Repost:Art

[Repost of an post on my other blog,as I post,I don't think anything has changed as such,our nature continues to be the same]

The recent incidents of the attacks on Chandra Mohan, a final year Master of Visual Arts student at The Maharaja Sayajirao University who was arrested by Sayajiganj police from the university campus on Wednesday,has stirred fresh controversy of "Moral Policing'.

I feel 'moral policing' is an euphemism and a more polite way of imposing the conservative and narrow ideas to impede the regular flow of fresh ideas and what they call aping the west and following their 'culture insensitive' ideas.

Chandra Mohan,who is originally from Andhra Pradesh, has been accused of hurting the religious sentiments of Christians and Hindus in the district and has been booked under Section 153 (A) for promoting religious enmity and hurting religious sentiments with nefarious intentions like creating riots.

There are a few things that I feel I might never understand..
What exactly is this Moral Policing all about?
Do we need Moral Policing?
Is there any way we can justify the fuss that VHP/ShivSena...
activities?

The younger generation is mature enough to know and understand the difference between what is right and what is not.Mimicking the west is a totally different concept.I really do not understand if a couple chooses to go around in park,is it such a big crime that they get beaten up for that,what gives the police this right and what gives these activists the right to beat up anyone.

Issue is not just about celebrating Valentines Day/or any other day neither is it about sitti8ng in the park with your friend.It is about imposing your ideas and ideologies over others.

How an individual chooses to live is purely his/her wish.Policing for all the right reasons has never been criticised ,consider the incident of the recent raid on the Pune rave party.

The past incidents of the moral policing by these activists include,
Damaging public property on Valentines Day,what harm did the shopkeepers do,they were just doing their business and destroying their property is illiegal,Police chooses not to book cases against these people of the fear that,they might be the next target physically,politically etc.

Attacking Private Parties...

any the list goes on...

Again coming to the Chandra Mohan issue...

What I could not understand is the difference between real /genuine ART and gimmickery

I was just watching a news item on NDTV which said (as all of us all will agree) that we can never justify the actions against Chandra Mohan by a group of VHP activists led by Niraj Jain...
but if we talk about the works...
many famous artists said that many works were mediocre and aimed at drawing negative publicity and most of the concepts were not new...
the college authorities say it was just a part of the internal examination but the people who visited this include many Art collectors and exhibitors etc. in thick number....

Well...this is just another dimension to this controversy...

Are the art pieces that rake such controversies are really ''Good" works of art or as the news item put it just a few Mediocre repeats aiming at those 15 sec limelight!Well...this argument might never end!

BJP: Skewed Ideologies!

"Never Judge a Book by it's Cover Picture and Name"

[I don't know who said it(if no one has,I'll add my name,IPR guys any?!)]

I wonder how many members of the current BJP Parliamentary Board have read Mr.Jaswant Singh's book 'Jinnah- India, Partition, Independence',I will not say that reading it would have altered their stance on this issue, given the fact that BJP,per se is made up of a confused bunch of individuals.Confused about the 'ideologies',confused about the so-called 'core beliefs' of the party,in general confused about anything that is scientific and non conservative.The truth is the BJP has been on the constant hunt for a nationalist ancestor for, they have none.Their attempt to project Savarkar as a national hero during the National democratic Alliance regime, during which it started a yatra from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands where Savarkar was imprisoned and unveiled a potrait in the Parliament, can be quoted as an example.Now it is the first Home Minister of India, Sardar Patel, inspite of the later asking for a ban on RSS after the assasination of Mahatma Gandhi.Though the Kapur commission later aquitted the senior RSS leaders.It held RSS responsible for breeding people like Godse and creating a communal situation in India.It was then that RSS was asked to draft a constitution.It is this futile search for an ancestor that is frustrating the leadership and driving them to take some mindless decisions which would prove to be highly detrimental in the future.

The party 'ideology' that Arun Jaitley was talking about in the press conference during the Chintan Bhaithak in Shimla is skewed conspicuously towards a heavily communal and rigid Hindutva pole.It was pro Sardar Patel not because the RSS looked upto him,but because noone from the party high command could support the founder of Pakistan, RSS would not let that be so.RSS started abiding by what its name is, but then slowly moved towards right wing extremism trying to gain currency in the conservatist's approach to religion in politics.

The other day I was reading an article by Vidya Subrahmaniam comparing Shashi Tharoor's 'India : From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond' and the Jaswant Singh's latest.'India : From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond' :the book, which Mr. Tharoor updated in 2007, is sprinkled with critical references to the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty. Yet the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress offered Mr. Tharoor a Lok Sabha ticket in the 2009 general election. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government went a further step and invited him to join the External Affairs Ministry as a Minister of State. Consider what Mr. Tharoor had to say about one of the Congress’ greatest icons — Indira Gandhi. “Had Indira’s Parsi husband been a toddywalla (liquor trader) rather than so conveniently a Gandhi, I sometime wonder, might India’s political history have been different?”.

