SACW - 1 Oct 2017 | Rohingya Mass Exodus / Pakistan: A cleric arrived, the music stopped / Sri Lanka: Provincial Councils Elections Amendment Act / India: Harvest of Hate / UN troops & sexual violence in Djibouti / Puerto Rico: Belonging to, But Not Part of

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at gmail.com
Sun Oct 1 03:17:19 EDT 2017


South Asia Citizens Wire - 1 Oct 2017 - No. 2955 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. The Girl From Pakistan by Gauri Lankesh (English translation of a 2003 essay)
2. Pakistan: ’She feared no one’ - the life and death of Qandeel Baloch | Jon Boone
3. India: Ideology spreading Hate is the Killer of Gauri Lankesh | Ram Puniyani
4. India: Why are we silent on the grave threat to Prof Kancha Illaiah ? | Vidya Bhushan Rawat
5. Why I worked on Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s Reflections on Kashmir | Nyla Ali Khan 
6. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: Mukta and Hamid Dabholkar carry forward their father and rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar’s legacy
 - The Führer Myth How Hitler Won Over the German People | Ian Kershaw
 - In Assam, Indian Muslims are being abused as 'Bangladeshi' | Aman Wadud
 - Link to William Dalrymple's report on Narendra modi at the time of India's 2014 general election
 - India's Ministry of External Affairs should steer clear from BJP Propaganda & Hindutva | Siddharth Varadarajan (The Wire)
 - Book Launch invitation: Hindutva Rising by Achin Vanaik (14 October 2017, New Delhi)
 - India: Inter faith marriage in Meerut disrupted by Bajrang dal and organisation of the far right
 - India: If govt can’t protect (me), other intellectuals not safe in country - Prof. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
 - India: Times Now TV mainstreaming of the vitriol that has existed among Hindu far right groups against rationalist KS Bhagwan
 - India: Apoorvanand examines why the late Jan Sangh leader is being actively deified and prodded to the top of national iconography
 - India: An ‘anti-conversion clinic’ in Kerala knows how to deal with 'disorders' such as inter religious marriages The Quint
 - India: Journalist who wrote a piece critical of a Modi Govt scheme gets threat saying see how the Hindutva right dealt with Gauri Lankesh by murdering her
 - Might is Right Politics - Not stepping back in the face of criticism, never apologizing (Santosh Desai)
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Mass Exodus: visualizing the scale of the Rohingya Crisis
8. Sri Lanka: CPA statement on passage of Provincial Councils Elections Amendment Act
9. Rohingya refugees fall from Burma’s pan of terror into Lanka’s fires of hate | Don Manu
10. Sri Lanka calls monks who attacked Rohingya 'animals'
11. Bangladesh: When words threaten | Santa Islam
12. A cleric arrived, the music stopped, a melee ensued: Why hard-liners stopped a Pakistani wedding | Haq Nawaz Khan and Pamela Constable
13. The post-Stanislav Petrov world | Jawed Naqvi
14. India: Where the centre lies still - Khan Market, in New Delhi, has actually got better with time | Mukul Kesavan
15. Make in India is looking more and more like a bad joke | Abheek Barman
16. Fighting the “love jihad” - India is working itself into a frenzy about interfaith marriages
17. Why I will avoid Bosu workouts | Shovon Chowdhury
18. Deshmukh on Narlekar's 'Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture'
19. Remote warfare and sexual violence in Djibouti | Ray Acheson
20. Puerto Rico: Belonging to, But Not Part of | Ed Morales
21. Keepers of the Secrets | James Somers
22. Why religious belief isn't a delusion – in psychological terms, at least | Dean Burnett

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1. THE GIRL FROM PAKISTAN BY GAURI LANKESH (English translation of a 2003 essay)
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Noor Fatima, a 2-year-old girl from Lahore, had several holes in her heart. The surgery was prohibitively expensive in Pakistan. Nadeem Sajjad, her father, a marketing executive, traveled with his ailing child and wife across several thousand miles, a difficult history and a toxic politics, to Narayana Hrudayalaya, a hospital in Bangalore, in southern India. The girl’s visit to Bangalore became a major media event. Ordinary Indians offered financial support; celebrations followed her successful surgery. Gauri Lankesh, the Indian editor who was assassinated this month, wrote about Noor’s surgery, India and Pakistan in the Kannada-language paper Lankesh Patrike.
http://sacw.net/article13499.html

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2. PAKISTAN: ’SHE FEARED NO ONE’ - THE LIFE AND DEATH OF QANDEEL BALOCH | Jon Boone
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Pakistan’s working-class icon Qandeel Baloch, killed in 2016 after becoming a social media celebrity. One year on, why has no one stood trial for her killing?
http://sacw.net/article13498.html

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3. INDIA: IDEOLOGY SPREADING HATE IS THE KILLER OF GAURI LANKESH
by Ram Puniyani
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Murder of Gauri Lankesh (5th September 2017) came as a big shock to those who uphold progressive liberal values. The same was celebrated by Hindutva supporting trolls, many of who are being followed by none other than Prime Minister Modi.
http://www.sacw.net/article13491.html

SEE ALSO:

ANNOUNCED: NATION WIDE SIT-INS IN INDIA AT STATUES OF MAHATMA GANDHI ON 2ND OCTOBER 2017 TO PROTEST THE KILLINGS OF RATIONALISTS & DISSENTERS
 Nation wide protest sit-ins in India at the statues of Mahatma Gandhi on 2nd October 2017 (Birth Day of Mahatma Gandhi) to protest the killings of rationalists and dissenters like Gouri Lankesh, MM Kulbargi, Govind Pansare, Narendra Dhabolkar. To condemn such killings our slogan is ’Those who killed Gandhi, Killed Gouri Too’
http://www.sacw.net/article13489.html

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4. INDIA: WHY ARE WE SILENT ON THE GRAVE THREAT TO PROF KANCHA ILLAIAH ?
by Vidya Bhushan Rawat
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Prof Kancha Illaiah must be provided all the security that he needs as well as those threatening to kill him must be prosecuted.
http://www.sacw.net/article13490.html

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5. MERGING THE POPULAR POLITICS OF MASS MOBILIZATION IN KASHMIR WITH THE INSTITUTIONAL POLITICS OF GOVERNANCE AND DEMILITARIZATION: WHY I WORKED ON SHEIKH MOHAMMAD ABDULLAH’S REFLECTIONS ON KASHMIR
by Nyla Ali Khan
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The Kashmir conflict is driven by nationalistic and religious fervor, each side pointing to the violence and injustice of the other, each side pointing to its own suffering and sorrow. The distrust, paranoia, and neurosis permeating the relationship between a large number of people of J & K and the Indian Union has intensified the conflict. The guerilla war in the state has gone through a series of phases since 1990 but repressive military and political force remains the brutal reality in the State, which cannot be superseded by seemingly abstract democratic aspirations.
http://www.sacw.net/article13493.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
- India: Mukta and Hamid Dabholkar carry forward their father and rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar’s legacy
- The Führer Myth How Hitler Won Over the German People | Ian Kershaw
- In Assam, Indian Muslims are being abused as 'Bangladeshi' | Aman Wadud
- Link to William Dalrymple's report on Narendra modi at the time of India's 2014 general election
- India's Ministry of External Affairs should steer clear from BJP Propaganda & Hindutva | Siddharth Varadarajan (The Wire)
- Book Launch invitation: Hindutva Rising by Achin Vanaik (14 October 2017, New Delhi)
- India: Inter faith marriage in Meerut disrupted by Bajrang dal and organisation of the far right
- India: If govt can’t protect (me), other intellectuals not safe in country - Prof. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
- India: Times Now TV mainstreaming of the vitriol that has existed among Hindu far right groups against rationalist KS Bhagwan
- India: Writer, Scholar Kancha Ilaiah’s car attacked in Warangal
- India: Apoorvanand examines why the late Jan Sangh leader is being actively deified and prodded to the top of national iconography
- India: An ‘anti-conversion clinic’ in Kerala knows how to deal with 'disorders' such as inter religious marriages The Quint
- India: Journalist who wrote a piece critical of a Modi Govt scheme gets threat saying see how the Hindutva right dealt with Gauri Lankesh by murdering her
- India: Bharatiya Jana Sangh presented its leader Deen Dayal Upadhayaya’s murder as a conspiracy, but Justice Chandrachud saw through these India: Modi's  - Might is Right Politics - Not stepping back in the face of criticism, never apologizing (Santosh Desai)
- India: Totally arbitrary detention/ arrest of Teesta Setalvad in Banaras
- India: Jharkhand’s anti-conversion law is part of an ongoing project to politicise tribal identity along religious lines | Shahana Munazir
- India: Did former vice-president Hamid Ansari attend an event organised in cooperation with women's wing of Popular Front of India ??
- India: Premchand’s 1934 essay on communalism and culture relevant today
- India: BJP, In Search Of An Icon - Is Deendayal Upadhyay Party's Mahatma Gandhi? (Subhash Gatade)
24 September 2017 22:20
 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7. MASS EXODUS: VISUALIZING THE SCALE OF THE ROHINGYA CRISIS
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http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/MYANMAR-ROHINGYA/010050XD232/index.html

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8. SRI LANKA: CPA STATEMENT ON PASSAGE OF PROVINCIAL COUNCILS ELECTIONS AMENDMENT ACT
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The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA)

    Press Releases

25th September 2017, Colombo, Sri Lanka: The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) is extremely concerned by the rushed and non-transparent process followed by the government to amend the Provincial Councils Elections Act. This amendment Act was passed by Parliament on 20th September 2017 with the support of more than two-thirds of the Members of Parliament. Due to a substantial number of committee-stage amendments that were adopted, the Act that was passed was materially different to the Bill that was gazetted (on 10th July 2017), tabled in Parliament (on 26th July 2017), and examined by the Supreme Court. The original Bill was only to provide for a quota of 30% for female candidates on the nomination papers submitted at Provincial Council elections. However, from the information available in the public domain (CPA has not seen the final Act) the Act that was passed changes the electoral system for elections of Provincial Councils and provides for a quota of 25% for women in all Provincial Councils.

