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Jesse Doyle: Sounds of the Beijing Underground

December 3rd, 2009 marykate Posted in China, Culture, Globalization, Music Comments

The music scene in China is currently undergoing a much needed revival and it’s being stemmed from the capital and cultural heart of the nation, Beijing. Deep inside the city’s university district there is an establishment which is at the forefront of this revival, an venue which is fundamentally changing the way Chinese youth are thinking.

The lyrics being sung from within its walls are a far shot from the cultural conformity which people have come to expect from the largely government-controlled Chinese music industry. For the youth in Beijing, indie rock club D-22 provides refuge from the monotonous sounds of mando and cantopop, which have dominated the party-controlled radio waves in recent times. The bands gracing the stage of D-22 have certainly struck a chord with China’s youth who are more than open to hearing fresh sounds.

One of these bands is P.K. 14, whose front man, Yang Haisong, also runs the independent label Maybe Mars Records with Peking University professor Michael Pettis, known locally as the “Godfather of Beijing Rock.” The label has been instrumental in nurturing the Beijing indie-rock scene, which over the past five years has undergone a major transformation from a somewhat nascent scene to one of the most developed and promising in all of Asia.

Pettis is no stranger to the world of underground rock. During the 1980s, in New York’s East Village he ran the indie-rock club SIN, which played host to a number of groundbreaking bands including Sonic Youth and Swans. From there he moved into the world of investment banking and worked the markets for 14 years in New York before sensing the need for a change of scene. After a trip to Beijing Pettis felt that it was the place to be. Having secured a position as a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management he made the move. Now Pettis finds himself shaping the indie-rock scene with D-22 alongside his professorship just as he did some twenty years ago, albeit in unfamiliar territory. Read the rest of this entry »

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Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac: Islam’s Seductive Weapon?

November 29th, 2009 marykate Posted in Culture, India, India: The Kerala Model, Islam, Religion Comments

This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Kozhikode (Calicut)—A specter is haunting India’s state of Kerala, a supposedly new and secret Islamic weapon known as “love jihad.” Namely, the idea that young Muslim men court impressionable Hindu and Christian women to capture their souls as well as their bodies. In the Malabar region, where the majority of Kerala’s most venerable Muslim community lives, it is whispered that as many as 4,000 women have already succumbed. Can it be? Will seduction threaten the communal peace in this tolerant multicultural state?

By chance, we arrived in Kozikode on the day riot police dispersed hundreds of demonstrators belonging to the activist group Hindu Aika Vedi (HAV) as they marched within a hundred meters of an Islamic social center. It was actually a “conversion center,” the protestors insisted. In reponse, a large crowd led by the Sunni Students Federation (SKSSF) gathered to protect the threatened social center.

In the end, it all ended peacefully, if not amicably. City authorities invoked a law banning provocative assemblies, a riot was averted, and the crowd dispersed. A newspaper account was careful to state that during the agitation, Hindu leaders of HAV escorted a pregnant Muslim woman in a jeep to the local women’s hospital.

It also happened that we were that day meeting two highly respected Muslim leaders: a Congress Party veteran, T. Sadarikkoya, who as a youngster took part in Gandhi’s “Quit India” campaign in 1943; and Prof. M. N. Karassery of Calicut University, a leading authority on Kerala’s Malayalam language and a widely read columnist.

Both agreed that yes, there were communal problems. Fundamentalists have been proselytizing, and its effects are evident in the prevalence of hijabs worn by a growing minority of Muslim women. But Malabar had its distinct civil culture. Whereas Muslims in India’s northern provinces arrived as conquerors, their brothers arrived in Malabar some 450 years ago as traders. With rare exceptions, they have lived in peace alongside Hindus and Christians. Another unifying factor, Professor Karassery stressed, is that while a common language, Urdu, unites northern Indian and Pakistani Muslims, the Malabar Muslims share the same language, Malayalam, with Hindus and Christians. Thus during the bloody exchange of populations that occurred when India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947 there were no riots in Kerala, and few Muslims migrated northward. Read the rest of this entry »

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Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac: Kerala: Between the ‘Icon’ and the ‘Supremo’

