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This will come as no newsflash to anyone who followed the story. Let's not put too fine a point on it: there was craven capitulation at Jaipur. Again.
After much plucking of flower petals about "will he-won't he" attend, the organisers finally pushed forward Rampratap Singh Diggi, owner of the Diggi palace, where the Jaipur Literary Festival was being held, to make an announcement:
“I have taken a decision not to allow the video link to take place on the advice of the Rajasthan police. There are lots of people who are averse to this video link. They are threatening violence. This is unfortunate. This is to safeguard you, my family, my children …”
Some of the immediate reactions are best reproduced from Twitter:
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Jan 24, 2012 AT 23:55 IST, Edited At: Jan 25, 2012 03:55 IST
After the Fab Four (before they became the Fab Five) read out passages from the Satanic Verses on Jan 21 in protest against the way Salman Rushdie had been prevented from participating in Jaipur Lit Fest, the organisers had come up with the following statement:
This press release is being issued on behalf of the organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival. It has come to their attention that certain delegates acted in a manner during their sessions today which were without the prior knowledge or consent of the organizers. Any views expressed or actions taken by these delegates are in no manner endorsed by the Jaipur Literature Festival. Any comments made by the delegates reflect their personal, individual views and are not endorsed by the Festival or attributable to its organizers or anyone acting on their behalf. The Festival organizers are fully committed to ensuring compliance of all prevailing laws and will continue to offer their fullest cooperation to prevent any legal violation of any kind. Any action by any delegate or anyone else involved with the Festival that in any manner falls foul of the law will not be tolerated and all necessary, consequential action will be taken. Our endeavor has always been to provide a platform to foster an exchange of ideas and the love of literature, strictly within the four corners of the law. We remain committed to this objective.
It was received with widespread consternation and many wondered about who could been responsible for something so craven.
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Jan 23, 2012 AT 23:59 IST, Edited At: Jan 24, 2012 06:12 IST
Prez Obama:
In the office late tonight, we all just took a break to huddle around someone’s computer and grin like idiots at this.
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Jan 20, 2012 AT 23:52 IST, Edited At: Jan 20, 2012 23:52 IST
First the statement from Salman Rushdie today:
For the last several days I have made no public comment about my proposed trip to the Jaipur Literary Festival at the request of the local authorities in Rajasthan, hoping that they would put in place such precautions as might be necessary to allow me to come and address the Festival audience in circumstances that were comfortable and safe for all.
I have now been informed by intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to "eliminate" me. While I have some doubts about the accuracy of this intelligence, it would be irresponsible of me to come to the Festival in such circumstances; irresponsible to my family, to the festival audience, and to my fellow writers. I will therefore not travel to Jaipur as planned.
I hope, however, to be able to participate by video link, at a time to be announced soon. Believe me, I am sorry not to be there in person.
***
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Jan 20, 2012 AT 19:14 IST, Edited At: Jan 20, 2012 19:14 IST
Midway through Manmohan Desai’s classic 1977 film about three brothers separated in childhood, a man in a top hat and a Saturday Night Fever suit leaps out of a giant Easter egg to inform the assemblage, “My name is Anthony Gonsalves.”
The significance of the announcement was lost under the impact of Amitabh Bachchan’s sartorial exuberance. But decades later, the memory of that moment still sends shivers down the spines of scores of ageing men scattered across Bombay and Goa. By invoking the name of his violin teacher in that tune in Amar Akbar Anthony, the composer Pyarelal had finally validated the lives of scores of Goan Catholic musicians whose working years had been illuminated by the flicker of images dancing across white screens in airless sound studios, even as acknowledgement of their talent whizzed by in the flash of small-type credit titles....
—Naresh Fernandes, Remembering Anthony Gonsalve
Photo Credit: Anthony Gonsalves/Laxmi Gonsalves. Scanned by Mr Vivek Menezes. Reproduced here from parrikar.com
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Jan 19, 2012 AT 15:00 IST, Edited At: Jan 19, 2012 15:00 IST
The fates seem to have got their calendar wrong. For almost all the important events in Homai Vyarawalla's life had something to do with the number 13 -- she was born in 1913, she met husband-to-be Maneckshaw when she was 13, her first car’s licence plate was DLD 13. And So there is an element of being cheated that Dalda 13 (a pseudonym she chose for herself) did not live on at least till 2013.
