Celebrating Bengaluru's Queer Pride

Bengaluru to Celebrate Queer Pride for the Second Time

After last year’s successful and vibrant queer pride march, which saw over 600 people celebrating and affirming queer lives in Bengaluru alone, Karnataka is gearing up for its second edition christened Karnataka Queer Habba. This year we as individuals and organisations, under the banner of Campaign for Sex-workers and Sexual Minorities Rights (CSMR), have decided to extend the festivities to a week beginning with a cricket match on June 21^st and culminating with the pride march on June 28^th. Come celebrate along with us as Bangalore’s LGBTQ community paints the town pink on the 28th June 2009. Like last year, this time too the pride march will begin at National College, Basavanagudi at 2:00 p.m and go up to Puttanachetty Town Hall via Sajjan Rao Circle and Minerva Circle and will culminate with a series of speeches as we gather on the Town Hall steps. Celebrities including actress Arundhati Nag will address the celebration at the end of the march.

After the success of last year’s pride we have decided to host an even bigger event christened “Karnataka Queer Habba” this year. As a run up to this year’s Pride March we will be hosting a week of events across the city. The events will include:

“Queering the Pitch”: Cricket Match

• When : Sunday, June 21^st, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Where : RBANMS Play Ground, Gangadhar Chetty Road, Ulsoor.
• Contact : Gurukiran 98803 65692 or Sunil 99450 90301

Dalit-Sexual Minorities Dialogue on Stigma and Discrimination

• When : Monday, June 22^nd, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
  
• Where : Indian Social Institute, 24 Benson Road
• Contact : Manohar 96322 23460

Release of Human Rights Watch Report - This Alien Legacy: The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism - followed by a discussion “Laws that Terrorise: Threats to Indian Democracy”

• When : Tuesday, June 23^rd, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
• Where : Institute of Agricultural Technologies, Queens Road.
• Contact : Arvind 99800 10933

Pirat Dyke Film Screening of One in Ten and Desert Hearts

• When : Wednesday, June 24^th, 6 p.m.
• Where : Swabhava Office, 4th Floor, No. 1., M.S. Plaza, 13th A Cross, 4th Main Road, Sampangiramnagar (opposite Sampangiramnagar Police Station)
• Contact : Nitya 99164 82928

Public Discussion on Religion and Sexuality

• When : Thursday, June 25^th, 4:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
• Where : United Theological College (UTC), Millers Road
• Contact : Shubha 92434 46105
  

Evening of Theatre and Dance Performance

• When : Friday, June 26^th, 4:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
• Where : St. Josephs College of Commerce auditorium
• Contact : Sumati 98451 65143

Story Telling Sessions

• When : Saturday, June 27^th, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
• Where : Cubbon Park
• Contact : Deepak 93437 63497

Bengaluru Pride 2009

• When : Sunday, June 28^th, 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
• Where : National College Basavanagudi to Puttanachetty Town Hall via Sajjan Rao Circle, Minerva Circle and J.C. Road
• Contact : Siddharth 98450 01168 or Nithin 98860 81269

Govt intervention- what lies beneath

Community Radio has made it big in India, and now there are roughly 200 organizations who have applied for a CRS license, i.e. to broadcast on FM.
So, I started wondering, that wow, not bad, the govt of our country has really improved, opening up policies, which allow people to express freely, to manage their own medium and so on. After all, they are opening up the radio sector, which was so far governed by the 1885 Indian Telegraph Act!!!
But then slowly, my focus has been shifting to the fine print of the policy, and sure enough: Broadcasting of news is banned!!
I mean, I'm getting tired of the exclamation marks in my blog, but that's what it is. No news, can you imagine? Even a local cable operator who has no idea what's happening can freely broadcast news on his local cable channel, but a properly registered and licensed radio station (that too at the Central govt level), cannot broadcast news.
Of course, all this is old hat, and people have been making suitable noises about this problem. Apparently, the Bangladeshi policy on CR has been modeled on India and so they will also be prohibited from broadcasting news. What a circus this is turning out to be!

