Guitar Heroes

Can a battle of the bands help end a brutal insurgency in India?

By Jeremy Kahn

Image credit: Sanjit Das

The young man warming his hands over a bucket of coals looks nervous. He opens his mouth wide, like a python swallowing a deer, then snaps it shut. “I’m trying to relax my jaw,” Lui Tzudir says. Tzudir is the 26-year-old front man for an alternative-rock band called Original Fire Factor, or OFF. Huddled nearby, the band’s two guitarists—one with dreadlocks, the other with headbanger-long hair—tune and retune their instruments while the drummer beats out a rhythm on the back of a chair. In little clusters around the cold, concrete room, other bands perform similar preshow rituals. The air smells of adrenaline, like a locker room before a high-school track meet.

The members of OFF look like the sort of Asian cool kids you might find jamming in a garage in Palo Alto or Seoul—but those places are worlds away. I am backstage at the Hornbill National Rock Contest, a battle of the bands held each December in Kohima, the capital of Nagaland, a forgotten corner of northeast India near the border with Burma. The contest seeks to crown India’s best unsigned rock act. For OFF and the other bands, winning means $10,000 and a chance at national recognition—perhaps even a record deal. But the stakes are higher for the state government, which set up the competition. It is betting that rock and roll might help end one of the longest-running insurgencies in Asia.

The rock contest is a modern addition to the larger Hornbill cultural festival, a kind of anthropological fair designed to showcase the folkways of the Nagas, the 30 or so related tribes that inhabit this region of mist-and-jungle-clad hills. The Nagas once had a fearsome reputation as warriors and headhunters. (At the festival, men of the Konyak tribe wear distinctive family heirlooms called yanra—necklaces strung with little human heads made of brass, one for every enemy decapitated in battle.) They resisted British rule until 1880, when they reached an uneasy accommodation with the colonial administration. As the British prepared to leave after World War II, the Nagas sought to establish their own country, and when neither London nor the newly independent India consented, they started an armed insurrection that has lasted 55 years, claiming thousands of lives. Today, convoys of the Assam Rifles—the Indian paramilitary force whose heavy-handed tactics have turned its motto, “Friends of the Hill People,” into an Orwellian joke—patrol Kohima with their faces hidden by black scarves, assault rifles at the ready.

Ending the insurgency is a priority for New Delhi. Naga tribes have become involved in rebellions in other northeastern states, and their example has encouraged other ethnic groups in the region to take up arms. India’s strategic rivals, Pakistan and China, have at times helped to arm and train the Naga rebels, using them as proxy fighters.

But a lasting peace settlement has proved elusive, and with the conflict deadlocked, the rebels have resorted to drug-running, kidnapping, extortion, and fratricidal killings among splinter groups. The violence has scared off desperately needed outside investment. The state’s only heavy industry, a paper mill, shut down in 1992, and nothing has taken its place. (Signs lining the route to the festival promote gathering honey from the forest as “sustainable development.”) With a population of just 2 million, Nagaland has 40,000 unemployed secondary-school graduates—offering the rebels a pool of angry young men without other prospects. In rural villages, the insurgents simply draft farmers’ sons into their ranks.

The members of OFF claim to care little about the separatist movement or its dream of an independent Greater Nagaland. “We are meant to believe certain things,” Tzudir says. “But the younger generation are not interested.”

Nagaland’s popular chief minister, Neiphiu Rio, wants to give these young Nagas alternatives. He has quixotic dreams of turning Kohima into India’s answer to Nashville or Motown. The rock contest is part of that plan. It is designed to connect Nagaland’s musicians to the outside world and, just maybe, to help reconcile feuding Naga tribes. “Any festival brings people together,” Rio tells me. “And when they start working together, moving together, doing things together, that brings people closer and brings understanding and unity.”

