i dreamt a couple mornings ago that bolsheviks killed me. how do i know they were bolsheviks? because lenin was there, with his bald head and beard and everything. i am often not me in my dreams, and i have the vague memory that i was jewish in this dream, and that had to do with why i was targeted. but i think many bolsheviks were jews... i'll have to get better at dreaming with more historical accuracy.

weird shit, no?

This is an article (unknown source) that addresses some of Human Rights Watch's work in India, but keep reading:

ACTIVISTS CHASTISE INDIA ON UNTOUCHABLES
Tue Feb 13, 12:31 PM ET


Indians at the bottom of India's Hindu caste system are attacked,
raped and killed daily due to their status, even though the rigid
social hierarchy has been outlawed for decades, an international
human rights group said Tuesday.

India has a strikingly uneven record of battling discrimination
against its 165 million dalits, or untouchables. A former president
and the current chief justice are dalits, but another 1.3 million
earn a pittance clearing human excrement off train tracks.

Five decades after the caste system was outlawed, the vast majority
of dalits remain relegated "to a lifetime of discrimination,
exploitation and violence, including severe forms of torture," Human
Rights Watch said in a report written with the Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice at New York University's law school.

"India needs to mobilize the entire government to make good on its
paper commitments and end caste abuses," said Brad Adams, Human
Rights Watch's Asia director.

Indian officials were not immediately available for comment.

The report offered a slew of examples of violence against dalits,
such as the case of a man beaten so badly in January - after
demanding that his daughter's rapists be tried - that both his legs
and an arm had to be amputated.

According to New York-based Human Rights Watch, 58,000 cases of abuse
against dalits were registered in India between 2001 and 2005.

The figure is thought to be a fraction of the real number because
most dalits are afraid to report such incidents, fearing retribution
from higher-caste Hindus or authorities, the report said. It cited a
2005 government estimate that crimes are committed against dalits
every 20 minutes.

Hinduism divides people into social castes, and dalits, who have no
caste, are considered society's lowest members.

Hindus make up about 84 percent of India's 1.1 billion people. There
are also caste-like divisions for Muslims, who account for 13 percent
of India's people, and Christians, who make up 2.4 percent.

AND THIS IS THE EXCELLENT PARTHA BANERJEE'S RESPONSE:

Human Rights Watch Chastise India on the Untouchables, but...

Even though the plight of the poor "untouchables" is serious in many parts of India, and must deserve our incessant vigilance and action, these blanket "reports" by big-name organizations are almost always skewed to serve a hidden, political purpose.

One big problem with these reports is that the history of the past and ongoing struggles of the people at the grassroots level against the ills is never mentioned. To the audience that knows little about the problem, it creates an artificial void, as if progressive and radical sociopolitical movements are altogether absent, and that there's a desperate need for liberal, philanthropic groups and individuals (mostly Western) to intervene.

Even though I would not put them in the same category, because HRW does have credibility, the politics is somewhat similar. It also could be that HRW does have more in the reporting that I don't know of.

However, I must say that we have seen an example of this politics in the Hollywood-glorified documentary Born Into Brothels (we had detailed discussions on this subject two years ago). We may see similar politics played out at this year's upcoming Oscars. Watch out for the "Indian" film Water.

I remember a few years ago CNN and its "celebrated" reporter Christianne Amanpour did a 60 Minutes story on the untouchables, and to many of us, it was done only to create sensationalism, CNN style. Her much-acclaimed-in-the-West reporting did not have any historical perspective or mention of peoples' movement, either. The only people she showed working on this problem, ignorantly enough, was a group of right-wing BJP supporters waving their saffron flags. If you don't know, BJP is a Hindu supremacist political megalith in India, and a big supporter of the religious status quo. The other people Amanpour showed taking it on, of course, are Christian missionaries. Are we surprised?

