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Waterlogging  in Delhi due to  heavy rains Cartoon – Heavy rain in Delhi caused traffic jam पिछ्ले दिनों गुडगांव में भयंंकर ट्रैफिक जाम हुआ था और आज भारी बारिश के चलते दिल्ली ही मानो डूब गई. चारो तरफ पानी ही पानी नजर आ रहा था और रेंगते हुए वाहन !! वही अमेरिका से आए US Secy […]

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अरविंद केजरीवाल – आप का स्वागत है गूगल पर Talk to Ak  सर्च करते हुए जब अचानक search Trends पर नजर गई तो गूगल सर्च पर सबसे उपर था Talk to Ak एक लाख से भी ज्यादा लोगो ने सर्च किया था  … हालाकि अच्छी बात को कोई भी  जल्दी से  appreciate नही करता …!! […]

The post अरविंद केजरीवाल – आप का स्वागत है appeared first on Monica Gupta.

आप के 21 विधायक और महामहिम का फैसला और शगुन का कौआ ( आप तो ऐसे न थे) पिछ्ले दो दिन से दो खबरें दिमाग में घमासान मचा रही थी. पह्ली तो अरविंद केजरीवाल और 21 विधायक और दूसरी कर्नाटक के मुख्यमंत्री सिद्धारमैया ने अपनी गाड़ी पर कौवा बैठने के बाद टोयोटा फॉर्च्यूनर खरीदने का ऑर्डर … […]

The post आप के 21 विधायक और महामहिम का फैसला और शगुन का कौआ appeared first on Monica Gupta.

बहादुरी की मिसाल पायलट अमित सरकार को कोसना हो हमारी जुबान हाजिर है.. अंट शंट कुछ भी बोलते चले जाएगे..  चाहे मोदी जी हों या अरविंद जी किसी की कमी निकालनी हो  तो पीछे नही हटते और कमिया हजारों निकालते चले जाएगें  पर अगर किसी की प्रशंसा करनी हो तो जुबान लडखडा सी जाती है.. […]

The post बहादुरी की मिसाल पायलट अमित appeared first on Monica Gupta.

मोदी जी की डिग्री और अरविंद केजरीवाल जहां एक ओर सूरज अपनी थर्ड डिग्री से सता रहा है वही अरविंद केजरीवाल मोदी जी के पीछे पड गए हैं कि अपनी डिग्री दिखाओ ताकि जनता भी जान जाए कि कौन कितने पानी में … दिल्ली के मुख्यमंत्री अरविंद केजरीवाल ने बुधवार को प्रधानमंत्री नरेंद्र मोदी मोदी […]

The post मोदी जी की डिग्री और अरविंद केजरीवाल appeared first on Monica Gupta.

 Odd Even Car Formula-delhi-AAP   Odd Even Car Formula-delhi-AAP आज से दिल्ली की सडकों पर Odd Even Car दौडेगी… प्रदूषित पर्यावरण को ध्यान रखते हुए एक महत्वपूर्ण कदम है… वही दूसरी ओर विपक्ष जम कर विरोध कर रहा है और नही चाहता कि ये मिशन कामयाब हो … पर स्वच्छ वातावरण के लिए ये आज […]

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आप का परिवारवाद… AAP भी आ ही गए परिवारवाद के लपेटॆ में अरविंद जी

भाजपा के प्रदेश अध्यक्ष ने कहा कि केजरीवाल भी कांग्रेस के नक्शेकदम पर चलकर ‘जय हिंद जीजाजी’ कहने की परंपरा को आगे बढ़ा रहे हैं और कांग्रेस की‘‘जीजा जी’’ परंपरा को आगे ले जा रहे हैं। हालांकि केजरीवाल जी ने इस मुद्दे पर ट्विटर पर सफाई देते हुए कहा, ‘‘वो मेरे चाचा की साली के जीजा की भतीजी के ससुर की भांजी के भतीजे की साली के भाई की बेटी है।’’ उन्होंने कहा कि विपक्ष ये अफवाह फैला रहा है कि स्वाती मेरी बहन जोकि पूरी तरह से बकवास है।

Kejriwal on DCW row: Swati Maliwal not even remotely connected to me | The Indian Express

The Aam Aadmi Party on Wednesday refuted charges of nepotism in appointing Swati Maliwal, wife of party leader Naveen Jaihind, as the head of the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW), saying she had a long record of “activism” in different spheres.

