Smashing Pumpkins

Twas the night of Halloween in NYC. Warm weather with rain that at times streamed down onto the sea of umbrellas which were held by the onlookers of the NYC Halloween Parade. 6th avenue had thousands of people all squashed in, waiting to watch the parade. I was situated on 15th street and the parade didn't get to us until 8pm. After a short while some of the spectators started filtering out, giving us a much clearer view of the participants.

That parade basically felt like New Yorkers Gone Wild. Think about - Halloween in NYC, on a Saturday night. The claws emerged and fangs were bared and snarling erupted from those in costume.

Here were my top 4 parade participants/costumes, in no certain order:

1. Steve Urkel - complete with voice and personality
2. A chubby man with dreads in a speedo and whistle, shouting "I'm a lifeguard!"
3. A nun whom I saw smoking and shouted at saying: "Nuns can't smoke!" His response: "I'm pregnant too!", and the nun rubbed his fake big belly.
4. Michael Jackson. We saw 50 Michael Jacksons, but this young man had the right energy, persona, hair, voice, and the right jacket, of the young MJ in Thriller. His response to being told he was loved: "I love you too!" - that's what MJ would have said. No doubt.

Another MJ highlight were a load of people acting out Thriller, complete with music, zombies, and the wimpy girl. It was wicked, and brilliant.

And yes, I did get scared at one point, when some sort of huge bride with a ghostly face and blood-stained dress (bride zombie? dead bride? killer bride? vampire bride? I dunno) lunged right at me. I crouched down and said "AAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!"

Yep.

Seen and Not Heard

I recently read and reviewed Sughra Ahmed's analysis and report on young British Muslims, called Seen and Not Heard.

For those curious you can read it here.

Cheers.

War is Peace.

Heads of state and their colleagues who wage war and occupy others win the Nobel Peace Prize. Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, and now Barack Obama. In 2005 Colin Powell, an architect of the Iraq war who lied to the United Nations and said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, was nominated. A former nominee who enabled up to a million Iraqis to be killed, murdered, destroyed - was a nominee of the Nobel Peace Prize. What kind of peace is this?

How can a president who has spent 9 months in office, who was nominated after only 2 weeks in office, be nominated? On what grounds was Obama nominated, and then the winner of this award? A president who has only continued and increased two wars and occupations? Who is going to be sending potentially 40,000 more US troops to Afghanistan? A president whose administration continues to give billions in military aid to Israel, and blocks any movement that will put the Israeli government in court for crimes against humanity?

America is an imperialist and militarized state. The US government wreaks havoc around the world and starves and sieges and bombs millions upon millions. And its leader gets the biggest-name peace prize. How can there not be political motivation or marketing behind this? The leader of the world's biggest imperial state in history is awarded a peace prize for...saying he wants peace? What about those who actually do things for others, without any political motivation, but just for the good of humanity?

Instead the head of the world's most imperial imperialist state gets the peace prize.

The Nobel Peace Prize was never really about peace. Its about power.

I don't think Orwell could have even written this stuff up. Orwell, the master of 1984, a book that has a world where everything is upside down, where the government has the motto War is Peace. We live in an absurd world, just like the world in 1984.

I don't think Orwell could have thought the same day that Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize, America bombs the moon. For what? For wanting to find water-ice. We have trashed and failed our planet - for probably forever. (Read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.) It is like science fiction - to bomb and take over other planets, or in this case, the moon. Having put our Earth through so much destruction, and its only continuing, the imperialist and militarized American government decides to bomb the moon, to see if we can start putting our rubbish there instead. Without anyone else's consent, as if the United States owns the moon. Leave the moon alone.

War is Peace.


Is that our world now? War is Peace?

Roy and the Economist

Who is the reviewer? I've not been able to find out - isn't that interesting? I find it quite sad that the Economist published a review that undermines Roy's amazing and necessary work. I wonder what's going on...


From: Arundhati Roy

Hi folks
A letter to the Economist about their charming review of my book. No news from them, so feel free to post on websites/circulate.

To,
The Editor
The Economist 25 August 2009

Dear Sir

This is with regard to the review of my book “Listening to Grasshoppers” that appeared in the Economist. If this letter is long, ironically it is because the factual errors in the review are so many. In an attempt to highlight my “flawed reporting and incorrect analysis” the reviewer makes some extraordinary errors and leaps of logic:

1. “Ms Roy cites a massacre of perhaps 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which the state’s Hindu-nationalist government was allegedly complicit. Almost no senior official or Hinduist agitator has been prosecuted over the atrocity. And Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister then and now, is currently vying to take over the leadership of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and one day India. Many of the country’s industrialists would approve of that; even Ratan Tata, the gentlemanly head of the vast Tata Group which prides itself on its ethical dealings, has praised Mr Modi’s business-friendly policies. Nothing annoys Ms Roy more.”