Tzudir and his band mates remain cynical. (“It’s nonsense,” Akum Aier, OFF’s long-haired bassist, says when I ask him about a new peace overture from the Indian government.) And yet, in one respect, Rio’s plan is already working. The guys in OFF don’t feel compelled to join an underground faction, and they are beginning to see rock and roll as a ticket out of Nagaland.

The question is: Where to go? Young Nagas feel alienated from “mainland India,” as they call the rest of the country. Most Nagas look East Asian, not South Asian, and those who travel to other Indian cities for education or work sometimes face discrimination or assault. Nagas speak English or Nagamese, not Hindi. They prefer Korean pop or American death metal to Bollywood or Bhangra. In a nation of Hindus, Jains, and Muslims, most Nagas are Baptist, thanks to American missionaries who ventured here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Every morning, I get up wishing I had been born somewhere else,” a 31-year-old engineer confesses to me during a party one night in Kohima.

OFF opens its first set at the festival with “Free Me,” a song that captures this longing for escape and the impossibility of realizing it: “Take me to some place where I can never be / Where I’ll become who I was meant to be,” Tzudir sings, his face aglow in multicolored stage lights. “Politics and sermons, you can’t move me.”

It is sometimes said that the Nagas have lived “10,000 years in a lifetime.” And on the competition’s last night, all 10,000 years seem to go by in a glance: girls in skinny jeans furiously thumb text messages while rubbing shoulders with guys in loincloths and headdresses who carry machetes and wicker baskets decorated with monkey skulls. Thousands of teenagers pack the outdoor amphitheater. The crowd is raucous, fueled by copious local rice beer. A wave of delighted screams washes over OFF, among the hometown favorites, as they take the stage. Throughout their set, fans in the front leap up and down like the colored balls in a toy corn popper.

When the machine-generated fog of rock war finally lifts, OFF emerges as the winner. “We still can’t believe it,” Tzudir texts me from backstage. The next morning I ask him what the band plans to do with the prize money. “Most will go to paying off the loans on our instruments,” Tzudir says, his voice still hoarse. “Then to make a recording of our songs and maybe upload it to the Net, or something like that.”

For a moment, it is easy to believe in the transformative power of rock and roll. The leaders of the largest Naga rebel faction recently met with top Indian officials, and both sides say they are serious about reaching a settlement. But they remain far apart on the details—and in Nagaland, gunfire has a way of drowning out a rocking bass line.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/guitar-heroes/8108/

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A rush to learn English by cell - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

More than 300,000 Bangladeshis sign up for new phone service

By Maija Palmer and Amy Kazmin
Saturday, November 14, 2009

More than 300,000 people in Bangladesh, one of Asia's poorest but fastest-growing economies, have rushed to sign up to learn English over their cellphones, threatening to swamp the service even before its official launch Thursday.

"We were not expecting that kind of response -- 25,000 people would have been a good response on the first day," said Sara Chamberlain, the manager of the discount service. "Instead, we got hundreds of thousands of people."

The project, which costs users less than the price of a cup of tea for each three-minute lesson, is being run by the BBC World Service Trust, the international charity arm of the broadcaster. Part of a British government initiative to help develop English skills in Bangladesh, it marks the first time that cellphones have been used as an educational tool on this scale.

Since cellphone services began in Bangladesh just over a decade ago, more than 50 million Bangladeshis have acquired phone connections, including many in remote rural areas. That far outnumbers the 4 million who have Internet access.

English is increasingly seen as a key to economic mobility, especially as ever larger numbers of Bangladeshis go abroad to find work unavailable to them at home. An estimated 6.2 million Bangladeshis work overseas, and their nearly $10 billion in annual remittances represent the country's second-largest source of foreign exchange.

However, English is also important for securing jobs at home, where about 70 percent of employers look for workers with "communicative English."

Through its Janala service, the BBC offers 250 audio and text-message lessons at different levels -- from basic English conversation to grammar and comprehension of simple news stories. Each lesson is a three-minute phone call, costing about 4 cents.

