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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Implosion

A post on Iraq written in March, 2007. Thanks are due to Rajiv GV.

The unspeakable horror of Iraq

The whole of Iraq has been smelling of death for a long time now, but only as recently as last month did the US intelligence come out with a sensational report that said ‘elements of the conflict in Iraq’ could be described as civil war. Ayad Allawi, recruited by the CIA in 1992 and brought from UK to be made free Iraq’s first prime minister in 2003, and who promptly went back to the isles when he was replaced after two years, had asked during his regime itself: “If this is not civil war, I don’t know what is.” 

The level of violence in Iraq has no historical precedent. It seems impossible to comprehend the scale of the tragedy. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University in the US published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet last October an estimate of 654,965 civilian deaths as a consequence of the US-led invasion, the majority of them due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire. It followed a study undertaken in October 2003 that concluded about 100,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq since it was invaded in March 2003. Despite media criticism, epidemiologists in the field of conflict and public health supported the methodology and findings.

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Bara Imambara

 

Ro lo azizo! Phir kahan tum aur ye din kahaan
Aglay baras jo zinda thay hain khaak mein nahaan

Kya ai’temad zeesth ka dunya ke darmiyaan
Paik e ajal se dahr mein milti hai kab amaan

Kahe ko is sawaab ko haatho se kho o tum
Aainda saal ho ke na ho khoob ro o tum

Ya Rabb! Jahan e nazm e riyazat hara rahe
Gulshan ye hum jiloon se phoola phala rahe

Ahle azaa pe saaya e mushkil kusha rahe
Daamaan gul e ummeed se har dam bhara rahe

Is nazm ka Anees tujhe phir sila miley
Sadqe se Panjetan ke jo ho muddu’a miley

From Ay Momino! Hussain ka matam akheer hai

by Mir Babar Ali Anees (1803-1874)

 

Chhota Imambara

Libaas hai phata hua, ghubaar meiN ata hua
tamaam jism e naazneeN, chida hua, kata hua
yeh kaun zeewaqaar hai, bala ka shahsawaar hai
ke hai hazaaroN qaatiloN ke saamne data hua

From Shahsawaar-e-Karbala

by Hafeez Jalandhari

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murder

A private security guard has shot dead a taxi driver in Iraq in the latest in a string of what Iraqis believe are unprovoked killings by US contractors hired to protect Americans. 
 
A spokesman for US-based DynCorp International said one of its teams opened fire at a vehicle in Baghdad after it approached a convoy in a “threatening manner”. [Link]

O!

Vishal Bharadwaj’s Omkara

In Omkara, The Vishal Bharadwaj Adaptation of Othello, the curtain opens in a parting of the bridegroom-manque Roderigo’s (Rajju) ’sehra’, on Iago’s (Langda Tyagi) villainous face. Before that, we had heard Saif declare in the darkness that a thread’s breadth separates the ‘bewkoof’ from the ‘chootiya’ (‘fool’ and, probably, ‘ass’.) And we had just seen vaguely a painting depicting an ancient time obscured by clouds and a shimmering composition, The Tragedie of Omkara.

Omkara’s opening sequence, like Maqbool’s, is clad in director Vishal Bharadwaj’s ambition and his joi-de-vivre at having discovered Shakespeare. The film opens the way the play does, Iago playing his tricks on Roderigo. Soon, however, we see Saif dragging himself with a crooked leg to a cliff-edge overlooking a landscape that Hindi cinema no longer traverses. Young cameraman Tassaduq Hussain goes on to celebrate the quintessential Indian rivers, hills and homes as Ashok Mehta did in Bandit Queen. And so, instead of This Heavy Act With A Heavy Heart Relate, Vishal Bharadwaj brings us cinefans much cheer and hope.

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Smoke without Fire

A lot of gas
 
There has been some appreciation for No Smoking, which is as ludicrous as the film. One reviewer found it “subversive, arthouse cinema”, another saw it as “daring, imaginative, often brilliant”. The critics can be forgiven their inanity, but surely one expected better from such an intelligent cinema buff as Anurag Kashyap, and even more so from the peerless Vishal Bharadwaj, who has led us astray by unfurling his banner over the film.
 
The German-speaking K (John Abraham) is supposed to be Anurag Kashyap’s alter ego (“it is my most personal movie.. I am K”, says Kashyap on his blog), so it seems Kashyap has imagined himself as a Kafkaesque figure. K wakes up from nightmares, gets sucked into a hopeless situation (echoes of Faust, it is said), and finally ends up in a limbo. All for what? For his arrogant, rebellious, subversive urge to smoke, all the time, everywhere. His motivation? Standing in front of the mirror with his chiselled chest bare and his vacant eyes hidden under dark glasses, he looks the epitome of cool with the smoke curling up his lips. “Nobody tells me what to do. Nobody,” he tells his reflection. Is the suggestion here more of Oscar Wilde than of Kafka? K’s narcissism has everyone attracted, and confused.
 