Mr Tata did not merely praise Modi’s business policies, he endorsed him warmly and publicly as a future candidate for prime minister. In India the said Mr Modi is still being investigated for his role in the 2002 pogrom. In his successful election campaigns after the pogrom, Modi brazenly cultivated communal hatred. He is a member of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh) an organization that is proud of its fascist origins and counts both Hitler and Mussolini as its heroes. In addition to the massacres about 150,000 Muslims were driven from their homes during the carnage. Even today, under Mr Modi’s administration, most continue to live in ghettos, socially and economically boycotted in a brutal system of communal apartheid, while the killers continue to live as free, respectable citizens. Incidentally, after considering the available information, the US government has denied Mr Modi a visa. A handicap, wouldn’t you say, for a potential prime -minister? Incidentally, for more on the Tata’s “ethical dealings” you could google “Kalinganagar” or “Singur”.

2. “…she is not always a reliable witness. Her claim that in Kashmir last summer protesters were as likely to call for union with Pakistan as freedom from India is probably wrong; most seemed to want to be shot of both countries.”

I have never made such a claim. Nobody with an even passing acquaintance with Kashmir would (or should) say something so ridiculous. Given the intensity and violence of the fratricidal wars that Kashmiris have fought, and the thousands that have lost their lives over the Pakistan vs Freedom issue, and given that Kashmiri leadership is still unresolved about the question, it’s extraordinary that the reviewer can so casually and so glibly claim to know what the majority of people of Kashmir want. My essay on Kashmir is actually titled “Azadi”, which in Urdu means “Freedom”. Perhaps the reviewer is unfamiliar with the language?

3. “More typically, she appears to gather her facts from newspapers (her articles strike the reader rather as ‘lounge notes’), before selectively arranging and then exaggerating them to suit her own ends. For example, about 25% of India's territory is alleged to be affected by a Maoist insurgency, but that does not make it, as Ms Roy writes, ‘out of government control’.”

If the reviewer had cared to read the book instead of ransacking it, he/she would have come across a sentence that clarifies that several of the essays are “responses to the responses” about certain events. Given that much of my book is a critique of the disturbing role that a section of the corporate media has played in these events, is it surprising that media reports are frequently referred to? Most of the time this is in order to expose them for being false and motivated. To conclude from this that my “facts are gathered from newspapers” and that the articles are “lounge notes” is laughable.

The figure of 25 % of India’s territory being under Maoist insurgency is a figure advanced by the Indian security establishment and is probably a slight exaggeration. However, it is a fact that vast swathes of India’s territory are out of government control. It is for this reason that the Government has announced that in October, after the rains, there will be a military operation in states like Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand in which ground troops will be backed up with helicopter gunships and satellite mapping. A brigade headquarters is being established in Raipur (Chhattisgarh), and 26,000 paramilitary troops (the same Rashtriya Rifles who are deployed in Kashmir, and similar to the Assam Rifles deployed in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland) are being raised for this war. This is in addition the thousands of security personnel who are already deployed in these areas. Perhaps the reviewer has never visited Dantewara , seen the burned, empty villages, or crossed the Indravati into the territory that is called “Pakistan”, where police and security forces do not venture? Perhaps he/she hasn’t heard of Abujmaad?

4. “Beyond India, her grasp of her subject-matter gets looser. If Ms Roy believes, as she writes, that a good portion of Africa’s ‘contemporary horrors’ are caused by America’s ‘new colonial interests’, she would do well to pay a visit to the continent.”

My book is about India, not Africa, but yes, there is a paragraph about Africa. Here’s the sentence the reviewer refers to: “The battle to control Africa’s mineral wealth rages on— scratch the surface of contemporary horrors in Africa, in Rwanda, the Congo, Nigeria, pick your country and chances are that you will be able to trace the story back to the old colonial interests of Europe and the new colonial interests of the United States.” My mistake here is that I didn’t mention the new colonial interests of countries like China and India as well. Does your reviewer not know about the legacy of Shell Oil in Nigeria? Or the politics that surrounds the mining of a mineral called coltan? Or of how Belgium’s colonial regime structured the barriers of hatred between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda with their racist profiling and social engineering? As for the recommendation that I pay a visit to the continent…it’s a grand idea, but how does one visit an entire continent? I have visited parts of it. Plenty of times. But the reviewer should know that it is possible to know things about places even if you haven’t been to them, like historians know things about history without traveling back in time.

