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Writing in the time of conflict

Recently I had the opportunity to listen to three writers talk about the conflicts in their countries and how it affects and influences their writing. This seminar was part of a wider event organised by Italian weekly Internazionale. The three writers were Suad Amiry from Palestine, Romesh Gunesekera from Sri Lanka and Abdourahman Waberi from Djibuti and talking to them was Italian journalist Maria Nadotti.

It was a fascinating discussion and for a long time I kept on thinking about it. Here are a few excerpts from this seminar.

Maria: Suad Amiry’s family was originally from Palestine, but they had to leave their countries before her birth and she was born in Damascus. However, she went back to live in Ramallah in Gaza some years ago. Palestine is composed of Gaza and Cis-Jordan, not connected to each other.

Gaza is a narrow strip of land along the coast, 6-14 km wide and about 40 km long. In this area live 1.537.000 persons, that means 472 persons per square km.

Cis Jordan is about 6000 square km area, its borders are not defined exactly, with a population of about 2.5 million Palestinians and about half a million Isrealis.

Suad: Talking about Palestine, it is a country that is shrinking all the time. At the beginning of century (Note: I think that she means the beginning of previous century – nineteen hundred), Palestine was four times as it is today.

In Palestine, space and time do not have significance. What I mean by that is that if I go out of the house to go to Jerusalem, which is only 15 km away from Ramallah. In a place like Ferrara, you can say “15 km means 15 minutes”. But in Palestine, those 15 km between Ramallah and Jersualem can take you 15 minutes, can take you 2 hours, could take you a whole day, may be you never reach Jerusalem, may be you never come back.

Thus the notion of the state of Palestine, in a situation of occupation, is different. Palestine is more or less the size of the island of Alba in Italy, but it has 500 check-points. These check points don’t separate Palestine from Isreal, they really separate Palestine from Palestine.

So if you talk of geography and if you look at the map of Palestine, it looks like a swiss cheese. Maria has asked me to talk about geography of Palestine so you see, it is an Arab country and has Arab culture, but we can never get to any Arab country because of the occupation.

The world media is only interested in bombardments and the suicide bombings, Abu Mazen and Yassef Arafat. No one really cares about three and half million persons under occupation. For me occupation means that space around me keeps on changing. I am an architect and I see that change. I became a writer purely by accident. Because of building of settlements, because of occupation, because of building of wall, we live in a changijng place all the time.

May be you have seen “Cinema Paradiso”, where the whole village goes into estrangement because one cinema, one building is gone. In Palestine, we live thousands of “Cinema Paradiso” because when I go out I am not sure what I am going to find.

Maria: Here we are talking of small countries, that are becoming even smaller. For political erosion, as in Palestine. For geographical erosion and migrations as in Sri Lanka and Djibuti.

My question is that migrations make a country smaller and at the same time, in another way, enlarge it. They multiply it. What would I know about those other countries without the voices of the emigrants? Writing about your countries from outside or from inside? What happens when you write about your countries from far away? Not just far away physically but also far away in memories? What do we know about our countries after thirty years of not living there? How does that differ from writing about it, living there in the middle of daily routines?

Suad who lives there, writes her daily happenings, an on going dialogue. While Romesh and Waberi write much more through evocation.

Romesh: This is complicated. People feel that you have to write about what you know or where you come from. There is a kind of pressure on you to write about certain things. Like some American writers feel that they can write only about the good things in America and not about the trash, even if trash is from where great literature comes.

There is an assumption that where you come from, that might affect your writing. One of my Indian writer friends, when he saw my first book, a very slim book, he said that it is because I come from a small island. He doesn’t write very big books but he believes that being from a large country, he has so much to cover and his canvas is going to be very large. May be there is an element of truth here.

How you write about a country when you are far away from it, is not an issue, because I am a writer of fiction. Unlike the writers of happenings, when you write fiction, in your imagination you are actually there. I am interested in the connection between the real world and the fictional world, but anyone who reads fiction and is excited by it, knows that there is an area of frisson between the real and the imaginary world. You are writing about a place and about people, which is true and also not true. That is why people love to go to the places where fiction is placed. Like, if you like James Joyce, people go to Dublin and they walk on the street where Leopold Bloom walked, they stop where he stopped and they know that he never existed and he never walked on that street. It is all in imagination. I think that connection is what is interesting.

Suad: As Maria said, I became a writer thanks to Sharon and my mother in law. I lived my life as an architect and being an architect is a state of mind. As writers also we are in a state of mind. “Murad Murad” is my fourth book, but I really can’t say that I am a writer. I can tell you what I do, how I live in my writing.

My first book “Sharon and my mother in law” came as a result of curfew for 42 days. My mother in law was ninety one year old and she came to live with me during those days. I tell Isrealis that one day I may forgive you for putting us under a curfew for 42 days but I will not forgive you for making my mother in law live with me. With her, those 42 days seemed like 42 years.

There were Isreali soldiers outside our house and I had my mother in law inside the house. So I had double occupation. Those of you who follow the news, you know that Isreali occupation is enough to drive you crazy but having my mother in law made me a writer. So what happened was that every day I would sit at home and write what ever was happening in our home, between my mother in law and I.

I wrote about going shopping when they lift the curfew for two hours and you can go out and buy everything you need, imagine eighty thousand people trying to shop all together. It was a mad house. I wasn’t thinking of writing. I was writing emails to friends, telling them that please do not share these with anybody, because they were so nasty about my mother in law. Little did I realize that people like nastiness, they liked them because of their frankness. It was reporting that was not intended to become a book.

