And then she would bend down and touch our feet.

Well at least bend down.

But we knew it was simply a fantasy. After all, why would Pam Anderson ever come to India when she had the sunny beaches of California to frolic in? After all, what did we Indian men, with our ability to recite multiplication tables upto twenty-three, have to offer her that she couldnt get  from Tommy Lee and Kid Rock?

Why would she ever, to paraphrase the words from the Pardes song, do a “zyara monitor se nikalke saamne a meri mehe-booba”? Why indeed?

Well now she has. And if there any further proof needed as to why India is shining, then one look no further than the fact that we have finally been able to get her, in flesh and blood. So who cares that she is now slightly long in the tooth and that the warranty on her implants might have expired? After all, if we Indians can’t do a mean service contract, who can?

I confess to have had a soft corner for Pam. Most of the magnetic bubbles of the floppy disks I owned were used to store the RGB values of her flesh-tones, most entries in my hard disk’s File Allocation Table pointed to different parts of her. My college backpack had a plastic box full of floppies I carried around like a first-aid box. One of these floppies contained a shareware program called SVGA which allowed one to view JPGs on DOS machines (since not all machines had Windows 3.1 and Paintshop Pro was a pain) very fast (like when the teacher in Numerical Analysis Lab would go out for a smoke) and the others, even though labelled in a Freudianly sinister way “InsertionSort (C++)” and “BubbleSort (C++)”  [putting D++ would have been too obvious] simply had different pictures of Pamela Anderson (Ok some were of Cindy Crawford also). When she as a spokesman for the PETA informed us about how chickens are bred to be top-heavy in poultries and how the weak legs of the chickens cannot support their heavy chest, I applauded her for sympathizing with their plight. When she starred in Barb Wire, a re-make of Casablanca in a strip club, I applauded her acting abilities (though I would have appreciated a line in the movie which went “Do it again Sam”). I applauded her non-acting abilities in some of the independent films that she starred in, shot home-video style.

In short, I adore her. The part of her which was real. And even more that which was imaginary. A most complex emotion if I may say so.

Given this long history, allow me to feel a sense of vindication that Pam Anderson has finally come to India.

Allow me please to feel proud of how much our generation has achieved, becoming from a country that had to barter its gold in 1991 to one that brings in the sona in 2011.

So Claudia, Sheryln and all the other sand-stuffers and heavy-top wannabes take a hike.

The original is here.

Aghast at this accusation aimed at Tagore’s patriotism,coming from someone who should definitely know better, I was about to raise that point when the floor was thrown open for audience questions. But then I stepped back, reminded of one of my father’s maxims “You can only argue with someone who is half-right. If someone is fully wrong, it’s simply not worth your time.”

Coming back home, I continued the discussion with a friend who said that he agreed with this prominent intellectual. It seemed he had grown up hearing this. After all was not Jana Gana Mana composed for King George by Tagore? Was he not an admirer of the British throughout his life? Was he not opposed to the Indian national movement of Mahatma Gandhi?

No this post is not about the Jana Gana Mana controversy. For those who still want to believe that rubbish, regardless of Tagore’s own clarification in his letter to Pulin Behari Sen [Link] and refuse to consider the small matter of his returning his Knighthood (which presumably would have been a big deal for someone supposedly enamored of the British) in protest against the Jalianwalah Massacre as proof enough of his anti-imperialism then it is beyond me or, for that matter, any kind of rational discourse to convince them otherwise.

What this post is about is Tagore’s idea of patriotism and a clarification of what is perceived to be his opposition to the freedom struggle.

The foundation of Tagore’s world-view was education. He firmly believed that independence from the British, in itself, would be meaningless and merely lead to replacing a foreign oppressor with home-grown ones as long as Indians stayed mired in superstition, ritualism and were closed to new ideas. Given this, he was strongly opposed to Gandhi’s philosophy of  “Education can wait, Swaraj cannot” because he believed that the ends (independence) did not justify means (mass boycott of education).

He was also disturbed by Gandhi’s use of religion and his invocation of India’s past glories as a means to galvanize the masses. This stemmed from Tagore’s opposition to the concept of nationalism as defined by “pride” and cultural chauvinism, having seen how it had led to untold suffering in the first half of the twentieth century both in Asia and in Europe, most egregiously from “nationalist” movements in Japan and Germany.

In addition, Gandhi’s use of religion and his call to revive a simpler pastoral lifestyle were to Tagore retrograde steps. Rabindranath favored a more open, international and ultimately secular outlook (There is a lot of literature on Tagore’s idea of God, which can be simplified grossly as something akin to the Bhakti movement’s tenets—a strong personal relationship of love with a Supreme Being ) for the next generation of Indians and was worried about the direction Gandhian philosophy, if followed to the letter, would take India.

Tenets of Gandhism related to suppression of sexual desire and Gandhi’s strong strictures on “proper Indian life” and propensity for moralizing were to Tagore unreasonable restrictions on personal freedom, a concept as near to him as education.

Tagore’s criticism of Gandhian struggle was not just motivated by ideology but also by pragmatics. In Bengal, the cloth trade had a strong Muslim presence and when Congress leaders exhorted people to burn clothes produced by British mills, many of the Muslim merchants refused on economic grounds—-they had inventory of Manchester products and local Indian cloth being more expensive and of bad quality was not commercially viable. Tagore was of the opinion that unless Indian industry had products that could compete in the market on their quality alone, it was unreasonable to expect people who had invested in the cloth trade to reject British-made goods just out of patriotism. Tagore felt that we first needed to make Indian industry competitive rather than take the easy way out and just burn foreign products , something which he felt, given the delicate communal fabric of Bengal and given the way the cloth trade worked, would wreak havoc.

