Marlene Dietrich - Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

Pete Seeger wrote the first three verses of this song in1961, after reading the following lines from a Cossack folk song, mentioned in Mikhail Sholokhov's 1934 novel "And Quiet Flows the Don": "Where are the flowers? The girls have plucked them. Where are the girls? They've all taken husbands. Where are the men? They're all in the army." The last two verses were added later by Joe Hickerson to make a cyclic song.

Here are the Lyrics :-

Where have all the flowers gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the flowers gone,
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone,
Young girls picked them every one
When will they ever learn
When will they ever learn

Where have all the young girls gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the young girls gone,
Long time ago,
Where have all the young girls gone,
gone to young men every one
When will they ever learn
When will they ever learn

Where have all the young men gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the young men gone,
Long time ago,
Where have all the young men gone,
gone to soldiers every one,
When will they ever learn
When will they ever learn

Where have all the soldiers gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the soldiers gone,
Long time ago,
Where have all the soldiers gone,
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn
When will they ever learn

Where have all the graveyards gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the graveyards gone,
Long time ago,
Where have all the graveyards gone,
Gone to flowers every one
When will they ever learn
When will they ever learn 

 

One hundredth of a second

Kate is an ambitious photojournalist. Caught in a shoot-out in an Eastern European war zone, Kate spots a young girl running through the chaos. Intrigued, she follows the Girl, photographing as she goes. The Girl accidentally encounters a Gunman who interrogates her, pressing his AK-47 to her head. Kate photographs the terrified Girl and is horrified when the Girl makes eye contact with her, pleading to Kate for help. But Kate is too engrossed in her photography. She takes picture after picture as the girl is shot in front of her. Kate's work is nominated for the New Photographer of the Year Award. At the ceremony, when her photograph wins the top prize, Kate finds herself haunted by the memories of the Girl. Seeing the image projected onto a screen, Kate runs out without collecting her award, leaving the audience staring at the brutal photograph of the dead Girl. Written by Alex Boden

Don Quixote - Barack Obama

From the World of Fantasy and Imagination of  Don Quixote La Mancha.

America's Present President Barack Obama is often compared to Don Quixote as he has done nothing but got the Nobel prize just for assuring that a change will follow and there will be peace just as Quixote assured of being a Knight and remove the evil but proved otherwise. That may be the case with Barack Obama too.

[caption id="attachment_174" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Barack Obama the Living Don Quixote"][/caption]

Satinder Sartaj - Sai

Another Beautiful Song by Sartaj .

To get to Ammi click here

A Green or an Unclean Diwali ?

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Black Button - Short Film

P.C. Joshi Memorial Lecture

The Archives on Contemporary  History was created on  1 December 1970 with the collection of documents, pamphlets, newspapers and other sources on the left movement in  India received by Jawaharlal Nehru University from Puran Chandra Joshi. Building on this rich collection, the Archives is today a major resource centre for the study of the Socialist and Communist movements in India.

Born on 14 April, 1907 in Almora and educated in Allahabad, Joshi was an activist and leader of the Communist movement for about fifty years. At the time of his death on 9 November, 1980, he along with K. Damodaran, was engaged in preparing a documentary history of the Communist movement in India.

In his memory, Jawaharlal Nehru University has instituted an annual lecture. The First Memorial Lecture was delivered by Professor Irfan Habib, Professor of Medieval History, Aligarh Muslim University, on 4 November 1993.

This year’s memorial lecture- “P.C.Joshi Birth Centenary Memorial Lecture”- was delivered by the well known historian Professor Bipan Chandra on 17 August 2007. The topic of the lecture was: P.C .Joshi: A Political Journey.

Professor Chandra gave some interesting details about P C Joshi when he was a youngman with leftwing leanings and worked in Workers and Peasants Party in Uttar Pradesh. This was the time when Joshi came into contact with Jawaharlal Nehru who had just returned from Soviet Union. Everywhere, in his speeches, he was explaining  socialist ideas to the youth. For Joshi this was a period of imbibing Marxism. During this period apart from organizing students in Allahabad University, Joshi also worked among the mill workers of Kanpur. Joshi formally joined the Communist Party in 1929. Soon after, along with 31 other Communist workers and Trade Unionists he was arrested in the famous  Meerut Conspiracy Case. He was released form Jail in 1933, Communists once again became actively involved in the organization of strikes in various industrial centers of India. There were the years of intense colonial repression. On 23 July, 1934, the Government of India declared the CPI, its sub-committees and branches to be unlawful associations. Joshi was leading the strike of the Muir Mills’ Cawnpore (Kanpur) workers  and was sentenced to two years of rigorous imprisonment.

