Prostitutes of God

VBS tv, the video brance of Vice Magazine, has made a documentary about sex workers in India, the Devadasi, who are dedicated to to a specific deity and serve the deity. Originally the devadasi served as ritual dancers, but this practice has turned into young women being dedicated into sex work. It can be watched here.

There are a few commenters on the website that say that the documentary unfairly represents the devadasi. While there is always a risk of patronization and colonialist sentiment when making a documentary like this one, the video (which can be watched below) that is in response to the documentary doesn’t present good arguments for how and why the documentary wrongfully portrayed the devadasi. In fact one of the commenterrs (Raju, the man who’s mother was a devadasi) enforces the documentary’s point that women turn to this line of work to support their families and should not have to become sex workers in order to make a living.

Harry Potter actress’ father, brother threaten “honor-killing”

Via the Zap2it via Hemat Mehta:

The 22-year-old actress’s father and brother have been charged with threatening to kill her, says the Daily Mail. The altercation occurred at the family home in Manchester, England. In addition to threatening her, Afshan’s brother, 28-year-old Ashraf, is also accused of physically assaulting Afshan and “causing her bodily harm.”

…

According to People [Magazine], Afshan’s Muslim family was angry about her relationship with a Hindu man…

Afshan is said to be staying with friends in London.

The NY Post  Afshan herself:

Ashraf told the Daily Telegraph that the family will suffer as a result of the scandal.

“We are going to get trouble from the community now,” he said. “It is bad news for our safety, her safety.”

“Her career could be ruined. When she goes to a premiere or something, they are going to ask her about this, not the film,” he added.

“My younger brother is going to get harassed at college,” Ashraf said. “All our family is going to be harassed by the community because of this.”

It might be somewhat callous to say this, but some great good could come out of this great evil, if Ashraf is willing to talk about her situation. She could be the catalyst for an open discussion about the violent traditionalism in unassimilated Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian and African communities–and be an inspiration to the tens of thousands of women and girls living under Sharia-inspired domestic tyranny.

Inter-caste marriages face honor killings in India

Orwell on Gandhi

Perhaps it is the calcification of my sympathy in old age (21 summers), but whenever I see the bumper sticker (more often on the bar of a bicycle than an actual bumper) reading “Be the change you want to see in the world,” I cannot but entertain the suspicion the driver (or, more often, cyclist) has only read that one sentence of Karamchand Gandhi’s, or that one and another (“Eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”), and maybe seen the fawning Ben Kinsley film. Most are probably ignorant of the not insubstantial body of writings including his own autobiography, Hindu apologetics, politics, methods, and the Ahimsa discipline that informed the actions of his public life. Therefore, in the common Western imagination, Gandhi is not so much an individual with a biography and opinions so much a symbol of sacrifice, peacefulness, and ineffable “Oriental” wisdom or “Eastern” profundity. The details of the prescriptions Gandhi saw necessary for moral living would likely be a jarring surprise to many of his Western admirers. The most extreme were detailed in a laudably even-handed essay by another one of the 20^th century’s great voices of democracy and decency, George Orwell:

Gandhi himself, in his middle thirties, took the vow of brahmacharya, which means not only complete chastity but the elimination of sexual desire. This condition, it seems, is difficult to attain without a special diet and frequent fasting. One of the dangers of milk-drinking is that it is apt to arouse sexual desire. And finally – this is the cardinal point – for the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves whatever.

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi – with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction – always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which – I think – most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

Saw “Slumdog Millionaire” tonight

Kinda. I walked out after about 30 minutes.

The lives of the rag-picker children of India’s shantytowns are of course one that deserves to be told; I just wish the filmmakers had found a more accessible way to tell it. What I saw was 30 minutes of unrelenting brutality. I realize that’s kind of the point–but I’m not too sensitive of a person; I can shrug off most cinematic violence and, indeed, the film’s conventional violence, in the scene wherein a Hindu radical mob terrorizes a Muslim village, made little impression on me. But I found this unwatchable.

The Academy obviously disagreed with me.

Obviously. Like, by giving Sean Penn an Oscar for Milk. As a human being, Sean Penn has probably affected more evil for gay sthan comfort in defending the murderously bigoted regime of Cuba. . Via Pink Triangle:

When Cuba adopted Soviet-style communism it also adopted Soviet-style prejudice and puritanism. Ever since Stalin promoted the ideology of “the socialist family” and recriminalised gay sex in 1934, communist orthodoxy dictated that homosexuality was a “bourgeois decadence” and “capitalist degeneration”. This became the Cuban view. “Maricones” (faggots) were routinely denounced as “sexual deviants” and “agents of imperialism”. Laughable allegations of homosexuality were used in an attempt to discredit “corrupting” Western influences, such as pop music, with the communists circulating the rumour that the Beatles were gay.

