipa Mondal contemplates about the state of the Indian media and its audience..

he day this news went viral, there was a round of giggles at the office. Quite aside from the horrifying violation of human dignity, it was the utter absurdity of the situation that tickled us. How could that guy be so stupid, we wondered aloud. A journalist should certainly have known better? The case of the journalist riding on a flood victim’s shoulders to report a “human interest” story about the Uttarakhand floods is a classic example of indiscretion. It is not inadvertent, just as a racist YouTube video put up in 2012 by the two white schoolgirls wasn’t an innocent mistake, or the photo posted online by a young woman who decided that dressing up as a Boston Marathon blast victim was a good idea for Halloween, wasn’t just a lapse in judgment. From this point, I can lead into a discussion

of the moralising capacity of social media, but I would like you to consider another question—what, actually, goes on in the mind of a person who performs such an act and then shares it with the world? Unlike the people in the other examples, Narayan Pargaein is a professional. What is common to all three examples, however, is the fact they were performed with the aim to get appreciation and ended up massively backfiring instead. More than the easures of chastisement available, I worry about the perverse nature of the original intention. These people aren’t villains. Nor are they morons. In their personal lives, they are often as intelligent and responsible as the next person. And these are not minor errors of impulsive thoughtlessness. Where are we going wrong, as a civilization, that such intentions are increasingly accepted as something worth giving voice to?

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I do not believe Pargaein’s subsequent defence that the visual of him astride the shoulders of the flood victim was never meant to go on air, but I do see his motivation behind performing it. In the cut throat competition of today’s journalism, sillier (though perhaps less ethically suspect) antics are performed every day to make a news byte stand out from the rest. And this phenomenon is not limited to journalism. Every job interview, every college application, every threshold to cross is asking us how we are unique, what makes us better than the other hopefuls vying for the same position. It is no longer sufficient to do one’s work adequately; one must also brandish several other qualities that may not even be relevant to the job description; and one must brandish them higher than everyone else. So what is the solution for those of us who aren’t born with the gift of genius? One of the wonders of my generation is the disappearance of the ordinary person. I look at my father, who seems to have led a comfortably ordinary life – he took up a job and stuck to it, provided for the family, fed the cat and held his own political opinions, personal biases and Mohun-Bagan loyalty close to his heart, and never suffered any angst strong enough to move him to greater (or stranger) action. Few people of my generation seem capable of surviving in such unperturbed ordinariness. As we struggle to find newer ways to stand out from the crowd, the first thing that goes out of the window is the moral compass. While we agree it’s not ideal to cheat on an exam, we do it to get by, and we justify it to ourselves by saying that everyone else does it also. While we compete to get better at the methods of a profession, we are less concerned with the ethics of it. The question we ask is “Will this story get attention?” and we are satisfied if the answer is “Yes.” But “Should this story get attention” or “is it benefiting the world at large?” are questions for which we answer with “None of my business” –particularly when the ethics required to answer those questions meaningfully seem contrary to the requirements for success. I have written so far in the first-person plural, implicating ourselves (you, my editors, and of course, myself ), in the same broad stroke with Pargaein, because I believe that the difference between him and those of us who got a laugh out of his career-destroying antics is not a stronger moral fibre but merely a more refined sense of discretion and political correctness. We laughed precisely at that; it’s his “stupidity” which was funny, since the display of tastelessness and entitlement certainly wasn’t. We, who are more Internetsavvy and aware of the repercussions of posting material online than the vernacular-language journalist from Dehradun, shook our heads in disbelief because his was an error that we would never have made ourselves. But as long as we keep using our social privilege to make inroads into places, or come home to treat our maids, drivers or garbage collectors as a kind of personal retinue, I’m not so sure we are better journalists – or better human beings, for that matter – than he is.

We, who are more Internet-savvy and aware of the repercussions of posting material online than the vernacular-language journalist from Dehradun, shook our heads in disbelief because his was an error that we would never have made ourselves. But as long as we keep using our social privilege to make inroads into places, or come home to treat our maids, drivers or garbage collectors as a kind of personal retinue, I’m not so sure we are better journalists – or better human beings, for that matter – than he is.

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The fruits that we have earned from the thriving economy need to be secured. So, raise the gates higher and higher and then secure them with barbed wires so that if an “alien” body dares transgress into your territory, he is so mutilated that others like him dare not invade your space. Yet, bodies slip in, time and again. They prod us in our little bubbles. Their disturbing presence reminds us of our fallibility, of our fragility, of our collective failures.

THE

Others

AMONGST

Us Hansal Mehta’s quietly bold ﬁlm Shahid, manages to take an honest look at the ﬁssures in a society that continues to splinter itself into “us” and “them”, without the jingoism – or martyrdom – that is usually served up as glossy and reassuring distraction by the big budget entertainment Industry, as Sayan Bhattacharya discovered.

urga Pujo had just ended but many idols were yet to be immersed. Bengalis were scraping at the last bits of revelry. I was in an auto, intently listening to a conversation between a co-passenger and the driver. Why does the government always accommodate ‘them’, was their question. If Bakri Id had fallen during the Hindu festive season, why can’t ‘we’ take out our processions on the road? Why did the government issue a circular to not allow immersions on Id? Why is secularism invoked only on ‘us’? And so it went on from a specific incident to Indo-Pak matches and who do ‘they’ support, to terrorism and beef and beyond… The reactionary nature of this conversation is not surprising because whoever takes public transport through certain specific routes of the city overhears such conversations regularly, be it on a Friday morning, when footpaths spill over with “them” offering prayers or when a bomb blast occurs. The topography of the city changes with every blink of the eye and old structures are razed to accommodate new ones, but the hegemony of who belongs to the state and the state belongs to whom is only further and further solidified. In fact, the changing economy flourishes on such polarities. The fruits that we have earned from the thriving economy need to be secured. So, raise the gates higher and higher and then secure them with barbed wires so that if an “alien” body dares transgress into your territory, he is so mutilated that others like him dare not invade your space. Yet, bodies slip in, time and again. They prod us in our little bubbles. Their disturbing presence reminds us of our fallibility, of

our fragility, of our collective failures. The image of Shahid Azmi’s face (as played by the powerhouse performer Rajkumar Yadav) covered in black ink is one such source of dissonance in our glassy paradise. Hansal Mehta’s film, Shahid sticks out like that sore thumb amid the 200 crore assembly-line productions, in a climate where jingoism has reconfigured itself into sleek, zany thrillers (D-Day, 24, Kurbaan and so on). It is a soreness that does not wallow in self-pity or in martyrdom but is a chillingly matter of fact reminder of how we have other-ised large swathes of our population. It is a film that may not have made crores, may not have high production values or may not even be structurally flawless, but a film that strikes right through our complacency, our privileges of class, caste and religion. Shahid was deeply moved by attorney Roy Black. “Even thorns and thistles can teach you something, and can lead to success.” These lines became his motto. Shahid Azmi was a Muslim. He was a lawyer who had achieved 17 acquittals in a career spanning 7 years. He was a lot more… He was fatally shot at. The perpetrators are still at large. Here’s hoping that his tarred image lives on to remind us how, where and why we failed him and thousands others like him.

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POST-MILEY

Feminism

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if it did not explicitly embrace intersectionality. In other words, was Cyrus going to find support from only a section of feminists on issues that had direct implications for them? Does feminism often work this way? If yes, should it? The images of Cyrus that night were compelling for various reasons. Her sexy outfits were the least of them all, in an era of a virtually saturated landscape so far as sexualized visual images go. What stood apart was how she used black women as props on the stage that night, reminiscent of the days of slavery when white masters used slaves as standalone objects/accessories for amusement of their guests. What stood apart was how she created an atmosphere of a circus, with herself as the ringleader motor-boating black women as the dancing bears. That she wanted to live out her fantasies and feel sexually empowered were all defensible propositions, but the fact that she had to degrade black women as objects in order to play those out, while in real life she does not have to experience the racist society as a black woman does, was what made it all so irrefutably disgusting. Likewise, while the white feminists supporting her right to rub herself on Robin Thicke was an acceptable defense, what became a profound contradiction was their remaining silent over her own treatment of backup dancers. Indeed, when black women pointed this out, they faced the charges of misconstruing feminism. Thus, it remained no longer a Cyrus moment. It demanded critical reflections on part of all those who identify with feminist, progressive and revolutionary politics.

Much of the media attention on Miley Cyrus’s“twerking” episode has revolved around the criticism – and, in turn, the defence – of “sluttiness”, but Saswat Pattanayak spotlights a deeper but largely overlooked problem: the objectiﬁcation of black women and appropriation of black culture by Cyrus.

wealthy white woman used specific “ghetto” elements from the black culture to materially profit from those insincere projections. And much of the world media ignored this aspect of Miley Cyrus’s performance entirely, while castigating her instead for wearing indecent attire. And finally, when this attracted the attention of white feminists, they rallied behind her to protest ‘slut-shaming’. Following her memorable performance at VMA in August,

Miley Cyrus helped generate what Mikki Kendall had earlier hash-tagged as, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen (in lambasting the ways white feminists had been protecting the disgraced Hugo Schwyzer). In conveniently overlooking the serious nature of cultural appropriation, what suddenly reemerged within the feminist discourse is how race intersects with feminism itself. It became quite apparent that feminism – or, for that matter, any radical politics - was not going to make any headway,

Batty Mamzelle wrote, “Historically, black women have had very little agency over their bodies. From being raped by white slave masters to the ever-enduring stereotype that black women can’t be raped, black women have been told over and over and over again, that their bodies are not their own. By bringing these ‘homegirls with the big butts’ out onto the stage with her and engaging in a one-sided interaction with her ass (not even her actual person!), Miley has contributed to that rhetoric. She made that woman’s body a literal spectacle to be enjoyed by her legions of loyal fans.” What the Cyrus episode brought to the fore was not just the need to apply intersectional analysis to feminism in the US, but by its very extension and logic, to have it applied everywhere. In much similar vein, argument can be made about the selective solidarities displayed among Savarna feminists in India, who remained eerily silent throughout the protest marches against rape and murder of a Dalit woman in Jind district of Haryana. The level of indifference was so staggering that the mainstream media, which had gone agog to report extensively on rape culture since Nirbhaya, entirely ignored a three-day conference organized by Dalit women to question the casteist nature of Indian justice system. In a bold move to oppose what I would term, after Kendall, as “Solidarity Is for Savarna Women”, the

organizers (AIDMAM) exclaimed: “The silence from all corners is deafening and this particular case of alleged rape and murder of a 20 year old Dalit girl in Jind is only another one in a long list of cases of sexual violence on Dalit women. Today, we do not even know what to ask for! Should we make a claim for a separate State for Dalit women? A State that will give us a life of security? A separate State that will allow us to live our lives peacefully? A State that will permit us to go to schools? A State that will allow us to go to the toilet without fear? A State that will give us the basic right to life? Dalit women have lost all hope in the Government, in the police, the judiciary, the elected representatives and with civil society. We do not want to just trigger the conscience of the system and the people, but seek all voices for justice for Dalit women in India.”