The scattered Communist group met in Surat in late 1935 and chose P.C. Joshi, when he was just 28 years old, as the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Meanwhile, the Comintern had once again changed its political line because of the rise of Fascism in Europe and advanced the political line of “United Front.” This kind of politics suited Joshi’s ideological temperament as he had the experience of working in close Collaboration with Congressmen and non-communist left groupings. Within months the party was reorganized to work in a coordinated manner, In 1936-37, Joshi toured all provinces and formed actually functioning provincial party committees. Despite repression the party was increasing its strength. In 1943, when the first Party Congress was held, there were 17000 full or candidate members.

His passionate hard work and enthusiasm instilled an immense pride in the Party among its members and sympathizers. From 1939 onwards, he was the editor of the Party weekly  National Front and used this magazine to organize communist activities and propagate anti-colonial socialist views. Various organizations like All India Kisan Sabha, All India  Trade Union Congress, Progressive Writers Association and All India Students Federation were either formed or revitalized during Joshi period . Joshi inspired hundreds of intellectuals, poets and artists in different professions. Many of them dedicated their entire life to the party’s work and lived a Gandhian life-style.

As a result of his efforts, the All  India  People’s Theatre (IPTA) movement was born and foundations of a progressive new culture were laid in India for the first time. This was Indian Communists’ unique and durable contribution to Indian social life. Later on, many of these cultural workers joined the new movement in Hindustani cinema which evolved a new genre of combining entertainment with a strong social message, of hope and faith in India’s future. As a result of Joshi’s vision and multi-dimensional activities, the CPI  though a numerically small party, came to occupy the vast intellectual ground in the life of the nation. Poets and writers like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Sardar Jaafri, Sahir Ludhianvi, Jan Nissar Akhtar, Kaifi Azmi, Majaj, Krishan Chander, Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Yashpal Dinkar and many others came to be associated with the activities of the Party.

From 1945 onwards, a strong group with adventurist ideas of Revolution began to emerge within the CPI under the leadership of B.T. Ranadhive. By 1947, this group had come to acquire a position of dominance within the party. Joshi’s pragmatism, based on an intuitive grasp of the unity of nationalism and socialism under conditions of colonialism, could not confront the infantile Marxist bookish discourse of Ranadhive. Joshi could not theoretically defend his new vision of hegemonic politics, even when successful, against the sectarian onslaught of the received Marxist wisdom. Partly, the reason for this was that Joshi himself shared some of  the dogmas of his tormentors. In fact, till today, on intellectual group or an individual has ever courageously and convincingly confronted this powerful foundational current of sectarianism within the Communist movement.

Soon, Joshi was first isolated and then unceremoniously thrown out of the Party. Those who were better educated and could brandish the weapon of Marxist quotations had managed to hijack the entire Party. Their slogan was: “ Yeh Azadi Jhooti hai.” In order to break his resistance and loosen his grip over the Party rank and file, Joshi was viciously attacked. After Joshi’s exit from the Party leadership in 1948, a large number of artists, writers and other intellectuals felt stifled and left the party in hordes. The Party itself came down from a membership of about 90,000 to barely 18,000. Later on, in the Sixities, Joshi was taken back into the Party. By that time, Stalinist methods of the leadership had destroyed his spirit and he was on longer Joshi of old days. He was even allowed to edit the Party Weekly, New Age, but on certain terms which reduced him to the status of a “Political prisoner.” Despite his opposition he could not stop factionalism, and ultimately, the split within the Communist movement. Up to the end, Joshi remained loyal to the cause of socialist, secular and democratic India.

Bhagawan Josh, Professor,
Archives  on Contemporary History, SSS

Home

We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate.

The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.

