Shunya's Notes

Who's Afraid of Savita Bhabhi?

The Indian government recently banned a website that runs a cartoon strip about the sexual escapades of a hot Indian bhabhi ("sister-in-law"), described as a "regular Indian woman who just can’t get enough sex". This is a curious move in an age of widely accessible cyberporn, with countless sites saturated with far more explicit hardcore videos and images, representing ~10% of the most trafficked Internet sites. What is so transgressive about Savita Bhabhi to warrant such draconian action? Shohini Ghosh examines the phenomenon in some detail.

Savita is an attractive middle class housewife whose dull, workaholic husband is rarely home. Consequently, she has ample time and space for torrid sexual encounters with, among others, a door-to-door lingerie salesman, local teens playing cricket, a former lover visiting from abroad, a potential boss, his secretary, a famous film star (with an uncanny resemblance to Amitabh Bachchan), a newly employed servant, the husband of her husband’s office colleague and a terrorist. As is evident from this brief summary, Savita Bhabi embodies for the moral purists, the most terrifying ideas about sexual transgression. She is married but not monogamous. She has sex for fun and not for procreation or love and in choosing lovers she does not discriminate on the grounds of class, caste, gender, occupation, age or status. Having had the most outrageous escapades, she gets away with it all.

More here.  You can find more related articles on Asian Window.

Dalrymple on Travel Writing

William Dalrymple on the future on travel writing in the shrinking, globalizing world of the Internet age: 

Today, however, many of the most interesting travel books are by individuals who have made extended stays in places, getting to know them intimately: such as Iain Sinclair's circling of the capital in London Orbital or Sam Miller's Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity. There is also Ghosh in his Egyptian village, published as In an Antique Land, or Christopher de Bellaigue's magnificent recent study, Rebel Land, which examines the way that the ghosts of the Armenian genocide and Kurdish nationalism haunt a single remote town in eastern Turkey. As Mishra puts it, in a more globalised, postcolonial world the traveller "needs to train his eye in the way an ethnographer does . . . to remain relevant and stimulating, travel writing has to take on board some of the sophisticated knowledge available about these complex societies, about their religions, history, economy, and politics."

The last world should go to Thubron, the most revered of all the travel writers of the 80s still at work. He is also clear that travel writing is now more needed than ever: "Great swaths of the world are hardly visited and remain much misunderstood - think of Iran," he told me recently. "It's no accident that the mess inflicted on the world by the last US administration was done by a group of men who had hardly travelled, and relied for information on policy documents and the reports of journalists sitting interviewing middle-class contacts in capital cities. A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people's existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute."

More here.

The Truth About Burning Man

Jay Michaelson's take on the famous event held each year in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada:

You don't get it. You don't get what it's like to have 50,000 people circle around a wooden effigy, with 1000 people spinning fire and 500 more playing drums, all encircled by 200 art cars -- and then all roaring in unison as the effigy is set afire. You might think you get it, and it may scare or tempt or delight you, but I assure you, you don't get it. None of us do, because it's not about any one thing in particular; "it" can be an orgiastic celebration, or the sad mourning of a lost loved one. Or a warm, hippie-like community. Or a mean, Mad-Max-like apocalypse. "It" is chiefly a space in which all these things are possible.

The temporary erasure of societal, social, and personal boundaries is, for most of us, terrifying. Such boundaries help build the structures of society and self; they give form to human life, which is often chaotic and unpredictable. Thus they have been the bedrock of religious and civil life for millennia, even before the Furies were imprisoned under Athens, and Moses descended from Sinai.

But if religion creates boundaries, mysticism and spirituality efface them. In the transcendence of ordinary distinctions, peak experiences such as those encouraged at Burning Man give a glimpse of the ultimate, the infinite. It may seem absurd to suggest that Burning Man is a mystical event. But then, if it's just a big party, why is there a temple in the middle of it?

More here. Is that the whole truth? Check out a contrasting view in the comments section. I have never attended myself.
(Photo sources: one, two, three)

Shilling for Apples

Champion of the Green Revolution Dies at 95

Who has heard of Norman Borlaug? I had not heard of him until now, after his death, when the Wall Street Journal calls him "arguably the greatest American of the 20th century".

Borlaug's life work, the Green Revolution, is the reason the world is not starving today as it was half a century ago. As the individual responsible for spreading high-yield agricultural practices through the hungriest parts of the world, beginning with South Asia in the 1960s, he was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006. He changed the world, as much as did Louis Pasteur or the Wright Brothers, yet his name is commonly unknown outside the Developing World. And his contribution is today seen as controversial.

He is eulogized today in the Wall Street Journal:

Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II.
....

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things."

Early Islam, Part 1: The Rise of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
__________________________________________

Imagine the Middle East in the early centuries of the Common Era. There is no Islam. The two dominant powers in the region are the Romans and the Persians, with a long history of fighting over territory and trade routes. The border between their two empires keeps shifting across Syria and Mesopotamia.