He was right. Gandhian politicians appealing to emotion and rhetoric moved through the countryside.  Muslims who refused to play along and burn their stock were branded as anti-nationals. In many places, shopkeepers and merchants, most of them who happened to be Muslims, were forced to burn British cloth through community pressure. Muslim leaders then dove in inflaming communal feeling, which was never far from the surface, with the message— “This is the way it is going to be for Muslims in independent India”. Things went south pretty soon, something that was doubly painful for Tagore because he was personally at the forefront of the 1905 struggle against the partition of Bengal, a time when Hindus and Muslims had risen as one against the British, possibly for the last time.

It was Tagore’s opposition to Gandhian struggle and his aversion for “nationalism” as “chest-thumping war-mongering” that has led to the popular impression that he was not a patriot, something that he was well aware of.   As  an artistic riposte, he wrote a novel “Ghare Baire” (The Home And The World) which had as its  “villain” a seductive rabble-rousing Gandhian politician (Sandip) whose appeal is based on populist oratory but who remains inherently self-centered  and had as its hero an old-world, staid, rather dull zamindar  (Nikhlilesh) whose opposition to the coercive methods of Sandeep is seen by his wife as “unpatriotic” and his ideal of constructive patriotism misunderstood as weakness.  Despite their ideological tension however, neither Gandhi nor Tagore doubted the other’s patriotism and the immense love and respect they had for each other is well documented. It was however lesser minds, many with an agenda of their own, who have kept persisting with this take down of Tagore.

As the final testament of Tagore’s patriotism, it is worth noting that he was, unlike many of his critics, no latte-drinking “intellectual” blowing hot air in a coffee house. In 1905, he was involved, hands-on, in a different kind of Swadeshi—- the promotion of local industry and local education as an alternative to the British. As part of his belief that Indians need to be educated not as clerks of the British but as technically competent individuals capable of building the nation on their own through entrepreneurship , he became one of the leading lights behind the National Council of Education, responsible for the foundation of Jadavpur University as an alternative to the more British Calcutta University.

While his experiments with alternative models of education, based on his concept of the freedom of the mind, in Santiniketan are well-documented what is however less universally known is his ceaseless work for tribal uplift in the area around Santiniketan, especially his initiatives for cooperative banks. Since there was no government help (Mahatma Gandhi arranged for some donors),  he would himself raise money, performing his dance dramas, even when his health was poor. This may come as a shock to people who think of a mystic of a rich family who wrote romantic poetry and theorized about politics, science and art,  but there were few intellectuals, then and now, who have done as much constructive and positive work for the promotion of education among tribals as him without of course the shameless publicity and political ambition that characterizes much of social work today.

Whether there were may have been greater talents than Tagore in India, I cannot say since I myself had not read the person the “literary figure” mentioned and talent is in any ways a very subjective concept. However I am fairly confident that  it would be difficult to find someone who was as visionary and as genuinely patriotic as Kobiguru Rabindranath Tagore.

[Those interested in reading a scholarly analysis of the Gandhi-Tagore schism are encouraged to read Dr. Amartya Sen's "The Argumentative Indian"]

[Update: Puneet points out a one typo in the piece which he feels calls into doubt its authenticity. So here, to support the above "suspect" article is another one (October 18, 1946 and containing essentially the same report about Gandhiji asking for women to commit suicide), written by one Preston Grover, whose bonafides as a correspondent for the Associated Press is attested to by this obit in the NY Times.I also now have the full scanned page of the front page of the newspaper where this article was published originally. If anyone else doubts the veracity of the piece, kindly email me.]

Mohandas K Gandhi advised women in the riot-torn areas of Noakhali tonight to commit suicide by poison or other means to avoid dishonor.

Later on in the article,

Gandhi addressing several hundred listeners in the untouchable’s colony here advised “everyone running the risk of dishonor to take poison before submission to dishonor. ”

In the official version of his statement given out by his secretary, no reference was made to other forms of suicide, but listeners fluent in Hindustani said he advised women in imminent danger of dishonor to use knives or guns to kill themselves, or to throw themselves into the water to drown.

[Full article here posted on this blog] (Link via Utsav)

For those who may be unaware, here is what Noakhali was. I urge you to follow this link and read about it, if you don’t already know the facts.

I do not know about you but I found Gandhiji’s statement to be shocking to say the least. Here is the father of our nation articulating the belief that a woman’s sexual chastity is what solely defines her identity—-once that so-called ‘honor’ is gone, her staying alive is meaningless. Mind you it’s not the existence of the sentiment that’s shocking (after all, this mindset is what drives honor killings even today) but the identity of the person who is expressing the sentiment that is.

Or maybe I am wrong.

Maybe this is an extreme form of non-violence that the Mahatma is preaching, where rather than having a woman defend herself by shooting as many assailants as she can (if she be so lucky so as to get a gun) thus possibly saving herself from rape, it is preferable that she shoot herself, sparing her attacker from death, thus triggering a chain of remorse and introspection in the mind of her would-have-been rapist.

Of course even this interpretation does not make it any less shocking.

One of them is Daniel Pearl, a “rising star” journalist with the Wall Street Journal— a musician, a humanist and a true “liberal”.

And the other: Omar Sheikh, an urbane British-public-school educated Muslim fundamentalist who had made a name for himself in the world of Jihad with his masterfully executed kidnappings. [Yes the same Omar Sheikh who was released by India (along with his spiritual guru Azhar Masood, the founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed) during the IC814 crisis.]

It is a story of how their lives collided in Karachi on a fateful January day in 2002. Daniel Pearl, eschewing the comfort of taking press releases from official sources, had been chasing the money trail of 9/11 and had started looking in all the “wrong” places. An appointment had been set up with a certain “Basheer” who was to take Daniel on to the next chain in the link.

