Bhumika (English: The Role) is a 1977 Indian movie directed by Shyam Benegal. The movie stars Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Anant Nag, Naseeruddin Shah and Amrish Puri.

This film is broadly based on the memoirs of the well-known Marathi Stage and screen actress of the 1940s, ‘Hansa Wadkar’ who led a flamboyant and unconventional life and focus at an individual’s search for identity and self-fulfillment.

Smita Patil gave the strong performance of transforming herself in its course from a vivacious teenage girl to a wiser but deeply wounded middle-aged woman.

The film won two National Film Awards and Filmfare Best Movie Award, it was invited to Carthage Film Festival 1978, Chicago Film Festival, where it was awarded the Golden Plaque 1978, and in 1986 it was invited to Festival of Images, Algeria.

This film remains an iconic film in the art house/ off-beat film tradition of Indian cinema and is still as relevant today as it was when it was first released in 1977 and the period that it depicts, ranging from the 30s to the late 50s. The film is inspired from and is a fictional recreation of the autobiography of the famous Hindi and Marathi screen actress of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Hansa Wadkar.This film is a very complex film in terms of its structure and the plethora of themes and issues that it tackles, but this in no way distracts the viewers from enjoying the film as it unfolds to us the story of Usha, aka Urvashi in a seamless blend of past and present.

Smita Patil’s essaying of the role is amongst the best performances in not just Indian cinema but world cinema and rightly fetched her the National Award in that year. Within the film, her depiction of different roles in the films that she performs in, not only traces the evolution of acting styles in Hindi cinema over three decades, but also demonstrates her remarkable histrionic ability.

By Erika Tapalla, INQUIRER.net – 24 March 2009

MANILA, Philippines—The United Nations is looking to set up a global network by which indigenous peoples (IPs) can help each other respond to violations of their rights, mainly by extractive industries.
Eighty-five IP representatives from Asia, Africa, the Pacific, Europe and Russia, Arctic, Latin and North America, as well as experts, have gathered in Manila for the International Conference on Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues said there is a need to unite IPs in a global network to strengthen their responses to the problems they face.
“This conference is really to tackle the indigenous peoples’ rights, which are violated by extractive industries…oil, mineral or gas corporations. There is a need to develop a global network because there is no one existing body of IPs, there is no existing global network. If there is one, the voice of these people [is] stronger, so that’s what we did in this conference,” Corpuz told INQUIRER.net in an interview.
Corpuz said among the things IPs could do is bring their cases before national and international courts, raise awareness about destructive cultural and environmental issues through media, and dialogue with investors.
“By raising the issues and cases to national and even international courts, the voices of the indigenous peoples will be heard. Now, with this global network, hopefully their voices can be heard. Media also [have] a crucial role in delivering the situations, the issues, these people encounter so everyone will know about what is really happening. And lastly, the dialogue with the investors and these corporations will really help. It is in fact the most important thing,” Corpuz said.
Corpus also said it was sound corporate thinking to respect IPs’ rights.
“It is in the self-interest of these corporations to respect the rights of the indigenous peoples because, if not, there will be more conflict, and more conflict means more expenses for them. Then they [corporations] will be seen in a bad light. If they don’t mutually agree to terms or negotiate, it’s like they are robbing these people of their own things in their own home,” she said.
Corpuz also said states and mining corporations should adhere to the standards set by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) to avoid criminalizing IPs for protecting their land or resisting the entry of extractive industries.
The UNDRIP, signed by 143 countries in September 13, 2007, is the latest international agreement adopted by the UN General Assembly.
Conference organizer Tebtebba, the Indigenous Peoples’ International Centre for Policy Research and Education, said cases of human rights violations committed against indigenous peoples have been filed before courts in various countries as well as inter-governmental bodies such as the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
IP representatives said their cultural territories continue to shrink because of massive encroachment by mining companies.
The Philippines alone has suffered two of the biggest mining disasters—the collapse of the Tapian Pit of Marcopper Mining Corporation, which spilled 1.6 million cubic meters of mine tailings into the waterways of Marinduque in 1996; and the cyanide-laden waste spill of Australia-owned Lafayette Mining Limited in waters around Rapu-Rapu Island in 2005.
“We thought that the Philippines was in one of the worse states, but after this conference, we have realized that many groups [and] tribes from different parts of the world experience similar issues. The actors involved are the same– corporations that act like thugs encroaching on the lands of the people,” Corpuz said.
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(Submitted by Michelle Cook and Cathal Doyle)

by By Kate Doyle and Jesse Franzblau
Source: The National Security Archive

Declassified documents show U.S. Embassy knew that Guatemalan security forces were behind wave of abductions of students and labor leaders. National Security Archive calls for release of military files and investigation into intellectual authors of the 1984 abduction of Fernando García and other disappearances.

Following a stunning breakthrough in a 25-year-old case of political terror in Guatemala, the National Security Archive today [March 17,2008] is posting declassified U.S. documents about the disappearance of Edgar Fernando García, a student leader and trade union activist captured by Guatemalan security forces in 1984. The documents show that García’s capture was an organized political abduction orchestrated at the highest levels of the Guatemalan government.

