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

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.

Mahasweta Devi gave the inaugural speech at the Franfurt Book Fair. You can read excerpts on Tehelka’s website. Like everything about her, the speech is fearless, eloquent and fierce:

I have said over and over, our Independence was false; there has been no Independence for these dispossessed peoples, still deprived of their most basic rights.

How to save and protect one’s culture in these circumstances? Which culture do we protect? And what do we mean when we speak of Indian culture in the 21st century? What culture? Which India? Sixty years after our hard-won Independence, the khadi sari is India just as the mini skirt and the backless choli is. A bullock cart is India just as much as is the latest Toyota or Mercedes car. Illiteracy haunts us, yet the same India produces men and women at the forefront of medicine, science and technology. Eight-year-old children toil mercilessly, facing unimaginable working conditions and abuse as child labourers. That is India. On the other hand, there is another lot of eight-year-olds who spend their time in air-conditioned classrooms and call their mothers at lunch break using their personal mobile phones. That too is India. Satyam Shivam Sundaram is India. Choli ke peechchey kya hai is also India. The multiplex and the mega mall are India. The snake charmer and the maharishi — they too are India.

I feel luck to have spent a week in her company filming her. It was a privilege.

My writer friends google themselves often, mostly to make sure that they are not getting ripped off by companies using their work for commercial gain, or doing unauthorized productions of their plays, and finally to find out which unlikely places they may have turned up in.

Since I am procrastinating instead of editing our documentary, I googled myself and came across the following:

Bikiinimõrvar jääb pikaks ajaks trellide taha

It is a news headline, and the language is Estonian, which took me a while to figure out. It’s a story about Charles Sobhraj, and somewhere in the end it mentions a film by me, I think:

Mees on jõudnud ka filmilinale, sest tema elulugu pakub ainest huvitavale käsikirjale: kümned mõrvad, noored ja imekaunid naised ning julged ja edukad põgenemised maailma eri vanglatest. Nii on India lavastaja Shashwati Talukdar näiteks teinud sarimõrvarist juba kaks filmi.

I don’t know what it means, maybe it just says, “and some idiot Indian filmmaker thinks Sobhraj makes good fodder for films.” I have no way of telling, but it sounds cool to know that I,”näiteks teinud sarimõrvarist juba kaks filmi.”

Update: Language Hat actually owns an Estonian dictionary, and here is what he has to say:

I’m afraid I don’t know Estonian, but I have a small dictionary, which
sheds a bit of light:

Nii [so] on [?] India lavastaja [producer] Shashwati Talukdar näiteks
[for example] teinud [second? another?] sarimõrvarist [serial
killer??] juba [already, yet] kaks [two] filmi [film(s)].

Sari is ’series’ and mõrvar is ‘murderer,’ so I don’t know what else
sarimõrvarist might mean. Make of it what you will!

When we were in Chharanagar earlier this year, working on our film, Dilip D’Souza dropped by and spent a couple of days. Here is an article he wrote for Tehelka based on that visit.

A rather sad story from the BBC about Verrier Elwin’s widow, who is living in extreme poverty in a village in Madhya Pradesh.

After he arrived in 1927, Verrier Elwin was one of the first anthropologists to write with great sympathy and understanding about India’s tribal communities. In 1940, the 37 year old Elwin married Kosi, a 13 year old Gond girl. They were divorced after ten years. For a few years Elwin sent Rs. 25 per month, and when he stopped, Kosi took jobs doing farm work to support herself and her two children.

Perhaps one should not be too surprised that a man who showed great sensitivity towards marginalized communities, should have shown such callousness towards the girl (an underage one at that) he married. Somehow those with ambitiously compassionate projects, seem to have none to spare for those who are around them.

We are midway through our time in Ahmedabad. It has been absorbing and exciting. We have met many interesting people and had some wonderful conversations.

A few days ago we went to Maninagar, where a group of formerly nomadic tribes have been living since 1960. There are Rajbhois who make ropes, Vaghris who work as laborors and Sansis who sell maps. There are about 191 families in this community, and none of the children go to school. The reason? The community has been bulldozed at least ten times in the past year. The disruption it has caused in their lives is incalculable, not only have the children lost their enrollment in school, even the social worker who came to give them lessons has stopped doing so. This is not the worst of what has happened to this community. Two children have died from exposure, and the week we visited, three members of the community had died because they did not have adequate shelter. They are living on the sides of a wall under a bridge, with a plastic sheet as the only form of protection from the elements.

Ahmedabad has decided it needs to be a “mega city” with shopping malls and multiplexes. Several communities have been uprooted to accommodate this ambition, not all of it legal, and none of it humane. See Roxy Gagdekar’s blog for some more details about what is happening in Maninagar.

The day we were in Maninagar, Ramsaroop Sansi, a very soft-spoken fifty year old man, offered us tea, and spoke without bitterness of the travails of this community– how their legal claims have been disregarded, and the uncertainty faced by them. When we got ready to leave, the people of this community, who have nothing, presented us with a map of India. When we refused, Ramsaroop said, “They make the rules, but we still sell their maps, please take this.”

Please write and tell the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to give the residents of Maninagar somewhere to live!
info@egovamc.com

We are very pleased to announce that Kurt Engfehr has agreed to be an advisor on the film. Kurt was co-producer and editor on both Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 911. Not only did those two films win an Oscar and a Golden Palm, but Kurt’s editing work on Columbine also earned him the American Cinema Editors’ Eddie award. His support and advice means a lot to us. His critical eye will help us keep Hooch And Hamlet In Chharanagar clear, honest, and engaging.

Almost Half Way There!

We’ve raised $6,816 so far! Thank you everyone. That puts us about a grand shy of the half way mark as we move towards our $15,000 budget. If you haven’t given yet, we’ve made it even easier to donate. You can now make a secure, tax-deductible, donation with your credit card online! ($20 min.)

Technorati Tags: dnt, Film, hooch and hamlet, India

Charles Sobhraj had his day in court yesterday, and the Patan Appellate court sentenced him to twenty years in prison. His lawyers tried to make a case based on a case heard in the Indian Supreme Court in 1996, which was about a murder case in Varanasi which resembles the Kathmandu murder. Charles was freed on the lack of evidence in the Varanasi case.

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.