But there’s no peace for the narcissist. [

Fictional Universe

Absent of the Absent: The Elusive Stories of Naiyer Masud

The incantatory quality of Urdu writer Naiyer Masud’s ‘fictional universe’–as translator Muhammad Umar Memon puts it–would seem witchcraftish to isolated and uncertain readers. Brittle and fluid, the painstakingly imagined worlds of these short stories have no resemblance in world literature. As silent and palpable as a dream, they rustle the senses until one realizes they are quite unprecedented in form and as ambitious in their idea of fiction and of tragedy.

Masud has said his stories are based on his dreams, some recurring over months which he keeps recording on waking up. [

The Loss of Lucknow

 

Shaam-e-Awadh: Writings on Lucknow
Edited by Veena Talwar Oldenburg
Penguin India
Rs 395

Decadent Delight

A new anthology attests that Lucknow may be a dying city, but it knew from the beginning we are born to die

Sharab, shabab aur kabab. Of these three shauqs of Lucknow’s nawabs (as in the “nawabi by nature”) it is shabab – youth – that Lakhnavis cherish the most, for they know by instinct that it is fleeting. The sense of loss lies at the heart of Lucknow, and the subtitle of Veena Talwar Oldenburg’s anthology Shaam-e-Awadh – “Memories of a dying city” – captures the decadence that has defined the city for much of its existence.

Perhaps it was the brutality of the British reprisal after the Revolt of 1857 that broke forever Lucknow’s trust in modern civilisation. The nawabs had given their people the idea that life was a picnic. They hadn’t built palaces for themselves, they’d built (with help from that maverick French genius, Claude martin) quaint, amusing structures – Bhoolbhullaiya, the labyrinth; Dilkhusha, the pleasure house; Kaiserbagh, a residential complex that accommodated enough open space for holding a mela, or a mass wedding of mangoes. Shatranj, patangbaazi, kabootarbaazi, sher-o-shaayri, raas leela, boating on the Gomti, idling in the orchards – this was all the elites cared for and encouraged by example. And everything had to have nazakat, be it the twitching of the eyebrows or the courtesan’s jibes at a henpecked taluqdar. Also, tehzeeb demanded that in this atmosphere of merry-making and sensuous speculation, sacrifice and pain wasn’t forgotten. So Mir Anis led the Muharram processions with his wrenching marsiyas, with the dying Meer following, longing for his lost city of Delhi.

This long-ago “Shia Muslim” culture, and the Mutiny that brought it to a bloodied close, is an inseparable part of Lucknow’s memories, and two-thirds of Oldenburg’s anthology is concerned with it. But the early and mid-twentieth century, when an arc of the progressive and independence movements had transformed the intellectual life of the city, is looked at only in passing. There is no essay, for instance, on the Urdu writers of the period, the range of poets from the fiercely Communist Kaifi Azmi to the destructively romantic brothers-in-law Majaz Lakhnavi and Jaan Nisar Akhtar. Or the liberal, epic sweep of Qurratulain Hyder’s fiction – that brought the “college girl” into Urdu literature – while the storyteller Naiyer Masud retreated more and more from all canons, honing his singular vision so much that it turned universal.

The chapter from Naipaul’s A Million Mutinies Now is too well known, but it contains a unique glimpse into the city’s memories of the Raj. Naipaul’s guide, whose name the writer changed to Rashid because of his “radical views”, does a curious thing for a man of his liberal education and temperament. When he takes Naipaul to the Residency, where the British were besieged for five of the most horrific months of their empire, he lets go of his outrage: “Bastards! Bastards! The British were such bastards”, he exclaims. Lucknow’s civilisation was barely a century old when it was crushed by the British in 1858. A body had been crippled in the first flush of its youth. This desecration has grown into a kind of legacy, and Lucknowwallahs carry in their heart an affinity with loss, a nostalgia that is quite instinctive and unsentimental. The iconic chronicler of the city’s court and street culture, Abdul Haleem Sharar, wrote that he would “as usual” return to Lucknow after each of several attempts to make a fortune elsewhere.

Oldenburg’s nostalgia-laced preface is a pleasure. It also has the interesting news that her family owned the Carlton hotel, a marvellous piece of architecture that stood amidst such thickly-leafed expansive greenery that it was almost another Dilkhusha. Half of this majestic hotel was recently razed by the Sahara group to build what is now one of Lucknow’s appalling malls. Oldenburg’s pain is widely shared. But she must remember, Lucknow may be a dying city, but like all great cities, it will never die.