[Reader-list] Fw: Thanks: on Delhi

[subhrodip sengupta]

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: subhrodip sengupta <sub_sengupta at yahoo.co.in>
To: Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
Sent: Monday, 10 August, 2009 7:13:58 PM
Subject: Thanks: [Reader-list] on Delhi


Dear Kshmendra,
First, thanks for your kind words, tell U, r honestly motivating. If you may please elaborate what connotaions you had in mind, the traumatic experience that the society goes through , or that it exists in the culture in mind of everybody, which we violate everytime we Dehumanise women, while talking useless of their character, the same for men ( IN Hindi we Say 'Jo di Nahin Woh Randi Hain'), wherein yours would be a better version than mine which calls of scantifying culture by keeping scantity in one's own code of conduct, as behaviour towards other, not by restricting worse for others Sexual Habbits.(U know I got this term under the intense pressure one feels when one sees people do away with reasonings coz of temporal gains, when I critisised the dogmatic theory of Sperm based linearage, the act of ruing the community by simply inseminating and making a woman pregnant...... as if the Vagina would break the society, families of  rape victims feel
 likewise, herein I claim the Hymen exists elsewhere, in our piety and does not break becoz of forced insemination( The law of land believes only evidence of penetration constitutes rape and gives relief in absence of strong resistance, brritish courts even believe a woman can lure a man to rape her by showing a part of her body, Just because she is hot,just another kind of Feudal values.........
Ur artistic touches me up. This was simply a side touch up. Unlike Chadni chowk where we have a less educated and crime prone people, in Gurgaon and Dwarka we have Sensitised and educated youth,....................... Still crime rates are higher here, which I attribute to lack of community feeling, which increases Voyeurism, though whenever a crime happens in full public view,and people choose simply to overlook it, it is not because of simply cost benefit analysis, it is beacuse the take part in the crime as silen specatators as if peeping through a key hole........ The worse the community tie up, the worse the extent of voyurism. Thus police patrols would not help unless Neighbourhood watch becomnes more responsible, not only towards people of their own neighbourhood. On delhi metro, in certain routes, I've seen the conditions are much better, just because the economic status these people share or may be of the cultural untiy they feel when on this
 public transport.....
Regards,
Subhrodip.



________________________________
From: Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
To: Readers list Yousuf Sarai. <reader-list at sarai.net>; subhrodip sengupta <sub_sengupta at yahoo.co.in>
Sent: Monday, 10 August, 2009 3:03:16 PM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] on Delhi


Dear Subhrodip

Your words "the hymen exists elsewhere".

Brilliant phrase. Have not seen it used. If it is your 'original' please patent it or ask for copyright. Since that might be difficult, at least an acknowledgement if someone else uses it.

Allow me a variation "the hymen exists everywhere"

Kshmendra
 

--- On Mon, 8/10/09, subhrodip sengupta <sub_sengupta at yahoo.co.in> wrote:


>From: subhrodip sengupta <sub_sengupta at yahoo.co.in>
>Subject: Re: [Reader-list] on Delhi
>To: "Readers list Yousuf Sarai." <reader-list at sarai.net>
>Date: Monday, August 10, 2009, 1:57 AM
>
>
>U know, I attended a seminaar by some reknowned Social Worker. Evry 3rd line was 'Aur Ma-beheno ke saath shosan hota hain!' (for present purposes,chicks not allowed!) Hilariously, most of the so called moms and sis left the discussion tired of the topic. True a hilarious note, but neither an insult, U know, I am poor and am sure the book'l take some time to reach the libraries, so hav no right to criticise;
>nor an inabbriated a/c of a frustrated denpo(A person who thinks knows too much). Somehow amongst all crimes, only rape seems to be highlighted. However, leaving the mentality of MAle-dominated lineARAGE, I'd argue that though these have diraect physical and hormonal damage, as far as mental trauma is concerned many crimes are as bad.  I argue the hymen exists elsewhere... There are many good things about feminism, but this I feel is a another form of reductionism.  Thankfully there exists something which still arouses the society.....................
>
>
>This was a hilarious start to some more grave issues, precisely 2 distinct one which I wish 2 take up, I ought have taken one of  them, concurrently 2 weeks ago, but precisely for long hours involved in editing, very conviniently shirked. 
>First on Gurgaon:
>What I have learnt is in many pockets, Rickshaw pullers are called on their mobile phones,a truely novel thing...........
>My experiences are quite vivid with a similar, may be not in terms of investment and culture, but in pattern of development, Dwarka, on which I'll try to jointly elaborate on this issue, involving the 'biker Gang' as well(they include not only sikhs or even jaats but Biharis and UP'ites as ell)
>In every other convergence( classical ) model of 'development', we talk of convergence, adjustment of MPL/MPK( through various mechanisms, including learning in classical sense), a term which is dubious, for the latter is indeterminate,  promoted by free trade, What happens actually is quite different thing. Leaving out things like Wine, labour constitutes nearly 70% of a commodities cost. So, in development, in order to keep feed of properly skilled or highly skilled labour, at cheap rates, we need labour or mass labour to be cheaper........................ We can say thus two roads are created=== a high road, of people who can really afford the 22K+ flats in Gurgaon and the super-expensive sabzis et-al max cost extracted by the rentier clas and the Haftas, and outsiders, who have no stake in the place's culture. While Gurgaon even gets it's skilled feed from adjoining places like Dwarka, most of the workers in both places come from neighboiuring
>villages on Haryana which have their own culture, law and governance. The result is both the defenders and offenders come from the same place and culture, while the beneficiary or the woman on the street is left moire vulnerarable. However I'd reject all stories of reporting a crime which I fell are consoling stories, and attribute to the records of increasing crime a simple tendency Voyeurism, looking through Key-hole, diversed from immidiate society in immadiate conomic relations, a man does not 'belong to' his surroundings, nor a woman! A dead body was taken from a pool in Dwarka, A row of appartments lay opposite to the site. A amn robbed of his car and stabbed. There he lay, who knows alive and yet no body reported. MAy be of fear of getting picked up. But why, not even later?
>Another experience, quite distant explores deeper in. We have all seen stories of gals getting harrassed in hotels. Yet many of the good ones are strictly reluctant to keep a single woman sans indemnity from any influencial group. In villages they give shelter, in cities, devoid of clan and confidence, we turn essentially voyeuristic and sarcastic of everyone else, thus finding a friction of cultures here. In villages since a city dweller doesnt get mixed with them , except where he tries to snatch land from them, they are usually friendly.............
>Incity,a race is on A dal is on betting for union, Boldly, rules are broken, women insulted called randis, though I do not find any abuse in that except victinsising and mass humiliation, the conflict goes on. Here we are biharis, punjabis, tamils, marwaris, jainsetc, conflicting with each other out in the open.. The friction of values much stronger. , , , ,  , , That is why women get little support and shelter here, because of dogmatism and narrow interest politics. Delhi is an elaboration, not an exception(Based on true experiences at a Kalibari at Safdarjung Enclave). 
