'Removal' of Tibet from the Movie Rockstar

November 7, 2011

To, Smt Leela Samson,

Central Board of Film Certification,

Bharat Bhavan, 91E Walkeshwar Road,

Mumbai 400006, Maharashtra, India.

 Subject: 
Respected Smt Leela Samson,


This is with reference to the recent Censor Board directive to the filmmakers of the Hindi movie Rockstar, directed by Imtiaz Ali. We are surprised and shocked to learn about the Central Board of Film Certification's decision to remove of the Tibetan National Flag and blurring the 'Free Tibet' banners from the movie sequence. We see no logic in preventing the filmmaker either from discussing Tibet or displaying the Tibetan National Flag of an occupied country when the Government of India has officially given asylum to lakhs of Tibetans in this country and has even allowed the Tibetan Government-in-Exile to function from the Indian soil for the last fifty years.


We, the concerned citizens of India and the supporters of Tibetan struggle for Independence would like to know from you the reason for such a drastic step, as there was no Indian Government directive on the use of the Tibetan National Flag in the country. Instead any Indian citizen and those Tibetans living in exile in India are free to fly the Tibetan National Flag anywhere in India. We would like to bring to your notice that we do not consider China a friendly nation as it had a long war with us in 1962 resulting in Chinese annexation and occupation of 32,000 Sq miles of Indian Territory. Recently Chinese Army had entered many places in Chumar Sector of Ladakh region. The Chinese government openly claims Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as their territory and the Chinese Embassy continue to issue stapled visas to the residents of the state of J&K and Arunachal Pradesh to provoke the Indian people. Referring to all these 'friendly' activities of China, we cannot term the relations India has with china as cordial but aggressive


May I recall movies such as Haqeeqat by Chetan Anand and Prem Pujari by Vijay Anand that prominently highlighted the issue of Tibet and the Chinese aggression on India. Tibet is a strategic issue for India from the defence point of view and by acting against the nation’s interest. The recent controversial acts of the Central Board of Film Certification raise doubt about its loyalty to the Union of India. We would request you to explain and clarify the reasons to the concerned people in this country which may once again strengthen our beliefs in institutions such as CBFC.

Your decision to ‘remove’ the Tibetan National Flag and Free Tibet slogans from an Indian movie gives us an impression that you have either acted under the Chinese pressure or have deliberately tried to appease the Chinese Government thus jeopardising the security and integrity of the Indian nation. We protest the denial of freedom of speech and expression enshrined to us by our Constitution.


Yours Sincerely,
Rohit Singh
(Campaigns Coordinator, Friends of Tibet)
rohit.singh@friendsoftibet.org


Friends of Tibet, PO Box 16674, Bombay 400050, India
फ्रेंड्स ऑफ तिब्बत, पीओ बॉक्स १६६७४, मुम्बई ४०००५०, भारत.


Friends of Tibet is a people’s movement to keep alive the issue of Tibet through direct action. Our activities are aimed at ending China’s occupation of Tibet and the suffering of the Tibetan people. Friends of Tibet supports the continued struggle of the Tibetan people for independence. Friends of Tibet is also one of the principal organisers of World Tibet Day around the world. To know more, visit: www.friendsoftibet.org

PG Wodehouse: a life in letters

Countless readers of Wodehouse have testified to the way his novels have their own "stimulating effect" on morale, providing not just comic, but almost medicinal effects: the exiledKaiser Wilhelm, after his defeat in the first world war, consoled himself by reading Wodehouse to his "mystified" staff; the late Queen Mother allegedly read "The Master" on a nightly basis, to set aside the "strains of the day"; more recently, news reports tell of the imprisoned Burmese comedian Zarganafinding comfort in Wodehouse during solitary confinement. "Books are my best friends", he confided. "I liked the PG Wodehouse best. Joy in the Morning – Jeeves, Wooster and the fearsome Aunt Agatha. It's difficult to understand, but I've read it three times at least. And I used it as a pillow too."

