Capitalism Vs Caste? Are you frigging kidding me?

Capitalism vs. caste. Something is amiss. Since when did capitalism start caring about abolition of caste? Why is it that we find communal disharmony and casteism flourishing in the so called financial capital of our country, Mumbai, where the hardcore right wing Shiv Sena had rallied against the “outsiders” from Bihar and Jharkhand? The same is the case with the “Shining Gujarat”, which is touted by capitalists far and wide as the model of development.

India is a de facto capitalist country, with its headquarters in Delhi, no matter what color of jersey those in positions of power are wearing – they have been following neo liberal policies since the early 90′s. From giving outrageous tax cuts to handing over natural resources almost free of cost [unless you count the enormous social cost of environmental degradation and unfair distribution, causing harm to habitats and communities etc] to amending labor and environmental laws so as to benefit the capitalists, almost everything in India is the “baap ka sampatti” of the capitalists. And yet, has casteism truly worn away? And is capitalism as a system trying to fight it? A little investigation will reveal the truth.

Let’s take the case of the educational institutes like AIIMS and IITs which produce the most promising servants of capitalism. One of the country’s biggest anti reservation movements often originate with great vigor and passion from these “centers of excellence”. There is even a group named “Youth for Equality” emanating from these centers, which are anything but egalitarian, as those who ask for the same rules for people standing at different lengths from the starting line are not asking for a level platform.

Before you start feeling sorry, these aren’t activists fighting for a just cause: these are medical students of “Youth for Equality” movement.

The following picture actually explains it quite well. The so called lower castes have been exploited for many years, and though reservation or quotas may not be a solution, to be opposed to the same will be even more detrimental and cause hindrance to them getting mainstream induction.

Farcical Equality

We see Gurukuls or highly patriarchal schools which promote Brahminism and hence casteism getting more and more popular. As an example, ITC [the major corporate house] has one, what capitalists call “Corporate Social Responsibility” project, Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata. There, the guru-shishya parampara, or the highly feudal, brahmanist culture of education is promoted. So where the heck is capitalism fighting casteism exactly? Sanskritization and Hinduization is being attempted in more ways than one. They call India Bharat Mata but the underlying concept is that the woman of the house should be eternally condemned to domestic slavery.

Crappy Guru Shishya Parampara tradition – brahmanist, casteist, patriarchal, hierarchical, repressive, feudal

Take the case of any firm. Who does all the menial work? Take the municipality or other casual laborers in general in the society, which runs under a capitalist economy. Still today, untouchability has not been abolished. Manual scavenging is still rampant. It only helps capitalists that casteism and patriarchy flourishes in India. This is because they get to exploit differentially [read more] using this age old tradition or rather monstrosity.

In Bihar, UP, Jharkhand or Chattisgarh, how are the so called lower castes and adivasis treated? How much value are their lives given? Don’t the authorities know that the Ranvir Senas and Bajrang Dals are raping the women and burning the houses of the “underprivileged” castes? Where is the justice to all these victims of casteism?

Following the death of Ranvir Sena Leader Brahmeshwar Singh Mukhia, the group behind massacres of Dalits like Bathani Tola carnage, riots were instigated by the right wing extremists

And as for the dalits who serve capitalism, the likes of A. Raja. Since when did he help fight casteism? What capitalist trashy mainstream media deliberately convolutes is they will present some “charity” as fighting social evils. Just like CSR can’t remove poverty, charity can’t help remove casteism.

Jaipur: When Humanity Hits a New Low

How would you feel if this was your family? Your son, your daughter, your mother or sister? In yet another incident of inhuman behaviour, this time in Jaipur, several vehicles passed by a severely injured man and his daughter, with his wife and daughter (a toddler) lying in a pool of blood, following a ghastly accident of their bike with a truck.

It reminds one of the many instances in the past where people have been left bleeding on the road after accidents. Who do we blame? Do we blame the system, or ourselves? Do we have any ounce of basic humanity left?

http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/385752/peoples-reaction-to-jaipur-accident-captured-on-cctv.html

One recent incident that sent shockwaves was a small child in China being run over several times, but no one coming to help.

A Film That Will be Lost in ‘Oblivion’

Futuristic movies, films on utopias or dystopias have always been one of my favorite genres. Perhaps it is one of the few ways I can let myself drift into a different world of thought altogether. Having liked Tom Cruise’s performance in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, I had reasonably high hopes for Oblivion, especially after checking out its trailer on IMDB. I liked the concept behind it, though it is hardly unique – earth, now in ruins, has only a few survivors left, and there is a mystery as to how the dear planet of all faced this destruction.