“Censorship Today: Violence, Or ecology as a new opium for the masses”

I was reading Zizek and found it very interesting and want to share it.

moving back to the sources for yesterday’s post… the following is by Slavoj Zizek, from lacan.com, posted in 2007:

Marco Cicala, a Leftist Italian journalist, told me about his recent weird experience: when, in an article, he once used the word “capitalism,” the editor asked him if the use of this term is really necessary – could he not replace it by a synonymous one, like “economy”? What better proof of the total triumph of capitalism than the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last 2 or 3 decades? No one, with the exception of a few allegedly archaic Marxists, refers to capitalism any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists – even of social scientists… But what about the upsurge of the anti-globalization movement in the last years? Does it not clearly contradict this diagnostic? No: a close look quickly shows how this movement also succumbs to “the temptation to transform a critique of capitalism itself (centered on economic mechanisms, forms of work organization, and profit extraction) into a critique of ‘imperialism’.” In this way, when one talks about “globalization and its agents,” the enemy is externalized (usually in the form of vulgar anti-Americanism). From this perspective, where the main task today is to fight “the American empire,” any ally is good if it is anti-American, and so the unbridled Chinese “Communist” capitalism, violent Islamic anti-modernists, as well as the obscene Lukashenko regime in Belarus may appear as progressive anti-globalist comrades-in-arms… What we have here is thus another version of the ill-famed notion of “alternate modernity”: instead of the critique of capitalism as such, of confronting its basic mechanism, we get the critique of the imperialist “excess,” with the (silent) notion of mobilizing capitalist mechanisms within another, more “progressive,” frame.

So what is the problem here? It is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the End of History, but the majority today is “Fukuyamaian”: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally-found formula of the best possible society, all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant, etc. The only true question today is: do we endorse this “naturalization” of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which will prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are three (or, rather, four) such antagonisms:

1. Ecology:
In spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes a market solution – why? Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies the trust into the objectivized/”reified” mechanism of the market’s “invisible hand” which, as a kind of Cunning of Reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. However, we are in the midst of a radical change. Till now, historical Substance played its role as the medium and foundation of all subjective interventions: whatever social and political subjects did, it was mediated and ultimately dominated, overdetermined, by the historical Substance. What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will intervene directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically disturbing its run by way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe, etc. No longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human history, the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter and even interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today that we can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived “not only as Substance, but also as Subject.” This is why, when confronted with singular catastrophic prospects (say, a political group which intends to attack its enemy with nuclear or biological weapons), we no longer can rely on the standard logic of the “Cunning of Reason” which, precisely, presupposes the primacy of the historical Substance over acting subjects: we no longer can adopt the stance of “let the enemy who threatens us deploy its potentials and thereby self-destruct himself” – the price for letting the historical Reason do its work is too high since, in the meantime, we may all perish together with the enemy. Recall a frightening detail from the Cuban missile crisis: only later did we learn how close to nuclear war we were during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on October 27 1962. The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no. “A guy named Arkhipov saved the world,” was a bitter comment of a historian on this accident.

2. Private Property:
The inappropriateness of private property for the so-called “intellectual property.” The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries is thus: how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the logic of profit can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free circulation of music)? And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point in the same direction? Phenomena are emerging here which bring the notion of property to weird paradoxes: in India, local communities can suddenly discover that medical practices and materials they are using for centuries are now owned by American companies, so they should be bought from them; with the biogenetic companies patentizing genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others…

The crucial date in the history of cyberspace is February 3 1976, the day when Bill Gates published his (in)famous “Open Letter to Hobbysts,” the assertion of private property in the software domain: “As the majority of hobbysts must be aware, most of you steal your software. /…/ Most directly, the thing you do is theft.” Bill Gates has built his entire empire and reputation on his extreme views about knowledge being treated as if it were tangible property. This was a decisive signal which triggered the battle for the “enclosure” of the common domain of software.

3. New Techno-Scientific Developments:
The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in bio-genetics) – Fukuyama himself was compelled to admit that the biogenetic interventions into human nature are the most serious threat to his vision of the End of History.

With the latest biogenetic developments, we are entering a new phase in which it is simply nature itself which melts into air: the main consequence of the scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is thus “desubstantialized,” deprived of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called “earth.” This compels us to give a new twist to Freud’s title Unbehagen in der Kultur - discontent, uneasiness, in culture. With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer “natural,” the reliable “dense” background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.