Anyway, this posting is not about our great CR policy but more about what happened next. In an effort to help out the poor organizations who have applied for Community Radio licenses, the Department of ----- and ********, has started a project called "Community Radio: Women's health and nutrition", wherein it pays community radio stations money for each program. They are supposed to broadcast a series of programs, preferably a program a day, for one whole year. The topics are decided by the govt, of course.
We all know that the only "community" radio stations which are on air to date are:
educational institutions which are about 30 in number.
So about 13 of them have got the money from the govt, and happily started broadcasting programs on the topics given to them.
One may innocently ask where is the community in all this, but one should also realise that the Dept ******, the Dean of the Colleges, the professors and all the doctors and experts are also a kind of community! so this project is for them! and of course because of all the hard work they are putting in, they must be paid too! its only fair
Nobody knows how and why this women's health and nutrition was decided. Further most radio stations have become production houses, because with the amount of money being doled out through this project, one need not do anything else...so its exactly like a production house, making any kind of programs for anybody provided the right amount goes into the right pockets.
So the govt is happy that they have fufilled their mandate of making programs about women, and that too on Community Radio Stations!
The colleges are happy that their 20 lakhs investment is recovered.

Finally, seeing how everybody is so happy, I'm sure the communities who have to listen to these "brilliant" programs, must also be very happy. After all, they have no other work in their life apart from listening to these programs!

Of photographs and 'frame'works

It's always bothered me to see that there are such brilliant photographs to be seen around. In fact with the photography medium going digital, every second person can seriously start taking up photography. The second revolution is that photography has become integrated with mobile technology. So now the camera is well and truly mobile!
You see, I have a problem. I don't have a problem with too many things, but this one thing I have always had a problem with; namely, with 99% of the photos I've seen, either in a physical frame or a digital frame (blogs etc), the subject is never mentioned! Most of the people are nameless in most photos.
Once the privacy of a person (s) has been captured, then the least the photographer can do is to credit the person. Just say that, the person you see in the photograph is Mr. or Ms. ABC, from XYZ place.
With that simple acknowledgment, people turn from faceless objects of fascination to real people .
As media expands both horizontally and vertically, it is a given that the content will increase, the producers will increase and therefore proportionately, the number of anonymous people popping up on either your TV screen, or websites, or photo magazines etc will only increase.
The only way to fight the tide, is not to start telling the media individually to change, but to start creating the basis for a paradigm shift in approach.
Basically, some policies have to be created, or rewritten, with a strong bent on ethics. We need to put the debates on personal space, privacy and its equations with information distribution; on more public fora, where these tough decisions become a part of public consciousness.
So atleast, if you begin to bring out your camera and want to snap away at some random person you think is interesting, it'll make you think.

Of course, the topic I'm trying to write about, is a much larger theme, and there are a variety of other issues, like consent from the community, etc. But that's another story for another time!

Where is community radio in India today?

I've written briefly about radio in India as of today, and this is mainly my diatribe about what's happening with the third category of radio in India- Community Radio.
To get to the nub of the story straight away, its been one year (give or take a week) since the Government of India, declared that NGOs, colleges and Krishi Vigyan Kendras (and not communities!!!) can apply for community radio licenses.
Today not even one NGO is on air. About 30 colleges are on air today, but nobody knows what kind of programming they are doing, how much of the community they are involving, what kind of impact has it had and so on. There is no central or organizing force which makes this kind of information available.
So in the land of committees and sub-committees, how on Earth did we miss this one out? Of course we didn't!
Sometime in Jan 2007, a body calling itself Community Radio Forum (CRF) was formed, with some of the people who have been associated with community radio initiatives, being at the centre of things.
They would have campuses, NGOs, Krishi Vigyan Kendras as members (since the policy has forced them to share the roof). They would organize details about members, their programming, their impact, their policies, would take up their case in advocacy matters, at the time of application, in case they got in to trouble with the government, create awareness about the concept, facilitate better technology for community radio etc. A noble thought, and what's more, a noble action, the meeting I mean.
We have already seen how seriously the government has taken its own policy.
Now its going to be a year since the CRF was formed. Even today, the CRF has not registered itself. So there is no question of members. Some people who are interested, use the open mailing list cr-india@sarai.net.
My open challenge is to approach the communities anywhere in India, and see if they have heard about the CRF. My guess is that you would be able to count them on a single hand.
Many NGO's have got their application for radio rejected (despite them being rooted in the community) merely on grounds that they are based in conflict areas. Sadly, there is no organization to come to their defence.
NGOs or institutions new to this matter have no idea how to apply, or what equipment to buy or generally, what to do and when.
According to the laws of physics, there are more than 5 million community radio stations which can come up in India, and after a year, about 30 colleges is the best we can showcase to the world and to our people.
Today, the hype is over, people have gone back to their own jobs, and soon new policies will come and its going to be the same new circus all over again. I say with shame that the sheer potential of community radio in India (especially in India!) may never be realized, and we would have lost the opportunity of a lifetime to hand over the power of a medium like radio to the real people of India, who need it the most.
signing off- An ashamed member of the CRF

