Tidbits, Trivias... Share what you want II - Page 18

Goons assault two Manipuri women in Delhi, cops go slow on case

If our momos can be accepted, why not us?

Four years in the national capital, apart from all other things I have developed immunity against, I find the word "chinky" extremely offensive and derogatory. I have ignored it while walking past people, thinking they were nave when they call me "chinky" right to my face. But now, with Nido Tania, the 19-year-old student from Arunachal Pradesh, being beaten to death in the capital, the thought keeps nagging me " was I right in ignoring the name-calling or should I have given it back to them?

The writer fails to understand the gaze and the comments being made about people from the Northeast. Do we look like aliens? she wonders. Representation pic

However, how many people will I fight and in how many places? Whether it is the bylanes of the place I live in (Lajpat Nagar, the residential-cum-commercial area in south Delhi where this incident happened) or the market places that I visit? There is no end to these names being hurled at you. For people it might be just a word to laugh about but for us (the female community from Northeast in particular) it is a "racial slur".

According to the dictionary, "chinky" is an English ethnic word describing a person of Chinese ethnicity, but for people here, it has become a word to describe girls from the Northeast with amusing connotations like "chilli chicken" and "chowmein".

Not just boys, who are much younger than you, but seemingly well educated, well-dressed men pass these remarks. Once, on my way back home from the office, a man probably my dad's age came close and said, "Chinky is so sexy."

Left startled I could barely react, my eyes welled (due to anger) but I could only just walk away helplessly. Is it our fault that our ancestors belonged to a certain race and had certain facial features? Why are we being branded this way?

A friend from Arunachal Pradesh narrated an incident from a busy market place. It was immediately after Nido Taniam's news, that she was teased and young boys called her "Chinese".

People in the heartland of the country should know we also hold the same citizenship and we also feel the same thrill when we hear our national anthem.

Having different facial features, speaking in a different way and our region being a little disconnected due to lack of communication, has saddled us with a label that we find hard to live down.

We accept we like to follow fashion and are genetically built differently, so what is wrong in that? Why are we stereotyped? The gaze and the comments made because of our dress is something I have failed to understand. Is it out of jealousy or do we look like aliens?

However, this apathy is not restricted to streets or public places but even on the professional front. Many have had to lose out even after having competitive talent and capability. A friend shared with me that a leading apparel brand that she knows rejected a strong contender for a fashion shoot only because she had different facial features. Off the record she was told she was "chinky", hence not suitable for the assignment.

So when one's talent takes a back seat to facial features, what more are we to expect?

We do not have good educational facilities in our region and there are not enough good jobs because of which we are forced to travel far away from home. And Delhi is as much ours as of the others. Delhi opens up to you with opportunities but then there is another battle to fight.

So what is the middle path for us? Is it our fault that our region is neglected and the government recognised the need to develop the area very late?

Having certain facial features, the hurdle doesn't end there. It also creates difficulties in finding a place to live in.

There are instances of prospective tenants being told bluntly that if you are from Mizoram, Manipur and other places from the Northeast you can't rent a place. House brokers ask your place of origin first " as if we are from outside India " even much before they want to know our names.

We are also told that we do not mingle and interact with people and stay confined to ourselves. How can one be friends when people on the other side are already judgemental about you? Moreover, we do not want to be an object of mockery.

We do not want to feel insecure so it is better to stay happy among ourselves. Once in a while one can tolerate or be indifferent or deaf to street insults and ignorant racial barbs, but not when it becomes a regular feature.

These are only a few instances, but in some way or the other this is a part of my everyday life and of many others like me who hail from Northeast " comprising no less than eight states of India. I do not know whether things will ever change. But I am left with one lingering thought: when the cuisine from our place, the tasty and succulent momo, has been accepted so widely why not the people who introduced it?

http://www.mid-day.com/articles/if-our-momos-can-be-accepted-why-not-us/15064043

Originally posted by: K.Universe.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/1209/Are-you-scientifically-literate-Take-our-quiz/Composing-about-78-percent-of-the-air-at-sea-level-what-is-the-most-common-gas-in-the-Earth-s-atmosphere

No Googling when taking the quiz. Quiz is not timed so you can take your time to think. Good luck! 😊

Dissent in the age of aggression

Vaishna Roy

Arundhati Roy has written an open letter to Penguin India in which she asks what "terrified" them into taking the book The Hindus: An Alternative History off the stands even before there was a "fatwa or ban," even though the "fascists are campaigning... but are not in power." The answer seems obvious. It was not fear of a legal battle " Penguin might have easily won that. It was not fear of bad publicity " Penguin could have only benefited from the inevitably larger book sales. No, it was fear of the mindless violence that certain bands of fanatics are capable of unleashing.

