Bawandar (Sandstorm)

Saw a Hindi film called Bawandar(Sandstorm)(2000) last week. It is based on an actual story of Bhanwari Devi a woman living in a small village in the Western state of Rajasthan in India, who was gang-raped as a punishment for her activism in the village. This happened in 1992 and led to a high profile court case.

By the standards of modern Indian films this is a daring film along the lines of the more internationally known film Bandit Queen(1994) as it is quasi-realistic though not a documentary. Though it uses regular actors it does not have the usual song-and-dance sequences of Bollywood films; the characters speak in the actual local dialect rather than just adding a "rural" accent; the depiction of rape is horrific and gut-wrenching (as is the nature of the act) rather than being euphemistically depicted where the woman's bangles symbolically shatter or a candle goes out, etc; and the proceedings of the court case are far more realistic that the typical flamboyant, sensationalized court scenes one sees in films. While it is commendable that somebody took this real story seriously enough to make a serious film, as a film it is not a particularly good one -- some parts of it are very good and some parts are just downright cheesy and given to oversimplification, stereotyping and mischaracterization.

Anyway, after the movie ended there was a discussion about what impact the film may have had on Bhanwari Devi. I did some looking around on the web to get a handle on the actual facts of the case and here are some of things that I found (organized into three categories)

1. Actual facts of the case
   A press release from 1995 by a collection of NGOs (Forum on Violence Against Women et al.) that provides a good summary of the case.
   
   
2. The impact of the film
   
   • Long wait for justice(March 04, 2001) -- a review of the controversy that the film raised in India due to the heavy handedness of the Censor Board from The Hindu (a national newspaper in India).
     
     
   • Unjust films on justice(December 03, 2000) -- Also from The Hindu, but a less sympathetic review of the movie.
     
     
   • Squabbling over how the movie impacted Bhanwari Devi
     
     • Rape victim enters Bollywood filmscript but stays an outcast (November 25, 2001) -- A journalist Sukhmani Singh for the The Indian Express (another national Indian newspaper) tracked Bhanwari Devi down and wrote a 'human interest' story on what effect the movie had on her and the claims and counterclaims of exploitation that it has led to.
       
       
     • A storm in the desert (December 14, 2001) -- Sukhmani Singh wrote a more personal (and more polemical) editorial on the fate of Bhanwari Devi and how she was being exploited and manipulated both by the film-makers, the NGOs who were using her as a poster child for their respective causes and middlemen trying to make a buck from this sudden media glut.
       
       
     • So many caricatures(December 20, 2001) -- Responding to these accusations, Jaya Sharma of a womens group (Nirantar) wrote a pointed rebuttal to this unfair potrayal of the NGOs.
     
     
   • Government extends financial help to Bhanwari Devi(January 10, 2002) - The online newspaper Rediff reports that "...Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot announced the allotment of residential plot to Bhanwari Devi and a grant of Rs 40,000 for construction of a dwelling on it..."
   
   
   
3. The larger impact of this case (which very surprisingly the movie never mentioned even during the epilogue)
   
   • [Extract from a United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) report Say no to gender violence:Chapter 5 (Pg 94)] (Note: CEDAW = Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women]
     

     "....In 1992, a group of women's organisations submitted a writ petition to the Supreme Court of India in Vishakha vs. State of Rajasthan. The petition concerned the gang rape of a social worker in a village in Rajasthan and the failure of local officers to investigate the matter.
     
     The Court was petitioned to enquire after the absence of laws prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace. In agreement with the petitioners, the Court found that, by ratifying CEDAW and
     making official commitments in Beijing, India had endorsed the international standard of human rights, making it mandatory for the Government to protect women"s rights in all spheres, including the work place.
     
     The significance of the Vishakha judgement was the Supreme Court's ruling that although CEDAW is not directly part of the domestic law of India, international conventions like it can be used by Indian courts to shape national laws. The Court drew up a set of guidelines and norms, including detailed requirements for processing sexual harassment complaints, which will bind private and public employers until the Government passes suitable legislation. 24 Government departments, universities and colleges are among institutions that have set up committees to investigate cases of sexual harassment. The Court's guidelines rely on CEDAW's general recommendation 19, especially with regard to the definition of sexual harassment. Unfortunately, however, the Court has not established a clear time frame for implementing these guidelines...."