4. New Forms of Apartheid:
Last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. On September 11th, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9th announced the “happy ’90s,” the Francis Fukuyama dream of the “end of history,” the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global, liberal world community lurks just around the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over). In contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border.

So what if the new proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the Third World megalopolises from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times. It is effectively surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are “free” in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat (”freed” from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, “thrown” into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.

While today’s society is often characterized as the society of total control, slums are the territories within a state boundaries from which the state (partially, at least) withdrew its control, territories which function as white spots, blanks, in the official map of a state territory. Although they are de facto included into a state by the links of black economy, organized crime, religious groups, etc., the state control is nonetheless suspended there, they are domains outside the rule of law. In the map of Berlin from the times of the now defunct GDR, the are of West Berlin was left blank, a weird hole in the detailed structure of the big city; when Christa Wolf, the well-known East German half-dissident writer, took her small daughter to the East Berlin’s high TV tower, from which one had a nice view over the prohibited West Berlin, the small girl shouted gladly: “Look, mother, it is not white over there, there are houses with people like here!” – as if discovering a prohibited slum Zone…

This is why the “de-structured” masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a non-proletarized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come. If the principal task of the emancipatory politics of the XIXth century was to break the monopoly of the bourgeois liberals by way of politicizing the working class, and if the task of the XXth century was to politically awaken the immense rural population of Asia and Africa, the principal task of the XXIth century is to politicize – organize and discipline – the “de-structured masses” of slum-dwellers. Hugo Chavez’s biggest achievement is the politicization (inclusion into the political life, social mobilization) of slum dwellers; in other countries, they mostly persist in apolitical inertia. It was this political mobilization of the slum dwellers which saved him against the US-sponsored coup: to the surprise of everyone, Chavez included, slum dwellers massively descended to the affluent city center, tipping the balance of power to his advantage.

How do these four antagonisms relate to each other? There is a qualitative difference between the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included and the other three antagonisms, which designate three domains of what Hardt and Negri call “commons,” the shared substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act which should also be resisted with violent means, if necessary: the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of “cognitive” capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education (if Bill Gates were to be allowed monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have literally owned the software texture our basic network of communication), but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc.; the commons of external nature threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to forests and natural habitat itself); the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity). What all these struggles share is the awareness of the destructive potentials, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, if the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free run. It is this reference to “commons” which justifies the resuscitation of the notion of Communism – or, to quote Alain Badiou:

The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.

So where do we stand today with regard to communism? The first step is to admit that the solution is not to limit the market and private property by direct interventions of the State and state ownership. The domain of State itself is also in its own way “private”: private in the precise Kantian sense of the “private use of Reason” in State administrative and ideological apparatuses:

The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of one’s reason, on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. By public use of one’s reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him.

What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there is a privileged social group which, on account of its lacking a determinate place in the “private” order of social hierarchy, directly stands for universality: it is only the reference to those Excluded, to those who dwell in the blanks of the State space, that enables true universality. There is nothing more “private” than a State community which perceives the Excluded as a threat and worries how to keep the Excluded at a proper distance. In other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, the one between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one, the point of reference for the others; without it, all others lose their subversive edge: ecology turns into a “problem of sustainable development,” intellectual property into a “complex legal challenge,” biogenetics into an “ethical” issue. One can sincerely fight for ecology, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, while not questioning the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded – even more, one can even formulate some of these struggles in the terms of the Included threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only “private” concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. Corporations like Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favor among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell products that contain the claim of being politically progressive acts in and of themselves. One buys coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one buys from companies that provide good benefits for their customers (according to the corporation’s own standards), etc. Political action and consumption become fully merged. In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting against poverty and diseases, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.

When politics is reduced to the “private” domain, it takes the form of the politics of FEAR – fear of losing one’s particular identity, of being overwhelmed. Today’s predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics – an awesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: “post-political” is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management and administration, while “bio-politics” designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primal goal. It is clear how these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what remains is only the efficient administration of life… almost only that. That is to say, with the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero-level of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity.

