Society & Culture

Philosophy of the Mahatma

Mahatma Gandhi engrossed in a document, while proceeding to the Working Committee Meeting. With him are Jawaharlal Nehru and Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan.

October 2 is Gandhi Jayanthi. Even after all these years, we continue to find that the Mahatma is relevant.

IIn an essay titled “Gandhiji’s political significance,” Gene Sharp, Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth looks at why the Mahatma is still relevant.

Prof. Sharp is known for his writings on nonviolent struggle, and which have had a bearing on various anti-government resistance movements across the world. He especially shot into the limelight during the first phase of the ‘Arab Spring’. He has also founded the Albert Einstein Institution, “a non-profit organisation devoted to studies and promotion of the use of nonviolent action in conflicts worldwide”.

Prof. Sharp quotes the Mahatma as saying: “‘I claim,’ Gandhiji once wrote, ‘to be no more than an average man with less than average ability’.”

“My Mahatmaship is worthless,”, he added. “I have become literally sick of the adoration … I lay no claim to superhuman powers. I want none. I wear the same corruptible flesh that the weakest of my fellow-beings wears, and am, therefore, as liable to err as any.”

But it is an undisputable fact that Gandhiji deserves a great amount of credit in getting non-violent action accepted as the technique of struggle in the freedom movement. “Nonviolence,” said Gandhiji in 1920, “does not mean meek submission to the will of the evil-doer, but it means the pitting of one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant …. I want India to practise nonviolence being conscious of her strength and power.” Thus, we have seen non-violence being a great weapon in bringing about change. The point is, will it work in the 21st century?

A great feature of the 20th century, and as we have seen in the 21st century, says Prof. Sharp, is to follow how the technique of nonviolence has developed. It includes forms such as non-violent resistance, satyagraha, strikes, boycotts, political non-cooperation, civil disobedience and non-violent obstruction, to name a few. It also derives its strength from the truth.

Recently, the enormous success that Anna Hazare enjoyed in leading a fight against the issue of rampant corruption, led many to compare him to being a modern-day Gandhian in his technique — a non-violent fight against an issue.

There was no violence at any phase, and the government finally took notice of what he was trying to highlight. In the end, what is the significance of this movement of non-violence? Perhaps, a part of that answer, says Prof. Sharp, lies in the point that by choosing to be non-violent, it increases the strength of a mass movement by giving it “an aura of moral superiority. It becomes morally more uplifting to society and to each participant in the movement.”

It would be right to look at what Jawaharlal Nehru said, says Prof Sharp. “After seeing the movement of non-violence, I feel more and more convinced that it offers us some key to understanding and resolving conflict. Gandhiji’s way has shown achievement,” said Nehru.

That may be the final answer.

How to Address a Letter to a Judge

Address a Letter to a Judge

Some letters are more important than others, but few will be as important as a letter to a judge. Take the time to address it properly and it will serve you well.

Instructions
Things You’ll Need
Paper & envelope
Stamps

• Address the first line of the envelope to “The Honorable [First and Last Name].” You can abbreviate “Honorable.” Example: The Hon. Jane Doe.

• Write the second line and include the official title of the judge (for instance: “Associate Justice” or “Judge”), add a comma, then include the full name of the court. Example: Chief Justice, United States Supreme Court.

• Use the remaining lines for the address of the court.

• Repeat the same full address at the beginning of your letter, which should be in a standard business format (see Resources).

• Use “Dear Judge [Last Name]” as your greeting.

• Proofread the address carefully for typos so that it can be delivered properly. If handwritten, be certain all letters are legible. Submit it to the mail when you are certain it contains no errors.

Tips & Warnings

• Print and keep a copy of any letters you write to a judge, or any other official.

• If you are addressing a judge about an ongoing case, always talk to an attorney first.

The day America changed forever

The towers loom over East Broadway, early 1980s

A personal memoir of the World Trade Center, of big events that impact little lives …on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

I was 14 when I first saw the World Trade Center buildings in New York. It was August 1970 and I had gone to New York to visit my sister Sukanya who had just moved there. The Beatles had split up and “Let it Be”, their last film, had just been released. My sister had moved into a ‘loft’ on East Broadway in Chinatown with her painter husband Ted. Loft living was an unusual feature specific to New York in those days — they were full floor spaces in old industrial buildings which artists found perfect to convert into studios. Most at that time were illegal to live in and her loft was not far from the site where the Trade Center buildings were coming up. To me, this was all very hip!

