[Reader-list] Is painting a currency note which can not be forged unless you act illegally?

[Partha Dasgupta]

Dear Taha,

Firstly, would like to clear out some misconceptions you have, before moving
on to other areas.

a)  As an IT professional who has worked with both governmental as well as
NGO's. would like to
     clarify some basic concepts.
     1.   There is no 'magic' in IT - or for that matter finger print or
smart card or other latest technologies.
           Unless people follow the 'rules' the high tech is as valuable as
a pan stained spit.

     2.  I have friends in the US with 2 licenses and 3 GC who move
violations on requisite documents
          so that no one identity is compromised.

      3. Computers are STUPID. They will only say / do what we define, and
our 'Chalta hai" attitude
           ensures everyting is OK.

b) India and Pakistan
     Used to think India was baaaa...ad, till I saw Pakistan. There is no
act... only jokers miming

c)  Passports are viable when boundaries hold a meaning - or a state /
nation has a value, an EQ
     Where is that now?

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 10:06 PM, Taha Mehmood
<2tahamehmood at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Dear Inder,
>
> Thank you for your response.
>
> Let me quote you first and carry on from there...
>
> >  See, it is only now that we see it like that, because the complexities
> of
> times were not as heavy on their heads as they are now.
>
> To a large extent I agree with this position but at the same time I also
> feel that for every age this position must have been true. For instance, I
> would like to believe that in Aristotle's time his thought or general
> discussions around the nature of knowledge, aesthetics, rhetoric,
> governance
> etc would have been most advanced form of thinking precisely because no
> other arguments were present which could have counter argued, or build upon
> Aristotle's thought or that of his peers with as much of poignancy as
> perhaps people from other ages were able to do. Having said that, I also
> believe that coupling of time under a generic category of 'age' is not
> precise, it is always negotiated. One can never say it with precision that
> at such and such date Renaissance ends or Enlightenment begins.
>
> > I believe, European Wars necessitated the need for a photograph to
> > represent an individual, which gave shape to a formal pass port with a
> > regular photograph in it.
>
> On the contrary, it seems European Wars were an opportunity for the nation
> states to condense the debate around passports. Hence, crystallization of
> the notion of passport could be seen as an attempt to make the idea of a
> nation state more unarguable.
>
> Passports have a longer history, from whatever little I know, passports
> were
> called, 'Safe conducts' till 15th Century in England. 'Safe conduct' was
> basically a note, signed by the King or Queen requesting authorities of
> other lands to not to harm the person of the carrier of the note. What was
> interesting in this practice was, the King or the Queen could issue this
> note to anyone. There was no distinction or discrimination on the basis of
> nationality, so a fake citizen or an original alien could apply for and get
> a passport. Hence there has been quite a  change, in the last say, six
> hundred years; as, now passports have become a virtual marker of one's
> nationality. And normatively speaking today, it seems, only an original
> citizen but no fake alien or no fake citizen and no original alien would
> get
> a passport.
>
> (You may follow this url for a detailed time line on the evolution of
> passports in England, if you're interested-
> http://www.ips.gov.uk/passport/about-history-overview.asp)
>
> The anecdote about Australian artist is excellent, because it, in a sense,
> questions a State's position about how are we to appear as our 'formal
> selves'. I think we need to probe further into the 'history-of-pose' to
> arrive at preliminary answers as to how and why are we asked to pose in a
> particular manner. Who are these people and what is their intellectual
> lineage which guides them to make us pose in a particular manner. This has
> also got to do with the idea that how 'official'/'formal' narratives of
> poses are constructed and manufactured.
>
> At times one wonders who needs who more, for in a way, the originals need
> fakes to be distinguished as originals and the other way round too. I think
> as a thought experiment it would be an adventure to think of a world where
> the imagination of fake does not exist. I think you were not entirely wrong
> to suggest in an earlier mail in this thread, that, 'the difference between
> original and fake is just a temporary one.'
>
> Historically too, we find narratives of fake and original being negotiated
> again and again. There is a non-permanence regarding original/fake in
> history too as you imply. Take the history of modern Indian policing for
> instance. Here too one finds ample evidence of a nervous and neurotic state
> power first appearing as 'illegitimate' then after a passage of time as
> 'legitimate' trying desperately to fracture in practices which we now see
> in
> the form of 'brands', of 'identification drives', of this market induced
> enthusiasm which might also be read as -frenzy- to inhumanly assign numbers
> to people, to regularize, to legitimize, to record, to verify and to
> classify. I referred the exercise to assign numbers to human beings as
> inhuman because we are still, in many ways are emerging from the un-sayable
> violence which practices introduced by Hitler, for instance wrought by
> marking Jews with numbers in concentration camps. If we ask any Jew who had
> been to Auschwitz, whether she liked that beautiful number on her forearm,
> I
> think, in her reply, we can perhaps know a lot more about this much valued