Most importantly, though, would HRW or other such groups talk about the plight of the economic untouchables in the Americas or Europe? That vast population is definitely a socio-economic class that's never touched upon by the rich and powerful. In fact, this class, as we all know, is de facto the new class of slaves. This cruel disparity, exploitation and repression are perhaps one of the most serious abuse and violation of peoples' dignity and rights in today's world. Big organizations with their name reputation and power, must condemn this new slavery and untouchability.

Plus, these blanket stereotyping of the Indian and other "God-forsaken, Third World" societies gives today's Western "Gods" another weapon to blast and undermine non-Western civilizations.

Many Westernized, "educated" liberals in and from those countries, with little real-life experience to live and work there, then tow in this line through their own power-politics and media manipulations.

That, in turn, helps today's Gods to instill, dogmatize, and convert.

so my 2nd Lina Wertmuller film (the first being in my past entry titled "Seven Beauties"), was really fucked up. i think, but i'm not sure, that she was ridiculing both filthy rich people (i.e. bitchy main female character), and to a lesser degree, communists (i.e. misogynist working class main male character). wertmuller is apparently an anarchist, and should therefore supposedly see through both camps.

but these two "fall in love," in this disgusting way, where he enslaves her when they are deserted on a mediterranean island. the tables have turned. and sure, he spouts off all these genuinely troubling things about disparities between poor and rich people. but he hits her whenever she says something "wrong." and she loves it. my gut was wrenching as i watched him about to rape her, but it instantly turns into a hot love scene. or maybe it's all supposed to be hot, but i was pretty disturbed. and she eventually turns into a demure, lustful, powerless woman--who is of course, blonde. quite a patriarchal wet dream.

sometimes women are the worst anti-feminists, i guess. i suppose as blonde-bombshell turns love slave, commie man becomes all the more excited by playing master (communists apparently don't really believe in equality), and maybe we're supposed to see the hypocrisy of both of them.

or maybe we're supposed to leave politics out of sex, because this sacred activity makes a master out of the slave, and vice versa. if that's the case, lina wertmuller is one fucking confused anarchist.

having written all of this, i don't mean to dismiss sex that involves domination and pleasure/pain-blurring. these aren't my tastes, but i definitely think consensual activities of all kinds are fair game for everyone. but that's not what was going on here.

it's all very confusing for those of us who want to celebrate sex in its full hedonism. i'm really not saying that we need to get ourselves off in only "politically correct" ways. it's more that i want us all (independent of the sex roles we play) to be equals in bed. because everything in society at-large tells us, straight or queer, that we're not.

Tags: film, politics, sex

Don't read this if you plan to see the film, "Bamako", because i will spoil it for you!!!

I was so incredibly excited to see it. When I skimmed Dennis Lim's review in the NY Times, it sounded like a contemporary non-violent "Battle of Algiers," a forthrightly political, anti-imperial film where the colonized raise their fists against their oppressors. I have seen next-to-no African cinema, and this was clearly a rare contemporary narrative film about international political issues and events.

Globalization is literally put on trial. The plaintiff is a monolithic Africa, and the defendants are the IMF and G8 countries that strangle african countries with aid debt. The wonderfully surreal courtroom is the backyard of a small residential building in Bamako, the capital of Mali, where building residents pump their bathwater right alongside a debate about their economic status and future.

I was disappointed, because the film was more brechtian than cinematic in its thrust. The film is literally a series of rhetoric-driven performances where different highly-educated white and african prosecutors and witnesses "testify" and sharply criticize the defendants' policies. Much of what they have to say is more shrewd commentary than what one would ever find in any american left publication's sporadic article on africa. But I don't look to narrative films for lessons on political economy or neocolonial oppression.

The camera cuts away from the trial to the city dwellers outside the "courtroom", listening to the trial via radio broadcast. These ordinary people never utter any subtle differences from or disagreements with the prosecutors' positions. The filmmaker never seems to question the prosecuting attorneys' role as a monolithic voice of "the people." Much to my boredom and ultimate frustration, this simplistic back and forth constitutes 80% of the film.