Wodehouse was born in 1881, and his early years were, in many ways, highly conventional. His father, Ernest, was "as normal as rice pudding" and determined to give his sons a childhood to match. The only thing conspicuously – but critically – missing was Wodehouse's parents. Ernest had a post as a magistrate in Hong Kong, so the children were billeted with nannies and various relatives in England. Pelham Grenville had almost no parental contact for the first 16 years of his life...

The "cladding", for Wodehouse, has always been his written style. While difficult to analyse (a critic in Punch compared the act to "taking a spade to a soufflé"), there are a variety of figures of speech that recur throughout his fiction, and his letters. One is the way in which he deflects emotion away from the self. When disaster occurs in the shape of income-tax demands or illness, it is the "home" that he metonymically laments. When he expresses admiration for his wife, her outfits – rather than her body – garner the praise.

Such manoeuvres are perfected in his fiction, with his use of the transferred epithet – a technique that casts the state of mind of the protagonist onto a nearby, often unlikely inanimate object. We have, for example, "I balanced a thoughtful lump of sugar on my teaspoon"; "he uncovered the fragrant eggs and b and I pronged a moody forkful"; or the memorable ablutions in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: "As I sat in the bathtub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, 'Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar', it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy."..

Faced with a changing political landscape, Wodehouse does what he knows best – he restyles it. But in a reversal of his fictional technique, this time his similes domesticate rather than distance – it brings the horrors of war home, but leaves the pain behind.

There is something telling about the absence of sentiment in Wodehouse's postwar letters. While forever saddened by his "blunder", he refuses to pay lip service to the all too readily summoned brand of postwar existential shame – what Primo Levi calls "the vaster shame, the shame of the world", finds no place in Wodehouse's articulated emotional repertoire. This is not to say that it wasn't felt. But complex emotion, for Wodehouse, was best played down. Shame, especially, was to be worked out according to the best codes of public-school etiquette, in the privacy of one's mental dormitory. The postwar period also shows Wodehouse recognising that the tenor of his fictional universe rode uneasily with the contemporary moment, with its "welter of sex" and "demand for gloom and tragedy". While his novels preserve their Edenic calm, his letters sometimes seem bewildered or angry. His chief pleasure, he noted, was "writing stinkers to people who attack me in the press".

The letters of his final years are calmer, offering a view into the endearing routine of his domestic life – the round of dog-walking, cocktails and daily soap operas. Ultimately, writing, and his beloved Ethel, were his greatest loves, with the rest of the world kept at bay. In an open letter to some admirers, he admits that his fiction was never intended to fit the criteria of "relevance": "The world I write about, always a small one – one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie Wooster would say – is now not even small, it is nonexistent. It has gone with the wind and is one with Nineveh and Tyre. In a word, it has had it. But I have not altogether lost hope of a revival."

The beauty of this sentence is that it enacts what it says. In a superlative run of clichés – "gone with the wind", "one with Nineveh", "in a word" – Wodehouse revels in, and revives, the contained sphere of an exhausted language (a "small world" of its own) and makes it a little larger. So it is with the worlds of his fiction. Almost lyric in their perfection, sometimes escapist, but never small-minded, they offer what Adorno called "the dream of a world where things could be otherwise". Right until the end, Wodehouse wrote to preserve the world of innocence he never quite grew out of – and to resist a world he never quite grew into – a ghost of Gladys by his side..

Read the full article: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/04/pg-wodehouse-life-in-letters>

Do crowds make us more stupid?

Shortly after the popular uprising that led to the establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871, the politician Georges Clemenceau recalled witnessing a riot: “Suddenly a terrific noise broke out, and the mob which filled the courtyard burst into the street in the grip of some kind of frenzy…All were shrieking like wild beasts without realising what they were doing.” For those who followed the English riots of 2011, the terms are familiar. On television, in newspapers and comment threads, the rioters were repeatedly likened to animals in the grip of a primitive frenzy, induced not by drink or drugs but by another culprit: the crowd.

