No Spoofs Please... We're Hindus
You either get it or you don't. Devendra Banhart's solitary claim to fame, at least in pop culture, so far, has been that he's Natalie Portman's ex-boyfriend. On his own, he comes across as a psychedelic rebel looking to affront. He ain't no Allen Ginsberg when it comes to the standard of psychedelic rebels but I thought he was amusing to read at least in this article that he wrote after his break up with Natalie Portman. He's also a songwriter, singer and a musician whose career, well at least I haven't been following.
His new music video for the song Carmensita, from his album Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, is a spoof of Ramayana and has gotten Hindu Religious scholars all riled up.
The Thieves of India
The Times Group is India's largest media conglomerate with a turnover of over USD $700 million. It has eleven publishing centers, fifteen printing centers, fifty five sales offices and over seven thousand employees. It owns five dailies, thirty one magazines, thirty two radio stations and reaches you, your children and your dog in two thousand four hundred and sixty eight cities and towns. Through its subsidiary companies it has interests in major radio, television, film and online businesses.
It is fair to say that the trap of this media composite is inescapable if you are in anyway connected to India. With ownership of such mass media, The Times Group exemplifies how modern corporatism has turned the meaning of language upside down. Mass Media is no longer mass if it is held by a couple of entities. The 'mass' in mass media was meant to be us, the masses. Mass media means people's media, not corporate media injected into people's veins. It means the media is of the people not a media which steals from the people.
Sign o' the Times
On 23rd September, 1932, Pritilata Waddedar led a bomb attack with 10 men on the Pahartali European Club in Chittagong, Bengal. The raid was successful but she was unable to escape and was trapped by the police. She consumed potassium cyanide as her next best option. The target, the European Pahartali Club, was chosen because it bore this offensive sign at its entrance:
"Dogs and Indians not allowed"
Seventy six years later, I was in Pune for some work this week and I came across this sign outside a posh residential complex:
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.
The Missionary Position
The Church is often accused of funding missions to convert people to Christianity. It is no secret that funds are openly made available for various proselytizing programs. But this isn't new news to anyone familiar with history. The Great Commission has been going on since the Roman Empire thorough the middle ages. After Islam came into the picture in the 7th Century it was but, only a matter of time before the Crusades began. These bloody religious wars changed the face of human society forever. Crusaders, greedy for power, masked themselves as holy warriors spreading the word of their respective Gods. Though the 13th century marked a calendared end to the Crusades, its consequences are felt even in the contemporary world. One could easily make the case that the Crusades are still going on.
Once America was discovered, the Church found a new zeal to pursue its proselytizing agenda. European powers such as Spain, France and Portugal frequently justified their Colonial efforts as spreading the message of Jesus and doing the work of God (God has been a handy term of abuse since its invention). So, alongside the genocide of the American Indians and the profitable slave trade a rapid and often forceful conversion to Christianity was taking place across the Americas and Africa. The indigenous wild pagan tribes had to be civilized.
Know Your District - Phulpur
This is Phulpur in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh.
| Population | 666,013 |
| Male | 54% |
| Female | 46% |
| Male Literacy | 70% |
| Female Literacy | 49% |
| District | Allahabad |
| Census Year | 2001 |
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The good people of Tehsil Phulpur have elected and given us some very interesting members of Parliament. These have included:
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.
Farewell in nineteen forty seven
This is how it all ended and started. Here's some incredible newsreel footage of the last British soldiers leaving India and the idea of a nation being born. Nationalism was a big thing in the 20th century. Even though I am aware of the propagandist nature of all newsreels, it still amazes me how congenial the final exchange must have been. There are a lot of post-mortem theories speculating that Britain left only because World War II had devastated the British Empire etc. but the magic of nineteen forty seven was that the British left as friends wishing India well and India wishing the last leaving soldiers a safe return back home. The magnanimity of this gesture is a testament to Gandhi and his non-violent movement.
Sure, they left us with the horror of partition and we still deal with the consequences, but even at that devastating moment in history, there was a sense of dignity in bidding farewell to a colonial imperialist power... with peace.
This film also gives us a fascinating glimpse into the birth of a young nation and the innocent hope of a better tomorrow. We've come a long way from naive innocence to a kleptocracy.
Memories of War
On August 6 and 9, 1945, 63 years ago, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked with nuclear weapons. "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
Many of us were not alive yet, but on those two days 220,000 people were killed, most of them vaporized within minutes. Over the years thousands more have died in the region due to radiation and exposure.
Keiji Nakazawa, who was 6 years old at the time, is one of the few survivors from the attacks. He went on to create Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), a manga (comic book series) about his memories. It became hugely popular and was adapted into three live action films.
His work becomes ever more pertinent today as we move to an age where nuclear weapons are considered safety nets and touted as weapons of peace.
