Harlot's Ghost Again - at the UN!

In Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer’s 1991 exploration of the morally tone-deaf world of the CIA, a character offers himself for buggery as an act of hierarchic submission.

Something of that sort has just happened at the UN, where Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was the one who bent over – to make a UN envoy of actor Daniel Craig, the incumbent “licensed to kill” James Bond.

What’s the logic of associating the UN with an envoy who glorifies serial killing?

Other than the fact that the British got Ban his job, nothing at all.

James Bond is a relic of the time when the British thought nothing of creating a dashing fictional character to hide in plain sight the real life Hastings Lionel Ismay (1887-1965), the man responsible for the deaths of figures ranging from Rasputin and Franklin Roosevelt to Mahatma Gandhi.

But seven decades down the pike, things have changed.

If movie hit men now are not to be seen as psychopaths they must be either semi-comic figures (Mr. & Mrs Smith) or tortured souls (Jason Bourne).

And Bond can’t be either. His character is too well established. Consider this exchange from Casino Royale:

Vesper Lynd: It doesn't bother you? Killing all those people?
James Bond: Well I wouldn't be very good at my job if it did.

And there is also the question of how people around the world perceive the British.

A poll would probably show they’re seen far more like Mr. Bean than swashbuckling James Bond.

So, from Bond’s perspective, there’s desperate need for some sort of respectable political cover.

Being a UN envoy is not exactly heavy duty political cover, but then nothing can really help when Bond is required to battle Mexican drug traffickers in his next film.

Perhaps the only hope for the seriously anachronistic franchise is for Bond to discover that M is the drug trafficking kingpin and the Queen her primary protector.

Which wouldn’t be too far from the truth.

The EPIC Channel’s Assault on India

Among the shows airing on the new EPIC channel the scurrilous sitcom Yam Kise Se Kam Nahin sitcom  is not exceptional. Other shows are also offensive and some are historically misleading.

One feature length movie, Shaheed Udham Singh, tells of the communist Sikh revolutionary who, in revenge for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, assassinated Michael O’Dwyer in London in 1940. The movie creates the impression that O'Dwyer was the man who commanded the troops at Jallianwalla when he was, in fact, the administrator of the district. (The man who led the troops was Reginald Dyer; he died peacefully in bed.)

The day before the assassination Udham Singh is shown celebrating in a London bar, doing the bhangra holding aloft three mugs of beer. At one point in the movie he derides the value of freedom to the poor of India. (Anyone inclined to agree should look at the ascent of Indian life expectancy after independence.) The show has several dumps on Mahatma Gandhi and one character refers scornfully to “Gandhi-priya” Indians. The producer is Iqbal Dhillon.

Dharmakshetra (26 episodes), is touted as going “beyond” the Mahabharata. The EPIC web site says “Well known characters from the epic” will be “questioned in a divine court where they explain their side of the story.”

In the episode I saw bits of costumed dramatization were interspersed with commentary by the host of the show, a woman whose name I could not decipher in the fast rolling credits. (Probably as a result of my identifying the producer of Yam Kise Se Kam Nahin, the credits on EPIC were – at this writing – either too blurred or rolled too fast to be read. A number had “Produced by” but no name. One had “Produced by R.”)

The show’s producer displays an extremely blunt understanding of Hindu scripture. At one point, Sri Krishna tells Arjuna “I am satya and also asatya,” a stunning statement nowhere in the Gita. The scriptwriter was either carried away by a misreading of the grand eloquence of Chapter 10 of the Gita or is engaging in a traditional missionary distortion.

Krishna is also shown saying that no one knows the mystery of life and death! As I have pointed out previously, the Katha Upanishad is focused entirely on that issue, and Krishna explicitly repeats the teaching in the Bhagavad Gita.

Some of the host’s interactions with "experts" chosen to provide illuminating commentary on the Mahabharata reinforce the impression that she and the producer are completely at sea about Hinduism. For example, she asks at one point, "Krishna could have stopped the war but did not. Why?”

The reply: “He didn’t want to stop the war because it was necessary to destroy adharma.”

Both question and answer are ignorant.

 Her question is based on the incorrect premise that India shares with ancient Greece and the Semitic/Western tradition, the deus ex machina concept of divinity (ie gods capable of magically transforming human narratives). The Indian concept, laid out at some length in the Gita and in common lore, is that Karma (causality) is a binding and universal law inherent in godhood itself.

The answer to her question is also stupendously wrong. The war did not destroy adharma; the Pandavas won but at a huge moral cost. The war augured the Kali Yuga when adharma is dominant.

