Orwell Blinked

Dude, you HAVE no Quran!

2010-10-12T15:47:00.003+05:30

Nick Frost on The Boat That Rocked!

2010-02-14T00:31:00.002+05:30

"I think the Sixties are romanticised by people who weren't there..."

The Story Of The Red Carpet Four

2009-12-27T21:07:00.002+05:30

On December 17th 2009, a group of Greenpeace activists grabs headline news around the globe by taking action during the Copenhagen climate summit. This is their story. So far.

Why is Kumi with Greenpeace?

2009-11-18T01:08:00.004+05:30

How you can live your life...

2009-11-04T02:18:00.002+05:30

2009-09-27T16:29:00.006+05:30

When Jozwin met Jharia

Gene, at the Climate Rescue Station, compares the coal mining industry in Poland to what he has seen in his home country - India.

On the streets of Amsterdam, on the off chance that you're paying any attention to the pavement, you might spot a stray ladybug tile. These spots mark scenes of senseless violence.

If these ladybug tiles were to be laid at every scene of senseless violence across the world, our planet would look like one big red-and-black ball from outer space.

A ladybug tile would be needed at the Jozwin 2B opencast mine in Konin, from the edge of which I write this blog. Dozens more would be needed for Poland's other coal mines. And one for the doorsteps of each of its thermal power plants.

These tiles would also need to stretch end-to-end across the coal belt of India, at thermal power plants in Dadri and Raichur and Kolaghat, at big dams in Narmada and Tehri, at nuclear power plants in Kaiga and Kudankulam, at oilfields in Assam and oil-rigs in the Kutch, at every assembly line manufacturing giant SUVs for India's fat and rich.

And of course, one ladybug tile would need to commemorate the senseless violence at Jharia.

Jharia, in the heartland of India, has coal reserves that span an area of 450 square kilometers. It's not just the largest coalfield in India, it's also by far the oldest, with mining activity that dates back over a century.

Just like Konin, Jharia's entire economy is built on the coal beneath the area. Coal, popularly known as "kala-heera" (Black diamond) is the only source of livelihood for people there. It's difficult to find any family in Jharia where at least one member isn't involved in mining work, or in selling coal on the unorganised market.

Taking a trip around Jharia town, camera and notepad in hand - as an activist, you're eager to document in human terms everything you witness, warts and all, yet keenly aware that you must maintain your objectivity and not view everything through the prism of your prejudices. In the background, the Dhanbad coal mafia runs the show. In the foreground, it's hell on earth.

The whole town is grey with coal dust, all water sources are contaminated with the waste released from coal washeries, the soil hasn't given root to any vegetation in years and never will, and noxious gases spew forth endlessly from hundreds of fissures and cracks that show up unannounced along roads, courtyards and fields. The average life expectancy here competes with that of people living in a war-zone.

At any one point of time, at least seventy coal-field fires smolder both above the ground and at the subterranean level. The oldest among these has raged for nearly as long as coal has been mined in Jharia. Together, they've consumed around 42 million tonnes of the finest black stuff known to man.

These fires have also hollowed out the earth upon which the city stands. As a result, houses develop cracks, walls collapse, and floors cave in, often without warning.

Once confined to the outskirts of town, the fire has spread inside the city... its flames can even be seen at the main square The Jharia-Patherdih railway station, once thronged by commuters, stands deserted. Fires below the railway tracks forced the station to shut down long ago.

As Jharia burns, the people who've chosen to make this place their home brave the fire and fumes to somehow eke a living and feed themselves two square meals a day.

Unlike Jozwin 2B here in Poland, Jharia doesn't show up in satellite pictures because a thick haze has covered the area for over a century. Some of the other stuff that doesn't show up in satellite pictures is the lethal cocktail of poisonous gases that are contained in the smoke from Jharia's many fires... particulate matter, oxides and dioxides of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur. Google Earth won't show you the many variants of skin and respiratory diseases, the chronic bronchitis, the tuberculosis, the asthma and the pneumoconiosis that define the life and death of Jharia. The last bit is an interesting medical condition.

As hardly any of the workers in the open cast mines wear any protective gear -- no masks, no boots, no overalls -- most end up with a film of soot covering their lungs. By the time pneumoconiosis is detected, it's too late to do anything. And then they die.

