'Gandhi, the Philosopher'- Akeel Bilgrami

First, Gandhi wanted all of India to be involved in the movement, in particular the vast mass of its peasant population. He did not want the nationalist achievement to be the effort of a group of elite, legally and constitutionally trained, upper-middle class Indian men (‘Macaulay’s bastards’), who argued in assemblies and round-table conferences. He almost single-handedly transformed a movement conceived and promoted along those lines by the Congress Party into a mass movement of enormous scale, and he did so within a few years of arriving from South Africa on Indian soil. Non-violent action was the central idea of this vast mobilisation. Second, he knew that violent revolutionary action could not possibly carry the mass of people with it. Revolutionary action was mostly conceived hugger-mugger in underground cells and took the form of isolated subversive terrorist action against key focal points of government power and interest, it was not conceived as a mass movement. He was not unaware that there existed in the west ideologies of revolutionary violence which were geared to mass movements, but he was not unaware either, that these were conceived in terms of middle class leadership vanguards that were the fonts of authority. Peasant consciousness mattered very little to them. In Gandhi there was not a trace of this vanguard mentality of a Lenin. He did indeed think that his ‘satyagrahis’ – the non-violent activists whom he described, with that term, as ‘seekers of truth’ – would provide leadership which the masses would follow, but it was absolutely crucial to him that these were not to be the vanguard of a revolutionary party along Leninist lines. They were to be thought of along entirely different lines, they were to be moral exemplars, not ideologues who claimed to know history and its forward movement better than the peasants to whom they were giving the lead. Third, Gandhi chose his version of non-violent civil disobedience instead of the constitutional demands of the Congress leadership because he thought that the Indian people should not merely ask the British to leave their soil. It was important that they should do so by means that were not dependent and derivative of ideas and institutions that the British had imposed on them. Otherwise, even if the British left, the Indian populations would remain a subject people. This went very deep in Gandhi and his book Hind Swaraj, is full of a detailed anxiety about the cognitive enslavement even of the nationalist and anti-colonial Indian mind, which might, even after independence, never recover from that enslavement.
These points are well known, and they raise the roughly political considerations which underlie his commitment to non-violence. As I said, they give only a first glimpse of the integrity of his ideas. There are deeper and more ambitious underlying grounds than these in his writing.

No Aging in India- Lawrence Cohen

In the chapters that follow, discussions of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century European cultural history come perilously close to readings of American supermarket tabloids and ethnographic descriptions of American support groups for Alzheimer's disease caregivers; these in turn are inserted into a text that focuses on several neighborhoods in one north Indian city but that includes discussions of an Italian pharmaceutical house in Bombay, a government ministry in New Delhi, an old age home in Calcutta, and geriatric clinics in Madras and Dehradun. Contemporary journalism rubs shoulders with Sanskrit epics and folklore, Hindi films and magazine ads, sociological anthologies, and religious calendar art. The author's two grandmothers make their appearance.
There is method to all this, and some constructive models in social theory. I will not belabor these here-- each juxtaposition must stand on its own-- save to make a few points relebant to this particular project. Field sites- to use the term anthropologists give to the places about which they write-- are plural. Each of the people I will invoke and remember below is located in terms of multiple sites: brain, body, psyche, family, household, neighborhood, religion, caste, ethnicity, class, sex, language, episteme, city, nation, world system, and so forth. These sites articulate with one another in various ways-- stable and shifting-- in time and space. I juxtapose variant classes of disparate material in different portions of this text to highlight one or another of these articulations and some of the political and interpretative issues at stake in each case. this method leads to a book that is far from Aristotelian in the sorts of unities it offers. Unlike the conventional sociology and anthropology of India, it is not quite "about India". Nor is it really a comparison, for in at least one strong sense there is no place called "the West" out there with whcih "India" can be compared. A genealogy of contemporary gerontological practice in India, for example, must draw upon the specifics of a European history of medical practice as opposed to reifying the latter yet again as a sort of black box called "Western medicine". It must ask what is at stake in the construction of a postcolonial social science around the figure of an old body, and in so doing turn to the governmental, nongovernmental, and commercial sites where such a science takes shape. It must take seriously the multiple and interlocking worlds of meaning and instituions of social regulation within which a body becomes a series of subjects over time. Such a porject requires an examination of many sites of cultural production, from changing readings of Brahmanic and anti-Brahmanic Hindu texts to different sorts of emerging urban spaces and the social dramas they frame to images and understangings incited by advertising. It must be a response to a world ever more global and yet trenchantly and often tragically ever more local in the ways poverty, violence, disease and toehr viscerally real effects of marginal subjectivity are imported, isolated, and maintained within ever less porous borders.
So, the book is about senility, dementia, hot brain, sixtyishness, Alzheimer's disease, dotage, weakness, enchantment, and other states not named but which might strike one who is familiar with one or another of these formerly used terms as being recognizable. That is, it is about the language of behavioural inapporpriateness and the poactices of exclusion that come to encompass the lived experience of many old people. It is about the structures- bodies, generations, households, neighborhoods, neurons, classes, and cultures--that mediate and sustain the relationship between experience, significance, and practice. It is ultimately about the differences between bodies that explode efforts to ground an analysis in any of these frames-- biological, political, or cultural-- without rethinking the relationships between them.