In a more mundane take on “history,” EPIC provides brief bits on ten warrior heroes. In those I saw, Prithiviraj Chauhan is represented as killing Mohammad Ghori after he is captured and blinded by the invader.

The piece on Tipu Sultan gives the French credit for developing the rocket technology that Indian forces used with devastating effect against the British; in fact, it was entirely unknown in Europe. Bangalore techies built the weapon the British later incorporated into their own army and used against George Washington’s forces (the American national anthem's reference to “the rocket’s red glare, bombs bursting in air” recalls the vivid impact).

A more respectable contribution to the history genre is “The First Heroes of the R&A Wing.” Eleven episodes will tell of the exploits of Indian intelligence agents. The first episode dealt with the role of Indian intelligence in helping Bangladesh to independence. The credits absolutely whizzed by so I could get no details about who produced it.

The show was strictly factual and made no move to follow the Western track of glamorizing intelligence operations; but the Indian political establishment must keep careful watch to prevent mischief.

Britain has traditionally glamorized intelligence operations as a way of diverting attention from its frequently thuggish and criminal pursuit of elite interests. The James Bond novels and movies, casting a serial killer as a hero, are a case in point.  

The United States offers a cautionary example that India should take to heart. After Churchill launched the Cold War in alliance with the American military-industrial complex in 1946, the nascent CIA (and FBI in cahoots with the mafia), took on the “license to kill” ethic of the British., In effect that subverted American democracy and ushered in an unprecedented era of high level assassinations and human rights abuses. Things have got so bad that hit men and mafiosi have become the stuff of romance and comedy in Hollywood films, neutering the outrage that should be the democratic response to such fascism.

Another of EPIC’s historical contributions was on the excellence of ancient Indian steel production; it noted, very briefly and sotto voce, that the British had killed that technology.

Most of the rest of EPIC programming is either utter nonsense or incredibly boring.

The episode of Daanav Hunters that I saw presented an endlessly repetitive battle against blood-sucking demons with occasional detours, one to ridicule a Tamil fan of superstar Rajnikant and another to present an NRI woman scientist’s view of India as a “strange country.” It should be noted that blood sucking demons and the living dead are not part of Indian folklore the way Vampires and Zombies are in the West (where they reflect the creative artistic response to the realities of the colonial and industrial eras). It remains to be seen if 20 episodes of Daanav Hunters will change that.

If the lugubrious Mughal era costume drama Siyaasat has a plot it escaped me, probably because the love story of crown prince Salim and Meherunissa will drag out over a staggering 42 episodes. 

By way of travelogue a lanky long haired host (whose name I did not catch), walked in slow motion around the overgrown crumbling ruins of Ross Island, where the British once lived in the Andamans. He is set to do the same in 10 other shows on “abandoned places” in India.

Another host, Jaaved Jaffrey, mocked at interminable length the plot of a golden oldie film, Victoria #203. He is set to do the same with a lineup of other popular old Hindi movies. This is the opposite of nostalgia; it is “feel-bad” programming.

All in all, the proof of the pudding so far is unavoidable: EPIC presents in its shoddy line up of shows a view of India that is confused, misleading, and in its political content, indistinguishable from British propaganda.

So who are the people responsible for all this?

In operational charge of EPIC is Mahesh Samat, who quit in 2012 as Managing Director of Disney India. The head of Development is Ravina Kohli, formerly of Yash Raj Television and Sony Entertainment.

Some 20 production houses are reported to be contributing content. They include Balaji Telefilms, Green Light Productions, Bolt Media, A Bellyful of Dreams, Rose Audio, Face Entertainment and Rangrez Media.

It is obviously in these production houses, under the watch of Samat and Kohli that
the offensive content of EPIC is planned and produced. To be fair, much that I have pointed out was probably under the radar of the executives at EPIC.

But there is no denying malign intent. The question is, where is it coming from?

The promoters of the channel are India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, Anand Mahindra, head of a $16.5 billion industrial conglomerate, and Rohit Khattar, a biggie in the hospitality business who headed Mumbai Mantra Media Ltd, the communications wing of the Mahindra Group.

As none of these figures has any reason for shaping the kind of content EPIC is airing, we have to look elsewhere: to EPIC’s almost sole advertiser, Aquaguard water purifiers.

Aquaguard is a product of Eureka Forbes, which is part of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, the largest single holder of stock in the TATA Group. To fill out the picture: Cyrus Mistry, who took over from Ratan Tata, is a scion of the Shapoorji Pallonji family; his billionaire father (living in Mumbai) has traded his Indian citizenship for that of Ireland.

