Race
Daffers
The BBC has a nice little photo essay about voting rights for Daffers [pronounced Dafirs], a DNT community. I suspect that these photos might be the same ones mentioned in this 2006 article by my friend Roxy Gagdekar:
From eking out a living as highway robbers, members of the once “most dangerous” denotified tribe - Daffers […]
Caging
From an interview with Greg Palast, where he argues that both the media and congress are missing the real story behind the US attorney scandal:
[Monica Goodling] was trying to tell us something important, but the dim bulbs of the U.S. press and the committee dolts wouldn’t listen. She began by accusing her bosses of perjury. […]
Disenfranchised
The following quotes and chart were culled from Jason DeParle’s New York Review of Books article, “The American Prison Nightmare.” The issue has been covered here extensively. Here is a Google search of the Keywords archives for the word “prison.”
Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites in […]
Fourth Estate
It is impossible to read a history of press coverage of the civil rights movement without reflecting darkly on today’s era of secret surveillance, clandestine prisons, and prosecutorial threats against newspapers that expose government misdeeds. As the struggle in the South illustrated, only when reporters throw spotlights on the ugliest behavior does the conscience of […]
Ambedkar
Over at Sepia Mutiny, Siddhartha has an excellent post on one of the most important figures in Indian history, a man whose contribution is not as well known outside of India as it should be, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.
Fifty years ago, on October 14, 1956 — and a mere two months before his death — […]
The Cross Cafe
A year and a half ago I wrote about being weirded out by the name of a dish at a restaurant in an upscale neighborhood in Ahmedabad. I later learned that less than a year before that the government of Gujarat had produced a textbook which had chapters titled “‘Hitler, the Supremo‘ and ‘Internal Achievements […]
Never Again?
This is so important that I can’t believe the NY Times wants you to pay to read it. So here it is: Kristof’s latest article on Darfur … and Chad.
{Chad, Darfur, genocide}
Incarceration Rates
Kieran Healy recently posted this chart showing incarceration rates in the US compared to other “basically well-functioning advanced capitalist democracies”:
Earlier he posted a more inclusive chart which also listed a few “countries that are not exactly model states.” America is still way out in the inglorious lead.
But what neither of these charts makes clear is […]
Immigration vs. Wages
One of the most interesting debates to arise out of the recent national debate on immigration is whether or not immigration drives down the wages of working class Americans. And Michelle Goldberg’s Salon piece is the best article I’ve found on the subject. In the context of discussing general divisions among progressives over the issue […]
106 Houses!
Last night Shashwati and I called Roxy in Chharanager and heard some terrific news. (Skype’s conference calling feature is amazing!)
Just after New Year’s, we’d visited a road-side settlement of Denotified Tribal people who had been displaced from their homeland by urban development. This was in the Ahmedabad district of Maninangar.
Last week, the Budhan Theatre and […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
