Scenes from an immigrant’s workers rights I went to yesterday in Taipei.  The theme this year was domestic workers, who want the right to a day off.  David on Formosa has a blog post about the march and immigrant workers in Taiwan.

Every time I see labor contractors in the Foreign Affairs office, they give me the heebie jeebies, they seem like a cross between pimps and petty landlords scared to death of losing their petty privileges, so it was great to attend something where immigrant workers could articulate their concerns.

The visual theme for the protest was slippers, since the Chinese word for slippers 拖鞋, shares its first character to mean ‘delay,’ as in ‘dragging your feet.’  The event ended with the Council of Labor Affairs being pelted with slippers. Me and my friends were in the front of the crowd, the wrong place to be if a crowd is going to be throwing slippers!

This is the first video I shot using the Flip. It was a pain editing it on FCP, and I pretty much had to do it blind, unless I wanted to spend hours rendering it to preview things. I marked in and out points on the audio track and picked an in point on the video and let the chips fall where they may.  Its not the greatest video ever, but it did get done in a couple of hours.

Daily Kos has a post about the DREAM Act:

Each year approximately 2.8 million students graduate from US High Schools. Some will go on to college, join the military, or take other paths in life, hopefully all becoming productive members of society.

But for approximately 65,000 of them, these opportunities will never be available. Not because they lack motivation, or achievement, but because of the undocumented status passed on to them by their parents.

The DREAM Act would allow these kids to do the things other people take for granted like being able to go to college, get a driver’s license, and get a job. It would allow them to participate fully in society, in the only country they know.

There are a couple of videos in the post. The first one was produced by Theresa Thanjan and me, and the music was composed by John Plenge. Theresa and I also did a music video of a song, ‘I have a dream,’ written by a couple of the kids.

Two very different op-eds in the New York Times that make an interesting juxtaposition. The first, by Gurcharan Das (Das is a right wing thinker– neo-liberal, anti-reservation, but not a Hindutva sympathizer) which has an essentialist, “India Shining” trajectory with a Reaganite twist:

….common saying among Indians that “our economy grows at night when the government is asleep.”

And the second, by Paul Krugman talks about the Republican contempt for government as being a product of its decision to “make itself the party of racial backlash”

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Another bomb has gone off in the capital, killing a 13 year old boy, meanwhile the authorities continue to posture and nobody seems to mind.

I’ve been reading about the bomb blasts since August with increasing alarm.  Two people have been shot, and a police officer lost his life in an “encounter” in Delhi, and three others were arrested near my alma mater in Delhi. Its very clear from this picture (Thanks YS) who those three are.

Why are the three kids wearing kaffiyehs? Nobody in India wears a kaffiyeh. We are not shy about wearing head gear, but a Palestinian kaffiyeh is not part of the sartorial vocabulary. In fact, according to the police, the leader:

..was against the typical looks of a bearded Muslim youth and encouraged workers to wear jeans and trousers.

So who put this head gear made fashionable by Arafat on these kids?  The police have shown great alacrity in finding the culprits, as they should (one can only hope for such promptness when VHP and Bajrang Dal go on the rampage). One has to wonder whether the meaning of this picture can be found in these questions about  what has been going on:

1) It has been widely reported (and not refuted by the Police) that in early August this year Atif, who is described by the Delhi Police as the mastermind behind the recent terrorist bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, underwent a police verification exercise along with his four roommates in order to rent the apartment they were staying in Jamia Nagar.

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My grandparents, for some reason saved their copies of the Illustrated Weekly from the fifties onwards. They only stopped saving them during the Emergency in the mid-seventies, the censorship of that era probably made the gesture meaningless. We spent our winter holidays at their home in Allahabad, and I would spend hours leafing through those old magazines. Which is how I found out about the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971, years after the fact. From the BBC:

The crisis was precipitated when East Pakistanis (who later became Bangladeshis) voted overwhelmingly in favour of autonomy and West Pakistan responded by sending in its army.

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, including Hindus, political activists, intellectuals and students. The Pakistani army carried out “collective punishment” where they suspected villagers of helping the freedom fighters.

Thousands of women were raped, millions fled into India. Bangladeshis say the killings amounted to a genocide and that three million people died.

Sometimes one can pin-point the exact moment one’s sense of self and the world changes irrevocably. Reading about that war was a moment like that. I must have been about ten, and it dawned on me that the world could be an anonymously cruel place. I did not know what the words ‘rape’ or ‘massacre’ meant, but it didn’t matter. The horror of 1971 was hard-wired into my brain.

I had an occasion to recall that feeling on reading about an effort in Bangladesh to prosecute perpetrators of the atrocities for war-crimes. One of the main organizations behind this effort is the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee, which is pressuring the Government of Bangladesh to go over its documents, gathered over 19 years and prosecute those responsible. Interestingly, many of the people it wants to be brought to justice are those who collaborated with the Pakistani army in the massacres:

In one of the most notorious incidents of the war, more than 150 academics and journalists (including BBC reporter Nizamuddin Ahmed) were rounded up in Dhaka on the eve of Pakistan’s defeat and killed by members of a group call Al-Badr, which was allegedly made up of members of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami.

Jamaat-e-Islami is a coalition partner in the present government, so this is a very large skeleton rattling in its cupboard. And true to form, as things go in these circumstances, Dr. Hassan, one of the organizers of the movement, has received death threats for his trouble.

To find out more about this particularly dark period in Bangladesh’s history look at the Bangladesh Genocide Archive. I didn’t quite have the stomach to go through it. Wikipedia has a good entry about the war and its political and cultural context.

Kerim has a post on Savage Minds about the Gujjars and the recent violence in Rajasthan.

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:

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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.

This American Life did a show back in June about Deception. The second story (24 minutes into the show) is about an upper middle class African American Lawyer who worked in a country club in Greenwich, Connecticut, as a bus boy. That was the only way they were going to admit him. Its a fascinating story in its horribleness. The funny thing is, its really hard to understand what era these people belong to, they sound so 19th century. Unfortunately, the reality is, its our own. And these people are hardly an exotic sub-species, they probably own everything and we can thank them for our lousy jobs.