>Yup Gurgaon is gliterring coz it is newly planned, but we need expert health care etc there too!
>
>
>
>
>________________________________
>From: Naeem Mohaiemen <naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com>
>To: sarai list <reader-list at sarai.net>
>Sent: Sunday, 9 August, 2009 8:49:31 PM
>Subject: [Reader-list] Sam Miller on Delhi
>
>"Twelve of India’s 54 billionaires live in the city, but the majority
>of its citizens are poor, powerless migrants from rural areas in
>India, Nepal and Bangladesh. It is one of the most unsafe cities in
>India for women, who are murdered, raped and harassed at home and in
>public more widely than anywhere else in the country, while the use of
>expensive ultrasound technology to enable the selective abortion some
>24,000 female foetuses every year has resulted in a skewed sex ratio
>of 820 girls to every 1,000 boys."
>
>
>The National (UAE)
>In his new book, Sam Miller tackles Delhi’s disparities by walking
>through it, eschewing its new arterial roads and flyovers for back
>streets and slums. Siddhartha Deb considers the city he discovers.
>
>Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity
>Sam Miller
>Jonathan Cape
>Dh94
>
>On October 31, 1984, the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was
>gunned down in her Delhi bungalow by two Sikh bodyguards. There was a
>bloody war going on between Sikh separatists and the Indian state, and
>the assassins were said to have been outraged by Gandhi’s decision to
>send soldiers into the Golden Temple, the holiest of Sikh shrines, to
>capture a separatist leader. After a brief period of calm, a process
>of savage retribution began in many parts of the country, directed at
>Sikhs who had nothing to do with the killing or the separatist
>movement. Delhi, despite being the most heavily policed city in the
>country, saw the worst of such violence. Leaders of the Congress
>party, then in power, led mobs through the alleyways of poor
>neighbourhoods like Trilokpuri, where they pillaged and murdered,
>often setting people on fire after dousing them with kerosene. By the
>time the army took control, nearly 3,000 people were dead.
>
>Twenty-five years later, none of the senior Congress functionaries who
>directed the mobs – and whose names are well known – have been
>punished. The killings of 1984 have instead become one more incident
>relegated to the past by an elite singularly obsessed with entering
>the future. As for Delhi, it has been busy transforming itself for the
>past decade, embracing the market economy of the West and furiously
>erecting shopping malls, five-star hotels and flyovers. The upper
>classes of Delhi talk about plans to remake it into a futuristic
>“world city” (a goal usually proclaimed by posters on the walls of
>public restrooms), and gesture with pride at the new train system
>whose steel-coloured cars can be seen racing across the skyline.
>
>But millennial Delhi remains an unequal, violent place. Twelve of
>India’s 54 billionaires live in the city, but the majority of its
>citizens are poor, powerless migrants from rural areas in India, Nepal
>and Bangladesh. It is one of the most unsafe cities in India for
>women, who are murdered, raped and harassed at home and in public more
>widely than anywhere else in the country, while the use of expensive
>ultrasound technology to enable the selective abortion some 24,000
>female foetuses every year has resulted in a skewed sex ratio of 820
>girls to every 1,000 boys. As for the new train system, it is an
>exception in a city where public transportation is erratic and unsafe
>and the roads are resolutely hostile to pedestrians. In every way, the
>high-rises and slums of Delhi are filled with so many stories of
>disparity that the city demands the kind of muckraking attention that
>Upton Sinclair, for instance, brought to a similarly corrupt Chicago a
>century ago. But even within India, there are few books on Delhi that
>compare to recent writing on Bombay, from Suketu Mehta’s nonfiction
>account, Maximum City, to Vikram Chandra’s thriller, Sacred Games. In
>spite of the city’s energetic publishing scene, its best writers,
>usually people who have migrated there from other parts of India, seem
>uncertain about how to engage their new home.
>
>This invisibility of Delhi, the way its most significant stories flare
>briefly into headlines before being rapidly extinguished, is something
>I think about every time I return there. So when I started reading Sam
>Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity in a local bookstore, I was
>intrigued to find that he had tackled Delhi’s disparities head on by
>walking through it. Miller, a BBC journalist who has lived in the city
>for seven years, writes: “If you don’t walk in Delhi, large parts of