Muzaffar Hussain is 32 years old and works with BCCL, the state mining company that runs Jharia's killing fields. His house, which shelters a family of ten, is practically a gas chamber with noxious gas hissing from cracks in the floor. His wife has been suffering from continuous nausea and breathing problems, and half of Muzaffar's monthly salary goes into her treatment. Like many others who work for BCCL, he hasn't received the health card that assures subsidised treatment at the hospital.

Gayatri Devi, an illegal coal collector, is 50 and lives in a one-room house in one of Jharia's active fire zones called Bokapahadi. The floor of her house has a huge crack, fumes from which fill the house. "I have lived here for 40 years," Gayatri tells us. "Last year, the floor cracked and since then my house is on fire. When we walk barefoot our feet burn. At night, my children feel suffocated on the pungent fumes. Eight of us sleep in this room. Neither have we anywhere to go, nor have we the money to make another house. We will probably die here."

In Lodhna, a slum in one of Jharia's fire zones, Greenpeace interviewed Shanti. "I have an unending headache due to these gases. It lasts for days. My children are also down with a headache most of the time. At times, there is no-one to go to work because my husband has TB. He coughs blood and is very sick. I hope we get over these troubled times soon..."

The testimonies of survival go on and on, like an engraved wall at some holocaust memorial.

According to BCCL's General Manager for Environment, they've been trying their best for the past two decades to control these fires, but there's no permanent solution. I'll repeat that last sentence just so you know this isn't a typo: they've been trying to stop the fires for two decades.

Of course they have. They've even proposed a budget of 60 Billion INR (1 Billion EUR) for controlling the fires and "shifting parts of the town." That would be the nearly 300,000 population of Jharia, 150,000 of them being miners, truck drivers, loaders and workers of one sort or the other. It's glaringly obvious why BCCL would like to spend a billion Euro on stopping fires and relocating people, instead of shutting down the mines, investing in clean energy and creating green-collar jobs... their single-point mandate is to dig for coal, and more coal, and nothing else.

Jharia and Jozwin 2B are worlds apart, yet their past and future are joined at the hip like some unmentionable medical horror.

The coalfields of Konin, many timezones away from Jharia, continue to projectile vomit the dirtiest fuel known to humankind. If current plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in coal plants are realised, CO2 emissions from coal could increase 60% by 2030, putting 120,000 Polish homes (and 350 million people worldwide) at risk of displacement due to flooding, putting 3 billion people at risk of water shortage, and putting over 40% of Earth's ecosystems at risk of extinction.

Already, more than 68% of India's energy needs are met by burning fossil fuels, over 92.3% of which are coal... and the country spends upwards of 140 billion dollars every year for the privilege.

But things needn't be this way forever, because Greenpeace has come up with a plan that would enable India to sustain its economic growth without increasing its Carbon emissions. It's called the Energy Revolution blueprint and it shows how renewable energy, combined with greater energy efficiency, can cut global CO2 emissions by almost 50%, and deliver half the worldís energy needs by 2050.

Considering that the Indian government isn't big into global altruism (when was the last time that happened?), the Energy Revolution scenario should still be a perfect whetstone for it to grind its axe on. By 2050, we can generate 48% of our energy (or 915 GigaWatts) from renewables -- sources you can pluck straight out of the sky... the wind, the sun's rays ...simple things like that.

When India implements this plan, no new coal-fired power plants or lignite mines will be required. There will never again be any need for a Jharia. Just like there will never again be any need for a Jozwin 2B.

Images © Greenpeace/ Pete Caton

Hell 2.0

2009-05-30T22:16:00.022+05:30

I'm sitting here in Gurgaon, the other BPO sweatshop of the planet, and I am sick.

I am sick. It started with being emotionally sick, but then psychosomatics took over and I became physically sick. I haven't eaten anything wrong, smoked anything odder than what I usually smoke, or drank any beer I'm not already intimate with. I am sick because this place is sickening.

Just to put things in context, I spent a small part of my growing-up years in Gurgaon. The first time I got laid, it was in Gurgaon. The first mobike I owned -- a second-hand Yamaha RX100 -- I bought for the 43-kilometre commute from my office in Delhi to our home in Gurgaon. The first time I saw a night-sky pixellated with stars and not the backwash of a city's light pollution, it was in Gurgaon. The first CD I ever played on the first pair of phat speakers I ever owned, it was in Gurgaon (man, you could turn that bad boy all the way to 11 and no-one would complain). The first time I had a biking accident (I crashed into a cow, though anecdotal versions differ) it was in Gurgaon. The first time I met the mother of my children, it was in Gurgaon. The first Zippo I owned and lost, it was in Gurgaon. The first time I saw a woman naked, it was in Gurgaon. The first time I discovered John Hiatt and Jackson Browne and J J Cale, it was in Gurgaon. The first time I owned a dog, it was in Gurgaon. The first time I met the blues, it was in Gurgaon. The first time I tasted home-made orange wine, it was in Gurgaon. The first time I told a cop he was out of line and way beyond his beat, it was in Gurgaon. The first time I left home, never to come back, it was from Gurgaon.