No wonder, then, that the by far predominant version of ecology is the ecology of fear, fear of a catastrophe – human-made or natural – that may deeply perturb, destroy even, the human civilization, fear that pushes us to plan measures that would protect our safety. This ecology of fear has all the chances of developing into the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion: it takes over the old religion’s fundamental function, that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ecology is constantly hammering is our finitude: we are not Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded in a bio-sphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources, we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our Earth with respect, as something ultimately Sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally, that should and will forever remain a Mystery, a power we should trust, not dominate. While we cannot gain full mastery over our bio-sphere, it is unfortunately in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance so that it will run amok, swiping us away in the process. This is why, although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress: every radical change can have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe.

It is this distrust which makes ecology the ideal candidate for hegemonic ideology, since it echoes the anti-totalitarian post-political distrust of large collective acts. This distrust unites religious leaders and environmentalists – for both, there is something of a transgression, of entering a prohibited domain, in this idea of creating a new form of life from scratch, from the zero-point. And this brings us back to the notion of ecology as the new opium for the masses; the underlying message is again a deeply conservative one – any change can only be the change for the worst – here is a nice quote from the TIME magazine on this topic:

Behind much of the resistance to the notion of synthetic life is the intuition that nature (or God) created the best of possible worlds. Charles Darwin believed that the myriad designs of nature’s creations are perfectly honed to do whatever they are meant to do – be it animals that see, hear, sing, swim or fly, or plants that feed on the sun’s rays, exuding bright floral colours to attract pollinators.

This reference to Darwin is deeply misleading: the ultimate lesson of Darwinism is the exact opposite, namely that nature tinkers and improvises, with great losses and catastrophes accompanying every limited success – is the fact that 90 percent of the human genome is ‘junk DNA’ with no clear function not the ultimate proof of it? Consequently, the first lesson to be drawn is the one repeatedly made by Stephen Jay Gould: the utter contingency of our existence. There is no Evolution: catastrophes, broken equilibriums, are part of natural history; at numerous points in the past, life could have turned into an entirely different direction. The main source of our energy (oil) is the result of a past catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions. One should thus learn to accept the utter groundlessness of our existence: there is no firm foundation, a place of retreat, on which one can safely count. “Nature doesn’t exist”: “nature” qua the domain of balanced reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris, brutally throwing off the rails its circular motion, is man’s fantasy; nature is already in itself “second nature,” its balance is always secondary, an attempt to negotiate a “habit” that would restore some order after catastrophic interruptions.

With regard to this inherent instability of nature, the most consequent was the proposal of a German ecological scientist back in 1970s: since nature is changing constantly and the conditions on Earth will render the survival of humanity impossible in a couple of centuries, the collective goal of humanity should be not to adapt itself to nature, but to intervene into the Earth ecology even more forcefully with the aim to freeze the Earth’s change, so that its ecology will remain basically the same, thus enabling humanity’s survival. This extreme proposal renders visible the truth of ecology.

Bibi Doesn't Like It

The Israeli Embassy objected on as cartoon portraying Bibi as an evil elf as I see it  , this cartoon was published in Al Ahram weekly. The artist /cartoonist behind it is the famous Fathi Abu Ezz whose political cartoons are very famous among the Egyptian blogsphere.

Here is the Bibi’s evil elf cartoon.

Why I Oppose Vietnam War - Martin Luther King

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U

How is Crying Essential for Health

Crying is essential to human health. Just as sweating is necessary for heat regulation, crying is necessary for emotional regulation.

Unfortunately, our society reacts to crying with fear and contempt. Crying is often seen as a lack of control and as a sign of weakness. In fact, strong or prolonged bouts of crying are considered a symptom of emotional illness, when in reality, they are an attempt to heal.

Natural systems - whether rivers, trees, or people - all require a steady flow of nutrients and energy in and out. If the flow is blocked in any way, a problem or sickness will occur.

Crying is an essential outflow. When our system is in pain, it moves some of the destructive energy out through movement, sound, and crying. If we are holding onto older hurts and traumas, crying can get us in touch with those feelings and help us to purge them and rebalance.

Unfortunately, our natural ability to cry, and thus to heal, has been suppressed. Crying is part of our emotional immune system, and we desperately need to get it back.

