HOMELESSNESS

Brothers Forever

I always remember my younger brother Bob. There is not a day, when once or twice, his smiling eyes don't appear from the blue and stare at me...asking, 'hey 'baroo, what are you up to? ' He is so lovable, so great and so sensitive....Bob has translated my many poems and short stories in a way as if he had written them. He composes me in his language. He restructures me in his way, in his letters. He re-writes me so amazingly that I wonder some time.... wow...was it me, who did it? Unbelievable..! This is the translation an author can dream of.
Once he wrote -' had I been born in Chattisgarh in India and Uday (baroo) in LA (US) ...we would still have been the same persons.' This is true.
I met him this year at Virginia, where he teaches my language to his students. He is a scholar of Sanskrit and Urdu beside Hindi. I've two collections of my short stories translated by him -'Rage Revelry and Romance' and 'Short Shorts Long Shots'.
He has a cool ..serene environ in his backyard with many flowers and plants. Yeah ! there is a small pond too..and you can see Indian lotus blooming there..surrounded from all the sides by American-westerner plants and buds and flowers. ...I'd seen lotus conversing with those flowers in whisper and had seen them playing with unknown colorful tiny birds and large squirrels...
He has four adorable cats and has named them ...Baasmatee, Kaajoo, Mokshaa...( I can't reach to the fourth one! all Indian names ...! )
My angelic and divine friend and a wonderful writer-translator Jason Grunebaum has allergy to the cat's hair so he had no option but to sleep in a traveler's tent in the backyard. hmm... there was then no remedy to Jason's hardships. there was a drizzle in the late night ..and he was there absolutely unperturbed...dreaming his dreams. I went out to see him and find out his woes...and was just astounded to see thaat he was in a deep sleep. Like angels sleep in divinity.
Kids also sleep like this... they dream of peace and tranquility, they dream about butterfly and rainbow colors under stormy skies. (I remember Von Gaugh's painting 'maze under disturbed shy'. It shows fragile and adoloscent maze plant's fear about an in coming holocaust... when you see this painting, you don't remain quiet, you develop an intense longing for peace...you search a whale's tummy to hide your self from the violent madness hovering over)
We celebrated Nazen's birthday next morning and Nazen (meri bahoo and Bob's wife) treated us all with tastiest 'jaljeeraa'...(hmm..abhi tak munh me paanee aa rahaa hai)

I'll write more about Bob soon...

This poem Tibet was written years before. I have seen Tibetan refugees, those lamas....monks passing through my small remote village since my childhood. They would give us children 'meethee golee sugar-balls. We loved them.
It was much later when I discovered -they are homeless. I was born in 1952 and they were driven out of their homes and lands in 1959...

Tibet
Uday Prakash

Having come from Tibet,
Lamas keep wandering around
These days, mumbling mantras

Their herds of mules
Go down into the gardens
They do not eat marigold flowers

How many flowers
On one marigold flower,
Papa?

When it’s the rainy season
in Tibet,
What season
Do we have?

When it’s three o’clock
In Tibet,
What time
Is it here?

In Tibet
Are there marigolds,
Papa?

Do lamas blow conch shells, Papa?

Papa,
Have you ever seen lamas
Wrapped in blankets
Running quickly
In the darkness?

When people die
Lamas stand
On all four sides of their graves
And bow their heads
They do not recite mantras.

They whisper – tibbut

tibbut tibbut....

tibbut tibbut
tibbut...

tibbut

And they cry
all night long.

Do lamas
Cry just
Like us, Papa?
Translator: Robert A. Hueckstedt

about Mohandas.