Back then, nobody would come here for love or money. It was the back of the back of beyond. On a quiet night (there was no other kind of night) you could hear owls screech in the distance, the footfall of stray wild animal, the rustle of bush as moles and other nocturnal things made their way blindly through the undergrowth. If you listened hard enough, you could hear creepers crawling over the garden wall, the dew drop from glistening leaf at dawn, even spiders stagger across the webs they wove. Our closest neighbour was One Tree Hill. It was one desolate tree on one solitary hill a hundred metres east-by-north-east behind the house.

If you needed disturbance, you had to talk to yourself. If you wanted feedback, you had to place the speakers right next to the amp. This was the kind of place that could move an Extraordinary Renditioner to poetry. Everytime Agnes sang in the shower, wild dogs would start baying miles away and begin committing unnatural acts.

There was a ditch outside the house that had padded up over time with wind-swept leaves. It was a comfortable pad -- a stray bitch had laid her litter there. One night it rained so hard, the ditch filled up and all the pups drowned. We heard her howling in the dead of night, rushed out into the rain and found her with the only surviving pup. We brought the pup in, and held it under the heat of the reading lamp all night. It lived. I named it after a Pink Floyd blues track, Seamus. No matter what time of night I rode back, Seamus could always tell it was me long before I turned the bike down the lane. He'd stay up, he'd wait up, he'd scratch at the door. Once, he got so excited he jumped onto the bike before I could get my gloves or helmet off and burned himself on the engine -- I'd just clocked 43 kilometres in 30 minutes -- and he never tried it again.

Once, Seamus ganged up with Pils and Ruff (two other dogs) and they came back home with blood-splattered snouts. They'd caught and dismembered a hare in the badlands that separated home and One Tree Hill. They'd try to mate with foxes, fuck around with snakes, chase blackbuck. All kinds of shit was going down with them dogs.

Another time, under the influence of THC and testosterone and long past the witching hour, I'd broken into a poultry farm a mile away and purloined a live chicken. Not knowing what to do with it and not having watched YouTube videos of DIY execution manuals, I let it go into the mystic night.

Man, I knew Gurgaon like Walter Trout knows guitar, and I was here for just two years. I suppose a lot happened in those two years. But a lot more happened in the next fifteen.

The Horror. The Horror.

Fifteen years later, I return for a top-secret web development project, and get lost in the first 30 seconds.

I can't find my way home. One Tree Hill is gone. All trees and hills are gone. The badlands are gone. The hares, blackbuck, snakes, owls, spiders, chicken, foxes, moles, even the cow I crashed into, all gone.

Handwritten "child bear" signs have been replaced by a swank air-conditioned restricted-entry Rockman's microbrewery where the beer comes at three degrees, the mugs come pre-frosted, and the tab comes to 250 INR a pop. And if beer's not your poison, you can always sip on a 100 INR latte at Costa. This, in a place where if you went out looking for coffee in 1995, you were looking for "angrejaan di chaa" ...for those who weren't in Gurgaon in 1995, that's "White Man's Tea."

Yesterday, I asked my host what'd be a good place (I'd been specific: nothing too posh or air-conditioned or mall-rattish) to get an honest drink in this strange new Gurgaon. She FaceBooked me a site that proudly and unabashedly proclaims:

"The pubs and bars of Gurgaon are amongst the major attraction to the new and old generations, the corporate, call centers, information technology folks and everyone who want to have good time after day's hard work. The pubs cater to a completely different segment and class of people. People who drop in to celebrate birthday parties, a raise, a promotion and to get rid of the stress they had over the week. There are drinks, food, and high volume music, dance floors, DJs and wide screen televisions incase you want to watch a cricket match or Formula One along with your drink. Great ambiance and good booze for everyone to forget about the week that went past and to start a new week ahead."