The images of Cyrus that night were compelling for various reasons. Her sexy outﬁts were the least of them all, in an era of a virtually saturated landscape so far as sexualized visual images go. What stood apart was how she used black women as props on the stage that night, reminiscent of the days of slavery when white masters used slaves as standalone objects/accessories for amusement of their guests.

The defense of “sluttiness” remains the primary - and, valid - agenda for white feminists in the US, and the demand for police protection of nightlife in Delhi remains a legitimate concern of savarna feminists in India. At the same time, however, the racial implications of the powerful images of Cyrus that night suggests, the peripheral realities can no longer be kept under wraps. While defending Slutwalk, it is necessary that white folks do not appropriate slavery, just as while deploying additional police force to ensure “Bekhauf Azadi” for urban women, it is necessary to make the legal system work efficiently to render justice for Dalit women whose priorities may vary qualitatively. Solidarity across race and caste is a possibility only when the histories of unique struggles by the historically oppressed are duly recognized, and sufficient consciousness-raising efforts are undertaken by the historically privileged.

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END OF FERGIE TIME

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Benjamin was convinced that the artist must align with the masses, and there was no place for autonomy and self-expression. By that logic, it is not important to worship the genius of a fashion designer, or the innate beauty of the design, rather the end product should be the expression of the masses where the designer functions merely as a channel

In the history of sports, the last quarter century has been marked by staggering commercialism that has threatened to devour the very spirit of sports. Yet, Manchester United’s former manager Sir Alex Ferguson, who retired this year, was able to keep his eyes and his players unfailingly focused on the quality of football, even as he took the Red Devils to dizzying heights of success. Abhimanyu Maheshwari pays tribute.

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hen Alex Ferguson took over at Manchester United, the USSR still had long queues to distribute communal ration, Michael Jackson hadn’t yet turned into a creepy white guy, the Berlin Wall stood, and Thatcherism and Reaganomics were considered acceptable mainstream political ideologies. The only common thread between Manchester United’s remarkable journey from a football club with a rich history – albeit prone to frequent spells of underachievement and trophy lulls and its transformation into the most successful football club in British history, a global behemoth, boasting of an estimated 700 million fans worldwide, and becoming arguably the greatest sporting brand in the history of sports, was Sir Alex Ferguson, its manager for the past 26 years. Alex Ferguson’s contribution to football is immense. It is comparable, for example, to Phil Jackson’s achievements with the Chicago Bulls and the LA. Lakers and Vince Lombardi’s achievements with the Green Bay Packers. The most apt analogy, however, would be cricket’s Sachin Tendulkar.

concentrated and relatively uni-dimensional one.

Alex Ferguson’s career has had its fair share of controversies compared to Sachin’s almost unblemished record. To an uninitiated observer, Ferguson would come across as a petulant kid gesticulating frantically on the sidelines of the football pitch, which stands in stark contrast to Sachin’s calm and graceful demeanour on the cricket pitch. But despite such variance in their styles, it is their sheer longevity and adaptability in the light of the tectonic changes To an uninitiated observer, that their respective sports Ferguson would come across have gone through, which is the unifying strand of as a petulant kid gesticulating greatness between these frantically on the sidelines of the two individuals. And in that sense, Alex Ferguson’s football pitch, which stands in achievements and contributions to football stark contrast to Sachin’s calm are as immense as Sachin’s and graceful demeanour on the are to cricket, and Alex’s retirement leaves as much cricket pitch. But despite such an irreplaceable void as variance in their styles, it is their does Sachin’s.

sheer longevity and adaptability in the light of the tectonic changes that their respective sports have gone through, which is the unifying strand of greatness between these two individuals. And in that sense, Alex Ferguson’s achievements and contributions to football are as immense as Sachin’s are to cricket, and Alex’s retirement leaves as much an irreplaceable void as does Sachin’s.

Last week Sachin played his last competitive cricket match, and after a heartfelt tear-jerker of a speech, walked into the sunset. Sachin’s appeal transcended cricket. He was an opiate that the Indians latched onto in the absence of much else to rejoice about. Alex Ferguson, by contrast, was a man of football, and his appeal would probably never transcend his sport in the way Sachin’s did. One reason for this difference could be because Sachin’s “1.2 Billion” fans shared a common culture, heritage and aspirations, unlike the largely disjointed 700 million Manchester United fans, united only by their love for the football club. In that sense, Sir Alex’s appeal is more eclectic and universal than Sachin’s

The game of football has seen monumental changes over the course of Ferguson’s managerial tenure - from the days of limited broadcasting, paltry sponsorships, limited media coverage and locally sourced players being paid subsistence wages, to the present day football of global brands, mega TV deals, millionaire footballers, teenage superstars, bloated egos, ubiquitous sponsors, FIFA 14s, Nike Mercurials, and everything in-between. It has been the journey of football clubs with hometown identities representing a very narrow, local, male-dominated demographic to billion dollar global businesses, bulldozing through geographies and demographics never explored before. Alex Ferguson’s tenure has to be seen in this context, by juxtaposing his achievements against this massive churning that the sport has undergone, and his ability to adapt, improvise and calibrate his managerial style in the backdrop of these changes.

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Ferguson, like all great leaders, was an institution builder, and that, when the balance sheets are drawn, will separate him from his forebears and contemporaries. He didn’t have the charisma and immediacy of a Jose Mourinho, or the revolutionary tactical genius of a Pep Guardiola. But they never left behind legacies, that indelible DNA, which would last long after they had left for greener pastures. Among Europe’s elite clubs, Ferguson’s emphasis on youth development and the foundations he laid at Manchester United for the players to come through from the academy is second only to Barcelona’s La Masia Academy. Contrast this to the disturbing reality of neo-rich clubs all over the world, funded by Middle Eastern oil money, which buys success with bloated fees given in for exchange for “finished products” and extracting a few prime years out of their lives, and repeat the same over every transfer window without ever developing any bedrock, any transferable ethos for the youth to grow into. Alex Ferguson managed an astonishing two hundred and ten senior players during his twenty-six year leadership. And he had a fair share of rabble-rousers, egotists, players who developed identities way beyond the sport. There was Roy Keane and his ‘savage tongue’, the genius of Eric Cantona and Cristiano Ronaldo, and there was David Beckham. The case of David Beckham encapsulates the no-nonsense, football-first, no-one-is-bigger-than-the-club philosophy that typified Alex Ferguson’s career. David Beckham was sold by Ferguson to Real Madrid when he was at the prime

of his career, when he was easily the most marketable commodity in the world of sports, whose jersey sales and branding rights would alone have warranted his continuity as a Manchester United player. But Ferguson saw it all very differently – as a player whose footballing talents had been waning, who had misplaced priorities, one who was getting bigger than the club for his own good, and thus deserved off-loading. Contrast this to this summer’s mega transfer of Gareth Bale, which is indicative of the modern day capitalist malaise that is cannibalising football. Gareth Bale was transferred from Totthenham for a ridiculous world-record fee to Real Madrid, which saw Mesut Ozil, a player with the best assist stats in Europe, and probably a better but a less marketable player, leave Madrid at half the fee, a decision strictly based on commercial over footballing considerations. Sir Alex Ferguson announced his retirement at age 71, after only a few days of decisively reclaiming the Premier League trophy back from the “noisy neighbours” Manchester City, and ending as the most decorated, most successful British Manager in history. But his 26 year due, four minute long farewell speech still found enough words for the future urging and rallying fans “to stand by your new Manager”. The jury would be out for many years for new manager David Moyes simply for the shoes he is filling in. ‘Fergie time’ might be over but the legend and legacy of Sir Alex Ferguson are going to live on far beyond the trophy rooms and corridors of Manchester United Football Club.

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When the Brazilian football team’s Confederations Cup victory met with millions of their compatriots rioting in protest, a dirty, open secret of big-money international sports ﬁnally demanded to be faced head-on. Shubham Nag looks at how FIFA seduces governments with the promise of prosperity only to have them subsidize its own proﬁts at the expense of ordinary people.

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FIFA’S PROMISE OF PROSPERITY

As the government invests massive amounts of money for stadiums, Brazilians are now wondering why politicians were asking them to pay more to ride the bus, why their overcrowded hospitals and crumbling schools aren’t built to “FIFA standards” in the ﬁrst place, and why the prosperity they were promised seems like such a pipe-dream now.

he night of 30th June, 2013 shall go down memory as one of intense drama in Rio De Janeiro. The red carpet had been rolled out. The photographers primed. Inside the refurbished Maracanã Stadium, thousands of Brazilians erupted as Neymar scored the second of their three goals which ensured their 3-0 win over World Champions Spain, in the Confederations Cup final. And then came the tear gas. As thousands erupted with joy inside Maracanã, millions outside lit up Rio in flames of protest, as they faced off with the police in riot gear, the air thick with insults. When Thiago Silva lifted the trophy to send alarming signals across the footballing world, little did they know that the next day’s front pages would be rather dedicated to the might and display of their countrymen outside. Three and half months later, on 15th October, 2013, when teams such as current champion Spain, England and Chile won games they needed to qualify for the 32-team tournament next summer, a few miles from Maracanã, the air was thick again. This time around, the protests had shifted to a theater in

downtown Rio, as it disrupted the premiere of City of God: 10 Years Later; a follow-up take on the much appreciated City of God. 10,000 odd people joined in support of dozens of striking teachers, as they clashed against the riot police,

once more. As teachers began to head home, hundreds of black-clad youths, known as the “Black Bloc” after the anarchist demonstration tactics they adhere to, began battling the outnumbered police. Violence was sparked.

Hundreds were detained, including quite a few innocent ones. “Police don’t know who is being good and who is being bad and start going willy-nilly with deployment of gas, flash-bang devices, pepper weapons, and then everyone

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becomes a victim,” said Eduardo Jany, a security consultant who has worked with forces across Brazil, in an interview with The Guardian.

up for the job. And now with Brazil, the money-mongering FIFA’s primary concern seems to be able to woo the tourism industries.

