Reuben of Zoo Station, posts on the dismal standard of reporting on the monsoon, in The Times of India (via Globalvoices). The English language press, barring a few exceptions like the The Hindu has been tabloid-izing itself for quite some time now. Even in the best of times, most of these newspapers were aligned with the interests of elite Indians or their British overlords; that is, till the political tides changed, but you could at least depend on them for news.

Siddhartha Deb has a very good article on the state of the English Language press in the Columbia Journalism Review. He spoke with several editors and journalists in New Delhi like Umesh Anand, the former editor of Times of India in New Delhi:

Anand said, explaining his growing disenchantment with changes in the mainstream media and his decision to start a small, independent magazine. “The management and marketing guys began to dominate the media companies. It’s happened everywhere, but we Indians catch the wave late and repeat the mistakes.” Anand didn’t consider himself biased against market forces, saying that he was all for a free market that allowed him to bring out a magazine like Civil Society. What he objected to was the growing sense of irrelevance about the content of the newspapers: “How many naked women do you need to see in the morning?”

What’s wrong with naked women, you might ask. Not much, if that is what the market wants, except that it seems to leave the media impotent when it comes to actually covering what is of relevance to the country. It sabotages any sense of reality about what is going on. A noteworthy example from Deb is about the 2004 elections:

The BJP government had hired a multinational p.r. agency to unleash a $20 million media campaign that was indistinguishable from “feelgood.” The BJP campaign used the slogan “India Shining,” claiming credit for the transformation of India into a confident, upwardly mobile country. There was nothing controversial about such a claim if one measured it against the booming middle-class neighborhoods in cities like Delhi; these are areas that have benefited hugely from the BJP’s economic and political maneuvers and have reciprocated with vociferous support for the party. But the images displayed in the advertisements, on television and in full-page color, showed a broader cross-section of the Indian population: farmers, village girls on bicycles, a Kashmiri Muslim boatman.

Much of the Indian media seemed to take this assessment at face value, predicting a comfortable electoral victory for the BJP, although the predicted margin of victory kept shrinking. As it happened, the ruling coalition lost badly, with the majority of the electorate voting overwhelmingly in favor of the centrist Congress party and its allies on the left.

Dick and Garlick (good to see him back in full form) has a post on the origins of “Wodehousian,” the especially silly, inventive language that the, usually upper-class characters, in P.G. Wodehouse stories speak.

Baboo Jabberjee, BA, was a character created by the English humorist F. Anstey for Punch, an Indian law-student in England who has learnt his English from books and speaks in absurdly inflated phrases…. I’ve read both the Jabberjee books: they’re politically incorrect, of course, but also quite funny, with devastating parodies of Babu English. Apparently, they had a great influence on P. G. Wodehouse’s style…

For the curious, here is the Wikipedia entry on Wodehouse, and you can download several of his books and stories at the Gutenberg project.

An upper-class male speaking in a nonsensical fashion isn’t limited to Wodehouse’s eccentric characters. Kerim pointed me to a post on Language Log about disfluency among upwardly mobile Wolof aristocracy in Senegal. And closer to home, members of the US senate. Members of the nobility cultivate inarticulateness as a sign of their status, which also includes the hiring of a lower class person to speak for them–their griot or press secretaries so to speak.

The strike at the Honda factory in Gurgaon is big on the news in India these days (The Hindu, BBC). Trouble has been simmering in the Honda factory for eight months, and finally things came to a head when workers demonstrated and were brutally beaten by the police. Part of the reason this is being discussed so avidly, is because the violence is being seen by people across the country via television. The images may be new, but the violence isn’t. I have actually seen the police doing traffic control in Varanasi by whipping the legs of the riksha-wallahs as they pass by. When I lived all the way across the Jamuna in East Delhi, I would see migrant labourers going to their shanty towns far away from the city on the back of a truck. When they passed the thana, the truck would stop and a few women would invariably get off to sexually service the policemen. It wasn’t something that I just heard about, I would actually see it from the window of the bus as I returned home.

Going back to the Gurgaon strike, The Telegraph has a timeline of how the events unfolded (on the left). The violence has gone beyond the the striking workers. Many of the workers were arrested, some had to go to hospital, their family members and co-workers didn’t know where they were and seem to have agitated which seems to have resulted in further violence (Photo below, from the Hindu). The lawyer who is working on behalf of the workers was arrested and beaten up by the police, and the lawyers will be striking tomorrow.