Actually it could be fictional because living in Palestine is so unreal. Sometimes, I ask when is reality? I don’t say what is reality, I say, when is reality? It is true that I am reporitng from everyday experience. People keep on asking me, is that real, is that true? I write for real, what people think may be fiction.

My second book, “No sex in the city” (Note: I am just translating from the Italian title that she quoted, actual original title may be different) was about Ramallah. That book was instigated and triggered by Hamas winning the elction in Palestine. That was so drammatic in my life, being a woman who was active, like I was active in PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation). I have been involved in it all my life, it is a secular movement. We always felt that we worked for women’s issues and secularism. To be one of the first countries of the world that would elect a religious party was drammatic, it made me loose reality. It made me think about who am I, what country am I living in, what future do I have? I felt that I have spent so many years of life to convey to the world that Palestinians are normal human beings, and then with election of Hamas!

I wanted to say that Palestinians are normal human beings, that Moslems are normal persons and those elections pushed me to write about the life of my women friends. I wanted to call that book “Palestinian Menopause” but the editor was afraid of the “menopause” in the title, and then the title was “No sex in the city” and that was fine because no one is afraid of the word “sex” in Italy.

It is about the life of women friends and about very real stories about how people became Palestinian. It is not about Palestinians. Only when I wrote that book, I realized that my women friends, the menopausal group with whom we go out every day, one is Egyptian, one is Moroccan, one is Armenian, one is American, hardly there is a Palestinian except for me, and I am half Palestinian and half Syrian. What brought us together was because of Palestine, as a cause rather than as a geography.

My last book is again from a harsh reality. The reality of building that wall, that is a concrete wall. But for me that wall is not a physical thing. It is a monster. If you ask Palestinians to tell about three events that marked the history of Palestine, they will say 1948 when 800,000 people were thrown out of historical Palestine that became Isreal and my family happened to be one of them from Jaffa; then they would say the setting up of those 500 check-points inside a small area, that prevents us from moving; and the third would be the wall.

Let me explain how this book “Murad Murad” came about. The wall is such a reality that I always ask – what would have happened if we Palestinians or Arabs around all the Jewish state of Isreal, how would the world treat us? It is beyond me, I don’t know whether it is a reality or fiction, that Isrealis, who everyday talk about need for peace, want to be part of the middle east, built that wall that separates them from their future neighbours.

Murad was like my mother in law in my other book, “Sharon and my mother in law”. My mother in law, who was ninety one year old, for me was a symbol of resistance. For her the curfew didn’t matter, she wanted her milk in the morning at seven o’clock. No matter what happened, she wanted to have lunch at one o’clock. So to me she was a symbol of resitence, of wanting to live a normal life in spite of the curfew imposed by Isrealis. Murad was symbolised same resistance to me.

I contemplated, how would I write about the wall? Then I thought that I want to write about the wall from an animal’s point of view. We human beings are so egocentric. The first things that hurt me about the wall was the one million five hundred thousand olive trees that were uprooted for this wall to be constructed. I was thinking what would a deer or a hare would think of this wall. Then Murad appeared one day in my life. He is a twenty one year old boy, who has been working in Isreal for the last seven years of his life. He woke up one day like the other 200,000 Palestinian workers, who had spent all their lives there and were told by Sharon that “No more illegal Palestinian workers coming to work in Isreal.”

We are all aware of issues of migrations and workers, but it is very difficult for me to think of Palestinian workers being illegal in their homes.

Abdourahman: Coming to the question of reality and fiction, it is very complicated. I often have this discussion with my students and ask them what is reality? If you go to the Piazza Trento and you shoot a video there near a lively place outside a café and then you go ten minutes later and the place is empty, so what is reality? I think that reality is something untrackable, something fluid.

Having written eight-nine books on my small country, I realize that I am not writing just from reality’s point of view or from geopolitical point of view, but I am also writing about something that is depper than reality, something that is country of my imagination that is mixed and overlapping with the country of reality. You have history, geography, mythology, etc. so this geological overlapping is something that you try to pierce or break into pieces by the use of the language or the use of imagination.

My writing has to do with both, with reality and also with mythology and history.  That is why I use fables like in this book “In the United States of Africa”. That “In” in the title signals that everything has happened, and the purpose of the book is to say that United States of Africa is a reality. It has been created by imagination. I start by taking it forward from there, that so what would happen? From this point of view, you can create distance and you can also produce criticism, what I call social criticism. You start with imagination and from that imagination, you can create a political action.

You can write like that about Palestine, how it was in 1844 and how it could be in 1984 and thus it can exist in the heads of the readers without polemics or whatever. Why I wrote this book, because I was an African in Europe or an European African, I have been for so long in France that I have been Francised, so what I am asking is who am I and who are we in this world?

I am asking if all Europe wants to emigrate to Africa, what would happen? Then you would see the issue of emigration and work, one of the key issues of today, from a different point of view. That is what I have tried.

Actually I am ready with a new book that is called “Passage of tears” that is looking at Djibuti in recent times. That is looking at two important areas – the Islamic discourse in the public and social space that is often linked to Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, and a new interpretation of Islam for a new political agenda. The country is changing also because of interest of the Persian gulf in Africa. Djibuti had strong exclusive links with France, but it is no longer the case. In Djibuti you have French, because France is an important partner within the global agenda, but you also have the US because it has the biggest military base in Africa in Djibuti. Then you have influence from Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and all those places. And in the book it is framing the situation from social and economic point of view. Having said that I am also trying to build some kind of historical connection between Djibuti of today and the France of the fascist Arab days, that situation of nineteen thirties and fourties in France, at that time Djibuti was a colony. This is a way of making the landscape and making new perspectives. It has to do with geropolitical situation and with history.

