IT vs Roti

The chameleonic changes happening in India are capable of reviving surrealist non-sequiturs. How can Information Technology (IT) be pitted against bread (Roti)? Such improbable opponents can only emerge from either the laboratories of Victor Frankenstein or economic scientists at the World Trade Organization.

Incessant repetitions have convinced the world, including the dying polar bears and penguins at the poles, that there is an IT revolution going on in India. Believe me, walking the streets of India outside of Bangalore or Gurgaon, it feels like a facetious rumor.

There are a lot of back-office, low-end jobs percolating down to India essentially because of the low wages our accent-trained English speaking young are willing to accept. The real human beings behind the pseudonyms of Mary Janes and Joe Smiths are not unaware of their exploitation. Living in a shortsighted culture that promotes the present, in the moment, instant gratification as the highest value, it is their only option for individual independence. In the pursuit of their individualism they are unwilling to question the greed of their employers. When their Government prostrates to the power of Corporations and legal due process is a farce (remember Bhopal) they are smart enough to shut up and show up for work at the stroke of the midnight hour.

Muscle Power

I thought this was hilarious, especially the mustached demon jaw of Bush layered on what is most certainly Arnold's steroid pumped body.

Demonstration against the India-U.S. nuclear deal in Hyderabad, India, Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008. (AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A.)

Krishi Darshan: Stuffed and Starved

For those of you born in the nineties or later, unaware of the word "Krishi Darshan": it is a TV program started in 1966 on Doordarshan - the Indian State sponsored Television channel. It literally translates to "A look at Agriculture".

In the eighties, growing up as an urban kid, it was the most boring program one could imagine watching, but then there was nothing else to watch. The dullest anchors interviewed the dullest speakers on the nature of soil, various low and high productivity seeds and ways to improve crops using chemicals and fertilizers. The National Propaganda and our lie-infested school books harped about how successful the Green Revolution was.

The underlying theme of all propaganda was: hold your head and your cock high because socialist India is going great guns. Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan (Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer). And so the pseudo socialist spin went on till 1991 when we were informed by the then finance minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, that India was about to go bankrupt!

Compared to today, some may remember that as a more innocent time. But that would be a romantic fallacy. Indira's India was as corrupt as today's India. The only difference being that there was a sense of shame in corruption (or maybe even that is my childhood imagination). Today, that shame, imagined or otherwise, has certainly gone away. Now we boldly proclaim our right to plunder and call it "Free Market". And of course a lot more have joined the orgy giving it a notion of democratic participation.

The Final Solution

Five years ago, in 2003, Rakesh Sharma made a documentary film, the Final Solution about the politics of hate in Gujarat. It chronicled the instigation and aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat Riots.

These riots broke out after the burning of Coach S/6, on the Sabarmati Express, in Godhra, on February 27th, 2002. Fifty eight people (23 men, 15 women and 20 children) were killed, burnt to death by a mob, while returning from a pilgrimage from Ayodhya. Using these killings as an excuse, the Hindutva outfits VHP, RSS and Bajrang Dal (members of the Sangh Parivar) unleashed mass riots in which close to two thousand people were killed and over a hundred and fifty thousand people displaced. Most of them were Muslims.

The Sangh Parivar (family of strong associations) is a group of various political parties. The BJP, which controlled both the state and national government, at the time of the riots, is the largest member of this family. The Prime Minster of India, at that time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee started his political career as a member of the RSS. The BJP chief minister of Gujarat, Narinder Modi has close ties to the VHP and the Bajrang Dal.

When the riots went on unchecked for over two months, till May 2002, allegations started surfacing that these riots were pre-planned, organized and aided by local authorities with carte blanche from the Government. It was a serious charge because if these allegations were true, it meant the government of Gujarat was aiding the massacre of its own people divided on lines of religion.

Pointillism meets Performance Art

If you haven't encountered Phil Hansen's work, you're missing out on a new form of Pointillism mixed with performance art. His work is politically charged, as all good art should be (I'm aware that "good art" is a dubious term, but I'm most interested in political art;). He doesn't necessarily look at museums or galleries to display his work and has preferred the world-wide-web as his exhibition space.

Hansen, an art school dropout, works as an X-ray technician by day, spending all of his spare time and money on his art. His presentation medium, though, has earned him a huge audience.