November 28th, 2009 marykate Posted in Culture, India, India: The Kerala Model, Sport Comments

This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Kannur—Cricket in India is not just a pastime, it is a passion. This was confirmed afresh as we arrived today in Kannur, a seaside city on the northern coast of Kerala. The topic dominating the national headlines, prime time news, and everybody’s tongue was a tempest prompted by a seemingly innocuous statement uttered by Indian cricket’s reigning divinity, Sachin Tendulkar. Here is what he said a week ago: “Mumbai belongs to all India. That is how I look at it. And I am a Maharashtra, and I am extremely proud of it, but I am an Indian first.”

If that does not sound like a verbal bombshell, one needs first to know (1) that Sachin’s status within India is like that of Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant, and Peyton Manning rolled into one; (2) that Maharashtras are a people defined by their language, Marathi, widely spoken in Mumbai (called Bombay throughout the British Raj but changed in 1995 by linguistic nationalists in the Shiv Sena Party led by a communal supremo named Bal Thackeray); and (3) that the entire furor erupted after an incoming member of the Mumbai assembly took his oath in Hindi rather than Marathi only to be beaten up by Raj Thackeray’s (Bal’s nephew and president of pro-Maharashtra MNS Party) language police.

This happened as all India was celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Sachin’ teenage debut as a megastar batsman. Hence the resonance of his remarks on Mumbai belonging to all India, a comment that Bal Thackeray instantly denounced as breaking his Marathi heart and insulting all true Maharashtras, “who will never accept such language.”

Still, if the initial headlines raised doubts about the sobriety of the world’s most populous democracy, the near-unanimous response dispelled them. In neighboring Gujarat, student demonstrators burnt an effigy of the Shiv Sena Party leader for “insulting” the “maestro.” India’s brace of outstanding English-language dailies joined in ridiculing Bal Thackeray: editorials noted that his real motive was to make Marathi the sole language permissible in local public service tests. Most revealing were the remarks of fellow Hindu nationalists, who prudently distanced themselves from Bal’s diktat, and the blizzard of press comments and letters to the editor, as in this sample:

  • “For a Keralite, the tussle between the ‘icon’ and the ‘supremo’ as well as the gush of Marathi sentiments seem absurd. A term like ‘Kerala for Keralites’ cannot be imagined.” M. D. G. Prasad (Indian Express)
  • “My father had said in 1966, ‘With Maharashtra for Maharashtrians and Kashmir for Kashmiris, where is India for Indians?” Shashi Tharoor, Minister of State for External Affairs and Congress MP for Kerala (Indian Express)
  • “The words used by the Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray—asking Sachin to stick to cricket and dare not tread into the realm of politics—express his skewed mindset. It is time the state marginalized such voices, thereby preserving the fabric of unity in diversity.” V. Chandrasekar (The Hindu)
  • “No civilized society can put up with the kind of behavior exhibited by Bal Thackeray and his ilk. They attack students who attend recruitment examinations, bully a legislator for taking the oath in the national language and what not. The Shiv Sena leader has now taken on an Indian icon. It is time leaders promoting divisive forces were told in no uncertain terms that India is one country.” P. A. Shakeel Mohammed (The Hindu)

Obviously, in this test match, the better batsman has (at least for now) prevailed.

VIDEO: Sachin Tendulkar Innings vs Pakistan part 1

Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac are authors of twelve books and many articles. Their most recent book, Kingmakers, completes their trilogy on the theme of empire. Meyer is editor-at-large at World Policy Journal.

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Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac: Report on Mumbai

November 26th, 2009 marykate Posted in Culture, India, India: The Kerala Model Comments

This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Mumbai—We arrived on Wednesday, Nov. 11, in Mumbai, formerly Bombay and India’s financial capital, on the Asian leg of Project Patchwork, our year-long quest for examples of multicultural societies where people of different creeds seemingly live together peacefully. Why Mumbai? One may well ask: a year ago, ten young Pakistani gunmen glided unseen into this great port and in a three-day rampage slaughtered at least 170 Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, purportedly in the name of Islam. And we arrived on the eve of the first anniversary of the November 26-29 bloodbath.