I'm not making this up. The new Gurgaon "caters to a completely different class of people..." Ermmm, I'm no Karl Marx, but which class would that be? The new Gurgaon not only encourages you to "get rid of the stress you've had over the week" but also "forget the week that went past."

The new Gurgaon has certainly a lot to forget. Such as yellow mustard fields rolling from horizon to horizon. That memory is now replaced by an eight-lane highway, to tread on which you have to pay a toll to this wonderful new subversion of our sovereignty: the Public-Private Partnership.

Gurgaon also has to forget the fragile but self-contained village economy that it has overthrown in a silent coup, with betrayal and eviction as its weapons instead of guns and executions. The mom-and-pop stores have simply disappeared over the past fifteen years. Back then, when you ran out of smokes or rubbers or a rat-trap, you trekked down to the shop and woke the Jaat chacha up. If he didn't have what you wanted, you took whatever he had. All that's buried and gone now, and even the grave has been desecrated, its tombstone sprayed over with neon and translites.

A vertical, monolithic, freeze-dried, hermetically-sealed, shrink-wrapped, scabrous, glass-and-steel monstrosity -- fed and drained by pipes -- has replaced an organic, horizontal, living-and-breathing ecosystem of interconnected and interdependent societies, economies and cultures. A styrofoam, McDonaldised, one-size-fits-all, unsustainable, TINA system has usurped community. There is no water, it has to be freighted in on giant tankers daily (don't ask which faraway village has gone dry for this privilege). And there isn't enough electricity. Even the modest 2,000 sq. ft. office I've worked out of over the past three days spends half-a-million in INR every year on diesel just to keep the power running.

Today, Gurgaon is a monstrous dingleberry in the unwashed crack of civilisation. This is where the Industrial Age came to defecate, and forgot to clean up after itself. Okay, I know, I know, coming from someone who's spent the last decade in Bangalore this should sound like high praise. But no, really, this place has gone way beyond Telegraph Road.

Dire Straits - Telegraph Road
Uploaded by knopfler.

Friedman, meet Klein. Klein, meet Friedman.

As is inevitable, all's not well in this shining city upon the hill. For every one yuppie with an indeterminable call-centre accent on her lips, a Fossil on her wrist and a Pepe under her ass, there are hundreds, thousands that are being disenfranchised, disempowered and dispossessed.

In the harsh, unending, treeless and dust-swept desert of Gurgaon, other ghosts stumble from pillar to post, scrabbling for the leftovers the haves left at the table, desperately trying to eke out a living in a landscape they can no longer comprehend, far less adjust to.

Seán Lemass, the rhetorician of supply-side (or trickle-down) economics proclaimed that globalisation is a rising tide that lifts all boats. If that is the case, then what I've just seen are the boats that ran aground on a jagged reef of inequity, cut adrift on an unforgiving sea of deregulation, or were simply scuppered by the absence of any social safeguards.

Thomas Friedman, that unrepentant and gormless apologist for predatory corporate free-market capitalism, once said "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist." He got his wish in 2005, when Honda turned to a bloody, brutal, available-on-demand state machinery to sort out its union problems. That hidden fist has left its mark on Gurgaon in the past, and it continues to flash its knuckle dusters at every pretext and every turn.

And two years later when Prime Minister and neocon economist Dr. Manmohan Singh, in mere lip service to the Left parties that helped form the first UPA government, had the temerity to suggest that the benefits of economic development must reach all classes, he was chastised by India Inc for his indefensible servility to the Leftist agenda.

To return to another deep and prophetic insight from Friedman: "If you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you."

The bad neighbourhoods are visiting Gurgaon today. Burglary, murder, rape, carjacking and mugging were never a novelty here -- the state of Haryana has been a proud standard-bearer for lawlessness for as long as I can remember -- but such crimes have taken on a decidedly "class war" colour over the past fifteen years. As globalisation fails to be that tide which lifts all boats, the gap between the rich and poor widens in Gurgaon, as elsewhere.

Walking through Gurgaon these past three days, I have seen razorwire fences atop high walls. I have seen the unwashed millions at the gates. And I have counted a dozen private security firms doing good business while an overstretched, undertrained, understaffed and underfunded police department twiddles its thumbs and stares at the bewildering passage of events in this brave new world.

Naomi Klein wrote...

