97th Constitutional Amendment

The Constitution (Ninety Seventh Amendment) Act, 2011 has come into force from 12th January, 2012. The official Gazette notification can be found here: http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/amend/amend97.pdf

The amendment act makes certain changes in Article 19 (1) (c) and under Part IV of the Constitution Article 43B has been added. The amendment focuses on the rights of co-operative societies in India.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK "OCCUPY WALL STREET"...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK’S OCCUPY WALL STREET SPEECH

They are saying we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath this ground. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street, "Hey, look down!"

In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh. we were young and it was beautiful.”
Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want? Remember. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harmless, moral protest. A decaffienated protest. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of a world where, to recycle Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy a Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes to third world starving children is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after marriage agencies are now outsourcing our love life, we can see that for a long time, we allow our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back.

We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible.

What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, "Impossible, this means totalitarian state." There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we need to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standard of living. We want a better standard of living. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not American here. But the conservatives fundamentalists who claim they really are American have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostaligically remembering “What a nice time we had here.” Promise yourselves that this will not be the case. We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much.

The Dirty Picture: Review

THE DIRTY PICTURE—UNVEILING THE DIRT WITHIN

Bhawna Gulati

The Dirty Picture—one of the most talked about movie in the year 2011 is receiving mixed responses apart from one unanimous verdict—Bravo Vidya. The movie depicts the life saga of a woman from a small village in Andhra Pradesh turning into the most sought after body in the south Indian film industry in the 1980s. However, contrary to the mass misconception the movie offers much more beyond the struggle of a ‘coming from nowhere’ south Indian porn star, cleavage showing by Silk (Vidya Balan) and her sad love life. The movie unveils not just the life trajectory of a famous south Indian star, Silk, in the 1980’s but also the hypocrisy of the society we live in. The character of Silk is analogous to the darkest character attributes that surround human beings. Their existence is known but could not be acknowledged.

Silk epitomizes that side of each one of us, which we know to exist but are too embarrassed to recognize or own it up. They are well appreciated as part of our own selves in lightless surroundings but in the bright lights any sort of acquaintance with them frights us of public opprobrium. The movie satirically depicts how each participant in the plot—the director, the actor, the journalist and the audiences—fulfill their desires, monetary and non-monetary, by encashing Silk’s sexuality yet they are capable of segregating the world into good and bad, pure and dirty. The movie also finely uncovers the prevailing gender discrimination at those times. The journalist in the movie, named ‘Naila’ (Anju Mahendru), though appreciate Silk’s so-called revolutionary attitude to fix the double standards of the society at the award evening, continues to remain the biggest critique throughout. Her advice to Silk ‘to remain as she is without thinking twice about what she is doing because her attitude will shape the revolutionary trend in society’ reaffirms the double standards because in spite of being a powerful agent of the society she was unable to publically propagate Silk’s bravado. Also the appreciation accorded to the ‘struggling’ director Ibrahim in the end, for making a movie of the same genre for which Silk was famous, depicts how the base level of subjective morality changes. When a man does the same thing as the woman was doing the ‘The Dirty Picture’ becomes ‘commercially viable film’. And to the author’s understanding, it was still Silk’s victory because ultimately what she said (“films run because of entertainment”) was proven right by Ibrahim adopting the similar strategy (minus Silk though) for his film.

Yet another example of gender bias—when the famous male film star ‘Surya’ felt offensive and said “pack up”, it was female actress’s (Silk) fault to respond to his humiliating remark of comparing a female actor in the movie to the plastic used for wrapping a cigarette packet. But when ‘Silk’ was ill treated by a director and said “pack up”, she was morally threatened of the expected downfall for saying no to work.

Though initially Silk was used for minting money by all stakeholders, her own unashamed gimmick of using her body as a short cut to success was not acceptable to the self-appointed moral protectors of the society. When her bold seductiveness became inevitable for anyone to ignore, it became the subject of criticism for being responsible for polluting the minds of male generation. By that logic, the criticism often accorded to smokers and drinkers should be considered ill-founded. If Silk is bad to show the world what they want to see then by the same logic, the cigarette and liquor manufacturers should be blamed for inducing innocent people into bad addictive life patterns. But ethics and morals are supposed to be the subjective cushions often used for human comfort. The movie shows how gradually Silk’s sexuality started haunting the very basis of the perceived ethics of the society. Her success posed doubts on the moral quotient of humanity because her success implied our appreciation of her skin show. Such stigmatic fear of facing the reality of the pretentious world forced humanity to put an end to further encounter with hard truths—putting an end to Silk. And she died. But the question remains whether it was just a suicide or a murder to cover up the naked realities which were uncovering with the shedding of her clothes. And she died all covered from head to toe in a red saree and a bindi. Though it was not indicated in the movie, but it seems that probably it was her innate desire to be seen as a woman, at least once, and not just as a body.