 Such a plot, as was the case with Terminator Salvation, often has a revolutionary theme, even anarchist or anti statist overtones. The cult movies of the 80’s from Hollywood, like Robocop, often were critical of authority and those in positions of power. I was hoping to see elements of anti war sentiments or anarchist ideals, as a form of respite from the mainstream garbage of day to day drudgery.

 But alas, it was quite a let down in that sense. Despite having some nice action packed sequences, the movie, if anything, turned out to be more like those silly propagandist movies that celebrate the “American way of life”, which is a cute way of saying bourgeoisie democracy. Or else why would the protagonist(s) Jack Harper dream of only his wife and the American flag flying high atop the embassy from the earth he knew and whose memory has been wiped from his head.

Spoiler alert: 

 The film starts with Jack Harper, the drone technician and Victoria being an “effective team”, alone, on Earth, with the knowledge that humans have won the battle against aliens but have lost the planet, due to the use of nuclear weapons. Jack knows that they are only a couple of weeks on Earth before they will head to Tet (?), the space station cum command center, from which their activities are coordinated, and then head off to Titan, Saturn’s moon, where all the human survivors are living.

 Everyday Jack has to set off in his highly sophisticated plane and scout for ‘aliens’ or ‘scabs’ who he has been told try to destroy the killing machines, drones. But he discovers that he has been duped, as the drones have only one objective- not to execute any aliens, rather carry out search and destroy humans still alive on the planet. Predictably, he comes across a resistance group, led by Morgan Freeman (I don’t know what he was doing in a film and that too in such an insignificant role like this).

What was most disappointing was the way the relationships were shown. The chemistry between Jack and his wife was melodramatic to say the least, and so was the heroic ending to save the earth.

The verdict is in: the film made a mess of what was an interesting concept. Poor acting by Olga Kurylenko did not help either.

Farmers Dump 40 Snakes in Tax Office Protesting Bribes… and some other unique protests

Not what you’d expect the farmers would bring when you ask for a bribe. About forty slithering snakes of various sizes and species on the floor, among which about 4 are cobras, sent the officials of an Uttar Pradesh tax office scurrying around and onto the tables. Some of the more persuasive ones among the snakes climbed up the chairs and tables, inducing more activity in the office, a rarity these days. The two farmers had been asking for tax records on their land, but the officials had been withholding those for weeks and demanding bribes. Nobody died or got injured, the snakes have been captured and the hunt is on for the farmer duo. No reports on whether there would be a hunt for the officials asking for bribes.

Granted, it could’ve been serious. Could’ve involved injury, or even death.

But that’s what you get when there’s just no risk-free way of getting justice. Fast? There have been plenty of fasts this year, some got noticed, some didn’t, and almost all ended without any significant results. There has been a lot of placard waving and sit-ins. Plenty of cases are pending in the courts of different states. The powerless has to pull some tricks to get the attention of more people, to get some more to rally for their cause. And in some cases they would want to get back at those who make them suffer. The people at the bottom of the power hierarchy will use whatever they’ve got. And in this case, one of the farmers being a snake-charmer, it’s 3 bags full of snakes.

The hypocritical standards that the mainstream media set will astonish you at times. The drone attack victims are written off as collateral damage. The villagers killed in the Green Hunt hardly motivates anyone in the mainstream to call for scrapping the GH altogether. But one risky move of the oppressed and the whole vast talking machine called the media jumps on them, never mind how they are pushed at the end of their tether by hunger, physical exhaustion, lack of dignity and what not. The bulk of the mainstream discussion then focuses on how irresponsible they have been. This one-sided criticism helps portray those people as irrational brutes, which in turn helps those who oppress them.

Does this mean we are not allowed to criticize the protest methods and demands? Of course not. But if we wish to look at the whole picture, the factors that played a crucially determining role in causing the event of the protest, the mainstream opinion discourse will not be of great assistance.

Time to check out some more unique protest styles. Yep, they grab attention and get the media talking about them and yep, that spreads the word.

Kiss-in of Chile: hundreds of students in Chile protesting huge education costs brought about by the privatized education system and demanding free and quality education for all gathered up in the dusk and kissed full on the lips.

Zombie walk of Chile: students part of the above-mentioned protests danced to the tune of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ taking over the Central Square dressed up as zombies.

Milk hose protest of Europe: farmers of Europe shot milk through high-powered hoses at the European Parliament in Brussels, protesting against the low price of milk that the farmers were getting. This protest was termed ’1000 tractors to Brussels. Some sprayed milk onto the policemen there in riot gear direct from cow udders, and one cow reportedly got scared in the mayhem and chased an office worker down the street.