Keenly followed

I knew all about the buildings. My father, Habib Rahman, was Chief Architect of the CPWD back in Delhi. The Trade Centers were to be the tallest buildings in the world, rising above the Empire State Building in New York and their design and engineering were being followed by architects around the world. For a teenaged Meccano model-maker like me, the structures were fascinating. They were the biggest buildings being built using the exterior wall-support tube structures in steel — a system which had been devised by Fazlur Khan, the structural engineer of Bangladeshi origin. I knew about him too, my father had told me about him and had met him in an international conference on tall buildings. The building was prefabricated in Japan, large sections of the steel wall coming by sea. The architect, Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986), was of Japanese American ancestry and well-known across the world.

When I first saw them from the Circle Line cruise boat on the Hudson river, it was a surreal site. There were sandy beaches of landfill with the huge two towers coming up in the dunes. It was the first time I had seen a self-raising crane in the central structure which went up as each floor rose. I made some of my earliest photographs of these structures with a plastic Kodak camera.

Many years later (1979), freshly graduated from the Yale Art School, my classmate George Shakespeare found an advertisement for a ‘raw’ loft for rent in the Fulton Fish Market on South Street. ‘Raw’ meant that there was a staircase which came through the floor, there were two electric plug outlets, and basic water and sewage pipes to which any toilet and kitchen fixtures could be attached. Many windows were missing. But it had a spectacular view of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge and it was huge. George put down the deposit and it was ours. It was a historic 1834 building of brick and wood which had been used to manufacture sails for the schooners docked across the street. The Fish Market was a short walk down Fulton Street from the Trade Centers. My loft became an adda for India’s artists and filmmakers.

The observation deck at the top of the towers became a mandatory stop for any tourist visiting New York, and if you could afford it, a visit to at least the bar of Windows on The World, the tallest restaurant in the world with a spectacular view. We all did it with visiting parents. My father and I were also given a technical tour of the buildings by an Indian engineer who worked for the Port Authority which owned the buildings. The architectural style of the plaza and the lobbies was oddly ‘cool’. With lots of steel and glass, this public plaza did not have the welcoming feel of the great public plaza in New York, Rockefeller Center. Huge and windy, the plaza was dominated by the severe vertical lines of the two towers looming overhead. Ironically, Yamasaki had developed an architectural vocabulary which was almost Islamic — stylised pointed steel arches in close repetition which looked like cloisters around a mosque courtyard. The best news stand in New York was run by desis in the basement. It carried newspapers and rare magazines from across the world and was a favourite hangout of mine. There were also great sandwich and pizza joints in the basement from where one could also catch the PATH trains to New Jersey. Most memorable were the rows of long escalators going down to the Path station which were dizzying with their seemingly endless depth.

When it happened

I was on assignment photographing the jazzy new bar in the Park Hotel in Bangalore on September 11, 2001 when a friend called and said I should turn on the TV, “Don’t you live near the World Trade Center ?” she said. We turned on a full wall of TVs and I saw the burning towers repeated on 30 TV screens. Later that evening in an even more surreal setting on the roof of the hotel, I was running out of Dominique Lapierre’s book launch and saw in the adjoining room the towers come smashing down. Luckily, my loft faced the East River so it missed the direct blast of the debris cloud which came smashing down Fulton Street and all of the tip of Manhattan. It took me hours to hear from my roommate Zette who had got into a PATH train in the basement of the towers to her job in New Jersey minutes before the first jet hit the north tower. From a distance, it was unreal. I knew the scale of the buildings and couldn’t believe that both had come down.

When I flew back on October 2nd, my neighbourhood was under curfew. There was no surface transport though the subways were running. I took a taxi with my luggage to the closest point I could get to — artist Krishna Reddy’s loft in Soho. Unpacking my luggage there, I took the subway home with two shopping bags of clothes. Residential IDs had to be presented to get to the Fish Market which had been closed and temporarily shifted to the Bronx. It was strange to see all of downtown with empty streets but filled with police and army vehicles. Huge refrigeration trucks were parked where normally fish trucks would be. But these trucks outside my door were to preserve human remains as they were found in the ruins down Fulton Street.