The eye of the director

A film need not always be about great sunsets... a poor sunset is perfectly fine if that is what the film requires, cinematographer-turned-director Mazhar Kamran shares with Priyanka Haldipur

Mazhar Kamran knew his destiny from the very beginning— that he was here to be a filmmaker. The path of cinematography (in Satya, Kaun, Jhankaar Beats, and Masti) was a small step that would help him make the giant leap to film direction someday. The day has arrived, as Kamran is ready to showcase his directorial skills with Mohandas which will release in the next couple of months. The film stars Sonali Kulkarni, Nakul Vaid, Sushant Singh, Sharbani Mukherjee, Sameer Dharmadhikari, Uttam Haldar, Aditya Shrivastav, Akhilendra Mishra and Govind Namdeo.

Excerpts from an interview with the newborn director:

Tell us more about Mohandas.

The film is based on a character called ‘Mohandas’. It is an allegory through which we have reflected Gandhi’s ideals, but the film has nothing to do with Gandhi himself. It looks at the issue of India as a nation and does a social and political examination of it, apart from jabs at the notion of democracy and the concept of justice for the common man.

Sonali Kulkarni plays a journalist who comes across a mysterious videotape from a remote place, and she decides to investigate it.

Is the film catering to a niche audience?

I have been a student of cinema for long and have taken care to reach out to people in general and not cater to a niche audience.

The screenplay of the film is by Uday Prakash and the music by Vivek Priyadarshan, both unfamiliar names in the film industry...

It is a low-budget film, but I haven’t compromised in terms of quality. Both individuals are from a non-film background, but are very good at their work. Uday is my close friend of ten years and a well-known short story writer. I knew I could work with him. Vivek’s music went well with my film.We were shooting a scene with Sonali where she enters a guest house in the village. Everyone but her was aware that we were shooting. This was so that I could capture her real reaction to the place on camera.

The support that you received for this project.

I received a lot of support from my star cast and technicians. They were co-operative and worked with all their heart inspite of the film’s light budget.

Your life as a cinematographer...

Very simple. I would just go by what story the director had in mind and decide on the look that the film should have based on that, instead of having an agenda of my own. I tried to do things differently in all my films and saw to it that the styles would not overlap.

Where Bollywood needs to improve in terms of cinematography...

A cinematographer should remember that he doesn’t have to make every movie look fabulous. A film need not always be about great sunsets... a poor sunset is perfectly fine if that is what the film requires.
What other yet-to-be released films have you provided cinematography for? What next in terms of direction?
(Laughs) I have made a conscious decision not to continue with cinematography anymore. I want to immerse myself fully in film direction.

I have a couple of scripts ready, each one in a different genre. I can tell you with confidence that each one of these will be unusual.

Wriggling out of clutches

Recently I wrote a small write up for the news letter of Sahitya Akademi. I put it here. I have received some calls to write something about my past and childhood for them in detail.

This small piece was written originally in English and now on I feel to write more in this lovely language I’m yet to learn properly.

In all my school certificates and other authorized documents, including passport, my birth date is shown as January, 1st, 1951। It looks momentous and a bit historic. First day of the first month of the year, and that too at the dawn of the rest last half of the 20th century.

However, the truth is, it is concocted and incorrect.

It was my father who did it and shifted my birth whole 12 months backward simply because he wanted his son’s birth in some way to appear ‘historic’. His was the generation which had witnessed how histories and great historic icons were shaped in the first half of the 20^th century and perhaps he was one of the later first few lesser beings who started ‘making’ history…. An unknown, slipshod, rural historiographer.

I was actually born in 1952. The date and month as given on certificates are however correct. It was the year when first for time people after independence went to cast their votes thus handed over their constitutional sovereignty to their representative. My father, despite ‘Nehru wave’ at that time, contested the elections and lost because of the two palpable reasons. First, because I was born at a time, when my mother was suffering from high fever and deadly small pox. And second, because my elder brother, who was 6 years old, had terrible attack of polio and became almost impaired forever upsetting my father’s hectic election campaign. I still remember my mother’s insubstantial decree, ‘rajaneeti hamaare liye ashubh hai’ (politics is not bliss for us.) Later on, after more than two decades of my own active political indulgence, I consequently feel the integrity of my mother’s tender sentence, who later died of cancer when I was 12 years of age.

