Art, politics and genital mutilation

My friends' Facebook updates are full of shock and horror about Sweden's minister of culture cutting a 'genital mutilation cake'. The first story I read about the cake carried the image above. It struck me as odd that the minister appeared to be feeding the cake to the head of the cake, rather than eating it herself.
I later learned the occasion was a performance by a Swedish artist of African extraction named Makode Aj Linde; his real head was part of the cake installaion, and he screamed everytime a part of his 'torso' was cut.



Once I saw the video, the whole thing made sense to me. The piece is a protest against the history of imperialist racism and the custom of genital mutilation. It's strange to me that even those who've seen the video interpret the performance as racist in intent or effect. One Facebook friend linked to the video with the words, "This is utterly revolting. If this is “freedom of expression” as the article suggests it might be argued, then Sweden (and everyone) is doomed." I, on the other hand, think, "If this is viewed as racist, then art is doomed". OK, that's an exaggeration. I don't really think art is doomed. I only think it's doomed to be misunderstood through dissemination in the media. The way M.F.Husain's painting of Sita and Hanuman was framed in media discussions, for example, it was hard to defend except by reference to an ideal of free expression that neither the Indian constitution nor the majority of India's citizens support. It's weird to see friends who defended Husain expressing disgust at Makode Aj Linde. They still haven't understood how media coverage distorts art's meanings, which was for me the central lesson of the long years of Husain's vilification.
One reason a number of people are repelled by the video is that those cutting the cake, including the minister, laugh through the process. However, that's the way art openings work. There's the context of the event, which is convivial and celebratory. There's also the emotional context created by the art, which is often very different. Just because we sip wine and joke while standing next to images of barbarity doesn't mean those images have failed to convey their true import or that we are insensitive to it. If the art is good, it will stay with us, and our minds will return to it on many occasions in the future when we aren't sipping wine or chatting with friends. Those women cutting into the genital mutilation cake might be laughing, not only because of the event's context but because there's a kind of grotesque slapstick involved in the performance. But you can see some smiles turning uneasy even during the very short run of the video. I have no doubt the artist's screams, and the act of cutting into what seems at one level like a body, created a great deal of discomfiture among those who participated. It may not be evident from the video, but those who've experienced such performances know the slow-burn effect they produce.
So I have no complaints whatsoever about the ethical or political background to the cake cutting. My only objection is that the velvet sponge looks orange rather than blood red.

It's really a bad idea for politicians to get involved with contemporary art: I just don't see the upside. Years ago, the British Council organised a workshop with a group of British and Indian artists. The resulting show was inaugurated by the then Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. I was in the gallery when he arrived followed by dozens of photogs. On one side of the room hung a massive Subodh Gupta photo-portrait showing the artist nude, riding a horse. On the opposite wall hung an equally nude and equally large photo-portrait of a female British artist whose name I can't recall. I noticed Mr Deshmukh glance quickly around the room as he walked through the door, and immediately recognise the potential disaster awaiting him: his photograph splashed on the front page of the next morning's papers looking either at a naked man riding a horse or, much worse, a naked White woman splayed on a floor. Obviously, he couldn't glance at either wall even fleetingly as he passed those prints. He moved straight across the room to where the lamp lay waiting to be lit, without seeming deliberately to ignore the art. Once past the minefield, he pretended to take more interest in what was on the walls.
For those brief moments, I admired the man's presence of mind. It isn't easy being a politician in our age. Of course, as Vilasrao Deshmukh knows well, political power offers a number of compensations.