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was also quick to deny that Maliwal was related to him.

“Some media houses and opposition leaders alleging that Swati is my cousin. Complete nonsense. She is not even remotely connected,” Kejriwal tweeted.

“Some media houses and opposition leaders alleging that Swati is my cousin. Complete nonsense. She is not even remotely connected,” Kejriwal tweeted.

Some media houses n opp leaders alleging that swati is my cousin. Complete nonsense. She is not even remotely connected(1/2)

— Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) July 15, 2015

The party said Maliwal has a long record of “activism” in different spheres and the appointment was done on “merit”. Kejriwal on DCW row: Swati Maliwal not even remotely connected to me | The Indian Express

The post आप का परिवारवाद appeared first on Monica Gupta.

Last week the Guardian reported, “A state minister from Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party has described rape as a ‘social crime’, saying ‘sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong’, in the latest controversial remarks by an Indian politician about rape.”  While horrified by these comments, I remembered that a book from OUP India’s office had recently landed on my desk and the author, Pratiksha Baxi, might be able to shed some light on the issue of rape in India for Westerners.  Below is a post Baxi sent in response to my query following the story mentioned above. –Christian Purdy, Director of Publicity

By Pratiksha Baxi

In the wake of the Delhi gang rape protests in 2013-2014, a section of the western media was critiqued for representing sexual violence as a form of cultural violence. For instance, a white woman reporter said to a friend, ‘we are filming Indian women of all kinds. You look modern. Please, can you say—I am India’s daughter’. Not fazed by the angry refusal, the reporter found some other ‘modern’ looking woman to mime this script for the camera. The Delhi protests became a resource for a certain kind of racialized sexual politics, which looped back to a nationalist rhetoric decrying the tarnishing of the image of the country abroad. Indian politicians responded by blaming the media, feminists, and the protests for sensationalising rape, and producing the crisis now posed to the image of a globalising economy.

The national and international political debates ignore Indian feminists and law academics—who innovated new juridical categories such as custodial rape and power rape—leading the path to conceptualise rape as a specific technique of state and social dominance.  They do not cite the learning of subaltern or Black feminists of the Global South. Nor are different jurisdictions compared to raise more serious questions about the cunning nature of law reform in neo-liberal contexts. Although there has been feminist research on rape, feminist interventions in international law and several global collaborations to combat violence against women, there seems to be an inability to carry the complexities of these debates in the national and international mainstream media.

Protests at Safdarjung Hospital. Photo by Ramesh Lalwani. CC BY-NC 2.0 via ramesh_lalwani Flickr.

In India, the political rhetoric on rape continues to deploy conventional scripts: boys will be boys; sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong; alcohol causes men to rape. There is a political refusal to recognise that rape is central to dominance, a routinized expression of sexualised power. Nor is it in political interest to displace the use of rape as a form of social control. Rather rape becomes a means of doing competitive party politics or as a technique of consolidating power.

Sexual assault is used as a means to control dissenting bodies. Rape is a technique of terror that is used with impunity to control social mobility, stifle dissent, reassert social control, gain political control, and target ‘hated’ communities. There is no serious attempt to challenge this kind of rape culture, which inhabits the cultures of policing. It is a political apparatus of sexual terror, not to be confused with theories of male sexuality or as evidence of cultural predispositions. Rather this rape culture rests on a political apparatus, which has several organised features.

First, it rests on a system of policing and law enforcement, which makes rape look like consensual sex, and consensual sex look like rape. For example, the use of the rape, kidnapping and abduction laws to criminalize love across caste or community is rampant, whilst rape as a form of caste dominance is scarcely taken seriously.

Second, the political apparatus of rape deploys violence to produce the public secrecy of rape: while everyone knows that women are raped, we are told no one must talk about it.

Third, this political apparatus rests on a scripted representational regime that attributes the blames of rape to women, alcohol, literacy, poverty, public access and so on—everything but the structures of dominance in a globalising economy. It institutionalises a politics of forgetting—from the traumatic histories of mass sexual violence to caste atrocities—we are told that there is no connection between everyday and mass scale sexual violence.