     
     Even as a lay person, it seems to me like a truly important decision.
     
     
   • The highlights of the "Vishaka versus State of Rajathan" judgement are summarized in Annexure 5.1 (Pg 29) of the report Making women more secure in Delhi: Towards confidence building and tackling sexual harassment (on the Delhi govt's Dept of Social Welfare website)
     
     
   • The real name of the prominent activist who helped Bhanwari Devi is Kavita Srivastava and she has an interesting paper called Facilitating justice for women & dalits: Experiences from Rajasthan
     
     
   • Finally, the Human Rights Watch chapter Attacks on Dalit women: a pattern of impunity(in the larger report Broken people: Caste Violence Against India's Untouchables, 1999) has a bit about Bhanwari Devi in the broader context of discriminatory violence against Dalits.
     

The 1911 Encyclopedia

:) Just discovered that the entire contents of the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is now online (see the Wikipedia entry for why this is so special).

You can find a raw version of the entire edition at LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia, and a more clean and correct segment of
Volume II: ANDROS to AUSTRIA at the Project Gutenberg site. Enjoy!!!

Tower of Hanoi

Check out the original box cover of the famous Tower of Hanoi puzzle and the two-page instruction sheet that accompanied it (in French and it's English translation), thanks to Paul Stockmeyer. The puzzle was invented and marketed in 1883 by Professor N. CLAUS (DE SIAM) -- an anagram pseudonym for Professor Edouard LUCAS (D'AMEINS).

A post on the newsgroup rec.puzzle from 1993, citing Ball and Coxeter's Mathematical recreations and essays, claims that the following piece of ancient folklore associated with this puzzle was concocted by Henri De Parville in 1884.

"In the great temple at Benares, says he, beneath the dome which marks the centre of the world, rests a brass plate in which are fixed three diamond needles, each a cubit high and as thick as the body of a bee. On one of these needles, at the creation, God placed sixty-four discs of pure gold, the largest disc resting on the brass plate, and the others getting smaller and smaller up to the top one. This is the Tower of Bramah. Day and night unceasingly the priests transfer the discs from one diamond needle to another according to the fixed and immutable laws of Bramah, which require that the priest on duty must not move more than one disc at a time and that he must place this disc on a needle so that there is no smaller disc below it. When the sixty-four discs shall have been thus transferred from the needle on which at the creation God placed them to one of the other needles, tower, temple, and Brahmins alike will crumble into dust, and with a thunderclap the world will vanish.

The confirmation of these origins is the authoritative post by David Singmaster on the Historia Mathematica mailing list (February 11th, 2000). It mentions that apparently Robert Ripley was taken in by this story and included it in one of his early Believe It or Not books. Also see Singmaster's Queries on "Sources in recreational mathematics" for a treasure trove of trivia on common puzzles.

Zelig (1983)

Last night I saw Woody Allen's absolutely hilarous mockumentary Zelig. In my evaluation this is easily one of the most ingenious and innovative of the films of his that I've seen so far.

Aside: The movie has several clips of Adolf Hitler and this was the first time that I've seen and heard a several minute long clip of Hilter making a speech. :) The first thought that jumped into my head was how similar he was to Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator, complete with the wild gesticulating. But I'm really curious now to see Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens(1934).

Films

I saw Maria Full of Grace last night. An excellent film and one of those movies where the realism makes watching the movie a gut-wrenchingly intense experience.

Stylistically, Maria Full of Grace reminded me deeply of Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist, in also being focussed on a teenage woman who is determined/stubborn yet confused who finds herself in a "strange" predicament (partially of her own creation) and entirely left to her own means to grapple with deep decisions about motherhood in these circumstances. In both films, the intense focus on the central characters, almost as if the camera were attached to their faces at every moment of the film, was like a connection right into their souls.

However, with respect to it's didactic intent the film is considerably closer to Dirty Pretty Things i.e. Exploitation of The Desperate in/from developing countries in the Trafficking "business" for the Developed World (drugs, organs, etc). While this is an obtrusive theme in Dirty Pretty Things, it does not interfere with the film in Maria Full of Grace.