The Guardian can't spell Kolaveri

I've cribbed about the art and food components of the Guardian's Bombay guide, and here's an interesting new blog taking on the audio-visual interpretation of the city created by the music collective B.L.O.T.
The Guardian's never been strong on India, but a recent article about the hit song Why This Kolaveri Di seems a low point even by the paper's standards. To begin with, the writer, Priya Virmani, gets the spelling of Kolaveri wrong. Then she translates Kolaveri Di incorrectly: the phrase does not mean "killer rage", only its first word does. The second word, Di, has no English equivalent, but defines the addressee as female. Why this Kolaveri Di? is equivalent to, "Why this murderous fury, girl?"
I'd have let this slide, but Virmani goes on to suggest the singer strings words together, "in a very James Joyce-like stream of consciousness". Now, I'm a bit protective about Joyce, and once Virmani's brought him into the picture, I take it personally. She digs herself deeper in the hole by asking, "Is this Joyce's 20th-century symbolist writing making a comeback in a 21st-century guise?" Do sample, here, the most famous example of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style, the final chapter of Ulysses, and decide for yourself if it has anything in common with symbolism, or with lines like these from Why This Kolaveri Di:
Aa.. distance la moonu moonu
Moonu colour-u white.
White-u background night night-u
Night-u coloru black-u
Haan.. why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri di

White skin-u girl-u girl-u
Girl-u heart-u black-u
Eyes-u eyes-u meet-u meet-u
My future dark-u
Why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri di

There have been hundreds of articles written about Kolaveri Di, but I'm yet to read a satisfying analysis of why the song works. Sure, as pointed out here, here, here and here, it's a catchy tune that employs demotic Tamil-English to amusing effect, but that's far from enough to explain the song's crossover success. Asking the singer-lyricist Dhanush isn't much help either, because he sees it only as a nonsense verse scribbled in under half an hour.
The song is very meta, and though that's true of pretty much every cultural product these days, it is still worthwhile underlining, as few writers have, that the singer switches regularly from a depressed, rejected loser to somebody commenting on the melody itself, using phrases like 'flop song', 'rhythm correct', 'maintain please', 'what a changeover mama', and 'OK, now tune change'. The music also contains ironic passages. It starts folksy with a nadaswaram beat, before shifting to a wedding band atmosphere and a trumpet going dreadfully, and comically, out of tune.
The distancing effect created by the words and music is greatly enhanced by an element that analysts have mysteriously missed: the visual dimension. Kolaveri Di's popularity exploded primarily through YouTube, where its viewership is about to hit the 50 million mark. The video focuses on four young, good-looking people in a recording studio: Dhanush, the singer; Anirudh, the composer; Dhanush's co-star Shruti Haasan; and his wife Aishwariya Rajinikanth who's directed the film featuring Kolaveri Di. Whether or not we know they're among the wealthy darlings of the nation, the video conveys an impression that these people have it all, in glaring contrast to the poor protagonist of the song.
The emotion felt by the 'soup boy', then, is twice filtered: first, through a pidgin tongue that varies from faintly to wholly ridiculous; and, second, through a visual rendition entirely at cross purposes with the song's theme. The two negatives end up making something like a positive. Whereas melodrama of the Devdas variety begs to be deflated, the Kolaveri Di singer -- endowed with the requisite props of moonlit night, glass of scotch, and teary eyes -- ends curiously validated. The multiple distancing, Brechtian alienation if you will, results in the condition being described floating free of its particular anchor -- the soup boy's tale of woe -- and assuming a general or universal aspect. The song's mildly nonsensical quality facilitates a disentangling of the fundamental state of being jilted, or of loving without requital, from any narrative specifics. This precipitates a recognition in ourselves of having felt a similar emotion, or been in an analogous situation, and therefore to identify with the singer and song. Viewing any incarnation of Devdas, my primary response for three hours straight is, "What an idiot". With Kolaveri Di it's more like, "This guy's foolish, but I've been there myself, or can imagine being there". I can't imagine being like Devdas, ever.
As one's identification with the singer and situation evolves, the silly lyrics, jotted in a hurry with no forethought, begin to appear clever, even eloquent, if some way short of Joycean in stature.