Crowds, we are often told, are dumb. They obliterate reason, sentience and accountability, turning individuals into helpless copycats. Commentators on the riots offered different explanations but most agreed that crowd psychology was part of the problem. “The dominant trait of the crowd is to reduce its myriad individuals to a single, dysfunctional persona,” wrote the novelist Will Self in theNew Statesman. “The crowd is stupider than the averaging of its component minds.” The violence was said to have spread like a “contagion” through the crowd, facilitated by social media. For those who wanted to sound scientific, the term to drop was “deindividuation”: the loss of identity and moral responsibility that can occur in a group. But do crowds really make us more stupid?

Earlier this year, the world watched a crowd bring down an autocratic government, by the simple act of coming together in one place, day after day, night after night. Egyptian protesters created a micro-society in Tahrir Square, organising garbage collection, defending themselves when they needed to, but otherwise ensuring the protest remained peaceful. As well as courage, this took intelligence, discipline and restraint. Few international observers accused the crowd in Tahrir Square of being dysfunctional, or of turning its members into animals...

John Drury, a psychologist at Sussex university who studies crowd behaviour, believes that the idea that crowds induce irrational behaviour and erase individuality just isn’t supported by the evidence. First, most crowds aren’t violent. The crowd in the shopping mall or at a music festival is usually calm and ordered. Even crowds that include conflicting groups, as at football matches, are more likely to be peaceful than not. Second, even when crowds do turn violent, they aren’t necessarily irrational. In the 18th century England was afflicted by food riots. If ever there was an atavistic reason to riot, that was surely it. But the historian E.P. Thompson showed that the riots took place not when food was at its most scarce but when people saw merchants selling grain at a steep profit; the rioters were motivated by a rational sense of injustice rather than the “animal” drive of hunger...


Read the full article: <http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/ian-leslie/crowds>

America’s Deadly Dynamics With Iran

Iran may be the most challenging test of the Obama administration’s focus on new, cheap technologies that could avoid expensive boots on the ground; drones are the most obvious, cyberweapons the least discussed. It does not quite add up to a new Obama Doctrine, but the methods are defining a new era of nearly constant confrontation and containment. Drones are part of a tactic to keep America’s adversaries off balance and preoccupied with defending themselves. And in the past two and a half years, they have been used more aggressively than ever. There are now five or six secret American drone bases around the world. Some recently discovered new computer worms suggest that a new, improved Stuxnet 2.0 may be in the works for Iran.

Not surprisingly, the Iranians are refusing to sit back and take it — which is one reason many believe the long shadow war with Iran is about to ramp up dramatically. At the White House and the C.I.A., officials say the recently disclosed Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States — by blowing up a tony Georgetown restaurant frequented by senators, lobbyists and journalists — was just the tip of the iceberg. American intelligence officials now believe that the death of a Saudi diplomat in Pakistan earlier this year was an assassination. And they see evidence of other plots by the Quds Force, the most elite Iranian military unit, from Yemen to Latin America.

The Ally From Hell - US Pak relations today..

See the recent BBC documentary Double Cross: 

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBq684IR5tQ>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ_mzOaf8Js>

“The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term, and long-term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon,” President Obama said last year at an international nuclear-security meeting in Washington. Al-Qaeda, Obama said, is “trying to secure a nuclear weapon—a weapon of mass destruction that they have no compunction at using.”

Pakistan would be an obvious place for a jihadist organization to seek a nuclear weapon or fissile material: it is the only Muslim-majority state, out of the 50 or so in the world, to have successfully developed nuclear weapons; its central government is of limited competence and has serious trouble projecting its authority into many corners of its territory (on occasion it has difficulty maintaining order even in the country’s largest city, Karachi); Pakistan’s military and security services are infiltrated by an unknown number of jihadist sympathizers; and many jihadist organizations are headquartered there already...

 In an interview this summer in Islamabad, a senior official of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), the Pakistani military’s spy agency, told The Atlantic that American fears about the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were entirely unfounded. “Of all the things in the world to worry about, the issue you should worry about the least is the safety of our nuclear program,” the official said. “It is completely secure.” He went on to say, “It is in our interest to keep our bases safe as well. You must trust us that we have maximum and impenetrable security. No one with ill intent can get near our strategic assets.”..