Guatemalan authorities made the first arrest ever in the long-dormant kidnapping case when they detained Héctor Roderico Ramírez Ríos, a senior police officer in Quezaltenango, on March 5th and retired policeman Abraham Lancerio Gómez on March 6th as a result of an investigation into García’s abduction by Guatemala’s Human Rights Prosecutor (Procurador de Derechos Humanos—PDH). Arrest warrants have been issued for two more suspects, Hugo Rolando Gómez Osorio and Alfonso Guillermo de León Marroquín. The two are former officers with the notorious Special Operations Brigade (BROE) of the National Police, a unit linked to death squad activities during the 1980s by human rights groups.

According to the prosecutor Sergio Morales, the suspects were identified using evidence found in the vast archives of the former National Police. The massive, moldering cache of documents was discovered accidentally by the PDH in 2005, and has since been cleaned, organized and reviewed by dozens of investigators. The National Security Archive provided expert advice in the rescue of the archive and posted photographs and analysis on its Web site. Last week, Morales turned over hundreds of additional records to the Public Ministry containing evidence of state security force involvement in the disappearance of other student leaders between 1978 and 1980. As the Historical Archive of the National Police prepares to issue its first major report on March 24, more evidence of human rights crimes can be expected to be made public.

Government Campaign of Terror

The abduction of Fernando García was part of a government campaign of terror designed to destroy Guatemala’s urban and rural social movements during the 1980s. On February 18, 1984, the young student leader was captured on the outskirts of a market near his home in Guatemala City. He was never seen again. Although witnesses pointed to police involvement, the government under then-Chief of State Gen. Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores always denied any role in his kidnapping. According to the Historical Clarification Commission’s report released in 1999, García was one of an estimated 40,000 civilians disappeared by state agents during Guatemala’s 36-year civil conflict.

In the wake of García’s capture, his wife, Nineth Montenegro – now a member of Congress – launched the Mutual Support Group (Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo—GAM), a new human rights organization that pressed the government for information about missing relatives. Co-founded with other families of the disappeared , GAM took shape in June of 1984, holding demonstrations, meeting with government officials and leading a domestic and international advocacy campaign over the years to find the truth behind the thousands of Guatemala’s disappeared. The organization was quickly joined by hundreds more family members of victims of government-sponsored violence, including Mayan Indians affected by a brutal army counterinsurgency campaign that decimated indigenous communities in the country’s rural highlands during the early 1980s.

Declassified U.S. records obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the United States was well-aware of the government campaign to kidnap, torture and kill Guatemalan labor leaders at the time of García’s abduction. “Government security services have employed assassination to eliminate persons suspected of involvement with the guerrillas or who are otherwise left-wing in orientation,” wrote the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research four days after García disappeared, pointing in particular to the Army’s “notorious presidential intelligence service (archivos)” and the National Police, “who have traditionally considered labor activists to be communists.”
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By Yusuke Nagano, The Asahi Shimbun

YOKOHAMA–The district court here Monday denied the children of a deceased journalist the chance to clear their father’s name in a case that is regarded as the most notorious instance of suppression of free speech in wartime Japan.
The court elected to bypass handing down a verdict on whether Yasuhito Ono was guilty of promoting communism and engaging in subversive activities during World War II, thus allowing his conviction under the Peace Preservation Law in 1945 to stand in what is known as the “Yokohama Incident.”
The Yokohama District Court, following a March 2008 ruling set by the Supreme Court in an earlier case, decided to dismiss the plea for a verdict that addresses the question of guilt or innocence.
Ono worked as an editorial member of Kaizo (Reform) magazine. He died in 1959.
Ono’s two children had requested the retrial. It was the fourth such request by former defendants convicted over the Yokohama Incident or their family members.
Presiding Judge Takaaki Oshima made clear he had no choice but to dismiss the case, citing provisions under the former Criminal Procedure Law, which stated that trials involving individuals convicted under laws no longer on the books and those granted amnesty should be dismissed.
The Peace Preservation Law was abolished in October 1945, after which Ono was granted an amnesty.
When the district court agreed to a retrial last October, Oshima cited evidence that would suggest a “not guilty” verdict was more appropriate.
For instance, the court noted that a 1942 meeting attended by political scientist Karoku Hosokawa, editors and others in Toyama Prefecture, which wartime police had labeled an occasion to discuss the resurrection of the Communist Party, was “nothing but a friendly meeting among editors.”
The court on Monday cited that finding again. It also noted that wartime special police used torture to make suspects confess their “crimes.”
“But for a legal obstacle, it would be possible to reach substantial judgment in a retrial right away,” Oshima said, apparently referring to the former Criminal Procedure Law.
But the court sidestepped the issue of guilt or innocence until family members take steps to request criminal compensation.
Ono’s son, Shinichi, 62, and daughter, Nobuko Saito, 59, said Monday they will not appeal the case but instead move to seek compensation from the state for their father’s ordeal.
“We wanted to hear the word ‘innocent’ from the court,” Shinichi Ono said at a news conference. “We now realize the difficulty of trying to overturn a Supreme Court decision.”
Ono was arrested by a special unit of the Kanagawa prefectural police in May 1943 after proofreading an article written by Hosokawa for Kaizo magazine in 1942. Wartime authorities determined that the article enlightened the public on communism.
Ono was found guilty in September 1945, a month after World War II ended.
Overall, more than 60 journalists and others were arrested on suspicion of violating the Peace Preservation Law between 1942 and 1945. Four of them died in prison as a result of being tortured during the investigation.(IHT/Asahi: March 31,2009)
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Researchers in the UK have invented a new way of boosting the sensitivity of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements by a factor of 1000. The technique involves mixing molecules of interest with a “spin isomer” of hydrogen and a metal hydride, which forces the nuclear spins of the sample into a specific energy state. This makes the molecules much more visible to NMR measurements as well as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which uses NMR to map different tissue types within the body.
According to the researchers, led by Simon Duckett and Gary Green from the University of York, molecules that have been treated in this way could someday be injected into the body, reducing the time to take an MRI image from hours to a fraction of a second. This, they say, could allow medical researchers to watch how a patient responds in real time to drug therapy. It could also allow larger and more detailed scans to be made — allowing doctors to see tumours earlier than possible today (Science 323 1708).
NMR measurements are made by exposing a sample to a very high magnetic field, which aligns the magnetic moments of its nuclei in a specific direction. The magnetic energy levels are quantized, and the spacing between the levels — as well as the time it takes for transitions between those levels — can be measured by applying a radio-frequency signal to cause a transition and then measuring the radio signals that are given off as the magnetic moments return to equilibrium. This provides a wealth of information about the chemical and structural composition of the sample.
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Amrit and Rabindra have always produced their fabulous art the only way they know how: together. Peter Stanford meets a singular pair

