Get Your War On: The Cross
Another awesome GYWO episode - thanks to the hilarious work being done at 236
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.
Ubuntu - Reflect my Humanity
While many of you may have come to know the word "Ubuntu" through the Linux based operating system it is worth getting to know its meaning which is deeply philosophical. Ubuntu is an ancient Bantu word and, like many ancient words, it is open to interpretation. Desmond Tutu describes it as:
A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
It is somewhat similar to the concept of Ātman in Hinduism though I understand Ubuntu as more humanist with lesser religious connotations. I personally liked what Chris Abani has to say about Ubuntu. In his talk at TED he said:
The only way for me to be Human is for you to reflect my Humanity back at me.
Simple, poetic and thoughtful. Reading Chris Abani, his sensitivity to human stories and the way he tells it, is reminiscent of reading Tagore. Abani, a Nigerian Heebo, is an English writer, poet and musician. His work is political in nature but very human in its telling. It mostly revolves around themes of lost and created identities and the absence of objectivity in human society. Graceland or his latest Song for Night are great books on American exported Pop Culture mixed with the reality of War, Greed and Corruption in conflict ravaged Africa.
Robots screwing Robots
America seems to be the land of abstractions, where numbers have taken on an existence of their own in phrases like "57 Varieties," "the 5 and 10," or "7 Up" and "behind the 8-ball." It figures. Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an industrial culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures. Take 36-24-36. Numbers cannot become more sensuously tactile than when mumbled as the magic formula for the female figure while the haptic* hand sweeps the air.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Marshall McLuhan, 1964
* The Greeks referred to the faculty of touch as the "haptic" sense.
Quantitative analysis is the foundation on which logic, science and reason stand. So great is our dependency on quantitative analysis that when something doesn't make sense we refer to the numbers. Numbers are seen as the unbiased validation of truth. Our faith in numbers is the basis of testing intelligence, of calculating progress, of creating economic models. The Number can tell you if you are happy or not, it can detect if you are lying or telling the truth. It can even pronounce you mentally insane. We strengthen our arguments by backing it up with numbers because everyone trusts the number. We measure success by numbers. And if the numbers don't add up, we attribute that to human error. The Supremacy of the Number even allows us to predict and control chaos and the unknown. It enables us to see into the future.
The abstract power of the Number is felt most tangibly in Economics. Today, Chaos Math and Game Theory are commonly applied to predict the Stock Market, the World Economy, Inflation, Employment, the GDP and even Poker Games (which a lot of people take quite seriously). In fact, Game Theory originated as a model to predict results in a Poker Game.
The first political applications of Game Theory are traced back to the paranoia of the Cold War years. In the late fifties it was used, at the Rand Corporation, to play out different scenarios of nuclear war and how to avert it. Simple quantitative models of human nature were drawn, based on radars that monitored Soviet activity, fed into a computer and then used by strategists to predict Soviet behavior and decide US policy. It was the first step to believing that we could incorporate the enemy into our own thinking. We could harness the power of the Number and mathematically predict how we and our enemy would play on a set of known and unknown rules.
But underlying Game Theory was a dark vision of human beings. That we were driven only by self-interest and constantly distrustful of those around us. One mathematician at Rand, John Nash (who entered pop culture through the film A Beautiful Mind) set out to show that this dark vision was not just applicable to the Cold War but could be used to create stability in all of Human Society. To prove his thesis, he invented a series of cruel games, the most famous of which he called "Fuck You Buddy".
Speaking of Nuclear matters
Over the last month, I have been struggling to understand the nuclear deal and its intricacies. It was all made more complex by the acronyms (NSG, ENR, 123, Hyde Act), the cacophony (The Left, the BJP), the babel (Laloo Prasad Yadav, the Indian Media) and then the crisis (The July no-confidence motion against the UPA government). Somewhere in this mayhem, we lost perspective on what this ruckus is all about. Most "expert" opinions seemed to be either following ideology or emotional dribble rather than offering any logical arguments.
To be for it or against it, it is first important to understand it. I will try to explain it as simply and clearly as possible. The Hyde Act is a good place to start. It is an act initiated by the late Republican Rep. Henry J. Hyde and passed by the US Congress in January 2006. Current US policy forbids dealing, in nuclear technology, with nations that are not part of the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty. Currently India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are the only countries that are not part of it. The Hyde Act is an unusual exception made only for India. In fact, both Israel and Pakistan have demanded similar treaties but the US has refused.
While it may be of interest to think about why Uncle Sam is making this exception for India (after all, he's not really your Uncle), I think this line of thought opens up a hornet's nest of other political discussions (China, Afghanistan, India's anti-Iran vote, US hegemony, geopolitics etc.) and takes us away from the most moot question. One that we in India should really be asking.
India needs much more energy for its economy to grow and nuclear energy has been around for almost half a century. There are currently over 30 countries, including India, that are using nuclear power for energy purposes. None of these other nations have any special treaties with the US. So why does India need special permission? Once you ask yourself that question, the cacophonous din begins to die and the puzzle starts making sense.
Get your War on - Episode 4
The mockery continues. Do you know what a surge is?
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 |
[src]
The good people of Tehsil Phulpur have elected and given us some very interesting members of Parliament. These have included:
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.
SIMI without its first S and last I
News networks are displaying headlines in 22 point font size claiming "Terror probe comes to an end", "Villains behind July 26 blasts identified, held", "Case Cracked". And then I heard the Gujarat Director General of Police, P.C Pandey at a press conference making a ridiculous claim with more sensational value than logic:
"The Indian Mujaheedin (IM) is nothing but another name for the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). If you remove the first S and the last I, you get IM from SIMI."
DGP sahib, you're joking right? Is this what you offer by way of proof? If I remove the middle G from your designation of DGP, I get Dog-Poop (DP) or even Delirious Paranoia (DP). How about Devil's Puppet (DP)? I can rearrange the letters in your title to create a few other meanings but the two vowels in SIMI's name are convenient and offer you an unfair advantage. But then, being the police, you are used to having unfair advantage. You can blasphemously slander and maim anyone and no one holds you accountable. Put a face, any face, with a beard on the "terror network" and the people without the beards will believe you and feel safe. This time you've chosen Mufti Abdul Bashar Kasmi. Okay children, he's a Muslim and we've caught him. Go to sleep.
