Return of the Naaginn

Zee TV has launched a new series called “Naaginn … Waadon Ki Agni Pariksha”. For someone like me, whose childhood, imagination and entire mental development has been shaped by the 80s, the concept of icchadhari Naaginn (a snake that can turn into human and back) was as phenomenal as Bappi Lahiri, Rajiv Gandhi, Gorbachev and Reagan.

But how relevant is Naaginn today? India enthusiasts will immediately stand up saying it’s our answer to Harry Potter and show the similarities between Naagmani and the Sorcerer’s stone. They will say, “We Indians were always far better at it, weren’t we?” Of course, any logical personal would be immensely excited at the prospect of 3000 plus episodes of Naaginn menace. For one, today’s Naaginn will be far easily excitable since she will find it hard to escape the nasal onslaught of Himesh which is far more menacing than the Sapera’s bin. And this time around, Naaginns can be marketed in a far better way, Hollywood style, with accessories and contests. With the financial sector booming in India, I can even imagine a commodity trading market for naagmanis in the near future. Yippieee, now that most tele novellas get a few episodes shot in Singapore, I am hoping to encounter a Naaginn for real.

But hang on, India enthusiasts; there are some points to ponder. Can the heterosexual Naag Naaginns survive for 3000 episodes in a global world whose future is undoubtedly gay and lesbian? Come on, even Dumbledore, from Harry Potter, was forced to come out of the closet by J K Rowling.

Also how appealing will be the concept of icchadhari Naaginn to even Indian audiences where there are so many icchadhari characters in Indian television already? The trend that was started by Tulsi’s husband in Kyunki… has been replicated by all serials who have turned the husbands into icchadharis.

Moreover, can the Naaginn, used to dance moves centered on epileptic movements of its head cope in this world of gansta hip-hop where dance poses are centered on epileptic gyrations of the ass?

Also, we have to be aware of Maneka Gandhi, who was earlier more concerned with publishing revealing private pictures of Suresh Ram (son of Babu Jagjivan Ram) and Sushma Chaudhury. Now that she is all for animal rights, how will she react to snakes being given such a position of privilege over other animals. She will surely fight for the case of an icchadhari chuchundar (rat); how nasty will it get legally?

Moreover in our current world of Discovery channel, Steve Irwin and Austin Stevens have repeatedly shown that insulting snakes repeatedly is a fairly safe exercise with no chance of generational retributions. So will modern day kids give as much respect to the ire of the icchadhari Naaginn as we gave in the 80s? May be, icchadhari Stingrays would have been a better choice.

An award for the best Indian politician?

Joaquim Chissano was recently awarded with the $5 million prize by the Mo Ibrahim foundation. Currently only African leaders who had left office within the last three years are eligible for the prize. What if such an award was to be given in India too: an award for politicians for good service?

In India, starting a new prize is a tricky affair. Immediately, hundreds of television channels will declare their own awards on similar lines. Of course, they will be quickly supported by Pan Masala and alcohol businesses who are typically the most anxious to drive excellence in the country. And to get maximum mileage, these channels would invariably turn the awarding process into an Indian Idol type show. But selecting a politician for the award in India isn’t going to be easy. It’s far simpler in Africa where a good leader is one who hasn’t massacred more than a thousand people and has left office without killing or getting killed at the end of his term. Also unlike US or UK, in India, politicians are yet to be judged through the number of hyperboles and jokes in their scripted performances targeted at average TV watching blokes. Sponsors of such an award will also have to live under the scare of slaps and shouts from the perennially angry Mamata Bannerjee.

What about the politicians themselves? Will they be interested in such an award given that many interested parties already give such financial awards (under the table) to politicians without prejudice for their noble service? But, $5 million is a big enough amount and can be comparable to lifetime earnings that a politician can make through bribes. Also no Indian politician is yet to be anywhere near Bill Clinton who made $10mn last year just through speaking fees. So it can be taken for granted that immediately several coaching classes would crop up to train present and wannabe politicians. Habitually, parents of politicians will heckle them to fight for the award. But how can they differentiate themselves? In a country like India where policies, parties and ideologies make little difference to overall conditions of the people, and with every politician feigning to be pro-poor, pro-business, pro-majority, pro-minority, pro-anti-corruption, pro-upper caste and pro-lower caste at the same time, only extra-curricular skills can make a politician stand out. Lalu Yadav (a judge in the music contest Sa Re Ga Ma), Vajpayee (part-time poet) and the actor Govinda (part-time politician), have an edge.