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Jan 15, 2012 AT 22:50 IST, Edited At: Jan 15, 2012 22:50 IST
Some background first:
Dec 5, 2011: In l'affaire Kapil Sibal V/s Social Networking sites, NYT had reported Mr Kapil Sibal as showing the representatives of social networking sites a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi, saying: “This is unacceptable.”
In his hurriedly called press-conference after the above news broke, on December 6, Mr Sibal had changed the focus to "Indian sentiments and religious sentiments":
"It was brought to my notice some of the images and content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google are extremely offensive to the religious sentiments of people of this country," Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal told reporters here.
"I believe that no reasonable person, aware of the sensibilities of a large section of the communities in this country, would wish to see this in the public domain," Sibal said.
The content posted on some of the sites, the minister said, was so offensive that it would hurt the religious sentiments of a large section of communities in the country. These contents would also offend any reasonable person looking at those images.
"We will not allow the Indian sentiments and religious sentiments of large sections of the community to be hurt," he said.
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Jan 13, 2012 AT 23:21 IST, Edited At: Jan 13, 2012 23:21 IST
To see and scroll through thumb-nails of other videos in the playlist, just click on the rectangular box beofore the + sign in the clip above
If nature vented its fury through the earthquakes and tsunami in Japan, the rage on the Arab street or even in TV studios was no less in intensity
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 23, 2011 AT 22:14 IST, Edited At: Dec 23, 2011 22:14 IST
Yes, they are totally right in their demand for an independent CBI, and on most other contentious points of the Lokpal Bill
Yes, we need not put too fine a point on this —the whole posturing with reservations and particularly the controversy over "minorities" in the Lokpal Panel is usual cynical delaying tactics by Congress with an eye to UP elections.
Yes, while the BJP is (correctly) tarred with being communal, the Congress's own "electoral communalism" in particular, and tokenism has always been at least as blatant. And even more brazen.
Yes, we could get into which communalism is more dangerous, and how these two parties fuel each other's competitive communalism, but those debates are meaningless.
For now, in addition to asking for a strong Lokpal, with all the safeguards they are insisting on, Team Anna would be well-advised to also demand at least one basic electoral reform.
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 23, 2011 AT 02:34 IST, Edited At: Dec 23, 2011 02:34 IST
2011's latest victim is none other than Christopher Eric Hitchens, journalist, born 13 April 1949; died 15 December 2011
“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in the Vanity Fair last year, and then in another piece this June, said, “My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.”
And one of those friends was the first to offer a tribute:
Elaine Woo, in the Los Angeles Times notes:
A swashbuckling opinionator, he loved few things better than a good argument — and he knew how to pick one. Once described by the New Yorker as "looking like someone who, with as much dignity as possible, has smoothed his hair and straightened his collar after knocking the helmet off a policeman," he tarred Bill Clinton as a rapist, Mother Teresa as a fraud and Henry Kissinger as a war criminal. He argued in Vanity Fair that women were less funny than men, which stoked the wrath of female comics. "I am programmed by the practice of a lifetime to take," he wrote, "a contrary position."
In his personal life he was no less the "rapscallion iconoclast," as historian Douglas Brinkley once described him.
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 16, 2011 AT 12:41 IST, Edited At: Dec 16, 2011 12:41 IST
POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 16, 2011 AT 01:56 IST, Edited At: Dec 16, 2011 01:56 IST
Writing in the Telegraph, Mukul Kesavan says that "despite the fact that Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan and Kiran Bedi seem at various times to be eccentric, hectoring, pious, self-righteous, reactionary and complicit with shady godmen, there’s little doubt that so far they have won the rhetorical battle against the United Progressive Alliance government, their ‘civil society’ critics and other appalled pundits and commentators":
...while they rhetorically berate corrupt elected politicians, they don’t repudiate the institutions of constitutional democracy: they offer, instead, detailed prospectuses for reforming them...