SlutWalk: In protest against a Canadian cop’s comment that if women wished to avoid rape, they should not dress like ‘whores’, women from various parts of the world poured onto the street with little or no clothes on, challenging the stifling control of the patriarchal society over women’s bodies. The protest was called ‘SlutWalk’ by the protesters in retaliation to the patriarchal perception of ‘bad’ women.

Naked protest of Manipur, India: protesting against the routine rape and murder by the Indian army in Manipur, hundreds of women of Manipur shed their clothes and marched with the banner ‘Indian Army, Rape Us’. The protests were triggered by the rape and murder of Manorama, a woman of Manipur.

Flamenco Dance of Spain: this began with 20 people of Flo6x8, an activist group, playing and dancing to Flamenco music in the lobby of Santander Bank in protest against crony capitalist policies of banks. Flamenco performing groups turned up after that in various banks protesting against heavy loan interests that Spaniards find deathly hard to bear.

And there are many, many more, such as animal rights campaigners pouring donated blood on fur coats, activists painting themselves red and lying on the streets with placards ‘Banks bled me to death’, protester dumping buckets of human poo in a bank and so on. In Russia when people were not allowed to gather in protest against elections, protesters put dolls with little placards that had slogans.

Caught in the CrossFire

‘We die when we take sides and we die even when we decide to stay neutral’.

These are the exact words of a villager of Sindhesur village in Gadchiroli.

A massive police encounter followed by a Maoist counter attack had claimed the lives of two villagers apart from 4 Maoists and 1 cop. Not too long ago, a Maoist ambush had left several cops dead when a hidden IED or improvised explosive device had gone off. In that case, several villagers had complained that the cops were using them as shields. These aren’t isolated cases at all, as such allegations have been made about both Maoists and cops earlier as well, whether by villagers, cops or by’ neutral observers’. The security forces as well as Maoists exchange blames and the ordinary villagers, often from the lowest rungs of the social order, find themselves getting caught in the cross fire, quite literally.

So what is the solution? Who is really to blame?

 The answer to this question is not to be found in some superficial who did what sort of fact finding. Of course it is possible that in some cases the Maoists used some villagers as shields, although they have denied this allegation. It is quite possible that the rebels execute villagers too often merely on suspicion of being police informers. On the other hand, living in constant fear, not to mention abject poverty can really drive the poor villagers to sometimes take the sides of the cops. But none of this leads us to a satisfactory explanation of the situation.

 The reason is pretty straight forward , so far the analysis has only been skin deep. We haven’t yet brought into consideration socio economic and political reasons that led to the growth of the so called left wing extrimism in the first place. Take the case of what Neutral observations like Samarendra Das’sarticle and this blog, Moonchasing or even Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country: Sudeep Chakravarti. They are not overtly Maoist sympathizers, but they also acknowledge how the state machinery exploits using the police and paramilitary. If you look at the geographic distribution of naxalite infestation (that’s the way mainstream media puts it anyway) you will find they are in the poorest of eastern states in the country. Not only that, the rulers are more than willing to hand over the natural resources to big corporate houses even if it is at the cost of environmental damage and loss of natural habitat for the thousands of villagers, most of them adivasis.

 The adivasi and dalit struggle has been a long one, in the states of bihar, orissa, chattisgarh. If the state wouldn’t have pushed the inhabitants of the land to big companies like Vedanta and Tata, much to the detriment of the adivasis, with their sub machine gun armed goons terrorizing the villagers, then perhaps such “Extremism” would not have thrived!

 What happened in Chattisgarh in the name of countering the Maoist violence is well known. The SPOs or Special Police officers formed what is (in)famously known as Salwa Judum, which went so out of hand that human rights organizations like PUCL started to raise a hue and cry over it, and quite legitimately so. Women found themselves caught between the SPOs and Maoists in the worst ways possible, since rape was used as a tool of intimidation often.

Nandigram, Singur, Kudankulam, Jangalmahal, Kalinganagar, Niyamgiri Hills, Dantewada, Posco site all stand testimony among others to the monstrosity that the state machinery can unleash in the face of slightest opposition to their regressive decisions of forceful land acquisitions and harmful projects.

What we as citizens must realize is that for a genuine solution, the answer lies in not just finding faults with the rebels but actually understanding their predicament and working towards establishing a more just state of affairs.