Two of a kind: Amrit (left) and Rabindra

You’re doing very well telling them apart,” Amrit and Rabindra Singh’s elderly father remarks as he watches me talk to his daughters. “I still get them confused.” The identical twins, dressed in matching Punjabi outfits, right down to the earrings, necklaces, bangles and jewelled bindis in the centre of their foreheads, smile indulgently at his joke. Even their laughter sounds the same.
But these Sikh sisters long ago stopped worrying about being mistaken for each other and have turned being twins to their advantage. They have made it part of their brand in the art world, where they are known and celebrated as one artist: the Singh Twins.
Their style is a fusion of Indian tradition and contemporary Western influences which they label “past modern”. Each canvas is produced jointly and combines the bright colours, intricate designs and flattened perspectives of intricate Indian miniature paintings with modern political, social and cultural themes. Among their best-known are From Zero to Hero, featuring the Beckhams, and Art Matters, a piece commissioned to mark Liverpool’s tenure last year as European Capital of Culture, but Singh Twins’ works are to be found across major national and international collections. In 2002, they were only the second British-born artists, after Henry Moore, to be accorded an exhibition at New Delhi’s National Museum of Modern Art. And the windowsill of their neat, calm, book-lined studio, next to the family home halfway up a sandstone hill between Birkenhead and the Irish Sea, is lined with awards that are sparkling in the spring sunshine.
“One thing that might help,” offers Rabindra, as I once again address her as Amrit, “is that I tend to find myself, almost subconsciously, standing on the right.” Indeed, the reddish shawl each wears is, helpfully, over her right shoulder and Amrit’s left until the photographer mentioned it and Rabindra duly moved hers to match her sister. There is undoubtedly an element of playing with hapless visitors’ confusion over which is which, but the twins regard their shared identity, I quickly come to realise, as more than a game or a marketing device. They have turned it into something to highlight the tensions they have encountered, as citizens and as artists, in being both British and Asian.
“Western contemporary art is all about the individual, the inner self,” reflects Amrit, the more talkative of the two, as the three of us perch at the end of the long studio table where their latest painting – based on events in Palestine and looking at the impact of politics on everyday lives – lies half-finished. “So in Western art, it doesn’t matter if anyone else understands the work, as it is about the individual artist and what they are feeling. This was certainly the view when we were studying art at university [from the mid-1980s until 1991 first at University College, Chester, later Manchester]. We were constantly being told that to be individual was healthy, that we had to be more different from each other, be influenced by different Western artists from each other, but that didn’t seem valid to us. From the point of view of Sikh, Indian or even Asian philosophy, the community comes first and the individual is second.”
The clash between the two codes, say the twins, left them, like many other British Asians, under sustained pressure to abandon their cultural heritage. Their final degree grades were even reduced because they wouldn’t yield – though they subsequently had the marking overturned after a seven-year battle with academia. The prejudice they encountered – at one stage an examiner was reported to have remarked, “Give them a 2.2, they won’t mind because they’ll soon be in an arranged marriage” – might have broken some, but it brought out the rebel in the sisters. “It was when we were at college,” Rabindra recalls, “that we started to deliberately wear the same clothes to challenge the notion of individuality. We’d always had the same clothes, but until then had not necessarily worn them on the same day.”
They see their art, too, as a challenge to questions of identity and what is acceptable or fashionable. It favours narrative, detail, colour and time-honoured techniques – none of which are qualities likely to see them lionised alongside their contemporaries, the Young British Artists. Yet it is also very modern and even edgy because of its exploration of what it is to be British and Asian simultaneously.
“We were told by our tutors that the miniature was outdated,” Amrit remembers. When they first wanted to exhibit, they would routinely receive “nice letters, saying how much they liked our work, but perhaps we’d do better in an ethnic gallery in the East End of London”. They have, with their success of the past two decades, turned the tables – though they feel that a “London, art- establishment elite” continues to look down on their work because of its traditional Indian roots. They decided early on not to sell their works in order to build a touring collection, but do accept commissions and have, of late, allowed some pieces to go into national collections. But it is hard to say what their paintings would command on the open market; substantial five-figure sums are mentioned by dealers.
Though they are “twin-dividuals”, they insist, the Singhs spend 99 per cent of their time together. They simultaneously discovered a passion for Indian miniatures aged 13, while spending a year travelling with their father around his native Punjab. They jointly devise and execute most of their works, their skills interchangeable. “We could probably tell which of us has done which part, but otherwise only those very close to us could work it out,” says Amrit. Some pieces, especially in the various series they have completed on particular themes (such as “The Hart Project” and “Facets of Femininity”), are wholly by one or the other. “But we don’t see it as my work, your work,” Rabindra stresses. “It is not that we can’t do things on our own, but this is a joint venture. Our thinking, our ideology, our political-social outlook is identical.”
She does concede that the sisters have different characteristics. “I am a perfectionist, which is not always a good thing, and Amrit is the one who gets it done.” But they also say the last three words in harmony.
Their mode of working, the twins point out, has parallels in the medieval age, when monks would work together on a single illuminated manuscript. And there is something rather monk-like and self-abnegating about the Singh Twins. For all their warmth and humour, they continue to see themselves as outsiders and are more comfortable talking about their work than themselves.
The twins’ Sikh father came to Britain when he was nine. They were born in Richmond, Surrey, but moved to the Wirral when they were still small and encountered what they describe as low-level racial prejudice as youngsters – name-calling and, on one occasion, a brick through their window. Though now in their early forties, they continue to live in the extended family home with their father, uncles and cousins. They used domestic settings a lot in their early work – part, as Amrit puts it, “of celebrating the more positive side of the traditional Indian lifestyle rather than girls locked in their bedrooms and forced marriages”.
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by David Streitfeld