At the outset, CPA notes that changing the electoral system to a Mixed Member Proportional system and the introduction of a quota for women in Provincial Councils are both welcome changes. However, the rushed manner in which these changes were made is contrary to the principle of representative democracy. The amendments, which completely changed the policy behind the Bills, were not made public to allow for any public debate or scrutiny, and were not subject to discussion even at the relevant Sectoral Oversight Committee. This procedure is particularly problematic when engaging in complex issues such as electoral reform, which requires complicated political compromises and mathematical formulae to be translated into legislative language.  Special care needs to be taken to ensure that the legislation drafted is not unworkable. Although what the government did was technically legal, the procedure adopted sets a bad precedent and brings into question the government’s commitment to transparency in governance, and to enabling the new sectoral committee system to perform its scrutiny and accountability role in any meaningful way.

The Sri Lankan constitution allows only for a limited “pre-enactment review of Bills of Parliament” seven days after a Bill has been placed on the order paper of Parliament. By adopting the process it did, the government has taken away the right of citizens of Sri Lanka to have the proposed amendments examined by the Supreme Court. The government has thus reinforced the concerns expressed by CPA and many others about executive dominance and the lack of transparency in the law-making process. CPA reiterates that legislation should not be passed in a rushed manner and that the constitutional role of Parliament and the constitutional rights of citizens in the law-making process should be respected.

The effect of the Act would be to postpone Provincial Council elections for at least six months. This is because the new electoral system requires demarcation of constituencies, which is a complicated and often contested process. The powers of the Provincial Councils whose term of five years will expire in the meantime will be exercised by the President and/or Parliament under Article 154L and 154M of the Constitution. This seriously impacts, as well as reflects adversely upon the government’s commitment to, the principle and practice of devolution. It is also entirely possible that this gap in democratically elected institutions at the Provincial Council level could continue beyond six months and impact all Provincial Councils. This precedent could easily be used by any government that intends to cripple the Provincial Council system in the future. In this context, it is disappointing that the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) supported this Act with little regard to the considerable attack on devolution that the Twentieth Amendment Bill (now aborted) and this Act cumulatively represent.

CPA notes that this drastic procedure was adopted after the Supreme Court determined that the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution Bill would require a referendum to be enacted. This creates the perception that the government has passed this Act to postpone elections. Provincial Councils are constitutionally established, and democratically elected institutions, and it is not legitimate for the government to interfere with such devolved institutions for whimsical reasons or to overcome its own strategic blunders. The postponement of elections is a serious violation of the sovereignty of the people and should only happen in exceptional circumstances if at all. The government has articulated no such exceptional circumstances. In light of several unfulfilled promises by leaders of the government regarding the date for elections for local authorities, there is no guarantee that elections for Provincial Councils will actually happen in six months as the government promises. CPA further calls on the TNA as the main opposition party in Parliament to put pressure on the government to ensure elections take place as promised.

CPA calls on the government to abide by its promise and ensure that all necessary steps are taken to conduct local authority elections before the end of January 2018 and Provincial Council elections before end of March 2018. CPA further insists that the government engages in law-making in a transparent manner that respects citizens’ rights as well as the role of Parliament, particularly in relation to constitutional issues.

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9. ROHINGYA REFUGEES FALL FROM BURMA’S PAN OF TERROR INTO LANKA’S FIRES OF HATE
by Don Manu
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(The Sunday Times [Sri Lanka] - 24 September 2017)

‘Sinha-le’ mob surrounds Mount’s UNCHR safe house where 16 children, 7 women and 7 men fleeing Myanmar violence were kept till repatriated

Forget their race, forget their creed and forget that they were born as Muslims in the land of Buddhist Burma, now Myanmar. Just hold them in your hearts for awhile as human beings, as victims of circumstances beyond their control, as innocent sufferers of another’s wrong, a nation’s crime, who must now cry in pain and bleed with grief; and storm heaven and verily raise the question, ‘ why me, why us, what grievous wrong have we and our children done on this earth this birth to deserve this terrible fate?

MODERN DAY SINHALA CHIVALRY: Monk mob threatening Rohingya women and children who sought Lanka’s alms of temporary refuge

On April 30th, the Sri Lanka Coast Guard craft patrolling the Indian Ocean waters off Trincomalee found 16 children, 7 women and 7 men huddled aboard a fishing boat. They belonged to a race known as the Rohingyas, a minority tribe successive Myanmar Governments had refused to recognize as an indigenous race, persecuted them without pause, and had now unleashed a systematic campaign of terror which the UN had condemned as ‘ethnic cleansing’.

They were the innocent civilian casualties caught up in a conflict not of their own making: forced to flee their burning villages in fear of their lives and their children’s lives, abandon their homes in fright to face a dark fearful future unknown. And carried with them naught but the only wealth they possessed: their lives and their children. They had endured the terror in their ghettoes of fear, where danger sprung from every government sewer and the swish of the machete slash could be heard cracking the silence of the night, followed by the death wail of a neighbour being hacked to death.

They had braved the perils of the sea, faced the tempests that brew in the Bay of Bengal and dared the gulfs to swallow them purely to flee the Myanmar Government’s military crackdown against their indigenous race; and seek refuge on some safe shore. Perhaps, they never even intended to come to Sri Lanka and had set their sails to some other shore; but, merciless fates, as they sometimes mockingly do to those in dire straits, may have directed some foul wind to blow their fishing boat to bob adrift off Trinco’s coast when the coast guard naval vessel arrived to their timely rescue.

The Sri Lankan Navy handed these unfortunates to the Mirihana detention camp. The Colombo office of the United Nation Commission for Human Rights (UNCHR) soon intervened and obtained a court order and secured their release. They were then taken and placed in a UNCHR safe house in Mount Lavinia pending repatriation to a third country.

Procedure had been followed to the letter. From the navy taking these 30 refugees from their fishing boat and handing them over to the Mirihana detention centre to the UNCHR intervening and obtaining a court order to secure their release and temporarily sheltering them until a country could be found willing to accept these 16 children and their parents. It has even been reported that one woman refugee had given birth during this period.

Even though they may have experienced every day their ever present trauma, reliving the nightmare of the horrors they had lived through in Myanmar, every time – five times a day – when they fell on their knees and prayed facing west in the direction of Mecca, no doubt, they would have thanked their Almighty Allah for setting the sails of their fishing vessel and steering their boat to stumble upon serendipity’s safe shore, where a gallant navy, a just court, concerned local UNCHR officials and a compassionate people guaranteed them peace of mind; and assured them that their temporary sojourn in this thrice blessed island of Theravada Buddhism would be safe.

But then this Tuesday, the bottom fell off their cherished hopes and revealed that, though 99. 9 percent of the nation’s Buddhists follow or strive to follow the Buddha’s teachings, there’s that one rotten iota that threatens to make the rest turn mold.

On 26th September, even as former president Chandrika and her sister Sunethra Bandaranaike were laying floral wreaths to commemorate the 59th anniversary of their father’s death, the founder of the SLFP and former prime minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike who, blood swathed and in excruciating pain after being fatally shot at his Rosmead Place residence, when asked as to who shot him had the exquisite presence of mind not to refer to his assassin as a Buddhist monk but to say with gasping breath ‘ it was a man in robes’, a few monks – or men in robes, SWRD would have called them – gathered around a house down Templar’s Road in Mount Lavinia.

They belonged to a new grouping of Buddhist monks called the Sinhale Jathika Balamuluwa which had come into existence only last year. Their slogan: Sinha-le. Like a poisonous deadly dapperling mushroom – Lepiota brunneoincarnata – they have sprouted from the compost pile of Lanka’s recent mire. And to make their mark in the morning’s paper and carve a niche of their own in the annals of face books, they displayed to the full the chivalry of Sinhala chauvinism by intimidating 16 children and seven mothers and seven men — Burmese refugees who had fled the homes in terror to meet terror again at the hands of a few monks.

And the head priest himself, no less, was present in person, to grace – or disgrace – the occasion with his saffron robe and to display to what extents men in robes could use the saffron shroud and stoop to blotch and taint, to blacken and tar the sacrosanct respect it invokes in a human heart. If you have heard of lay people looking up and spitting, this was a prime time example of a few monks groveling in dung and smearing in earnest the respect and worship the people accord them – not for the man but for the robe. Shorn of the accumulated respect it had earned though the ages by the venerable monks of old, these rabble rousing ragbag would be stripped in public and exposed; revealed as scarecrows dressed in a turmeric shroud to ward of crows.

And by their actions – how can one claim to be a Buddhist let alone a monk, if one not only fails to practice the sublime truth of Compassion towards the unfortunate but actively encourages others, too, to join one in attacking the discriminated – they effectively and conclusively demonstrated they had not only taken leave of the senses but had taken leave of their right to wear the robe of the truth seeker and were fit only to don the horns of the caricatured devil in cartoons.

Even as a Saville Row bespoke double breasted suit made in the best of British wool does not make one a gentlemen neither does a saffron robe make one a Buddhist monk. As President Sirisena asked in New York this week at New York’s Sri Lankan Buddhist Temple, “Who is a Buddhist monk? Anyone can go to a shop and buy a robe and an atapirikara, and dressed thus people will worship him as he walks the streets, but does that make him a Buddhist monk? Or is it the qualities that he possesses that make one a monk, worthy of reverence?”

It’s a tragedy of our times that certain monks have chosen to exploit the sacrosanct respect people have for the robe, and have chosen to prostitute it for illicit political gain in the self same manner a tart on twilight street would hitch her mini skirt an inch higher to attract custom.

