India’s Tommy Hilfiger utopia is a bluff that will soon be called across the globe

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Krauze-007 Last week, as India's TV anchors and columnists worked themselves up into a moralistic frenzy about a measure of poverty proposed by the planning commission (40p a day per person), I visited the new outlet for Tommy Hilfiger in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Press coverage about the opening, and accounts of the new Hermès store in Mumbai, which will sell saris for £6,000, seemed to make debates about India's poverty line look irrelevant. Himachal, too, seemed to be taking a giant step towards becoming a consumer of western brand names.

The shop was empty, the salesmen sunk into torpor. There were no likely customers in sight when I passed it a few days later. Obviously, there are few takers for the reassuringly expensive preppy look in one of India's predominantly rural states. But the wisdom of financial elites and their mouthpieces in the media rarely brushes against actuality. In any case, appearances are everything in the age of globalisation.

Along with Tommy Hilfiger, several new private “universities” have also opened up recently in Himachal. According to a local daily, the Tribune, one of these institutions enrolled students and started offering courses even before it came into legal existence. You might put down this haste to the high demand for quality education among India's overwhelmingly youthful population. But as the Tribune described in a series of reports, the universities not only lack faculties, laboratories and libraries; a few do not meet the criteria for acquiring property in the state.

In other words, private universities have become a pretext for real estate speculators to acquire expensive land from the government: another example of the collusion between state and private business manifested recently in some of India's biggest corruption scandals.

More here.

The Lioness of Iran

Iran’s most prominent poet, a two-time Nobel nominee, on the greatest epic in history, the nightmare of censorship, and why her country will eventually achieve democracy.

Shiva Rahbaran in Guernica:

Simin_Behbahani300 Simin Behbahāni is optimistic about where Persian thought and literature are headed despite Iranian society’s many post-revolution disillusionments. She speaks of the ruinous itinerary of the “literature of censorship” and the phenomenon of self-censorship, but she believes that exceptional knowledge has been stored up given Iranian social and cultural resistance to the consequences of the 1979 revolution. This knowledge creates fertile ground for the growth of contemporary Persian literature. From this perspective, the importance of poets and writers for the survival of Iranian civil society is undeniable. Behbahāni points out that this role has been inherited today after a thousand years of attacks on Iran’s writers and thinkers.

Behbahāni views her poetry in its historical context. She sees herself as an iconoclast, but has never severed her link with Iran’s past literature. On this same basis, far from attaching any importance, as a poet, to ‘being a woman,’ she considers any reference to it an insult. In other words, her poetry is part of Persian poetry as a whole, whether produced by men or by women.

More here.

Where is India’s Steve Jobs?

10-Jobs-Obit-IndiaInk-blog480 Over at the NYT's India Ink blog Samanth Subramanian talks to 3QD contributor Aditya Dev Sood (also check out the Design!public blog, curated by Aditya's Center for Knowledge Societies):

Perhaps this is a hollow, even narcissistic, question. Brazil hasn’t produced a Steve Jobs; neither has China, the Philippines, Zambia, Australia or any one of dozens of countries around the world. We cannot even be certain that America “produced” Jobs, in the sense that a factory produces an automobile, by processing a load of raw material into a finished specimen; Jobs may have been entirely sui generis and only coincidentally American. But I put the question anyway to Aditya Dev Sood, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Knowledge Societies, a consulting firm that works in what may be considered Jobs’ pet areas: user experience design and innovation management.

The question of innovation has been weighing particularly heavily on Mr. Sood’s mind because, later this week in Bangalore, his firm will host Design Public, a conference on innovation and the public interest. Mr. Sood’s first thought, unsurprisingly, concerned the Indian education system, “which prepares us for society by a series of instrumental grading mechanisms that treat us like chickens in a hatchery.” This is, he contended, a legacy of colonization, and although Thomas Babington Macaulay’s infamous Minute of 1835 is now deep in India’s past, it still lays out colonial sentiments on education vividly.

Macaulay, who served on the Indian governor-general’s Council of India between 1834 and 1838, presented his Minute as part of discussions leading up to a reform of English education in India. Macaulay saw education in India as fit only for “conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population,” and he decried scholars who “who live on the public while they are receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to them that, when they have received it, they must either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives.” Macaulay’s views fitted the principles of colonial governance, Mr. Sood said: “They needed people to run around and man the arms of the state, not to propel the economy forward. We still haven’t reformed that system of education.”

Is a New Sectarianism Reshaping the Arab World?

