As a foreign news correspondent for the BBC you’ve travelled all over the world and must’ve seen horrifying and extraordinary things: can you give us examples of humanity at its best and at its worst?

I have witnessed first hand many instances of the horrific treatment of vulnerable people in my work as a correspondent: young girls being enslaved to work as prostitutes, babies being bought and sold, the mental ill being kept in chains and villagers murdering fellow families because they’re from a different caste or religion. And that is not counting the suffering and violence associated with armed conflict and, in a different way, with natural disasters.

It would be easy to have a cynical view of human nature. But what heartens me is the knowledge that I am not the only person who finds such stories distressing. In all these environments, I have come across many examples of people who are brave enough to take a stand against injustice and fight for other people’s rights and safety, often at great personal risk. I’ve also seen great acts of kindness – for example, families who are desperately poor themselves but who willingly take in a family of strangers and feed and shelter them, just because they are in need – or, during murderous riots, people who risked their own lives by intervening to try to defend those under attack. In a less direct way, it is also humbling when I have broadcast a report and afterwards “ordinary” people, who live thousands of miles away in a different culture, get in touch with me to ask how they can help or how they can send money to the people in need.

You’re currently based in London: do you prefer to be at home and travel on assignments, or do you prefer long-term postings abroad, such as those in Delhi and Washington, DC? Would you like to leave the UK again and, for that matter, do you consider the UK your home?

I definitely consider the UK to be home. I was born and brought up here and my family lives here – and has done for as far back as we can trace the family tree. I loved living overseas for almost all of my 20s and 30s. It was exciting and I learned so much about other cultures, about people, about news and, of course, about myself. But now I am very happy to have the best of both worlds: living in London but having the chance to travel often for work and pleasure.

To what extent are the characters, locations and situations described in your novels based on your experiences as a journalist?

I try to draw on elements of my own experiences to give my novels credibility and authenticity. My real life experiences help me, for example, to give a strong sense of place and describe what a particular environment feels, smells and looks like. It also feeds the books in terms of developing key themes and ideas.

My first novel, The Last Kestrel, is set in Helmand Province during the current conflict and it would have been really hard to describe a village in Helmand, give a sense of the local culture and reflect an experience of a journalist who is embedded with the British military if I hadn’t experienced these things for myself.

But it’s also extremely important that the actual events, the plot lines and characters are all fictional. It’s almost a case of knowing a place to start with – then taking a big step away from the real world, going into the imagination and only then starting to write. Also plot is very different from real life and needs to come to reasonably satisfying resolutions and conclusions.

Far from my Father’s House is a case in point. I’ve spent time in relief camps in North West Pakistan, interviewing people who have escaped from communities which had been taken over by the Taliban and some of the stories I heard and the women I met made me inspired, some time later, to sit down and imagine a set of fictional characters and the journeys they might take.

Do you write your fiction with an agenda? That is to say, are you trying to create a work of art or raise social issues? ‘Both’, of course, is an entirely reasonable answer.

I don’t want to pursue an agenda. That would imply for a start that I thought I had the answers – and a theme in the novels is that no-one really does. Agendas are too simple. The moral landscapes in all my novels are very grey. There are no good or bad characters. The characters are all people who are doing the best they can to survive and to pursue their dreams in very difficult situations and while they are coming under immense internal and external pressure. I’d like readers to have a sense of the humanity of these characters – with all the complexities and struggles that humanity involves. So they’re not intended to deliver simple social messages – that would be unrealistic and too convenient.

Who are the writers that you admire and enjoy?

I used to love Virginia Woolf when I was a teenager – especially To The Lighthouse. Her use of language was so lyrical and groundbreaking. More recently I’ve really enjoyed the novels of Sarah Waters – probably Fingersmith is my favourite – for their clever plotting and very clean but evocative use of language.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road blew me away when I first read it. It’s harrowing but also a very moving examination of a man’s love for his child.

One of my favourite recent books was Wolf Hall – a very worthy winner of the Booker Prize. She has such a gift for narrative and for character. I felt bereft when I finished it – and can’t wait for the sequel to come out.

Do you feel that any of them influence your style?

I suspect that all these years as a working journalist have influenced my style more than other writers. My writing used to be more lyrical when I was younger and I was interested in language for its own sake. Now I see language as a means to an end, not an end in itself. The narrative and the characters matter and the words only serve them. Journalism also taught me the discipline of sitting down and getting on with it.

Finally, as a journalist, do you think the recent phone hacking saga will make the public wary of the media as a whole, or reinforce trusted organisations like the BBC?

There’ve always been good and bad journalists, some who are very ethical and some who are less so. I think the public has the sense to realise that good journalism is valuable, in fact essential, and needs to be safeguarded. The current scandals are a terrible shock for the profession but hopefully it will lead to wider debate about what’s acceptable and what isn’t, what’s genuinely in the public interest and what is not.

As McGivering says, all her characters are fictions pulled together from strands of reality and this is most evident in the central character of Layla who is presented to us through the first person. The author gives Layla a very convincing voice which makes the relationship between the girl and her family so engaging, and equally evocative are the descriptions of Pakistan itself. Layla is educated as the son her father never had and sometimes wishes that she indeed been a boy so she could work and travel as the men of her people do. Gender inequalities are a central theme of the book but McGivering is able to avoid ever sounding like a preaching churl of Western values who thinks Muslims have everything wrong.

Layla’s father attempts to resist the Taliban but, despite his courage, his school is crushed by the oppressive agents of that glorified crime ring. There are more attacks on education later in the novel, highlighting that under all totalitarian regimes freedom of thought and expression must be crushed in order to protect the thugs who would seek to control every aspect of their supporters’ lives.

Ellen, a British journalist, and Jamelia, Layla’s father’s first wife, are the other two voices in the book – this time in third person. Sometimes it can be a distraction switching between first and third perspectives but one must ask oneself would anything be lost if it were written in one or the other? In this novel the answer is yes, if the novel were written all in third person then we would lose the keen insight into Layla’s thoughts and feelings; conversely, if it were written in first person from Ellen’s perspective this would be too easy for McGivering.

Throughout the book the author builds tension well and the opening chapters are an immediate hook for the reading – Layla’s fear of being seen by Taliban supporters, even on the first few pages, is especially well rendered. The events surrounding Ellen are narrated equally vividly, however, certain plot twists were somewhat too loudly signalled: the use of the character Adnan by the Taliban and the involvement of the sinister aid huckster Quentin Khan, for example. However, Jamelia was another credible character who lent her strength and wisdom to the men of her family and struggles to overwhelm their inertia in the face of the Taliban.

If there was an off-putting branch of the narrative it was the relationship between Ellen and Frank; this felt superfluous to the overall plot and was not required to keep the reader engaged. One might say that this novel was aimed towards a female audience but the lives of the women themselves are remarkable enough to stand without a love angle.

Perhaps the book could have probed further into issues such as equality for women and education for girls but, as she says above, McGivering does not write with an agenda and literature is not an engine for social change. It is enough to have written a satisfying book that encompasses mystery, adventure and suspense whilst making you think – and all set in a country which every Westerner thinks they know, but which might yet yield some surprises.

Last month, the non-profit organisation Worldreader held a video contest. The first price was a trip, but instead of the five star hotel one would expect for a price, Worldreader took the winner to Ghana to do some volunteering work.

Contesters were asked to submit a video that answered the question “Why do you want to help Worldreader bring ‘Books to All’ to the developing world?” This was great PR for the NGO, which has found much praise lately for its work of using e-readers to teach literacy in the developing world. While we take our access to technologies for granted, it is easy to forget that we are part of the mere 25% of the world’s population who have a wonderland of information at their fingertips – access to the internet. Mobile network connections, health data collection software, things that are such a vital part of our lives that they have started to seem trivial, are missing in the developing world as huge steps towards the end of extreme poverty.

Few NGOs, such as Worldreader, have started to use new technologies to tackle global development and humanitarian challenges. Worldreader aims to “put a library of books within reach of every family on the planet”, so the organisation decisively writes on its website. The idea itself has nothing to do with technology: books have been the basis for education for thousands of years, the information source that has been driving the human race in its development towards what we have accomplished today. Without books to learn from, we would be pretty stuck. At the Orphan Aid Africa school in Ghana, where Worldreader had the first trial of their concept in March 2010, kids were studying without having books available. It’s no new idea that we need books to learn, but it is new to have the technology to access a whole library with one single device not bigger than a paperback. With e-readers, we are reducing the cost and complexity of providing reading material even in the most remote areas. Thus we can teach literacy, increase the level of education and consequently boost a country’s economy through better educated graduates. With the cost of digital content falling quickly, the shipping being a mere fraction of what it would cost to take the same amount of material in books, it seems rather simple. Writers the likes of Cory Doctorow and Daniel Pinkwater are donating their work to make the content available on the donated readers even more diverse.