But a fervent appeal must be made to these misguided monks not to take advantage of their blessings. Not to bring contempt upon the robe which invites the laity’s respect and fills their bowls with alms. If not for the robe, they would end up as nothing more than beggars on the street without a Dhamma to preach for their mid day meal. Do not disparage, do not reduce to ridicule and contempt the noble compassionate philosophy of the Buddha which had so moved the world for over two thousand five hundred years – which had so moved India’s greatest emperor Chandasoka to turn Buddhist and become Dharmasoka after seeing the tranquil countenance of a young Buddhist monk. That serene sight so moved him to renounce his title as King of Violence and seek re –coronation as Emperor of Peace.

If the sight of that young monk, garbed in the same sparse robe the Buddha had worn two hundred years before, moved so ruthless a king to renounce his ambitions of further conquests and to sheath his conquering sword forever; and, instead, to repose in his remorseful heart the sublime perfumed fragrance of the Buddha’s doctrine of non violence to any living being on earth – for whatever reason – if the sight of the saffron robe the Buddha wore had moved Emperor Asoka to send his son Arahant Mahinda to Lanka and carry with him the philosophy of the Buddha tucked in his begging bowl and offer it to Lanka’s King Devanampiyatissa as India’s greatest gift to this island nation – what would you say the presence of a saffron robe conveys today?

Today, the presence of a man in saffron robes outside the door does not evoke serenity but invokes fear in the downtrodden people’s heart, people who need compassion most. And, like a motorist, often irked by an errant driver on the road, shouts through his shutter, ‘who gave this fellow license to drive,’ one has come to the point when one must ask “who gave these men in robes, upasampada?”

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10. SRI LANKA CALLS MONKS WHO ATTACKED ROHINGYA 'ANIMALS'
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yahoo.com
AFP - September 27, 2017

Cabinet spokesman Rajitha Senaratne condemned the attack on Rohingya refugees (AFP Photo/ISHARA S. KODIKARA)

The Sri Lankan government Wednesday slammed a group of radical Buddhist monks who attacked Rohingya refugees on the island as "animals", pledging action against police who failed to protect them.
Rajitha Senaratne, a cabinet spokesman, said the government condemned Tuesday's storming of a UN safe house where 31 Rohingya refugees, including 16 children and seven women, had been given shelter.
"As a Buddhist I am ashamed at what happened," Senaratne told reporters.
"Mothers carrying very young children were forced out of their safe house which was attacked by a mob led by a handful of monks," he said.
The mob broke down the gates of the multi-storied building near the capital Colombo, smashing windows and furniture as frightened refugees huddled together upstairs.
There were no reports of casualties among the refugees, who were later taken to another location, but two police officers were wounded and admitted to hospital.
Senaratne said police had been ordered to take disciplinary action against officers found to have failed to control the mob.
"This is not what the Buddha taught. We have to show compassion to these refugees. These monks who carried out the attacks are actually not monks, but animals," he said.
Sri Lanka's extremist Buddhist monks have close links with their ultra-nationalist counterparts in Myanmar. Both have been accused of orchestrating violence against minority Muslims in the two countries.
One of the monks who stormed the building posted a video on Facebook filmed by his radical group Sinhale Jathika Balamuluwa (Sinhalese National Force) as he urged others to join him and smash the premises.
"These are Rohingya terrorists who killed Buddhist monks in Myanmar," the monk said in his live commentary, pointing to Rohingya mothers with small children in their arms.
The 31 Rohingya refugees were rescued by the Sri Lankan navy five months ago after they were found drifting in a boat off the island's northern coast
They had been living in India for several years before leaving a refugee camp in Tamil Nadu state.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees expressed alarm over Tuesday's attack and urged Sri Lankans to show empathy for civilians fleeing persecution and violence.
Almost half a million Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh since August 25.
They have been the target of decades of state-backed persecution and discrimination in the mainly Buddhist country, where many view them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

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11. BANGLADESH: WHEN WORDS THREATEN | SANTA ISLAM
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(Dhaka Tribune, September 28, 2017)

We need better laws to protect our freedom of speech

In this era of communication development, and thus the changing mode of virtual threats, there is no scope of doubting the necessity of a legal framework to ensure secure regulation of virtual activities.

Keeping that in mind, Bangladesh had enacted Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT) Act, 2006 to play a stewardship role necessary to enhance growth of ICT sector for development.

The main purpose of this act is to “provide legal recognition and security of Information and Communication Technology and rules of relevant subjects.” Later, the government brought amendments with tougher punishments to the act on October 2013. But since the amendments, the act has received great criticism from civil society, journalists, human rights activists, online activists, etc.

Most of the criticism was surrounded on Section 57 of the act — that it contains vague wordings, allowing its misuse against journalists, activists, and social media users. It curtails the right to freedom of expression which is considered as the essence of democracy.

A law too vague

The draft translation of section 57(1) of the existing ICT act says: “If any person deliberately publishes or transmits or causes to be published or transmitted in the website or in electronic form any material which is fake and obscene or its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see, or hear the matter contained or embodied in it, or causes to deteriorate or creates possibility to deteriorate law and order, prejudice the image of the state or person or causes to hurt or may hurt religious belief or instigate against any person or organisation, then this activity of his will be regarded as an offense.

“For this offense, the maximum punishment is 14 years’ imprisonment.”

The ambiguities of this provision have created a huge scope of abusing the law.

    The act has received great criticism from civil society, journalists, human rights activists

It has provided blanket immunities to the law enforcing agencies to arrest any person for even trivial matters.

It also shirks the obligation to safeguard freedom of the press, and also contradicts the Right to Information Act where freedom of speech is recognised as one of the basic rights of citizens.

Section 57 of the act also clearly contradicts Bangladesh’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as Bangladesh is a state party of the covenant.

Under this covenant, in any circumstances, the state can’t restrict freedom of expression of the citizens through vague, imprecise, and overly broad regulatory language.

Where we all come to play

With the advent of communication technology, which virtually links the minds of people, our young generation is becoming vibrant on social media networks. They generate ideas and share arguments in support of their own views towards society, country, and the world.

Now, with this law, their free and unintended expressions could be interpreted as criminal activities under this ICT Act.

The act thus has chilling effects among writers, bloggers, columnists, and users of social media.

These provisions have created confusion among them, and also imposed a restriction on what they say.

The criticism

In the context of Bangladesh, where unconventional opinions are not welcome all the time, political opponents are considered as an enemy, these provisions could be used to malicious ends.

The UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief has also expressed concern on this. After his official visit in Bangladesh,  he states in his report: “Restrictive laws, such as Section 57 of the Information and Communication Technology Act, which threatens draconian sanctions for vaguely defined defamation offenses, have created an atmosphere of legal insecurity, in which people are afraid to participate in public debates on sensitive issues, including religious issues.”

Expectedly, online activists, CSOs, and journalists have been demanding for the removal of the article from the very beginning of enactment of this law.

The concern surrounding the law consequently increased, as the country started experiencing a rise number of cases filed under this act.

According to media reports, at least 25 journalists have been sued under this act from March 2017 till July 2017.

Following the continuing criticisms, Law Minister Anisul Huq on several occasions said Section 57 would be removed, though many other members of the ruling party expressed their views in favour of Section 57.

To protect, not punish

After all these criticisms and condemnation, the state should take into account all the concerns while incorporating the provision in the new law. And, Section 57 should be fully repealed ultimately.

Terms used in the new law should be clarified, as there should not be any scope of misuse. The act should also provide sufficient safeguards for the protection of human rights with reference to international human rights standards.

The right to freedom of expression protects both the right of the speaker and the right of the listener. It also respects people’s right to dignity, safety, and privacy.

Let us protect these rights.

Santa Islam is working at the Media and International Advocacy Unit, Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK). 

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12. A CLERIC ARRIVED, THE MUSIC STOPPED, A MELEE ENSUED: WHY HARD-LINERS STOPPED A PAKISTANI WEDDING
by Haq Nawaz Khan and Pamela Constable
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(The Washington Post, September 26, 2017)

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — For nearly a decade, nobody dared play live music at weddings or parties in much of the northwest region bordering Afghanistan, for fear of raids by the area’s Islamist government or violent reprisals by armed militants. Many local musicians and singers fled and relocated in large cities such as Karachi.

Things loosened up after the liberal Pakistan Justice Movement won political power in the region four years ago and the army drove out the most hard-line insurgent groups. Musicians drifted back to their workshops and the traditional sounds of stringed rebabs and drums poured from wedding halls.

But an alarming incident several weeks ago at a lively village wedding in the Khyber tribal area suggested that the threat of violent moral sanction from Islamist vigilantes had suddenly returned.

Hundreds of guests had gathered for an evening of entertainment Sept. 4 when a stranger burst in and said they must suspend the performance or it would be halted by force, reportedly on orders from a local seminary leader.

“We were happy and the boys were dancing, but we didn’t want any trouble so we stopped everything,” said Nawaz Khan, an uncle of the bridegroom. Soon afterward, though, he said a group led by Syed Muhammad Ilyas Binori, a cleric known as Lala Khan, arrived carrying white flags and shouting, “God is great!” 

Witnesses said the intruders shoved the musicians and seized a drum and some microphones. Israr Gul, a drummer, said the lights went out in the melee and the performers fled. There were reports that Binori’s group publicly burned the instruments from the wedding after weekly prayers Sept. 8.

The incident, widely reported in Pakistani media, raised alarms that Islamist militants seeking to purge what they see as modern vices were returning to a region that civilian and military leaders said was free of religious oppression.

But the attackers turned out to be from a mystical strain of Islam called Sufism, which features trancelike dancing and inner communion with God. Many Sufi shrines have been attacked by extremists as un-Islamic; more than 70 devotees died in a suicide bombing in February at a historic shrine in Sindh province.