That “Basheer” was actually Omar Sheikh, one of the world’s most dreaded terrorists. Drawn in by his friendly emails from nobadmashi@yahoo, Daniel felt that Basheer was a guy he could trust. It was a fatal error in judgement that would end with Daniel Pearl being mutilated and beheaded on video and the Western world, for the first time, catching a brief glimpse of the ground realities in the real cradle of Islamic terrorism …Pakistan–ironically also a “first-class ally” in the West’s battle against terror.

While the documentary is about Daniel Pearl, its most powerful scenes are when Omar Sheikh is in focus—a grainy 80s video of a British pub with a clean-shaven nattily dressed Omar Sheikh looking like an uppity prep-school boy, Omar Sheikh taking on hugely muscled men in arm-wrestling competitions (and winning many times), his friend talking about a violent, mean, fearless streak in Omar throughout his childhood and a Pakistani cop who was in charge of Omar Sheikh when he was undertrial saying that Omar Sheikh was “beyond brainwashed”.

What emerges through the documentary is the chilling profile of a religious, supersmart pyscho. A man who organized a vast network of micro-modules of terror…none of which were intentionally told about the whole plan (The terrorists who kidnapped Pearl thought he would be released after a propaganda tape was made. Except that Daniel’s death rights had been “sold” to a group of Arabs for $50,000. These people first made Daniel read out a prepared statement stating he was a Jewish person who had strong links to Israel and then he was made to condemn America. After that, his neck was hacked off slowly with a knife and his head paraded in front of the camera. Then his body was hacked into 10 pieces and buried). A man who so charmed his victims with his urbane friendliness that he never needed a gun to make them get into a car. A master organizer, a “people person” with wells of deep violence and hatred, Omar Sheikh is about as scary a demon as you can imagine.

The documentary also treads unfamiliar ground for Western audiences since it very clearly articulates the fact that Omar Sheikh was trained in Pakistan to perform kidnappings in Kashmir, that when he was released in Kandahar, there were ISI agents on the ground along with the Taliban coordinating the whole operation ,that after Daniel Pearl’s capture, when the Pakistani police were “looking” for Omar Sheikh, he had already been “taken in” by the ISI. [Omar Sheikh basically gave himself to the police--the entire thing coordinated by the ISI] and that one of the most plausible reason Pearl was murdered was because he had come “too close” to revealing the ISI nexus with 9/11.

Of course, all these still do not conclusively prove Pakistan to be a “terrorist state”—nothing short of Jesus Christ writing that in blood on the blue sky will make that happen.

But at least the facts are being brought out in the open in primtime on HBO. And the real terror masterminds being identified. Make no mistake. If Islamic terror is a fast-food-shop, Osama is just the Ronald McDonald mascot, a colorful front, the media guy. It is people like Omar and Azhar Masood who are the actual store managers—the guys who keep the assembly line moving…making sure that if the store clerk quits there is one to replace him immediately. And that your fries are never cold. And the ketchup bottle never empty.

An interesting titbit in passing. According to Pervez “the Pinocchio” Musharaff , Omar Sheikh was actually an MI6 spy and not an ISI agent as universally believed. I really think Gen Mush would have called his book “Experiments with Truth” had it not already been in use.

This may come as no surprise, but I have came across discussions and articles that support Omar Sheikh, making him out to be a victim of a conspiracy. They claim that Omar never actually murdered anyone, that his confession was taken under pressure [and this despite the fact that Omar Sheikh had also told reporters that he had "organized the kidnapping" and was "proud of it" ], that the court (Pakistani) was biased and did not follow proper proceedures and that 9/11 was done by the evil West [just as we are to believe that the Indian government attacked parliament]

And I was compelled to do a Search-Replace with Omar Sheikh being replaced by Mohammed Afzal.

What came out was almost the same arguments that Nandita Haskar and her cohorts in the press and in the blogosphere are circulating, trying to prove that Mohammed Afzal is innocent. Never mind that SAR Geelani, a self-proclaimed Kashmiri freedom struggler who considers violence against the Indian state as “not terrorism” does not think that Afzal is innocent.

I am not saying he is innocent…but Afzal has been deprived of a fair trial. The quantum of punishment awarded to him does not match his role in the attack and the opinion is being shared by people of the Kashmir valley and political parties.[Link]

Is the similarity between the defence of Omar and Afzal a coincidence?

Do not think so.

It’s just that there is a standard template of Jihadi defense that just keeps on getting tweaked with each scumbag that turns up.

So what has become of Omar Sheikh? Sentenced to death in 2002, he is still alive in a Pakistani jail after his execution was stayed 33 times because “it is feared that he might reveal information implicating a certain Pakistani agency”.

The name of that Pakistani agency?

Why MI6 of course.

Indeed if Mohammed Afzal and Omar Sheikh are “innocent”, then what’s the problem in believing that?

If it was the Rang-de-Basanti-inspired “be the change” in early 2006 that captured the imagination of the nation, the last quarter has seen the the Return of Bapu—courtesy “Lage Raho Munnabhai”, a predictable yet pleasant movie about a Don who reforms himself after being visited by the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi.

The original Mahatma Gandhi, the master communicator, had to don a langoti and speak the language of religion and poverty to make a connection with India’s teeming population and launch the greatest mass mobilization in modern history. The new bubble-wrapped Mahtama of Bollywood has a new challenge—to work his magic on the outsourced generation of today and rake in a few bucks for the producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Because the secret of today’s blockbuster is to give the audience an illusion of intellectual nourishment while feeding him the same old escapist fare—so that when he walks out from the multiplex he has a “feel good rush” and a desire to “change the world”–a desire that if we are lucky will last for a week.