Ibish3 Hussein Ibish over at his blog:

Across the Arab world, terrifying sectarian dynamics are starting to emerge, essentially pitting Arab Sunnis versus all religious minorities. The elements of this have been obvious for quite a while, but the pattern has become so pronounced and almost pervasive that it demands to be recognized no matter how frightening the prospects.

Throughout the region, political forces are lining up time and again along this extremely dangerous binary divide. For instance, the ecumenism of the Egyptian revolution has given way to the most gruesome sectarian violence between the military and Islamist mobs on the one hand and Coptic protesters on the other hand. This was particularly evident over the weekend, with deadly clashes and sectarian incitement raging throughout Cairo.

The Syrian regime has done its best to cast the uprising in that country in a sectarian light, with a disturbing degree of success. Regional support for Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite-minority rule is now almost entirely restricted to non-Sunni Arabs (as well as Iran), including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Shia-led Iraqi government, Shia parliamentarians and activists in Kuwait and other Gulf States, and a significant number of Christians in Lebanon and Syria.

By contrast, Assad’s alliance with Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has collapsed largely along sectarian lines. Support for Assad among Arab Sunnis has dropped to virtually zero, including all Sunni-dominated governments. Support for his rule has also further exacerbated the already deeply-damaged reputation of Hezbollah among Arab Sunnis.

The Sunni Arab world, meanwhile, has been largely silent about the campaign of relentless persecution and repression against the Shia majority in Bahrain, implicitly backing the oppressive rule of the Sunni-minority royal family.

the Tranströmer: more than meets the eye

9781852244132

Sweden’s greatest living poet, Tomas Tranströmer, celebrated his 80th birthday in April of this year. To mark the occasion, Bloodaxe Books published a new expanded edition of his New Collected Poems, the award-winning definitive translation of all his poetry by Robin Fulton. In Sweden, Daphne Records released Dagsmeja: Emma Tranströmer sjunger Tomas Tranströmer (Noon Thaw: Emma Tranströmer sings Tomas Tranströmer). This is a recording of settings of eighteen poems by Tranströmer performed by his daughter Emma Tranströmer, pianist Andreas Kreuger, guitarist David Härenstam and violinist Bernt Lysell. The main musical emphasis is on Fredrik Jakobsson, an outstandingly talented Swedish composer largely unknown to the general public. Emma also includes a couple of songs by the more established Maurice Karkoff, who recently completed two new Tranströmer settings, plus a few songs by Håkan Parkman, who died in a tragic drowning accident in August 1988, aged only 33.

more from Bloodaxe Blogs here.

Dissolve My Nobel Prize! Fast!

Nobel-flask_custom

It’s 1940. The Nazis have taken Copenhagen. They are literally marching through the streets, and physicist Niels Bohr has just hours, maybe minutes, to make two Nobel Prize medals disappear. These medals are made of 23-karat gold. They are heavy to handle, and being shiny and inscribed, they are noticeable. The Nazis have declared no gold shall leave Germany, but two Nobel laureates, one of Jewish descent, the other an opponent of the National Socialists, have quietly sent their medals to Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics, for protection. Their act is probably a capital offense — if the Gestapo can find the evidence. Inconveniently, that evidence was now sitting in Bohr’s building, clearly inscribed “Von Laue” (for Max von Laue, winner of the 1914 Prize for Physics) and “Franck” (for James Franck, the physics winner in 1925) — like two death warrants. Bohr’s institute had attracted and protected Jewish scientists for years. The Nazis knew that, and Niels Bohr knew (now that Denmark was suddenly part of the Reich) that he was a target. He had no idea what to do.

more from Robert Krulwich at NPR here (featuring our friend Sam Kean).

the peace delusion

187_feature_gray

Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence. They look to science to show that, over the long run, violence will decline—hence the panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts. The result is no more credible than the efforts of Marxists to show the scientific necessity of socialism, or free-market economists to demonstrate the permanence of what was until quite recently hailed as the Long Boom. The Long Peace is another such delusion, and just as ephemeral.

more from John Gray at Prospect Magazine here.

Last chance to support 3QD and make it better!

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Update 10/13/11: New posts will always appear below this one for now, by the way.

Dear Readers, Writers, and Friends of 3 Quarks Daily,

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If you value what we do, please help us raise $25,000. Consider that going to the movies for an evening for two people costs $30-$45 (depending on the size of popcorn you like to get–I admit I am a Super-Combo man myself!). What is it worth to you to keep 3QD running? Do you check the site regularly? Do you take comfort in our daily toil to separate the internet wheat from the internet chaff? Please help us NOW by donating whatever you can, and please spread the word to others. Use the ChipIn widget below or near the top of the right-hand column. It's easy. It's fast. And it'll be much appreciated.