The banks need another bailout and countless homeowners cannot handle their mortgage payments, but one group is paying its bills: the dead.
Dozens of specially trained agents work on the third floor of DCM Services here, calling up the dear departed’s next of kin and kindly asking if they want to settle the balance on a credit card or bank loan, or perhaps make that final utility bill or cellphone payment.
The people on the other end of the line often have no legal obligation to assume the debt of a spouse, sibling or parent. But they take responsibility for it anyway.
“I am out of work now, to be honest with you, and money is very tight for us,” one man declared on a recent phone call after he was apprised of his late mother-in-law’s $280 credit card bill. He promised to pay $15 a month.
Dead people are the newest frontier in debt collecting, and one of the healthiest parts of the industry. Those who dun the living say that people are so scared and so broke it is difficult to get them to cough up even token payments.
Collecting from the dead, however, is expanding. Improved database technology is making it easier to discover when estates are opened in the country’s 3,000 probate courts, giving collectors an opportunity to file timely claims. But if there is no formal estate and thus nothing to file against, the human touch comes into play.
New hires at DCM train for three weeks in what the company calls “empathic active listening,” which mixes the comforting air of a funeral director with the nonjudgmental tones of a friend. The new employees learn to use such anger-deflecting phrases as “If I hear you correctly, you’d like…”
“You get to be the person who cares,” the training manager, Autumn Boomgaarden, told a class of four new hires.
For some relatives, paying is pragmatic. The law varies from state to state, but generally survivors are not required to pay a dead relative’s bills from their own assets. In theory, however, collection agencies could go after any property inherited from the deceased.
But sentiment also plays a large role, the agencies say. Some relatives are loyal to the credit card or bank in question. Some feel a strong sense of morality, that all debts should be paid. Most of all, people feel they are honoring the wishes of their loved ones.
“In times of illness and death, the hierarchy of debts is adjusted,” said Michael Ginsberg of Kaulkin Ginsberg, a consulting company to the debt collection industry. “We do our best to make sure our doctor is paid, because we might need him again. And we want the dead to rest easy, knowing their obligations are taken care of.”