“The world is a better place when people have access to more information. The goal of universal access to all human knowledge is a noble one,” Doctorow says about his involvement with Worldreader.

Noble it is, but is it realistic too? The challenges of this cause can not be underestimated. Although the prices are falling quickly, e-readers are still expensive. They may seem easy to use, but for students who have never had access to a computer it requires time-consuming training to teach them how to use their new gadgets. Yet these are all issues that can be more or less easily dealt with compared to the two biggest challenges: a) you can’t download books without internet access and b) you can’t charge a battery-powered gadget without access to electricity.

Trying to fund a solar cell and satellite internet access suddenly take things to a whole new level – and quite a disillusioning one at that. Internet access is a luxury that organisations like the Web Foundation are trying to make a given for everyone, but this is far from being achieved. Instead, it has been mobile technology that has been giving NGOs the chance to provide tools that make a significant difference. The area that has profited most from this little revolution is health care.

“Very few technologies have scaled down to even the remotest village in sub-Saharan Africa. Cars haven’t, fridges haven’t, literacy hasn’t. But mobile phones have,” says Joel Selanikio, co-founder of US-based social enterprise DataDyne. He would know: DataDyne’s open-source, mobile data collection tool EpiSurveyor has tackled one of the main weaknesses of healthcare in developing countries. The lack of tools to gather time-sensitive health data quickly and systematically is a disaster when it comes to disease prevention, consultation, diagnosis and treatment. That is why the systematization of the collection of health data has absolutely boomed in the last ten years. Using mobile phones as a database and writing easy-to-use software has helped to fight malaria, diarrhoea (which is, sadly, globally seen still the leading cause of illness and death) and reduced the number of deaths from measles in Africa by 90%. All this just because health workers suddenly have the possibility to access a database of information, without an internet connection, to find out about disease treatment guidelines, essential drug lists and patients’ records within minutes, in remote, resource-poor areas miles away from the next hospital.

By using PDAs to transmit and receive data via cellular networks, US-based NGO Satellife connected 175 remote health facilities serving more than 1.5 million people in Uganda to a data collection platform. As the program was brought to scale, the health officers’ knowledge of health care needs increased significantly even in the most remote areas. They aim to improve. Advanced platforms like recently released GATHERdata are being launched, making the aggregation of data speedier, the software easier to use, the analysis more sophisticated. GATHERdata provides digital forms for the collection of relevant data and sends it wirelessly to the district health office and ministry, into one central database. The information collected will immediately be scanned for anomalies. If any are found, the ministry can notify public health officials within seconds by text message – the time saved saves lives.

“GATHERdata is made up of ‘best of breed’ software elements and we are constantly evaluating possible tools for incorporation or substitution into the platform. One of the key drivers behind this is trying to make GATHERdata easier for end users to employ in their projects,” Satellife’s Associate Center Director Andrew Sideman tells Spike. Training the end user to use a system has proven to be a challenge in any attempt at imposing new software in development projects. Even the least complex programs are difficult to adapt by health workers or citizens who have often never used a computer or mobile phone before in their life. Making systems simpler means less necessary training, ergo less time and less money spent. Andrew, who has led the development of GATHERdata, found that training was necessary even though the system is virtually the same as a paper-based version.

“There are invariably differences of interpretation on the part of end users. We always hope that pre-testing of the form will have resolved any questions related to language, as in what the questions on the form are actually asking for, and logic, like how the questions are ordered.”

GATHERdata involves built-in business intelligence modules, which are used to automatically send messages to authorities to alert dangerous situations – a vital feature to prevent often occurring pandemics. Software like this can be implemented in many other areas than ‘just’ health care. Like it has been used in Mali, to track school construction projects as part of an education system decentralization program. Or in Liberia, to survey school facilities and assets. Working towards constant improvement, GATHERdata is fully exploiting what java-rosa based forms make possible.

“We are developing and will deploy in Bangladesh a system using SMS to notify end users that a form is available for their use with a link to a web page,” says Andrew. “End users will access the form and use their mobile phones to fill out short web-based forms. Data will be stored in the GATHERdata back end to allow aggregation with data gathered or integration with other data sets.”

What mobile networks in combination with simple Java software have achieved is impressive on its own. Compared to the technologies available to us in the western world it is, of course, ridiculous.

How long until we bridge the digital divide in internet usage and use the technology we have to create a connection between all parts of the world, allowing access to the same network of information to everyone? It seems like the obvious next step after the mobile phone wonder. Making e-readers available in schools with the possibility to download books, sending and accessing health data via WiFi, are just two concepts which could make current efforts easier, faster, richer in information. The Web Foundation believes that making certain information available could enable local entrepreneurs to build up businesses relevant to their country, or help farmers trying to grow vegetation in harsh environments. The latter became the Web Alliance for Regreening Africa project, an attempt at growing trees and crops in the desert by spreading the knowledge to do so to thousands of farmers. This knowledge is mostly local. When serious droughts severely damaged farming conditions in many rural communities in West Africa in the 1980s, a number of innovative locals in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali developed techniques to rehabilitate large areas of degraded land. With this kind of knowledge already existing, it is the sharing of it that comes as a challenge. The project tries to achieve an efficient sharing of ideas by exploiting the available infrastructure of internet cafes in larger towns, mobile phones and radios.

Is this the way to use information technology in development work? For now, yes it is. Making good use of the technology already available to share information is the most efficient way to make an impact. It is basically the spreading of knowledge that is successfully fighting some of the developing world’s most urgent challenges. Diseases, fought by aggregating health data. Bad education, fought by providing the invaluable content of books. Hunger, fought by sharing knowledge to grow crops. The key word in this kind of help is ‘sustainable’ – sharing knowledge isn’t charity, it is setting the basis for self-help. NGOs around information technology are certainly working towards using the tools they have in the best possible way. But until the technologies we take for granted have become truly ubiquitous, the divide in information access will stay insurmountable.

Further Resources:

• Worldreader: Books for all
• DataDyne and EpiSurveyor
• Cory Doctorow’s Craphound
• GATHERdata at AED-Satellife
• W4RA at World Wide Web Foundation

Sourav Roy from Mumbai battles gluttony, despair and cricket fever to hunt down seven utterly original book stores of the city

As somebody who has been taking books to bed way before hitting puberty, I have it on good authority that the addiction of buying and reading books, is not so very different from any other addiction. Your ears prick up at the mention of new releases, your breathing changes when you meet a strange book review and your legs do their own walking when they see a bookshop close by. But just like any veteran junkie would tell you as the monkey on your back gains weight, only higher doses just don’t cut it.

The fume of addiction grows denser, splits into veins and develops its own ecosystem of multiple sins, each demanding its own special fodder of words, pages and genres.

As your fix changes, so does your peddler. You start avoiding the standard-issue, brightly lit, bestseller-clad, staffed-to-the-gills-with-idiots chain bookstores and ache for the ones little-known: the roadsiders, the rare, the forgotten and the niche. A bookshop with that glorious musty smell, shady alcoves where you can disappear for hours and an owner as obsessed as Calvin Tower yet as colourful as Willy Wonka. In short, a Flourish and Botts for adults.

As one evolves into a reader every author daydreams about – “ah, and a lover of lists, a twiddler of lines. Shall this reader be given occasionally to mouthing a word aloud or wanting to read to a companion in a piercing library whisper? Yes; and shall this reader be one whose heartbeat alters with the tense of the verbs? That would be nice…” (1) – your quest for the ideal book store becomes more and more fervid. You are neither intimidated by previous wisdom – “If Jack Kerouac had set out to find a real bookstore in the suburbs, he would still be on the road, Phileas Fogg would still be in the air, the Ancient Mariner wouldn’t have had time to tell anyone his story” (2) – nor are you disheartened, even if the city is Mumbai, where Mammon is the said ruler, fantasies apparently come attached with business plans, and devoted readers are said to be as rare as authentic book stores.