Romesh: I can add to that because it struck me that even with fiction, the reader is getting news from some where. It tell you about real things even if it is not reality. My last book, The Match, part of it is set in the Philippines in the nineteen seventies when I grew up there. I was a little worried when I did that, wondering if I new enough about it or if I could do it well. When the book was published, I was very interested in reactions from the people in Philippines.

Philippines is a country of young people and so most people and most people who read the book were not there in the nineteen seventies, so it is a new country in a sense. To read about that for them was to read about a different place. The other feed back that I got was that newspapers etc. you don’t have to be Philippino to understand the country, you just have to be there or you just have to imagine it to redefine the way you think about the place.

That made me think of something that Russian writer Nobokov said about fiction, when you read something and you sense the excitement or a sense of fear of the character, what you sense is actually quite often the real sense of writer behind that who has a sense of excitement or fear about the sentences that he or she is dealing it, it comes out of the words themselves.

Comment: It was a fascinating morning listening to the three writers. I felt the three of them also symblised three different ways of bring a writer. For me Abdourahman’s way of talking about his work seemed more intellectual, Romesh’s way of articulating seemed more emotional, while Suad seemed more rooted in irony.

I liked all three of them, and I also liked the way Maria probed them, but I was struck very much by Suad’s way of narrating her daily dilemmas. There is so much rhetoric all around about human rights, democracy and other such ideals and yet listening to her and what happens in Palestine is a cruel reminder of the distance between reality and rhetoric.

After the meeting I talked some more with Romesh. I asked him if the main protagonist in his new book “The Match” is more autobiographical in the sense that it is about a person who has forgotten his roots and then in the middle age, rediscovers them, and that emigrant writers often touch on this theme of rediscovering their roots, sooner or later in their writings. Romesh said that almost all important writers are emigrants, from Shakespear to Dante, which I found very intriguing.

Uttam Kumar, Suchitra Sen & Durga Puja

This year, Durga Puja came earlier, in the last week of September. As usual, Binil from the Bengali Association of Bologna, “Sanatan Sanskritik Parishad” came to ask me to prepare the Durga Puja programme.

Every year, our Bologna Durga Puja has the same old films – Mahalaya, Ramayan, etc. I don’t remember watching such films during the Durga Puja in Delhi during the 1970s – we used to watch so many Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen films. But I can’t make Binil change his mind, he is adamant about showing these religious films.

Here are a few pictures from this years Durga Puja, followed by one of my old post on this theme written in May 2005.

From 2005 post: Watched Nayak with Uttam Kumar and Sharmila Tagore. Ray made it in 1966, just a year before Uttam Kumar himself produced Chotti si Mulakat. Nayak is a stereotype of how we feel rich and famous must be living their lives – it is all a façade. Nice smiles, cars, autograph hunters in the day. Nightmares, loneliness, people trying to exploit you all the time, to fall into alcoholic sleep.

In that genre, both Uttam Kumar as Arindam Mukherjee and Sharmila as the feminist journalist with heavy glasses and sans dimples are both stereotypes. Yet it is Uttam Kumar’s charm that raises the film’s interest. His nightmare with banknotes and skeleton hands holding ringing telephones may not be very imaginative but he makes every thing look effortless. The cliché seem plausible.

Reading his biography it is easy to see why people feel that the film was autobiographical.

I remember watching Chotti si Mulakat in Alipur Dwar. It had Vyjayantimala and “Ya Ya Hippi Hippi” in technicolor. Upperstall says that “He produced Chhotisi Mulaqaat in 1967 starring himself and Vyjayantimala. The film was adaptated from Agniparikhsha and had music by Shankar-Jaikishen . The film however was a dismal failure at the box-office leaving him with a pile of debt and probably leading to his first heart attack. Though he recovered and returned to full time acting, thus clearing his debts, he was never to produce a film again.”

The Bangladeshi DVD shop owner has so many Bengali films. The DvD with Nayak has 11 of his films, including different films with Suchitra sen.

Makes me remember the Durga Puja in the park in R-block, where they would show all those emotional films of Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen that I loved – Deep Jale Jaye, Saptpadi, …

Reclaiming my faith

It was January and sister Leela, an old friend and a nun from India,  was with us that evening. Marco and Atam, my son and daughter in law, had come for dinner. Leela recited her prayers asking God to bless all the persons sitting around that table and made a sign of cross. All others murmured “Amen” and made signs of cross, including my Sikh daughter in law. I didn’t.

A few days later, we were having dinner in the evening, when I told my wife what was troubling me. I had grown up in India, where I had learned that we respect all religions. As a child and a growing up man, in India, if I visited a Gurudwara of Sikhs, I would cover my head and kneel before Guru Granth Saheb, if I visited a church, I made a sign of cross, if I visited a temple I would fold my hands and accept the vermillion mark on my forehead.

We were not a religious family. Rather, I would say that I heard much more criticisms about Hinduism. My mother often complained about “hypocrisy in the temples and wasting precious milk and ghee on stupid rituals that can feed so many poor”. My paternal grandmother, wrote “Ram, Ram” countless times on sheets of paper to espiate her sin of being a widow and read religious books. We would go to all Ramleelas and Durga Pujas with very non religious excitement of “having a good time” and hoping to get some tasty prasad to eat.