But who will get the first prize for politicians? In India, it is a norm for any prize in any field to be given to Amitabh Bacchan. So the choice in the first year for all channels would be easy. Some radical channels will of course have the option of Tendulkar.

Samantha Fox and fall of cummunism: the agitprop case

While in Vietnam, I came across a shop selling agitprop posters. The cheapest poster was worth $10. No wonder, revolutions stopped happening a long time back. But there was a time when posters of clenched fists, intense eyes, and the supreme leader would need to be taken seriously.

Agitprop posters were very similar across the world and had a few set patterns. Since they were targeted at the masses, they had to be dumbed down. No hidden messages, no abstraction, no exceptional faces. Juan Miro would have died a beggar in a communist society. Typically these posters would show a group of people including women and children, all men and children wearing uniforms and caps, with intense faces, seeming to be part of an extremely serious gameplan. There would always be a sense of action, with fingers pointed at a certain direction being a recurring theme. Some dumb sounding slogan would be written at the bottom; either hating a target class (reactionaries or country (USA); or promising a shiny happy future by calling people to action. Sometimes the benevolent face of the supreme leader would dominate these posters, especially when the posters needed to be produced in a short time, or when a good artist was not around, or when the sponsors of the posters needed to curry favor with higher forces.

The town where I was born was under red power for years. And there was a certain excitement we had when the party people would come to spoil the walls of our public housing with new posters. But in the early 80s, agitprop was being replaced by something bigger and bouncier. Large posters of Samantha Fox were cropping up almost everywhere, outside photo studios, restaurants, cinema halls. “Naughty girls need love too” and “I Wanna Have Some Fun” were replacing slogans like “Down with Imperialism”. Even we kids could identify more with the new slogans and this new supreme leader and the party workers could no longer keep up with this onslaught. Within a few years, Samantha Fox led to the fall of Berlin Wall and global communism. All the same, pasted below are some of my favorite agitprop posters.

USSR: Pentagon

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My favorite from Cultural Revolution: Destroying the Old World (see the religious icons been hammered)
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Cuba: Revolutionary saints??

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Laos: Very typical poster

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North Korea destroying the USA
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Simple messages of Cultural Revolution: Unite, Peoples from the whole world! Down with American imperialism! Down with Soviet revisionism! Down with reactionary gangs from all countries
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Vietnam: Shooting down planes while at work

Utility no.1 : Cookery Shows

A few years back, while taking a stroll in London, I met this procession of five, holding placards saying, “I hate Jamie Oliver”. That’s when I realized that television cookery shows and their hosts are of much greater social and political import than what we assign them. After all, these are the people who keep teaching us dimwits again and again what mankind learned to do several thousand years ago. Just imagine, if you missed the episode on Chicken Tikka Masala, will you be able to redeem yourself in life again? The way to a man’s heart is his gut, stupid, not your blog.

Everyday around the world, the tele-chefs, all with beaming faces, fill the time slots in television channels one by one. There are even dedicated 24 hour food channels. May be at any point of time, there are more cookery shows in the world than there are recipes. So to differentiate themselves, some like Nigella Lawson take to cutting spinach in a sexy way while those like Gordon Ramsey take to the best thing one can do today to attract immediate attention: bad mouth people around. Yes, Simon Cowells and Anne Robinsons are fast taking over our world.

Still, the most magical thing about cookery shows is the speed and ease. The star chef puts the lamb on slow flame; goes for a commercial break, and when back, bingo, the food is ready. Life is beautiful. Often these cookery shows bring in a guest who is forced by the chef with a smile and some sweet talk to taste the food. Given that the audience has no way to know whether the food has been cooked well or not, this celebrity guest plays the most crucial role. After tasting the first spoonful, he has to put up a blizzard of facial expressions and throw up a verbal diarrhea of praises to prove how the sautéed asparagus tastes the best thing ever allowed to go inside our mouths. Life is simple.

In India, watching a cookery show by Sanjeev Kapoor will instantly earn hundreds of in-laws miles for the new bride. As for me, to serve my metro-sexual aspirations, I did take to watching a few episodes of cookery shows. Soon I realized that I didn’t know recognize any of the English names of the ingredients, neither did I know their names in Indian languages. So whether it was Lamb Shank or Navratan Korma, it all ended up with pepper, salt, chili powder, and a little turmeric for me. And I have been desperately looking for a cookery show that rather starts with the basics: how to boil water, how to distinguish a microwave alarm from an SMS beep, how to make instant noodles, etc.

