Miss Trans in India e altro

Segno dei tempi?

(Blitzquotidiano):

L’India ha incoronato per la prima volta la sua transessuale più bella: il concorso si è svolto oggi a Chennai (l’ex Madras nel sud del Paese), con la partecipazione di 120 concorrenti di età compresa dai 20 ai 35 anni. Al primo posto – secondo quanto ha riferito uno degli organizzatori, Aj Ariharan – si è classificata una modella di 25 anni, Kareena (video 1 sotto).

I premi sono stati conferiti anche alle categorie di «Miss bella chioma», «Miss begli occhi», e «Miss pelle delicata». Il concorso, insieme con molte altre iniziative presentate nei mesi scorsi, è stato organizzato per migliorare l’integrazione delle minoranze sessuali in India. Nel Paese la maggior parte dei transessuali vive ai margini della società. Lo scorso novembre, al termine di una lunga campagna, gli eunuchi hanno ottenuto di poter essere riconosciuti e denominati come «altri», cioè di sesso diverso da uomini e donne, sulle liste elettorali e sui documenti d’identità. Inoltre, a luglio, l’Alta Corte di Nuova Delhi aveva depenalizzato le relazioni tra omosessuali adulti consenzienti, dichiarando incostituzionale una legge contro l’omosessualità che risaliva all’epoca coloniale.

(Update: quello che mi era sfuggito, Miss Queen International, la giapponese Ai Haruna, video 2 sotto).

La battaglia degli Adivasi: “Gaon Chhodab Nahin/Non lasceremo il nostro villaggio”

Il filmato, diretto da K. P. Sasi, è ispirato a una canzone di Bhaghwan Maaji, leader della lotta degli Adivasi contro l’estrazione di bauxite a Kashipur (India).

India test-fires nuclear-capable Agni-II missile

Due aspetti molto interessanti: la cominicazione istituzionale e il lancio del missile

Balasore (Orissa), May 19 (PTI) India today successfully test-fired its nuclear-capable ‘Agni-II’ missile with a strike range of upto 3,000 kms from a launch pad off Orissa’s coast. The test of the indigenously built Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile missile was carried out from a mobile launcher at about 1006 hrs from launch pad-4 of Integrated Test Range at Wheelers Island near Dhamra, about 80 kms from here, defence sources said.

It was a user trial conducted by the army and scientists from Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) were present to provide the necessary logistical support, the sources said. The trial of the sophisticated missile was successful and scientists would conduct a detailed analysis. The missile after three successful trials by DRDO is ready for production. “We have completely developed systems for such variant of missiles,” a senior defence scientist said. A special missile group has been raised in the army to handle such weapon. The state-owned Bharat Dynamics Ltd is the nodal agency for production of Agni-I and Agni-II missiles. The indigenously built surface-to-surface Agni-I missile has a strike range of 1500 km, while Agni-II missile has capability of hitting targets at ranges between 2500 to 3000 kms with a 1000 kg pay-load. PTI

India al voto 2009: gli scenari tracciati da Al Jazeera

Sonia Ghandi è favorita ma quali sono gli scenari in India?