Fourth, it denies the link between the dispossession of the marginalised from property or land, and the growing rate of sexual violence. In the Baduan rape and lynching case, the children went out to the fields of the dominant caste to relieve themselves. The subsequent demand for bathrooms for dalit women is an expression of this dispossession, which makes them vulnerable to brutal sexual violence, murder and lynching.

Fifth, such a political apparatus acts as a thought police. It denies the right to sexual autonomy and choice. And it rewards those politicians who rape, riot, murder, censor or humiliate.

All this means that there is complicity between state and society in privileging rape as the expression of male power. The state conserves and even stokes the desire to rape as the foundational tool of male power. This is a political trait, not a cultural trait. There is an ever-expanding indifference to sexual violence survivors, which seems to be in inverse proportion to the anti-rape protests. For instance, even today a spare pair of clothes is not provided to rape survivors when their clothes are confiscated as evidence in police stations or hospitals.

Sexual violence can be prevented and redressed if this political apparatus is disbanded. To destroy this political apparatus, the doing of politics—local, national and international must change. Rather than engaging in an aggressive and masculine competition over crime statistics, politicians must engage seriously with the nature of institutional reform and response to sexual violence.

In the context of the international laws and policies on violence against women, the new government must allocate generous gender budgets to provide essential facilities to rape survivors and institute measures to prevent sexual violence. This must accompany zero tolerance for rape of women, men, sexual minorities and children. The recommendations to criminalise marital rape; repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and legislate against rape as a mass crime must be implemented. Section 377 IPC, a colonial law criminalizing homosexuality must be repealed. In other words, sexual autonomy and sexual dignity must be respected. This means that the conventional notions of sexual morality, which regulate women’s sexuality, pathologize queer sexuality and celebrate violent masculinity, must no longer lay the foundations of the Indian polity. National and international politics must recognise rape as political violence rather than cultural violence; substitute the language of ‘rescue’ with repatriation and learn from languages of social suffering rather than vocabularies of power.

Pratiksha Baxi is Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and author of Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India (OUP India, 2014)

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The post Political apparatus of rape in India appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Trevor Naylor

The written word has always played its part in the spreading of revolutionary ideas and in the recording of historical events. Until the Internet, this was done principally by the bookshops of the world, nowhere more so than across the countries of Asia and the Middle East, where the humble corner bookshop sells not just books, but newspapers, magazines, stationery, and all manner of things to keep its daily customers up to date.

Often such stores have been places for the local intelligentsia to hang out, gossip, and ruminate on the events of the day, be they local or international. No wonder then that such places also attract the unwanted attention of government intrusion and censorship.

All the great centres of bookselling I have enjoyed working with have their stories and family histories to tell. Recounted during long pleasurable evenings over dinner, booksellers eager to record their own role in history and the ups and downs of their businesses.

Delhi, in particular Ansari Road and Connaught Place, teems with books and book people, the Hindu family bookshops that settled there after the terrible events of Partition, when the most exciting book capital in the world, Lahore, was ripped apart.

To go from one to the other was a joy, one day selling to the Indians and the next to the Pakistani families whose forebears used to have stores beside those now in Delhi.

In Lebanon, booksellers found a way to sell books as the city around them literally fell in pieces; Antranik Helvadjian somehow came to London and Frankfurt, with cash in hand, to pay his bills and ship new titles. Many publishers still have a sentimental side and such people continue to be honoured and supported.

One country’s book trade which has not fully recovered from a Revolution is Iran, where the complete reversal by those events of everything it had known and its ongoing sense of isolation from the world has prevented the import of books and news from returning and thriving — a huge pity for its people, whose history with books is one of the world’s oldest.

During the Gulf War the booksellers in Kuwait kept their heads down and survived, while in Turkey the ups and downs of both the military and the Turkish currency have seen stores thrive, then barely survive, but they continue because it’s all they know.

I come then to Egypt, centre of Arabic publishing, the home of AUC Press for over fifty years, and a haven for readers and bookshops for hundreds of years. From the backstreets of Islamic Cairo to the glorious riverside in Luxor, intelligent and brilliant family booksellers have greeted the millions who live in or travel to the country.

Today they sit mostly waiting, surviving and finding ways to keep the sales ticking over and to pay their faithful staff. They watch the turmoil that surrounds them, hoping it will settle soon, for they know that the draw of Egypt is indeed eternal and things will come back. They know that because they, or their father, or indeed their father’s father (ask Fahdy Greiss at the Anglo-Egyptian Bookshop) saw it all before. Revolutions, wars, and terrorism mean it’s never certain what is round the corner here, but this is one trade that won’t be beaten by them.