The Guardian on Bombay street food

If the article on galleries carried by the Guardian was bad, the one on the city's street food is arguably worse. It doesn't have as many mistakes, specially since Sardar is now correctly identified as being close to Bombay Central station rather than Churchgate as was the case when the list first appeared. The web allows such changes to be made after publication, and Nayantara Kilachand's corrected the most striking ones in her article. However, Monisha Rajesh, who wrote the street food piece, has a problem so fundamental it can't possibly be set right: she doesn't understand what 'street food' means.
Of the places she singles out, Sarvi is a sit-down eatery for the working-class of Nagpada, and a popular take-away for the affluent. It's large and airy by Bombay standards, very far from a street stall. The same is the case with Sardar (not Sardar's; the Indian love for apostrophes seems to be shared by foreign-born desis), Olympia Coffee House, Cream Centre and Mahesh Lunch Home. In other words, five out of the Guardian's ten recommended street food places are actually restaurants. In the case of the crab at Mahesh Lunch Home, the article now admits the dish isn't exactly street food.
There's also a video on the same subject presented by Vandana Verma. She starts with a home-cooked tiffin (not street food) before moving to Swati Snacks (a mid-range vegetarian restaurant, not close to street food), then takes an auto-rickshaw (that's the cut-away, anyway) along a route where no auto rickshaws operate, to a sandwich vendor whose only qualification is that he stations himself outside Verma's old school.
By the Guardian's criteria, a tour of London's best street food joints might involve bangers and mash at the Marlborough Arms and high tea at The Ritz.

Nayantara Kilachand on Bombay's best galleries

Nayantara Kilachand is the founder of Mumbai Boss, which is a sort of Time Out on the Web, and has a number of ex-Time Out people on its payroll. I browse the site now and again, mainly for articles by those ex-Time Out people. Nayantara herself writes very well about art.
Which is why I was surprised to read this article by her in the Guardian, covering Bombay's top 10 galleries. One of the ten, Matthieu Foss, is apparently about to close, so maybe Nayanatara's piece is dated already. A number of other lines in the article struck me as odd.

About Chemould Prescott Road, she writes: One of the oldest and most prestigious galleries in Mumbai, Chemould was a hothouse for a group of modernist artists who later come to be known as the Progressives (its most famous exponent, MF Husain, passed away in London last year). Today, relocated to a vast loft-like space, it alternates between showing contemporary bigwigs (Shilpa Gupta, Atul Dodiya, Nalini Malani) and emerging artists (Dhruvi Acharya, Shezad Dawood) and remains an inspiration to the art world's new generation of stars.

Chemould was founded long after the Progressives had disbanded, so it could never have been a 'hothouse' for the group's members. If there were such hothouses in the 40s and 50s, they were the Artists' Centre in Kala Ghoda and the Bhulabhai Desai Institute.
The Progessives called themselves the Progressive Artists' Group, so I don't see how they 'later came to be known as the Progressives'.
I don't consider Dhruvi Acharya and Shez Dawood emerging artists, but I suppose there's a degree of interpretation involved there.

About Project 88: This cavernous space was once a warren of office cubicles that housed employees of an elevator company. Luckily, the six-year-old gallery, owned by Sree Goswami, is now a minimalist space with exposed beams and iron pillars and bears little evidence of its industrial past. In addition to the coterie of big names – such as Vogue India fashion photographer Bharat Sikka, auction house favourite Bharti Kher and graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee – Goswami also takes a chance on the offbeat and experimental, like the intellectual Raqs Media Collective...

Little evidence of its industrial past... except those exposed metal beams and pillars. Beams and pillars which, in my opinion, not only give the space an industrial feel but render it rather non-minimalist.
It's debatable whether a show of Raqs Media Collective is 'taking a chance on the offbeat and experimental', since the trio has shown across the globe in some of the most important exhibitions and museums.

On the Prince of Wales museum: The CSMVS, formerly the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, was built at the behest of the people of Bombay in 1914 (though it opened to the public in 1922) and sits in domed splendour in South Mumbai. In the past few years, thanks to donations and government grants, it has spluttered into life.

A few rich guys who wanted to commemorate the visit of the Prince of Wales thought of building a museum in his honour in 1904. The building was completed in 1915, and, after being used as a hospital during WWI, was inaugurated as a museum in early 1922.
The museum's been flourishing for a long time, rather than having 'spluttered into life' in the past few years. Kalpana Desai, the museum's previous head, did a lot in terms of outreach to young students in the 1990s.

On Gallery Maskara: In a neighbourhood of matchbox-sized spaces, this former grain storage facility is enviously roomy. The ceiling alone soars to about 50ft, allowing for giant installations ...