The Art of Controversy

Check out the online edition of The Art of Controversy by Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by T. Bailey Saunders, eBooks@Adelaide, 2004) -- a highly engaging manual for how to win an argument by the careful use of controversy.

Here is a sampling of his premise:

"...For human nature is such that if A. and B. are engaged in thinking in common, and are communicating their opinions to one another on any subject, so long as it is not a mere fact of history, and A. perceives that B.‘s thoughts on one and the same subject are not the same as his own, he does not begin by revising his own process of thinking, so as to discover any mistake which he may have made, but he assumes that the mistake has occurred in B.‘s. In other words, man is naturally obstinate; and this quality in him is attended with certain results, treated of in the branch of knowledge which I should like to call Dialectic, but which, in order to avoid misunderstanding, I shall call Controversial or Eristical Dialectic. Accordingly, it is the branch of knowledge which treats of the obstinacy natural to man. Eristic is only a harsher name for the same thing.

Controversial Dialectic is the art of disputing, and of disputing in such a way as to hold one’s own, whether one is in the right or the wrong—per fas et nefas. A man may be objectively in the right, and nevertheless in the eyes of bystanders, and sometimes in his own, he may come off worst..."

"...If the reader asks how this is, I reply that it is simply the natural baseness of human nature. If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no moment, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence; but, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right. The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment. For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They speak before they think; and even though they may afterwards perceive that they are wrong, and that what they assert is false, they want it to seem the contrary. The interest in truth, which may be presumed to have been their only motive when they stated the proposition alleged to be true, now gives way to the interests of vanity: and so, for the sake of vanity, what is true must seem false, and what is false must seem true.

However, this very dishonesty, this persistence in a proposition which seems false even to ourselves, has something to be said for it. It often happens that we begin with the firm conviction of the truth of our statement; but our opponent’s argument appears to refute it. Should we abandon our position at once, we may discover later on that we were right after all; the proof we offered was false, but nevertheless there was a proof for our statement which was true. The argument which would have been our salvation did not occur to us at the moment. Hence we make it a rule to attack a counter-argument, even though to all appearances it is true and forcible, in the belief that its truth is only superficial, and that in the course of the dispute another argument will occur to us by which we may upset it, or succeed in confirming the truth of our statement. In this way we are almost compelled to become dishonest; or, at any rate, the temptation to do so is very great. Thus it is that the weakness of our intellect and the perversity of our will lend each other mutual support; and that, generally, a disputant fights not for truth, but for his proposition, as though it were a battle pro aris et focis. He sets to work per fas et nefas; nay, as we have seen, he cannot easily do otherwise. As a rule, then, every man will insist on maintaining whatever he has said, even though for the moment he may consider it false or doubtful. "

And here are some of the strategies that would be very familiar:

The appeal to simplicity

"XXVIII.
This is chiefly practicable in a dispute between scholars in the presence of the unlearned. If you have no argument ad rem, and none either ad hominem, you can make one ad auditores; that is to say, you can start some invalid objection, which, however, only an expert sees to be invalid. Now your opponent is an expert, but those who form your audience are not, and accordingly in their eyes he is defeated; particularly if the objection which you make places him in any ridiculous light. People are ready to laugh, and you have the laughers on your side. To show that your objection is an idle one, would require a long explanation on the part of your opponent, and a reference to the principles of the branch of knowledge in question, or to the elements of the matter which you are discussing; and people are not disposed to listen to it.

For example, your opponent states that in the original formation of a mountain-range the granite and other elements in its composition were, by reason of their high temperature, in a fluid or molten state; that the temperature must have amounted to some 480° Fahrenheit; and that when the mass took shape it was covered by the sea. You reply, by an argument ad auditores, that at that temperature—nay, indeed, long before it had been reached, namely, at 212° Fahrenheit—the sea would have been boiled away, and spread through the air in the form of steam. At this the audience laughs. To refute the objection, your opponent would have to show that the boiling-point depends not only on the degree of warmth, but also on the atmospheric pressure; and that as soon as about half the sea-water had gone off in the shape of steam, this pressure would be so greatly increased that the rest of it would fail to boil even at a temperature of 480°. He is debarred from giving this explanation, as it would require a treatise to demonstrate the matter to those who had no acquaintance with physics."