I was then a child by all standards and deeply attached to my mother when I saw death approaching her. First it took away her voice and ultimately at one early morning, picked her up. Same day, when my mother died, I lost a nail cutter, I had used previous evening to polish her nails.

Anyway, I was talking about official documents. It shows Singh Uday Prakash, born in 01/01/1951 at village Sitapur, District Shahdol, Madhya Pradesh. The truth is, when I was born, there was no such province like M.P. on India’s map. There were Mahakaushal, Madhya Bharat, Vidarbha, Vindhya Pradesh and others. Madhya Pradesh was created when I was already 4 years old and I was put in to it by the government. Again, when I was more than 50 years old, a new state and many more districts were extracted from the earlier ones and I now find myself in district Anuppur, M.P. at the border of Chhattisgarh, the newly formed state. And about the prefix of my name –‘Singh’, I have never used it personally for the last 40 years, I’ve never composed a poem or stories using this prefix, even my children do not carry this stigma of caste in their names, abominably I always found it indelibly inscribed even before I start existing in my own name.

Therefore, authorized documents related to me (and to many like me) do not supply the truth. I think, this is the reason that I’ve developed an innate, instinctual and robust skepticism about all sorts of papers known as ‘formal’, ‘official’ ‘authorized’ ‘governmental’ documents.

This could have as well been the genesis of my suspicion towards anything which is known to have authority, political or other sorts of formal power.

I feel convincingly that this innate suspicion inside me is the devil that has wrecked my life but I don’t know how to wriggle out of its clutches

I’ve put my two photographs one with my favorite bicycle and other in my favorite shirt. These two are taken in year 1964 and 65. Printed and developed by me in village.

I am not unknown

Goodbye
Uday Prakash

I too am riding this bus somewhere
I too would have an autobiography
You too would be a passenger
Having come from another life
You too must cross a threshold
To enter a house of
Inertia, defeat and exhaustion
You cannot know how old my shirt is
How much I like the sky before the rain
How old my dusty ragged thoughts are
How the silence of my failures and suffering
Is held in these books in my bag
I too have a silence that always remains silent
On the far side of which people come and go
Up and down, shoulders swaying
With the dry withered throat
Of my lost senseless soul
Filled with the total darkness of the river
In my eyes that grasp for breath like
Fish pulled from the water
Today I’ll say Goodbye
For the first time
So defeated
So alone
The rest of my life
I’ll see your sad back
Getting off at a stop unknown
Leaving me far behind
As all the kerosene lamps of childhood
Sooner or later leave
Everyone on the road going away
And return to their own city
Forever far away.

Translated by Robert A. Hueckstedt.
(Note: The Hindi original appears in the collection Ra¯t me˜ ha¯rmoniyam (New
Delhi: Va¯n.ı¯ Praka¯s´an, 1998), pp 139–140. Translation copyright c
2001)