The cruelest examples of the film's privileging of western-educated voices, is in its lacking subtitles for a farmer's testimony, and the lyrics to a song tearfully sung by a woman who lives in the building where the trial takes place. As they express themselves in what I assume is Bambara, the language spoken by 80% of Malians, we can only listen to the foreignness of the sounds the farmer makes as he speaks, or self-indulgently wonder at the tears on the singer's face.

Dennis Lim writes, "Last month [Filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako] showed his film in Bamako, in front of the courtyard where it was shot. Thousands turned up. Still, insofar as the movie is a broadside, its designated audience is a Western one."
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/movies/11denn.html?ex=1171947600&en=dcc73c5ecdf6bd72&ei=5070

Which makes me think that Sissako didn't just happen to leave out the subtitles. Does he or doesn't he want us to do more than revel in the otherness of non-Westernized africans? Which is more valuable to his cause when he's pitching it to us, a western audience?

Maybe the film's "representational" mode of discourse is simply endemic to a jurisdictional, rather than a grassroots, or revolutionary, political approach. By definition, attorneys advocate for their parties, selectively allowing them to speak for themselves. But I think filmmakers need to do more.

All this being said, I still want to honor the film for making economics and the politics of living its focus. And although I complain about it's seeming disinterest in the aesthetic powers of cinematic drama, as the camera documents what could easily take place on a stage, the reality is that this story will travel the world as a film, which it wouldn't as a play.

And the film dragged, and made me confront my own privileges in making the demands that I do of films that I watch.

what is it about the night that makes my chest decide it needs to hack itself? 1988, the year that I was 12 years old, was my year of bronchitis. i was such a stressed out kid, and my throat and chest seemed to bear the burden. i'm amazed antibiotics still have an effect on me, given all the erythromycin i took that year.

but luckily it didn't stay that way, for many years in fact. i had to move to new york 14 years later to get my next nasty bouts. i was new to the city and unemployed, so i walked out of my lovely, unfurnished 1 bedroom apartment that my unemployment check just barely covered, down the street to Elmhurst Hospital. Having slummed it even more since then, I have learned that Elmhurst Hospital makes Bellevue look like an oasis of splendor. Not to knock Bellevue, which definitely got me through some bad shit.

But back at Elmhurst, the doctor, told me to wait in a chair near the front desk. I overhead another doctor telling a nurse, "I just don't really care about being the best doctor. I mean, I'll do my job, go through the motions, but that's it." That wasn't a very comforting thought.

I mean, that's very much the attitude I have about my job. After accepting that I am too critical of social justice organizing methods, too disgusted by careerism, and too resentful of authority to throw myself into working for organizations that inevitably were markedly unprogressive (it would take an infinite number of livejournal entries to fully explain), I finally gave up on working for nonprofits. And a similar, more recently arrived-at conclusion, is that I don't want to work in tv/film.

I'd rather do an uncomplicated, low maintenance kind of job where I'd be free to read the news, and have the time and space to think about it. Because while I still want to make the world a better place, I want to do it through telling stories, and creating images that inspire something new in others. And getting your ass kicked by asshole, unbelievably unprofessional television production people just wouldn't allow me to get anywhere with that. I mean, there's the inevitable ass-kicking that goes into working for a hyper-dysfunctional aristocrat who only half cares about his business. That's what I do now. But he's not around that much. And I'm making 1.75 times more money. And I get to work with other day-jobbing, creative people who also like to talk about what they're watching, reading, hearing and thinking. And there's no snobbery about or competition over who gets to work on the sexy projects--entertainment and social justice groups really do share that in common. Granted, at my current job, there aren't any sexy projects to fight over. We make junk mail, for christsakes. (Although, a new client sells blood sugar-testing AND sexual health devices for today's senior citizen.)


