Month: October 2009

Tate Modern’s latest spectacular show in the Turbine Hall coincides with the Frieze fair and a proliferation of gallery displays. Is this conclusive proof that Britons are no longer scared of art?

Olafur Eliasson with his installation ‘The Weather Project’ in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. Photograph: Dan Chung

Dust off your glad rags, culcha bunnies, and stiffen your Resolve, because this week is the biggest in the UK’s art calendar. The Frieze fair of international contemporary art, open to the public from 15 to 18 October, will be accompanied by a dizzying array of museum-based exhibitions.

Tate Modern’s 10th Turbine Hall commission, unveiled on Tuesday, is by Miroslaw Balka; the institution’s John Baldessori retrospective opens on the same day. The Modern’s near neighbour, the Hayward Gallery, will from Wednesday be presenting Ed Ruscha: Twenty Years of Painting. The Serpentine is already showing Gustav Metzger, and next weekend hosts a special two-day poetry marathon in its Pavilion, with Brian Eno, Gilbert and George, Nick Laird, James Fenton, Tracey Emin and Alasdair Gray among the performers. The Whitechapel is opening Sophie Calle on Friday, to accompany its Jeremy Dellar and Alan Kane-curated selection from the British Council Collection and Goshka Macuga’s response to the gallery’s Guernica tapestry. Oh, and there’s the small matters of Turner and the Turner Prize, both at Tate Britain.

Not to mention Zoo 2009, the fringe art fair turned East End event, which brings together 50-plus smaller arts organisations and practitioners; the Museum of Everything, for non-mainstream art; plus all the commercial galleries, busily lining up their big boys: Anselm Kilmer at White Cube, Grayson Perry at Victoria Miro, Anish Kapoor at Lisson, chiming with his lauded Royal Academy show.

GCO

By Ram Puniyani, Countercurrents.org

The rising tide of communal violence from the decade of 1980 has consolidated the communal politics, politics in the name of religion. The party riding on the chariot of religious nationalism became the second largest party and tasted power at center for six long years and is now entrenched in few states and is knocking at the door of power in few other states. The hope that its recent defeat in Lok Sabha elections will reduce the impact of communal politics in society or will ensure that all communities can breathe the air of civil rights and equal citizenship rights with ease, seems to be like distant drums!

The impact of the rise of this politics and accompanying effect on minorities has resulted in worsening their lot. This downward slide in the condition of minorities is very obvious, is going from bad to worse, to worst. It has resulted in the conditions for minorities where they have to live in fear, alienation and the impact of constant profiling in different walks of life. This communal politics has been talking of Hindu nation, has been spreading hate against minorities, against Muslims in particular. The Muslim community has been the major target of attack and has been bearing a huge brunt of the divisive politics being spearheaded by RSS, its progeny and by those influenced by the RSS ideology. They are not only there in the state machinery and media but also in other crucial spots of Indian social, economic and political life. The worsening plight of Muslim community got reconfirmed in the recently held national meet on ‘What it means to be a Muslim in India Today’, organized by Anhad in Delhi (Oct 3-5).

The meeting was addressed by the victims and social activists working in the area of human rights particularly of minorities. The pain and anguish of the Muslim community was heart rending, coming through different narrations of illegal arrests, tortures, detentions and adverse judgments. The latest trick is to implicate the Muslim youth in multiple cases in different states. This will ensure their being behind the bars for good. The communal violence which has broken the back of the Indian community is being supplemented by the intense and blind police action against innocent Muslim youth, in the name of terror attacks. While the communal violence is now being orchestrated at low intensity and is scattered far and wide, in the post 9/11 period another front for torturing the community has been opened. Here the modus oprendi is simple enough, there is ‘Intelligence’ tip and that makes our efficient police machinery to arrest the Muslim youth, being Muslim is the major ‘tip’ for arresting and torturing innocent youth by the guardians of law. Many a youth in the middle of their education for professional lives face immense obstacles, their illegal arrests are never compensated for and nor are they supported to complete their education despite being proved innocents.

CCO

A nuclear weapons free world is within grasp if concerted action is taken at all levels, write Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi

The Middle East has long been a testing ground for achieving the ultimate goals of peace. In 1978, Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin sat down with president Jimmy Carter at Camp David and agreed on a historic framework for peace in the Middle East. If nothing else, Camp David is an example of collaboration between former enemies resulting in breakthroughs of the kind needed for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament today.

Since that historic event, Egypt has courageously undertaken further initiatives, most prominently, its decision to embark on the difficult road to nuclear non-proliferation. The Sadat government’s decision to ratify the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1981 was a defining moment for Egypt’s nuclear programme. Soon after, with the 1982 entry into force of its International Atomic Energy Agency Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (INFCIRC 302), Egypt’s facilities were brought into the verification and inspection components of the non- proliferation regime. This reflected a clear commitment by Egypt to non-proliferation with full transparency under the international safeguards system of the IAEA.