That was the second teachers’ demonstration in a week to Official reports suggest that Brazil is spending about 30 end in violence. As in June, when hundreds of thousands billion reais to host the World Cup. And FIFA claims that took to the streets, crying for better health, transport and the hosts will earn about 112 billion reais from the mega event. So just how much education services and an cash does FIFA expect to end to corruption, among Sports has always been pocket? In 2010, it took other things, one rallying home truly impressive cry was: “THERE WON’T considered the drug of the people. revenue of $3.2 billion BE ANY WORLD CUP.” Well, the people in Brazil are now with event-related costs of Reading news reports the $1.2 billion, which led to a next day, football fans climbing the walls of Rio’s municipal “surplus” (please don’t call it planning their 2014 trips chamber, and spray-painting a profit) of a whooping $2 to the land of Samba must billion for the 2010 World have wondered: whatever “Get Out FIFA”. Cup. happened to the carnival? The protests against the hosting of the mega event in Brazil only showcases FIFA’s tryst with troubled World Cups. Every world cup has had its unique issues: With Germany 2006, it was the issue of rival European fans. With South Africa 2010, FIFA faced the question of whether the country’s security forces were

And how much revenue did South Africa earn from hosting the World Cup? FIFA made a contribution of around $500 million to the Local Organising Committee and the South Africans retained the net income from ticket sales (the only risky revenue stream), but this was small change compared to the money needed

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to fund new stadiums, improved transport networks and better security. This financial imbalance famously gave the expression “a game of two halves” a whole new meaning in Johannesburg, in 2010.

the whole reason governments are involved in this. There would be no government involvement in this if these things were privately profitable. So what they require is a massive government subsidy — a growing government subsidy.”

Brazil’s bid for the Cup proposed spending less than $1 billion on stadiums, but updated projections say the costs will exceed $3 billion in public funds. And most of the transportation and infrastructure projects that were supposed to benefit all Brazilians have been canceled or delayed. As the government invests massive amounts of money for stadiums, Brazilians are now wondering why politicians were asking them to pay more to ride the bus, why their overcrowded hospitals and crumbling schools aren’t built to “FIFA standards” in the first place, and why the prosperity they were promised seems like such a pipe-dream now.

Even if Brazil settles down before the World Cup begins next year, the protests have already forced economic policy alterations, and they may ultimately make the rest of the world and FIFA acknowledge the fact that the formula of ‘prosperity and success’ they’re selling doesn’t work. The World Cup isn’t a major economic revitalization project. Acknowledging that reality and promoting the World Cup for what it is - significantly social and cultural - may make them harder to justify, but it could also lead to a better sporting event that isn’t packaged with a wrapper of prosperity. Taking that path will be tough for FIFA, because less costly stadiums and less lofty goals play against their interests.

“If you view it as a business where the object is to be profitable, then the answer is no [they aren’t cost-efficient],” University of Michigan sports economist Stefan Szymanski said. “We should all know that from the beginning. That’s

Sports has always been considered the drug of the people. Well, the people in Brazil are now climbing the walls of Rio’s municipal chamber, and spray-painting “Get Out FIFA”.

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hen musician Lou Reed passed away in October, an entire branch of the rock n’ roll family tree lost a parent. If “alternative rock” is broadly defined to mean music that sounds like either a precursor to or descendant of punk, it arguably began with the band Velvet Underground, with Lou Reed as lead singer, in 1965. Reed had written more conventional, even silly songs for a sort of mass-production song-writing factory prior to that, with titles like Your Love and The Ostrich, but he was trained as a journalist at Syracuse University and thought more like a beatnik writer such as Jack Kerouac than like a popular musician. Joining forces with music school avant-gardist John Cale from the UK, he formed a band that would use droning tones, guitars distorted by feedback, and vocals so flat as to sound almost like beatnik spoken-word poems -- then use that sound to bring to life subject matter even darker than the material that was then upsetting the parents of rock n’ roll fans around

LOU REED DIES

But the ‘alternative rock’ he helped create endures By Todd Seavey

In other words, he wasn’t just creating pop songs, he was making art. Rock n’ roll had never before gazed at things quite so low or aimed quite so high. the globe. Their sound was similar to the ragged “garage rock” of the era, but now, with lyrics as rough as the music. Heroin use is the subject of two songs on the band’s 1967 album The Velvet Undergroud and Nico. Another track, Venus in Furs, describes sexual sadomasochism. Some say the band’s willingness to broach such topics was it’s only real musical innovation. Regardless of whether and how much they themselves innovated, they did go on to have great influence on future musical innovations. Brian Eno from the British band Roxy Music famously remarked that the 1967 Velvet Underground album sold only a few thousand copies but it seems to have inspired all those who bought it to start bands of their own. Punk rock of the 1970s and New Wave of the 1980s (popularised with the help of MTV) echo with the band’s sound, as do the more recent “indie” bands and clear imitators such as the Strokes. Velvet Underground was promoted and produced by artist Andy Warhol and was a fixture of New York City’s seamy but artistic Lower East Side culture. Reed and Cale partnered again in 1990 to make an album of songs in honour of Warhol after he passed away. Velvet Underground had broken up years

earlier, but Reed had a solo hit in the interim, Walk on the Wild Side, describing characters such as a transsexual prostitute. Reed’s own sex life was said to be comparably experimental. Eventually, though, he married musician Laurie Anderson, whose own songs are much more ordered, clear, cerebral, synthesiser-based, and self-consciously avant-garde. If he sounds like a grandparent to punk, Anderson sounds more like New Wave’s most intellectual offspring. She made an album of philosophical reflections about America inspired by novelist Herman Melville while he a dark album called The Raven inspired by poet Edgar Allan Poe. While neither musician has ever been wildly popular, both were revered among music critics, fellow musicians, and their fellow New Yorkers, who, among other honours crowned them king and queen of the annual Mermaid Day Parade on Coney Island in 2010. Their partnership provides an interesting context to understanding Reed’s later life and mindset. Anderson was politically left-wing enough to have expressed fear in 1990, that East Germans should perhaps “Go back!” instead of rushing to embrace triumphant capitalism. Reed shared her basic political orientation -- offering supportive comments about the ‘Occupy protest’ movement in recent years -- but, much like the individualistic beatniks, he sounded more cynical and brooding than politically passionate. Reed’s Velvet Underground bandmate, drummer Moe Tucker, went another way, being politically passionate, but in a more right-leaning direction, by becoming a Tea Party activist in recent years and protesting the U.S. federal government’s ever-increasing spending and debt. Reed’s own influence on politics has been significant. His rebellious streak was an inspiration to ‘Velvet Revolution’ leader Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, the poet and antiCommunist dissident who would later become president of the Czech Republic. Until shortly before his death from liver disease at age 71, Reed continued to collaborate with other musicians, on projects such as his 2011 album Lulu with heavy metal band Metallica. His lasting legacy, though -- and the fundamental reason that his rebelliousness was different from pop singers like, say, Miley Cyrus (who tweeted mournfully about his passing) -- is that his goal was not simply to entertain fans while shocking his parents, a common enough tactic in rock n’ roll. His goal was to make listeners, whether numerous or few, feel the degree of joy or pain appropriate to the stories his songs told, even when they were about characters that most of society would consider disturbing. In other words, he wasn’t just creating pop songs, he was making art. Rock n’ roll had never before gazed at things quite so low or aimed quite so high. Follow Todd Seavey at http://Twitter.com/ToddSeavey.

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“I

t should have the quiver of a 17 th century courtesan’s inner thigh.”

THE FALL OF THE

“Domestic Goddess”

It takes a woman of a certain kind of imagination – and an image to nurture – to come up with a line like that. It is small detail that this manner of quiver was meant to describe how a humble Italian dessert like panna cotta ought to behave. The pronouncement came from the domestic goddess Nigella Lawson, a voluptuous paragon of sensuality, a picture of domesticity, even the ideal to aspire for. That’s the picture that she must have decided to draw around herself somewhere along the way to her meteoric rise to worldwide fame. It sure helped her build a formidable empire that includes bestseller books, popular long-running television shows and the ensuing celebrity. Women want to be like her…not least because men love her. And then, that photograph. It was an ‘Et tu, Brute?’ moment, at least for the first few minutes. Not her! Not her! The outrage! Not because something horrible happened, but because it happened to her. Her of the rich marriage, successful life, gorgeous kitchen, and wholesomeness, it couldn’t happen to her too, when it was supposed to be restricted to us lesser female mortals. The story that the tabloid photographs narrated was that her then husband, Charles Saatchi, grabbed her throat, caused her distress and made her cry. A ‘confidante’, albeit a dubious source, told a journalist that Lawson never cries, it goes back to certain incidents from childhood. Then for her to shed tears, that too in public, and be photographed doing so, was like some last shred of hope shivering and dropping upon the ground to be cruelly trampled under hurried feet. Let’s make her a hero then, a different icon now. Let’s make her the poster woman, the go-to girl for the cause of marital/ domestic abuse. Let her be the misunderstood definition of a feminist, that of a man-hater, the victim, the oppressed. Lawson’s reluctance for being typecast into an icon of this kind and for this kind of cause seems to have led to as much disgust as for the photographs themselves. She has not yet spoken about the incident where, in an instant, her carefully constructed image was shattered. Perhaps, in her years of being married to the former advertising mogul and art collector Saatchi, she lived through many instances of domestic abuse.

The recent photographs of Nigella Lawson splashed across UK tabloids narrated a shockingly distasteful story, contrary to the one conjured by her exotic spices until now. What does her silence on the matter smell of? Deepa Bhasti takes a whiff…

Perhaps this was really a one-off incident; photographs can lie too. Perhaps her silence is a hint loud enough that she doesn’t want to be tagged a victim for the rest of her days. She has a public image to protect and a life to move on with. In her silences perhaps Lawson has attempted to reclaim the dignity she so publicly lost that day of the photographs. It is a tall order to expect her to click her heels and fall in

line to speak now for the ‘domestic abuse’ victims of the world. Yes, it happened. Yes, it was shocking. Yes, it was high profile. But there are also hundreds of thousands of silent women around the world for whom Lawson would a compatriot. In India alone, between eight and 31 per cent of married women are estimated to have been victims of varying degrees of domestic violence. Each of us have stories to tell, either our own or those of maids or mothers or sisters who live each day in fear of the raised hands, raised voices of their men folk. The recent abused ‘Goddesses of India’ campaign was meant to create awareness about domestic violence. The campaign claimed that 68 per cent of women in India have been abused in some manner of the other. Unfortunately, what the carefully reconstructed photos of models dressed as Goddesses from the Hindu pantheon, with black eyes and deep bruises did, was to feed into the fantasy of the damsel

Lawson’s reluctance for being typecast into an icon of this kind and for this kind of cause seems to have led to as much disgust as for the photographs themselves. She has not yet spoken about the incident where, in an instant, her carefully constructed image was shattered. in distress who needed to be ‘saved’. By glamourising the idea of violence, it pushed the issue itself aside. It is tempting to add a little sheen of glamour to ideas and contexts; those get much attention. But there is only so far you can go with glamour and clever make up. The reality is that domestic violence is far too common. There isn’t anything sexy about any part of it. While there are a dozen changes that the world ought to see yet, grant the reluctant victim her dignity. She has the right to remain silent. She has the right to refuse to be a hero or, an ambassador. Nigella deserves to carry on publicly as if this was just an inconvenient blimp. That doesn’t mean she, or the rest of us in our own pasts, haven’t wept privately.