big fish

DNIS News Network - In a major victory for the disability sector in India, leading activist and Executive Director, National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (N.C.P.E.D.P.), Javed Abidi has been nominated to the Central Advisory Board of Education (C.A.B.E.), the highest body to advise the Central and State Governments in the field of education.
His nomination brings cheer to the ongoing campaign for Inclusive Education to ensure equal opportunities for children and youth with disabilities in the mainstream educational structure.
The nomination of Abidi, by Minister for Human Resource Development Arjun Singh needs to be seen in the context of the movement in the past year toward Inclusive Education. On 21 March 2005, Singh had tabled a ‘Comprehensive Plan of Action for Inclusive Education of Children and Youth with Disabilities’ in the Rajya Sabha, making the idea of Inclusive Education a buzzword for the education sector.
Further, Abidi’s nomination also highlights a significant change in the focus of C.A.B.E., and a move in the direction of making the premier body more representative. Recently, the Hon’ble Minister, referring to C.A.B.E., said: “Unfortunately, for some reason, this premier body of inter-State consultation went into disuse, which I personally feel, deprived the educational initiatives both the necessary legitimacy as also proper perspectives of both the Centre and the States. This led to arbitrariness and intellectual dishonesty.”
Speaking at the 51st meeting of the National Development Council, Arjun Singh also highlighted that, “There can be no monopoly and no single individual or group that can claim to have exclusive monopoly over how the education process in a country like India should be carried out.”
This nomination of a representative from the disability sector is definitely a step in the direction of not only making the body more representative but also a credible step for initiating a serious discourse on Inclusive Education at the highest level.
Javed Abidi was appointed a few months back to the Council of National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (N.I.E.P.A.). He is also an Executive Committee member of the National Mission for the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (S.S.A.).

Jim Fergy

Jim Fergy replied to my mail today. I'm on a high.
Led me to Matthew Kohrman (Bodies of Difference)
im so coooooooooo!!
what a yippie.

if i stopped measuring myself by everything i haven't done or am not then maybe i'd stop not liking myself.

hmmm and please don't ever interpret this as profound bullshit!

three steps

-status of the current disability discourse in South Asia (govt. docs, newspapers, academic work) its important to discuss this 1) discussions at various levels of the need to look at disab as a social phenomenon 2) academic discourse such as that of Ghai, Karna, Bhame etc. that discusses the issue of Disab Studies in India

-seeing the discourse in the light of studies on colonial experience (hist of spl. ed in india; David Arnold)

- why is it troublesome to adopt certain concepts without investigation? if late-Fou theoretical framework is adopted what are the issues that arise. (History of Sexuality Vol. 2, Abnormal, Hermeneutics of the Subject)

story

i will not begin at the beginning but at a point when i want to look back. often that is all the time. but it's great isn't it to have found a place to keep a story, a story that might be read by people who know me but for now i like the idea of keeping this far away. that will make me say things i haven't written about but would love to.

having to think like someone else takes up my life. i'm watching a film with meryl streep in it and just as it started i did that inward eye-roll thinking i hate this woman. that's how i started thinking about why i think that. it's because someone that influenced me a lot didn't like her. so i don't like meryl streep too. its easy. i didn't have to think to make that choice. but that changed. i learnt to like those i like from the people i met, different people from the ones she introduced me to. they were my characters in my story, i could like them or not and even if she had a different opinion it didn't matter.
i don't like psychoanalysis. even as i write this i know there are people who as they read this who will try to pin everything down to my warped childhood. that's very boring for me. trust me, this comes at the end of back to back viewings of 'Sybil' and 'Adadptations'. i know where you're going with your interpretation. and just by the way, i didn't have a traumatic childhood. like Y would say "my boat wasn't rocked".
and this is the way i've always written, with the consciousness of someone peering over my shoulder as i write, reading what i write.
so, this will be the first time when i have been away from home for a whole year. a full year. maybe it's not such a big thing but it sounds grand to me, for me it's a huge thing i can commemorate, somewhat privately, somewhat publicly.
i don't like being structured into a pattern. i don't like it when people expect me to be the ph.d student one is supposed to be. each one comes with their own stereotype of that label. most of them are boring. some of them get to me and drive me for a while but i don't like being dictated by them. once when i was caught in the throes of that moral need-to-be-a-structured-person guilt, ambit told me that i wasn't that type of person, that i could live the foucauldian, live out of time.
i have been finding it difficult to focus on my proposal, the proposal for my dissertation. people who work in a focused manner and get their stuff done and then talk about it put me off. i have friends who are not even in thier second year of the program who are publishing in scholarly journals. when i think about the situation seriously i can scare myself and drive myself to the depths of self-deprecation. i find it easy to accuse myself of being useless. god knows, i troubled ambit a lot about feeling like that just before my prelims and the oral defense. but i think all that is boring. i don't have the pre-requisites to have a publication yet, and i want out, want out of thinking that i'm part of that race. i have an idea, i have to write it but i don't have to hurry that to meet expectations that don't matter to me. i shouldn't be unfair to my idea.
i want to live out of, not upto these expectations.
i like what Eldrum's work means for him or how its working out. i like how the Cat thinks, and the intensity involved, but maybe not what she had to deal with in the bargain. neither of them bully me. the way they talk about their work doesn't guilt-trip me, it inspires me. i wish them the very best with their dissertations. they will be beautiful.

Embedding the Colonial

As it turns out, in the course of the narration, any attempt to restore to both the colonial state and the indigenous society their density and specificity must be founded on a refusal of the polarities that have made the ‘indigenous’ the antithesis of the ‘colonial’. In fact, the research on offer can be, in a manner of speaking, described as a return to the interests of the 1960s with the insights of the 1980s. In the 1950s and 1960s, a period when studies of administrative policy and methods were much in vogue, a good deal of scholarly work was undertaken which aimed at probing the assumptions and purposes that the colonial state actually embodied and at revealing how it had worked in practice. Such studies have become rather unfashionable in the past 25 years or so, when the emphasis has shifted from the intentions of the colonial rulers of India to the workings of Indian society. Much has been written about the capacity of Indian society to frustrate colonial initiatives or to produce consequences from them which could be very different from those which the British intended.
-S.Hegde
http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2005&leaf=06&filename=8793&filetype=html