It is also extremely rare for a Sufi group to be linked with violence. In this case, though, the family of Binori had an unusual history of condemning and acting to stop what it regarded as immoral public behavior, such as music, and its zealotry had reportedly been accepted in the past by some in the conservative Muslim region.

“This is a shocking incident for all of us,” said Ashraf Gulzar, an Afghan Pashto singer in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, saying it was the first time in years that he had heard of a musical event being attacked or threatened. 

Binori denied having ties to militant groups and said the shrine he looks after was bombed several years ago. “We are victims of terrorism, so we should not be called terrorists,” he said in an interview. Yet he also declared that his group views music, gambling and alcohol as “un-Islamic and unlawful” and that members often take punitive action to stop them.

“We seize their instruments and punish them by burning their houses. We burn their equipment after Friday prayers,” Binori added. His nephew, Ishaq Binori, said, “We have done nothing wrong, only stopping un-Islamic and antisocial activity.” 

A local government administrator, Tehsin Ullah, said there was no official ban on music and that his office had summoned the cleric about the attack. “He signed a written apology that he would not take the law into his hands in the future,” Ullah said. 

But Binori and his aides said they had not apologized and did not regret their actions. They said they had only signed an agreement not to take part in “anti-state activities” but said that they would “continue our mission as jihad” if officials failed to stop activity they consider immoral.

Some community residents said the Binori family was respected but that such raids were counterproductive.

“Music was never banned in the past, except during Taliban time,” said Shakir Ullah Afridi, a local elder. He said there had been no public musical events in the area for nearly a decade, mostly for fear of violence. But in the past several years, he said they had been revived and that he had hosted a public music party with fireworks.

 “Such events are needed to do away with the fear of militants,” he said.

Constable reported from Islamabad, Pakistan. 

Pamela Constable is The Post’s bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She previously served as a South Asia bureau chief and most recently covered immigration in the Washington area for several years.

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13. THE POST-STANISLAV PETROV WORLD
by Jawed Naqvi
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(Dawn, 26 September 2017)

IT is difficult to play down the irony of our myriad daily pursuits. We may be planning to blow up the world, as ‘brattish’ Kim and ‘dotard’ Trump seem to be pondering. We may be locked in a wordy duel on Kashmir or the Rohingyas with no succour in sight for the hapless folks we claim to speak for. We may be preparing to walk in a Muharram procession of self-flagellating mourners. Or we may be assembling a suicide belt to slaughter them with.

We may be rearranging the political furniture in Europe — Brexit, refugees, racism et al, or we may be searching for the survivors of the latest earthquake in Mexico or a hurricane in Florida. We may be the ubiquitous state that habitually assaults and robs its people of their freedoms and dignity. We may be the people fighting to turn the tide.

Whatever it is about life, any aspect of it we may be celebrating today, or whatever strife we may be confronting or wading into, the fact is that we are around to do all that thanks to Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet army colonel who averted a third world war by simply keeping his nerve.

Petrov — who passed away in May as quietly as he had lived, and we came to know of his death last week — was the duty officer at an early-warning anti-nuclear centre near Moscow on the day the world came closest to apocalypse. It was Sept 26, 1983, and his wristwatch showed midnight when the hair trigger siren went off at a deafening decibel. Only a few weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a Korean passenger jet. The disaster had set off a spiral of Cold War omens, which played out elsewhere, including Afghanistan.

    Petrov’s computer showed the US had launched a ballistic missile towards the USSR.

Large red signs on Petrov’s computer showed that the US had launched a ballistic missile towards the Soviet Union. Within moments, a few more popped up. It turned out to be a glitch, but imagine the crisis on the watch of, say, a Pakistani or an Indian officer who would not have the precious 15 minutes to take a world-saving decision that Petrov had.

According to subsequent Russian accounts, from the moment the warheads had taken off, there was “only half an hour for the Kremlin to decide on whether to push the red button in retaliation and just 15 minutes for Petrov to determine whether the threat was real and report to his commanders. ‘My cosy armchair felt like a red-hot frying pan and my legs went limp. I felt like I couldn’t even stand up. That’s how nervous I was when I was taking this decision’,” he would say later.

The Russian officer did a quick if risky calculation. He saw it as strange that the US, with its thousands of nuclear warheads, would begin an assault with just a few of them. That was his hunch. It was a good hunch in the end. But it could have gone horribly wrong. The early detection system was new and Petrov had little trust in it. Whatever the arguments, he knew that all he really had to go on was a hunch.

His brief was to determine whether the threat was credible, and how to report it to his superiors, who would relay the information directly to the assigned Politburo members.

“I was the one with the information and my reaction would determine the course of action. If I told them it was an attack, it would have been easier for them to go along with this and to act accordingly than to say otherwise. The panic would have spread like in a henhouse,” Petrov said.

A high-level inquiry commission probed the malfunctioning alarm system and it was found to have many glitches that were hopefully corrected. Based on Petrov’s story, the movie The Man Who Saved the World premiered in 2014. It featured Kevin Costner who sent the Russian hero $500 as a ‘thank you’ for his decision. A sincere thank you note would have been adequate, and perhaps more respectful.

There have been several close calls, of course, that would have brought the world to a sudden end, and how many times have US nuclear forces, on their part, braced to launch on a false alarm? None of the corrections, however, involved a self-effacing human hero as Petrov was.

I am not sure what Petrov’s views were about a nuclear weapons free world. As an officer who was ready to respond to fire with fire, one can only surmise that he was sanguine in the nightmarish logic of the Cold War. If there is a lesson to glean from his moment of sagacity, however, it can be best expressed by accepting the fact that we are living on a second chance. Petrov could double guess a faulty computer and save the world. It is harder to imagine anyone to fix the glitches of our frenzied minds.

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14. INDIA: WHERE THE CENTRE LIES STILL - KHAN MARKET, IN NEW DELHI, HAS ACTUALLY GOT BETTER WITH TIME | Mukul Kesavan
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(The Telegraph, September 17 , 2017)

First of all, the name is Khan Market. You need to say both words, and not just Khan. There are those who say "I'm off to Khan" but they're the sort of people whose natural habitat is a mall, who pay in cash and who sit down to lunch in gaggles of twelve, arrivistes, who haven't lived their formative years in Pandara Park's C-I houses or even Rabindra Nagar's D-I flats, who have no idea what it is to live in that republican pastoral, the government colony. It's not their fault but they could at least try to pass... and calling it Khan Market would be a start.

Also Khan Market isn't Lutyens' Delhi. Not only is it postcolonial (it started life in 1951), it is republican in a foundational way, being a refugee market that gave shopkeepers from the NWFP a new start in life. Which is why it's called 'Khan' Market, after Badshah Khan's brother, Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan, better known as Dr Khan Sahib, the leader of the Frontier National Congress at the time of Partition, who helped many Sikhs and Hindus find safe passage to Delhi.

There was a time when the road running past it was called Cornwallis Road but now it's called Subramania Bharati Marg. The great poet has a sarkari neighbourhood named after him too, hard by Khan Market: Bharati Nagar. To balance things out regionally, the other government colony adjacent to the market is named after Tagore, Rabindra Nagar. When they were first built, they were rather vulgarly called Maan Nagar and Shan Nagar to celebrate, perhaps, the bureaucratic dignity of the the director rank officials they were meant to house. (The locality built to house clerks and peons was, naturally, called Sewa Nagar.) Nehru intervened to have Maan and Shan Nagar renamed, so perhaps its best to see Khan Market as a child of the Nehruvian republic.

Pay no attention to Delhi's professional nostalgists; Khan Market is the only place in New Delhi that has actually gotten better with time. A childhood friend of mine whose claim to Khan Market is sound (he spent his school years in Pandara Road's D-II flats just five minutes away) was going on about how much better it was in the Sixties and Seventies. It wasn't.

In those decades, Khan Market seemed to consist mainly of general stores that styled themselves 'dairies'. So we had Kashmir Dairy, Saluja Dairy and Sovereign Dairy. Confusingly, the shops that didn't call themselves 'dairy' were also general stores; the Empire Stores, which soldiered gallantly on into republican times, was one of them. The upscale general stores (or dairies) lived to serve an expatriate clientele and were happy to let their native customers know this. One of them was managed by a horrible man with a Hitler moustache whose allergy to desis was so pronounced and so easily brought on that as children it was worth our while to loaf about his counter just to watch him yip with rage and disapproval.

Instead of restaurants, Khan Market had mithai shops. There was one called Raj Sweets and another called Bengal Sweets. Both of them claimed to serve 'Bengali sweets' which was a lie; they were vegetarian dhabas that sold dirtily-made, deep-fried food along with fly-specked barfis and laddoos. There was a restaurant in one corner of the market at the back, glamorously named Alfina. In the verandah in front of it (Khan Market used to have verandahs or corridors running past its shopfronts) stood a kababchi with his grill and while he had customers, no diner, as far as we could tell, had ever darkened the restaurant's door. Nobody dined out in Khan Market; you went to Connaught Place for that.

There were more chemists shops than anyone needed; no one mourns their passing. All the good shops from that era survive: Delhi Cloth House and Garg Tailors, Bahrisons, the bookshop and Shoes & Sports. The only useful one that didn't survive the transition to ridiculous rents was Kalra Cycles where young boys bought their first bikes. But apart for the odd casualty, Khan Market has achieved a kind of surreal splendour.

Its new shops and restaurants sum up the inside-outside world of the Indian city powerfully: the interiors perfectly air-conditioned, wonderfully serviced and quirkily furnished; the steep, narrow stairs that lead you out into its slummy lanes, where the market's infrastructure is measured out in dangling cables. Torpid, spayed strays sleep in its shaded corridors, swollen like full waterskins, waiting for some long dead bhishti to take them away.