Egypt, today, is a member in good standing of the NPT and the leading proponent of establishing a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Middle East. While Egypt has consistently led efforts to establish a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons (and since 1990 zone free of WMDs), there have been roadblocks along the way.

It is our strong hope that the Middle East peace process can produce results that will allow the region to address the issues of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation from a new perspective. The prospect of nuclear threats in the Middle East is deeply disturbing for the security of all states, and has the potential to initiate an arms race that will further destabilise the region, and divert resources from social and economic uses.

It is highly encouraging that global momentum is building to ensure that the 2010 NPT review does not succumb to indifference and lost opportunities. There have been a range of appeals from current and former world leaders and nuclear decision-makers urging a renewed effort to move the nuclear disarmament agenda forward: for new cuts to nuclear arsenals, bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) into force, and to immediately commence negotiation of a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons use. It is highly significant that President Barack Obama has chosen to convene this month a special meeting of the UN Security Council on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

The International Commission on Nuclear Non- proliferation and Disarmament, which we have the privilege to co-chair, seeks to contribute to this global effort to help build a new momentum towards reconsideration of the role of nuclear weapons in international relations and eventually to eliminate them.

WA

By Jennifer Loven, WASHINGTON

Now that he’s Nobel laureate Barack Obama, will he find smoother sailing for his plans to rid the world of nuclear weapons, to forge Mideast peace and stabilize Afghanistan, to halt climate change?

Not likely.

The Nobel committee members made no bones about it: Helping Obama achieve ambitious peacemaking goals was their goal in awarding the prize Friday to an as-yet mostly unaccomplished U.S. president.

But while the prestige could give Obama and his efforts a boost, nations steer their courses according to their own interests and little else. U.S. lawmakers, too, aren’t going to be influenced in politically difficult votes on climate change legislation or nuclear-reduction treaties by the Nobel Peace Prize, no matter who wins it.

That’s not to say it wasn’t an impressive achievement.

At just 48 years old and not even nine months in office, Obama became only the third sitting U.S. president to win the prize.

The widespread reaction, however, when the stunning news hit the nation was: For what?

Obama said so himself. “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize,” he said hours after being awakened — and surprised — by spokesman Robert Gibbs.

Comments from Nobel committee members revealed that they fully intended to encourage, not reward. Consider this: The nomination deadline was only 12 days after Obama first entered the Oval Office. It’s an enduring myth that the prize is only about accomplishment — it actually was created as much to supply momentum for peace as to celebrate it.

Indeed, with a leftist slant, the five-member committee was applauding Obama as much for what he’s not — his predecessor. Former President George W Bush was much reviled overseas for “cowboy diplomacy,” the Iraq war and his snubbing of European priorities such as global warming.

So some cheerleading probably can’t hurt, as Obama presses forward on efforts to repair America’s relations with Muslims, bring Israelis and Palestinians into fruitful negotiations and turn back climate change. The committee especially singled out Obama’s aims to create a nuclear weapons-free world and to set out a new, more cooperative diplomatic doctrine.

JT

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong — a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness.

Why you should listen to him:
Dan Gilbert believes that, in our ardent, lifelong pursuit of happiness, most of us have the wrong map. In the same way that optical illusions fool our eyes — and fool everyone’s eyes in the same way — Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss.

The premise of his current research — that our assumptions about what will make us happy are often wrong — is supported with clinical research drawn from psychology and neuroscience. But his delivery is what sets him apart. His engaging — and often hilarious — style pokes fun at typical human behavior and invokes pop-culture references everyone can relate to. This winning style translates also to Gilbert’s writing, which is lucid, approachable and laugh-out-loud funny. The immensely readable Stumbling on Happiness, published in 2006, became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages.

In fact, the title of his book could be drawn from his own life. At 19, he was a high school dropout with dreams of writing science fiction. When a creative writing class at his community college was full, he enrolled in the only available course: psychology. He found his passion there, earned a doctorate in social psychology in 1985 at Princeton, and has since won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize for his work at Harvard. He has written essays and articles for The New York Times, Time and even Starbucks, while continuing his research into happiness at his Hedonic Psychology Laboratory.