This piece was inspired by a conversation with an ardent Nigella Lawson fan and a pretty good cook herself.

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A road to

DOMINANCE? Dibyesh Anand takes a walk through the divergent paths, a new road connecting the isolated Metog County to mainland China, could take…

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men and women welcoming their Chinese developers. This representation fits into the meta-narrative of the Chinese as liberators of Tibet. The narrative started with Tibet being incorporated into People’s Republic of China in 1951 and, in recent decades it has been used to propagate the message that all China does in Tibetan regions is to bring development. In ‘China’s Tibet’, Chinese are not exploiters or occupiers, but modernisers to whom Tibetans are forever grateful. States domesticate. Contrary to the media reports on the new highway, today’s Metog County is not a stagnant timeless place where history and politics don’t exist. Historically known as Pemako, it was impenetrable to foreigners (including the British, British Indian and Chinese) throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But this isolation doesn’t imply it was stagnant. Within it, there was a constant movement of various peoples, including Tshangla, Lopas, Tibetans, Monpas, and others from Eastern Bhutan. Relations between Ganden Phodrang (Tibet government of Lhasa) and the Powo ruler of Pemako was fluid. It was not until 1931 that Lhasa took direct control after abolishing the kingdom. It was a politically dynamic, religiously significant place, considered to be beyul (hidden paradise). States occupy. Pemako was part of the Eastern Himalayan zone of interaction which by the middle of twentieth century faced an unprecedented challenge. The challenge was the arrival of modern states of postcolonial India and revolutionary China that both sought to translate on the ground, the concept of rigid national boundaries that had no patience for the fluid frontiers and zones of local tradition or for shared and layered sovereignties.

tates build. Earlier in November, China announced the opening of a new highway connecting the ‘last isolated county’ of Metog (also written as Metok, Medog or Mutuo depending on the transliteration) in the difficult to access terrains of Nyingtri prefecture in Tibetan Autonomous Region near the disputed borders between India and China. States care. At least they are supposed to care for people who are its citizens, including those who were forced to be citizens. The inhabitants of the county, as gushing reports from Chinese state media repeat endlessly, are pleased to

be connected to the rest of the “motherland” because it gives them better access to goods, eases their movements and brings them tourists. But they are assured against over-exposure to tourism, as the County government has proposed restricting tourism to help maintain its area’s pristine environment. States patronise. The uncritical and celebratory register of media reports is not surprising, because when it comes to Tibet, there is no difference between state and private journalism in China. The only images of local inhabitants anyone gets to see are of smiling, traditionally clothed

States militarise. The revolt in Tibet, the exile of the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of Tibetans, the militarisation of the de facto disputed border by 1959, the Indo-Chinese war in 1962 and further militarisation ever since, have all vitiated the historical exchanges of peoples, goods, and ideas that gave the place vitality. Not surprising, then that the Indian reaction to the new highway that is next to the disputed territory of Arunachal Pradesh (referred to as South Tibet by the Chinese) is one that subscribes to the strategic logic of infrastructure growth. The news is viewed with anxiety by security experts in India who bemoan the relatively slower growth of infrastructure, including roads and highways, on their side of the Himalayas. States compete. Given the masculinist ethos of security discourses, this ‘who has bigger and stronger roads’ competitiveness becomes a struggle over soft and hard power. Border roads, such as the new highway, are meant to make troop movements faster. At the same time, in recent years, they are used to display the might of the state to the people and to the outside world. Better roads on the Chinese controlled side may be seen by Himalayan people living in Indian controlled areas as evidence of Chinese

superiority and Indian ineptitude. The news of the Metog highway therefore may spur further network of roads in Arunachal Pradesh. States destroy. Whether such competitiveness over roads and infrastructure growth on the Tibetan plateau and Himalayan region is environmentally sustainable and desirable, whether it addresses the aspirations of the inhabitants and whether it helps or hinders in shifting away from a zone of conflict toward a zone of contact, only time will tell. The conduct of China and India in this region gives little room for optimism. People hope. The day the Chinese invite the Dalai Lama and exiled Tibetans to return to their homeland of Tibet with political freedom and dignity would be the day roads such as these will become truly liberating. Until then, it is fair to say that the highway is yet another example of Chinese colonisation of Tibet.

Given the masculinist ethos of security discourses, this ‘who has bigger and stronger roads’ competitiveness becomes a struggle over soft and hard power. Border roads, such as the new highway, are meant to make troop movements faster. At the same time, in recent years, they are used to display the might of the state to the people and to the outside world.

Dibyesh Anand is the Head of the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, and an expert on China, India, Tibet relations. He is the author of ‘Tibet: A Victim of Geopolitics, The Politics of Fear’, and is currently working on a book on China-India border dispute. He is mostly available at www.facebook.com/dibyesh

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good as it gets. Being part of the Google X Lab, this project is deliberately mysterious, and very little, if anything is really known about it. But talk of it is abuzz with excitement. Time Magazine’s speculation regarding its death-defying capabilities has lent Calico the kind of credibility that was once reserved for path-breaking inventions such as the telephone, airplane or computer.

Calico:

THE CAT THAT MAY NEVER COME

OUT OF THE BAG

Saswat Pattanayak examines the implications of entrusting secretive, unaccountable and all-pervasive corporate monopolies with decisions about the most profound questions of human life and health.

s privatised healthcare gets to be seen more as a consensus than a contested issue, Google is investing in the sector that promises to fetch maximum return in coming decades. Unlike the inevitable controversies associated with privacy searches, there is minimal resistance to its foray into such a “noble” domain. Just around the time when

capitalism’s reputation has reached the lowest nadir, Calico Project aims to put the kindest human face yet on this vicious system. Perhaps no other futuristic idea has generated as much enthusiasm as Calico. And why not? A promise at least to cure illnesses, if not to enhance longevity while at it, is just as

This growing fascination with Calico probably should leave us asking far profounder questions - of both idealist and materialist nature. Should Google solve death? Does longer life equal greater joy? Need we strive for quantity over quality? Is immortality or extreme longevity the best healthcare priorities in a world steeped in inaccessibility and survival problems for the disabled, malnourished and the poor? How much more can we trust private pharmaceuticals to take care of public health? Can making healthcare free and accessible for everyone in the planet, a goal the Calico Project can dare to set? At the same time, unfortunately what makes these questions especially redundant is the ways in which capitalism functions, so as to enable the monopolists to dictate the defining questions of the times, howsoever utopian they appear to be. In fact, only by pretending to solve attractive questions, does capitalism become acceptable in the first place. As one of its foremost champions today, Google has proposed to save humanity from death and illness, at the very same time when its own health was dwindling to a trickle. Mired in numerous scandals involving illegal activities – from violating privacy rights, to profiting from installing unauthorized cookies in users’ browsers, to using information of its users for commercial gains without consent, Google is an empire founded on deceit and manipulations. Indeed, Google has always preferred to settle rather than contest cases related to its ad spying behaviors (this year it paid $17 million in fines and last year it had paid $22 million for the same crime). This is precisely because by paying such meager penalties, it stands to gain more profits than it would, if it stopped illegal spying. So, whereas Google will make $47 billion dollars this year from advertising through spying (which is now an integrated feature of Google Plus), it will pay a tiny fine that equals to only three-hours worth of its revenues. It should appear highly suspect that a parasitical corporation that feeds off innocent data sharing of its users can be entrusted, literally, with the well-being of humanity. And yet, instead of being shocked by such a scenario, the world media is full of adulation for Google, because while corporations act as individuals when it comes to paying taxes, they get mystified as larger than life entities while committing crimes. When in 2011, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had fined Google over privacy violations by Google Buzz, it conveniently shut down the project. In real life, an individual may have to face a life imprisonment for a fraction of the crimes committed by Google.

Instead of jail terms, the “innovators” were found dining with the American president - who has been using the National Security Administration (NSA) for similar purposes, so at least he cannot be faulted for hypocrisy. Instead of penalizing the companies that acquire bright initiatives only to shut them down when it no longer makes commercial sense, capitalism rewards big monopolists by entrusting with them the credibility to continue with similar onslaughts. Google has often thrived on hypes - be it the “invitation codes” to open email accounts or the mystery labs that not even its own employees have seen. – There is a pattern to the way it attracts initial investments with scant regard to

Should Google solve death? Does longer life equal greater joy? Need we strive for quantity over quality? Is immortality or extreme longevity the best healthcare priorities in a world steeped in inaccessibility and survival problems for the disabled, malnourished and the poor? How much more can we trust private pharmaceuticals to take care of public health? Can making healthcare free and accessible for everyone in the planet, a goal the Calico Project can dare to set? their long-term viabilities. Whether Calico survives for the long-term or simply earns temporary profits for the bosses at Google depends on the wisdom of its head, Arthur Levinson, who chairs Genentech and is a director of its owner Roche, which has numerous dubious distinctions of its own, for breaking antitrust laws and engaging in price fixing to eventually emerge as one of the largest entities worldwide, in the privatized healthcare industry. It remains to be seen if the privacy encroachment giants Google, Apple, Genentech and Roche will use this hype as an opportunity to invest in researches that address genuinely important healthcare issues or whether they will use it as a humanizing veil to cover-up the crimes of capitalism while collaborating with nefarious motives that inform the pervasiveness of greedy pharmaceutical corporations, and privacy encroachment giants.

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2-dimensional images with ink sprayed in designated patterns, it takes some substance (polymer sheets, powders, or pulps) and layers it in designated patterns to form a precisely shaped 3-dimensional object. This year, biomedical researchers at Cornell University made a prototype human ear by “printing” a collagenhydrogel mould from 3D image files of a natural ear and seeded it with a cartilage cell culture, which then grew into fully-formed ear cartilage. Right now, only the structure is human; the cells came from animals. But as biochemical processes become easier to automate, like the manufacturing already is, organ printing could become routine. Just as monochromatic document printing soon gave way to multicoloured printing, the earliest 3D printers, which printed only single-substance structures, are giving way to machines that can use multiple materials in numerous combinations, making things that are not only morphologically complex,

PLAY

it BY

Dr. Taylor may not have to strip a real heart down to its skeleton every time, however. She can just keep a complete proﬁle of 3D images of the organ in a computer ﬁle and just “print” the scaffolding using appropriate materials. Nobody has successfully printed a heart matrix yet, but the Cornell team did make an ear, and that’s certainly a start.