There's always talk of how the market is overrun by cars now and how it needs a multi-level car park to deal with the congestion. Old timers reminisce about the time when Caryhom ice cream carts stood in a row amid a general emptiness. May the car park never get built; where else in Delhi will you get to see well-heeled desis on fawning, first-name terms with their social inferiors, in this case, parking attendants? And how can you have too many spectacle shops? There is no better fieldwork site than an optician's shop in Khan Market if your subject is the urban rich. To watch someone drop fifty thousand rupees on a pair of plastic frames indistinguishable in every detail from a pair that costs five thousand is to know that Delhi's rich have dismissed use value from their calculations as conclusively as contemporary art purged the figure from its aesthetic.

Now that Khan Market is virtually made up of middling, wildly overpriced restaurants, you can see in a way that you couldn't before that the point of these places is to persuade you, briefly, that you're elsewhere, in some temperate, Western clime. Not all of them do this with the lovely candour of the Big Chill which achieves its effects with foreign movie posters, but the determination to transport you is impressive.

Sometimes, though, the cosmopolitanism is overwhelming. Sometimes you feel deranged by it, like the afternoon I found myself shopping for a wedding present in an upscale objet shop and a smartly dressed man tried to sell me a low-slung, curvy glass decanter that looked like an edgy urine bottle of the sort invalids use. At times like this I retreat to Khan Market's still centre, the old barber shop that has occupied a corner of it for as long as I can remember. It's an old fashioned shop, the sort in which you can't lean back to have your hair washed, where the barber doesn't address individual strands of hair with meaningful snips. His scissors hum like a bird by my ear and I sink into a haircut stupor, knowing that he has seen these shops in, and, with any luck, he'll see them out.

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15. MAKE IN INDIA IS LOOKING MORE AND MORE LIKE A BAD JOKE | Abheek Barman
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(The Times of India, October 1, 2017)

Ambrose Bierce satirised money as, “An evidence of culture and a passport to polite society.” So when market analysts spout Homer in misery, beware. A report written by Suvodeep Rakshit and two colleagues for Kotak Securities, published September 25, is called ‘Between Scylla and Charybdis’. It refers to the dreadful choice faced by Odysseus while sailing through the Strait of Messina, between Italy and Sicily. Get dashed to smithereens on the rocks of Scylla or sucked into the whirlpool of Charybdis.

Rakshit and Co weren’t sailing ships or flying kites: they were saying New Delhi had dug itself so deep into a fiscal hole that its only choice was to splurge and break the bank, or get stingy and choke the life out of growth. They used jargon, but you get the drift.

Flashback to September 2014, when PM Narendra Modi unveiled a scheme called, ‘Make in India’ (MII), with a gear-and-cogs lion logo. Three years later MII has, literally, gone off the rails. By October next year, work was supposed to start on the largest MII project: a $2.5 billion venture by America’s GE to make diesel-electric locomotives in Marhaura, in Chhapra, Bihar.

But two weeks ago, New Delhi switched off the Bihar project, saying electric trains were the future. Chief minister Nitish Kumar, who gambled his political future by breaking with a Congress-Lalu Yadav coalition to ally with BJP recently, isn’t amused. He says it’ll take ages to electrify India’s 1,10,000 km of tracks. As a two-time rail mantri and Bihari, Nitish should know.

Against government claims that 96% of Bihar villages are electrified, a 2015 survey found only 8% of households get electricity for 20 hours a day. A staggering 80% of homes don’t use electricity for lighting, but get by with kerosene lamps. An incensed GE wants India to pay it Rs 1,300 crore in compensation. Such irony: our loss-making, cash-poor railways will now pay to cancel MII investments. What is New Delhi smoking?

By the mid-2000s, most railways worldwide scrapped all-electric locomotives to pull the heaviest loads; without an internal combustion mechanism, electric engines take very long to accelerate or brake. Now the world’s most powerful locomotives, like 2015’s 4,400 horsepower (HP) EMD machines in the US or Iran’s Alstom 4,300 HP engines or China’s 6,250 and 6,300 HP HNX series, are diesel-electric combinations; Russia’s giant 11,300 HP Sinara locomotive is powered by a GT gas-electric engine.

New Delhi thinks electric trains will save India the cost of diesel. Is electricity made out of thin air? A study in the mid-2000s argued that it makes no sense to run heavy freight trains, moving under 100km per hour, with electricity. By shifting all freight trains to diesel, railways could save 20% of its power bills. The bijli could be diverted to industry and commerce, which now use diesel to generate power. Shunting the locomotive project could be the last nail in MII’s coffin, but there are other stupendous failures.

Someone fancifully called India the ‘pharmacy of the world’. This hype is busted by numbers. India contributes 0.9% of its GDP to research, compared to China’s 2.1%. Medicine is no exception. Last year, a team led by Samiran Nundy, one of India’s most respected medical doctors, found 60% of medical institutions produced no research. Those that did were mostly taxpayer-funded, with Delhi’s AIIMS at the lead. But even AIIMS produced less than a third of the nearly 5,000 research papers published by the Massachusetts General Hospital every year.

Another study found that of the top 316 medical R&D spenders worldwide, India had only eight (mostly state-owned), while China was host to 21. India does the grunt work of digitising global research or supplying human guinea-pigs to test therapies developed overseas. We pretend our medicine-makers are world beaters. Rubbish. Mostly, they import medical raw material (called Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, or APIs) from China, package and sell them as desi brands. This adds some value to Indian exports, especially to the US, wary of importing bulk drugs direct from China. In 2000, India imported only 23% of APIs from China. Through 2014-16, when MII was supposedly in full throttle, we imported 52% of APIs from China, each year.

The BJP gloats about staring down Beijing in Doklam. It forgets that India’s policy of capping medicine prices, encouraging local R&D and manufacturing, started only after our defeat in the 1962 China war. Two months ago, we had to slap 10% duty on imported mobile phones, making them dearer, to tempt Chinese companies like Foxconn to invest. Nokia’s Tamil Nadu plant has been mothballed for two years, as investors haggle for sops. Last November, India’s largest engineering company, L&T, sacked a record 14,000 employees.

For the near-30,000 young people trying, but failing to get jobs every day, Make in India is a joke in poor taste.

Abheek Barman is Consulting Editor, ET Now

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16. FIGHTING THE “LOVE JIHAD” - INDIA IS WORKING ITSELF INTO A FRENZY ABOUT INTERFAITH MARRIAGES
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(The Economist - 30 September 2017)
Hindu nationalists warn of a Muslim plot to seduce Hindu women
https://www.economist.com/news/asia/21729806-hindu-nationalists-warn-muslim-plot-seduce-hindu-women-india-working-itself-frenzy

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17. WHY I WILL AVOID BOSU WORKOUTS | Shovon Chowdhury
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(Metro Plus / The Hindu, August 07, 2017)

[Photo] Former West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu  PTI  

When I first heard that The Hindu was doing an article on Bosu workouts, I was nonplussed. There has only been one Bosu in my life, and his name was Jyoti. You can anglicise his surname as much as you like, with your Tagores and Mitters and Sinhas, and the corruption of innocent Bandopadhyayas into Banerjees, but he will always be Bosu to me.

I was shocked because the words ‘Bosu’ and ‘work’ have rarely been used in the same sentence before. It seems unnatural. Despite being a legendary leader, he was very democratic. He never did any work, and he didn’t expect us to do any either. We were receptive and eager. We too felt that work was inherently wrong. It was a long, slow process. I spent 20 years in Calcutta. I grew up, got a job, and had children, and throughout this period, two things were constant. He was always the Chief Minister, and the Calcutta Metro was always under construction. His influence was all-pervasive. I have two nephews, who used to beat each other up when they were small. They’ve stopped now, because they’re in their 40s. Their father was a dedicated communist. In between the punches and the hair pulling, they would call each other terrible names, such as ‘petit bourgeois’ and ‘capitalist roader’, while their mother wept in a corner, dabbing her eyes with her pallu . In this way, he inspired the youth.

I never quite understood the secret of his appeal. He was largely inert, and spoke very little. Perhaps, he just seemed like the type of person who ought to be a leader. He came from a good family, and his English was good. His dhoti s were always spotless. His taste in whisky was refined. His sarcasm was withering. It never occurred to any of us to ask him to actually do anything. In hindsight, this was a mistake. Economically and socially, he left us with nothing but chit funds and cultural activities. Politically, many of us automatically reach for a rock whenever we hear the word ‘communist’.

What about health? How did he affect us, health-wise? Our mental health was good. We were spared the trauma of work stress, because we didn’t have any work. Wealth can also be a source of stress, but this too was never a problem. Physically, we faced certain drawbacks. We were beaten savagely by party cadres, leading to a rise in medical expenses. Due to frequent power cuts, we had to study by candlelight, which is why so many Bengalis wear spectacles.

Personally, I live in fear that he might come back, a decaying corpse in an excellent dhoti , reaching out blindly to switch off the lights. Whenever I see his picture, or hear his name, a shiver goes down my spine. So I’m sure the Bosu Workout is excellent, but I’ll give it a miss.

In Shovon Chowdhury’s latest novel, Murder With Bengali Characteristics , a former Chief Minister of West Bengal is resurrected, using traces of DNA found on a whisky glass

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18. DESHMUKH ON NARLEKAR'S 'BOMBAY MODERN: ARUN KOLATKAR AND BILINGUAL LITERARY CULTURE'
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Anjali Nerlekar. Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture. FlashPoints Series. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. xix + 292 pp. $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8101-3274-0; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8101-3273-3.

Reviewed by Madhuri Deshmukh (Oakton Community College)
Published on H-Asia (July, 2017)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Modern Literature from Maharashtra

Anjali Nerlekar’s Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture focuses on a fascinating and pivotal period, place, and poetics that, if studied carefully, can overturn a good lot of common literary assumptions about language, modernity, nationality, and cosmopolitanism in South Asian literary criticism today. First off, Bombay Modern is worthy of notice for the simple fact that it is one of so few studies to focus on South Asian poetry rather than fiction or history or sociology. Indeed, it would seem absurd to think of English or American or European modernisms without the poets, and yet, when it comes to South Asia, the poets have been largely overlooked in the efforts to articulate the “alternative modernisms” of the subcontinent. Nerlekar’s book makes a convincing case that the poem is “the unit of the modern rhythm of post-independence Bombay” (p. 213).

