The Nanavati Commission has determined in its investigation of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984:

(That) the violence that followed the assassination of the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was “organised and systematic” in several areas, the entire Congress apparatus could not be held responsible for the acts of individual politicians, hooligans, depraved people and local gangs.

Sounds a little bit like the “a few bad apples” theory. There have been ten commissions of inquiry to date, makes depressing reading as chronicled by Dilip D’Souza, when people like Sajjan Kumar have been let off the hook:

A CBI team went to Kumar’s home to file the charges; his supporters locked them up and threatened them harm if they persisted in their designs on their leader.

In retrospect, 1984 feels like a dress rehearsal for Gujerat. When powerful people subvert the law, it does not go unnoticed, and those who would follow them refine the tactics they have learnt, knowing they can do so with impunity.

The Nanavati Commission however does recommend that the most egregious culprits, HKL Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar and Dharam Das Shastri be re-investigated. But when you read accounts of people like Advocate Harvinder Singh Phulka, it becomes clear that while people haven’t given up, the tactic of bureaucratic delay makes the prospect of justice seem rather dim. For more information on this and other Human Rights issues look at Jas Karan’s blog at the Harvard Law School.

I had written about Pavitra Prabhakar, way back in June. Recently there was an interview with the CEO of Gotham Entertainment, Sharad Devarajan on Fresh Air on NPR. Its a nice interview, Devarajan says that one of the ways in which Spiderman has been transformed into Pavitra is by making him a hick from the hinterland, since being good in school isn’t necessarily uncool in India! and Peter/Pavitra has to be a bit of an outsider. I didn’t see copies of the comic when I was in India, but at least one Indian reviewer seems to hate this comic, he sees the comic as symptomatic of American hubris:

The typical American superhero is designed to defeat evil at all costs, using a set of special powers that he has acquired by some means. Good versus evil, always ending in victory for good. Black and white, zero or one, with no room for gray. With great power comes the notion — “If you are not with us, you are against us.”

Ouch! trawling around I found other comic book fans who think the Indian Spiderman to be a ridiculous, and a form of cultural imperialism and not a patch on the homegrown Raj Comics with characters such as Bheria (Wolf Man), Nagraj(King Cobra, on the left) and Super Commando Dhruva. Nagaraj has serpent powers but in his non-superhero life wears spectacles and works in a PR department, sound familiar?

After a month of travel I am catching up on my reading and just finished Elizabeth Kadetsky’s First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance (2004). Having practiced Iyengar Yoga for six years or so, and really glad that yoga is in my life, I was quite delighted to read this book.

Kadetsky is at her best when she explores the history of yoga. One of the premises of this book is that Westerners who seek out Eastern systems often have an ahistorical view, which is highly problematic. It ultimately treats those systems as exotic, doing a disservice to the system as well as to themselves. It was hugely refreshing for me to know how the various systems of modern yoga developed, what other mystical and secular practices it might be related to, in addition to the rich mythology it is related with. One of the interesting aspects explored in the book was about the systems of patronage. Before independence, yoga was supported by the kings of various princely states. After 1947, yogis like Mr. Iyengar were forced to look elsewhere. The biggest patrons turned out to be the West and hardline Hindu nationalists (a very disturbing connection). Most Westerners that I know who are into Eastern mysticism are unlikely to bother their pretty little heads about anything so earthy as the social history of yoga. But people like me are much happier knowing than not knowing it. Yoga can be an esoteric and deeply internal discipline, or just a system to stretch your limbs (as I have seen on countless awful videos), but it certainly allows people like me, who are not ritualistically Hindu as much as intellectually so, to find a practice that suits our temperament. I would prefer to be made uncomfortable with the contradiction of a system that is growing and changing with the times than be lulled into following the narrative of an ahistorical exotic system (Western ashram groupies) or an ahistorical chauvinism (the Hindu nationalists), with these two narratives often supporting each other.

This book seems to have generated different reactions on the Amazon page. From the casually racist:

…..she wades through 14 generations of yogic history: it’s challenging to keep Kuvalayananda straight from Krishnamacharya, especially since Indians themselves argue over which stories are legends and which are facts. Iyengar himself is portrayed as a tyrant who berates other teachers for defiling yoga’s purity, even though he has done more to break its traditions and promote its Westernization than his rival instructors. (The Publishers Weekly)

To fulsome praise:

With incisions that “unzip the viscera” she exposes not only her personal journey towards healing – as a child of divorced parents, the daughter in a mixed-marriage and the rigors of anorexia – to make sense of her own life; but also the exploration towards understanding the heartbeat and inner workings of the brilliant yet challenging experience it is to be at the source of Iyengar yoga in Pune, India. (From an Amazon Review)

The personal journey is the weakest part of the book. It almost feels like the publisher demanded that a personal “spiritual” narrative accompany the book. Coming from my experience as a filmmaker, I can think of at least two aspects of the publishers rationale:

1) We need a white person to guide us through this confusing realm of the “Third World,” since readers couldn’t possibly understand that world in its own terms.