From a sampling of the papers, the narrative generally is: this is bad for India’s image, and this could discourage MNCs from making Gurgaon their home. There is much talk of how India’s labour laws need to be “flexible.” Which seems to be a thinly disguised word for a subdued and docile workforce (Singapore seems to be everybody’s dream). Nobody can deny that India’s archaic and contradictory labor laws need to be overhauled. However, the need for democratic protections for the workforce are very coyly suggested somewhere deep in these articles, if at all. Very few have remarked on how disturbing it is, that an arm of a democratically elected government would brutally attack an unarmed citizenry, on behalf of a corporate entity. This has also proved to be a great boon to the political parties, the Left as well as the BJP, who are calling for further strikes, the dismissal of the Haryana government etc. which is just hypocritical, they can hardly be said to be the friends of the working class or the poor.

You can read comics on the blog, comic project which is devoted to Indrajal comics. This week’s installment has a Bahadur comic, called The Dictates of Destiny. Bahadur’s side kick is the attractive Bela. Its all quite chaste, they are married and we see them going to their room and drinking tea (there is quite a bit of tea/coffee drinking in the story), but you never see them going to their bedroom.

I also found a history of Indrajal comics, which is greatly concerned with how the issues were catalogued, but it has scans of the fabulous covers of the Phantom comics, and I managed to glean a few facts about Phantom, The Ghost Who Walks:

…Because of The Phantom’s close connection to India, the editors made several “politically correct” changes to places and names — Bengali became Denkali (there are no pygmy people in Bengal, which would have puzzled Indian readers); the Singh Brotherhood were known as “Singa” pirates; and Rama (the murderer of the 20th Phantom) became Ramalu, even though Ramalu is also a common Indian name.

This is all very fascinating, considering Lee Falk, the creator of the Phantom comic series in the 1930s, is from St. Louis, and didn’t travel till later in life.

There was a Phantom movie in 1996, starring Billy Zane, and for what it is worth, there was a funny moment, when Phantom comes across a sign in the jungle saying, “Property of the Rubber Company.” But that is where the satire stopped.

The latest on Charles Sobhraj is that his appeal has been postponed for the third time. It seems that the lawyers didn’t finish making their arguments, and:

According to the Nepalese legal system, the next hearing may have different judges, which would mean the lawyers having to repeat the same arguments they have already covered.

This is a horribly absurd situation. Ionesco or Beckette couldn’t have dreamt it up any better. The French government is pressuring the Nepalese government to speed things up, to no avail. I suppose Sobhraj’s trial is a welcome relief to the Nepalese government and the press, since they aren’t allowed to talk about much these days. It suits every one just fine to drag their feet.

Amardeep has an extensive post (I don’t know how he can be so prolific) on the latest Ram Gopal Verma movie, Sarkar. It seems Sarkar has stirred up a controversy in the UAE, the link is here, but it was something else that caught my eye:

…”Amitabh Bachchan was appointed ambassador of the Dubai Shopping Festival this year. But instead of promoting Dubai, he has acted in a movie which shows Dubai, particularly its national hero in bad light,” another viewer said.

I didn’t know there was such a thing as a shopping festival. There are twenty five malls in Dubai, and many souks. Not only can you shop till you drop, there are cultural events and performances you can go to. Here are some photographs from the festival by Brian McMorrow. One of the things the festival has is a “Heritage Village” where you can see “live exhibits” of Arab culture. If anything or anybody is in a museum, you can generally be certain that they have perished or perishing.

Dubai seems to be a city of excesses, the crown prince, known affectionately as Sheikh Mo, has big plans for Dubai, which have included an under water hotel, the tallest building in the world, a ski resort in the middle of the desert. Mike Davis has an essay on Dubai (via Tom Dispatch), its “imagineered urbanism” and what it takes to be that way. You guessed it (or maybe not) 99% of the workers in the private sector, making these mega-projects are from South and Southeast Asia. Their living conditions and lives are the darker side of Dubai–a British colonial style of indentured servitude. Not to mention all the Russian women sold into sexual slavery. The Davis article doesn’t mention it, but one has to wonder what about the people from the UAE who aren’t wealthy oil sheikhs or connected to the Royal family? maybe they subsist on performing at the Heritage Village?