The Despair of Discretion vs. Strand Book Stall

As courtship with books turns into a long-term relationship, the usual tricks up a book’s dust sleeve – the bold and bright bestseller insignia, the gushing blurb, the shady ellipses in the praises section – start losing their charm. They only make you more wary instead of more enthusiastic. You tread with caution remembering all the times in the past you have been hasty and burnt. You look for genuineness and magic which don’t fade out once you are back home with them. 

When it comes to loving books truly, madly, deeply, it is hard to find somebody more genuine than late T.N. Shanbhag, founder of the 63-year-old Strand Book Stall. Driven out of a bookstore for browsing way too long, he started his own bookshop at the lobby of the elite Strand Cinema, Mumbai. He started with not one but many quixotic dreams which come true everyday at seven of their outlets across India for hundreds of readers – one in Mumbai, three in Bengaluru, one in Mysore, one in Pune, one in Hyderabad. Except the major two in Mumbai and Bengaluru, the rest of them are by request of IT majors Wipro and Infosys in their respective campuses.

The dreams of a book stall where browsing is held sacred, only genuinely good books are stored (bestsellers are sourced in a jiffy too, if you insist on being a yokel) and most importantly every book comes with a discount of at lest 20% on the cover price, are dreams no more. The discount is actually the margin from publishers, aka profit, handed over to the readers. None of them seemed to make any sense for a businessman, but Mr. Shanbhag was a reader first.

And now that Strand Book Stall is run by his daughter Vidya Virkar in Bengaluru and the family of his Man Friday and Manager, Mr P.M. Shenvi in Mumbai, things have only turned sunnier for readers.

Strand Book Fair, a brainchild of Vidya, is now a bi-annual pilgrimage for Bengaluru and Mumbai book lovers. Huge exhibition spaces are hired and the entire warehouse of Strand Book Stall turns up in full glory. When this collection joins hands with up to 80% discounts, the book lovers’ eyes glaze over with lust and their wrists ache with plastic bagfuls of haul.

True love for good books compels Strand Book Stall to take up occasional publishing endeavours of exceptional books, simply because nobody else will. Like the 1931 book A Case for India by the noted philosopher Will Durant. A book which went to great lengths to praise India’s poise under British fire and its upcoming glory. This book has since been conveniently let go out of print. Now republished by Strand Book Stall in English and several Indian languages it’s finally getting its due share of attention.

And it’s again true love of books that makes them think twice before spending money on expanding, computerizing or sprucing themselves up. Because who would want yet another shiny book shop that keeps the profit and sells bestsellers at cover price?

Strand Book Stall, ‘Dhannur, Sir P.M. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400001. Tel: 0091 22 2266 1994/2266 1719/2261 4613, www.strandbookstall.com

The Gluttony for Bargains vs. City Book Centre

There has been at least one recorded instance where a biblioholic has paid the price of a steady girlfriend for a rare autographed book. (3)

And there have been gazillions of instances where book addicts have spent other equally obscene amounts on books. In fact, there is someone, somewhere blowing the roof off his credit limit right now at a book store. But inexplicably, if there is anything which this species enjoys more than overspending of books, it is saving money on books. They will go anywhere, even the deep entrails of the internet to get a great deal on books.

They also go to City Book Centre. It was transported to the suburbs after being evicted following the Municipal Corporation’s enforcement of their no-hawking policy at Fort a couple years ago. Very few of the wonderful roadside booksellers have been so successfully replanted.

As soon as you cross the crowded street, you are thrown headlong into books of all sizes, shapes and ages. The readers are just as varied. Mothers buying books for children, Engineering students fingering text books, Medical students looking at them irritatedly (medical books are not stocked due to their high price) and pretty much everybody leafing through modern day penny dreadfuls and the latest Man Booker winners.

Nobody leaves empty handed from City Book Centre because even if you don’t want to spend a pittance (it’s impossible not to like even a single book in this tiny yet jam-packed darling of a store), there is a lending library system with dirt cheap refundable deposits and variable fees. The beauty of the fee structure is the resale value of the book is less than the deposit. So the books are theft-protected.

The owners reveal that they source their rich haul of secondhand books from containers at Mumbai ports. I could have pressed on but I shut right up when the throw in a cup of tea in my bargain haul of books.

I smile as I wade through knee-deep traffic.

City Book Centre, Shop No 5, Sukhamani Building, Junction of S.V. Road & V.P. Road, Near Archie’s Gallery, Andheri West, Mumbai 400058. Tel: 0091 22 6553 2739, pramodcitybookcentre@yahoo.com

The Sloth of Familiarity vs. Victoria Book Centre and VCD DVD Library

Every book lover has a favourite position in bed, for reading. (4) Lying on your side, lying on your back holding the book up with your strong hands, doing the half-cobra pose with your hands propping your cheeks, pillow under your stomach with the book against the wall, and several others which might best be kept inside bed rooms. But no matter how uncomfortable your position sounds to others, it is instant Nirvana for you. The moment you and your book strike that pose, the cares of the world fade away, the day slowly slides off your shoulder and you are home.

I feel the same aura of familiarity when I enter Victoria Book Centre and VCD DVD Library, even though I have never been there before in my whole life. Past the faded, hand-painted ‘Wanted Help’ posters (not a single spelling mistake, by the way) and racks and racks of magazines, I enter the store and learn that the owner has been out for lunch for the last couple of hours. As a strong supporter of both independent spirits and long lunches, my heart gladdens and I start browsing. A shopfront with multiple sections for new books, old books, magazines and soon to be added text book section, it’s a place with a whole long, lazy summer afternoon’s worth of browsing. Luckily, it was a long, lazy summer afternoon. I spot usual suspects, vintage favourites fallen from grace and a surprisingly eclectic collection of Indian writing in English.

As I chat with the lady in the store and the owner on the phone, I wonder why this 60-year-old store seems so familiar to me. Then, a bunch of kids walk in to browse, and I know the answer. This was how all bookshops used to look when I was a kid.

The kids turn out to be a few of the thousand plus members of the lending library who pay a laughably low fee to read hundreds of books. When I ask the owner why the fees are so low, he laughs indulgently and says most of the kids who are members today are third generation patrons of the store. Then he mentions the really high number of members to make it good, as well as the advantages of being located next to a school. Then he stops for a moment and hastily cracks a joke about me being a probable income tax agent in disguise.

When I step out, I notice the owner has trust enough in strangers like me and many others to keep the keys hanging from the glass cases. I let out a contented sigh. All seems to be well with the world.

Victoria Book Centre and VCD DVD Library, 12 L.J. Road, Between Sitladevi Temple & Victoria School, Mahim, Mumbai 400016. Tel: 0091 22 2446 1897

The Lust for the Niche vs. Marine Sports

There is a very thin line between discretion and niche-snobbery when it comes to the reading habit of biblioholics. For example, a fellow biblioholic had started an online group for discussing books so niche that only a handful of people had read them, an idea poetically doomed to some and simply doomed to most. On the other hand, there is another biblioholic who refuses to read Harry Potter books simply because they are way too popular. But no matter which side of the line your err in, just like the occult to the masses, the niche has an Eldorado’s appeal to biblioholics.

Reason why I landed up at Marine Sports, Mumbai’s and India’s only sports bookshop, despite being gloriously underaccomplished in all kinds of sports since childhood. The Cricket World Cup 2011 has just been over. I have avoided it like the plague and cursed it repeatedly for hindering my bookshop-hopping. But there was another, secret reason. I frankly could not believe that there were enough books about sports that could fill up a bookstore. Because playing sports are all about not reading books and vice versa, right?

I realise how wrong I was, the moment I step into the store. Only cricket rulebooks cover up a sizeable portion of the wall. Then there are some more cricket. Biographies, analyses, history, rare Wisden Almanacs and encyclopaedias. Though the three-fourths of the store are cricket books, there are books on tennis, netball, rugby, water sports, cycling, football, hockey, judo, table tennis, sports psychology, sports medicine and, most importantly, Olympics. I also spot a gorgeous giant tome about the automobiles of Maharajas. In fact,their online catalogue lists sports alphabetically with sometimes multiple entries under each letter. And then there are how to videos, recorded matches and other paraphernalia. When a gentleman drops in for a history of table tennis, he is confidently told that no such book existed yet, otherwise it would have been available.