For Gandhi is the ultimate feel-good-man—nothing makes the new generation feel better about themselves than acting “Gandhian”. But there is always a problem—everything Bapu has asked us to do is so god-damn tough and boring. Like shovelling your own shit….that is so not cool. Also the “sex is a pathway to violent animal tendencies” idea —-nyet nyet. The ‘go back to the villages’ whole anti-industrialization angle—you mean no cell phones and IPods? And that ‘spin your own cloth’ Gandhian principle—-dude are you crazy? Do you want me to be a fashion disaster like Karishma Kapoor in her first movie? Puleeze.

So here’s an idea.

Get rid of the facets of Gandhi-ism that are uncomfortable or sound way too tough or too 1940-s. Let’s get Bapu to talk Tapori. Let’s make him a gentle Agony Uncle who guarantees the sure way to get the girl. There might not be a lot of the original Gandhi left in this new Gandhi but hey that’s not our problem. The thing is to make people think they are having a karele ka juice that tastes sweet. Let’s put in a few simple, contrived situations. Add some “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies” homilies and voilà, we have a product—easily palatable, leaving a warm, fuzzy afterglow.

But wait. On second thoughts—- is this new-age, sanitized Gandhi altogether a bad thing? A commercial construct– sure is. But perhaps this filtering out of the parts of Gandhiism that are impractical, utopian and plain anachronistic is the only way to keep Gandhi-ism relevant today. By making his ideals easier to follow. By serving up what he stood for in bite-sized portions.

While most “neo-Gandhibaadis” who were “Rang-de-Basantists’ a few months ago will soon migrate to other things, we hope that there will be a few people who, like Sanjay Dutt in “Lage Raho Munnabhai”, will ensconce themselves in a library where, through knowledge gleaned from books (as opposed to a two hour movie or email forwards) objectively evaluate, free of idolatory and iconcoclasm ——- Gandhi the person. Gandhi the politician. And Gandhi the personal saviour.

And through this path of enlightenment, triggered by ‘Lage Raho Munnabhai’ but not limited by it, each of us shall realize Bapu in our own way.

Simple. Making it mandatory to sing “Vande Mataram” is a gross infringement on individual freedom. No government has the authority to force a word out of my larynx. Or block me from reading a blog. Or prevent me from reading a book (like say for instance “Satanic Verses”) . End of story.

Of course, the futility of this whole “Vande Mataram” debate overwhelms me. At a time when there is no shortage of issues and challenges facing us, we stop, turn our asses to all our problems and start obsessing about the lyrics of a song written more than a hundred years ago— why we are all obliged to sing it, why a few of us should not sing it, whether the author was communal, whether singing the first two paragraphs of a five paragraph song is a good compromise and whether patriotism is defined by the songs on our playlist.

And the debate saddens me too. Because for the generation that won us our independence ‘Vande Mataram’ was not just a song. It was emotion set to tune. They walked to the gallows with “Vande Mataram” on their lips. Strangers in chains, both Hindus and Muslims, bound only by a shared dream of a Shashyashyamalang future, joined voices in singing “Vande Mataram’, keeping their sanity through the dark nights of torture and isolation.

To them, ‘Vande Mataram’ was a symbol— a vision of an independent, prosperous motherland. And it was this symbolism that elevated the song above all kinds of literal analysis.

Even in those days, people were well aware about the controversial origins of the song, the context in which it is sung in Anandamath and the dedication to Goddess Durga which comes after the second paragraph. As Rabindranath Tagore said in 1937

The core of ‘Vande Mataram’ is a hymn to goddess Durga: this is so plain that there can be no debate about it. Of course Bankim does show Durga to be inseparably united with Bengal in the end, but no Mussulman [Muslim] can be expected patriotically to worship the ten-handed deity as ‘Swadesh’ [the nation]. This year many of the special [Durga] Puja numbers of our magazines have quoted verses from ‘Vanda Mataram’ – proof that the editors take the song to be a hymn to Durga. The novel Anandamath is a work of literature, and so the song is appropriate in it. But Parliament is a place of union for all religious groups, and there the song can not be appropriate. When Bengali Mussulmans show signs of stubborn fanaticism, we regard these as intolerable. When we too copy them and make unreasonable demands, it will be self-defeating.

And yet , it made no difference for the freedom-fighters on the streets and in the jails. Irrespective of their religion—-’Vande Mataram’ was their anthem, their very own.

Much has changed since then. That very symbol of patriotic pride has been misappropriated for sectarian gains. For the BJP/Hindu revivalists, “Vande Mataram”‘s Durga-imagery is a vindication of its identification of nationalism with “Hindutva”. For the proponents of a pan-Islamic identity (like the Imam Bukhari) who are dead set on showing to the world that Islam is under attack in India (despite the fact that Muslims enjoy rights and privileges in India they would struggle to have in other non-Muslim countries—paradoxically rights which Muslim countries deny to their own minorities), “Vande Mataram”‘s allusion to a non-Allah superior being is proof positive of a sinister Hindu conspiracy to humiliate and oppress their community.

Thus with the help of politically expedient literalism, both of these extreme influences have helped each other in transforming an unifying concept into a divisive one, a protest against authority into an instrument of it , a cry of the soul into a mere concatenation of words.

Herein lies the cruel twist of irony.

It is with a heavy heart that I have to announce the death of an old friend.

Desibaba is no more.

Desi Baba Desi Babes
Is closed till further notice.
Copyright © 1998 – 2005 DesiBaba.com
For those who came in late, Desibaba was the original Indian porn site. But it wasnt merely a “porn site”—it was a landmark in desi pop culture.

Let me explain.

The cable revolution of the early 90s came as a blessing from heaven (or hell) for the raging hormones of my generation who were henceforth liberated from the oppressive censorship of state-owned television. The “Chosen One” was Star Movies which served up an intoxicating feast of “After Dark” movies—”Lake Consequence”, “Wide Sargasso Sea” , “ Blindfold—Acts of Obsession” —amazing feasts of carnality whose charm never decreased with multiple viewings and where sound was not necessary for understanding the plot.

