From kaiwanmehta at gmail.com  Wed Jun  1 21:07:05 2005
From: kaiwanmehta at gmail.com (kaiwan mehta)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 21:07:05 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: Bombay Sarai - We meet again
In-Reply-To: <2482459d05052608314a7175a3@mail.gmail.com>
References: <2482459d05052608314a7175a3@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <2482459d050601083718a8c344@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,
Many regulars have not yet responded, what Prashant said he did not
see the mail!

Some are out travelling, should I postpone?

Best Kaiwan

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: kaiwan mehta <kaiwanmehta at gmail.com>
Date: May 26, 2005 9:01 PM
Subject: Bombay Sarai - We meet again
To: reader-list at sarai.net


Hi,

Feels good that many sarai relatives are congratulating us for the
Sarai (satsangs) in other cities!!

Well let all of us meet again, some of us specifically wanted to
discuss our researches with each other, so we could do that - else sit
and chat and feel good about meeting each other.

Its great some of us have developed interesting correspondences since
out first meeting.

Well I suggest,
Saturday 5 June at 6 pm - same place regal Barrista. If there is a
good night show at Regal - some of us could catch that too!!

If you have any other suggestions for date or place, let me know.

If most of you cant make it we can reschedule, so please do get in
touch with me.

Looking forward to meet you all,

Cool Regards,

Kaiwan

- --
Kaiwan Mehta
Architect and Urban Reseracher

11/4, Kassinath Bldg. No. 2, Kassinath St., Tardeo, Mumbai 400034
022-2-494 3259 / 91-98205 56436


- -- 
Kaiwan Mehta
Architect and Urban Reseracher

11/4, Kassinath Bldg. No. 2, Kassinath St., Tardeo, Mumbai 400034
022-2-494 3259 / 91-98205 56436


From ish at sarai.net  Wed Jun  1 02:13:35 2005
From: ish at sarai.net (ISh)
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 02:13:35 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Re: "Made with Linux" List?
In-Reply-To: <pan.2005.06.01.18.55.05.599807@dsl.pipex.com>
References: <1117557853.22174.20.camel@localhost.localdomain>
	<pan.2005.06.01.18.55.05.599807@dsl.pipex.com>
Message-ID: <429CCC77.1040909@sarai.net>

Would it be beneficial to encourage a separate "music made with Linux"

list?  Thoughts?

___________________________________________________________________________

Hi All.

Music itself holds no prejudice so I think it should be all promoted as 
Music. ( Pure and safe , which is free from definitions and critics) 
There are already too many categorizations nowadays in music which 
usually ride a fad or fashion curve and are used for filling up shelf 
space. I think categorizing music as ‘music made on linux’ is baseless.

And discriminating music on the basis of which platform it was produced, 
like Linux or from OS X of any other OS, actually degrades Music.(also 
is a very technical discrimination) It is not something like it is rock 
or jazz. It is also in a way admitting that linux is inferior in music 
circles, which is not true at all. So I think we should be a little 
careful while saying it is music produced on linux or a mac because for 
the end listener it will be our music that is doing the talking(not 
linux or windows). Linux, softwares, Mac, Sequencers etc are all 
important but are still 'tools' to achieve the music.

<>Boom

<>Ish
frEeMuZik.net/ sarai.net

(P.S I m a strong supporter of Free software and Linux ... but (1) the 
thoughts mentioned above are for ‘music’ and are not part of the 'free 
software Vs. Proprietary software’ argument and (2) I m not looking at 
'made with Linux' as a very technical definition, i m looking at it as 
an 'end listener' definition )



James Stone wrote:

>On Tue, 31 May 2005 12:44:13 -0400, Greg Wilder wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Would it be beneficial to encourage a separate "music made with Linux"
>>list?  Thoughts?
>>    
>>
>
>There is the recently created "free musicians" wiki to post info and links
>to music made with Linux: 
>
>musicians.opensrc.org
>
>There is also a radio station stream there to which can be added links to
>music.
>
>I think that it would be really good if people could set up pages there,
>to make the links to the music a bit more permanent, and also to help
>others to find out how the music was composed.
>
>Best,
>
>james
> 
>
>
>  
>



From soudhamini_1 at lycos.com  Thu Jun  2 08:10:50 2005
From: soudhamini_1 at lycos.com (sou dhamini)
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 21:40:50 -0500
Subject: [Reader-list] madurai
Message-ID: <20050602024050.4B0C8E5BC7@ws7-2.us4.outblaze.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20050601/dffa3624/attachment.html 

From prashantpandey10 at rediffmail.com  Wed Jun  1 10:56:57 2005
From: prashantpandey10 at rediffmail.com (Prashant Pandey)
Date: 1 Jun 2005 05:26:57 -0000
Subject: [Reader-list] Murtaja Mustafa , Bollywood Music ,Prashant Pandey
Message-ID: <20050601052657.707.qmail@webmail10.rediffmail.com>


He has got training from the best
masters of the Indian classical tradition.
A voice that evokes in you what is
termed as spiritual. No wonder A.R
Rahaman has chased him from time to 
time for singing opportunities. 
The man is Murtaja Mustafa,son
of the legengary Ustad Ghulam Mustafa. 
Murtaja Mustafa is one of most chilled 
out singers that I have ever met.Both of us
are  sitting on a red persian carpet in 
his small drawing room decorated with 
trophies,awards,and ancient muscial 
instruments. " yaha pe Rahman ki class lagti
hai",(So this is AR Rahman's music class!)
I say to myself. Thats another story;we will 
come to it later.  



I had gone to his Turner Road residence 
to meet the legendary classical vocalist ,
Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan. Apart from 
being the leading light of the Rampur 
Ghrana , Ustad ji  has taught/mentored 
almost every second playback singer. 
Right from Asha Bhosle ,Manna De to 
Shaan  and Sonu Nigam, Ustad Ji has 
helped generations of playback singers 
to excel in their art. Then there are 
two special disciples who are just family 
to him- AR Rahman and Hariharan. Ustad is
extremely low-profile and quiet in 
his demeanour. He also doesn’t prefer to
talk much about his star students. 
I had lot of questions in mind when I 
started the interview but I started to 
realize that he was not at all interested 
in critiquing anybody or anything. He
answered all my questions in parables 
like a Zen master.Then he has also taught
his two sons Kadir and Murtaja. If you
have heard Rahmans’ Pia Haji Ali (Fiza),
Anarkali (Boys, Tamil) and Chupke se (Sathiya)
,and Ismail Darbars' Kisna (Kisna) you 
would feel instantly what and how their 
smooth vocals have contributed to these songs.
Murtaja has often collaborated with Rahman (bhai) 
on films like The legend of Bhagat Singh,
whose background score he recorded in London. 
Murtaja is also working on an album 
where all the three brothers will sing. 
Then there are usual routine classical
performances, studio recordings and 
riyaz and more riyaz ; Mustafa household 
never sleeps. Murtaja told me, “Even if
I come at 3 o clock in the night and I
have a 10 am mixing session next day in 
the studio I will reach the studio at 
sharp 10 am. Same applies to Papa, he
has taken sessions with Rahman bhai 
at 3 am in the morning”. Something 
like this offers an insight on the 
industry where professionals try to 
beat lack of time and space with passion.
Motivation levels are very high here.  


I had a good chat with Murtaja. I had 
been chasing him for a fortnight and
he finally got me an appointment 
with Ustad ji and also agreed to talk 
to my Dictaphone. The result – he got 
late for a recording session and missed 
altogether his Friday Jumma Namaz. 
It re-affirmed my belief that in my
research, respondents have at times 
proved to be more self-sacrificing 
than me. Such gestures often make me 
feel more responsible for my work.

Readers,let me know if you want to know
more about the interview I will do a 
detailed posting.

PRASHANT PANDEY, for SARAI 







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From steffl at bigfoot.com  Thu Jun  2 03:29:34 2005
From: steffl at bigfoot.com (Erik Steffl)
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 14:59:34 -0700
Subject: [Reader-list] Re: [linux-audio-user] Re: "Made with Linux" List?
In-Reply-To: <429CCC77.1040909@sarai.net>
References: <1117557853.22174.20.camel@localhost.localdomain>	<pan.2005.06.01.18.55.05.599807@dsl.pipex.com>
	<429CCC77.1040909@sarai.net>
Message-ID: <429E2FC6.3040706@bigfoot.com>

   I think the point of having examples of music made with linux (i.e. 
tools available for linux) is to be able to see what can be done, to 
have subsequent discussions about which LADSPA plugin was used and all 
that stuff. IMO it makes sense for lot of people on this list.

	erik

ISh wrote:
> Would it be beneficial to encourage a separate "music made with Linux"
> 
> list?  Thoughts?
> 
> ___________________________________________________________________________
> 
> Hi All.
> 
> Music itself holds no prejudice so I think it should be all promoted as 
> Music. ( Pure and safe , which is free from definitions and critics) 
> There are already too many categorizations nowadays in music which 
> usually ride a fad or fashion curve and are used for filling up shelf 
> space. I think categorizing music as ‘music made on linux’ is baseless.
> 
> And discriminating music on the basis of which platform it was produced, 
> like Linux or from OS X of any other OS, actually degrades Music.(also 
> is a very technical discrimination) It is not something like it is rock 
> or jazz. It is also in a way admitting that linux is inferior in music 
> circles, which is not true at all. So I think we should be a little 
> careful while saying it is music produced on linux or a mac because for 
> the end listener it will be our music that is doing the talking(not 
> linux or windows). Linux, softwares, Mac, Sequencers etc are all 
> important but are still 'tools' to achieve the music.
> 
> <>Boom
> 
> <>Ish
> frEeMuZik.net/ sarai.net
> 
> (P.S I m a strong supporter of Free software and Linux ... but (1) the 
> thoughts mentioned above are for ‘music’ and are not part of the 'free 
> software Vs. Proprietary software’ argument and (2) I m not looking at 
> 'made with Linux' as a very technical definition, i m looking at it as 
> an 'end listener' definition )
> 
> 
> 
> James Stone wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 31 May 2005 12:44:13 -0400, Greg Wilder wrote:
>>
>>  
>>
>>> Would it be beneficial to encourage a separate "music made with Linux"
>>> list?  Thoughts?
>>>   
>>
>>
>> There is the recently created "free musicians" wiki to post info and 
>> links
>> to music made with Linux:
>> musicians.opensrc.org
>>
>> There is also a radio station stream there to which can be added links to
>> music.
>>
>> I think that it would be really good if people could set up pages there,
>> to make the links to the music a bit more permanent, and also to help
>> others to find out how the music was composed.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> james
>>
>>
>>
>>  
>>
> 



From pukar at pukar.org.in  Wed Jun  1 10:35:16 2005
From: pukar at pukar.org.in (PUKAR)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 10:35:16 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] [announcements] Reminder: Talk on 3rd June
Message-ID: <004601c56667$87a1ce00$0dd0c0cb@freeda>

The PUKAR Gender and Space Project

 

presents a talk

 

by Nandita Godbole

 

on

 

The making of an immigrant home

Representation and improvisation of inherited cultural landscapes in immigrant homes

 

date:                 Friday, 03 June 2005

time:                 3 p.m.

place:               PUKAR Office, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Opp Stand Book Stall, Sir. P M Road, Fort, Mumbai 400001. 

    Tel: 5574-8152

 

 

Abstract

Overlays of political borders, contested lands and cultural landscapes often complicate and blur definitions of home.  In culturally diverse, cosmopolitan cities, immigrant families continually reinterpret the fundamental question, "What is home?"  As these families define their physical and cultural 'selves' in their adopted country, we witness the transformation of ordinary, mundane places into socio-culturally complex neighborhoods and cities.

This on-going study examines how immigrants use visual elements to reflect their intrinsic values and philosophies and reinforce the idea of 'home'.  It also explores how 'inherited' cultural landscapes influence, shape and define homemaking sensitivities of immigrant families.

 

Nandita Godbole has a Masters degree in Botany (University of Mumbai) and Landscape Architecture (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). She is currently an independent researcher and her areas of interest include public space usage and sacred landscapes. 

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research)
Mumbai

Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001
Telephone:: +91 (022) 5574 8152 / +91 (0) 98204 04010
Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in
Website:: www.pukar.org.in
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_______________________________________________
announcements mailing list
announcements at sarai.net
https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements

From iram at sarai.net  Thu Jun  2 12:22:22 2005
From: iram at sarai.net (iram at sarai.net)
Date: Thu,  2 Jun 2005 08:52:22 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd:HIMAL is back 
Message-ID: <1e5edb0a8f4724e3f2df5ddf226b09ed@sarai.net>

------  Original Message  ------
Subject: Fwd:HIMAL is back
From:    shivamvij at gmail.com
Date:    Thu, 02 Jun 2005 08:33:50 +0200


http://www.himalmag.com/

Within Grasp: Persian Gas for the Southasian Engine
by Kanak Mani Dixit

The Islamabad-New Delhi thaw has made real the possibility of a pipeline
that would transport natural gas from the offshore reserves of Iran,
through Pakistani territory into India. While it would cater to the
ever-increasing demand for energy in the Subcontinent, the appeal of the
Iranian gasline also lies in the economic linkages it would deliver to
cement ties of goodwill between India and Pakistan. Too good to be true,
but true, the gasline is an idea whose time has come. It will create,
literally, facts on the ground capable of sustaining a strong cross-border
relationship beyond the 'bhai-bhai bonhomie' of today. Full Article

Important Notice

This is a preview of the reintroductory July 2005 issue of Himal
Southasian, which suspended publication in May 2004. The magazine will
restart continuous publication in October 2005.

 To receive a hard copy of the full July 2005 issue at no charge, write to
distribution at himalmag.com
 To subscribe to Himal Southasian, write to subscription at himalmag.com
 For advertisement information, write to advertising at himalmag.com

Old subscribers are informed that their pending subscription will be
reactivated in October 2005.
-------------- next part --------------
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From: shivam <shivamvij at gmail.com>
Subject: HIMAL is back
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 17:17:45 +0530
Size: 3522
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From mahmoodfarooqui at yahoo.com  Thu Jun  2 12:53:42 2005
From: mahmoodfarooqui at yahoo.com (mahmood farooqui)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 00:23:42 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Reader-list] Murtaja Mustafa , Bollywood Music ,Prashant Pandey
In-Reply-To: <20050601052657.707.qmail@webmail10.rediffmail.com>
Message-ID: <20050602072342.17629.qmail@web80909.mail.scd.yahoo.com>


Dear Prashant,

Please post the interview as soon as possible...I have
been following with postings with great interest,
music being the very stuff of Hindi cinema it is
amazing how little we know about its conditions of
production, yours being one of the first serious and
sustained attempts I have come across.

I knew about the Kumar Sanu school of singing but the
Sonu Nigam school was news for me...

Lovely.

wrote:

> 
> He has got training from the best
> masters of the Indian classical tradition.
> A voice that evokes in you what is
> termed as spiritual. No wonder A.R
> Rahaman has chased him from time to 
> time for singing opportunities. 
> The man is Murtaja Mustafa,son
> of the legengary Ustad Ghulam Mustafa. 
> Murtaja Mustafa is one of most chilled 
> out singers that I have ever met.Both of us
> are  sitting on a red persian carpet in 
> his small drawing room decorated with 
> trophies,awards,and ancient muscial 
> instruments. " yaha pe Rahman ki class lagti
> hai",(So this is AR Rahman's music class!)
> I say to myself. Thats another story;we will 
> come to it later.  
> 
> 
> 
> I had gone to his Turner Road residence 
> to meet the legendary classical vocalist ,
> Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan. Apart from 
> being the leading light of the Rampur 
> Ghrana , Ustad ji  has taught/mentored 
> almost every second playback singer. 
> Right from Asha Bhosle ,Manna De to 
> Shaan  and Sonu Nigam, Ustad Ji has 
> helped generations of playback singers 
> to excel in their art. Then there are 
> two special disciples who are just family 
> to him- AR Rahman and Hariharan. Ustad is
> extremely low-profile and quiet in 
> his demeanour. He also doesn’t prefer to
> talk much about his star students. 
> I had lot of questions in mind when I 
> started the interview but I started to 
> realize that he was not at all interested 
> in critiquing anybody or anything. He
> answered all my questions in parables 
> like a Zen master.Then he has also taught
> his two sons Kadir and Murtaja. If you
> have heard Rahmans’ Pia Haji Ali (Fiza),
> Anarkali (Boys, Tamil) and Chupke se (Sathiya)
> ,and Ismail Darbars' Kisna (Kisna) you 
> would feel instantly what and how their 
> smooth vocals have contributed to these songs.
> Murtaja has often collaborated with Rahman (bhai) 
> on films like The legend of Bhagat Singh,
> whose background score he recorded in London. 
> Murtaja is also working on an album 
> where all the three brothers will sing. 
> Then there are usual routine classical
> performances, studio recordings and 
> riyaz and more riyaz ; Mustafa household 
> never sleeps. Murtaja told me, “Even if
> I come at 3 o clock in the night and I
> have a 10 am mixing session next day in 
> the studio I will reach the studio at 
> sharp 10 am. Same applies to Papa, he
> has taken sessions with Rahman bhai 
> at 3 am in the morning”. Something 
> like this offers an insight on the 
> industry where professionals try to 
> beat lack of time and space with passion.
> Motivation levels are very high here.  
> 
> 
> I had a good chat with Murtaja. I had 
> been chasing him for a fortnight and
> he finally got me an appointment 
> with Ustad ji and also agreed to talk 
> to my Dictaphone. The result – he got 
> late for a recording session and missed 
> altogether his Friday Jumma Namaz. 
> It re-affirmed my belief that in my
> research, respondents have at times 
> proved to be more self-sacrificing 
> than me. Such gestures often make me 
> feel more responsible for my work.
> 
> Readers,let me know if you want to know
> more about the interview I will do a 
> detailed posting.
> 
> PRASHANT PANDEY, for SARAI 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and
> the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to
> reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the
> subject header.
> List archive:
<https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>



		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. 
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 


From mahmoodfarooqui at yahoo.com  Thu Jun  2 12:53:53 2005
From: mahmoodfarooqui at yahoo.com (mahmood farooqui)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 00:23:53 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Reader-list] Murtaja Mustafa , Bollywood Music ,Prashant Pandey
In-Reply-To: <20050601052657.707.qmail@webmail10.rediffmail.com>
Message-ID: <20050602072353.59879.qmail@web80908.mail.scd.yahoo.com>


Dear Prashant,

Please post the interview as soon as possible...I have
been following with postings with great interest,
music being the very stuff of Hindi cinema it is
amazing how little we know about its conditions of
production, yours being one of the first serious and
sustained attempts I have come across.

I knew about the Kumar Sanu school of singing but the
Sonu Nigam school was news for me...

Lovely.

wrote:

> 
> He has got training from the best
> masters of the Indian classical tradition.
> A voice that evokes in you what is
> termed as spiritual. No wonder A.R
> Rahaman has chased him from time to 
> time for singing opportunities. 
> The man is Murtaja Mustafa,son
> of the legengary Ustad Ghulam Mustafa. 
> Murtaja Mustafa is one of most chilled 
> out singers that I have ever met.Both of us
> are  sitting on a red persian carpet in 
> his small drawing room decorated with 
> trophies,awards,and ancient muscial 
> instruments. " yaha pe Rahman ki class lagti
> hai",(So this is AR Rahman's music class!)
> I say to myself. Thats another story;we will 
> come to it later.  
> 
> 
> 
> I had gone to his Turner Road residence 
> to meet the legendary classical vocalist ,
> Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan. Apart from 
> being the leading light of the Rampur 
> Ghrana , Ustad ji  has taught/mentored 
> almost every second playback singer. 
> Right from Asha Bhosle ,Manna De to 
> Shaan  and Sonu Nigam, Ustad Ji has 
> helped generations of playback singers 
> to excel in their art. Then there are 
> two special disciples who are just family 
> to him- AR Rahman and Hariharan. Ustad is
> extremely low-profile and quiet in 
> his demeanour. He also doesn’t prefer to
> talk much about his star students. 
> I had lot of questions in mind when I 
> started the interview but I started to 
> realize that he was not at all interested 
> in critiquing anybody or anything. He
> answered all my questions in parables 
> like a Zen master.Then he has also taught
> his two sons Kadir and Murtaja. If you
> have heard Rahmans’ Pia Haji Ali (Fiza),
> Anarkali (Boys, Tamil) and Chupke se (Sathiya)
> ,and Ismail Darbars' Kisna (Kisna) you 
> would feel instantly what and how their 
> smooth vocals have contributed to these songs.
> Murtaja has often collaborated with Rahman (bhai) 
> on films like The legend of Bhagat Singh,
> whose background score he recorded in London. 
> Murtaja is also working on an album 
> where all the three brothers will sing. 
> Then there are usual routine classical
> performances, studio recordings and 
> riyaz and more riyaz ; Mustafa household 
> never sleeps. Murtaja told me, “Even if
> I come at 3 o clock in the night and I
> have a 10 am mixing session next day in 
> the studio I will reach the studio at 
> sharp 10 am. Same applies to Papa, he
> has taken sessions with Rahman bhai 
> at 3 am in the morning”. Something 
> like this offers an insight on the 
> industry where professionals try to 
> beat lack of time and space with passion.
> Motivation levels are very high here.  
> 
> 
> I had a good chat with Murtaja. I had 
> been chasing him for a fortnight and
> he finally got me an appointment 
> with Ustad ji and also agreed to talk 
> to my Dictaphone. The result – he got 
> late for a recording session and missed 
> altogether his Friday Jumma Namaz. 
> It re-affirmed my belief that in my
> research, respondents have at times 
> proved to be more self-sacrificing 
> than me. Such gestures often make me 
> feel more responsible for my work.
> 
> Readers,let me know if you want to know
> more about the interview I will do a 
> detailed posting.
> 
> PRASHANT PANDEY, for SARAI 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and
> the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to
> reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the
> subject header.
> List archive:
<https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>



		
__________________________________ 
Discover Yahoo! 
Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out! 
http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html


From freestspirit at yahoo.co.uk  Thu Jun  2 12:54:36 2005
From: freestspirit at yahoo.co.uk (Bikram Jeet Batra)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 08:24:36 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Reader-list] Re: Delhi Master PLan 2021
In-Reply-To: <20050602065605.A00E628D9A3@mail.sarai.net>
Message-ID: <20050602072436.72182.qmail@web25302.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>

Hi Aman and Sanghmitra,

The draft 2021 plan is available from the DDA website.
It is also available at the Jain Book Agency in CP and
Aurobindo Mkt.

Aman - It might be a good idea to talk to Lalit at
Hazard Centre in New Delhi. They've been doing a lot
of work around the master plan, and are following work
on the commonwealth village etc.

best,
Bikram 



>  Thnks Aman. Your mail gives me a chance to visit 
> the book stores. I am also looking for it. We are
> working with urban poor in calcutta.  
> Thanks
> Sanghamitra
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Aman Sethi 
>   To: reader-list at sarai.net 
>   Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 6:47 PM
>   Subject: [Reader-list] Delhi masterplan 2021
> 
> 
>   Dear all
> 
>   I am working on an article on the Commonwealth
> Games Village, to be built in time for the 2010
> Commonwealth Games - Delhi .. I don't really have an
> angle yet .. but Delhi's proposal included plans for
> a review of the transportation and residental
> infrastructure in east and central delhi.
> 
>   I need a copy of the draftplan of the 2021
> masterplan for delhi .. does anyone know where i can
> get  a copy from? .. am already trying to contact
> the Urban development department, DDA and MCD .. if
> anyone has any other resources/ ideas?
> 
>   regards
>   Aman 
> 



	
	
		
___________________________________________________________ 
Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


From ysaeed7 at yahoo.com  Thu Jun  2 14:14:55 2005
From: ysaeed7 at yahoo.com (Yousuf)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 01:44:55 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Reader-list] Murtaja Mustafa , Bollywood Music ,Prashant Pandey
In-Reply-To: <20050602072353.59879.qmail@web80908.mail.scd.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20050602084455.79136.qmail@web51401.mail.yahoo.com>

Dear Prashant 
Are you sure if his name is Murtaja? Maybe you could
check if he spells it as MURTAZA...

Yousuf 

wrote:

> 
> Dear Prashant,
> 
> Please post the interview as soon as possible...I
> have
> been following with postings with great interest,
> music being the very stuff of Hindi cinema it is
> amazing how little we know about its conditions of
> production, yours being one of the first serious and
> sustained attempts I have come across.
> 
> I knew about the Kumar Sanu school of singing but
> the
> Sonu Nigam school was news for me...
> 
> Lovely.
> 
> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > He has got training from the best
> > masters of the Indian classical tradition.
> > A voice that evokes in you what is
> > termed as spiritual. No wonder A.R
> > Rahaman has chased him from time to 
> > time for singing opportunities. 
> > The man is Murtaja Mustafa,son
> > of the legengary Ustad Ghulam Mustafa. 
> > Murtaja Mustafa is one of most chilled 
> > out singers that I have ever met.Both of us
> > are  sitting on a red persian carpet in 
> > his small drawing room decorated with 
> > trophies,awards,and ancient muscial 
> > instruments. " yaha pe Rahman ki class lagti
> > hai",(So this is AR Rahman's music class!)
> > I say to myself. Thats another story;we will 
> > come to it later.  
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > I had gone to his Turner Road residence 
> > to meet the legendary classical vocalist ,
> > Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan. Apart from 
> > being the leading light of the Rampur 
> > Ghrana , Ustad ji  has taught/mentored 
> > almost every second playback singer. 
> > Right from Asha Bhosle ,Manna De to 
> > Shaan  and Sonu Nigam, Ustad Ji has 
> > helped generations of playback singers 
> > to excel in their art. Then there are 
> > two special disciples who are just family 
> > to him- AR Rahman and Hariharan. Ustad is
> > extremely low-profile and quiet in 
> > his demeanour. He also doesn’t prefer to
> > talk much about his star students. 
> > I had lot of questions in mind when I 
> > started the interview but I started to 
> > realize that he was not at all interested 
> > in critiquing anybody or anything. He
> > answered all my questions in parables 
> > like a Zen master.Then he has also taught
> > his two sons Kadir and Murtaja. If you
> > have heard Rahmans’ Pia Haji Ali (Fiza),
> > Anarkali (Boys, Tamil) and Chupke se (Sathiya)
> > ,and Ismail Darbars' Kisna (Kisna) you 
> > would feel instantly what and how their 
> > smooth vocals have contributed to these songs.
> > Murtaja has often collaborated with Rahman (bhai) 
> > on films like The legend of Bhagat Singh,
> > whose background score he recorded in London. 
> > Murtaja is also working on an album 
> > where all the three brothers will sing. 
> > Then there are usual routine classical
> > performances, studio recordings and 
> > riyaz and more riyaz ; Mustafa household 
> > never sleeps. Murtaja told me, “Even if
> > I come at 3 o clock in the night and I
> > have a 10 am mixing session next day in 
> > the studio I will reach the studio at 
> > sharp 10 am. Same applies to Papa, he
> > has taken sessions with Rahman bhai 
> > at 3 am in the morning”. Something 
> > like this offers an insight on the 
> > industry where professionals try to 
> > beat lack of time and space with passion.
> > Motivation levels are very high here.  
> > 
> > 
> > I had a good chat with Murtaja. I had 
> > been chasing him for a fortnight and
> > he finally got me an appointment 
> > with Ustad ji and also agreed to talk 
> > to my Dictaphone. The result – he got 
> > late for a recording session and missed 
> > altogether his Friday Jumma Namaz. 
> > It re-affirmed my belief that in my
> > research, respondents have at times 
> > proved to be more self-sacrificing 
> > than me. Such gestures often make me 
> > feel more responsible for my work.
> > 
> > Readers,let me know if you want to know
> > more about the interview I will do a 
> > detailed posting.
> > 
> > PRASHANT PANDEY, for SARAI 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > > _________________________________________
> > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and
> > the city.
> > Critiques & Collaborations
> > To subscribe: send an email to
> > reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in
> the
> > subject header.
> > List archive:
> <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
> 
> 
> 
> 		
> __________________________________ 
> Discover Yahoo! 
> Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM
> and more. Check it out! 
> http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html
> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and
> the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to
> reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the
> subject header.
> List archive:
> <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
> 



		
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From machleetank at gmail.com  Thu Jun  2 15:31:25 2005
From: machleetank at gmail.com (Jasmeen P)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 15:31:25 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] blank noise: lost and found.
Message-ID: <faa8cf8e05060203014c52af5@mail.gmail.com>

(SHORT TEXT MESSAGE)
One Night Stand: public participatory performance to reclaim the
streets. May 27 Brigade Road Coffee Day 6 pm. Please call to
participate. 98868 40612


27th may 2004

Payal, Romal, Sandhya and I are drenched as we enter at Coffee House
on MG Road. Time 4 30 pm.

I begin to believe that god is a man against feminism.

It continues to pour and I receive a hundred text messages:

"Is it on?"

"Sorry I don't think I can make it."

"Am stuck in traffic."


6 pm:

It is still drizzling. The traffic is less. We move from coffee house
to coffee day. The people there are nice, smiley, friendly.

Out of the 13 expected the people that showed up were Payal, Rahima,
Romal, Sandhya, Hemangini, Rahima, Namita. Umesh.  Smriti, Umang and
Yashas showed up as documenters of the event..

People required: 14
Numbers present: 8
People missing: 6


"Let's get people on the street to participate!"



The event for the evening took various avatars while being introduced
to different people.

At the traffic signal we say, "Hello, we are doing social work here.
Can you put these posters up at the police traffic signals?" we also
let him know that we were going to do a small performance without
interrupting the traffic.

( The traffic police man was a nice man. He whistled and we would
exit. No problem on that front at all. )


Or "hello we are doing a project on street sexual harassment…err….eve
teasing and we invite you to participate. Would you like to be an
alphabet of the sentence, ' Y R U LOOKING AT ME?' and appear/disappear
at traffic signals?


We targeted the shop "Health and Glow": a shop where one can buy all
the girly things from body wash to cosmetics to sanitary napkins.
Rahima, Namita and I went about introducing the project idea to both
customers and the working staff. We were lucky to find participants in
the customers there. Neha, Vikram, Siraj and Rajitha there. THANKYOU!!

(Everyone is all smiles and we walk onto the road.)



Yes it happened. 

The reactions included curiosity, surprise, discomfort, more
questions, public support.

"I think people were willing to listen. it was a good place to catch
them. But they need a slogan. Something condensed so that they get the
point. There were also some inquisitive people who got into a dialogue
and supported it." Smriti Chanchani.

Namita felt that we could illustrate different characters through the
clothes we wear during the performance.

My response: to bring on the different people and include them in the
performance versus us trying to illustrate their presence.


Plan B:
To do it again. It is evolving. Will keep you posted.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Hi everyone,

For those of you wondering about the incoherence from my part here's a
'brief' update-
My mails and the blog seem a bit confusing I hope this mail should
clear things a little-

The project in two phases:
The first phase was with 'dealing with the victim hood' of street
sexual harassment.
The second phase is towards being proactive and confronting.

Here are some of the tangible materials I have right now with which I
would want to work-

-	A handful of clothes; -from the 'did you ask for it' project (most
of it my own. I'm still hoping people will send me theirs)
-	Testimonies via sound.
-	The news piece.
-	Newspaper reports
-	Emails- responses to the project- responses to clothes email-'did
you ask for it'. Testimonies.
-	Photographs of stalkers.
-	Smaller sub projects: a project on women bus conductor's perception
of safety in relation to the uniform she wears daily. (photo and
sound)
-	Questionnaire results: questions on clothing and safety, answered by
college students.
-	Documentation of presentation
-	A floating group of I'm interested' participants.
-	Documentation of performances.




About Building testimonies in a public space
I was concerned with the form I would adapt. I toyed around with the
idea of 'cleansing and spitting'- I thought of an interactive sink
into which you could expunge your memories (of these unpleasant
incidents). I'm not sure if I would like to go through with this
because while this would fit perfectly in a space like a gallery I
don't see it there at this point in time.

There were also initial ideas of confession booths around the street
and broadcasting testimonies. I am not convinced about this either
(plus the whole religious connotations that come with confession
booths)

The third idea was to use clothing to build testimonies-for this I've
collected my clothes, my mother's clothes-clothes that we wore when we
were sexually threatened. The initial response from people was that
this was a great idea and that they wanted to help but soon the
excitement subsided and degenerated into the standard, familiar
responses:

-I don't remember what I was wearing
-I burnt it, but can I send you something similar?
-I don't agree with you on this one-It's not about the clothes
-I don't want to give it you, they are my favorite pair/I can't give it away
-why don't you take a photograph of it? Or ask people to send you
photos of them in it??

Despite these minor hiccups I definitely want to take this part
forward. It is ongoing.


This could never be an isolated arts project. People fear the word
activist. In the initial stages (2003) I did too. While I don't have a
problem with my project being 'activist art' or 'community art' or
'public art' disillusionment creeps in when the people I'm supposed to
be working with don't respond the way I would expect them to (not
turning up for meetings, not being responsive enough…etc).

I've been thinking about 'approach', 'strategy', 'transparency', and
the language or tone addressing participants and wonder if I should be
relying on other participants or just going ahead with it (which seems
to be the easy and convenient way even though it defies the whole
purpose of what I'm trying to achieve).

I'm still grappling with these conflicts and would be grateful for any
feedback/suggestions/advice.


Things I actually did :

Went around to colleges looking for participants. Most of the colleges
were busy with the exams but some of them were nice enough to give me
time, space and students to make 2 hour presentations. The
presentations made it clear that this wasn't some
feminist/ultra-feminist project and that anyone (men especially) was
welcome. About 200 pamphlets, questionnaires and enthusiastic 'yes's'
later 3 people showed up for the meetings.

Bangalore University was an eye-opener. No one wanted to
participate-they either had exams or were concerned with the
'morality' of the whole issue.

These moral issues not impinging I've still decided to work on my
immoral project with smaller groups (the most promising one seems to
be a group of journalism students from Christ College)








The concrete ideas that came out of these meetings were

A)	A newspaper

B)	 A street performance on the street with help of costumes designed
by students of  fashion at srishti,nift.

C )Have also been meeting with people who own cafes and have TVs
installed; they    could broadcast the news video there. I've already
discussed this with owners of cafes who seemed open and enthusiastic.)


Things I  am doing/ have happened and are still happening.
The night walk in collaboration with Pukar.( was to happen on the 20th
of May in Mumbai, it didn't quite work but was quite an experience.)
on the 20th of May, Friday or the 27th:  key performers wearing a
reflective badge will perform through the night in Marine Drive in
Bombay and Brigade Road in Bangalore :

I'm still trying to figure out ways in which it wont be an exclusive
'feminist performance'.

Should it be transparent and direct?

In terms of form, I have been in dialogue with Ashok Sukumaran. We
have chosen to go ahead with reflectors. The one/ two main performers
in each city will be wearing a costume made of reflectors. In addition
they will also be carrying speakers that will disperse testimonies of
women who have experienced street sexual harassment. I can see the
performance being static. That is just standing for two hours while
the people are walking by. Others present are free to do what they
want; they will also be wearing reflector badges. Hopefully people
will keep joining in, there will be a floating crowd of women in
reflectors. Every woman walking there will wear a reflector.

In performance I will be dispersing testimonies of women who have
experienced street sexual harassment, implicitly.

I am also hoping to gather about 10 people who will choreograph the
performance with me. For example (Brigade Road) there are men who just
hang around on the railing of the footpath, outside movie halls,
against the walls; something a woman will be less inclined to do). 
This would happen through the night.

I'd be very grateful for any feedback/suggestions

PS: eagerly waiting for the clothes.


Jasmeen 

www.blanknoiseproject.blogspot.com
www.fotolog.net/machlee/

-- 
ph: + 91 98868 40612

From sastry at cs.wisc.edu  Fri Jun  3 11:37:54 2005
From: sastry at cs.wisc.edu (Subramanya Sastry)
Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 11:37:54 +0530 (IST)
Subject: [Reader-list] Report for May
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0506031136350.1111@krishna>

        NewsRack: Automating News Gathering and Classification
        ------------------------------------------------------

Here is my report for the month of May.

Bug fixes
---------
I have made several minor bug fixes and the software is now more stable.
The Sarai installation has now been running for the over 3 weeks without
crashing, or having to be restarted.

New developers 
--------------
A couple of students (undergraduate, masters) are now considering working on
NewsRack for their projects under the joint guidance of Prof.Om Damani of
IIT-Bombay.  I have been working on creating suitable workable projects for
them to work on, based on their background, skills, and time commitment.
One of these students will work for about 1.5 months, and the masters student
will work for about an year.

Current development
------------------- 
I have begun the process of making NewsRack usable with news sites that
do not provide RSS feeds (Hindu, Deccan Herald, Hindustan Times, for ex).
The algorithm itself is straightforward and is outlined below and is
essentially a spidering process.
  1. Download main URL
  2. Identify Base HREF, if any
  3. Identify all unique relative URLs in the page -- but weed out
     links that point to images.
  4. Construct a list of URLs to follow using the Base HREF and the relative
     URLs found in the page.
  5. Recursively follow the links found in 4 above by repeating steps 2-4
     for every candidate link.
By this process, the title, date, and URL links can be identify for every
possible news item.  There are (of course) problems with this approach
which I am going to list later on.
  
I have begun this experiment by writing Perl scripts to fine-tune the
algorithm.  I now have a working Perl script that successfully downloads
the day's news links for Hindu, Deccan Herald, and The Telegraph (of those
newspapers that I have tried).  But, it doesn't work well for Hindustan Times,
Indian Express, or Times of India.  On a little further investigation,
it can be noticed that Hindu, Deccan Herald, and Telegraph organize
their news as: http://<ROOT>/<DATE>/<STORY-LINK> (or some such variation).
Since only relative links are followed, only links relative to
"http://<ROOT>/<DATE>" are followed and hence only news for that day is
downloaded.  But, ToI, HT, and IE all organize their websites as
database-driven sites.  So, this strategy does not quite work.  So, I am
now investigating other ideas, including examining time stamps of the
published news items and only downloading news published in the last 24
hours or so. 

In addition, there is still the problem of sifting through downloaded files
to identify which files are actually news stories.  For example, some of the
downloaded files are page indexes and headline pages.  It is unclear how to
do this without some sort of newspaper-specific hacks -- for example, all
Hindu stories are stored as http://<ROOT>/<DATE>/stories/<LINK> so, I could
discard all other links.  But, there is no obvious generic solution to this
problem at this time.

New Interest
------------
There is continuing interest in this tool.  When possible, I am now trying
to meet with individuals and groups and help them with the process of
setting up a profile, since the tool still requires a fair bit of initial
time investment.


From prashantpandey10 at rediffmail.com  Thu Jun  2 12:09:34 2005
From: prashantpandey10 at rediffmail.com (Prashant Pandey)
Date: 2 Jun 2005 06:39:34 -0000
Subject: [Reader-list] Quotes, Bollywod Music,Prashant Pandey
Message-ID: <20050602063934.17972.qmail@webmail9.rediffmail.com>

 
Its a must read for you all... What everybody here has to say about a researcher from Sarai. 

1. Aree Sarai na... mujhe yaad hai ek baar hum log kisi seminar me gaye the... i think Adoor was also there... the panel spoke so much about the films...jitna sala filmmaker ne bhi na socha ho...You are a film student... wahe pe jo chala jaiga sari filmmaking bhool jaiga...
(Oh Sarai, i remember now...once there was a film seminar there...Adoor Gopalakrishnan was also there...Even the filmmakers hadnt thought of all that what the panel was talking about...You are a film student...dont go there you will forget your film making"

Sudhir Mishra(filmmaker)

2. Does your work make you an anthropologist ?
 Vivienne Poacha( Singer)

3. Do they pay you for all this ?
 Asif (Music company executive)

4. He is a student doing a research project for his college...
  Shantanu(Bombays' ace sound engineer introducing me to his colleages)

5. Chalo accha hai ki koi pehli baar hum logo ka haal chaal poochne aaya hai...aap please media me hum logo ke bare me likho.(For the first time somebody has come to us...Please write about us in media)

Yogesh Pradhan(Music Arranger for Lucky,Devdas,HumDil De Chuke Sanam)

6. Is this for a newspaper ? 
  (Himesh Reshamiya, Music Director) 
 
7. Please tell me all the jargons that you have thrown in your proposal...Sarai is a scam. You must be staying in a posh hotel on their money.
(A senior from College) 


8. Impressive. You have done your homework. Can I have your CV ? 

  (Shameer Tandon, Head of Virgin Records India and Music Director,Page 3)

...................................................................

PRASHANT PANDEY 


 
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From zzjamaal at yahoo.co.in  Thu Jun  2 14:41:08 2005
From: zzjamaal at yahoo.co.in (khalid jamal)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 10:11:08 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Reader-list] Fast food chains:McDudes!!
Message-ID: <20050602091108.17880.qmail@web8608.mail.in.yahoo.com>


Hi all,

 

I m almost finished with my Post Graduation (and my bank balance TOO..!!)

And hence am able to spend a great deal of time with “Fellows” at fast food chains. Our discussions, as usual, starts with a lot of curls and curves, comes to our work and then to our employers.

 This time I deliberately chose to provoke questions pertaining to “work pressure” and the general dissatisfaction amongst employees across fast food joints.

 

Following are some of the responses that came out as a result of my provocations.

 I must admit here that provoking is a real fun!! And a fine Art too, Especially if you are a researcher at Sarai.

 Its time for my next posting which also becomes the time to put all the fun I have had in writing.

 

READ!!!!

 

    -------------------------------------------

The McDonald’s 

Way.

 

 

Move forward.

Focus on what is best for the system.

 

 

Contributions.

Recognize individual and team achievements.

 

Develop.

Integrity and trust

 

Open communications.

Confront and resolve solutions.

 

No losers.

Aim for “win-win” situation.

 

Actively Listen.

Act the way you talk.

 

Leverage diversity

Debate for the benefit of customer and system.

 

Deliver.

All commitments.

 

Support.

Decisions 100%

 

-------------------------------------

 

 

 

“Your Work is your choice, dude!!”



 I’ve been a McDonalds employee for almost 4 years now.  2 as crew 1 as a shift
manager and now an assistant manager.  Yes I work at McDonlads it has
been my choice I choose to work there, I may not like it all the time
but I could quit any time if I wanted to.  I do empathize with a lot of
the people here.  I have employees that are the best I could possibly
have and see them get treated like crap by our Owner/Operator and
General Manager.  I also have to deal with the employees that call me a
f**king A*s when I asked them nicely to sweep (seriously I had
someone say that to me)  I've been crew and been crapped I've also been
a manager and been crapped on.  But I chose to stay for my own reasons. 
Like I said it is my choice, I could go down to some call center, Departmental store or some factory job and get paid maybe a little less, or maybe a little
more, but I choose to stay. (Somedays I wounder why)  But I still stay. 
I dont mind reading about peoples complaints because no matter where you
work you will always have that one day were you just come home and rant.
Every job has that.  But if some one has found a job where they haven't
had a day like that send me an application!!  I just think
everyone needs to chill out and realize that its just a work, a job and its your choice to work there. 

 Have fun with it.  I try
to have fun with my employees we try to have fun and work at the same
time sometimes it goes a little to far and I have to step in a little but
99.9 % of the times when there happy Im happy.  And if you have a
crankey manager just hit them over the head with the reality board a
couple of times.  I promise it won’t hurt them much.  Have fun and have
a great day at work.

 

Bharat,McDonald’s.

 

---------------------------------

 

 

 

I have been working there for roughly 1.5years. 
Here are the reasons why I have stayed there for so long, and will
probably never leave for a while:

* 

 Managers treat you like they would treat their friends. No, they don't
let you off with eating in the crew room while clocked on, or swearing
on shift etc, but they are very sociable, open people who are great to
work with. I am not a lonely person who accepts anyone with open arms, I
am a very social person myself and I can see how these Managers are a
great asset to the store.

*

The condition of the store is second-to-none and the store looks like something you
would see on a training video.

 *

Management and Owners treat staff with the utmost respect with things
like rostering, wages and training. No crew is treated differently from
the other, whether full time or casual.

*

The "old school" crew who work there are never going to leave, because
they have learnt that it is a good job. Up to 12 crew haven't left in the last 6 months.
 This is an obvious sign that this store is
doing really well.

Whether you are good or bad comes from the customer.

 It seriously comes from customer feedback. It's like everyday that a
McDonald's restaurant has a new employee being trained, these employees
get in shit for going too slow or doing everything wrong or not doing
things that they weren't taught. Sure they make like millions of
mistakes but that’s because they're learning, and what do customers do?
They glare at the manager on duty and they get the crew person in shit.
Sure it's not all customers but its most of them.

 

 I basically hate work only because of the way I get treated by
the customers. I admit that I love working with the people I work with
but not these Inspectors who expect everything to be perfect and
dandy, they focus on customer satisfaction but not the satisfaction of
their employees. Here's my point, the crew working in the service get in
shit from customers, the back people get in shit from the service people
for going too slow, the crew get in shit for arguing, then all of this
leads to some of the employees abusing the work and the employer.

 

 I'm just gonna agree with people saying that you're not forced to
be working for the company, you have a god damn choice!

 

 If I , being a woman, can travel for almost an hour by bus during this scorching heat to do the work that  I do, why not others? 

 

The crux of the matter is: My work engages me and hence   imlovinit!!

 

And iminit!!

 

Lubna khan,McDonald’s 

------------------------------------------
 

I'm a college student, and I make overtime pay all the time,
but only because I choose to work those hours.  If someone is so stupid
they stay with a job they hate, that's their problem.  I was promoted
because I care about the job I do.

Managers at McDonalds do the same job as the crew.  I was a crew person
for 2years, and I was treated perfectly fine and paid more money than
most professions that require the same skills.  Why?  BECAUSE I KNEW HOW
TO DO MY JOB.  Of course you won't be treated as well if you don't do
your job right.  Nobody likes that.  I have news for you.  If you work hard,
your pay will reflect it.  If you are lazy or stupid, or both, of course
you will make low wages.  I have more news for people who think our job is sad... THAT'S NOT
MCDONALD'S PROBLEM!  It is a business just like any other.  I can tell
you right now though, I probably make more money at McDonald's and get
more benefits than you do at whatever the hell you choose to do, and
this is just a job to get me through college.  



  When things are slow, we may cut some labor and send someone
home or when things are high we don’t hesitate to overstaff either, but basically, we have a lot of fun.  Managers and crew laugh and
make jokes constantly with each other and we all have a good time. 
Working at my store is more like getting paid for going out to club. 
Sure there is work involved, but hey, there's no reason you can't have
fun. So, you must work for the shittiest McDonald's in the Nation, That,
or you're just the shittiest employee and you don't know how to make
your bosses laugh

Sandeep, McDonald’s,

 Pursuing MBA Correspondence from IGNOU. He regularly sees McDonald’s website, likes McD TV ads. and dreams of going to Hamburger University to learn trade formally.



-----------------------------------------

Hi, I will have been a McD's employee for 2 years next month. I think this
has given adequate time for me to judge the good side and bad side.

PROS:



Money- working at McDonalds gives me the opportunity to earn money 
which means i don’t have to beg for money from family to go out on a
week end at PVR   or to buy clothes of my choice,like some of my friends do.

People- I ve met lots of people at my store who i now consider to be
close friends. these include managers and other crew. also, ifind managers at my store
are very understanding about problems with scheduling, being late etc. i
suppose im just lucky.

Working conditions-I find that my store is a good, safe place to work.
there are plenty of first-aid to go to if you injure
yourself, if a piece of equipment beaks it will usually get fixed pretty
soon afterwards.


CONS:

Scheduling- although managers are usually understanding when it comes to
changing shifts, it doesn't stop the scedule being f*cked up. people get
put down fo shifts they cant turn up for, people requesting days off
months in advance and not getting them, people asking for shifts and not
getting them, full timers getting part time hours and vice versa,
sometimes at night you'll be lucky to have 3 crew and 2 managers on which isnt nearly enough.

Customers- i dont think people realise that a mcdonalds extra value meal
is NOT a culinary delicacy.....its fast food!!! We can’t get them meticulously prepared food with right amount of salt and pepper and sause all the time. Sometimes,our customers expect us to be their mothers!! 



McDonalds disciples- these are people who love their job...too much.
they spend all their time in the store forsaking education and a social
life for a good pay review. from these seeds unpopular managers do grow.
it comes as no surprise that these people are unpopular manager's
favourite crew members.

Some managers- the minority of managers at my store think they are
better than crew because of the type of shirt they wear. These are the
type of managers who try to run a kitchen on a Saturday afternoon and
fail miserably and blame it on the crew. Luckily, other managers put
these ones in their place.

Food- well, if you eat the same thing over and over in the same environment which is a strictly regulated work place , you too will be exhausted soon.

 

Ahh well, I suppose that the cons outweigh the pros slightly. but still I love my work,
basically because i have many good friends there and i
know i am good at my job.

 

Sandhya Sharma,McDonald’s

 

---------------------------------------------------

 

 

Smile in the Golden Arches

 

 

Apparently,”Lean Time is Clean Time”, at McDonald’s. However,”Smile” remains an integral part of the McD uniform. 

And You See It On
  

 

 Smiling Cashier : greeting in a “friendly” manner.

 

Smiling manager: Making passes through the dining room on a regular basis, interacting with customers, raising a smile or two. 

 

Smiling customers: Hung on the wall (wall of fame!!) after being photographed during one of their parties at Mc D.



Smiling Stars: McD employees being honored as Employee of the month, or Rising star, stamped on the wall with their pass port-size-smiling –face-snap.

 

Smiling service guy: Looking directly into your eye and Offering you a Meal-solution; “Would you like some extra cheese with mustard ketchup, sir? “ 

 

And last and also the least


 

Smiling interiors: With changed color, look and the “feel” inside the store, particularly emphasizing on “environmental graphics” and “warmer tones”.

 



ONE LIFE. ONE SHOT. 