When the affable owner, Theodore Braganza drops in to chat, I get to know the amusing birth story of this store. Started by his father late Bruno Braganza in Marine Lines, Mumbai as a sports goods store it slowly turned itself into a bookshop. All because of his abiding love for books and increasing distaste of the murkiness of sports goods business. And his acquaintance with the leading sports institutions and sportsmen of those days certainly helped. Legendary cricketers dropped in often, asking for books on opponents, before they went on tours. Thanks to extensive networking with sportsmen, sports journalists and genuine eye and nose for sports books, Marine Sports has grown into the institution it is today, supplying to hundreds of library and thousands of individuals worldwide. Prudent moves like a website and regular presence at all major sporting events have not hurt either. In fact, so encyclopaedic is their collection that many a devoted mail order customer have been shocked when they have walked into the tiny store.

This unique access to the sports fraternity has also helped them publish unique books, mostly on cricket that are considered collectibles by the discerning. India’s recent Cricket World Cup 2011 win has spurred him into publishing two books, once for the serious cricket junta and one for wide-eyed fans.

After an unusually long chat and browsing, when I finally get up to leave, I realise my apathy to sports has come down several notches thanks to the familiar empathy with books I saw at the heart of Marine Sports.

Marine Sports, 63A, Gokhale Road North, Dadar West, Mumbai 400028. Tel: 0091 2432 1047/2436 6076, www.marinesports.in

The Pride of Idealism vs. Gandhi Book Centre

No bibliophile ever says this out loud but all of them secretly believe that books can change lives. And this belief has not come to them from any self-help book but from themselves. They know how books have changed their own lives, helped them travel through time, discover deep bonds with perfect strangers, made them live hundreds of lives in one lifetime, made them less judgemental, more compassionate and most importantly less bored. That is why when I come to know of a bookstore that only sells Gandhi-related book, I take down my shield of cynicism and get going without any delay. After all who has changed more lives than this man in loincloth and a pair of round glasses?

With the latest idiotic Gandhi controversy (5) still buzzing in my head I approach the book shop, my vision stumbling into Mumbai’s tallest building sticking out like a sore thumb in the background. A few moments after I walk into the store and start browsing a little self-consciously, the staff rush to my help, stricken perhaps by my utterly non-Khadi appearance. My ruse of browsing over, I meet up with the man at the helm, T.R.K. Somaiya. And from him I come to know the surprising origin of the book centre and why Gandhi Book Centre is anything but a book centre. The story had, not surprisingly, had less to do with lofty thoughts and more to do with down-to-earth actions, just the way Gandhi intended.

The year was 1982. Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi was running in Bombay to packed theatres and Gandhi-ism was in the air. T.R.K. Somaiya, a dedicated Gandhian, decided to make use of the opportunity and started selling The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Gandhi’s autobiography) in front of theatres. The plan seems to work wonderfully and thus was born Gandhi Book Centre. Twenty-three years later, the Gandhi Book Centre is hardly a book centre but an exhibition, a museum and most importantly a Gandhian nerve centre that sends out his thoughts in periodic waves throughout the country. As a book centre it stocks more books by Gandhi than on Gandhi with a special emphasis on affordable books in Indian regional languages. It also stocks works by Vinoba Bhabe and Swami Vivekananda, both considered Gandhi’s spiritual blood-brothers.

While personal monetary losses mount every year, T.R.K. Somaiya doesn’t hike the mark-up on his titles, neither does he man every exit of city cinema halls but looks for more practical and exciting ways to take the message of Gandhi forward. He doesn’t stop at the usual exhibitions, seminars, exchanges and speeches. He visits the principals of schools and colleges and wardens of prisons in person and convinces them to join the Gandhi Peace Examination Programme, a unique written examination, where the study materials and question papers are supplied from the centre and the prizes as well as certificates are arranged by the respective institutions. About 35,000 students from 73 colleges and 67 schools and 500 prisoners have taken the examination this year. The moment you secretly start scoffing at the naivete of it all, he would smile and introduce you to Laxman Gole. Currently a corporate consultant, he used to lord over a nine member extortionist gang. Charged nineteen times with various crimes and already six and a half years prison sentence over his head, he was all set to go places in the Mumbai underworld. But that was all before he wrote the Gandhi Peace Examination.Now a model citizen, he is one of the living, breathing results of Mr. Somaiya’s experiments with truth.

And whenever T.R.K. Somaiya takes a short break from spreading the truth, helping hands show up from everywhere. Like Professor Aparna Rao from NITIE, a respected local management institution, who helped sell 6,000 copies of Gandhi’s autobiography in a month through her students as part of a management experiment.

While India’s relationship with Gandhi remains ambiguous, a curious mixture of hate, idolatry and occasional surrender (the sales of Gandhi-related books show a sudden spurt whenever there is a national crisis), the relation with T.R.K. Somaiya and Gandhi has remained rock solid in foundation but fluid enough to change with the times. Quite like the tetra-packed buttermilk he gave me to drink.

But next morning Anna Hazare (6) breaks his fast with fruit juice.

Gandhi Book Centre, 299 Tardeo Road, Nana Chowk, Mumbai 400007. Tel: 0091 22 2387 2061/2388 4527, www.mkgandhi.org

The Greed for Serendipity vs. Smoker’s Corner Book Stall

“Secondhand books are wild books, homeless books,” said Virginia Woolf. “They have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”

Book veterans would agree wholeheartedly. The joy of secondhand bookshops are more in the chase than in the finish. So imagine my anticipation after finally making into very suggestively named Smoker’s Corner Book Stall after three misses. More than half a century ago, the entrance of this store had a tobacco shop frequented by sailors in transit and hence the name.

The readers in the know had told me this was one of the best second-hand bookshops in town. And I am not disappointed. With a zig zag of glass cases, nooks and alcoves, I am already in a biblioholic’s candy land, a secondhand book version of Alice’s wonderland, a little musty, a little dog-eared but with infinitely more character. I wander aimlessly and meet lavishly illustrated German fairy tale books, Harlequin romances, oddball science fiction all tied up in strings, looking out like orphaned puppies in an animal shelter for a second home. I comply.

Smoker’s Corner Book Stall, Botawala Chambers, Sir P.M. Road, Fort, MumbaI 400001. Tel: 0091 22 2216 4060

The Longing for the Lost vs. The New & Second Hand Book Shop, Kalbadevi

The journey unfortunately comes to an end with an obituary. No book pilgrimage in Mumbai supposedly should exclude The New & Second Hand Book Shop, Kalbadevi. I was forced to commit this blasphemy. Because the book shop no longer exists and has given way to a computer goods shop recently. From a report from the past, by cnnngo.com:

Founded in 1905 by Vishram’s grandfather Jamalbhai Ratansey, this corner store started out selling raddi paper, moving on to include school texts and exercise books before finally introducing fiction and non-fiction around the Second World War.

Ask whether people still read a lot nowadays and Vishram smiles somewhat ironically, “to use modern terminology, the ‘feedback’ is not so great.” He rues especially the decline in the number of younger readers thanks to media like television and the Internet, saying that “most now read only if they have to, if the book happens to be in their curriculum.”

Even though there’s no (apparent) order within each section, browsing through these shelves is like taking a chronological crash course in Mumbai’s reading preferences. From the frail 1855 copy of the Poetical Works of John Dryden (Rs 350), to the quirky Rise and Fall of American Humour (Rs 150), the beautiful illustrated 366 Goodnight Stories (Rs 120) and an outdated Cassette Guide from Penguin (Rs 150). (7)

May the soul rest in peace. Amen.

Footnotes:

1. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, William H. Gass
2. Michel Winerip, The New York Times
3. http://commonsense2.com/2008/11/essays/lost-the-girl-got-the-book/
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/sep/01/sitting-lying-reading-position
5. Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, Joseph Lelyveld
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Hazare
7. http://www.cnngo.com/mumbai/shop/mumbais-secondhand-book-shops-262929

Images Courtesy: Prarthana Singh (www.cnngo.com), Fiona Fernandez (www.mid-day.com)

Although not the first screen adaptation of his work, Norwegian Wood opens a potential floodgate of cinematic versions. Does Murakami survive or get lost in translation? Declan Tan finds out

Anh Hung Tran’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel Norwegian Wood is one of those films that leaves you seeking out the source material. Perhaps that isn’t even a bad thing.

As good as Murakami’s text might be, this film is coldly one-dimensional and only seems to mean it in parts. The rest of the time it’s plain uninteresting. The story is actually quite strong. Watanabe (Matsuyama), our protagonist, journeys with us through his seeking of lasting love, his dalliances with death and all of his lost passions. Watanabe’s best friend, Kizuki (Kora), commits suicide at 17. Naturally, Kizuki’s girlfriend, Naoko (Kikuchi), is pretty devastated. Eventually Watanabe and Naoko get it together after spending a lot of silent moments, hours, days together. Then Naoko disappears, checking herself into a sanatorium. Watanabe, with his blank face incapable of expressions, doesn’t know what to do. He meets another girl but can’t decide between them. That is quite a cheap summary and probably doesn’t do Murakami’s tale justice. But it will do for this film.