In the name of the new socialist morality, homosexuality was declared illegal in Cuba and typically punishable by four years’ imprisonment. Parents were required to prevent their children from engaging in homosexual activities and to report those who did to the authorities. Failure to inform on a gay child was a crime against the revolution.

Official homophobia led, in the mid-1960s, to the mass round-up of gay people, without charge or trial. Many were seized in night-time swoops and incarcerated in forced-labour camps for “re-education” and “rehabilitation”. A few disappeared and never returned

Yet Penn, in his perennial cluelessness, didn’t let any of this stop him from writing apologies for the regime in The Nation as late as last year.

On a related note, I’m pleased the Academy didn’t honor Soderburgh’s biopic of mass murderer and homophobe Ernesto “Che” Guevara—though this might only be the case because the film was released so late in the year that it will be consideered for next year’s awards.

Aaaaaand I almost let my post about  a night at the movies turn into  a chiding of the left for undeserved veneration of Che Guevara. Not that this is not an unworthy thing to write for–but rather it deserves a post all its own.

Update: Indian extremists plan Valentine’s Day demonstration

Sri Ram Sena, the Hindu nationalist group who mobbed a pub full of women has vowed to march on Valentine’s Day against a perceived Western, Christian conspiracy against Indian identity. However, the women of India have but into motion some counter-demonstrations already. Via TNR and NYT:

The Facebook group, called “A Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women,” was formed to combat plans by the conservative Hindu activists, known as Sri Ram Sena (”the Army of Lord Ram”) to intimidate Indian women on Valentine’s Day. As of Friday morning, the Facebook group had more than 34,000 35,000 members (and it still growing: the group has added 1,000 members in the hour after we first published this post)…

The counteroffensive, led by the group that is using Facebook to organize, began with a campaign to get young women to send pink women’s underwear to Sri Ram Sean’s leader, Mr. Muthalik.

The BBC reported on Friday that thousands of pairs had been sent:

A spokeswoman for the group, Nisha Susan, told the BBC it was giving chaddis (Hindi colloquial for underwear) as they alluded to a prominent Hindu right-wing group whose khaki-shorts-wearing cadres were often derisively called “chaddi wallahs” (chaddi wearers).

“We chose the color pink because it is a frivolous colour,” she said.

The Blogspot  of the loose and forward women is here.

Indian mob assaults co-eds

Via NYT:

A mob attack on women drinking in a college-town bar has set off the latest battle in the great Indian culture wars, uncorking a national debate over moral policing and its political repercussions, and laying bare the limits of freedom for young Indian women.

The latest Old versus New India hubbub began one Saturday last month when an obscure Hindu organization, which calls itself Sri Ram Sena, or the Army of Ram, a Hindu god, attacked several women at a bar in the southern Indian college town of Mangalore and accused them of being un-Indian for being out drinking and dancing with men.

The Sena had television news crews in tow, so its attack on the women at the bar, called Amnesia—the Lounge, was swiftly broadcast nationwide. The video, broadcast repeatedly since then, showed some women being pushed to the ground and others cowering and shielding their faces…. Eventually, more than 10 members of the Sena were arrested, only to be released on bail in a week. Since then, they have promised to campaign against Valentine’s Day, which they criticized as a foreign conspiracy to dilute Indian culture, and they said they did not disapprove of men drinking at bars.

The conflict surrounding so-called pub culture in India set off nearly two weeks of shouting matches on television talk shows and editorial pages. Politicians have also jumped into the fray.

At first, some lawmakers with the governing Congress Party seized on the Mangalore attack to denounce their political rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., for its loose affiliations with a variety of Hindu radical groups. But the B.J.P., which governs the state of Karnataka, where Mangalore is located, instantly condemned the violence. And soon enough, others allied with the governing coalition, while condemning violence, joined the finger-wagging.

One official denounced shopping malls, too, calling them havens of hand-holding. The health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, promised a national alcohol law to curb drinking, without which, he told reporters, “India will not progress.”

B. P. Singhal, a former member of Parliament who was with the B.J.P. and who has been making the rounds of television talk shows, rued that men acted irresponsibly in the company of women at bars. A Sena leader appeared on television to say his group was stepping in to enforce morality because the government had failed.

Sena is trying to do nothing more or less than exempt men from managing their own thingers, etc. etc. etc., and all the other things that shouldn’t have to be said anymore.

The women and child development minister, Renuka Chowdhury, has been one of the few politicians to openly criticize the Sena, calling its methods “Talibanization.”

The debate comes as a new generation of Indian women steps out of the home for work or play in a rapidly expanding economy and finds itself having to negotiate old social boundaries, harassment and, sometimes, outright violence. New Delhi is among the most notorious for this; among big cities in India, it has logged the highest number of reported cases of rape and molestation for the last decade.