The book introduces us to a periodization that will strike those trained in English-language literary studies as new: Sathottari, referring to literature written between 1955 and 1980 and published in little magazines, often edited by poets themselves, and by the small publisher movement that emerged in Bombay as a defiant challenge to the literary establishment and the polite, middle-class readers who were its patrons. Indeed in introducing readers to this period, Bombay Modern enacts the very thing it is trying to locate, the bilingual nexus of writing in English and Marathi that defines the modernity of poets caught in the tension between the global and the local, the national and regional. The writing of this period was, in many ways, a response to two significant events: the carving out of the monolingual state of Maharashtra, with polyglot Bombay city as its bleeding heart, and, in 1956, the conversion of millions of Dalits to Buddhism under the leadership of Babasaheb Ambedkar. Nerlekar shows that the post-independence disillusionment incarnated in the Angry-Man of the 1970s films actually has its roots in the transgressive, highly physical, sometimes scatological, demotic poetry of the Sathottari period.

Nerlekar divides the book into two parts: the first part is a detailed overview of the little magazine and small publisher movements that emerged in Bombay between 1955 and 1980, and the second and more compelling part, a study of the work of Arun Kolatkar, arguably the most important of the poets to emerge out of this rich period. The second half includes a first-ever study in English of Kolatkar’s astonishing Marathi magnum opus, Bhijaki Vahi (2003) (The Drowned Manuscript), a book about and in the voices of women, some real and some mythical, who have faced the oppression and violence of patriarchy. The title itself is drawn from the story of the drowned notebook of Marathi bhakti poet Tukaram, who was compelled to throw his poetic compositions into the river by Brahmins threatened by his poetic and religious stature. It is also, as Nerlekar shows through analysis of the poems and graphic art, an image of a book drenched by the tears of the women in it: Cassandra, Helen, Rabia, Kim (the young girl fleeing napalm in the Vietnam War), Dora Marr (Pablo Picasso’s girlfriend), Susan Sontag, and Maimun (a Muslim girl from Haryana, India, who was gang-raped and killed for marrying outside her caste)—just to name a few. One poem analyzed by Nerlekar is about Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of Osip Mandelstam, in which the speaker says: “My eyes are simply / Quoting these tears / Without your permission / Nadezhda // I am not going to wipe them off // These quotation marks / standing in my two eyes / let them stay hanging there / forever” (p. 157). Kolatkar’s “quotation marks” here refer not only to a self-consciousness about his cultural appropriation of Nadezhda’s suffering but also to her own act of writing out her husband’s banned poetry from memory after he had been exiled by Joseph Stalin. Nerlekar’s translations and careful analysis of these poems gives English readers a glimpse into the importance of Kolatkar’s prodigious Marathi poetry.

Notable also is Nerlekar’s comparative analysis of Kolatkar’s most well-known book of poems about an important religious and pilgrimage site, Jejuri (1977), written first in English and then translated into Marathi, though the term “translation” does not do justice to the varied literary acts involved in the endeavor as Nerlekar shows with her fascinating and original side-by-side analysis of the companion English and Marathi poems. Kolatkar was roundly criticized for writing Jejuri in English, not only by Nativists, like the novelist Bhalchandra Nemade, but also by many others who were taken aback by the way the use of English defamiliarized and distanced such a well-known local place. The poet Dilip Chitre rather brilliantly writes about Jejuri that “even Kolatkar could not have conceived it in Marathi. Its ironic objectivity is a property of Kolatkar’s poetic ideolect, and he is using his other language—as the language of the other in a spiritual sense as well” (p. 196). Nerlekar shows that this sort of grappling with the dislocations of modernity, linguistic and religious, can only be seen and studied through a multilingual critical approach.

In spending so much time on the little magazine and small publisher movements in the first half of the book, Nerlekar seems to have one particular element above all others in mind, the importance of the materialist-textual context and contours of the poetics that governed this period. Thus, the ephemerality of the little magazines, covered in detail in the first half, itself becomes a kind of aesthetics that helps us better understand the fluidity and editorial history of Kolatkar’s Bhijaki Vahi, while Kolatkar’s involvement in the technical decisions of layout and graphic arts as an editor of a small press and an award-winning graphic artist in his own right helps us to see Kolatkar’s poetry as “a materially oriented act of imagination where ‘meaning’ is most fully constituted not as a conception but as an embodiment” (p. 179). Indeed, Nerlekar’s analysis of layout, the effect of blank spaces, the retro and verso placement of poems, and the graphic elements of his books, all published by small publishers, sheds new light on his poetry and makes a convincing case for their meaning-making centrality.

There is, however, less emphasis on interpretation of the content of the poems here, on those elements we might group under the word “meaning.” Perhaps this is because the very materialist aesthetics Bombay Modern draws out cautions against any such forays as mere speculation. As the poets strove to marry word and thing, so Nerlekar stays grounded in the material-textual presence of the poems and their immediate literary context, never straying much further to interrogate the larger cultural and historical concerns of the poets themselves. For example, more detailed analysis of the crossovers, contrasts, and concerns of Sathottari poetry and the Dalit Renaissance of the 1970s might have helped readers new to the literature better understand their historical place and significance. In general, the hefty questions of caste, gender, class, and ideology addressed by the poets of the Sathottari period take a backseat to the literary-textual focus of Bombay Modern. To some this may seem a weakness of the book, and indeed there are places in the book where one wishes for more critical engagement, but given the relative paucity of focus on literary concerns in South Asian scholarship, dominated as it is by the social sciences, Bombay Modern still remains refreshingly distinct.   Nerlekar’s comparative methodology draws in poets from all over the world, not only Allen Ginsberg and the Beats who actually knew and promoted the Sathottari poets, but Adrienne Rich, William Wordsworth, Margaret Atwood, other Marathi writers, A. K. Ramanujan, and many others, thus clearly hewing out a unique multilingual literary space for analysis.

Nerlekar’s notable contribution to literary studies is her unique focus on bilingual South Asian poetry as a challenge to the facile pronouncements of an English-dominated global cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and to the parochial Nativism of monolingual writers who also, in the opposite way, fail to account for the polyglot realities of South Asian lives on the other hand. The bilingual poets of the Sathottari period shed light on the intricate, multilingual, and local workings of modernity in South Asia, the alienations and deracinations effected by it, and the changes wrought by it. Kolatkar and other poets of the period, like Chitre, did not see this alienation as particular to the modern, but, as their engagements with the corpus of bhakti poetry shows, in continuity with a particular South Asian past and also the global present. It is this particular moment in time, neither past nor present but both at once, and aesthetic space, neither global nor local, national nor regional, but all of these at once that Nerlekar attempts to bring into focus for us. As Kolatkar puts it in his unfinished poem “Making Love to a Poem”: “Some of the finest poetry in India, or indeed in the world, has come from a sense of alienation.... It is the central experience of a lot of bhakti poetry for instance / it’s at the bottom of a lot of Dalit poems / it has given us poems like ‘Cold Mountain’ / folk poetry where women sing their lot” (p. 183).

The best thing that can be said about any book of literary criticism may be said of Nerlekar’s book: it makes readers want to go and read the poets for themselves again. Hopefully, Bombay Modern will bring much deserved scholarly attention to the words and legacy of Kolatkar, to the Sathottari period, and to the momentous output of South Asia’s bilingual poets so far so unjustly neglected in studies of South Asia.

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19. REMOTE WARFARE AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN DJIBOUTI
Written by Ray Acheson
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Published September 2017 by Reaching Critical Will, a programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

This report looks at possible connections between foreign military bases and sexual violence in the East African country of Djibouti.

China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States have troops and contractors stationed in this East African country, which also had a record of trafficking and forced prostitution. There has been some indication of foreign soldiers engaging in illegal sexual activities with women and girls; this report seeks to expose what we know and encourage international organisations and governments to dig further.

http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Publications/remote-warfare-sexual-violence-djibouti.pdf

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20. PUERTO RICO: BELONGING TO, BUT NOT PART OF | ED MORALES
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(Verso Blog, 28 September 2017)

The Trump administration's delay in sending real aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria is a distasteful display of colonialist racism. But it's par for the course: our citizenship has always been second-class.

“We’re American citizens. How can Trump turn his back on us?” This is one of the pleas I’m hearing over and over again about the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria. While it is a distasteful display of colonialist racism that the Trump administration takes its time to decide how much help Puerto Rico deserves, after pulling out the stops for Miami and Houston, ostensibly because there’s not “a really big ocean” separating them from Washington, it’s kind of par for the course. Our citizenship has always been second-class.

Going back as far as the 1901 case Downes v. Bidwell, decided by some of the judges who ruled on Plessy v. Ferguson, a new colonial turn of phrase entered the American vocabulary. Puerto Rico should not be considered fit for becoming a state in the Union, but would be instead an “unincorporated territory” “belonging to, but not part of,” the United States. Belonging to, but not part of. Separate, but also not equal. Sort of.

We were bodies, then, that should not mix with the body of white America, for we were already stained with mixture, through both our fraught tropical sweatbox of consensual and non-consensual unions, and the legacy of our Iberian antecedents, who had been festooned in Moorish veils of uncertain North African origin. Unwashed bodies, unworthy bodies, and like the body of Homer Plessy — the Louisiana Creole passenger booted from the whites-only section of the train — a body marked for destruction, the object of violence, literal and figurative.