"all these fences are connected: the real ones, made of steel and razor wire, are needed to enforce the virtual ones, the ones that put resources and wealth out of the hands of so many. It simply isn’t possible to lock away this much of our collective wealth without an accompanying strategy to control popular unrest and mobility. Security firms do their biggest business in the cities where the gap between rich and poor is greatest -- Johannesburg, São Paulo, New Delhi -- selling iron gates, armoured cars, elaborate alarm systems and renting out armies of private guards... It now seems that these gated compounds protecting the haves from the have-nots are microcosms of what is fast becoming a global security state -- not a global village intent on lowering walls and barriers, as we were promised, but a network of fortresses connected by highly militarized trade corridors."

Heading back from Gurgaon to Bangalore, the original BPO sweatshop of the planet, I can finally understand what it is that's been making me sick these past three days. But hey, who the fuck am I to complain? After all, in 1992, I wrote the first ads for a certain real estate developer, pimping Gurgaon as the city of the future.

This is that future. Welcome to the smegmatic, dystopian, heartbreaking epicentre of a nation on the march. This place deserves every last bit of whatever's around the corner.

It wasn't the hare that won the race in the end...

2009-05-09T16:23:00.001+05:30

What exactly is my Tata up to?

2009-02-03T09:00:00.002+05:30

I don't necessarily agree with a lot of what this guy's put down, but it's interesting how some of our cyberactivists go the extra mile and rather than just electronically rubberstamp mails to our corporate targets, write something original on their own. I was marked on the following mail from some Manish R Hegde to Ratan Tata recently...

Dear Mr.Tata,

Like every other Indian, I have grown up with your brand. As a child, I knew not to pick up salt from the shop unless it was Tata salt. The only tea my mother would drink was Tata tea. The rarest treat in our lower-middle-class family? An annual pilgrimage to Isfahan, at the Taj Palace. A Tata hotel.

As I grew up, your company grew too. My first watch, a graduation gift from my foster father, was a Titan FasTrack. Why? Because it was a Tata brand. This watch last told time in 1990 -- seventeen years ago -- but I still own it.

Our first and only car in the family will be a Tata Nano. Your company will build it.

When I bathe my three-year-old daughter, the water isn't heated by a geyser. It comes from a Tata BP solar heater.

The other day I had to pick up new clothes for her before her playschool reopened. There are 80 stores that sell clothes on Bangalore's Commercial Street. We went to Tata WestSide.

Every call I make or receive at my office is carried by a single telecom company. Tata Telecom.

From a lower-middle-class family, after thirty-six years, we've become an upper-middle-class family. A lot has changed. The only thing that hasn't changed is how much faith we place in the Tata name.

Because it is reliable. Because it is Indian. And because it seems to do a lot for the nation that built it. All of which makes us proud and hopeful... if a nation impoverished by 200 years of colonial thievery could rise from its own ashes and produce something like the Tata brand, then there's hope for other nations still trying to be born. East Timor. Aceh. Palestine.

All of this has not been without its share of disappointment, of course. Your company's treatment of Kalinganagar, for instance, sent a shock-wave down our collective spines. We sat here, speechless, wondering whether this was a different Tata inflicting these inhuman atrocities in Orissa. One would expect such behaviour from the likes of Hero Honda (just see their behaviour in Gurgaon).

And now this. I've learnt that the port you're proposing to build in Dhamra will directly affect a fragile ecosystem that includes horseshoe crabs, rare crab-eating frogs, white-bellied mangrove snakes, and endangered Olive Ridley sea turtles. The perfunctory EIA that you've carried out on this area, it has come to light, isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

What exactly is my Tata up to? And when the history books are written, how will you be judged for your actions, or inaction, in protecting not just your shareholders' interests, but also those of nature?

Thanking you in anticipation of a prompt response,

Manish R Hegde

A small step for the Parliament. A giant leap for the Police State.

2009-01-01T05:00:00.009+05:30

Precisely twenty years ago at this time, my favourite Hashmi was beaten to death by a lynch mob belonging to India's then-current dispensation, the Congress Party. Safdar mama was just thirty-five when he was killed for the unspeakable crime of staging a street play supporting industrial workers' rights. It took fifteen fucking years before his killers, with the labyrinthine Indian judicial system on their side, were finally brought to book.