The AUC Press has several stores, the biggest and most famous on the corner of Tahrir Square itself. Some days we are busy, some days we are closed, some days no one visits, but we know they will again. The thirst for knowledge is undiminished here. Most people are not directly involved in the events you see and read of. They just want a normal life; they wish to study and move forward. When that time returns the bookshops of Egypt will still be waiting.

Trevor Naylor is the Sales, Marketing, and Distribution Director at The American University in Cairo Press, Egypt. Oxford University Press is proud to distribute AUC Press titles in North and South America.

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Image credit: Alexandria, Egypt – November 21, 2010: Young Egyptians relax and work on a book themed bench, outside the famous Library of Alexandria. (c) 1001nights via iStockphoto.

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This Day in World History

March 21, 1739

Nadir Shah enters Delhi and captures the Peacock Throne

On March 21, 1739, Nādir Shāh, leading Persian (modern Iranian) and Turkish forces, completed his conquest of the Mughal Empire by capturing Delhi, India, its capital. He seized vast stores of wealth, and among the prizes he carried away was the fabled Peacock Throne.

Nādir Shāh Afshār. Source: Victoria & Albert Museum.

The new ruler was bent on conquest. He built a navy and captured Bahrain and Oman before launching himself overland against the Mughals. His conquest of that empire went quickly, giving him the prized throne. Built originally by the Mughal ruler Shah Jahan, it reportedly had silver steps set on golden feet. The back showed two open peacock tails. The whole was studded with precious gems.

The throne became the symbol of the Iranian monarchy, though it only remained in Nādir Shāh’s hands for a short time. He was defeated in battle by the Kurds, who seized the throne and apparently dismantled it. A modern Peacock Throne was made in the early 1800s. That splendid but less spectacular model served as the throne of Iran’s Shahs until the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Nādir Shāh did not fare much better than his magnificent throne. He continued his warring ways, building an empire that was plagued by financial problems and frequent revolts against his cruel rule. In 1749, he was killed by members of his own army.

“This Day in World History” is brought to you by USA Higher Education.
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One of the small problems about flying off next week to tell stories at Delhi's Bookaroo Children’s Book Festival(with surrounding holiday) is that . . . . er . . er . . . part of me quite wants to stay home here in Yorkshire working on Tome Two.

I’m behind on my personal deadline. This Autumn’s run of visits tore into the energy I need for my writing work. This is not a complaint, especially as the schools and libraries were really great, but the big fact in most author's writing/earning balance. Visiting is essentially “Out There”; Writing is “In Here”.

I know I should be up and at the Tome every spare second, but my creative mind doesn’t work like that, and before anyone quotes inspirational tales of Messrs Trollope or Archer or even the feted Miss Price, I have no servants, assistants or anyone else writing down my book words.

However, the enforced silence was useful. Returning to the Tome, I suddenly saw that a certain light and subtle story twist was actually constructed of a material somewhat heavier then lead. It required, and will require, strong and severe plot-wrangling.

There is also another problem to solve. The small matter of X, a secondary character: a pale, pitiful creature doomed to arrive at a poignantly early end.

X has decided to be nothing of the sort. In true Jasper-Ffordean manner, she is stomping on furiously, full of life and health and wanting to have her own way. Just now I can’t see how or if I can ever take her in hand, let alone what she will do to the main characters. So much for the power of the synopsis! She cannot be trusted alone.

So I have decided that in Delhi, home of the power-cut,I must keep writing, but it will be - aagh! - by hand. Even though that means facing up to my awful over-excited scrawl. Even though I need the protective “writing distance” my computer screen gives me. I considered the lap-top option, but that adds weight and safety issues. Hand-writing sounds so much more reliable, doesn’t it?

I fear it will all come back to me: the stained fingers, the gloom as the paper is covered in more and more deletions, the awful over-writing, the sense of homework badly done. Ho hum. I must try to be positive.

Will my back-to-scribbling plan work? It's essential that it does, because I’ve reached a significant point in the making of Tome Two, a moment that ABBA writers may recognise, and it is joyous. When I sat down to work this last week, the writing had begun speaking back to me.

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