The quietness with which this surrender took place was about accepting beforehand that a certain kind of ideological climate could possibly soon come to hold sway in the country, and realising that any voice-of-reason argument the publisher might extend would certainly be drowned in the clamour of righteous indignation that was bound to rise.

In the run-up to the elections, one of the more noticeable aspects of offline and online political debate has been the extreme aggression on display. When the Aam Aadmi Party's Prashant Bhushan suggested a referendum in Jammu and Kashmir on Army deployment, a right-wing mob attacked his office and vandalised it. When the Tarun Tejpal incident came to light, a bunch of right-wing activists attacked Tehelka's (now former) managing editor Shoma Chaudhury's house.

Shouting down critique

In online activity, it is impossible to avoid noticing the extreme hostility of the right-wing voice. Despite other political parties pitching in " the Congress' Amaresh Misra, for instance, notoriously threatened a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporter on Twitter: "We know where you live, Shilpi" " nobody else has been able to keep pace with the right's sheer efficiency or decibel levels. It is not so much that these voices are simply defending their hero, which is correct and laudable; it is that they are unanimous in wanting to silence any voice critical of NaMo, ruthlessly trolling down the merest hint of disagreement.

I found an amusing online game recently, a Right Wing Insult Generator. Each time you refresh the screen, a new string of abuse is generated " sickular, anti-national, gay-sex loving, anti-Hindu pacifist, Taliban-lover, Paki stooge, anti-development troll, Maoist, Trotskyist tree-hugger... it is quite a hilarious list. What is not so hilarious is that all these words and phrases are gleaned by the key-word generator from actual comments on actual websites. Disagreement is vital in a democracy, but the problem here is with tone. How does one engage with yobs?

The rationale behind such efficiently channelled and PR-generated hostility is obvious. Aggression and machismo are useful tools to project Narendra Modi's image as an alpha male " a man who represents a robust and rejuvenated BJP against an emasculated Congress, led by weaklings. This is the campaign from which the brash online supporter emerges. He is no accident but a carefully nurtured persona who has been taught that it is weakness to respond to an argument with mere counter-argument; one must destroy the arguer. Accommodating opposing ideas is considered submission, as is allowing the existence of films, art or books that question your belief system.

The strategy is to play to a kind of willing Indian who has often suffered from a slight inferiority complex on the world stage; the Indian who imagines he must now shout to be heard, one whose national pride is at stake at every turn. The voices representing this personality must be ber masculine and willing to take up arms to defend honour, religious beliefs, sexual mores " anything that is perceived to be under threat. To this personality, any Gandhian talk of non-violence sounds wimpish; Iron Man Patel makes a far better icon.

As election strategies go, this is just fine. It makes sense to create such a personality in the face of the much softer, weaker and ineffectual Rahul Gandhi. It makes sense because Indians want to be seen as strong, as waiting in the wings to grab power and become world leaders. The problem arises when the violence spills over from theory into practice quite so quickly and willingly. When verbal assault so often becomes actual violence " stones hurled, chairs smashed, women mauled, books burned " the stance is harder to ignore. Worse, it doesn't take much to provoke these reactions. They have been seen in the past spanning a range of issues " from art exhibitions to history books.

Demos in a democracy

To create an aggressive image in order to win an election might be good strategy but what happens afterwards when the boring job of governing must be done? It will be difficult to cork all this overflowing testosterone back into the bottle when ordinary administration and law and order concerns become important. Something the AAP found out when it went all guns blazing into Delhi's Khirki Extension to flush out a drug and prostitution gang. Even in a democracy, you cannot actually let the demos rule " something that the AAP will soon discover.