Like many statements made by Pakistan’s current leaders, this one contained large elements of deceit. At least six facilities widely believed to be associated with Pakistan’s nuclear program have already been targeted by militants. In November 2007, a suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying workers to the Sargodha air base, which is believed to house nuclear weapons; the following month, a school bus was attacked outside Kamra air base, which may also serve as a nuclear storage site; in August 2008, Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers attacked what experts believe to be the country’s main nuclear-weapons-assembly depot in Wah cantonment. If jihadists are looking to raid a nuclear facility, they have a wide selection of targets: Pakistan is very secretive about the locations of its nuclear facilities, but satellite imagery and other sources suggest that there are at least 15 sites across Pakistan at which jihadists could find warheads or other nuclear materials...

Nuclear-weapons components are sometimes moved by helicopter and sometimes moved over roads. And instead of moving nuclear material in armored, well-defended convoys, the SPD prefers to move material by subterfuge, in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic. According to both Pakistani and American sources, vans with a modest security profile are sometimes the preferred conveyance. And according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, the Pakistanis have begun using this low-security method to transfer not merely the “de-mated” component nuclear parts but “mated” nuclear weapons. Western nuclear experts have feared that Pakistan is building small, “tactical” nuclear weapons for quick deployment on the battlefield. In fact, not only is Pakistan building these devices, it is also now moving them over roads.

What this means, in essence, is this: In a country that is home to the harshest variants of Muslim fundamentalism, and to the headquarters of the organizations that espouse these extremist ideologies, including al-Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (which conducted the devastating terror attacks on Mumbai three years ago that killed nearly 200 civilians), nuclear bombs capable of destroying entire cities are transported in delivery vans on congested and dangerous roads. And Pakistani and American sources say that since the raid on Abbottabad, the Pakistanis have provoked anxiety inside the Pentagon by increasing the pace of these movements. In other words, the Pakistani government is willing to make its nuclear weapons more vulnerable to theft by jihadists simply to hide them from the United States, the country that funds much of its military budget.    Read more:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/the-ally-from-hell/8730/?single_page=true

See the recent BBC documentary Double Cross: 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBq684IR5tQ>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ_mzOaf8Js>

A Historical View of Economic Categories

NB: This essay on Marxist economic categories arose out of a lecture delivered in Hindu College in 1987, and was published in Mainstream, Vol XXVI No. 35 June 11, 1988

The founder of neo-classical economics, Alfred Marshal, defined economics as the study of man “ in the ordinary business of life” . It is not surprising that he should have referred to life as a business - his choice of phrase is but an example of the uncritical ideological reflexes of capitalist society which characterizes much of ‘social science’. When we are urged to “Be Indian, Buy Indian”, is not ‘being’ equated with ‘buying’? When state policy is proclaimed as being neither Right or Left, but merely ‘Good for India’ (all states exult in patriotic virtue), does not this mystical abstraction serve as an ideological cloak for the accumulation of capital, as a mode of representing the interest of a part of society as its collective interest? Does it not serve to remind us that the very notion of the Good is tending towards global uniformity and subject to IMF approval? Dominant trends in social science treat as axioms such phrases as “ the productivity of Capital”, the “Good for the Nation”, the “Greatest Good of the greatest number”, the “ Growth of the economy”, etc. all of which serve to obfuscate still further the object of their investigations.

In an essay on Marxian economics —she presumes there is such a thing— Joan Robinson dismisses Marx’s method as “Hegelian stuff and nonsense” and then goes on to speak of the ‘productivity’ of capital, reducing the latter sometimes to machines and sometimes to applied science and technology. She goes on to appeal for the necessity of liberating capital from private ownership, as if its alien and despotic character were not its very essence. The plot thickens. It is clear that we need to look critically at the language of economics and to look outside its domain, because to ask the apologist of the status quo for clarifications of basic questions is like expecting to comprehend the inner universe of the asylum by asking its inmates to write textbooks of grammar.