This Godless Communism is a comic book series from the sixties (via Boing Boing) published by the Catholic Guild. This has great artwork, a lot of it done by artists who also worked on comics like Tales From the Crypt! Other wonderful things include a letter from J. Edgar Hoover and the liberal use of the L and F (liberty and freedom) word.

Thankfully, such comics aren’t relics from the past. Folks like Jack Chick are keeping these paranoid narratives alive. There are tracts about how rock music is the work of the Devil, how Creationism is superior to science, my personal favorite is the comic about how we must support Israel, because that is where the battle of Armageddon will occur, bringing the second coming; on the way to this, we are reminded that England lost is colonial pre-eminence because of turning its back on Israel!

His greatest ire is however, reserved for Catholics, notably in his Alberto series about a penitent priest. The man is a veritable industry unto himself, the site has articles, videos, you name it. He has articles about how Islam is a false religion, started by a pedophile; the Hindus are Demon worshipers and the Budhists…okay I could go on….you get the idea.

Land of the Dead (2005) by George Romero. The Pittsburgh auteur does it again. This is a good zombie movie. The world is in shambles, the zombies stumble through it, and the few decent humans try to do their best. I particularly liked the violence, its neither sadistic not aestheticized. Its more like medieval versions of hell, and actually quite beautiful, without trying to be beautiful. Its really well-cast, the stars don’t take over the ‘aura’ of the film. Romero’s sense of humor is intact and the zombies are hungry, very-very hungry.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) by Vincente Minelli. Lauded as one of the greatest MGM musicals ever, this one gave me a tummy ache. I completely understand why Judy Garland became a drug addict.

Street Fight (2005) by Marshall Curry. The documentary was about New Jersey politics in the form of the 2002 mayoral race in Newark. This one made for great viewing; it was better than the average political-race documentary, which gets so caught up in the “characters” that it forgets to think about anything else. New Jersey’s politics are quite like Bihar’s–if an elected official is in jail, his wife or son takes over, pork barrels galore, and other unsavory things. Street Fight looked at the political process when an older African-American Democrat mayor is challenged by a younger Yale educated African-American councilman, also a Democrat. NPR has a short interview with the filmmaker.

The Bush administration has been doing such a great job with its War on Terror (Every year, since 2001 there has been a major attack somewhere in the world, not to mention no reduction in endemic violence in other parts of the world), it has gone after that other nefarious breed–pornographers.

Regulation 2257 (via Filmmaker) is designed to “protect the children.” Newsday explains:

Regardless of one’s feelings about adult entertainment, the situation is a disturbing illustration of a larger trend in the Bush administration: the use of regulatory powers to advance a conservative moral agenda.

Part of a revision to the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988, the new regulations were quietly published last year and target a seemingly mundane part of the porn business – record keeping. While huge corporations such as Time Warner make a hefty profit broadcasting adult entertainment, porn is largely produced by smaller entities, often operating without even an office.

Individuals and small companies producing adult entertainment will be devastated by new regulations requiring them to provide copies of government-issued IDs for performers retroactive to 1995. In addition, these small producers, perhaps operating out of a garage or second bedroom, will need to have a public office, open at least 20 hours a week, where their records are available for inspection.

The regulation, which defines “sexually explicit” very vaguely gives extraordinary powers to regulatory agencies, directly in conflict with protection afforded by the constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an article on why we need to worry:

Consider the blogger who writes a post on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and wants to post some of the existing or soon to be released sexually explicit photos of prisoner abuse. (Even if the pictures were blurred, under 18 U.S.C. § 2256, the regulations would likely still apply, since the definition of “sexually explicit conduct” includes “sadistic or masochistic abuse.”)

The result very well might be:

For the Abu Ghraib photos, since records of the “participants” are not available (at least not outside the US military), the record-keeping requirements could not be met, and the blogger could face criminal liability for posting the images. This will unconstitutionally chill protected speech — indeed, in this example, core political speech.

In Whose Name? and Whose Children Are These? is screening in New York again at:

28TH ASIAN AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
(in ‘War, What Is It Good For ?’ Shorts Program)
on Tuesday, July 19, 2005 @ 6:30PM
ROSE HALL, THE ASIA SOCIETY
725 PARK AVENUE @70th St, NYC
www.asiancinevision.org