Questa inchiesta di Al Jazeera ci offre dati e spunti di riflessione

L’India verso il voto: Sonia Gandhi favorita

New Delhi, 12 apr. (Apcom) – Dalla prossima settimana l’India va al voto per rinnovare la Camera bassa del Parlamento giunta a scadenza dopo 5 anni che hanno visto al potere una coalizione di centro-sinistra guidata dal Congresso, il partito di Sonia Gandhi. Data l’impossibilità di far votare in un solo giorno 714 milioni di elettori (oltre 40 milioni in più rispetto al 2004), le elezioni sono state diluite in cinque settimane e cinque fasi dal 16 aprile al 13 maggio. Lo scrutinio sarà invece il 16 maggio. Per la seconda volta il voto sarà interamente elettronico. Nella precedente maratona elettorale la partecipazione era stata del 57%, una percentuale che questa volta potrebbe aumentare secondo alcuni analisti grazie all’incidenza dell’elettorato giovane (un quarto dell’elettorato è sotto i 35 anni) e anche della mobilitazione popolare nata dopo l’attacco terroristico di Mumbai del 26 novembre. La “più grande democrazia del mondo”, come è spesso definita l’India, sarà quindi di nuovo in marcia nei prossimi due mesi. La campagna elettorale, almeno finora, non ha riservato grosse sorprese. Se si esclude davanti alle sedi di partito, nella capitale Nuova Delhi è difficile avvertire il clima pre-elettorale. Anche giornali e televisioni sono abbastanza cauti nello sfornare sondaggi dopo la “debacle” nel 2004 quando nessuno riuscì a prevedere la sconfitta del Bjp e del governo di centro destra pro riforme di Atal Behari Vajpayee. L’ultima proiezione pubblicata ieri dal “Times of India” pone in testa (con 154 seggi su un totale di 543) il partito di Sonia Gandhi che, in caso di vittoria ricandida come primo ministro l’economista dal turbante azzurro Manmohan Singh. L’opposizione indu-nazionalista del Bharatiya Janata Party (Partito del Popolo Indiano), guidato dall’ultraottantenne Lal Krishna Advani, è invece in calo (135 seggi) rispetto a un mese fa. Ma nessuno dei due partiti nazionali è comunque in grado di governare da solo. La battaglia sarà quindi dopo il 16 maggio quando inizierà il balletto delle alleanze. L’era del bipolarismo Bjp-Congresso sembra definitivamente tramontata con l’emergere di forti poteri regionali guidati da ambiziosi e potenti leader come Mayawati, la leader dei dalit, gli ex intoccabili, che governa lo stato settentrionale dell’Uttar Pradesh che con i suoi 160 milioni di abitanti e 80 seggi alla camera, influenza la politica nazionale. Mayawati è a capo di un cosiddetto “terzo fronte” che unisce un variegato gruppo di partitini regionali, ma che non hanno neppure un programma politico comune. Altri leader dell’Uttar Pradesh e del confinante Bihar, hanno invece formato un “quarto fronte” dopo essersi staccati dalla coalizione con il Congresso. Un altro tassello del complesso mosaico politico indiano sono poi i partiti comunisti che hanno appoggiato il governo di Manmohan Singh dall’esterno fino all’anno scorso quando hanno rotto l’accordo perché contrari al patto indo-americano sul nucleare pacifico. I comunisti, concentrati negli stati del Bengala Occidentale, lo stato di Calcutta, e nel meridionale Kerala, sono la terza forza in Parlamento e hanno il 7% dei consensi (27% il Congresso e 22% il Bjp). Secondo i sondaggi potrebbero però subire uno scivolone per via delle polemiche nate in seguito alla chiusura della fabbrica della Tata Nano a Singur, vicino a Calcutta, dove il governo locale guidato dai comunisti non è riuscito a trovare un compromesso con il movimento contadino sulla confisca delle terre agricole. VGP

Tata Nano – World’s Cheapest Car

Accuse di sfruttamento per il premio Oscar The Millionaire

Il film “The Millionaire” è stato al centro di polemiche che l’hanno accompagnato sin dalla sua uscita. Una delle famiglie dei ragazzi che hanno partecipato alle riprese aveva denunciato una sorta di sfruttamento da parte della produzione che aveva pagato il figlio appena 2500 euro a fronte delle decine di milioni di euro d’incassi. La vittoria degli Oscar sembra però aver placato gli animi.

“Sono così felice che mia figlia abbia vinto questo premio. La sua fama deve essere anche un motivo di orgoglio per tutta l’India”, ha detto Muni Qureshi, madre di Rubina Ali, 8 anni, che nel film ha interpretato la bambina della bidonville Latika.

Il regista e il produttore avevano negato in blocco le accuse spiegando che la produzione ha anche previsto di pagare gli studi dei ragazzi fino a quando saranno maggiorenni.

“La cosa più importante è che una persona povera come mio figlio venga riconosciuta internazionalmente – dice il padre del piccolo Azhar Mohammed Isamil -. Quello che mi rende più felice è che sia riuscito già a farsi un nome”.

Alcuni abitanti della bidonville si sono sentiti offesi dal titolo inglese del film che li chiama “Slumdog”, letteralmente cani dei bassifondi, e hanno presentato una denuncia in tribunale.

The Mumbai Attacks

by Justin Podur

 

The scale of the attacks is incredible: the Taj, the Oberoi Trident, a major train station (CST), a major hospital (Cama), a cafe that’s favored by tourists (Cafe Leopold), the Jewish center, all in different parts of the city.  Some attackers came by sea, others set off bombs, others just entered buildings or public areas and started shooting.  The people of India’s cities, like Pakistan’s and many others, have suffered many bombings in recent months and years.  There have also been major raids against targets in India, like the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi.  But so many simultaneous attacks on so many different parts of the city, with gunmen taking hostages in some places, setting off bombs in others, fighting commandos for days in others, is something new and terrifying.  The death toll is already well over 100 and will probably be higher before the end.