Food is an amazing thing. A spoonful spends about five seconds in our mouth after which it loses all its glamour or horror as it touches the esophagus. Yet, it has spawned celebrity chefs, super-expensive restaurants and Foie gras. But then, as Credit Suisse ad would have said, some think cooking, we think opportunities in sewage clearing.

Images of Che Guevara

40 years after Che’s execution, the debate continues on why Che’s image has remained so widespread and enduring. The global intellect is yet to resolve why despite Che’s immense failures in Congo and Bolivia, and Guevarism being rejected by several leftist movements for being adventurist and insular in nature, school going adults still relish in enhancing their rebellious image by donning a Che t-shirt. And the moment one wears the t-shirt, by some miracle, he or she becomes familiar with concepts such as surplus value of labour, cultural hegemony, inevitability of history, and Protracted People’s war.

There are probably no t-shirts with images of people such as Gabriel Peri (France), Karl Liebknecht (Germany), Abimael Guzmán (Peru) or Alexandros Panagoulis (Greece). Even in India, where the general population is largely insulated from external developments, images of Che are better recognized than that of Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal or Safdar Hashmi. Is it all because these people didn’t have a good photo like Che had? Parents, take note.

So who’s next? I had big bets on Ricky Martin, but he has faded away fast. And with EZLN (Mexico) gradually fading from the global left’s consciousness, there is little chance for the once super-star Subcomandante Marcos. My bet now is on the newest face for Louis Vuitton, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Anyways, much has been written on this topic. So I thought I would rather post some of the more interesting interpretations of Korda’s picture of Che. Also check out the site of Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

Che was Gay????

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Che on 5$, by Pedro Meyer
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Branded Che: American investment in Cuba, by Patrick Thomas
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Jean Paul Gaultier and Che

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Che on Pocho
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Child upbringing and religion

In our world, most children are claimed to be born with a religion, the religion of one of his parents. And right after its birth, the child is exposed to an entire jamboree of religious rituals. Around the age of two, when its consciousness of self and the external world is just developing, it is taught basic skills such as language together with loads of religion. In India, it is not unusual to find parents teaching two year old kids to fold hands when in front of idols. As soon as the child learns to respond to language and speak, most parents teach their children religious chants in Sanskrit. Children born to parents with certain religions are denied rights to their own bodies through acts such as circumcision (for both male and female) and shaving off of head!!!!

And when a child begins his formal education, thus arriving at a stage in life where there are critical outcomes from his efforts, parents and society at large ingrain it in his mind that there are supernatural forces at play, groveling to whom will result in great benefits and hellfire consequences otherwise. Many parents tell their children that physical disabilities and abject poverty are consequences of god's wrath. With such messages being hammered down the throat of the child by multiple sources, most children reach a point of no return wherein irrational faith becomes a cornerstone of their lives. From that point onwards, it becomes an uphill task for anyone to take the notional risk of defying gods by being a skeptic. The child is also exposed to the cheap thrills of religion; festivals with their material gifts, lavish food, and relief from daily toil (studies).

Modern secular liberalism dictates that the public messages to be sent to people is to respect and appreciate each other’s faith (it’s like asking a thousand idiots to appreciate and respect each other’s unique idiocies). Never do the public media encourage people to adopt a skeptical attitude. As for private media, it’s full of reactionary tele novellas espousing the greatness of going to a temple or a church. For a child, how accessible are works by Sartre, Camus, Bertrand Russell, Dan Barker or Christopher Hitchens as compared to Koran, Bible or Geeta?

The moot point is that religion and faith typically have an open playing field in the child’s mind and one has to swim against a waterfall to develop a critical attitude in life. As personal religion is mostly about securing through prayers, personal success (at studies or at work), health, love life, and happiness with family, people dare not think of doubting faith and risking the wrath of the so called almighty.

I don’t believe that any institution has the right to force anyone to abandon religion. There is indeed a case for faith that it brings (false) hope and (false) meaning to the lives of many in this world. But I also believe that it is only fair to a child that he or she is spared from an onslaught of Pavlovian religious conditioning before he or she has the mental ability to judge between arguments. Alas, as some say, the world is only about jails and churches. Will we people, who so blindly adulate missionaries of charity ever give a fair chance to a few visionaries with clarity?