Parallels with renaissance man Victor Jara seem inadequate here, but while the government lost no time to felicitate this poet, playwright, musician, artist, activist, English literature lecturer, feminist, journalist, trade unionist, political theorist, champion of farmers' rights, working-class hero and loving uncle (they even named a street Safdar Hashmi Marg within a week of his murder) the arts continue to be underfunded. Our museums -- the only recorded memory of what it's taken to build this nation -- are a disintegrating piece of dog-shit in the rain. Our agrarian sector is such that farmers -- once the cornerstone of this nation's economy -- are committing suicide in thousands every year. Workers' rights are summarily fucked over from Vibrant Gujarat to Silicon Karnataka. And every single establishment from the NFDC to our censor boards has been politicised, compromised and pasteurised.

Over twenty years ago, in an interview with the New York Times, Safdar said "I believe socialism will win in ten, twenty, thirty years. It cannot fail. Capitalism is struggling with its contradictions: the pressures of an inflated economy, greater competition, low growth rates, huge debts. And it won't be long that the bubble bursts, like it did with the crash of the New York Stock Exchange. There will be more like those." Prescient, perspicacious, prophetic. But what he didn't predict was that civil liberties, the rule of law, habeas corpus and freedom of speech could have come to such a sorry pass in this country he loved so much, and so fiercely.

Meanwhile, in Parliament, they've just dressed up the same old whore of a Patriot Act and are pimping her as the new virgin on the block.

Happy goddamn new year. And best of bloody luck. But before any of that, a look at how we got here...

Presumed Guilty Until Proven Innocent.

Okay, so we had something called the TaDA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities prevention act) which was a bit like Patriot Act Lite. We let it have a ten-year run, then got rid of it because it had a conviction rate of less than 1% and it frankly didn't help in curbing terrorism.

Then we got something called PoTA (Prevention of Terrorist Activities act) which was pretty much standard Patriot Act stuff. Which means it could piss over you, your great-grandmother, and every other fundamental-rights-claiming twit in the middle. And to fantastic use it was put too. People disappeared, people were tortured, people confessed, that kind of thing. The only discernible progression over TaDA was that the conviction rate under PoTA was 2%. And terrorism continued unabated in India. So, just two years later, we got rid of that too.

Then, just last week, with the stroke of a pen the Parliament pushed through something called UAPA, and with the dull thwack of a rubberstamp, our invertebrate President (not like there's another kind) made it law.

Now, this is one mean bastard of a law, in the sense that it's still PoTA, but it now has the backing of not just the right-wing, flag-waving, hypermasculine, ultra-nationalist, xenophobic, fascist lunatics, but also the centrist parties. In short, it's become law much the same way the Patriot Act became law... one big terrorist attack on Bombay's fat and rich (for a change), and the entire Parliament rallies behind a draconian finger-nail-pulling, unconstitutionally-wiretapping, habeas-corpus-screwing, six-months-without-trial, guilty-until-proven-innocent law that's then passed without so much as a slap on the wrist or even a ceremonial tsk-tsk. The UAPA is so beyond the pale that even Amnesty, whose political independence I've always been a bit unsure about, has come out with scathing response... "The so-called “war on terror” has led to an erosion of a whole host of human rights. States are resorting to practices which have long been prohibited by international law, and have sought to justify them in the name of national security."

All of this begs the "emperor-has-no-clothes-on" question that mainstream media (with the notable exception of The Hindu) just ain't asking: If our anti-terror laws are getting sharper sets of teeth year after year, why is it that terrorist incidents have increased in India over the years? Hmmm.

That must be because they hate us. They hate our freedom. They hate our democracy. Hmmm. Why do they hate us? They hate us because they hate us. It's an evil ideology. Hmmm. They live in caves, we'll smoke them out, blah-de-blah-de-blah...

Kristallnacht, Karnataka, Kandhamal...

Barely 100 days after its ascendance to power in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, the right-wing BJP government slammed down its calling card. In just under four months, nearly 60 pre-meditated major attacks were orchestrated against churches and other Christian prayer halls across the state. That's one attack every two days. Apparently, even stormtroopers need to rest every other day.

Among the reasons given by the Bajrang Dal (the BJP's militant wing) for the "retaliatory" violence was that a pamphlet issued by an evangelist group in the state allegedly contained derogatory remarks about Hindu gods and goddesses. Never mind the minor inconvenience that the printing press mentioned in the pamphlet was bankrupted ten years ago, and that its owner is now running a weaving business.

This is our very own Kristallnacht.

Kandhamal in Orissa (also ruled by a BJP coalition), saw its churches vandalised, torched, or razed to the ground throughout the year. A nun was gang-raped and paraded naked in broad daylight under the watchful gaze of policemen, on the same day that another missionary was burnt to her death. Thousands of Christians were hounded out from their villages and, months later, many are yet to return from makeshift relief camps.