And the Dead Tree Gives No Shelter

A play by the same title was performed today by Parnab Mukerhjee, a development consultant and a creative mentor (don't ask me what that means!) at Koramangala.
The play stitches together three narratives, two of which are short stories by Mahasweta Devi, one of the more prolific short story writers and activists, based in West Bengal, India. The props used in the play were simple- A cloth with a Dali painting- The Persistence of Memory , a miniature face mask, some clips for drying clothes, a clothesline, some rope, black scotch tape, a chair and a bedsheet.
The play begins with the story of Yashodha, a tribal woman somewhere in Purulia, West Bengal, but place is insignificant as it resembles the tribal landscape anywhere else in India. The story is simple- the woman is young but her husband loses both legs in an accident, his employer is a lecherous fellow, and his employer's wife offers her money but she has to breastfeed her grandsons in return. She is a private fascist but just doesn't show it. Soon Yashoda starts breastfeeding other children in return for earning money. There is the conflict of why her identity should be reduced to her breasts only to earn some money but on the outward, she goes through the motions stoically. Soon, she learns that her husband has got property elsewhere and so he abandons her to start life anew with another woman. Her two daughters elope when the time is right. All three family members show disgust at being supported through the breastfeeding money (even though that was the sole means of support for them). Soon she dies from blood cancer.
The story is a front for reserving comment on the state of the Advasi in India, what is the extent to which they occupy the mindscape of ordinary people like you and me, what is the violent displacement they undergo and their miserable integration in to the urban life, by becoming servants, construction workers etc at the expense of state sponsored SEZ type projects.
The second story is that of Ram, who is a photographer who has attained fame by shooting Shurpanaki, an adivasi woman who was shot bare chested in all her innocence. This shot makes it to a calendar sold in New York and she becomes famous. Soon, the fame starts fading, and one day 12 members of the local Panchayat rape her precisely because of her fame. She confronts Ram (who is unaware of this incident) and he tries to placate her with some kind of compensation or rehabilitation, but she is way beyond such talk. She has totally lost all inkling of hope. Ultimately, Shurpanaki, who lives in a Shanty by the railway station in Mumbai, starts running towards the train, with Ram behind her. The newspaper states that two bodies have disappeared, in the next day's news.
The third story is Parnab's personal story, as a middle class failure, who in the days of successful role models, wants to become a model failure by committing suicide in full media glare. And so he invites the media people to cover his suicide, (by cutting himself with the free safety blades he got at an offer at a supermarket). He wants to die because he has no options left. He refers to researchers, academicians, fund loving NGOs, etc who all are a part of this hypocritical society who will watch and discuss and sympathise while the poor are systematically getting raped and murdered all over India.

All through the play, the emphasis was on the body itself. The body became the point of reference, and this was particularly thought provoking because today when everyone is talking about community, globalization and generally of a flat, uniform world; bringing the focus back on the body singles the individual, her feelings, her identity and brings the individual back into the picture. Perhaps this is a comment on how Adivasis are different from the rest of us, how they have always been neglected, been getting the raw end of the deal and how State attitudes and middle class attitudes in India don't really work for these Adivasi individuals whose stories are portrayed in this play. Ultimately, the play hits hard the point that all arts are either escapist or political, and maybe this is true of people on a larger level also, and Parnab provokes us into thinking whether we want to keep on living our lives with our aspirations and escape the realities around us or make a conscious decision to be political and actually have the courage to face the differences of this "socialist, democratic, secular and fairly well known republic called India"

The play does not assume to have any answers to the problem, and does not articulate any specific "social problems" either. All it does is tell some stories, largely unheard stories, and asks us to think about what we as individuals want to do about these stories.

All credit to Logos Theater and Parnab Mukherjee for bringing about this play, for the hard hitting lines and hopefully they will remain etched in memory long enough for us to wake up, sit and take notice.

Thought for Today-WTF

Hindus and Christians desperately trying to convert
Muslims desperate for survival
Buddhists getting stomped by generals
Jains pushed into obscurity
Sikhs fighting for identity
Today's the day
I remember Nietzsche

Leftwing genocide in Nandigram
Rightwing genocide in Gujarat
Ordinary people,
without any politics to hide behind,
thieving, killing and raping
The Congress is red taping

What government, what law and what order
What country and what border
Acually WTF

Rastey- an anthropological view of civil works

We Indians have humility
Is it philosophy?
Is it our tradition?
I think not,
what rot.
Cause if we don't look down,
we will disappear
down the holes down that road..
Our bodies-the full load..
and appear all bloated,
if not broken,
at the next sequential manhole
or pothole

Its the end of the Road!