Escape Pod (a sci-fi podcast) is one of my reliable companions on long walks. A few weeks ago they had a story, Artifice and Intelligence, about a super intelligent entity called Saraswati and her human companion, Pramesh, a tech support guy somewhere in a bunker in Pondicherry. It was pretty good, though it didn’t live up to its promise-the characters were interesting, and by the time they were developed, the story was over. It didn’t really develop the social or psychological relationships between the characters, which good sci-fi seems to do economically and effectively, like the brilliant play, Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan.

Its interesting to compare the two, since both the narratives involve First World and Third World characters, but the stakes are  much higher in ‘Harvest’ and there palpable sense of  power imbalances between the characters, which is missing in the artificial intelligence story. I guess its problem is that it just doesn’t seem to have that much to say. And no, it doesn’t have to be only about the Third World being exploited for its wombs or back office workers, it could be a Bollywood tech story like Transmission (which I enjoyed a great deal). Outsourcing is ripe for a ripping sci-fi story, so I am sure one will come along pretty soon, if it hasn’t already. Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy Escape Pod and its fine fare which makes my iPod, oh so worth having.

I was trying to courier something off to my sister in India at the Family Mart, and it proved impossible to do. The clerk kept taking me to the aisle and pointing at envelopes, and I kept saying I wanted DHL, UPS or Federal Express in a mixture of English and Chinese. Finally she produced a form. After about five minutes of trying different phrases, I was able to communicate that I needed to send something off to India and not the US, Australia or Japan. It turned out that they did not serve India, which made no sense to me, but I was too worn out to negotiate any further. I ended up going to the Post Office, where I think I sent the thing off. Time will tell.

I had to get a bunch of pictures framed.  I went to the guy I usually go to, but he was away. After pacing up and down for half an hour, waiting for him to come back, I walked into another framing shop and asked if anyone spoke English, it turned out the lady in charge did not, but somehow she was able to make herself understood. And between us we were able to accomplish the fairly complicated task of picking colors, frames, dimensions and placement. It got to be so, that she was able to ask me how come I had no children, what my spouse did, and if I was coming from the US, how come I was so short. She even took her tape measure and remarked at my amazing height - all 150cms of it, which she had very diligently measured. A gesture, I confess, I did not find offensive in the least. The un self-consciousness of most people in Taiwan regarding physical characteristics is rather refreshing.

I wondered why it was easier to deal with the art store lady and not the clerk at Family Mart. Kerim thinks that its easier to communicate with those who have more cultural capital. I think he is right.  In this case, it almost worked in a motivational way.  If you can ask someone their opinion, about something they are trained for, and care about, chances are they will try and make themselves understood. And both of you will have an equal investment in being patient since you respect  the other’s opinion. Ofcourse it helps that the lady probably owned her own business and I wasn’t going to haggle with her about the price. Something that does not quite work the same way when you are dealing with an overworked clerk at a boring job.

The Bloomberg administration has proposed easing the rules for independent filmmakers regarding permits to film in public spaces in New York City. :

The rules, to be released on Tuesday for public comment, would generally allow people using hand-held equipment, including tripods, to shoot for any length of time on sidewalks and in parks as long as they leave sufficient room for pedestrians.

This change of heart resulted from the lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Rakesh Sharma in 2005:

The film office originally agreed to write the rules as part of a settlement in April of a lawsuit brought on behalf of Rakesh Sharma, a documentary filmmaker who was detained by the police in 2005 after using a hand-held video camera in Midtown. Told that he was required to have a permit to film on city property, Mr. Sharma later pursued a permit and discovered that there were no written guidelines on how they were granted, according to the lawsuit.

Hurray for the NYCLU, and the City.

Ten people have been beaten to death by a group of villagers in the northern Indian state of Bihar, officials say.

Every time I read an item like the above, I think, “Those people who got lynched were probably Denotified Tribals,” the report doesn’t tell you who the people who were killed were, who killed them, and the story always ends in the same way–nobody was punished for lynching a defenseless person.