For those with a more earthy, daughter-of-the-soil preference, there was Sun TV’s late night adult programs where ladies with Sachin Tendulkar shoulders and Ramesh Krishnan waistlines heaved and thrusted away. As a result, Silk Smitha, Nylon Nalini and the other goddesses of the wet sari pantheon became part of our nightly vocabulary. Watching TV late at night with the sound off became a national obsession.

This was too good to last. In the north rose a fell presence, an evil Eye that never slept; whose sole purpose was to take us back to the Dark Ages.

In other words, I&B minister Sushma Swaraj—the hysterical lady who admonished DD newscasters for wearing transparent saris and showing cleavage, launched a war against flesh tones on the airwaves! Soon she was passing one dictat after another —-Star Movies censored all their sugar and spice, Sun TV followed suit and a dark shadow of depression and KLPD-ness swept the land.

The Net was making its presence felt then in India and the tech-savy section of the country focussed their attention into tapping the vast potential of the cyberworld. It’s well known that porn drives technology—it drove Net commerce in the early days just as it is doing for the multi-media part of the cellular phone business today. But therein lay the problem, smut was a business. Every damn site needed a credit card and we were poor undergrad students with” not a penny to our names” even though we wanted to see others “without a shirt on their back.”

Plus firang models got boring after a while and we could never associate ourself with the hot stories set in the context of the decadent West.

It’s always darkest just before dawn. And when things are at their worst, guess who should come alawn (poetic license)

It all started with a whisper campaign. Hey guys, a new website has come up whose theme is desi. Best of all, it’s free. No credit cards (supposedly used for “age verification” by respectable sites—my foot), no passwords.

The name was desibaba.com.

Suffused with the spirit of Swadeshi, we started the “Danda March” where we vowed to free ourself of the shackles of government censorship. In the process, Desibaba created a whole generation of libertarians impacting the future political landscape of India in an unforeseen way.

So what was this catalyst of social change? It was a Pakistani website (reportedly) that inspired by the vision of the new dot-com economy had a revolutionary business model—fully advertising-revenue driven , free-for-all porn site primarily built on a South-East Asian theme but with enough international pizzazz to please those among us who considered themselves citizens of the world. No dead links, no unbounded opening of pop-up windows and again most importantly no credit cards, Desibaba truly brought honor to the world of smut.

Chock full of content for every man’s taste, it was a pioneer in many respects. For example, it was the only website that would close during the month of Ramzan. But if you had an emergency and had taken the precaution of bookmarking “into” the site, you could still get access. Such thoughtfulness combined with piety and morals.

Yes of course there were some ugly critics who carped that most of the stories were badly spelt, had no grammar or thematic structure and were extremely perverted. But of course, one man’s perversion is another man’s daily routine—-most importantly Desibaba promoted a culture of non-judgementality and acceptance. The only crib I had was the repeated misspelling of the Bengali word for “brother’s wife”—-it was invariably spelt as “bodi” while it should have been “boudi”. A small blemish.

Desibaba preceded Orkut as a social networking center….so many of those badly spelt, barely coherent stories ended with lines like “Any hot aunties in and around Chennai who would like to pay for massage and …..” . I have often wondered what the success rate for these attempts at networking was. Guess I shall never find out.

Desibaba greatly impacted the Indian media—for instance they were the first to come up with the idea of “Babe of the month” —-a concept later adapted with slight modifications by certain other more mainstream publications. Desibaba also pioneered the art of digital picture manipulation —-in a bygone age where actresses used to keep themselves covered up, it was Desibaba’s view of the bold new future. I read with alarm, that the Desibaba technology is being applied to the reticent and shy Meghna Naidu to make her expose even more than what she usually does. Which just goes to show how much impact it has left on our popular culture.

There were spinoffs and copycats—Desimama mounted a challenge before it became a pay site called Chalugirl. Indian porn portals came out and soon Western porn conglomerates were eyeing the lucrative Indian market. The dot-com industry went bust and the model of advertiser-driven businesses was discredited. Desibaba was swamped with Western competition who, very slyly, started using their old stock photos of Hispanic/Latina women and passing them off as 100% desi. Young Indians, on the crest of a BPO boom, had more credit cards than ever before and were increasingly getting more comfortable using them on the Net and elsewhere.

The death knell for Desibaba had been sounded. People stopped going to websites for their porn—instead they started making them themselves armed with tools hitherto in the hands of a privileged few—camera phones and webcams.

School kids in respectable institutions were shooting their own sex videos and marketing them through auction sites. Desibaba suffered.

Consider this. Who would go to Desibaba to watch digitally morphed pictures when people like Tanusree Dutta were going topless in songs in reality (reference: Aashiq Banaya Aapne)?

Indians were being sexed up too fast and Desibaba was now a relic of a more innocent bygone era—-an anachronism, a giant who had not been able to keep pace with the times. Somewhat like Sourav Ganguly.

It spluttered on for some time before its inevitable death.

Weep not. A website may die but an idea does not. I would like to believe that Desibaba is still alive—spread out over thousands of hard drives where pictures and stories from it have been downloaded over the years .

Indeed I would like to believe something even more powerful. That there is a little bit of Desibaba in each of us—-in the memories we carry. Memories of mammaries, of innocence, of shared secrets, of careless whispers, of the thrill of discovery, the whiff of heaven, the hours of unalloyed joy and most importantly the ideal that Desibaba embodied, an ideal many of us bloggers have been inspired by :

” Real pleasure cannot be bought. It is free.”

Desibaba. 1998–2005.

Rest in peace.

But there is more to talk about.