Both Shapoorji Pallonji Group and TATA have long-standing and strong British ties. I think that somewhere in their nexus of interests is hidden the directive British element of EPIC.

If the programming does not change course as a result of what I have written, we should expect the British propaganda element in EPIC programming to become more overt.

In closing it is necessary to note that with the enormous clout of EPIC’s promoters the channel could be a major force for India’s intellectual decolonization. It is tragic that on its current tack it will only becloud our national awareness and extend the colonial mind-set.

Feedback on the International Film Festival of India

The International Film Festival of India (IFFI), the 45th edition of which concluded its ten-day run in Goa on 30 November, allows each delegate a maximum of three tickets a day. The 28 films I saw have left me dizzy with cinema.

I saw only a fraction of the films on offer and missed Leviathan the Russian production that won the Golden Peacock. As most of those at the festival also missed the film, perhaps the IFFI organizers could think of a special screening of its award winning films at next year’s festival? Or conclude each festival by special screenings accessible to all delegates?

The official feedback form asked delegates to identify positive and negative aspects of the festival. In particular it wanted information on what could be done to make IFFI a world class event. The positive was definitely the rich diversity of the films. I would like to highlight in particular a cricket centered Malayalam movie, 1983, a world class production at once funny and warmly humanistic.  (Another, Swapnam, that could have been a ferociously funny black comedy succumbed to melodrama.)

The negatives are all nitpicking complaints that could (unfortunately) be made of any Indian event:

1. Insanitary conditions: The eating arrangements at the Inox complex and at the Kala Akademi were fly infested. The consolidation of garbage at the Inox entrance gate resulted in a decidedly non-world-class aroma. The Kala Akademi men’s washroom lacked soap and some of the stalls were not clean.

2. Q etiquette: IFFI attracts a sophisticated set of Q jumpers. They don’t just resort to force majeure as the hoi polloi do but pretend to be deeply involved in conversation/reading/meditation as they edge forward. The more brazen casually attempt to join a line near its front. If someone pulls them up, they appear astonished. The line goes all the way back?! Who would have thought! In one line I had a fat man behind me who seemed oblivious his stomach was acting as a bumper. In another the man behind me had no sense of personal space and when I elbowed him away, sidled up the other side and tried to get ahead.

4. Early leavers: At every show there were people who left before the films concluded, often disrupting entire rows as they did. A special breed of early leaver is the one that seems to think getting to the exit is a competition. Its members obviously have no appreciation of film and often seem to lack even a basic understanding of content: their departure is often set off by the nature of the music in the soundtrack. They are prone to miscues and then stand in front of the hall like so many sheep, staring up at the still unfolding story.

5. Cell phone rudeness: People routinely ignored the request at the beginning of every show that mobile phones be turned off or put on silent mode. At every event phones rang and people carried on conversations despite the irritated responses of their neighbours. At one show a teenager near me had the phone out during the entire show, and when she was not involved in conversation, was checking mail and playing games.

As for program content, I think the festival could do with a new element to bring into focus the meta-text of the audiovisual medium. I tried to raise this matter during a lunchtime panel discussion but met with blank incomprehension. That was not surprising given our general state of post-colonial zombiedom.

Let me explain.

Most Indians seem blissfully unaware that our cultural/intellectual environment is heavy with propaganda meant to subvert nationalism and foist acceptance of Western dominance. Our so-called “elite” mass media have been systematically suborned to that end, as have key figures in television, cinema, sports and advertising. Items:

• The use of the demeaning term “Bollywood” to describe the world’s largest film industry is illustrative; it has been popularized and sustained by our comprador English medium mass media.Fortunately, Amitabh Bachan in his excellent opening speech noted that he did not like the term. (Unfortunately, he then went on to refer to the "Indo-Aryans" coming to Goa.)

• Some of our A-list film stars have actively sought to revive and sharpen provincial/communal identities the British created to divide and rule India. Their prime provincial targets have been Tamils and Sikhs. Shah Rukh Khan has not only targeted Tamils, his “I am a Muslim and not a terrorist” mantra has spread the idea of the victimhood of the entire community, the tried and tested first step to its political manipulation. (The technique was invented and perfected by the British over the last 800 years, beginning in Ireland.) The Owaisi brothers and al Qaeda/ISIS have now taken his project in hand and the first trickle of Indian youths into the nightmares of the Middle East has begun. Meanwhile, SRK has joined the ranks of the richest actors in the world.

• Advertising agencies also contribute to the creation of provincial identities with television commercials using thick provincial accents that serve no rational marketing purpose. The most recent examples have been commercials for Red Bull (the energy drink rumored to cause male impotence) and Chola insurance.