If I'm not mistaken, the storage space was meant for cotton. That's why the ceiling's so high.

About Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke: One of the very few Mumbai galleries to bring in noteworthy international names (such as Kiki Smith and Wolfgang Laib), Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, run by mother-and-daughter team Usha Mirchandani and Ranjana Steinruecke, also rotates local talent on its small but expertly curated list – including the likes of Tejal Shah and Mansi Bhatt.

I'm certain Tejal Shah is not represented any longer by Usha and Ranjana. Neither, as far as I know, is Mansi Bhatt, whose last Bombay show was at Chatterjee & Lal.

On Chatterjee & Lal: Though compact, this one-room gallery in Colaba, founded by husband-and-wife team Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal, has already managed to push the boundaries of contemporary art: it was among the first to host performance artist Nikhil Chopra, who spent three continuous days and nights in the gallery, as well as staging retrospectives of Amrita Sher-Gil, and the hugely talented but little-known Pakistani photographer Nasreen Mohamedi.

A retrospective of Amrita Sher-Gil? It must've been tough to get the NGMA to loan all those canvases. As for the 'hugely talented but little-known Pakistani photographer Nasreen Mohamedi', well, I'm sure Nayantara's got feedback on that one and is cringing already, but for those who aren't aware, Nasreen Mohamedi was Indian, and is pretty well-known. She was selected posthumously for the last Documenta in Kassel, which gave her international prominence. Nasreen did shoot some fabulous photographs, but characterising her as a photographer is almost as much a stretch as calling her 'little-known'.

So, OK, there are a few dozen people out there waiting for me to write an under-researched article so they can get back at me. I can add Nayantara Kilachand to that list. The good news is that the gallerists she's written about don't care that her piece is full of errors. They're in a top ten list in the Guardian, that's all that counts.

Update: Some of the mistakes have been corrected since I wrote.
Update: Now, Matthieu Foss has been taken off, and replaced by Tasveer, which isn't even based in Bombay. the gallery shows now and again at Vickram Sethi's ICIA. But to rank Tasveer above Sakshi, Pundole et al is utterly ridiculous.

The missing Goya

"If the authorities had only so much as considered an online search, it would have been clear that the painting is still housed at the Prado", said the artist Sanjeev Khandekar, about a canvas, supposedly Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son, confiscated by the police from the home of a real estate agent named Majeed Sultan Khan.
Sanjeev is absolutely right, the police should have done a basic check. But since I believe it's impossible to underestimate the competence of our investigative agencies, I'm not surprised the cops felt they'd found a 19th century masterpiece in an Oshiwara tenement. Instead of pointing a finger at the police, though, shouldn't the Times of India question the decision by its editors to feature the story on the front page yesterday? Why didn't the writer of the article, Vijay V Singh, google 'Francisco Goya' himself? I mean, if the police announce tomorrow they've found the original Mona Lisa in a Goregaon shanty, will the Times take that at face value and put it on the front page as well?

Manufacturing controversy, courtesy Hindustan Times

I'm involved with The Skoda Prize Show, currently on view at the Lalit Kala Akademi. One of the three artists nominated this year, Bangalore's Navin Thomas, has a work on display that uses live pigeons. They sit in a room that's sixteen feet by twelve feet, and are being fed bird food bought from Khan Market. The room's walls are made from cotton mesh that allows fresh air in. The artwork involves sound, white noise emitted by transistors inside the room. At the opening, a few viewers were disturbed by the use of live animals, and the uncomfortably high sound level. Openings are noisy affairs. We have four other pieces in the show which use sound, and the artists who created them wanted their work to be audible to the large number of viewers who came for the inaugural function. In order for Navin's transistors to be heard above the noise of neighbouring works, he turned the sound up higher than it had been in his solo show at Bangalore's GallerySKE, which I saw a year and a half ago.

Once the opening was over, we put all videos on headphones, because henceforth there would rarely be more than two or three people wanting to see a given video at the same time. Navin then turned the volume inside the bird room down to a level perfectly comfortable to human ears.