The military sophistication is matched by political incomprehensibility.  Very little that is credible is known about who the attackers are and what their motivations could be.  This will continue to be the case for some time, as it is still the case with many of the attacks and bombings of civilians that have occurred in India in recent years.  But if the “Deccan Mujahadeen” whose emails have been released to the public are a real group and are responsible, they will not win themselves any political points with India’s Muslims, who are moving in the opposite direction.  Delhi-based commentator (and friend of mine) Badri Raina earlier this week contrasted the changes happening in the Indian Muslim community with the posture of India’s Hindu chauvinists in the Sangh Parivar:

A remarkable dynamic counter to the re-centralizing, purity-oriented turmoil within the Sangh Parivar is currently at work among India’s Muslims.  A dynamic that I venture bears the promise of defeating the renewed fascistic call of the Parivar more conclusively than anything else in view.

That dynamic, Raina says, has two parts.  On the one hand, a questioning of “social practices supposedly ordained by one clerical authority or the other,” “condemning the killing of innocents especially as un-Islamic”; and on the other, the participation of Muslims “increasingly and in great numbers” in “civil rights activities that seek . . . to reinforce the non-discriminatory exercise of the rule of law.”

While India’s Muslims may be trying to move in one direction, what follows this attack could be dangerous for that community.  After the February 2002 Gujarat pogroms and Godhra massacre, Arundhati Roy wrote about what could happen to India’s Muslims:

Under this relentless pressure, what will most likely happen is that the majority of the Muslim community will resign itself to living in ghettos as second-class citizens, in constant fear, with no civil rights and no recourse to justice.  What will daily life be like for them?  Any little thing, an altercation in a cinema queue or a fracas at a traffic light, could turn lethal.  So they will learn to keep very quiet, to accept their lot, to creep around the edges of the society in which they live.  Their fear will transmit itself to other minorities.  Many, particularly the young, will probably turn to militancy.  They will do terrible things.  Civil society will be called upon to condemn them.

During those Gujarat massacres of 2002, people resisted the police and the mobs that were doing the killing.  In 2004, the BJP were out of power nationally because people did not vote on chauvinist lines.  Some citizens of Mumbai have already said that they will stay together and not allow these attacks to destroy their community.  The political forces that will seek to benefit from this are those who want violence between India and Pakistan and between Hindus and Muslims in India.  The trap these forces have set will fail if these attacks fail to derail the positive movement in South Asia for detente between India and Pakistan and fail to strengthen communalism in India.  That Pakistan is publicly cooperating with India will help, as will the fact that the BJP is not in power today.

Remembering the great Indian revolutionary

The Hindu, Sunday, Oct 12, 2008

Photo: R. V. Moorthy

In memory of Bhagat Singh: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh felicitating relatives of Bhagat Singh during the inauguration of an exhibition on the revolutionary freedom fighter and the freedom struggle, in New Delhi on Saturday.

 

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh inaugurated an exhibition on the legendary freedom fighter Bhagat Singh and the Indian revolution titled “Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna” at Teen Murti Bhawan here on Saturday.

The exhibition commemorates Bhagat Singh’s 101st birth anniversary.

Panels of different sizes depicting various aspects of the country’s freedom struggle have been mounted at the exhibition.

Some of the panels also portray events that had an impact on Bhagat Singh and his ideas and how they resulted in his intellectual and ideological transformation.

“It is a moving experience to see panels where Bhagat Singh and his contemporaries express themselves on the great social and personal challenges of the times like revolution, nationalism, multiple paths to fight injustice,” said the Director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Mridula Mukherjee.

Earlier, the Prime Minister felicitated relatives of Bhagat Singh and other revolutionaries of the freedom struggle.

Those who received the honours were Jagmohan Singh, son of Bibi Amar Kaur, the younger sister of Bhagat Singh; Yatindra Singh Rathore, nephew of Mahavir Singh, who died during a hunger strike at Andaman Cellular Jail; National Commission for Protection of Child Rights chairperson Shanta Sinha, who is the daughter-in-law of noted revolutionary Vijay Kumar Sinha; and Bharti Dutt Bagchi, daughter of Batukeshwar Dutt.

Ranjit Kapoor, grandson of Jaidev Kapoor, and Yadvendra Singh Sandhu, grandson of Kulbir Singh, who was the younger brother of Bhagat Singh, were also felicitated.

The family members relived some of the memories of their legendary relatives. Ms. Bharti Dutt Bagchi donated some of her father’s manuscripts to the museum.

A choir of school children and a musical troupe from Punjab presented some patriotic songs.

Prime Minister’s wife Gursharan Kaur and the Chairman of the Executive Council of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Dr. Karan Singh, were also present.

The exhibition is open up to January 30 next year (from 9-30 a.m. to 5-30 p.m. daily).

Post-colonialism vs Neo-colonial Imperialism

Online edition of India’s National Newspaper

Postcolonial encounters

RUMINA SETHI

Neither East Nor West looks at the ways in which colonial imperialism continues to function today through new forms of globalisation.