Tran’s refusal to really mark out some genuine feeling – allowing it too long to drip like a loose faucet – hurts the film’s chances of hitting any of the right emotions. Mostly you’ll be feeling straight frustration, which may lead eventually to boredom. Maybe. There are good ideas in here, not in the directorial execution, but in the content of the script, Murakami’s story.

The ‘moments of significance’, as underlined by Tran, are unsubtle and obvious, tripping the slow burning patience that he seems to be building, which leaves the narrative feeling all lumpy and unsure of itself, as if Tran didn’t know what to keep in or leave out. The end result is the sneaking suspicion that much of the shooting script was simply cut for length (and at 133 mins, it already feels too long).

What is missing? Hard to say. The performances are fine, if sometimes veering wildly from melodramatic to unfeeling – Kikuchi does a fair job, while Matsuyama is frozen in time it seems. The shots are okay, yawning in places, and the slow pace isn’t even particularly boring. It’s just the rhythm of an uneven narrative that fails to really grips. Everything seems slightly askew and void of feeling, perhaps because Tran underplays it too much, trying to let it build by itself, which it doesn’t quite manage.

It’s a kind of just inessential cinema. It doesn’t offer anything new, refreshing or interesting that the novel didn’t. A symptom of an unnecessary adaptation.

Alternatively, watch Villon’s Wife.

Chris Hall revisits J.G. Ballard’s childhood and finds the future in the past

The opening of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984) has young Jim watching British war propaganda films with fellow choristers in the crypt of the Holy Trinity church in Shanghai, which was designed by George Gilbert Scott and built in the 1860s and is due to reopen this year after extensive renovations. Ballard himself attended the church’s prestigious boys school, a 1920s Art Deco addition. It’s a nice thought that Ballard’s archive is going to be in the British Library, right next door to another Gilbert Scott building, what used to be the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras railway station in London, also recently restored to its former glory.

I was recently in Shanghai, researching a book about Ballard, and this was one of the many places from his childhood there (from 1930 to 1946) that I visited, including the Ballard family home on what used to be Amherst Avenue. It’s now another restaurant – the Xinyue Club – after some recent renovation work and, though internally much has changed, the structure of the house remains. Ballard described it as being in the “stockbroker style of the home counties”. A Chinese friend who lives in the city steered me there and we pretended that we’d come to take a look at the private dining rooms upstairs to hire for an event. Seeing what would have been Ballard’s bedroom as a “luxury and elegant private room” hammers home his belief that “reality is a stage set”.

It hit me while I was there that a great deal of those quintessentially Ballardian obsessions are seeded in Shanghai – gated communities, suburbia, his interest in Art Deco, etc. As Ballard himself said, the Art Deco buildings of Shanghai – the city is thought to have a higher concentration of them than even Miami Beach – seem somehow more modern than the steel and glass skyscrapers that tower above them.

Further south is Lunghua pagoda, which the Japanese used as a flak tower against the US planes and which features a lot in Empire of the Sun. The pagoda is oddly affecting when I finally chance upon it, and, like the Ballard house, it’s a very moving sight. Ballard wrote about the time shortly after his family’s internment: “During the American raids the pagoda had lit up like a Christmas tree, tracers streaming towards the low-flying Mustangs, but now its guns were silent and unmanned”.

From the ghost towers of Bangkok and the very real atrocity exhibition that is the War Remnants museum in Saigon, to the empty streets of Hong Kong the day after Chinese New Year and especially the drowned world of Brisbane, my trip had been a little too Ballardian for comfort.

Further Resources:

• Chris Mitchell: In Search of Ballard’s Shanghai

In exile you are bound in time with endless knots of history and fate to live in the distant memories of your land and people. Borrowed memories of vast expanses of green pastures where yaks and sheep grazed under the clear turquoise sky where cranes flew with the wind and traversed the eternal white peaks of the Himalayas to return to Tibet in the spring when the mighty rivers roared down with milky brown snowmelt water that gave life to the fields, frozen from the harsh winter, and thawed them for planting buckwheat and potatoes, radishes and turnips in the summer of the festivals and the horse races where all the beautiful girls come, dressed in their best chupas and hats, with their families at dawn to make offerings of chang and tsampa to the deities on the hill and to pray for the happiness of all the sentient beings in this world and for good rain before they head down to the festivities to put up their tents and have a lunch of meat, blood sausages, momos and lots of chang with the dancing and singing that filled the green valley with songs that sang of their devotion to their lamas and parents, their love for the melancholic mountain valleys of gushing rivers in deep gorges and of the bittersweet stories of the short lived summer love, of lovers sending secret messages with fishes that never forget, unaware of the talkative birds that hide among the trees near the river whose cold clear water shimmered white and yellow in the late summer sun casting soft long shadows in the evenings that came before the clear autumn nights of countless stars in the deep dark blue of the night sky where the stories of constellations and stars, demons and ogres, were told by the grandparents to the children in the warmth of the kitchen by the hearth with glowing embers until the children fell asleep with no worries of tomorrow or regrets of yesterday.

Worries come with age. You worry about being forgotten as just another one that came and went. You worry about your grandchildren not knowing the tales of the mountains, rivers, the pastures and the forests and the animals in them. Distant memories of a people fading and vanishing with the death of our grandparents and with the birth of each new baby in exile.

I came to know of Tibet in the stories of my grandparents. I know of those mighty Himalayas and the difficult passes that they had to cross to come to India. The village, the houses and the people they left behind but still carried in their memories down to their last days waiting to return.

When my grandma talked of her life in Tibet, she held a distant gaze, searching for something beyond the cement plastered walls of her low-ceilinged room, something beyond the low hills and the red soil of this Tibetan refugee settlement in South India. Her eyes twinkled when she told us of those distant mountains and pastures of Chamdo in eastern Tibet. It was as if she could see everything right in front of her eyes. Those memories were all that was left of Tibet with her. She revisited her past with childlike enthusiasm as she forgot about the present. The present did not seem important then. Every time we met, she would tell the same stories as if she was telling them for the first time. She wanted to tell us everything about her life. What is this passing down of memories? Is it not in memories that we become immortal? It is a constant fight against the fear of being forgotten; not only as an individual but to be forever consigned to the dusty shelves of history as a people.

I remember drawing – we always drew – pictures of Tibet in primary school. We drew from what we knew of Tibet. Our memories of Tibet were just the bare essentials. Blue skies dotted with cotton white clouds. Snow capped mountains with prayer flags between their peaks, little square pieces blue as the sky, white as the clouds, red for fire, green for water and yellow for earth. Then, below those mountains a vast expanse of green pasture where a blue river runs bending down the sheet of paper as it widens. Black yaks and white sheep grazing in the pastures near a tent of a nomad family. And the mother is churning bhoejha, salted butter tea, in her dongmo. A big Tibetan mastiff tied to the pole with an iron chain. These are good guard dogs and they could kill a man. You can hear a flute of a shepherd playing in the distant pasture resonating between the big purple-brown mountains. Peaceful and content. That was our idea of Tibet and you had to make do with what you had. Just the bare essentials.

This desire not to be forgotten in this intricate and great web of human history is what drove me towards writing. Towards telling the history of my people and my land. A land I have never seen. I am afraid that the land and the people, tortured for years, might betray those borrowed memories that I have now made mine. Tibet has changed. I know that. I also know that there are more Chinese in Tibet than there are Tibetans; that we are in danger of becoming a token minority in our own land. Forced to smile Communist Party approved smiles and herded in front of the international media in gaudy costumes (that could hardly be called Tibetan) to applaud the “glorious” leadership of men who led around 50 million of their own people to death in misguided policies like the Great Leap Forward. It is as if the entire nation of Spain vanished in a matter of 20 years.

A million Tibetans died in that period and there were only six million of us. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army destroyed thousands of our sacred monasteries and the ones spared are allowed nothing more than being mere tourist attractions. The once great monasteries that boasted of thousands of monks, teeming with life and the energy of intellectual pursuit have been reduced to big walkable museums where a few hundred people are forced to play to the wanderlust of western and Chinese tourists for Shangri-la and ‘inner peace’. Nothing more.