In Rajendra Nagar, where we lived, on one side we had Sajid bhai and his wife Ireen with their two children, and above them the very religious Sharma family. There were many Sikh families in our street. But my closest friend was Sam, who had come from Hyderabad to stay with his aunt, Mrs. Rock. With him, I had gone to a few mid-night Christmas masses.

Yet, religions of the persons were not something so clear in my mind. Like Akhtar bhai, who must have been just 5-6 years older to me and who used to come to our home to meet my father, I had never thought of him as “Muslim”. When I had to go to Udaipur for an interview, I stayed with Haseena ji’s family, a friend of my father, without really thinking that I was going to a “Muslim” house.

Perhaps those times were different and today religious identities and differences have become much more marked, but I often find myself thinking of the past and classifying persons by their religions, like I did above for Sajid bhai, Akhtar bhai and Sam. It feels wrong to me yet I can’t stop myself from doing it. And it all started about two decades ago, when I decided that I will not make the sign of a cross.

Coming to Italy was what started this change. People here are more used to sharp religious boundaries and perhaps most of them expect persons to follow those boundaries clearly. “If you are not Catholic and you are not even a Christian, why do you make the sign of cross?” an Italian priest once asked me. I tried to explain that it was normal in India, that going to a church or making the sign of cross did not make me less Hindu, but it showed that I respected the others, but he was clearly not convinced.

That priest was not the only one. It happened a few more times. They said that it was “hypocrisy” or  ”ambiguous” or  ”dishonest” or “an attempt to conform and to ingratiate”. I was angry and hurt and I stopped making the sign of cross in a church. Thus, whenever I accompanied my wife to a mass, I would stand stiffly, showing clearly that I was not Catholic.

It hurt me inside and every time I entered a church as a tourist, I felt that I was disrespecting God by not stopping to pray for a few moments. I knew that it was not rational. How does it matter to God if I pray inside me or I show it with folded hands or with a sign of cross? A temple or a mosque or a church is just a building and God is no more or no less there than in any other building? I tried to explain it to myself, to justify it, but I felt as I had violated something at deeper level inside me.

It was the first time, I was actually talking about it. I told my wife all this. She felt that I should not let myself be influenced by what others say or think about my religious ideas, but I should behave in the way I wish.

In April, when I visited India, I talked about it with Daisy and like my wife, she had the same advice for me, to behave in the way I felt inside me and not let myself be influenced by others.

Understanding something rationally is perhaps different from the emotional understanding, when something comes from deep inside you? I had the rational understanding but I was waiting for my inner self to understand it.

Finally it came on last Sunday. I was in Rome, visiting an old church. There was just an old woman sitting and praying. I made my peace with myself as my hands made the gesture of cross.

Actually I have not changed my way of thinking. The statues or the temple or the church or the mosque, do not make any difference to me, since I feel God is there in everything, in all beings live or inanimate. But I feel happier, I have reclaimed my right to respect the religions in way I feel right. If others feel that I am being a hypocrite or ambiguous, they are welcome to think what ever they wish.

Development of sexuality

I continue with my review of some old posts. This one was originally written in June 2005. While re-reading it I could remember the time I had thought of that post – while cycling back from work, which is one of the most fertile moments for thinking interesting things!

Most of the time, ideas keep on cominng and passing through, and I can hardly remember them but I like this re-reading of my old posts to have vivid memories of my thoughts at that time.

Anyway, here is the post:

<<Suddenly I thought of the differences in the male and female bodies. Why are males full of force and muscular strength but have lower life expectation while women have less muscle force, are apparently weaker and have longer life expectancy? It is because they have to carry babies in their wombs, I thought, so they could not have participated in hunting and gradually over time, we ended with men developing muscle power and women developing other powers.

May be that is true for humans but a tigress or a lioness is as strong as a lion or a tiger? I don’t think that it is males who go for hunting while females wait at home, so both have to hunt and find food. So then why did nature create males and females? Wouldn’t it have been better to have hermafrodites, both males and females in the same bodies? It would have been more practical and reproduction (continuation of the species as the most important primordial impulse) much easier? It has to be something to do with mixing of genes so that if there are any defects in genes, they can be overcome. Confused? Don’t know where this kind of thinking is supposed to lead but I am still thinking!

I like the way they use old buildings in Italy to put them together with new things and the result is wonderful. Bologna has a wonderful university auditorium that was a 2000 year old ruin and they have kept part of old walls and added glass and steel to make a remarkable structure. Or the way, they use old fountains and stairs, like the Spanish square in Rome that is used for fashion shows. In India too we do it, like the Khujaraho festival, but we use old buildings for classical dances and similar things so it is beautiful but not contrasting.>>

I think that this post is not complete, it starts with some reasoning that isn’t taken to its conclusion. Rethinking about it, I think that separating males from females is good for survival of species. Perhaps outgoing males had greater chances of dying while home staying women could complete the pregnancy and ensure the continuation of the gene pool. What do you say?

And I can’t make out the relationship between the first part of this post about sexuality and the last bit about conservation and alternative use of old buildings, and why I had mixed up these two things!

Black memories

These is one of the old posts from the older version of “Aree kya baat hai”. Re-reading the old posts is like remembering a dream that you think that you had forgotten, yet that was just sitting there, waiting to be called. This post is about the time I was living in Delhi 25 years ago. I was working as a general doctor at that time.

There are so many things that I wish I go back into time and change them. This post is about such memories.

“I suddenly thought of the man and his daughter. I was writing about the daily “Sofie’s choice” that you make as father or mother, when you don’t know if you are going to eat that day, when you decide which of your children is going to eat and how much, if you can take your child to the doctor… and I thought of them.

