by MATHEW JOHN

The Feku regime has found an ingenious way of making people “disappear” whose loyalties are uncertain, eerily reminding one of George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’.

“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves… The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.” 

– From the play Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare 

My story is about Bholistan, a dystopian country eerily like ours, brimming with injustice and oppression. For a whole decade and more, that benighted land has been ruled by a Feku – cruel, mendacious, boorish and wrapped up in himself. He has wielded untrammelled power that he has used to tyrannise and bamboozle his people who have meekly submitted to his every command as he wrecks their world – values, kinship, institutions – for his own gain and that of his cohorts.

The special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Maghda is the latest atrocity that the Feku has inflicted on his people. From being a vocal critic of the universal Uphaar identity card scheme before coming to power in 2014, calling it a “political gimmick”, he pushed the Uphaar Act through the legislature in 2016 and since then had made it mandatory for all kinds of purposes including filing of income tax returns, availing of government welfare schemes, getting a passport, opening a bank account, as identity for voting and what have you.

But now the Feku and his factotums in the National Electoral Commission (NEC) have decided to pull the rug from under the people’s feet. The long-suffering citizens, whose lives are being disrupted repeatedly on account of the Feku’s hare-brained or mischievous schemes have been told that the Uphaar card is no longer proof of citizenship or date of birth.

With the upcoming Maghda election in mind and with the obvious but unstated intent of excluding dadi-topiwalas and the marginalised from the electoral process, the NEC has completed the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Maghda, but not before shockingly deciding that the Uphaar, voter ID and ration cards are not valid indicative documents for voter registration.

Consequently, a huge swathe of the electorate has been disenfranchised. Out of 7.40 crore electors as many as 80 lakh have been denied the vote. A cute Labrador, though, was issued a residence certificate, thereby demonstrating the unbridled power of the NEC to cull and hand-pick the electorate.

The Feku regime has indeed found an ingenious way of making people “disappear” whose loyalties are uncertain, which reminds one of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, that described the Party’s practice of making individuals who were inconvenient to disappear from society, history and memory, effectively turning them into ‘unpersons’. It’s surreal, the way the Feku has been trampling all over his country’s constitution and the values that underpin it, even as the guardians of the constitution – the judiciary – hems and haws but then does his bidding. And his people are mute.

Given the Feku’s dodgy educational credentials, the rumour that he keeps a copy of Mein Kamph by his bedside is probably apocryphal. What is indubitable, though, is that he has somehow imbibed the Fuhrer’s tips on how to propagate the Big Lie: “The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small but their power of forgetting enormous…all effective propaganda must be limited to a few points and must harp on these in slogans.”

The Great Dictator also commended the art of lying: “Great liars are also great magicians.” The Feku has acted decisively on this advice.

The Wire for more

by B. R. GOWANI

they starved us
they stripped us
they degraded us
they terrorized us
they executed us
they suffocated us
…

that super power was crushed by dying & new superpowers

we were planted in someone else’s land

we gradually stole most of the land

we also got huge reparation money from our oppressor

many of us also made money out of the tragedy

the Superpower has supported us financially/politically/vetoically

once we got the land …

we then became … them

we humiliated them
we imprisoned them
we terrorized them
we starved them
we bombed them
we executed them
…

And …

almost no one came to their rescue

a few little ones were crushed

the big one was taken care of by the Superpower

we are “God’s chosen ones” & the Superpower’s loved ones

No one has hindered our mission …

Our protector is all around us …

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

THE FRIDAY TIMES

Long before Islamic kingdoms ruled the land, Pakistan was a cradle of Buddhist civilization, home to the majestic Gandhara region, where kings like Ashoka promoted dharma, and Greek and Indian cultures fused in stunning sculptures and stupas. Explore how Buddhist thought flourished across Taxila, Swat, Sindh, and Gilgit-Baltistan until Hun invasions and the rise of Islam faded its presence. Rediscovered through British archaeologists and modern collaborations, today Pakistan’s grand monasteries, rock carvings, and museum collections are drawing global attention. This documentary traces that transformation, from Mauryan roots to modern preservation, and shows why this forgotten heritage still shapes shared culture and identity. 