Let us start with a philosophical issue that is at the core of any pro-reservation argument. That being that certain individuals, namely the meritorious “non-quota” students, who will be deprived of their rightful chance at high quality education should have to make a sacrifice for the greater good of the country—-a good that will be manifested in the realization of the concept of social justice.

In other words, some people shall be asked to take a “hit for the team”.

The same pro-reservation intellectuals (and I am not referring to politicians here but to certain “liberal bloggers/commentators” ) however totally repudiate this ideal of “sacrifice of the individual for the greater good” in the case of say the Narmada Project. Over there, these people are all for the exact opposite principle–” the interests of the individual take precedence over everything else.

Which is why Medha Patkar will fast unto death for the Naramada displacees but not one supposed liberal activist will forgo a meal for the millions of meritorious students who are going to be deprived of their rightful opportunities.

In the Narmada project, at least the government recognizes the need for rehabilitation and compensation (whether what they have promised is sufficient or has been properly disbursed is another question) whereas no such intentions are even expressed for those students asked to make the sacrifice.

And please note: the injustice of displacing people for the sake of a dam is a one-time thing—its effect, as traumatic it is for the concerned people now, will gradually dissipate with time as the displacees get absorbed in other places over a generation or two.

However this is not the case with reservations. Ostensibly motivated by the intention to level the playing-field among different castes in India, it is nothing but a political construct, motivated by vote-bank politics, that seeks to impose educational apartheid for generations on end—–even after the social balancing has been accomplished. (How else do you explain why progenies of people who have already taken advantage of reservations be allowed to take it again?). Which is precisely why the deletrious effects of reservations will perpetuate through generations and cause far more misery than the Narmada dam.

However, this is just the beginning. Soon there will be a quota for Muslims (only a matter of time) and with only about 35% of “unrestricted” admission remaining on pure merit, we will have the makings of a caste war on our hands.

And to add insult to injury, even though the main motivation for reservations will be electoral expediency and sheer greed (the sheer ad-hocness with which the same caste is an OBC in one state and not in the other is ample evidence of the wheeling and dealing that has gone into the making of these lists), there will not be a dearth of intellectuals and let me add, some beneficiaries of the Mandal commission, who shall try to convince us of the need of positive discrimination over pure merit and of the sagacity of Mandal and his political backers.

However, this “positive discrimination” , that little euphemistic phrase, still contains discrimination in it —no matter which way you spin it.

Reservations based on economic criteria, up to a proper percentage (not half of the total seats) and a proper identification of the “creamy” layer ( a mildly amusing term) is the only kind that is fair and just—-everything else is plain rot.

And if that sounds blunt and simplistic and politically incorrect, well that’s just the way it is.

With January 26 here, I thought of sharing it with you.

Dear Phuchiburo (that’s me) and Mago (my wife),

Our first stop of the day was the Cellular Jail. The weather in Calcutta was cold but Andaman was hot although it was also officially winter there.

There is a museum inside in the jail where the pictures of freedom fighters who were detained here are kept. We did not know that Dadu’s picture features prominently there. So when I saw Dadu’s photo on the wall with “Armed Action Case” written on the top of it and his name below, I froze– literally and emotionally. You don’t expect to see your own kin as an exhibit in a museum and that too someone who has been around you physically.

All these times we have gone to so many museums and seen so many people’s pictures and their personal effects but I never ever felt any sort of emotional twitch anywhere in my otherwise very emotional mind because all of them were just “people”– mere statistics to me . Yes they were heroes–noble people whom I respect but who are ultimately strangers—the kind that stare back at you from history books and from the walls of museums. You stop, look at them, feel respect and then move on to the next picture.

But this was different. The man in the picture was someone I knew–in flesh and blood. I called him Baba, I touched his feet, I loved him and I got mad at him for certain things that he did or didn’t do. This was Jyotirmoy Ray, my father-in-law, revolutionary, member of a dangerous anti-British secret society and one of the prisoners of Andaman Cellular Jail.

The same man who also lovingly called me khukuma.

After my son’s marriage, I really came to know what emotional value that simple word “ma” conveys because I call my daughter in law “maago” and nobody knows better than me how much I love her. Same relationship, same love, same hate, same agreements, same disgust, same happy moments. The only difference is that I can’t talk to him now but my daughter in law can talk to me and that is a gigantic difference.

I realized that tears were now flowing down my cheeks. I felt terribly breathless — the impact of controlling my emotions in a public place. Now I know what celebrities in the public domain feel like; not that I am a celebrity but my father-in-law is. I shuddered to look at your father because I knew what was going through his mind.

If this is how I felt, then God knows how he was coping . After all he is his youngest son and the most favorite and pampered of all the three brothers. I really did not want to look at him but my impulse took over. God, he was a mess. I wanted to hold his hand but could not bring myself to because instead of being a source of strength to him, I myself would break down and make a fool of myself in a public place.

Plus he seemed to be lost in a world of his own as he looked at the picture—lost in the memories of his father and his own childhood. So intensely personal to your father was this moment of sadness, remembrance and pride that I did not want to impinge on its tear-soaked purity.

So I just pretended to look at other pictures of freedom fighters who are heroes but definitely not my kin —in order to get a grip on myself and attain the demeanor of an objective museum-visitor. Your father did the same thing for the same reason. We did not look at each other on purpose lest the emotions come flooding back again.

Anyway, we took some pictures and moved on to the next section. This is where the exhibits are. I came to learn that the British authorities made Indians torture fellow Indians. According to them if any prisoner needed any punishment, which was pretty often, then they were to be whipped by Indians—the white man did not want to get his hands dirty with the blood and the sweat. The whipping was done while the prisoner was strapped to a frame by hand and feet so that there was no running around or change of position to lighten the torture. Prisoners’ non-cooperation or hunger strike or failing to fulfill the work quota called for various degrees of punishment as Britishers consider themselves to be fair minded!