(Submitted by reader)

By Al Jazeera / Eva Golinger

During a recent news segment, Al Jazeera aired a video obtained from inside Colombia of an interview conducted by police investigators of incarcerated Colombian paramilitary assassin Geovanny Velasquéz Zambrano. During the interview, obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera, the Colombian paramilitary confirmed that a “wealthy Venezuelan politician” named Manuel Rosales, offered him $25 million to assassinate President Chávez by any means. The conversation with Rosales took place at a secret meeting in 1999 with several Colombian paramilitary leaders. Rosales said that he personally would be in charge of the plan to assassinate President Chávez, though the money would come from several sources. The Colombian paramilitary forces involved in the assassination attempt first went for training in Catamumbo, on the border with Venezuela. But in 2004, approximately 100 Colombian paramilitary forces were detained in a farm outside of Caracas belonging to an opposition leader, Robert Alonso, who has often called for the violent overthrow of the Chávez administration. The Colombians were detained and accused of a plot to assassinate the President. They were found with military uniforms, weapons and sufficient ammunition to cause serious damage in the country. Robert Alonso, a Cuban-Venezuelan and brother of the famous actress Maria Conchita Alonso, fled in exile to Miami, where he has remained ever since, continuing to plot violently against President Chávez.

On the video aired by Al Jazeera, the Colombian paramilitary confirms that currently there are around 2500 Colombian paramilitary forces inside Venezuela with the objective of assassinating President Chávez and destabilizing the country.

Although assassination attempts against President Chávez have been denounced on several occasions, the international press and Venezuelan opposition have largely ridiculed such claims. Nevertheless, the presence of Colombian paramilitary members inside Venezuela is largely well known. This new revelation, from the mouth of one of the participants, confirms what Venezuela has been denouncing for some time: Colombia has been infiltrating paramilitary forces into the country to destabilize, from the inside, and assassinate the President, when and where possible. This information also confirms that Manuel Rosales did not flee Venezuela and request political asylum in Peru because he was facing corruption charges, but rather because he feared the truth would come out one day about his participation in a plot to assassinate the President. With this information, the Venezuelan government has the right to request Rosales’ extradition from Peru, since political asylum cannot be granted to criminals.

See the original Al Jazeera segment here:

VA

About 0.5 million infants die avoidably each year in the US Occupied Territories, 9.5 million die world-wide annually under Obama and 60 million will die annually through climate genocide. In despair we ask can Children save the World’s children through school genocide and war crimes tribunals?

Let us examine these shocking numbers that derive from authoritative sources.

1. Passive mass murder of over 4 million infants in US Alliance wars (1990-2009).

Consulting UNICEF we obtain the following estimates of “annual under-5 infant deaths” in the following countries subject to occupation by the US or US-backed surrogates: Occupied Afghanistan (338,000), Occupied Haiti (21,0000), Occupied Iraq (41,000), Occupied Palestinian Territory (4,000), and Occupied Somalia (54,000), for a total of 458,000 per annum (i.e. about 0.5 million) and 1,255 per day. Note that this analysis ignores Occupied Diego Garcia that has been completely ethnically cleansed, partially occupied countries such as Lebanon and Syria and countries subject to ongoing US-backed wars, notably the US robot-bombed NW Provinces of Pakistan. About 90% of these infant deaths are avoidable and due to non-supply of life-preserving requisites by the war criminal US or US surrogate Occupiers.

However this assessment ignores US hegemony over much of the Planet in addition to the territories that the US and its surrogates are actually militarily occupying, namely Occupied Haiti (originally invaded by US forces, now replaced by US-backed UN forces), Occupied Somalia (by the US, US-backed Ethiopia and US-backed African Union forces), Occupied Cyprus (by US ally Turkey), Occupied Palestine, Occupied Lebanon (the Shebaa Farms area), Occupied Jordan and Occupied Syria (by US-backed Apartheid Israel), Occupied Iraq, Occupied Diego Garcia, Occupied Afghanistan (by the US Alliance) and US robot-bombed NW Pakistan (US robot occupation from the air – no wedding parties or family picnics are safe from US mass murder).

UN Population Division data tell us that post-invasion under-5 infant deaths in the still-occupied Occupied Haitian, Somalian, Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories total 0.08 million, 0.2 million, 0.2 million, 0.6 million and 2.3 million, respectively. To this we can add the 1.2 million Iraqi under-5 year old infants who died under Sanctions (1990-2003) to yield a horrendous total of 4.6 million under-5 year old deaths of which 90% were avoidable i.e. 4.1 million avoidable infant deaths due to US Alliance war crimes.

A major part of these ongoing war crimes is the US Alliance occupation of Afghanistan (the ongoing Afghan Genocide) and the human cost is revealed by UNICEF statistics – 338,000 under-5 year old infants die each year in Occupied Afghanistan, 90% avoidably and largely because the Occupier refuses to supply life-sustaining food and medical supplies unequivocally demanded of an Occupier by Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”.

WHO informs us that the total annual per capita health expenditure permitted by the US Alliance in Occupied Afghanistan is $29 as compared to $6,714 for Occupier United States of America (aka United States of Israel).