5. “For a more measured analysis, Ms Roy should perhaps turn to the finance ministry’s recently published Economic Survey. There she would read that, ‘High growth is critical to generate the revenues needed for meeting our social welfare objectives.’ Ms Roy should take note.”

Am I really being waved back into my seat with the finance ministry’s Economic Survey? I thought everybody knew that the cut back on public spending (social welfare objectives) is almost in direct proportion to the growth rate? It’s often a pre-requisite when loans from the World Bank, the ADB and the IMF are negotiated. Isn’t that what structural adjustment is all about? Or is this the old Trickle Down theory being re-cycled? I’ve always wondered about this. Some times they say the Free Market provides a level playing field – but then when questioned, they ask us to wait for Trickle Down. But things only Trickle Down slopes don’t they? Anyway, there is a school of thought, which believes that people actually do have rights. The right, for instance to resist the Government taking away their land and their livelihoods, often at gun point, and then ordering them to wait for the leftovers (if the gentlemen leave any) to trickle down after the feast.

Regardless of our obvious ideological differences I hope you agree that errors and innuendo of this nature undermine the real debate.

With best wishes

Arundhati Roy
2A Kautilya Marg
New Delhi 110021

***

Necessary, but wrong

Jul 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. By Arundhati Roy. Hamish Hamilton; 256 pages; £14.99. To be published in America as “Field Notes on Democracy” by Haymarket Books in October. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

IT IS impossible not to admire Arundhati Roy. Despite her flawed reporting and analysis, her left-wing prejudices and one-sided portentous writing, the author who carried off the 1997 Man Booker prize for her novel, “The God of Small Things”, is just the sort of brave and energetic critic that India needs.

Not for her the national image projected by India’s smug elite, of a nascent superpower lifting off. Ms Roy’s India is a truer one—a poor, rural country beset by grave problems, where, notwithstanding the holding of regular elections, wretched injustices are perpetrated by a corrupt and often brutal state.

As prime evidence of democracy’s failure to protect Indians, in this collection of her recent journalism and other writings, Ms Roy cites a massacre of perhaps 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which the state’s Hindu-nationalist government was allegedly complicit. Almost no senior official or Hinduist agitator has been prosecuted over the atrocity. And Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister then and now, is currently vying to take over the leadership of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and one day India. Many of the country’s industrialists would approve of that; even Ratan Tata, the gentlemanly head of the vast Tata Group which prides itself on its ethical dealings, has praised Mr Modi’s business-friendly policies. Nothing annoys Ms Roy more.

The Hindu nationalists’ hateful tendencies are well-known. Perhaps less notorious is the weakness of India’s non-political institutions, and Ms Roy skewers most of them. In three deft articles, she examines the dubious methods of the police in securing the conviction of Muhammad Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri, for masterminding a 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building—allegedly by planting evidence and torturing him into confessing. Given that India’s police are often alleged to use torture, and have long enjoyed impunity in Kashmir, where Mr Guru was picked up, this would not be surprising. But neither India’s complacent judiciary nor its often-craven journalists shows much interest in reinvestigating his case. Mr Guru remains on death row.

Whether or not he is guilty, Ms Roy does laudable work in defending Mr Guru when others—including at times India’s legal fraternity, according to Ms Roy—would not. On other issues, however, she is not always a reliable witness. Her claim that in Kashmir last summer protesters were as likely to call for union with Pakistan as freedom from India is probably wrong; most seemed to want to be shot of both countries.

But that faulty observation was at least noted by Ms Roy in the field. More typically, she appears to gather her facts from newspapers (her articles strike the reader rather as “lounge notes”), before selectively arranging and then exaggerating them to suit her own ends. For example, about 25% of India’s territory is alleged to be affected by a Maoist insurgency, but that does not make it, as Ms Roy writes, “out of government control”. Beyond India, her grasp of her subject-matter gets looser. If Ms Roy believes, as she writes, that a good portion of Africa’s “contemporary horrors” are caused by America’s “new colonial interests”, she would do well to pay a visit to the continent.

So entrenched is the anti-globalisation that informs her world view, she would be tough to dissuade. But what alternative strategies does she advocate for improving India? Hard to say. A rare suggestion for better governance—the formation of a shadow parliament “that keeps an
underground drumbeat”—does not seem terribly serious. On economic policy, Ms Roy has even less to offer—other than to slam recent governments for aspiring to rapid economic growth. This is a “project” she considers to be “encrypted with genocidal potential”. For a more measured analysis, Ms Roy should perhaps turn to the finance ministry’s recently published Economic Survey. There she would read that, “High growth is critical to generate the revenues needed for meeting oursocial welfare objectives.” Ms Roy should take note.