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Romancing the Revolution

by Hartosh Singh Bal

Naxalites Sixty-five years or so after India’s independence, conflicts that question the idea of a constitutional republic do not show any signs of dying down. A few deservedly get some attention, such as the one in Kashmir. The others, for instance the events in the northeast, hardly get noticed in the rest of India, leave alone the rest of the world. What is common to most of these conflicts is that they are localized along India’s borders where ideas of ethnicity, religion and belonging are contested. There is, however, one such conflict that escapes these categories – the armed struggle against the Indian state by Left-wing guerillas interchangeably termed Maoists or Naxalites.

Till recently the outside world had paid little attention to this conflict which stretches through a large part of the forested belt of central India, a belt also occupied by forest-dwelling tribes subsumed under the label `tribals’. As narratives of an emerging, liberalizing India have lost their novelty, correspondents both foreign and Indian have suddenly discovered a counter-narrative in the Maoists. Unfortunately though, the tribals already badly done in by the Indian state and the Maoists are being used again, as props in stories that show them as noble savages rescued from exploitation by gun-wielding Marxists.

The problem with such a description is not what it says about the Indian state. An incompetent and arrogant minister in-charge of internal security P. Chidambaram, who enjoys the confidence of the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and more importantly the leader of the Congress party Sonia Gandhi, has over the past year planned and implemented a campaign against the Maoists. While the Army has been kept out, paramilitary troops, ill-trained and ill-equipped for jungle combat, have been thrown against the Maoists. Easy targets for the guerilla fighters, they have vented fury against local tribals who they believe may be helping the Maoists.

Read more »

Monks/Juicy Tomatoes

by Haider Shahbaz

Tomato_lydecker Juicy tomatoes. Crispy lettuce. A succulent chicken breast. Olive oil. Black pepper. Chopped green onions and chopped smelly garlic. Mustard. Rosemary bread, perhaps? Lightly heat the oil. Brown the garlic and the onions as you hear them sizzle. Sprinkle black pepper on one side of the chicken. Sautee the chicken with the pepper side down until a knife cuts it smoothly and exposes the white tender flesh. Smell it. Spread the mustard on slices of rosemary bread. Place the succulent chicken between soft bread with juicy tomatoes and crispy lettuce. Eat.

He imagines tomatoes, chicken, bread. He is hungry. Famished, in fact. Soft, juicy, crispy and succulent: you cannot understand the severity of these adjectives as they orbit his mind. You cannot understand the severity of adjectives. But, let’s stop here. This story is not about food. Not even about poverty or desire. This story is not of love, definitely not bravery. It is not meaningful; it is not meaningless. This story is simply about Muzzamil, who will eat soon. And it is about Dave, who already ate. Still, this story is poor and desirous and brave and loving and meaningful and meaningless in its own peculiar way, like you and I, and our characters and adjectives. And yes, like tomatoes, too.

Read more »

Monday Poem

Aftermath

Goaded by hurricane the river raged through
on a tear to the sea taking trucks and trees
Oil tanks bobbed under bridges
on swells of liquid gravity
a wood-framed studio pirouetted from its piers
off downstream, a ship of art, rudderless
until it lodged against the steel
lifts of the dam gates
Cellars filled with silt
and whatever the river’d dredged
from back-yard cesspools
from gardens of summer afternoons
from landfills and barns,
leaving earth and offal recollections
along its banks, in basements,
across fields of flattened corn
that had been high enough for its
cobbed yield to have smiled yellow
from white plates until the hurricane
laid it low, tens-of-thousands of stalks
a quashed mat after the pull
of the river’s winnowing rake,
supine as a man after a swift life
lies still before the sweep of the sea
.

by Jim Culleny
9/22/11

Alas, Poor Yorick. Thoughts on Myths and Skulls

by Mara Jebsen

Skull244 There was a special skull in Paris in the late 1800s. Like all skulls, it once belonged to a larger structure–a display at the Ecole des Beaux Arts offered to young artists studying anatomy. Amongst these is the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke, though struck by the “manifold interlacing of the muscles and sinews” and the “complete agreement of the inner organs with one another”, can’t handle the majesty of an entire corpse. He comes to fix his attention uniquely on the skull. He gets hold of it.