Ear

THE

like musical instruments, but also have to be chemically precise, like food... or both, like body parts.

Century technology at her disposal. She could just tweak a “food replicator” by supplying it the molecular and design specifications for a toe, a liver, or an ear.

printers’) are being used to “print out” everything from the delightful, (violins and chocolate) to the truly disturbing (guns).

This has extraordinary implications for regenerative and reconstructive medicine. For centuries, surgeons have tried to replace lost or damaged physical features, by attaching prosthetics, transplanting organs donated by others, and grafting pieces of tissue taken from other areas of patients’ own bodies. But the most painstaking reconstructive surgery can still only create (relatively) crude facsimiles of a limb, digit, or organ that nature seems to produce so effortlessly. If you’re missing an ear, a surgeon can fashion a new one from cartilage found elsewhere in your body, typically the ribs. But ear cartilage has unique properties, giving it a perfect balance of strength and flexibility, ideal for an ear’s functions, which rib cartilage just can’t match.

Now it seems we’ve arrived at the 24th Century well ahead of schedule. Today’s additive manufacturing devices (‘3D

How it works is, you send instructions from a computer to a machine, like an inkjet printer, except, instead of making

Some organs – hearts, lungs, pancreases – are too complex to reconstruct from a body’s other tissues. So, transplantation

Another scientiﬁc breakthrough has yet to bridge the divide between science and ethics. Koli Mitra walks the tightrope.

hen Star Trek’s Doctor Crusher needed a new body part for a patient – perhaps someone who lost a limb while repairing the star ship’s “warp engine” – she had some fantastic 24th

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is the only option. But naturally occurring organs aren’t exactly lying around as spare parts. Someone has to die or at least undergo an amputation to give an organ. Moreover, there are serious concerns about organ trafficking and coercion of impoverished and marginalized people. This means organs obtained safely and ethically often come from people who have died from illness or old age and not always in the best condition. Most usable organs tend to be from accident victims – not something we’d like to see increasing. The potential for using animal organs – or xenotransplantation – has been studied, but, so far without success; and it raises profound ethical issues of its own. Also, transplantation (even within our species) comes with a risk that the patient’s immune system – evolved to fight off invasive foreign biological matter – will reject the transplant. So... the prospect of growing new organs from patients’ own cells is getting much interest these days, making “regenerative medicine” the hottest new research field. Scientists have cultured human cells in laboratories for years, but now, they’re increasingly able to custom-design cells to fit specialised requirements. Human embryonic stem cells can be developed into any cell the body needs. This year, for the first time, patient-specific embryonic stem cells were successfully cloned from adult human cells (which can be implanted into the same adult human without rejection risk, since they’re not genetically “foreign”). Another patient-specific process, now favoured by most researchers, is “induced pluripotent stem cells” (iPS) derived from adult somatic cells by reprogramming them to act like embryonic stem cells. The iPS method eliminates ethically murky issues associated with embryonic stem cells (like cloning and embryo-destruction). Cells, though, are just building blocks. Once you’ve created some in a petri dish, how do you configure them to form a functioning organ? Among other things, you’ll need a mould – a scaffold – on which the cells could grow to give the organ the right form. In 2011, scientists at the University of Minnesota, led by Dr. Doris Taylor, found a way to chemically dissolve all of the cellular material on a heart without damaging its underlying protein ‘skeleton’. It left behind what Taylor calls a “ghost heart”, an exact matrix of the human heart – down to the finest branches of the most intricate web of capillaries – that can serve as the scaffold for growing a new heart from a patient’s own cells. Dr. Taylor may not have to strip a real heart down to its skeleton every time, however. She can just keep a complete profile of 3D images of the organ in a computer file and just “print” the scaffolding using appropriate materials. Nobody has successfully printed a heart matrix yet, but the Cornell team did make an ear, and that’s certainly a start. But is it all good news? 3D printers are already being used to make handguns. What sinister purposes might be served in future when people can manufacture biology at home? Researchers are understandably focused on the therapeutic

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purposes for which they are developing the technology. But, our moral development as a species hasn’t always kept pace with our dazzling capacity for technical innovation. For now, I guess we’ll just have to play it by ear.

This has extraordinary implications for regenerative and reconstructive medicine. For centuries, surgeons have tried to replace lost or damaged physical features, by attaching prosthetics, transplanting organs donated by others, and grafting pieces of tissue taken from other areas of patients’ own bodies. But the most painstaking reconstructive surgery can still only create (relatively) crude facsimiles of a limb, digit, or organ that nature seems to produce so effortlessly. If you’re missing an ear, a surgeon can fashion a new one from cartilage found elsewhere in your body, typically the ribs. But ear cartilage has unique properties, giving it a perfect balance of strength and ﬂexibility, ideal for an ear’s functions, which rib cartilage just can’t match.

MARD

There has been a recent ﬂurry of media campaigns to reconceive masculinity in terms of “real men” as protectors of women rather than assailants.. but this only perpetuates the culture of gender violence by glorifying patriarchal notions of men being in charge of women’s safety and wellbeing… Sayan Bhattacharya explains.

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“L

et me introduce the Common Indian Male… Frequently spotted in domestic circles, traveling in a family herd… There is a telling phrase that best captures the Indian man in a relationship — whether as lover, parent or friend: not “I love you” but “Main hoon na.” It translates to “I’m here for you” but is better explained as a hug of commitment — “Never fear, I’m here.” These are men for whom commitment is a joy, a duty and a deep moral anchor.”

Against the barrage of coverage in the Western media that exoticised gender violence and luridly painted a predatory landscape, came this recent op-ed by Lavanya Sankaran in the New York Times that exoticised the Indian family. Post the 16th December, 2012 rape incident; a cottage industry seems to have sprung up to churn out instant fixes to sexual violence! However, among all these fixes, the one that has caught on most seems to be Farhan Akhtar’s MARD (Men against Rape and Discrimination) campaign1 that was launched in March, 2013 to “instill gender equality and respect towards women… thereby bringing about a sustained change in society.” It has received massive coverage with a host of celebrities, chiefly from Hindi cinema and some from cricket endorsing it. In this day and age of social networking and 24X7 media, Farhan Akhtar has succeeded in mounting a campaign that has reached out to lakhs and lakhs of people through Twitter, Facebook and a host of tie-ups. MARD merchandise is catching up too with brisk sale of tee shirts and caps from the online shopping site myntra. The campaign clearly has a target audience base, which is the urban, middle class consumer. Akhtar constructs his real mard/man as someone with a pan Indian identity base, thus subsuming the specificities of class, caste, community and language. He is ‘modern’, ‘sensitive’ and ‘liberated’, all attributes used metonymously, but does not overstep the boundaries of Indian tradition either. If we trace the career trajectory of Farhan Akhtar, a direct link can be established between his choice of films as director and actor and his pet project, MARD. The charter of the campaign defines a man as someone “… Whose heart holds respect, whose deeds display honour/He, who venerates women for their mind, body and soul/who ensures that their dignity will never be compromised…” Now, let us sample the oath to be taken by any officer in the Indian Army. “I,.............................. do swear in the name of God that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India as by the law established and that I will, as in duty bound, honestly and faithfully serve in the regular Army of the Union of India and … that I will observe and obey all commands of the President of the Union of India… even to the peril of my life.” The MARD manifesto and the Indian army oath read almost identical in tone and tenor. In the former, it is the woman’s honour that is to be protected

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while in the latter case, it is the honour of the Constitution and the State of India that commands allegiance. Thus women and the nation state can be used interchangeably whose honour and integrity are with the real mard/army (interchangeable too) of the country, which again harks back to Farhan Akhtar’s second feature film as director, Lakshya centering around an aimless youth who finally finds his true calling in the army and finds purpose in life by becoming a major catalyst for the Indian victory against Pakistan in the Kargil War. Yet, this protectionist attitude is what feeds into the culture of violence. While on a factual level, both Jyoti Pandey and the young photo intern in Mumbai had male companions but protection in this form did not ensure their safety, on an ideological level, such a discourse does not question the patriarchal institutions that produce and reproduce misogyny and heterosexism and hence breed gender violence. Right after the Park Street rape incident in February 2012, the West Bengal Chief Minister ordered all pubs to be shut down after 11:30 implying as if only drunk men rape at night and hence women need to stay home to

This harks back to Farhan Akhtar’s second feature film as director, Lakshya centering on an aimless youth who finally finds his true calling in the army, an institution with a code of honour that is very similar to that of MARD.

protect themselves from the past midnight raging hormones of men. The implication being city spaces are intrinsically hostile to women and hence they should either stay away from them or venture out only with protection. While this discourse of safety, outside of being classist (the target being the migrant or the slum dweller who render the city spaces unsafe and hence their removal sanitizes the space), allows the state to abdicate its responsibilities towards its citizen subjects on one hand, it also privileges the home as a secure space for women on the other, where as records show that the domestic space is a major site of gender violence. Shilpa Phadke has argued2, the tool to combat sexual violence is not protection from violence but the freedom to share in the risks. And this is where her discourse on loitering becomes important. Women’s access to public spaces is always linked to purpose. And this idea of purpose often frames the State and society’s reaction to gender violence. So the fact that Suzette Jordan was out pub hopping and drinking late at night, unaccompanied, was as important, if not more, as the fact that she was sexually assaulted. So

it is a challenge to conceive and create public spaces which women can own and consume with or without purpose, where they can loiter, amidst friendly and unfriendly bodies, where they can articulate their dissent as well as lay a stake to the spaces. However, Akhtar steers clear of such complexities and experiential realities of women to give prescriptive sermons on ideals of masculinity. The benign man has also been hailed in the latest Tanishq commercial. Here are images that Indian advertisements have never witnessed. A dark woman who is not apologetic about her complexion, who is not seeking cosmetic intervention to lighten her skin tone, a woman who is getting remarried, a man who is accepting of her and her daughter… and all of this in a jewellery campaign, jewellery that is seen as the foundation of a traditional wedding. In the media that pays maximum premium to skin tone, where women are set exacting standards of beauty, the Tanishq ad is an exception indeed. Yet, this exception cannot go unproblematised. A single commercial has packed in antidotes to as many societal ills as possible. Remarriage of women, then remarriage of women with children, that too girl children and to round it off neatly, remarriage of dark women. However, the makers of this ad, Lowe Lintas is the same advertisement agency who also count Fair and Lovely as its major client. Year after year Fair and Lovely and Fair and Handsome commercials keep telling us how the key to success is a light skin tone. The much successful “Dark is Beautiful” campaign had the same theme with celebrities like Nandita Das endorsing it. The problem here is in a country as diverse as India, one is not oppressed just on the basis of skin tone. Sruthi Herbert, a researcher, writes in the Roundtable India 3, “In India, the