>the city will be invisible to you. Its slums are mainly situated away
>from the main roads, hidden from the upmarket residential areas.” He
>knows his project is dangerous – pavements and pedestrian crossings
>are rare, and speeding vehicles are known to run people over – but he
>thinks the effort worthwhile, not only for the narrative frisson it
>yields, but also because it increases the possibility of sudden,
>serendipitous encounters, especially with the hidden poor.
>
>A writer walking through the madness of Delhi needs a method, not
>least because the route one chooses determines the story. Miller is
>aware of his literary precedents: Baudelaire, whose flâneur strolled
>the boulevards of 19th-century Paris at night, thereby encountering
>pimps, prostitutes and police agents; WG Sebald, whose walks along the
>Norfolk coast of England in The Rings of Saturn offered a slow,
>melancholic consideration of the once-frenetic energy of the mansions
>and hotels of the region, now fallen into ruin; and Ian Sinclair,
>whose “psychogeographical” approach of walking along a route suggested
>by an arbitrary letter drawn on a London map helped create a portrait
>of a city unknown to tourists or gentrifiers.
>
>After reading about the concentric circles used to build Muslim cities
>in India, Miller chooses a spiralling circuit for himself. It was an
>astute decision, ensuring not only that he would cross tightly
>segregated demographic zones, but also that he would follow the
>circular layout of the old Connaught Circle and the two Ring Roads,
>once central to the city’s layout, but now obscured by the hauteur of
>straight arterial roads and looping overpasses.
>
>Miller starts his tour in the concentric circles of the British-built
>area of Connaught Place, then takes in the chowks of the Mughal city
>to the north known as Old Delhi, and wanders past the five-star hotels
>and high-walled bungalows of Luyten’s Delhi, a neighbourhood of
>politicians, bureaucrats and industrialists. As his spiral widens, he
>also navigates the affluent neighbourhoods of the south, the arriviste
>settlements of the west, and, just across the toxic strip of water
>that was once the Yamuna rivers, the middle-class clusters of the
>east. It is telling that he finds no fixed address, no set
>neighbourhood, for the poor. Instead, he encounters them in the
>interstices of the metropolis, sleeping on the streets and under
>flyovers, in blue plastic tents next to construction sites, or in
>slums that can be cleared away at a moment’s notice. Walking along the
>banks of the Yamuna, Miller sees on its east side the Akshardham
>temple complex, a sprawling monument of Hindu kitsch approved by the
>courts despite concerns that it would impede the river’s flow of
>water. Almost directly across from it, he finds a police barracks on
>the site of what was, until recently, Delhi’s largest slum, housing
>some 300,000 people.
>
>Such scenes are depicted with empathy by Miller, who uses the
>privileged eccentricity of his whiteness to engage in conversations
>that reveal much about lives usually relegated to the margins of the
>city’s consciousness. He meets butchers who interrupt their slaughter
>of buffaloes to threaten him with knives but who shake his hand before
>he leaves; a young woman who, slightly sick from the smell of
>industrial glue, offers the author a soda before returning to her job
>demonstrating a 10-foot long printer; and a man on a bicycle who uses
>a speaker magnet to collect traces of iron from vehicle emissions that
>he plans to sell for 30 cents a kilo. Miller’s prose has none of the
>baroque texture to be found in Baudelaire, Sebald and Sinclair, but he
>blends anecdotes and details well. His decision to emulate Sebald in
>placing small black-and-white photographs within the text is
>particularly successful, lending the book a kaleidoscopic feel that
>captures something of the ad hoc nature of the city.
>
>In a chapter on Old Delhi, we see a grainy picture of a suspected
>heroin dealer being beaten by two policemen against a
>dystopian-seeming backdrop of a crumbling mansion, a dead tree, piles
>of trash, and an audience of ragged children:
>
>“The violent policeman slapped him across the face. He recoiled in
>slow motion, his shoulder hunching up as if waiting for the next blow.
>Instead, the policemen began emptying his pockets. A piece of string,
>some tinfoil, some matches, a few coins, and what looked like a
>tightly folded empty crisp packet, secured with a rubber band.
>‘Evidence,’ said the violent policeman, speaking a word of English for
>the first time, as he placed the little package in his pocket without
>opening it. And then his second world of English, just a little