By adopting aggression as its guiding principle, the right wing is playing with the kind of Frankensteinian monster that it will never be able to control. It will inevitably attract rightist groups from the lunatic fringe who will take umbrage at everything. From couples celebrating Valentine's Day to women dancing in pubs, a dozen innocuous puppy dogs will come in the way every day, and in a real democracy, they cannot be run over by supporters already seething with so much rage.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/dissent-in-the-age-of-aggression/article5699623.ece

The cult of the leader

It is possible an archaeologist may one day puzzle over this holy relic: the bespectacled idol perched over the lingam inside the Shiva temple at Bhagwanpur, Uttar Pradesh, its Fair-and-Lovely' complexion in fetching contrast with its hot pink lips. Mediated through moffusil pop art, Narendra Modi's likeness may lack the gravitas of Michelangelo's Moses, but that has done nothing to deter the faithful. Sonia Gandhi has also begun to enter India's religious iconography, incarnating as the Goddess of Telangana and, earlier, as an eight-armed Durga in a Congress party calendar.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal doesn't need a temple: he has abandoned his atheism, claiming his own rise to power is proof god is on his side. The great Bertrand Russell would have been delighted: "Look at me," the philosopher mocked the theists. "I am such a splendid product that there must be design in the universe."

The rise of these cults of the leader, each invoking divinity to legitimise its power, points us to a dispiriting dysfunction in our political culture. "For the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins," wrote Salman Rushdie in The Moor's Last Sigh. "We were our own wooden horses, each one of us full of our doom."

The wages of chaos

From the time of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to his grandson, India's political bodies all orbited a single star. In the last two decades, the constellation fell apart, never quite regaining its centre. The idea that the political universe lacks a guiding hand seems self-evident: corruption and misadministration are endemic; economic growth is threatened; demographic and ecological pressures are mounting. The dramatic performances on the Telangana issue in Parliament on Thursday was just a scene in unfolding operatic crescendo, that spectators cannot but suspect may have a tragic end.

Leadership cults give the illusion of order, even if the choice is principally between a man who thinks Alexander's armies were beaten back on the banks of the Ganga, and another who mystifyingly proclaims that politics resides "in your pants."

It doesn't take a lot to notice that the major cults have an awful sameness to their scripture. Rahul Gandhi and Mr. Modi, though enmeshed in establishmentarian party machines, both cast themselves as outsiders. Mr. Modi thinks that "government has no business doing business"; Mr. Gandhi says he's upset business is being "held back by slow decision making." They both agree that some variant of community self-rule is a good thing, say the empowerment of women is a core concern, and agree on larger entitlements for the poor. And they're united in their outrage against corruption.

Mr. Modi has a vision: "India will once again rise and become a great power." Mr. Gandhi has a vision, too: he promises to propel India towards becoming a superpower.

Phrases like these have all the substance of a Chetan Bhagat novella: it's not for nothing that the word vision, after all, also applies to chimeras. They tell us next to nothing about what public policy interventions leaders intend to make. There's no detail at all on precisely how corruption will be stamped out, what administrative reforms will be put in place, or exactly how education will be improved. From all this, there's one safe bet to be made: whoever takes power in 2014 is guaranteed to make his predecessor look like an intellectual giant.

The lack of seriousness about actual reform has manifested itself in the outgoing Lok Sabha, which has passed less legislation than any of its full-term predecessors. The point of politics has become the possession of power, mainly for ends linked to municipal patronage, not its exercise for transformative ends.

For many Indians, political choice has become a matter of aesthetic preference, not rational decision-making. It may be true, as Mr. Modi's supporters say, that he has a record of delivering on governance. But if governance alone was the criteria, the data shows Mr. Modi's supporters ought be throwing their weight behind Ms Jayalalithaa. Mr. Gandhi's supporters, for their part, cast the choice as a defence of pluralism and social justice. His party, though, has an unsurpassed record as a practitioner of mass communal violence and economic injustice. Few Delhi voters who support the spartan Mr. Kejriwal would consider backing the even more austere Tripura Chief Minister, Manik Sarkar.

