South Asia
Being the Other
Spring was short this year, it arrived late and is in a hurry to go –dusty winds are taking over fast. But there’s a bloom in my backyard, the least likely place in the guesthouse. Not many in the guesthouse know that my room has a backyard.
Nicholas Kristoff seems like a nice guy. He has on-the-ground experience witnessing - albeit as a NYT journalist - some of the worst abuses that people- and particularly women- face in the poorer parts of the world. He has brought attention to issues like trafficking, health, labour conditions, and poverty to a greater degree than most white male journalists working for a source as conservomainstream as the New York Times probably would have - and he has done it with a level of human detail that makes these issues moving, rather than eye-glazingly boring.
CNN-IBN just happens to be on my television. This is what I see on the chyron, interspersed with the occasional story, mostly full of b-reel footage of the SLA and unending lines of shell-shocked families marching to an uncertain future.
Read between these lines below and you will see the war and its political context in India, stripped of all complexity and boiled down to its essential absurdity:
. . .
16 Apr 2009
Passers of the roti in Delhi might have an interest in this film festival organized by the Magic Lantern Foundation. It shall be held on April 17-19 at the India International Centre (40 Max Mueller Marg, Lodhi Estate). All are welcome and entry is free. Please click on the title for more information.
epoliticus
(previously known as "odear" in these parts)
I. A few years ago, I was walking down the street near the East Village with some colleagues from various organizations when a woman came up to us and stopped us. "Have you heard about Gujara?" she asked me. She did this without saying hello, introducing herself, or saying her name--which all makes sense, because she was, in fact, a total stranger. She just happened to want to talk to me about the emotionally loaded topic of the Hindutva pogroms in Gujarat without knowing me, where I come from, or what my views might be.