The Friday Times for more

SCROLL STAFF

The 1981 classic, starring Rekha, has been restored and will be re-released in cinemas on June 27.

Among the beneficiaries of the recent trend of older films being re-released in cinemas is Umrao Jaan. Muzaffar Ali’s celebrated period drama from 1981, starring Rekha in one of her most well-regarded roles, is not available on any streaming platforms. This makes its re-emergence special, the director told Scroll.

Umrao Jaan’s rights are held by the son of the original producer of the film, Ali said. “Had he sold the film to a streaming channel, it would have lost its mystery,” the director added. “There is still a craving for the film since people want to see it in its better form.”

The movie, which has been restored by the National Film Archive of India, will be out in PVR and Inox theatres on June 27. Audiences can expect Rekha’s amazing grace, sumptuous visuals, gorgeous costumes and jewellery, Khayyam’s music, Asha Bhosle’s singing, Shahryar’s lyrics.

Most of all, they will see “a convergence of nostalgia and a dream for the future”, as Ali wrote in his memoir Zikr – In The Light of Shadow and Time (Penguin Random House, 2023).

Ali adapted Umrao Jaan from Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s historical fiction Umrao Jaan Adaa, about the courtesan Amiran. The movie, like the novel, is set in the nineteenth century. It traces Amiran’s arrival in a brothel in Lucknow and her relationships with characters played by Farooque Shaikh, Raj Babbar and Naseeruddin Shah.

Amiran’s experiences run parallel to the decline of Lucknow as the cultural hub of the former kingdom of Awadh. Umrao Jaan is classified as one of the most important courtesans films made in India, but it’s actually a “lost Lucknow film”, Ali said.

“It’s a film about relooking at Awadh with a sense of truth,” the 80-year-old filmmaker and designer observed. “A lot of films of this kind are placeless. You can’t smell the place. In Umrao Jaan, the fragrance of Lucknow is very strong. My film is deeply rooted in the geography of a place where I belonged.”

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by LAURA RODRIGUEZ SALAMANCA

When Meta embedded AI bots in its apps, even students in the most remote corners of Colombia gained access. But rather than boosting learning, it’s getting in the way.

• Meta’s popularity has made it the first place many Colombian students encounter and use generative AI.
• Teachers report a surge in AI-generated homework and essays, while student performance on exams declines.
• Educators warn easy access to AI is deepening existing problems in the country, which was already struggling with low graduation and literacy rates.

Chemistry teacher María Intencipa misses the good old days — last year — when her small school in rural Colombia was sheltered from the artificial intelligence revolution by its remoteness. 

José Gregorio Salas Rural High School, where she works, lacks enough computers and reliable internet. Few students can afford the high-end smartphones or data plans that top-of-the-line AI requires.

Intencipa had heard about ChatGPT, but from what she could tell, few of her students were using it. In 2023, some started whispering about getting help from “Lucia.” She thought it might be the name of a tutor, but they were referring to the Luzia app, which turns the WhatsApp messaging app into an AI bot.

Then, last year, AI metastasized to almost every class. Teachers across the school noticed a surge in unusually high-quality answers that didn’t resemble their students’ typical work. Homework and essays suddenly featured erudite arguments, sophisticated vocabulary, and points that had not been taught in class or the textbooks. 

“When I assign homework, students just use AI,” Intencipa told Rest of World. “Because it’s easier.”

Despite the burst in brilliance, more kids were failing exams, teachers said. 

Starting in July 2024, AI was suddenly everywhere all at once in Latin America after Meta Platforms started incorporating chatbots in its apps across the region. Whether users wanted them or not, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram became homes for a variety of AI bots. 