Neither East Nor West: Postcolonial Essays on Literature, Culture and Religion, edited by Kerstin W. Shands, Sweden: Sodertorns Hogskola, 2008, p. 186, price not stated.Edward Said’s Orientalism squarely established that the world inhabited by academics certainly knew of its two-fold division into East and West. Whereas the West was propped up by its innovativeness, advancement, adulthood and scientific temper, its other, by default, acquired connotations of imitativeness, sluggishness, childhood and sorcery. The West led and the East lagged. Unfortunately, this view has endured. Needless to say, the West is the centre to the rest of the world because the belief systems it engendered during the Enlightenment phase created permanent divisions between the West and the rest.

Such a view was built up and aided by an industry of unselfconscious writing and representation, some sympathetic, some vitriolic. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe teaches Friday to call him Master and in one stroke, polarises the world into civilised and primitive. Crusoe’s imaginings of the savagery of the inhabitants of the place he finds himself shipwrecked have continued to date in the cinematic representation of Tom Hanks in “The Castaway” or much earlier in “The Blue Lagoon” and many other films. More seriously, Marx’s infamous papers on British rule in India consider colonialism to be the “unconscious tool of history in bringing about . . . revolution”. Said’s Culture and Imperialism, in fact, gives us a veritable list of novels, opera, and other cultural artefacts which define the pattern of relationships between the Western world and its overseas territories. Connecting Conrad and Jane Austen with this enterprise, Said holds them culpable of depicting native peoples as “marginally visible” and “people without History”.

Cultural negotiations This kind of geographical diversity provides the matrix for cross-cultural exchange both at the mundane and the sublime levels, which is what Neither East nor West intends to uncover through a series of conference essays on the subject. At a juncture when the world can no longer be encapsulated into Said’s water tight contexts, the contributors explore the ways in which postcolonialism has been “developing and diversifying in several ways”. Postcolonial subversion has taken many forms: either its literary manifestation includes overt resistance through an emphasis on nativism or it charts an ambiguous terrain where the contributions of colonialism cannot be overstated. Postcolonialism has acquired a whole new range of meanings today and moved from its focus on imperial control to neo-colonialism. Colonialism is really an anachronistic term for capital expansion, and so it comes as no surprise that capital expansion in global terms is often conflated with globalisation. Among its many connotations as highlighted by several contributors, one interpretation stands out in the contemporary milieu — that postcolonialism has less significance in connoting “after colonialism” than in emphasising the persistence of it in terms of a continuing imperialism. With the new imperialism of the superpowers, it seems that colonialism has never been done away with. Postcolonial Studies thus becomes an ever bigger discipline than originally envisaged as colonialism had never been a metaphor for oppression in such a gargantuan manner.

Kerstin Shands’ Introduction charts the theoretical trajectory of the marginalised, peppering it with names of dozens of postcolonial commentators from Helen Tiffin, John McLeod and Moore-Gilbert to Aijaz Ahmad, Dirlik, Loomba, Appiah and Graham Huggan. Even the views of Hardt and Negri on the borderlessness of contemporary nations are roped in. In short, the editor sweeps in the many facets of postcolonialism — language, nation, translation, globality — in the effort to make the book comprehensive.

Postcolonial Studies is placed in a particular predicament today: it purports to be a liberatory practice but it is complicit with new hegemonies. Part of the problem arises from the inability of this discipline to step outside its textual parameters. Postcolonial theory, by addressing representation and the relations between centre and periphery, loses its historical-material reality and begins to exist in theory only. The significance of the Third World is thus well-nigh lost in service to “high theory”. Postcolonialism and postcoloniality are themselves not unproblematic terms any longer, as the editor points out, because they originated in the Western academy even as they purport to give a voice to the underprivileged non-Western people. So it is that postcolonial studies, postcolonial intellectuals and postcolonial identity have become global in their conceptualisation. Yet postcolonialism is a necessary intervention in the dominant discourse of European humanism which continues into contemporary globalism.

Diverse perspectives Within such a terrain, the various articles here present perspectives ranging from the space of the marginalised in both the South African Andre Brink and the Bengali Mahasweta Devi to the 19 century Oriya novel and its counterpart in England; from the significance of the Man Booker Prize and the “disproportionate emphasis on India” to a rather oft-trodden analysis of identity crisis in the figure of Naipaul’s Mohun Biswas; from a caricature of the “Mohammed cartoons” by the Western media and the unexplained hostility towards Muslims to a celebration of Arabo-Islamic literature and culture, especially among women scholars who are sidelined in similar ways as alien and inferior. Though wide-ranging in its formulation, the compilation is limited in its originality and insights.