Happiness, Health & Peace, 
Syed Khalid Jamal   

		
---------------------------------
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From cahen.x at levels9.com  Fri Jun  3 13:19:18 2005
From: cahen.x at levels9.com (xavier cahen)
Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 09:49:18 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] pourinfos  letter / 05-26 to 06-02-2005
Message-ID: <002401c56810$bf2a8f10$0301a8c0@acerkxw6rbeu2s>

pourinfos.org
l'actualité du monde de l'art / daily Art news
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

infos from May 26, 2005 to June 02,2005 (included)
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(mostly in french)

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01 Call : call for works/sound is art, Phonurgia,
Arles, France.
http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1686
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02 Call : Call for generative sound artists/composers,
Toy Satellite,Victoria, Australia.
http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1685
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03 Call : Call for paper, A Creativity & Cognition
Symposium, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1684
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04 Call : Avent Calendar exhibition, Biot, France.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1683
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05 Job : director of Art Center, Serigan, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1681
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06 Job : Art teacher, Ecole Régionale Supérieure d'Expression Plastique, Tourcoing, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1680
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07 Job : Director of Institut d'Arts Visuels, Orleans,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1679
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08 Job : art teacher assistant - Photography, Lorient,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1678
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09 Job : Art teacher assistant - communication,  Ecole supérieure d'arts de Lorient, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1677
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10 Job : Art teacher graphic design, Ecole
supérieure d'arts de Lorient, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1676
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11 Workshop : Workshop franco-german about sound documantary of creation, Summer University of radio, phonurgia, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1675
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12 Job : art teacher assistant - video, Ecole supérieure
d'arts de Lorient, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1674
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13 Publication : archée cybermensuel, may_2005, Montréal, Canada.
http://pourinfos.org/publications/item.php?id=1673
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14 Residency : artist residence Abbadia, Henday, France.
http://pourinfos.org/residences/item.php?id=1672
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15 Exhibition : Guillaume Leblon, winner of XV th monumental art award of Ivry, galerie fernand léger, Ivry, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1671
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16 Exhibition : "Chapitre 2"  At abbey of Maubuisson / student exhibition from
l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy,Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1670
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17 Exhibition : David Bioulès, open studio MMV,  la reserve,
Montpellier, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1668
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18 Exhibition : artcore 10 : " BRÉSIL ÉCOSOPHIE ", galerie artcore,
Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1667
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19 Exhibitionn : Fluxer... it is taken part ! Villa Myosotis, Dunkerque,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1666
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20 Exhibition : Fabrice Hyber, "Nord-Sud", Frac des Pays de la Loire,
Carquefou, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1682
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21 Exhibition : Like animals, Association art visuel, Tour des
archives, Vernon, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1669
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22 Exhibition : Hussein Chalayan, Turkey Pavillon, 51 st Venice Bienniale 2005, Italy. 
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1665
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23 Various : The Audio-visual creation killed by his ? Paris,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/divers/item.php?id=1663
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24 Various : Petition against the demolition of Metelkova, Ljubljana,
Slovénia.
http://pourinfos.org/divers/item.php?id=1664
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25 Various : Petition : NO to dismantling of the royalties of Visual artists,Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/divers/item.php?id=1662
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26 Call : Young creation : Jeune Création 2006, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1661
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27 Call : Emerging Curator Program, Firstdraft, Surry
Hills, Australia.
http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1660
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28 Call : Refuse To Die, Propeller Centre, Toronto,
Canada.
http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1659
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29 Call : Furtherfield.org, Londres, United Kingdom.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1656
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30 Call : Light feast /Faites de la Lumière, France.
lien http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1655
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31 Call : Accumulation Project, Brooklyn NY, USA.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1657
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32 Screening : daily images,  Maison du Théâtre et de la Danse,
Epinay-sur-Seine, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1654
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33 Meeting : Conference : " Artists versus medias.", POLART, Strasbourg, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1653
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34 Performance : De In Search Of The Miraculous, David Christoffel,
Centre d'Art du Quartier Quimper, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1652
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35 Various : First International City of Vinaròs Award for Digital
Literature, Vinaròs, Spain.
http://pourinfos.org/divers/item.php?id=1651
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36 Exhibition : Vienneses Videos, Bétonsalon-Paris, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1650
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37 Exhibition : Six millions, Fanny Aboulker, Espace Brochage
Express,Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1649
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38 Exhibition : web exhibition  "Why rock?" Annie Abrahams,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1648
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39 Exhibition : 2nd episode, Olivier Leroi, la box_bourges, Bourges,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1647
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40 Exhibition : Festival for Jubilee of art Cybernetique,SCHÖFFER studio, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1646
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41 Sceening : Compilation #3 " The invention of the laughter "videobox, Lunch
Box, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1645
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42 Call : Festival of new cinema de Montréal,
Canada.
http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1644
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43 Call : sound pieces about social control for
Zeppelin2005, Barcelone, spain.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1643
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44 Call : documentary screening, 1st International show
of A E P C E, Saint-Ouen, France.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1642
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45 Call : 'Out of Darkness', Artist's video and
cinema, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1641
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46 Publication : portrait, number 5, review Parade, Ersep,
Tourcoing, France.
http://pourinfos.org/publications/item.php?id=1640
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47 Rencontres : Cycle "Exil(s)" Art en exil Association, Brood des
Récollets, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1639
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48 Meeting : seminars about Pure Data interactivity, Art Sensitif,
Mains d'Œuvres, Saint Ouen, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1638
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49 Meeting : What means to represent today? transversale, Brood des Cordeliers, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1637
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50 Meeting : Rendez-vous, Anne Laplantine, La Salle de Bains,
Consortium, Dijon, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1636
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51 Exhibition : " Postures ", Michaëll Sellam, lagalerie, Paris,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1635
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52 Screening :  Draft of a dream, the beautiful moment, Hall, Scam,
Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1634
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53 Rencontres : programme Critical Secret, Paris, France.
lien http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1633
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54 Program : Tatiana Trouvé et cneai editions, cneai,
Chatou, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1632
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55 Exhibition : Inventory 2003/2005, Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture
E.S.A., Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1631
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56 Exhibition : Africa Remix, Pompidou center, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1630
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57 Exhibition : Saverio Lucariello, Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1629




From madhumita at disabilityindia.org  Sat Jun  4 07:27:14 2005
From: madhumita at disabilityindia.org (Dr Madhumita Puri)
Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2005 07:27:14 +0530 (IST)
Subject: [Reader-list] Millennium Development Goals
Message-ID: <E1DeNvL-0002SU-00@smtp.net4india.com>

Dear All
Sorry for the cross posting....

A group of professionals involved with disability development have been 
striving to bring to the attention of the UN, non-inclusion of 
disabilities in the Millennium Development Goals.

We have finally drafted the petition and put it up on 
www.disabilityindia.org

I request you to read the draft and please add your signature as well as 
pass it on to others. You can mail your agreement to 
sales at disabilityindia.org

Looking forward to your support,

Dr Madhumita Puri



From jassim.ali at gmail.com  Fri Jun  3 12:29:37 2005
From: jassim.ali at gmail.com (Jassim Ali)
Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 12:29:37 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Quotes, Bollywod Music,Prashant Pandey
In-Reply-To: <20050602063934.17972.qmail@webmail9.rediffmail.com>
References: <20050602063934.17972.qmail@webmail9.rediffmail.com>
Message-ID: <271ece9c050602235922cc8e46@mail.gmail.com>

Wow prashant ...the cross section of the music industry and their varied 
quips and questions throws up a very interesting picture of our jing bang 
(whatever that means, hhehee) music industry with its own bruce dickinsons 
and cowbells ! 

great going and lookin fwd for more fireworks 

regards,
jassim 

On 2 Jun 2005 06:39:34 -0000, Prashant Pandey <
prashantpandey10 at rediffmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Its a must read for you all... What everybody here has to say about a 
> researcher from Sarai. 
> 
> 1. Aree Sarai na... mujhe yaad hai ek baar hum log kisi seminar me gaye 
> the... i think Adoor was also there... the panel spoke so much about the 
> films...jitna sala filmmaker ne bhi na socha ho...You are a film student... 
> wahe pe jo chala jaiga sari filmmaking bhool jaiga...
> (Oh Sarai, i remember now...once there was a film seminar there...Adoor 
> Gopalakrishnan was also there...Even the filmmakers hadnt thought of all 
> that what the panel was talking about...You are a film student...dont go 
> there you will forget your film making"
> 
> Sudhir Mishra(filmmaker)
> 
> 2. Does your work make you an anthropologist ?
> Vivienne Poacha( Singer)
> 
> 3. Do they pay you for all this ?
> Asif (Music company executive)
> 
> 4. He is a student doing a research project for his college...
> Shantanu(Bombays' ace sound engineer introducing me to his colleages)
> 
> 5. Chalo accha hai ki koi pehli baar hum logo ka haal chaal poochne aaya 
> hai...aap please media me hum logo ke bare me likho.(For the first time 
> somebody has come to us...Please write about us in media)
> 
> Yogesh Pradhan(Music Arranger for Lucky,Devdas,HumDil De Chuke Sanam)
> 
> 6. Is this for a newspaper ? 
> (Himesh Reshamiya, Music Director) 
> 
> 7. Please tell me all the jargons that you have thrown in your 
> proposal...Sarai is a scam. You must be staying in a posh hotel on their 
> money.
> (A senior from College) 
> 
> 
> 8. Impressive. You have done your homework. Can I have your CV ? 
> 
> (Shameer Tandon, Head of Virgin Records India and Music Director,Page 3)
> 
> ...................................................................
> 
> PRASHANT PANDEY 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
>  <http://clients.rediff.com/signature/track_sig.asp> 
> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with 
> subscribe in the subject header.
> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
> 
> 


-- 
Cheers,

Jassim Ali
Client Partner
(Strategic Planning & Business Development)
Webchutney 

"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken."- St Tyler
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From zulfisindh at yahoo.com  Fri Jun  3 20:29:37 2005
From: zulfisindh at yahoo.com (Zulfiqar Shah)
Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 07:59:37 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Reader-list] Europe: an identity against civil war
Message-ID: <20050603145937.41176.qmail@web30708.mail.mud.yahoo.com>


Europe: an identity against civil war

Josep Ramoneda 


In order to be assured of at least the possibility of becoming just another citizen in a world free from the spectre of blood and the bewitchment of horror, he could only anticipate the destruction of the existing world. 



These are the words, slightly paraphrased, of Hannah Arendt. The citizen to whom she refers, the "man of goodwill", is Franz Kafka. Kafka died in 1924 and thus did not live to see the collapse he foresaw; neither did he see the destiny that was in store for his city, Prague, doomed to linger for so long in suffering. Now that Europe is at last becoming whole, this evocation of Kafka helps to remind us that the great founding myth of Europe has been that of the taboo against civil war. 



The "no" votes in France and the Netherlands over the proposed treaty establishing a constitution for the European Union demonstrates the enormous difficulty of progressing towards constructing a European cosmopolitanism based on shared experience. Yet this is the only possible way for Europe to overcome the contradictory impulses that challenge it: a flight into globalisation versus a retreat into nationalism (the latter being, as Olivier Roy has pointed out, the most serious risk Europe faces). 



The injection of more democracy into the process of uniting Europe will encounter obstacles and diversions along the way – which the French and Dutch results can be seen to represent – but it is essential that Europe proceeds by devising a minimal framework that can accommodate but also go beyond the cultural exceptions of each nation. 



The meaning of a taboo

If it is true that identities are defined in opposition to something or somebody, the identity of Europe has been defined in opposition to civil war. I say "civil" because, if we Europeans really wish to form a shared "demos", then wars between Europeans are civil wars (perhaps it is significant that in China, what was first known as "the great war", then as "the first world war" – the combat of 1914-18 – was long referred to as "the European civil war"). 



Europeans have been killing each other for centuries. But it took the Nazi extermination of the 1940s, which went beyond all limits in the exercise of evil, for Europeans to realise the need to construct a Europe that would define itself in opposition to the massacre of Europeans, to industrial-scale genocide, and to the conversion of "crimes of logic" (Albert Camus) into state imperatives. Thus, after 1945 and taking shape from the early 1950s, the new Europe was born. 



Civil war – a clash between members of the same community rather than between states – is the worst of war’s many horrors. Human beings inhabit spaces that are delimited by belonging, which slowly have been expanding: family, community, city, nation. From the moment that Europe becomes common territory, any war between European states will be at least in part a civil war. With the construction of the European Union, civil war in Europe became – and remains – unthinkable. 



In order to establish this taboo, however, it was necessary to descend to the seventh circle of hell that the Nazi era represented. The European Union is, in its origins, a huge market (and it is difficult to make of it anything more than a market) but it also entailed from the very start a profound moral component: "never again".



In the 20th century, Europe demolished the idea of limits. Totalitarianism started from the idea that anything is possible. Reason ceased being critical to become the legitimiser of the will to power, of systemic injustice. As accomplice to extermination, reason died. When the reality of Nazi genocide came to light after 1945, the idea that this could never be repeated took root in the consciousness of citizens. If the European Union has any meaning today, it is precisely this: the taboo against civil war. 



The lesson of Buchenwald

The sense of the European demos that is now under construction was already present in 1945, in Albert Camus’s Letters to a German Friend.



When Camus wrote "we", he did not mean "we, the French" but "we, the free Europeans"; when he wrote "you", he did not mean "you, the Germans" but "you, the Nazis". This "we" of Camus is the origin of the new European demos whose identity and legitimacy have emerged in opposition to total evil, to civil war, and is therefore inextricably united with the defence of freedom. 



Jorge Semprún describes how he understood for the first time what Europe was when a prisoner in the in Buchenwald concentration camp. There, a handful of Europeans struggled for survival against Nazism. That group was Europe itself. 



Among them were young people from the Soviet Union, in particular Ukrainians. Those who endured the camps and returned home were suspected of being accomplices of the Nazis for the mere fact of having survived. The great majority ended up in Siberia, where they continued to resist the Stalinist form of totalitarianism. In other words, they continued, albeit unknowingly, to construct Europe. It would be enormously unjust to deny them the right to be Europeans. This is why Europe was incomplete until the countries of its east began to join; it is also why (though it may seem paradoxical), although Europe cannot be unlimited, it must attend to all countries that knock at its door. 

The Balkans failure

Europeans have not lived along the same timescales. In the east, the descent into hell was prolonged. For millions of citizens, "liberation" in 1945 simply meant changing from one form of totalitarianism to another. Now, they have started to come together again in the Europe to which they always belonged. 

The peaceful course of the revolutions of 1989 shows that east-central Europeans too had begun to internalise the taboo of civil war. But a Europe returning to itself was shadowed by persistent scars, above all the Balkans. The savage wars of a disintegrating Yugoslavia from 1991 saw the triumph of ethnic cleansing, internationally endorsed. 



This failure of Europe is a reminder that nothing is ever achieved definitively: not even the taboo against war. Each time that Europe has surrendered its principal weapon, critical reason, to the service of the will to power (in the name of fatherland, class, ethnic group, religion, or technology) the way has been opened up for civil war and disaster. The Balkans are Europe, and Europe needs the Balkans. We must not look away again, nor keep the region at a distance, as if it was some kind of potential reserve of base passions. 



Europe as critical reason

A mean-spirited dialectic seems to be confronting the countries that were in 2004 incorporated into the European Union in the form of a fidelity test: either Europe or the United States. This is an absurd game, fostered by people who have an interest in debilitating Europe. What is so strange about people, who have lived for so many years with Russia as a constant threat, feeling a special admiration for the prime enemy of their oppressors: the United States? 



The evolution towards authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin’s regime (with the assent of certain European governments that suffer from paralysis of their democratic reflexes whenever they are anywhere near Moscow) is hardly reassuring. Yet the destiny of these countries is Europe. And only if Europe should fail will it be different. 



What might be the failure of Europe? Two things: the inability to extend to everyone the social cohesion that has so far been attained; and the breaking of the civil war taboo. The "Europe of 25" raises short-term problems of economic, financial and social adjustment but in the long term its strength depends on a key area: that of education and culture. The ability to invent, create and seduce (viral power) must be the distinctive hallmark of Europe. 



Europe presents herself as a bearer of human rights. But if, as erudite people claim, the basic principle of humanity is reason, human rights are universal and not the exclusive property of anyone. It would be ethnocentric to believe otherwise. 



Europe developed curiosity (the driving force of knowledge) in the interests of both conquest and science, deploying critical reason to advance beyond other nations that remained bogged down in their own glory. Europe has come to grief every time it has abandoned critical reason. In our present-day society of risk, Europe will once again undergo the test critical reason presents. 



Europe cannot remain a prisoner of its own impotence in international relations; neither can it respond by dispersal its energies in new conflicts. Europe must define its own model without fear of being different or being led astray by dogmas of economic growth as the foundation of all progress. 



Europe must defend its secularism and institutional neutrality as territory that is common to all: those who are here now and those yet to come, without detriment to the beliefs of anyone. If it abandons critical reason and comes under the sway of truths that solidify in the brain (to use JM Coetzee’s expression), if it takes the path of security at any price, if it gives way to community fragmentation in the name of false relativism out of fear of the newcomer, or if it forgets the centrality of the human individual (a notion that has dominated its culture since the Renaissance), instead of growing Europe will shrink. 



The recently incorporated countries (and those still on the waiting list, like Romania and Ukraine) have emerged from an experience different to that of modernity, and they come with renewed energies after tremendous change. Europe will be at once denser and more open as a result. Some people stress the economic weakness of the new arrivals, but it is more intelligent and forward-looking to highlight their great educational and creative potential. 



An identity without enemies

An identity against civil war is exactly the opposite of units of destiny in universal terms. "A civilisation is an anti-destiny", writes Andre Glucksmann; it unites "against what destroys it". The peculiarity of the European identity is its nature as an open or transcendent identity, one not defined by exclusion of the other, but rather by the incorporation among ourselves by all those who reject civil war, independently of their origins or where they might be coming from. 



Europe must demonstrate that, contrary to Carl Schmitt’s doctrine, it is possible to engage in politics without any need to point at an enemy. This is why it is an error to believe that the European identity will be constructed in opposition to the United States. There are and will be conflicts of interests with the United States, but it is absurd to think of Europe’s relations with the US in polarised ways. This is a trap set by American neo-conservatives; only those who suffer from the childish ailment called anti-Americanism will fall for it. 



The European identity is always projected beyond Europe – with the risk of being suspected of identity imperialism – in keeping with the enlightened requirement that obliges Europe to act in accordance with Kant’s categorical imperative: "as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature....." And, precisely because it was founded in the experience of evil, it is a vigilant identity, one that is alert to threats of destruction and self-destruction. 



If closed identities have been and are (as in the Balkans) the standard-bearers of civil conflict among Europeans, the identity that will arise to oppose this conflict will naturally be open. The only condition for including the "other" as one of "us" is rejection of civil war and acceptance of the framework agreed for the rules of the game. 



Like any process of de-territorialisation, this generates crises and fissures. There will always be somebody who reacts fearfully when borders and certainties are blurred. A few seek shelter and protection under the wing of the strongest party (like the Atlanticist front that clustered around George W Bush during the war in Iraq), while others lose themselves in the time warp of closed societies (like the nationalist front that rejects the processes of globalisation). 



It is natural that, when faced with the uncertainties that come hand-in-hand with change, more conservative people want to reaffirm the values of tradition in the founding documents of the new Europe. They should not forget that Christianity is, in Europe, both Catholicity (another form of universal vocation) and diversity, and that the splits within Christianity represent a step towards freedom; as Voltaire remarked, "if there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism; if there were two they would cut each other’s throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness." 



An open Europe

Why is the identity constructed against civil war an open one? Because the lowest common denominator is rejection of fraternal destruction. And beyond that, all ideas and positions are amenable to being presented and discussed on the European stage. As George Steiner has noted, being a European means seeking to reconcile, morally, intellectually and existentially, the incompatible ideals, claims and praxes of the city of Socrates with those of the city of Isaiah. 



The proposed, contested European constitution has dispensed with the erroneous category of "the people", a category designed to snare individuals in the cobwebs of atavism, of a story that presumes to be above them. The European demos was not founded on peoples but on citizens and states. The next step will be to recognise the full, founding power of citizens. Europe’s patriotism is not one of freedoms, nor one of conflict between the different groups of "we"; if it were, the only line of exclusion would be drawn by the person who wants to regress to civil war, the self-destruction of Europe. 



The European identity thus defines a peculiar relationship with the "other". This makes the debate on borders – understood in relation to internal frontiers as well as geographic limits – decisive. Europe cannot be a fortified "white world" that reacts in paranoid fashion to anything that seems to be different. With regard to the exterior, it must be permeable enough both to project itself and to permit itself to be inseminated; with regard to its interior, it must accept that globalisation is happening in all directions and that Europe too is at once recipient and motor of the process. This means not fleeing from contact or from conflict but transforming them into shared policies and institutions. 



True, there is a danger in believing that Europe’s pacification means that plenitude has been achieved and Europe’s potential historically realised. This fantasy, if accepted, would confirm the prejudice of Europeans’ inability to take responsibility for themselves – corroborating the views of Americans like Robert Kagan who see Europe as a post-heroic paradise that cannot recognise, far less confront, the problems of the world. 



Europe knows, precisely because its only general requirement is rejection of self-destruction and its results, that unity is not a value in itself. The value is pluralism. Europe’s identity is not a fact prior to some common project inscribed on the skin of the history of Europeans but (as Etienne Balibar says) "a quality of collective action" continually being shaped in the course of the complex evolution of European society. 

In the European space of freely-associated states, we see the emergence of a potential system of political articulation, one capable of overcoming the physical and spiritual divisions that accompany what is national: the system of cities, of the diversity of cultures brought into relationship on the basis of the protocols of urbanity, of modernity. The city overflows borders and makes it possible to weave a fabric that prevails from within over all national packaging, thanks to the viral power of what is urban. Only the city can save us from multiculturalist errors. 



>From regression to renewal 

The identity against civil war as a minimalist identity, pared down to the essential, one that does not attempt to befuddle the consciousness of citizens. It is etched into the modern European awareness that war is something to be avoided. United States neo-conservatives see this as a weakness or sign of impotence. It may be, in part; but the taboo against war, constructed upon images of extermination, is a key component of the European identity. 



In the past, Europeans engaged in a classical form of imperialism: that of conquest and occupation of territories. The experience has left gaping wounds and a bitter aftertaste. Today, for Europe, negotiation and agreement are frontline instruments. The Americans, by contrast, have been engaging in a modern, return-ticket kind of imperialism: they act and then leave, they are present to destroy and absent when it is time for construction. 

Europe’s strength now is in what I call "viral power" (although others prefer the more prissy formulation of "soft power"): the ability to make contagious those ideas and customs that give shape to a certain way of being in the world. 



In the network society the viral capacity of countries or regional groups is decisive, so much so that I believe that it is possible to divide societies into two types. The first has the viral power that can transcend its borders, in terms of life, information, money, industry, inventiveness and ideas (exogenous viral power, or cosmopolitan power); the second has a self-destructive form of viral power perhaps because of an inability to generate viruses that are expansive and universal (so that the miasmas remain in the family, as endogenous – or national – viral power). 



Europe should use the tremendous potential of its exogenous viral power as an antidote, both against ethnic multiculturalism and against any order that is founded in fantasies of the end of history. 



A European demos

The preamble of the European constitution – not exactly a memorable text – refers to the terrible disagreements that have led to this coming together: "Believing that Europe, reunited after bitter experiences, intends to continue along this path of civilisation, progress and prosperity 
 " 

An identity is not imposed, but is formed, is developed and is extended: the taboo against civil strife was followed in Europe by a rejection of political totalitarianism and moral authoritarianism. Such an identity would continue to assert itself as the everyday experience of the citizens took on a European dimension in addition to local and national ones – a necessary condition for the consolidation of a European demos. 

But European identity will always be open to other countries that share the same standards of coexistence and communication. Hence Europe does not have closed borders. This means Turkey, of course, and why not Israel and Palestine some day? 



It might be argued that as long as European identity is so minimalist, national identities will be assured of a long life. People need to feel they belong and want to have strong community feeling but are not aware that every identity represents a certain loss of freedom, which is ever greater with each turn of the identity screw. The European identity cannot be – in the experience of the citizens – an identity that is of the same order as national identities, and neither need it be incompatible with them. The feeling against civil war is stronger than the mythical national stories that are constructed upon the abuse of power, selective memory and outright deception. Spain knows something of this: being against civil war is the shared value that has made a relatively peaceful transition possible. 



An identity against civil war is something like a renewal of the promises of the social contract now that modern experience has reached its limits, in totalitarianism and weapons of mass destruction. The European social model is not far removed from the bases of this identity. It was constructed in the post-war years to buttress a rejection of civil war and it requires updating and reforms. To destroy it would be a kind of self-destruction of Europe, regression to civil war.



This essay was translated by Julie Wark



Source: Open Democracy 


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From shekhar at crit.org.in  Sun Jun  5 02:02:39 2005
From: shekhar at crit.org.in (Shekhar Krishnan)
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 21:32:39 +0100
Subject: [Reader-list] Mumbai Free Map
Message-ID: <9bd41d1116e5a85477001c0fda4dc916@crit.org.in>

Dear All:

Please see the latest demo of the Mumbai Free Map on 
http://freemap.crit.org.in

This now contains detailed vector layers for roads, railways, buildings 
and plots, projected onto a satellite composite image of the city. The 
data has been sourced from existing municipal development plans, 
surveys, and maps, which we have scanned, traced and stitched together 
with our archive of project materials at CRIT.

This project has been developed using completely free and open source 
software (Map Server, GRASS, QGIS) and copyleft and public geographic 
data.

The project web page is on http://www.crit.org.in/projects/gis and we 
welcome comments and feedback on it as we begin developing an interface 
by which to annotate the maps and develop the Mumbai Free Map as an 
open source and interactive city archive and community information 
infrastructure.

Regards,


S.K.
_____

Shekhar Krishnan
CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust)
B-43, Shravasti
Goregaon-Malad Link Road
Malad (West), Mumbai 400064
India

http://www.crit.org.in/members/shekhar



From singhgurminder2000 at hotmail.com  Sun Jun  5 14:43:47 2005
From: singhgurminder2000 at hotmail.com (gurminder singh)
Date: Sun, 05 Jun 2005 14:43:47 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Visit a Gurdwara in Delhi
Message-ID: <BAY16-F15BE1B46E89B88641BDF2ACFF80@phx.gbl>

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From shivamvij at gmail.com  Sat Jun  4 15:16:11 2005
From: shivamvij at gmail.com (shivam)
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 15:16:11 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Caste and Gender (Insight Magazine)
In-Reply-To: <20050602180947.31013.qmail@webmail49.rediffmail.com>
References: <20050602180947.31013.qmail@webmail49.rediffmail.com>
Message-ID: <fd72ba1a05060402463fd75807@mail.gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Insight Magazine <insightjnu at rediffmail.com>
Date: 2 Jun 2005 18:09:47 -0000
Subject: new issue-insight

Dear All,

the new issue of INSIGHT on Caste and Gender is now online at
http://www.sammaditthi.com/INSIGHT/insight_home.asp

we have worked hard to put forward dalit women perspective.
we are eagerly waiting for ur response. the printed version will be
released tommorow

regards
 Anoop


From kranenbu at xs4all.nl  Mon Jun  6 16:11:49 2005
From: kranenbu at xs4all.nl (Rob van Kranenburg)
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 11:41:49 +0100
Subject: [Reader-list] IV Global Conference of =?iso-8859-1?q?Peoples=92?=
	Global Action, 	Haridwar, Uttaranchal, North India
Message-ID: <p04330103bec9d8915760@[192.168.2.132]>

Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 16:40:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: pga-4globalconf at riseup.net
To: "caravana" <caravan99 at lists.riseup.net>

Subject: [caravan99] CALL: IV Global Conference of
      Peoples´Global Action


IV Global Conference of Peoples’ Global Action
27th September to 2nd October 2005
Haridwar, Uttaranchal, North India


1.	Background
2.	Why a global conference now? Why in Asia?
3.	Objectives of this conference
4.	Asian convenors and conference hosts
5.	Dates, venue and logistics
6.	Programme and preparation process
7.	Participants

Appendixes:
I.	Hallmarks of PGA
II.	Organizational Principles of PGA
III.	A brief history of Peoples’ Global Action
IV.	Sustained campaigns
V.	Application form


1. Background

Global capitalism is causing more exploitation, oppression, destitution
and war in our times than ever before. The governments, multinational
corporations and financial interests that rule over the global economy
continue concentrating wealth and power. They fasten their control over
our lives and resources on multilateral institutions and agreements, such
as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), and regional trade agreements like the EU, FTAA,
APEC, etc. These entities ensure that injustice and destruction expand all
over the world, increasing the pain and despair of all oppressed and
discriminated people, such as peasants, indigenous peoples, women,
workers, the unemployed, slum dwellers, ethnic or religious minorities,
Dalits and other exploited castes, Hijras, etc . The monstrous global
inequalities have reached an absurd level where almost 1 billion people
suffer chronic hunger and more than 1 billion lack access to safe drinking
water, while the 3 richest men own more wealth than the poorest 48
countries, and 285 individuals posses as much as half of the humanity.

In addition to the daily economic violence engendered by capitalism,
imperialist countries are waging more and increasingly destructive wars to
steal resources from the poor. This is why many anti-capitalist movements
have actively participated in anti-war protests as a natural extension of
their activity. The atrocious nature of those wars is one more consequence
of capital’s expansion, just like the suicides of thousands of indebted
peasants in South Asia, the displacement of indigenous peoples, the
exploitation of workers and women, etc. The world is full of such examples
of the destructive and insatiable greed of a social and economic system
that most humans reject and despise.

The people and institutions that rule over this system will continue
generating abuse, misery and death, and any attempt to reform them are a
waste of energy and time. For this reason, grassroots movements are
working in all continents to take back collective and democratic control
over our resources and forms of life, to rebuild our autonomy and
self-organisation. This is the continuation of an ancient revolutionary
tradition which encompasses slave insurrections and anti-colonial
liberation struggles, indigenous and feminist uprisings, peasants’ and
workers’ revolutions, anti-capitalist direct action and environmental
activism, cultural and sexual self-affirmation, grassroots antagonist
education and independent media, just to mention some examples.

Over the last decades, growing numbers of grassroots movements have come
to the common conclusion that we need to strengthen and interconnect this
revolutionary tradition. We are all fighting against common problems and
adversaries, and this struggle requires the participation of all people
who suffer the consequences of discrimination or oppression of all kinds.
Today more than ever, the emancipation of any of us is connected to the
emancipation of all oppressed people in the world. This results in an
urgent need to learn from and about each other, in order to be able to
support each other as much as possible. To achieve that, we also need to
become aware of our own participation in sexism, racism or other forms of
inequality and exploitation, and fight against them.

Another shared conclusion is the need to build locally controlled and
genuinely democratic and participatory social and economic relations as
alternatives to capitalism. We don’t want to repeat past mistakes and
replace one form of exploitation and control by another. We cannot make
our freedom depend on the good will of any revolutionary vanguard or
political party. All revolutions of the 20th century have confirmed that
centralised power corrupts and leads to disappointment and collapse.
Therefore if we want emancipation to last, it should be built and
maintained by the equal participation of all people in struggle, by local
autonomy combined with international solidarity and globally coordinated
action.

For these reasons, grassroots movements all over the world have built
tools for non-hierarchical communication and coordination on the basis of
diversity, autonomy and decentralisation. Peoples’ Global Action (PGA) was
created with this aim in February 1998 by a wide range of grassroots
movements from the South and the North. It has served as tool to call for
Global Days of Action against Capitalism during summits of global bodies
(like the WTO, the G8, the IMF/WB, etc), and it inspired other forms of
action and solidarity (such as inter-continental caravans, local actions,
gender conferences, seminars and exchanges, publications, etc). PGA is
defined by a number of features that distinguish it from other
international networks, expressed in its hallmarks (the basic points of
consensus on which the network is based, see appendix I), and
organisational principles (see appendix II).

The 4th global PGA conference will take place in a very different context
than the previous one, which took place in September 2001 (see appendix
III for a brief history of PGA). The September 11th 2001 attacks have been
used by some Western countries and economic interests to attempt regaining
the legitimacy of the global capitalist regime, after a period of
extraordinarily fast growth of anti-capitalist protests all over the world
(also in the North). The attacks were also presented as a justification to
invade and devastate Afghanistan and Iraq, and to intensify control and
repression and foster fear and racism all over the world. This fear and
racism is targeted especially against Arabs and Muslims, who are used as
scapegoats to divert attention from the daily violence inflicted by
capitalism over millions of people all over the world.

Due to all these changes, from 2001 to 2005 the international activity of
many social movements was focused on reacting to the aggressions and wars
caused by imperialist countries and economic interest. Many movements did
so in the framework of large coalitions and platforms, which were not
necessarily anti-capitalist or horizontal, and more often than not
dominated, by NGOs and political parties. We believe that it is time to
strengthen again the global self-organised coordination of grassroots
antagonist action, to take again the initiative and attack the economic
interests and entities in the driving seat of global capitalism.






2. Why a global conference now? Why in Asia?

At the last global conference (Cochabamba, Bolivia, September 2001) it was
decided by consensus to focus on strengthening the regional processes at
continental level. The decentralised process that followed has been
different in each region: in some the process slowed down, while in others
it has been strengthened, expanded and consolidated (see appendix III).

Regarding the Asia region, the PGA process has been further strengthened
and consolidated after its last regional conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh,
hosted by Krishok Federation (Organization of farmers of Bangladesh) and
Kisani Shaba (Farmers women organization of Bangladesh). It was attended
by over 150 activists from grassroots people's movements from South and
South East Asia, comprising peasants, women, trade Unions, fisher folk,
indigenous people and youth.

One of the conclusions of this conference was that at this point in time
it makes sense to bring together again the regional processes into a
global conference, in order to revitalise successful forms of global
action against capitalism and explore new strategies to reinforce the
cooperation, exchange and solidarity at the global level.

It was also argument that even when there are new and well-funded
platforms with similar aims, such as the Social Forums, which started in
January 2001, there is the strong necessity of a specific space, with a
real horizontal, anti-capitalist and feminist nature for grassroots
movements.  Thus, we believe in the urgent necessity of strengthening and
consolidate globally the anti-capitalist network  “People Global Action”
as a tool of coordination and communication, which combines a
confrontational action-orientation with decentralisation and the full
autonomy of all participant movements (NGOs may only participate as
observers, if at all, and that representatives of political parties are
not welcome).

So, following the Asian PGA Conference, South Asian movements met in
Bangalore (India) and discussed the necessity of holding the Fourth PGA
Global Conference. As a result, Asian movements proposed that the next PGA
Global Conference takes place in Asia, few months before the next World
Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, which will be held in Hong Kong
in December of 2005. This proposal was bring to the rest of regions. The
European Regional Conference that took place in Belgrade in summer 2004
also agreed and supported the Asian proposal for the global conference.


3. Objectives of this conference

The objectives that we propose for the global conference are:

·	Contributing to the consolidation of regional PGA processes.

·	Planning in-depth exchanges between movements in different regions, in
particular about the construction of decentralised and alternative
livelihoods and social relations as alternatives to capitalism.

·	Define a plan of action and strategies of struggle, including Global
Days of Action against Capitalism, especially before and during the
upcoming WTO ministerial conference.

·	Revitalising a collective discussion about the global PGA process,
alongside the consolidation of autonomous regional processes.

·	Promoting gender work within each organisation and within PGA
as a whole.

·	Creating a PGA women network and introducing masculinity work at global
level.
4. Asian convenors and conference hosts

The convenors of Asia, chosen at the last regional conference in
Bangladesh are:

Asian Convenor: All Nepal Peasants’ Association (ANPA), Nepal
South East Asian Convenor: Assembly of The Poor, Thailand
South Asia Convenor: Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU), India

This conference was initially going to take place in Nepal, hosted by
ANPA, but due to the outrageous coup d'état and dictatorship recently
imposed by the King, the venue had to be shifted to North India, near the
border with Nepal. The Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers’ Movements
(ICC) has taken on the task of hosting the conference.

We are holding the conference near the Nepalese border in order to make it
possible for conference delegates to visit Nepalese movements after the
conference, in case the conditions allow. Nepal is undergoing a very
interesting pre-revolutionary situation, due to the combined efforts of
many different grassroots movements. Many of these movements are eager to
meet the delegates of the PGA conference. Therefore, if the security
conditions allow, ANPA and other movements will organise a visit to Nepal,
and if that is not possible, there could be a solidarity action at the
border. We therefore advise all participants to leave some days free after
the conference.


5. Date, venue and logistics

The conference will take place from the 5th to 12th October in Haridwar,
India.

Haridwar is a town of 220.000 inhabitants in the state of Uttaranchal
(North India), 5 hours away from Delhi by train. It will be preceded by a
mass protest in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) on the 2nd October,
which we hope to be attended by all conference participants, since it will
set a very positive and action-oriented collective tone for the rest of
the conference. A caravan of grassroots movements from South India will
reach Mumbai on the 2nd October to meet the international delegates and
participate in the protest with them, and we will travel all together to
Haridwar after the protest. We hope that all participants will join us in
Mumbai.

Haridwar is situated at the foothills of the Himalayas, in the precise
place where the Ganges River leaves the mountain range. It has therefore
been considered a sacred place for centuries, and every night floating
lights are deposited at the point where the river enters the plains (known
as “The Stairs of God”). Thousands of people come to bath in the cold and
crystalline water (considered to have special healing powers in this
location) and every 12 years there is an immense spiritual festival. This
explains the large amount of ashrams (places for meditation, yoga and
spiritual introspection) that exist in this town.

The accommodation will take place in ashrams, which are sympathetic to the
aims of the conference. The conditions will be modest and coherent with
the principles and ideas of PGA: sleeping on thin mattresses on the floor,
quite a lot of people in each room, collective toilets, etc. Participants
should bring their own sleeping bags or sheets and blankets, and are
advised to bring anti-mosquito cream and mosquito nets. There will be
rooms for women only and men only, as well as mixed rooms. The food will
be contributed by Indian peasants, members of the farmers’ organisations
of the ICC (conference hosts), who despite their difficult situation want
to make this contribution to the success of the conference. We hope that
all participants will be happy to share the same simple and unpretentious
conditions. We will do our best to do special arrangements for people with
restricted mobility or any other particular need. Anyone needing any other
type of accommodation for comfort reasons should make their own
arrangements.

As mentioned above, besides the action in Mumbai before the conference,
there will hopefully be a visit to Nepal at the end, if the security
conditions allow. This visit will be organised by the Nepalese movements.
Registered participants will receive more information in the future. If
this visit is not possible, there might be an action of solidarity at the
border with Nepal, and visits to Indian movements. We therefore advise
everyone to leave at least one week free between the end of the conference
and their date of return.


6. Programme and preparation process

The final programme for the conference will be defined over the next
months through a collective discussion process, which will hopefully
include grassroots movements from all continents. The basic structure
proposed by the conference hosts is:

2nd October:  Action in Mumbai. Travel to Haridwar with Indian movements.

4th October: Arrival of the participants to Haridwar.

5th  - 6th October:  Gender training workshops, including masculinity.

7th – 8th October:  Information Exchange: workshops proposed by the
participant organizations, such as on the struggle against sexism and
other forms of oppression, militarism, privatisation, trade and gender,
etc.

9th – 10th October: Campaigns and plan of actions. Building alternatives.
These two days proposals of the organization of initiatives and action
strategies at the global level: exchanges, inter-regional solidarity,
sustained campaigns, etc, as well as coordination of actions against the
Hong-Kong WTO conference and other future Global Days of Action against
Capitalism will be discussed and concretised.

11th - 12th October: PGA global process: convenors committee, manifesto,
organisational principles, next conferences, etc.

13th October: Visit to Nepalese grassroots movements. If it is not
possible to visit Nepal, solidarity action at the border and visits to
Indian movements.

The parts in italics are not part of the conference programme but we hope
that all participants will be able to attend them.

All the organizational process, as well as decision-making will be
completely transparent and collective. Regular reports on the progress of
the organization of the conference will be sent to all regional PGA lists.
The following elements will be use in the discussion process for the
preparations of the conference:

·	E-mail discussion: we propose to use the list
caravan99 at lists.riseup.net. To subscribe, send an email to
caravan99-subscribe at lists.riseup.net
·	Preparatory meetings: According to the conclusions of the last European
PGA conference (Belgrade, summer 2004), there should be at least a
preparatory meeting in Europe which should be attended by all European
organisations and collectives that want to participate in the global
conference. One of the purposes of this meeting is to discuss which issues
Europeans want to take to the conference, and to talk about the programme
and all other aspects of the conference. We hope that this meeting will
take place, and would be very glad if similar meetings could take place in
other regions. Where it is not possible to hold such meetings, regional
lists can be used (such as agplatina at lists.riseup.net for Latin America,
pga at lists.riseup.net for North America and pga-asia at lists.riseup.net,
pga-asia at cupboard.org for Asia)
·	Direct communication with participants: the application form asks
participants their opinion about the programme of the conference and
whether they want to present any workshop, film, exhibition, etc. All
answers will be sent to caravan99 at lists.riseup.net and the regional lists
as contributions to the collective discussion.

We hope that the combination of all these elements will make it possible
to prepare collectively the conference and define its contexts. According
to the PGA organisational principles (see appendix II), the convenors
committee has the mandate to set the conference programme, but we hope
that it will be possible to set it by a consensus-based collective
process.


7. Participants

Grassroots movements, organizations, collectives, unions, etc that agree
with the PGA hallmarks (see appendix I) are welcome to join the
conference. Delegates from NGOs may have a status of observer if the
grassroots organizations coming from the same country agree. Political
parties are not allowed to send representatives.

In the case of delegations of more than one representative, at least half
of them must be women.

The Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements will provide food
and accommodation for a maximum of 600 participants.

The organisations from Africa, Latin America and Asia that need support
for part of their travel costs should apply before the 20th August. Visas
or other expenses besides the travel costs will not be covered. Only in
very exceptional cases the complete cost of the flight tickets will be
reimbursed, we ask all the organisations to contribute with a minimum of
20% of their tickets, if possible more.

In order to avoid an imbalance in the representation from the South and
the North due to economic reasons, all participants from Western Europe,
North America and Australia are asked to cover their own travel costs and
establish redistribution channels to ensure the participation of
disadvantaged social sectors or regions (such as Eastern Europe). In
addition to this, we expect all participants from the North to contribute
to the travel costs of participants from Africa, Latin America and Asia.
We will try to raise funds for this purpose from coherent sources besides
the contributions of participants from the North, and any help in that
respect will be more than welcome. However, the contributions from
Northern participants are most likely to be essential to the success of
the conference, since Southern participation might otherwise be very
limited.

There will be a fee of 50 US$ for participants from Western Europe, North
America and Australia, and 10 US$ for participants from other regions.

All participants should apply and pay for their tourist visas in their
respective Indian consulates or embassies. If you face any problems to get
a tourist visa, please let us know with enough time.

The working languages during the conference will be English, Spanish and
Hindi. If you need translation to other language and cannot arrange it,
you should let us know well in advance, to see if translation can be
organised.

The final application deadline will be the 2nd September in order to leave
enough time to send the information to the different regional lists and
the caravan99 at lists.riseup.net list. Participants asking for help with the
travel costs should apply before the 20th August.  The application form
can be found in the appendix V, and it should sent to:

pga-4globalconf at riseup.net


Appendixes

I Hallmarks of PGA

The following hallmarks define the basic consensus on which PGA is based:

1.	A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism; all
trade agreements, institutions and governments that promote destructive
globalization;

2.	We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination
including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious
fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all human
beings.


3.	A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can
have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organizations, in
which transnational capital is the only real policy-maker;

4.	A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social
movements' struggles, advocating forms of resistance which maximize
respect for life and oppressed peoples' rights, as well as the
construction of local alternatives to global capitalism;


5.	An organizational philosophy based on decentralization and autonomy


II Organizational Principles of PGA



III. A brief history of Peoples’ Global Action

A brief history of PGA will be included in the web page www.agp.org

IV. Sustained Campaigns

The following global campaigns were defined at the previous global
conference in Cochabamba (Bolivia):

·	Campaign against state militarism and para-militarism
·	Campaign for defence and recognition of self-determination and land
sovereignty of all people
·	Campaign against all privatisation
·	Campaign on construction of alternative models to the
capitalist system,
based on education and training

Most campaigns have not even started at the global level, due to different
reasons (such as the post-Sept 11th wars, the fact that they were defined
at the global conference rather than emerging from the grassroots level
and passing through regional conferences, etc). At the Haridwar conference
we should decide what to do about them.



V. Application form

Please send this application form to pga-4globalconf at riseup.net before the
2nd September. Organisations that need help with travel costs should send
this application before the 20th August.


1.	ORGANISATION DETAILS

Name of the organization:
Address:
Email:
Tel:
Fax:

2.	DESCRIPTION OF THE ORGANISATION

·	When and why was it created, where and on which issues does it work?
·	Objectives of the organisation
·	Current activities, campaigns, actions, etc.
·	Is your organization working on alternatives to capitalism,
such as seed
banks, decentralised water management, alternative energy, cooperatives,
etc
? If yes, please describe briefly such projects.

3.	PARTICIPANT(S)

Name and gender of the participant(s):
Languages:

4.	CONTENTS OF THE CONFERENCE

·	Which issues does your organisation think should be discussed in the
conference?
·	What is your opinion of the proposed structure of the conference?
·	Does your organisation want to organize any workshop, performance or
culture event?
·	Does your organization bring any exhibition or video?

5.	LOGISTICS AND TRAVEL

·	Do any members of your delegation need any special arrangement, such as
a special diet, special beds, wheelchair or medical care?
·	Could your organisation help with translation of documents before the
conference? Could your delegation help with translation during the
conference (documents, workshops or informal conversations)? If yes, in
which language?
·	For organisations located in Africa, Latin America or Asia: does your
organisation need help with travel costs? In that case, how much can your
organisation contribute?
·	For organisations located in rich countries: can your organisation
contribute to the travel costs of organisations from the South? If yes,
how much?

6.	DOCUMENTATION

Please, send with this form any document that your organization wants to
be distributed during the conference.

We are going to prepare a welcome document with the description of the
participant organizations and the documents send by them. This welcome
document will be distributed in Spanish, English and Hindi, but we invite
all organizations to translate this document into their own language.

If you want any document to be included in the welcome document, please
send it to us as soon as possible. We would be thankful if you could also
provide translations of your document in English and/or Spanish and/or
Hindi.





caravan99 at lists.riseup.net
--

http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/person-1024.25.html&lang=en
http://blogger.xs4all.nl/kranenbu/
http://locative.net/blog/mixreality/
0031 (0) 641930235







From iram at sarai.net  Mon Jun  6 15:15:18 2005
From: iram at sarai.net (iram at sarai.net)
Date: Mon,  6 Jun 2005 11:45:18 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] 4th post by Biswajit and Nilanjan: How children view
	the hanging
Message-ID: <f102f5faafcb99ea42371a732adb8e1e@sarai.net>

How children view the hanging

Fourth posting by Biswajit and Nilanjan

Hetal Parekh, the victim in the most talked about rape and murder case of
out time, was a schoolgirl. How did her peers react to the crime, the
punishment and the media coverage? We have seen some of them in the TV and
newspaper pictures holding up placards evidently prepared by grown-ups to
demand “exemplary” punishment of the convict, Dhananjay Chatterjee, or
silently standing in prayer lines. But beyond that? We did not know because
we did not want to know. As we started talking to the children, it became
apparent that not only did the mass media have a deep impact on young minds
(as expected), but the young ones, too, had important things to say about
the issues raised by the media and the way these were raised.
The first group we discussed with was an all-girl one. It comprised nine
students (class VI-IX) of Jagatpur Rukmini Vidyamandir for Girls, a rather
“ordinary” school in Behala at the south-west fringe of Kolkata. The
students mostly belonged to working-class families. Their fathers were
masons, gardeners, petty shop-owners or cab-drivers, or had left them in
the care of their mothers, who worked as domestic helps. Most of these
children were not yet born when the Hetal was raped and murdered by the
security guard of her apartment building, Dhananjay, in 1991.
Two of the children do not have TV at home while two others have no cable
connection. None of their families subscribe to any newspaper regularly.
However, their elders read newspapers particularly when some news turns
into hot topic. The children, too, read newspapers occasionally but watch
TV regularly, either at home or at some neighbour’s place.
What did they like to watch? Almost all of them named crime-related
programmes such as Police File, Crime Diary, Crime Files, etc., as well as
detective soaps like CID. There is an abundance of prime-time crime-related
programmes, both on Bengali and Hindi channels, where the highly dramatised
and gory reconstructions of violence, particularly crimes on women like
rape and murder are being dished out every evening. Our interaction with
these children shows that their perceptions – rather imaginations, fears
and hatred – about the crimes and criminals as well as values about the
punishments are greatly shaped by these programmes.
According to them, the elders in their families, too, avidly watch these
programmes and ask the teenaged girls to do the same to make them “aware
of the dangers ahead”. “My grandpa told me to watch the Police File to
know how the girl (Hetal Parekh) was tortured and murdered by Dhananjay. It
will enhance my knowledge about the dangers that girls face,” recalled
one of them. Another said that her father told her to follow the news on
Dhananjay’s hanging. “An aunt in the neighbourhood told me watch it to
learn about the bad things that boys do to girls,” reported one of them.
All of them came to know about the crime and punishment of Dhananjay
chattarjee from elders who were engrossed in hot discussions before as well
as after the judicial execution. “It was discussed everywhere – at
home, in the locality and school. TV and newspapers were also full of
stories on the hanging. This made us curious,” said one girl.
Most of them followed the news of hanging on TV channels. Like the elders,
they became conditioned to the gradual building of climax to the great
spectacle of the hanging, orchestrated by the media and the government.
“I watched the TV whole night on the day of the hanging. We have never
seen a hanging. I wanted to watch the hanging to know how a normal living
person was turned into a dead man,” said a girl. Others, too, were keen
to watch the episode.
The images of Dhananjay they had received from the TV reconstructions of
his crime were grotesque. They particularly mentioned the Police File
programme on Akash Bangla, the TV channel known as the ruling CPI(M)’s
unofficial organ. “The person who acted as Dhananjay was ugly and
fearsome. His loafer looks, bloody eyes and beastly body movements sent
chills through our spines. We began to hate and fear Dhananjay. This
portrayal of Dhananjay led us to support the hanging,” said Lipika, while
other girls corroborated her. But they were able to make a distinction
between the hyper-real and real. “Later, we saw Dhananjay’s picture in
the newspapers and TV news. He looked like a normal bhadralok in bridegroom
make-up and certainly not as horrific as he was shown in the Police File.
The Police File report tried to convince us that he was a bad man who
deserved the hanging. People came to favour his hanging after this episode
was telecast. In other episodes, there were commercial breaks, but this one
hardly had any,” observed Sebika and Lipika while others in the group
supported them.
The children reflected the divisions and swings in public opinion on the
death sentence. While the elders and the media influenced their judgments,
their ability to articulate was striking. There were arguments both for and
against the death sentence and taking a decision was not easy, they noted.
According to them, the hanging could be justified because: a) Dhananjay had
tortured and killed Hetal, b) if released, he would have committed the same
crime again, and c) this could have happened to them also. At the same
time, they felt opposed to the hanging on the following grounds: a)
Dhananjay had been in jails for years together, b) it was his first crime,
c) many criminals who had committed multiple crimes of similar nature were
still evading arrest or conviction, d) there would be no difference between
the killer and the judge if the latter ordered killing of the former, and
e) it was often found that courts rectified the previous conviction orders,
which had compelled innocent persons to languish in jail for long. There
would be no chance of such judicial rectification if the convict was hanged
to death.
“Initially, most of the people were in favor of the hanging. But the mood
changed substantially on the eve of the hanging. We, too, felt it was
better to keep Dhananjay in prison for life rather than killing him. The
government should stop hanging but imprison the criminals for life who dare
to violate the honours of women,” said the girls.
These children were aware of the class bias of our legal–judicial system
and made critical observations on that issue. “If the crime had been
committed by a fellow resident of the apartment rather than the security
guard, he would have escaped the noose. We know that ministers’ sons or
relatives go unpunished even after committing heinous crimes. Why was there
such a hue and cry over Dhananjay when such crimes are often committed?
Dhananjay’s poor family could not match the money power of Hetal’s
family and failed to engage better lawyers to save his life,” argued one
of them. When asked why they came to such a conclusion, they said, “Those
who were opposed to the death sentence said this during the TV debates.
These aspects were also discussed at our homes.” They even demanded that
the government look after Dhananjay’s parents who had lost all their
resources in the long legal battle.
Nevertheless, they would have favoured the hanging uncritically if Hetal
was their friend or a student of the same school. “If she was our friend
or a senior in school, we would have reacted in the manner the students of
Hetal’s school had reacted.”
Hangman Nata Mallick evoked a mixed response. While his name sounded funny
for them, his bizarre job evoked awe and fear. But the girls had their own
reading of the texts. “He was not eager to hang Dhananjay and fell sick
after the hanging. We have seen that on TV. He should not be blamed for the
hanging, as it is his livelihood. He just obeyed the government order,”
they pleaded.
Why did the media make a big hype over the hanging? The children put forth
an explanation. “There was no hanging for many years. Reporters have done
their jobs. Otherwise how can the news business go on?” maintained the
girls. Condoning the hype, however, these girls were critical about the
demonstration of the hanging or techniques of noose making in the media.
“Younger children, attracted to the constant discussions everywhere on
the issue and repeated media images on hanging, imitated it playfully
without realising the danger.” These girls in their early teens, however,
did not go for the temptation. “We heard that some children died while
imitating the hanging. Earlier, the same kind of deaths occurred when
children tried to imitate Shaktiman. But we knew the danger involved in
this game and also feared that parents would scold us if they came to
know.”
Do they feel safer after the hanging, now that the perpetrator of a grave
crime against women has been eliminated? “We feel more scared. Parents do
not want to leave us alone either at home or outside. They are always
scared that we could be abducted and tortured (throughout the discussion,
they seemed to be consciously avoiding the words like ‘rape’ or
‘molestation’). The men would not come to their senses even if they are
taught about the right virtues a thousand times. Girls cannot enjoy freedom
even if they earn money,” they commented. However, they made a
distinction between their friends and the unfamiliar males. “We have no
fear of our friends among the boys in our locality. But the situation is
different with others whom we do not know.”
Aware of AIDS and the use of condoms for safe sex through the TV and other
media campaigns, these young girls felt embarrassed by the sexist ads of
male undergarments (e.g., a youth with his genital area covered by computer
graphics crashing into a bathroom to make animated love to bathing beauty)
or soaps and shampoo ads (the Liril ad which suggests strong erotic
gestures with male and female characters chasing one another other after
the bath with green chilies and carrots in their hands). Nevertheless, they
are glued to the cola or shampoo ads which cast their favorite heroes.
Other ads, which attract these growing-up girls, visibly undernourished,
are related to food products such as ice-creams.
The second batch of students were from one of the city’s posh schools —
South Point School in south Kolkata. Among 12 students, 11 were boys. Four
of them were studying in class X and the rest in class IX.
All of them have television with cable connections and at least two
newspapers at home. Seven stay in high-rise apartments. Their parents are
middle-class or upper middle-class professionals – college teachers, bank
managers, engineers and public sector company officials.
Most of them came to know about the Dhananjay episode from TV as well as
newspapers. But their interest in the incident was triggered by the heated
discussion among the elders, both at home and outside. “Normally, we do
not read beyond sports and entertainment pages. But Dhananjay‘s story
became the hottest topic all around us. The stories on hanging hogged the
front-page headlines for weeks together. So it was virtually impossible to
ignore them,” recalled one of the students. Another admitted that he
began following the newspaper reports on the hanging after watching Police
File.
The girl among these students stay alone at home after her school hours
since both of her parents are working. “After the reports on Hetal Parekh
murder, my parents warned me to be cautious while staying alone at home or
moving outside. Parents of my friends also gave them the same advice,”
said the girl, Suparna. The boys also reported some kind of heightened
insecurity among parents or tension about the security of the teenage
girls. Their parents, cousins and friends’ families had restricted the
movement of young girls at that time, they recalled.
Despite living in apartment buildings where employment of security guards
are common now, they did not recall any tension in the relationship between
the residents and guards or an attitudinal shift towards them even though
Dhananjay was a security guard. “Neighbours in our apartments discussed
the issue among them. But we never talked to the security guards on the
issue,” said one of the students. While the perceptions about personal
security were different among the boys and the girl, all of them pointed
out that the hanging of Dhananjay did not increase any sense of security
among them or their parents.
On the question of death sentence, it was interesting to note that all
except one boy were opposed to it while the girl was basically in favour.
It may not coincidental that boys could not recall Hetal’s name properly
while the girl could. “Being a security guard, Dhananjay betrayed the
trust. That’s why his crime attracted so much condemnation. The death
sentence was justified in view of the betrayal and the crime,” she
opined. But the boys condoned the crime on the ground that Dhananjay had
committed the crime “on momentary excitement”. “TV channels showed
him as a ghastly criminal. We think he was basically a good man. He
deserved punishment and served 14 years in jail. He could have been
detained for life, but the death sentence was not justified,” said the
boys. The sympathy with Dhananjay, a rural poor, was not missing despite
these students’ own urban upwardly mobile background. “Many high-class
criminals are still alive and free despite committing multiple murders and
crimes on women,” they reasoned.
All of them castigated media, both print and audio-visual, for committing
“excesses” in covering the whole episode. “Media should be held
responsible for the death of the children [playing the hanging game].
Particularly TV channels made the hangman a hero and showed his
demonstration of the hanging and preparation of the noose. TV channels and
newspapers carried his interviews. How can you focus on such a person whose
job is to reply violence by violence? Even after the hanging, popular TV
programmes like Khonj Khabar showed Nata Mallick’s business of selling
pieces of the noose as talisman. Was it necessary at all?” questioned a
student. Others expressed their reservation about the coverage of
Dhananjay’s last days at the condemned cell. “It was almost a running
commentary on his daily chores — what he was eating, how he listened to
the radio. Was it a circus?” remarked another. Another student reported
that cell-phone operators, too made it abuzz with the latest reports on the
hanging. “There was no way to escape it,” he recalled. But how
differently would they have covered the episode if they were journalists?
The students were at a loss. “That’s a difficult question,” one of
them grinned.
Out of the entire coverage, the lasting media images for the boys were the
front-page pictures of Dhananjay’s last journey to the crematorium and
the stories about the Bengali delicacies he had had before leaving for the
gallows. For Suparna, however, the climax of whole episode, the hanging
itself, was more memorable.
While all the boys like to watch the various crime-related programmes to
make themselves “aware and cautious about the criminals”, only one
reported parental objections to the viewing of such daily dishes of
violence. “One programme showed a child being killed by driving nails
into his body. That was excessive violence. They should not show such
brutality. There must be a limit,” observed a student. However, exposed
to round-the-clock mass media “representations of violent societal
reality”, these teenagers were clearly as confused over the “limit”
as the grown-ups.