To the north of this border, in the steppes, are the Turks, deemed ‘savage and warlike’ by Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth century Roman historian and native of Syria. To the south, in the desert, are the Arabs. Neither the Persians, nor the Romans, took much interest in conquering these semi-nomadic tribal peoples. Instead, they followed that most pragmatic of imperial policies: turn these ‘semi-civilized’ folks into allies and use them opportunistically to score against their main rival.

At stake, besides territorial control, were the trade routes to the East for Chinese silk and Indian spices, which either went through the northern Turkish lands, or across the Sinai and the Red sea, or over the caravan routes hugging the western Arabian coast down to Aden and beyond by sea. [1] The Persians, during times of conflict, blocked all overland eastern access for the Romans.

So the two empires acted like modern corporations doling out political ‘contributions’, and the Arabs and the Turks learned to exploit the situation to their advantage, extracting a variety of military and economic subsidies from both empires. The Romans, after a botched military campaign to gain a foothold at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula and the Red sea, preferred thereafter to rely on the principalities of Arabia for the safer overland route to Aden. This caravan trade soon supported several small towns and kingdoms in Arabia. The imperial powers, by and large, sought to maintain some form of indirect rule or clientage.

How to Write About Africa

Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan author and journalist, in the winter 2005 issue of Granta:

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates... Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls...

Friday Cats

Five from the Shunya archive.

The Merchant of Weapons

The NY Times reports that the leader of the free world accounted for 68.4% of all international arms trading in 2008, netting $37.8 billion, about $30 billion of it from the developing world. Thirteen of the top 25 buyers "were either undemocratic governments or regimes guilty of major ongoing human rights abuses," often with weak internal arms controls. A New America Foundation report says, "U.S. arms transfers are undermining human rights, weakening democracy and fueling conflict around the world." The top five nations that profit from the global arms trade happen to be the five original members of the nookiller weapons club: USA, UK, France, Russia, and China. They are also the only five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and the only five with veto power. No pattern there. 

Even a US President, Jimmy Carter, noted as far back as 1976, "We can’t have it both ways. We can’t be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of arms." Now one might say that the US is just fulfilling demand that exists out there. If it doesn't sell, someone else will, such as Russia, or Italy. One might say that the leaders of developing countries are responsible, who either have their priorities all messed up or have a legitimate desire for security. The demand side of the market is the problem, warlike human nature is the problem. The problem is not the merchant of weapons.

This strikes one as almost reasonable until one recalls the US State Department's attitude to drug trading, and the moralistic war on drugs it has taken to the supply side for years, to the jungles of Colombia and to Afghanistan, while locking up hundreds of thousands of drug dealers at home. (Of course, the rise of international drug cartels was largely due to US Cold War politics and its need to finance proxy wars around the world, but that's another story.) For now, let's just reflect on this neat reversal in attitudes: when it comes to drugs, the supply side of the market becomes the problem, profiteering from it becomes the problem. The messed up priorities of American consumers, or their legitimate desire for recreational intoxication is not so much the problem. The problem, they declare, is the merchant of drugs.

The Passion of GMB Akash

"My passion for photography started in 1996 when I received an old camera from father ... For a long time, I have been focusing my attention on portraying people living on the edge of society and have done this in various countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. ... For the last four years, I have been working on child labor. ... Children in poor countries spend long days working under very unfavorable conditions. Child Labor is an issue closely connected with poverty, education, socio-economic exploitation and discrimination. These factors keep children out of school and force them to work under harsh and dangerous, unhealthy and fatal circumstances. Child workers are subject to abuse, both physically and mentally, by their employers. These youngsters even risk their lives for low pay."

Read Manisha Verma's short interview of GMB Akash and checkout his photography at his website.

A Culture of Fear

Europe has long held an edge over the US when it comes to social welfare for its citizens, such as labor laws, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and public housing. This is reflected in various quality-of-life surveys across countries, where the Scandinavians top most lists. But one area where Europe lags way behind the US is in assimilating its immigrants and ethnic minorities. Remember the French civil unrest of 2005? The historian Tony Judt recently wrote, "For nearly four decades mainstream European politicians turned a blind eye to all this: to the impact of de facto segregated housing; isolated unintegrated communities; and the rising tide of fearful, resentful white voters convinced that the boat was "full.""

Today there is an altogether sharper climate of anti-immigration hysteria and, lately, the fear of being swamped by Muslims. Pankaj Mishra takes a courageous stand against such shameful developments in the Western intelligentsia, laying bare their lies and prejudices.

Is Europe about to be overrun by Muslims? A number of prominent European and American politicians and journalists seem to think so. The historian Niall Ferguson has predicted that "a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonise — the term is not too strong — a senescent Europe". And according to Christopher Caldwell, an American columnist with the Financial Times, whom the Observer recently described as a "bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties", Muslims are already "conquering Europe's cities, street by street". So what if Muslims account for only 3% to 4% of the EU's total population of 493 million? In his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be the Same With Different People in It? — which was featured on Start the Week, excerpted in Prospect, commended as "morally serious" by the New York Times and has beguiled some liberal opinion-makers as well as rightwing blowhards — Caldwell writes: "Of course minorities can shape countries. They can conquer countries. There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today."

Apparently it's not only Islamist revolutionaries, but also rapidly breeding Muslims who are transforming Europe into "Eurabia". The birthrates of Europe's Muslim immigrants are actually falling and converging with national averages, according to a recent survey in the Financial Times; but "advanced" cultures, Caldwell claims in his book, "have a long track record of underestimating their vulnerability to 'primitive' ones". As the Daily Telegraph, quoting Caldwell, asserted last weekend, Britain and the EU have simply ignored the "demographic time bomb" in their midst. Muslims, Nick Griffin of the BNP once warned, are seducing white girls as part of a plot to take over Britain. ...

Caldwell stops short of speculating what Europe would or should do to atone for its folly of nurturing a perfidious minority. The Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, whom Martin Amis has hailed as a "great sayer of the unsayable", does not hesitate to spell it out in his bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. ... In a democratic age, you can't buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em.

More here.

An Ethnography of Wall Street

Mention the word ‘ethnography’ and a tribe in a faraway place comes to mind. But couldn’t it just as well apply to us moderns, with our own myths, rituals, assumptions, customs, and oddball ideas of the world? Here is Scott McLemee on anthropologist Karen Ho’s ethnography of bankers, traders and analysts, the tribe of elites who shape our world in the image of ‘Wall Street’s bulimic culture of expediency’.

Each social group has its particular mixture of small-scale habits, large-scale rationalisations and everyday assumptions about the how the world really works. Like a good journalist, the ethnographer will find and describe telling details about what goes on within a subculture. But the ethnographer takes an additional few steps by trying to understand how even the most taken-for-granted aspects of behaviour within a group reflect a set of powerful but largely implicit rules and beliefs. Daily experience tends to reinforce the subculture’s shared outlook in ways that make it seem inarguable.

It’s one thing to do this with, say, Albanian shepherds – and something else to attempt it with those financial titans who Tom Wolfe once satirically called the Masters of the Universe. But the same general principles apply. The ethnographer has to spend time observing what the Albanian shepherd expects from the sheep, and from himself – and also figuring out how either may be different from what a Greek shepherd expects. A significant part of Wall Street’s outlook is available in documents, of course, unlike with a rustic subculture; but the really interesting dimension of Liquidated comes from its account of how the financial sector’s members understand their own daily experience.

More here (via 3QD). I wonder if anyone has done a similar ethnography of today’s professional scientists (esp. the neo-atheist type).

Plastic, Plastic Everywhere

For the first time ever, scientists have embarked on a study of the Plastic Vortex, also called the Pacific Garbage Patch, a gargantuan collection of plastic trash that has collected in the North Pacific Ocean. The garbage patch floats on and near the surface of the ocean in the North Pacific Gyre; it is currently believed to be about twice the size of Texas.

About a month ago, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego and the nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute sent two research vessels, The New Horizon and the Kaisei, to meet at the gyre and study its composition, dimensions, and impact. The ships have just safely returned from their journey, and the first details of their findings are trickling out. The San Jose Mercury News reports:

Scientists who returned to the Bay Area this week after an expedition to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" brought piles of plastic debris they pulled out of the ocean — soda bottles, cracked patio chairs, Styrofoam chunks, old toys, discarded fishing floats and tangled nets.

But what alarmed them most, they said Tuesday, was the nearly inconceivable amount of tiny, confettilike pieces of broken plastic. They took hundreds of water samples between the Farallon Islands near San Francisco and the notorious garbage patch 1,000 miles west of California, and every one had tiny bits of plastic floating in it. And the closer they sailed to the garbage patch, which some researchers have estimated to be twice the size of Texas, the more plastic pieces per gallon they found.

This short video (2:45) sums up the mission and their preliminary findings:

If you're interested to learn more about Project Kaisei, you might start with the websites Project Kaisei, SEAPLEX, and Marine Debris.

Language on the Philosopher's Zone

The Art of Biography

"Ray Monk from the University of Southampton in the UK is something unusual in philosophers of the English-speaking world: he's a biographer.... he tell us about the challenges of writing the lives of Bertrand Russell and of the great Ludwig Wittgenstein and why he thinks that biography is a very Wittgensteinian genre."

The Art of Translation

"We continue our look at translation by examining the extreme case of radical translation. How do you translate from a language which has no connection with yours and of which you do not speak a single word, and what does all this have to do with the mysterious word 'gavagai'? We also look at the challenges of translating philosophy this week focusing on translating French, German and English."