Rilke takes the skull back to his student quarters to spend many nights with it. He contemplates it by candlelight, and keeps it company, until, as we’d expect (for its Rilke, Paris, candlelight, skull) he has a strange thought. . .

But first I want to turn your attention to another skull. This one appears in a poem which appeared to me, appropriately enough, in an anthology of Russian poetry : “In the Grip of Strange Thoughts”. The second skull is a photographic reproduction, an X-Ray, of the one inside the actual poet’s head. Its no good– me trying to describe this skull–as Elena Shvarts does it with such stinging radiance that I can hardly describe her powers of description. She writes:

And my God/growing dark/Slipped me this photograph/In which my glowing skull/Etched from the invisible/Swam, blocking out the dusk/And the stripped naked park

She’ll go on in the poem to be bemused, casual, even crude. But in this moment she’s struck and trembling with the oddness of her own skull. She seems to be naming something intrinsically weird. . .

Read more »

Glimpses of Nigeria: Kissbaby’s Ambition (2008)

by Tolu Ogunlesi

ImagesCA7I0F6W The first time I met ‘Kissbaby’, 21, he was a security guard at the Silverbird Galleria in Lagos. I was driving out of the parking lot, and as is standard practice in Lagos, tipped him. Then I became curious. I wanted to know what he did with all the tips he got. What I heard was somewhat surprising. He told me he saved up all his money to pay for recording sessions at music studios.

By the time I meet him again, a few months after the first encounter; he has left his security-guard job. “The salary is too poor; not enough to fulfil my needs… mostly my studio stuff.” That is not all. “The work is not encouraging,” he says. “People always underrate you whenever they see you putting on security uniform.”

But his job is about the only thing that’s changed. The passion for music is still as potent as ever. “As you see me, looking at my appearance, you see music in me. Even if I am not there, my shirt is smelling of music!” he declares. Even the job was meant to be a way of furthering his musical ambitions. “The main reason I decided to work was because of my music, so I’d be able to get money and come out with my album.” His decision to get a job at the Galleria, he says, was influenced by his desire to network, to seek a “connection” that’d advance his budding music career.

The Galleria (a popular hangout for celebrities, and home to one of Lagos’ biggest music stores) is part of the Silverbird Group, which is arguably Nigeria’s largest and most prominent entertainment conglomerate, encompassing radio, television, beauty pageants, and music festivals. “Different types of people always come in… I met them,” he says.

Read more »

Notes On Zuccotti Park

Photographs from Zuccotti Park

Notes on Zuccotti Park One: Mic Check! A Pay Check Away From You. DSC00539

Mic check!

They are just a pay check away from being you. Take strength

Keep your courage, for yourself

And for them, they need you.

They who are today up there

Imprisoned– parked in concrete shelves—scraping the skies.

In these towers rising all around you

Surrounded by walls

Clinging to a useless fantasy that these streets are meant to lead them

To those paved with gold

But no! Yours is the golden path.

You who sit here in the park, enclosed by police barricades-

Liberated by thoughts, your dialogue.

Under an October night sky without stars

Sounds of your drums beat the police sirens

And rise above the din of ongoing construction

Called Freedom at the crossroads

Of Trinity and Liberty.

And there, a surveillance—NYPD tower

And a sign that says no skateboarders allowed in the Park.

Winter’s mist begins to rise off the damp pavements.

You see the lit windows high above

And you think they shine like places light years distance from you

Here in the park in the darkness below,

As though signaling–a passing, to you.

Silhouettes framed in the windows high up above you

In amber light, they appear caught in an eternity of fear, petrified.

And you sympathize

For rents have to be paid, mortgages met

What happens if there is no pay check?

They know they are just a paycheck away from you.

As you Mic check, in your attempt to reach them,

They know this too: it is not light that distances them from you—

They are just a pay check away from you.

Read more »

What if we win?

by Omar Ali

316743_10150340654784292_529734291_7856373_1074019852_n1-300x185 Pakistan’s predicament continues to draw comment from all over the world; in the Western (and Westoxicated Eastern) Left, the narrative remains straightforward(to such a degree that one is tempted to share an essay by Trotsky that Tariq Ali may have missed): US imperialism is to blame. In this story, US imperialism “used” poor helpless clueless Pakistan for its own evil ends, then “abandoned” them (it’s very bad when the imperialists go into a third world country, it’s also very bad when they leave) and they have now returned to finish off the job. I have written in the past about my disagreements with this Eurocentric and softly racist narrative and have little to add to it. In any case, no one in authority in either the imperialist powers or Pakistan is paying too much attention to the Guardian or the further reaches of the Left. But even among those who matter (for better and for worse), there seems to be no agreement about what is going on and what comes next. Everyone has their theories, ranging from “lets attack Pakistan” to “let’s throw more money at them” and everything in between. I don’t know what comes next either, but I have been thinking for a few days about an outcome that many in the Pakistani pro-military webring think is around the corner: What if we win?