Among the reasons given by the VHP (the BJP's organising wing) for this "retaliatory" violence is that local Christians had killed a VHP ideologue. Never mind the minor inconvenience that the said ideologue was killed by Maoists who, last I checked, are a bunch of godless sandal-wearing freaks like myself.

This, too, is our very own Kristallnacht, but don't expect an international outcry. Far from it.

Our "free press" did little more than a drive-by commentary of what had been unraveling under its gobsmacked nose for months. By September, Kandhamal dropped below the news radar. And barely a month later, there were more pressing things to breathlessly gush over... the relocation of Tata's Nano plant to Narendra "Genocide" Modi's Gujarat, the knighthood of Shahrukh Khan by some Malaysian geriatric squad, a beauty queen pimping her lobotomy on a global catwalk, some tupenny-bit Bollywood actor's navel sighting, the launch of some late-Sixties piece of electronic circuitry into lunar orbit.

This meticulously designed and deployed visitation of violence against India's minorities could, ostensibly, be cited sometime in the future as justification for a terrorist strike against this nation, just as the militants that took Bombay hostage for over sixty hours last November cited the Kashmir and Gujarat genocides for their actions. But what if the rot runs deeper, and wider?

The Police State Has Always Been Here. We Just Didn't Know What To Call It.

Last September, Lakshman Kailash was picked up from his Airport Road flat in Bangalore, the world's software sweatshop, and spirited away to a prison across the state border for nearly fifty days without a trial. Why? Because someone had posted some blah about Shivaji on the popular social networking site Orkut, and Lakshman's telco mistakenly gave his IP address to the pigs. Next thing po-boy Lakshman knows, he's woken up by the brown shirts, his computer is scanned, he's interrogated for hours, and then he's sent to the gulag. The media, of course, thinks nothing of it. No questions raised about how goddamn wrong this whole thing might be. Not a word about freedom of speech. Not a word about privacy laws. Not a word about state jurisdiction. Not a word about habeas corpus. Nothing. Diddly-effing-squat. Instead, the whole debate (if I may use the term loosely) revolved around "oh, they caught the wrong guy!"

Hey, truth be told, I have as little regard for Shivaji as I do for all the neanderthals that eulogise him. So, what happens next? Do they come and get me for thoughtcrime, just like they got Lakshman?

Ah, there's a knock at the door. That was fast.

Speaking of thoughtcrime, get a load of this... Just a fortnight back, some enterprising young fella named Jameel Ahmed (working with Bosch, Bangalore, the aforementioned software sweatshop of the world) made the godawful mistake of suggesting that Muntadar al-Zeid, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush, was a hero. Next thing po-boy Jameel knows, he's detained by the police, questioned by several high-ranking police officials, taken to his house where a large number of documents are seized, his SIM cards and laptop are sent to forensics to retrieve information, and -- hold your breath -- a deputy commissioner of police shamelessly tells the media that “we are planning to use the detained man to crack old cases.” Would that be Advani, Modi or Thackeray?

If you think I'm making any of this up, just consider how this nation's favourite rag (the Times Of India) reported the incident... "The police are questioning Jameel about his suspected terror links." Again, as with the Lakshman-Orkut incident in September, no questions raised. Personally, I think Muntadar al-Zeid is a fucking wimp. He should have used an RPG. Or at the very least stilettos. Personally, I'm also dying to find out how the Times Of India would report my imminent arrest... "Leftist Radical Arrested For Thinking Bad Things!"

It would appear, as Winston Smith stoically noted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, that "thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death."

Driving With Moslems

A report card of the Police State's outstanding performance would be incomplete without a mention of what happened in the last week of 2008. The world's by-now-famous software sweatshop witnessed three incidents that went nearly unnoticed, and almost unreported, by mainstream media.

On Christmas, a college bus carrying a group of Hindu, Muslim and Christian students on an excursion to Mysore was attacked on National Highway 48 by over a dozen Bajrang Dal foot-soldiers (yes, the same Bajrang Dal). Tipped off by one of the Hindu students on the bus that "several Hindu girls were travelling in the bus which also had Muslim and Christian boys,” the Bajrang Dal activists -- armed with swords, rods and clubs -- forced their way into the bus and beat the crap out of everyone in sight. The president of their city unit, Sharan Pumpwell (that really is his name) said “it is a natural reaction from us against those who dare to commit moral violations.”