Yet we quickly learned that there is little new Hindu-Muslim tension. “Most people see the killings as an act of foreign aggression,” we were told by Naresh Fernandes, editor-in-chief of Time Out Mumbai and editorial board member of World Policy Journal. “Things have been calm locally during the last four or five years, and the real dispute nowadays is about linguistic nativism.” He was referring to a bizarre controversy over the politically and legally correct language to be used by an elected lawmaker in taking his or her oath of office.

Most native-born Mumbaikars speak Marathi, and a calculated storm arose in the city’s legislative assembly when an incoming opposition lawmaker from neighboring Uttar Pradesh took his oath in Hindi, India’s most widely spoken language. [Watch a video on the controversy here.] For this offense, he was roughed up by Marathi-only militants linked to a fundamentalist Hindu party, the MNS (Maharashtra Navnirman Sena) led by Raj Thackeray, who regards migrant workers from other Indian states as hostile aliens. The subtext for language is jobs. The MNS first targeted polyglot Tamils, then Muslims, and currently northern newcomers. As the furor mounted, Thackeray tellingly upped the ante by demanding that in Mumbai all job seekers at the State Bank of India (SBI) had to be fluent in Marathi. And this just as the SBI says it needs 20,000 new clerical employees. Read the rest of this entry »

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Ed Hancox: Obama’s Missed Uyghur Moment

November 24th, 2009 marykate Posted in Asia, Barack Obama, China, Culture, Diplomacy, Discrimination, human rights Comments

It could have been a powerful image—America’s first multicultural president promoting the benefits of an ethnically diverse society to the Chinese—but during his trip to China this week, Barack Obama chose to steer clear of comments that could be perceived as lecturing the Chinese on their (poor) human rights record, and that included any reference to their treatment of their Tibetan and Uyghur ethnic minorities.

Lecturing another country on their shortcomings during a state visit is usually a diplomatic no-no.  Unfortunately, for the past year the Obama Administration has generally taken the position that silence is golden when it comes to China and the issue of human rights, including not meeting with the Dalai Lama when he visited the United States last month. For the Chinese, the Dalai Lama is an international irritant, a highly visible spokesman reminding the world of China’s ongoing attempts to eradicate the indigenous Tibetan culture and replace it with an ethnic Han Chinese one.

Due north of Tibet, China is engaging in a much lower-profile, but just as tenacious, cultural eradication campaign against the Uyghur community in Xinjiang, China’s northwestern-most province. The Uyghurs, a Turkic people practicing the Muslim faith, have lived in the region for well over a millennia; their empire once stretched over a broad swath of Central Asia. Today the Uyghurs find themselves a minority within what’s officially called the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” of China.

It is the result of a process that started more than 60 years ago when the Uyghurs’ briefly-independent nation of “East Turkestan” was gobbled up by Beijing and the People’s Liberation Army in 1949, a mere five years after its founding.  In 1949, just 7 percent of Xinjiang’s population was Han Chinese, but today that figure is over 40 percent—the result, the Uyghurs say, of an aggressive Han resettlement policy orchestrated by Beijing. The Chinese government meanwhile has opposed the teaching of the Uyghur language, closed mosques, arrested Uyghur religious and cultural leaders, and, the Uyghurs claim, kept them from getting jobs in their homeland, prompting a large migration of Uyghurs from Xinjiang.  (Uyghurs now make up just 45 percent of the population in their “Autonomous Region.”) Read the rest of this entry »

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David A. Andelman: The Stoning of Neda S.

June 25th, 2009 HollyFletcher Posted in Culture, Gender, Iran, Justice, Religion, Women's Rights Comments

If you’d like to know the kind of people who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran, there’s no better example than the villagers—the husband, his sons, and the citizens—of the remote stone-walled hamlet of Kupayeh who populate the vivid, at times horrifying, film called “The Stoning of Soraya M.”

Opening Friday across the United States, its arrival could not come at a more opportune moment, for gathered within this tale are all the characters whose today’s real-life homologues are parading across the world’s television screens (at least those outside Iran, where anything remotely accurate is being purged).