Even during the two and a half hours of the opening, however, there was no indication whatsoever that the pigeons were in any discomfort. The door to the room was open for minutes on end, and none of the pigeons bothered to hop out. They sat on Navin's copper-wire aerials or pecked at their Khan Market food. Many viewers, though, were less interested in observing the pigeons' behaviour than to drawing conclusions based on anthropocentric assumptions.

One of these, clearly, was Isha Manchanda of Hindustan Times. She's published a piece in today's paper headlined 'Artiste in soup for confining pigeons'. The truth is that Navin Thomas (who is an 'artist' not an 'artiste') is not in any soup, but Isha Manchanda clearly wants him to be in one. I spoke to her and it was evident she's an extremist who will not listen to reason: the animal-rights equivalent of those wanting to persecute Salman Rushdie and M F Husain.

Manchanda has interviewed Navin, and four (count 'em) animal rights activists. None of these activists has seen the way the birds are actually exhibited, but that has never stopped ideologues from drawing conclusions. There is one point made in the article that might have got the Skoda Prize Show in a spot of bother. This is the assertion by members of the Animal Welfare Board that permission from the Board was required before we could exhibit Navin's birds. Manchanda, however, has substituted a quote from a person who knows nothing about the show for basic research. I just looked at the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, and scrutinised with care the section which deals with exhibition of animals. The relevant paragraph (Chapter V, Clause 21) states: “Exhibit” and “train” defined : In this Chapter, " exhibit" means exhibit or any entertainment to which the public are admitted through sale of tickets, and "train" means train for the purpose of any such exhibition, and the expressions "exhibitor" and "trainer" have respectively the corresponding meanings."

The Skoda Prize Show does not fall into the category of 'exhibit' as defined by the Act. There are no tickets sold, it is not a show mounted for profit in the manner of, say, a circus. It is free to view in a public gallery. Ergo we did not and do not need any permission from the Animal Welfare Board.

Hopefully, this manufactured controversy will end right here, viewers will continue to appreciate the many excellent works on view at Lalit Kala Akademi, and the Hindustan Times will pull up its staff for bad research and dreadful language skills (an 'artiste' is , 'A skilled public performer or entertainer, especially a singer or dancer' ).

The myth of creating consensus

Every time a row erupts in Parliament, there are MPs and medipersons who accuse the government of 'failing to evolve a consensus on the issue'. Chetan Bhagat's take in today's Times of India on foreign investment in retail is typical. Titled Shopping for Consensus, the argument advanced in the article has three facets. First, that FDI in retail is a smokescreen to occlude more important issues like the Lokpal bill. Second, allowing Tesco and Walmart to open supermarkets in India is a good thing in itself. Third, that "the government, with humility, should involve everyone in Parliament to get a general policy consensus on FDI, not just for retail, but all sectors, across all industries."

In other words, talk sweetly to Prakash Karat and he will hit the Like button of WalMart's Facebook page. Bhagat ignores the simple truth that there exist in every parliament ideological divisions which cannot be bridged. Electoral democracy would be pretty useless if that wasn't the case, since we'd have a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Moreover, even when two parties have economic policies that are as similar as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, which has been the case with the Congress and BJP over the last two decades, the party in opposition will fight policies tooth and nail that it would support as head of a ruling coalition. And it will not budge despite all the discussion and consensus building in the world. This happened with the civil nuclear deal and is happening again in the present dispute. What has changed is that Parliament is growing dysfunctional, with increasingly frequent disruptions and forced adjournments.

David Ben Gurion said that for every two Jews there are three opinions. This is equally true of Indians. Doesn't it describe all communities? To a degree, yes, but I suspect that in the case of our largest neighbour, "Two Chinese, one opinion" is likelier. Evolving consensus in India is an impossible task. Nehru fought for years to get the Hindu Code Bill passed; and he couldn't manage anything close to unanimity even within his own party in that time. In recent months, the BJP has been uncooperative in introducing non-controversial, non-ideological changes, such as a nation-wide Goods and Services Tax. What's the likelihood, then, that the main opposition party will accept government policy in a matter where there are votes to gain by the bushelful?