Finally, of course, some of those who pay a dead relative’s debts are unaware they may have no legal obligation.
Scott Weltman of Weltman, Weinberg & Reis, a Cleveland law firm that performs deceased collections, says that if family members ask, “we definitely tell them” they have no legal obligation to pay. “But is it disclosed upfront — ‘Mr. Smith, you definitely don’t owe the money’? It’s not that blunt.”
DCM Services, which began in 1999 as a law firm, recently acquired clients in banking, automobile finance, retailing, telecommunications and health care; DCM says its contracts preclude it from naming them.
The companies “want to protect their brand,” said DCM’s chief executive, Steven Farsht. Despite the delicacy of such collections, he says his 180-employee firm is providing a service to the economy. “The financial services industry is under a tremendous amount of pressure, and every dollar we collect improves their profitability,” he said.
To listen to even a small sample of DCM’s calls — executives played tapes of 10 of them for a reporter, electronically edited to remove all names — is to reveal the wages of misery, right down to the penny.
A man has left credit card debt of $26,693.77, the legacy of a battle with cancer. A widow says her husband “had no money. He pretty much just had debt.” Asked about an outstanding account of $1,084.86, a woman says the deceased had no property beyond “some tools in the garage” and an 18-year-old Dodge.
Not everyone has the temperament to make such calls. About half of DCM’s hires do not make it past the first 90 days. For those who survive, many tools help them deal with stress: yoga classes and foosball tables, a rotating assortment of free snacks as well as full-scale lunches twice a month. A masseuse comes in regularly to work on their heads and necks.
Brenda Edwards, one of DCM’s top collectors, spoke with a woman in New Jersey about her mother’s $544.96 credit card bill.
“She had no will, no finances, nothing,” the daughter said. “Nothing went to probate.” The $200 in the checking account was used for funeral expenses. But the woman also said the family “filed a form with the county,” indicating that perhaps there was a legal estate after all.
“Is anyone in the family in a position to pay this?” Ms. Edwards asked, adding: “I’m not telling you it needs to be paid at all.”
The woman reached a decision. “I will talk to my brothers and sisters and we will pay this,” she said.
Ms. Edwards has a girlish voice that sounds younger than her 29 years. “If you plant a seed and leave on a good note, they’ll call back and pay it,” she said.
DCM started a Web site called MyWayForward.com to provide the bereaved with information, tools and, some day, products. “We will never sell death. But it’s O.K. to provide things that could be helpful to the survivor,” Mr. Farsht said. Death will be the end of one customer relationship but the beginning of another.
Some survivors are surprised, and a few are shocked, that they are hearing from a collector.
Eric Frenchman, an online consultant, said a DCM agent inquired about his late father’s $50 Discover card balance before the bill was even due. Since Mr. Frenchman had been planning to pay it anyway, he emerged from the experience vowing never to get a Discover card himself.
The major deceased-debt firms say such experiences are rare. Adam Cohen, chief executive of Phillips & Cohen Associates of Westampton, N.J., said his team of 300 collectors “are all trained in the five stages of grief.”
If a relative is more focused on denial or anger instead of, say, bargaining, the collector offers to transfer him to the human resources company Ceridian LifeWorks, where “master’s level grief counselors” are standing by. After a week, the relative is contacted again.
DCM executives say some of the survivors not only gladly pay but write appreciative notes. They offered up a stack, with the names deleted, as proof.
One widow wrote that a collector “was so nice to me, even when I could only pay $5 a month a few times.” Saying that money was “so tight” after her husband died, she added: “It was very hard for me, and to get a job at my age. Thank you.”
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By Del Quentin Wilber and Michelle Boorstein

In the Islamic Center of Washington, beneath the 160-foot minaret that towers over Embassy Row, a tale of intrigue has simmered for years. It is marked by bitter recriminations between two men who are credited with rehabilitating its reputation as a prominent symbol of Islam in the United States.
The center’s business manager has been accused of stealing $430,000 from the mosque in a complicated check scam. The key witness against him is the center’s director and imam, a Saudi who says he noticed the crime when he spotted too many checks being written to a gardener.
The Iranian-born business manager has a different story. He says the imam told him to take the money. About half was used to pay off debts and living expenses of two women who were close to the imam, and the rest was used to pay informants for tips about the mosque’s security, he said.
It was enough to confound a jury, which deadlocked 9 to 3 after the business manager’s three-week trial last May.
Now prosecutors are attempting to retry him, and the manager is firing back. He has accused the imam of committing perjury and obstructing justice. A federal judge is expected to rule in coming weeks on whether to drop the charges or prevent the imam from testifying.
Muslim community leaders say the controversy has remained mostly out of the public eye because the center, built in the 1940s by ambassadors of majority-Muslim nations, is not a typical mosque. The center enjoyed a relatively peaceful existence until the 1979 Iranian revolution, when it underwent an acidic struggle for control between the mosque’s board and a dissident group of worshipers, mostly Iranians opposed to the shah of Iran.
There were protests, arrests and other clashes. The board, composed of ambassadors from Muslim nations, locked down the mosque for a time.
In 1984, hoping to put the disputes in the past, the board hired Abdullah Khouj, a professor teaching in his native Saudi Arabia, to be its director and acting imam.
That same year, the board also hired Farzad Darui, who was born in Iran but became a U.S. citizen, as its director of security. Khouj later promoted Darui to be the mosque’s manager.
Khouj did not respond to interview requests made at the mosque and by telephone. Darui declined to comment.
Trial testimony and interviews with worshipers indicated that the men were dedicated to improving the mosque, which today is mostly a gathering place for the diplomatic community. It was this mosque that President George W. Bush chose to visit the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Its Northwest Washington location, far from the large Muslim population clusters in the suburbs, draws a largely transient base of worshipers that includes commuters, students, travelers and a steady flow of taxi drivers.
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(Submitted by a reader)

[Ishtar: the goddess of love and war in Akkadian (Babylonian) Civilization.]

By Professor Sarojini Sahoo
As the term myth may suggest, it is something which is absurd or fictional. Or is it?
While these beliefs and stories need not be a literal account of actual events, they may yet express ideas that are perceived by some people and cultures to be truths at a deeper or more symbolic level. The word myth comes from the Greek word “mythos.” The Greek Lexicon Liddell and Scott defines “mythos” as: word and speech <1>.

In his essay “Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?” Paul Veyne writes: “Myth is truthful, but figuratively so. It is not historical truth mixed with lies; it is a high philosophical teaching that is entirely true, on the condition that, instead of taking it literally, one sees in it an allegory” <2>.
In The Golden Bough (1890), Sir James George Frazer writes that all myths were originally connected with the idea of fertility in nature, with the birth, death, and resurrection of vegetation as a constantly recurring motif <3>.

It is very interesting to note that though Mesopotamian, Greek and Hindu civilizations, religions and cultures existed in different parts of the world and were separated by great distances and time, but there are some amazing similarities between their fables and myths. The concept of goddess always lies with sexuality and we find great similarities in all the myths of goddesses in worldwide. In Sumer, the goddess was known as Inanna, and in Babylon and Assyria, was known as Ishtar. She was Aphrodite for the Greeks. The Egyptians called her Hathor, Quaddesha and Aset. To the Phoenicians, she was Astarte. To the Hebrews, she was Ashtoreth and Ashera. And to the Philistines, she was Atergatis.