From aleclerc at fondation-langlois.org  Tue Jun  7 01:36:52 2005
From: aleclerc at fondation-langlois.org (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Andr=E9ane_Leclerc?=)
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 16:06:52 -0400
Subject: [Reader-list] News from the Daniel Langlois Foundation
Message-ID: <641A525B0A2A2540B1DD0A3DE660241C982D2F@exchange.terra-incognita.net>

The Daniel Langlois Foundation announces its new and revised programs

After more than a year of evaluation, consultation and reflection, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology announces the progressive resumption of its programs, effective September 2005. The mandate of the Foundation has not changed at all; its purpose is to further artistic and scientific knowledge by fostering the meeting of art and science in the field of technologies. The Foundation seeks to nurture a critical awareness of technology's implications for human beings and their natural and cultural environments and to promote the exploration of aesthetics suited to environments shaped by human beings. 
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/pdf/e/pressrelease.pdf


From vishnu at cscsban.org  Mon Jun  6 13:28:21 2005
From: vishnu at cscsban.org (T. Vishnu Vardhan)
Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 13:28:21 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Nativity in Mythologicals
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.1.20050606125606.02470e20@localhost>

Hi, this is the fifth posting from the project Documenting the Death of a 
Genre: Mythologicals in Telugu Cinema.

 From the interviews that I have done of few yester year stars, technicians 
and critics one thing has interested me a lot.

That is the nativity in Telugu cinema or as some call telugudanam in telugu 
cinema.  Nativity is seen as oen of the important reasons for the success 
of N.T. Rama Rao both in films and politics.  And when I asked where and 
how does he embody telugudanam/telugu nativity... the answer is "his 
mythological roles", "the fluency with which he delivers (lengthy and 
grandhik) dialogues", "his diction", etc.

In the third posting, I outlined the critique of Telugu mythologicals of 
1930s which failed to use high grandhik language.  One can understand this 
as a pre-cursor to the standardization of Telugu in films, before the 
formation of Andhra Pradesh, and which has a different trajectory in telugu 
literature.

But the interesting and surprising thing for me is that this high-flown 
Telugu in mythologicals being seen as an important aspects of nativity or 
telugudanam.  Why because, almost no Telugu speaks in such language in 
her/his day to day life.  Further, I have come across some people 
critiquing socials of the same time (produced in Madras) for lacking 
nativity, because these films were shot in and around Madras.  That means, 
some of the viewers had problems with the geographic location.  For 
instance, one person writes that in so and so film they showed a village 
but it does not look like a Telugu/'Andhra' village.  And most of the time 
socials were seen as representing Telugu nativity/Telugudanam or in other 
words, it is expected from socials.

Whereas Mythologicals were never burdened with such a demand except for the 
critique of using 'non-standard' language as I mentioned.  But this highly 
grandhicised Telugu is what even people like A. Nageshwara Rao see as 
nativity/telugudanam.

Listening to these interviews, I was trying to think and read more about 
nativity.
A lot of people (academic and non-academic) mention nativity, but I hardly 
came across any description of it.  Everybody seems to have an 
understanding of what nativity is, and outline various (sometimes wiered 
things) which represent nativity.

Specifically in the context of the recent Telugu cinema (Gemini), some of 
the viewers said that the heorine in the film lacked nativity.  And the 
wonder is that the heroine in the film is a marwadi.  But the viewers 
expect a certain 'native' representation of this marwadi heroine.  And lot 
of Telugu film critics, directors, etc. talk about nativity in their 
films.  But again the biggest surprise is that almost all the film songs 
are shot abroad.  Further, this nativity is no where near to a realistic 
representation of the world we see or in other words 'realism'.

One more instance, is that of Bapu's and K.Vishwanath's films (both are 
popular film directors of 80s) which people think and write have a lot of 
nativity.  And there are songs where the hero sings about the heroine and 
says 'you are like a Bapu drawn picture'.  And gongura is seen as 
representing telugudanam in cuisine, which atleast from the part I come 
from hardly eat.

Looking forward for comments and useful bibliography.

More anon....
Vishnu Vardhan. T

T. Vishnu Vardhan
Centre for the Study of Culture and Society,
466, 9th Cross, 1st Block, Jayanagar,
Bangalore - 560011.
e-mail: vishnu at cscsban.org
         thvishnu_viva at yahoo.com
Tel. no. 080-26562986
mobile no. +919845207308
fax no. 080-26562991  
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From carlos.katastrofsky at gmx.net  Mon Jun  6 13:39:55 2005
From: carlos.katastrofsky at gmx.net (carlos katastrofsky)
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 10:09:55 +0200 (MEST)
Subject: [Reader-list] [ann] [mov] SINS part 2 - skin
Message-ID: <10894.1118045395@www75.gmx.net>

dear all,
i´m proud to announce the second part of the project SINS (stands for Sins
Is Not Surface). have a look at it here:
http://aqua.subnet.at/carlos/projekte/media/sins

::::
the video series SINS deals with different concepts of human “layers”. each
of the five parts of SINS focuses on one of the following terms: surface,
skin, fashion, architecture and screen.

the footage of each movie has been exclusively extracted from the web by
means of searchengines and consists of approx. 1500 pictures as well as
numerous audio- and videofiles. the short movies are - according to their
thematical focus - technically constructed as tense representations of the
www - material.
layer by layer the pictures and sounds make us aware of the im/possible
glance beneath any layer we encounter.
::::

comments are welcome!

greetings,
carlos

-- 
Weitersagen: GMX DSL-Flatrates mit Tempo-Garantie!
Ab 4,99 Euro/Monat: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl


From jhuns at vt.edu  Tue Jun  7 20:48:33 2005
From: jhuns at vt.edu (Jeremy Hunsinger)
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 11:18:33 -0400
Subject: [Reader-list] Civiblog
Message-ID: <3AEB1EB2-2C3E-4EF8-BC68-5C5018C4B833@vt.edu>

distribute as appropriate

Civiblog, a one-stop-site for global civil society. Canadian to the  
core — ever-devoted to peacekeeping and “globalist” foreign policies  
— it is our aim to showcase all communiqué in the sector, at home and  
abroad, onsite and by way of links and RSS syndication to partner  
sites. We are tapping into two explosive movements at once: 1) the  
growth of the citizen sector and 2) blogging, which is an  
increasingly popular tool with the potential to empower citizens the  
world over, one post at a time.

Civiblog is completely free - no hosting costs or licensing fees.
Civiblog is targeted - designed by and for civil society workers.
Civiblog is community-driven - news from around the world, written by  
you.

http://www.civiblog.org/

jeremy hunsinger
jhuns at vt.edu
www.cddc.vt.edu
jeremy.tmttlt.com
www.tmttlt.com

()  ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail
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From nisha2004 at gmail.com  Wed Jun  8 01:20:53 2005
From: nisha2004 at gmail.com (Nisha .)
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 22:50:53 +0300
Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: To Fanatics, Crackpots,
	and Other Theatrical Creatures
In-Reply-To: <OF94FF9D84.00CB3A76-ON43257019.001E985C-43257019.001EA499@oxfam.org.uk>
References: <OF94FF9D84.00CB3A76-ON43257019.001E985C-43257019.001EA499@oxfam.org.uk>
Message-ID: <299c778405060712507034474d@mail.gmail.com>

                     "Seagullindia"
                     <feedback at seagull        To:       "SeagullIndia"
<feedback at seagullindia.com>
                     india.com>               cc:
                                              Subject:  eSTQ Invitation piece
                     06/06/2005 20:01
                      :15 Kb
e-stq
To Fanatics, Crackpots, and Other Theatrical Creatures
 By Sudhanva Deshpande


 Sometimes, it is easy to forget what a remarkable phenomenon Indian theatre is.


 I should instantly rephrase that: remarkable phenomena that Indian theatres
 are.


 For a moment, let us ignore that we have a performance history going back some
 two thousand five hundred years. Let us ignore that the first systematic
 treatises on performance and aesthetics were compiled in India. Let us ignore
 all this, not because it is not important, but because it can prevent us from
 appreciating what we have, right now, in the present.


 After all, wasn't there someone who quipped that the theatre has no future,
 because it is always here and now, in the present!


 What we have is mind-boggling. A director recently speculated that there are
 some 40,000 theatre groups in the country. If there are about 50 people
 associated with each group ? and I suppose he was including here the backstage
 workers, ushers, lighting persons, the dhobi who irons the costumes, the tea
 boy, and so on ? we get a figure of 20,00,000 people who are associated with
 theatre in India. This figure, according to him, does not include those who do
 plays in schools and colleges, but I presume it includes rural troupes.


 Two million people, then. This figure is more than the total population of a
 country like Mauritius, or more than the total adult population of several
 European countries. If, on average, each of these 40,000 groups produce 2 plays
 per year, that makes 80,000 plays every year. If each play has a run of 5
 shows, you get 4,00,000 performances every year. In other words, at least 1,095
 performances every day.


 By any reckoning, this is extraordinary. Not simply in terms of numbers, but in
 terms of range.


 Take Bombay, for example.


 The city is home to four major language theatres: Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi,
 English. In the first two of these languages, you have a thriving commercial
 theatre as well as an amateur theatre. In Gujarati, according to another
 informal estimate, some 60 lakh people pay to watch commercial theatre every
 year in Bombay. For Marathi, my guess is that the figure would be higher.


 Alongside, Bombay also has theatre in Kannada, Sindhi, Bengali, Malayalam and
 Telugu. Then there are the large number of students who do theatre in colleges
 and schools. Bombay also has some active street theatre groups. Then there are
 the plays that get done in colonies and housing societies as part of various
 festivals, the Ganesh puja being the most important. Then there are workers ?
 yes, that species still survives, miraculously, in the face of overwhelming
 odds ? who do plays in their unions and bastis.


 The variety of performance spaces is also huge.


 You have the large auditoria, like Shivaji Mandir in Dadar or Dinanath
 Mangeshkar Natyagruha in Vile Parle, that mount the commercial plays. Sometimes
 two, or even three, a day. You have smaller, more experimental spaces like the
 NCPA at Nariman Point or Prithvi in Juhu. Prithvi made the lovely Horniman
 Circle Gardens in South Bombay its second performance space. Prithvi and others
 have also been mounting shows at the Bandra seaface for the past two years.
 Then there are auditoria like the Karnataka Sangh, which cater, though not
 exclusively, to certain language groups. The Marathi theatre group Awishkar has
 been performing in a school in Mahim for the past few years, reminding one of
 Chhabildas, which spawned a veritable movement of experimental theatre back in
 the seventies.


 Now, this is only one city. There are smaller cities, and villages.


 Consider Andhra Pradesh, not a state one generally associates with theatre.
 Here, the Praja Natya Mandali has over one thousand units across the state. In
 other words, a unit in not just every district or taluka, but virtually every
 village! Some of these units are all women, many are all dalit. When a friend
 went to their State Conference last year, she had to address a gathering of
 some 40,000 actors, singers and dancers!


 There is no doubt about it. Theatre is alive, and growing.


 Some would object to my optimism. They would point to the indifferent quality
 of a lot of the work being done, they would point to the lack of infrastructure
 that most cities provide (and this would include Bombay, in spite of its
 thriving theatre scene), to the lack of resources that individual groups have,
 to the lack of funding, lack of newspaper space, lack of critical discourse,
 lack of training institutions, and so on and so forth.


 All this, of course, is completely true.


 But there is another way of looking at it, isn't there. Theatre lacks nearly
 everything, and yet it obstinately survives and even thrives. Which means that
 those 2 million or more who do theatre love it with such passion that they
 refuse to let it die.


 More importantly, there are many million more who watch them. They are the
 lifeblood of our theatre. They endure all manner of hardships to sustain this
 fragile art ? ticket prices, uncomfortable seats, mosquito attacks, bad acting,
 and so on. They endure all this, and more, for that one moment of magic that
 only live performance can give them.


 In other words, we have in our country, many million fanatics and crackpots.
 They are the heroes of our theatre.


 This space, the weekly eSTQ, hopes to reach out to them.


 This is not a space only, or even primarily, for the theatre practitioner or
 scholar. This is a space, most of all, for the theatre lover.


 We invite your opinions, comments, thoughts, musings, outbursts, anything. You
 could write about the state of theatre in your city or state or language; you
 could look at larger trends; you could review a play that you have recently
 seen or a book you have read; you could talk about a playwright past or
 present, or an actor or director or critic or anyone connected with theatre;
 you could share your difficulties, practical or theoretical; you could
 interview someone; you could pretty much do anything at all in this space.


 And, it goes without saying, you are welcome to respond to a previous article
 that has appeared here. We do not need only well-argued essays. Hazy or random
 thoughts would just as well.


 If you wish to send in things in a language other than English, please do. We
 will have it translated to the best of our ability.


 The word limit is 800 words minimum, 1200 words maximum. And yes, you will be
 paid, if your piece is carried. Not a prince's ransom, but enough to get you
 tickets to next week's show. (Unless you want a five star dinner to go with
 it.) If you want to send in shorter comments on earlier pieces, do that.
 200-300 words. We'll carry that in the readers' response section, without
 monetary compensation, though.


 This is your space. Claim it.


 Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor, director and playwright with the Delhi-based
 group, Jana Natya Manch.He can be reached at deshsud at rediffmail.com..



 Please click on reply to comment





 Theatre Log


 WRITERS'S BLOC
 If you have a full-length or one-act play, monologue or anything that shows
 your talent as a playwright contact us on letsrage at hotmail.com. If your
 original play is in an Indian language please send in an English translation.
 Script Submission - 5 June 2005. In association with British Council, Mumbai
 and Royal Court Theatre, UK


 Delhi
 Moneeka Misra Tanvir passed away on 28 May, and with her, we lost an incredible
 life devoted to theatre. Through Naya Theatre she helped make some of the
 finest theatre many of us ever saw.
 Come together to remember Moneeka-di, to share her memories, to salute her.
 Saturday, 4 June 2005, 5.00 pm., Deputy Speaker's Hall, Constitution Club, Rafi
 Marg.


 Mumbai
 A Summertime Attraction
 At Prithvi Theatre, 4, 5, 18, 19 June. All shows 11 am. A play for everyone
 above 14 years. Neeraj Kabi [Actor, Director, Human resource trainer] Email:
 pravahtheatre at gmail.com


 Bangalore
 Pratidwandi by Mayaavan
 A play based on Sunil Gangopadhyay's novel. Adapted and directed by Abhishek
 Majumdar. In English on Friday, 3 June and Saturday, 4 June at 7.30 pm. In
 Bengali on Sunday, 5 June at 7.30 pm at Ranga Shankara, Bangalore. Call
 9886491601 or email maayaavan at yahoogroups.com for information.


 ACTor's new production Sleuth at Ranga Shankara, Bangalore 7-12 June 2005.


 Chennai
 The Madras Players and EVAM present Evam Indrajit by Badal Sircar at Sivagami
 Petachi Auditorium, Chennai, on 4, 5, 11, 12 June at 7.15 pm and on 5 and 12
 June at 2.00 pm. Tickets Rs 300, 200 and 100. Call 98402 22363 for bookings or
 96102 96102 for door delivery.


 Kolkata
 Panel discussion on Changes in Theatre at G D Birla Sabhaghar on 9 June.
 Participants include Arun Mukherjee, Bibhash Chakravorty, Dolly Basu, Kaushik
 Sen, Suranjana Das Gupta. Moderator S.V. Raman.


 Swapnasandhanee presents Bhalo Rakhshas-er Galpo Every Saturday in June, 6.30
 pm, Sujata Sadan. Story Joya Mitra. Adaptation Ujwal Chattopadhyay. Director
 Kaushik Sen.


 Sundaram presents Operation Bhomragarh on 5 June at Girish Mancha, Kolkata, 7
 June at Nazrul Mancha, Kamarahati, 10 June at Madhusudan Mancha, Kolkata, 12
 June at Kala Mandir, Kolkata. All shows 6.30 pm. Playwright and director Manoj
 Mitra.


 to submit your announcements click here












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Registered office: 274 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 7DZ.
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http://www.oxfam.org.uk -- breaking news, emergency information, and
enhanced content is only a click away.


From guenther.schatter at medien.uni-weimar.de  Tue Jun  7 17:33:39 2005
From: guenther.schatter at medien.uni-weimar.de (Guenther Schatter)
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 14:03:39 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] Professorship in Experimental Radio
Message-ID: <42A58D1B.8010900@medien.uni-weimar.de>

Extension of the Application Deadline for a

W2 Professorship in Experimental Radio

Media Faculty of the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany

“Experimental Radio” refers to radio as a global phenomenon and includes 
"Hoerspiel" and auditory media, journalistic, literary, and musical 
reflection, sound objects and sound installation as well as artistic 
strategies, interventions and cooperative working practice. Internet, 
wireless culture, and the faculty’s own radio frequency provide possible 
tools and methods of approach. Through the adoption of current 
international tendencies and new technological means, countless 
experimental radio works can be tested, researched, and developed.

Requirements for the position include a completed university degree, 
university teaching experience, and relevant job experience in the area 
of radio art. An active cooperation with other projects within the 
university’s Faculty of Media Design - especially in the area of 
electroacoustic music and sound design, part of an existing cooperation 
between the Franz Liszt Academy of Music and the Media Faculty of the 
Bauhaus University - as well as the support of non-commercial radio 
initiatives on the regional, national and international level is expected.

General employment requirements are ruled in § 48 of the "Thueringer 
Hochschulgesetz".
Judicial employment classification complies with § 50 of the "Thueringer 
Hochschulgesetz".

Further information (mainly in German) is available at:
http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/mediengestaltung
http://ewww.uni-weimar.de/ausschr/m0606.de.html

The Bauhaus-University Weimar makes special efforts in employing and 
supporting women.
Severely disabled persons with equal professional qualification receive 
preferred consideration.

Applications should carry the reference number M/AP-03/05 and should be 
sent
together with the usual supporting documents to

Bauhaus-Universitaet Weimar
Dekan der Fakultaet Medien
Bauhausstraße 11
99421 Weimar
Germany

until 2005/06/30


From lists at shivamvij.com  Wed Jun  8 00:47:44 2005
From: lists at shivamvij.com (Shivam)
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 19:17:44 -0000
Subject: [Reader-list] [arkitectindia] Invitation: Poetry reading on 12 June
Message-ID: <d84rso+tlnp@eGroups.com>

Dear all,

On 3 June, the ZESTPoets list turned one and we are organising the
first ever ZESTPoets real-world poetry reading on:

 Saturday 12 June 2005, 5 pm
 at the National Coffee House, Connaught Place, Delhi.
 (Third Floor, Mohan Singh Place, near Rivoli Cinema)

You are welcome to walk in, preferably with poems in hand. Anyone can
read any poetry. You don't *have* to be a ZESTPoets member to attend,
but joining the group would not be a bad idea either:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/join

We have chosen CP because it is central and accessible to all; and
Coffee House on Anand Vivek Taneja's recommendation. Anand promises,
"Coffee House is used to impecunious poets hanging out for hours on
end and declaiming (usually terrible) free verse..."

So we'll try and rescue the place! You are welcome to bring along
friends and spouses. It would be nice if you could inform beforehand
that you will be there, by sending a brief email to
lists-at-shivamvij-dot-com.

See you there!
Shivam






 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/arkitectindia/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    arkitectindia-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
 




From mihir25 at indiatimes.com  Tue Jun  7 13:59:19 2005
From: mihir25 at indiatimes.com (mihir25)
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 13:59:19 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] When he was called Pandit Jinnah
Message-ID: <200506070833.OAA13673@WS0005.indiatimes.com>

When he was called Pandit Jinnah

RAJNISH Sharma
Hindustan Times
Lucknow, June 5

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5922_1389389,0015002500000000.htm

When the former Deputy PM L K Advani described Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a secular man during his early days, he wasn't quite off the mark as it is now a part of recorded history. Though his comments have raised a furore back home, few would know that this man was even referred to as Pandit Jinnah once. 
And if indifference to religion is any indicator of secularism, the Qaid-e-Azam was probably the biggest of all secular fundamentalists. 
There are two incidents hitherto not found in any history book which highlight this aspect of his character in a rather comical way which were narrated by none other than the eminent jurist and statesman, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru. It was told by Sir Tej to his granddaughter's husband Dr IM Chak, Retired Dy Director of CDRI during a meeting with his grandfather Pt. Prithvi Nath Chak, another legal giant of that time under whom Motilal Nehru learnt to practise law.
A contemporary of Sir Sapru, Jinnah along with him once visited Egypt during the month of Ramzaan. The Muslim porters there refused to carry their luggage saying they would only carry the luggage of a fellow Muslim. When Jinnah told them to go ahead, the porters decided to test them. They were asked to recite the kalma. While Sir Tej happily recited it with �lan, he had Jinnah looking sheepishly at him for the wine loving brown sahib didn't know a word of it! Sir Tej had a hard time convincing the porters that Jinnah, who was to later create a separate Islamic State, was indeed a Muslim!
The other incident saw these two friends sparring in the court of law in a case that involved elements of religion. The case saw Sir Tej quoting innumerable ayats from Quran in support of his arguments. Jinnah, though a formidable lawyer himself, drew a blank once again on this account. The next day local newspaper headlines screamed Pandit Jinnah vs Maulana Sapru!

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From aarti at sarai.net  Wed Jun  8 23:41:52 2005
From: aarti at sarai.net (aarti at sarai.net)
Date: Wed,  8 Jun 2005 20:11:52 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] harpers article
Message-ID: <cb983cad7e913e8fd7e3ddf0b2791395@sarai.net>

interesting article in harpers about the cuban model of agriculture.


http://www.harpers.org/TheCubaDiet.html

The Cuba Diet
What will you be eating when the revolution comes?
Posted on Monday, June 6, 2005. Originally from April 2005. By Bill McKibben.
Sources

The pictures hanging in Havana’s Museum of the Revolution document the
rise (or, depending on your perspective, the fall) of Cuba in the years
after Castro’s revolt, in 1959. On my visit there last summer, I walked
through gallery after gallery, gazing upon the stock images of socialist
glory: “anti-imperialist volunteers” fighting in Angola, Cuban boxers
winning Olympic medals, five patients at a time undergoing eye surgery
using a “method created by Soviet academician Fyodorov.” Mostly,
though, I saw pictures of farm equipment. “Manual operation is replaced
by mechanized processes,” read the caption under a picture of some heavy
Marxist metal cruising a vast field. Another caption boasted that by 1990,
seven bulk sugar terminals had been built, each with a shipping capacity of
75,000 tons a day. In true Soviet style, the Cubans were demonstrating a
deeply held (and to our eyes now almost kitschy) socialist belief that
salvation lay in the size of harvests, in the number of tractors, and in
the glorious heroic machinery that would straighten the tired backs of an
oppressed peasantry—and so I learned that day that within thirty years of
the people’s uprising, the sugarcane industry alone employed 2,850
sugarcane lifting machines, 12,278 tractors, 29,857 carts, and 4,277
combines.

Such was communism. But then I turned a corner and the pictures changed.
The sharply focused shots of combines and Olympians now were muddied, as if
Cubans had forgotten how to print photos or, as was more likely the case,
had run short of darkroom chemicals. I had reached the gallery of the
“Special Period.” That is to say, I had reached the point in Cuban
history where everything came undone. With the sudden collapse of the
Soviet Union, Cuba fell off a cliff of its own. All those carts and
combines had been the products of an insane “economics” underwritten by
the Eastern bloc for ideological purposes. Castro spent three decades
growing sugar and shipping it to Russia and East Germany, both of which
paid a price well above the world level, and both of which sent the ships
back to Havana filled with wheat, rice, and more tractors. When all that
disappeared, literally almost overnight,

Cuba had nowhere to turn. The United States, Cuba’s closest neighbor,
enforced a strict trade embargo (which it strengthened in 1992, and again
in 1996) and Cuba had next to no foreign exchange with anyone
else—certainly the new Russia no longer wanted to pay a premium on Cuban
sugar for the simple glory of supporting a tropical version of its Leninist
past.

In other words, Cuba became an island. Not just a real island, surrounded
by water, but something much rarer: an island outside the international
economic system, a moon base whose supply ships had suddenly stopped
coming. There were other deeply isolated places on the planet—North
Korea, say, or Burma—but not many. And so most observers waited
impatiently for the country to collapse. No island is an island, after all,
not in a global world. The New York Times ran a story in its Sunday
magazine titled “The Last Days of Castro’s Cuba”; in its editorial
column, the paper opined that “the Cuban dictator has painted himself
into his own corner. Fidel Castro’s reign deserves to end in home-grown
failure.” Without oil, even public transportation shut down—for many,
going to work meant a two-hour bike trip. Television shut off early in the
evening to save electricity; movie theaters went dark. People tried to
improvise their ways around shortages. “For drinking glasses we’d get
beer bottles and cut the necks off with wire,” one professor told me.
“We didn’t have razor blades, till someone in the city came up with a
way to resharpen old ones.”

But it’s hard to improvise food. So much of what Cubans had eaten had
come straight from Eastern Europe, and most of the rest was grown
industrial-style on big state farms. All those combines needed fuel and
spare parts, and all those big rows of grain and vegetables needed
pesticides and fertilizer—none of which were available. In 1989,
according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the
average Cuban was eating 3,000 calories per day. Four years later that
figure had fallen to 1,900. It was as if they suddenly had to skip one meal
a day, every day, week after month after year. The host of one cooking show
on the shortened TV schedule urged Cubans to fry up “steaks” made from
grapefruit peels covered in bread crumbs. “I lost twenty pounds
myself,” said Fernando Funes, a government agronomist.

Now, just by looking across the table, I saw that Fernando Funes had since
gained the twenty pounds back. In fact, he had a little paunch, as do many
Cuban men of a certain age. What happened was simple, if unexpected. Cuba
had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started growing its own
food again, growing it on small private farms and thousands of pocket-sized
urban market gardens—and, lacking chemicals and fertilizers, much of that
food became de facto organic. Somehow, the combination worked. Cubans have
as much food as they did before the Soviet Union collapsed. They’re still
short of meat, and the milk supply remains a real problem, but their
caloric intake has returned to normal—they’ve gotten that meal back.

In so doing they have created what may be the world’s largest working
model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as
heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping
vast quantities of food back and forth. They import some of their food from
abroad—a certain amount of rice from Vietnam, even some apples and beef
and such from the United States. But mostly they grow their own, and with
less ecological disruption than in most places. In recent years organic
farmers have visited the island in increasing numbers and celebrated its
accomplishment. As early as 1999 the Swedish parliament awarded the Organic
Farming Group its Right Livelihood Award, often styled the “alternative
Nobel,” and Peter Rosset, the former executive director of the American
advocacy group Food First, heralded the “potentially enormous
implications” of Cuba’s new agricultural system.

The island’s success may not carry any larger lesson. Cuban agriculture
isn’t economically competitive with the industrial farming exemplified by
a massive food producer across the Caribbean, mostly because it is highly
labor-intensive. Moreover, Cuba is a one-party police state filled with
political prisons, which may have some slight effect on its ability to
mobilize its people—in any case, hardly an “advantage” one would want
to emulate elsewhere.

There’s always at least the possibility, however, that larger sections of
the world might be in for “Special Periods” of their own. Climate
change, or the end of cheap oil, or the depletion of irrigation water, or
the chaos of really widespread terrorism, or some other malign force might
begin to make us pay more attention to the absolute bottom-line question of
how we get our dinner (a question that only a very few people, for a very
short period of time, have ever been able to ignore). No one’s predicting
a collapse like the one Cuba endured—probably no modern economy has ever
undergone such a shock. But if things got gradually harder? After all, our
planet is an island, too. It’s somehow useful to know that someone has
already run the experiment.

* * *

Villa Alamar was a planned community built outside Havana at the height of
the Soviet glory days; its crumbling, precast-concrete apartments would
look at home (though less mildewed) in Ljubljana or Omsk. Even the names
there speak of the past: a central square, for instance, is called Parque
Hanoi. But right next to the Parque Hanoi is the Vivero Organopónico
Alamar.

Organopónico is the Cuban term for any urban garden. (It seems that before
the special period began, the country had a few demonstration hydroponic
gardens, much bragged about in official propaganda and quickly abandoned
when the crisis hit. The high-tech-sounding name stuck, however, recycled
to reflect the new, humbler reality.) There are thousands of organopónicos
in Cuba, more than 200 in the Havana area alone, but the Vivero
Organopónico Alamar is especially beautiful: a few acres of vegetables
attached to a shady yard packed with potted plants for sale, birds in
wicker cages, a cafeteria, and a small market where a steady line of local
people come to buy tomatoes, lettuce, oregano, potatoes—twenty-five crops
were listed on the blackboard the day I visited—for their supper.
Sixty-four people farm this tiny spread. Their chief is Miguel Salcines
López, a tall, middle-aged, intense, and quite delightful man.

“This land was slated for a hospital and sports complex,” he said,
leading me quickly through his tiny empire. “But when the food crisis
came, the government decided this was more important,” and they let
Salcines begin his cooperative. “I was an agronomic engineer before
that,” he said. “I was fat, a functionary. I was a bureaucrat.” Now
he is not. Most of his farm is what we would call organic—indeed,
Salcines showed off a pyramidal mini-greenhouse in which he raises
seedlings, in the belief that its shape “focuses energy.” Magnets on
his irrigation lines, he believes, help “reduce the surface tension” of
the water—give him a ponytail and he’d fit right in at the Marin
farmers’ market. Taking a more “traditional” organic approach,
Salcines has also planted basil and marigolds at the row ends to attract
beneficial insects, and he rotates sweet potato through the rows every few
plantings to cleanse the soil; he’s even got neem trees to supply natural
pesticides. But Salcines is not obsessive even about organicity. Like
gardeners everywhere, he has trouble with potato bugs, and he doesn’t
hesitate to use man-made pesticide to fight them. He doesn’t use
artificial fertilizer, both because it is expensive and because he
doesn’t need it—indeed, the garden makes money selling its own compost,
produced with the help of millions of worms (“California Reds”) in a
long series of shaded trenches.

While we ate rice and beans and salad and a little chicken, Salcines laid
out the finances of his cooperative farm. For the last six months, he said,
the government demanded that the organopónico produce 835,000 pesos’
worth of food. They actually produced more than a million pesos’ worth.
Writing quickly on a piece of scrap paper, Salcines predicted that the
profit for the whole year would be 393,000 pesos. Half of that he would
reinvest in enlarging the farm; the rest would go into a profit-sharing
plan. It’s not an immense sum when divided among sixty-four
workers—about $150—but for Cuban workers this is considered a good job
indeed. A blackboard above the lunch line reminded employees what their
monthly share of the profit would be: depending on how long they’d been
at the farm, and how well they produced, they would get 291 pesos this
month, almost doubling their base salary. The people worked hard, and if
they didn’t their colleagues didn’t tolerate them.

What is happening at the Vivero Organopónico Alamar certainly isn’t
unfettered capitalism, but it’s not exactly collective farming either.
Mostly it’s incredibly productive—sixty-four people earn a reasonable
living on this small site, and the surrounding neighbors get an awful lot
of their diet from its carefully tended rows. You see the same kind of
production all over the city—every formerly vacant lot in Havana seems to
be a small farm. The city grew 300,000 tons of food last year, nearly its
entire vegetable supply and more than a token amount of its rice and meat,
said Egidio Páez Medina, who oversees the organopónicos from a small
office on a highway at the edge of town. “Tens of thousands of people are
employed. And they get good money, as much as a thousand pesos a month.
When I’m done with this job I’m going to start farming myself—my pay
will double.” On average, Páez said, each square meter of urban farm
produces five kilograms of food a year. That’s a lot. (And it’s not
just cabbage and spinach; each farm also seems to have at least one row of
spearmint, an essential ingredient for the mojito.)

So Cuba—happy healthy miracle. Of course, Human Rights Watch, in its most
recent report, notes that the government “restricts nearly all avenues of
political dissent,” “severely curtails basic rights to free
expression,” and that “the government’s intolerance of dissenting
voices intensified considerably in 2003.” It’s as if you went to Whole
Foods and noticed a guy over by the soymilk with a truncheon. Cuba is a
weird political system all its own, one that’s been headed by the same
guy for forty-five years. And the nature of that system, and that guy, had
something to do with the way the country responded to its crisis.

For one thing, Castro’s Cuba was so rigidly (and unproductively)
socialist that simply by slightly loosening the screws on free enterprise
it was able to liberate all kinds of pent-up energy. Philip Peters, a Cuba
analyst at the conservative Lexington Institute, has documented how the
country redistributed as much as two thirds of state lands to cooperatives
and individual farmers and, as with the organopónico in Alamar, let them
sell their surplus above a certain quota. There’s no obvious name for
this system. It’s a lot like sharecropping, and it shares certain key
features with, say, serfdom, not to mention high feudalism. It is not free
in any of the ways we use the word—who the hell wants to say thank you to
the government for “allowing” you to sell your “surplus”? But
it’s also different from monolithic state communism.

In 1995, as the program geared up, the markets were selling 390 million
pounds of produce; sales volume tripled in the next three years. Now the
markets bustle, stacked deep with shiny heaps of bananas and dried beans,
mangos and tomatoes. But the prices, though they’ve dropped over the
years, are still beyond the reach of the poorest Cubans. And the
government, which still sells every citizen a basic monthly food ration for
just a few pesos, has also tried to reregulate some of the trade at the
farmers’ markets, fearing they were creating a two-tier system. “It’s
not reform like you’ve seen in China, where they’re devolving a lot of
economic decision making out to the private sector,” Peters said. “They
made a decision to graft some market mechanisms onto what remains a fairly
statist model. It could work better. But it has worked.”

* * *

Fidel Castro, as even his fiercest opponents would admit, has almost from
the day he took power spent lavishly on the country’s educational system.
Cuba’s ratio of teachers to students is akin to Sweden’s; people who
want to go to college go to college. Which turns out to be important,
because farming, especially organic farming, especially when you’re not
used to doing it, is no simple task. You don’t just tear down the fence
around the vacant lot and hand someone a hoe, quoting him some Maoist
couplet about the inevitable victory of the worker. The soil’s no good at
first, the bugs can’t wait to attack. You need information to make a go
of it. To a very large extent, the rise of Cuba’s semi-organic
agriculture is almost as much an invention of science and technology as the
high-input tractor farming it replaced, which is another thing that makes
this story so odd.

“I came to Havana at the time of the revolution, in 1960, to start
university,” said Fernando Funes, who now leads the national Pasture and
Forage Research Unit. “We went from 18,000 university students before the
revolution to 200,000 after, and a big proportion were in agricultural
careers. People specialized in soil fertility, or they specialized in
pesticides. They were very specialized. Probably too specialized. But
yields were going up.” Yields were going up because of the wildly
high-input farming. In the town of Nuevo Gerona, for instance, there is a
statue of a cow named White Udder, descended from a line of Canadian
Holsteins. In the early 1980s she was the most productive cow on the face
of the earth, giving 110 liters of milk a day, 27,000 liters in a single
lactation. Guinness certified her geysers of milk. Fidel journeyed out to
the countryside to lovingly stroke her hide. She was a paragon of
scientific management, with a carefully controlled diet of grain
concentrates. Most of that grain, however, came from abroad (“this is too
hot to be good grain country,” Funes said). White Udder was a kept woman.
To anyone with a ledger book her copious flow was entirely uneconomic, a
testimony to the kinky economics of farm subsidies.

“In that old system, it took ten or fifteen or twenty units of energy to
produce one unit of food energy,” Funes said. “At first we didn’t
care so much about economics—we had to produce no matter what.” Even in
the salad days of Soviet-backed agriculture, however, some of the local
agronomists were beginning to think the whole system was slightly insane.
“We were realizing just how inefficient it was. So a few of us were
looking for other ways. In cattle we began to look at things like using
legumes to fix nitrogen in the pasture so we could cut down on
fertilizer,” Funes said. And Cuba was inefficient in more than its use of
energy. Out at the Agrarian University of Havana on the city’s outskirts,
agriculture professor Nilda Pérez Consuegra remembers how a few of her
colleagues began as early as the 1970s to notice that the massive
“calendar spraying” of pesticides was breeding insect resistance. They
began working on developing strains of bacteria and experimenting with
raising beneficial insects.

They could do nothing to forestall the collapse of the early 1990s, though.
White Udder’s descendants simply died in the fields, unable to survive on
the tropical grasses that had once sustained the native cattle. “We lost
tens of thousands of animals. And even if they survived, they couldn’t
produce anything like the same kind of milk once there was no more
grain—seven or eight liters a day if we were lucky,” Funes said. Fairly
quickly, however, the agricultural scientists began fanning out around the
country to help organize a recovery. They worked without much in the way of
resources, but they found ways.

* * *

One afternoon, near an organopónico in central Havana, I knocked on the
door of a small two-room office, the local Center for Reproduction of
Entomophages and Entomopathogens. There are 280 such offices spread around
the country, each manned by one or two agronomists. Here, Jorge Padrón, a
heavyset and earnest fellow, was working with an ancient Soviet
refrigerator and autoclave (the writing on the gauges was in Cyrillic) and
perhaps three hundred glass beakers with cotton gauze stoppers. Farmers and
backyard gardeners from around the district would bring him sick plants,
and he’d look at them under the microscope and tell them what to do.
Perhaps he’d hand them a test tube full of a trichoderma fungus, which
he’d grown on a medium of residue from sugarcane processing, and tell
them to germinate the seed in a dilute solution; maybe he’d pull a vial
of some natural bacteria—verticillium lecanii or beauveria
bassiana—from a rusty coffee can. “It is easier to use chemicals. You
see some trouble in your tomatoes, and chemicals take care of it right
away,” he said. Over the long run, though, thinking about the whole
system yields real benefits. “Our work is really about preparing the
fields so plants will be stronger. But it works.” It is the reverse, that
is, of the Green Revolution that spread across the globe in the 1960s, an
industrialization of the food system that relied on irrigation, oil (both
for shipping and fertilization), and the massive application of chemicals
to counter every problem.

The localized application of research practiced in Cuba has fallen by the
wayside in countries where corporate agriculture holds sway. I remember
visiting a man in New Hampshire who was raising organic apples for his
cider mill. Apples are host to a wide variety of pests and blights, and if
you want advice about what chemical to spray on them, the local
agricultural extension agent has one pamphlet after another with the
answers, at least in part, because pesticide companies like Monsanto fund
huge amounts of the research that goes on at the land-grant universities.
But no one could tell my poor orchardist anything about how to organically
control the pests on his apples, even though there must have been a huge
body of such knowledge once upon a time, and he ended up relying on a
beautifully illustrated volume published in the 1890s. In Cuba, however,
all the equivalents of Texas A&M or the University of Nebraska are filled
with students looking at antagonist fungi, lion-ant production for sweet
potato weevil control, how to intercrop tomatoes and sesame to control the
tobacco whitefly, how much yield grows when you mix green beans and cassava
in the same rows (60 percent), what happens to plantain production when you
cut back on the fertilizer and substitute a natural bacterium called A.
chroococcum (it stays the same), how much you can reduce fertilizer on
potatoes if you grow a rotation of jack beans to fix nitrogen (75 percent),
and on and on and on. “At first we had all kinds of problems,” said a
Japanese-Cuban organoponicist named Olga Oye Gómez, who grows two acres of
specialty crops that Cubans are only now starting to eat: broccoli,
cauliflower, and the like. “We lost lots of harvests. But the engineers
came and showed us the right biopesticides. Every year we get a little
better.”

Not every problem requires a Ph.D. I visited Olga’s farm in midsummer,
when her rows were under siege from slugs, a problem for which the Cuban
solution is the same as in my own New England tomato patch: a saucer full
of beer. In fact, since the pressure is always on to reduce the use of
expensive techniques, there’s a premium on old-fashioned answers.
Consider the question of how you plow a field when the tractor that you
used to use requires oil you can’t afford and spare parts you can’t
obtain. Cuba—which in the 1980s had more tractors per hectare than
California, according to Nilda Pérez—suddenly found itself relying on
the very oxen it once had scorned as emblems of its peasant past. There
were perhaps 50,000 teams of the animals left in Cuba in 1990, and maybe
that many farmers who still knew how to use them. “None of the large
state farms or even the mechanized cooperatives had the necessary
infrastructure to incorporate animal traction,” wrote Arcadio Ríos, of
the Agricultural Mechanization Research Institute, in a volume titled
Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance. “Pasture and feed production did
not exist on site; and at first there were problems of feed
transportation.” Veterinarians were not up on their oxen therapy.

But that changed. Ríos’s institute developed a new multi-plow for
plowing, harrowing, riding, and tilling, specially designed not “to
invert the topsoil layer” and decrease fertility. Harness shops were set
up to start producing reins and yokes, and the number of blacksmith shops
quintupled. The ministry of agriculture stopped slaughtering oxen for food,
and “essentially all the bulls in good physical condition were selected
and delivered to cooperative and state farms.” Oxen demonstrations were
held across the country. (The socialist love of exact statistics has not
waned, so it can be said that in 1997 alone, 2,344 oxen events took place,
drawing 64,279 participants.) By the millennium there were 400,000 oxen
teams plying the country’s fields. And one big result, according to a
score of Ph.D. theses, is a dramatic reduction in soil compaction, as
hooves replaced tires. “Across the country we see dry soils turning
healthier, loamier,” Professor Pérez said. Soon an ambitious young Cuban
will be able to get a master’s degree in oxen management.

* * *

One question is: How resilient is the new Cuban agriculture? Despite ever
tougher restrictions on U.S. travel and remittances from relatives, the
country has managed to patch together a pretty robust tourist industry in
recent years: Havana’s private restaurants fill nightly with Canadians
and Germans. The government’s investment in the pharmaceutical industry
appears to be paying off, too, and now people who are fed by ox teams are
producing genetically engineered medicines at some of the world’s more
advanced labs. Foreign exchange is beginning to flow once more; already
many of the bicycles in the streets have been replaced by buses and
motorbikes and Renaults. Cuba is still the most unconsumer place I’ve
ever been—there’s even less to buy than in the old Soviet Union—but
sooner or later Castro will die. What then?

Most of the farmers and agronomists I interviewed professed conviction that
the agricultural changes ran so deep they would never be eroded. Pérez,
however, did allow that there were a lot of younger oxen drivers who
yearned to return to the cockpits of big tractors, and according to news
reports some of the country’s genetic engineers are trying to clone White
Udder herself from leftover tissue. If Cuba simply opens to the world
economy—if Castro gets his professed wish and the U.S. embargo simply
disappears, replaced by a free-trade regime—it’s very hard to see how
the sustainable farming would survive for long. We use pesticides and
fertilizers because they make for incredibly cheap food. None of that
dipping the seedling roots in some bacillus solution, or creeping along the
tomato rows looking for aphids, or taking the oxen off to be shoed. Our
industrial agriculture—at least as heavily subsidized by Washington as
Cuba’s farming once was subsidized by Moscow—simply overwhelms its
neighbors. For instance, consider Mexico and corn. Not long ago the
journalist Michael Pollan told the story of what happened when NAFTA opened
that country’s markets to a flood of cheap, heavily subsidized U.S.
maize: the price fell by half, and 1.3 million small farmers were put out
of business, forced to sell their land to larger, more corporate farms that
could hope to compete by mechanizing (and lobbying for subsidies of their
own). A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace enumerated
the environmental costs: fertilizer runoff suffocating the Sea of Cortéz,
water shortages getting worse as large-scale irrigation booms. Genetically
modified corn varieties from the United States are contaminating the
original strains of the crop, which began in southern Mexico.

Cuba already buys a certain amount of food from the United States, under an
exemption from the embargo passed during the Clinton Administration. So
far, though, the buying is mostly strategic, spread around the country in
an effort to build political support for a total end to the embargo. No one
ever accused the Cubans of being dumb, said Peters of the Lexington
Institute. “They know the congressional district that every apple, every
chicken leg, every grain of wheat, comes from.” But that trickle, in a
free-trading, post-Castro Cuba, would likely become, as in Mexico and
virtually every other country on earth, a torrent, and one that would wash
away much of the country’s agricultural experiment.

* * *

You can also ask the question in reverse, though: Does the Cuban experiment
mean anything for the rest of the world? An agronomist would call the
country’s farming “low-input,” the reverse of the Green Revolution
model, with its reliance on irrigation, oil, and chemistry. If we’re
running out of water in lots of places (the water table beneath China and
India’s grain-growing plains is reportedly dropping by meters every
year), and if the oil and natural gas used to make fertilizer and run our
megafarms are changing the climate (or running out), and if the pesticides
are poisoning farmers and killing other organisms, and if everything at the
Stop & Shop has traveled across a continent to get there and tastes pretty
much like crap, might there be some real future for low-input farming for
the rest of us? Or are its yields simply too low? Would we all starve
without the supermarket and the corporate farm?

It’s not a question academics have devoted a great deal of attention
to—who would pay to sponsor the research? And some clearly think the
question isn’t even worth raising. Dennis Avery, director of global-food
issues at the conservative Hudson Institute, compared Cuba with China
during the Great Leap Forward: “Instead of building fertilizer factories,
Mao told farmers to go get leaves and branches from the hillsides to mulch
the rice paddies. It produced the worst soil erosion China has seen.”
Raising the planet’s crops organically would mean “you’d need the
manure from seven or eight billion cattle; you’d lose most of the
world’s wildlife because you’d have to clear all the forests.”

But strict organic agriculture isn’t what the Cubans practice (remember
those pesticides for the potato bugs). “If you’re going to grow
irrigated rice, you’ll almost always need some fertilizer,” said Jules
Pretty, a professor at the University of Essex’s Department of Biological
Sciences, who has looked at sustainable agriculture in fields around the
world. “The problem is being judicious and careful.” It’s very clear,
he added, “that Cuba is not an anomaly. All around the world small-scale
successes are being scaled up to regional level.” Farmers in northeast
Thailand, for instance, suffered when their rice markets disappeared in the
Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. “They’d borrowed money to
invest in ‘modern agriculture,’ but they couldn’t get the price they
needed. A movement emerged, farmers saying, ‘Maybe we should just
concentrate on local markets, and not grow for Bangkok, not for other
countries.’ They’ve started using a wide range of sustainability
approaches—polyculture, tree crops and agroforestry, fish ponds. One
hundred and fifty thousand farmers have made the shift in the last three
years.”

Almost certainly, he said, such schemes are as productive as the
monocultures they replaced. “Rice production goes down, but the
production of all sorts of other things, like leafy vegetables, goes up.”
And simply cutting way down on the costs of pesticides turns many bankrupt
peasants solvent. “The farmer field schools began in Indonesia, with rice
growers showing one another how to manage their paddies to look after
beneficial insects,” just the kinds of predators the Cubans were growing
in their low-tech labs. “There’s been a huge decrease in costs and not
much of a change in yields.”

And what about the heartlands of industrial agriculture, the U.S. plains,
for instance? “So much depends on how you measure efficiency,” Pretty
said. “You don’t get something for nothing.” Cheap fertilizer and
pesticide displace more expensive labor and knowledge—that’s why 219
American farms have gone under every day for the last fifty years and yet
we’re producing ever more grain and a loaf of bread might as well be
free. On the other hand, there are those bereft Midwest counties. And the
plumes of pesticide poison spreading through groundwater. And the dead zone
in the Gulf of Mexico into which the tide of nitrogen washes each planting
season. And the cloud of carbon dioxide that puffs out from the top of the
fertilizer factories. If you took those things seriously, you might decide
that having one percent of your population farming was not such a wondrous
feat after all.

* * *

The American model of agriculture is pretty much what people mean when they
talk about the Green Revolution: high-yielding crop varieties, planted in
large monocultures, bathed in the nurturing flow of petrochemicals, often
supported by government subsidy, designed to offer low-priced food in
sufficient quantity to feed billions. Despite its friendly moniker, many
environmentalists and development activists around the planet have grown to
despair about everything the Green Revolution stands for. Like Pretty, they
propose a lowercase greener counterrevolution: endlessly diverse, employing
the insights of ecology instead of the brute force of chemistry, designed
to feed people but also keep them on the land. And they have some allies
even in the rich countries—that’s who fills the stalls at the
farmers’ markets blooming across North America.

But those farmers’ markets are still a minuscule leaf on the giant stalk
of corporate agribusiness, and it’s not clear that, for all the paeans to
the savor of a local tomato, they’ll ever amount to much more. Such
efforts are easily co-opted—when organic produce started to take off, for
instance, industrial growers soon took over much of the business, planting
endless monoculture rows of organic lettuce that in every respect, save the
lack of pesticides, mirrored all the flaws of conventional agriculture. (By
some calculations, the average bite of organic food at your supermarket has
traveled even farther than the 1,500-mile journey taken by the average bite
of conventional produce.) That is to say, in a world where we’re eager
for the lowest possible price, it’s extremely difficult to do anything
unconventional on a scale large enough to matter.

And it might be just as hard in Cuba were Cuba free. I mean, would Salcines
be able to pay sixty-four people to man his farm or would he have to
replace most of them with chemicals? If he didn’t, would his customers
pay higher prices for his produce or would they prefer lower-cost lettuce
arriving from California’s Imperial Valley? Would he be able to hold on
to his land or would there be some more profitable use for it? For that
matter, would many people want to work on his farm if they had a real range
of options? In a free political system, would the power of, say, pesticide
suppliers endanger the government subsidy for producing predatory insects
in local labs? Would Cuba not, in a matter of several growing seasons, look
a lot like the rest of the world? Does an organopónico depend on a fixed
ballot?