The Cellular jail was built by convicts. It had seven wings spread in the form of seven spokes of a wheel, though unequal in length. There were 696 cells specially built for solitary confinement of the prisoners. A three storied central tower was built at the centre of the convergence of the seven wings. A single guard could supervise all the seven wings from this vantage position. Another unique feature was the total absence of communication between the prisoners in the different wings, since the front of one row of cells with verandah running all along, faced the back of the other wing.

Each cell measuring 12ft by 7 ft had an iron grill door. A 3 ft by 1 ft ventilation 9 ft above provided some light and air. A verandah about 4 ft ran all along the front of the row of cells from one end to the other end of the wing. Each cell grill was well secured with sturdy iron bolt and lock which ran through a rectangular channel on the outside of the cell wall a few feet away from the entrance door. This way the prisoners could not even touch the lock for tampering. Each wing had a courtyard in front with a workshop where the prisoners toiled during the day. There was only one kitchen for the prisoners of the whole jail. The prisoners ate in their cells. The food was passed through a trap door.

There was a pot (similar to the one in which they ate) which was to be used for urine and stool within the cell that were to be cleaned by the prisoners when they were let outside in the morning for toiling. They ate, slept, wept and plotted for the freedom of their land in those dingy dark rooms with the stench of excreta, blood, tears and sweat and the screams of pain emanating through the walls as their only companions.

In the jail, work in the oil grinding mill was all the more terrible and caused several deaths. The quantity of work they were made to do was not humanly possible. Thus almost every day was a punishment day. The punishment varied from whipping to hand cuffs for a week to bar fetters to solitary confinement. With hand cuffs the prisoners had to eat and drink like an animals. Bar fetters were long iron rods joined from hand cuffs going down to the ankle cuffs. This way the prisoners could not bend any way. If they decided to lie down, they would have to throw themselves on to the ground and thus get hurt in the process. Some of them were fed boiled wild grass and their drinking water was collected rain water with worms in them.

A majority of the prisoners went through these unimaginable indignities and punishments but did not give in. Some committed suicide. Some lost their mind. For some, their body gave way but not their spirit and they went onto a more peaceful place.

Going through all these made me feel absolutely drenched out. Honestly I could hardly move. I did not ask your father about how he was feeling because I knew the answer.

Just like any Indian, I have read about freedom fighters and the freedom struggle. But I never really realized the actual depth of the zeal that drove them even though I knew that it involved my father in law. The incidents were just dates and events you had to memorize and analyze for examinations though it gave you a warm fuzzy feeling to read about the sacrifices of so many. But somehow such emotions only scratched the surface—-it made us feel “patriotic” in the way an Indian victory in a cricket match makes us feel.

However this Andaman visit and the associated experience and emotions touched a chord that ran much deeper. Is this the reason why psychologists refer to the experience of going back to your “roots” as so important a part in the process of self-realization?

If this is the reason they do, then I fully agree with them. Of course I must also add that had it not been for my own association with a freedom fighter whom I loved, I would surely not have this depth of emotion and understanding in spite of my first hand experience.

We went to the ground floor cells. Barring Savarkar’s cells, all cells were unmarked because the prisoners were quite often shifted from cell to cell. This means my father in law was anywhere and everywhere over here.

By this time my brain cells were asking me to stop due to the physical discomfort from the knee problem. (my mother has a debilitating knee condition which has severely hampered her mobility) But my heart was on autopilot—and somehow in this place the consciousness of your own physical discomfort pales in comparison to the realization of what the people here had to endure for years.

I decided to climb up the two floors above. Your father knows my knees’ endurance level so he was surprised at my decision. I told him “I want to show my respect to my father in law in my own way”.

We went two flights up looking at those empty dingy cells as if searching for the man who directly and indirectly gave me all I have. The cells were, in a way, frightening—despite the apparent peace and tranquility that reigns today, there is still a brooding sense of pain, suffering and death that hovers over the place like a cloud—invisible yet palpable.

But no there was something else which is even more powerful—a light ethereal wondrous presence that dispels the darkness of suffering.

Hope. The hope that sustained these men (your grandfather among them) despite floggings, torture and subhuman treatment. The hope that one day things would be different, the hope that their sons and daughters would grow up in a land free from foreign oppression. And as your father stared into the dark abyss of a cell reaching out for a part of your grandfather forever lost in these walls, I could not help thinking that somehow your father’s presence here, as a free man and as a professor of a premier institute of higher education of a proud resurgent India, is a vindication of the sacrifices your grandfather and his fellow prisoners made.

It was getting late. We moved away—leaving behind the shadows of your grandfather and his fellow patriots. I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness , great pride and a deep sense of understanding of what a hero my father-in-law really is. In a way, it seemed as if I was knowing him all over again—so many years after he passed way.

As we went out of the gates, a bird, catching the last rays of the sun, spread its wings and vanished into the sky. Looking up, I silently thanked your grandfather for everything and I am sure that he heard me all right.

Do visit this place if an opportunity arises. You owe it to him.

God Bless you

Ma

Despite not having seen the movie myself and basing my assessment solely on what the Telegraph and Amit says the movie contains , I shall have to disagree.

Amit quotes the Telegraph article.

The £6.5 million production, which is largely in English and which opened across Britain on Friday, accuses the [British East India] company of murdering civilians to further its interests and of flouting the Empire-wide ban on slavery.

In one scene an officer is shown bidding for a slave girl who is sent to a brothel for the exclusive use of British officers. Later, a fellow officer orders the destruction of a village and itsdefenselesss inhabitants after they refuse to set aside land for opium production.