Dubious fame

I will never forget the smell. The debris was smoking and smouldering for months and even though our windows faced away, there was no getting away. I took architect Charles Correa to the ruins and as he looked sadly at the burning twisted steel he told me that his first apprenticeship after his undergraduate studies in Michigan had been with Yamasaki. “He is the only architect to have two major projects blown up,” he said, as I looked at him astonished. The other had been the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St Louis Missouri, a classic case study of public housing which became a hotbed of social and criminal problems and was actually dynamited by the city! (built in 1954 demolished in 1972). It was a chilling and poignant moment.

Looking at the smoking debris I couldn’t get a thought out of my mind — how this was America’s Babri Masjid moment. I had seen the debris of the Babri Masjid after it was demolished, walking through those barriers of steel surrounded by suspicious armed guards, and this was strangely reminiscent of that. My friend Paul turned white when a man came up to me at the ruins one night and yelled at me to go back to where I came from. Just as the mosque demolition changed India forever, 9/11 changed America. It also made me think of the passions which can be aroused by a building … a creation of an architect. Both structures had become the focus of attacks by extremist political outfits using religious rhetoric for their justification. The New York attacks were led by outsiders, unlike the Ayodhya one. Both buildings had motivated symbolism projected onto them, quite unintended by their designers. Even after the passage of years, that rhetoric of hate and fear focused around these sites has not diminished there or here.

The historic fish market was finally moved for good in 2005, a victim of the changes to lower Manhattan brought on by 9/11. The neighbourhood had been a hotbed of artist lofts (many famous) since the 1950s. The market move led to the loss of my loft. The historic building had been bought just a month after 9/11 by the canny son of a New York architect who sensed a great investment opportunity. During the legal procedures as he tried to evict existing tenants, he called the police on a false complaint against me. When the cops entered my loft without a warrant and body-searched me I knew what it felt like to have a Muslim name in America after 9/11.

Seeing the slow rebuilding on the site, I have mixed feelings. The attacks unleashed two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing scores of people. They made the Muslim community a hated one and led to America turning inwards. I am happily back in Delhi, only apprehensive of another Babri Masjid here. Big events like these impact little lives like ours.

It’s her world

JUST IMAGINE: There was great variety at Mrs. Homemaker

For many of the older participants, it was a chance to travel down memory lane… to a more carefree existence when their life was full of girly chatter, and endless laughter. For the younger set, it was like an extension of college life — where a gang of girls got together for some fun time.

That way, Mrs Homemaker achieved what it set out to do — provide women the time of their lives even as it helped them discover their latent talents.

The event, organised by Chennai-based Twilite Creations, made its debut in the city this year with 60 participants drawn from Coimbatore, Tirupur, Palakkad and Erode. The event has been a staple in Chennai for six years now.

This year, it has expanded to Tier-II cities such as Madurai, Coimbatore and Tiruchi.

Getting creative

The show seeks to do away with the notion that women must necessarily be tested on the basis of their skills in the kitchen, says Sumathi Srinivasan, CEO, Twilite Creations. Which is why they focus on contests that will bring women’s creativity to the fore — such as vegetable jewellery, gift wrapping, one-minute makeover and the individual talent rounds. However, cookery does find a slot in the finals!

The ballroom at The Residency, the venue, was abuzz with activity during the gift wrapping and vegetable jewellery rounds. For the former, they used a range of materials, including coconut husk, to come up with eye-catching gift wraps.

Edible jewellery?

Some women were ready with their chopping boards (though they could bring cut vegetables) during the 15-minute jewellery round. As the judges P. Yasotha And S. Geetha Margret from the Department of Costume Design and Fashion, Sri Krishna Arts and Science College, looked on, they peeled, pared, julienned, cubed and chopped vegetables and fruits to come up with near-wearable jewellery.

Carrot, peas and beans were the most popular choice, but some thought out-of-the-box. Like Shobana from Tirupur (she made a neat-looking neckpiece and netthichutti using pumpkin, kottamuthu, yam and other native vegetables) and Beena from Coimbatore, whose interesting neckpiece featured a beetroot pendant and a strand of pomegranate pearls. Another lady used a slice of capsicum studded with red radish to come up with a hair adornment. A few rows further, a contestant had painted shallots golden and strung them into an interesting looking necklace.