There’s clearly something inherently destructive about an authoritarian
society—it’s soul-destroying, if nothing else. Although many of the
Cubans I met were in some sense proud of having stood up to the Yanquis for
four decades, Cuba was not an overwhelmingly happy place. Weary, I’d say.
Waiting for a more normal place in the world. And poor, much too poor. Is
it also possible, though, that there’s something inherently destructive
about a globalized free-market society—that the eternal race for
efficiency, when raised to a planetary scale, damages the environment, and
perhaps the community, and perhaps even the taste of a carrot? Is it
possible that markets, at least for food, may work better when they’re
smaller and more isolated? The next few decades may be about answering that
question. It’s already been engaged in Europe, where people are really
debating subsidies for small farmers, and whether or not they want the
next, genetically modified, stage of the Green Revolution, and how much
it’s worth paying for Slow Food. It’s been engaged in parts of the
Third World, where in India peasants threw out the country’s most
aggressive free-marketeers in the last election, sensing that the shape of
their lives was under assault. Not everyone is happy with the set of
possibilities that the multinational corporate world provides. People are
beginning to feel around for other choices. The world isn’t going to look
like Cuba—Cuba won’t look like Cuba once Cubans have some say in the
matter. But it may not necessarily look like Nebraska either.

* * *

The choices are about values,” Pretty said. Which is true, at least for
us, at least for the moment. And when the choices are about values, we
generally pick the easiest and cheapest way, the one that requires thinking
the least. Inertia is our value above all others. Inertia was the one
option the Cubans didn’t have; they needed that meal a day back, and
given that Castro was unwilling to let loose the reins, they had a limited
number of choices about how to get it. “In some ways the special period
was a gift to us,” said Funes, the forage expert, the guy who lost twenty
pounds, the guy who went from thinking about White Udder to thinking about
oxen teams. “It made it easier because we had no choice. Or we did, but
the choice was will we cry or will we work. There was a strong desire to
lie down and cry, but we decided to do things instead.”



From amitrbasu50 at yahoo.co.in  Wed Jun  8 11:31:46 2005
From: amitrbasu50 at yahoo.co.in (Amit Basu)
Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 07:01:46 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Reader-list] Kolkata Sarai Fellows Meet 5 May 2005
In-Reply-To: <299c778405060712507034474d@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20050608060146.81006.qmail@web8509.mail.in.yahoo.com>


On Sunday I went to meet other Sarai Fellows at Udipi Restaurant, near Deshapriya Park. After a few mails, some of us decided that we will meet here at 5.00 pm. When I reached there I saw Vasudha was sitting with a paper written "Sarai Meet" placed on the table . Her residence is close. She said only Madhuja informed that she wont be able to make it. Myself and Vasudha sat there for more than an hour speculating what are the pecularities of Kolkata fellows that unlike Mumbai and Delhi they are not keen to meet others and share different ideas, views and concern. Not even on the reader-list we find any comments on this issue! Both of us could not draw any conclusion and acknowledged that, this could be an issue worth researching. As the old joke goes about the Calcuttans that 'only two persons are good enough to start a Union'.

So we concluded our meeting with the decision to meet at Udipi Restaurant on every Second Saturday at 5.00 pm.  And we hope that on 9 July more fellows will join us. 

Amit


		
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From geert at xs4all.nl  Thu Jun  9 02:29:55 2005
From: geert at xs4all.nl (Geert Lovink [c])
Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 22:59:55 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] Incommunicado 05: information technology for
	everybody else
	(Amsterdam, June 15-17)  (Modified by Geert Lovink) [u]
Message-ID: <fdafd750e83ddba652915607c930cc08@xs4all.nl>

Incommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else

(final program)

June 15: Opening Night
June 16-17: Working Conference
De Balie, Amsterdam

Organization: Institute of Network Cultures, together with Waag Society 
& Sarai.
Supported by: Hivos, Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and IICD.

Information and registration: www.incommunicado.info/conference
Wiki: http://www.networkcultures.org/wiki/

Incommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else

Incommunicado 05 is a two-day working conference working towards  a 
critical survey of the current state of 'info-development', also known 
as the catchy acronym 'ICT4D' (ICT for development). Before the recent 
“flattening of the world” (Thomas Friedman, 2005), most computer 
networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and 
info-development mostly involved rather technical matters of knowledge 
and technology transfer from North to South. While still widely (and 
even wildly) talked about, the assumption of a 'digital divide' that 
follows this familiar geography of development has turned out to be too 
simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global 
info-politics, is emerging.

Different actors continue to promote different -and competing- visions 
of 'info-development'.New info-economies like Brazil, China, and India 
have suddenly emerged and are forming south-south alliances that 
challenge our sense of what 'development' is all 
about. Development-oriented systems (like simputers and MIT’'s $100 
computer system) emerge and re-emerge. The corporate sector suddenly 
discovers the “bottom of the pyramid” and community computing, in their 
drive for markets beyond those now increasingly stagnant in the OECD 
countries, and among the prosperous and professional in the rest of the 
world.

However tempting, these new developments and particularly the emerging 
alliances  should not be romanticized in terms of a new 
tri-continentalism. Brazil's info-geopolitical forays are anything but 
selfless. And while China's investments in Africa have already been 
compared to the 19th century scramble for Africa led by European 
colonial powers, many expect it to be soon exporting its 'Golden 
Shield' surveillance technologies to states such as Vietnam, North 
Korea, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, for all of whom it is acting  as a 
regional internet access provider.

However, the cohesion of the new south-south alliances originates in 
part from the shared resistance to an emergent Euro-American front on 
 intellectual property rights (IPR) and related matters. In parallel, 
and in eager response to the newfound enthusiasm for ICT4D through 
Public-Private Partnerships (fueled largely by the ongoing UN financial 
crisis and the broader neo-liberal privatization agenda), major 
info-corporations are advertising themselves as “partners in 
development” and are promoting ICTs as the vehicles for “good 
governance and effective service delivery” („e-governance“), but also 
to stake out their own commercial claims, crowd out public-sector 
alternatives, and subvert south-south cooperation.

Ambitious info-development projects struggle to find a role for 
themselves either as basic infrastructures supportive of all other 
development activity or as complement to  older forms of infrastructure 
and service -oriented development. And often they are expected to meet 
a host of often contradictory aims: alleviating info-poverty, 
catapulting peasants into the information age, promoting local ICT and 
knowledge based industries, or facilitating democratization through 
increased participation and local empowerment. Meanwhile, of course, 
info-development also facilitates transnational corporate efforts to 
offshore IT-related jobs and services in ever-shorter cycles of 
transposition, leaving local 'stakeholders' at a loss as to whether or 
not scarce public subsidies should even be used to attract and retain 
industries likely to move on anyway.

Info-development creates new conflicts, putting communities in 
competition with each other. But it also creates new alliances. Below 
the traditional thresholds of sovereignty, grassroots efforts are 
calling into question the entire IPR regime of and access restrictions 
on which commercial info-development is based. Commons- or 
open-source-oriented organizations across the world seem more likely to 
receive support from southern than from northern states, and these 
coalitions, too, are challenging northern states on their self-serving 
commitment to IPR and their dominance of key info-political 
organizations.
Meanwhile lesser-known members of the UN family, such as the World 
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), are beginning to feel the 
heat brought on by “no-logo”-style campaigns that are targeting the 
entire range of public international actors and bring an agenda of 
accountability to the institutions of multilateral governance. As a 
response to the increasingly contradictory (dare one say confused) 
info-political activities of the major agencies like the ITU, UNDP, 
UNESCO, and WIPO, even the UN  has begun to lose its aura. As public 
tagging of a perceived positive UN role in governance, humanitarianism, 
and peacekeeping shifts towards corruption and inter-agency rivalries, 
(carefully guided by neo-conservative think-tanks), the ensemble of 
supra-state apparatuses supposed to sustain visions of a post-imperial 
order suddenly seems mired in a frightening family dispute that 
threatens to spin out of control.

In spite of the neat sociological grammar of declarations and 
manifestoes, increasingly hybrid actors no longer follow the simple 
schema of state, market, or civil society, but engage in cross-sector 
alliances. Responding to the crisis of older top-down approaches to 
development, corporations and aid donors are increasingly bypassing 
states and international agencies to work directly with smaller 
non-governmental organizations. And while national and international 
development agencies now have to defend their activity against both 
pro- and anti-neo-liberal critics, info-NGOs participating in 
public-private partnerships and info-capitalist ventures suddenly find 
themselves in the midst of another heated controversy over their new 
role as junior partner of states and corporations. Responding by 
stepping up their own brand-protection and engaging in professional 
reputation management, major NGOs even conclude that it is no longer 
their organizational culture but their agenda alone that differentiates 
them from corporate actors.

The spectacular world summit on the information society (WSIS), barely 
noticed by the mainstream media but already uniting cyber-libertarians 
afraid of UN interventions in key questions of internet governance, 
will conclude later this year. While many info-activists are assessing 
(and re-assessing) the hidden cost of invitations to sit at 
'multi-stakeholder' tables along with mega-NGOs and corporate 
associations, others are already refusing to allow an organizational 
incorporation of grassroots or subaltern agendas into the managed 
consensus being built around the dynamic of an 'international civil 
(information) society'. Mirroring the withdrawal from traditional 
mechanisms of political participation, there is growing disaffection 
with multilateralism as the necessary default perspective for any 
counter-imperial politics. Unwilling to accept the idioms of 
sovereignty, some even abandon the very logic of summits and 
counter-summits to articulate post-sovereign perspectives.

 And alongside this of course, is the day to day reality of those at 
the grassroots and most importantly working as policy, research and 
practice info-intermediaries to find ways of using (and remaking) ICTs 
to be of benefit to the “multitudes”.order profitability) have used 
ICTs to transform the global networks of commercial production and 
supply. The challenge for ICT4D is not to ensure that everyone in the 
world has 24/7 access to .xxx and “Texas hold’em” but that the 
opportunities that the Walmarts have so successfully and creatively 
seized are similarly the basis for a transformation towards creative 
and open access opportunities for transforming the life chances and 
lived realities of everybody else.

 History

The 'incommunicado' project started early 2004 as a web research 
resource combined with an email-based mailinglist. It was founded by 
Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink, who had earlier collaborated during the 
European Make World and Neuro events, that attempted to develop 
critical work around new media and no border issues.

Incommunicado didn't start out of the blue. It was a merger from two 
lists, Solaris, founded late 2001 by Geert Lovink and Michael Gurstein, 
and a defunct G8 Dotforce list. The Solaris email list was an early 
attempt to develop a critical discourse around the ICT4D policy complex 
and was inspired by the then-newly opened centre Sarai in Delhi, a 
place that embodies new cultural practices beyond the classic 
development models. Beginning in late 2003, the first World Summit on 
the Information Society accelerated the awareness that critical voices, 
inside and outside the Machine, had to gather in order to reflect on 
the circulating metaphors and rhetoric. Poor outcomes of the 
alternative 'WSIS, We Seize' campaign, which positioned itself outside 
of the world conference spectacle, proved that there is a great need 
for a radical critique of notions such as 'information society', 
'e-governance', 'digital divide' or 'civil society'.

At the moment there are 300+ subscribers to the list, and at any given 
moment in time 50-70 users are either reading the incommunicado 
rss-news or searching the collaborative weblog, whose topic areas 
include network(ed) ecologies, ICT for Development, internet 
governance, analyses of the NGO sector, and emerging South-South 
relations. So far, incommunicado has been an exclusively online 
resource and list community, consisting of researchers, ICT 
practitioners, activists and social entrepreneurs. The event in 
Amsterdam in June 2005 will be the first meeting of this emerging 
network. Future plans include the launch of an open-access journal or 
an incommunicado reader.

On Being Incommunicado

The term incommunicado generally refers to a state of being without the 
means or rights to communicate, especially in the case of incommunicado 
detention and the threat of massive human rights violations. The latter 
also implies an extra-judicial space of exception, where torture, 
executions and "disappearances" occur - all-too-frequently in the lives 
of journalists and media activists, online or offline, across the 
world.

After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bilateral order, 
the discourse of human rights has become an important placeholder for 
agendas of social change and transformation that are no longer 
articulated in third worldist or tricontinentalist terms. Yet despite 
the universalizing implications of human rights, they can also invoke 
and retrieve the complex legacy of specific anti-colonial and 
third-worldist perspectives that continue to inform contemporary 
visions of a different information and communication order.

The term 'incommunicado' was chosen as the name for this research 
network to acknowledge that while questions related to info-development 
and info-politics are often explored in a broader human rights context, 
this does not imply embracing a politics of rights as such. Instead, 
one of the aims of the incommunicado project is to explore tactical 
mobilizations of rights-based claims to access, communication, or 
information, but also the limits of any politics of rights, its 
concepts, and its absolutization as a political perspective.

---

Final program:

::Wednesday, June 15::

Opening Night
20.00-22.30 Main Hall

Situating the workshop agenda in the broader context of the UN Summit 
on the Information Society (WSIS) as well as the controversy over an 
emerging international civil society, the public event on Wednesday 
night will introduce the topics of the work conference to a broader 
non-specialist audience. Offering a working definition of 
info-development/ICT4D, the public event will raise some of the key 
conference issues, including the extent to which this field is indeed 
characterized by a shift from North-South to South-South alliances and 
the role played by info-development NGOs.

Chair: Tracey Naughton (Chair WSIS Media Caucus, South Africa)

With contributions by:
Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink, introduction to the Incommunicado project
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society, 
Nigeria) : The mirage of South-South cooperation in ICT4D
Jeebesh Bagchi (Sarai New Media Initiative, India): Forgetting 
Development: Cybermohalla Practices and Information Networks
Bernardo Sorj (University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): Internet in the 
Slums
Anthony Mwaniki (One World, Kenya): Mobile Technology - A Tool For 
Development?
Partha Pratim Sarkar  (Bytesforall, Bangladesh): ICTs at the grassroots 
and intermediaries: who empowers whom?
Anriette Esterhuysen (APC, South Africa)

::Thursday, June 16::

Plenary Lecture 1: Introduction and Overview
10.00-11.00 Main Hall

ICT4D is widely considered a key element in processes of 
democratization, good governance, and poverty alleviation. This plenary 
will situate the rise of ICT4D in the context of the transformation of 
development as a whole, and outline individual workshop agendas.

Chair: Geert Lovink (INC, NL)

With contributions by:
Roberto Verzola (sustainable agriculture campaigner, Manilla): The 
emerging information economy. Respondant: Heimo Claassen (researcher, 
Brussels)
Monica Narula  (Sarai New Media Initiative, Delhi): The Delhi 
decleration, a new context for new media

Workshop A1: NGOs in Info-Development
11.30-13.00 Main Hall

We have become used to thinking of NGOs as 'natural' development 
actors. But their presence is itself indicative of a fundamental 
transformation of an originally state-centered development regime, and 
their growing influence raises difficult issues regarding their 
relationship to state and corporate actors, but also regarding their 
self-perception as representatives of civic and grassroots interests. 
Following a survey of some of the major info-development NGOs and 
networks, this workshop will address questions related to the politics 
of representation pursued by these actors: why should they sit at a 
table with governments and international agencies, and who is 
marginalized by such a (multistakeholder) dynamic of 'inclusion' 
dominated by NGOs?

Chair: Anriette Esterhuysen (APC, South Africa)

With contributions by:
Loe Schout (HIVOS, NL): Internet connects world citizens, but does it 
breed new ones, too?
Maartje OpdeCoul (One World, NL): Evaluating ICT4D projects
Michael Gurstein (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA): Civil 
Society or Communities: The Contradiction at the Core of the 
Information Society
Maja van der Velden (University of Bergen, Norway): Cognitive Justice
Partha Pratim Sarkar (Bytes4all, Bangladesh)
Toni Eliasz (Ungana-Afrika, South Africa): What CSOs bring to ICT 
Policy Processes

Workshop A2: After WSIS: Exploring Multistakeholderism
11.30-13.00 Salon

For some, the 2003-5 UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) 
is just another moment in an ongoing series of inter-governmental 
jamborees, glamorizing disciplinary visions of global ICT governance. 
For others, WSIS revives 'tricontinentalist' hopes for a New 
International Information and Communication Order whose emphasis on 
'civil society actors' may even signal the transformation of a system 
of inter-governmental organizations. Either way, WSIS continues to 
encourage the articulation of agendas, positions, and stakes in a new 
politics of communication and information. Following the effort to 
actively involve civil society actors in WSIS activities, the idea of 
an emergent 'multistakeholderism' is already considered one of the key 
WSIS outcomes. This workshop will take a critical look at different 
approaches to the idea of multistakeholderism.

Chair: Neeltje Blommestein (IICD, NL)

With contributions by:
Lisa McLaughlin (Mass Communication and Women's Studies, Miami 
University-Ohio, USA): Introduction:  Issues in Multi-stakeholderism.
Ralf Bendrath (University of Bremen, Germany): Experiments in 
Multi-Stakeholderism—Lessons learned from WSIS.
Beatriz Busaniche (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina): WSIS and 
Multistakeholderism: Could we call them "best practices"?
Ljupco Gjorgjinski (Center for Dialogue and Democracy, Macedonia): 
multistakeholder partnerships–cybernetic Governance for the information 
society
Stijn van der Krogt (IICD, NL): The Polder model applied to ICT4D in 
the South-- lessons learned from IICD's multi-stakeholder processes
Sally Burch (ALAI, Equador)
Paul Maassen (HIVOS, NL): Civil society as a stakeholder: the dilemma 
of constituency
Ned Rossiter (University of Ulster, UK): Post-Representation & the 
Architecture of Net Politics
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society, 
Nigeria): Partnerships and Networks: the African Civil Society 
Perspective

Workshop A3: Open Source, Open Borders
11.30-13.00 Cinema

Chair: Jo van der Spek (radio maker, NL)

Some of the organizations active in the WSIS process lost their 
accreditation because participants used their visa to say goodbye to 
Africa. Widely reported, the anecdote suggests that media and migration 
form a nexus that is nevertheless rarely explored in the context of 
ICT4D. In this session, we will survey some of the work on migrant and 
refugee media. It will also introduce the agenda of the wireless bridge 
project, a sister event of the incommunicado work conference that will 
take place in Tarifa (Spain) later in June.

Presenters:
Florian Schneider (kein.org, Germany)
Roy Pullens (researcher, NL): IOM and border control as info development
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society, 
Nigeria): An Anecdote of a would-be illegal immigrant.

14.00-16.00 Open Sessions

Main Hall:

14.00-15.00 Solomon Benjamin (urban researcher, CASUM-m, Bangalore
India): case study on ICT and real estate in Bangalore (including video 
documentary, produced for Incommunicado 05)

15.00-15.30 Francois Laureys (IICD) in conversation with Sylvestre 
Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso)

15.30-16.00 Sally Burch (ALAI, Ecuador): Social movements, 
communication and ICTs

Salon: E-Waste

14.00-16.00
E-Waste: Special session on electronic waste, organized by Waste, 
advisors on urban development and development.
In this session, a highly diverse group of people from the development, 
  ICT, recycling, finance, insurance, and waste management worlds 
consider strategies and approaches in relation to preventing, reusing 
or recycling WEEE, or waste from electronic and electrical equipment in 
the Netherlands. The impulse behind the session comes from a twinning 
project between Stichting WASTE, in the Netherlands, and the NGO 
ACEPESA, in Costa Rica. The goal of the session is to arrive at ideas 
for interventions in both the Netherlands and Costa Rica.

Session organisers: Anne Scheinberg, Kiwako Mogi, Stichting WASTE,  
Gouda (www.waste.nl). Session chair: Jeroen IJgosse, WASTE. Confirmed 
Discussants: Portia Sinnott, Micro Services Plus, California, Joost 
Helberg, Vereniging Open Source Netherlands, Stephan Wildeboer,OS-OSS, 
Angela Jonker, Flection Netherlands, dhr Herben, Province of Limburg, 
Netherland

Cinema:

14.00-14.20 Kim van Haaster (INC researcher, NL), The University of the 
Future: Software Development in Revolutionary Cuba.

14.20-14.40 T. B. Dinesh (BangaloreIT.org, India): Observations on the 
impact of IT on Society, in Bangalore.

14.40-15.00 Toni Eliasz (Ungana-Afrika, South Africa): on lacking ICT 
capacity among small development organizations and networks

15.00-15.20 Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina ): on the 
hidden prices for ICT4 aid.

15.20-15.40 Oliver Vodeb and Jerneja Rebernak, art & ICT4D, a 
presentation of the Memefest 2005 competition.

15.40-16.00 Jo van der Spek and others: info solidarity with Iraq 
(www.streamtime.org)

Plenary Session 2: After Aid: Info-Development after 9/11
16.30-18.00 Main hall

What is the status of aid in the promotion of ICT4D, and how have ICT4D 
actors responded to the politicization and securitization of aid, 
including the sale of security and surveillance technologies in the 
name of info-development? To what extent does info-development overlap 
with new info-infrastructures in the field of humanitarian aid 
(ICT4Peace)? Are global trade justice campaigns a response to classic 
development schemes?

Chair: Ravi Sundaram (Sarai, India)

With contributions by:
Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina),
Glen Tarman (Trade Justice Campaign, UK): Join the band: ICTs, popular 
mobilization and the global call to make poverty history
Steve Cisler (librarian, USA): Outside the Church of ICT
Shuddha Sengupta (Sarai, India): Knowing in your Bones: Politics, 
Anxiety and Information in Delhi, 2005

20.30: Screening, part 1, co-curated by De Balie

::Friday, June 17::

Plenary 3: ICT4D and the Critique of Development
10.00-12.00 Main Hall

The critique of development and its institutional arrangements - of its 
conceptual apparatus as well as the economic and social policies 
implemented in its name - has always been both a theoretical project 
and the agenda of a multitude of 'subaltern' social movements. Yet much 
work in ICT4D shows little awareness of or interest in the history of 
such development critique. Quite the contrary, the ICT4D debate, whose 
terms are reproduced in the members-only loop of a few major NGO 
networks like APC, OneWorld, or PANOS, along with a small number of 
states and influential donor organizations, remains surprisingly 
inward-looking, unable or unwilling to actively challenge the hegemony 
of an ahistorical techno-determinism.

Even many activists believe that ICT will lead to progress and 
eventually contribute to poverty reduction. Have development skepticism 
and the multiplicity of alternative visions it created simply been 
forgotten? Or have they been actively muted to disconnect current 
struggles in the area of communication and information from this 
history, adding legitimacy to new strategies of 'pre-emptive' 
development that are based on an ever-closer alliance between the 
politics of aid, development, and security? Are analyses based on the 
assumption that the internet and its promise of connectivity are 
'inherently good' already transcending existing power analyses of 
global media and communication structures? How can we reflect on the 
booming ICT-for-Development industry beyond best practice suggestions?

Chair: Kees Biekart (ISS, NL)

Contributions by:
Ravi Sundaram (Sarai New Media Initiative, India): Post-Development and 
Technological Dreams: An Indian Tale
Solomon Benjamin (urban researcher, CASUM-m, Bangalore India): 
E-Politics of the New Civil Society
Jan Nederveen Pieterse (University of Illinios, USA): Digital 
capitalism and development
Tracey Naughton (Chair WSIS Media Caucus, South Africa): Putting 
Lipstick on Pigs

Workshop C1: ICT corporations at the UN
13.00-15.00 Main hall

The controversial agreement between Microsoft and the UNDP, issued at a 
time when open source software is emerging as serious non-proprietary 
alternative within ICT4D, is generally considered in terms of a 
public-private partnership, to be assessed on its own terms. But it 
should also be considered in the broader context of rising corporate 
influence in the UN system, from the almost-no-strings-attached Global 
Compact, widely criticized as multilateral collusion in corporate 
'bluewashing', to the Cardoso Panel on UN-Civil Society Relations and 
its controversial definition of civil society.

Chair: Soenke Zehle (Incommunicado, Germany)

With contributions by:
Lisa McLaughlin (University of Illinois, USA): Cisco Systems, the 
United Nations, and the Corporatization of Development
Michael Gurstein (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA): Critiquing  
Apple Pie: What We Can Say and Not Say About the UN These Days
Manuel Acevedo (consultant, Spain): ICT4D partnerships at face value: 
experiences from the multilateral trenches
Steve Cisler (librarian, USA): PPPP: problems of public-private 
partnerships

Workshop C2: FLOSS in ICT4D
13.00-15.00 Salon

Pushed by a growing transnational coalition of NGOs and a few allies 
inside the multilateral system, open source software has moved from 
margin to center in ICT4D visions of peer-to-peer networks and open 
knowledge initiatives. But while OSS and its apparent promise of an 
alternative non-proprietary concept of collaborative creation continues 
to have much counter-cultural cachet, its idiom can easily be used to 
support the 'liberalization' of telco markets and cuts in educational 
subsidies. What is the current status of OSS as idiom and 
infrastructural alternative within ICT4D?

Chair: Paul Keller (Waag Society, NL)

With contributions by:
Dorkas Muthoni (Linux Chicks Africa, Kenya): Chix Presence: A strategic 
partner in increasing the efficiency of FOSS for the benefit of society
Felipe Fonseca (MetaReciclagem, Brazil): MetaReciclagem: technology 
re-appropriation and collective innovation"
Ednah Karamagi (Brosdi, Uganda)
Bill Kagai (FOSSFA, Kenya)
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society, 
Nigeria)
Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina ): ICT are not (just) 
tools
Seppo Koskela (Applied Linux Institute, Helsinki): Free Software, ICT4D 
and Finland - the Short Story.
Sylvestre Ouéadraogo (executive President of Yam Pukri Burkina Faso)
Alexandre Freire (Digital Cultures/Ministry of Culture, Brazil)

Workshop C3:  Culture and Corporate Sponsorship in the ICT4D Context
13.00-15.00 Cinema

Introduction: Solomon Benjamin (Bangalore)
Open informal discussion.

What is the aim of Western cultural organizations in the context of 
ICT4D projects? Think of the hip design event Doors of Perception in 
Bangalore and Delhi, our own Waag-Sarai Platform, Beijing and its new 
media arts inside the Millennium Dome, or the German media festival in 
Chiang Mai (Thailand). What is the agenda of these organizations? Is 
the ‘electronic art’ they are exporting merely paving the way for the 
big software and telecom firms to move in, or should we reject such a 
mechanic, one-dimensional view?

Workshop D1: New Info-Politics of Rights
15.30-17.00 Main Hall

Recent framings of ICT as an object of civil society politics have 
resulted in the coupling of ICT with the notion of “rights”: issues of 
the spread, use and adaptation of these technologies are increasingly 
defined in terms of human, civil, communication and information rights, 
et cetera. This session questions the choice, perhaps the tactical 
optionality, of making ICT-related issues into matters of rights. The 
rights-frame  formats ICT for particular modes of the institutional 
processing of issues. At the same time, ICT and the discourses knitted 
around this object themselves can be seen to spread the rights frame. 
Considering that counter-cultural engagements with new media were 
previously framed as tactical undertakings, the question is whether the 
rise  of “rights” does not thwart the potential of a creative, 
aesthetic, affective politics of the tactical. Or is the case that 
networks have a better use for rights than institutions? This is the 
context in which we ask: what are rights for, how are they used by 
NGOs, when does the coupling of ICT with rights work, and when does it 
fail?

Chair: Richard Rogers (GovCom/University of Amsterdam, NL)

With contributions by:
Soenke Zehle (Incommunicado, Germany): Politics of Info-Rights meets 
Tactical Media
Jodi Dean (HWS Colleges, USA)
Noortje Marres (University of Amsterdam, NL): Why is this happening to 
ICT? Info-rights as a special case of issue hybridisation
Magela Sigillito (Third World Institute, Montevideo, Uruguay)
Thomas Keenan (Bard College Human Rights Program, USA): On some 
dilemmas in claiming rights: persistence, elasticity, instrumentality
Ned Rossiter (University of Ulster, UK): organised networks and the 
situation of rights

Workshop D2: Digital Bandung: New Axes of Info-Capitalism
15.30-17.00 Salon

We are witnessing a shift from in the techno-cultural development of 
the web from an essentially post-industrialist euro-american affair to 
a more complexly mapped post-third-worldist network, where new 
south-south alliances are already upsetting our commonsensical 
definitions of info-development as an exclusively north-south affair. 
One example of this is the surprising extent to which a 'multilateral' 
version of internet governance has been able to muster support, another 
is the software and intellectual property rights reform (WIPO 
Development Agenda). info-development, that is, has ceased to be a 
matter of technology transfer and has become a major terrain for the 
renegotiation of some of the fault lines of geopolitical conflict - 
with a new set of actors. But does this really affect the established 
dependencies on 'northern' donors, and if so, what are some of the new 
alliances that are emerging? What is this new ‘post-Bandung’ movement?

Chair: Ravi Sundaram (Sarai, India)
Open informal discussion

Workshop D3:  Nuts and Bolts of Internet Governance
15.30-17.00 Cinema

One of the few areas where WSIS is likely to produce concrete results 
is internet governance (IG). The IG controversy revolves around the 
limits of the current regime of root server control (ICANN/US) and 
possible alternatives, but it is also significant because it signals 
the repoliticization of a key domain of a technocratic internet culture 
that long considered itself to be above the fray of ordinary 
info-politics. The sense that IG has info-political implications and 
should be subject to discussion beyond expert fora is, however, much 
more widespread that actual knowledge of the techno-cultural dynamic 
actually involved in governing the internet. This workshop with be a 
nuts-and-bolts session for non-techies.

Chair: Reinder Rustema (Internet Society, NL)

With contributions by:
Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina)
Danny Butt (Independent Consultant; Researcher, New Zealand): Cultures 
of Internet Governance: From global coordination to trans-cultural 
dialogue"

Plenary 4: Closing Session
17.30 – 18.30  Main hall

Moderated by Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink
Plus: WSIS Awards, Dutch nominations, announced by Jak Bouman

Video Session
Rethinking 'underdevelopment or revolution' through ICTs.
Live videoconference with San Francisco, coordinated by Sasha Constanze 
Chock

18:30-19:00   Cinema

This session is focused on appropriation of ICTs by social movements 
that don't fit into the public private development industry framework. 
Rather than consider the success or failure of strategies to patch ICTs 
into a 'development' framework that means binding peripheral locations 
and populations more tightly to service of the metropole, we'll discuss 
ICTs and revolutionary activity in Brazil, Korea, Bolivia, and 
elsewhere. With remote participation from, amongst others, Dongwon Jo 
from MediACT in Seoul, Dorothy Kidd from University of San Francisco, 
Pablo Ortellado/Indymedia Brazil and members  from ERBOL and CMI 
Bolivia.

20.30: Screening, part 2, co-curated by De Balie



From harshvardhan.tripathi at tv18online.com  Wed Jun  8 10:58:15 2005
From: harshvardhan.tripathi at tv18online.com (Harshvardhan Tripathi)
Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 10:58:15 +0530 
Subject: [Reader-list] When he was called Pandit Jinnah
Message-ID: <4F81D7B1314DB14B8DD0FB274DDC29DB020D02BC@postman.bomtv18.com>

VERY INTERSTING

-----Original Message-----
From: mihir25 [mailto:mihir25 at indiatimes.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 1:59 PM
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Subject: [Reader-list] When he was called Pandit Jinnah


When he was called Pandit Jinnah RAJNISH Sharma Hindustan Times Lucknow,
June 5 http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5922_1389389,0015002500000000.htm
When the former Deputy PM L K Advani described Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a
secular man during his early days, he wasn't quite off the mark as it is now
a part of recorded history. Though his comments have raised a furore back
home, few would know that this man was even referred to as Pandit Jinnah
once. And if indifference to religion is any indicator of secularism, the
Qaid-e-Azam was probably the biggest of all secular fundamentalists. There
are two incidents hitherto not found in any history book which highlight
this aspect of his character in a rather comical way which were narrated by
none other than the eminent jurist and statesman, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru. It
was told by Sir Tej to his granddaughter's husband Dr IM Chak, Retired Dy
Director of CDRI during a meeting with his grandfather Pt. Prithvi Nath
Chak, another legal giant of that time under whom Motilal Nehru learnt to
practise law. A contemporary of Sir Sapru, Jinnah along with him once
visited Egypt during the month of Ramzaan. The Muslim porters there refused
to carry their luggage saying they would only carry the luggage of a fellow
Muslim. When Jinnah told them to go ahead, the porters decided to test them.
They were asked to recite the kalma. While Sir Tej happily recited it with
élan, he had Jinnah looking sheepishly at him for the wine loving brown
sahib didn't know a word of it! Sir Tej had a hard time convincing the
porters that Jinnah, who was to later create a separate Islamic State, was
indeed a Muslim! The other incident saw these two friends sparring in the
court of law in a case that involved elements of religion. The case saw Sir
Tej quoting innumerable ayats from Quran in support of his arguments.
Jinnah, though a formidable lawyer himself, drew a blank once again on this
account. The next day local newspaper headlines screamed Pandit Jinnah vs
Maulana Sapru! 
  _____  

Indiatimes Email now powered by APIC Advantage. Help!
<http://email.indiatimes.com/apic/>  
 <http://imaround.indiatimes.com/IMaround/presencefr.mss?userid=mihir25> My
Presence  <http://email.indiatimes.com/apic/userpage.html> Help 
  _____  



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From kranenbu at xs4all.nl  Thu Jun  9 15:09:20 2005
From: kranenbu at xs4all.nl (Rob van Kranenburg)
Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 10:39:20 +0100
Subject: [Reader-list] RFID in Delhi... in the stomachs of cows...watch out
	when you're eating!
Message-ID: <p04330105becdbe69ed93@[192.168.2.132]>

From: <snakeking2 at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 09:34:50 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: [SV_RFID] Microchip IDs for cattle

Nod for tracking stray cattle with microchips

By Sandeep Joshi


NEW DELHI, APRIL 5. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi has cleared the
controversial proposal to implant computer chip in the stomachs of
buffaloes and cows to ascertain their ownership and keep track of their
movement in the city. However, the Bharatiya Janata Party has expressed
the fear that the project would make milk costlier and also put an
unnecessary financial burden on dairy owners.

The proposal was passed recently by the MCD Standing Committee without
any debate. The civic body expressed the hope that the microchips in
the stomachs of bovines -- to be read through a special scanner --
would help keep track of their movement in the city, besides checking
the mushrooming growth of unauthorised dairies. In fact, a similar
project is already being implemented in Punjab and is a common practice
in developed countries.

The microchip will have a unique identity number and will ensure that
no new animals are smuggled into the city from the neighbouring States
and also check the menace of stray cattle. The owners of all authorised
dairies would be charged Rs.900 for each implant. Each microchip would
be given orally to the animals and it would then get embedded in their
stomach. The civic body has warned that those animals found without the
microchip would be impounded and auctioned.

The MCD took this decision after the Supreme Court's directed that all
unauthorised dairies be relocated at Ghogha in Narela in North-West
Delhi. Significantly, while a Corporation survey revealed that there
were nearly 35,000 cows and buffaloes in these unauthorised dairies,
the civic body was surprised to receive applications for allotment of
land for as many as 50,000 cows and buffaloes. Later, investigations
revealed that some people from the neighbouring townships and land
sharks were trying to get dairy land allotted in Ghogha.

Under the Ghogha dairy relocation scheme, the Delhi Government has
allotted 180 acres for the development of a dairy colony with all the
necessary facilities and basic infrastructure. The Corporation
officials plan to implant the microchip in cattle when dairy owners
move here and subsequently, every year the dairy owners would have to
pass the chip detection test and those without them would be impounded.


However, the BJP Councillor and Standing Committee Member, Vijender
Kumar Gupta, has accused the Congress leaders in the civic body of
getting the controversial issue passed in haste without any discussion.
"The impractical scheme would not only result in waste of public money
as well as that of dairy owners, it will also increase the cost of milk
in the Capital," he said.

Mr. Gupta also alleged that the proposal was opposed by the BJP as it
was prepared to financially benefit some predetermined private operator
and not to control the unauthorised dairy menace in the city. The
matter was then referred to a sub-committee for investigation but it
never met. But the Standing Committee without any discussion approved
the recommendations of the so-called sub-committee, he added.



--- rhnarendra.ol24 at hathway.com wrote:


---------------------------------

-- 

http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/person-1024.25.html&lang=en
http://blogger.xs4all.nl/kranenbu/
http://locative.net/blog/mixreality/
0031 (0) 641930235







From shivamvij at gmail.com  Tue Jun  7 20:58:00 2005
From: shivamvij at gmail.com (shivam)
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 20:58:00 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Civiblog
In-Reply-To: <3AEB1EB2-2C3E-4EF8-BC68-5C5018C4B833@vt.edu>
References: <3AEB1EB2-2C3E-4EF8-BC68-5C5018C4B833@vt.edu>
Message-ID: <fd72ba1a050607082813b80894@mail.gmail.com>

Dear Jeremy,

I am curious as to how Civiblog is any different from the myriad free
blogging services on offer: surely, it makes no difference as to
whether I host my civil society blog on blogspot or civiblog. Or does
it?

thanks
shivam

On 6/7/05, Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu> wrote:
> distribute as appropriate
> 
> Civiblog, a one-stop-site for global civil society. Canadian to the


-- 
Go to google.com and look for - The Slimes of India
www.shivamvij.com


From abshi at vsnl.com  Thu Jun  9 21:41:25 2005
From: abshi at vsnl.com (abshi at vsnl.com)
Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 21:11:25 +0500
Subject: [Reader-list] Talk 17 June 2005: PANOPTIC BODIES: BLACK EUNUCHS IN
	THE TOPKAPI
Message-ID: <7235c307232c7d.7232c7d7235c30@vsnl.net>

The PUKAR Gender and Space Project

presents a talk

by

Jateen Lad

on


PANOPTIC BODIES:  BLACK EUNUCHS IN THE TOPKAPI PALACE

 
date:                 Friday, 17 June 2005

time:                 6.30 p.m.

place:               Max Mueller Bhavan, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai


 Abstract
This lecture engages the disciplines of architecture, philology and theology to explore the notion of the harem as a forbidden and guarded sanctuary in both ritual and palatial contexts. The fantasme of the black eunuch in the Grand Seraglio has been a silent but persistent presence in representations of the imperial harem; either a perverse shadow in the margins of Orientalist representations or the epitome of loyalty in more contemporary readings. This paper enters the labyrinthine passages of the quintessential harem, the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, in an attempt to better understand the body of the eunuch and the nature of the imperial harem as an actual space. There follows a consideration of how the presence, identity and the subtleties of power acquired by the black eunuchs came to be embodied architecturally. In the process, it will be shown how the notions of surveillance and mediation - qualities embodied in the function and body of the eunuch - permeated the enclo
sing walls of the harem to infuse deep into its inner structure. 

 Jateen Lad studied architecture at Cambridge, UK and has practised in London, Berlin, Rotterdam and East Africa and is design critic at a number of London schools. As a research fellow with the Aga Khan Program at Harvard and MIT his writings engaged architecture, philology and theology to explore the notion of the harem as a forbidden and guarded sanctuary in both ritual and palatial contexts. He is currently establishing a design studio in Pondicherry and is researching notions of display and multiplicity in the Hawa Mahal at Jaipur. 

 PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research)
Mumbai
 
Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001
Telephone:: +91 (022) 5574 8152 / +91 (0) 98204 04010
Email:: genderspace at pukar.org.in
Website:: www.pukar.org.in




From k.kuldeep97 at rediffmail.com  Fri Jun 10 11:09:15 2005
From: k.kuldeep97 at rediffmail.com (kuldeep kaur)
Date: 10 Jun 2005 05:39:15 -0000
Subject: [Reader-list] Hospital's labour room as a space for unheard voices
Message-ID: <20050610053915.8166.qmail@webmail17.rediffmail.com>

  
Better sense may prevail as I don’ t have any other reason to continue



Kalapna was screaming with pain as I entered the induction room. At least five-six gynae doctors were there on her bedside. A senior resident of surgery was trying to insert I/V canula to maintain body fluid volume. All of them were busy. I requested the evening duty nurse to give over the charge. She said, “Didi you will have to count down the instruments, articles by yourself. I cannot leave this patient.”
“Oh! Then we can start right with this patient only.” I replied.
“ Yes, it is must. She is Kalpana, a mother with 8th month pregnancy with severe anemia (Hb=4gm) with severe pregnancy induced hypertension (BP was 220/130 mm/hg). She is semi-conscious, not responding to verbal commands. She is about to deliver the baby.”
In between our conversation we were assisting the doctors in handling the patient for her internal assessment as well as to avoid displacement of I/V lines. She was on anti-eclamptic drug, which is emergency drug to avoid possibility of sudden fit.
	Suddenly our senior resident shouted, “come fast, she is delivering the baby” she was on bed. Bobby and I (evening duty nurse) have to run for normal delivery set and required medicines. In the mean time pediatric nurse was also called in. She immediately received the baby and rushed to the Nursery (a small neo-natal unit attached with induction room). I left the evening duty staff nurse with the patient and decided to help pediatric Nurse for resuscitating the baby. Pediatric senior resident was also informed by through intercom. After ensuring that baby was normal and stable I joined evening duty nurse for further management of my patient.
	We helped Kalpana to get out of the bed. Placenta was yet inside and a through internal examination was required. Evening duty was over at 8:00 PM but Bobby (evening duty nurse) was still there for the patient.
	Pediatric Nurse came to show the baby’s sex to the mother after sometime. Kalapna was looking surprised. She immediately shouted in furious voice, “This is not my child, I can never give birth to a girl-child. This is not my child, show me my baby. I give birth to a male baby. He is my baby. Give me my baby.”
	It was a shock for all of us. We tried to convince her but she was not listening to anyone. “Dr Mona, I think she is not in her senses although her Blood Pressure is stable now. She is not able to cope-up with the process of labour.” I tried to break the silence.
	“Blood pressure is normal. She is arguing. No major complication now. She can easily recognize her baby”. We planned to call her mother. The pediatric nurse decided to show the baby to her husband and brothers and to get their signatures on respective files to avoid further confusion. She persuaded her, “ Kalpana, this is your first baby, your own baby. Why you are not accepting her? She is so cute and sweet you are a mother now. You can not ignore your baby.”
	“ Par yeh mera bacha he nahi hai (But this is not my child) Tum police le ke ayo, hum sabat kar ke dikhange. (Call the police, I will prove).” She insisted.
	Till that time I took the over from evening duty nurse and she left for her hostel. We were at least eight medical personnel in the induction room, trying to convince her but she was screaming and trying to remove all her canulas, I/V lines and catheter. We decided to call her mother inside so that she can make her co-operate. Her mother entered the induction room in furious mood and shouted at us.
“Aap log samajate kauon nahin? (Why don’t you understand?)” She looked around at all of us and continued, “is ke ladki ho he nahi sakti. Humne iska ultrasound karwaaia hai, doctor ne bataya hai ke ladka he hoga. Pura ek hazar rupaya laga hai hamara ultrasound pe. Aab ladki kaise ho sakti hai. (She can never give birth to a girl child. We have got her Ultrasound, The doctor has told us about the male fetus. We have paid one thousand for that check-up. How can it be girl?”
	We were stunned. Condition of Kalpana was not improving. She was not allowing us to keep up the efforts to check the bleeding. She was bleeding profusely. She could go in shock once again. Despite all our efforts she was not ready to listen. She was not allowing us to pursue with episiotomy suturing. A junior resident ran to blood bank to get blood for her. I was trying to give her I/V fluids. Senior resident was assisting with another junior resident in Episiotomy suturing. Kalpana tried to run outside in delivery gown with all tubing. It was already 9:30 PM. During this time we could not take care of the other patients. Her mother and relatives were arguing with night duty staff out side the induction room and were using abusive language. Then we informed emergency medical officer and Nursing Supervisor. Consultant was also called from home. 
All patients admitted in ward and their relatives were listening each and everything with keen interest. This whole atmosphere was working out to create an imagery fear in rest of the patients and attendants. We were seen as suspects with no reason to substantiate the claims of Kalpana and her family members. I was feeling very upset to realize that how we will be to re-establish their faith in us? The social pressure to give birth to sons was turning to be an extra burden on us. We discussed that have the doctor who did the ultrasound would have told them about girl fetus and they would have got the male baby what would have been their reaction. What could we do about the doctor who did the ultrasound and told them the sex of baby despite much talked about campaign against such practices? 
The family was ready to accept the baby girl half mindedly. They cursed us saying that god will see to all and everyone will get the justice. Here my thoughts were with the newborn and the behavior she will encounter as an unwelcome sudden guest. One of my colleagues said that with the passage of time they will find the similarities of features of newborn with her parents. I found it wishful thinking and became a bit philosophical that better sense may prevail. 


regards

kuldeep
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From ravig1 at vsnl.com  Thu Jun  9 12:06:18 2005
From: ravig1 at vsnl.com (Ravi Agarwal)
Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 12:06:18 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] More on Jinnah- Indian Express
Message-ID: <028201c56cbd$8ce6ec90$6801a8c0@ToxicsLink.local>

      So many Jinnahs 
     
     
      Was he an avowed communalist or advocate of a secular Pakistan? 
     
     
            IAN TALBOT          
           
     
      Posted online: Thursday, June 09, 2005 at 0000 hours IST

     
     
       The furore surrounding L.K. Advani's recent visit to Pakistan and his homage to its founder at Jinnah's mausoleum in Karachi has reopened the debate about the Quaid-e-Azam's vision for the subcontinent. A rhetorical reply to the question, will the true Jinnah stand up, is the response which one do you want? For there is the Jinnah of the 1916 Lucknow Pact, dubbed by Sarojini Naidu as the "Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity". Then there is the Jinnah of the 1940 Lahore Resolution and the two-nation theory basis for dividing the subcontinent. Another Jinnah speaks of making Pakistan "a laboratory for Islam", while contradicting this is the celebrated espousal of a secular state in the speech of August 11 1947 which Advani cited with approval in Karachi. One could go even further and add the Jinnah of Ayesha Jalal's Sole Spokesman construction who is portrayed as arguing only for Pakistan as a bargaining counter in the constitutional round with Congress and the British. Jinnah was, however, finally forced to accept the "moth-eaten" Pakistan of the 3 June Plan as the only realistic option. 

      Nearly 60 years later, the debate continues to swirl around Jinnah's enigmatic vision for Pakistan. Its academic and public dimensions, as at the present, frequently generate more heat than light. Why the controversy? First and foremost, it stems from Jinnah's own vagueness about Pakistan. This was a deliberate attempt to provide as much common ground as possible in the Muslim League struggle. Lack of a clear vision hindered post-colonial nation building. It left the field open to conflicting understandings of the role of Islam, language and ethnicity in the new Pakistan state. Jinnah's early death enabled his legacy to be appropriated by all manner of aspirants to power. The fact that he did not commit his innermost thoughts to paper provided further scope for mythologising. For the carefully preserved record of his public utterances reveal them for what they are. Addresses finetuned for their differing audiences and contexts. They are as much all things to all men as was the Pakistan demand itself. Selective quotations frame the Jinnah required by those who seek to refer to history to legitimise contemporary concerns. Founders of nations are always used in this way. Jinnah however is a particularly rich symbolic resource for a subcontinent negotiating conflicting sources of identity. 

           
           
      The view of Jinnah in India has been much more consistent than in Pakistan. Despite the attempts by such writers as H.M. Seervai and Gandhi's grandson Rajmohan to row against the current, the tide of opinion is overwhelmingly negative. This intellectual view finds a popular echo in bazaar level portrayals of Jinnah as Ravana. With varying degrees of sophistication, Jinnah is thus the maligned "other" of Indian nationalism; the communal counterpoint to Nehru's secular vision of a united India. Personal circumstances, the desire for power and the divide and rule policies of the Raj have all been used to explain his 20 years' transformation from Muslim nationalist to communalist. The final descent to the dark side is marked by the passage of the Lahore Resolution. Jinnah the architect of Pakistan, the destroyer of Indian unity in this discourse cannot be readily accorded a "secular" mantle once Pakistan is created. The speech to the Constituent Assembly of August 11 is thus ignored, or glossed over as damage limitation, a desire to keep the minorities and more importantly their money in Pakistan. Political considerations aside, this way of thinking about Jinnah in India inevitably casts Advani's comments on Jinnah's secular credentials in a dissonant note. 

      For Jinnah, the secularist, resplendent in the clarion call, "Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual but in the political sense as citizens of the state", we have to turn to the liberal discourse in Pakistan. Why is Jinnah its hero? It needs to be recognised that successive bouts of martial law have hindered civil society and freedom of expression. In such circumstances even muted liberal sentiments require the buttressing of the founding father's favour. The key text as Advani rightly recognised is the August 11 1947 speech. In times of enlightened moderation, Jinnah's Karachi Constituent Assembly address is available in full. During the martial law regime of Zia-ul-Haq, it was removed from collections of his speeches. Newspaper articles on the occasion of the anniversary of Jinnah's birth in 1981 omitted the key "secular" phrases of the speech. This censorship was consonant with the regime's self-perceived commitment to the preservation of the Pakistan ideology and the "Islamic character" of the state. 

      It was also during the period 1977-88 that a number of unconvincing attempts were made to depict Jinnah as wanting to establish an Islamic state. Karam Hydri's work (Millat ka pasban) was typical of this genre. The restoration of democracy in 1988 encouraged liberal interpretations which played down the two nation theory and the conception of Pakistan as a "theocracy". Saeed R. Khairi (Jinnah Reinterpreted) contrasted the pragmatic and reasonable Jinnah with the Utopian and irrational Gandhi who introduced religion into politics and the insensitive Nehru who dealt the final blow to Indian unity with his "re-writing" of the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan. 

      The most ambitious reinterpretation of Jinnah was produced by Akbar S. Ahmed, social scientist and civil servant. He grandiloquently called Jinnah's August 11 speech as part of his "Gettysburg address". Ahmed, however, ran into controversy surrounding his multi-media projects on Jinnah because his portrayal was too socially liberal, rather than because it undermined nationalist orthodoxy. Indeed he castigated Jalal for disconnecting Jinnah from his cultural roots and portraying him like a "robot" "programmed to play for high stakes". Attempts to provide Jinnah with a "human face" with respect to his Parsi wife Rattanbhai Petit did not however play well. With a good deal of sophistication and scholarship, Ahmed maintained that in the closing period of his life, Jinnah increasingly moored his concern for tolerance and the safeguarding of minority rights in his understanding of Islam. In other words, Jinnah's secular vision had an Islamic rather than western basis. This squaring of the circle enabled Ahmed to claim that Jinnah provides a paradigm for Muslim identity and leadership in a modern world obsessed with western media images of Islamic fanaticism and terrorism. 

      This view is as much a construct as the many other images of Jinnah created by devotees and opponents alike. The real Jinnah remains as ungraspable as the aloof stereotypical portrayals of Pakistani painters. His inscrutability is nothing new. It frequently frustrated Mountbatten during the series of meetings which took place between them early in April 1947. Historians may well gnash their teeth at the futility of projecting backwards contemporary understandings of secularism and fundamentalism in order to label Jinnah. Competing visions for the subcontinent he helped divide will continue to appropriate his legacy in the quest for legitimacy. 


      Talbot is director of the Centre for South Asian Studies, Coventry University, and author of 'Pakistan: A Modern History' 

     



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From pukar at pukar.org.in  Thu Jun  9 16:13:20 2005
From: pukar at pukar.org.in (PUKAR)
Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 16:13:20 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] [announcements] PANOPTIC BODIES: BLACK EUNUCHS IN THE
	TOPKAPI PALACE; Talk by Jateen Lad
Message-ID: <002701c56ce0$168a3e80$16d0c0cb@freeda>

The PUKAR Gender and Space Project 

 

presents a talk

by 

Jateen Lad

 

on

 

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­PANOPTIC BODIES:  BLACK EUNUCHS IN THE TOPKAPI PALACE

 



date:                 Friday, 17 June 2005

time:                 6.30 p.m.

place:               Max Mueller Bhavan, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai

 

 

 

Abstract

This lecture engages the disciplines of architecture, philology and theology to explore the notion of the harem as a forbidden and guarded sanctuary in both ritual and palatial contexts. The fantasme of the black eunuch in the Grand Seraglio has been a silent but persistent presence in representations of the imperial harem; either a perverse shadow in the margins of Orientalist representations or the epitome of loyalty in more contemporary readings. This paper enters the labyrinthine passages of the quintessential harem, the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, in an attempt to better understand the body of the eunuch and the nature of the imperial harem as an actual space. There follows a consideration of how the presence, identity and the subtleties of power acquired by the black eunuchs came to be embodied architecturally. In the process, it will be shown how the notions of surveillance and mediation - qualities embodied in the function and body of the eunuch - permeated the enclosing walls of the harem to infuse deep into its inner structure. 

