Nowhere does Aditya justify violence and you know it. The”smileys” you point to occur in four places: one where Manash corrects my spelling of his name, the second where I end a comment on the nature of the commodity, the third where Manash speaks of Umberto Eco and misreading and the fourth where I query Prashant on an interpretation of his comment.

Truly they must be the sinister grimaces of the rich-hating communist fanatics that people Kafila!

regards
Aarti

Manash, I think that the poor-must-get-rich kind of idea is much wider, and I’d rather leave it to individuals to decide how they want social mobility to impact them, or how they deal with such an impact. As for questions of difference and issues such as displacement, let’s just follow a rights based mode – the idea of a ‘humane’ society does not have to be mutually exclusive with the very sane idea of a social mobility.

You have mixed up many issues!

But leaving that aside, the example of your model friend reminded me of the provocative point Austrian Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek makes in her essay ‘I want to be shallow’. She finds actors on stage to be making subjectively dishonest and objectively unreal representations of the world, with a “false unity” of a supposedly “higher meaning” of life. In contrast, she finds fashion shows to be making more sense, where “women speak sentences through their clothes”, as both forms dissolve into each other, and in a way, pretend to say nothing “outside” their own forms.

And a small correction – my name’s spelt Manash, not Manosh. I prefer the original pronunciation rather than the Bengali rasagulla-ization which turns all ‘A’s into ‘O’s. :)

See sometimes people might wish their life-worlds to be disturbed. What this seems to boil down to is a question of agency: how much control can I excercize over the conditions of my life. But how do I take political positions in situations where this is not clear cut in any sense. For instance, let me share some snippets of a debate I have been having with a close friend over some years.

This friend of mine is a model. She is not originally from Delhi. Not a big model or anything, but she models for a living and earns enough money to live independently by herself, away from her parents. Now I have, as a feminist, very strong reservations about the way in which women’s bodies are displayed, represented etc. I also have reservations about the ways in which certain ideals of feminine beauty are set up as the normative against which all women must judge themselves. I am painfully aware that my subjectivity does not lie outside of these images, that I too try conform in my life to certain ideas of what an attractive woman should look like.

But on the other hand modelling as a career has opened certain worlds for my friend which she finds, personally, very liberating. And this is the correct word to use in her case. For her the precise things that worry me, are the things that enable her to explore her body and life and sexuality in a way she could not, would never have, in the town where she comes from.

Now obviously I am not saying anything new or unique or something feminists have not engaged with. The point of course is to be able to not see these two as paradoxes in the first place, rather to fashion languages that account for the ways in which a personal lifestyle or choice, is not wholly explained by a political position. Nor is a political position invalidated by personal choice. And I have a fidelity to a feminist critique of the construction of images of beauty and in fact this critique itself enables me to see the liberatory potential that my friend gestures to.

The same issue arises maybe when we think of what others have termed “dalit capitalism” and chandrabhan prasad’s position which sees a liberatory potential in the entry of dalits into commodity capitalism. I am not saying that there is not something problematic with his position or that i agree with it in its entirety. But it has to be engaged with and here I don’t think Manosh that one can outright say, being “rich” is vulgar. This might also be the way to read Mayawati’s insistence on wearing diamonds, wearing silk and cutting 100 kilogram cakes on her birthday. She is making a political statement about consumption and luxury and the claiming of a symbolic world which has hitherto been closed to dalits.

Just some random thoughts :)

A

“I think the point of an equitable society is not that the rich have to become poor but that the poor have to become rich” –

I profoundly disagree. This is a very industrial-society point of view where being “rich” is almost like a value to be attained, and in its name, all questions of “difference” – of cultures, habitats, identities, etc – are sidelined. It is through arguments of helping the poor get rich that the dams and the factories are being thrust upon people whose sense of livelihood is not just about earning more money but also other important issues like displacement. You are surely as aware of it as I am. The poor-getting-rich rhetoric is a Nehruvian policy which has most seriously come under criticism. The issue is about generating what Amartya Sen calls “entitlements”, without having to disturb people’s “life-worlds” (to borrow the term from Habermas).

So instead of believing in naive ideas of an “equitable” society, let us sharpen our critiques towards anything “rich” and fight for at least a more humane society, where the idea of being “rich” itself is vulgar and inhuman.

I find your comment extremely disturbing and not just for inciting violence. I think the point of an equitable society is not that the rich have to become poor but that the poor have to become rich. I have been to glitzy malls and expensive dinners and I have also donated (not out of guilt, but solidarity) for various causes relating to people who will never go to these malls and those expensive restaurants. Beyond black and whi9te there are other colours, not just shades of grey.

Thanks for this post. In line with Devika’s comment on the demonizing of workers, here is a report of an incident that occurred four days later. The CEO of a Texas based company was dragged out of his car and hit on the head by four men.

Notice nowhere in the report does it say that it was in fact workers who pulled him out of his car, but by bracketing it with the Grazioni incident thus:

“NOIDA: The CEO in India of a US-based software firm was dragged out of his car and viciously attacked in Noida, police said on Saturday.

The incident comes just four days after the India CEO of an Italian firm was lynched by workers in nearby Greater Noida. ”

and then having him say:

“A resident of Sector 61 in Noida where his office is located, Dwivedi is now scared to go to work although there has never been any labour trouble there. “This city seems unsafe,” said Madhu. ”

The image of the criminally deranged working classes is complete. And just so we are not in doubt about the fact that we are faced here with yet another example of mediocy at its best, here is his comment on the car they were driving:

“Kashir Dwivedi said: “I had left my office in Noida Sector 63 around 9.30pm(local time). Four men in a Tavera overtook my car (a Honda Civic) and parked in such a way that my vehicle got trapped.”

A Travera, for those of us who don’t know, is the Chevrolet Travera which costs the piddling sum of 7.5 lacs only. So obviously it MUST have been the workers!

best
Aarti

I think in Kerala, post 2000, workers are beginning to face similar processes. So subtly, the worker looks more and more like a criminal, and this becomes an interpretative framework which gives sense to all acts by workers, political or not. I’m not a believer in conspiracy theories, but given the recent record, it may be possible that the mainstream parties’ ‘inability’ to lift the trade unions’ blockade at Chengara is indeed the continuation of a subtle process of demonising the worker.