I am pissed off that Modi's RSS goons killed a Tamil author!

I was in India when the editor/publisher of Ananda Vikatan died.  He was my father's age and belonged to an era that seems ancient whenever I visit India.  An era when Tamil literature was alive, and rich, and entertained and educated the youth and the old alike.

The magazine devoted an issue to the editor's demise.  One contributor was the author Jayakanthan, who reminisced about how the editor boldly published Jayakanthan's stories, even though they were considered troublesome to the establishment.  Jayakanthan went on to write quite a bit, grew in stature, and has been recognized with awards galore.

That era seems even more ancient than ancient history when I read about the recent developments in the land that was once home to me, whose literature and language will always be a part of who I am. Even what I wear sometimes!  What happened for me to lament like this?

"Author Perumal Murugan has died"

Source

The author was the latest victim of the provincial, parochial, ill-informed, goons, also known as as the Hindu right-wing group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) who are making the best use of the opportunity now that one of their favorite and well-known is India's prime minister.

Ok, the RSS didn't kill the person.  The person lives:

"Author Perumal Murugan has died," the Tamil writer and professor posted on Monday. "He is no god, so he is not going to resurrect himself. Nor does he believe in reincarnation. From now on, Perumal Murugan will survive merely as the teacher he has been."

Why kill the author?  For a book he wrote. Not now, but back in 2010!

"Madhorubagan" is set about a century ago near the author's native town of Tiruchengode in southern India. In the book, a childless couple from the land-owning Gounder caste contemplate participating in a local temple festival ritual - during which a childless woman has sex with a man other than her husband in order to conceive a child.
Last month, unexpectedly, local groups led protests about the book - they said the "fictitious" extramarital sex ritual at the centre of the plot insulted the town, its temple and its women. Copies of the novel were burnt, residents shut down shops, and a petition sought the arrest of the author.

Yep, these goons conveniently forget that love and sex, and god, have been a wonderful tradition in the rich literature and arts in Tamil and throughout India.  But then when were goons ever seriously interested in knowledge!

The author is no bloke. Not any pretentious professor like this blogger. No, ma'am:

Perumal Murugan has been a professor of Tamil for the past 17 years, during which time he has developed considerable expertise in three different areas: building a lexicon of words, idioms and phrases special to Kongunadu; researching Kongu folklore, especially the ballads on Annamar Sami, a pair of folk deities; and publishing authoritative editions of classical Tamil texts. Murugan’s output in these areas over the past decade has been substantial. 

His knowledge led him to something that absolutely fascinated him:

It was his continuing interest in Kongu folklore that prompted him to apply for and obtain a grant from the India Foundation of the Arts, Bangalore, to undertake research on folklore surrounding the temple town of Thiruchengodu, a town he knew very well from his childhood but, in another sense, did not know at all.
There are many idols on the Thiruchengodu hill, each one capable of giving a specific boon. One of them is the Ardhanareeswarar, an idol of Shiva who has given the left part of his body to his consort, Parvathi. It is said that this is the only place where Shiva is sacralised in this mythical form. Murugan was intrigued on encountering several men in the region past the age of 50 who were called Ardhanari (Half-woman) or Sami Pillai (God-given child). On digging further he found out that till as recently as 50 years ago, on a particular evening of the annual chariot festival in the temple of Ardhanareeswara, childless women would come alone to the area alive with festival revelries. Each woman was free to couple with a male stranger of her choice, who was considered an incarnation of god. If the woman got pregnant, the child was considered a gift from god and accepted as such by the family, including her husband.

He then worked this into his fictional work. All done. That was in 2010.

In 2014, the RSS darling, Modi, was elected India's prime minister.  Now, the goons got bolder.  Which is why it has taken the idiots this long to go after Perumal Murugan and kill the author--ironically, after the English translation of the novel came out!

The NY Times expresses worries over the trend of silencing authors.  But, you think President Obama will bother to pressure his new friend, Prime Goon Modi, about such issues?  Heck no. After all, the attraction is all because Modi talks the business language and money talks, while everything else takes a walk!  As Shikha Dalmia writes:

Modi will use Obama's visit as the West's vote of confidence in himself, and pooh-pooh growing domestic alarm over his creeping Hindutva agenda.

Yep! :(

Obama can't ignore the political forces he'll be aiding and abetting in India.
India is a young democracy whose commitment to religious liberty is still fragile. On its Republic Day, President Obama should do nothing to undermine it.

Like Obama cares about any of these!

I did something that I did once before when the RSS/Hindutva assholes went after a book and its author.
I have bought myself a copy of Perumal Murugan's novel.

I never imagined reading a Hitchens essay would make me teary. Now I know

In a moving essay, that is rich with intellectual references that are all new to me, Christopher Hitchens writes about how the cancer is robbing him of his ability to speak.  Oh, please do read the entire essay (ht).  Hitchens concludes:

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

"freedom of speech" ...

In the essay, Hitchens refers to poems and essays, and to Leonard Cohen's “If It Be Your Will.”   I tracked it down on YouTube, and listening to it, I can immediately see why Hitchens notes "it’s best not to listen to this late at night."  Here is one version of it:

This comic was not published?