• Sania Mirza’s “new glamorous avatar” as a television instructor giving “James Bond lessons” on ways to a “woman’s heart” is featured in the latest India Today, perhaps the most overtly comprador magazine in India. Her on-air appearances in that role emphasize the tart like qualities of “Bond girls" and recall the insulting “Octopussy” contribution of the franchise to the image of Indian femininity. (I wonder if Sania Mirza, who certainly does not strike me as a bimbo, has thought through the impact of what she is doing on less fortunate Indian women struggling to maintain their self-respect and safety against heavy odds.)

• The unstinting flow of praise for Attenborough’s Gandhi, a finely honed piece of British propaganda shows a complete lack of awareness that it obliterates the truth of what happened in the final phase of colonial rule in India.

• There is general lack of awareness that the British manage "Brand India" globally. For example, Slumdog Millionaire and Midnight's Children cast India's improving global image into the mould of colonial stereotypes the British created. I haven't seen the new film on the "worst industrial accident" that killed thousands at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal in 1984, but can bet it will give no credence to the reality of British-sponsored terrorism that was the most probable cause of the gas leak.

•  People are also oblivious that television images carry a heavy emotional/cultural content and shape global perceptions of India. For instance, the image of the two girls in Badaun, supposedly raped and left hanging from a tree, packaged into one potent cocktail the India-associated ideas of caste brutality, gender violence, open defecation and police ineffectiveness. According to the reports carried by our "elite" media, the girls were raped because they had to go out at night to defecate in the fields, and their bodies hung from the tree for 12 hours -- an image that made the prime time news around the world -- because all the constables in the local police station were drunk. According to the just released CBI report on the killings, none of that was true. The older of the girls had a long-standing relationship with the prime accused, a police constable. Her cell phone shows she had over 400 conversations with him. On the night of the murders, she called to ask him for money and they planned to have sex. The CBI says the girls committed suicide because a relative discovered this. (I don't buy that for a second. Everything the CBI report unveils supports my theory that the girls were killed for money, and that they were left hanging from the tree to create an image that would wipe out the hugely positive one of the majestic transfer of power in New Delhi.)

All this points to a dire need for greater Indian awareness of the politics of mass media. If people in general understand that Indians collaborating with foreign interests are no different from the traitors of the past who profited from helping enslave the country, national security would be materially enhanced.

IFFI should develop a program element to raise awareness of the subliminal political/cultural messages of audiovisual media.

The Real "Bond Girls"

Malala Yousafzai struggling to recover from a Taliban assassin’s bullets is the latest real life “Bond Girl.”

She is one of the many millions of women and children who have been victims of those “licensed to kill” for Britain.

The linkage is direct. The Taliban was created by Pakistan’s ISI, which was established by British Military Intelligence in 1948 and has been its proxy ever since.

Ian Fleming, who invented the fictional serial killer James Bond, was a psychological warfare expert of British Military Intelligence.

Fleming tarted up murder with sex and fancy gadgetry and conjured up a series of bizarre villains, but underpinning the fiction was the grim reality of officially sanctioned murder of anyone who stood in the way of British “interests.”

The Taliban proxies of MI6 protect the $60 billion British interest in the drug trade out of Pakistan and Afghanistan. To keep that trade going it is necessary to keep the region as the badlands of Empire; Malala had to go. Similarly, protecting the diamond monopoly of DeBeers from post Cold War Russian and Arab mafias required a reign of terror in African producing countries; in Sierra Leone the job was taken in hand by former British special ops soldier Foday Sankoh, who persuaded locals not to deal with outsiders by cutting off hands, legs, ears and noses of thousands of people, including six month old babies.

During the heyday of the British Empire, London’s “interests” required the elimination of entire peoples. In such situations imperial agents killed without a qualm. In Tasmania, British settlers hunted the local people like animals until they were extinct. Winston Churchill even justified such policy to a parliamentary committee on Palestine, saying he did not “feel sorry” for the American Indian or the Australian aborigine because they were replaced by a “superior” race.

In colonial India, the killing was also on genocidal scale. At a conservative estimate, the British killed about 100 million Indians from the time they took control of Bengal (1757) to the imperial sunset turned ruddy by the deaths of over a million people in the assiduously engineered Partition "riots" of 1947.

There was also much targeted killing, the kind 007 is “licensed” to execute. The string of prominent Indians who died sudden and often premature deaths stretches from Raja Rammohun Roy, who was almost certainly poisoned, to Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi.