The so-called political science reduces the definition of the nation-state to an arithmetical sum of geographical, demographic and social attributes with no apparent links between them. Similarly, common-sensical economics refers us to three “factors of production”, Land Labour and Capital, understood not merely as three forms of distribution of revenue, but as three independent sources of value creation, working harmoniously together. Marx referred to this conception sarcastically as the ‘Trinity formula’ and said of these ‘factors’, that “they have about the same relation to each other as lawyers fees, red beets, and music.” Denoted thus by the Trinity formula, capitalism appears as “an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time as mere things” . Marx stresses that it is an illusion to derive ground-rent simply from the earth, or wages simply from labor, but that these forms of distribution presuppose modern, capitalistically modified landed property and modern wage-labor. Land and labor in this simple form are common to all modes of production, whereas capital is a definite social relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society.

Paradoxically, the same common-sense that treats capital as a thing, a mere natural factor of production, also tells us that capital creates wealth, that money somehow magically begets more money, and that profits spring automatically from the difference between the cost price and the sales price of commodities. Marx on the other hand, refers to capital as being ‘productive’ only in the one sense of its being the ruling social relation of the bourgeois mode of production, a relation which enforces surplus labor in a disguised form and develops the social productive forces. But by no means does ‘it’ add to value of commodities or create value. To confound capital with labour as two equivalent ‘factors of production’ is to confuse the energy behind the whiplash with the motive power provided by the horse. Its real ‘productivity’ lies in its insatiable hunger for surplus-value. Thus, questions such as “what is wealth” and “what are the factors of production?” resolves themselves further into the question, what is productivity?” and this cannot be dealt with except historically.. 

Read the full essay at http://www.sacw.net/article2367.html

Also see - An analytical essay on corruption

The Currency of Sentiment: An Essay on Informal Accumulation in Colonial India

The Twenty-First Century - the End of History?

This essay originated as the Chandrasekhar Memorial Lecture, delivered in Patna on September 20, 2000:

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War are events of great magnitude. Because we are living through them, many of us do not appreciate fully the significance of what has happened - but as the new century unfolds it will become clearer. For certain liberal intellectuals these events signify the end of history itself - that is, history interpreted as the realisation of the idea of progress. Thus, Hegel’s celebration of the Prussian absolutist state is replicated in Fukuyama’s understanding of liberal capitalism as the final point of arrival of historical evolution. This ideologically coloured concept of history carries the implication that the future can unfold only as an endless vista of capitalist accumulation, and that there is a logical and natural connection between capitalism and democracy. Such theories are linked to classical political-economic notions of capital as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, or an ahistoric “factor of production”. 

The same presumptions underlie the view that capitalism is an economic system which mysteriously combines greed and profiteering with the fulfilment of human interests through what Adam Smith named “the hidden hand” of the market. Contemporary history has also been witness to the ideological rise of monetarist triumphalism, and neo-liberalism, the politically inspired dismantlement of the gains of social-democracy, and an all-round crisis of vision that affects both left and right-wing political forces. It has heralded an era of identity politics and fragmentation, creating more and more barriers between ordinary people on the one hand, coupled with structural adjustments geared toward maximum freedom for MNC’s and speculative capital, on the other. After 9/11, it been engulfed in the first overt phase of an emergent world order, one of whose characteristics is a global assault on civil liberties and long-standing legal conventions on human rights in wartime. It is now a matter of intense debate whether this phase is the last gasp of American imperialism, or the first expression of a more global and esoteric empire, the Empire of Capital.

The idea that capitalism is a permanent arrangement is an assumption that we must challenge. But there is a problem here. Right-wing triumphalism may indeed be challenged when placed in historical perspective. However, radical theory cannot approach the gigantic historical events of the century gone by without performing a thoroughgoing critique of its own past. Is it capable of doing this? The traditions of the past weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, said Karl Marx - and the movement for social transformation is certainly living through a nightmare. To what extent is it of our own making? 
Read the full essay: http://www.sacw.net/article2368.html

See also:

A Finer Balance - An Essay on the Possibility of Reconciliation

Closing the Circle: Article on Revolution in Frontier, August 2012