Over to Matt Welch:

As Radley Balko noted in yesterday's Morning Links, the Washington Post and other newspapers pulled Wiley Miller's syndicated "Non Sequitur" cartoon from their comics pages two Sundays back, because Miller pulled a familiar-to-Reason-readers "where's Waldo?" gag with the Prophet Muhammad, satirizing the new 21st century taboo on the depiction of even jokes about the fear of depicting a historical figure who really existed.
As is typical of the genre, Washington Post editors tried to play their own "where's Waldo" with the censorship process:

Style editor Ned Martel said he decided to yank it, after conferring with others, including Executive Editor Marcus W. Brauchli, because "it seemed a deliberate provocation without a clear message." He added that "the point of the joke was not immediately clear" and that readers might think that Muhammad was somewhere in the drawing.

If the Post's new standard for comics is to make jokes "immediately clear," then it might be time to kill the comics page altogether. No, Martel/Brauchli, you pulled the cartoon because your fear of Muslims outweighs your commitment to free expression, period.
Now comes L.A. Times media critic James Rainey, who, even while concluding that the cartoon should have run (the L.A. Times, to no one's surprise, suppressed it), makes sure we understand that fear was not a factor, nosiree:

That's not to agree with some commentators who have called the refusal to run the comic a cowardly retreat from radicals. I'd say the ax that fell on "Non Sequitur" had more to do expediency. Moving in a hurry, with many other decisions that seemed more pressing at the time, editors probably killed the item rather than face the possibility of a furor for a piece they honestly felt was not of high quality.

Uh-huh.

"The law is a ass—a idiot"

So said Mr. Bumble in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.

That is what I could think of when I read a LA Times news story about this man and a Supreme Court case:

He went to the South as a "freedom rider" in 1961, joining other civil rights activists on behalf of African Americans seeking the right to travel freely on interstate buses. He was arrested, then badly beaten by white cellmates. "When I went to jail in Alabama for violating the Jim Crow laws, they charged me with disturbing the peace," he said.

Guess what? According to the government, this man is a terrorist!

Who is he and why is he a terrorist?

He is Ralph Fertig, a retired judge and USC professor.  The guy turns 80 next week (Happy birthday, Mr. Fertig.)

What did he do?  Hide explosives in his underwear while on a plane?  Nope.

Fertig says he wants no part of terrorism or violence, but rather the freedom to advocate for the rights of the Kurdish minority in Turkey. He is troubled that Kurds can be punished for speaking their own language or displaying their national colors. And he believes the 1st Amendment protects his right to counsel Kurdish leaders to steer away from violence and to take their cause to the United Nations.

"I am opposed to violence. It seems crazy to me that I could go to jail for trying to persuade people to engage in nonviolence," said Fertig, a retired judge and a USC professor of social work.

The State Department has named the Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK, as a terrorist organization. The PKK, which seeks an independent state for the Kurds, has been accused of violent attacks on Turkish targets, including civilians.

See, the law is a ass.

BTW, apparently even writing columns in newspapers can warrant a terrorist label:

Government lawyers say [the anti-terrorism law] even forbids filing a legal brief or writing an op-ed essay on behalf of a designated terrorist group.

Great! Now my colleagues will be happy to report to the feds my opinions as terrorist activity in their attempts to oust me:)

Google, and Censorship in China

James Fallows observes:

What happens after Google is so roundly cheered for taking so clear a stand? China will still be there; many of its people will hunger for outside information and most will aspire to modernization. What is the way out of this that does the least overall damage to Google and the people who once relied on its services inside China? That is the question taken up here (I have met a number of the Google-China employees shown in the pictures) and the the WSJ editorial as well. As that editorial says:

"it's worth remembering that this is a lose-lose-lose scenario. The most likely outcome is that Google loses access to an important market, Chinese customers lose access to its services, and the government loses face."

The next step is to find some way to reduce the number of losses -- including, yes, for the Chinese government, since (believe me) absolutely no good will come to anyone anywhere from the government's feeling shamed, humiliated, or newly insecure. It is emotionally satisfying to see the Chinese government thrown off balance after its recent repressive moves. That won't make things better for most people in China.

Image ht

Google, and freedom of speech in China

HT to a friend who sent me the link to this important info about Google, China and human rights.  Read the entire piece, which is at the official Google Blog.  Google is sharing this with the public because:

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech.

More excerpt:

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

China @ 60

I am glad I don't live in China. I mean, when I have a tough time even dealing with oppressive faculty colleagues who have successfully killed my freedom of speech, I bet I would not have literally lived under the Communist regime.  But, hey, thanks to the all-controlling government, they put on quite a show to celebrate turning 60.  Here is a video summary of the parade--the entire parade packed into four minutes: (HT)

China's 60th Anniversary national day - timelapse and slow motion - 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

More attacks on free speech

Even the so-called liberal democratic countries are deteriorating rapidly. Awful.
Spiked has this comment before the link to a photo-essay:

Along with the double decker bus, Big Ben and red phone booths, London ‘Bobbies’ have long been a popular motif for tourist snaps in the British capital. But from this week, under Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, photographing a cop can land you a fine or a 10-year prison sentence. spiked’s Nathalie Rothschild took to the streets in defiance of this latest assault on our liberties.

View photo essay

A good sign for freedom of speech

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have signed a global code of conduct promising to offer better protection for online free speech and against official intrusion. ....
[The Global Network Initiative] states that privacy is "a human right and guarantor of human dignity," and the agreement commits the companies to try to resist overly broad demands for restrictions on freedom of speech and the privacy of users.
They will also assess the human rights climate in a country before concluding business deals and make sure their employees and partners follow suit.

More here, and here