Though in all these cultures, sex is so suppressed in social conversation that if any one tries to have a conversation about sex or sexuality, some may think of it as “dirty” or “perverted.” But in case of myths (if we consider myths as tales of the people), we find a fascination towards sexual orientation has made these myths more attached to sexual fantasies than to other aspects of life. In his book Gay Witchcraft: Empowering the Tribe, Christopher Penczak, an author in the fields of paganism and magic, has elaborately discussed some gods and goddesses created by these myths with the sexual fantasies. For instance, the Greek king Oedipus unwittingly married his mother after killing his father, putting out his eyes when he discovered their identity. The Candomble deity Orungan ravished his mother, Yemanja, who then gave birth to a dozen children as well as the sun and the moon. In one version of the Aztec myth about their mother goddess, Coatlique’s husband physically abused her until one of her several hundred sons took action, killing his father and becoming his mother’s lover. The South American Panare mythology contains an example of father-daughter incest: Whenever the Sun and his daughter the Moon have intercourse, there is a total eclipse. Zeus, who occasionally dallied with handsome human males, was so sexually voracious that he would be positioned near the boiling center of the circle or in other words, at the torrid “heat” of sexual passion. Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas, was not far behind Zeus in his sexual proclivities. He ravished numerous women including the goddess Demeter. He raped Amphitrite, although he latter married her.

In mythology, the gods are often transsexual or can switch sexes in an instant. For example, there is the Balinese god, Syng Hyang Toenggal; a Hindu equivalent would be Indra, the transgendered sky god; and the Nordic equivalent would be the two-gendered Ymir, whose sacrifice was necessary for the creation of the Earth. Quan Yin, the Chinese goddess of compassion, is often pictured with Buddha. She is seen as beyond human conceptions of male or female, and can change her gender at will, as the occasion demands. Hermaphroditus, the son of Aphrodite and Hermes, is a hermaphrodite, giving his name to those whose physiology incorporates both a penis and female breasts. The concept of Ardhanariswara, the “ambisexual” creator god in Hindu mythology, is also compared with the Aztec god Ometecuhtli, who could give birth to the deities of the four directions. Candomble, an African-Brazilian religion, venerates Oxala, the “ambisexual” god of purity and wisdom. Baron Samedi, the Vodoun deity both of death and sexuality, typically is portrayed wearing both male and female garments, and is often pictured inviting men to engage in anal intercourse with him. Another “ambisexual” Vodoun deity is Damballah, the god of rainbows, peace, and prosperity <4>.

In the northern area of Sumeria known as Akkadia, later called Babylonia, women were not confined to the home but instead had a role to play in public life. This was especially true of the priestesses, who owned property and transacted business. Property from family estates was inherited equally by sisters and brothers. A daughter, when she married, was given a dowry that she was allowed to keep in the event of a divorce. Sometime around 2300 BC, all this began to change. The patriarchal form of society began to empower more and the masculine world took a more authoritarian role. A woman might still own property but it was no longer hers to dispose of freely. Now she must first consult her husband and obtain his permission. When Hammurabi formulated his code known as Code of Hammurabi in around 1760 BC, the position of women had obviously been greatly eroded. Sarah Dening <5>, the noted dream expert of noted Kingdom, tries to shape sexual roles in different social sequences cited above through myths in her much acclaimed book The Mythology of Sex <6>.

Dening pointed her finger to the Sumerian myth of Inanna. She was the goddess of love and procreation, similar to the Hindu goddess Rati Devi; Anath of Canaan, Isis of Egypt, and the Babylonian goddess, Ishtar. All these goddesses were rejoiced in their sexuality. Inanna is often depicted resting her foot on the back of a lion, offering the king the symbolic objects indicating his ruling power. Lions, when associated with feminine deities, represent the other side of their character manifesting undomesticated, fierce, aggressive aspect of the female like the Hindu deity Durga.

Although Inanna was the goddess of love and sexuality, she was also called Mother of Harlots and the Great Whore of Babylon, and she declared of herself as a prostitute. Her holy city of Erech was known as “the town of the sacred courtesans.” In no way, therefore, was prostitution in the Babylonian era considered a shameful profession. On the contrary, temples to Ishtar were inhabited by sacred prostitutes or priestesses known as Ishtartu or Joy-Maidens, dedicated to the service of the goddess. Their sexuality was seen as belonging to her, to be used therefore only in the sacred rites undertaken in her worship. Indeed, the original meaning of the word “prostitute” was “to stand on behalf of,” that is, to represent, the power of the goddess <7>. Curiously perhaps, from a contemporary standpoint, Ishtar was often referred to as “Virgin,” implying that her creativity and power were self-engendered and not dependent upon masculine power.

Unlike to the Devdasi system among ancient Hindus where the unmarried maid disciples got married to the gods, in Babylonian culture, the priestesses would undertake the sacred marriage with any male worshipper who wanted union with the goddess. The man, whom the priestess had not met before and would not meet again, spent the night with her in the temple precincts. Their intercourse would put him in contact with the rejuvenating energy of the Goddess, mediated through her priestess who would bestow on him an ecstatic experience. For the priestess, the sexual act represented a ritual offering to the goddess. A very real benefit was therefore enjoyed by all concerned, not least the temple itself which could expect to earn considerable income from such worshippers. Apart from their sexual and commercial activities, temple prostitutes demonstrated considerable gifts in other areas. Because their natural secretions were considered to have a beneficial effect, they were greatly respected as healers of the sick. One clay tablet dating from this era tells us that diseases of the eye can be cured by a harlot’s spittle. These women also acted as seers and were skilled in sorcery and prophecy <8>.