Critics might find the suggestions made by Hazare and his lieutenants unworkable or deluded, but Team Anna can’t be accused of not offering concrete ways of reforming what it sees as corrupt or debauched governance. Nor can its critique of the actually existing democracy be summarily dismissed, if only because it seems to resonate with large numbers of people who turn out to be counted...
Kejriwal’s genius for mobilization and Anna’s scary willingness to die for his cause seem to have created an irresistible force and Parliament is turning out to be rather less than an immovable object. Apart from a reservation or two about the status of the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Opposition is now publicly committed to every major provision of the jan lok pal bill...
The government’s bill will be the jan lok pal bill in every important detail. Rumours already swirl that the ruling dispensation will agree to place the prime minister and Class C and D employees within the lok pal’s jurisdiction. The subordination of the CBI to this super ombudsman seems to be the sticking point and here too the government will find a form of words to which it can surrender. This will be both an utter rout and a famous victory.
Read the full piece at the Telegraph: A Very Public Tutorial
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 15, 2011 AT 23:56 IST, Edited At: Dec 15, 2011 23:56 IST
In their various pronouncements since the censorship controversy broke, Mr Kapil Sibal and Mr Sachin Pilot, the minister and minister of state respectively in the ministry of communications and information technology, have been vocally insisting that the government does not want to resort to censorship and believes in the constitutional right of free speech.
These pieties were once again repeated today by the two ministers after meeting representatives of social media companies, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, for what is now being spun as an "open dialogue to empower individuals and citizens" while reliable sources also reveal that their ministry "is mulling forming an inter-ministerial group to work out a mechanism to monitor and avoid uploading of any defamatory material on Internet."
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 15, 2011 AT 22:55 IST, Edited At: Dec 15, 2011 22:55 IST
Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express says our debates are about scoring points, not in making progress:
The government believes it is more important to be seen to be doing things than to be doing them well. The proposed food security legislation is another example of this tendency. The legislation exemplifies the self-defeating obduracy of bureaucratic modes of thinking. But the debate around it also exemplifies a failure of intellectual argument in India. Our debates often have this character. First, we spend a lot more time arguing about the destination than necessary. It is absolutely unconscionable that the need for a credible food security system still needs to be argued. Then we have a slightly more productive discussion about the route to get there. Some will argue that the Public Distribution System, though currently broken, can be fixed. Others will argue we need to replace food with cash. Sometimes these debates are in good faith. But sometimes in these debates, as in identity politics, belief chases evidence, not the other way round. But once we have, for good or for ill, chosen a route, we stop caring whether we will drive well enough to get to the destination. Or, worse still, we will actively subvert whatever route has been chosen. Often this is because each side can say, “I told you PDS won’t work.” Or, “I told you private provisioning won’t work.” We make sure that the conditions that might make the chosen architecture work do not obtain.
Read on at the Indian Express: Food Insecurity Bill
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 15, 2011 AT 02:46 IST, Edited At: Dec 15, 2011 02:46 IST
Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express, last week:
Dear Mr Gandhi: The elections in Uttar Pradesh are, understandably, your major preoccupation. It is difficult to predict the result. But even if you do well, will India have reason to celebrate? Electoral success will show that you are better than the opposition. But that bar is now so low that it is almost an embarrassment to trumpet that one is merely better than the opposition. In 2009, the Congress got as propitious a mandate as any party could have expected. There was hope and expectation. The opposition, both on the left and right, was decimated. But what did India gain? It frittered away the good times. Instead of using growth to lay a secure foundation for the future, and create conditions where the scourge of poverty can be removed, we undermined the prospects for growth. We have high inflation, worrying public debt, slowing growth, uncertain currency prospects, falling investment, crushing interest rates...
Your party may not have some of the worst, exclusivist tendencies of your rivals. But you have not found ways of transcending the traps of identity politics that have kept India small...
Your party is trapped in two illusions. First, governance and politics are different issues. Second, only those policies that specifically address poor people affect the poor. You wreck the macro-economy in the name of the poor, and then cheat the poor because you refuse to govern...