He was from Rajasthan, he had said. His thin sun-burnt face creased with lines. Broke stones on the roads because there was nothing to eat in the village. His wife and two children were dead. Only that girl was left. 8-9 years old, thin with wise eyes. She was sick, swaying slightly. Had diarrhea and vomiting. She was dehydrated. It was Sunday afternoon and I had promised Nadia that we would go out. I gave him some medicines and told him to come back next morning. There was no other way. Saw him after a few months. How is your daughter, I had asked. She died that night when we had come to see you, he had said simply. Without any hint of resentment or anger in his voice.

Every now and then I think of Triveni. In the servant quarters. Blood soaking her sari. Sitting there with blood on my hands, unable to do any thing. She still comes in my nightmares, making me wake up with heart pounding in the chest. Her daughters must be grown up and married. Wonder what kind of lives they had. Did her husband get remarried?”

Bollywood has arrived in Italy

These days there is a Bollywood wave in Italy after a series of Hindi films were shown on Italian national TV channel on prime time.

Compared to some of other western European countries like UK, France, Germany or Netherlands, Italy has a limited population of Indians and perhaps for this reason, Bollywood films were almost unknown in Italy till recently. There were persons who liked Bollywood and who watched Hindi films with English sub-titles but their numbers were extremely limited. On the other hand, there have always been some persons interested in world cinema, the kind of persons who go to film festivals and many of these persons were aware of the realistic films that usually make it to film festivals but they were not into the usual masala films of Bollywood.

During the past twenty years, I am only aware of two occasions when Indian films made it to the Italian TV and in both instances these films were broadcasted late in the night – one was Kagaaz ke phool by Gurudutt and the second was Lagaan by Ashutosh Gowarikar.

Italy doesn’t have a culture of subtitled films and all films must be dubbed into Italian. Many years ago a dubbed version of Deewar was released in Italy but it didn’t find any audience. More recently Lagaan, Mission Kashmir and Sawaariya were released in dubbed versions but none of them made it to any cinema halls and were only released on DVDs.

Perhaps the change came with the films made by expatriate Indian film directors like Mira Nayar, Deepa Mehta and Gurvinder Chadha. Mira nayar’s Salaam Bombay and more recently, Monsoon Wedding & The Namesake, Deepa Mehta’s Water and Gurvinder Chadha’s East is East and Bend it like Backham, all had theater releases, DVDs and TV broadcasts.

Then in the TV “dead-season” in summer 2008 the national channel RAI had shown 3 Hindi films (“Cheeni Kum”, “Hum Tum” and “Aur ho gaya na”). In summer, Italians go on holidays and TV viewership goes down and that is the time when usually old reruns of TV serials and films are shown. In 2008, there was some awareness of Bollywood first created. Then in 2009, this experiment was repeated and it started in July with “Namastey London”. The waves this year have been much bigger since the film topped the viewership ratings of the Saturday primetime.

Since then, on successive Saturdays, it has been Bollywood time on RAI and each time it tops the viewership ratings. Thus the series that was supposed to stop at end of July was extended to mid-August and now it seems it will go on till end of August. The other films shown so far in this season include – Fanaa, Salaam Namastey, Jab We Met, Laaga Chunri Mein Daag and Mujhse Dosti Karoge. Next saturday will be the turn of Dil Ka Rishta.

Suddenly people want to know about Hrithik Roshan, Saif Ali Khan, Rani Mukherjee, Preity Zinta and Kajol. My Italian blog Awaragi, where occasionally I wrote about Bollywood films, used to get about 10-15 hits a day and now on Sundays after the the Bollywood nights, the number of hits reach upto 700-800. Suddenly as an “expert” on Bollywood I am in demand with people writing in to ask about meanings of the words of the songs or other things related to Bollywood.

The Hindi films shown on RAI are reduced versions from which most of the songs and some scenes are removed. They last around 1 hour and 40 minutes so that with the ad-breaks they finish in 2 hours. For example in Salaam Namastey, the whole Javed Jaffery track and parts of the final hospital scene were removed, along with the songs. Unfortunately, even those background songs that are left in the film, are without subtitles so people write to ask for meanings. Initially, especially in 2008, the dubbing was strange with persons using sing-song voices, sounding caricatures of Indians like Peter Sellers in The Party, but that has improved considerably. All these films are mainly romantic films and perhaps for that reason, majority of feedback I have received is from women.

I think that this opens up a new market for Hindi films in Italy, especially in terms of DVDs. Right now, no Hindi film has proper Italian subtitles – most Italian subtitles in Hindi DVDs seem to be done with automatic translation software that often butchers the meanings. Italy is flooded with low quality pirated Hindi DVDs aimed at Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani emigrants. People write to me asking for Bollywood films dubbed into Italian or with proper Italian subtitles, but I don’t have any clue about what to advice to give to them.

I hope that Indian film-makers and international distributors can read it and take necessary steps to safeguard the interests of the Indian film industry.

New Italian Sex Symbol Is A Cow?

Yesterday’s news papers had a picture of the new Italian sex symbol – Cristina del Basso. Miss del Basso became known to the Italian public as one of the participants of the last season of Italian reality show Grande Fratello 9 (Big brother 9) and was immediately noticed for her very generous attributes.

It seems that ever since, Miss del Basso’s fame has been growing and her pictures with these huge tits hanging out were splashed all over newspapers yesterday because she is the new calender girl for the Panorama magazine 2009-2010 calender that came out yesterday.