It seems like such a simple thing, but many of us have forgotten how to really cry. We get "misty" in a movie and think we're emotional. We sniffle, drop a few tears, and think we are crying. But a dripping tap isn't Niagara Falls.

To read more click here

Spartacus - Salva Nos

Here's the Original Portuguese Lyrics

Salva nos, stella maris
Et regina celorum
Salva nos, stella maris
Et regina celorum

Que pura deum paris
Salva nos, stella maris
Et per rubum signaris
Nesciens viri thorum
Salva nos, stella maris
Et regina celorum

O virgo specialis
Salva nos, stella maris
Sis nobis salutaris
Imperatrix celorum
Salva nos, stella maris
Et regina celorum

Tu mater expers paris
Salva nos, stella maris
Manna celeste paris
Et panem angelorum
Salva nos, stella maris
Et regina celorum

O parens expers maris
Salva nos, stella maris
Partu non violaris
Paris sanctum sanctorum
Salva nos, stella maris
Et regina celorum

Celeste manna paris
Salva nos, stella maris
Lux cecis, dux ignaris
Solamen angelorum
Salva nos, stella maris
Et regina celorum

Salva nos, stella maris
Et regina celorum

Now it's in English :-

Save us, star of the sea
And queen of heaven
Save us, star of the sea
And queen of heaven

Who while the pure didst bear God
Save us, star of the sea
And art signalled in the burning bush
Not knowing man as a consort
Save us, star of the sea
And queen of heaven

O virgin most special
Save us, star of the sea
Be thou our salvation
O ruler of heaven
Save us, star of the sea
And queen of heaven

Thou, mother lacking an equal didst bear
Save us, star of the sea
The manna of heaven
And the bread of angels
Save us, star of the sea
And queen of heaven

O parent lacking a male
Save us, star of the sea
And not defiled by the birth
Thou didst bear the holy of holies
Save us, star of the sea
And queen of heaven

Thou didst bear the manna of heaven
Save us, star of the sea
O light to the blind, leader to the ignorant
Solace of the angels
Save us, star of the sea
And queen of heaven

Save us, star of the sea
And queen of heaven

The line of beauty

With her scenes of village life, Amrita Shergill dedicated herself to painting the 'true' India. Strikingly attractive, outspoken and intelligent, she died suddenly at only 28. Salman Rushdie on the inspiration for his flamboyant heroine in The Moor's Last Sigh

The Guardian , Saturday February 17, 2007

'I will stick to my intolerant ideas and convictions' ... Untitled by Amrita Sher-Gil. Photograph: Tate Modern

In the mid-1990s, when I began to think about my novel The Moor's Last Sigh, I soon realised that it would contain an account of the character (and also the work) of an entirely imaginary 20th-century Indian woman painter. I thought about my friendships and acquaintanceships with a number of fine contemporary artists - Krishen Khanna, Bhupen Khakhar, Gulam Mohammad Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, Anish Kapoor - and of others I did not know personally but whose work I admired - Pushpamala, Navjot, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gieve Patel, Dhruva Mistry, Arpana Caur, Laxma Goud, Ganesh Pyne. The work of all these painters helped me think about the pictures my fictional Aurora Zogoiby might create. But the figure that, so to speak, "gave me permission" to imagine her personality, to invent a woman painter at the very heart of modern art in India - to believe in the possibility of such a woman - was an artist I never met, who died tragically young, and whom I first encountered in a luminous painting by Vivan Sundaram, her nephew. That artist was Amrita Sher-Gil.

The painting is of a family at home. A male figure stands brooding in the background, a western woman sits stiffly on a chair (and there is a pistol on a table at her side). The room is rich in furnishings and art, and the whole is portrayed in a palette of glowing oranges and golds. But for all the lushness and mystery of the scene, the eye is drawn to the young woman in the foreground, strikingly beautiful, faintly smiling: an intelligent, amused face. This is Amrita.