 

 

Jateen Lad studied architecture at Cambridge, UK and has practised in London, Berlin, Rotterdam and East Africa and is design critic at a number of London schools. As a research fellow with the Aga Khan Program at Harvard and MIT his writings engaged architecture, philology and theology to explore the notion of the harem as a forbidden and guarded sanctuary in both ritual and palatial contexts. He is currently establishing a design studio in Pondicherry and is researching notions of display and multiplicity in the Hawa Mahal at Jaipur. 

 

 

 

 

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research)
Mumbai

Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001
Telephone:: +91 (022) 5574 8152 / +91 (0) 98204 04010
Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in
Website:: www.pukar.org.in
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https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/announcements

From shivamvij at gmail.com  Wed Jun  8 11:32:52 2005
From: shivamvij at gmail.com (shivam)
Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 11:32:52 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Correction: Invitation: poetry reading on 12 June
In-Reply-To: <fd72ba1a0506071210433455b4@mail.gmail.com>
References: <fd72ba1a0506071210433455b4@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <fd72ba1a0506072302349740a6@mail.gmail.com>

To all those who read this invitation, 12 June is a Sunday, not
Saturday. My apologies if this caused any inconvenience.
Shivam

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: shivam <shivamvij at gmail.com>
Date: Jun 8, 2005 12:40 AM
Subject: Invitation: poetry reading on 12 June
To: announcements at sarai.net


Dear all,

On 3 June, the ZESTPoets list turned one and we are organising the
first ever ZESTPoets real-world poetry reading on:

 Saturday 12 June 2005, 5 pm
 at the National Coffee House, Connaught Place, Delhi.
 (Third Floor, Mohan Singh Place, near Rivoli Cinema)

You are welcome to walk in, preferably with poems in hand. Anyone can
read any poetry. You don't *have* to be a ZESTPoets member to attend,
but joining the group would not be a bad idea either:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/join

We have chosen CP because it is central and accessible to all; and
Coffee House on Anand Vivek Taneja's recommendation. Anand promises,
"Coffee House is used to impecunious poets hanging out for hours on
end and declaiming (usually terrible) free verse..."

So we'll try and rescue the place! You are welcome to bring along
friends and spouses. It would be nice if you could inform beforehand
that you will be there, by sending a brief email to
lists-at-shivamvij-dot-com.

See you there!
Shivam


From cahen.x at levels9.com  Fri Jun 10 16:38:13 2005
From: cahen.x at levels9.com (xavier cahen)
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 13:08:13 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] pourinfos  letter / 06-03 to 06-10-2005
Message-ID: <001901c56dac$b1e42a90$0301a8c0@acerkxw6rbeu2s>

pourinfos.org
l'actualité du monde de l'art / daily Art news
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

infos from june 03, 2005 to June 10,2005 (included)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
(mostly in french)

-------------------------------------------------------------------
01 Call : Open Source/Open Ear, Chicago, USA.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1739
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02 Call : corpo at corpo, Send me an “image” of your body, and I will send
you an “image” of mine, Montpellier, France.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1738
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03 Workshop : Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1737
-------------------------------------------------------------------
04 Job : Otis College, LA, seeks Asst. Chair for Academic
Admin. for Fine Arts, Los Angeles, USA.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1740
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05 Residency : artist at Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam,
Netherlands. 
http://pourinfos.org/residences/item.php?id=1736
-------------------------------------------------------------------
06 Meeting : and the total library:  A debate organized by the BPI,
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1734
-------------------------------------------------------------------
07 Meeting : Seminar open over "the century" of Alain Badiou,
Etablissement d'en Face projects, Brussel, Belgique.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1733
-------------------------------------------------------------------
08 Screening : Le MEX-PARISMENTAL festival 4th edition, Cinéma la Clef,
Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1732
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09 Exhibition : Antoni Muntadas, Spanish Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale
2005, Italy. 
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1729
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10 Exhibition : When somebody lends you his eyes... Olga Kisseleva,The
New Gallery, Canada.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1728
-------------------------------------------------------------------
11 Exhibition : Jean-Gabriel Periot, Aire, Moulins, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1730
-------------------------------------------------------------------
12 Performance : Keith Hennessy, Chosen, Les Laboratoires
d'Aubervilliers, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1727
-------------------------------------------------------------------
13 Performance : contemporary dance Festival, Latitudes
Contemporaines, Lille, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1726
-------------------------------------------------------------------
14 Exhibition : Caroline, Boucher, Ingrid Luche, Le Dojo, Nice.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1725
-------------------------------------------------------------------
15 Meeting : Death is never like, Claude Ber, poetry market, Marche de
la
poesie, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1735
-------------------------------------------------------------------
16 Exhibition : Aurelien Louis, Aymeric Louis, Jean-François Roux -
Federic Trialon,L'atelier P.K.182 , Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1724
-------------------------------------------------------------------
17 Exhibition : Mounia Lazali, The Lights of the lanterns, galerie 
perif.net , Beijing, China.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1723
-------------------------------------------------------------------
18 Call : Ingenio 400, Short Film and Net Art Awards,
Madrid, Spain.
lien http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1722
-------------------------------------------------------------------
19 Call : ANAT New Media Lab 2005 Call for Applications,
Melbourne, Australia.
http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1721
-------------------------------------------------------------------
20 Formation : call,  La Manufacture nationale de
Sèvres, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1720
-------------------------------------------------------------------
21 Job : assistant in charge of communication, Contemporary
art center La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1719
-------------------------------------------------------------------
22 Publication : The 485 places of the contemporary art, guides
institutions of contemporary art, France.
http://pourinfos.org/publications/item.php?id=1718
-------------------------------------------------------------------
23 Residency : artist residence, Experimental TV Center, Newark,
USA.
http://pourinfos.org/residences/item.php?id=1717
-------------------------------------------------------------------
24 Various : Art Radio, WPS1 Venice Biennale Live , Venice, Italia.
http://pourinfos.org/divers/item.php?id=1714
-------------------------------------------------------------------
25 Screening : Hot Society, David Kidman, Transat Video et l’Autre
cafe, St-Laurent de Terregatte, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1713
-------------------------------------------------------------------
26 Various : Concert-web. Do not forget all the hostages of the world,
Florence Aubenas, Hussein Hanoun and others, Les Riches
Douaniers, France.
http://pourinfos.org/divers/item.php?id=1715
-------------------------------------------------------------------
27 Exhibition : The 32th edition of FIAC 2005 , Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1712
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28 Exhibition : Program of june, Abbaye de Maubuisson,
Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1711
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29 Exhibition : performance, Henningsen, Infr´Action at Venice, Italia.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1710
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30 Exhibition : lucien pelen, chaises, les ChantiersBoiteNoire,
Montpellier, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1709
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31 Exhibition : Felice Varini, Entre ciel et terre, Biennale de la
Ville, Saint-Etienne, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1708
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32 Exhibition : MULtiple d'artistes, Astrrides - artist studio,
Marseille, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1707
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33 Screening : Program Barbizon theater, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1716
-------------------------------------------------------------------
34 Meeting : Diffusion of Numerical Arts...Laboratoire
Paragraphe, Paris 8, Saint Denis, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1704
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35 Meeting : Internet ethics / Etica di Internet , Facoltà di
Design e Arti, Rome et Venise, Italie.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1703
-------------------------------------------------------------------
36 Meeting : Eric Rondepierre, "Alterations", Rec., Play,
Rew., Centre d'art Mira Phalaina / Maison populaire, Montreuil,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1702
-------------------------------------------------------------------
37 Meeting : Conference "watchwords passwords" directed by Mark
Alizart, Espace Paul Ricard, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1701
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38 Call : to answer the questions which were raised by students,
Pretoria, South Africa.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1699
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39 Publication : Archistorm # 13 - mai-juin, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/publications/item.php?id=1698
-------------------------------------------------------------------
40 Publication : Writing on art: a specific literature ? Figures de
l'art # 9, Pau, France.
http://pourinfos.org/publications/item.php?id=1697
-------------------------------------------------------------------
41 Publication : Camouflage Comics: Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht,
Pays-Bas.
http://pourinfos.org/publications/item.php?id=1705
-------------------------------------------------------------------
42 Residency : artist residence, Synapse 2006, Ecole superieure d'arts,
Rueil
Malmaison, France.
http://pourinfos.org/residences/item.php?id=1696
-------------------------------------------------------------------
43 Residency : artist residence,The Newark Museum Arts Workshop,
Newark, USA.
http://pourinfos.org/residences/item.php?id=1695
-------------------------------------------------------------------
44 Exhibition : Gilles Balmet, la galerie de l'Esad, Amiens, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1693
-------------------------------------------------------------------
45 Exhibition : performance NØ PØRNØISE#1, //errances de l'eros//
ERRATUM, Les Voutes, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1706
-------------------------------------------------------------------
46 Exhibition : program  "ManifestO" Festival d'images at Toulouse,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1692
-------------------------------------------------------------------
47 Exhibition : directed by Michel François, Ecole Regionale des
Beaux-Arts de Rouen, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1691
-------------------------------------------------------------------
48 Exhibition : " Obsession "International Audio -Video Art Festival,
Gallery -X, Istambul, Turkey.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1690
-------------------------------------------------------------------
50 Exhibition: Web exposition : new work at computer fine arts
collection, New-York, USA.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1689
-------------------------------------------------------------------
49 Exhibition : Venice good-bye, Le Sous-Salon, news space opening in
Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1688
-------------------------------------------------------------------
50 Exhibition : Lucy ORTA Jorge, Drink water 01, Fondazione Bevilacqua
La Masa, Venice, Italy.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1687
-------------------------------------------------------------------
51 Exhibition : Patrick Chambon, Inauguration of the gallery Stephane
GianGiacomi, Monaco, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1694




From shivamvij at gmail.com  Fri Jun 10 22:25:22 2005
From: shivamvij at gmail.com (shivam)
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 22:25:22 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Delhi I-Fellows meet in June
Message-ID: <fd72ba1a05061009554cba216a@mail.gmail.com>

Dear all,

Delhi-based Independent Fellows 2004-05 have decided to meet on
Saturday the 18th of June at the National Coffee House at Bhai Mohan
Singh Place near Rivola cinema in Connaught Place at 5 pm.

Past I-Fellows, current and past student stipendiaries, Sarai regulars
and absolutely anyone who would like to attend, is most welcome.

We particularly invite Sumit and Saumya, past I-Fellows whose research
subject was the coffee houses.

Like tea at JNU, coffee at the coffee house is cheap and does not
bolster the interests of any multinational.

Looking forward to the meet,
Shivam


From db at dannybutt.net  Sat Jun 11 01:43:24 2005
From: db at dannybutt.net (Danny Butt)
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 08:13:24 +1200
Subject: [Reader-list] Cultural Futures: Call For Contributions and Event
	Announcement: (Auckland, Dec 1-5 2005)
Message-ID: <BED04DA4.23922%db@dannybutt.net>

First Event Announcement and Call For Contributions - please circulate

CULTURAL FUTURES: PLACE, GROUND AND PRACTICE IN ASIA PACIFIC NEW MEDIA ARTS
Hoani Waititi Auckland / Tamaki Makaurau, December 1-5 2005
http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz

"The first imperative, that of crossing borders, translates as scepticism of
the rhetoric of bounded identities, and relates to the role of the
practitioner as a 'journeyman', as the peripatetic who maps an alternative
world by her journey through it.  The second, of building a shelter against
the odds of the law, insists however on a practice that is located in space,
and rooted in experience, that houses itself in a concrete 'somewhere' on
its own terms, not of the powers that govern spaces. It is this fragile
insistence on provisional stability, which allows for journeys to be made to
and from destinations, and for the mapping of routes with resting places in
between." 
-- Raqs Media Collective, 'X Notes on Practice'

Cultural Futures: Place, Ground and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts
is an international event exploring cultural issues in the emerging new
media environment. It brings internationally significant artists to Auckland
/ Tamaki Makaurau for dialogue, workshops and exhibitions. Cultural Futures
is affiliated with the International Symposium for Electronic Arts
(ISEA2006), as an initiative of the Place, Ground and Practice Working Group
for the Pacific Rim New Media Summit. The Cultural Futures symposium,
exhibitions and workshops will develop international awareness of local work
in new media arts; and link international practices in new media arts to
dialogues in Aotearoa's cultural identity.

Confirmed participants include:

Albert L Refiti (Aotearoa)
Amanda Macdonald Crowley (Australia)
Cheryl L'hirondelle (Canada)
Creative Combat (Australia / Aotearoa)
Fatima Lasay (Philippines)
Jenny Fraser (Australia)
Lisa Reihana (Aotearoa)
Rachael Rakena (Aotearoa)
Raqs Media Collective (India)

with more currently under negotiation. Information on the presenters is
available at http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz/presenters.html

The symposium will include significant time set aside for open discussion,
and an entire afternoon for workshops that will develop ongoing initiatives
for new media arts in the Asia Pacific region. The outcomes from the
workshop will be presented at the Pacific Rim New Media Summit in San Jose,
California in August 2006.

To support this dialogue, we will be publishing a poster/broadsheet which
includes writings and imagery on the theme of "place, ground and practice in
the new media context". The broadsheet will be distributed to a wide public
to help establish an agenda for discussion during the symposium. Submissions
might address the following themes:

Place-based new media practices
Migration and movement
Indigeneity and colonisation
Home and belonging
New media and cultural transformation
Globalisation and cosmopolitanism
New media audiences and infrastructure
Activism and social change

Texts (in any genre) should be of less than 1500 words and images in JPEG
format under 2MB 
in size. These should be sent via e-mail to
info at culturalfutures.place.net.nz by August 30 2005. Publication will be at
the discretion of the editors, and all submitters will be notified of the
editors' decision as soon as possible. All contributions printed will be
attributed and copyright will remain with the contributor. All submitters
not attending Cultural Futures will receive copies of the publication by
post - please include your postal address with your submission.

We are also exploring possibilities for a book and/or journal issue on these
themes, to be developed after the symposium. Please e-mail if you wish to
receive more information about these plans as they develop.

Kia ora.

Danny Butt
Jon Bywater
Nova Paul

Organisational Group,
Cultural Futures
info at culturalfutures.place.net.nz
http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz




From kaiwanmehta at gmail.com  Sat Jun 11 09:09:42 2005
From: kaiwanmehta at gmail.com (kaiwan mehta)
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 09:09:42 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Bombay Meet - Tea at Banganga
Message-ID: <2482459d05061020392fce5bb@mail.gmail.com>

Hi All,

WE had to postpone the last meeting since most were travelling then!

Well can we meet Saturday 18 JUne at 6 pm at Banganga .... the water
tank at walkeshwar!

Drop in a reply - coming or not!

Banganga would be cool and nice ..... lets meet!!

I have CC'd to some personal addreses I had....pass it on if you have
some other sarai fellows' personal ids.

Regards
Kaiwan

-- 
Kaiwan Mehta
Architect and Urban Reseracher

11/4, Kassinath Bldg. No. 2, Kassinath St., Tardeo, Mumbai 400034
022-2-494 3259 / 91-98205 56436


From mediachef at gmail.com  Sat Jun 11 16:18:09 2005
From: mediachef at gmail.com (Steve Dietz)
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 11:48:09 +0100
Subject: [Reader-list] ISEA2006 Community Domain Commissions - Call
Message-ID: <85d7931b050611034832ba69ed@mail.gmail.com>

ISEA2006 Symposium
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge
CALL FOR PROSALS FOR COMMISSIONED WORKS
THEME: COMMUNITY DOMAIN
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu./calls.html
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/communitydomain1/

This is an invitation by the ISEA2006 Symposium and ZeroOne San Jose:
A Global Festival of Art on the Edge to groups and individuals to
submit proposals for exhibition of interactive artworks and projects
reflecting on the thematic of Community Domain. Up to three
commissions will be awarded, and the results will be shown at the
ISEA2006 Symposium and ZeroOne San Jose Festival.

ABOUT THE ISEA2006 SYMPOSIUM AND ZEROONE SAN JOSE FESTIVAL

The 2006 edition of the internationally renowned ISEA Symposium will
be held August 5-13, 2006, in San Jose, California.

The Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international
non-profit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse
and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals
working with art, science and emerging technologies. Prior host cities
include Helsinki, Paris, Sydney, Montreal, Chicago, Manchester and
Nagoya.

ZeroOne San Jose is a milestone festival to be held biennially that
makes accessible the work of the most innovative contemporary artists
in the world. In 2006 it will be held in conjunction with the ISEA2006
Symposium.

See http://isea2006.sjsu.edu for more information about the Festival
and Symposium.

ABOUT THE COMMUNITY DOMAIN CALL

Over the next year leading up to August 2006, individuals or groups
will be commissioned to work with various San Jose communities
combining technologies such as GPS, mobile communications or digital
imagery to map their experiences and to tell their stories. These
experiences and stories will become part of the fabric of the
festival. In this way, the Festival becomes not only a glimpse of the
possibilities of art and technology, but using some of those same
innovative technologies, it is a celebration of the diversity found in
San
Jose and a platform for community members to participate.

A wide range of cultural contexts, media, art disciplines and venues
are feasible within the definition of "Community Domain".  See
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/thematic.html#community for more about the theme.

San Jose has a very diverse and hybrid population. , and we are
particularly interested in projects that traverse different
communities.

Three commissions will be offered for projects related to the
Community Domain theme: one at a level of $25,000 and two at the level
of $5,000.

Proposals may be submitted by individuals or groups: professional
artistic credentials and advanced forms of technology are not
required.  The proposal narrative should be no more than three pages
in length and should cover five topics:

Description of the project: What are the characteristics of the
project?  In what ways will the project connect to the theme of
Community Domain?

Audience: In what fashion will an audience be engaged in this project?
 In what ways will the project seek to engage audience members of
varying cultural backgrounds?

Technology: What types of technology will be incorporated into the project?

Personnel:  Please identify the key individuals/groups involved in
this project, and their qualifications.

Budget: Please provide a brief explanation of how funds will be used
to support this project.

Special Considerations:

Projects will be welcome in a variety of traditional or new forms of
art, media and physical environments.  For example, projects in formal
theater or exhibition settings or informal community or outdoor
settings will be appropriate.  All art forms are welcome including
literary, performing, visual, media and multidisciplinary. 
Appropriate forms of technology include, but are not limited to,
mobile communications, Worldwide Web, recorded audio or video, film,
robotics and digital imagery.

Projects involving teams and collaboration are encouraged.

All projects should incorporate an element of "shared space" that will
be accessible to persons of varied backgrounds.

Preference will be given to projects involving artists and other
personnel having significant familiarity with the communities and
cultures of San Jose and Silicon Valley.

TIMELINE

Proposals must be submitted by August 1, 2005. Proposals will only be
accepted online at http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/submissions.  All
proposals will be reviewed by a panel of distinguished authorities on
culture, art, technology, and community. Final awards will be
announced by September 1, 2005.  All awards are subject to ZeroOne San
Jose's fundraising efforts.

INQUIRIES

Questions regarding this call for proposals can be addressed to
communitydomain at yproductions.com

PLEASE NOTE
There will be a subsequent call, beginning September 1, 2005, for
existing projects related to the Community Domain theme that do not,
necessarily, focus on San Jose / Silicon Valley.


http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu./calls.html
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/communitydomain1/

-- 
Steve Dietz
Director, ZeroOne: The Network
Director, ISEA2006 Symposium +
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu : August 5-13, 2006
stevedietz[at]yproductions[dot]com
AIM: WebWalkAbout
http://www.yproductions.com


From blarkin at barnard.edu  Sat Jun 11 18:17:39 2005
From: blarkin at barnard.edu (Brian Larkin)
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 08:47:39 -0400
Subject: [Reader-list] conference on nigerian video films
Message-ID: <0619b25b77d6ec3f85a21b0814bf531c@barnard.edu>

nollywood rising is a major  conference/film festival on nigerian video 
films - nollywood as it is being called - which are rapidly becoming 
the dominant visual media in africa.
the links page has a series of journalistic articles on the phenomenon.

www.nollywoodconventionusa.com

fyi for those interested in emerging media forms

best
brian larkin



From shivamvij at gmail.com  Sun Jun 12 12:07:23 2005
From: shivamvij at gmail.com (shivam)
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 12:07:23 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] MUMBAI: Loquations celebrates a year of ZESTPoets
Message-ID: <fd72ba1a05061123379f3f39f@mail.gmail.com>

Loquations extends a warm invitation to all ZEST-ers in Bombay; please
join us in the reading of your poems at NCPA on 14th July 2005.

14th July: Poetry on the net: Selections from ZESTPoets
(ZESTPoets celebrated their first birthday on June 3rd.)
Various readers present a programme of poems posted on the ZESTPoets list.

Moderator: Jane Bhandari.
Venue: The Sunken Garden, NCPA, Nariman Point, Mumbai
(Entrance opposite the Oberoi.)
Time: 5.30 (more or less) till 8.00.
Date: Tuesday, 14th July 2005


ABOUT LOQUATIONS: Loquations was started by Adil Jussawalla a little
over five years ago to provide a platform for poetry readings in
English, including translations from other languages. There are about
fifty members, some of whom are practising poets, though this is not a
requirement. Presentations cover a wide variety of poetry subjects and
styles, ranging from Sufi poems to William Shakespeare, from Rap to
Classical Greek, or a simple reading of favourite poems. Presenters
are mostly drawn from the group itself. Members do not read their own
poetry at these meetings. From time to time outstation poets drop by
to read their works, and take part in a lively discussion afterwards.

Loquations meets every Tuesday evening at The Chauraha, NCPA, by kind
permission.

Membership is free, and visitors are welcome.

For more information email loquations2003 at yahoo.co.uk


-- 
I poured reason in two wine glasses
Raised one above my head
And poured in into my life
(-JD)

www.shivamvij.com


From epk at xs4all.nl  Sun Jun 12 19:02:55 2005
From: epk at xs4all.nl (Eric Kluitenberg)
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:32:55 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] 
	Live Streams from Incommunicado 05 on June 15, 16 & 17, 2005
Message-ID: <42AC3987.7010205@xs4all.nl>

A  N  N  O  U  N  C  E  M  E  N  T:

LIVE STREAMS FROM INCOMMUNICADO 05

JUNE 15,16 & 17, 2005.

http://incommunicado.info/conference

http://www.debalie.nl/live

Incommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else
International Working Conference
Amsterdam, De Balie, June 16-17, 2005

Incommunicado 05 is a two-day working conference working towards a
critical survey of the current state of 'info-development', also known
as the catchy acronym 'ICT4D' (ICT for development). Before the recent
“flattening of the world” (Thomas Friedman, 2005), most computer
networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and
info-development mostly involved rather technical matters of knowledge
and technology transfer from North to South. While still widely (and
even wildly) talked about, the assumption of a 'digital divide' that
follows this familiar geography of development has turned out to be too
simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global
info-politics, is emerging.

The opening debate and the proceedings of the Incommunicado conference
in the Main Hall of the conference venue De Balie in Amsterdam, will be
streamed live as MP3 audio stream and a broadband videostream (Real).

The main parts of the program are:

* Wednesday June 15, 20.00 - 22.30 hrs Central European Time:

    Opening: Public Debate

* Thursday June 16, 10.00 - 18.00 CET:

    First Day Program, discussions and workshops

* Friday June 17, 10 - 18.30 CET:

    Second Day Program, discussions and workshops

* Friday June 17, 18.30 - 19.15 CET:
    Remote session

The live-streams are available via the following web-links:

De Balie live page:
http://www.debalie.nl/live

(includes link to conference live-chat)

MP3 stream direct:
http://live.nu/balie-lo.m3u

Real-stream direct:
http://live.dds.nl/1.ram

Please refer to the conference website for further details and
background on the program:
http://incommunicado.info/conference

A small web dossier has been set up on the website of De Balie that will
also make video-registrations of the conference live-streams available
after conclusion of the event:
http://www.debalie.nl/dossierpagina.jsp?dossierid=38576

Concept:
Geert Lovink & Soenke Zehle

Incommunicado 05 is organized by the Institute of Network Cultures
(Amsterdam) together with Waag Society (Amsterdam) and the New Media
Centre Sarai (Delhi), with support from HIVOS, IICD, and the Netherlands
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
http://incommunicado.info/conference










From deb99kamal at yahoo.com  Mon Jun 13 05:07:45 2005
From: deb99kamal at yahoo.com (Debkamal Ganguly)
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 16:37:45 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Reader-list] Introducing Swapan Kumar: Crime pulp fiction of Bengal
Message-ID: <20050612233745.65335.qmail@web52802.mail.yahoo.com>

Hello,
In all my previous postings, I taled about pieces of
memoirs or crime novels that date in the end of 19th
century or early 20th century, As my intention is not
that much to collect the comprehensive list for those
books, I feel in previous postings I could provide
some cases of literature involving crime, at the same
time those texts are sites for study of other dominant
cultural discourses regarding 'notion of history',
'idea of rationality', the use of the new form of
novel in the context of Bengal in case of crime
stories while retaining older narrative strategies. As
my main working area is juvenile crime fiction I would
provide in future postings for that genre as well. 

Right now, I would like to introduce a pulp cime
fiction writer, Swapan Kumar. It was his pseudonym.
According to the collected books possibly his first
published pocket book came out 1953, and I can recount
my juvenile period in late 70s and early 80s, till
that time he was a prolofic writer. I tried to trace
his career. First I tried to locate him. I asked to
few publishers and book sellers in famous College St.
At place people could remember him but they were
amazed to know that he can become a subject of serious
study. They were unable to give me his personal
details not even his real name. As his books are no
more available in new editions, my only luck was to
look in the heaps of old books, scattered in the
footpaths in and around College St. After repeated
effort of mine and one of my  film-institue friend
Kallol (eventually he is also fascinated by the tales
of Swapankumar) some old editions were dug out from
the heaps of those books. More over oneday in a suburb
railway station bookstall, I could find new copies of
Swapan kumar. Interestingly the size of the book is
shorter and thinner than the eralier more familiar
editions and the publication house also has been
changed. Now some of the Swapan Kumar books are
published by a house who specialise in publishing in
pocket books in subjects like commoner's witchcraft,
how to do tantric rites to keep your enemy  always
away from you or a book contained instructions how to
read a signs to know your future from the behaviour of
a visible crow (Kaakshatra). This unusual connection
of Swapan Kumar with these kind of subaltern beliefs
and rituals provided me an important cue to   make an
impression about Swapan Kumar.

While I asked about the whereabouts of Swapan Kumar, I
came across two interesting stories. According to one
story his real name was Dr. S.N.Pandey, and he started
writing these cheap crime fictions to cover his
expenses for carrying out the medical course. He also
wrote some popular books on the nature and cures of
'Gupta Jouna Rog" (secret sexual diseases) in his real
name. According to another version Swapan Kumar also
was known was Sri Vrigu, one of the most popular
Jyotishis (Palmist, future forcaster) in the suburb of
Kolkata. Advertisement of his future forecasting
clinic comes often in the personal columns of most
celebrated dailies of Bengal like Anandabazar Patrika.
In the meantime my friend Kallol unearthed the most
crucial news from an old man of publishing industry,
that Swapankumar/Sri Vrigu died six months back before
commissioning of this project. It was a real moment of
set back for me. The only option that stays with me is
to construct a Swapankumar and the associated
subculture around him, which was far away from the
'glory of Bengal enlightenment' culture.

In coming postings I would try to provide some general
characteristics of his stories, the possible cultural
reading of those texts with the seriousness of
studying  obscured cultural artefacts.
Till next posting
Debkamal 

-------------------------------------------
404 Vimla Vihar 
8-49 Gautamnagar St no. 1 
Dilsukhnagar, Hyderabad - 500060 India 
Phone - 9246363517




		
__________________________________ 
Discover Yahoo! 
Stay in touch with email, IM, photo sharing and more. Check it out! 
http://discover.yahoo.com/stayintouch.html


From shivamvij at gmail.com  Fri Jun 10 19:16:16 2005
From: shivamvij at gmail.com (shivam)
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:16:16 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Mumbai 14th June and Delhi 12th June: ZESTPoets first
	anniversary reading
Message-ID: <fd72ba1a050610064626dca735@mail.gmail.com>

Loquations extends a warm invitation to all ZEST-ers in Bombay;
please join us in the reading of your poems at NCPA on
14th July 2005.

14th July: Poetry on the net:
Selections from ZESTPoets
(ZESTPoets celebrated their first birthday on June 3rd.) 
Various readers present a programme of poems posted on the ZESTPoets list.
Moderator: Jane Bhandari.
Venue: The Sunken Garden, NCPA, Nariman Point, Mumbai
(Entrance opposite the Oberoi.)
Time: 5.30 (more or less) till 8.00.
Date: Tuesday, 14th July 2005
 

ABOUT LOQUATIONS:
Loquations was started by Adil Jussawalla a little over five years ago
to provide a platform for poetry readings in English, including
translations from other languages. There are about fifty members, some
of whom are practising poets, though this is not a requirement.
Presentations cover a wide variety of poetry subjects and styles,
ranging from Sufi poems to William Shakespeare, from Rap to Classical
Greek, or a simple reading of favourite poems. Presenters are mostly
drawn from the group itself. Members do not read their own poetry at
these meetings. From time to time outstation poets drop by to read
their works, and take part in a lively discussion afterwards.

Loquations meets every Tuesday evening at The Chauraha, NCPA, by kind
permission.

Membership is free, and visitors are welcome.

For more information email loquations2003 at yahoo.co.uk 

Issued by Jane Bhandari, Mumbai

o o o o o 

The ZESTPoets list has turned one year old, and we're celebrating by
organising its first real-world poetry reading on

Sunday 12 June 2005, 5 pm
at the National Coffee House, Connaught Place, Delhi.
(Third Floor, Mohan Singh Place, near Rivoli Cinema)

You are welcome to walk in, preferably with poems in hand. You are
welcome to read whatever poetry you would want to. You don't have to
be a ZESTPoets member to attend, but joining the group would not be a
bad idea either.

We have chosen CP because it is central and accessible to all; and
Coffee House on Anand Vivek Taneja's recommendation. Anand promises,
"Coffee House is used to impecunious poets hanging out for hours on
end and declaiming (usually terrible) free verse..."

So we'll try and rescue the place. You are welcome to bring along
friends and spouses. It would be nice if you could inform beforehand
that you will be there, by sending a brief email to
lists-at-shivamvij-dot-com.

See you there!

Issued by Shivam Vij, Delhi

o o o o o

Please distribute as appropriate


From zulfisindh at yahoo.com  Sun Jun 12 04:17:09 2005
From: zulfisindh at yahoo.com (Zulfiqar Shah)
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 15:47:09 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Reader-list] The Price of Hate and Pardon:Paulo Coelho
Message-ID: <20050611224709.81738.qmail@web30714.mail.mud.yahoo.com>


The Price of Hate and Pardon

Paulo Coelho

[Unpublished]

 

In my notes for the year 1989 I come across some sentences jotted down from a conversation I had with J, whom I call my “master.” At that time we were talking about an unknown mystic called Kenan Rifai, about whom little has been written.

 

“Kenan Rifai says that when people praise us we should watch how we behave,” says J, “because that means that we hide our faults very well. Finally we end up believing that we are better than we think and then the next step is to let ourselves be dominated by a false feeling of security that will eventually set up dangers all around us.” 


     “How can we be attentive to the opportunities that life gives us?”
     “If you have only two opportunities, learn how to turn them into twelve. When you have twelve they will multiply automatically. That is why Jesus says: “he who has a lot will have a lot more given. He who has little will have that little taken from him.” 


     “That is one of the harshest sentences in the Gospels. But I have noticed throughout my life that it is absolutely true. So how can we identify the opportunities?”


     “Pay attention to every moment, because the opportunity - the “magic instant” – is within our reach, although we always let it pass by because we feel guilty. So try not to waste your time blaming yourself: the universe will see to correcting you if you’re not worthy of what you’re doing.” 


     “And how is the universe going to correct me?”


     “It won’t be through tragedies; these happen because they are part of 

life, and they should not be thought of as punishment. Generally the universe shows us that we are wrong when it takes away what is most important to us: 

 

our friends. 
   

  “Kenan Rifai was a man who helped many people find themselves and to achieve a harmonious relation with life. Even so, some of those people proved to be ungrateful and never even turned their head to say ‘thanks’. They turned to him only when their lives were in a state of utter confusion. Rifai helped them again without mentioning the past: he was a man with many friends and the ungrateful always ended up on their own.”


     “Those are fine words but I don’t know if I am capable of pardoning ingratitude so easily.” 


     “It’s very difficult. But there is no choice: if you don’t pardon, then you’ll think about the pain they caused you and that pain will never go away. I’m not saying that you have to like those who do you wrong. I’m not telling you to go back to that person’s company. I’m not suggesting that you start seeing that person as an angel or as someone who acted without any hurtful intentions. All I am saying is that the energy of hate will take you nowhere, but the energy of pardon which manifests itself through love will manage to change your life in a positive sense.”


     “I have been hurt many times.”


     “That’s the reason that you still bear within yourself the little boy who cried hiding from his parents, the boy who was the weakest in his class. You still bear the marks of that frail little boy who could never find a girlfriend and was never good at sports. You haven’t managed to chase off the scars of some injustices they committed against you during your life. But what good does that do you? None at all. Absolutely nothing. Just a constant desire to feel sorry for yourself for being the victim of those who were stronger. Or else dress up like an avenger ready to inflict more wounds on those who hurt you. Don’t you think you’re wasting your time with all that?”


     “I think it’s human.”


     “It’s certainly human. But it’s neither intelligent nor reasonable. Respect your time on this Earth, understand that God has always pardoned you, and learn to pardon too.”

 

After this conversation with J, which took place just before I traveled to spend 40 days in the Mojave desert in the United States, I began to understand better the boy, the adolescent, the hurt adult I once was. One morning, going from the Valley of Death in California to Tucson in Arizona, I made a mental list of everyone I thought I hated because they had hurt me. I went along pardoning them one by one and six hours later, in Tucson, my soul felt so light and my life had changed much for the better.

 

Warriors of Light [Network]


		
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From iram at sarai.net  Mon Jun 13 09:51:38 2005
From: iram at sarai.net (iram at sarai.net)
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 06:21:38 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] Rakesh Sharma vs NYPD : Please sign the petition
Message-ID: <c64ed19828e8a31a076b79683d7834a1@sarai.net>

Subject:Fwd: Rakesh Sharma vs NYPD : Please sign the petition
From:anusha rizvi <anusharizvi at yahoo.com>
Date:Fri, 10 Jun 2005 07:28:35 +0100 (BST)
To:reader-list at sarai.net

    fyi

    Subject: Rakesh Sharma vs NYPD : Please sign the petition


    Enclosed below is the text of a petition to be sent to authorities in
New York, Washington DC and New Delhi to protest against Rakesh Sharma's
harrowing experience with cops from NYPD. His seems to be a clear case of
racial profiling, which, inspite of explicit denials by the US
establishment, is a rampant practice. Please lend your support by raising
your voice against harassment of individuals through draconian powers being
exercised by the US law enforcement agencies in the name of War on Terror.
Please sign the petition by going to http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/980334649 . Please circulate this petition to others in your addressbook as well.

     

    Petition text :  

    We are shocked to hear about the intimidation and harassment faced by
the well-known Indian film-maker Rakesh Sharma in New York on May 13, 2005.
NYPD personnel 'detained and interrogated' him for 3 hours and subjected
him to verbal and physical abuse. The details of the incident can be found
in the formal complaint filed by him on May 16, 2005 with The Civilian
Complaint Review Board, New York. (http://rakeshfilm.com/NYPD/index.htm)

     

    Mr. Rakesh Sharma has been traveling in several countries including USA
to screen his film – Final Solution ( http://www.rakeshfilm.com/finalsolution.htm). The film has been screened at over 60 international film festivals and has won over a dozen awards. On May 12, 2005, he was invited to present his film in New York at a screening co-organized by Columbia University and New School. As is clear from the sequence of events, the next day, Mr. Sharma was taking street shots of traffic in Manhattan, less than a block away from his hotel, when an NYPD detec tive accosted him. Even though Mr. Sharma answered each query, produced his identification papers and offered to put the detective in touch with his hosts in New York, he had to face hostile questioning, threats and public humiliation. The detective confiscated his passport, physically pushed him, snatched his camera and among other things said to him: "We know how to deal with you guys, asshole", clearly a racist remark. Though Mr. Sharma was not formally arrested, he was not free to leave, not allowed to make any phone calls and was 'interrogated' by 2 more sets of officers. Finally, detectives of the 'cold case squad' at the 17th precinct illegally previewed the footage shot by him even after his identity had firmly and formally been established.

                           

    We would like to register a strong protest against the NYPD and urge
you to immediately conduct an enquiry into the episode. We find the ethic
of interrogation adopted by the NYPD to be violent, insidious and
oppressive . We feel that the NYPD not just violated several of Mr.
Sharma's rights but may possibly have indulged in racial profiling.
According to Mr. Sharma – " Perhaps I was accosted and interrogated
because of my brown skin, my beard and the fact that I had a camera". We
urge the United States Department of Justice through its Civil Rights
Division to respond, especially in view of its " Initiative to Combat
Post-9/11 Discrimina tory Backlash".

     

    Mayor Bloomberg, we urge you to take immediate punitive action against
officers responsible for the incident. We hope that a formal apology will
be tendered to Mr. Sharma and due compensation will be offered to him for
the mental and physical distress suffered by him. May we also urge you to
take formal steps to ensure that visitors to New York City are not
subjected to such harassment and intimidation by NYPD in the future.

     

    We would like directives to be issued to law enforcement agencies to
put an immediate stop to the practice of racial profiling. We oppose and
resist the perpetuation of newer and more grotesque forms of violence by
state agencies in the name of national security and protest strongly
against the consequent violation of peoples' civil liberties and legal
rights. May we suggest that such actions are not just an assault on the US
Constitution but on the very concepts of liberty and freedom of expression.

     
---
    Rakesh
    wwww.rakeshfilm.com



From aarti at sarai.net  Mon Jun 13 15:20:52 2005
From: aarti at sarai.net (Aarti)
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 15:20:52 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Sarai.txt 2.2 (text version)
Message-ID: <42AD56FC.5090608@sarai.net>

Sarai txt 2.2
1 May - 1 July, 2005
Also see: http://broadsheet.var.cc/blog for previous issues.

*TRANSMIT*

A blank audio cassette, CD, notebook is a medium of as well as testimony 
to multiple everyday acts of creativity; a tool and an impetus to the 
flow of needs, desires and friendships; a gift, and also a commodity. 
That which does not contain anything can take any form. That which does 
not have a fixed location finds itself constituting the rhythms of 
different relationships. It flows, leaving trails in the landscape.

These trails are lines of transmission. They could be the pre-configured 
circuits on which transmission rides. Or rewired circuits, as that which 
is transmitted seeks and finds new shapes, carriers, loops, in its path. 
And they are also eddies, of acts performed and journeys undertaken when 
that which is being transmitted spills over its destined routes.

Depending on how lines of power are drawn, and where we position 
ourselves, we experience and register blockages, barriers, risks, 
threats, fears and small moments of epiphany.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

Content of the text version:
(Does not include the poster)


SIDE 01
Anchor texts:

- Production of Newness (commons-law post by Solomon Benjamin)
- Forms of Technology Transfer (from public lecture at 'Contested 
Commons Trespassing Publics' conference, Sarai-CSDS and ALF, by Doron 
Ben Atar)

SIDE 02

- PLAY: Even Before I have Stepped into The Station... (Meera Pillai, 
Sarai Independent Fellow)
- SHUFFLE: How to Build a Transmitter
- REPLAY: What it Is and What It's Called (from presentation at 
'Contested Commons Trespassing Publics' conference, Sarai-CSDS and ALF, 
by Jane Gaines)
- PAUSE: Long Distance Conversations (Shuddhabrata Sengupta)
- REWIND: The Censor and the Interpreter (from presentation at 'History, 
Memory, Identity' seminar at Sarai-CSDS, by Luisa Passerini)
- RECORD: The Map is Never Complete/Terracotta (Muthata Ramanathan, 
Sarai Independent Fellow, and Smriti Vohra)
- RELEASE: MGM Vs Grokster: "My Way" to "Our Way"

BACKPAGE:
- Sarai[s] : Saraiki + frEeMuzik.net
- Forthcoming: Medianagar 02
- Credits

write to : broadsheet at sarai.net for print copies.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 


SIDE 01:

Subject: Production of Newness
Date: 19/03/2005
To: commons-law at sarai.net
Reply to: sollybenj at yahoo.co.in

Hi,

I want to raise some questions and provocations about the 'production of 
newness' regarding settled understandings about modes of producing 
social goods, specifically in the context of the divide between research 
in the university setting and its application on the ground.
My observations come from a close look at three of India's large 
industrial clusters - one in Delhi, which in 1995 manufactured about 30% 
of the cables (23 family types) and conductors (both copper and 
aluminium) in the Indian market; and textile clusters in the cities of 
Kancheepuram (of 'high grade' silk sarees) and Ramanagaram (silk 
reeling, with Asia’s largest silk cocoon market).
Our studies in these areas have been to trace how these economies grew, 
paralleling macro-economic transformation, to demonstrate that very 
little, if not all, of the innovation came from non-university trained 
people, on the job. Not only is the range of innovations in all three 
places fascinating, but also, in the very short period of three months, 
a new fabric made out of silk waste found itself in the high-fashion 
markets of Milan, New York and Tel Aviv, via 'suitcase entrepreneurs'.
I would like to point out that there was no intellectual property regime 
to 'sustain and foster innovation', and no technical or management 
training by NGOs or government agencies. There were a few cases where 
there was an attempt to promote 'new technologies' - one by an NGO, and 
the other by the Tata Energy Research Institute - on silk reeling. These 
were total disasters, and the overqualified technicians doing their 
stints in the field were the laughing stock of the scruffy locals, who 
commented that the salaries would be better utilised in buying more 
cocoons!
As for 'basic research', one has only to visit the computers supplied by 
Japan Aid laid out in thick plastic sheets in a 'demonstration' Tata 
silk farm near Bangalore. I suspect that as part of a Nehruvian 
development argument, the issue of basic research in universities, as 
contrasted with 'slummy'/applied research innovation, reflects a 
politics of the ability to corner resources. Earlier, it was the select 
few in the IITs (Indian Institute of Technology); and now it's the 
multinationals, via complex contractual regulations and the 
international intellectual property rights asserted in their newfound 
collaborations.
I'll take the chance to mention here a very interesting document - the 
1912 Mysore Economic Conference by Sir Vishwaria, where the issue was 
technological innovation in silk production. The verbatim accounts of 
the discussions show that the big debate was whether to have research 
exclusively in laboratories, or instead for scientists to sleep out on 
the farms, and observe how farmers reared cocoons and made yarn. And in 
this way, test out their 'innovations' in the field, and move away from 
a framework of 'technology transfer' to a framework of 'technology, 
basic and applied'.
For those interested, we'll be happy to share this, perhaps in a more 
reflective piece. But for now, I strongly urge a look at accounts of 
historical and social processes like the 1912 conference! History may 
help us ask necessary questions about our assumptions and axioms.

Cheers,
Solly

Excerpted and adapted from a posting by Solomon Benjamin on the 
commons-law list.
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/2005-March/002324.html

***

- Forms of Technology Transfer

During the 18th and 19th centuries, there were three forms of technology 
transfer between the US and Europe. One was the knowledge itself, 
whichever way it came. It could come as something written or described, 
but this was problematic because descriptions lacked standard 
measurements. For example, when people registered for patents in the 
English Patent Office, they were required to describe the machine, but 
they always kept their accounts vague because they feared that if the 
descriptions were too detailed, the machine would be copied.
Another form of transfer was the machines themselves. But these were not 
of great use unless you knew how to operate them. Which brings me to the 
central agent, the people themselves, the carriers of skill and 
technological know-how, who were crucial to this process.
The migration of artisans and the dissemination of technical skills took 
place in spite of a concerted effort on the part of the British 
government to keep its trade secrets at home. As the imperial conflict 
between the patriots and the metropolis took shape in the mid-1770s, the 
British Parliament ruled that all people leaving for North America from 
the British Isles and Ireland, with the intent to settle, were required 
to pay £50 per head. After the United States won its independence from 
Britain, the act of exporting equipment for various industries, from 
textiles, leather, paper and metals to glass and clock-making, was 
prohibited. The Utopian Socialist thinker Robert Owen, recalling his 
earlier days in the English textile industry, reported that in the 
1780s, “Cotton mills were closed against all strangers. No one was 
admitted. They were kept with great jealousy against all intruders, with 
their doors being always locked.” A tactic that can still evoke smiles 
was that of employing Welsh speakers in certain mills. These people were 
‘safe’; they could not go anywhere or divulge anything, as no one 
understood their language.
The American ‘founders’ knew of these restrictions. But they also 
believed that for the United States to survive politically and 
economically, it had to close the technology gap. Framers of the US 
Constitution unanimously approved Article 1, Section 8, which instructed 
the government to promote the progress of science and useful arts by 
securing, for a limited time, for authors and inventors, the exclusive 
right to their respective writings and discoveries.
This was a significant break from the English system of intellectual 
property, which was itself founded on the promotion of piracy. In the 
14th century, the English monarchy lured European artisans to England by 
offering them a production monopoly. The English law of patents granted 
what are known as ‘patents of importation’ to introducers. ‘Inventors’ 
and ‘introducers’ are different categories; yet in the English system, 
they are not distinct.
The first United States Patent Act broke with the European tradition of 
patents of importation. It restricted patents exclusively to original 
inventors, and established the principle that prior use anywhere in the 
world constituted grounds for invalidating a patent. In theory, the US 
pioneered a new standard of intellectual property rights that set the 
highest possible standards for patent protection, that of worldwide 
originality and novelty. But the intellectual property laws Congress 
enacted in the first fifty years of its existence were a smokescreen for 
a very different reality. The statutory requirement of worldwide 
originality and novelty did not hinder widespread, and officially 
sanctioned, technology piracy.
William Thornton, who administered the American Patent Office for an 
extended period, did not insist on the oath of worldwide novelty. It is 
indeed entirely possible that most of the patent applications received 
were for devices that were already in use, since acquiring a patent 
required little more than the successful completion of paperwork. 
Moreover, the Patent Act of 1793 explicitly prohibited foreigners from 
obtaining patents in the US for inventions that had been put to work 
elsewhere in the world. This meant that while US citizens could petition 
for introducers patents in European nations, European inventors could 
not protect their intellectual property in America.
What seems to be emerging, then, is a new understanding of the proper 
arena for technology piracy. The young republic embraced a Janus-faced 
approach. In theory, it pioneered a new standard of intellectual 
property with the strictest possible requirements. A self-respecting 
government, eager to join the international community, could not flaunt 
its violation of the laws of other nations. But in practice, the state 
encouraged widespread piracy and industrial espionage.
In this process of theoretical distancing from/pragmatic embracing of 
piracy, the US had come full circle. The fledgling republic had become 
the primary technology exporter in the world. The years of piracy upon 
which the current stature was founded were, however, erased from the 
American national memory. The intellectual debt owed to imported 
technology did not turn the US into a champion of the free exchange of 
knowledge. As the diffusion of technology began to flow eastward of the 
Atlantic, America emerged as the world’s foremost advocate of extending 
intellectual property rights to the international sphere.

Excerpted and adapted from “US Path to Wealth and Power: Intellectual 
Piracy and the Making of America”, a public lecture by Doron Ben- Atar 
at the ‘Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics’ conference organised by 
Sarai-CSDS and the Alternative Law Forum (6-8 January 2005, New Delhi). 
The full text of the lecture can be accessed at: 
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-April/005344.html
An audio file of the lecture is available for free download at: 
http://www.sarai.net/events/ip_conf/doron.mp3

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SIDE 02

PLAY

- Even Before I Have Stepped into the Station...

Spotting us from the corner of their eyes, the boys leap up and flee. 
Joseph calls out, “Hey, it’s us! Where are you off to?” They pause, two 
or three with a leg over the railings. Their faces split in grins, they 
wait for us to catch up with them.
“Did you think we were the police?” asks Joseph, his cheerful voice 
booming.
“We were playing bomma,” they explain. A simple game played by younger 
boys at Vijaywada railway station: tossing a coin, calling out heads or 
tails, keeping the coin if you call correctly. The keepers of law 
mistake this for gambling, and usually object.
Curious passersby slow down, stop to watch us talk to the children. 
There are seven boys aged 8-12 in this group, hanging out at the end of 
the handicapped-accessible ramp beside the broad steps of the station’s 
side entrance. Vijaywada is the largest junction on the South Central 
Railway. It services 135 trains and about 30,000 passengers daily. On an 
average, 23 children arrive here each day, having left their homes and 
families. Joseph and Basha, who trawl the railway platforms daily on 
behalf of a local NGO working with children in need of care and 
protection, are familiar figures to these particular boys. The fact that 
I am accompanying Joseph and Basha makes me ‘safe’, in the group’s 
perception.
“Does anyone speak Hindi? She can speak Hindi,” Joseph says. In my 
minimal Telugu, and with hand gestures, I explain, “Telugu raadu. I 
can’t maatlaadu, but if you speak to me, artham cheysukontaanu.”
All seven are amused at my incompetence, but generous about my effort. 
Three start talking to me in Hindi, and a fourth, we discover, speaks 
Tamil, so he and I have that language in common. Most important is their 
question “Tumhara gaon kahaan (Where is your village)?”
One of them has travelled to Bangalore, and asks me where the street 
children’s shelters are. “I looked for them, but I couldn’t find them.” 
I give him a quick tip on how to locate the shelters there.
A man comes by with a flask and tiny plastic “glasses” that can hold 
about two tablespoons of liquid. Within a moment, we are all sipping 
tea. The vendor is in a chatty mood. “I tell them they should also sell 
tea...I can help one or two. They can sell tea and make Rs. 50-100 a 
day. But they don’t listen.”
The boys ignore him. “Do you hang out here often?” I ask. They say yes, 
nod casually.
“And no one disturbs you?”
“No...Or if they come, we go there. Or there.” They point to the roof 
abutting the ramp, to the roof of the wide porch, to the space under the 
metal stairs leading from a footbridge to the road outside the railway 
station. “When we want to sleep, we go under those stairs. Or up there, 
when it is hot. We climb up that.” They point at a cast iron drainpipe 
along the side of the building.
“Is that difficult?”
They laugh. One boy leaps onto the railings. In a couple of seconds, he 
has shimmied up to the roof and back. “We can climb up that neem tree to 
the porch. Or use that pipe over there...or those pipes.”
I’ve not even entered yet, and already I’ve seen three non-standard 
living spaces that the Vijaywada railway station provides to its young 
residents. Spaces that I have never noticed there before. This was my 
second lesson in recent times. Earlier, three young men at the station 
had drawn freehand maps to indicate spaces they thought were ‘safe’ and 
‘dangerous’ for children who live there. In their sketch, a well-lit, 
modern food court and the railway reservation counter were marked as 
dangerous, and the roofs of footbridges and stairways connecting 
different platforms were marked as the safest - for rest, for play, for 
living. How the youngsters inhabiting the station perceived its spaces 
in terms of ‘security’ and ‘threat’ was in complete contradiction to how 
those same spaces were perceived by me, a middle-aged, middle-class woman.

Meera Pillai
mpillai65 at yahoo.com
Sarai Independent Fellow, 2004-05. Her research is titled “Food Courts 
and Footbridges: Conceptualising Space in Vijaywada Railway Station”.

Compiled from two postings, which can be accessed at:
https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-January/004879.html
https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-May/005689.html

***
SHUFFLE

Materials Required
ØA 1-megahertz crystal oscillator
ØAn audio transformer
ØA generic printed circuit board
ØA phone plug
ØA 9-volt battery clip
ØA 9-volt battery
ØA set of alligator jumpers
ØSome insulated wire for an antenna

How to Build a Transmitter
1] Flatten out the two metal tabs on the bottom of the transformer and 
glue them to the circuit board.
2] Insert and firmly secure the leads of the oscillator into the circuit 
board, placing it far to the right. Solder.
3] Insert the stripped end of the red wire of the transformer into a 
hole in the printed circuit board. Insert the red wire from the battery 
clip into another hole that is connected by copper foil to the first 
hole. Solder.
4] Insert the white transformer wire into a hole whose copper foil is 
connected to the upper left pin of the oscillator. Solder.
5] Cut one of the clip leads in half and strip the insulation from the 
last half-inch of each piece.
6] Insert the black wire of the battery clip into a hole whose copper 
foil connects to the lower right pin of the oscillator. Do the same with 
the stripped end of one of the alligator clip leads. Solder the two 
wires to the copper foil. The alligator clip will be the “ground” 
connection.
7] Insert the stripped end of the other alligator clip into a hole that 
is connected to the upper right pin of the oscillator. Solder to the 
copper foil. This is the antenna connector.
8] Open the phone plug, insert the blue and green wires of the 
transformer into the plastic handle. Put each of the transformer wires 
into holes in the plug. Solder.