This 44" x 104" image of Kim Jong Il is made using half a liter of his own blood and over 6000 bandages on the canvas. Here's a close up of the canvas:

Another piece titled Paul, is a 144" x 96" portrait of a homeless man made by stepping in paint and walking all over the canvas.

The Sixties as Fables of Protest

Just finished watching Chicago 10 and my first reactions are that today's modern world is the servile anti-thesis of the sixties. Free, critical thought encouraged to question authority and power has been annihilated by a materialist education system. Brett Morgen's Chicago 10 is a documentary film about eight antiwar protesters who were put on trial for attempting to disrupt the 1968 Democratic Convention being held in Chicago.

It is told using archival footage mixed with animation and some stellar rock music and takes you back to 1968, the days of Lyndon B. Johnson.

It was a time very much like today. The Vietnam antiwar sentiment, like the Iraq antiwar sentiment was at its peak. At that time it was not the Republicans but the Democrats who were in power. Johnson, when he took office after JFK's assassination, escalated the war from 16,000 American soldiers in Vietnam to 550,000 by the end of his term. John Frankenheimer's A Path to War is an excellent film about the LBJ years.

But coming back to Chicago 10, one the most noticeable differences of today's world and the sixties is how independent and critical the news media was of the government and the authorities. I mean today's media is reduced to a mouthpiece of the government and the corporate world. Just forty years ago, this was not the case and this film documents that so interestingly.

Taking offense to SEZs

Last week I caught a discussion on NDTV's new program "Uncommon Ground". The discussion was between Medha Patkar and Anand Mahindra. Since Medha Patkar is rarely interviewed on television, my interest was piqued. Having met both Medha Patkar and Anand Mahindra I also knew where they'd be coming from. The discussion was going to focus on land acquisition for Special Economic Zones.

The show was mediated by Rohini Nilekani who, I thought, looked inexperienced, clueless and a terrible head-bobbing anchor hosting a children's program. At least she doesn't suffer from the high-pitched yelling syndrome that seems to have infected most Indian TV presenters thanks to Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sardesai. But that's another story. Maybe Rohini will improve over time. She should check out Zeinab Badawi, Bill Moyers or even the bubbly Mishal Husain to get some ideas on anchoring such a program.

The guests, both Medha Patkar and Anand Mahindra came across as intelligent and did not resort to a yelling contest which was refreshing. I was quite impressed with Anand Mahindra. He was articulate, sincere and made a pledge on behalf of the Mahindra group, stating on record:

"...if there is any question where any farmer does not want to part with their land, I am telling you, Mahindra and Mahindra will not go [forward] with it [the acquisition of land]."

Manufacturing Consent

As Indian mainstream media starts looking more and more like a bad Xerox copy of American media, viewers must equip themselves with the knowledge and vocabulary on how the media helps manufacture consent. This should be required viewing for you and your children, especially since they might be learning fascism at school.

Our Whistleblowers, their Whistleblowers

India often likes to compare its highly dubious 'democratic' credentials to America. The idea is to somehow make-believe that America and India are natural allies since both are 'democracies'. In some other sections of Indian society, America and all western culture is frequently referred to as the great Satan. While I have no religious moorings, American foreign policy can certainly seem that way to its victims.

But what makes America great? It is not its fluff pop culture, its lame-ass suburban shopping malls or its oligarchic corporate greed. These are the things that India is most voraciously aping. What stands out in America is its freedom of speech which is a guaranteed constitutional right. A right which is often denied them, but their democracy fights back. This is something India has yet to understand. Even though the Indian Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, albeit very differently from the United States, in practice it is a mockery of the constitution.

I was just listening to Glenn Greenwald's podcast at Salon. His podcast debut interview was with Daniel Ellsberg, a prominent political whistleblower whose release of the Pentagon Papers expedited the end of the Vietnam war.

Glen Greenwald - Daniel Ellsberg Podcast

Hearing the podcast, it struck me how Indian whistleblowers fared in comparison. After all, true sister democracies have to have this fundamentally important shared value.

Skeletons in the racist closet

Channel surfing amidst head over the cloud stock market euphoria, bzzzz... never ending cricket madness bzzzz... bronze statues of Hindu gods drinking our much needed milk, bzzzz... a girl from Nagaland denied entry to a bar lounge/restaurant, hmm. This got be rethinking about Racism in India and how it is rarely acknowledged yet practiced so blatantly, so casually that it would make 17th century slave owners proud.