So it is no coincidence that, weeks after Charlottesville, and the many other spectacles of implied and literal violence that have marked the Trump reign, the mainstream media has apoplectically ping-ponged between the Colin Kaepernick-inspired National Anthem kneeling protests and the tragedy of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans root-shocked and desesperados by a landscape of twigs where Ceiba trees grew, zinc roofs shattered into shards, and a simmering, rising tide of noxious, contaminated water flowing through what were once quaint Caribbean towns. The kneeling protests staged by African American athletes were a silent rejection of internal colonialism, while the Shock Doctrine military-P3 complex that's about to overtake Puerto Rico is the end game of a century or so of external colonialism.

Even complaints about Trump’s slow-motion doddering on Maria from well-meaning, proud Puerto Ricans who had served in the U.S. military, insisting that their sacrifice deserved respect, seemed to forget that the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th century had been significantly motivated by the angry disappointment African American and Mexican-American soldiers endured when they returned home to Jim Crow segregation and dehumanization after having fought in the Good War of Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation. This is 2017, we often claim, how can this be? It’s because the language of “belonging to, but not a part of,” and “separate but equal,” has never been formally written out of the narrative that is still America.

So here we were, vulnerable in our beautiful brown bodies, at the intersection of mainland and island, diaspora and isleñidad, and perhaps the ruling dialectic of the late-capitalist world system, debt and crisis. The debt, all $147 or so billion of it, is of course, a fiction, but the crisis is all too real. The privatization frenzy promised by PROMESA, the congressionally-authorized debt collection agency, is poised to accelerate at unimaginable speed once the spin of the Trump casino government roulette wheel picks out the winning bids. Planeloads of desperate Boricuas will evacuate to Central Florida, Texas, and beyond, while prime beach real estate is gobbled up by billionaires like John Paulson.

While it is the only possible humanitarian solution, a rescinding of the debt seems highly unlikely, and its nagging accumulated weight will be used to institute a permanent state of crisis. A major motif of this crisis is the infrastructure, which — like our bodies, subjected to violence — was exposed, poorly maintained. Electrical cables ran along haphazardly installed posts crisscrossing the island, constantly failing for years before the storm, and are now lay fallen like the mass casualties of war. Collapsed like the stick-figure balloons that advertise car washes, Puerto Rico’s infrastructure is in a grand mal seizure.

To perform the crisis mode, the military phase has already begun with the deployment of U.S. Army North deputy commander Richard C. Kim, and under-the-radar DOD private contract firms like Strategic Response Partners, who have already been spotted on San Juan streets. Despite some favorable reports of remote mountain area rescues and deployments to deliver diesel gas for electric generators and restore cell towers, the fragile fabric of this island society has frayed almost completely. And the reality show ethos of the current administration continues to distract: Trump has even invited Jenniffer González, the effervescent Resident Commissioner, or non-voting representative to Congress from Puerto Rico’s right-wing pro-statehood party, on Air Force One to discuss his plans, presumably alongside Omarosa Manigault, if she’s not fired yet.

While we need to continue to fight for debt relief, the calls for a military presence — more to help restore infrastructure than to stop and frisk looters, imagined and real — and massive federal investment for the rebuild will be made, from my heart at least, reluctantly. The absolute destruction that has been visited on the island has temporarily rendered pro-independence politics untenable. Of course they must reappear in time, but for now we have to insist that the U.S. take economic responsibility for miring Puerto Ricans in debt (with considerable help from the the island's political and banking elites) and putting them in the path of an extreme atmospheric event fueled by the protracted sluggishness to react to climate change and fossil fuel addiction.

Hurricane Maria has been compared to Katrina because of the extent of the damage and suffering, and its potential to illustrate that Trump, as Kanye West famously suggested about George W., doesn’t care about black and brown people. But New Orleans emerged from the storm with some areas decimated, others intact. Maria has spread its destruction in egalitarian fashion across an entire island about the length and width of Massachusetts, and made it a deforested, barren wasteland, at least for now. It is not so much a disaster area as it is a disaster nation. A nation of bleak, hot, humid, thirsty radio silence.

Puerto Rico weathered the loss of electric power for months on end after hurricanes in the 80s and 90s, and although arduous, it was not often life-threatening. Most horrific now are the health threats, the homelessness, the months of rationing, potential environmental disasters, and what will most likely continue as a lingering problem in many remote corners of the island: the inability to communicate. Puerto Ricans now send messages to radio stations and social media in the hopes that someone might hear them, like a NASA probe filled with recordings of Louis Armstrong, gamelan music, and Glenn Gould launched into deep space on the remote chance that someone will listen. The lack of communication with hospitals, mountain towns, buried seaside shacks, is also artificially lowering the death count, which hovers between 15 and 20.

Of course we know, after centuries of colonialism, that we are resilient. AF. And when one hears the peculiar sing-song of the Puerto Rican lilting, consonant-dropping Afro-Caribbean language on the fluttering airwaves, it’s clear that the will to survive is strong. It’s embedded in the mountains, the same ones that have stood for centuries without wavering, against the shearing winds that coalesce off the coast of West Africa and spin chaotically into the Northeastern peaks of the Luquillo Range.

I can hear those disembodied spirits of Puerto Rico holding a press conference right now, near the damaged radio towers of the El Yunque National Rainforest. They’re saying “We’re doing a great job, an amazing job a tremendous job, for an island in the middle of an ocean.” And no one thinks they’re lying.

Ed Morales is an author and journalist who has written for The Nation, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and the Guardian, among many others. He is the author of Living in Spanglish (St. Martins) and The Latin Beat (Da Capo Press), and Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture, forthcoming from Verso. He is currently a lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and a fellow of a new working group studying the Puerto Rico debt crisis at the Center for the Study of Social Difference.

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21. KEEPERS OF THE SECRETS
by James Somers
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(The Village Voice - September 20, 2017)

I was told that the most interesting man in the world works in the archives division of the New York Public Library, and so I went there, one morning this summer, to meet him. My guide, who said it took her a year to learn how to get around the Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, led us to an elevator off Astor Hall, up past the McGraw Rotunda, through a little door at the back of the Rose Main Reading Room. Our destination was Room 328.

A sign above the door called it the “Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts.” Inside, there were a handful of quiet researchers stooped at large wooden desks, and in the corner, presiding over a cart of acid-free Hollinger document boxes, was the archivist Thomas Lannon.

Lannon is younger than you’d expect, just thirty-nine years old. Clean shaven, with slacks, well-kept shoes, and a blue knit tie over a light button-down shirt, he looks less like an assistant director for manuscripts/the acting Charles J. Liebman curator of manuscripts than a high-level congressional aide. He talks with a kind of earnest intensity, and fast, with constant revisions, so that he sounds almost like a scientist who can’t quite put his discovery into words.

Having grown up in Exeter, New Hampshire, Lannon had always wanted to get to New York, the fount of his heroes (Sonic Youth, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg). But he makes a point of the undistinguished academic career that led him to the library a decade ago. He went to Bard (“a middling to decent liberal arts school”), where he first met his now-wife, also an archivist, in an early Greek philosophy class. Later, he studied library and information science at Pratt, before getting a master’s in liberal studies at The Graduate Center at CUNY.

Before he started pulling out boxes, I was asked to trade my pen for a pencil, for fear that I might get ink on the ledger from the late 1700s that came out of the first one. Lannon held it with bare hands (because gloves, I learned later, would dull his sense of how fragile a page is). The ledger belonged to Samuel Bayard, a wealthy New York landowner whose ancestors had married into the Stuyvesants, and whose estate, when he died, may have fueled the feud between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. It seemed full of accounting minutiae, Lannon said, but if you knew what you were looking for it told a story.

That was the way it was with archives. He flipped to page 19, which assessed the value of a plot of land that Bayard owned, a so-called “negro burial ground.” “Everyone talks about how in archives you find things,” Lannon said. “But this shows the moment when something disappeared.” This entry, he explained, was the last surviving reference to the burial ground, which was on land at New York City’s 1750s border near Duane and Reade streets. Shut down in the 1790s, the burial ground disappeared from popular memory, remaining known to history only through documents like this.

Lannon had a story like this for every box he showed me. In one, among administrative debris, there was an investigation by the New York Academy of Medicine into marijuana, signed in ink by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. It was the first American study to declare that the drug wasn’t addictive or dangerous. In another, there were records from the sign-making company that built what it called “spectaculars” around the city, like a Camel Cigarettes billboard in Times Square that actually blew smoke, and the New Year’s Eve ball.

In still another box, a diary from the 1840s of a sixteen-year-old girl. The July 7 entry tells of encountering Mr. Levi, a Jewish man, on her walk around the neighborhood. “This is an account of the peopling of New York, where you have a well-to-do daughter going for a walk, exploring the city, meeting someone from another background, and sort of marveling over the way they live,” Lannon said. “Mr. Levi who lived in that house wrote no books, left no records, we have no idea who he is except here he is in this diary.”

The New York Public Library’s Schwarzman building is most famous for the ornate and cavernous Rose Reading Room, now reopened after two years of restoration. The stacks under the library can hold 4 million books (the actual number in storage is lower, though no one is quite sure), which are delivered to the reading room by 950 feet of miniature rail running at 75 feet per minute.

But the real gem of the library, in Lannon’s view, is the stuff that you can find only in boxes like the ones now strewn across the table. “You can get a book anywhere,” he said. “An archive exists in one location.” The room we’re standing in is the only place that you can read, say, the week’s worth of journal entries in which New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal contemplates publishing the Pentagon Papers. It’s the only place where you can read the collected papers of Robert Moses, or a letter T.S. Eliot wrote about Ulysses to James Joyce’s Paris publisher, Sylvia Beach.

These collections aren’t digitized. The only way to find out what’s inside them is to ask for a particular box — often with just a vague notion of what will be in it — and to hold the old papers in your hands. “I don’t know how one could be interested in libraries and not archives,” Lannon told me. They tell you “the stories behind things,” he said, “the unpublished, the hard to find, the true story.” This, I began to see, is why someone might have been inclined to call Lannon the most interesting man in the world: it’s because he knows so many of these stories himself, including stories that no one else knows, because they are only told here.