Tribute to office accessories

Who are the most loyal beings in any office? Of course the office accessories: the stationary articles, the furniture, the water dispensers, the coffee machine, the microwave. After all, in today’s world, it is not surprising to find most staplers outliving the stints of CEOs in any office. As for lower and middle management staff, the first box of stapler pins outlasts most of them. Yet while organizations spend hours and days figuring out how to hire and retain their employees, they rarely commemorate these silent soldiers. Come on, have you ever smiled at the office coffee machine and clapped to applaud its performance after a typically hard day when it had churned out over 100 cups without bitching about any of us? Or consider the poor office chair, forced to support our inglorious behinds for over 15 hours a day. Remember; whether you perform or not, it will never refuse to seat you unless your human boss drives you out. So when have you garlanded it and provided it with a plaque for completing five years of “dedicated” service? Sure, some of us stock up office accessories at our homes as memorabilia (most favored being notebooks and pens). But does that still provide the office accessories and furniture the dignity they deserve?

Now, Hindutva enthusiasts may argue that their annual worshipping of their god “Vishwakarma” institutionalizes celebration of work tools. But hang on, as is the nature of religion to promote the powerful while ignoring the underprivileged, “Vishwakarma” puja also merely commemorates the heavy machinery, ignoring staplers and pencils.

Office accessories and office furniture are most appreciated by new employees, those fresh out of college. Many of us may recall the day when we first went to work and found that there were pens, staplers, tapes and notepads waiting for us at our desk. It’s great to watch a new employee fresh out of college, walk up to the office coffee machine for the first time, a little shy, exploring the different options with avid interest, often talking to herself in a low voice, and eventually going for the kill: Another great Serengeti waterhole moment. Remember, these were the stuff that we used so extensively during our college years and for the first time in our lives, we wouldn’t have to pay for them any more. There’s a certain carnal pleasure in this, isn’t it? But as with all instances of happiness in our lives, the good feeling fades within a few minutes. And the rest of our working lives, most of us keep incessantly complaining about the poor quality of office stationary, office coffee, and office chair.

Office accessories have lost their days of glory when procurement managers would spend hours selecting the highest quality of stuff from pretty saleswomen. Nowadays, most offices buy their wares from such inglorious carton boxes such as Staples or OfficeDepot. Only if Pablo Neruda had been alive, he would have by now expanded his brilliant “Odes to common things” to include poems on staplers, paper punches and binder clips. But can a modern office chair, that often looks like a Voyager spacecraft, inspire any poetry?

Another attempt by the tribal people to remind us they exist

Over 20,000 tribal people from 12 states are marching to India’s capital Delhi from Gwalior to place three key demands before the Prime Minister: creation of a national land authority for supervision of land reforms, a single widow system to resolve land disputes, and fast-track courts for speedy disposal of such cases.

As expected, the news was covered only in international media (including the Angolan Press) and not India’s own shiny happy media. It would be too early to place great hopes on this new initiative being undertaken by the tribal people of India. All the same, it is a refreshing development in a situation where the tribal development issue has been caught up for years in the struggle between a militant Maoist movement and an equally aggressive state and state-sponsored paramilitary.

India’s tribal people have suffered the worst since independence primarily because of their inability to do what the backward castes were able to do so well : to emerge as a sizable homogeneous political force. And between 1950 and 1990, 8.5 million tribal people have been displaced from their traditional lands due to industrialization or preservation of these lands as forest lands (Ministry of tribal affairs). Educational and health standards among tribal population remain abysmal with literacy rates for tribal people being as low as 34% in Orissa in 2001. (src: Govind Chandra Rath) Such a situation leaves the tribal people totally unable to reap any advantages offered by the strong economic growth in recent years in India that has primarily boosted the wages of the salaried class. This has also left tribal people either as largely unaware of their rights or as unable to defend the same. The Maoists movements have been able to leverage this situation and 2007 has already witnessed 432 fatalities from related conflicts.

The recent march can be considered indicative of a new form of political movement arising in parts of the world where the affected people are playing a key role in voicing and addressing their concerns without allowing involvement of political parties and NGOs. The pioneer of this form of movement is the South Africa based Abahlali Basemjondolo, an anarchistic movement by slum dwellers to fight for their rights with slogans such as “Talk to us, not for us”.

Tribal people have increasingly fallen behind as middle class India romps ahead in reality and hype. The recent victory of India in the 20-20 cricket cup was hailed for weeks by the Indian and international media as the sign of emergence of shiny small town India. India’s tribal people have been representing the country in most competitive sports events at the world stage for years without gaining any attention of the media and popular mindshare. After years of getting influenced by Maoists, right wing paramilitaries (Salwa Judum) and inept politicians, may be the tribal people of India should turn to cricket to emerge in our awareness and push for their fair share in India’s development.