Dear Tropical Storm Danny

Dear Tropical Storm Danny,
You sure like to rain a lot. But its ok, I don't mind, because I don't have to walk around in the city.

Instead I'm visiting the comic family in Boston who have a cat that likes to follow me around and sit on all of us. Some members of the comic family like to imitate how their cat constantly meows. Today we made stuffed mushrooms and it was a bit difficult to not lick my fingers in the process. Earlier we went to the Indian shop and I witnessed how my phupi and phupa buy their meat - by being very animated and loud. The cashier guy at the front left the shop for something and so my phupa stood behind the counter and pretended to be the cashier. In the meantime my phupi bought what she claims is the best aachar that I will ever eat: "Punjabi Mango Pickle" made by a company called "Mother's Recipe." I'm taking it back to NY with me.

I've been told recently that its quite remarkable that my whole extended family still speaks Urdu/Hindu predominantly. I always took it for granted that all the adults in my family speak only Urdu to each other, and for the most part, to their kids as well. In my family if you don't speak Urdu well or have difficulty speaking it, you basically get teased. But no one really minds getting teased - when I was growing up it was a catalyst for me to speak and learn Urdu. I forced my parents to speak to me only in Urdu when I was about 10 because I didn't want to get teased anymore. And it worked, though of course my Urdu could definitely improve.

And so I've always taken it for granted that my whole family still communicates in our native tongue, instead of the language of the colonizers. I realize now though that many South Asian families, especially in these States, have practically abandoned their native languages in an effort to assimilate. I guess my family members are more stubborn to stick to their ways - which in this example, is a good thing.

Peace.

Back

It's nice to be back in the city after a few weeks. But its also bittersweet.
We'll see what happens, yeah?

"Various"

I wonder how many mixtapes there are around the world that are buried in boxes, titled "Various."

I am at my parents' house at the moment. My family has done so much moving around over the years, that most of my stuff is in boxes, with a lot of things getting thrown out over time. As a result, I have very few remaining possessions from high school and beyond. Somehow, I didn't throw out my small cassette collection. I rediscovered them yesterday in my cupboard when I was trying to make my room look as clean and tidy as it was before this visit. My sister-in-law once said something like "Hena whenever you come home it looks like your room just throws up stuff."

Anyway, here's such a mixtape from my early high school days, I think from the year 2000. That means that this tape is almost a decade old! I played it today in the car. Let's just say the audio quality wasn't that amazing - but it was great to hear these songs again.


Here's the complete playlist, with the correct spellings and titles. Its a bit obvious that I was going through a bit of a funk and disco phase, with some soul thrown in. As you can tell I had discovered the oldies station. There's also some classic house.

Side A:

BeeGees - Staying Alive
The Spinners - Its A Shame
KC & the Sunshine Band - That's the Way I Like It
Archie Bell and the Drells - Tighten Up
PM Dawn - Set Adrift on Memory Bliss
U2 - Beautiful Day
Michael Jackson - Rock With You
Grace - Not Over Yet
Livin' Joy - Dreamer

Side B:

Jennifer Paige - Crush
Michael Jackson - Billie Jean
Michael Jackson - Beat It
Soul Decision - Faded
Cheryl Lynn - Got To Be Real
The Friends of Distinction - Grazing in the Grass
Labelle - Lady Marmalade
Average White Band - Pick Up the Pieces


Its kind of fun to rediscover my old tapes. I never had that many as I transitioned to starting a CD collection pretty quickly. But its kind of nice to have to press forward, and rewind, to hear certain songs - there's no ultimate instant gratification, that you get with CDs, mp3s, and now Youtube. I haven't heard many of these songs in years, and now I can find them right away online, which is kind of cool but I feel like something is taken away with that instant gratification.

I didn't know who half of these songs were by or had totally forgotten, until I typed up this playlist just now. Another discovery.

I now remember making these tapes and listening to the radio, waiting for the right song to come on so that I could record it. I must have gotten pretty good at this, because this tape sounds almost seamless - I must have got skilled at pressing record and pause at the right time. I had such useful skills.

And, I don't think of myself as a nostalgic person. This mixtape however is a bit of a window into a past version of me - I can hear what I was listening to at that time, at what was influencing me. Can mixtapes be a sort of personal historical documents, like journals? I've never read one page from my old journals, but I'm listening to my old mixtapes.