Because to be anything more is to be Tibetan and to really be Tibetan and engage in activities to ensure the continuation of Tibetan culture and language is to subvert the popular Chinese Communist Party narrative of the happy liberation, assimilation and integration of the Tibetan minority into the Han dominated ‘motherland’. Because to really allow the study Buddhism in the monasteries is to allow people to question the nature of reality; something that eats at the very core of a regime built upon blunt lies, secrecy, despotic control and oppression.

So far we have managed to survive and preserve our culture and language in exile. So far we have survived the Chinese onslaught on our culture and language in Tibet. In India we have managed to reestablish and recreate a little bit of Tibet in the refugee settlements under the guidance of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. There are monasteries, Tibetan schools and a Tibetan Government in Exile. Although the snow mountains have become mere hills now, the hills will have to suffice. But for how long? It has been more than half a century since the Tibetan plateau was occupied by the Chinese. It has been half a century of life in exile for Tibetans. I was born an exile. An exile from fate. An exile from identity.

If I ever go back to Tibet, will I go back just to see drying lakes and rivers where the water once flowed? Will the pristine pastures and mountains of my grandma’s stories still be there, waiting for me? Will the nomads that I drew in the pictures be there? Will the ancestral songs that sang of the Tibetan’s love for their land and their religion still resonate in the melancholic valleys? I am not sure. An exile lives the life of eternal uncertainty. Your heart is in two places. The place you know and the place you long for. I am afraid that I might not be worthy or Tibetan enough to call Tibet mine. I don’t know whether the land owns the people or the people own the land. The Tibet of my borrowed memories might not be there. But at least it will be Tibet.

The status of sexual minorities in today’s India is in a state of transition after homosexual sex was decriminalised in 2009. While the legal judgment can be framed as a move towards a more inclusive and secular society where religious beliefs against homosexuality cannot prevail over human rights, sexuality continues to be a controversial issue, stirring the political and cultural agendas. Through a brief excursus of the legal battle to decriminalise homosexuality in India, the opposition from various political and religious entities, and the persistent discrimination and violence suffered by gay citizens, I would like to open up a discussion around concepts like democracy, globalisation, secularism and modernity. The complexity of the Indian socio-political landscape is a good case in point to show how such concepts are far from clear-cut.

On July 2nd, 2009, the Delhi High Court pronounced a ‘reading down’ of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, effectively decriminalising consensual homosexual sex between adults. After a eight-year-long legal battle initiated by NAZ Foundation India, an organisation working with HIV-positive people, homosexual sex ceased to be a punishable crime. Section 377 (as other parts of the Indian Penal Code) had been introduced in 1860 by Lord Macaulay, at the time of the British colonial domination of India. I arrived to Delhi only days after the judgment, and witnessed a sustained media attention for the following weeks. All the major national newspapers reported the news on the first page. The judgment was called “historical” and “a great, albeit belated, step towards globalisation”, “a landmark judgment”, “sexuality equality”. However, the same day protests started to mount against the legal judgment from various sources. A member of a centrist political party urged the government to appeal to the Supreme Court of India, as the ruling on homosexuality would sadden the old people of India and cause the country’s culture to “crumble”. Lalu Prasad Yadav, a widely-known political figure, said, “Yes, homosexuality is a crime… Such obscene acts should not be allowed in our country. The society is adversely affected”.

Religious leaders from Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh communities unanimously expressed their discontent with the ruling (a rare example of inter-religious solidarity) , citing the ‘unnaturalness’ of gay sex and some advancing the hypothesis that such a decision would in fact help the spread of AIDS. Such oppositions to the Court decision translated in eight counter-petitions filed to the Supreme Court over a period of four months.

The debate around secularism in India was sparked, in recent times, by the death of thousands of people in Gujarat in 2002, a planned massacre supported by the rightwing political party BJP. Such an event, the looting and ferocious murders of thousands of Muslim citizens, was in many respects unprecedented in its scale and organisation, so much so that it has been called “genocide”. Tensions between Hindus and Muslims reached a new high with the Gujarat episode, and called for a reflection on the state of democracy and secularism in India.

Since the end of British colonial power, India had to forge a viable, strong national identity in the struggle for independence. Tensions between different religious groups, political ideals and castes emerged already during Gandhi’s time. Despite Nehru’s secular stance, which inspired the political and social policy of modernisation in India for decades after Independence, conflicts within the management of the republic emerged, particularly with regards to religious and ethnic minorities. India, as an independent nation, relied on the centrality of a strong state in administering national and state policies and on a ‘secular’ constitution.

The configuration of the meaning of secularism in the Indian context does not rely simply on the division and independence of the state vis á vis religion; rather, the dialectics of the relationship between the state and its citizens is complicated by other intersecting factors. If we think of the Gujarat massacre as a horrid example of the ‘clash of religions’, it is obvious that religion refers less to matters of faith and belief than to ideas of identity and political culture. Religion is changing, or rather, penetrating various dimensions of human experience. Is the separation between state and church, seen as the pillar of secularism, enough to guarantee social and civic pluralism, respect for human rights, and democracy? The case of India offers interesting points for reflection on the meaning of secularism and its relation to democracy and rights, in particular with respect to minorities.

Anthropologist Peter van de Veer remarked that any democracy, albeit modern, is always founded on the unequal power that the majority has over minorities and that, as such, from the point of view of a given minority “there is not much reason to fear a religious majority more than a secular one” and that the connection between secularism, pluralism and tolerance is one borne out of a specifically European enlightenment tradition. Given that the power of the majority will always imply that the minorities will have to comply with decisions they might not agree with, how is this power deployed by a secular state? In India the state was a strong presence particularly in the first decades after Independence; it exercised direct control over the country’s economy and it was aided by the political continuity afforded by a powerful governmental coalition. The fact that the state had a strong impact on development policies and the economy does not mean that it could guarantee peaceful coexistence among the various ethnic, religious and political groups of Indian society; one only has to think of the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, or the insurgent Maoist guerrilla in the central state of Chhattisgarh, to get a sense of the struggles the state has to face in order to keep the country unified (if not united). Issues of sexuality, and especially of queer sexualities, don’t seem to be directly related to the political life of a country; at most, they remain at the margins of the political agenda. Yet in the last two decades Indian politics devoted quite some time and effort toward the management of sex.

In the last two decades, India has witnessed a renaissance of the Hindutva ideology; the configuration of Muslims as enemies of the nation found its most destructive outcome in the destruction of the Babri Masjid (a mosque) in 1992, and ten years later in the above mentioned state-backed extermination of Muslims in Gujarat. Hatred based on supposedly religious foundations coexists, in the more recent Hindutva programmes, with campaigns to eradicate Western influences from India. The socio-cultural changes brought about by globalisation and the liberalisation of economy in 1991-1992 are seen as morally corrupting and dangerous for the imagined Hindu identity of India. It must be noted, however, that it was the BJP (the mainstream rightwing political coalition) who launched the now infamous ‘India Shining’ campaign before the 2004 elections; after running the country for the previous five years, the BJP sought to present a new image of India as a modern country, focused on progress, unprecedented growth and global aspirations: from the point of view of economy and foreign investments, interaction with the West was more than welcome. It should not be surprising that the Hindutva ideologues chose to concentrate instead on issues of sexuality and morality as the preferred loci where corrupting influences would spread.

With regards to sexuality, it must be said that ideas of properness and respectability had begun to circulate and be debated already during colonial times. The origins of discourses around the sexuality of Indian women can be traced back to the nationalist project of casting a radically different model of femininity and sexuality from that of the European invader; values such as chastity, wifehood, motherhood, purity and domesticity came to symbolise a form of resistance to the colonial rulers, and women cast as the ideal bearers of such values. If, for some, the Indian nation is imagined partly through powerful symbolic references to sexuality, one can easily see how the emergence of queer subjects and other sexual subalterns (like the sex worker) asserting the right to express their sexuality is not only a question of sex, but it becomes cultural and political. It seems as if sexuality – and in particular non-normative sexuality – easily becomes one of the most important sites where articulations of identity and rights, but also violence and abuse are experienced; sexuality is also one of the main sites where individual subjectification meets power discourses; where secular guaranteed rights do not always supersede religious beliefs; the site where, in fact, the oppositional model that sees secularism as a synonymous for individual rights and liberties and religion as a static, repressive ideology is an imperfect one.