The fact that the US/NATO are in trouble in Afghanistan is no longer news. The fact that Pakistan is about to “win” may not be as obvious to many outsiders (or even to many Pakistanis). but “strategic victory” in Afghanistan is now taken for granted by the Paknationalists. And one should take them seriously, since their theories are not only a product of GHQ, they are also the basis GHQ’s own decision making. The circle goes like this: psyops operators create the theory in the morning. It’s taken up by the paknationalist media through the day and is on GEO TV by nightfall. The generals hear it on the evening news and excitedly call up their friends: did you see what everyone is saying!

What does it mean for Pakistan to “win” in Afghanistan?

Read more »

The Quintessential North American Reptile

Article and photos by Wayne Ferrier


Northern Michigan I had that unmistakable feeling of being watched. It was a sunny autumn afternoon, and I was helping my father dig up an old drainage ditch at their Central Pennsylvania home. I was pretty far down in the ditch, pitching gravel over my shoulder onto the bank above me. I paused and looked around.

It didn’t take long to find out who was spying on me. A common garter snake, Thamnophis sirtalis, lay curled up on the bank, watching me with an intensity that I would have to say bordered on fascination.

A curious thing about the encounter was that the snake was half buried in gravel. She was too enchanted watching me work to worry much about being buried in stones.

No doubt I was excavating a favorite hunting ground. Digging up and replacing the old drainage system, I was uncovering a lot of salamanders (Eurycea bislineata), most certainly a staple in this particular garter snake’s diet.

I do not know how long she had been there, inches from my head. For a moment we remained motionless, eyeing one another, but eventually she lost her nerve and darted off towards the stone wall. Slick yellow and brown lateral stripes proved to be excellent camouflage gliding through a background of burnt grass and autumn leaves, and she quickly disappeared from view.

Read more »

Sunday Bath

I
My sister latched the door:
A tube of light through the pane
stunned the cement floor.

My kid brother and I sat
naked near a bucket,
a canister to scoop water

Lifebuoy soap on chipped saucer,
a cylindrical container poised on bricks,
faucet crudely soldered to hem.

Under the container,
nuggets glowed on a charcoal burner
heating up the water.

Let’s be clear about this: No
shower, no tub, no sink, no mirror,
only a hole in the floor

for draining waste bath water out to a gully.
To be fair to bathrooms he had known,
Father had named The Cube.

II
Dizzy and nauseous, heart faster,
beads of sweat on bony chest,
the more I breathed, the more I gasped,

wondering what was taking my sister
so long to scoop water from the bucket
and shower it on my head..

She dragged herself to the door
on tip-toe to reach the latch, fell back,
slowly rose, her fingers clawing the pane.

My kid brother collapsed
on the floor, his mouth an O.
Are we playing dead?

Charcoal, the Mother of All Coals,
Father later said, burns quickly
in airtight rooms, releases deadly gas.

You can’t see, smell, or taste it.
Inhaled, it displaces oxygen
we breathe to stay alive.

I remember only blurs: glass
shattering, treetops waving, sirens,
a cold mask on my face: breathing.

III
Farouk, older brother, waiting
his turn to bathe, sat on a small
crate outside the Cube, reading

Superman, wondered
why no waste water flowed
out to the open gully

in the courtyard. He bolted upstairs
to tell Father, who ran down
without touching the handrail,

broke the glass, unlatched the door,
dragged us all out, and sent Farouk
on his Hero bike to summon Red Cross.

IV
My sister gradually grew
protective of me and my kid brother
who stopped sucking his thumb, after all.

Praised for his presence of mind,
Farouk promised but never gave me his comics
and never lets us forget his heroics.

V
Seeing her three angels in mortal poses,
Mother ripped her blouse,
pummeled her bosom.“ There is no god

but God, no god but God, no god”
The next day, my parents sacrificed
a lamb, gave meat to refugees

camped in Murree
near the Cease Fire Line,
after the first war over Kashmir.

For Farooq

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest writer at 3quarksdaily.