Vadilal does a Häagen-Dazs

Vadilal ice-cream had retreated for years to its home base, Ahmedabad, but is now taking another stab at capturing a chunk of the market in other Indian cities. It is advertising a new range called Vadilal Gourmet. The ad, which you can see here:



is a straightforward copy of commercials Häagen-Dazs has run for a while:


The question is: can Vadilal's Belgian Chocolate flavour mimic the Häagen-Dazs taste? Now that would be a copy worth checking out.

Fast food and smoking guns

My Yahoo! India column this time is about media time versus real time. Read it here.

The Huffingtonpost and writing for free

I've never trusted Arianna Huffington. The founder of The Huffingtonpost has changed her ideological spots too often for her political beliefs to seem anything but cynical and self-serving. I wasn't surprised, therefore, when, after banging on about US unemployment for months; after bashing President Obama for supposedly doing too little to spur job growth; and after running hundreds of columns against corporate greed; she sold her website to AOL for $315 million, and sacked over 200 journalists from the two organisations.
HuffPo, as the site is known for short, was built around two controversial strategies: cannibalising (or 'aggregating') content from online editions of newspapers; and persuading hundreds of bloggers to write for free. Many of these bloggers were celebrities or politicians -- the likes of Alec Baldwin, Robert Reich, Gary Hart and Deepak Chopra -- for whom any payment would seem like a pittance. There were hundreds of others, however, who could have used a bit of cash, but agreed to contribute gratis, tempted by the site's wide readership.
The business model angered journalists as well as newspaper owners, but there was little they could do about being undercut by content aggregators like HuffPo. Everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Bill Keller of the New York Times took issue with Arianna, but her admirers interpreted the criticism as sour grapes. HuffPo groupies saw it not as a parasite but as an alternative to mainstream media. The AOL-HuffPo deal has left those naive souls disillusioned. It's worse than Ben & Jerry selling out to Unilever.
Now a class action suit has been filed on behalf of all who contributed without payment to help HuffPo become a dominant online force. It's interesting to discover how many bloggers were taken in by the idea that they'd benefit by giving away content to Arianna Huffington.
I'm used to this sort of thing happening in India. Years ago, I was asked to write an art column for the Bombay Times. Shocked at the payment offered by the most profitable newspaper in India, I turned down the proposal immediately. The journalist who made the offer thought he was doing me a huge favour, and couldn't understand my refusal; after all, many better known people were writing columns for the same amount. Two friends I spoke to about it also said I'd been wrong to refuse. As a career move, having a picture every week in the Bombay Times would be a great boost (I should clarify this was a decade ago when the supplement was at its peak).
I have a narrow moral view of these matters, though: if somebody can afford to pay, they should do so, instead of pushing for cut-price rates promising corollary benefits. I've done my share of pro bono writing and lecturing for non-commercial ventures. If I also offer discounts (from a low starting sticker price) to billionaires, how am I going to make a living at all?

NDTV's false propaganda about ports

Anybody who has watched NDTV down the years knows that Prannoy Roy (who appears to have instructed correspondents to highlight his educational achievements: Yesterday one of them said, "Prannoy... I'm sorry, Dr.Roy") loves liberalisation and the stock market. Every February 28, he suggests the best way of judging the budget is tracking the market's intra-day movement.
But there's one business Prannoy Roy seems to abhor: ports.
NDTV has been conducting a drive to Save India's Beaches. Perhaps because of worries this would be regarded as elitist, this has now morphed into a campaign to Save India's Coast. Roy emphasises it's not about people tanning themselves on golden sands but about the livelihoods of poor communities. The programme is sponsored by Toyota Etios. It stands to reason that the manufacturer of machines that cause massive amounts of pollution is chosen to fund an environmental crusade.
Perhaps the problem is with the medium itself. Is television well equipped to handle complex issues while maintaining ratings? TV programmes depend on assigning blame to easily identifiable targets. But there is no single predominant cause of beach erosion. Factors that can influence such erosion include dams on rivers, ports that don't dredge adequately, rising sea levels resulting from global warming, sand mining and catastrophic events like the 2004 tsunami. Of all of these, Roy has elected to concentrate almost exclusively on ports as the culprit threatening beaches.
Beach erosion, in turn, is blamed for all kinds of ills for which it's not responsible. In last night's programme, a correspondent from Madras spoke of salinity of water, and Roy annotated this by saying that, as beaches are destroyed, sea water tends to get further inland and contaminate wells. This is not false as an abstract statement, but is absolutely not the reason why Madras's wells have turned more saline. The cause of that is overuse of groundwater, leading to depletion, leading to tubewells being sunk ever deeper, until groundwater levels fall below sea level.