I would like to focus here on two inter-related cases where Hindu-right supporters advanced their protest against what they saw as expressions of moral decadence that came from the West: the spread of HIV/AIDS in relation to homosexual sex, and the screening of the movie Fire by Deepa Mehta. Both events received extensive coverage both in mainstream media and in academic discussions on India’s democratic future in the face of religious and political extremism.

Many organisations working on sexual health issues started to operate in India at the time when the AIDS epidemic was spreading in the country. One of them was the NAZ Foundation Trust, who also initiated the petition against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. In 2001, the Lucknow offices of NAZ and Bharosa (another sexual health organisation) were raided by the police and their workers arrested; NAZ and Bharosa worked primarily with men who have sex with men by visiting the parks and other public places where such practices were widespread and educating people on the risk of infection. The police confiscated educational material on safe sex and condom use claiming that the organisation were distributing obscene material and encouraging sex against the order of nature, and were hence able to use Section 377 to prosecute the NGO workers. A few years before this incident, medical teams visiting the Tihar Jail in New Delhi had found several cases of HIV infection due to widespread sodomy among male inmates, and had recommended the provision of condoms; the prison authorities refused on the grounds that such an initiative would further encourage criminal sex practices and would implicitly admit the existence of homosexual sex in prisons. Such extreme episodes reflect an attitude that circulated among right-wing politicians such as Bal Thackeray (leader of the rightwing group called Shiv Sena), who claimed that AIDS was a Western disease imported into India through decadent Western practices, and that foreign NGOs were only paid to produce ad hoc statistics about increased sexual activity in India in order to discredit the country.

The release of the feature film Fire by female director Deepa Mehta in the autumn of 1998 caused violent reactions in several Indian cities. Women activists from the Shiv Sena demanded that the film be banned in Maharashtra as it was morally offensive. Hundreds of people vandalised and forced cinema theatres to close both in Mumbai, where the protest had originated, and in other cities such as Delhi, Pune, Surat. The incidents were followed by extensive media attention and politicians’ statements regarding the film. Fire is the story of two women, unhappily married to lower-middle class Hindu men, and their romantic homosexual relationship as it develops among the daily chores and the rituals of a typical north Indian extended family. The film gathered positive criticism abroad and enjoyed a certain success in India too, although it doesn’t belong to mainstream Hindi cinema (also known as Bollywood). The relationship between the two wives develops into a lesbian one, and the film contains a couple of love scenes that are fairly unusual in popular Indian cinema. Predictably, Shiv Sena’s chief Bal Thackeray stated that the lesbianism portrayed in the movie was a phenomenon imported with globalisation, alien and extremely dangerous for the social fabric of India. In another interview, Thackeray admitted that, had the film focused on Muslim women, he would have found it acceptable: in both cases, homosexuality is configured as something alien and foreign, whether it comes from the decadent West of from the ‘internal’ Muslim enemy.

The controversy surrounding Fire was part of a concerted attack by the Hindu Right on films, art, and images: as visual culture spread in the 1990s as a result of the diffusion of foreign media and the beginning of the computer age, the Hindu Right used cultural production to wage their war against immorality. It is interesting to note that by casting homosexuality as foreign, what the Hindu Right did was to enforce an idea of hetero-normativity as a nationalistic, anti-colonial move. It was in this political and cultural climate that activists and NGOs started their battle to repeal Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code; it took eight years, and during this time the terms of the debate have shifted considerably. The first petition against 377 focused on health concerns, claiming that section 377 prevented organisations from carrying out important HIV/AIDS prevention work; the government of India dismissed it, claiming that repealing it would provide license to criminal and immoral behaviour and that criminal law must reflect public morality. In 2009, after other organisations joined in signing the petition against section 377, the High Court judgment, invoking inclusion and non-discrimination as basic Indian values, seemed to testify to a truly historic ideological change.

Now that the legal battle has been won, and the Court expressed a progressive message, one would expect a supportive reaction from the government of India. And yet, after the ruling passed and the counter-petitions were filed, it was reported that the central government (centre-left Indian National Congress) still had not taken a clear stand on the issue. Would it support the High Court or the political/religious homophobia? Interrogated on the matter, majority politicians claimed that they needed more time and before making any official statement they wanted to ‘access the public mood’ on such a sensitive issue. One might argue that, even though Hindutva ideologues were not in the picture any longer, the state failed to position itself in favour of the decriminalisation. As for ‘the public mood’, and aside from the openly hostile views of religious leaders, the comments expressed by readers on the main newspaper websites show how divisive the issue of homosexuality still is. While some readers welcome the change as an example of democracy and secularism, others argue that the court’s decision does not reflect the views of the majority of people. A brief sample from the Times of India website:

Its all an example of Democracy , Untill and unless if someone is not making harm to others , it can’t be framed as Illegal.People have full right to live in their own way in a democratic and secular country atleast.Its all a matter of perception for society.(D.R. from Hyderabad)

I do not agree with the judges decision to legalise homosexuality. If the media reports on the growing number of homosexuals/ lesbians, then why cant the media see the majority of the society is against this decision. Does the majority need to take a procession to voice their protest? Very soon we will have these guys holding hands and walking on the streets, same sex marriages and even worse our country will have increase in HIV cases. Sodomy cases will increase. Surely, the HC judges decision is demeaning (Or demonising) our society. Hope better sense prevails or else our country will go to ruin. (C. from Mumbai)

This is one of the biggest progrssive action taken up by India in this 21st century. Our country is the largest democracy and we must not deny the rights of the sexual minorities. (N. from Delhi)

india is gone (M. from Delhi)

On April 7th, 2010, Professor Srinivas Ramachandra Siras, a retiring teacher at the Aligarh Muslim University, was found dead in his residence. Although suicide seemed most likely, the official cause of death was never declared. Two months earlier, Siras was fired after a videotape surfaced of him having sex with another man in his apartment. As homosexuality is not a criminal act anymore in India, professor Siras appealed to the court in Aligarh and was given his job back, but as his sexual orientation was a publicly know fact, he experienced harassment and marginalization. Whether he killed himself out of shame over being caught on video or because of the humiliation and discrimination he suffered afterwards is uncertain. His sexual partner, a rickshaw puller, tried to set himself on fire in July, after being not only shamed but also repeatedly beaten by the police, who initially suspected him of the death of Siras.

I think the case of professor Siras is emblematic. Where is the progressive, democratic and inclusive society? What was the use for Siras to appeal to the institution of the Court, thus gaining his right to work back, only to be blackmailed and marginalised?

In relation to the marginalization and abuse that gay citizens such as professor Siras continue to experience despite formal justice, what can be said about democracy, secularism and modernity? Should we be inclined to think that all the people who maligned Siras until his death were religious extremists? Or, like some could argue, that India as a society is perhaps not ready to accept sexual diversity – as if we in the West were? What interests are being protected by allowing discrimination and violence against sexual minorities?

Societal attitudes are not easily formalised, and a legal pronouncement is clearly not enough to change them. This is nothing new. What I find problematic when discussing social developments in non-Western societies is that common categories and concepts don’t seem to work too well, if taken for granted. I feel uncomfortable in using the words ‘democracy’, ‘modernity’, ‘justice’, ‘secular state’ – the dramatic events unfolding in India remind me how these noble concepts are never stable, never achieved once and for all. Someone is always excluded, left out, for the benefit of the majority.

When the Hindu Right decides to target movies and other cultural products in order to advance its repressive ideas, it does so precisely because popular culture is the ideal terrain to plant the seeds of intolerance and extremism; when mainstream Indian media enthusiastically reports a historic change for homosexuals in India, it nonetheless makes sure to clarify that gays will not be able to marry, a welcome tranquilliser for the public who might worry that the most important social institution may be at risk. Even though sexuality (as well as religious belief) belongs to the domain of the private in any democratic and secular society, one can see how some sexualities don’t seem to fit too well into the social fabric; they may be perceived as threatening, disruptive, polluting. Hence, it is important that their existence, even when sanctioned by the law, is kept away from the eyes of the ‘silent majority’: some sexualities are more private than others as the values they convey are not acceptable. Contrary to what the majority of commentators said on the eve of the decriminalisation of Section 377, in the case of professor Siras the legal change did not have a positive impact on the visibility of homosexuality or the right to positively affirm his sexual orientation. On the contrary, his ‘outing’ took the form of a scandal and marked the beginning of prolonged harassment that had tragic consequences. That homosexuals are citizens enjoying equal rights within an inclusive society was clearly not enough to save Siras’s life. Perhaps in mainstream debates on democracy and secularism the concept of equality has been overdetermined at the expense of the concept of difference. Acts of abuse, discrimination and violence such as the one I reported compel us reflect upon the meaning of equality and difference. I offered the example of India because the very recent events I presented offer, in their dramatic and extreme developments, a picture (even if fragmented and incomplete) of the relation between state and individual encompassing variations which go beyond the traditional Western dualistic model. Variations that, if taken into consideration, could help us question our definitions of secularism, modernity and democracy.