>threateningly, a word of closure and command: ‘Goodbye,’ he said and
>waved me away.”
>
>There are many similar passages in the recent fiction anthology Delhi
>Noir, whose 14 contributors use noir conventions to offer scathing
>indictments of the brutality of the city’s police, the vulgarity of
>its upper classes, and the desperation of the poor (the first story,
>by Omair Ahmad, even reconstructs one of the killings of 1984).
>Unfortunately, the stories rarely achieve the intensity on display in
>Miller’s book. Often, their accounts of corrupt policeman and
>resentful servants merely expand on headlines without offering a fresh
>perspective or allowing for full immersion into the lives or city
>being depicted. Those that succeed – Siddharth Chowdhury’s Hostel,
>Hartosh Singh Bal’s Just Another Death, and the Hindi writer Uday
>Prakash’s The Walls of Delhi – do so because they are alert not just
>to the horrible things that happen in Delhi, but also to how it feels
>to observe and write about them. In Bal’s story, for instance, the
>idealistic narrator, an ambitous journalist who has investigated a
>random, insignificant killing ends his account abruptly, on a cynical
>note that captures the numbing effect of the city by borrowing the
>hard-boiled tone of the noir detective who, ultimately, cannot make a
>difference:
>
>“What Mohanty had just told me didn’t make the case any simpler –
>either the police or the councillor and his men were capable of such
>brutality. But at that moment, the facts didn’t matter. No one in this
>city gave a damn, and having made it so far, I was just beginning to
>realise neither did I.”
>
>Miller, too, has to come to some form of reckoning. At the end of his
>walk, he finds himself in the suburb of Gurgaon, surrounded by
>shopping malls and condominiums whose names (“Malibu Towne,”
>“Belvedere Park,” “Maple Heights”) have been copied from suburban
>America. Just a few pages earlier, he had visited similar housing
>developments expanding through fields of mustard, with former farmers
>doubtfully counting the cash they have made from selling their land,
>hoping their children will find service jobs in Gurgaon. Miller
>doesn’t like Gurgaon, but he repeats the conventional wisdom that
>“Gurgaon is probably the future, and Delhi, and other Indian cities,
>will become more and more like Gurgaon.”
>
>This is a false note in what is otherwise a remarkably perceptive
>book, for Gurgaon’s modernity is just as skin deep as Delhi’s, even if
>it has been laid on by more competent cosmetic surgeons. Its apartment
>blocks may be newer and cleaner, but they play out the same stories of
>disparity and its discontents. Gurgaon represents not a solution to
>the city’s problems, but an attempt to evade them in the manner
>characteristic of India’s elite in recent years. Such an evasion can
>work for only so long. There are already signs that the lopsided
>economic growth that made such subterfuge possible is beginning to
>give way to national slowdown. And in Delhi, one sees a return of the
>repressed. In April a Sikh journalist outraged at a government report
>absolving a Congress leader of responsibility in the killings of 1984
>threw his shoe at the home minister. Meanwhile, there are biker gangs
>on the streets, carrying out petty muggings and the occasional murder.
>The perpetrators are thought to be the children of victims of the
>anti-Sikh riots of 1984, survivors who have decided that what prevails
>in Delhi is might, not justice..
>
>
>Siddhartha Deb is a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe
>Institute, and he teaches creative writing at the New School. He is
>currently working on a nonfiction book about contemporary India.
>_________________________________________
>reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
>Critiques & Collaborations
>To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header.
>To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list 
>List archive: &lt;https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
>
>
>      See the Web's breaking stories, chosen by people like you. Check out Yahoo! Buzz. http://in.buzz.yahoo.com/
>_________________________________________
>reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
>Critiques & Collaborations
>To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header.
>To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list 
>List archive: &lt;https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> 

________________________________
See the Web's breaking stories, chosen by people like you. Check out Yahoo! Buzz. 


      See the Web&#39;s breaking stories, chosen by people like you. Check out Yahoo! Buzz. http://in.buzz.yahoo.com/