And then if you wait for a bit, you find out that they were Nats, a Denotified Tribe from an article by the tireless Mahasweta Devi, who has to remind readers, yet again of the terrible injustice done to India’s Denotified Tribes, and has to conclude the article with:

Dalits, caste Hindus, Muslims, everyone who feels like it can kill them. When will the state government start doing something to ensure that the Nats do not have to live in fear of being lynched any more?

This week Tehelka (thank you, Anant) has a harrowing report by S. Anand about the pattern of brutality visited upon those who exist on the margins of the margins.

Here is a picture of a man who was accused of stealing a gold chain. He has been tied to a motorcycle in preparation of being dragged through the streets of Bhagalpur in Bihar. Two policemen are part of this mob.

Lest you think that this is the problem only of Bihar, think again. A ‘Gypsy’ woman was attacked in Kerala, woman were killed in Assam for being “witches,” and a community of Pardhis were unlawfully evicted from their homes in Madhya Pradesh.

S. Anand argues that the State in India is very weak, and these incidents aren’t about a brutal State savaging its citizens, but citizens brutalizing those they consider non-citizens.

While, I don’t think Anand is wrong, I wonder what the role of the police is in all of this. They are an arm of the State, yet are the most flagrant breakers of the law. They are often in collusion with corrupt politicians, powerful criminals and the rich and powerful in the area (who are often one and the same person). These are the people who constitute the State as most people experience it. I suppose there is the state and then the State.

Update: Two policemen involved in the incident in the picture above were exonerated by an inquiry committee set up by the State Government, one of the policemen is I believe the man on the motorcycle. What a disgrace.

An online exhibition and essay of poster art and popular film about Indian Muslims by filmmaker Yousuf Saeed.

What do you call a cricket fan who hurls racial insults at a player? the answer is, a nice middle class uncle-ji who is showing his true colors. This particular incident is from Bombay, and exactly the same thing had happened in Vadodara. At that time the explanation given by the chair of the BCCI was that the crowd was invoking Hanuman! This photograph taken by Getty Images photographer Hamish Blair certainly does not say Hanuman worship to me. Its just good old fashioned hate speech. I agree with Mukul Kesavan:

It’s silly and deluded to look for anthropological explanations that will turn racist behaviour by Indians into something subtly different. Cricket writing by Indians in English sometimes makes the mistake of thinking of the “average” Indian fan as non-English speaking and therefore naïve and unsophisticated. This assumption makes it possible for “us” to explain “their” behaviour away as a kind of unschooled brutishness that is unfortunate but not wicked. This is why Blair’s photograph is so important: it shows you upwardly mobile men - who probably discuss the virtues of one malt whisky over the other, who possibly holiday abroad, whose children certainly go to private schools that teach in English - using one of the many international codes they’ve learnt in their cosmopolitan lives, the Esperanto of bigotry. The mudras they’re making aren’t derived from Kathakali : they’re straight out of the international style guide to insulting black men.

There was a time when Vivian Richards was as well liked as Kapil Dev. What happened? Were we always like this-vis a vis our obsession for fair skin, and caste based discrimination. Or did our minds get re-colonized with the rise of potato chips and computer chips. Or did we forget that we used to have empathy with those who came from previously colonized countries. All of the above, none of the above?

This photo was in the Taipei Times today:

BRAKE DANCING
Volunteer traffic police integrate traffic direction gestures into a dance while performing in the “traffic dance” segment of the first national competition for applied police skills at Taiwan Police College in Taipei yesterday. (Photo by GEORGE TSORNG)

I don’t even know where to begin trying to parse this one.

The Guardian has an article by Priyamvada Gopal on the troubling tendency of Western liberals to see the fight for gender equality as an exclusive quality of Western civilization, with its corollary — its frequent invocation to justify dubious interventions in the name of saving Brown Women from Brown Men.

The article is a butchered version of the original — all the significant details have been taken out. Read the original underneath:

Read the rest of this entry »

After thinking about it for 22 years, a declaration on the rights of indigenous people was approved by the United Nations. Global Voices has a round up of all the blogs that have covered it. Sadly, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have voted against it.

The above is from Anu Matthew’s portfolio, “Bollywood Satirized.” Regarding which she says:

Bollywood Satirized, is a critical commentary on the societal expectations that I experienced as a woman growing up in India.

More images by the very versatile Annu Matthew on her website.