Depending on the antenna, the transmitter can send voice and music 
across the room, or across the street. To get a good range, clip the 
ground wire to a good ground, such as a cold water pipe, and clip the 
antenna to a long wire. Choose your range. Transmit.

http://www.scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/radio/am_transmitter.html

***
REPLAY

- What It Is, and What It’s Called

How many times can a joke be told if a joke be told more than once?
How many ways can a joke be told if a joke be told more than once?
What would a jester do if told that a joke dies with its first telling?
Would a joke remain the same joke if we only changed the spelling?

In 1895, the Lumière brothers in France made a film called L'Arroseur 
Arrosé, or The Waterer Watered. The plot was apparently simple, comic, 
almost slapstick. A gardener is holding a hose. A boy steps on the hose, 
choking off the flow of water. The gardener peers down the hose. The boy 
lifts his foot from the hose. The gardener is squirted.
Early films were in high demand; the period between 1895 and 1899 was a 
sort of Wild West of opportunity to reproduce at random and at large. 
Often the original negatives ran out, and the prints could only be shown 
about 60 times; by then they were reduced to shreds. In such instances, 
as with The Waterer Watered, the only option was to re-shoot, i.e., to 
‘re-tell’ the joke. So, like all jokes which grow and transform in the 
telling, this rudimentary plot changed with each version. Stylistic 
components such as depth of field were introduced; so were dramatic 
elements. The boy is spanked; the ‘watered’ gardener ‘waters’ the boy in 
turn; the boy is played by a girl...
 From 1896 to 1903 occurs what I call the moment of the too-too-many 
copies of The Waterer Watered. Through my research on this film’s 
multiple variants, we know that a film called The Gardener (Le 
Jardinier, 1895, Lumière Company) was shown at the Salon Indien in 
Paris. The film later becomes The Waterer Watered. This is further 
complicated, in that the Lumières made the same film, The Waterer 
Watered, more than once.

Making and Re-making:
Most textbooks record one version of The Waterer Watered, and possibly 
two. Only two textbooks from the 1930s refer to ten versions. I have 
actually counted up to sixteen versions. As we shall see, these versions 
were not just by the Lumières, the ‘original’ makers. In 1896, Méliès 
made his own version. Edison made an 1896 American version, Bad Woman, 
Bad Boy, in which both roles are played by women; this film is not 
extant. The British made The Bad Boy and the Garden Hose (Blackton and 
Smith), and The Gardener with Hose or The Mischievous Boy (W.H. Smith). 
Then we have two more French examples, one of them made by the pioneer 
woman producer/director Alice Guy-Blaché.
Most interesting to me is the mystery print, The Gardener and the Bad 
Boy, which was shown in New York in 1896, but had no mention of any 
exhibitor or distributor. The date of this ‘extra-legal’ screening does 
not correspond with the date that the Lumière company actually showed 
the first work in New York.

Prints and Titles:
The other question of the too-too-many copies, besides the number of 
copies, is also what you call the copies. Do the titles give us an 
indication of the prints? Because all we have to go on, in our attempt 
to do this kind of motion picture history, this history of copyright, 
are titles and prints in archives all over the world which have probably 
been misnamed. In addition to the multiple translations of the French 
L’Arroseur Arrosé as Waterer and Watered and The Waterer Watered, you 
will also see The Practical Joke and the Gardener, Watering the 
Gardener, The Sprinkler Sprinkled, and Teasing the Gardener. With all of 
these variations, where is the correspondence, if any, between the 
titles and the prints?
Some argue that The Waterer Watered is the first comedy, some argue that 
it’s the first fiction film. I have to tell you that I am not a believer 
in ‘firsts’. I am also on the warpath against ‘origins’. And what I love 
about this particular project is that it is impossible to really 
determine where the ‘first’ occurs, when the ‘first’ occurs, or if there 
is a ‘first’...

Excerpted and adapted from the presentation “Early Cinema, Heyday of 
Copying” by Jane Gaines, at the ‘Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics’ 
conference organised by Sarai-CSDS and the Alternative Law Forum (6-8 
January 2005, New Delhi). An audio file of the presentation can be 
accessed at: 
http://www.sarai.net/events/ip_conf/day02_audio/stream-070105-afterlunch.mp3 


***
PAUSE

- Long Distance Conversations

I am a prisoner of phone booths. STD/ISD/PCO/FAX/Xerox By Japanese 
Machine booths. I am enthralled by their darkened glass panes, 
stencilled signage and plastic flowers, the late hours they keep, and 
the stories that gather on their wallpapers. Like an idiot hungry for 
tales of travellers who idled in the sarais of the Delhi sultanate, I 
waste my time in the phone booths of ‘90s New Delhi. Even when I have 
nothing to say and no one to call. I go there to eavesdrop on the world, 
to whisper in my head the magic of distant place names: Adas, Addagadde, 
Galsi, Gambhoi, Kanjirapuzha, Kalna, Zira, Zineboto. Or, I search 
further in the book of codes for cities with enchantments: Rosario, 
Uppsala, Valparaiso, Zauqa, Aqaba...and Sandnes...and Los Angeles.
...Phone booths in the city centre, close to railway stations and cheap 
hotels, are home to a floating population of tourists and travellers in 
various stages of fatigue and enthusiasm. They unbuckle their voluminous 
rucksacks, unzip their hip pouches to take out scraps of paper with 
phone numbers in Belgium or Germany, while imagining the prospects of 
return and mapping their future itineraries. Will it be Ladakh before 
Goa, or Dharamsala before Varanasi? These are the roving envoys of the 
lonely planet, invariably overcharged by smooth phone booth owners who 
hide their racism behind the complicated arithmetic of time and money 
conversions.
...A refugee Afghan doctor and his wife come to ring up Kabul. I asked 
them once if they still have friends or relatives there. “No,” they 
said, “everyone is dead, or in exile. We call only to see if the house 
we left behind is still standing. When the phone rings, it means that 
the house has not been shelled.”
...Three Malayali nurses, exceptionally graceful, regularly call up 
family in their home town. After the change has been tendered, the boss 
of our phone booth, who lets the nurses move to the head of the queue 
(no one seems to mind), asks them searching questions about the 
Christian faith. Is the Holy Ghost a ghost? Was Jesus reborn after his 
death? Did the Virgin Mary have a normal delivery? Do Christians have 
caste? The nurses painstakingly answer these questions in halting Hindi, 
promise to try and find out from their priest.
...The night’s calls are nearly over, at 12.40 am. Along with me, 
there’s a backpacker still trying to get through to Barcelona, and the 
boss, staring at cable TV. The phone rings, but the boss and the 
backpacker have fallen asleep, and for the next twenty-five minutes or 
so, the shiny-shoed salesman who rushes in makes long-distance love to a 
married woman in Bangalore. Sometimes he breaks off from Kannada and 
begins talking about her long hair in English. He jokes about the 
sleeping husband, asks for news of the children, promises to see her soon.
...The boss counts the day’s takings and begins to roll down the 
shutter. I offer to drive the backpacker down to the all-night STD booth 
outside the Eastern Court buildings on Janpath. We drive in silence; we 
have things to say to the people we need to call, not to each other. 
Then my companion decides to tell me that his friend is dead and cold in 
a hospital morgue, that he is catching the next flight back in the 
morning with her body. When we get to the booth, he lets me wake the 
operator and get the cards with which to work the phones. He shuts the 
door tight behind him when he calls, and I cannot hear his voice. When 
he is done, he thanks me and leaves before I can ask him if I can take 
him to his hotel, or to the hospital.
...How did he say what he had to tell his friend’s family? “Flavia and I 
are coming home tomorrow, but she is not alive”, or “Flavia died this 
morning at 6.45 in her sleep”, or just, “Flavia is dead.”
Sometimes I think of all the telephone conversations that criss-cross 
the earth...Numbers don’t match, there is static interference, satellite 
links fail, people don’t know what to say, or are unable to say what 
they mean. Perhaps all that is unsaid collects each night and hovers 
above us like an unknown layer in the atmosphere, until it is blown away 
on the rare days when people find it possible to really speak to each 
other.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
shuddha at sarai.net

Excerpted from an essay first published in The India Magazine, 
August-September 1996; republished in Elsewhere, ed. Kai Friese, Penguin 
India, New Delhi, 2000. For full text see: 
http://www.sarai.net/compositions/texts/works/longdistance.htm

***
REWIND

- The Censor and the Interpreter

For an oral historian, the first major source is the encounter between 
two subjectivities, between the interviewee and the interviewer. But 
when I say two subjectivities, I mean not only the agency, the capacity 
to act. I mean also the world of ideas, imagination, thought, emotion, 
which inhabits the subject. And the source here is to be understood in 
the literal sense like the water which vivifies. The source is the 
meeting between human beings, and therefore the recognition between 
them, how they relate to each other and present each other, the 
understanding between them, and finally the actual emotion of meeting.
So this is the first source of oral history: the emotion of the meeting. 
Of course, there are other similar sources. I mean, there is a similar 
source in history also that does not use the oral at all, and it is 
called empathy. It is the empathy of the biographer; it is the empathy 
with the document. So this encounter is there, the encounter of feelings.
Why do I insist on the emotion? Not only because I think that it is an 
under-recognised topic and attitude in history, but also because I am 
thinking of Freud’s reference to the question of emotion when he says 
that the erotic drive is actually extremely flexible. It is much more 
flexible than the drive to eat, because you cannot eat just anything but 
you can become attached to anything. You can love anything.
This flexibility of sentiment is the first source of oral history.
Secondly, this encounter between two subjectivities is expressed in 
words, and therefore it gives rise to an inter-subjectivity of dialogue. 
It is this inter-subjectivity that is taped on the tape recorder.
This ‘tape’ is a very strong censorship. It is the censorship of 
everything that is not a word. The tape recorder does not include the 
image, does not include the body. (It does, however, include laughter, 
chuckles, cries...).
But the very censorship it operates through also forms the tools through 
which we work. The taped interview is the source I always send my 
students back to. They cannot go back to the original situation but they 
can go back to the taped interview.
The transcript, which is the third source, is only a shortcut: a 
shortcut for analysis. But the transcript is already the translation of 
the oral into the written. So it has undergone a huge transformation.
And then there is a fourth transformation, which is interpretation. Here 
one uses all sorts of disciplinary tools, from folklore, from 
anthropology, from media studies, from economics, and so on.
Then there is the question of temporalities. I would say that in the 
oral interview there are three temporalities at least. One is the time 
in which one does the interview – the present. Another is the time 
period of the narration. A narration, for instance, can refer to Fascism 
in the 1930s, between the two world wars. And the third is the 
temporality of the narration itself. The narration can very well have 
centuries-long roots. It can have roots in other traditions of narration 
– a tradition of narration that exists since a very long time or that 
comes from different spheres, for instance TV shows, and so on.
Operating through these three temporalities, the inter-subjectivity of 
the encounter produces something that can constitute very different 
collections. It can constitute an oral archive, it can become the basis 
of a community project or it can undergo literary treatment, or it can 
become a radio programme, or it can become a source for history.
These are ways in which oral material becomes a source...In order to be 
transformed into a source, oral material has to undergo specific 
procedures.

Excerpted and adapted from a talk by Luisa Passerini at the ‘History, 
Memory, Identity’ workshop organised by Sarai-CSDS (14-16 January 2005).

***
RECORD

- The Map Is Never Complete

This project is an attempt to extend critical understandings of the use 
of spatial technologies (remote sensing and GIS) that typically focus on 
institutional and instrumental aspects. My research includes documenting 
my observations of the actual processes of technological practice.
I argue that we should pay attention to the spaces and actors involved 
in the technical stages of knowledge production, and maintain the 
linkages from the phenomenon to be represented (e.g., the agrarian 
landscape) to the objects of representation (e.g., a land use map) and 
the manner in which these are utilised.
During my ongoing interactions with the technical staff of the NGO that 
I have been associated with for this work, I have noticed a specific 
culture of learning/practice.
I accompanied a soil scientist on a soil mapping field trip. To 
familiarise me with his approach to soil classification and mapping, he 
handed me a soils manual and asked me to read it on the day before our 
field visit. It contained information about soil characteristics such as 
texture, depth, and colour – specifically, definitions of different 
classes of texture, depth, etc. Later he gave me a quick overview of his 
field methods.
These methods were based on the interaction between soil 
characteristics, and this information was not contained in the manual. I 
asked him about this as we drove to the site the next morning. He 
replied that while writing the manual, he had made a deliberate choice 
to not include the information about the interactions. He also refused 
to tell me about it in the jeep. He described this as a question of 
style that he had developed over the years. In his opinion, if he ‘told’ 
me about it, broke it down into steps, it would not help me in the 
least. I would not develop my own style or understanding, and would 
instead practice a simplistic method of soil mapping.
We spent nearly two days traversing the fields, classifying soils and 
mapping their distributions. During this, he shared many insights. 
However none were prescriptive; instead, they were (some rather 
slippery) building blocks.
This seemed to me a specific epistemology and approach to learning. 
There is no absolute soil class or soil map for a region. Much is based 
on interpretation and making tough, but informed, choices on the ground. 
In order to impart this kind of knowledge, my ‘teacher’ chose to provide 
me with the basics textually, and then chose to show the way differently 
through ‘practice’.
I had to learn to make these choices myself as I stood on a plot of land 
and looked around – how to situate myself with respect to the local 
topography, interpret the local geology, triangulate it with standing 
crops (if any) in the area, the slope of the land, the colour of the 
soil. The map is never complete, stage by stage, inch by inch – a choice 
you make down the line might still influence a choice you had just made.

Muthatha Ramanathan
muthatha at u.washington.edu
Sarai Independent Fellow, 2004-05. Her research is titled “Tracing 
Spatial Technology in the Rural Development Landscape of South India”. 
Her posting can be accessed at:
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-April/005376.html

+++++++

Terracotta, known locally as peeli mitti (yellow earth), is of a 
recalcitrant grain, its rough beauty fretted with stones, roots, twigs, 
sharp edges of buried fragments, gritty seams of resistance willing 
their own annihilation.
To prepare this clay for use, soak it in a bucket overnight. Pour off 
the water that collects on the surface of the sediment. Vigorously sieve 
the dense slurry through a close-latticed mesh. Free of detritus, liquid 
silk falls through, so fine that it coats the skin without nudging the 
alignment of a single hair.
Allow this yield to dry to the preferred consistency, turning it over 
occasionally to make sure it is evenly exposed.
Technically speaking, if the slurry is kept adequately moist and left to 
“sour” in the bucket for an extended period, the clay later proves 
stronger, as well smoother and more supple, to the potter’s grip.
smriti at sarai.net

***
RELEASE

- MGM vs. Grokster: “My Way” to “Our” Way

In October 2001, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer and twenty-eight of the world’s 
largest entertainment companies took the makers and distributors of the 
Grokster, Morpheus and Kazaa softwares to court, alleging secondary 
copyright violation. They held that the distributors of the software 
were directly responsible for the infringing activities of users of the 
system. MGM vs. Grokster came up for hearing before a bench of the US 
Supreme Court on 29 March 2005. Arguments are currently in progress, and 
a decision is expected by the end of June this year.
Grokster, like other P2P softwares such as Kazaa, Limewire and 
BitTorrent, enables users connected to a network, such as the Internet, 
to share files with each other. These could be music files, video files 
and even digitised books. The industry has traditionally been suspicious 
of technologies that enable the circulation of cultural material in ways 
and forms that cannot be controlled by the owners of the copyright on 
that material. An anxiety ratcheted up by the immense transformative 
possibilities opened up by new media and digital technology tools on the 
one hand, and a parallel tightening of an international intellectual 
property regime on the other. The Grokster case is not the first 
instance of such a suit. In 1999, AGM music filed a similar suit against 
the makers of Napster, a similar file-sharing software.
At the juridical level, the Grokster case is a question of technological 
innovation and its limits, when situated within a regime that places an 
equally high value on the protection of the intellectual property of 
other innovators, such as artists, authors, musicians, etc., which 
technologies like Grokster are seen to threaten, violate and undermine. 
A precedent had been set in 1984 with Sony Corporation of America vs. 
Universal City Studios, or the Betamax case. The US Supreme Court ruled 
that a company was not liable for creating a technology that some 
customers may use for copyright infringing purposes, so long as the 
technology lends itself to substantial, commercially viable 
non-infringing uses.
However a consideration of the Grokster case would have to take into 
account the fact that this is as much about the ‘case’ and all that 
surrounds it as a cluster of transmissible signals, as it is about the 
bare facts of the case itself.
The many avatars of Grokster – a posting on a list, an announcement on a 
website, a transcript in an archive, an entry in a blog, perhaps a 
conversation between a judge and his teenage grandson – gesture to the 
cumulative effects of what happens when something enters a network 
capable of allowing the simultaneous exchange of information between an 
ever-expanding constituency of interested parties.
Ideas multiply and go places. And so does the simple idea of file 
sharing. From a court case to a web log to a posting to the words in the 
paper that you hold in your hand to the next set of hands that hold the 
paper, and so on.
A lawsuit against a technology of transmission itself becomes the object 
of transmission along the byways of the Net. Information travels across 
the neurons of the Net sparking off connections, sometimes at random. A 
Washington lawyer who attended the oral submission before the Supreme 
Court describes this on his blog, an artist who uses file-sharing 
software to upload and share his music with peers features news of the 
case on his site, a website begins a countdown of all the technologies 
that would be retrospectively prohibited if the Court rules against the 
technology, a law school decides to upload the oral transcripts in pdf 
format on its portal. A group of artists get together and file amicus 
curiae (friends of the court) briefs in favour of Grokster, just as 
other artists signed by the recording labels file briefs against it. A 
critical mass gathers around the case, so that regardless of whether the 
final judgment is in its favour or not, it (and along with it, the idea 
of file sharing) has nonetheless entered the accretive memory of the 
network.
The circulation of things is crucially about the patterns of usage that 
emerge around them. Circulation builds cultures and contexts of 
sociality, in which things are gifted, shared, transformed, repurposed 
and remixed. In a network, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” is open to becoming 
“his way” and “her way”. Sometimes maybe even “our way”. Then, these 
‘ways’ enter the everydayness of discourse and practice and it becomes 
difficult to create barriers to block them.

For more information on this case see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios_v._Grokster and 
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/
To download a full text version in pdf format of the oral submission 
before the United States Supreme Court, see:
http://p2p.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000167039288/

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

BACKPAGE:

- Story: Saraiki

SARAI[S]:

In medieval South Asia, sarais (inns) were constructed at strategic 
distances all along intersecting trade routes, providing free food and 
lodging for travellers, and grain and fodder for their weary horses, 
camels and pack animals. Sarais were junctions where those on the road 
-– merchants, traders, artisans, seekers of fortune, scholars, pilgrims, 
vagrants, beggars, priests – could find shelter, sustenance and 
companionship. Magicians, dancers and musicians lived around the sarais 
and performed for its floating clientele.
Sarais functioned as crucial hubs in an extensive communication network 
that used horse mail and itinerant human couriers to cover huge 
distances. Messages passed along the length and breadth of the South 
Asian subcontinent, from Kandahar and beyond in the far north-west, 
bordering Afghanistan and the Baluchistan deserts in the west, to the 
Irrawaddy basin in Burma in the east, and from the Tibetan plateau in 
the far north to the far southern tip of the Deccan peninsula.
Even today, the map of Delhi is inscribed with at least twelve locations 
that include the word sarai.
A transit point suspended between departure and arrival, the sarai was a 
site for the exchange of news, stories, gossip, trade secrets and useful 
information. Many tongues carrying their own subtle inflections and 
unique cadences jostled for space here. From this eloquent din emerged a 
strange, polyglot creation, an unruly mix of Persian, Khari Boli, 
Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto and Turkish. It was called Saraiki: the language 
of the sarai.

**

frEeMuzik.net
Welcome to frEeMuzik (http://www.freemuzik.net/). This is a digital 
intervention, a collective where musicians can interact and create 
recordings without commercial pressures. It aims to foster an open 
cultural space for the expression and documentation of musical forms 
that are
ignored/neglected in the market, and are threatening to disappear. All 
music on the site can be freely downloaded.
Artistes are invited to improvise, experiment and freely contribute to 
frEeMuzik.net, which will focus on genres across the musical spectrum, 
including Indian and Western classical/folk, Latin, Indigenous and 
electronic.
With its alternative, non-profit approach, and without soliciting 
funds/promotion from music companies or corporate sponsors, 
frEeMuzik.net intends to establish a record label and recording studio, 
and build an audio library by collecting old and rare records as well as 
new CDs. We will also be working with Internet radio towards 
broadcasting frEeMuzik.net in the public domain.
We welcome participation from photographers, musicians, sound 
recordists, mixing/mastering experts, studio professionals, software 
coders and people interested in contributing to the frEeMuzik.net 
resource base in any way.
Contact ish at sarai.net
http://users.sarai.net/ish/idea.htm


FORTHCOMING: Medianagar 02
Medianagar is the annual Hindi publication of the Publics and Practices 
in the History of the Present project, in Sarai. Medianagar 02 explores 
the dynamic and fluid networks of the production, distribution and 
circulation of diverse media forms. It attempts a creative exploration 
of the forms, trends and representations of media in the contemporary city.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[END OF BROADSHEET]

CREDITS

Editorial Collective:
Aarti Sethi
Iram Ghufran
Shveta Sarda
Smriti Vohra

Editorial Co-ordinator
Monica Narula

Design (print version): Mrityunjay Chatterjee
Photographs: Monica Narula

Write to
broadsheet at sarai.net


From shivamvij at gmail.com  Mon Jun 13 23:36:02 2005
From: shivamvij at gmail.com (shivam)
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 23:36:02 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] India has one of the world's best universities
Message-ID: <fd72ba1a050613110634474a05@mail.gmail.com>

No exams. No classes. No degrees. Only some violence, a few suicides. 
Welcome to India's Universities. 

o o o o o o 


No exams again, boy ends life


By Siraj Qureshi
Thursday, June 02, 2005
AGRA, JUNE 1: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=71517


A student of Dr B.R. Ambedkar University in Agra committed suicide
yesterday after the authorities put off the pharmacy examinations for
the third year in a row.

Sonvir Singh's classmates took to the streets after the incident and
went on a rampage for over three hours inside the campus today,
pelting stones at the Institute of Basic Science and the
Vice-Chancellor's office. The university authorities had to call in
the police to bring the students under control.

According to the students, Sonvir, a resident of Saiyyan town of Agra,
had shut himself inside his hostel room on Tuesday after he saw that
the university has closed for summer vacation till July 4 without
announcing the exam dates for the pharmacy course. It was to be held
in May.

Fearing that his careerwas doomed, he allegedly took his own life.


From machleetank at gmail.com  Tue Jun 14 12:54:33 2005
From: machleetank at gmail.com (Jasmeen P)
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 12:54:33 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] ONE NIGHT STAND
Message-ID: <faa8cf8e050614002439947969@mail.gmail.com>

Hi

One Night Stand is a mobile public performance about asserting
yourself on the streets.

This performance/event invites you to be participant. 

We begin at 5 pm from the MG/ St Marks Road crossing and gradually
move towards Brigade and Residency Road.

Looking forward to seeing you,

With kind regards,
Jasmeen Patheja.

Contact Jasmeen at 98868 40612

Email: blanknoise at gmail.com
www.blanknoiseproject.blogpsot.com





-- 
ph: + 91 98868 40612


From kcoelho at email.arizona.edu  Tue Jun 14 01:02:27 2005
From: kcoelho at email.arizona.edu (Karen Coelho)
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 01:02:27 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] new posting
Message-ID: <002201c5704e$a2789a60$42008796@user>

On "Thaneer"

 

Ashokamitran's novella "Water" ("Thaneer" in the original) is a prose documentary set in the drought-stricken summer months of 1969 in Madras. I am reviewing it here for two reasons: first, it is built, to a large extent, on the same images and textures that I have in mind for my project. And second, it drew me almost too easily into its present, telescoping time, suggesting a changeless city and casting an ironic light - or shadow - on all the putative developments of the intervening 35 years. The work first appeared in serialized form in the journal "Kanaiyaazhi" in 1971, and then in its entire form in 1973.  I am reading a version published by Katha in 2001, translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom.  

 

The book is a detailed realist-impressionist depiction of the struggle for water on the streets of Madras, through an almost claustrophobic focus on a single street whose existence (and near destruction) revolves around the daily quest for water. Its protagonist is a single woman in her late twenties called Jamuna who lives alone in a rented room on the street.  Her restless tossings of ambition, hopelessness, self-hate and compassion are mirrored and inflected by the action on the street outside.   Water, in this book, is social and symbolic material, medium, metaphor.   It drops into every conversation - as central character or casual idiom; it is not only background to the action, but propels it (for example, characters make decisions to move or stay on the street based on the water situation).  Worries about water punctuate every scene; strategies to capture water form and dissolve social relationships; hope, despair, cruelty and compassion, play out on the street between landlady and tenant, relatives and neighbors as the water alternately gushes and withholds itself.  Jamuna's despair over her sister leaving the house and moving to a hostel is expressed in worries over water: hotels and hostels were supplied with water from drums, rarely cleaned and "filled in the dead darkness from some decaying well. That water could contain roots, droppings, rubbish, leeches, snails, cockroaches, even frogs. Chaya had gone away to that hostel.  Was this the water that she was drinking?... Chaya. Chaya" (p.43).  Subtle changes in the water situation mark the passage of time, or rather, produce effects of timelessness - "it was now months since the water had stopped coming out of the taps." (p.44).



The street comes alive in the darkness just before dawn when the pumps start to flow.  Women, awakened by the sounds outside that signal the beginnings of the brief release, are instantly in the fray, churning urgently back and forth across the street, pleading, fighting, negotiating, building up or calling on favors, as one pump stops and another continues to yield.  The whole range of social relations and norms is indexed and invoked to claim priority in the queue - age, property rights, states of ritual purity. Yet, always, the need for water, the right to water is vociferously asserted to counter these claims. 

The street gets almost reluctantly knit into a neighborhood through peculiar "gifting" relations around water - a particularly enterprising and particularly desperate woman noses out a still-yielding pump hidden in somebody's bathroom down the street, and marshals all her conversational skills to procure a bucketful. 

  

At some point the Municipal Corporation lorry arrives to install a tank on the street, and a new set of gender and social relations develop around this source, as the lorry driver and workers negotiate their stakes with men in the neighborhood, and avenues for petty entrepreneurship are slowly recognized.  Then, in the name of improving the situation, the street gets dug up, ostensibly to clean the mains.  But the Corporation team also uncover - as they expect to --  the "nipples" that have been illegally attached to each household connection  - these are small pieces of extra tubing that intrude into the street water main, in the hope of sucking water out of the pipes when levels are lower than usual.  Residents had paid hundreds of rupees to corporation workers to intall these a few months earlier.  Now the corporation supervisor systematically removes all these connections.  The excavation sends the street into a spiral of chaos - electric lines are damaged, plunging portions of the street into darkness; vehicles get stranded in the trench which remains uncovered for days.  A drainage line gets broken by a worker's spade and the hapless resident of the house is forced to repair it.  

 

But the street excavations also provide a source of hope: residents have heard that new pipes are being laid in some places and that "places like Mylapore and Mandaveli are not suffering so much!" (p.60).  The supervisor of the digging team informs them that the entire pipe system on this street was only recently laid, and that a few pipes would soon be renewed.  It turns out that his brother-in-law had been hired to dig a borewell on the street, which yielded nothing.  The supervisor defends his relative: "Saar, I am told they dug to a depth of eighteen feet.  Tell me, what can anyone do if there is no water left underground?" (p.60).  Ultimately, then, hope drains away into the unknowable underground, even as it is being publicly policed in messy excavations.  The public is also aware of the leakiness of this underground order: residents remark on how one of the houses on the street always has water.  "They say there's a little water flowing out there, somehow" (p.20).

 

Once again, what struck me in all this was how much the descriptions resonated with contemporary landscapes of thirst in the city.  Or, how little has changed despite all the hype about infrastructure improvements funded by close to 1000 crore rupees since the 1980s, much of this loaned from the World Bank.  Most Chennai residents would still claim, as a character in the book does: "This water business has become a terrible struggle" (p.23).   Yet, for some the problem remains trivial, as it is for Bhaskar Rao, a film producer in the novel.  When Jamuna refuses to go out with him because "Today is the day they start giving us water from the tank,"  he responds: "Such a fuss, and it is only water. I tell you, I'll bring huge cauldrons of water tomorrow, in my car" (p.33).

 

 

 
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From vivek at sarai.net  Wed Jun 15 13:50:00 2005
From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan)
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 13:50:00 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Sarai Independent Fellow Archana Jha on Folk Forms
Message-ID: <42AFE4B0.7020303@sarai.net>


Painted Folklore- Tradition of Chitrakatha

India has a very old tradition of 'gatha gayatri' and in some areas it 
still exists. Story-tellers used to go to distant places, roam around 
from village to village, and tell stories. This factor has played an 
important role not only in the development of the folk art of India, but 
also helped in spreading various local folk forms from one area to the 
other.

While Court art forms were patronised by State and the kings, the ruling 
class never determined the character of local folk forms. Folk forms 
preserved their elements in changing social environment for quite long 
periods. However, with time, the character and style changed in folk 
forms due to social and economical factors or because of some outside 
influences.

The tradition of 'chirtra katha' in India dates back to the time of 
Patanjali. In his writings, there is a reference of 'Chitra Katha' style 
when story-tellers spread moral and religious doctrines among the people 
with the help of pictorial illustrations. In Bihar and Bengal, the 
storytellers were called 'Jadu Patua'. They moved with their scroll made 
of clothes, beautifully painted in different colours. The main character 
in these paintings was always 'Krishna'. The pictures provided a vivid 
account of events from the famous epics. In Maharashtra and Madhya 
Pradesh in central India, Chitra Katha, particularly the 'paithans', was 
very popular. They moved village to village to entertain people with 
their paithan style paintings, which told stories from Ramayana. Pot 
Painting of Orissa and Rajasthan have also came from Chitrakatha tradition.

The storytellers from South India, particularly from Tamilnadu, used a 
painted wooden cabinet that could be unfolded to depict a kind of altars 
to display illustrations of Vishnu legends. In Kerala, people used 
leather puppets for this purpose and in Andhra Pradesh (Tirupati), 
people painited in Kalamkari style. The storytellers went to distant 
places to entertain and in that process they influenced locals with 
their particular style of painting and singing.

One can find same kind of motifs in folk paintings of different areas. 
For instance, 'Ramgoli' in Maharastra, 'Alpana' in Bengal, 'Aripan' in 
Bihar, 'Kolama in South India, 'Mandana' in Rajasthan are some motifs 
influences by these stories and styles.

With passing of time and the changes in societies’ modes of existence, 
changes also come in the art forms. The 'Patuas' of Bengal, who used to 
paint the colourful pictorial scroll, adopted a new style. By then they 
had migrated to urban areas for survival. And hence, the urban 
requirements and sensibilities forced them to change their age old 
style. In city (Calcutta), they started producing art for mass market, 
mainly the pilgrims. There articles were cheap, but did not have much 
artistic value. The intention was that it should be within the reach of 
everyone, because in religious places, people came from all kinds of 
social and economic backgrounds. The important factor is that now the 
character of these paintings was not only religious; a number of themes 
were also taken from daily life of common people and contemporary local 
events.

The kalamkari and paithani style of painting still exists but few people 
can afford to purchase them. But printed cloth materials with kalamkari 
style motifs are easily available for mass consumption.

In India even the metros and big cities still contain some local 
elements. One, in the shape of communities coming from same region and 
state living in the same localities try to retain some of the common art 
and folk forms in various manners. Two, a growing demand for cloth and 
other materials with folk motifs has been generated in recent years, and 
it helps in their survival in some form or the other. Therefore, one can 
easily see an association with the strong tradition of story telling and 
art motifs in various forms even now.


Archana Jha
(Independent Fellow)



From mpillai65 at yahoo.com  Wed Jun 15 15:16:16 2005
From: mpillai65 at yahoo.com (Meera Pillai)
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 02:46:16 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Reader-list] "Dabbu kaavaala?": Interview notes from Vijayawada
	Railway Station
Message-ID: <20050615094617.12685.qmail@web53506.mail.yahoo.com>



Rayanna says he's ten years old, but size-wise, he
looks barely seven.  Thin, he has a small face like an
upside-down drop, with bright eyes and a brighter
smile.  He sits beside me on one of the shiny
hexagonal black granite seats on Platform 1, sketching
the station from his perspective.  The seats are built
around several of the iron pillars that prop up the
silver-painted corrugated iron and clear fibreglass
roof of the platform.  When he's done, he stands in
front of me and hops from one foot to another as I ask
him questions - not impatiently, but barely containing
the energy in his little body.

Originally from Eluru, he has been at Vijayawada
railway station for about two months now.  Why did yu
leave?  "My father died, and my mother married again. 
My stepfather used to beat me.  So I left."  How come
you decided to get off at Vijayawada, rather than any
of the other stations?  "I was travelling on the train
from Eluru.  I met another boy on the train.  He told
me to get off at Vijayawada.  He said there was a
hostel there that helped boys like us.  So I got off,
and one of the "akkas" who works on the platform took
me to the hostel."  You can stay at the hostel, and
they'll look after you and you can go to school and so
on, how come you came back to the station?  "The
people at the hostel are really nice, but you can't
get money there.  So I came back to the station.  I
still go back to the hostel to sleep, and eat there
often."

What do you do at the station?  "I sweep the trains." 
He gestures with his little palm-leaf broom.  "I only
come to the station in the morning.  I come after
breakfast at the hostel, stay till about 11:30 - 12. 
I only pay attention to two trains - the Cochin and
the Howrah.  I only work on them."  He tosses his head
cockily, dismissing the other trains as unworthy of
his notice.  Why is that?  "There are lots of rich
people on those trains.  They give me money and food. 
I go back to the hostel after that, eat, play carroms
and watch TV in the evening, eat dinner and sleep."

How much money do you make?  "Thirty, forty, fifty." 
That's a lot of money.  Will you give me some?"  He
invokes the parental authority that he has left
behind, saying firmly,"My mother has told me I
shouldn't give money to anyone."  He reaches into his
pocket and brings out a neat stash of one-rupee coins,
clinking them backwards and forwards on his litttle
palm.  That's a lot of money, I say again.  Surely you
can give me some?  His face softens.  With a
questioning upward intonation to his voice, he asks me
gently, "Dabbu kaavaala?"  There's something
exceedingly poignant in the seriousness in his voice
as he checks whether this woman, twice his size,
thrice his weight and four times his age really needs
financial support from him.  I shake my head, laying
my palm against his cheek.

Rayanna is wearing a pair of long trousers in dark
suiting material that are a perfect fit, though grimy
and missing the critical top button or hook - he has
tucked in the ends of the waistband at his twelve inch
waist like one would a dhoti.  His upper body is bare,
in deference to the 40 degree plus Vijayawada summer
heat.  Didnt the folks at the hostel give you other
clothes?  "As soon as I got there, I got a set, but
after that I didn't bother.  There's no point.  They
get dirty when I clean the trains."

There are so many people around in the station - how
do they deal with you?  Rayanna's friend, Surya Raja
Rao, twelve years old, who has also been chatting with
me, answers, "They beat you.  The police especially,
but almost any adult."  "They don't beat me.  Nobody
beats me," Rayanna says proudly.  He is so slight, so
bright, it would be difficult to dredge up sufficient
animosity against this little chap to carry it through
to a corporal conclusion, but that is likely to change
as he grows older and bigger, if he continues here. 
He holds his body in mock-respectful stiffness, a foot
held forward at a ridiculous angle to rob the posture
of any possibility of seriousness.  He raises his hand
to his forehead in a seeming salute - "I just salute
them and get on my way."  And just in case I didn't
get the full dramatic effect, he repeats the gesture,
and then actually gets on his way, breaking into a
skip and a run. 



		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. 
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 


From mihir25 at indiatimes.com  Wed Jun 15 19:36:59 2005
From: mihir25 at indiatimes.com (mihir25)
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:36:59 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] When he was called Pandit Jinnah
Message-ID: <a06210215bed5e6741fb2@[10.0.1.67]>

When he was called Pandit Jinnah RAJNISH Sharma 
Lucknow, June 5 Hindustan Times 
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5922_1389389,0015002500000000.htm 
When the former Deputy PM L K Advani described 
Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a secular man during his 
early days, he wasn't quite off the mark as it is 
now a part of recorded history. Though his 
comments have raised a furore back home, few 
would know that this man was even referred to as 
Pandit Jinnah once. And if indifference to 
religion is any indicator of secularism, the 
Qaid-e-Azam was probably the biggest of all 
secular fundamentalists. There are two incidents 
hitherto not found in any history book which 
highlight this aspect of his character in a 
rather comical way which were narrated by none 
other than the eminent jurist and statesman, Sir 
Tej Bahadur Sapru. It was told by Sir Tej to his 
granddaughter's husband Dr IM Chak, Retired Dy 
Director of CDRI during a meeting with his 
grandfather Pt. Prithvi Nath Chak, another legal 
giant of that time under whom Motilal Nehru 
learnt to practise law. A contemporary of Sir 
Sapru, Jinnah along with him once visited Egypt 
during the month of Ramzaan. The Muslim porters 
there refused to carry their luggage saying they 
would only carry the luggage of a fellow Muslim. 
When Jinnah told them to go ahead, the porters 
decided to test them. They were asked to recite 
the kalma. While Sir Tej happily recited it with 
Èlan, he had Jinnah looking sheepishly at him for 
the wine loving brown sahib didn't know a word of 
it! Sir Tej had a hard time convincing the 
porters that Jinnah, who was to later create a 
separate Islamic State, was indeed a Muslim! The 
other incident saw these two friends sparring in 
the court of law in a case that involved elements 
of religion. The case saw Sir Tej quoting 
innumerable ayats from Quran in support of his 
arguments. Jinnah, though a formidable lawyer 
himself, drew a blank once again on this account. 
The next day local newspaper headlines screamed 
Pandit Jinnah vs Maulana Sapru!


From zainab at xtdnet.nl  Wed Jun 15 20:37:06 2005
From: zainab at xtdnet.nl (zainab at xtdnet.nl)
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:07:06 +0400 (RET)
Subject: [Reader-list] Borders No More
Message-ID: <1124.219.65.12.67.1118848026.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl>

Borders No More ...

I am sitting in front of my PC, in my house, in Byculla, Mumbai, India.
While I am attempting to write, my mind races back to my home guard friend
Vijaya’s experiences of patrolling Victoria Terminus Railway Station in
Mumbai. “Platform number one, very danger. They (the authorities) asked me
to take on permanent duty there. But I refused. Very danger,” was Vijaya’s
final opinion. Vijaya and her other colleagues believe that platform
number one is a danger zone. It has many pickpockets and drug addicts. For
some days after hearing from Vijaya and her colleagues, I was wary of
being at platform number one. A friend responded to me on hearing this
story. She said, “That is perhaps how boundaries get created. We define
zones and spaces in our minds and practice them regularly. Soon, they
acquire that character.”

I am attempting to write of my recent experience of visiting Bangladesh.
Bangladesh – perhaps a far away place for a Mumbaiitte, a place that can
be imagined and read about in the newspapers and seen on television. I
fell in love with someone there and love drove me to Bangladesh. On my
first visit, I started out from Mumbai to Kolkatta in a train. On the way,
there were conversations between a co-passenger and me. “Where are you
headed?” he had asked me. “Bangladesh,” I replied. After a while, he had
said with a tone of disgust and anger, “All the bloody terrorist
activities in Assam are sponsored by the Bangladeshi government.” I did
not react. He stuck firm to his opinion. An old Bengali lady traveling
with us in the same compartment happened to ask him where I was going.
When she heard that I was going to Bangladesh, a look appeared on her
face. I can’t describe that look in a word – there is no word for that
look. It was mixture of memories, history, identity, past, nostalgia,
pain, longing and desire. “Bangladesh” is all that she said to me with
that look.

I reached Kolkatta. My host received me at Howrah Station. On our way to
his home, we were speaking of how Muslims are usually perceived. He said,
suddenly, “Door se dekho to har cheez ajeeb nazar aati hai (When seen from
a distance, everything appears strange).” These words have remained with
me ever since then.

Bangladesh is a distant dream to a Mumbaiitte. I did not even know that
there was no embassy in Mumbai. Maybe that many people don’t go to
Bangladesh. From Kolkatta, the route to Bangladesh requires you to have a
hundred rupees in your pocket. Board a local train to Bonga from Sealdah.
The ticket costs Rs.17. on reaching Bonga, cross the railway tracks and
take a share-an-auto to Haridaspur border. This ride costs you Rs.20. The
border area is lush green. It looks like a transport hub. There are people
who have houses and homes around the area. And there is regular trade,
exchange and activity taking place there. When I first reached the border,
I was too surprised. In my mind, I had imagined the border to be a
deserted place. But here was something completely contrary to my desert
imaginations. Later I was told that people living around the border
regularly cross here and there. Some Bangladeshi laborers pay fifty rupees
to the border officials in order to come over to Kolkatta just to catch a
night show Hindi film in Kolkatta. They return back the next day. An
Indian beggar was once helped to cross over into Bangladesh where he now
begs and regales the local Bengalis with his Hindi and tales.

Haridaspur on the Indian side; Benapole on the Bangladesh side – these are
the names of the borders that you need to write on your immigration form.

You start your journey at Haridaspur with exchanging money and getting
immigration forms. There are several touts who make their living by asking
you pay fifty rupees and with that amount, you shall cross over the
immigration and the customs on the Indian side of the border with absolute
ease. Actually, the fifty rupees is to save you from useless harassment –
there is always a commission in the fifty rupees for the officer on the
table. After you cross immigration and customs on the Indian, you land to
the gate. This gate has emblems of the Indian flag. It is always closed. I
don’t know how borders and boundaries get created in reality. I don’t know
who decided that the gate should be put there itself. But the gate is
there – in reality and a few kilometers away, at Bonga station and beyond,
in West Bengal, the gate exists in the mind and, that gate in the mind is
also closed.

I show my passport to the Border Security Force guard. He checks for the
immigration stamp and clearance. He turns my passport up, down, checks the
front page if the photo in the passport is the same as the person standing
before him, looks at the last page, some address and then, he opens the
gate. As I move beyond the boundaries of the gate, I land into the
infamously famous ‘no-man’s-land’. No-Man’s-Land, I ask myself. At one
level, I am filled with tears and at another level I wish to laugh out
aloud, as if that laughter is only another darker manifestation of my
tears. I stand on that space – the no-man’s-land. Apparently, I have no
identity once I am on this patch of land. I belong nowhere. There are some
labourers working on that patch of land. An old lady is snorkeling there,
sifting among the bushes and shrubs, trying to find something. As I stand
firmly on that piece of land, I ask myself for my own identity. And a
sense of strength prevails all over me. I know my identity – I am Me. But
the funniest part of nationhood is that I need proof of my identity – some
papers, with some stamp, with some authorization, to prove who I am.

I move slowly from no-man’s-land and I am confronted with another gate
which is open and has emblems of the Bangladeshi flag. I am now officially
landing into Bangladesh. The transfer is not just physical. I need to wind
my watch thirty minutes ahead. I hear the muezzin’s call to prayer. The
landscape is still the same – lush green, but the language is completely
Bengali. I pass through Customs and Immigration and with a few bribes,
some amount of harassment, some amount of story telling, stamps are put on
my passport and I am now in another country altogether.

I have been to Bangladesh thrice in my life thus far. When I came back to
Kolkatta after my first visit, my host introduced me to his friend. His
friend said to me, “Wow! You have some nerve. It really requires love to
take you to Bangladesh. Otherwise we, sitting here in Kolkatta, never
dream of going there and you, from Mumbai went there ...” He had gone
ahead to ask me about whether Hindus were being killed in Bangladesh. My
host intervened and said, “Hush, hush. Why talk about all this now? Let’s
eat dinner.”

Each time I come back from Bangladesh, I am struck with this one question:
Bangladesh is so close to people in Kolkatta. Each one of them has an
ancestral, a historical connection with Bangladesh. Yet, when I narrate my
Bangladesh tales to my friends in Kolkatta, I see in their eyes that same
look which is a mixture of memory, identity, history, past, pain, desire,
longing and nostalgia. And that look makes it seem that Bangladesh is so
far. It so far that it can only be evoked as a place of the past. It is so
far that it is only a place which lies in memory, in the past. It is so
far that it cannot be reached. The gates are closed ... it appears forever
...



Zainab Bawa
Bombay
www.xanga.com/CityBytes
http://crimsonfeet.recut.org/rubrique53.html



From zainab at xtdnet.nl  Wed Jun 15 20:40:13 2005
From: zainab at xtdnet.nl (zainab at xtdnet.nl)
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:10:13 +0400 (RET)
Subject: [Reader-list] Borders No More
Message-ID: <1158.219.65.12.67.1118848213.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl>

Dear All,
Sharing a piece from my recent travels to East India and beyond. Hoping to
write more.
Cheers,
Zainab


Borders No More ...

I am sitting in front of my PC, in my house, in Byculla, Mumbai, India.
While I am attempting to write, my mind races back to my home guard friend
Vijaya's experiences of patrolling Victoria Terminus Railway Station in
Mumbai. "Platform number one, very danger. They (the authorities) asked me
to take on permanent duty there. But I refused. Very danger," was Vijaya's
final opinion. Vijaya and her other colleagues believe that platform
number one is a danger zone. It has many pickpockets and drug addicts. For
some days after hearing from Vijaya and her colleagues, I was wary of
being at platform number one. A friend responded to me on hearing this
story. She said, "That is perhaps how boundaries get created. We define
zones and spaces in our minds and practice them regularly. Soon, they
acquire that character."

I am attempting to write of my recent experience of visiting Bangladesh.
Bangladesh - perhaps a far away place for a Mumbaiitte, a place that can
be imagined and read about in the newspapers and seen on television. I
fell in love with someone there and love drove me to Bangladesh. On my
first visit, I started out from Mumbai to Kolkatta in a train. On the way,
there were conversations between a co-passenger and me. "Where are you
headed?" he had asked me. "Bangladesh," I replied. After a while, he had
said with a tone of disgust and anger, "All the bloody terrorist
activities in Assam are sponsored by the Bangladeshi government." I did
not react. He stuck firm to his opinion. An old Bengali lady traveling
with us in the same compartment happened to ask him where I was going.
When she heard that I was going to Bangladesh, a look appeared on her
face. I can't describe that look in a word - there is no word for that
look. It was mixture of memories, history, identity, past, nostalgia,
pain, longing and desire. "Bangladesh" is all that she said to me with
that look.

I reached Kolkatta. My host received me at Howrah Station. On our way to
his home, we were speaking of how Muslims are usually perceived. He said,
suddenly, "Door se dekho to har cheez ajeeb nazar aati hai (When seen from
a distance, everything appears strange)." These words have remained with
me ever since then.

Bangladesh is a distant dream to a Mumbaiitte. I did not even know that
there was no embassy in Mumbai. Maybe that many people don't go to
Bangladesh. From Kolkatta, the route to Bangladesh requires you to have a
hundred rupees in your pocket. Board a local train to Bonga from Sealdah.
The ticket costs Rs.17. on reaching Bonga, cross the railway tracks and
take a share-an-auto to Haridaspur border. This ride costs you Rs.20. The
border area is lush green. It looks like a transport hub. There are people
who have houses and homes around the area. And there is regular trade,
exchange and activity taking place there. When I first reached the border,
I was too surprised. In my mind, I had imagined the border to be a
deserted place. But here was something completely contrary to my desert
imaginations. Later I was told that people living around the border
regularly cross here and there. Some Bangladeshi laborers pay fifty rupees
to the border officials in order to come over to Kolkatta just to catch a
night show Hindi film in Kolkatta. They return back the next day. An
Indian beggar was once helped to cross over into Bangladesh where he now
begs and regales the local Bengalis with his Hindi and tales.

Haridaspur on the Indian side; Benapole on the Bangladesh side - these are
the names of the borders that you need to write on your immigration form.

You start your journey at Haridaspur with exchanging money and getting
immigration forms. There are several touts who make their living by asking
you pay fifty rupees and with that amount, you shall cross over the
immigration and the customs on the Indian side of the border with absolute
ease. Actually, the fifty rupees is to save you from useless harassment -
there is always a commission in the fifty rupees for the officer on the
table. After you cross immigration and customs on the Indian, you land to
the gate. This gate has emblems of the Indian flag. It is always closed. I
don't know how borders and boundaries get created in reality. I don't know
who decided that the gate should be put there itself. But the gate is
there - in reality and a few kilometers away, at Bonga station and beyond,
in West Bengal, the gate exists in the mind and, that gate in the mind is
also closed.

I show my passport to the Border Security Force guard. He checks for the
immigration stamp and clearance. He turns my passport up, down, checks the
front page if the photo in the passport is the same as the person standing
before him, looks at the last page, some address and then, he opens the
gate. As I move beyond the boundaries of the gate, I land into the
infamously famous 'no-man's-land'. No-Man's-Land, I ask myself. At one
level, I am filled with tears and at another level I wish to laugh out
aloud, as if that laughter is only another darker manifestation of my
tears. I stand on that space - the no-man's-land. Apparently, I have no
identity once I am on this patch of land. I belong nowhere. There are some
labourers working on that patch of land. An old lady is snorkeling there,
sifting among the bushes and shrubs, trying to find something. As I stand
firmly on that piece of land, I ask myself for my own identity. And a
sense of strength prevails all over me. I know my identity - I am Me. But
the funniest part of nationhood is that I need proof of my identity - some
papers, with some stamp, with some authorization, to prove who I am.

I move slowly from no-man's-land and I am confronted with another gate
which is open and has emblems of the Bangladeshi flag. I am now officially
landing into Bangladesh. The transfer is not just physical. I need to wind
my watch thirty minutes ahead. I hear the muezzin's call to prayer. The
landscape is still the same - lush green, but the language is completely
Bengali. I pass through Customs and Immigration and with a few bribes,
some amount of harassment, some amount of story telling, stamps are put on
my passport and I am now in another country altogether.

I have been to Bangladesh thrice in my life thus far. When I came back to
Kolkatta after my first visit, my host introduced me to his friend. His
friend said to me, "Wow! You have some nerve. It really requires love to
take you to Bangladesh. Otherwise we, sitting here in Kolkatta, never
dream of going there and you, from Mumbai went there ..." He had gone
ahead to ask me about whether Hindus were being killed in Bangladesh. My
host intervened and said, "Hush, hush. Why talk about all this now? Let's
eat dinner."

Each time I come back from Bangladesh, I am struck with this one question:
Bangladesh is so close to people in Kolkatta. Each one of them has an
ancestral, a historical connection with Bangladesh. Yet, when I narrate my
Bangladesh tales to my friends in Kolkatta, I see in their eyes that same
look which is a mixture of memory, identity, history, past, pain, desire,
longing and nostalgia. And that look makes it seem that Bangladesh is so
far. It so far that it can only be evoked as a place of the past. It is so
far that it is only a place which lies in memory, in the past. It is so
far that it cannot be reached. The gates are closed ... it appears forever
...



Zainab Bawa
Bombay
www.xanga.com/CityBytes
http://crimsonfeet.recut.org/rubrique53.html



From kristoferpaetau at GMAIL.COM  Wed Jun 15 14:19:41 2005
From: kristoferpaetau at GMAIL.COM (Kristofer Paetau)
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 10:49:41 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] Re-Institutionalize # 07: PIET'S VOYAGE
Message-ID: <80bd928c05061501491da84179@mail.gmail.com>

"Piet's Voyage" is an art-experience I made with a friend, Piet
Strauven, who doesn't think of himself as an artist, but whom I
consider to be an interesting model for artists. The project is about
a deal that I made with Piet, concerning his voyage and the pictures
he would take during this trip. You are welcome to have a look at this
project:


A web documentation to view at:

http://www.paetau.com/downloads/Re-Institutionalize/Piets_Voyage_English.html


A PDF documentation (324 KB) to download at:

http://www.paetau.com/downloads/Re-Institutionalize/Piets_Voyage_English.pdf



Auf Deutsch:

Eine Webdokumentation zum Anschauen:

http://www.paetau.com/downloads/Re-Institutionalize/Piets_Voyage_Deutsch.html


Ein PDF Dokument (320 KB) zum Runterladen:

http://www.paetau.com/downloads/Re-Institutionalize/Piets_Voyage_Deutsch.pdf



Best, MfG. Kristofer Paetau


--
If you do not want mails anymore, you can unsubscribe automatically by
sending an empty e-mail from your e-mail account to:
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http://www.paetau.com/exhibitionviews
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From eye at ranadasgupta.com  Thu Jun 16 12:52:48 2005
From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:22:48 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] Microsoft helps China to censor bloggers
Message-ID: <42B128C8.7070601@ranadasgupta.com>

fascinating.

