It is hard to understate the dramatic nature of the transformation Budhan Theatre has wrought on Chharangar. In the past, only policemen and customers of the locally brewed illegal liquor would dare venture into this urban ghetto; now, even if their neighbors still dare not venture into the community, the rest of the world comes [...]
Two days ago we filmed a protest play performed by the Budhan Theatre in front of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad. The play was called Mujhe Mat Maro Saab, or “Don’t beat me sir!” The story behind the protest is not too different from the situation in Maninagar (which I wrote about [...]
The other day we visited Maninagar with Dakxin Bajrange. Maninagar is now little more than a street lined with tents. The people there used to have homes, homes that they had lived in since the 60s. Their children used to go to school here. That was before the city decided to develop their land, bulldozing [...]
Guest post by tf What is the CRAN? If you rely on The New York Times for your news, you don’t know. Same thing if your source is The Wall Street Journal. Or The Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times, or the The Boston Globe, or The Miami Herald. The only major daily paper [...]
Guest post by tf The will to exoticize is often flagrant in Paris. This is a window display from an agency of a large French travel chain: It seems to me one part Josephine Baker, whose 1926 banana dance remains a popular image here, and one part sorceress, from the popular 1998 animated film Kirikou [...]
The people of the Balkans may not be able to agree about much, but they can agree about one thing: they all love Bruce Lee! I was going to blog about this back in September, when I heard about it on NPR (story here), but now they’ve actually unveiled the statue. The NPR story explains [...]
Writer Dilip D’Souza, a long time advocate of India’s Denotified Tribes, or DNTs, has a moving post promoting our film. He draws from his book, Branded By Law: Passbook entries There is an interesting sequence of entries in a bank passbook I once saw in Purulia District, West Bengal. Shyamoli Sabar, a young woman from [...]
The Justice Department overruled objections to a Georgia voter-identification law: A team of Justice Department lawyers and analysts who reviewed a Georgia voter-identification law recommended rejecting it because it was likely to discriminate against black voters, but they were overruled the next day by higher-ranking officials at Justice, according to department documents. What were the [...]
Tehelka reporter Sonia Faleiro has written a wonderful story about Chharanagar, which she’s posted up on her blog, along with some pictures she took when she was there. (She used one of my pictures for the print edition!) The community’s children accept this police presence in their lives with equanimity. Says 13-year-old Haresh Macherekar, “Our [...]
Jeffrey Rosen called Chicago law professor Richard Epstein the “intellectual guru” of a movement to “resurrect the Constitution in Exile,” meaning the effort to roll-back the New Deal. So I wasn’t surprised to see him arguing that corporations should be allowed to demand genetic tests of potential employees if they so please. He does so [...]