The students of José Gregorio Salas Rural High School put them to work on their homework. This small community of farming and cattle-ranching families was no longer shielded from the AI revolution, which was disrupting education worldwide. It could no longer escape because the new bots were embedded in the apps everyone was already using. Meta had fine-tuned the apps for the emerging-market consumer, making them cheaper to use and designing them to work with less sophisticated phones and patchy connectivity.

Rest of world for more

by MIKE LOFGREN

NY Times’ pet conservative offers a lengthy apologia for America — and gets pretty much everything wrong

America’s so-called sane conservatives have had a lot of explaining to do since 2016, and even more since January of this year. How do they dissociate themselves from Donald Trump and still justify their own continuing belief in a conservative ideological project that is supposed to be good for America, but in practice has brought chaos, misery and poisonous social strife?

It would be more straightforward and honest of these anti-Trump conservatives to admit that postwar conservatism in America was all a lie, that they were dupes and that they finally saw the light. Or they could claim they were seduced by its darker, authoritarian strains, its temptation to worship power, and now they have finally saved their souls by renouncing this ideological devil. That is the well-worn path of sinners come to confession, or, in secular terms, Whittaker Chambers renouncing his allegiance to Stalin.

Instead, they typically reposition themselves as the immovable axis of correct values, and denounce their former ideological fellow travelers as heretics who profaned true conservatism. As they so often claim, I didn’t leave the party, the party left me.

This form of rationalization and denial is embarrassingly evident in a recent apologia by David Brooks, the New York Times’ notion of an ideal conservative. Writing in The Atlantic, Brooks says that the conservatism he enthusiastically discovered in the early 1980s was a movement bursting with ideas. There was a minority within the movement, he admits, who were not real conservatives, but reactionaries. At the beginning, they were barely worthy of notice.

I won’t bore the reader by recapitulating the process of his shocked realization, 40 years too late, that the reactionary “fringe,” as Brooks calls it, was the true core of the party, the seed of a poisonous fruit that required decades to reach its putrid bloom. It’s said that every confession is a species of boasting, and Brooks’s mea culpa, that he “should have seen this coming,” is in that vein: He was just too good-hearted to think his fellow travelers in the conservative movement capable of such iniquity.

Of course, maintaining one’s innocence requires rearranging history. It was mainstream conservatives, not some fringe, who perpetrated the Iran-Contra affair, invaded Iraq under false pretenses, enthusiastically tortured prisoners in the quixotic war on terrorism, and recklessly cut taxes and deregulated markets to pave the way for the biggest global financial crash since the Great Depression. It was mainstream conservatives who voted unanimously against Barack Obama’s rather tepid Affordable Care Act, itself a rehash of a Heritage Foundation proposal from the 1990s.

It was mainstream conservatives, not some fringe, who perpetrated the Iran-Contra affair, invaded Iraq under false pretenses, tortured prisoners in the quixotic war on terrorism, and paved the way for the biggest global financial crash since the Great Depression.

Brooks’ labored apologia is a history — his history — of recent American conservatism, a Manichaean fable of civilized, conscientious conservatives full of marvelous ideas and déclassé, knuckle-dragging right-wingers. But beyond its heroes-and-villains simplicity, the piece reminds us of a characteristic habit of conservatives.

Salon for more

by RAMZY BAROUD

Israel is aggressively implementing plans to shape Palestine’s future and the broader region, sculpting its vision for the ‘day after’ its genocide in Gaza.

The latest, bizarre iteration of this strategy proposes fragmenting the occupied West Bank into so-called ’emirates,’ starting with the ’emirate of Hebron.’

This unexpected twist in Israel’s protracted search for alternative Palestinian leadership first surfaced in the staunchly pro-Israeli US newspaper, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). It then quickly dominated all Israeli media.

The report details a letter from a person identified by The WSJ as “the leader of Hebron’s most influential clan.” Addressed to Nir Barakat, Jerusalem’s former Israeli mayor, the letter from Sheikh Wadee’ al-Jaabari appeals for “cooperation with Israel” in the name of “co-existence.”