R



http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1506477,00.html

Microsoft helps China to censor bloggers

Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Wednesday June 15, 2005
The Guardian

Civil liberties groups have condemned an arrangement between Microsoft 
and Chinese authorities to censor the internet.

The American company is helping censors remove "freedom" and "democracy" 
from the net in China with a software package that prevents bloggers 
from using these and other politically sensitive words on their websites.

The restrictions, which also include an automated denial of "human 
rights", are built into MSN Spaces, a blog service launched in China 
last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, a venture 
in which Microsoft holds a 50% stake.

Users who try to include such terms in subject lines are warned: "This 
topic contains forbidden words. Please delete them."

Even the most basic political discussion is difficult because 
"communism", "socialism", and "capitalism" are blocked in this way, 
although these words can be used in the body of the main text. Many 
taboo words are predictable, such as "Taiwanese independence", "Tibet", 
"Dalai Lama", "Falun Gong", "terrorism" and "massacre". But there are 
also quirks that reflect the embryonic nature of net censorship and the 
propaganda ministry's perceived threats.

The word "demonstration" is taboo, but "protest" is all right; 
"democracy" is forbidden, but "anarchy" and "revolution" are acceptable. 
On MSN Space, Chinese bloggers cannot use the name of their own 
president, but can comment on Tony Blair. "Tiananmen" cannot be mentioned.

A Microsoft spokesman said the restrictions were the price the company 
had to pay to spread the positive benefits of blogs and online messaging.

"Even with the filters, we're helping millions of people communicate, 
share stories, share photographs and build relationships. For us, that 
is the key point here," Adam Sohn, a global sales and marketing director 
at MSN, told the Associated Press news agency.

For the Chinese government, which employs an estimated 30,000 internet 
police, the restrictions are an extension of a long-standing policy to 
control the web so that it can be used by businesses but not by 
political opponents.

For Microsoft, it appears to be a concession to authoritarianism on the 
net. It comes only months after Microsoft's boss, Bill Gates, praised 
China's leaders, who have mixed market economics with rigid political 
control. "It is a brand new form of capitalism, and as a consumer it's 
the best thing that ever happened," he said.

Along with a throng of other net giants, Microsoft is trying to make 
inroads into China's fast-growing internet market, expected to top 100 
million users this year. Only the United States has more people online, 
but Mr Gates admitted this year that his company was underperforming in 
China.

Microsoft is not alone in accepting censorship requests from China. The 
free-speech group, Reporters Without Borders, says Yahoo has a similar 
policy. The group said any justification for collaborating with Chinese 
censorship based on obeying local laws did "not hold water". The 
multinationals must "respect certain basic ethical principles" wherever 
they operated.

China's information industry ministry, meanwhile, has ordered owners of 
blogs and bulletin boards to register their sites by the end of this 
month or have them shut down.

The ministry's website said: "The internet has profited many people, but 
it also has brought many problems, such as sex, violence and feudal 
superstitions and other harmful information that has seriously poisoned 
people's spirits."


From eye at ranadasgupta.com  Thu Jun 16 12:57:53 2005
From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:27:53 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] The future of the atmosphere
Message-ID: <42B129F9.4080305@ranadasgupta.com>

The Chairman of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, is a pretty interesting person, and 
this interview with him is so too.  Bizarre that multinational oil 
corporations are lobbying governments to regulate oil consumption in 
anticipation of ecological catastrophe...

R



'The boat is sinking'

As our appetite for oil hastens climate change, who will speak out for 
the alternatives? One possible champion is Lord Ron Oxburgh, the 
distinguished geologist who also happens to be chairman of Shell. He 
tells Aida Edemariam why the time for complacency is over

Wednesday June 15, 2005
The Guardian

When Lord Ron Oxburgh visited the Hay festival a couple of weeks ago he 
arrived during a spell of weather best described as unsettled. A 
record-breakingly warm Friday was followed on Saturday by a wild, 
gusting wind and, in the festival marquees, a great howling and a 
flapping of canvas.

The lighting rigs creaked with the strain, and pictures of Hay, 
projected on to screens behind the performers, bucked and swayed; it was 
a glimpse of how it must feel to sail a boat into a storm, and an almost 
too appropriate backdrop to chief government scientist David King's calm 
laying out of the basic facts of climate change: that since the 
industrial period carbon dioxide levels have risen from 270 parts per 
million (classical for all previous warm periods) to 379ppm today, and 
are rising at 2ppm per year. In 10 years' time they will be at 400ppm; 
at 500ppm, Greenland's ice will melt entirely - it's already receding by 
10 metres a year - and the sea level will rise, drowning coastal cities 
and entirely changing the contours of the earth. Most scientists now 
agree that unless we stabilise the earth's atmosphere by 2050, there 
will be no way to halt the disaster.

Oxburgh, the non-executive chairman of Shell in the UK, on the dias with 
Greenpeace executive director Stephen Tindale, listened to King with 
increasing impatience, his abundant black eyebrows knitting restlessly 
under windblown white hair. As soon as he decently could, he grabbed the 
microphone, strode to the front of the stage and launched into his 
speech, contemptuous of the lectern, glancing only occasionally at his 
notes, leaning in towards the audience as if, like an evangelist, he 
wanted to pick everyone up and shake sense into them, just as the wind 
was shaking the tent. "We have roughly 45 years. And if we start NOW, 
not in 10 or 15 years' time, we have a chance of hitting those targets. 
But we've got to start now. We have no time to lose."

We meet later but, returning to the speech, I suggest to Oxburgh that 
there is a certain inconsistency to his position. He heads one of the 
biggest petrochemical multinationals in the world; a multinational, 
moreover, whose recent track record includes an attempt to scupper the 
decommissioned Brent Spar oil platform; a series of North Sea gas leaks; 
struggles in the Niger Delta with the Ogoni tribe, who believe Shell's 
riches are being acquired at their expense; failure to halt the 
execution by the Nigerian government of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who campaigned 
for the Ogoni; oil spills and ground-level flaring in the Delta. The 
Climate Justice Programme has called this practice "environmental 
racism", as it seems only to happen in developing countries; Oxburgh, 
somewhat unconvincingly, insists the locals appreciate the flares as a 
heat source for drying fish.

And then there was the unfortunate moment last year when Shell announced 
it was downgrading the size of its oil reserves by 20%, greatly 
upsetting its investors. Shell was subsequently investigated by the US 
Securities and Exchange Commission, and Oxburgh's predecessor lost his 
job - though in 2004 Shell somehow also posted the biggest profit of any 
British company ever: £9.3bn. So if the logical solution to the trouble 
we're in is to stop using oil, surely Oxburgh's comrades at Shell aren't 
too happy with him? "I think most of the people I work with talk in the 
same way. Though they might not talk about it so publicly." Also, many 
of them are, principally, businessmen; "the difference is, I have worked 
for a lot of my life as a research scientist. And if I don't say it, 
who's going to?"

Oxburgh always wanted to be a scientist, but despite the support of his 
parents, who had themselves left school at 14, his teachers 
steamrollered him into classics at Oxford. After five terms he'd had 
enough, so he looked around and saw that the head of the geology 
department was also the man who had climbed furthest up Everest (this 
was before Edmund Hillary), "and I guess because I was a climber" he 
joined the geology department. "Geology was an incredibly boring subject 
in some ways, but for the fact that it got you out into the mountains." 
At Oxford he and his friends climbed every building they could, the 
prize being the crumbling cupola of its historic library, the Radcliffe 
Camera. There were no indoor climbing walls, so they practised on the 
mantelpieces in their rooms. He's 70 now, and doesn't climb any longer, 
but he loves orienteering, gleeful that it allows you to rely on your 
wits rather than physical fitness, and thus to beat people far younger 
than yourself.

Shell made him his first job offer after he had finished a PhD at 
Princeton, where he made major contributions to the discovery of plate 
tectonics. But they wanted to wait until he had done military service; 
when the military rejected him, Oxford offered him a short teaching 
contract. He stayed for 18 years. Since then he has taught at Cambridge, 
been Rector of Imperial College London and was chief scientist at the 
MoD during the six years in which Russia imploded, the Berlin Wall came 
down, and the first Iraq war began. Now a KBE and crossbench life peer 
who sits on the House of Lords select committee on science and 
technology, he joined Shell as a non-executive director in 1996. He is 
tough, but approachable; he gives the impression of idealism, and 
smilingly refuses to be drawn into any criticisms of his company.

But Oxburgh also has a reputation for independence and, in these last 
two months before he retires from the chairmanship, a fierce need to 
talk about the future. "Look, Shell is an energy company, not an oil 
company, and the fact is that neither Shell nor any other energy company 
is going to be doing business in the same way in 25 years' time." 
Already Shell "can't actually make enough solar panels at the moment to 
satisfy demand". So far it has spent $1.5bn, more than any other 
company, he says, on renewables. (To put this in context, the cost of 
getting one oilfield up and running can reach $10bn, though funding can 
come from a variety of sources.)

But these are early days for biofuels and renewable energy, and early 
days too for a method many including Oxburgh tout as a possible eureka: 
carbon sequestration, which involves trapping the CO2 produced by 
burning fossil fuels and storing it, usually underground, in the 
cavities where the oil, natural gas, or coal came from in the first 
place. It's a possible option in the North Sea and in the US, but more 
difficult in India and China, where abundant cheap brown coal produces 
relatively high levels of CO2 but where there are few obvious places to 
store it.

Which brings up another, potentially far greater, problem. As Oxburgh 
points out, China, India, Brazil and Mexico are rapidly emerging 
markets, and "as countries grow and become more prosperous, they use 
more energy. It is a sad fact that if these countries experience the 
perfectly legitimate growth in GDP [gross domestic product] that they 
have a right to expect, and they do so in the same energy-inefficient 
way that we have seen our prosperity grow, then I think we are wasting 
our time. Because, frankly, the numbers of people are so large, and the 
rate of change is so great, that there will be simply no hope of meeting 
our targets by 2050." China, for example, "is opening a new, 
old-fashioned, dirty, full-sized power station at the rate of one a 
fortnight." (The developing world, not surprisingly, will be most 
affected by climate change: Africa is forecast to get warmer at double 
the rate of anywhere else and, says David King, will soon be feeling the 
effects of climate change at a level rivalling the effects of the HIV 
epidemic.)

This is the sort of issue that must be dealt with at government level, 
and governments are notoriously blind beyond the next election, not to 
mention worried about upsetting powerful corporations. Yet just a couple 
of weeks ago Shell and 12 other signatories, including BP, sent an open 
letter to Tony Blair, in which they pointed out that "governments tend 
to feel limited in their ability to introduce new policies for reducing 
emissions because they fear business resistance, while companies are 
unable to take their investments in low-carbon solutions to scale 
because of lack of long-term policies," and urged immediate action. 
Oxburgh advocates that government uses the controls at its disposal: 
"Regulate biofuels. Or subsidise. Or tax" - any incentive really, but 
"what we don't want to see is in two years' time the government simply 
becoming bored with climate change after we've invested a lot of our 
shareholders' money. Remember, those shareholders are pension funds and 
other similar organisations." The prospect of big business forcing 
government to regulate it would be funny, if it weren't so serious.

Meanwhile, the price of oil is high at $55 a barrel, and the oil 
companies don't see it falling substantially in the near future. At the 
current rate of progress, says Oxburgh, "we are going to be really quite 
dependent on fossil fuels for another 50 years. And nothing is going to 
slow the world economy more, and inhibit our control of the greenhouse 
gas problem, than a world recession. So, fundamentally, what we are 
trying to do worldwide is to make sure that we have enough of a supply 
of oil and gas." Paradoxically, the high price of oil is also good for 
renewable energy, as it forces the speedier development of alternatives, 
and Oxburgh just views this as a further business opportunity: corn 
ethanol, to take the example of a biofuel currently in use, currently 
costs nearly as much as oil.

Shell, therefore, is in no trouble. But the planet is, and Oxburgh sees 
no point in mincing words. "The boat is sinking, and we have to use 
everything that we possibly can."


From keith at thememorybank.co.uk  Thu Jun 16 13:15:14 2005
From: keith at thememorybank.co.uk (Keith Hart)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:45:14 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] Microsoft helps China to censor bloggers
In-Reply-To: <42B128C8.7070601@ranadasgupta.com>
References: <42B128C8.7070601@ranadasgupta.com>
Message-ID: <42B12E0A.3080501@thememorybank.co.uk>

There has been much commentin the western media about Microsoft 'caving 
in' to Chines government pressure and someabout how Google, Yahoo etc 
aree not averse to suspending international law in order to get a 
toehold in the Chinese market. This misses the larger point that 
Microsoft has made a strategic decision to line up with states in the 
struggle for democracy on the internet.

India offers an equally compelling, but more decentralized case study of 
the samething. Thousands of decisions are being made at every level of 
government and society there to install the software and machines that 
will establish Indian standards for decades to come. The main 
competitors are Microsoft and Linux (represented by its own commercial 
corporations such as Red Hat Linux). The latter promote their software 
by stressing that it is cheaper, more robust and flexible than Windows. 
Bill Gates, on the other hand, emphasizes Microsoft’s track record of 
collaboration with government bureaucracy in regulating access to the 
internet.

The point is that the corporate model of capitalism, inaugurated in the 
late nineteenth century and brought to its climax in the so-called 
'neo-liberal' world economy today, rests on legal collaboration between 
states and corporations to subject people everywhere to a system of 
command and control from the top. The main issue is how do you force 
people to pay up within a generalized system of private property brought 
to this stage of monopoly? China is really a boon for democrats since it 
makes clear what the stakes are in a way that is not so obvious in 
India, for example. And the old men in Beijing are likely to lose in the 
not so long run.

Keith


From pukar at pukar.org.in  Wed Jun 15 14:40:05 2005
From: pukar at pukar.org.in (PUKAR)
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 14:40:05 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] [announcements] Reminder: Talk by Jateen Lad at Max
	Mueller Bhavan on Friday, 17 June 2005
Message-ID: <002001c5718a$172c1e40$21d0c0cb@freeda>




The PUKAR Gender and Space Project 

 

presents a talk

by 

Jateen Lad

 

on

 

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­PANOPTIC BODIES:  BLACK EUNUCHS IN THE TOPKAPI PALACE

 



date:                 Friday, 17 June 2005

time:                 6.30 p.m.

place:               Max Mueller Bhavan, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai

 

 

 

Abstract

This lecture engages the disciplines of architecture, philology and theology to explore the notion of the harem as a forbidden and guarded sanctuary in both ritual and palatial contexts. The fantasme of the black eunuch in the Grand Seraglio has been a silent but persistent presence in representations of the imperial harem; either a perverse shadow in the margins of Orientalist representations or the epitome of loyalty in more contemporary readings. This paper enters the labyrinthine passages of the quintessential harem, the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, in an attempt to better understand the body of the eunuch and the nature of the imperial harem as an actual space. There follows a consideration of how the presence, identity and the subtleties of power acquired by the black eunuchs came to be embodied architecturally. In the process, it will be shown how the notions of surveillance and mediation - qualities embodied in the function and body of the eunuch - permeated the enclosing walls of the harem to infuse deep into its inner structure. 

 

 

Jateen Lad studied architecture at Cambridge, UK and has practised in London, Berlin, Rotterdam and East Africa and is design critic at a number of London schools. As a research fellow with the Aga Khan Program at Harvard and MIT his writings engaged architecture, philology and theology to explore the notion of the harem as a forbidden and guarded sanctuary in both ritual and palatial contexts. He is currently establishing a design studio in Pondicherry and is researching notions of display and multiplicity in the Hawa Mahal at Jaipur. 

 

 

 

 

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research)
Mumbai

Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001
Telephone:: +91 (022) 5574 8152 / +91 (0) 98204 04010
Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in
Website:: www.pukar.org.in
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From peeyush.bajpai at gmail.com  Thu Jun 16 14:14:48 2005
From: peeyush.bajpai at gmail.com (Peeyush Bajpai)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 14:14:48 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Re:Reader-list] When he was called Pandit Jinnah
Message-ID: <220f752b05061601446e0b4ba3@mail.gmail.com>

Ingonrance of his (Jinnha) own  religion or religious text do not make
him secular. But utilizing religion to fragment or create discord can
only be entitled as communalism.
 
In this context, Advani is as communal as Jinnha, or read backwards
both equally secular.

Hence Advani did not say anything wrong as he belives himself to be
secular too!.
 
peeyush


Message: 1
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:36:59 +0530
From: "mihir25" <mihir25 at indiatimes.com>(by way of Monica Narula)
Subject: [Reader-list] When he was called Pandit Jinnah
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Message-ID: <a06210215bed5e6741fb2@[10.0.1.67]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed

When he was called Pandit Jinnah RAJNISH Sharma
Lucknow, June 5 Hindustan Times
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5922_1389389,0015002500000000.htm
When the former Deputy PM L K Advani described
Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a secular man during his
early days, he wasn't quite off the mark as it is
now a part of recorded history. Though his
comments have raised a furore back home, few
would know that this man was even referred to as
Pandit Jinnah once. And if indifference to
religion is any indicator of secularism, the
Qaid-e-Azam was probably the biggest of all
secular fundamentalists. There are two incidents
hitherto not found in any history book which
highlight this aspect of his character in a
rather comical way which were narrated by none
other than the eminent jurist and statesman, Sir
Tej Bahadur Sapru. It was told by Sir Tej to his
granddaughter's husband Dr IM Chak, Retired Dy
Director of CDRI during a meeting with his
grandfather Pt. Prithvi Nath Chak, another legal
giant of that time under whom Motilal Nehru
learnt to practise law. A contemporary of Sir
Sapru, Jinnah along with him once visited Egypt
during the month of Ramzaan. The Muslim porters
there refused to carry their luggage saying they
would only carry the luggage of a fellow Muslim.
When Jinnah told them to go ahead, the porters
decided to test them. They were asked to recite
the kalma. While Sir Tej happily recited it with
Èlan, he had Jinnah looking sheepishly at him for
the wine loving brown sahib didn't know a word of
it! Sir Tej had a hard time convincing the
porters that Jinnah, who was to later create a
separate Islamic State, was indeed a Muslim! The
other incident saw these two friends sparring in
the court of law in a case that involved elements
of religion. The case saw Sir Tej quoting
innumerable ayats from Quran in support of his
arguments. Jinnah, though a formidable lawyer
himself, drew a blank once again on this account.
The next day local newspaper headlines screamed
Pandit Jinnah vs Maulana Sapru!



-- 
Peeyush Bajpai
www.indicus.net


From ravig1 at vsnl.com  Thu Jun 16 15:54:54 2005
From: ravig1 at vsnl.com (Ravi Agarwal)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 15:54:54 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] The future of the atmosphere
References: <42B129F9.4080305@ranadasgupta.com>
Message-ID: <040601c5725d$a5547db0$6801a8c0@ToxicsLink.local>

Good to hear, hard to explain..see below..... maybe these are times of
'multiplicities'

ravi agarwal
======================================================================


Oil firms and toxic waste disposal
The Punch, Thursday June 16, 2005

In spite of the United Nations' 1992 Basel Convention that banned toxic
waste trade worldwide, reports alleging reckless dumping of toxic wastes in
various parts of the country have persisted. Recently, oil multinational,
Shell Petroleum Development Company, SPDC, was accused of burying suspected
toxic substances in Igbeku, Sapele Local Government Area of Delta State, in
2002. The community reportedly discovered last year, when their crops
started withering, that the waste was buried in a virgin land. Experts then
conducted soil tests and confirmed the waste as toxic. The SPDC has denied
the allegation, though its contractor was said to have handled the deal.

The company faced a similar charge in 1999, when a community in Ozoro, Isoko
Local Government, also in Delta State, accused one of SPDC's agents of
pumping over one million litres of chemicals suspected to be toxic waste
into a 17,000ft deep dry well. Strange health conditions, withered crops,
polluted farmlands and fish ponds were also reported. Shell was accused at
the time, yet it treated the alarm raised by the community with contempt.

The Sarabubowei community in Warri, Delta State, has also alerted the
authorities that three of its people have died in the past six months
following persistent release of dangerous chemicals from gas flaring by
ChevronTexaco. Many of the villagers are allegedly afflicted by strange
illnesses caused by dangerous emissions from the oil firm's facilities.

For long, the health of many Nigerians have been threatened by reckless
dumping of hazardous wastes. The most controversial, perhaps, was the Koko
toxic waste dump of 1987/1988. About 18,000 drums of lethal substances were
dumped on a piece of land provided by a Koko chief. The substances were so
potent that many who came in contact with them suffered burns, partial
paralysis and blood vomiting. Early this year, hazardous waste suspected to
be chlorine was dumped at Onipepeye in Ibadan. Some people who inhaled the
substance ended up in hospital, while surrounding vegetation immediately
withered.

There was a ray of hope that such stories would abate when, following the
Koko episode, the Federal Government, in 1988, set up the Federal
Environmental Protection Agency, FEPA, charged with the implementation of
the Harmful Waste (Criminal Provisions) Decree 42 of 1988 and other such
local and international laws. However, with reports that hundreds of alerts
have been received from 1992 to date, involving unscrupulous Nigerian and
international businessmen shopping for dump sites for toxic wastes in the
country, such optimism seems misplaced.

It is quite distressing that the SDPC and other oil firms have been
repeatedly accused of facilitating indiscriminate disposal of toxic waste.
Can the oil firms and their contractors trifle with the disposal of
hazardous wastes in countries where the laws on environmental degradation
are strictly applied? The companies are, obviously, exploiting the
complacence of the Nigerian Ministry of Environment and FEPA to gamble with
the health of the people.

In the face of government's insensitivity to the problem, Nigerians, NGOs,
and the human rights community should take up the gauntlet. Available laws
at home and abroad should be explored to redress clandestine business
practices that endanger the people's health and sources of livelihood.
Politicians, especially governors, senators, federal and state lawmakers, LG
chairmen and councillors, all should resist the lure of betraying their
communities for self-serving pursuits. Their claim of serving the people is
baseless if they cannot lead the battle to bring companies that toy with the
lives of Nigerians to book.

The Punch, Thursday June 16, 2005

============================================================================
=



----- Original Message -----
From: "Rana Dasgupta" <eye at ranadasgupta.com>
To: <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2005 12:57 PM
Subject: [Reader-list] The future of the atmosphere


> The Chairman of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, is a pretty interesting person, and
> this interview with him is so too.  Bizarre that multinational oil
> corporations are lobbying governments to regulate oil consumption in
> anticipation of ecological catastrophe...
>
> R
>
>
>
> 'The boat is sinking'
>
> As our appetite for oil hastens climate change, who will speak out for
> the alternatives? One possible champion is Lord Ron Oxburgh, the
> distinguished geologist who also happens to be chairman of Shell. He
> tells Aida Edemariam why the time for complacency is over
>
> Wednesday June 15, 2005
> The Guardian
>
> When Lord Ron Oxburgh visited the Hay festival a couple of weeks ago he
> arrived during a spell of weather best described as unsettled. A
> record-breakingly warm Friday was followed on Saturday by a wild,
> gusting wind and, in the festival marquees, a great howling and a
> flapping of canvas.
>
> The lighting rigs creaked with the strain, and pictures of Hay,
> projected on to screens behind the performers, bucked and swayed; it was
> a glimpse of how it must feel to sail a boat into a storm, and an almost
> too appropriate backdrop to chief government scientist David King's calm
> laying out of the basic facts of climate change: that since the
> industrial period carbon dioxide levels have risen from 270 parts per
> million (classical for all previous warm periods) to 379ppm today, and
> are rising at 2ppm per year. In 10 years' time they will be at 400ppm;
> at 500ppm, Greenland's ice will melt entirely - it's already receding by
> 10 metres a year - and the sea level will rise, drowning coastal cities
> and entirely changing the contours of the earth. Most scientists now
> agree that unless we stabilise the earth's atmosphere by 2050, there
> will be no way to halt the disaster.
>
> Oxburgh, the non-executive chairman of Shell in the UK, on the dias with
> Greenpeace executive director Stephen Tindale, listened to King with
> increasing impatience, his abundant black eyebrows knitting restlessly
> under windblown white hair. As soon as he decently could, he grabbed the
> microphone, strode to the front of the stage and launched into his
> speech, contemptuous of the lectern, glancing only occasionally at his
> notes, leaning in towards the audience as if, like an evangelist, he
> wanted to pick everyone up and shake sense into them, just as the wind
> was shaking the tent. "We have roughly 45 years. And if we start NOW,
> not in 10 or 15 years' time, we have a chance of hitting those targets.
> But we've got to start now. We have no time to lose."
>
> We meet later but, returning to the speech, I suggest to Oxburgh that
> there is a certain inconsistency to his position. He heads one of the
> biggest petrochemical multinationals in the world; a multinational,
> moreover, whose recent track record includes an attempt to scupper the
> decommissioned Brent Spar oil platform; a series of North Sea gas leaks;
> struggles in the Niger Delta with the Ogoni tribe, who believe Shell's
> riches are being acquired at their expense; failure to halt the
> execution by the Nigerian government of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who campaigned
> for the Ogoni; oil spills and ground-level flaring in the Delta. The
> Climate Justice Programme has called this practice "environmental
> racism", as it seems only to happen in developing countries; Oxburgh,
> somewhat unconvincingly, insists the locals appreciate the flares as a
> heat source for drying fish.
>
> And then there was the unfortunate moment last year when Shell announced
> it was downgrading the size of its oil reserves by 20%, greatly
> upsetting its investors. Shell was subsequently investigated by the US
> Securities and Exchange Commission, and Oxburgh's predecessor lost his
> job - though in 2004 Shell somehow also posted the biggest profit of any
> British company ever: £9.3bn. So if the logical solution to the trouble
> we're in is to stop using oil, surely Oxburgh's comrades at Shell aren't
> too happy with him? "I think most of the people I work with talk in the
> same way. Though they might not talk about it so publicly." Also, many
> of them are, principally, businessmen; "the difference is, I have worked
> for a lot of my life as a research scientist. And if I don't say it,
> who's going to?"
>
> Oxburgh always wanted to be a scientist, but despite the support of his
> parents, who had themselves left school at 14, his teachers
> steamrollered him into classics at Oxford. After five terms he'd had
> enough, so he looked around and saw that the head of the geology
> department was also the man who had climbed furthest up Everest (this
> was before Edmund Hillary), "and I guess because I was a climber" he
> joined the geology department. "Geology was an incredibly boring subject
> in some ways, but for the fact that it got you out into the mountains."
> At Oxford he and his friends climbed every building they could, the
> prize being the crumbling cupola of its historic library, the Radcliffe
> Camera. There were no indoor climbing walls, so they practised on the
> mantelpieces in their rooms. He's 70 now, and doesn't climb any longer,
> but he loves orienteering, gleeful that it allows you to rely on your
> wits rather than physical fitness, and thus to beat people far younger
> than yourself.
>
> Shell made him his first job offer after he had finished a PhD at
> Princeton, where he made major contributions to the discovery of plate
> tectonics. But they wanted to wait until he had done military service;
> when the military rejected him, Oxford offered him a short teaching
> contract. He stayed for 18 years. Since then he has taught at Cambridge,
> been Rector of Imperial College London and was chief scientist at the
> MoD during the six years in which Russia imploded, the Berlin Wall came
> down, and the first Iraq war began. Now a KBE and crossbench life peer
> who sits on the House of Lords select committee on science and
> technology, he joined Shell as a non-executive director in 1996. He is
> tough, but approachable; he gives the impression of idealism, and
> smilingly refuses to be drawn into any criticisms of his company.
>
> But Oxburgh also has a reputation for independence and, in these last
> two months before he retires from the chairmanship, a fierce need to
> talk about the future. "Look, Shell is an energy company, not an oil
> company, and the fact is that neither Shell nor any other energy company
> is going to be doing business in the same way in 25 years' time."
> Already Shell "can't actually make enough solar panels at the moment to
> satisfy demand". So far it has spent $1.5bn, more than any other
> company, he says, on renewables. (To put this in context, the cost of
> getting one oilfield up and running can reach $10bn, though funding can
> come from a variety of sources.)
>
> But these are early days for biofuels and renewable energy, and early
> days too for a method many including Oxburgh tout as a possible eureka:
> carbon sequestration, which involves trapping the CO2 produced by
> burning fossil fuels and storing it, usually underground, in the
> cavities where the oil, natural gas, or coal came from in the first
> place. It's a possible option in the North Sea and in the US, but more
> difficult in India and China, where abundant cheap brown coal produces
> relatively high levels of CO2 but where there are few obvious places to
> store it.
>
> Which brings up another, potentially far greater, problem. As Oxburgh
> points out, China, India, Brazil and Mexico are rapidly emerging
> markets, and "as countries grow and become more prosperous, they use
> more energy. It is a sad fact that if these countries experience the
> perfectly legitimate growth in GDP [gross domestic product] that they
> have a right to expect, and they do so in the same energy-inefficient
> way that we have seen our prosperity grow, then I think we are wasting
> our time. Because, frankly, the numbers of people are so large, and the
> rate of change is so great, that there will be simply no hope of meeting
> our targets by 2050." China, for example, "is opening a new,
> old-fashioned, dirty, full-sized power station at the rate of one a
> fortnight." (The developing world, not surprisingly, will be most
> affected by climate change: Africa is forecast to get warmer at double
> the rate of anywhere else and, says David King, will soon be feeling the
> effects of climate change at a level rivalling the effects of the HIV
> epidemic.)
>
> This is the sort of issue that must be dealt with at government level,
> and governments are notoriously blind beyond the next election, not to
> mention worried about upsetting powerful corporations. Yet just a couple
> of weeks ago Shell and 12 other signatories, including BP, sent an open
> letter to Tony Blair, in which they pointed out that "governments tend
> to feel limited in their ability to introduce new policies for reducing
> emissions because they fear business resistance, while companies are
> unable to take their investments in low-carbon solutions to scale
> because of lack of long-term policies," and urged immediate action.
> Oxburgh advocates that government uses the controls at its disposal:
> "Regulate biofuels. Or subsidise. Or tax" - any incentive really, but
> "what we don't want to see is in two years' time the government simply
> becoming bored with climate change after we've invested a lot of our
> shareholders' money. Remember, those shareholders are pension funds and
> other similar organisations." The prospect of big business forcing
> government to regulate it would be funny, if it weren't so serious.
>
> Meanwhile, the price of oil is high at $55 a barrel, and the oil
> companies don't see it falling substantially in the near future. At the
> current rate of progress, says Oxburgh, "we are going to be really quite
> dependent on fossil fuels for another 50 years. And nothing is going to
> slow the world economy more, and inhibit our control of the greenhouse
> gas problem, than a world recession. So, fundamentally, what we are
> trying to do worldwide is to make sure that we have enough of a supply
> of oil and gas." Paradoxically, the high price of oil is also good for
> renewable energy, as it forces the speedier development of alternatives,
> and Oxburgh just views this as a further business opportunity: corn
> ethanol, to take the example of a biofuel currently in use, currently
> costs nearly as much as oil.
>
> Shell, therefore, is in no trouble. But the planet is, and Oxburgh sees
> no point in mincing words. "The boat is sinking, and we have to use
> everything that we possibly can."
> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
subscribe in the subject header.
> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>



From lawrence at altlawforum.org  Thu Jun 16 17:10:36 2005
From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 17:10:36 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Survey of Open content usage in South Asia
Message-ID: <BED7630C.8736%lawrence@altlawforum.org>

Hi all

I am ding a small survey on use of open content projects in South Asia , and
the definition of open content includes works that allow for derivation.
Will post my results on the lists as well, do let me know of any projects
that you are aware to ensure that  I don miss out.


Lawrence 




From hilalbhatt at yahoo.co.in  Thu Jun 16 19:33:40 2005
From: hilalbhatt at yahoo.co.in (Hilal Bhat)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 15:03:40 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Reader-list] Pilgrim's Progress
Message-ID: <20050616140340.16521.qmail@web8408.mail.in.yahoo.com>

Dear friends
            Here is a narrative which tells us how
civilians in Kashmir who survive the bullet and the
bomb become victims in other lesser-known but
infinitely more insidious ways of a protracted
condition of violence. and finally how they snap back
to the indigenous system for the remedy.  

Ghulam Hassan, 39-year-old farmer of a village in
Kupwara was picked up in 2002 by what he hesitantly
calls ‘unidentified gunmen’. He was lucky unlike 12000
other Kashmiris who have undergone similar enforced
disappearences and never returned. But the ordeal of
Hassan began once he was back home.

"I was living a normal life till September 2002 when
gunmen forced their way into our house and took me
in a gypsy."

" For seven days I didn’t see the light of day.
Every day I saw a number of people coming to me for an
assigned task. The first group beat me with gun
butts till I lost consciousness. As I regained my
senses another group was ready to torture me with
electric shocks. They were beasts. They
didn’t spare even my private parts.  In the evening,
they gave me an injection, " he recalls.

He was set free after 7 days.  The arduous routine
ended but not the suffering. It lengthened with each
passing day.

Back home Hassan continued to cry in pain. He was
taken to a chemist in the neighborhood. The unlicensed
chemist-cum-practitioner prescribed  Fort Win
injection, a pentazocine drug of morphine group with a
strong sedative effect.

"On the first day the injection was of great relief.
Next day I felt the pain again and injected another
dose. That is how I started taking injections, " he
says. 

When the affect of injections lessened.  Hassan
Increased the dosage. In two years time he was taking
twenty injections per day. It cost him Rs 1000 per
day.

Hassan belonged to a relatively well off family. He
had a decent income form the apple orchards he owned.
But the dependence on Fort Win ruined him physically,
financially, mentally and morally. 

Spending most of his time in the haze of morphine led
him to neglect the orchards resulting in the shrinking
of his income. Despite his several attempts, Hassan
couldn't rid himself of the addiction.

"When one of my friends died in front of me.  It was a
chance for all of us to realize the folly. I forced
myself indoors for seven days. On eighth day when I
stepped out, I went straight to the chemist and
injected another dose. 

Then someone suggested a de-addiction center in
Srinagar and I volunteered to become an inmate.”
The only difference it made in his life was a lull of
10 days and thereafter the craving came back. 

To meet the mounting expenditure he started selling
his portable property. When he had nothing to pay for
the injections he tried to strike a deal for selling
his 16- year-old daughter to a friend. That was the
time when relatives and friends heard. A relative took
him to Dargah Hazratbal, a historical mosque in
Srinagr which houses the holiest relic in Kashmir, a
hair from the beard of the Prophet, which consequently
is both a mosque and a shrine. On the waterside of the
Dal Lake, hundreds of devotees visit the Dargah daily.
Here Hassan was initiated unto the power of the
spiritual to heal and comfort.This was the beginning
of the end of the two-year-old ordeal that had reduced
Hassan from being a productive and prosperous
individual to being a physical and psychological
wreck. 

Hassan terms the mechanism through which one enters
into the realm of healing and vitalization at a sacred
place like Dargah as an esoteric and inexplicable
phenomenon. But does not shy away from counting
certain attributes of a sacred place like dargah which
go into the making of such places as thereaupeutic
especially for the people suffering from pshychiatric
and attitude based disorders. "This is the only place
in the city where you won't find the men with
Klashankoves slinging to their shoulders. All the
people you meet here are victims in one or other way
and interacting with them makes you to identify
yourself with the troubles of others. 

Each Friday Hassan visits the Hazratbal mosque in
Dargah and spends whole day here. I noticed him here
during my two visits to the sacred place in pursuance
of I-fellowship. The composure of his countenance and
the serene look in his eyes tempted me to initiate a
discussion with him.

Rgds
Hilal Bhat
I-Fellow 
Srinagar ( Kashmir)




		
__________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your friends 'n family snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://in.photos.yahoo.com


From cahen.x at levels9.com  Thu Jun 16 19:55:26 2005
From: cahen.x at levels9.com (xavier cahen)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 16:25:26 +0200
Subject: [Reader-list] pourinfos  letter / 06-11 to 06-16-2005
Message-ID: <019e01c5727f$3d9eaf70$0301a8c0@acerkxw6rbeu2s>

pourinfos.org
l'actualite du monde de l'art / daily Art news
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

infos from june 10, 2005 to June 16,2005 (included)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
(mostly in french)

-------------------------------------------------------------------
01 Job : art teacher Design - P.A.O. option,  Ecole Superieure des
Beaux-Arts du Mans, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1787
-------------------------------------------------------------------
02 Job : art teacher option DESIGN option, full time, Ecole Superieure
des Beaux-Arts du Mans, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1786
-------------------------------------------------------------------
03 Job : art teacher option DESIGN option, Part time, Ecole Superieure
des Beaux-Arts du Mans, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1785
-------------------------------------------------------------------
04 Workshop : about edition from July 11 to 14, Conception and making
photography books, Arles, France.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1784
-------------------------------------------------------------------
05 Workshop : Workshops " WE'RE ALL CYBORGS!", New York, USA.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1783
-------------------------------------------------------------------
06 Workshop : Design graphique + Internet + Animation 2D et
interactivity, SYNOX, Montreal, Canada.
http://pourinfos.org/emploi/item.php?id=1782
-------------------------------------------------------------------
07 Call :  study for a project of public work of art,la Teinturerie,
Amiens, France.
http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1780
-------------------------------------------------------------------
08 Call : 21st International Short Film Festival,
Detmold, Allemagne. 
http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1781
-------------------------------------------------------------------
09 Publication : Derives, number 54, esse arts + opinions, Montreal,
Canada.
http://pourinfos.org/publications/item.php?id=1779
-------------------------------------------------------------------
10 Publication : Spike art quarterly - 04 out now!, Vienna, Austria.
http://pourinfos.org/publications/item.php?id=1778
-------------------------------------------------------------------
11 Publication :  PAJ : A Journal of Performance and Art, New York,
Usa.
http://pourinfos.org/publications/item.php?id=1777
-------------------------------------------------------------------
12 Call : 10th Rencontres internationales
Paris/Berlin, movies festival, video et multimedia, Paris,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1776
-------------------------------------------------------------------
13 Call : Piksel05 - october 16-23. 2005, Bergen, by
the Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK), Norway.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1775
-------------------------------------------------------------------
14 Call : themes of the ninth rencontres Traverse
Video  pour mars 2006, Toulouse, France.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1774
-------------------------------------------------------------------
15 Call : Saturday june 18, feast/Make Light throughout the world!
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1773
-------------------------------------------------------------------
16 Meeting : debats, AFRICA REMIX, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1772
-------------------------------------------------------------------
17 Meeting : Crisis or golden age of photography? Les Rencontres
Place Publique, Rencontres Internationales de la Photo d'Arles,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1771
-------------------------------------------------------------------
18 Meeting : Soutenances "numeriques" - june 16 & 17 2005, Ecole du
Louvre, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1770
-------------------------------------------------------------------
19 Meeting : Park in progress, Pépinières européennes for young artists,
Marly-le-Roi, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1769
-------------------------------------------------------------------
20 Various : Program of 23 th Market of poetry, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/divers/item.php?id=1768
-------------------------------------------------------------------
21 Various : lisen Marcel Proust, editions Thélème and L'echo des Livres
association, Theater de l'atelier, Paris,
France.
http://pourinfos.org/divers/item.php?id=1767
-------------------------------------------------------------------
22 Various : art-public.com open a permanent service on line
documentation, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/divers/item.php?id=1766
-------------------------------------------------------------------
23 Exhibition : la box_interstice.txt, Sabine Macher,  Ecole nationale
superieure d'art de Bourges, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1765
-------------------------------------------------------------------
24 Exhibition : " roads of passion ", Antonio Caballero,
Galerie Polaris, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1764
-------------------------------------------------------------------
25 Screening : TheOneMinutes, Videoattitudes, Lucullus, Amiens, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1763
-------------------------------------------------------------------
26 Exhibition : " Party taken ", Jean Chazy, lagalerie , Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1762
-------------------------------------------------------------------
27 Exhibition : Urban art from Pacifique, 9 th rencontres d'art
contemporain de Saint-Auvnet, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1761
-------------------------------------------------------------------
28 Exhibition : Gianfranco Gentile, Mana ART espaces asbl, Brussel,
Belgium.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1760
-------------------------------------------------------------------
29 Program : the letter de visu No. 056 
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1759
-------------------------------------------------------------------
30 Exhibition : Why no Iraq Pavilion at the 51st  Venice Biennale?
Italy.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1758
-------------------------------------------------------------------
31 Program : Manifesto, pointligneplan, dans le cadre du festival
movies Paris, L'Entrepot, Paris.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1757
-------------------------------------------------------------------
32 Program : mai 14 mai to july 16 2005, international landscape art
center
of l'île de Vassivière, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1756
-------------------------------------------------------------------
33 Exhibition : Genius of the place, Fonds regional d'art contemporain
de
Bourgogne, Museum des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1755
-------------------------------------------------------------------
34 Call : Video'appart, art video exhibition, Paris, France.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1754
-------------------------------------------------------------------
35 Call : CIMATICS.05, Brussels International Festival
for Live Audio Visual Arts & VJ'ing, Belgium.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1753
-------------------------------------------------------------------
36 Call :  M/C - Media and Culture, Queensland
University of Technology, Australia.
http://pourinfos.org/participation/item.php?id=1752
-------------------------------------------------------------------
37 Call : STRP art & technology festival , Eindhoven, Netherland.
http://pourinfos.org/candidature/item.php?id=1751
-------------------------------------------------------------------
38 Meeting : Cycle conferences, Invisible city, Les Ateliers de
l'Image, Marseille, France.
http://pourinfos.org/rencontres/item.php?id=1750
-------------------------------------------------------------------
39 Various : Open Letter to save the cloister of Carmel,
Montreal, Canada.
http://pourinfos.org/divers/item.php?id=1749
-------------------------------------------------------------------
40 Exhibition : Repetition, 2005, Production still, Artur Zmijewski,
Polish Pavillon, 51st Venice Biennale, Italiy.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1748
-------------------------------------------------------------------
41 Exhibiton : Hours of great listenings H-GE, Melanie Perrier,3 BIS
F, Aix en Provence, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1747
-------------------------------------------------------------------
42 Performance : impact point, espace d'arts contemporains, Geneve,
Switzerland.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1746
-------------------------------------------------------------------
43 Exhibition : LE VANITà DELL'UCCELLO IN GABBIA, CACT_centro d'arte
contemporanea ticino, bellinzona , Switzerland.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1745
-------------------------------------------------------------------
44 Exhibition : Stories of trees, Regional center of Contemporary art,
Tremblay Castle, Fontenoy, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1744
-------------------------------------------------------------------
45 Exhibition : the House Arthur Rimbaud out the walls, est-ce une
bonne nouvelle,  Rajata Art House, Bangkok, Taïlande.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1743
-------------------------------------------------------------------
46 Exhibition : Etienne Bossut - Christophe Cuzin, Parc Saint Léger -
Centre d'art contemporain, Pougues-les-Eaux, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1742
-------------------------------------------------------------------
47 Exhibition : Generation 2005, graduate Students exhibition of the
Higher National School of Art Arson Villa, Nice, France.
http://pourinfos.org/expositions/item.php?id=1741




From zainab at xtdnet.nl  Thu Jun 16 20:58:21 2005
From: zainab at xtdnet.nl (zainab at xtdnet.nl)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:28:21 +0400 (RET)
Subject: [Reader-list] Porous Borders
Message-ID: <4609.219.65.14.99.1118935701.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl>

LANGUAGE, HINDI CINEMA, TELEVISION, ET AL
(POROUS BORDERS)


I am now on the other side of the border, in Bangladesh, thirty minutes
ahead of time. Yet, the differences are not that great. The landscape is
similar to that of Bengal. And the culture is essentially Bengali, not
Islamic. Bengali language rules here. You either speak the language or no
other option. During my first visit, I had learnt that the first revolt
which the Bangladeshis had launched against the tyranny of West Pakistan
was that of language. The Bangladeshis refused to submit to the authority
of Urdu. They blackened all Urdu signs and hoardings, the walls of cities
on which Urdu was written. Bangladeshis are proud of their language. From
my second visit onwards, I was beginning to perceive that English and
Hindi were slowly creeping into the everyday lives of the people there. I
started spotting advertising hoardings in English and came to know of the
popularity of Hindi television serials and movies. The famous song “Kaanta
Laga” had been translated in Bengali. Each day as I would walk the markets
of Khulna, I would hear more of Hindi music. One day, the Daily Star, a
popular English daily published from Dhaka, carried an article where the
author complained of the prevalence of Hindi film music and the decline of
Bengali music and poetry.

During each of my visit, my various hosts would ask me to speak Hindi,
“the way it is spoken in television serials”, they would insist each time.
I have always been dumbstruck on this request. I hardly watch the
television serials. So I don’t know what kind of Hindi is spoken.
Moreover, Hindi is not a homogenous language. It has its dialects, accents
and it is spoken differently in different places and regions in India.

Hindi TV serials of STAR PLUS, SONY and ZEE are heavily popular among the
womenfolk and children. “From Monday to Thursday, 1 PM to 5 PM, it is like
a film show for them – all the TV serials they watch,” tells me my host’s
brother-in-law in Chittagong. One evening, there was no electricity. In
the heat, amidst fanning ourselves, the elder daughter-in-law of the house
asked the children to sing and dance to Hindi film songs. Mithila, the
little girl, began to sing, as if reciting poetry, ‘if you want to be my
lober, lober (lover, lover), if you want to be my lober, lober 
 saaniya
dil mein aana re, aa ke phir na jana re 
” I was trying to understand
whether Mithila understood what she was singing. It strikes that may be
she is constantly exposed to the song and has picked it up subconsciously.
I think this is an interesting feature of cities – we are constantly
amidst sounds and noises. Often, we subconsciously pick up information and
often, we don’t filter everything – it’s just about the noise!

Hindi films are popular in Bangladesh. But the youngsters tell me that
while earlier films were remembered for popular dialogues, today’s films
are based on star power. Amitabh Bachan is heavily popular in Bangladesh.
Each day when I would pass by the Moila Putta Street in Khulna, I would
notice the huge Pepsi hoarding with Amitabh Bachan smiling out of it. The
hoarding promised, “Drink Pepsi. Get lucky, meet Amitabh in Kolkatta!” As
Amitabh smiled out of this hoarding, I began to realize that Amitabh is
not just an icon; he is representative of a nation. He symbolizes the
nation itself. He is the nation – he is one face of India to the
Bangladeshi people.

Pirated VCDs of Hindi films reach Bangladesh before they are released in
India. The route is apparently Pakistan where the films are pirated. I
remember Aymen Khan, the taxi driver in Amsterdam telling me of his visit
to Dubai. “I had been to one of your underworld don’s younger brother’s
house. There were suitcases, black ones, piled with film reels. That is
how they make their money. Films are released in Dubai by these people.”
The experience in Bangladesh and Aymen’s story make me feel that films and
Bollywood are an important aspect of the political economy of South Asia.
Films, TV, cinema, these in a way contribute to the porosity of borders
that exist within South Asia. In 1999, during my visit to Korea, a
Pakistani colleague had said to me, “ZEE TV, it is the unifier between
India and Pakistan. Else, there was always a distance!” I don’t know in
what ways films and television contribute towards the understanding of
other. I don’t know how television and cinema reduce distance (or whether
they do at all?)? I wonder whether cinema and television assist in making
‘the other’ appear more comprehensible? What????

While I can understand Bangla and if I speak, I wouldn’t be doing a bad
job, I feel conscious when I speak the language. Ladies of the houses I
would visit would tell me, “Speak Hindi, no problem. We can understand. We
watch the television serials.”

This time around, a new cellular phone service was being launched in
Bangladesh. It is called DJuice and is a service of the popular Grameen
Phone service. DJuice advertises in Hindi. Bengali on its advertising
pamphlets is written in English. For instance, ‘Khoroch Koto (what are the
expenses?)’ is written in English instead of Bengali. One of the boys in
the University said to me, “I refuse to patronize DJuice. They are
spoiling our language by writing Bengali in English. What impact will it
have on the coming generations? Already I see the decline in our language.
Given the TV serials and films, I am convinced that the next three or four
generations will be Hindi speakers.”

I wonder whether borders are porous 
 Are cultural borders in South Asia
porous?



Zainab Bawa
Bombay
www.xanga.com/CityBytes
http://crimsonfeet.recut.org/rubrique53.html



From abshi at vsnl.com  Thu Jun 16 21:19:03 2005
From: abshi at vsnl.com (abshi at vsnl.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 20:49:03 +0500
Subject: [Reader-list] =?iso-8859-1?q?Rreminder=3A_Talk_on_17th_June_2005?=
	=?iso-8859-1?q?_-_=AD=AD=AD=AD=AD=AD=AD=AD=AD=AD=AD=AD=AD=AD=ADPAN?=
	=?iso-8859-1?q?OPTIC_BODIES=3A__BLACK_EUNUCHS_IN_THE_TOPKAPI_PALAC?=
	=?iso-8859-1?q?E?=
Message-ID: <7d3426f7d32ecd.7d32ecd7d3426f@vsnl.net>

The PUKAR Gender and Space Project 

presents a talk

by 

Jateen Lad
on


­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­PANOPTIC BODIES:  BLACK EUNUCHS IN THE TOPKAPI PALACE

 
date:                 Friday, 17 June 2005

time:                 6.30 p.m.

place:               Max Mueller Bhavan, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai

 
Abstract

This lecture engages the disciplines of architecture, philology and theology to explore the notion of the harem as a forbidden and guarded sanctuary in both ritual and palatial contexts. The fantasme of the black eunuch in the Grand Seraglio has been a silent but persistent presence in representations of the imperial harem; either a perverse shadow in the margins of Orientalist representations or the epitome of loyalty in more contemporary readings. This paper enters the labyrinthine passages of the quintessential harem, the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, in an attempt to better understand the body of the eunuch and the nature of the imperial harem as an actual space. There follows a consideration of how the presence, identity and the subtleties of power acquired by the black eunuchs came to be embodied architecturally. In the process, it will be shown how the notions of surveillance and mediation - qualities embodied in the function and body of the eunuch - permeated the enclo
sing walls of the harem to infuse deep into its inner structure. 

 Jateen Lad studied architecture at Cambridge, UK and has practised in London, Berlin, Rotterdam and East Africa and is design critic at a number of London schools. As a research fellow with the Aga Khan Program at Harvard and MIT his writings engaged architecture, philology and theology to explore the notion of the harem as a forbidden and guarded sanctuary in both ritual and palatial contexts. He is currently establishing a design studio in Pondicherry and is researching notions of display and multiplicity in the Hawa Mahal at Jaipur. 

 
PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research)
Mumbai
 
Address:: 1-4, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Sir P. M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400 001
Telephone:: +91 (022) 5574 8152 / +91 (0) 98204 04010
Email:: pukar at pukar.org.in
Website:: www.pukar.org.in



From kranenbu at xs4all.nl  Fri Jun 17 02:38:30 2005
From: kranenbu at xs4all.nl (Rob van Kranenburg)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 22:08:30 +0100
Subject: [Reader-list] [ZESTEconomics] The architecture of a sustainable
	American Indian economy
In-Reply-To: <42B129F9.4080305@ranadasgupta.com>
References: <42B129F9.4080305@ranadasgupta.com>
Message-ID: <p04330104bed79a5abbe3@[192.168.2.20]>

From: "Vipul Bathwal" <vipbat at gmail.com>
Sender: ZESTEconomics at yahoogroups.com
List-Id: <ZESTEconomics.yahoogroups.com>
Date: Sun, 05 Jun 2005 11:02:49 -0000
Subject: [ZESTEconomics] The architecture of a sustainable American
Indian economy


The architecture of a sustainable American Indian economy
   By Paul Frits
   © Indian Country Today | June 02, 2005
   http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=96411017



Everyone knows what the important economic question is. And that
question applies to all tribes, because we - all our tribes - have
experienced more or less the same history.

After so many centuries of our lands and resources, our cultural
norms and our original social orders and governance systems being
assaulted, violated, disrespected, stereotyped, ridiculed,
appropriated, misappropriated, substituted, adulterated,
misrepresented, persecuted, suppressed, dominated, smothered and, in
some cases, snuffed out by the dominant culture, how can Native
societies reconstitute themselves to the point of forever leaving
behind a dependent survival pattern?

The answer may be found in another question: How can the North
American tribal community develop a long-term, robust, sustainable
and inclusive economy capable of achieving necessary self-government
revenues, acceptable employment statistics and desirable growth
rates across all (or most all) tribes, towards a collectively secure
self-governance tradition and a mutually supportive economic future?

This is perhaps the primary defining question that confronts our
tribal leaders in rebuilding our collective community of First
Nations of the Americas. We are perhaps now, finally, close to
seriously addressing this challenge.