‘value’ of people’ and their ‘beauty’ cannot be so easily and automatically connected. If that were so, then one would not have heard so often that ‘She is so fair that to look at her, one wouldn’t say she is an SC girl’… This automatic correlation of skin colour with caste is a lived reality for most people in my part of the world. How many factors contribute to the self-worth of women in a society that is structured around many kinds of oppression?” Putting maximum premium on physicality – be it dark or light complexion – ultimately could end up being two sides of the same coin, and that coin being the perception of women based on their physical appearance. Also, while the assertive and unapologetic woman is being celebrated, it is important to note that her autonomy is being asserted through the institution of marriage, where her husband is broad-minded and sensitive enough to accept her as she is. Thus, though the moustachioed man of MARD, an important image this year, seems to be a refashioning of machismo on the surface but it fits quite snugly within the contours of the ever mutating patriarchy. (Endnotes) 1 http://www.realmard.com/ 2 Phadke Shilpa, Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities: Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol- XLVIII, No. 39, September 28, 2013 3 Herbert Sruthi, A Dissent Note on the ‘Dark is Beautiful’ campaign, Roundtable India, August 28, 2013

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T e h e l k a

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Amit Sengupta was one of the editors at ‘Tehelka’, when it was still called the ‘People’s Paper’. In a heart-breaking account he narrates the fall of the magazine from the highest pedestals of soulful journalism into the shallow depths of corporate sponsored, selfglorifying and pompous reportage. With the latest incident of sexual assault by its Editor-in-Chief Tarun Tejpal, the mirror has ﬁnally cracked...

not a stone this, nor inside her vagina; but, Soni Sori knows. By Prabu Venkat

and repetitive celebration of megalomania, ritualistically glorified by its photogenic Managing Editor, perhaps like the point-size of the by-line with a mug shot becoming larger than the headline of a story or column. Do more readers read you if they see your mug shot? It’s like saying that China is a multi-party democracy. It’s like writing with shameless pomposity that M.F. Hussain had once asked me to write his autobiography, and that too after he had died in exile.

Indeed, the fall was always there, only that there was too much sound and fury, while the silences of white spaces in the colourful supplement of the holy ghost always seem to get buried and crushed. Routinely, there was a splash of addictive

The cracked mirror? They never really cared. Like original painters of fake paintings, they turned public interest journalism into an art form. Perhaps Shiv Khera can start teaching marketing executives in five star hotels, with a hefty price of course, on how brand Tehelka became a commodity and victim of its own fake longings and mirror images, outsourcing and marketing public interest into a ‘buy one get three’ brand with a lot of dubious sponsorships and mining mafias thrown in for both spice and spirituality. In

ike those slick, spoofy movies about con artists who start believing that that they are actually artists and seem to completely forget that they are basically con-guys, or like the hugely talented painters of fake paintings who start believing that the fake ones are really the original ones, the Tehelka bosses too have suddenly rediscovered their stunning originalities and self righteous narcissism in the cracked mirror of our times. So much so, they might still believe that it is the mirror that is cracked and hence it is finally the fault of the mirror. The mirror can go get damned, and who cares if it cracks many times more and falls with a jarring sound in a room replete with silence?

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this Stinkfest everything smells of Old Spice, which Tarun Tejpal loved so much, so much so, there was always that lovely red plastic bottle next to him on his desk at GK II in Delhi. In the end, their pockets only got deeper and deeper, and it did not matter if Soni Sori was jailed and condemned on fake charges, her body violated and brutalised by the Chhattisgarh repressive state apparatus led by the BJP. All that mattered was Shoma Chaudhary’s eternally flowery prose of elevated self righteous morality, even while the company (Essar) officials who were alleged to have paid her as an intermediary for the Maoists were all out there flaunting their muscles, as free as freedom, honourable citizens of a fat cat millionaire mining cartel, laughing their way to the bank. The Tehelka incestuous leadership too seemed to be laughing at our faces even as they lined

Perhaps Shiv Khera can start teaching marketing executives in ﬁve star hotels, with a hefty price of course, on how brand Tehelka became a commodity and victim of its own fake longings and mirror images, outsourcing and marketing public interest into a ‘buy one get three’ brand with a lot of dubious sponsorships and mining maﬁas thrown in for both spice and spirituality. their public interest journalism with big sponsorships and funding by dubious companies with impeccably shady track records, such as Essar in Chhattisgarh or the mining mafia in Goa. Eat. Love. Pray and make hay. For them the sun was always shining. Xerox another fake painting. Make Love. Make evangelism. Become Jesus Christ on a crucifix. Make big money. Sell your soul. Sell your sob story. Sell your high end fake ethics. Buy big cars. Celebrate big property. Hoist your pseudo revolutionary flag on the republic of chicken. Remember Tarun’s inaugural speech at the last Stinkfest in Goa? So whatever happens when all the chickens come home to roost? The decline started long ago, even when a group of talented, committed, sensitive journalists, many of whom left cushy jobs to choose the rough and passion of the zigzag by-

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lane, precisely to create a parallel cinema of the ossified, fossilised, corporatised, stagnating, soul less journalism of the mainstream big media. This ‘alternative-mainstream’ defied the tyranny of the mediocrity, broke all the barriers of stasis and conformism, challenged all the clichés of establishment journalism, and pushed the threshold of professional excellence, hard-nosed journalism and deep sensitivity. They changed the rules of objective and subjective coverage of both bitter realism and the realism of hope. Where else could you have, week after week, pictures and stores splashed in full pages on the rights of the cyclists on the roads of Delhi and street hawkers across all metros in India, or multiple stories of the Bhopal gas victims and women of the Narmada Valley, or Dalit writers writing their autobiographies, or face to face with underground Maoists? Or, how the Modi regime tried to buy off Zaheera Sheikh, or why journalism should stand for secular pluralism at all cost.

Otherworldly

This was a refreshing stream of consciousness which turned the entire media dialectic upside down and rediscovered the rational kernel of pulsating idealism in journalism without compromising on high professional standards. Small is beautiful, but small can also change the world. It was collective stream of consciousness, true. It was heady and great. Tears, blood and sweat, as Tarun wrote in his fake atonement letter. I never thought that a great and original writer and editor like Tarun too would resort to such predictable clichés. If there were tears, blood and sweat, surely, it belonged to him as much to all of us, across the hierarchy, even while we, the captains of the ship, walked upon the waters holding the hands of all the young sailors, like sensuous sleepwalkers in an infinite dream sequence of a fantastic, impossible, beautiful rainbow coalition. That dream now lies shattered, broken into many pieces, and not even the sound of the broken glass can be heard. The cracked mirror has suddenly become one-dimensional. There is neither image, nor sound. The decline of the self and the soul which started long ago, the fall of word, space and text, the apocalypse of idealism, seemed to have moved into another time and space. In this time and in this space, it is humid, dingy and shallow, all the windows are tightly shut, the doors of perception are like prisons of penance, and the dream is forever dead. Truly, I don’t want to join the lynch mob. I don’t want to become the hangman. I don’t want to die in my sleep. But my heart too is broken. My mirror too has cracked. And the dream I see now, has neither colour nor feeling. It is a dead dream. Like a scream in abject silence. So, I remind myself of an old slogan. I tell myself that hope and despair are the same thing, like pessimism and optimism. That dream and wakefulness move in synthesis. There is no catharsis. No anti-catharsis. They are all the same. Tehelka is dead. Long live Tehelka.

India’s mission to Mars should be celebrated, because peaceful scientiﬁc achievements and investments in knowledge can bring with them the grand promise of a deepened perspective on life and the universe, if not a materially better life for more people here on earth… Koli Mitra remains fascinated…

ndia is famous for its “otherworldly” preoccupations. It’s a reputation that many scholars, like Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, have said is incomplete, inaccurate, and/or misleading. Well, with the Mars Orbiter Mission, popularly known as Mangalaayan,

that reputation seems to have been subverted and given a tantalizingly literal and scientific interpretation. It really is headed for another world! Whether you are a materialist/ humanist or of a more spiritual, “otherworldly” bent, you can’t help but get just a little excited, watching Mangalaayan

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take off for India’s first venture out of the cradle of cislunar space and into the interplanetary void. Some have expressed concern that this spaceward attention is too distracting for a country with so many unmet needs at the basic level of human survival. But the Mars mission’s price tag is only Rs. 4.5 billion (or about $73 million out of an economy worth more than a couple of trillion), and unlike many public expenditures, this is an investment that pays significant dividends, like useful (and profitable) technological developments. Unless one believes that nothing other than subsistence commodities is worth investing in (in which case communication infrastructure, transportation, the arts, all should be de-funded), then the case for halting scientific projects is untenable. Maybe, to some people, space exploration seems too bold, too ostentatious for a “poor country” to attempt before “feeding its people”. But the point is, investments in knowledge and discovery are precisely the kinds of endeavours that raise people’s quality of life, both in the short term (through technical innovation and collateral revenues, which can even be used for anti-poverty efforts) and in the longer term by making leaps in education and training, and by inspiring young people to learn and strive. It seems silly to reject a certain type of science because it feels too grand. A sense of awe and wonder is a bonus, not a deficiency. Then, there are the cheerleaders, giddy with patriotic pride. Some have hoped out loud that, like India’s Chandrayaan

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mission, which confirmed the presence of water on the moon after other nations failed to do so, even with a headstart of half a century or so, it might be India that finds the first certain evidence of life on the Red Planet. But really that’s beside the point. Ultimately it doesn’t matter who finally settles that question. Maybe a future mission from Bangladesh, or Eretria, or Haiti will find the decisive piece of evidence. We can all learn from and marvel at the contributions of our fellow humans. Whatever scientific discovery Mangalaayan yields will be valuable, to all human civilization, equally.

MERICA, MERICA

Despite the frequent injection (by politicians) of a competitive, international “space-race” dimension into the process, the scientists and knowledge-enthusiasts who actually make successful space programs happen are typically not interested in rubbing their own success in other people’s faces. They almost invariably prefer to invite the entire family of humans to band together to love this planet that is their home, this solar system that is their neighbourhood and this cosmos that is their world. I am not an Indian – though I have deep connections to the country – but I think we can all be inspired and proud, whether we are Indians or just humans, that another device of human origin is striking out into the deep, in search of more knowledge about our magnificent, rust-coloured neighbour. Go in peace and in splendour, Mangalaayan! what’s out there!