This “co-existence,” according to the “clan leader”, would materialize in the “Emirate of Hebron.” This “emirate” would “recognize the State of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people,” in exchange for reciprocal recognition of the “Emirate of Hebron as the Representative of the Arab residents in the Hebron District.”

The story may seem perplexing. This is because Palestinian discourse, regardless of geography or political affiliation, has never entertained such an absurd concept as united West Bank “emirates.”

Another element of absurdity is that Palestinian national identity and pride in their people’s unwavering resilience, especially in Gaza, are at an unprecedented apex. To float such clan-based alternatives to legitimate Palestinian leadership seems ill-conceived and is destined to fail.

Israel’s desperation is palpable. In Gaza, it cannot defeat Hamas and other Palestinian factions who have resisted the Israeli takeover of the Strip for 21 months. All attempts to engineer an alternative Palestinian leadership there have utterly collapsed.

This failure has compelled Israel to arm and fund a criminal gang that operated before 7 October 2023, in Gaza. This gang functions under the command of Yasser Abu Shabab.

The gang has been implicated in a litany of violent activities. These include hijacking humanitarian aid to perpetuate famine in Gaza and orchestrating violence associated with aid distribution, among other egregious crimes.

Like the clan leader of Hebron, the Abu Shabab criminal gang possesses no legitimacy and no public support among Palestinians. But why would Israel resort to such disreputable figures when the Palestinian Authority (PA), already engaged in “security coordination” with Israel in the West Bank, is ostensibly willing to comply?

The answer lies in the current Israeli extremist government’s adamant refusal to acknowledge Palestinians as a nation. Thus, even a collaborating Palestinian nationalist entity would be deemed problematic from an Israeli perspective.

While Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is not the first Israeli leadership to explore clan-based alternatives among Palestinians, the Israeli prime minister and his extremist allies are exceptionally determined to dismantle any Palestinian claim to nationhood. This was explicitly stated by extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. He famously declared in Paris, in March 2023, that a Palestinian nation is an “invention.”

Palinfo for more

by FELIPE OSSA

Camel beauty enhancements are big business in Saudi Arabia

Lithe necks, blown-out lips, eyelashes worthy of a cartoon princess. The camels that compete in Saudi Arabia’s annual King Abdulaziz Camel Festival are a striking bunch. Many contestants, who are mostly female, have undergone cosmetic enhancements, including Botox injections and surgical procedures such as nostril enlargement.

For the camel owners, winning a pageant can be life-changing—millions of dollars in prize money.But the same goes for the dromedaries: Some of the procedures can cause serious long-term harm to their health.

A Botox scandal that led 40 camels to be disqualified a few years ago did not stomp out the practice. “It’s a continuous game of cat-and-mouse between rule enforcement and circumvention,” says Mohamed Tharwat, a professor of veterinary medicine at Qassim University in Saudi Arabia, by email.

Cosmetically enhancing camels with medically invasive procedures may have started about 15 years ago, says Tharwat, but it has been banned by the festival since its inception in 2016.

Last month, Tharwat wrote a paper for Frontiers in Veterinary Sciencethat calls attention to the alarming practice. Fascinated with camels from a young age, he later became a veterinarian, but his current work focuses increasingly on ethical and welfare issues related to the animal, which is so central to Arabian culture.

Camel beauty is big business. Running for over a month, from late November through the start of January, the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival is the largest camel-related event in the world. It draws thousands of spectators and even more camels, and hosts falconry, racing, and other events apart from the pageants, according to Saudipedia, a digital resource maintained by the Saudi government.

Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have brought it and other pageants on the Arabian Peninsula to a broader audience, boosting demand for female camels with the features of a beauty queen, according to some researchers, who spoke to owners and breeders in the United Arab Emirates for a paper published recently in the journal Heritage.