One basic lesson involves listening to and repeating simple dialogue such as: "What do you do?"

"I work in IT, what about you?"

"I'm a student."

"That's nice."

All six cellphone operators in Bangladesh have agreed to cut the cost of calls to the service by 50 percent to make it more affordable. Chamberlain also said the project team was in talks with the cellphone companies to increase capacity to cope with the unexpectedly high demand.

The launch of the service comes just a few weeks after Grameenphone, the country's largest cellphone operator, held Bangladesh's largest initial public offering. Shares in the company are due to start trading on the Dhaka Stock Exchange next week.

The language lessons target mainly 18- to 24-year-olds, who typically have five or more years of formal education but whose training in English has been weak. Also targeted are people living on less than $145 a month, who would struggle to pay for formal English lessons.

Chamberlain said the service could be developed later to offer tailored English instruction to people in different industries, such as call centers, garment factories and the tourist industry.

-- Financial Times

Palmer reported from London and Kazmin from New Delhi.

Chandrahas Choudhury on how globalization changed the Indian novel - Foreign Policy

How globalization is changing the Indian novel.

BY CHANDRAHAS CHOUDHURY | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009

In a scene early in Vikram Chandra's massive 2006 cops-and-robbers novel Sacred Games, the small-time gangster Ganesh Gaitonde sells some stolen gold and feels, for the first time in his life, wealthy and powerful. He goes looking for pleasure on the streets, and a pimp offers him "a high-class cheez." But no sooner is Gaitonde left alone with the prostitute than he begins to feel set up. He has only one way of finding out whether his "cheez" is as high-class as promised. "Speak English," he orders the woman. When she complies, Gaitonde cannot understand the words, but it doesn't matter. "I knew that they were really English," he thinks to himself. "I felt it in the crack of the consonants."

The prostitute's utterances in English earn her fee, just as the Indian novelist who chooses to write in English has often been accused, especially by readers and critics at home, of being inauthentic or a sellout, forcing characters with their roots in the words and worldview of some other Indian language to "speak English." The debate, of course, is old, fraught with the historical baggage of India's British colonial past. In fact, the book now considered the first Indian novel, Rajmohan's Wife, was written in English in 1864 by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a young magistrate of the Raj.

But the tension has taken on a new form amid the growing appeal of the "global novel" -- a story that is pitched not just to a national but a worldwide audience, and thereby necessarily written in English. As the Indian novel in English, assisted by India's rising profile in global affairs, finds an audience wherever English is spoken, it often seems to sacrifice the particularities of Indian experience for a watered-down idiom that can speak to readers across the globe.

Often such books are received very differently by those at home and those away. For instance, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008), the story of an antihero and a cutthroat new culture that rests upon and often perpetuates the inequities of the old India, won the Man Booker Prize and is now a global hit. Yet within India, the best-selling book did not make the short list for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award, the country's most prestigious prize for novels in English.

The use of English -- which often makes the Indian novelist both writer and translator-generates major problems of language and perspective that can be off-putting for Indian readers. Sacred Games is written in high-flown and lyrical English, but even so, the reader is persuaded that its narrator is an uneducated gangster because Chandra flecks his English with resonant Hindi words that he leaves untranslated. The novel generates, like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children did a generation ago, its own tongue, neither wholly imitative nor entirely invented.

But in the hands of lesser writers, much of the specificity and charge of Indian life is simply lost when rendered in English, becoming paler, weaker, and more simplistic. So what readers around the world frequently find instructive, fresh, and moving about Indian novels available to them in English is often experienced by Indian readers as dull, clichéd, and superficial.