I like to think that doctor at Elmhurst meant that she wanted space for cultivating herself in her work life too. And not that she doesn't care to give her patients her utmost attention...a much more likely, but disheartening conclusion. The glass really is half full. And it's okay to thrive on a cynical, rather than a consciousness-raising means to a paycheck. But I continue to need reminders. And justifications.

Last night really sucked because I missed out on what might have been a really cool party with my awesome new friends. I even went out to buy an outfit, always a distressing kind of exercise. It was a sexy party, and it's been about 7 years since I went to one of those. But alas, the pestilence that had struck my body this past week had not completely given out. I did sleep the whole day, and was probably better for it. But I still felt on the edge, and didn't think I'd want to kiss anyone under the circumstances. I thought it would be good to still go, even if I didn't fully participate, because I'd at least get to see what these parties are like. They are apparently for "open" couples and single women, to keep pain in the ass straight guys out of the picture. I wonder where gay men factor in. I wasn't sure if the "open" couples meant only straight ones. I sure hope not! Where does that leave gay single men? I will have to find out at the next party. I'm going, damn it! I'm hoping it's a real live "Shortbus".

But it gave me an opportunity to watch a movie, something I definitely don't do enough these days. I watched a WWII film with the blackest humor imaginable. It was an Italian film by Lina Wertmuller called "Seven Beauties":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075040/

I got the movie because she was the first woman to be nominated for the Best Director oscar. The film description looked pretty weird. Something about a zany comedy about a guy with seven prostitute sisters during WWII. But needless to say, I was curious.

I wasn't a fan of "Dr. Strangelove," but that's the only thing I can sort of compare this movie to, it being a film about the stupidity of war, and all. Only I like "Seven Beauties" because it's not sardonic in its attitude, and its really about the stupidity of fascism, while still being a very human story with a lot of great physical comedy woven into all the difficult to watch parts. And then there are pieces that you don't know how to fit into the whole (I won't say where): newsreel footage of the war stitched together, bombs exploding, bodies flying, narrated by this deathly cynical song.

I wouldn't say I loved it, but I thought it was a whole lot more courageous and complex than most anything I've ever seen.

My sisters are respectively 7 and 10 years older than me. But when I got to the 5th grade, my social studies textbook was the same one they studied from.

It had pictures of naked "aboriginal" kids from Australia, smiling for the camera. The photograph captions explained that aborigine children eat grubs. Dirty looking children eating dirt. This is what I knew all the others were thinking.

And it was from this textbook that I first learned of India's caste system. Because even though my parents came from India, and even though I'd heard plenty of stories from my older sisters about how unpleasant it was to learn about India at school, where all the white suburban children looked in laughing contempt at us. Because we were from that backwardness. I still never knew about caste.

I didn't believe it. I thought it was some made-up shit, just like how the book said that Hindus worshipped cows, and that cows were sacred because everyone wanted to reincarnate as one. I didn't trust the authors of this book with fucked-up pictures of indigenous kids.

But I got myself somewhat caught up. I asked my mom why she'd never told me about the caste system. She didn't know. I learned that we were Brahmins. But I suffered the delusion that caste didn't really matter in the present. I didn't see it as an issue among the Indians I saw. Granted, I rarely saw them. And I knew that my sister's fiance was not in our caste. And my parents thought he was such a nice boy. It would later become funny to remember the two priests at my sister's wedding, one Brahmin, and one Kshatraiya, not getting along with one another. Caste difference seemed so benign to me.

Then I went to a big, "progressive" university and I was really excited to be involved with an organization of left-leaning grad students from India (and maybe one from Pakistan.) We had film screenings, and signed petitions, and acted like we were doing something politically about the state of things in South Asia, and South Asians in the U.S.

By then, I knew more about the wretchedness of low caste people's experiences and struggles. Why didn't we talk more about caste? We talked a lot about the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India, which meant that Muslims were the hot target.