What judges tend to look for in a standout one-humped contestant are a pendulous lower lip and long upper lip covering the teeth; a wide and elongated nose; a long, slender neck; a high-set hump; and long eyelashes, among other traits. These beauty standards “are rooted in traditional Bedouin appreciation of camel form and elegance,” says Tharwat. But they don’t improve a camel’s health, or ability to provide transport, meat, or milk.

The standards vary a bit among different breeds of Camelus dromedarius. The most popular breeds for festivals, says Tharwat, include the Majaheem, which are often black and known for their high milk yield, and the Maghateer, which range from white to light brown, and are known for their “elegant appearance.”

For the Majaheem, ears that are long and forward-facing are most desirable; for Maghateer it’s short ones that are pricked backward. To produce the most beautiful contestants, owners use state-of-the-art breeding techniques. But some go much further.

Illegal interventions include filler injections in the lips and nose area, lip stretching and binding, ear trimming, nostril enlargement, and injected anesthesia that makes the lips droopier, and by extension, more attractive. Some owners also inject their camels with testosterone, which changes the shape of the animals, in part by increasing muscle growth.

But these enhancements have consequences: Short-term pain, infections, and distress are some of the immediate concerns for the camels, says Tharwat, but many of the procedures can also cause chronic health issues. Botox can paralyze facial nerves, making it hard for the camel to eat and drink. Reshaping the lips and ears can undermine sensory function. And testosterone can render a female camel infertile or suppress milk production. Perhaps what’s most frightening is that often these interventions aren’t carried out by professionals.

Making animals more aesthetically appealing to their owners and other humans is by no means confined to the Arabian Peninsula. In the United States, people crop the ears of their dogs and dock their tails—practices banned in many countries but still accepted by the American Kennel Club as ways to help certain breeds “perform the tasks they were meant to do.” But it’s hard to argue that cropped ears on a Doberman have any useful value apart from meeting a standard of beauty. “They’re amputations, plain and simple,” says Barbara Hodges, director of advocacy and outreach for the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association.

The most thorough investigation of camel cosmetic practices took place at Saudi Arabia’s 7^th annual camel festival that ran from December 2022 to January 2023. An inspection of some 12,385 dromedary camels at two different sites at the festival found that almost 8 percent had been tampered with, according to a paper in the Open Veterinary Journalfrom last March by Tharwat and colleague Abdulla Al-Hawas. The most common procedure: lip stretching. Nearly 8 percent of the inspected camels also had unusually elevated testosterone levels, indicating they’d been injected, probably as they were growing.

Nautilus for more

by PIUS FOZAN

One was supported by major brands and corporations. The Internationalist Queer Pride event, by contrast, was call to remember that pride is political.

There were two pride marches in Berlin on July 26.

One, organised by CSD Berlin, a registered NGO, was supported by major brands and corporations. Trucks bearing corporate logos rolled through the streets. Brand slogans floated on flags, club-style music blared from sound systems. Behind them, groups of revellers danced, posed, and marched in festive clusters.

In keeping with Berlin’s character, it is a technicolour procession, heavy on spectacle.

“This is a party,” said Yassi, 24, who works in hospitality. She identifies as lesbian.

I was with two other queer friends, Lisa and Charlie. We had taken the S-Bahn from Potsdam to Berlin and reached the Victory Column just as the CSD parade reached its final stop behind the Brandenburg Gate.

The mood there was jubilant, and familiar, much like the previous three prides I had attended.

But we weren’t staying.

We turned and left for the second march: the Internationalist Queer Pride.

Charlie, our usual route-finder, found us a back way after metro stations nearby were blocked off.

On the Telegram channel, IQP had just posted an alert: the police had attacked the demonstration; the march had temporarily stopped.

More updates followed, hinting at escalating tensions. Days earlier, the organisers had issued an advisory, not on party etiquette and sunscreen, but on protest safety. “Carry a lawyer’s number; avoid oil-based creams that worsen the effects of pepper spray; stay calm, stay together.”

The anticipation of arrest and police action was evident.

It was a sober primer for navigating a demonstration under duress, a telling indicator of how Berlin’s police treats political dissent.

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