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Bag it, tag it, sell it to the butcher at the store…

I’ve just discovered one of the – dubious – joys of becoming part of an online community. You are liable to get tagged. N having left this cryptic message – ‘you have been tagged’ – as a comment on a post of mine, I had to Sherlock my way into figuring out what it meant. Don’t snigger (yet; that’s still to come). New entrants to new universes have a tough time figuring out local topography and language. Simply, it means this:

  • Say who tagged you
  • Say eight things about yourself
  • Tag 6 people

Ouch.

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Nothing but sound and fury?

So another Independence Day dropped by, and left, somewhat disappointed at the muted hospitality of our home this year round. I was not really in the mood for adda-bajji (a very Bengali term for gourmet gossip) around nationalism, patriotism, jingoism and the shades of difference.

Granted, I think of the nation as an imagined community, courtesy Benedict Anderson, but the alleys and hyperboles of this landscape tend to reach two dead ends: one, of too much imagination (in that too many people imagine the nation in too many different ways; i.e. when do the joys of pluralism get overwhelmed by the dangers of confusion?) and the other, of too little imagination (in that too few people seem to have the power to change the nature of the nation for the greater good, and those who do, hardly seem to think about it at all).

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Ignorant MPs

From The Hoot:

NDTV India did a random survey of members of parliament to see if they knew something about India’s history. What is the order of colours on India’s flag? What was Mahatma Gandhi’s full name? Who wrote the national anthem? Lots of blank faces around, but no red ones. Our MPs apparently think history is for the schoolbooks, and did not seem particularly embarrassed at their ignorance. Najma Heptullah referred to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee as Bumkum Chottopadhya.

Minimum security, maximum impact…

Or: women political cartoonists and why we need more of ’em.

I thought it was about time I introduced Stephanie McMillan to those of you who read this blog, but don’t know about her (and possibly don’t check my blogroll; hey, that’s okay, forgive you). I came upon her when this brilliant cartoon did the rounds:

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This was up on Stephanie’s site, Minimum Security, in April 2006, in response to Republican Senator Bill Napoli‘s support to a legislation in South Dakota limiting abortion services access to (in his words):

…a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married.

The rest of us, married or otherwise, virgin or otherwise, religious or otherwise, clearly don’t count. So Stephanie felt, if anti-abortion politicians can be so certain about telling women what to do with their bodies, why not let them deal with other decisions women make? All other decisions…!

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Geeky Gals at the BlogHer Conference

I know I was being cheeky by commenting on Stake Five that we might explore Feminist ColdFusion or ColdFused Feminism, but the interfaces between gender and technology do fascinate me. Unsurprising, now that I’m with a geek who’s feminist and slowly turning into a feminist gee-eek! myself (what else can explain my evangelism around Ubuntu, which is my OS, and various other minor joys around website constructions and blog creations?). Any which way, it made me interested in learning more about the second BlogHer (‘where the women bloggers are’) conference, held in San Jose, July 28-29.

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Flower and Fire: a tribute to Kaifi Azmi

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On Saturday, Ashwin and I went to watch ‘Kaifi Aur Main’ (Kaifi and I), Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar‘s tribute to Kaifi Azmi and Shaukat Kaifi, Shabana’s parents. Based on Shaukat’s book ‘Yaad Ki Raah Guzzar’ (Down Memory Lane) and Kaifi’s own poetry and interviews, it was a wonderful evening in memory of a strange and wonderful man.

Ashwin, unfortunately, found the Urdu too difficult, so all he could do was to watch my delight (hardly entertainment, I fear)… It did help that the performance was at the St John’s auditorium, round the corner from home – everything one does/not do in Bangalore these days is a locational hazard.

The evening had been billed as a theatrical presentation by IPTA Mumbai, but as Deepa Punjwani points out in her review of the performance in Mumbai, it was not quite theatre. It was quite a mehfil (particularly with Jaswinder Singh’s music), and certainly a tribute. Both to Kaifi and to Shaukat, interestingly. For instance, Shaukat remembers how she thought the feminist in Kaifi was speaking directly to her, when she first heard his poem ‘Aurat’ (Woman):

Rut badal daal agar falna foolana hai tujhe
Uth meri jaan mere saath hi chalna hai tujhe
(Change the season to grow, to flourish
Wake up, my love, my soul; walk with me).

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‘News’ bhi kabhi news thi

In other words: once upon a simple time, News!!! used to be plain, common, possibly boring, but certainly unadorned: news. On one channel, if we were lucky enough not to be interrupted by power cuts at a drop of rain. And now? Move over soap operas. Here comes the news.

Last weekend, a concerned Indian public spent breathless hours – over two whole days – in front of the idjit box, gazing fearfully at the sight of a little boy trapped in a 60 foot well. Without seeking accountability from the contractor(s) for gross negligence, the (un’countable) news channels jostled with each other to provide us a whimper by whimper account of Prince’s trauma. While no one is denying the fear and hope of the situation – and the classic plot of a feel-good ‘human interest’ story when Prince was finally rescued – did we (and Prince) have to be submitted to the indignities of sensational media coverage?

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In protest

I’m too sickened by all that’s going on around and about me to write much today. I’m just going to point towards the various online petitions I’m signing and the on-ground protests I’m sympathising with – and hope that somehow, somewhere, something changes for the better… Tomorrow better be another day. Or as Yoda might say: Another day tomorrow better be.

About the siege in Lebanon, a description from within, and anti-siege protests from within Israel (the latter much tougher to find online than the former). And two petitions against it: Justice for Lebanon and Save Lebanese Civilians.

About the Right to Information Act of India and the government’s proposed amendment: to remove file notings from much of the decision-making conveyed to citizens (so what does that leave of the ‘information’ given to us by ‘public servants’ and ‘polity-cians’, hmm?). A petition against the amendment.

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Whose news is it anyway?

If you’re lucky, you’ve been able to blog about it. If not, you’ve been fuming in offline silence over the Indian government/ISPs’ inept blocking of blogsites over the past couple of days. But in the midst of all this cyberspace critique, a news item in early June seems to have passed under the radar of many bloggers. Or was there a blackout there too? And this time, by the mainstream media?

On June 5th 2006, The Hindu carried a story on the first ever statistical analysis of its kind: a survey of the social profile of more than 300 senior journalists in 37 Hindi and English newspapers and television channels in Delhi. As Newswatch India commented, if sex, religion and caste are to be taken together, more than two-thirds of the top media professionals in the India come from less than 10 per cent of its population. Shocker (or is it really?): there is not a single Dalit or Adivasi amongst these top 315 media decision-makers. Hindu upper caste men hold 71% of these jobs, and Muslims, only 3%. Interestingly, a gender analysis gives the most positive spin, but there too, mainly in the English electronic media: women account for 32 per cent of the top jobs. In the English print media, women form 6 per cent of top editorial positions and 14 per cent and 11 per cent in the Hindi print and electronic media. But there is no woman amongst the few OBC (Other Backward Classes) decision-makers: groups that suffer ‘double disadvantage’ are almost entirely absent from those surveyed.

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Transgendering science: mind the gap

Former President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers may – once again – need to eat his (in)famous words – that innate differences between men and women lead to fewer women than men in the top rung of scientists. This time, he may have to chew them fairly soundly. Because Ben Barres, a neurobiologist at Stanford, is uniquely placed to refute his argument: he used to be Barbara. In Shankar Vedantam’s piece on Barres in the Washington Post, he quotes Barres:

After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”

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