After more than five centuries following initial contact with the
first immigrant settlers in this hemisphere, we are perhaps poised
to truly re-develop an ''international'' community of First Nations
based on a positive, harmonized, collective momentum of economic
initiative, rather than a merely reactive pattern of responses to
successive generations of negative external pressures.

Historical inter-tribal commerce

It is a truism that the North American tribal community constitutes
a group of societies whose collective identity is defined by so much
more than being simply one member of the contemporary North American
community of ''visible minorities.''

Rather, our true collective identity is as much fed by the mythic
and historical value of our shared spiritual relationship with the
lands of our respective ancestors as by the way we all - every last
tribe, from all four directions - weaved the mystical properties of
our natural environments into the belief systems and collective
rituals that held our communities together, as self-governing and
sovereign societies since time immemorial.

And yet we may be well-advised to learn some commercial and
financial practices from other minorities (visible and otherwise)
that were not original inhabitants of the Americas, but who have
come here and lifted the economic tide of their respective
communities through their own economic behaviors. There are many
such minorities whose constituent groups have offered jobs,
opportunities and benefits to the surrounding community while
benefiting individuals and groups within their specific minority.

This has been accomplished in such ways that a greater-than-average
per capita percentage of net benefits accrued within that minority
in areas where the need was greatest. Such benefit-sharing has been
conveyed within these minority groups through the advancement of
capital on credit, investment opportunities and co-venturing
opportunities, contracting opportunities and job opportunities. And
such practices have been of critical importance to the expansion and
diversification of economic activity within those minority groups.

In this vein, it is worth noting that our collective Native identity
has been defined in part by the historic patterns of commercial
interaction that existed between our societies, particularly in pre-
Columbian times. In that context, we are informed by oral traditions
and by the record of archaeological relics that reveal there was an
extensive system of interactive trade patterns extending northeast
and northwest from Central America across most of North American. A
similar trade pattern also extended southeast and southwest from
Central America across much of South America.

Returning to original economic patterns

The modern return to pre-Columbian, inter-tribal economic patterns
will, in part, be based on natural preferences favoring the hiring
of Native peoples, and the procurement of goods and services from
Native-controlled businesses. It will also, in part, be based simply
on the networking of tribes and Native individuals with common
investment interests, towards co-investing in specialized or general
markets.

It will be further based on the establishment of commercial Native
enterprises, and by tribal governments and non-governmental Native
individuals and groups that structure their services and products to
reach out to Native markets and facilitate specialized access to
goods and services to which access has previously been subject to
barriers. In this way, new secondary and tertiary Native industries
are more likely to emerge.

Facilitating such patterns

These themes were addressed to some extent at the annual convention
of the National Indian Gaming Association, held in San Diego in
April, and expressed principally in two proposed initiatives.

The first initiative proposes to encourage the tribal government
gaming sector to be active in training and hiring Native
individuals, and in exercising purchasing practices which benefit
Native companies and companies that have a policy of benefiting
Natives through employment and/or subcontracts.

The second initiative contemplates the active development of an
American Indian Business Network that might facilitate positive
results in the first initiative described above, and have other
positive effects.

The proposed NIGA initiatives echo a theme that has been the subject
of initiatives pursued for some time by the National Center for
American Indian Enterprise Development (NCAIED). These efforts were
the subject of many conference sessions and various public addresses
made at the NCAIED-organized Res 2005 conference held in February in
Las Vegas.

In fact, NCAIED has long facilitated, through its networks and its
Native business support program, access in favor of Native business
(both tribal government and private sector) to U.S. government
contracting preferences (under Section 8(a) of the Small Business
Act), and similar access to the mainstream private sector business
community (particularly public companies having ethnic
diversification policies).

It is clear that such continued efforts are required. The average
poverty rate for members of gaming tribes is still high: 24.7
percent. The rate for non-gaming tribes is 33 percent.

In view of these statistics, the desirability of encouraging and
facilitating the aforementioned patterns of contemporary Native
business practices is unquestionable. But even more significantly,
in view of the rapid growth of the American Indian population over
the next generation, these commercial patterns are desirable for the
expansion and diversification of the broader Native economy.

Such diversification is also particularly desirable in view of
emerging challenges to any tribe's inadvisable reliance upon a
single-industry economy.

Adapting the ancient practices

There are special reasons for, and approaches to, optimizing the
implementation of such remedial collective inter-tribal practices,
especially in the case of particular standard tribal government
business sectors not limited to gaming - upon which some tribes have
become inordinately reliant. Moreover, there are tips to avoiding
undesirable complications in the implementation of such practices
and efforts. These will be explored in the next installment of this
column.

Paul Frits is a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River.
He was a member of the board of his First Nation's Business
Development Corporation through most of the 1990s, and continues to
be an honorary member of that corporation. Frits practiced Native
law for many years and has advised many tribal administrations in
their public governance matters and economic development
initiatives, including casino/hospitality, financial services,
energy, natural resources, services, manufacturing,
telecommunications and information technology, cultural and other
industries. Frits volunteers his time to research and write
perspective columns on matters of interest to the broader Native
community. He may be reached at paulfrits at hotmail.com.


--

http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/person-1024.25.html&lang=en
http://blogger.xs4all.nl/kranenbu/
http://locative.net/blog/mixreality/
0031 (0) 641930235







From shivamvij at gmail.com  Fri Jun 17 19:50:35 2005
From: shivamvij at gmail.com (shivam)
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:50:35 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Delhi I-Fellows
Message-ID: <fd72ba1a05061707205b9bb822@mail.gmail.com>

This is to remind all Delhi I-Fellows that we are meeting tomorrow at
the Indian Coffe House at Mohan Singh Place, near Rivoli Cinema in
Connaught Place at 5:30 pm.
I was there this last Sunday too and must avoid being a regular there...
Everyone's invited!
Shivam
 

-- 
I poured reason in two wine glasses
Raised one above my head
And poured in into my life
(-JD)

www.shivamvij.com


From eye at ranadasgupta.com  Sat Jun 18 02:29:06 2005
From: eye at ranadasgupta.com (Rana Dasgupta)
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 02:29:06 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] An essay on hope in the Republic of Georgia
Message-ID: <42B3399A.2050108@ranadasgupta.com>

This is an essay I wrote some time ago following a trip to Tbilisi.  It 
reports on conversations I had with people about how the future can be 
imagined in a place where people have become entirely cynical of it.

For those who know anything about Bhilai and its steel plant the central 
character in this essay has fascinating connections to it.  The other 
histories of a place.

http://www.ranadasgupta.com/texts.asp?text_id=30

happy reading...

R

Rana Dasgupta
www.ranadasgupta.com


THEREAFTERS
Trying to imagine the future in Georgia
Essay : Republic of Georgia, Tbilisi, politics, history, Soviet Union, 
Saakashvili, hope, despair
Friday, June 17, 2005 13:42 GMT


There are people who are citizens of nations about which there is no 
doubt. This fact is important for their confident, relaxed sense of 
self. They see a world full of certainties: they talk easily of the past 
and the future, they suffer no lapses of memory, no aphasia, no 
persistent misgivings about their own existence. Often they do not 
acknowledge the origins of their breezy composure, for they have been 
allowed to grow up believing themselves to be self-created “individuals” 
(such is the maturity of their nation-parents). All that is left over 
from this repressed paternity is a general, primordial faith in the 
benign power of the nation-state.

For such people, the myriad uncertainties that arise from being part of 
a nation that is little more than a phantom are something of a 
curiosity. Secure within a national fiction that has long ago congealed 
into fact, they find themselves smiling indulgently at the anxious 
imaginative turns of more doubtful places: fanaticisms about long-dead 
heroes, macho fantasies of integrity and purity, neurotic combinations 
of bitterness and awe vis-à-vis the handful of nations whose triumphant 
exception is supposed to be the rule. But in a world where the 
nation-state is the beginning and end of thought, the absence of grand 
national narratives is experienced as personal lack; and stories of 
absent greatness rush in to fill the void.

David the Builder (1073-1125), whose conquests created an empire 
extending across the Caucasus, ranks as Georgia’s most glorious 
long-dead hero. His memory helped to focus a Georgian political 
consciousness during the nearly eight centuries from the routing of the 
medieval empire by Genghiz Khan in 1220 to Georgia’s independence from 
the Soviet Union in 1991 when Georgians never had a state of their own – 
except for the three years between Russia's loss of the territory in 
1918 and its renewed occupation in 1921. Even now, the Georgian 
government does not have control over large areas of what is considered 
to be Georgian territory; and its future attempts to occupy these areas 
could be very bloody. Meanwhile, for most of its short history, the 
present Republic of Georgia has found itself ruled by stern, predatory 
business groups that have borne little resemblance to the benign 
governments that nation states are “supposed” to have. Largely as a 
result of their power games, nearly everyone in the country has seen 
their fortunes dwindle and their possibilities shrink since the long 
hoped-for independence.

It is only in this context of national failure and disappointment that 
it is possible to understand the scale of the hopes aroused by Mikhail 
Saakashvili’s “rose revolution” of November 2003. A dashing 36-year old 
with a law degree from Columbia, a Dutch wife, and facility in five 
languages, Saakashvili had already been battling corruption from the 
centre of Georgian politics for eight years when he became the 
figurehead for a wave of public resentment against alleged 
election-fixing by the much-detested President Edvard Shevardnadze – 
whose family and immediate circle controlled some 70% of the Georgian 
economy. In a startling, bloodless coup supported by euphoric street 
demonstrations, Saakashvili took over as president. Like a modern heir 
to David the Builder, he pledged to right all the wrongs of history and 
turn Georgia into a “proper” nation state: he would reclaim the 
breakaway provinces, oust corruption and make the country part of the 
international flows of jobs and investment. In the presidential 
elections that followed two months later, he won over 96% of the vote.

It was two months after this, when the posters of the revolution were 
still on the walls, that I arrived in Tbilisi to do some research for my 
next novel. It was a country I had been interested in for some time as a 
setting for a particular character.

Tbilisi airport is full of signs showing anxious women accompanied by 
leather-jacketed good-for-nothings counting dollar bills, and carrying 
the assurance: “You Are Not For Sale.” These are a reference to 
Georgia’s world leadership in the domain of human trafficking, and to 
the great traumas suffered by many of those trying to cross this border 
in the opposite direction. As a citizen, however, of the United Kingdom 
of Great Britain and Northern Island, a little-doubted state, I 
naturally encountered only smiles of welcome as I went through immigration.



On my second day in Tbilisi I telephoned Dr Nikoloz Kenchosvili, an 
academic at the Institute of Oriental Studies. He was not expecting my 
call. A friend of mine had given me his name just before I set off from 
home; there had not been any time to warn him of my arrival. The phone 
was answered after two rings. I explained how I got his details, that I 
was researching a novel and if he wasn’t too busy...? He burst out laughing.

“This is Georgia. Intellectuals are never busy! Shall we have lunch?”

We arranged to meet outside Philharmonia, Tbilisi's large, late-60s 
concert hall. I arrived slightly late: I could see him from a distance 
pacing up and down, white hair shining in the sun.

“Dr Kenchosvili?”
“I was beginning to think you were lost! Come: let us find a place where 
we can talk.”

We crossed the road to a small cafe where we ordered beer and ham and 
khajapuri . He needed little encouragement to tell me about himself.

Nikoloz was born into an educated, middle-class Tbilisi family whose 
members were deeply anti-Communist. During the terrifying and paranoiac 
1930s, Beria sent his father’s brother to Siberia for sedition. His 
father joined the Communist Party in an attempt to protect the family 
from more such assaults, but their ideological credentials remained 
shaky, and the young Niko had to abandon his dreams of becoming an opera 
singer – a career which would have required significant Party patronage. 
He studied languages and literature in Moscow and returned home to 
become an academic. (Nikoloz's uncle was to return to Tbilisi in 1948 
after eleven years of hard labour. His brother would go through the same 
ordeal a few years later.)

In the early 1960s, Nikoloz applied for a job as interpreter at the 
recently-built Bhilai Steel Plant in central India. Bhilai was India's 
first nationally-owned plant, and an epic statement of Nehru's 
socialist, modernising vision. It was set up with financial and 
technical assistance from the Soviet Union, which sent a large number of 
engineers and managers to oversee the project. The frisson of this 
intimate encounter persists in the town to this day: people still talk 
about the foreigners who came to stay, they still drive the Ladas that 
were imported at the time, and still have a few words of Russian.

The impact on Nikoloz was electrifying. As for many of his secluded 
generation, international travel felt truly magical; and he fell in love 
in a way that was full-blown, adolescent, rapturous, and permanent. 
There were obstacles, of course – the tedium of constant surveillance, 
the prohibition on social contact with Indian workers and their 
families, the obligatory daily readings from Marx and Lenin, the 
censorship (he was prevented, for instance, from seeing the 
“anti-Soviet” Dr. Zhivago when it came to India) – but these did nothing 
to muddle the fixity of his adoration. Though such strictures eventually 
forced him to give up the job and return to Tbilisi, Nikoloz was to 
devote the rest of his life to studying Indian culture. To date he has 
translated fourteen works of Hindi fiction into Georgian, and is the 
author of a number of papers on Indian folktales and literature. His 
business card described him as “Leading Scientist (Indologist)”.

Niko's vocation relegated him to a lonely, eccentric corner of Georgian 
life. In the old days he had been able to earn money by translating 
Marxist Indian writers into Georgian. Now such avenues were closed: 
Georgian publishing was all but wiped out, and authors who wanted to see 
their works in print had to pay the publishing costs themselves. 
Naturally, Niko’s recently-completed Georgian version of Patanjali's 
second century BC Yoga Sutra lay unpublished. He thought often of giving 
it all up. “Perhaps I should try some business. What do you think? This 
indology is getting me nowhere.”

We were still sitting in the cafe.

“I would naturally like to invite you to my house, but I wanted to meet 
you first. My place is very small, and I didn't know what kind of person 
you were.” Niko, like most academics in Georgia, earned a salary of 
under $30 a month. His wife, a teacher of music theory, earned about the 
same. They lived in an apartment she had recently inherited from an 
uncle, which allowed them to supplement their income by letting out 
their old one. “That's how we survive," says Niko. "Most of my friends 
cannot even eat. They cannot afford a simple meal like this.”

Nikoloz was effusive and dignified, but his conversation circled 
continually back to the same points of bitterness and anger. “Our 
consciousness was crushed. This is what is worse than the economic 
hardship. Young people now have a pure consciousness, but my generation 
had their minds in a prison. Stalin was a genius but he hated nice men. 
Intellectuals. He destroyed us and now we have no one who values the 
intellect. Now the country is run by criminals. They are simple thieves. 
This Georgian ruling class hates the new President, Saakashvili, because 
he is a nice man, handsome, intellectual, sincere. He is a genius, and 
also handsome. I am sure things will get better. But I am sixty-five 
years old: I have no time to wait.”

Meanwhile, he was forced to ask questions of survival. “I am writing a 
paper in order to qualify for a professorship. Then I would get a 
pension. But I want to go to India. That is where I belong. But how can 
I afford it? Do you think I could set up a school to teach Georgian? 
There must be some people interested in learning Georgian, no? And I 
will make khajapuri. I can make it very well.” He sensed that history 
had overtaken him, and that he should try to adapt to a more prosaic, 
business-minded age, but he struggled when he tried to imagine the 
practicalities. “I am not a businessman. I am a creative spirit. My 
spirit must realize itself in creative work. I cannot escape my self. 
There are people who are born to be businessmen. You can see that they 
are meant to do it: how effortlessly they make money! I can never be 
like that, no matter how hard I try.”



For most Georgians, the end of Soviet rule was a personal catastrophe. 
1991 marked the beginning of a period of collapsed industries, civil 
war, terrorism, mass poverty and unemployment, declining health and 
literacy, and organized crime. Cut off from the commercial network of 
the Soviet Bloc, which had provided a vast, automatic market for 
Georgian industries, and then reduced by crime and instability to a 
highly undesirable destination for new investments, Georgia is now a 
bleak place to try and make a life. Shops in the city have little to 
sell. There are few jobs. The transit points by the highways outside the 
city are bustling with men queuing for day labour in construction or 
transport. The “middle classes” are so defined only by the nature of 
their work, not by their standard of living, since they too live in 
poverty. One doctor I met had had to pay a $100 bribe to secure a job in 
a hospital that paid her $10 per month. Everywhere there are old people 
begging on the street to supplement the state pension of $7 a month.

In contrast to nearly everyone else, the political elite has managed to 
make good money out of Georgia. As those in power began to see how the 
end of the Soviet Union would play out, they seized as much as they 
could of the collapsing state’s assets in order to shore up their 
position for a new, hardened world. A few individuals consolidated huge 
fortunes, which made them into significant regional commercial players 
and turned them inexorably towards organized crime. Unlike the official 
industrial system of the Soviet Bloc, which was destroyed by its 
break-up into separate states, the flexible criminal networks that 
operated out of Moscow and extended all over the world were only 
strengthened by the collapse of state power: suddenly their 
international channels faced no competition from “legitimate” ones, the 
policing of criminal businesses was almost eliminated, and in the new, 
deregulated climate, powerful organizations were suddenly able to get 
their hands on amounts of cash that would have been unimaginable under 
the Communists. Crime paid; and people seeking returns on their wealth 
built large conglomerates operating in every high-profit sector, whether 
legal or not: property, construction, hospitality, energy, drugs, 
prostitution, money laundering, etc.

This fact determines the texture of daily life at nearly every level. It 
accounts for the absurdly high number of casinos in Tbilisi, and for the 
ghostly feel of prime areas of the city’s real estate, where expensive 
boutiques and restaurants run empty because their real business is money 
laundering. It explains the fact that there are newly-built but empty 
buildings everywhere. It is the reason for the high levels of violence 
that broke out on Tbilisi streets, particularly in the late 1990s, as 
large business organizations fought over turf. It explains the pattern 
of Georgian emigration, which has largely followed the channels opened 
up for it by the power of criminal organizations, and has therefore been 
dominated by human trafficking and prostitution. Above all, it explains 
the sclerotic nature of Georgian politics, which has been taken over by 
criminal interests, and is systematically, even joyfully, corrupt. If 
one image can sum up the last few years it is this group of 
criminal-politicians, people who were often already powerful under the 
old regime but who are now toughened for the era of gangsterism, and 
updated with the hysterically festive style of the hyper rich living 
amid economic apocalypse.
What is the relationship between all this and the great talent that 
Georgians seem to have for discussion and friendship? The cafés and bars 
are filled with the hubbub of intense debate – love, politics, history – 
and people treat each other with a rare generosity. When you see the way 
that the whole city comes out onto the streets on a Sunday to amble 
slowly with friends and discuss the events of the week, you wonder if 
this provincial town has preserved unhurried forms of intimacy that have 
been lost elsewhere to speed and distraction. But it is also possible, 
despite everything, that there is some humanizing aspect to the 
experiences of the last few years. You cannot abandon yourself to some 
sleepy faith in the ultimately benign nature of time – to an idea of 
inevitable progress – because it has shown itself to be spectacularly 
whimsical, and even destructive. If the future is to be any better it 
will have to be constructed so by you, and by those around you.



Having seen some posters announcing that the piano students at the 
Tbilisi conservatoire were giving public recitals, I went one day to 
listen. The conservatoire was on Griboedov Street near the Academy of 
Arts; there was a small sculpture garden on the opposite side of the 
street where stone sculptures had long since toppled over and become 
overgrown. Inside the conservatoire, a recital was in progress and the 
doors to the concert hall were closed. I waited in the lobby, where the 
sound was indistinct; students listened with their ears to the crack 
between the doors. At length we heard applause from within, and the 
doors opened.

As is well known, the Soviets were great promoters of classical music, 
and even in these dismal times – or perhaps because of them – there 
seemed to be a thriving minority of people involved with this 
conservatoire. Sixty or so people were here to listen: students, 
teachers and a few parents. At the back of the room sat a 
distinguished-looking row of whispering judges in half-moon glasses. A 
Petrof concert grand stood open on the stage; the pale blue walls were 
decorated with stucco cherubs and lyres. There were busts of Bach and 
Beethoven and the other great composers.

A young woman walked onto the stage: she was perhaps seventeen. She wore 
a knee-length skirt and glasses; her movements had a teenager’s 
awkwardness to them. She offered a minimal bow to the audience, walked 
to the piano and began a Bach Toccata and Fugue. She played with her 
back stooped right over, so her nose was just above the keyboard. Her 
performance was expansive and romantic, with a swelling pedal and the 
sort of heroic self-expression that went out of fashion some time in the 
1950s among western performers of Bach. She ended, and the audience 
waited silently; she moved on to Liszt’s thundering Rhapsodie Espagnole, 
and then the Prokofiev Toccata. The whole things lasted about forty 
minutes. It was a performance of astonishing virtuosity, during which 
her absorption in the music did not break once – until the final 
applause, at which point she bowed coyly and walked hurriedly from the 
stage.

I had once seen a photograph of this room from 1904, when it was newly 
built; it still looked exactly the same. There was almost nothing about 
this whole scene, in fact, which could not have occurred at pretty much 
any point in the century since then.



At the crossroads of east-west routes from the Caspian Sea to the Black 
Sea, and north-south ones from Russia to Turkey and the Middle East, 
Tbilisi acquired the status, in the second half of the nineteenth 
century, of a prosperous little outpost of the Russian empire. Wars with 
Persia and the Ottomans had expanded the empire into the Caucasus, and 
Russian administrators had begun to transform Tbilisi with the 
boulevards, tramlines, expansive squares and public institutions that 
were the shared vocabulary of nineteenth-century cities across the 
world. In 1851 an imposing opera house appeared, an exotic fantasy of 
Islamic arches, which brought companies from Paris and Rome who 
performed Mozart, Donizetti, Bizet, Puccini and Verdi. Amid all the 
other kinds of people in this trading town – the Azeri troubadours, the 
Persian caravan traders – arose a small bourgeoisie that wore the 
top-hatted, sober uniform of its peers around the world. Merchants and 
industrialists from Armenia dominated Tbilisi’s economy, building 
painted mansions with tiled roofs and carved wooden balconies that 
climbed gaily up the hillsides to look down on the growing town. A 
generation of Georgian nationalists, educated in Petersburg, returned to 
the city in the 1860s to work on celebratory Georgian histories and 
poems about Georgian kings, peasants and warriors that still provide the 
basis for a Georgian national consciousness. Since many intellectuals 
and artists from eastward-galloping Russia were in the habit of falling 
in love with everything that was oriental about their empire, balmy 
Tbilisi became a frequent destination for them, too: Pushkin, 
Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy all spent time there, and Lermontov became so 
passionate about it he has been adopted as a Georgian national hero. 
Economic development accelerated towards the end of the century when 
nearby Baku, on the Caspian, went through its meteoric rise under the 
influence of the Nobels and Rothschilds, who built it into the 
centrepiece of a European oil empire to rival Rockefeller’s Standard 
Oil. Oil from Baku was needed in western Europe, and the Transcaucasian 
railway (1883) and the subsequent pipeline (1889) went via Tbilisi for 
loading onto ships in the Black Sea port of Batumi. Tbilisi also became 
an important centre of socialist thought and activism: for the 
marginalization of Georgians from its economy added a nationalist tinge 
to Marxist critiques that made them extremely compelling, and the de 
facto Menshevik administration that ruled with widespread support during 
Russia’s crises of 1905 was the first to do so under such a banner 
anywhere in the world.

Comparatively little of what was built in those dynamic days has been 
destroyed. If you look down on old Tbilisi from the hills on the other 
side of the river where the Sheraton Hotel now stands, the view is not 
very different from what you might have seen in 1900. The steep slopes 
are still stepped with ornate wooden houses and the occasional polygonal 
church; above the city the hilltops are still bare. The stone domes of 
the public baths still cover the square in front of the mosque exactly 
as they did in Sergei Paradjanov’s 1969 film of eighteenth-century 
Tbilisi, The Colour of Pomegranates.

Close up, however, things are different. The opera house on Rustaveli 
Avenue, still graceful, is run-down, and large trees grow out through 
the cupolas on the round billboards outside. Many houses are empty and 
collapsed: balconies have fallen to the ground and staircases lead up to 
floors of bare wooden beams. Children play football in courtyards where 
the glass has broken in the carved window frames, to be replaced by 
chipboard. Such decay is everywhere, reaching beyond the old city into 
the more monumental areas built during the Soviet era. Many of the large 
housing complexes from the 50s and 60s are now only habitable thanks to 
makeshift repairs with corrugated iron and plastic sheeting. David 
Agmashenebeli Avenue, a major thoroughfare of the city’s 
twentieth-century expansion, has become a proletarian mockery of its 
former affluent self, with signs for currency exchange and second-hand 
clothes plastered rudely onto the dilapidated façades of what once were 
theatres and boutiques and cinemas. Old women sit in every doorway 
selling sunflower seeds, whose husks lie in little piles under their 
stools, and apples and onions that they bring in plastic bags. The 
street is full of idle taxis, whose drivers sit together on the curb to 
smoke.

There are graffiti on nearly every wall. “Toyota” invokes the 
unencumbered power, perhaps, of the Land Cruisers that are standard 
issue for the city’s gliding diplomatic and UN personnel. The names of 
British football clubs and American actresses (“Angelina Jolie”, 
“Jennifer Lopez”) resound with glamour and achievement. Some walls have 
been decorated painstakingly, with drawings of animals or trees or 
women’s faces. The most common graffiti, however, are “Tupac” and 
“Eminem”. Heroes for an in-between age, who stand for no particular set 
of ideas, but who seem to aim all their monumental masculine media power 
against the way the world is, and thus provide an ego ideal for bored, 
frustrated youths who have little to do except rail impotently and play 
video games in Tbilisi’s many arcades.



I sat down to lunch with a young bureaucrat, Vakhtang Maisaia, from the 
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and an American journalist named Jeffrey 
Silverman. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we were the only ones in the 
restaurant. In front of us was an enormous spread of barbecued pork and 
khinkali accompanied by Georgian wine and Borjomi mineral water.

“Who’s going to eat all this?” I asked.
“We are!” Vakhtang was thirty-one years old, but his air of avuncular 
warmth and his mouthful of gold teeth made him seem older.
“Anyway,” he added, “it doesn’t look nice to have a small amount of food 
on the table.”

We began to eat. There was no elegant way to tackle the khinkali, and 
Vakhtang discouraged my efforts in this direction.

“You have to eat it with your hands. That is the way. Don’t worry if the 
juice runs down your face. And try this mineral water. Borjomi is very 
famous. It contains many minerals and is very good for your health.”

Jeffrey laughed scornfully.

“Every place you go to has a different kind of Borjomi mineral water. 
They all claim to be the original. Just look into who owns them all and 
you’ll have a whole new perspective on it.”

Jeffrey was a tough southerner married to an Armenian from Georgia. Now 
in his fifties, he had previously worked for a long time for a tobacco 
company in the US and, as if in reaction to this experience, now lived 
in Tbilisi where he spent his time seeking out tales of corruption – 
especially the sort that involves American corporations. His articles on 
corporate cover-ups, large NGO funds slipping into personal pockets, 
arms deals and unexplained murders made him a well-known figure in the 
city, cursed and adored in equal measure.

It was March 14th, 2004. Early that morning President Saakashvili had 
been barred from entering the province of Ajaria by the troops of its 
Russian-supported strongman Aslan Abashidze. A military build-up was 
beginning on both sides, and my lunch companions began to receive a 
barrage of mobile phone calls. While we talked about Georgia’s political 
situation they ducked out periodically for urgent exchanges of the 
latest news.

“The day I got my job in the Ministry,” said Vakhtang, “my boss said to 
me, ‘We will pay you $20 per month. You must earn this money. You have 
to be at your desk every day and fulfil your duties. Beyond this, you 
may carry out your own business in any way you wish. I will not 
interfere.’ He was explaining the ground rules of corruption to me. 
Corruption is systematic and entirely necessary – for how can you 
support a family on $20 a month?”

Vakhtang was a man of serious intent, exasperated with this reality, who 
wished the country could be brought to a state of “normality” and who 
had chosen a line of work in which he could do his bit to move things in 
this direction. He had a strong sense of mission and, in the wake of the 
revolution, renewed hope.
“This region is still very dangerous. The effects of the break-up of the 
Soviet Union are still being felt. There are more than forty conflicts 
over ethnicity or territory that are already violent or may become so; 
most of these groups are asserting their claims more and more strongly. 
Meanwhile, Russia still wields undue power in the country. It cuts off 
our gas supply when it wants to apply pressure. It has provided generous 
supplies of weapons to the country’s breakaway leaders in order to keep 
Georgia weak. It’s still not impossible that it could walk in and occupy 
us again. Now Saakashvili is in power it is at last time to put an end 
to our fragile situation. We have to quickly reunify the country and 
forge strong international alliances.”

Of such alliances, America, of course, is the most important. And, as it 
happens, America is exceedingly interested in Georgia right now. At a 
point when its continued access to Middle Eastern oil is so 
unpredictable, the extensive deposits in the Caspian Sea have assumed 
unprecedented importance, and the US is not leaving its supply lines in 
the region in any doubt. It has fought long and hard to create an oil 
corridor from the Caspian that will avoid Russian and Iranian territory 
and pass through countries that are smaller, easier to control, and 
friendlier. The most visible result, the soon-to-be-completed 
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, was one of the most common subjects of 
conversation and news reporting in Georgia while I was there, and helps 
to explain why this poor, provincial place is so full of foreign 
businesspeople, NGOs and diplomats. It gives Georgia significant 
geopolitical importance at this point in time, making it clear that its 
future will be determined at least in part by the struggles of the Great 
Powers, and holding out the possibility that on this single point of 
foreign interest might be hung a future of international connections, 
investment, and prosperity.

More food kept coming. Jeffrey was on the phone to some diplomat.

“Yes I know exactly how they got those arms…
“Yes…
“Of course we can meet… I can tell you when they got them and from whom…
“Tomorrow morning?”

For Vakhtang, the ascendancy of the US in the region was probably a good 
thing.
“We are a small country on the doorstep of a giant. Our future will 
always be insecure if we do not have American protection.”

The US is delivering its protection across the region, making it clear 
that it will not leave its investments exposed to the Caucasian 
elements. American military bases have recently appeared in Uzbekistan 
and Kyrgyzstan, and are likely to do so in Tajikistan and Azerbaijan. 
Kazakhstan is setting up a Caspian naval base under US supervision, and 
US troops have been sent to Georgia to provide training and equipment to 
its armed forces. All this makes it much less likely that Russia would 
ever launch a hostile operation against Georgia.

But this is only part of the attraction of the American presence. For 
Vakhtang – and for Mikhail Saakashvili’s government – the imagined 
“normality” to which Georgia must return is, at this time of neoliberal 
consensus, a thoroughly corporate one, and American interest is crucial 
for bringing it about. Georgia, of course, is one of those places where 
you see corporations at their most rapacious, and many Georgians may not 
like what they are doing there. The upheaval caused by the building of 
the pipeline through villages and agricultural land, for instance, will 
hardly be assuaged by the NGOs employed by BP to calm the social storms 
in their wake. But the twentieth century’s utopias have destroyed the 
country to the point where there is no room anymore for fine debate, new 
visions or private misgivings. All the choices for Georgia’s future 
amount to just one choice, which is the same one choice enjoyed by 
everyone else: to usher in the tumult of the global market. The 
indications are that Saakashvili’s government will do so with an almost 
unmatched level of fundamentalist passion.

Jeffrey finished his phone call and looked at me.

“Stick around,” he said. “You may see a war.”

He was impatient with Vakhtang’s pro-American sentiments. He did not 
believe that American interests could ever be made to serve Georgian ones.

“The US invokes ‘terrorism’ as an excuse for its military influence in 
this part of the world. This is exactly the same strategy that Russia 
has pursued. They both want to keep talking about Chechen fighters in 
Georgia, to treat the country as a ‘failed state,’ so they can exert 
their influence on its affairs. But their interest is not terrorists, 
but energy. The real reason the US troops came here was to train the 
Georgian army to guard their pipeline. Do you think the US could walk in 
to a successful democracy like Latvia or Estonia and tell the army what 
to do? No. It’s very convenient for them right now that the country is 
unstable and they can set things up the way they want them.”

The table was awash with pink napkins drenched in khinkali juice wiped 
from greasy chins. Jeffrey appealed hotly,

“I seriously think it would be better if they put a wall around this 
country for fifty years and didn’t let anyone in or out. I really 
believe that would solve Georgia’s problems more quickly.”

But the phone calls were becoming only more insistent and lunch was 
disbanded. Vakhtang had to return to the Ministry. Jeffrey went to check 
his facts ready for his exchange of intelligence the next morning.

After I left the country, the stand-off between Saakashvili and 
Abashidze ended – without a shot being fired. Abashidze fled to Moscow 
and Saakashvili entered Ajaria to a euphoric reception. The first 
obstacle to his reunification of the country had been honourably 
cleared, and his prestige was sky-high. Vakhtang was proud and excited – 
doubly so, since he had been appointed Counsellor to the Georgian 
Diplomatic Mission to NATO, and was going to Brussels for three years.
Jeffrey began to write me depressed emails wondering if the Saakashvili 
administration would not turn out to be more power-hungry and corrupt 
even than what had gone before. But then his propensity to hang out in 
the most dangerous Caucasian recesses got him into more trouble than 
just the usual beating. While trying to work out what was really 
happening where the official maps read “Here Be Terrorists” he found 
himself arrested in Azerbaijan under an old warrant he did not know 
about; his passport was confiscated and his attention became more 
focussed on gathering money from well-wishers to pay to the Azerbaijani 
police.
Meanwhile, the nearly-complete Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, built by 
French, American and Indian contractors for the BP-led consortium, 
buried under concrete and watched at all times by guards and electronic 
sensors, is as secure as human beings know how to build.



Power was in short supply in Tbilisi, and at night most of the streets 
were in deep darkness. The headlights of an occasional Lada taxi would 
speed past loudly over the cobbles. Late-night shops spilled light out 
onto the sidewalks; their simple interiors, with sausages hanging from 
the ceiling and sacks of flour and potatoes on the floor, seemed 
cheerful and welcoming in the deep night. Outside, old people sat in the 
blackness of doorways, and gypsy children trailed passing pedestrians, 
trying to argue money out of them. A team of men walked the streets with 
a torch, pasting new posters onto the palimpsest of city walls. A fleet 
of taxis and gleaming 4x4s jostled outside the Adjara Hotel, whose 
nightclub was host to some DJ from Paris; rich young men with Gucci 
shades and model girlfriends were still arriving at 1am to join the 
crowds of dancers, whose Ecstasy-induced serenity rendered them 
relatively indifferent to the erotic gyrations of the elongated women up 
on the stage. A birthday party was happening in one of the restaurants 
on Perovskaya Street. A large family was packed around a thirty-foot 
table whose surface was entirely covered, end-to-end, with a couple of 
hundred of dishes of food. A gypsy band had been hired for the evening: 
three old men played dances at blistering speed on a violin, accordion 
and synthesizer. The endless toasts had started – to Georgia, to 
parents, to women, to love, to memories, to the departed, and so on, and 
so on – and soon the young people would start to dance wildly until they 
collapsed with drink. Their seated grandmothers would clap them on to 
ever-faster footwork, they would leap and reel to the rhythm of the 
music, and they would end each dance by throwing themselves to the floor 
and lying in a group on their backs, laughing out loud.



Most of the people I met in the bars and cafés were young. Some of them 
had jobs. One worked for Opel, in the marketing department, while 
studying for her MBA in the evenings. Another was employed by an 
American NGO whose values and motives he mistrusted entirely – but the 
money was good, and for people whose opportunities are so slender there 
is not much irony to such contradictions. But many were unemployed. They 
did not order drinks, and came just to talk.
The young men all seemed to spend their time writing poetry. It was 
poetry they knew would never be published, written for themselves and 
their friends. There was a café in Tbilisi, popularly known as the 
“Literature Café,” where such people met and discussed politics and 
literature, and where Georgia’s most famous writer, Dato Turashvili, 
held court in Sartrean style. These people had a romantic persona based 
on a deep cynicism about almost anything the wider world had to offer, 
and the celebration of love, sex and the artistic interiority. They 
found me artificial.

“So you are paid to write books? That is your living?”
“Yes.”
“So then for you it is a business. You do not write from the heart. You 
think only of what people will buy.”

End of conversation. We talked about other things.

It was difficult for these people to believe that any established 
interest could ever do anything to benefit them. They were young enough 
to have lived their whole life in a situation of economic and political 
desperation, and it had become a fundamental condition. They were among 
those, of course, who had protested during the revolution, and who had 
had the satisfaction of seeing the old regime removed and humiliated. 
But their support for Saakashvili was provisional.

“We are giving him time. He is new, he is just starting. Let’s see what 
he does. We will support him for a while. But he is not our saviour. If 
he does nothing we will fight to get him out of power.”

They had a general sense that things must get better. The entrenched 
interests of the former Communist elite could not survive the new 
political and economic currents, and one day life would perhaps come 
closer to the fantasy of “normality” that seemed everywhere to float 
like a mirage above the apparent aberration of Georgian life. But they 
did not think anything was happening soon:

“Maybe in fifty years, maybe in a hundred. Georgia will become a normal 
place. Too far away for us.”

Dr. Kenchosvili, four decades older than these people, had said a 
remarkably similar thing. It was as if the future always began just 
after you had ceased to be able to experience it, no matter when that 
was likely to be. This was not about real time, but about an inability 
to imagine oneself living in a certain kind of world: relaxed, and 
confident. Sometimes only some deus ex machina seemed adequate to 
transform this reality into that:

“We need some nuclear bomb. Destroy everything. Start from zero!”

Everyone laughed.

But even an image of such total finality was not quite enough. Someone 
added,

“Don’t you think even then our rulers would just get up from the blast, 
and start putting their cousins in power?”

This joke was even better. The laughter was uproarious.

Shortly after I left, a young woman from this group who had had a job 
lost it as a result of post-revolution realignments. It was a 
well-paying government job, and she was at a loss for how to find 
something else comparable. At a party she met a recruiter for an 
American construction company operating in Iraq, and within a few days 
had departed for Baghdad.



On the last day I went to Nikoloz’s house. I turned up, as per his 
instructions, after 5pm, since that was when the electricity came. He 
lived on the edge of a teeming market selling cheap goods from China and 
Iran. There was a small room with two single beds, a television and a 
piano. In the adjoining kitchen the oven door was open to heat the room. 
Downstairs was a damp basement that Nikoloz had made habitable by 
building a stove in the corner and covering the brick walls with plastic 
panelling. A friend of his, hearing that a foreign visitor was coming, 
had stopped by in the morning to drop off wooden crates for the fire; 
they burned very quickly, so the freezing room was filled with periodic 
bursts of heat. On the wall was a large sheet of paper with the 
handwritten title, “My journey to India.” It was covered with 
photographs from Bhilai (“In those days I was an important person. Look 
how all the workers looked up to me. Now they earn four times what I 
do.”) and from the three subsequent trips he had made as an academic. 
The shelves were lined with Hindi volumes and the desk was piled with 
folders labelled “Letters from Indian friends” and the like. His wife 
brought down a meal of stew, cheese, ham and beer, and departed. We 
talked about the same things again: the indignities of poverty, the 
destruction of a society, the indifference of the world towards his 
nearly four decades of work.

It was time for me to leave. We went upstairs and I played a few notes 
on the piano. Niko was delighted. He put some scores in front of me. His 
wife was irritated by his interference: “Just let him play!” She had sat 
down on the bed to listen. “No, no – play this!” he told me. It was a 
collection of Italian songs. I started playing the introduction to “O 
Sole Mio”, and he joined in with a lovely tenor voice. The first time 
around we were a somewhat shaky ensemble; we performed it once more. It 
was a strangely beautiful moment: this sugary nineteenth-century love 
song, this comfortable drawing room sound, here in a proletarian 
district of a poor Central Asian city, with a slightly out-of-tune 
piano, Niko’s precise Italian accent, and his unaccustomed voice 
cracking on the high notes. It felt like a ballad of nostalgia for a 
genteel past that never existed. I was moved. His wife applauded. I 
hugged her emotionally, and she waved strenuously from the door.

Niko walked me to the subway station telling me that when he had not 
drunk beer his voice was much better, and did I think his singing could 
become a little business?




From zainab at xtdnet.nl  Sat Jun 18 11:05:57 2005
From: zainab at xtdnet.nl (zainab at xtdnet.nl)
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 09:35:57 +0400 (RET)
Subject: [Reader-list] Other, Another!
Message-ID: <3012.219.65.11.140.1119072957.squirrel@webmail.xtdnet.nl>

OTHER – OTHER – OTHER/S
ANOTHER – AN – OTHER – ANOTHER/S – AN – OTHER/S


Fleeting conversations in Bangladesh 


We are in Dhaka. And we are meeting with my friend’s university professor
Mr. Alam. Mr. Alam is a well-traveled person. He enjoys indulging in
conversations and discussions. This afternoon, Mr. Alam has invited us to
lunch.
We are enjoying a sumptuous Bengali lunch. Mr. Alam starts talking with us
about the Middle East where he has traveled a bit. “Saudi, Dubai, Riyadh
and Abu Dhabi, I have been to these places. Dubai is cosmopolitan. Saudi
is conservative and rigid,” he said. “How is it in India? I have heard a
lot about North India. How is the food there? What kind of people are
Punjabis?” My friend and I start to wonder how to describe North India.
Within the region itself there are considerable differences. My friend
says, “Punjabis are different people. They are enterprising, gregarious
but they can also be aggressive.” I say, “Punjabis are different in
different places in India. There are Punjabis in Pakistan as well. If you
ask my father, he has a list of biases against Muslims. His top- most
dislike and prejudice is against Punjabi Muslims, those in Pakistan.” Mr.
Alam sprang up from his seat and said, “That is it! That is it! Punjabis!
Even our independence struggle against West Pakistan was really against
the dominance of the Punjabis. You know why we won independence from
Pakistan? Because we told the Pakistani army that we are mainly against
the Punjabis. And they surrendered. Yes, Punjabis it is!”

I have often perceived the hatred that Bangladeshis have against
Pakistanis. My friend tells me, “In an India-Pakistan match, Bangladeshis
will support India because they hate Pakistan. That’s the only reason they
will support India.”

I think about history, memories, ‘The Other’ and borders 



We are in Khulna. My friend’s classmate, Shona, and I are talking with
each other in her house. We have been invited to a davat, a dinner party.
Shona talks to me about Bangladeshis love going to Kolkatta because
‘shopping is very good there.’ Bombay is too distant for Shona. She can
imagine it. “There must be many Hindus there, isn’t it?” She has a look of
suspicion on her face. I am trying to read beyond the look. What is the
suspicion about? “Yes, there are Hindus. Most of my colleagues and friends
are Hindus. My cousins and siblings are wedded to Hindus. My origins are
from the Hindu lineage,” I tell her. But that does not change her look. I
am a Muslim to her. I don’t know what more to tell Shona.
Back in India, when people ask me about Bangladesh, I perceive a similar
look of suspicion on their faces about Muslims in Bangladesh. “Aren’t
Hindus being targeted and killed in Bangladesh?” What do I tell them that
the culture in Bangladesh is far from being Islamic? If anything at all,
it is truly Bengali culture!
Diya, a friend from Dhaka, had narrated this incident to me during my
first visit to Bangladesh. “We are a research institute. We had visitors
from Delhi. Among them was a Hindu lady Neeta. She had her own perceptions
about Bangladesh. She thought that all the women here wore veils. She
thought that we are strict about prayers and religious customs and
behaviour. When she came here, she was too surprised to see us wearing
sarees. She had asked, ‘Sarees? Is it okay to wear sarees?’ I had told her
how we Bangladeshi women look for occasions to wear sarees. She was even
more surprised to see us wearing bindis (a Hindu symbol on women’s
foreheads). And then I informed her that each one of us, men and women,
have a Bengali name in addition to an Islamic name. And we are referred to
more frequently by our Bengali names. She was too surprised and it was
very hard for her to believe what she saw.”


I am in Chittagong now. We are sitting in the now famous Foy’s Lake. It’s
evening time. Mithu, Shumon and me are chatting and passing our time,
watching the crowds and frequently indulging in ice-creams! Something
happens and MIthu talks about Mujeeb-ur-Rehmaan. “Yeah, he was your
independence struggle leader,” I remark. Mithu is surprised. “How do you
know?” “Come on,” I tell him as a matter-of-fact, “We study the Bangladesh
liberation war as part of our history syllabus in school and college.” “Is
it?” he remarks sarcastically, adding, “Tell me more about what you have
studied?” I tell him about the election results where East Pakistan had
acquired a majority and General Zia tried to suppress these results and
impose the West Pakistani government. And then Mujeeb and others rose in
revolt. “And India supported the rebellion and sent its army to help,” I
end. “Yeah, India sends its army huh?” Mithu says. For a moment, I am a
bit taken aback. But I realize that my tone is one of patronizing and
Mithu is not impressed with this. I begin to perceive the big-brotherly
aka Uncle Sam attitude which India has on South Asia overall. Mithu reads
the same attitude in my narration of history. And he does not like this.
On occasions, I have seen a few borders which India has with Bangladesh.
We are too close to each other. A few kilometers away from Chittagong, our
host takes us to a place where there are hills and waters. There is a golf
course there. And it is an army patrolled area. It is now a picnicking
spot along with boating and fishing activities. From atop the hill, our
host points out to us: “Look, look beyond that boat. That is Bay of
Bengal. That is India.” I realize how ‘in the face’ India is to
Bangladesh. “We are totally surrounded by India, on all sides,” one of my
Bangladeshi friends had said to me during my first visit to Bangladesh. It
is the perception of fear, of territory terrorizing and of potential
conquest. Wow!

Memories, borders, history, identity, territory 
 Other – Other – Other/s
– Another – An – Other – Another/s – An – Other/s 




Zainab Bawa
Bombay
www.xanga.com/CityBytes
http://crimsonfeet.recut.org/rubrique53.html



From taranginis at yahoo.com  Thu Jun 16 17:25:28 2005
From: taranginis at yahoo.com (Tarangini Sriraman)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 04:55:28 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Reader-list] Re: reader-list Digest, Vol 23, Issue 27,
	Re: when he was called Pandit Jinnah (Peeyush Bajpai)
In-Reply-To: <20050616100005.6BD2928D8C6@mail.sarai.net>
Message-ID: <20050616115528.48144.qmail@web54103.mail.yahoo.com>

I couldn't agree more with Peeyush on that.
And i was also going to write saying that in jinnah's case
a lot of people simply confuse his private atheism with
secularism, a strictly public definition.
Partha Chatterjee once wrote that there are all kinds of
religious and secular types, ones that believe in religion in the 
public and the private sphere, ones that believe in religion in 
the private but in not in the public sphere and those who believe in
the public but not in the private sphere. The last category Partha 
identifies as the most insidious, as these people themselves dont believe yet 
can make others believe, Jinnah belongs to this category, Chatterjee says.
So Jinnah's ignorance of a religious text not only does not make him secular but
makes suspect his later convictions about the two-nation theory. (How can a man who professed atheism suddenly believe that Muslims as a religious community would get a raw deal in what he conceived as  HIndu India, when he did not believe in religion, let alone religious distinctions?
My point is that fundamentalism cannot be transcendental, there can be nothing self-evident
or incontrovertible about it. Jinnah did not seem to have proved his relgious or his secular credentials.Nor has Advani in any real sense, and certainly not by his volte-face recently.
 
Tarangini Sriraman

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1. Re:Reader-list] When he was called Pandit Jinnah (Peeyush Bajpai)


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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 14:14:48 +0530
From: Peeyush Bajpai 

Subject: [Reader-list] Re:Reader-list] When he was called Pandit
Jinnah
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Message-ID: <220f752b05061601446e0b4ba3 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"

Ingonrance of his (Jinnha) own religion or religious text do not make
him secular. But utilizing religion to fragment or create discord can
only be entitled as communalism.

In this context, Advani is as communal as Jinnha, or read backwards
both equally secular.

Hence Advani did not say anything wrong as he belives himself to be
secular too!.

peeyush


Message: 1
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:36:59 +0530
From: "mihir25" (by way of Monica Narula)
Subject: [Reader-list] When he was called Pandit Jinnah
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed

When he was called Pandit Jinnah RAJNISH Sharma
Lucknow, June 5 Hindustan Times
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5922_1389389,0015002500000000.htm
When the former Deputy PM L K Advani described
Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a secular man during his
early days, he wasn't quite off the mark as it is
now a part of recorded history. Though his
comments have raised a furore back home, few
would know that this man was even referred to as
Pandit Jinnah once. And if indifference to
religion is any indicator of secularism, the
Qaid-e-Azam was probably the biggest of all
secular fundamentalists. There are two incidents
hitherto not found in any history book which
highlight this aspect of his character in a
rather comical way which were narrated by none
other than the eminent jurist and statesman, Sir
Tej Bahadur Sapru. It was told by Sir Tej to his
granddaughter's husband Dr IM Chak, Retired Dy
Director of CDRI during a meeting with his
grandfather Pt. Prithvi Nath Chak, another legal
giant of that time under whom Motilal Nehru
learnt to practise law. A contemporary of Sir
Sapru, Jinnah along with him once visited Egypt
during the month of Ramzaan. The Muslim porters
there refused to carry their luggage saying they
would only carry the luggage of a fellow Muslim.
When Jinnah told them to go ahead, the porters
decided to test them. They were asked to recite
the kalma. While Sir Tej happily recited it with
Èlan, he had Jinnah looking sheepishly at him for
the wine loving brown sahib didn't know a word of
it! Sir Tej had a hard time convincing the
porters that Jinnah, who was to later create a
separate Islamic State, was indeed a Muslim! The
other incident saw these two friends sparring in
the court of law in a case that involved elements
of religion. The case saw Sir Tej quoting
innumerable ayats from Quran in support of his
arguments. Jinnah, though a formidable lawyer
himself, drew a blank once again on this account.
The next day local newspaper headlines screamed
Pandit Jinnah vs Maulana Sapru!



-- 
Peeyush Bajpai
www.indicus.net


------------------------------

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From vivek at sarai.net  Fri Jun 17 13:56:28 2005
From: vivek at sarai.net (Vivek Narayanan)
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 13:56:28 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] [Announcements] Marcus Westbury, Artistic Director,
	Next Wave Festival, Melbourne Australia
Message-ID: <42B28934.2060506@sarai.net>


Please excuse the impersonal nature of this e-mail. Marcus Westbury is 
the Artistic Director of the Melbourne-based 2006 Next Wave Festival and 
will be arriving in India on Sunday 19th June. Marcus will be in Mumbai 
from Sunday 19 to Tuesday 21 and then in Delhi from Tuesday 21 to 
Saturday 25 June. Marcus will be in Mumbai and Delhi with the intention 
of meeting as many people as possible to discuss works and artists for 
potential inclusion within the next festival. Marcus will also be 
traveling Malaysia and by the time he reaches India he will have been to 
New Zealand, Canada, Belize, England, Scotland, South Africa, Kenya and 
Singapore.

The theme and title of the next festival is Empire Games and it will 
take place in March 2006 alongside the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth 
Games. The name is an old term for a new time and Marcus is looking for 
different takes on today’s Empire Games.

Marcus is looking for Commonwealth country-based artists under 30 years 
of age who make-work in the areas of visual arts, theatre, media, film, 
sound and design. Marcus is particularly interested in:

    * art that does not fit into typical art categories: work that
      crosses mediums and artistic disciplines, or new and hard to
      categorize work
    * "light-based" projects: anything using light, including
      projection, digital or video film/animation
    * all kinds of visual arts, preferably suitable for exhibition
      outside of typical gallery spaces
    * theatre/dance/performance work, preferably small-scale and
      venue-flexible
    * music/ sound art/sound installation, both small and large scale:
      DJ‚s and live acts for large venues, as well as small scale
      musical /sound performances
    * "new media": all things digital, interactive, and cross-disciplinary
    * works which involve themes of culture jamming

For more information on Next Wave Festival please visit 
www.nextwave.org.au <http://www.nextwave.org.au/>.

If you would like to meet with Marcus or can suggest people with whom he 
should meet I would be grateful if you could let me know ASAP.

Yours sincerely, Rachel Young


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From anupam_iase at yahoo.co.in  Mon Jun 20 02:09:35 2005
From: anupam_iase at yahoo.co.in (anupam pachauri)
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 21:39:35 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Reader-list] Mr. Jinnah at India Habitat Centre
Message-ID: <20050619203935.23483.qmail@web8402.mail.in.yahoo.com>

Narender Mohan’s Mr. Jinnah is being staged at India
Habitat Centre on

Date: June 22, 2005 
          and
     June 23, 2005

Time: 7.30 pm
 
Director: Arvind Gaur

Music: Dr. Sangeeta Gaur

An Asmita Group Production






Cheers!!
Anupam




		
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