Golfing on Human Souls

October 09, 2007
The Junta's Accomplices

George Monbiot

China has become the world's excuse for inaction. If there is anything a government or a business does not want to do, it invokes the Yellow Peril. Raise the minimum wage to £6 an hour? Not when the Chinese are paid £6 a year. Cap working time at 48 hours a week? The Chinese are working 48 hours a day. Cut greenhouse gas emissions? The Chinese are building a new power station every nanosecond. China is our looking-glass bogeyman. If you behave well, the bogeyman will get you.
As we saw during George Bush's climate pantomime last week, China the excuse is not the same place as the China the country. Bush insists that the US cannot accept mandatory carbon cuts, because China and India would reject them. But while he stuck to his voluntary approach, China and India called for mandatory cuts(1). "China" is a projection of the West's worst practices.
I mention this because the western companies still trading with Burma use it as their first and last defence. If we withdraw, they insist, China will fill the gap. It is true that the Chinese government has offered the Burmese generals political protection in return for cheap resources. In January, for example, China vetoed a UN resolution condemning the junta's human rights record. Three days later it was given lucrative gas concessions in the Bay of Bengal(2). It is also true that the Chinese government has no interest in promoting democracy abroad. But the more the Burmese junta must rely on a single source of investment and protection, the more vulnerable it becomes. China is not intractable. If western governments boycotted the Beijing Olympics, they would precipitate the biggest political crisis in that country since 1989.
The businesses still working in Burma are having to scrape the barrel of excuses. Even Tony Blair, that bundle of corporate interests in human form, said "we do not believe that trade is appropriate when the regime continues to suppress the basic human rights of its people."(3) Explaining his company's decision to pull out of the country, the CEO of Reebok noted that "it's impossible to conduct business in Burma without supporting this regime. In fact, the junta's core funding derives from foreign investment and trade."(4) As the junta either controls or takes a cut from most of the economy, as almost half the tax foreign business generates is used to buy arms, any company working in Burma is helping to oppress its people.
The travel firms Asean Explorer and Pettitts, which take British tourists round the country in defiance of Aung San Suu Kyi's pleas, both refused to comment when I rang them, then slammed down the phone(5). Aquatic, a British company which provides services for gas and oil firms, was more polite, but still refused to talk(6). The tourism companies Audley Travel and Andrew Brock Ltd promised to phone me back but failed to do so(7). But aside from invoking the Chinese bogeyman, each of the others produced a different justification.
The spokeswoman for Orient Express, a travel company which runs a cruiser on the River Irrawaddy and a hotel in Rangoon, told me that "tourism can be a catalyst for change." Given that tourism has continued throughout the junta's rule, I asked, how effective has that catalyst been? "There has been very slow progress, but we feel it has helped."(8) The Ultimate Travel Company explained that "We feel we just like to offer the people who travel with us a choice. If people want to travel, they can. And really I'd prefer not to enter into a debate about it."(9)
Rolls-Royce, which overhauls engines for Myanmar Airways, a company owned by the state, told me that it operates "in line with UK export licences. ... As long as we are meeting government requirements, that's what we work to. I'm not getting into a debate on this issue. We're doing this to ensure passenger safety."(10)
William Garvey, the boss of the furniture company which bears his name and which works mostly in Burmese teak, admitted that he buys timber "that comes from Rangoon, through government channels." But if he stopped, "a highly likely consequence is that the rate of felling would increase dramatically. ... whatever you may think about the Burmese government, they are still using a sustainable system for extracting teak." Aren't human rights a component of sustainability? "In the strict sense, no."(11)
The managing director of Britannic Garden Furniture, which makes its benches from Burmese teak, and supplies the Royal Parks and the Tower of London, told me "I know it's no excuse to say we don't buy it directly. ... You try and get teak from other sources. But it's rubbish. ... The government has given us no directive not to trade with Burma."(12)
All these companies have felt some pressure already, thanks to the work of the Burma Campaign UK, which includes them on its "dirty list"(13). But I have stumbled across one western firm which most Burma campaigners appear to have missed. It is run by one of the world's most famous sportsmen, the golfer Gary Player. Player has made much of his ethical credentials. Next month he will host the Nelson Mandela Invitational golf tournament, whose purpose is "to make a difference in the lives of children". One of his websites shows a painting of Mr Player bathed in radiant light and surrounded by smiling children. Nelson Mandela stands behind him, lit by the same faint halo(14).
Golf, to most of us, looks like a harmless if mysterious activity, but in Burma it is a powerful symbol of oppression. Some of the country's courses have been built on land seized from peasant farmers, who were evicted without compensation. Golf is the sport of the generals, who conduct much of their business on the links.
Player's website shows him, in 2002, launching the "grand opening" of the golf course he designed, which turned "a 650-acre rice paddy into The Pride of Myanmar. The golfer's paradise that stands in Myanmar today is said to be living proof that miracles do happen."(15) I asked his company the following questions. Who owned the land on which the course was constructed? How many people were evicted in order to build it? Was forced labour used in its construction? As Player's company is based in Florida, did the design of this course break US sanctions? His media spokesman told me "The Gary Player Group has decided not to comment on any questions regarding Myanmar-Burma."(16) It seems to me that there is a strong case for asking Nelson Mandela to remove his name from Mr Player's tournament.
If, like me, you have been shaking your head over the crushing of the protests, wondering what on earth you can do, I suggest you get on the phone to these companies, demanding, politely, that they cut their ties. I sense that it wouldn't take much more pressure to persuade them to pull out. By itself, this won't bring down the regime. But it will cut its sources of income, and allow us to focus on confronting the reality of Chinese investment, rather than the excuse.