Indeed, globalization has spawned a kind of hackneyed Indian (really, South Asian) novel that, even as it tells a story, acts as a primer on Indian and Pakistani history, politics, and culture, self-consciously offering bits of potted history and contextual explanation that seem absurd coming from characters rooted in a particular world. Such novels typically use history as a crutch, pegging their tales to wars of independence, revolutions, famous assassinations, or other public events. But for all their epic canvas, they are often novelistically banal and unambitious, content for the most part to repeat the familiar gestures of an enervated realism. The result, in books like Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva (2007) or Ali Sethi's The Wish Maker (2009), is homogenized, almost cynically calculated works that inhibit the power of the novel to illuminate a particular view of life or moment in history, and that seem, like any other consumer good, to want to stupefy rather than activate the imagination and intelligence of the receiver.

In contrast, some of the best Indian novels of the last two decades, whether in English or in translation, are largely unknown to American readers. A classic example is Kiran Nagarkar's Cuckold (1997), which is set in the royal court of the 16th-century Rajput kingdom of Mewar and told in a rich and powerful English that is easily the equal of the best Indian prose writing in English today. Another example is Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres and a Third, first published more than a hundred years ago but only recently translated into an English worthy of its original Oriya. A riotously satiric village comedy, it is one of the earliest and greatest Indian novels, but it appeared in the United States in 2005 to no reviews and no press.

The response of Indian critics to the so-called global novel has frequently been to invest the fiction of regional (or in Indian parlance "vernacular") Indian languages with the magic tag of "the authentic." But this perspective itself is an instance of simplistic binary thinking. Not all Indian writing in English panders to a Western audience or reduces the gold of Indian life into the base metal of English; nor does all vernacular literature deserve the aesthetic label of authenticity.

India is so multilingual and multicultural that it might be more truthful to think of every Indian novelist, whether writing in English, Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, or Gujarati, as a kind of translator. No novelists, whatever language they work in, can be said presumptively to be "authentic," as they sometimes are in the literary-critical wars in India today. Rather, novels earn their authenticity through their attention to specific details of character and situation and through the ingenuity of their problem-solving.

A better measure to judge the Indian novel in English should perhaps be "the specific," which is a less barbed and problematic concept than "the authentic." For it is in the details presented and the others left out, that any novel reveals the quality of its engagement with life and the presumptions it makes about its audience. All too often these days, the slice of Indian literature available to Western readers is at once too specific -- excelling in stating the obvious -- and not specific enough. The "global novel" has had to make many compromises to ensure its dominion.

Illustration by EDEL RODRIGUEZ

Chandrahas Choudhury is author of the novel Arzee the Dwarf and book critic for the Indian newspaper Mint. He also writes the literary weblog The Middle Stage.

English Wikipedia Reaches 3 Million Articles

August 17th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder

Beate Marie Eriksen (born 19 October 1960) is a Norwegian actress and film director. She acts in Hotel Cæsar, a popular Norwegian soap opera. The article about her on Wikipedia is the three millionth article there; another important milestone in the history of the people’s encyclopedia.

This latest milestone was announced on the front page of the English Wikipedia, but searching Wikipedia for itself reveals other interesting stats (for even more stats, read about the history of Wikipedia). It has about 10 million registered users and over 17 million pages. For comparison, the oldest English language encyclopedia, Britannica, has 40 million words on half a million topics. And yes, I also found that on Wikipedia ().

Although the growth of Wikipedia has slowed down somewhat in recent years, it is, without question, one of the most important sources of knowledge today. The number of articles will never grow as explosively as it did in the early days, for obvious reasons: so many topics have already been covered.

It is important to note that Wikipedia actually has 13 million articles, if you count the versions in other languages, which still have tremendous room to grow. Therefore, I’m sure that the largest online encyclopedia hasn’t will reach many more milestones in the future.