"We have far too many ports. We have a 180 odd ports, that's nuts", Roy complained last night. Well, we have over 180 television channels, and that's nuts too. But wouldn't it be worse to forbid the entry of new channels? Wouldn't that be against the free market principles Roy otherwise espouses? Of course, he has never suggested markets ought to be unconstrained by regulation; but then, there ARE regulations governing ports. Ports are required to ensure they do not block the drift of sand, so beaches continue to be replenished. The point is not to disallow ports but ensure they obey the law of the land, and punish them if they fail to comply. It would help if NDTV did an investigative report on ports that skirt regulation and harm the environment as a result.
NDTV's normal go-to person for environmental causes is Sunita Narain. You can read what I think of her operation, the Centre for Science and Environment, here. Among a series of platitudes on the programme, she indicated it's important that our development move inward. So should we set up a harbour in Chattisgarh next? A dockyard in Sikkim? And is the CSE supportive of any large extant industrial projects in the hinterland?

China, by the way, has 2000 ports.

Wikileaks lies

How will governments react to the potential for more embarrassing revelations in the future from Wikileaks and likeminded websites? They will obviously grow more circumspect, and will probably place greater restrictions on access to diplomatic and security related documents. It's mind-boggling that 3 million people in the United States had access to the cables now being published in dribs and drabs by Wikileaks.
I believe governments might also begin to insert convenient fictions into such communications. People tend to believe that everything released through Wikileaks reflects truth on the ground, but that's far from the case. A cable from a diplomat in Cuba stated, for example, that Michael Moore's Sicko was banned in Castro country, while the documentary was in fact shown on Cuban national television. Now we get news of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being slapped by Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander-in-chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. This incident might well have actually happened, but it's also one of the cables whose publication the US will not regret. It's possible the message, which came out of Baku, was based on embellished information. After the Iraq WMD fiasco we know how dissidents tend to tell the CIA what US politicians want to hear.
The question then arises: If diplomats can lie or pass on dubious details in official cables, what's to stop US intelligence from going further and seeding data banks with misinformation in case of further leaks? Muddying those waters will create a new barrier to transparency in government functioning.

Hindustan Times: Thanks for the virus

I stay away from Indian newspaper sites as much as I can because of the intrusive ads they use, but can't avoid them completely. So ,this morning, a link from Google News took me to the Hindustan Times website; about five seconds later, I got a virus alert. I hit 'Heal' on the virus guard and thought I'd caught it. I was mistaken. I found I couldn't access any files on the machine because, ostensibly, a disk defragmentation was required. I've seen that kind of thing before: run the defrag and it eventually says there's a problem with the system and only buying HDD Plus (the malware in question) will solve it.

The last virus that attacked my machine came from the Indian Railways online reservation system. That was particularly infuriating because it's a site that generates revenues through ticket sales and has no business foisting bank loan ads on clients.

Luckily I'm not in the middle (or worse, near the end) of a long article with an urgent deadline. Also, I use a wireless modem that allows me to surf from my laptop. Small mercies.

My article on Anish Kapoor in Tehelka

Tehelka has published a backgrounder by me about Anish Kapoor in advance of the artist's shows in Delhi and Bombay. It can be read here. Tehelka, as the name suggests, likes sensationalism, and I guess they found my article a bit tame. To compensate, they've picked the most potentially controversial bits for the blurbs, and somewhat misrepresented my words in the intro.
"Girish Shahane traces his decades of evolution and explains why Bombay, and not Delhi, will have the real show", the introduction reads. While I've said the Bombay show was planned first, and will have the larger pieces because of the limitations of the Delhi NGMA's new wing, by no means do I believe there's a 'real show' and a 'false show' involved. I suspect the Bombay show will be more spectacular because of the scale allowed by the venue, but there will be plenty of interest in the Delhi display as well. Anish Kapoor isn't going to send second rate work for an exhibition in India's premier museum of modern art.
I also can't understand the meaning of the headline, 'His unsunny passage to India'.