There’s Ayatollah Ali Khameini, masquerading as the venal, crooked mullah of the village, newly released from a felony stretch he was serving in jail after the Shah was overthrown and Islamic justice returned with the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini. Clearly, he sees the Koran he clutches in his crooked paw as his path to wealth, power, and, whenever he can, illicit sex extorted from any woman who seems sufficiently vulnerable or gullible.

There’s Ahmadinejad, in the form of Kupayeh’s mean-spirited, opportunistic mayor with a vicious streak—frightened of his own shadow and so easily intimidated by the local mullah and a husband who by day serves as a prison guard with all the lethal tools of power at his control and at night pursues the 14-year-old daughter of a death-row inmate.

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Zachary Karabell: Enough Already

February 18th, 2009 jakeperry Posted in Barack Obama, Culture, Finance, Media Comments

The financial markets are again getting pummeled, both domestically and globally. The nearly $800 billion stimulus package signed with fanfare by President Obama has done little to alter the mood. In fact, if you read through financial websites and assorted blogs on politics, economics, or anything related to those, you will find a nearly endless sea of misery. The level of anger, pessimism, despair, and sheer hopelessness seems to reach new highs every week, in inverse relation to the movement of global equity prices and the size of individual retirement accounts.

It’s been said but bears repeating: global economic activity fell off a cliff after October last year, and has remained there. The implosion of the credit system—built as it was on the flimsiest of foundations, layered as it was onto a few million sub-prime mortgages of homes predominantly in Arizona, Nevada, Florida, and California—led to a near halt of buying, spending, and investing.

But bad fundamentals are only one aspect of what is going on. What makes the present that much worse is a complete meltdown of confidence about the very possibility of a more balanced future. And it’s not just an erosion of confidence. It’s the flourishing of our destructive instincts, the opposite of the “better angels of our nature,” the demons, the whispers in the night that all is about to go up in flames.

We all have our fears, whether we admit them or not. But this has gone too far. In the financial world, there is a game of one-upmanship to find more dire adjectives, and any who dissent and suggest that yes, there will be a tomorrow, and yes, there will be a future of growth, moderate and different but still motion forward and movement upward, they are treated with contempt. Indeed, contempt on the order of those made to walk the streets during the Cultural Revolution with dunce caps and signs of shame around their necks.

Those who bet that the market will go down until there’s nothing left to lose, who are convinced that value will be permanently wiped out—the shorts and the traders—they are enjoying their moment in the sun, and some are undoubtedly profiting from the collective misery. There’s nothing wrong with that in small doses, and almost everyone can benefit from hedging their bets in the market. But you can’t be short forever, and you can’t ultimately profit from everything going down. A few can make money for a while, and if you believe that it’s all survival of the fittest, then you probably don’t care if 99 percent suffer as long as you’re part of the 1 percent that prospers. The sheer delight in “burn, baby, burn” is hardly unique to our age. We’ve been there before, and it leads nowhere, except to a whole world in flames.

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Benjamin Pauker: Soccer Wars…and Peace?

June 25th, 2008 Ben Pauker Posted in Culture, Europe, Sport Comments

Ben Pauker, Managing EditorFor those of you not passionately following the Euro 2008 soccer tournament (which every four years pits Europe’s top 16 national teams against one another), let me be the first to tell you that the semifinals have arrived. There are two big games over the next couple of days, but something feels slightly off.

The streets of London won’t fall eerily silent as Brits pack the pubs, the Champs Elysees won’t be thronged with reveling Parisians, and there’ll be no splashing about in Rome’s Trevi fountain: Europe’s traditional powers have all been knocked out. England didn’t even place high enough in qualifying to make the tournament.

Instead, the final four teams remaining in Euro 2008 are Turkey, Russia, Spain, and Germany. Pardon the crude turn of phrase, but Europe’s outliers, once knocking at the door, have let themselves in, looked through the fridge, and sat down at the table.

In some ways, soccer—particularly in Europe—has been an acute barometer of politics and demographics, if not an agent of change itself.

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