2) Women should write deeply felt personal narratives, since they don’t really have credibility with anything larger than their own backyard. Obliquely reflected in the recent brouhaha on the harvard president’s pronouncements, via Sepia Mutiny.

Hot on the heels of the Star and Buc Wild show comes another radio gem. One of the top radio stations in NY (HOT 97) is playing a skit, calling tsunami victims “screaming ch**nks.” From a forward:

For the last week Hot 97 has been running a hideously unfunny and offensive skit named the “Tsunami Song,” It’s being played on the station’s morning show, hosted by Miss Jones, who has had serious run ins because of her racism (one in the news concerning the game, Ghettopoly) and has never been fined.

Here are some choice lyrics sung to “We Are the World”:

“..All at once you could hear the screaming ch*nks
and no one was safe from the wave there were africans
drowning, little chinamen swept away you could
hear God laughing, “swim you b*tches swim”
So now you’re screwed, it’s the Tsunami
you better run or kiss your ass away, go find your mommy
I just saw her float by, a tree went through her
head and now the children will be sold to child
slavery…”

But so far Hot 97 hasn’t acknowledged that there’s anything wrong with it, and they continue to air it everyday.

Contact HOT 97 here:

HOT 97
395 Hudson St. 7th Fl.
New York, NY 10014

(212) 229-9797

hot97@hot97.com

Is the FCC listening, or do they still have their nose buried in Janet Jackson’s nipple? Their website does not have a section for complaints that have to do with hate speech, indecency and bad language is all that they care about.

Back in the city after a month long sojourn in India. It was a very exciting trip with work, travel, and family fun thrown in. I will write about it as I sort it out.

I hadn’t been back in four years, and the last time was too full of family events to pay any attention to the place itself, so in effect it was like going back after almost ten years. My first impression, once you bypass the usual–”the place is bursting with people and there are a lot more cars on the streets,” was how many ugly little temples had sprung up on every corner.

My hometown of Dehradun isn’t a big place for religious activities, despite its proximity to major pilgrimage spots, Rishikesh and Hardwar; so it was a little surprising to see so many of these monstrosities in places where I played cricket as a child. And its just not Dehradun, it seems that the VHP plans to install 600,000 Ram statues (and judging by the icons I saw, bound to be ugly) in villages across India, in just such unaesthetic structures I suppose. Anything that creates such ugliness is surely a sign of degradation.

When I spoke to my friends they expressed hope that such a hijacking of public space would come to an end with the defeat of the NDA government, with its history of granting land to ideologically preferred religious groups. However, what was striking in my conversations with my friends was that despite their hope, just how scared they seemed to be, especially if they were non-Hindu. It wasn’t as much as what they said, but how they said it, when I asked about the current political climate, their voices would lower, and they would start looking furtive and uncomfortable. At least a couple of people told me horrible stories….some spoke of migrating, others seemed to have become even more religious than I remembered them. So what is one to make of the NDA defeat in the last election? Radhika Desai has an excellent article in the New Left Review unfortunately it is only available by subscription.

Hindutva Halted?
Ambiguous reasons for the unexpected relief of the BJP’s ouster in New Delhi: less a clear-cut verdict on Hindutva or neoliberalism than vicissitudes of regional power-broking and first-past-the-post electoral lottery? Congress caught between loyalty to the stock market and pressures of the poor, as it seeks to recover its position as the mainstream reference of Indian capital.

Desai essentially says that the BJP has replaced the Congress as the party of the bourgeoisie, and its defeat is a temporary setback in its fortunes, as the Congress behemoth breathes its last.

If you are planning to celebrate with watching the epic documentary, “Eyes on the Prize” think again, says Thom Powers in the Boston Globe:

“EYES ON THE PRIZE,” the epic 1986 documentary series on the civil rights movement, contains a scene showing Martin Luther King Jr. on his 39th birthday — his last — in 1968. King, who was trying to take on poverty and the Vietnam War simultaneously, was under tremendous stress at the time, and his staff sang ”Happy Birthday” in an attempt to cheer him up.

But the producers of ”Eyes” almost had to leave the scene out of the finished documentary. ”Happy Birthday,” as it turns out, was copyrighted in 1935 and, following the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, will remain so until at least 2030. Filmmakers have been known to pay $15,000 to $20,000 for just one verse, according to a recent report on documentary clearances issued by the Center for Social Media.