Update: After seeing the exhibition in Delhi, I realised my sources provided me with a very wrong impression about the NGMA show. Mea culpa: the article is entirely misleading about the Delhi segment's content and quality.

More on Defence land

A Ministry of Defence report has reportedly criticised the lack of transparency in utilisation of defence land. The armed forces own 17 lakh acres across India, of which just 2 lakh acres is being used by 62 cantonments.
One of the arguments against my proposition that the military shift away from densely populated zones was that land acquisition is a huge obstacle. Well, it appears the forces have more than enough land of their own. If they need to acquire more, they can do so through internal resource generation. The price of unutilised defence land is estimated at 20 trillion rupees, which is ten times the current annual budget.

What's the payment, dude?

In the long period I've been a freelancer, I've noticed a striking difference between Indian and foreign publications. When chaps from abroad ask me to write, they always provide the basic information I need to make up my mind. By basic information I'm speaking of the subject, the word length, the deadline and the payment. Indian editors, on the other hand, invariably act coy about money. I can't recall a single commissioning editor who provided me with all important details in the initial approach. Recently, I've written for Take On Art magazine and Outlook Traveller; have accepted assignments from Caravan and Tehelka; and rejected proposals from three or four other publications. In every single case, it was left up to me to ask what I was going to be paid.
The reluctance to discuss fees stems, I suppose, from the fact that most magazines and newspapers these days pay very poorly. Still, since the issue's going to come up at some point, why not just get it over with right at the start?

Unsurprising surprise

It's been amusing these past years to read continually of 'suprise' or 'unannounced' visits to Afghanistan and Iraq by foreign heads of state. The media never began to feel the redundancy of those words, even though ALL such visits were surprise and unannounced. The surprise, though, was apparently not surprising enough in David Cameron's case. His helicopter was almost brought down over Afghanistan during his visit to that country in June. Insurgents had got wind of his plan to visit troops in the Helmand province.
As it happened, Cameron also faced air problems during his next visit to this part of the world, a well publicised trip to India. A radar at New Delhi airport malfunctioned just as the UK Prime Minister's flight was due to land.
Lots of people are seeking signs of real progress in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well here's one to look out for: Barack Obama arrives in Baghdad or Kabul on a visit that's been announced weeks in advance. Don't hold your breath on that one.

Superbugged

My Yahoo! India column for the fortnight can be read here.

The Return of Old Spice

The first fragrance I used regularly was Old Spice. There wasn’t an option in those days. You either applied no aftershave at all, or you applied Old Spice. The brand’s advertisements played regularly on television, featuring bronzed, square jawed surfers; and the crescendo from Carmina Burana’s O Fortuna. I was aware that, in the wider world, Old Spice was an unfashionable brand. A Billy Joel record I possessed had him singing of taking his old man’s Trojans and Old Spice aftershave. If Billy Joel’s dad used Old Spice it couldn’t possibly be cool. My dad used it as well, and a similar conclusion could be drawn from that fact. In any case, how hip could a product be that had ‘old’ in its name?
I’m gobsmacked, therefore, that Old Spice has made a comeback. It's all thanks to a series of advertisements that have gone viral on the Web. The clever original spot, for Old Spice shower gel, cannily took aim at the notion that such products are for girlie men. It also targetted women, because surveys showed they were the ones buying stuff like shower gel for husbands and boyfriends.
Here’s a long interview about how the commercial was made.

The BBC confuses one Harry Potter twin for another

Parvati and Padma Patil are twins who don't look at all alike in the Harry Potter movies. That hasn't stopped the BBC from getting them mixed up.
Afshan Azad, who plays Padma Patil (the girl on the right in the picture), was reportedly threatened by her father and assaulted by her brother (for reasons unknown but time will tell). In its story, the BBC carries a picture of Shefali Chowdhury, who plays Parvati. This is worse than Indian newspapers mixing up the two Ashleys.