These huge mammeries are not how the nature had made them, they have been surgically enhanced, but then in todays Facebook-Twitter era, the competition to get noticed is so high, that all help is welcome. I don’t think saliva-dripping hormone strung guys are complaining. I am just a little bit worried about her gravity-related problems, but probably I need not worry as she must be using some strong back-support to compensate for the forward-downwards pull.

Watching Miss del Basso’s pictures, I was reminded of a programme about cows with massive tits and fast-growing huge chickens that I had seen on Italian channel Rai 3 sometime ago. “Report”, this programme goes behind the scenes to dig deeper and understand the issues. They explained that in the Agro-food industry, to earn profits by supplying to big supermarket chains, one must increase production to very high levels.

So they have these Dutch Frisona cows, that stand in rows whole day, blocked above troughs carrying their food, munching antibiotics and hormone enriched cereals mixed with some other things (cow bone powder is no longer given to them after the mad-cow disease scare, they assure), and automated milking machines are attached to their tits so that each cow gives up to 60 to 90 liters of milk every day.

These cows never see those green grassy hills, where they shoot the lovely milk advertisements for enticing public to drink more milk. Within one or two years, these cows are literally pumped out completely, they can’t have any more calfs and their milk production goes down, so they end up in steak houses. It is a factory line production, where new cows come and old ones go to the butcher.

There are chickens as well. Thousands of chickens closed inside enclosures, packed tightly so that they look a beautiful furry carpet and like the cows, they spend all their days eating the feed fortified with antibiotics and hormones. In just 3 weeks they weigh 3.5 to 3.8 kg, ready to be packed and put on the supermarket shelves.

It is not very clear what those antibiotics do to the human beings who eat this meat but they are probably not very harmful as there is no ban on using antibiotics in animal & bird feeds.

If the idea of fucked up cows and chickens excites you, you can watch that episode of “Report” on their website. In the mean time, you can search for more pictures of Cristina del Basso or become her fan on Facebook.

After all it is just a question of markets. While Cristina del Basso may have decided to get screwed out of choice to enhance her attributes, while the dutch frisona cows have no choice but to be part of assembly production line, in the end both, the sex symbol and the cows, are praying to the same market god.

Looking for Karl Marx

When I heard that Karl Marx’s grave is in London, I was very surprised. Poor Marx. Wonder, how he feels surrounded by all the testosterone driven city yuppies in the world capital of free market and globalisation.

I had reached London on 8th July afternoon. After I finished my meeting in Euston, I decided to take the underground to Archway and walk to highgate London cemetery, to take a look at old friend Marx’s grave.

This time, I had decided to ignore the weather predictions on BBC. Everytime, they say it is going to rain and I carry an umbrella with me, I find a sunny London. So this time, it did decide to rain. The way to highgate rises on a steep hill, it is supposed to be the highest spot in London, so soon I was breathless and more than a little wet.

Finally when I did reach the cemetery, I found that it was closed. In spite of all their claims about London being the financial hub of the world, free markets and all, so many places continue to observe the office times, from 10 AM to 5 PM. I guess, even the cemetery workers need to go out and enjoy the long summer evenings and visiters can very well take a leave if they wish to visit their dead.

So after all my efforts, in the end I could just take a picture of the entrance of the cemetery, that has a sign that no videos and pictures can be taken inside. However, the walk back to Archway was downhill and much more easier, and it was not raining anymore.

I took the underground to Leicester square, where I was supposed to change to the Piccadilly line. In spite of the cold and wind, it was too early to go back to the hotel, so I decided to walk around Leicester square. The London rickshaws with Savanna ads painted over them, outside the Leicester underground station, looked kind of cute.

However, like the Highgate cemetery, even in Leicester square, teeming with tourists, the park in the middle of the square was already closed. With the summer and the sunlight till 9 PM, it seems funny that parks are closed when people come out of the offices. In the park, I could see a small black statue that looked like Charlie Chaplin, so I decided to take a picture of the park with the zoom.

Then, I walked over to the Trafalgar square. The fourth statueless plinth in Trafalgar square is hosting “living sculptures” by Antony Gormley these days. The concept of this initiative is interesting. Starting from 6 July, a new person will get a place for one hour on the plinth to be a living sculpture and persons will keep on changing every day, 24 hours, till October. A total of 2400 persons are expected to participate in this very inclusive art event and anyone can apply through a website. This website also has a live webcam of the plinth.

When I arrived in Trafalgar square, a lady dressed in red was trying to set up a playing card statue, but with strong wind, the cards were refusing to stay in position and some of them flew off the plinth into the safety net and in the square.

While walking around in the square, near one of those statues sprouting water into the fountain, I heard an Indian father tell his young son in Hindi, “Beta dekho, woh baccha kulli kar raha hai” (Son, look that child is gargling).

Yuck! I didn’t want to go near the kulli-water anymore.

By that time, there was some commotion near the fourth plinth. It seemed that the next participant who was supposed to go up as a living sculpture, had not arrived. Finally Sandy Nairne, director of National Portrait gallery, went up as a substitute and sat there sketching something.

From Trafalgar square, I walked towards Piccadilly, where as usual, hordes of tourists were sitting around the Mercury statue, that always reminds me of the god of love, Kamdev, from Indian mythology.

Tired from all the walking, finally I decided to go back to the hotel.

On 9th July, I had an early morning meeting with a French-Italian friend, who is married to an Indian. For our breakfast we went to a small Italian place in one of the small streets near Euston. The place had old pictures of Sorrento, but none there spoke any Italian. Perhaps the original Italian place was bought over by someone else?