That is the paradox of being an archivist. The reason an archivist should know something, Lannon said, is to help others to know it. But it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his knowledge on anyone else. Indeed, if the field could be said to have a creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important. Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane or not?

***

The “backend” of the New York public library system is a three-story building in Long Island City, a few blocks from the Court Square subway stop, that looks like an elementary school. The building says “BookOps” on the facade, and sits next to a Tower TLC rental facility for livery drivers. It houses “technical services” for the NYPL and Brooklyn Public Library; every new item destined for either library first comes through here to get cleaned up, bar-coded, and entered into the library database. Rare books that are falling apart, or old maps, are meticulously restored in industrial-grade laboratories on the third floor.

This is the home of the archival processing team, the organization that turns newly acquired archival collections — like Lou Reed’s collected papers and recordings, or jazz musician Sonny Rollins’s, both of which were acquired this year — into a resource that’s usable by researchers.

It used to be that papers were donated to libraries. Now, as often, major archives are sold, sometimes for millions of dollars. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin, which is well-funded and ambitious, is said to have particularly driven up the price for the most sought-after collections, like David Foster Wallace’s papers.

When a collection arrives in Long Island City, the first step is to “stabilize” it, as though it were a patient just arrived at the ER. One recently acquired collection — the archives of the New York Review of Books — had been sitting at the Navy Yard for twenty years. It was covered in oily dirt. The archivists who brought it here had to wear Tyvek suits and facemasks while unpacking it. There’s a room on the third floor called the “disaster recovery room,” where, say, a mold infestation might be taken care of.

It is at this stage, too, that the not strictly archival material usually gets found in the filing cabinets. Lea Osborne, the head of the archival processing unit at the NYPL, told me that she’s found dentures before, homemade roller skates, a bottle of ginseng, and, so far in the Sonny Rollins archive, more than $8,000 in cash. (That gets returned to the donor.)

The real work, though, in processing a collection, is intellectual. The goal is to make the files you’ve received findable by a researcher; and of course to make them findable, you have to know what’s in them. In the old days, this was slow work. Archivists would read most of the documents in a folder, taking note of them, rearranging the documents if they seemed disorganized. Their finding aids, the all-important database record that tells a researcher what’s in a given collection were deeply hierarchical, with detail all the way down to individual pieces of paper in individual folders. You wouldn’t just get the “Ezra Pound letters,” you’d get something akin to “Ezra Pound letters, 1904–06, re Joyce.”

The explosion of paper made this approach unsustainable. “When the National Archives in Washington was created in 1934, it inherited an awesome backlog of about one million metres of federal records, with a growth rate of more than sixty thousand metres annually,” the archival theorist Terry Cook wrote in a paper. “By 1943, under the expansion of the state to cope with the Great Depression and World War II, that growth rate had reached six hundred thousand metres annually.”
Max Touhey for NYPL

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22. WHY RELIGIOUS BELIEF ISN'T A DELUSION – IN PSYCHOLOGICAL TERMS, AT LEAST
Dean Burnett
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(The Guardian, 21 September 2017)

Religious beliefs are typically incompatible with scientific evidence and observable reality, but aren’t considered to be delusions. Why not?
Conservative Party MP Jacob Rees-Mogg receives Holy Communion during the funeral of Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor at Westminster Cathedral, London, Britain, September 13 2017. REUTERS/Mary Turner
There’s nothing to be concerned about, in the psychiatric sense, when it comes to someone using religious beliefs to explain awful behaviour and views. Photograph: Mary Turner/Reuters

If someone told you, in all seriousness, that they talk to invisible beings who control the universe, you’d probably back away slowly, nodding and smiling, while desperately looking for the nearest exit or escape route. If this person then said they wanted to be in charge of your life, you’d probably do the same, but more urgently, and with a view to finding the nearest police officer.

And yet, this happens all the time. Arch Brexiter, unlikely Tory leadership candidate and human Pez-dispenser Jacob Rees-Mogg recently blamed his extreme and unpleasant views on his Catholicisim, which was seen as a valid excuse by many. Current placeholder prime minister Theresa May has made a big deal about how her Christian upbringing makes her suitable for the role. And despite the lawful separation of church and state, every official and wannabe US president has had to emphasise their religious inclinations. Even Trump, whose enthusiasm for maintaining the noble traditions of the presidency can be described as limited at best.

That’s interesting in itself if you step back; many people have attempted to pin mental health diagnoses on Donald Trump (unwisely, in my opinion), but his more-recent claims to be a representative of an all-powerful invisible deity who created the Earth in six days have been dismissed as just cynical pandering. Does that not seem … inconsistent?

Well, it shouldn’t be, because as they say, “You talk to God, you’re religious. God talks to you, you’re psychotic.” That’s a line from the TV show House MD, delivered by the eponymous acerbic medic played by Hugh Laurie. But variations of this comment have been made many times over the years. However, while it is seemingly intended to highlight the double-standards inherent in accepting someone’s religious views as fine while dismissing similarly unscientific claims as signs of mental disturbance, there is a valid reason for this apparent inconsistency.
Blurry image of nightmarish alien beings.CE7GT8 Blurry image of nightmarish alien beings.

Visited by aliens? Ridicule. Visited by angels? Book tour. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Psychosis is defined as a loss of contact with reality, and can manifest in numerous ways. It’s alarmingly common: our big, bulky, complex brains are unnervingly vulnerable to internal disruption from a very wide range of illnesses or physical ailments, so much so that it’s regularly labelled a “diagnosis of exclusion”; you have to rule out numerous other problems before you can diagnosis psychosis in its own right.
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Psychosis typically manifests by people experiencing hallucinations (perceiving something that isn’t actually there) and delusions (unquestionably believing something that is demonstrably not true). Hallucinations can be straightforward; if someone is repeatedly saying there’s a talking bear in the room demanding french fries, it’s relatively easy to determine whether this is the case or not, usually by looking around to check if there is indeed a talking bear in the room with you. It’s the sort of thing you’d notice. If there isn’t one there, the person is very likely to be hallucinating.

Delusions are trickier: it’s not about what someone perceives, but what they believe. Delusions have many forms, like grandiose delusions, where an individual believes they’re far more impressive than is the case (e.g. believing they’re a world-leading business genius despite being a part-time shoe shop employee), or the more common persecutory delusions, where an individual believes they are being relentlessly persecuted (eg everyone they meet is part of some shadowy government plot to kidnap them). These delusions tend to be very resistant to argument, no matter how blatant the evidence to the contrary: “If you’re a world-leading business guru, why do you flip burgers for a living?” “It’s all part of my brilliant plan, you wouldn’t understand”, or “That’s not a secret government spy, it’s an old man walking his dog” “Well you WOULD say that, you’re in on it!” And so on.

That’s actually one of the signs of delusional beliefs: they’re very resistant to being challenged, no matter how inconsistent they are with reality. Because the brain isn’t “working” like it should, logic and reason aren’t as potent they might otherwise be.

But then, that begs the question, why do religious beliefs get a free pass? People are very resistant to those being challenged too. And believing that there’s a kindly-but-all-powerful father figure in the sky who watches and judges everything you do and his son who died but came back to life two millennia ago is going to return any minute, surely that’s no less likely than someone being targeted by a shadowy government conspiracy? It’s substantially less likely, in actual fact. What gives?

Visitors pass outside the front of a replica Noah’s Ark at the Ark Encounter theme park during a media preview day, Tuesday, July 5, 2016, in Williamstown, Ky. The long-awaited theme park based on the story of a man who got a warning from God about a worldwide flood will debut in central Kentucky this Thursday. The Christian group behind the 510 foot-long wooden ark says it will demonstrate that the stories of the Bible are true. Its construction has rankled opponents who say the attraction will be detrimental to science education. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

“I can believe that a stone age man built a wooden boat large enough to house every species on Earth, but climate change just seems a bit of a stretch to me” Photograph: John Minchillo/AP

Well, delusions are believed to stem from anomalous activity in the brain’s system for interpreting what does happen and what should happen. The brain essentially maintains a mental model of how the world is meant to work, and what things are meant to happen and when. Beliefs, experiences, expectations, assumptions, calculations; all are combined into a constantly-updated general understanding of how things happen, so we know what to expect and how to react without having to figure everything out from scratch each time. Luckily, the brain is usually quite good at filtering out irrelevant information and occurrences that would otherwise challenge this model of how the world works.
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Delusions are what happens when, due to illness or other disruption, this delicate system fails, and things we perceive that would usually be dismissed as innocuous or irrelevant end up being processed as far more significant, and our belief system alters to accommodate it, however wrongly.

But the thing is, our brains don’t come with an understanding of the complex science of how the world works already preinstalled, like Windows 10 on a new laptop. This mental model of the world is built up over time, from life experiences and other learning. So, if you’ve been raised in an environment where you’re told by everyone and everything that there’s a kindly deity in the sky, or that the world is 6,000 years old, or that there are thousands of multi-armed gods controlling the world, or whatever, then why wouldn’t you believe it? There’s nothing that you experience on a day-to-day level that contradicts this, so your mental model of the world is fine with it.

That’s why delusions are only diagnosed if they’re not consistent with the person’s existing belief system and views. A devout creationist talks to God while in church, that’s fine. An avowedly atheist lawyer starts doing it in the middle of a meeting, they’re probably delusional. If both of them suddenly started saying the world is going to end in 30 minutes because of angry frogs living in the sun, they’d both be considered delusional.

Unless that’s mentioned in the Bible somewhere? I admit I haven’t read it in a while.

This article was adapted from The Idiot Brain, Dean Burnett’s debut book, available now in the UK and US and elsewhere.

Dean Burnett is a doctor of neuroscience. He tutors and lectures at Cardiff University.
@garwboy


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