The dissident’s dissident

Avram Noam Chomsky (pronounced ‘Khomsky’ in the original Yiddish), didn’t just discover generative grammar, he has given dissent an unshakeable dignity, an almost generative, life-like power.

‘Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population — to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff.’

‘Of course it’s extremely easy to say, the heck with it. I’m just going to adapt myself to the structures of power and authority and do the best I can within them. Sure, you can do that. But that’s not acting like a decent person. You can walk down the street and be hungry. You see a kid eating an ice cream cone and you notice there’s no cop around and you can take the ice cream cone from him because you’re bigger and walk away. You can do that. Probably there are people who do. We call them “pathological.” On the other hand, if they do it within existing social structures we call them “normal.” But it’s just as pathological. It’s just the pathology of the general society.’

(For the best collection of links to material by Chomsky, visit ZNet)

Twenty20

Keeping it simple, sticking to basics over chicanery can see you through in cricket’s latest circus, says Vikrant 

Test of nerves

The brainchild of Stuart Robertson – Twenty20 – had to weather incessant criticism by the connoisseurs of the game before the ICC gave it the go-ahead as the shortest version of international cricket. So much so that even the respective boards didn’t prod their stalwarts to be a part of the extravaganza, if they chose to watch the world cup from their living rooms.

As the ‘circus’ began, the format was subjected to microscopic examination, its finishes tickled the most dead nerves and received rave reviews from the fraternity. You bet, players like Tendulkar, Ganguly, Youhana, Murali (though Murali cited health concerns) and the likes must be ruing the lost chance.

Mermaid

From an island of memory, Geeta leaps into the river of forgetfulness.

Wait for the morning,
and give grace another chance.
I know, I know,
once bitten is twice shy,
a million bitten is a million bitter;
but step another step.
See how nestled in its black mother’s breast,
the white morning waits to arise.
Do not think of woes,
or wallow in pity, despair and loss…
I have always kept my promises,
So said the saint,
after cigarettes and coffee.
So, I awaited the next journey,
Sleeping on the feet of the next door.
I readied my feet in broken dreams.
All the doors are me,
all the rooms are mine,
and the corridors echo forever
with my steps.
And what are my moments,
but rivers flowing through
old lands.
Look those immortal ghosts,
talking to me,
carrying me to a place uknown.
There is something still to be found,
and to vanish forever in it.
But, I`ll walk tomorrow,
for now,
it’s time for rest.
For forgetting.
And I jump into hay from abandoned palaces,
I play in the rivers.

(Painting by Jamil Naqsh, Blue Woman with Dove)

Naqsh

Pakistani painter Jamil Naqsh. Pigeons I. 1989.

Watercolor on paper.

Why I am so wise

Ecce homo, behold the man! As we peer down time’s long barrel to try to see him, his hand keeps turning the kaleidoscope.  

The time, Nietzsche predicts, is fast approaching when secular crusaders, tools of man’s collective suicide, will devastate the world with their rival claims to compensate for the lost kingdom of Heaven by setting up on earth the ideological economies of democracy and justice, economies which, by the very force of the spiritual derangement involved, will lead to the values of cruelty, exploitation, and slavery. “There will be wars such as have never been waged on Earth. I foresee something terrible, chaos everywhere. Nothing left which is of any value, nothing which commands, ‘Though shalt!’” Ecce homo; behold the man, homo modernus, homo nihilismus. [More]

For heaven’s sake do not confound me with anyone else

 

Legend has it that Freud, although educated in the philosophies of his day, studiously avoided the work of Nietzsche to preserve the originality of his ideas against external influence. Nietzsche’s analysis of the human psyche, how values were supposedly projections of people’s unspoken jealousies and fears, ran dangerously close to Freud’s idea (still a work in progress at the end of the 19th century) that the roots of conscious behavior lay in unconscious desires.

But after reading Dr. Peter Kramer’s outstanding new biography of Freud, one wonders if Freud feared something else, not influence but self-knowledge, for Dr. Kramer’s Freud is practically the living embodiment of Nietzsche’s will to power. It’s not simply that Freud was incredibly ambitious. (At age four, after soiling a chair, he reassured his mother that he would grow up to be a great man and buy her another.) Rather, it was Freud’s determination to systematize the world, to bring order to chaos, and to impose his theory of life on life itself — a determination so intense that one of Freud’s colleagues called it a “psychical need.” [More]

Ghalib-e-khasta

Ghalib scholar Ralph Russell on himself:

I was born in 1918. I became a communist at the age of 16 and am still content to call myself one despite the traumatic experiences from 1946 onwards of the corruption and eventual collapse of the communist movement and the Soviet Union, because I still hold to the humanist values which made me a communist.