As a result, priestesses often engaged in commerce and might be involved in import and export, land management, and other profitable endeavors. The modern brothel of our own culture, with its “madam,” might perhaps be seen as a somewhat pale reflection of the temple of Ishtar.

According to author Sarah Dening, the myths of Inanna were created when patriarchal milieus had not been in dominant form.

After Hammurabi, comes another myth, the Sumero-Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. Enkidu and Gilgamesh were two friends having a homosexual relationship. Later they meet the goddess Ishtar, who offers to marry Gilgamesh, promising him untold delights. He, however, preferring his friend Enkidu, rejects her advances in a deeply insulting way, referring to her in derogatory terms:
“Listen to me while I tell the tale of your lovers. There was Tammuz, the lover of your youth. For him you decreed wailing, year after year. You loved the many-coloured roller, but still you struck and broke his wing. You have loved the lion tremendous in strength: seven pits you dug for him, and seven. You have loved the stallion magnificent in battle, and for him, you decreed the whip and spur and a thong. You have loved the shepherd of the flock; he made meal-cake for you day after day and he killed kids for your sake. You struck and turned him into a wolf; now his own herd-boys chase him away. His own hounds worry his flanks” <9>.

Enraged, Ishtar asks her father to create a heavenly bull to destroy the insolent hero. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the bull and Enkidu throws its organs into Ishtar’s face. This is too much for the assembly of the gods, who decide that Enkidu must die. This will be the punishment that Gilgamesh must bear. Later, Enkidu is allowed to emerge from the underworld for a visit and Gilgamesh begs him to reveal what death is like.

Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of love and beauty and was famous for her erotic nature. When we compare Ishtar with Aphrodite, we find the former is more free to her will than the later. For example, Ishtar was never forced to sleep with any one against her will, but in case of Aphrodite, we find she had to sleep with many gods even against her will. Ironically, Aphrodite was wed to Hephaestus, who was lame and considered to be the most unattractive of all the gods. This marriage was through no choice of her own, but instead, was arranged by Zeus in order to keep Aphrodite out of trouble. The goddess of love did not take her wedding vows very seriously and was accustomed to having many affairs involving both gods and men. She had constant relations with Mars. Her children by Mars were Harmonia, Deimos (Fear) and Phobos (Panic). She was also the mother of Hermaphroditus with Mercury (Hermes), Priapus with Dionysus (Bacchus), and Beroe (after whom the city Berytus in Lebanon was named) with Adonis. Aphrodite was also the mother of Eryx and Rhodes by Poseidon, Aeneas and Lyrus with Anchises (a mortal king killed by Zeus for drunkenly telling of his affair with Venus), Astynois with Phaethon (a beautiful young boy whom Venus ravished), Eryx with Butes (of Jason and the Argonauts), and Eros (Cupid) and Anteros (the avenging spirit of spurned love) by unknown fathers.

Referring to the transformation of ethical values of myths with the change of milieus in society, Dening writes “Given that myths tend to reflect aspects of the culture prevalent at the time, we may surmise that intimate relationships between men were not considered unusual. This could perhaps be expected in a society where archaeological evidence has shown that women had, by now, a very inferior role. Dual standards existed for married life, where a wife might be put to death for adultery, while a husband was free to enjoy as many women as he chose, provided he did not seduce the wife of another man” <10>

If the myths are in any way to be considered as the reflection of ‘social ideas’ of any group or society, then we can say that with the development of patriarchal control over feminine civil rights, the sexual freedom described in those myths was cut down from the women’s world and transferred to the men’s world with anti-feminist moral milieus which gradually made the female a sex object, however powerful they might be in their goddess perspectives. This is a strapping point, I believe, that the sex negative feminists have to think of before raising their voice against the sex role attitudes of the female.

Bibliography:

<1> Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon is the world’s most authoritative dictionary of ancient Greek. Indispensable for biblical and classical studies alike, the world’s most comprehensive and authentic word list.
(An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, (7th edition), published by Oxford University Press, USA; (December 31, 1945), ISBN-13: 978-0199102068.
<2> Veyne, Paul (1988). Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on Constitutive Imagination. (translated by Paula Wissing). University of Chicago. ISBN 0-226-85434-5.
<3> The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The book was originally published in two volumes in 1890.Now it is available with Touchstone , published in December 1, 1995, ISBN-13: 978-0684826301.
<4> Penczak, Christopher: Gay witchcraft: Empowering the tribe, published by Red Wheel/Weiser, Boston, 2003, ISBN-13: 9781578632817
<5> Sarah Dening, a psycho therapist of UK, began her career by studying for a degree in Philosophy at London University and subsequently went on to work in film production, PR and then to run an art gallery. In the early 1980’s, she set up the first public floatation tank facility in the UK whilst working towards becoming a Jungian psychotherapist. Many people had extraordinary experiences whilst floating including being reunited with a long-dead father and meeting an angel! For the last eighteen years she had been busy developing therapy practices in London and York. Dream work is an important aspect of Jungian therapy and she had worked with hundreds of clients, helping them to understand how their dreams can further their personal development. For nine years she had written a weekly national newspaper column interpreting readers’ dreams in the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and, latey, in the Daily Mirror. She died in August 2007 with cancer. She wrote several books like Healing Dreams, The Everyday I Ching, Dreams made Easy, The Mythology of Sex, etc.
<6> Dening, Sarah: The Mythology of Sex, Publisher: Batsford Ltd (5 Nov 1996), ISBN-13: 978-0713481112
<7> Sandars, N. K. ( Translators): The Epic of Gilgamesh, published by Penguin, 1960,. ISBN-13: 9780140441000
<8> Marling, Roderick W: VAMACARA TANTRA, KamaKala Publications, Portland , Oregon , 1997
<9> Sandars, N. K. ( Translators) : The Epic of Gilgamesh, published by Penguin, 1960,. ISBN-13: 9780140441000, p. 86
<10> Dening, Sarah: The Mythology of Sex, Publisher: Batsford Ltd (5 Nov 1996), ISBN-13: 978-0713481112
Professor Sarojini Sahoo is an author and a feminist and can be reached at sarojinisahoo2003@yahoo.co.in.
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Media Revolution or Mirage?
By ROBIN BLACKBURN
Perhaps you have to be a visitor, as I am from the UK, to register the astonishing media revolution currently underway in the United States – and the threat it constitutes to the country’s progressive press.
Once upon a time the New York Times backed the Iraq War, published phoney reportage on WMD and supported an [unsuccessful] coup against Venezuela’s elected leader. Some of its star columnists – with super-jingo Thomas Friedman heading the list – purveyed market fundamentalism. As for the US cable networks, their chauvinism and demagogy is a by-word.
Yet suddenly I’m living in a parallel universe where Newsweek’s cover declares ‘We Are All Socialists Now’, and the New York Times outflanks the Nation, the Comedy channel turns deadly serious and MSNBC mocks the consensus.
Instead of neo-liberal triumphalism the New York Times finds space to cover some real issues. Safire and Kristol have been dropped and in their place a steady drumbeat from Krugman and Dowd urges Obama to nationalize the banks and lock up miscreant CEOs. Recently a detailed op-ed explained that the administration’s foreclosure policy – giving tiny loans to help mortgagees make their interest payments – was useless. What had to be done was for Treasury to pony up serious money to pay down principal on mortgage debt. Another outlined ‘How to Leave Afghanistan’. On March 14 Evo Morales explained to Times readers that the campaign to criminalise the chewing of coca, ‘a healthy indigenous past-time’, was cruel and unjust. And in the Business section Gretchen Morgensohn’s exposé of the Pharaonic scale of the public indulgence of AIG and the zombie banks was picked up and endorsed by the main section.
Meanwhile the most circulated item on Facebook is Jon Stewart’s Daily Show interview with Jim Cramer of CNBC’s ‘Mad Money’, in which he took the strident share-booster to the cleaners, complete with deadly clips showing Cramer advocating scams he now claims to disavow. Stewart previously denounced Israeli slaughter in Gaza when the rest of the US media and political world preferred to look the other way.
The new openness of the Times no doubt reflects a new conjuncture – the voters’ pain at depression hits, anger at bail-outs for the rich and greedy, a creeping paralysis which the White House fails to address, and, close to home, the purchase of the paper’s stock by Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire – not forgetting the specter of an end to print newspapers. Likewise the Daily Show is occupying new territory at a time when Rachel Maddow of MSNBC is refreshing the tired recipes of cable news by imitating alternative network stars like Amy Goodman and Laura Flanders.
Obama’s Plan A – inviting those who created the catastrophe to fix it – is foundering before our eyes, so it is good that some are working on Plan B. The trouble is Plan B needs a lot of work if it is not to collapse like a credit default swap issued by Lehman Brothers. Indeed what is really needed is Plan C.
Thus nationalizing the banks is a good starting point if the aim is to construct a public utility finance system. But if the aim is simply to return the banks to the private sector as soon as possible – as Krugman urges – their lending policy will not help investment and small businesses on the scale now needed. Likewise ‘withdrawal’ from Iraq and Afghanistan is fine, but should not mean leaving behind huge military bases bulging with US troops.
All those pieces comparing Obama with Roosevelt alert us to a problem. Then the president had to reckon with a surging labor movement. And he could mobilise a strategic detail of red experts when he gave $40 billion to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to build five hundred giant plants, taking a strategic stake in all the corporations which need these facilities. By 1945 the US government owned large chunks of Lockheed, Boeing and GM, but red scares led to the closing of the RFC.
The TVA and RFC were examples of the sort of bold public enterprise now needed but where are those needed to staff them? Some of those laid-off bankers might serve as useful foot-soldiers but they will need competent commanders and planners.
Of course there is a dream-like quality to media radicalization. Friedman’s effort in the Times of March 18 brought me back to reality. Apparently we all have to rally behind an even larger bail-out of the very same banks that have been rescued at such cost several times before. Forget nationalization. Instead US households who have lost about $12 trillion (so far) must foot the bill for ‘bank healing’ which requires ‘another big, broad taxpayers’ safety net’.
The media revolution may be exhausted but if the president follows this advice it could be street barricades and bank occupations next.
Robin Blackburn writes for New Left Review and is a visiting professor at the New School in New York. He can be reached at robinblackburn68@hotmail.com

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