The BBC reports:

Village council candidates in India should be allowed to stand for election only if they have a toilet at home, the rural development minister says.

The venerable minister, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh’s reason for proposing this rule is:

Mr Singh told the BBC that more than 65% of India’s rural population defecated in the open, along roadsides, railway tracks and fields, generating huge amounts of excrement every day. “This finds its way into the water sources,” Mr Singh said.

In a country where only thirty percent of the population has access to adequate sanitation and produces 900 million litres of urine and 135 million kilogrammes of faecal matter per day, the scale of the problem boggles the mind (From the Toilet Museum in New Delhi).

As amusing as this proposal sounds, I have several questions and thoughts. I wonder if the rule is being proposed to encourage people to install toilets, or to keep those who can’t afford toilets out of the race. The other aspect of this whole toilet business is the group of people who clean up after the others–the Dalits (See the BBC story on excreta collectors in Bangalore). Kerim has an account of our meeting with Pavan, a former tailor who came from a community of bhangis in Jaipur. One of the things that really stayed with me regarding that conversation was learning that higher caste/class women weren’t allowed to go out of the house to defecate, hence bhangi women were needed to clean up after them. This situation made it particularly difficult for Dalit women to change their occupation; there was a whole system in place to keep them doing their jobs, often backed by violence, not only from outside the community, but also from the men within their community.

So the minister’s insistence on flush toilets doesn’t sound so outlandish after all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

School of the Visual Arts recently had an exhibition of political posters from around the world (Thank you Sarah). You can see some of the images here. The PBS show NOW did an interview with Milton Glaser, one of the curators of the show, and you can see some more images on their website.

Also, if anyone knows where to find this T-shirt, please leave a comment, interested people want to know.

If you are a fan of the Chappelle Show. The mystery of the disappearance of season three of the show is now solved (Thank you Sam). Entertainment Weekly reports:

Chappelle said he was staying in Durban, South Africa, with his friend Salim Domar, a fellow Muslim, for what he calls a ”spiritual retreat.” Contrary to Entertainment Weekly’s report last week, he says he has not checked himself into a mental health facility, though he acknowledges spending a single 40-minute session with a psychiatrist.

Its seems that Dave also tried to go on Hajj (I didn’t know he was a Muslim), but only got as far as Turkey.

If you don’t know the show, check it out on Comedy Central. Some skits are just about boobs and not so interesting, but others like the one about the White Supremacist who turns out to be African-American, but doesn’t know it because he is blind, are sheer genius.

Entertainment Weekly has other links on Dave Chapelle.

An article in The Telegraph (thanks Diditi) highlights a film club that screens films in villages. Rather patronizingly titled, Reaching Ray to the Masses, it says:

“It all started in 2002 when we were working on a project in Amragachhi. We found that the villagers suffered an inferiority complex from watching the larger-than-life presentation in mainstream Hindi and Bengali films. So, we decided to screen films like Meghe Dhaka Tara, Pather Panchali, Bicycle Thieves, 400 Blows, Goopi Gayen Bagha Bayen and Bari Theke Paliye. They liked the films immediately as they could connect with the rawness of life,” says Chiranjeeb Mukherjee, who with three others formed Drishya to reach a different kind of reel magic to villagers.

The club has grown from four members to seventy, with screenings being expanded to other places in the country. Sadly, they show films on VCD.

There used to be many traveling film exhibition companies all over India. Photographer Jonathan Torgovnik documented one of the last remaining ones in Maharashtra in his book, Bollywood Dreams. A really wonderful book of photographs about other aspects of the industry as well. These companies were commercial ventures with ancient 35 mm projectors, they would go to where the audience was, set up a screen and show a movie. When I was in school, that is how films used to be shown to us. Mr. Movie Man (we actually called him that) would come with a projector and usually an ancient Tarzan movie. We would re-arrange our chairs, and take down the partition between the classrooms, the school was in the stables of the country house of one the local princely families, so if we wanted an assembly hall indoors, we had to re-arrange the partitions and move the desks out of the way. Once we were set up, the film would be introduced, the principle would tell us to behave and the movie would start. Once, by mistake, Mr. Movie Man put in a French film, it was fading and probably from 1960. It wasn’t anything special. A woman in a long coat and sunglasses walked into a beach cabin. She sat there, and then a man came in. And he kissed her, on the mouth! After that first kiss, there was either deadly silence or a collective gasp, then the lady took off her clothes, not all of them, but enough for the film to be stopped and reel yanked out. Then we were back to seeing “savages” and a full grown man leaping through trees, something much more salubrious for our tender psyches.

A few years later, the film projector was gone and replaced with a VCR, and by that time I was gone from the lovely grade school I had attended into the Convent. And that is how I first saw the “The Evil Dead,” on the feast day of the patron saint of our house.