The bottom line in any comparative analysis of violent wrongdoing is consequential death. The current “annual death rate” is 7% for Occupied Afghan under-5 year old infants under the US Alliance – as compared to that of 4% (for Poles under the Nazis in WW2), 5% (French Jews under the Nazis and the Nazi-collaborator Vichy régime in WW2), 13% (Australian POWs of the Japanese in WW2) and 19% (Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe) (see “Polish Holocaust (1939-1945) & Afghan Holocaust (2001- )” ).

2. Passive mass murder of 9.5 million infants annually on First World-dominated Spaceship Earth.

There is an even bigger picture of avoidable child mortality that encompasses not just the evil American Empire but much of the rest of the World.

Recent estimates published in Global Research indicate that the US military currently has 737 military bases in 63 countries and 2.4 million military personnel in a total of 156 countries. Further, the US with 5% of the world’s population consumes 25% of the world’s resources. Accordingly, the US makes a major contribution to global avoidable mortality (excess deaths, avoidable deaths) that in the period 1950-2005 totalled 1.3 billion (the World), 1.2 billion (the non-European World) and 0.6 billion (the Muslim World), these estimate being consonant with UN Population Division data indicating 1950-2005 under-5 year old infant deaths that totalled 0.85 billion (the World), 0.8 billion (the non-European World) and 0.4 billion (the Muslim World).

While excess deaths in the period 1950-2005 totalled 82 million in countries actually militarily occupied by the US in the post-1945 period, the US Alliance (the US, UK, France, NATO, Australasia, Japan) has a much greater share of responsibility for the 1950-2005 global avoidable holocaust of 1.3 billion avoidable deaths. Accordingly, the US under Obama is a major contributor to the annual global avoidable mortality of 16 million avoidable deaths, with 9.5 million of these being of under-5 year old infants (for details see my book “Body Count. Global Avoidable mortality since 1950”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://mwcnews.net/Gideon-Polya ).

3. 6 billion infants are predicted to perish in climate genocide due to unaddressed, man-made global warming.

MWC

By Partha Chatterjee

Manna Dey, the 2007 Dada Saheb Phalke Award winner, has enthralled discerning listeners since the 1950s.
G.P. SAMPATH KUMAR

Manna Dey performing in Bangalore on May 10.

THE Dada Saheb Phalke Award for 2007 has gone to Manna Dey, one of the finest singers to have sung for Hindi and Bengali and other regional language films. The honour, in the opinion of many, has come to him rather late in the day. It cannot be truly exhilarating to be recognised for one’s contribution to the art of playback singing at the age of 90, especially if the last memorable song one sung was well over 30 years ago.

Manna Dey shot into fame in the early 1950s with his rendering of “Chaley Radhey Rani”, a kirtan-based song for Bimal Roy’s moving cinematic rendering of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Bengali novel Parinita. His sound training in Hindustani music was amply evident here as was his feeling for an emotive form like the kirtan, which he inherited from his uncle, the legendary Krishna Chandra Dey.

After this song, Manna Dey was recognised as a singer with immense potential. Doors opened for him in the Hindi film industry of Bombay, as Mumbai was known in those days. The legendary actor-director Raj Kapoor invited him to sing for Shree 420, the former’s take on socialism; and sing he did. Manna Dey, along with Lata Mangeshkar, sang “Pyaar hua iqrar hua”, written by the poet of the people, Shailendra, and tuned by the music composer duo Shankar-Jaikishan. Recorded 55 years ago, this romantic duet continues to be aired on the radio to this day. It is amongst the finest in the annals of Hindi film songs.

In his autobiography Memories Come Alive, Manna Dey remembers the composer duo thus: “The most interesting feature of Shankar and Jaikishan’s melodies was their sheer novelty and, in that respect, they remain unrivalled.” He felt particularly indebted to Shankar, who, he felt, brought out the best in him. He does not feel the same way though about another stalwart, Sachin Dev Burman, who, when he engaged Manna Dey to render “Upar gagan vishal” for Nitin Bose’s Mashaal, actually wanted him to resurrect K.C. Dey’s style. Of course, it is one of Manna Babu’s finest songs and is terribly difficult to sing. But S.D. Burman never asked him to sing regularly for him even after the singer proved his mettle a hundred times over with other noteworthy composers.

The Hindi film industry has always lacked imagination and has therefore toed the line of least resistance and closed the possibility for innovation. Just because Manna Babu was classically trained and could sing raga-based compositions really well, he was considered “unsuitable” for singing playback on a regular basis for the leading actors of his time, such as Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor. This problem, however, did not affect Mohammed Rafi, also classically trained, who was asked to sing very often for Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar, Bharat Bhushan, Guru Dutt, Rajendra Kumar and Shammi Kapoor, not to forget Dharmendra and Jeetendra. Why Manna Babu was not given similar opportunities remains inexplicable.

FL