[More]

Post-it

The Plebeian Postcard

Now that Lalu Prasad Yadav has managed a detour at an Indian Institute of Management, one wishes he would change track to the Ministry of Post and Telegraph and infuse some steam into the sorely unambitious postcard. For a postcard is not only what a postcard does, it is also what a postcard can.

I do not know what the postcard’s share in the revenue of the Indian Postal Services has been over the years, but I clearly remember seeing it piled up in ever increasing heaps on DD’s Surabhi programme. Surabhi asked some difficult questions of its viewers but answers poured in on postcards from exotic and unheard of places.

Then Cable TV came, and other shows promising more lucrative prizes, and the poor postcard got an affluent cousin–the competition postcard. Shortly after that those enormous heaps grew smaller and smaller until they vanished.

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Roadside Library

Leafing through Daryaganj’s Sunday book bazaar

The books arrive on rickshaws and autos, in Maruti Omnis and 800s, and burst upon the pavement in rubble-like heaps, or quietly lay claim to separate portions of the available earth.

Daryaganj’s Sunday book bazaar isn’t firmly established until after 10 in the morning but it begins practising its charms from three hours before. The wide road is traffic-free, the crowd not yet gathered, and the day’s stock is virgin. Slowly and suddenly you find yourself entangled in a careless pile, lost in the smell of old paper, warmed by the lovely words in which a book is gifted. No matter how far you dig, the curious book keeps turning up.

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Carbon trading

How the “Green Industry” works in India, and elsewhere.

In autumn 2005, three journalists working for the environmental group the Centre for Science and Environment decided to investigate some of the Indian projects which were trying to break into the lucrative new business of carbon trading.

They started looking at four schemes in Andhra Pradesh which were trying to convert biomass – dead plants, animal dung – into fuel. They studied the formal reports which the schemes had commissioned from a UK company, Ernst and Young, to satisfy the demanding requirements of the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism. And they noticed a very odd thing.

Each of the four Ernst and Young reports had had to consult people near the proposed schemes to ensure that there was no risk to the local economy or environment. One report quoted three different community leaders, each expressing enthusiastic approval for the project and concluded: “Poor farmers are getting reasonable monitory gains for harvesting the available biomass and supplying it to project activity.”

What was odd that with two of the other schemes, each many miles from the other, Ernst and Young quoted three sources who had the same job descriptions, the same opinions, summarised in precisely the same words which even included the same spelling mistakes (Secretry, monitory). In the fourth case, the wording was slightly different, but the opinions were the same, and it too concluded that “poor farmers are getting reasonable monitory gains etc.”

The three journalists wrote up their conclusions in the group’s magazine, Down to Earth, and made it clear that they were accusing Ernst and Young of simply cutting and pasting the same material into four supposedly separate and independent reports. Ernst and Young said there was nothing wrong: the local people in all four places happened to have said very similar things in response to a standard set of questions. But the environmental journalists were concerned enough to write to the executive board of the Clean Development Mechanism, offering further information. The CDM board never even acknowledged their letter.

How’s the Weather?

The cloud on climate in the US

The New York Times has obtained drafts of a report being prepared by the Bush administration to meet obligations to a United Nations convention. The report, due to have been released in the summer of 2005 but still not out, says that emissions by the United States of gases that contribute to global warming will grow nearly as fast through the next decade as they did the previous decade, that is at 11 per cent.

This comes on the heels of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most authoritative body on climate science, declaring that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that it is more than 90 per cent likely to be due to human factors, mainly the burning of fossil fuels and land use changes. Last year a report compiled for
the UK government by Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, noted that if the world didn’t act now on climate change it would face devastating economic consequences. It warned that if no action is taken on geenhouse gas emissions, there is more than a 75% chance of global temperatures rising between two and three degrees Celsius over the next 50 years and a 50% chance that average global temperatures could rise by five degrees Celsius in the same period.

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