English Still 1st Language

Aug 14, 2009

It will be decisive for career advancement for all, says MM Lee

By Clarissa Oon & Goh Chin Lian

ENGLISH will remain Singapore's master language even as the country nurtures more bilingual talents who can do business with China, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said on Thursday. 'The command of English is a decisive factor for the career path and promotion prospects of all Singaporeans. 'For Chinese Singaporeans and those who want to study Chinese, Mandarin will be an added economic advantage with a thriving economy in China for many years to come,' he said. Even new residents from China know they will not go far without an adequate grasp of English, he added. 'And they are pushing their children to master English, otherwise they will be disadvantaged in getting places in our good schools and universities, and in getting scholarships and eventually jobs.' However, he drew the line at making it a requirement for permanent residents and new citizens to be fluent in English. 'We cannot make (the requirements for residency) so onerous that they will not come, for example, by requiring permanent residents or new citizens to be fluent in English, which even some existing citizens are not.' His remarks at a constituency dinner follow a recent debate in The Straits Times Forum pages on whether Mandarin is slowly replacing English as the language on the streets, and its consequences for Singapore's multiracial society. One ST reader, Ms Amy Loh, wrote how Geylang has evolved from a racially mixed, multilingual area into an enclave for new residents from China, with a growing prevalence of Chinese-only shop signs. Another letter writer, Mr Samuel Owen, said it is becoming increasingly difficult to order in English in some Chinese restaurants and shops because many workers from China cannot speak English. While agreeing that Mandarin proficiency was important to Singapore society, Mr Owen urged the Government to strike a balance between that and English as a lingua franca. MM Lee called on Singaporeans to give the new arrivals from China some time to adapt to life here. 'It is not easy to adjust to a different society, multiracial, multilingual, multi-religious, with different customs and ways of life,' he said. People also need to be circumspect about the Government encouraging Singaporeans to speak more Mandarin and take scholarships to study in China's top universities Said MM Lee: 'Do not be misled by the emphasis on Chinese language and culture... It does not mean we are displacing English as our working and common language, our first language.' clare@sph.com.sg

China Launches Arabic TV Channel

By Michael Bristow
BBC News, Beijing

China is launching an Arabic-language TV channel to show the Middle East and North Africa the "real" China.

China Central Television's station will broadcast news, entertainment and cultural programmes 24 hours a day.

It is part of the Chinese government's plan to promote its own viewpoints by encouraging state-controlled media organisations to go global.

Beijing, while saying that some foreign broadcasters misrepresent China, tightly restricts its own media.

'Distorted views'

"It is imperative for us to be a multi-language, multi-faceted and multi-perspective broadcaster," said Zhang Changming, vice-president of CCTV.

Speaking at a launch event, he added: "[We hope] the world can know China and China can know the rest of the world even better."

CCTV already has four international channels that broadcast in English, French and Spanish, as well as Chinese.

The new Arabic channel will be accessible for nearly 300 million people in 22 Arabic-speaking countries from 25 July.

“ CCTV will present the world with the real China ”
Zhang Changming Vice-president, CCTV

The broadcaster declined to comment on how much the channel was costing and how many viewers it is hoping to attract.

It will have an initial staff of about 80 and is being fronted by Arabic-speaking Chinese presenters.

Mr Zhang made it clear that the aim was to counter some of the "distorted" views about China that are put out by a number of foreign broadcasters.

"Our principle is to be real, to be objective, to be accurate and transparent. CCTV will present the world with the real China," he said.

He did not mention that Chinese media outlets are routinely censored by the government and face tight restrictions about what stories they can cover.

Expansion plans

CCTV also plans to launch a Russian-language channel in September and is not the only Chinese media organisation to have expanded.

In April the Chinese-language Global Times newspaper launched an English edition with the aim of promoting Chinese people's views to foreigners.

China has long complained about what it says are biased and unfair reports about the country carried by foreign media outlets.

There was a government-backed campaign against the "prejudiced" foreign media last year following the unrest in Tibet, which led to death threats to some foreign correspondents based in China.

But China is not the only country broadcasting to the Middle East. Last year the UK's BBC launched its own publicly funded Arabic TV channel.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/8166486.stm

Published: 2009/07/25