Saul David, the author of the acclaimed The Indian Mutiny: 1857, attacked the depictions as fabrication.”I am no apologist for the British East India Company but I have never come across any evidence which supports either of these assertions,” he said. “It is nonsense. Of course a certain amount of criticism is justified but this sounds like vilification of the British just for the sake of it.”

Now let me tell you what the British did do. In Bengal (at least and I am sure they did it in other places) till 1860s, the British forced the local farmers to grow indigo instead of paddy. When they refused, the British East India Company would drag villagers to their bunglows, whip and torture them till they signed away their land and set fire to their paddy crops.Sometimes they just did it for the fun of hearing the natives squeal in pain.

The “Neel Sahebs” (the British who were Indigo cultivators) were famous for scouring the land on horseback and kidnapping women for their carnal amusement.

When villagers in Bengal talk about the ancient bunglows of the British in hushed whispers because “the screams of women still echo in the night” they are articulating the collective generational memory of so many Indian women who were raped in those places.

Now I dont know about you, Saul David but this does not seem to me to be too different from “brothels for the exclusive pleasure of Britishers” and “burning villages to force them to grow opium”.

Lest it be dubbed as a conspiracy to defame our erstwhile masters, the person who brought this to public notice was a preacher named Rev. James Long who translated Dinabandhu Mitra’s “Neel Darpan” from Bengali to English.

His motivation? The Indigo planters were too much of a negative advertisement for Christianity—a religion he was trying to get the natives to convert to.

Coming back to the main point, history is not being “manufactured” here—–it is merely being put in a different context for the sake of a movie. Which is not an unreasonable thing to do.

However historians like Saul David, who are intent on sanitizing British rule in India, want to sweep under the carpet the inevitable barbarity that is concomitant of any imperialist agenda (I am sounding like a loony left guy here) and in the process deny bare-facedly the atrocities they have committed.

Amit continues:

The film’s naive political agenda was articulated by Aamir Khan as well, in a recent interview to Time Out in which he said:

The script questions the right of any superpower to move into anothercivilizationn and control and loot it economically and socially try and change its norms. Which is also what’s happening today, that’s what America is doing all over the world. [...] I felt, arre, this happened in 1857 in India, it’s happening today in Iraq and Afghanistan!

And there, in one casual sentence, he condones the barbaric regimes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussain. (I also find the bit about “this happened in 1857 in India” amusing, because what he shows in the film did not, as it turns out, happen.) Afghanistan is certainly better off since the Americans got there and, far from “loot[ing] it economically”, they’ve spent tonloads of money in that place, just as they have done in Iraq. Aamir’s analogies are ludicrous and ignorant.

Again, Amit, I find myself, hopefully for the last time, on the side of a Bollywood actor.

I agree with you—the Taliban was a scourge and so was Saddam. You and I both agree that democracy is the best form of government. And that the US is fighting to bring democracy and spending money to develop infra structure in a foreign country. In other words, in our eyes, the US is doing something to foster positive change. But it is not doing so from a motivation of “liberating suffering peoples ” (despite the political rhetoric) they are doing it to further their national interests. In the process, some “good” is definitely coming about. But the point to note—it is “good” according to our “modern” Western belief systems.

Likewise the British brought about many positive changes but they were motivated by their own self-interest. Western education spread because they needed English-knowing clerks. Railways were built to help British goods reach their market. Their own value system was imposed on Indians, not because the Indians wanted it but because the British (the Evangelical movement was in its ascendancy then) felt it was the white man’s burden to civilize the natives.

The Sepoy Mutiny (or the First War of Independence) was a rebellion against this imperial hubris—- “the white man knows best”.

Looking back, the political reasons behind the Mutiny seem today to be “wrong” ( the caste system, blind superstition, the reinstatement of the lame-duck Bahadur Shah Zafar). However what was “right” was that it was a rebellion against “imposed change”—-true change has to come from inside; it cannot come at the end of a gun. Only resentment is born that way.

[The initiative to ban "Sati" came from intellectuals like Raja Rammohan Roy and widow remarriage from Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, which is why these initiatives were "successful". ]

I know this is a difficult issue to wrest with——there are no clear cut good and bad guys—–I personally support the US’s initiative and believe that the region will be stronger if democracy is established, even though it is an imposed change (which is not the ideal let me add).

However these changes are happening because the US has pre-ordained that “Afghanistan needs democracy” just like the British decided that “feeling overtly emotional about biting off a greased cartridge was silly.”

In that respect, the parallels are striking.

A source says

Their British officers, for their part, are normally scrupulous observers of these silly religious protocols. But on this day, of all days, they appear not to care—if the sepoys are to be properly civilized, they must do away with useless religious forms sooner or later. Why shouldn’t it be sooner?

From the Wiki (this I have seen in all history books about the War)

The Commander in Chief in India, General George Anson reacted to this crisis by saying, “I’ll never give in to their beastly prejudices”, and despite the pleas of his junior officers he did not compromise.
…………………..

In February 1857 when 19th Bengal Native Infantry regiment came to know about new cartridges, they refused. Their Colonel confronted them angrily with artillery and cavalry on the parade ground, but then accepted their demand to withdraw the artillery and cancel next morning parade.

This is what the Telegraph critiques “the Rising” with:

The film’s version of events is rather different. Not only are the bullets issued but an officer threatens to slaughter reluctant sepoys with a cannon unless they agree to use them.

In other words, according to the Telegraph, noone confronted the sepoys with artillery and cavalry once they refused to use the cartridges. Creative with the truth here perhaps?

So here’s the final deal. From what I hear, “The Rising” has its share of historical inaccuracies—but it does not exaggerate British repression to such an extent that they should start croaking about it.

The British did a lot of good (without intending to) but if they want to pretend to have been merely benign political masters whose only legacy was Western education, the Railways and cricket—–then they are, in true English style, understating themselves.