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?