Let’s see

it might be India that finds the first certain evidence of life on the Red Planet. But really that’s beside the point. Ultimately it doesn’t matter who finally settles that question. Maybe a future mission from Bangladesh, or Eretria, or Haiti will find the decisive piece of evidence. We can all learn from and marvel at the contributions of our fellow humans. Whatever scientific discovery Mangalaayan yields will be valuable, to all human civilization, equally. Since Edward Snowden blew the cover on America’s vast surveillance operation against everyone from international allies to ordinary citizens – all in the name of “national security” – the world has felt anything but “secure”, not least Americans themselves, whose very sense of a national character was betrayed by their government …. Koli Mitra shares…

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“I

’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.” – Edward Snowden. When Edward Snowden walked out of the airport in Moscow after being stuck there, stateless, for two months, someone remarked that he must be relieved to finally “breathe the free Moscow air.” So many ironies are compressed into that statement – and the whole Snowden saga – that it’s hard to know where to begin unpacking it. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s comment that Snowden could stay in Russia temporarily on the condition that he ceases to engage in activities that harm Russia’s “American allies” sounded so odd, that even Putin himself had to acknowledge it. In truth, the not-always-latent hostility in the U.S.-Russia “alliance” is really the ONLY reason

Should Google solve death? Does longer life equal greater joy? Need we strive for quantity over quality? Is immortality or extreme longevity the best healthcare priorities in a world steeped in inaccessibility and survival problems for the disabled, malnourished and the poor? How much more can we trust private pharmaceuticals to take care of public health? Can making healthcare free and accessible for everyone in the planet, a goal the Calico Project can dare to set? Snowden is there. Russia is not exactly celebrated for its record on free-speech or privacy rights, the bases of Snowden’s current predicament. Russia’s decision to let Snowden stay almost certainly isn’t based on principle. Even apart from the scintillating Cold-War-themed historical drama element in all this, the fact that Snowden has the “free air” of Russia to look forward to is a striking thought. For Americans – especially those of us who still choose to value that part of our identity, and even consider ourselves patriotic, without choosing to descend into the xenophobic “patriotic” tribalism that’s been rising to prominence for some time– it’s a frightening wake up call. We’re more accustomed to seeing people fleeing to the United States. It seems the “natural” direction of flight.

I can think of at least one political refugee who fled her country after getting into trouble for, among other things, criticizing her government for being “too pro-American”; yet, even she chose to seek—and was granted – sanctuary in America. All my life, I’ve known political asylees living ordinary lives in America – as students, cab drivers, doctors, lawyers, even lawyers working for government – who openly and relentlessly criticize America – its culture, its foreign policy, its food, the alleged intellectual inferiority of its people – but somehow they never consider returning to their countries of origin, and become agitated if questioned regarding this choice. My observation is not meant to condemn them. It’s meant to point out that, despite its flaws, America really is a place where dissent is generally allowed, even embraced. The “wake up call” doesn’t necessarily erode the confidence that “dissent” will continue to be tolerated in ordinary American life. It’s more sinister. It’s a creeping suspicion that dissent is irrelevant, because the governing class (including both major political parties) is so powerful that it essentially finds “dissent” toothless. The powerful can afford to let us chatter on in protest or discontent because if one of us ever becomes a serious problem (either as a genuine security threat or as a political inconvenience) they’ll know all our vulnerabilities and our exact location. Ironically, the United States Constitution guarantees that “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated” by the government. “ Yet the government is violating that promised sense of security in mass scale, all in the name of providing for our national “security.” If Snowden were granted asylum somewhere similar to the U.S., someplace with a free press and/or a relatively free civil society, like the Netherlands, or India, or Iceland (Snowden’s first choice), I might feel less disheartened. As it is, though, I’m not only watching my government possibly flout a host of my constitution’s guarantees (against unreasonable searches, against violations of personal privacy, against suppression of speech and more...) but I am watching all the world’s so-called liberal democracies, where people supposedly care about human rights, shun this young man who is being hunted by the world’s most powerful government. I can’t conclude either way about whether Snowden is “innocent”. It’s certainly possible that his revelations exposed his nation to threats against which it has a right to shield itself. But can we decide his guilt without a fair trial? Can he get a fair trial anymore? Not one country in the so called “free world” thought, “let’s give him a place to stay and an opportunity to prepare for his defence until a fair trial can be arranged”? None of America’s real “allies” in the free world had the political courage to mediate between their powerful ally and one of its citizens who is arguably now a persecuted political dissident? And who gets to decide whether the government, accused of violating our

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most sacred laws, is “innocent”? The histories of most countries, especially those that have become rich and powerful, tend to be rife with human rights violations: exploitation, violence, imperialism. Most thinking Americans are aware (and frequently critical) of our country’s history of imperialism and other misdeeds. Yet, when we criticize our government, we don’t typically look to other countries – certainly not Russia – for guidance on how to behave. Rather, we appeal to our own national values and argue for holding ourselves to a “higher standard.” Years ago, I spoke to a woman who complained sullenly about the double standard in how Americans are treated in “places like Iran and Libya, but we are expected to respect their rights as equals when they’re here.” I responded, quite righteously “You really want us to take human rights policy cues from Iran or Libya?” Remarkably, that seemed to sway her. Something about the ideals we consider definitive of our national character makes us aspire to be the kind of country that doesn’t cross certain lines. Snowden himself insists

his actions are true to American values. He says it’s the government that’s “unchained itself from the (American) constitution.” Daniel Ellsberg of the 1970s Pentagon Papers fame has called Snowden a “patriot” – a term Ellsberg also used to describe Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning), who is now in solitary confinement for having revealed evidence of the government’s extralegal activities. When I say “we” I don’t, of course,claim to represent all Americans. I do believe, however, that most ordinary Americans have some degree of un-cynical expectation that our country should uphold the rights and freedoms spelled out in our constitution and meet some common sense standards of fairness and be held “accountable” when it fails. We usually feel pretty comfortable that our march through history has generally taken us forward in the right direction. That’s why the rise of neo-conservatism has been so alarming to us. We had hoped all that had peaked with the Bush presidency and that we were now on the road to repair. So many events of the Obama presidency, the latest being Edward Snowden’s revelations and his subsequent life on the run, have shaken that faith to the core.

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T H E

M I S S I N G L I N K

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take you through a similar path. There is no such thing as a ‘God Particle’ except in the sensationalist heads of certain journalists.

thousands of scientists, research institutes, universities and laboratories worth 7.5 billion Euros – all to find that one missing sub particle in the ‘Standard Model’.

This article does, however, try to convey the importance of the research and the magnitude of such a discovery. We need not be sensationalist, but we can nonetheless admit that the discovery was sensational. In 1964, François Englert and Robert Brout, and Peter Higgs independently published two manuscripts on obtaining of mass of certain particles. What they had theorized was fundamental to the ‘Standard Model’ of particle physics. The ‘Standard Model’ describes how fundamental particles and forces interact in the universe. Crucially, in the model, these particles are without mass.

Adding to the difficulty of the experiment is that the fact that the Higgs Boson cannot be observed directly but rather, has to be reconstructed from particle decays left in its wake. Moreover, approximately one collision per trillion produced a particle in the collider. Yet, since the project started in 1998 (the LHC was built between 1998 and 2008), thousands of scientists have produced a phenomenal amount of data from trillions of colliding protons to simulating the conditions existing at 10second after the Big Bang – all of which eventually led to the 2013 announcement.

However, matter clearly has mass, as we see around us, so a problem remained as to identifying how this mass comes to exist. Yet, any attempt to forcibly put mass into the theory resulted in the ‘Standard Model’ collapsing. This led Englebert and Brout, as well as Higgs, to posit the existence of another fundamental particle. All the fundamental particles and the quanta mediating forces would gain mass through this fundamental particle, which was dubbed the Higgs Boson.

This is why the scientific confirmation of the Higgs Boson and the Nobel Prize to Englert and Higgs are both such significant occurrences of 2013. This discovery is not just rooted to this year, but is one of the significant discoveries in all human history. And it does not end there. With true scientific humility, the scientific community have been quick to declare that this is just the beginning. It is only one part of an even greater puzzle of the Universe. There are still quite a few remaining mysteries in particle physics including the possibility of varieties of the Higgs Boson, the existence of dark matter and dark energy and questions about the weakness of the gravitational force.

In July 2012, scientists at CERN, (European Organization for Nuclear Research), announced the discovery of a particle that seemingly displayed the characteristics consistent with the Higgs Boson. This was followed by the announcement in March 2013 that new results did indicate that the new particle was indeed a Higgs Boson, thus bringing to a relative conclusion, the research of 50 years. So why is this discovery so important? Fundamentally, this looks at how the Big Bang could create mass out of massless energy. It is the missing piece that solves a fundamental part of the greatest puzzle of all – the Universe. The scientific impact of such a discovery is obvious. However, as was the case with several discoveries of the past, an immediate real world impact is unlikely. We simply do not have corresponding technological advancements or knowledge to reap the benefits of such a discovery yet. This however, is not to say there aren’t any – we just don’t know them yet. Furthermore, its contribution to human knowledge (and here we speak of knowledge for the sake of knowledge) is enormous. The discovery of Higgs Boson, after years of painstaking research is one of humanity’s greatest breakthroughs in understanding the Universe. The 2013 Physics Nobel was deservedly awarded to the scientists even before the discovery. Rohit Roy joins in the applause.

n the 8th of October 2013 the Nobel Physics prize was awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs (the ceremony is on the 10th of December) of December). This award was the culmination of a half a century of

work on the ‘Standard Model’ in physics and the answer to one of the many fundamental questions that remain. As is often the case in matters between academia and general reporting, the jump from Higgs Boson to ‘The God Particle’ was quite easily cooked up by the media. This piece does not

If, however, the greatness of a discovery is partly measured by the complexity and difficulty in achieving it, then the experiment to find the Higgs Boson could not have been greater. Firstly, there was the actual experimental setup. Where usually a small laboratory or even a relatively expensive one would do, experiments in particle physics (including research on the Higgs Boson) required setting up the ‘Large Hadron Collider’ (LHC) – a 27 km circular tunnel of superconducting magnets, lying underneath the Franco-Swiss border, made as a collaborative effort between

The journey has only just begun. Thankfully, it began with a bang!

Any attempt to forcibly put mass into the theory resulted in the ‘Standard Model’ collapsing. This led Englebert and Brout, as well as Higgs, to posit the existence of another fundamental particle. All the fundamental particles and the quanta mediating forces would gain mass through this fundamental particle, which was dubbed the Higgs Boson.

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‘The heart

OF DARKNESS’ As Indians, we face racism across the ﬁrst world, and yet, we are guilty of being one of the most racist nations in the world. The recent ostracization of Nigerians in relatively liberal Goa, paints the darkest picture ever, of our nonexistent anti-racist consciousness. Nitasha Kaul reports.