I had to go to another meeting near Russel square and there was some time for that, I decided to walk, pulling my suitcase trolley behind me.

When we finished with the meeting, I thought that I could spend a couple of hours in the British museum nearby, as they are having different exhibitions and events linked to India under the Indian Summer initiative. However, the guard at the museum told me that my suitcase was too big for the cloakroom and so he couldn’t allow me to enter.

Again I walked back to Euston to kill some time and then took the underground to Victoria. Since it was cloudy and windy, so walking was good fun (after a month in the buring 42 degrees of Delhi, my evident joy at clouds and wind is easy to understand, though most of my European friends are a little perplexed by it).

I still had four hours for my flight back to Italy, so decided to walk to Buckingham palace from Victoria station.

The buildings around Victoria station have a mix of old and new architecture. The golden coloured statue on the old Victoria theater looks strange against the ugly looking high rise building, but some other glass buildings made for much better contrast against the old British architecture.

Buckingham palace area was crowded with tourists. It must be weak British pound that has brought back tourists from all over to UK.

Finally it was the time to take the train back to Gatwick airport but I was quite satisfied by my walking initiatives.

There was a time, when I hardly saw anything in the cities I visited for work. I have been to so many countries and cities, where I saw just the airports and the hotels. But I like my new me, the one who decides to walk, to get lost, to talk to people and to get a feel for the people and the cities. It is more tiring and but also so relaxing!

And, I love clicking with my digital camera. So that I may not spend a lot of time walking around as a tourist, but then I can look at the pictures back home and try to see things that I didn’t have time to stop and admire.

Delhi’s Coming Out

Delhi Queer Pride parade, planned on 28 June 2009. But it was going to be in Connaught Place and it was supposed to start at around 5.30 PM, which probably meant that it wouldn’t start moving at least till 6 PM. So I was sure that I could not participate in it. I was in Delhi to look after my mother, who can’t be left alone. After preparing the dinner, the maid usually leaves around 7 PM and there was no way to go to the parade and then be back in home by 7 PM.

That whole week had been terribly hot, just putting the head out of the door felt like being a cake getting cooked inside an oven. And I was sweating so much! 5 minutes after coming out of the house, I was already looking like Shiv ji who has just received river Ganga on his head, streams of sweat running all around me. Probably in all these years of being away from India, my body mechanisms have forgotten how to deal with the Delhi summer, since I couldn’t see anyone else around me sweating so much.

Thus the heat was another reason, I felt that I couldn’t go the Delhi Queer Pride.

I wanted to. I had not been in Delhi in June for the past 25 years and I am not likely to come back here again in June (if I can help it)! So this was my only chance to see it. I had been to the Queer Pride parades in Italy and I had loved it with their wonderful music and colourful floats.

And then on Sunday 28, we woke up to a cloudy sky. During the night, the breeze coming in from the window had turned very pleasant. It was still a little hot and humid, yet the clouds were a sign of hope. The morning newspapers had talked about the Pride but didn’t give any practical information about it. However a search on internet took me to the Delhi Queer Pride website, that had all the practical information. People were supposed to collect at the Tolstoy Marg-Barakhamba road crossing at 5 PM.

What if I leave home around 4 PM, reach Tolstoy Marg-Barahkhamba road crossing by 5 PM, stay there for about 30 minutes and then, come back home, aiming to reach home by 6.30 PM

OK, I will take the decision in early afternoon, finally I decided. If the clouds stayed, it was a sign from the heavens that I should go, I told myself.

The heavens were definitely in favour of my going, and they showed it by a small shower in the afternoon, and I was there at the starting venue just before 5 PM. There were no floats, and compared to the Pride Parade in Bologna, which is a city of half of million persons, the group gathered there was really tiny. but persons were in high spirits and it was colourful with masks and all kinds of shining-feathery dresses. It was still very hot and some of the heavily made-up drag queens were literally melting down, but still they were busy laughing and preening themselves, like peacocks forced to hide in the darkness of caves, suddenly out in the daylight and enjoying this day of freedom.

There were a lot of policemen all around, but they were relaxed. There were even more journalists, TV reporters, video-cameras and photographers, who were busy looking for persons willing to talk in front of the cameras.

The Pride manifesto explains the basic issues facing the sexual minorities in India:

“400 years ago, the word “queer” meant odd or unusual. 100 years ago, the word was used as an insult for anyone who was different from the society’s norm of gender and sexually “correct” behaviour. It was used to demean and marginalise people. Today, people across the world have reclaimed that word to empower, celebrate and unite people of diverse genders and sexualities. With the rainbow as our symbol of beauty in diversity, we celebrate Queer Pride in solidarity with queer people across the world.

Queer Pride is about celebrating who we are, whether gay, kothi, lesbian, queen, dyke, transgender, bisexual, hijra, butch, paanthi … whether manly looking women or men who sleep with men, whether sex worker or sex changer, Queer Pride affirms our diverse expressions and our everyday struggle for respect and dignity.

Today in India, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people face violence and discrimination from different quarters. Here are some examples of our daily oppression:

• Lesbians are subject to violence, forced into marriage and even driven to commit suicide by their families.
• Gay men are blackmailed by organized scandals that often involve the police.
• Hijras are routinely arrested and raped by the police.
• Same sex couples who have lived together for years, can not buy a house together or will their property to each other or even adopt a child as a couple if they wish.
• LGBTI people are constantly mocked, demeaned and denied their basic human rights of self-expression.