Further, “Mrs. Gandhi was skilled at the acquisition and maintenance of power, but hopeless at the wielding of it for larger purposes. She had no real vision or program beyond the expedient campaign slogans; “remove poverty” was a mantra without a method ?. Declaring a state of Emergency, Indira arrested opponents, censored the press, and postponed elections. As a compliant Supreme Court overturned her conviction, she proclaimed a ‘20-point programme’ for the uplift of the common man (No one found it humorous enough to remark, as Clemenceau had done of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, that “even the good Lord only had ten.”) Its provisions ? remained largely unimplemented. Meanwhile her thuggish younger son, Sanjay (1946-1980) emphasizing two of the 20 points, ordered brutally insensitive campaigns of slum demolitions and forced sterilizations.” Mr. Tharoor had a reference to Rajiv Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Vadra too.

The BJP had the Tharoor example before it. It could have taken Mr. Jaswant Singh’s book in its stride, and appeared large-hearted, as the Congress did with Mr. Tharoor. Instead, it chose to show its illiberal side.

Can you quarantine an entire nation?

"Now what is it that you are blaming the Indian government for this time? The swine flu did not originate in India, so we are not to blame for this. Furthermore, it is a pandemic; there are more than 168 countries which have been affected by this. Why blame the government for this?"
When people across nations were reeling under this influenza, we were sitting in our living rooms enjoying the bulletin on our television sets. We did nothing till the 17th of May when the first patient was screened at the Hyderabad International airport. Even then, but for a few eye-washing steps we did nothing. Now when it has reached epic proportions and hundreds of cases have been registered, we 'react' and how? We 'react' by shutting downs institutes and complete cities. What we still did not acknowledge is that we cannot go quarantining entire cities. Shutdowns will not stop the virus, what it will do is create panic. Ironically the government itself issues as Don't-Panic notice. Blames people and media for creating this panic and rush. Will we ever grow up? Will this delinquent behaviour ever end?

"Okay, there were cases like these before as well, sample bird flu. These are all viral. How can you prepare for something you do not know?"
No we cannot prepare for the unknown. But we can learn from our past experiences. What this exposed is that we do not have a good crisis management machinery in place. Our stance needs to change from a react-ive one to a proactive one. We still lack a clear direction. The notices that were issued were too less and far-spaced. We are still importing testing kits in a few hundreds everyday. There is only one institute that can perform these tests, i.e., the NIV, Pune and it is so overburdened by the number of requests (around 650 a day!) that it is turning down further requests for tests. We need to have a strong conformity of infrastructure in place. It is if-I-contracted-this-where-will-I-go syndrome that is haunting people more than the fear of the virus. Where do we go, if we are apprehensive? To the government hospitals (if we ignore that fact how ill-equipped they are!) and here the medical attendants turn you off saying that there are already enough cases. Now where does one go? To a private hospital? And what are the odds that the government has not yet issued a list of private hospitals that are authorised to test.
When a situation such as this strikes, one of the first things that strikes some people is ‘business’. Sick! How else would you define people trying to hoard and even black-market the N-95 masks or even TamiFlu in certain cases. Inspite of the heavy culture talk (that has now become a trademark of India) we do often, we lag way behind in terms of some primary things like ‘social responsibility’. We still throw our garbage on the road, have a heavy not-my-problem attitude, don’t bother to carry handkerchiefs around, lack the basic etiquette that is taught to the kindergarten kids and feel that things like swine flu are pretty exotic and out of this land to infect us!
What we are also overlooking is the fact that WHO has issued a notice saying that even if the flu plateaus now, it will resurface again in winter, it has put the number of people estimated to contract this at around 2.2bn,almost 30% of the world population! The national labs say that cheaper testing kits are coming not before a month. We still don't have a vaccine; even Tamiflu at best is questionable. Are we prepared for all this? Or are we doing what we are best at: play the waiting game; wait till it strikes that big!
What we cannot ignore is the financial hit that we will take. Mexico lost close to $55mn a day during shutdown. The headlines on BBC World yesterday morning were, “The commercial capital of India shuts down”. You cannot shut down financial hubs like Mumbai where thousands of people are dependent on daily wages. And as a senior journalist put it, If you are an 'aam-aadmi's' government you definitely cannot ignore the 'aam-dani of that aam-aadmi!