I did not know much about her in those days. I knew she was half-Hungarian, and I had seen some of her paintings of scenes of village life - storytellers, young girls - both in the National Gallery in Delhi and at Vivan's home. And while I was writing my book, I resisted knowing more. I conjured up an imaginary Amrita for myself - a woman much influenced by Gandhian ideas, who dedicated herself to painting the "true" life of India, the life of the villages - and decided that my Aurora would be in many ways her antithesis, an unrepentant urbanite and sophisticate. It was only after the book was done that I permitted myself to know the real Amrita a little better, and I discovered at once that she and my Aurora had much more in common than I suspected. Indeed, in some ways - her sexual proclivities, for example - Amrita Sher-Gil was a more bohemian, less inhibited figure than the flamboyant woman I had made up.

In her letters, the real Amrita leaps from the page. "You will think I am self-opinionated," she writes in 1934, aged just 21, "but I will stick to my intolerant ideas and to my convictions." Her outspokenness, which makes her so very much the sister, not the antithesis, of Aurora Zogoiby, is one of the most delicious aspects of her correspondence. She praises Nobel prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore, but she also says, "his eminence is due to the surrounding flatness of the country". Her anger at the philistinism of the Nizam of Hyderabad leads her to speak bluntly to his face: "He has millions of rupees worth of junk at the same time as beautiful jade and good Mogul and Rajput paintings in his palace ... and when I saw the Lord Leightons, the Wattses, the Bouguereaus amassed there and everybody in the party spouted admiration and praise, I felt so sick that, when he asked me what I thought of them, I asked him in return how on earth anybody with any taste could buy Leighton, Bouguereau and Watts when there were Cézannes, Van Goghs and Gauguins in the market." After this, he unsurprisingly refuses to buy her two "cubist" pictures, and she is "of course, furious". And, writing to her close friend and great ally Karl Khandalavala, she talks about his art criticism in terms that might have damaged a lesser friendship: "One has an impression of a lucid impersonal account written by an objective person, the possessor of a calm and collected mind. And while one is reading it one is inclined to say aloud, 'quite so', but as soon as one has laid it aside one forgets it. That is to say, 'It creates no powerful or lasting impression on the mind.' It is too moderate in its mode of expression (perhaps the fault lies in your choice of words)." Perhaps her most heightened contempt is reserved for the artists of the Bengal school, whom she compares dismissively to the ancient Ajanta cave-painters: "Ajanta is painting with a kernel, the painting of the Bengal school has only got a shell, it is a lot of things built round nothing, a lot of unessential things and it would cease to exist if those unessential things were taken away from it." She admits that Jamini Roy has "a certain talent", but refuses to allow his line to be compared to the masters of Ajanta, either.

This ferocity of mind and sharpness of tongue, combined with an unashamed openness about her own behaviour, and an insistence on her right to behave as she chooses, is also present in her thoughts about her own family and friends. When her father ("Duci") hesitates about her proposed return to India from Europe, and accuses her of lacking interest in India, she delivers herself of an extraordinary text that is at once an artistic testament and an assault on her father's narrower mores of social and sexual conduct: "I wish to return primarily in interest of my artistic development ... how utterly mistaken you are when you speak of our lack of interest in India, in its culture, its people, its literature, all of which interest me profoundly ... Our long stay in Europe has aided me to discover as it were, India. Modern art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and sculpture. It seems paradoxical, but I know for certain that, had we not come away to Europe, I should perhaps never have realised that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musée Guimet is worth more than the whole Renaissance! In short, now I wish to go back to appreciate India and its worth ... I was rather sad to realise that you place the conservation of your good name above your affection for us. I was also disappointed to know what a place of importance you give to the bickering of public opinion ... I don't in the least consider myself an immoral person, I am not immoral ... Besides I think you are rather dramatising the situation (a thing you are apt to do at times) when you say that the ruin of your good name is synonymous with our returning to India. Fools and mischief-makers will always talk, even if one doesn't give them food for it. And there are narrow-minded prejudiced and fanatical people all over the world, in India too (as you found out at your expense) but need one bother about them?"