Gideon Polyna, an Australian academic who has made a specialty of counting up the cost in human lives of the British Empire, estimates that from 1950 to 2005 the "excess deaths" in the British Commonwealth numbered a staggering 700 million. Included in that number were the 100,000 or so Mau Mau rebels killed in Kenya, many by the most gruesome torture. (In July three survivors of that period learned that their effort to sue the British government would be allowed to go forward.)

It is amazing that the editors of Indian “elite” media do not see the dark reality behind the meretricious glamour of James Bond. It is one thing for Judi Dench, the porky British actress who has the role of “M,” the head of MI6, to burble about how “endearing” she finds the character of Bond; for Indian reporters to evince similar sentiments is like a Jew being starry-eyed over Adolf Eichmann or Josef Mengele.

NYT Blog: Why no Indian Steve Jobs?

The New York Times blog on India has an item asking, “Where’s India’s Steve Jobs?” The writer, an Indian journalist by the name of Samanth Subramaniam who seems to cater mainly to foreign magazines, admitted it was perhaps a “hollow, even narcissistic, question" because "Brazil hasn’t produced a Steve Jobs; neither has China, the Philippines, Zambia, Australia or any one of dozens of countries around the world.”  But he proceeded to address it anyway.

In doing so he did not hazard a personal opinion on the matter but noted several from a supposed expert, a business consultant on “knowledge societies,” who blamed India’s failure to produce a Steve Jobs on the inadequacy of our educational system, the years of “flirtation” with socialism, and the incapacity of the Indian economy to support success on so grand a scale.

The piece is a textbook example of feel-bad journalism.

First, consider the false presumption that Indian entrepreneurs have failed to innovate spectacularly.

As Raghunath Mashelkar pointed out in his excellent book Reinventing India (Sahayadri Prakashan, Pune, 2011, 403 pages Rs.499. jadanghadan@gmail.com), there have been many cases of huge success.

There is Narayana Murthy’s Infosys, founded in his small apartment with Rs10,000 in capital, growing to a valuation of Rs. 60,000 Crores and vaulting into the front ranks of the global Information Technology industry.

There is Mumbai’s Dabbawala tiffin delivery system, a daily miracle of business organization without parallel anywhere in the world.

There is Dr. Kurien’s “white revolution” that helped make India the world’s top milk producer and Dirubhai Ambani’s soap company that emerged from a Mumbai chawl to become India’s largest business conglomerate.

There are the anonymous scientists of C-DAC who developed an indigenous supercomputing capacity in three years after Cold War politics denied India access to the Cray XMP-1205 in the 1980s.

There is the Indian Space Research Organization, overcoming the same Cold War restraints to design and build domestic capacity from scratch, making India one of the leading nations in the field.

As Mashelkar's book noted, innovation has also thrived outside the organized sector and without government support. When the National Innovation Foundation set up three years ago under his chairmanship organized an annual competition, it received over a thousand submissions the first year and 16,000 the second year. The winners included illiterate and semi-literate people. An illiterate farmer won with a disease resistant pea he had developed, another with a cardamom variety that now accounts for 80 per cent of the crop in Kerala; a high-school dropout got an award for building a complex robot.

 The problem in India is not that we lack success stories but that we do not celebrate them and do not see ourselves as winners. Despite awards ceremonies to recognize excellence and the occasional programme on successful people, our mass media focus consistenly on the negative. Even in reporting the grand and glamorous success of the Indian film industry, the largest in the world, they emphasize the negative. Their label, Bollywood, focuses on the monkey-see-monkey-do aspect of Indian films, ignoring their homegrown verve and grace. Can you imagine the Japanese media labelling their film industry Jollywood? Or the Chinese describing their’s as Chollywood?

The other side of the mass media projection of India as a semi-comic failure is a consistent promotion and celebration of the meretricious foreign. Our major television channels are slavishly imitative of Western trends, with much of the programming lifted from British sources. People are so used to this that few are aware of how bizarre it is, or indeed, how subversive. HBO India is running a month-long programme of James Bond movies sponsored by Tata Manza, with daily email updates on “Bond Girls” delivered to your computer.

The “HB007” promo promises to trace the “evolution” of the “licensed to kill” operative over the years. I am pretty sure it won’t include any reference to the real-life license to kill that Britain exercised in India, targeting not oversize “Bond villains” but Indian freedom fighters, with vast collateral damage. The death toll, if we include the punitive “man-made” famine of 1943 in Bengal and the engineered Partition “riots,” runs into the millions.

As Mashelkar says, the problem “is not the Indian mind but the Indian mindset.”