All this is happening because section 377 of the Indian penal code treats LGBTI people as criminals. It has been used to arrest, prosecute, terrorize and blackmail sexual minorities. It has strengthened the already existing stereotypes, hatred and abuse in homes, schools, workplaces and streets, forcing millions of LGBTI people to live in fear and silence at tragic cost to themselves and their families.”

 

Thus the Pride is asking for change of section 377 as well for affirmative legislation to support the rights and dignities of LGBTI persons.

I also tried to identify some persons willing to talk and tell about their views. Most persons were shy, afraid, and some were clearly traumatised. Finally Anil and his friend agreed to say a few words. My initial questions got the usual answers that most young men with alternate sexuality give, “I am gay, I am proud to be gay and it is nice to be able to come out here but it is so difficult to find acceptance from parents and society.

Anil is a counsellor for men who have sex with men (MSM) and are affected with HIV, and he works with a NGO. I knew a bit about HIV issues among women sex workers and I was curious to know about similar issues among gay men, “Women sex workers, even if they know about HIV, can’t always ensure that their clients use condoms, because they are powerless while clients can force them into unsafe sex. Does that happen to gay men also?” “Yes, it is exactly the same for gay men” he told me.

I also spoke to Ritu Parna who works for a women’s organisation. She was much more willing to speak and more articulate. Ritu said, “I am a queer activist. I have been actively involved in my support to the GLBTI movement and also involved in organising the Pride as part of a community, that is also the “Pride committee”, as there is no formal organisation as such.”

“How do you form a community in a society like the Indian society?” I asked.

“It is difficult because there is social stigma against it. But we make community through bonding, through shared experiences, others they face our same issues, so we know there are other queer people, who will be with us. So it is an informal network. There also some formal organisations that are working in this area like Sangma in Bangalore that works for sexual minorities.”

“What are the strategic issues related to the women in the movement?”

“The issues faced by other women are also the issues of queer women. Like domestic violence. When a lesbian comes out in the family she faces more domestic violence. Or the sexual harassment, a lesbian women also faces the same or may be even more harassment. Because of the sexuality, they face greater challenges. In terms of gender, they are exploited by the society.”

“In terms of GLBTI movement, in Europe it is felt that transgender persons face greater difficulties and even among the movement they are marginalised. What is the situation in India?” I asked her.

Ritu was not so sure about this, “It might be relatively, but it may differ from place to place. The hetero-normative society discriminates against all those who are different and in that sense transgender persons also face discrimination. But in our movement, we don’t discriminate, and you can see how many transgender persons are there today in this Pride.”

Ritu agreed to give a small message to the Italian GLBTI movement, “We are all the same, we need your support, we are also with you, we love you all.”

It was nice talking to Ritu and I would have loved to speak to many more persons. For example, I would have liked to know if class and social backgrounds are also an issue in the movement, and how do they deal with it? I did try to speak to a couple of other persons, but they all seemed to be afraid of talking and in the end, I gave up.

My 30 minutes for the Pride were over so quickly and soon I had to look for an auto and come back home. On my journey back home, I was thinking about another group of persons, who face greater barriers in the GLBTI movement, not only in India but all over the world. That is, persons with disabilities. In the Delhi Queer Pride, I didn’t see any one on a wheelchair, or a blind or a person with obvious disability. Perhaps there could have been some deaf gay or lesbian persons, that I didn’t meet.

Both, sexual minorities and disabled persons, face isolation, discrimination, stigma, barriers and violations of human rights. Disabled persons who are also sexual minorities face even greater barriers, more so if they are women.

However, I feel that India has a very strong disability movement and in some countries, transgender persons are a strong component of disability movement. I hope that the strong Indian disability movement and the budding GLBTI (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexuals, Transgenders & Intersexuals) movement will join hands and support each other. Fight against discrimination requires unity.

In the evening, the coverage in the 24×7 news channels was quite uneven. On some channels, the kind of language they were using, was aimed at sensationalising and a little bit offensive. Some other channels seemed more aware and used a more balanced language.

On one channel, a “swami ji” thundered about the “aprakritik” (against nature) practices and that “these are against our culture”. I can’t understand this logic of aprakritik. Every thing created by nature is prakritik (natural) and you don’t really need to have genetically modified human beings to become gay or lesbian, because that would be aprakritik. If being gay or a lesbian is “against nature” simply because it is not the majority behaviour, then even being a swami or a monk is also aprakritik, so why discriminate only against gays and lesbians?

The morning after, the English newspapers were full of colourful pictures. The staid TOI even had a kissing gay couple, though not on the cover page. Loksatta, the Hindi newspaper was more restrained, it only mentioned about the Pride in one line, as an afterthought to a statement by the Minister Moily, and didn’t carry any pictures.

May be the flamboyant pictures present just one facet of the GLBTI movement, most of the gay or lesbian persons, don’t go around wearing feathers or dress up like “rave party on the beach” – their daily lives also move around home-office-home routines like other persons in their communities, still I am sure that any publicity is good publicity at this stage of the movement. Thousands of persons who find themselves isolated with fear, can see those pictures and read about others like them who had the courage and the possibility to come out and be themselves.

It was just the second Pride in Delhi. In the first Pride in 2008, they just had 500 persons, this time they were supposed to 2-3,000. So the movement is growing and getting stronger. The wide publicity the parade received this time, will bring even more persons into open, the next time!

You can see some more pictures from the Delhi Queer Pride 2009 at my Kalpana webpage. If you are in a picture and wish to receive it (free) in higher resolution, send me an email at sunil (at) kalpana.it – if the picture can create any difficulty for you, let me know and I will remove it.