Read the full piece at the Indian Express: Tomorrow's Battles
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 15, 2011 AT 02:04 IST, Edited At: Dec 15, 2011 02:04 IST
Writing in the Telegraph, Amit Chaudhuri raises the question about Calcutta that is perhaps as relevant to Delhi, or, indeed any other urban centre where haphazard "development" has allowed "the tragedy of an irreversible change to take place without even noticing it; to seamlessly become a recent, crowded suburb."
But before addressing that, he wonders that if every Bengali bourgeois’ destiny is to be a prabasi, or an expatriate, "what is going right in Calcutta to make that expatriation work, for that destiny to be realized in an increasingly precarious free-market workplace?"
And what’s going right here to some extent, but against the odds it would seem, is secondary education for the middle classes. However depleted the resources of this city, something is working if we’re still able to produce a steady flow outward of skilled expatriates, from academics to doctors to professionals in the spheres of software programming and other segments of the service sector. Something is going right, in this strange auto-pilot-like manner, and it would be good to know what it is. It manifests itself peculiarly from time to time, though we may not notice it — for instance, the immense discipline that goes into the Pujas, from the ingenuity and judgment that create the pandals, to the epic-scale traffic-and- human management, largely unobtrusively achieved. Why this sort of orchestration and care don’t inform our lives more often, when, seemingly, they’re perfectly capable of doing so, is a puzzle...
Read the full article at the Telegraph: The City Vanishes
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 15, 2011 AT 02:00 IST, Edited At: Dec 15, 2011 02:00 IST
Mario João Carlos do Rosario de Brit de Miranda, aka Mario Miranda (1926-2011). RIP.
As if the year hadn't been cruel enough already, Mario de Miranda died in his sleep in his ancestral house in the early hours of Sunday, December 11. He was cremated yesterday, in accordance with his wishes, at his village in Loutolim.
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 13, 2011 AT 22:59 IST, Edited At: Dec 13, 2011 22:59 IST
From the Narrative of the visit to India of their majesties, King George V. and Queen Mary, and of the coronation durbar held at Delhi, 12th December, 1911 by Sir John William Fortescue
We are pleased to announce to Our People that on the advice of Our Ministers , tendered after consultation with Our Governor-General-in-Council, We have decided upon the transfer of the seat of the Government of India, from Calcutta to the ancient Capital of Delhi...
--King George V, December 12, 1911
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 12, 2011 AT 23:18 IST, Edited At: Dec 12, 2011 23:18 IST
Mr Kapil Sibal was quoted by the Hindu today as saying that "he had been left with no choice" because the internet companies "refused to delete incendiary hate-speech."
In response, Google pointed to its Transparency Report which effectively demolishes Mr Sibal's claims, as it points out that out of 358 items requested to be removed in the period Jan-June 2011, only 8 requests pertained to hate speech, while there were as many as 255 complaints against "Government criticism".
Google also told Medianama:
“We believe that access to information is the foundation of a free society. Google Search helps spread knowledge, enabling people to find out about almost anything by typing a few words into a computer. And services like YouTube and Google+ help users to express themselves and share different points of view. Where content is illegal or breaks our terms of service we will continue to remove it.”
Mr Sibal's claims fail to stand up to scrutiny and are contradicted by another, yet unpublished, draft report by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) which shows that intermediaries are erring “on the side of caution” and "over-complying after complaints are filed" and that free speech on the Internet in India is already being curtailed in a “chilling” manner.
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 07, 2011 AT 23:58 IST, Edited At: Dec 07, 2011 23:58 IST
The Indian government has asked Internet companies and social media sites like Facebook to prescreen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online, reports Heather Timmins in the NYT:
About six weeks ago, Mr. Sibal called legal representatives from the top Internet service providers and Facebook into his New Delhi office, said one of the executives who was briefed on the meeting.
At the meeting, Mr. Sibal showed attendees a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi. “This is unacceptable,” he told attendees, the executive said, and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites.
In the second meeting with the same executives in late November, Mr. Sibal told them that he expected them to use human beings to screen content, not technology, the executive said.
The three executives said Mr. Sibal has told these companies that he expects them to set up a proactive prescreening system, with staffers looking for objectionable content and deleting it before it is posted...
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 05, 2011 AT 23:59 IST, Edited At: Dec 05, 2011 23:59 IST
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