India among top human trafficking destinations: UN

Wednesday, October 03, 2007
New Delhi: India is emerging as a leading destination for human trafficking in South Asia, with over 35,000 young girls and women from Bangladesh and Nepal being brought into the country every year, the United Nations said on Wednesday."Human trafficking is world's third largest profit-making illicit industry and in south Asia India is among the favoured destinations. Women are mostly brought from Bangladesh and Nepal," said Gary Lewis, chief of UN office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

"In India 20,000-25,000 women and children are trafficked from Bangladesh annually, while 5,000-15,000 are brought illegally from Nepal for the primary purpose of prostitution and slavery," Lewis said ,"The more devastating fact is that now Nepali girls below 10 years are being forced into the trade. In the 1980s (trafficked) girls were mostly in the age group of 14-16 and in 1994 the age further reduced to 10-14. But last year girls below the age of 10 were found trapped into the human trafficking business. This not only puts their lives in peril but also exposes them to higher risk of HIV/AIDS. 2-3 million people are trafficked annually in and out of India and, most disturbingly, a large number of people from states like West Bengal and Orissa and the northeastern region are trafficked to metropolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai for various reasons.’

According to the UN definition, trafficking in persons means the recruitment, transport, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion abduction, of fraud, for the purpose of exploitation.
P.R. Nair, project coordinator with UNODC, said: "People from these states are trafficked to work in dance bars, pubs, restaurants, friendship clubs, massage parlours and for domestic chores."
Asked about what initiative the UN is taking to curb human trafficking, Nair said: "We are closely working with states and are also providing special training to police officials dealing with human trafficking victims. Nair said that 96 rescue operations have been conducted so far this year and 800 victims including 662 minors were rescued. "A total of 1,008 traffickers and 220 customers were also arrested."
Roma Debabrata, who runs an NGO 'STOP' for such people, said the need of the hour is more and quick conviction of those involved in human trafficking.

Whose Lives are This Anyway

With All the Rigor of Pity
Count them
You may count them. They
Are not like the sand on the sea shore. They
Are not like the multitudes of stars. But Single people.
In a corner, in the street.

Yes, count them. Watch them
Watch the sky from their ruins.
Get out from between the stones, and Return. Where to return. But count them,
For they serve their terms in dreams.....

(Yahuda Amichai)



This was the railway track, where just one day before, these kids were flying colorful kites over the sky. The date was 15th August 2007, Independence Day of India. They were flying kites to celebrate the day. They love their country, they cheer and dance when India wins a cricket match. They cry when India loses...
That day, while flying kites three of them got crushed under a fast running train. They were looking to the sky and to the colors of their kites at that time....
Well, it hardly matters. India is one of the fastest developing country in Asia just after China.
Wheels of development are moving fast. No matter who and what comes on the way. Kids still love their India. They cheered when it won Asia Cup in Hockey and wept when it lost to England in cricket...
(These and many more photographs are taken by a very young and brilliant photographer Marcus Fornell, touring India through all modes of transportation...Train, Aeroplane to Bullock-carts. A few days before, he fell from the camel and received bruises on chin and got one of his camera lens broken. However, he has brought fascinating pictures from the deserts and villages of colorful Rajasthan.
Want to see ? Go to Incredible India: http://marcusfornell.blogspot.com