This is because our society has lost the intellectual capacity to seek the information that a rational choice would require. Issues of policy roll past Indian ears like Sanskrit mantras, incomprehensible to all but a caste of high priests. Indian democracy is thus reducing itself to a question of whether we like our heroes to have charming dimples or manly chests.

Fascism or farce?

Liberals sometimes argue that this degeneration marks a slow drift towards fascism. Mr Modi's holographic clones and his armies of followers have been read as evidence of an authoritarian anti-politics in which the person of the leader replaces god. It isn't just an idle argument. The historian Emilio Gentile argued that the Italian fascists used festivals and rituals to create a kind of lay religion " a cult of the Duce. The cultural critic Walter Benjamin argued that fascism's great success was to give the masses a means to express themselves, using politics for "the production of ritual values."

In India, though, politicians who cannot be credibly described as fascist have also used this idiom. Following the death of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.G. Ramachandran in 1987, 31 grief-stricken followers committed suicide. No less than 21 people killed themselves in 1986, mainly by burning themselves, to protest the arrest of his rival, M. Karunanidhi.

Last year, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa's fan H.U. Hussaini had a bust of her made up in human blood. Elsewhere, supporters were reported to have cut off their thumbs and tongues as acts of ritual sacrifice. Followers in Tamil Nadu, journalist D.B.S. Jeyaraj has recorded, "light camphor and lay flowers" before her photographs.

It would be tempting to write this off as some kind of amusing Tamil eccentricity, but the sad fact is that it is deeply woven into our national cultural fabric. Journalist Amita Verma has chronicled how former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kumari Mayawati asked her party workers to treat her as deity. Later, artist Mahesh Tripathi put up an exhibition with works depicting her in various goddess-like states.

Sonia Gandhi herself has long been cast by the Congress as a mother-goddess figure. Tamil Nadu Congress leader Vimla Ganesan, typically, said her leader was "above greed and power." She was also, Ms Ganesan went on, above human passion, asking "for clemency for her husband's murderer."

India's leadership crisis is part of a larger landscape of cultural dysfunction, which our political life simply provides a stage for.

The politics of Fan Bhakti'

The scholar M. Madhava Prasad called this political culture Fan Bhakti.' Dr. Prasad's reflections, published in 2007, were provoked by the rise and rise of movie star Rajinikanth. The actor's fans famously conducted a palabhishekham " the ritual washing of temple idols with milk " on his cut-outs. Hinduism, Dr. Prasad contended, allowed for the production of "a space of worship around any suitable image, however produced." It was not that fans watching an actor play Krishna mistook him for the real thing. Instead, the actor came to embody virtues one associated with godhood"for example, justice and the hope of a better life.

Fan Bhakti,' Dr. Prasad's work suggests, flourishes in cultures were politics fails to devolve meaningful power to people. India's people are thus reduced to worshippers before a deity, supplicating it for favours.

For those of us old enough to remember the disillusion that followed the seductive sunrises of Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the contenders in this election are just the latest in a long line of prophets. Faith in prophets is often closely followed by disillusion " but, then, as the durability of queues at temples shows, disillusion rarely deters believers.

The degeneration of our political life is likely enmeshed with a broader crisis. The obsessive influence questions of ethnic-religious identity have come to have in the lives of Indians; the tyrannical suppression of individual freedoms by tradition; the recrudescence superstition and ostentatious religiosity; of the anxieties over masculinity that so often erupt into rage: these together point to our failure to evolve a culture with the vocabulary modern democracies need.

It is improbable that meaningful political change will take place until society comes to value evidence-based thinking, reason and the pre-eminent republican quality, citizenship. Leaders will not hold themselves to higher standards of conduct until society starts demanding that of them. The democracy we've got is the one we've built.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-cult-of-the-leader/article5685768.ece?homepage=true

Synthetic lace lingerie ban prompts street protests in Russia and Kazakhstan

Up to 90 per cent of ladies' underwear could disappear from shop shelves across Russia due to new legislation brought in by EU-style "Eurasian Union" trade bloc