Nu-jazz, purportedly Asian influenced owing to multi-instrumentalist Kono’s (Japanese, I believe) heritage, however my immediate overall impression was of a fairly straightforward Western blend. ‘Castles and Daffodils’ opens the record to rambling effect; originally a paean to a downcast Stanley Kunitz poem, the originally effect was scrapped and re-engineered as an upbeat, light bit of proggy puttering with Zawinul influences all over it. This arguably obligato achievement accomplished, we move to the goods, traditional bop sax on ‘Common Ground’; Weather Channel background cooking on ‘Rice’. Lots of Mingus threatening as with any new-schooler, but it never rushes the gates; infinitely inspiring coffee-time stuff here. Unless I’m nuts, I’m starting to see the names of these New York session guys more and more on jewel cases, for instance Pete McCann, whose John McLaughlin depth complements Henry Hey’s keyboards, in particularly the – you should know by now I’m a sucker for the sound – Fender Rhodes.

Grade: A-

“Film Business Asia is a new company, created and run by some familiar names in Asian film: Patrick Frater and Stephen Cremin. Based in Hong Kong and with a reach across the Asia-Pacific region, the company is a next-generation film trade publication — less magazine and more market intelligence platform”.

01 Film Business Asia: Aiming to be the go-to for industry information in the Asia-Pacific region, Film Business Asia currently provides quality, if not-yet comprehensive, news and reviews. Evolving since January 2010 (it had something of a public launch at Cannes last May), the site promises plenty of new features (see below). According to the Film Business Asia, India, Japan, and China are among the five most prolific cinema industries. The Asia-Pacific market increased 12% to $7.7billion in 2009, compared to North America’s $10.6billion. Although designed principally for these huge (and growing) markets, it is an excellent resource for cinema fans everywhere.

02 Remit: Think Asian IMDB Pro with the emphasis on quality and consistency. The site is largely English-language, is well-researched, well-designed and makes good use of stills. South Korea is particularly well-represented on the site, with a balance of coverage between Japan, and China / Hong Kong. However, India is surprisingly lacking to date. Different genres are present without any clear bias and a cursory look through the reviews shows the range of interesting issues that are currently being tackled in film.

03 News: Two to three stories daily, generally written by Patrick Frater, former Variety journalist and CEO of Film Business Asia (see below). Coverage falls into 18 categories, including Awards, Box Office, and Festivals. Frater’s journalism is solid and the writing relevant. The site needs to take on more correspondents in order to expand its coverage.

04 Features: Four key stories give an at-a-glance insight into the top issues as Film Business Asia sees them. These often relate to the interaction of different markets: how Australian production companies are funding Asian films, for example, or Asian involvement in US festivals and distribution. Currently, new stories will tend to cycle over a two-week period.

05 Reviews: For the casual reader, this is currently the site’s strongest area. Over 230 reviews have appeared since January 2010, usually at a rate of one or two per day. These can be accessed via a variety of views and are nicely organised and laid out. Each film is graded out of 10 and gets an authoritative synopsis, as well as comprehensive technical and production details. Whereas IMDB has begun to fragment over the years, the presentation here is clean. A sales contact is listed (for the Asian market) and reviews breakdown into 12 key countries: China / Hong Kong / India / Indonesia / Japan / Malaysia / Philippines / Singapore / South Korea / Taiwan / Thailand / Vietnam. Almost every review is written by Derek Elley, another refugee from Variety. Whilst there are no complaints about the quality of his work, the site would again benefit from more human resources.

06 Forthcoming features: This could be the special source. The founders of Film Business Asia have been compiling data which they currently offer as products. The homepage promises a range of services including release and festival calendars, box office charts, news tracking, various contacts directories and Stephen Cremin’s extensive database (see below), however none of this is yet functional. It is possible to add project and company listings to the database, which gets used in a number of ways.

07 Who’s behind it: Patrick Frater (CEO): “Over 20 years of experience as a journalist (formerly with Variety, Screen International and Hollywood Reporter) in three countries, an unmatched knowledge of the film business and a commitment to improving the professionalism of the Asian film business media, have brought Patrick to the point today where he launches Film Business Asia”. Stephen Cremin (CTO): “Stephen co-founded the London Pan-Asian Film Festival in 1998 before joining Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy. He has also worked as a correspondent for Screen International in Taipei. However, his life work is a multilingual database of Asian cinema that has been in active development since 1993 and forms the core of Film Business Asia”.

08 Going Further: Film Business Asia has a functional Facebook and Twitter presence. Logging in allows users to create a profile and add their details to the databases mentioned above. The system is efficient, self-explanatory, comprehensive and generally well-thought out.

Futureland #17 – Shanghai, China, 2010. Ink jet print, 110 x 145 cm
© Nuno Cera and Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, reproduced with thanks

Nuno Cera’s project Futureland catches the process of rapid urbanisation in the act. Between 2008 and 2010, the photographer travelled between nine of the world’s fastest growing cities as they rush towards the future (and the sky). Rather than the gleaming metropolis, however, Cera’s photographs and videos portray the delirious repetition of mass housing and crowds, and slums giving way to building sites giving way again to slums. The exhibition catalogue quotes Rem Koolhaas, whose writings on Lagos might be seen as an appropriate adjunct to the images: “People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming”. Commenting on the chosen locations (LA, Dubai, Istanbul, Mexico City, Cairo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Jakarta), Cera has stated, “Each of these cities has its own scale, form, density and diversity that shall be quantified, memorized and compared. From an artistic, personal and subjective view, the project transmits a temporary experience of new and old Mega Cities on their transformation to future Giga Cities”.

Born in Beja, southern Portugal, in 1972, Nuno Cera now divides his time between Berlin and Lisbon. Spike asked him about his attitudes and working methodologies:

How are your working days? Are they casual or disciplined? Driven by deadlines or goals? Do you work every day?
My working days are rather structured and organised which helps to stay focused and concentrated within a rather ‘casual’ and ‘non-organised’ atmosphere and nature within the contemporary art scene, art production and discussion I feel surrounded by (in Portugal). I try to separate private and working areas. I am lucky therefore to have my own studio in the centre of Lisbon, where I work every day of the week. I usually arrive in my studio around 10am and leave at 6pm. I see myself as disciplined in a way and I try to work concentrated and effective. Since I moved to my new studio in Lisbon, I have been starting to organise and sort my ‘archive’ from the past 10 years – meaning old research material, texts, photos, prints and negatives, articles published about my work, documentation about past exhibitions of mine, etc. Sometimes my working schedules are driven by a deadline, some times rather by my personal goals. When I am facing a huge production outside the studio, I normally try to prepare the schedules and teams carefully beforehand. Somehow I feel it is important to keep working and to development my work even if the conditions or perspectives are not the right ones…

Do you own original work by other photographers?
Yes, I do. I own a few photos from some artist friends.

What influence does your photography and video work have on the rest of your life?
My work is the prior and central point in my life. The work is constantly influenced by my life and vice-versa. I really can’t separate one from the other.

Do your cameras have distinct personalities? Or do you consider them merely as tools?
Different cameras offer very different forms of seeing. They are rather tools to reach a goal, but at the same time they open and offer me different ways of photographing and seeing the reality.

Do you ever face a crisis in your work, one that perhaps demands a new direction or a temporary boredom? How do you deal with it?
There are always the two moments of input and output. In the moment when I feel the need to read more, see more exhibitions, travel, watch more movies, I enter into a process of input of ideas and stimulus. Then there are moments of creation and output, where I am very focused in my work and in the production. Generally I would not apply the term ‘crisis’ onto my case – I do not feel a crisis or being in crisis – I rather feel the need and demand of ‘input’.

Futureland #4 – Bombay, India, 2010. Ink jet print on Hahnemühle paper, 45 x 60cm
© Nuno Cera and Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, reproduced with thanks

Further Reading:
Nuno Cera’s website with extensive examples of his work
Nuno Cera’s page at at Galeria Pedro Cera
An essay on Futureland by Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove