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An Uncommon History of the United States
For the most part, mainstream history in the United States has little in common with this trenchant narrative from a leftist perspective — and not because this has any less truth or clarity (23 mins). (They could have chosen a better title for this film though. 🙂
No comments on An Uncommon History of the United States
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Who Owns the News?
Gouri Chatterjee on how the business of news has changed in India in recent decades: from one kind controlled by relatively independent social elites / journalists to another kind controlled by profit-driven corporate moguls (see also this post on parallel trends in the U.S.).
The complete insouciance with which Reliance declared its business intentions vis-a-vis its foray into the media world, and the matter-of-fact manner in which it has been accepted by one and all is ultimate proof of the secondary status of journalists in the news business in India today. Journalists are there to do their owners’ bidding, not to play any meaningful role in society; content is something owners decide while journalists merely execute their wishes; making money is the primary objective of any media organisation, even if that leads to carrying news that is paid for. In this model, the ‘customer’ is given whatever they want, journalistic ethics or standards be damned.Though this trend began in the liberalised 90s, it has now come to fruition. In newsroom after newsroom across the country, journalists no longer so much as dream of exercising editorial independence without deferring to the wishes of Owner-Ji and his business boys. Instead of deciding the course of news and taking a call on what is or isn’t in the public interest, or taking up cudgels against those who wield power in ministries or in boardrooms, editors are content to be bit players – the errand boys of the business managers who pay their salaries. This is not how professional editors used to be, and owners respected them for being what they were – or so it is said.
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Fixing Capitalism in the 21st Century
By now you’ve probably heard of this summer’s blockbuster book by French economist Thomas Piketty. As I see it, Piketty’s primary, carefully argued, data-backed conclusion is: To salvage capitalism (and to improve the odds of social stability and world peace), governments need to raise taxes on the rich—more steeply on capital (i.e., tax on wealth and inheritance) than on labor (i.e., tax on wages)—and redistribute it to reduce today’s absurd level of inequality that’s on track to become even worse. The book jacket description says:
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy, but satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx, but we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality — the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth — today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values, but economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says and may do so again. A work of extraordinary ambition, originality and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.Many excellent reviews of the book are compiled here (thanks to Patrick S O’Donnell). Four reviews I liked in particular, the last two of them mixed ones, are by Cory Doctorow, Paul Krugman, David Harvey, and Fred Guerin. Those who like graphs will find this summary interesting.
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Representative Democracy?
Some observations on the recently concluded parliamentary elections in India (for a closer look at the electoral data, see here and here): - The BJP polled only 31% votes nationwide but won 52% seats in the parliament (282/543). Even more strikingly, the BJP polled only 42% votes in U.P. but won 89% seats (71/80).
- BSP polled 4.2% votes nationwide (3rd highest after BJP and Congress) but won 0 seats. In U.P., the BSP polled 20% votes but won 0 seats.
- Both AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and Trinamool Congress in W. Bengal polled fewer votes than BSP (and only a bit more than BSP in U.P.), but won 37 and 34 seats, respectively (vs. 0 for BSP).
- SP polled 18 M votes in U.P. but won only 5 seats, whereas the Shiv Sena polled only 10 M votes in Maharashtra and won 18 seats.
- About half of all Indians voted for regional parties, not national parties. 69% of the people voted for a party other than the BJP.
These examples show how India’s parliamentary democracy, owing to its first-past-the-post voting system, fails to represent the political preferences of its citizens. This is in addition to the fact that elected politicians in India also do not represent its citizens sociologically (they’re far more likely to be upper caste, wealthier, Hindu, male, urban, etc.). According to the economist Jeffrey Sachs, “The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger’s Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections.” Alternatives that reduce the drawbacks of FPTP exist. Isn’t it time to rekindle the debate on making Indian democracy more representative, both at the political and sociological levels?
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Sri Lanka in Pictures
For most of April, I traveled in Sri Lanka with my partner, Usha. Not only a beautiful island with a rich cultural history and ample wildlife, it’s the only country in S. Asia rated “high” on the UN Human Development Index. It has relatively low economic disparity, little abject poverty, high literacy, and universal healthcare. To most Indians, Sri Lankan urbanscapes and rhythms of life will feel familiar and comfortable. I found traveling to be easy enough, the locals friendly, and the food delicious. Sri Lanka even has seven UNESCO world heritage sites.
It’s also a country whose major ethnic communities—mainly Tamil and Sinhala but also the Muslims—haven’t learned to live with each other. Their troubles mostly began in the 1950s with Sinhala nationalism and majoritarianism, driven by chauvinistic monks and militant buddhists, and fueled by cultural insecurities and jaundiced readings of religio-historic texts like the Mahavamsa. Humiliated and cornered, the Tamils demanded their own homeland; many resorted to violent resistance, leading to harsh reprisals from the Sinhala-dominated state. Over nearly three decades, Tamil areas suffered great destruction, mass exodus, and genocidal violence; ruins of war abound in the north. The LTTE may be finished, but will the great many atrocities committed against Tamil civilians near the war’s end be forgotten or forgiven easily, esp. with no reconciliation underway, tens of thousands forced off their lands, and 100K+ refugees still in India five years after the war’s end? Under the Rajapaksa family’s authoritarian regime, Sinhala pride and triumphalism have resurged, public corruption is rampant, there is little freedom of the press and disappearances are common, especially in Tamil areas that have an oppressive army presence. The economy, however, is growing again and new infrastructure, often funded by the Chinese, is coming up: an airport, modern highways, high-rise apartments, casinos, resorts, and more. For a country its size, I found Sri Lanka to be enormously complex and interesting.
Read a brief history of Sri Lanka here. For a closer look at contemporary Sri Lankan society and politics, start with the following: How Not to Win a War, Buddhists Behaving Badly, Beyond the Beach, Sri Lanka After the War, Five Years On (an archive of recent journalism), and the harrowing documentary, No Fire Zone. Below are some of my pictures.
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Sugar: The Intimate Enemy
This brilliant talk by Dr. Robert Lustig persuasively argues that sugar, based on how our bodies metabolize it in the liver, is no less a poison than alcohol. He explains how our bodies process different carbohydrates like glucose, sucrose (table sugar), and fructose, and why sugar in the latter two forms is the primary cause of obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and more. He also debunks many common myths of health and nutrition by showing that a calorie is not a calorie (its source is important), why exercising is not about burning calories but improving metabolism, why fat is nowhere near as bad as sugar, etc. Also read this review of the related new documentary, Fed Up.
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The Rationalist and the Romantic
On Arundhati Roy’s introduction to Dr. BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. (Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
A few weeks ago, the Indian publishing house Navayana released an annotated, “critical edition” of Dr. BR Ambedkar’s classic, Annihilation of Caste (AoC). Written in 1936, AoC was meant to be the keynote address at a conference but was never delivered. Unsettled by the scathing text of the speech and faced by Ambedkar’s refusal to water it down, the caste Hindu organizers of the conference had withdrawn their invitation to speak. Ambedkar, an “untouchable”, later self-published AoC and two expanded editions, which included MK Gandhi’s response to it and his own rejoinder.AoC, as S. Anand points out in his editor’s note, happens to be “one of the most obscure as well as one of the most widely read books in India.” The Navayana edition of AoC carries a 164-page introduction by Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint (read an excerpt). The publisher’s apparent strategy was to harness Roy to raise AoC’s readership among savarna (or caste Hindu) elites to whom it was in fact addressed, but who have largely ignored it for over seven decades, even as countless editions of it in many languages have deeply inspired and empowered generations of Dalits.
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A Harvest of Savagery and Hope
A Review of Savage Harvest: Stories of Partition by Mohinder Singh Sarna, Rupa, 2013. This review first appeared in the Sunday Guardian.
“What sort of a Pakistan was this that had entered their village like some maddened bull, trampling humanity under its hooves and turning everything upside down?” wonders an anguished man in Savage Harvest: Stories of Partition by Mohinder Singh Sarna (1923-2001), translated from Punjabi and introduced by his son and diplomat, Navtej Sarna. On both sides of the new western border between India and Pakistan, an orgy of violence had broken out in towns and villages. It was Hindus and Sikhs vs. Muslims, with both sides pillaging, raping, and killing, leaving a million dead, 12-18 million refugees, and a still-poisoned well of politics in the region.Over the decades, Partition has produced many popular and critical narratives: its causes, villains, avoidable mistakes, its defining features and aftermath. While such narratives can never be immune from subjective perspectives, much of it—despite notable work from scholars like Gurharpal Singh, Ian Talbot, Urvashi Butalia, Perry Anderson, Gyanendra Pandey, and Jan Breman—remains mired in crude nationalistic politics, taboos, and mythologies of India, Pakistan, and Great Britain.
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Omprakash Valmiki, RIP
Omprakash Valmiki, a leading Hindi writer and poet, died last week. He was 63 years old. He is best known for his memoir, Joothan, whose translation by Arun Mukherjee I reviewed some years ago. “It is a memoir of growing up ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s outside a typical village in Uttar Pradesh. Told as a series of piercing vignettes, Joothan is also a remarkable record of a rare Indian journey, one that took a boy from extremely wretched socioeconomic conditions to prominence as an author and social critic.” In this video in three parts (one, two, three), Valmiki reads some of his poems, which are powerful and moving.
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Caste Iron
I have an essay in The Caravan on Ambedkar’s place in the Indian imagination, and why he hasn’t received his due from upper-caste Indians.
“Turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path,” wrote Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, India’s foremost crusader for dignity and civil rights. That monster has always haunted Ambedkar’s legacy, polarising it along caste lines. On the one hand is his godlike presence in Dalit communities, who, out of affection and admiration, have built countless statues of him, usually dressed in a Western suit and tie, with a fat book under his arm, and in whose folk songs, poems, and calendar art he has long held pride of place. For generations, his bold, secular, and emancipatory ideas inspired many Dalit activists and writers, many of whom recall their lives in “before-and-after Ambedkar” phases. When Omprakash Valmiki, the author of the memoir Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, first read about Ambedkar’s life and work, he “spent many days and nights in great turmoil.” He grew more restless; his “stone-like silence” began to melt, and “an anti-establishment consciousness became strong” in him. Ambedkar gave voice to his muteness, Valmiki wrote, and raised his moral outrage and self-confidence. On the other hand, there remains a longstanding apathy for Ambedkar among caste Hindus. What respect he gets from India’s elites is usually limited to his role as the architect of the constitution—important, but arguably among the least revolutionary aspects of his legacy. The social scientist and educationist Narendra Jadhav, interviewed in the Times of India earlier this year, described Ambedkar as the “social conscience of modern India”, and lamented that he has been reduced to being “just a leader of Dalits and a legal luminary.” Indeed, even thoughtful, liberal elite Indians are commonly ignorant about Ambedkar’s life and social impact, both in his lifetime and in the decades since—as the scholar Sharmila Rege noted in Against the Madness of Manu: BR Ambedkar’s writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy, not only lay readers, but Indian post-graduates and academics in the social sciences, humanities, and women’s studies are also unlikely to have read him. What explains this severe disjunction in how Ambedkar is received in India?
Workshop: Critical Writing III – Write Your Professional Obituary
Where: Adianta School for Leadership & Innovation, New Delhi.
When: Tuesday, 19 November, 2013; 10 am – 6 pm
Instructor: Namit Arora
_____________________Listen up, young professionals! Chances are that you chose your profession for a host of reasons: perhaps you were lured by its financial rewards; perhaps you chose its promise of daily joy or intellectual adventure; perhaps you saw it as a means to positively impact the lives of your fellow humans. Or perhaps, as is fairly common, you didn’t choose your profession as much as it was chosen for you by peer pressure and family expectations. Whatever your mix of reasons, you are now immersed in it and wonder—occasionally if not often—about the professional path and the milestones you ought to pursue.
Now imagine you’ve reached the end of your professional life. You’re looking back and reflecting on what you’ve achieved. How would you like to sum it up? In other words, what would you like your professional obituary to read like? Central to this imaginative exercise are questions like: given that life is short and you will die, what pursuits are worth devoting 40-50 hours a week to and why, what measures of success and rewards should you value, and what might it cost you to get there (as in opportunity costs, psychic costs, etc.). In “Critical Writing III — Write your professional obituary”, we’ll explore this subject matter through critical readings, group discussions, and hands-on writing (leading to your 300-word professional obituary). After this workshop, you may well have some answers, or at least more clarity on the questions you’ll need to resolve in order to evolve and attain your long-term professional aspirations.
Black Venus: The Saartjie Baartman Story
Saartjie (or Sarah) Baartman isn’t a name that many will recognize, outside of her native South Africa. But her story seems to embody so much about historical (and modern) contradictions of race and gender, violence, fantasy, exploitation, and prejudice, that she’s become an icon for many, such as the founders of the Saartjie Baartman Center for Women and Children in South Africa.Baartman was a young Khoisan woman who traveled to England in 1810, when she was 20 years old, to become a performer. In England, she quickly became famous as the “Hottentot Venus,” the main attraction of a popular Piccadilly freak show exhibit, in which she presented herself as a wild savage tamed by her keeper. Dressed in a revealing bodysuit and beaded ornaments, she swaggered and growled for the audience, and turned to let them closely examine her famously prominent buttocks. Between performances, she lived comfortably, dressing as a European woman and going freely about town. She also fell to heavy drinking and her health declined. After a few years of this in England, she was sent to France, where her exploitation deepened, including her presentation as a biological specimen studied by leading scientists eager to promote their theory of white racial superiority. In France, she died of one or more undetermined infections at the age of 25.
The fact that the cause of her death remains uncertain is curious, given that after her death her remains were carefully examined, measured, and preserved in pieces. Of particular interest to these men of science who dissected her were her genitalia, which were separated and kept in a jar that was displayed in France’s National Museum until the late 20th century. In 2002, after calls from the South African government, her remains were finally repatriated and buried, surrounded by a great swell of national feeling and homage paid in speeches, song, and dance.
Dispatches from India 2: On Hiring Domestic Help in India
(Usha Alexander’s periodic musings on her life in India. She moved there in mid-2013. Read Dispatches from India 1: First Impressions.)
Shoreefa‘All you get here are these Bangla maids. They’re so lazy! To get them to work you have to shout at them and shout at them,’ lamented a neighbor. I had casually asked her, two days after our arrival in Gurgaon, if she knew anyone looking for work as a cook or house cleaner. Her voice tensed as she spoke, and her forehead crumpled with the pain of a woman in search of commiseration.
The Terrain of Indignities
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
A review of Unclaimed Terrain, a book of short stories translated from Hindi, and a conversation with its author, Ajay Navaria.
“Indian writing” is often equated in the West with its small subset: the work of a tiny class of Indians that thinks and writes in English. Salman Rushdie fueled this folly in his introduction to Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-97, declaring the work of such Indians a ‘more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the “16 official languages” of India’. He co-edited this anthology and of the 32 works of fiction and non-fiction that appear in it, 31 were written in English and one in Urdu, i.e., only one translation made the cut. Some of this lopsidedness can be explained by the paucity of translations into English, but is Rushdie’s judgment defensible in a country where, even today, less than one percent of Indians consider English their first language, less than ten percent their second, and 80 percent of all books are put out by hundreds of vernacular language publishers, including from authors with far greater Indian readership than most who write in English? Rushdie doesn’t even speak most of these languages. Isn’t his claim, then, an instance of linguistic prejudice? Aren’t the dynamics of class in India, and the power of English language publishing in the West, speaking through him?PechaKucha #20, New Delhi
I spoke on the topic of “value” at a recent PechaKucha event in New Delhi, hosted by the Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation, New Delhi on Aug 29, 2013. “PechaKucha 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images.”Pecha Kucha Night #20: Value
We use the term value in two surprisingly contradictory ways in our everyday life: on the one hand, we speak of our valuables, market valuation, and other forms of economic worth, and on the other hand we speak of social, cultural and moral values. In generations past it was more or less accepted that these two forms of value could not be reconciled. The things one had to do to create economic value might simply remain in tension or opposition with one’s personal or familial values. Increasingly, however, we see that young people in India and around the world are trying to bring these two kinds of value into alignment with one another.
Changing Diglossias in India
In any multi-lingual country, questions of language will inevitably be political. This is certainly true in India, where local languages, Hindi, and English continue to shift in relative status and as markers of identity and social class.
I came across this interesting BBC radio program on the complex social dynamics around languages in India. It’s an episode of a series called Word of Mouth that aired in April, 2013. What I enjoyed about the program wasn’t so much that it yielded shocking new insights, but that the producer includes the voices of several mid-range media-wallas, and this helps make vivid the multi-poles and multilayers of the current linguistic reality.
More than a billion people, twenty two scheduled languages, and dozens more mother tongues: In the second of two programmes, Chris Ledgard explores the complex and passionate politics of language in India. In Delhi and Jaipur, we visit schools, business and newspaper offices to ask – how do the languages you speak, read and write in India influence your life? Click here to listen to the story.
Categories: CultureMore From the Annals of Animal Intelligence
…. [Head keeper Jerry] Stones finally managed to catch Fu Manchu in the act. First, the young ape climbed down some air-vent louvers into a dry moat. Then, taking hold of the bottom of the furnace door, he used brute force to pull it back just far enough to slide a wire into the gap, slip a latch and pop the door open. The next day, Stones noticed something shiny sticking out of Fu’s mouth. It was the wire lock pick, bent to fit between his lip and gum and stowed there between escapes.Apparently, Orangutans are the escape artists of the animal world. This particular incident happened back in 1968, but scientists at the time weren’t paying attention, as they were busy with their apes struggling with language and performing tasks in their labs.
However, Eugene Lynden, author of several books on animal intelligence, found it more than interesting. Lynden’s 1999 article on animal intelligence is remarkable for the way that it’s astutely anecdotal. Lynden had realized what “now seems obvious: if animals can think, they will probably do their best thinking when it serves their purposes, not when some scientist asks them to”, and he then began to speak to a broad range of people who work intimately with animals: zookeepers, veterinarians, trainers, and yes, researchers. He says,
John Stoltenberg on Manhood
Here is a thought-provoking interview with John Stoltenberg, an American radical feminist activist, scholar, magazine editor, and author of The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience and Refusing to be a Man. He was the life partner of radical feminist Andrea Dworkin.
Q: How do you see the place of pro-feminist men in the feminist movement? A number of feminists have reservations about it because, in their view, some of these allies tend to speak in their place and pretend to decide what feminism should be about. According to these feminists, men’s contribution to feminism can be of help only if it meets certain conditions: acknowledging their privilege, never forgetting that they belong to the dominant class. And do for feminism what they can do best as men: deconstruct male supremacy from the inside. Do you agree with these views or do you think they are too limiting? A: First of all I don’t think any man of conscience—whether self-identified as pro-feminist or not—can or should presume to speak in women’s place or “decide what feminism should be about.” That’s just a baseline principle. Many women have justifiable grievances about individual men who have disregarded it. Those “me too” men ought to know better, and they should not require scolding and hand-holding from women to figure it out, because exemplary life lessons abound: Individuals from the dominant class in other struggles have found countless meaningful ways to be of use while analogously abiding by that principle—for example, whites in the black civil-rights movement in the US, sons and daughters born to wealth in the movement for economic justice, non-Jews in the movements against antisemitism. Such sincerely committed allies always recognize and acknowledge the privilege that stems from their membership in the dominant class. And often such allies have found that their usefulness lies in deconstructing, disrupting, interrupting, exposing, protesting, and defying such systems of oppression from the inside. Same holds for any man of conscience who wishes to be of use on behalf of feminist revolution. It’s not complicated.
Dispatches from India 1: First Impressions
(Usha Alexander’s periodic musings on her life in India. She moved there in mid-2013.)
Jamun sold in Old DelhiSo here I am living in Gurgaon for the last four months. We arrived in the hottest days of the year and to summer’s sweet deluge of fruits—mangos, lychees, jamun, watermelon—which we enjoyed daily. Within three days of arrival, we found a furnished rental with adequate water and power backup, and we lucked upon the services of an excellent cook and a cleaning woman, both recent migrants from West Bengal. We soon identified some take-out places, a barber, dairy outlet, and other services in the small bazaar two streets over. And we found a gleaming mall with a modern gym, theater, grocery stores,
bookstores, and electronics, just a 15-minute walk from our
door, across lots filled with cows, stray dogs, mansions, and shanties.Jackson Katz on Gender Issues
To commemorate Teacher’s Day today, here is a great talk on how men ought to approach “gender issues”, and the complicit silence and self-deception that pervades the lives of men. Obvious parallels here for upper-caste Indians on how to approach “caste issues”.