> relationship between a number and a human being. I wonder what is the moral
> argument for the Government of India to assign numbers to every Indian.
>
> Anyways, let us for a moment look at an instance in the history of modern
> Indian Policing with respect to this debate around original/fake or
> copy/original.
>
> One of the first move to systematize police procedures in India, was
> initiated by William Henry Sleeman later Sir Sleeman, during his campaign
> to
> eradicate, 'thugs' of India between 1829 and 1847. In 1947-a hundred years
> later, as we all know, India became a post colonial state.
>
> But Sleeman, as not many of us know, was born in 1788 in a little known
> Cornish village, his father Phillip was a supervisor of Excise who was
> given
> the responsibility of catching Smugglers/pirates. Sleeman's first home was
> Stratton which was a smuggling country and by many accounts, Sleeman's
> ancestors were involved this trade.
>
> Sleeman's bête noire was Feringeea who was born in 1800, he was a Brahmin,
> a
> twice born Brahmin at that. A Dvija. Feringea's father  Purusram was
> considered as a great thug leader of Chambal valley.
>
> Before Sleeman, it seems there were no systematic police archives which
> contained any personal information on 'thugs', like before MNIC there does
> not exist any systematic archives which contain personal information on
> citizens of India.
>
> Sleeman assigned an officer on every case and all the raw data was entered
> into a register which contained the names of every 'Thug' who was
> identified, just as the government of India has kindly proposed to make a
> National Register of Citizenship and a National Register of population
> which
> will contain the name and other information classified in sixteen different
> categories to be contained in these registers.
>
> Every 'Thug' was assigned a unique number, just as, all of us are soon
> going
> have our own National Identity Numbers. Against this number, Sleeman
> recorded information pertaining to his name, his location, details of his
> associates and the crimes for which his was accused,like, for all of us in
> India, we will soon have an interlinked database, wherein any official
> having our NIN number can have access to sensitive personal and financial
> information, of course for official purposes only. And I would argue that
> after having entrusted our information to the Indian Government, we must
> not
> offer 'surprise' as a reaction, in case this database containing our
> information find its way to a thrift shop on MP3, like it did, in case of
> data belonging to US army personnel recently. Because may be this is how
> things are meant to be.
>
> (Man 'finds US troop data' on MP3
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7853213.stm)
>
> While things were not meant to be in Sleeman's case, because there was no
> precedent, to begin with. He had to use his own intelligence to separate
> wheat from chaff, identify the original from the fake or its copy. He had
> all the legitimizing arguments working for him because he was dealing with
> criminals and murderers, like Hitler had all the legitimizing arguments
> working for him because he was dealing with 'Jews'. I wonder what is the
> ethical basis for the Government of India to argue that assigning numbers
> to
> every Indian is in the good of the nation. Sleeman's department after his
> campaign evolved into an all India police force, who were given the
> responsibility to gather information on Indian Nationalist groups and other
> potential 'rebel' leaders, but of course the department was officially
> called the Central Intelligence Office, its popular name was, however, the
> 'Thugi Dufter'.
>
> Thugs caught by Sleeman's gang were branded on the forehead or on the back
> with word 'Thug' marked by the process of Godna which is essentially
> tattooing through a needle in Hindi or in Persian characters.
>
> I think what we are witnessing in the process of MNIC is perhaps an act of
> 'closing-in' by a state of an experiment which was started by Sleeman to
> first garner information on a fringe population of criminals. Later this
> fringe population included nationalist leaders and 'rebels' and now it
> seems
> it is everyone.
>
> There is one more strand of thought, which emerges from this narrative
> which
> of course, pertains to the idea of Fake and Original OR Copy and Original.
> Sleeman's forefathers were Pirates i.e. they did not pay tax to the state
> while transacting goods. Sleeman,on the other hand, started his career as
> an
> enforcer of State's diktat, so one could argue that while his forefathers
> were engaged in illegitimate read 'fake' practices, he was in a legitiamate
> read 'original' practice. Sleeman found his greatest calling as a ruthless
> administrator while in pursuit of a man,who was an Indian but called
> himself
> Feringeea (meaning alien, or a Gora, a White, a non-native) and who was a
> Dvija or a twice born (so we can always debate, which birth of his was
> original and which fake). Sleeman was able to put a full stop to this
> debate
> by inserting a number which identified Feringeea as Feringeea forever or
> maybe not, for like Munch's Scream, as you point out, we do not know which
> one is the one or whether the one is really the one because, we are organic
> and we change slowly and subtly and consistently over time.
>
> I think, your examples from the pharmaceutical industry, from the art
> world,
> and from history point to a hesitation, a lack of belief or a conviction
> with which the larger social world around us views identity. I wonder what
> gives the Government of India so much confidence in the magic of a number,
> perfected by toils of colonial enforcers like Sleeman and by people like
> Hitler, which will  help crystallize identity of us Indians as Indians.
>
> Warm regards
>
> Taha
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-- 
Partha Dasgupta
+919811047132