ROMANS 13

CHARACTERS
Pastor Jeremiah-In his fifties.
Jimmy-a parishioner. Late twenties.
Mary-His wife. Mid twenties.
Congregation-A group of nice people.

PLACE
Church

TIME
Day

PASTOR JEREMIAH
The government’s established by the Lord, you know.
And, that’s what we believe in the Christian faith.
That’s what’s stated in the scripture.

CONGREGATION
Amen!

Storm troopers come in. The Pastor and the congregation ignore them.

PASTOR JEREMIAH
Let every soul be subject unto the power. For there is no
government but of God: the power is ordained by God.

CONGREGATION
Amen!

A soldier grabs Jimmy.

JIMMY
Hey! What the…

PASTOR JEREMIAH
Romans 13:1

JIMMY
(shouting) That verse is taken out of context.

MARY
Jimmy! Oh, Jimmy!

PASTOR JEREMIAH
Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the
ordinance of God: and they that resist shall
receive to themselves damnation.

JIMMY
But I am going to heaven. I have not made any provisions of the flesh. I haven’t slept with Mary in years.

MARY
(crying) Its true. Its true.

JIMMY
Romans 13:14

CONGREGATION (chorus)
Hellooo! Too much information.

PASTOR JEREMIAH
And do this, understanding the present time.

JIMMY
But…

PASTOR JEREMIAH
The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber,
because our salvation is nearer now than
when we first believed.

PASTOR JEREMIAH
Amen!

MARY
Oh darling Jimmy! It must be because we have debt.

JIMMY
Romans 13:6. We should have never
bought that living room set.
And put your medication on the credit card.

MARY
And now your soul belongs to the credit card company.

JIMMY
Yes.

MARY
That is how it should be.

PASTOR JEREMIAH
(In unison) And do this, understanding the present time.
The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our
salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. Romans 13:11

JIMMY
Amen.

The Storm troopers drag an unresisting Jimmy away.

Romans 13 by Shashwati Talukdar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. In plain English, this means that you can use this work, but you must credit the author, and you can’t use it for commercial gain, unless you get in touch and make other arrangements.

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.

POTTED PLANTS-OR SAY SOMETHING IF YOU SEE SOMETHING

CHARACTERS
Mabel-a little old lady
June-Mabel’s neighbor, entering middle age

LOCATION
A neat little garden in front of a semi-detached townhouse.

TIME
A lovely summers day

JUNE
Your roses are beautiful

MABEL
So they are. I never believed in false modesty, but I can certainly say a nice thank you. Thank you.

JUNE
What is your secret?

MABEL
Kill your husband and bury him in the garden.

JUNE
Ha, ha, you are funny.

MABEL
Yes, funny how Frank makes such good fertilizer.

JUNE
Com’on Mabel

MABEL
You are right…

JUNE
Yeah, not even in your dreams

MABEL
Speaking of dreams, I dreamed last night that Frank went to Pakistan

JUNE
What for?

MABEL
He wanted to get one of them Pashtun outfits, you know the long shirt and the baggy pants, and grow a beard.

JUNE
And then?

MABEL
Well, he went off and joined the Taleban.

JUNE
Wow. Where is Frank anyway?

MABEL
He went out of town.

JUNE
But Frank never goes anywhere.

MABEL
Well, he’s gone now.

JUNE
That is strange.

MABEL
Oh well, gotta go.

JUNE
Go where Mabel? Something the matter?

MABEL
At my age? no.

JUNE
You are being evasive. Its Frank, isn’t it? Where is he?

MABEL
I told you. He is fertilizer.

JUNE
More like a fertilizer bomb.

MABEL
No, just for the roses.

JUNE
He grew a beard you said.

MABEL
In my dream.

JUNE
What? you were in on it, it was your dream too? eh! death to America. Your dream. Our biggest nightmare.

MABEL
Frank is buried in the garden.

JUNE
You mean he will be in the garden of paradise with a hundred virgins.

MABEL
You are crazy.

JUNE
Not as crazy as you. You freedom hater you. (she whips out her cell phone and punches 911)
Hello, Homeland Security. I saw something and want to say something. A woman just helped her husband go to Pakistan and become a terrorist.

MABEL
I keep telling you, I killed Frank and buried him in the rosebed. (June ignores her and continues to talk into the phone in a whisper) Hey! listen to me. I killed my husband and buried…

(CURTAIN as Rose and Mabel go on repeating their dialogue and action)

Potted Plants or Say Something if you See Something by http://blog.shashwati.com/2008/06/22/potted-plants/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. In plain English, this means that you can use this work, but you must credit the author, and you can’t use it for commercial gain, unless you get in touch and make other arrangements.

The masseuse realized my English was better than my Chinese and asked me where I was coming from. I replied, “United States of America.” He turned to a seeing woman next to him and asked her what I looked like. Specifically what the color of my skin was (I could comprehend that much despite my poor language skills), then he turned to me and said, “Are you White?” what reply was he expecting me to give? Yes that I was White, so should be treated better. But he already knew the answer, so was he testing the “truthiness” of a non-White person? I told him no, I was browner than the brownest Taiwanese, and that the US had many people of different races and colors, and America should not be equated with being White, it was a big diverse country. I was suddenly in possession of language skills that normally elude me.

These days I have made it a point to say ‘Meiguo’ when I get the ‘where are you from’ question, not because of any perversion of patriotism, but rather to do my small bit in undermining the idea of a monocultural world (Taiwan has immigrant workers who are largely invisible and a huge number of foreign brides from China, Vietnam and Indonesia). I can remember the time when I first saw “Do The Right Thing” at the USIS in New Delhi. It was a revelation, I had never seen a movie where Black people were the main characters, and not servants or completely invisible. This was in 1989, which is not that far in the past.

Its interesting to compare the two, since both the narratives involve First World and Third World characters, but the stakes are  much higher in ‘Harvest’ and there palpable sense of  power imbalances between the characters, which is missing in the artificial intelligence story. I guess its problem is that it just doesn’t seem to have that much to say. And no, it doesn’t have to be only about the Third World being exploited for its wombs or back office workers, it could be a Bollywood tech story like Transmission (which I enjoyed a great deal). Outsourcing is ripe for a ripping sci-fi story, so I am sure one will come along pretty soon, if it hasn’t already. Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy Escape Pod and its fine fare which makes my iPod, oh so worth having.

I had to get a bunch of pictures framed.  I went to the guy I usually go to, but he was away. After pacing up and down for half an hour, waiting for him to come back, I walked into another framing shop and asked if anyone spoke English, it turned out the lady in charge did not, but somehow she was able to make herself understood. And between us we were able to accomplish the fairly complicated task of picking colors, frames, dimensions and placement. It got to be so, that she was able to ask me how come I had no children, what my spouse did, and if I was coming from the US, how come I was so short. She even took her tape measure and remarked at my amazing height - all 150cms of it, which she had very diligently measured. A gesture, I confess, I did not find offensive in the least. The un self-consciousness of most people in Taiwan regarding physical characteristics is rather refreshing.

I wondered why it was easier to deal with the art store lady and not the clerk at Family Mart. Kerim thinks that its easier to communicate with those who have more cultural capital. I think he is right.  In this case, it almost worked in a motivational way.  If you can ask someone their opinion, about something they are trained for, and care about, chances are they will try and make themselves understood. And both of you will have an equal investment in being patient since you respect  the other’s opinion. Ofcourse it helps that the lady probably owned her own business and I wasn’t going to haggle with her about the price. Something that does not quite work the same way when you are dealing with an overworked clerk at a boring job.

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.