IPL 2013: The Drama That’s Got It All

IPL 2013 is on, and like a classic fart, its smell is everywhere. More ads are featuring the teams, the players and the celebrity owners. Shah Rukh Khan, Kolkata Knight Rider, Dhoni, Delhi Daredevils, Chennai Super Kings, SRK again, Mumbai Indians, Kings XI Punjab, Pune Warriors and so on. Live updates of IPL, match details and schedules are on a bunch of websites hoping to draw people to them. Media is never tired of showing IPL folks. Raging debates between KKR lovers and Delhi Daredevils fans, Shah Rukh fans and Sourav Ganguly fans, Kohli and Gambhir, T-20 lovers and cricket puritans, I-T officials and franchise stakeholders are taking place. So we here can’t just ignore the drama.

Who has the IPL roped in? Cricketers, of course, but also celebrities, politicians, corporates and finally the public, the last category being the only one that isn’t getting any money out of it. We haven’t forgotten the involvement of law enforcement agencies, and the stakeholders surely haven’t as so many of them are getting constantly raided by I-T officials. Allegations of proxy stakes of politicians and offshore money in the franchises have got a lot of hot people bothered. And tax benefits are cute but not to all, and some are making quite a fuss over it.

And the cricket part? Yep, there’s that, amid the money, glamour, corruption, quarrels, racism and sexism over cheerleaders and cries of the water-electricity-crisis-facing states. This one thing of the IPL is that post-IPL, there have been more opportunities to local cricketers. New cricketers are getting recognition through the IPL. Money and stardom are becoming accessible to a few more. The number of foreign players has been raised from 8 to 10 per team, and the foreign players that are roped in are usually off their launchpads, so we’ll see how the IPL goes for non-celebrity players in the coming seasons.

So for now, be entertained, because that seems to be about all we’ll get out of it.

Presidency College Attack – A War on Centers of Excellence?

What is a center of excellence? What makes an institution excellent? What does a good student in an exploitative system mean? Does it mean that he/she is radical and wishes to use the education to bring about positive change? Even if the wish is there, does this system allow the student to explore such a desire? The answer is obvious. Only as long as a student complies with the rules, written or implied, and plays along with all the inherent injustices of the system, will they be rewarded. Otherwise, they have to face the wrath of the ruling classes.

The fact that a student is not exactly in any particular class, or rather in the transitional phase before either making it to the capitalist or working class is what makes their case very important. They are young, enthusiastic and have loads of potential. Quite understandably, political parties of all colors try to take advantage of this face. From far left to the far right, young people have been and are still exploited through brainwashing.

But does it mean that politics itself is bad, as this Times of India article tries to establish? Or that educational institutes should be made “apolitical”? Hardly so. It is the faulty definition of politics that leads to such absurd and ridiculous claims. Politics is something that encompasses everything of our lives, from micro to macro, from big to small. When a student is exposed to the item songs of Hindi cinema, or that the boy of the family should do the earning while the women should do household chores, or that Pakistan is our enemy nation, or that it is “cool” to buy luxury goods and indulge consumerism, are these not part of “politics”? Of course they are.

It is the nature of whatever goes by the name of politics in the state of West Bengal and indeed perhaps the entire nation, that has contributed to the widespread hatred of politics itself. And yet the only answer to the politics of violence, the politics of muscle power and dada giri is another kind of politics – that of harmony and understanding, while having a no compromise attitude towards anything hostile to fundamental democratic rights.

This is particularly true in case of educational institutions in West Bengal. Since the new party Trinamool Congress has come to power, it has hardly shown any change to bring an end to the era of political intimidation that its predecessor, namely the Left Front, used as a tool to serve political ends. During the Left Front regime, union elections went unchallenged, as students feared going against the hooligans of SFI and the party they were affiliated to.

The same tactics, albeit more crudely, is being employed by the new rulers. The attacks on Presidency college and its famous Baker lab are not isolated – they form part of the terror that got a new lease of life after the public humiliation of senior members of the party in Delhi by CPM and SFI cadres.

So it would be a mistake to assume that the attack on Presidency and its lab had anything to do with it being a so called center of excellency. If anything, it had a lot to do with the fame of the college, which would have given the attackers their publicity. It was nothing but the supremacist, elitism of the author of this article that led her to give such differential privilege to Presidency for this incident. She indeed stresses that it is because the college is getting so much attention, that this has happened. Let us not forget that since the transition in power took place, the college has got unprecedented and arguably unwarranted attention, with goodies being showered on it, while the rest of the colleges have got peanuts.

For an education system to be truly one that harbors excellence, it should not be hierarchical and selective or prejudiced. It should try to bring out the best in everyone, and not find the best among everyone. The aggregate effect is only detrimental in the latter case, as such competition only makes things uneven and unfair and discourages rather than motivates most.