The individual talent round saw the participants display their ability to sing, dance and do mimicry, among other skills. This was judged by Sumathi and actor Balaji.

Sumathi says that some of the women who’ve won the titles earlier have developed enough confidence to turn entrepreneurs or set up boutiques. That’s also what we are looking at, she adds.

There were 13 finalists from Coimbatore — Bhuvaneswari, Lavanya, Subhashini Shankaran, Lalitha, Angayarkanni, Meenakshi, Chitra Ramaswamy, Suganthi Muralidharan, Beena, Padmavathy, Punya, Kamala and Hatlin Sugi.

They will go on to compete with the winners from other districts. The finalist will be crowned Mrs. Homemaker Tamil Nadu.

The Hindu was the media partner for the event.

In India, civil and political movements warm to social media

If recent trends are anything to go by, Indian netizens are getting all too vocal on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Topics like ‘India Against Corruption’ and key words, including ‘Lokpal,’ are trending.

Today, India has one of the fastest growing communities on Facebook globally, with more than 29 million registered accounts. According to the latest Internet usage statistics published by http://www.internetworldstats.com, India has more than 100 million unique users, ranking second in Asia in actual numbers, even overtaking Japan. Twitter has close to 6 million accounts.

In western countries with higher Internet penetration, it is the not-for-profit and civil rights groups that have dug deep into the resources of social networks. The trend is catching up here, too. Rajesh Lalwani, founder, Blogworks (www.blogworks.in), a strategic social media consulting firm, says that in the past two years, things have changed drastically. “The biggest change has been that most people are logging on to their social networks immediately after getting online. The opportunities for participating in a conversation are more than ever before.”
All details online

As is the case with the India Against Corruption campaign, volunteers are putting out everything, from details about where the protests are being organised to even documents comparing the Jan Lokpal and the government-sponsored Lokpal to mobilise popular support.

There are other innovative options being explored. The Chennai chapter of India Against Corruption, which maintains its website at http://www.iacchennai.org, organised a video web-stream of a lecture featuring activist Arvind Kejriwal on the IIT-Madras campus in July. It invited those logging on to interact with him. Filmmaker M.S. Chandramohan, one of the media strategists for India Against Corruption, said: “We received more than 2,300 questions and had more than 20,000 unique users for the webcast.”

Increasingly, groups are willing to chalk out elaborate social media strategies, Mr. Lalwani says. “Serious discussions used to be on a 1:1 un-dispersed basis but not any more.” A case in point, he says, is ‘Bell Bajao-campaign against domestic violence.’

Breakthrough, an international human rights organisation, decided to tap all media tools to drive home its message on domestic violence. Its blog, http://www.bellbajao.org, continues to give people a platform to share their experiences of and encounters with domestic violence.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has also jumped on the social media bandwagon to reach out to more people. While the global @PETA is drawing nigh on 2,00,000 followers, the Indian @PetaIndia has just over 2,000 followers on Twitter.

Application for Anna

No stone is left unturned to reach out to the people through networks. Juvenis Technologies Private Limited, a start-up in Mumbai, has put out an application for India against Corruption on the Android marketplace. Apart from keeping users updated, the application allows them to show their solidarity with the movement by making a missed call to a number held by India Against Corruption. So far, it claims to have received close to 1.3 crore missed calls.

Deepansh Jain, founder of Juvenis Technologies, was himself a volunteer with India Against Corruption in Mumbai. “We initially put up an app just for Anna Hazare, and we started getting enquiries from Indians abroad asking us to put out more information on the mobile networks. We contacted India Against Corruption’s core committee and it has helped us.”

The not-for-profit movements and civil rights groups apart, the Bharatiya Janata Party has been taking its Facebook page seriously for a year now, running a proactive campaign. It has close to 3.5 lakh ‘likes’ to its page, even having an online fund-raising video campaign featuring national president Nitin Gadkari.
Feedback mechanism

Arvind Gupta of the party’s IT cell that oversees the strategy said: “The BJP believes in using social media effectively for listening, engaging and responding to its members, workers, supporters and citizens. Social media acts as a continuous feedback mechanism between the party leaders and citizens at large.”

The party organises regular online discussion forums, with its senior leaders addressing queries through its official Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/ BJP4India.