She chides her mother, too, first for maltreating servants and later, as that troubled lady descends into mental instability, for her lies. "She charges us indiscriminately with every vice, criminal ingratitude being the least of them, of filth, sloth and abnormal sexual manias ..." Caught between a cold, conventional father and an increasingly deranged mother, Amrita takes refuge in an artistic vision remarkable not only for its outspokenness, but for its passionate love of what is beautiful. In a letter to her sister Indu, she tells of frescoes found in Cochin: "I spend my days from morning till evening, that is to say till the light fails, at a deserted palace here. It contains some perfectly marvellous old paintings that haven't been 'discovered' yet. Nobody knows about them and the local people, even so called responsible people, like the Diwan would destroy them, I am sure. If that were in their power - because some of the panels depict erotic scenes. Animals and birds are copulating with the utmost candour, but curiously enough the human figures are never depicted in the act ... it is only when one starts copying them that one realises what an astounding technique these people had and what an amazing knowledge of form and power of observation they possessed. Curiously enough unlike the slender forms of Ajanta, the figures are extremely massive and heavy here. The drawing perhaps the most powerful I have ever seen."

The Cochin frescoes return in a passionate letter to Khandalavala, and it is clear they influenced her deeply, just as Breughel did, and Renoir. She became convinced that "all art, not excluding religious art, has come into being because of sensuality: a sensuality so great that it overflows the boundaries of the mere physical".

Her taste in art is impeccable, whether it be European literature (Rousseau, Verlaine, Proust) or the majesty of the Ellora carvings and Ajanta cave-paintings ("Dear Karl, ELLORA, AJANTA. Revelation.") Her taste in human beings is good, too: "I have met a wonderful woman at last, [the poet and politician] Sarojini Naidu. And her two interesting daughters. One of them a felinish creature beautiful in a negroid way, who curiously enough is intelligent and witty, and her younger sister who looks the older of the two a strange wild creature, sympathique comme tout, and extremely interesting to say the least."

Such a woman could perhaps not be expected to be happy in such a time. She writes to Indu in March 1941, "I ... have passed through a nervous crisis and am still far from being over it. Feeling impotent dissatisfied irritable and unlike you not even able to weep. There seem to be forces at work - elemental forces - disrupting, throwing things out of equilibrium. The chaos and darkness of the lives of individuals - the wars, earthquakes, floods all seem to be indefinably interconnected. We are not alone. I see it everywhere." (But then, a few lines on, she finds time to criticise her sister's handwriting - "you must make an effort to render it lisible" - and to be glad that a new divan "looks lovely".) Six months later, she was dead, aged just 28, of a cause that remains uncertain.

It is immensely moving to encounter, in Amrita's letters, this impassioned, opinionated, brilliant voice that spoke so clearly but for such a brief time. To return to her paintings after this reading is to find new depth in her sombre palette, all earth tones and shadows. She writes, only partly ironically, of choosing to depict "principally the sad aspects of Indian life ... It may be that the sadness; the queer ugliness of the types I choose as my models (which to me is beauty that renders insipid all that which, according to the standards of the world, goes under the category of the word 'beautiful') corresponds something in me, some inner trail in my nature which responds to things that are sad, rather then to manifestations of life which are exuberantly happy or placidly contented."

Amrita Sher-Gil's is an art which moves naturally towards the melancholy and tragic, while keeping its eye fixed firmly on high ideals of beauty. That it, and she, were so often misunderstood is poignant, but not, perhaps, surprising. In a letter from abroad, written to her parents in August 1938 after they had burned a "roomful" of her letters, including old love letters, she resigns herself to a "bleak old age unrelieved by the entertainment that the perusal of old love letters would have afforded", and ends, piteously, in Hindi: "Me kohi aysi baat nahin kahungi ya karungi jisse aap ko dukh pahunche" - "I will not say or do anything that would cause you pain".

She was denied old age, bleak or otherwise, but neither her exuberant, magnificent self, nor the work it made, contained anything for which she needed to apologise. Time has passed, and her art endures. As Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby wrote of his mother Aurora: "Even now, in the memory, she dazzles, must be circled about and about. We may perceive her indirectly, in her effects on others ... Ah, the dead, the unended, endlessly ending dead: how long, how rich is their story. We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep."

· Amrita Sher-Gil is at Tate Modern, London SE1, from February 28 to April 22. Details: 020-7887 8888. Amrita Sher-Gil: an auto-portrait in letters and writings, annotated and edited by Vivan Sundaram, will be published by Tulika Books, Delhi, later this year.