But I also think that because we Indians in the west are so sick of being associated with americans' tired images of India (that is, before the days of indian computer chips, and an abundant english-speaking, technically skilled workforce), that we don't want to talk about it.

It's like talking about the oldest, dirtiest of notorieties. Because in many ways it really is. And we, as examples of Indianness for the Americans among whom we live must bear the brunt of accounting for the idiocy of it all. It's a position worth resenting, but I fear that we lost opportunities to castigate what truly is wrong, however wrong our racist critics may be for separate reasons.

That same year of hanging with the grad students, I learned in class that there is no basis for the caste system in any of the Hindu scriptures. My professor didn't explain how Hinduism, and even some Muslims, allowed caste to be so relevant within their religious lives.

To this day, I wonder how Hinduism came to be understood in the West as so tolerant. Because for centuries, the arbiters of the faith have fed into this discriminatory, age-old "custom" to protect their own elite place.
___________________________________________________________________
The Persistence of Caste
and Anti-Caste Resistance
in India and the Diaspora

by
Moses Seenarine

There is currently a popularization of South Asian culture in the West. The "dot head" or bindi is no longer a mark of gender subordination and ethnic backwardness, but a fashion statement worn by Madonna, Janet Jackson, TLC, and many other international pop stars. South Asian clothes serves as an inspiration for many top designers in London, Paris and New York, while mandis and nose rings are the envy of many Western youth who wear tattoos and pierce their bodies. From sitar and tabla, Qawwali and ragas, Bangra and Bollywood videos, there is a growing influence of South Asian music on the international music scene as well. And yes indeed, no longer a strange odor, curry is now a much in demand dish served in many five star hotels. These all represent the commendable, positive aspects of South Asian culture.

However, there are many deeply negative aspects of South Asian culture which rarely gets coverage in the Western media. Casteism, child labor, female subordination and exploitation, religious fundamentalism, discrimination and violence against tribals, Christians and minorities, language and regional conflict, and many other problems are brushed aside as multinational corporations rush to co-opt South Asian cultures for profit. Curiously enough, this is not the first time the West has fallen in love with South Asian culture. The love affair first occurred during the 17th and 18th centuries when Western intellectuals first encountered the caste system and admired it as the most ideal way of organizing a society. Their analysis of the caste system led to the development of the dominant social theory know as functionalism, which like casteism, is merely a justification for class stratification and discrimination.

Casteism in South Asia

Nearly a quarter of a billion people born and die as untouchables in Hindu-dominated South Asia, most of them in India and Nepal. Although abolished by law, in practice Hindus continue to observe caste restrictions. For a traditional Hindu of the upper castes, untouchables or Dalits, are not Hindus since they pollute everything they touch. Most Dalits live out their lives in terrible poverty and humiliation. Many toil the land as bonded laborers in the rural areas, or migrate to the cities to work as day-laborers, sweep the floors and streets, scavenger, panhandle, wash the latrines, even haul away buckets of human excrement, or perform sex work. Moreover, caste-based violence, including the rape of low-caste women, is endemic. All over India, the lynching, beheading, and burning of Dalits and Christians is on the rise. These violations of basic human rights are not seriously investigated by caste Hindu authorities.

Without question, caste is the curse of Hinduism, and it has humiliated millions through the ages. Caste is Hinduism's sorrow, the apartheid that makes Hindus hang their heads in shame. Caste serves as the prime reason for conversions even today. Purity is the pivot on which the entire caste system turns. Rank, social position, economic condition may all influence caste, however it remains strong and rigid because the ideas of the people regarding purity and pollution are rigid. (Ketkar 1909:121-2). The idea of relative purity and consequent social inequality underlies the cultural rules, from marriage and death, to eating and drinking together. Even Swami Vivekananda called Kerala a "lunatic asylum" for its bizarre caste-separation rules (which were later ameliorated).