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villages. The Goan ‘Rent-a-Bike Association’ (a government scheme for tourists) decided that it would not rent bikes to any Nigerians. They put up banners in Mapusa, a market town and home of the Goan CM, stating “Say No to Drugs. Say No to Nigerians”, and led a rally (also on a national highway) from Mapusa to Porvorim, demanding that Goans not rent houses or vehicles to Nigerians. The Goan Minister of Art and Culture, Dayanand Mandrekar said, “Nigerians are like cancer”, a statement for which he later apologised. Meanwhile, the CM sneered at the media, asking if they could take on a Nigerian one-to-one. In his view, Nigerians were “seven-feet tall, huge and aggressive”, and that it would take “at least 100 of our policemen to handle a crowd of 50 Nigerians”. Subhash Phaldesai, another MLA of the same ruling BJP party, said Nigerians were like “ wild animals pumped with drugs”. Some of the arrested Nigerians went on a hunger strike in jail demanding that human rights panel members meet them to record their statements. A newspaper in the UK concluded “The Goa police does keep its hands off European tourists, but the Nigerians aren’t so lucky”. By presenting this entire episode as a case of lawlessness carried out by illegal Nigerians, the Goan CM requested more police resources from the central government, complaining that the BJP government in Goa was being given “step-motherly” treatment by the centre.

acism is ubiquitous in India. And like many other overlapping prejudices - sexism, casteism, regionalism, homophobia, Islamophobia - it thrives on the public denial of its presence. A poll published in the Washington Post earlier this year found India to be the second most racist nation in the world. India’s smallest state, Goa, in spite of its relatively liberal attitude to attire, alcohol, and nightlife aspects of being a tourist beach destination, is no different from the rest of India. In 2013, A Nigerian man was stabbed to death and five others wounded in Goa. Clearly lacking faith in the Goan administrative system, 200 Nigerians protested by marching on a national highway, demanding that a Nigerian official be present at the deceased man’s autopsy. They believed the

murder was carried out by a local drug mafia called Chapora Boys and that the police was unwilling to act against them. Mismanaging the protest, the police looked on as clashes between the locals and Nigerians escalated and a Nigerian was brutally beaten up. Later, fifty-three Nigerians – but no locals – were arrested in connection with the violence. Voices in the local media made it clear that if any FIR was booked against the locals, they would not tolerate it and would “come out on the streets”. The Goa Chief Minister, Manohar Parrikar, said the stabbing of the Nigerian man was related to the drug mafia. He also promised to track down any Nigerians living illegally in Goa and deport them, thereby collectively scapegoating all Nigerians as illegal drug Mafiosi. Some village councils (Silom and Parra) started a campaign to expel all Nigerians from their

The BJP, with its Hindutva agenda in general, is a party whose politics derive from the quest for a morally pure society where all problems are ascribed to those perceived as “outsiders”. The ascendancy of such right-wing intolerance in India across the board has made prejudice more entrenched in a politics of self and other. This widespread prejudice and stereotyping is the real cause of the violence, and policing is not a solution for addressing that. When the Nigerians in Goa are referred to as “wild animals on drugs” or are equated with drugs and diseases, what we see is not just xenophobia but an inexcusable de-humanisation of people. In this case, the de-humanisation and collective punishment draws upon a larger armoury of racist prejudice against black people in India. There is a strong racist subtext in many Bollywood movies and advertisements that depict Africans in less-than-human terms as ignorant, primitive cannibals. In a newspaper report on racism in Delhi’s residential areas, a local broker was quoted as saying “We accommodate chinkis, but never habshis”, displaying a hierarchy of racist prejudice that ranks black people lowest. There are numerous cases of abysmal discrimination and hostility against people from various African countries who are legally in India, either as students and professionals or accompanying their spouses (who are either Indians or other foreigners who in India for lawful purposes). These legal visitors and residents routinely face racist chants, assault, and infringement of their rights and liberties. A

similar situation exists even in supposedly more liberal cities like Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore. In a land where whiteness creams are peddled for everything from male faces to female intimate parts, being black is seen as somehow sub-human. Remarkably, there is very little in the way of anti-racist consciousness or struggle, either in the state or in civil society. On a visit to Goa, I saw the words “Goa is like a fridge. Everyone comes to chill here!” painted on many walls. Not all Goans are racist, but for most Nigerians today, Goa is indeed a chilling place.

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narrative, what the Gezi Park protests were all about: a modern, educated woman (a university professor, it turned out) being attacked by the brutal, regressive machinery of the state. The secular forces of Turkey were finally fighting back against the creeping Islamisation of their country, and against the chief driver of this conservative push, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The West-friendly middleclasses were fed up with encroachments on their freedom, from restrictions on buying alcohol to stringent new rules on abortion. One of the most cheerful purveyors of this narrative was The Telegraph, a famously conservative UK newspaper. This should tell us something about the way the narrative was being deployed. An article in The Telegraph puts it bluntly: the iconic photo “set off a major escalation of the protests, which have pitted Turkey’s secular middle class against what they see as an increasingly authoritarian Islamist government.” The Western media found it easy to fit the Turkey protests into familiar binaries: tradition vs. progress, Islam vs. secularism, women’s rights vs. oldfashioned gender roles. And it’s no surprise that Western commentators chose the side of secular progress against supposedly regressive Islam. (Funny that the conservatives of Turkey and the conservatives of the UK don’t get along; you’d figure they have plenty of common ground, from restricting women’s rights to praising unbridled capitalism. Maybe they feel competitive with each other.)

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In fact, media outlets like The Telegraph buy into the same reductionist, misleading dualism that Erdoğan has himself promoted. As he lost the support of liberals (who were crucial to his initial rise to power), Erdoğan has sought to bolster his credentials by appealing to his remaining supporters, who are largely rural and conservative. While there is a grain of truth to the opposition of rural/ conservative/religious to urban/liberal/secular, it erases the deep complexity of a changing Turkish state. Erdoğan, who has presided over many of these changes, should be the first to recognise this; but then, it is more politically expedient for him to polarise the Turkish people and consolidate his remaining support base.

It is increasingly difficult to pin-point the specific causes of various protest movements across the world, but all of them signify a fluid feeling of unease and discontent…Thomas Crowley tries to understand the true nature of the recent protests in Turkey.

‘T

he Occupy movement’ in the United States produced a similar image: a police officer dressed in riot gear cavalierly dousing a protester with pepper spray. But that image, though shocking, doesn’t have the same symbolic weight, nor the electric energy, of the photograph that emerged from the Gezi Park protests

in Istanbul, Turkey on May 28, 2013. In the foreground of the full-sized photo (it is often cropped), a concerned-looking woman hunches her shoulders and scrunches shut her eyes. Behind her, a police officer, riot gear on, knees bent, shoots a stream of pepper spray at another woman, who is wearing a red, summery

dress and has a white canvas bag draped over her shoulder. Her hair is flying up, as if hit by a gust of wind, and her gaze is down, but her stance is firm, as if defiant. Naturally, the news media loved this image, as did the various social networks, and the photo quickly spread. It came to symbolise, according to the standard media

Against both Erdoğan and The Telegraph, many reports from the sites of the protests attested to their spectacularly diverse character. They actually began as an environmental protest, opposing the building of a mall in one of the city’s last green spaces; the construction company slated to build the mall had close ties to the ruling party. The environmental protest was part of a larger discontent with Erdoğan’s farreaching urban renewal schemes, which were themselves just one element of the current government’s remaking of Turkey along neoliberal lines. It is true that outrage at police brutality, not environmental concerns, served as the spark that ignited the larger wave of protests. However, a wide cross-section of society took to the streets, with the dominant attitude being “enough is enough!” The fact that about 2.5 million people participated in the protests is itself

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a sign that it was not merely an uprising of a small, urban, Westernised elite. The protests drew the young and the old, the left and the right, the secular and the religious. At the protests, there were prominent signs hung by a group called the AntiCapitalist Muslims. When Ramadan came, the protesters began organizing a mass iftar for anyone who wanted to join. When Erdoğan dismissed the protesters as just a few “looters,” the protesters – who throughout showed an admirable sense of humour – began referring to themselves as “looters” as a point of pride. Erdoğan perhaps revealed his real fears later, when he blamed the protests on the foreign “interest rate lobbies” who wanted to exploit political instability in Turkey for their own financial gains. Although this was dismissed by most as a loony conspiracy theory, it was grounded in Turkey’s past experiences of indebtedness at the hands of Western financiers and governments, as well as the risks Turkey has taken recently by opening itself up to global market whims. In an insightful analysis of the protests, which appeared in Kafila, Tamer Söyler notes that Erdoğan is a businessman at heart. This – more than the woman in red or Erdoğan’s recent attempts to ban co-ed hostels at government colleges – may be a truer sign of Turkey’s changing fortunes.

It is true that outrage at police brutality, not environmental concerns, served as the spark that ignited the larger wave of protests. However, a wide cross-section of society took to the streets, with the dominant attitude being “enough is enough!” The fact that about 2.5 million people participated in the protests is itself a sign that it was not merely an uprising of a small, urban, Westernised elite.

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s a v a r

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1100 garments workers. Around 2500 workers were injured and another 800 went missing. One of the most devastating industrial disasters of the century required 17 days of rescue operation. The corpses of workers were brought out of the wreckage while the relatives of the workers waited outside, holding pictures of their loved ones. Some of the victims were

T r a g e d y

By Parvez Ahmed / Photopeer

‘Rana Plaza’ was a nine-storied commercial building at Savar, in the outskirts of Dhaka where, on 24 April 2013, a building collapsed, perhaps the most devastating mishap in the history of Bangladesh. All the floors from the third to the seventh collapsed, where at least 5000 workers were employed. Despite reporting a major crack in the building structure one day before the catastrophe, the workers were forced to come to work the next day. The building caved in at around nine in the morning, killing

trapped under the corpses, some had to be rescued by amputating their arms or legs, the paramedics shouting out for “equipments to cut off the limbs which are trapped under concrete”. Some relatives frantically searched for the bodies with torch light. Just to find a single person alive.

PHOTO ESSAY

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The skilled garments workers, who finely craft apparels for others, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even get a simple piece of clean cloth for their own burial. As decomposed corpses, their burnt, bloodied clothes were the only bit of their identifiable identity. These workers mostly come from distant villages and are mostly from below poverty line. They come to the city just for a better

PHOTO ESSAY

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life. For a while, their deaths shock us. But how long does the impact last? Who are these people, really? What are their realities? What are their stories? Do they have any voice? Or are they just a nameless mass contributing to our development? Unheard. Unattended. Under the wreckage of Rana Plaza.

PHOTO ESSAY

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

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