Elsewhere in the BJP-ruled state, a telco salesman was attacked on the same day by the Bajrang Dal as, in the words of Mr. Pumpwell (no, that really is his name) "he had dared to gain the affection of a Hindu girl." The salesman is badly hurt but out of danger. Therefore, no case has been registered. On condition of anonymity, sources close to Arthur Miller inform that he will not be coming up with a sequel titled "The Near-Death Of A Salesman" since the author's already long since dead, having dared to gain the affection of some Christian girl named Marilyn.

Driving While Speaking Urdu

Bus-driver Mushtaq Ahmed worked his knuckles to the bone to put his teenage son through Bangalore's prestigious Baldwin College. What he didn't figure, sitting behind the wheel all those years, was that with the unfortunate name of Mohammad Mukarram, his son wouldn't go far in this time and space.

Known to his mates as "Wheeler", Mohammad was a star of Bangalore's legendary and illegal midnight drag races. He was shot dead shortly after he ditched his bike and took refuge on the terrace of some military-industrial-complex cunt's gated-community house. His crime? He was calling home on his cellphone, frantically explaining he was stuck on a roof while ducking the police, speaking in Urdu.

Bidari, the unrepentant motherfucker that heads Bangalore's police force, had this to say: "they spotted a man on the terrace talking on his mobile in Urdu. They told him to surrender but he did not listen. Anyone in the situation would assume he was a terrorist.”

Right.

All of this goes unquestioned by our free press. And for as long as all of this goes unquestioned, I'm shitting myself every time I walk on to my terrace to speak on the cell in Urdu. Either my fucking telco better improve its reception in my toilet, or my eighty-year-old grandma's gonna havta learn another language to converse in.

Long story for a short point, but we've got a serious problem with terrorism in this country, and we need serious laws to sort the shit out. But while we're about it, it might just be useful to look at what it is we're doing all wrong as a nation. Why is it that young people are getting pissed off enough to blow themselves and others up? What are we doing to drive them to such a point?

We could ask those questions and hope to solve some of our problems, or we could do what Bush, Modi, Advani and the rest of them do: ask no questions, get no answers.

It's all up to us, really.

We're All Tokyo Two Now...

2008-12-09T14:14:00.001+05:30

If defending whales is a crime, arrest me

If Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki have committed a crime by opposing the scandal and corruption of the Japanese whaling programme, you must arrest me for assisting them.

All of us who have supported efforts to save the whales with time, money, or by lending our name to letter writing campaigns, petitions, virtual marches, or e-cards are complicit in Junichi and Toru's actions.

If you are going to start rounding up political prisoners for the crime of defending whales, you will need to arrest a great many people around the world.

Your full name

Country of residence

Rescuing the Climate

2008-12-01T22:39:00.004+05:30

They say this guy left India and went to Poland, increasing the gross domestic IQ of both countries...

Predatory Corporate Capitalism At Its Best

2008-12-01T15:03:00.001+05:30

Delhi Boys Go To Bombay

2008-12-01T15:02:00.000+05:30

Aapka Niraash Customer

2008-07-09T23:27:00.000+05:30

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth...

2008-07-09T23:26:00.000+05:30

Wake up and smell the extinction...

2008-07-09T23:24:00.000+05:30

OK TATA BYE-BYE

2008-07-09T23:22:00.002+05:30

Who would Lennon kill?

2008-07-09T23:20:00.000+05:30

Jo's message to Ratan Tata

2008-07-09T23:18:00.000+05:30

Volatile India-Pakistan Standoff Enters 11,680th Day

2008-07-09T23:14:00.001+05:30

Volatile India-Pakistan Standoff Enters 11,680th Day

9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says

2008-04-13T20:16:00.000+05:30

9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says

Technology that takes lives...

2007-08-23T00:45:00.000+05:30

Al Qaeda Also Fed Up With Ground Zero Construction Delays

2007-05-30T11:06:00.000+05:30

Al Qaeda Also Fed Up With Ground Zero Construction Delays

You've read the book. Now see the movie.

2007-01-01T16:05:00.000+05:30

"In accordance to the principles of Doublethink it does not matter if the war is not real... or when it is, that victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labor. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia but to keep the very structure of society intact...

Julia? Are you awake?

There is truth, and there is untruth.

To be in a minority of one doesn’t make you mad.

Julia, my love...

I understand how.

I don’t understand why..."