The theory/practice dichotomy

XXXIII.
“That’s all very well in theory, but it won’t do in practice.” In this sophism you admit the premisses but deny the conclusion, in contradiction with a well-known rule of logic. The assertion is based upon an impossibility: what is right in theory must work in practice; and if it does not, there is a mistake in the theory; something has been overlooked and not allowed for; and, consequently, what is wrong in practice is wrong in theory too.

The feigned ignorance approach

"XXXI.
If you know that you have no reply to the arguments which your opponent advances, you may, by a fine stroke of irony, declare yourself to be an incompetent judge: “What you now say passes my poor powers of comprehension; it may be all very true, but I can’t understand it, and I refrain from any expression of opinion on it.” In this way you insinuate to the bystanders, with whom you are in good repute, that what your opponent says is nonsense. Thus, when Kant’s Kritik appeared, or, rather, when it began to make a noise in the world, many professors of the old ecclectic school declared that they failed to understand it, in the belief that their failure settled the business. But when the adherents of the new school proved to them that they were quite right, and had really failed to understand it, they were in a very bad humour.

This is a trick which may be used only when you are quite sure that the audience thinks much better of you that of your opponent. A professor, for instance may try it on a student.

Strictly, it is a case of the preceding trick: it is a particularly malicious assertion of one’s own authority, instead of giving reasons. The counter-trick is to say: “I beg your pardon; but, with your penetrating intellect, it must be very easy for you to understand anything; and it can only be my poor statement of the matter that is at fault”; and then go on to rub it into him until he understands it nolens volens, and sees for himself that it was really his own fault alone. In this way you parry his attack. With the greatest politeness he wanted to insinuate that you were talking nonsense; and you, with equal courtesy, prove to him that he is a fool."

Previews

To the handful of people who visit this blog, there will be no updates till Monday next week. But stay tuned because I have two extremely interesting threads that I've been digging into and which have shown up in earlier entries, namely the politics of food commodities -- in particular the colonial conquests motivated by the craving for spices and the unbelievably crazy politics of salt!!!

The birthday of Mahatma Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in the town of Porbander in the state of what is now Gujarat (India) on the 2nd of October 1869.

In his characteristic approach to subversive politics, to protest the oppressive salt tax the 61-year old Gandhi set out with 78 others on a 241 kilometer (150 mile) march to the coastal city of Dandi on March 12th, 1930 with the deliberate goal breaking the law (therefore referred to as the Dandi March). There are several excellent accounts of the march on the web, including a
book.

Here is a link to a rarer account of the socio-economic climate in the state of Orissa prior to this event: The Story of Salt, Mohinder Singh, Gandhi Marg, October-December 2002,Volume.24, No.3

Two faded photos of the march from Kamat's archives of theIndian National Congress [Photo-1][Photo-2])

On tamarind

It all began with the simple question of what part of the world tamarind originally came from.

The etymology (from Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages):

"...In Arabic tamr-hindi simply means “date of India” (“date” being a general name for the fruits of various palm trees); needless to say, tamarind neither stems from India nor is it related to palm trees. In spite of this deficiency, loan translations of this name have made their way into English, German (Indische Dattel) and Russian (Indiyskiy finik).
The term "date" itself came to English via Old Provençal datil and allegedly goes back to Greek daktylos “finger”; this naming, obviously motivated by shape resemblance, seems even more fit for tamarind than for true dates..."

So it turns out that the the actual origin of tamarind is in Eastern Africa, even though it grows all over the tropics. Coooool!

---

[Aside: despite the same spelling, "date" (as in 2nd October 2004) has a very different etymology - "In ancient Latin, the date of a letter was expressed thus ‘Dabam Romæ prid. Kal. Apr.’, i.e. ‘I gave or delivered (this) at Rome on the 31st March’, for which the later formula was ‘Data Romæ, given at Rome’, etc. Hence data the first word of the formula was used as a term for the time and place therein stated." (from the Oxford English Dictionary)]