Tell me about your childhood

Or the perverts idea of comfort....

Oh my daughter should talk to you she wants to be a counsellor...... all her friends confide in her...... mine too.... I think I have a talent....

If I had a penny every time  I have heard that said ...... The idea that we are all disturbed and can only be healed by a warm loving soul is getting tiresome. I do think human suffering is  problem that needs tackling I am not so sure confiding in these helpers of society is always the right answer. For most part these are people who have barely put their own house in order and seem to take a perverse delight in other people's misfortunes.

If suffering isn't pleasant neither is dealing with it, when someone tells me they enjoy solving other people's problems I suspect their motives. I am suspicious of the fact that they need to boast about it. feeding off another person's misery is the lowest and most ungracious thing to boast about.

It isn't surprising though we live in an era where are expected to reveal all be tormented by secret mental conditions, to discover our true selves.  Our emotions are to be put on display and the magicians who can swish them away are the new powerful class. Directing our every move feeding off our misery  in a self contentment that can only come from a deluded sense of self.

Maybe I am being too harsh but I have had enough of Psychiatry's little helpers.


Adam Curtis did a nice piece about this a while back think it is somewhere on this blog.

I had to add this wonderful quote The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule -H.L. Mencken

The Virgin Mary and books.

Last week I was at the National Gallery in London. Being the medievalist I think I am I couldn't pass up the opportunity to look at rooms full of medieval art. It is interesting how early representations of The Virgin Mary almost always showed her reading. Engrossed deeply in her book almost unaware of the Angel Gabriel about to tell her she is to conceive a child. Even more nurturing  examples of her with baby Jesus almost always depict her with a book in hand. 

The paintings reflect the artists own social climate but also the way they imagine this piece of history. I am a bit tired of the whole medieval women were oppressed and all they did was wait in their helplessness for the renaissance. The evidence is out there. 

These paintings have  an implication it has on our theology and also on the way we constructed gender. Women and their education must have been an issue women reading books must have been an ideal. I am no theologian but those images convey a certain truth about my faith.

Searching through the internet I found this article which explains the symbolism of the paintings better than I would. 

http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/meditations/olbook.html

Case in point. This paintings is from  The Mérode Altarpiece by Robert Campin It was created between 1425 and 1428.

Myths about colonialism

This will be a reoccurring post and will deconstruct myths about colonisation. Yes, I know colonisation was terrible but it was not genocide. I am tired of it getting misrepresented because it has consequences on people living in former colonial nations. The idea that we were passive observers of our own destruction  

Myth 1- The English language was imposed on us.

• At present (2014) the Republic of India does not have a national language. However, we have official languages- Hindi (in the Devanagari script) and English. India has over 700 languages and dialects. State languages are equally represented. 
• A highly Persianized and technical form of Urdu was the lingua franca of the law courts of the British administration in Bengal, Bihar and the North-West Provinces & Oudh. Until the late 19th century, all proceedings and court transactions in this register of Urdu were written officially in the Persian script. In 1880,  Sir Ashley Eden, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal abolished the use of the Persian alphabet in the law courts of Bengal and Biharand ordered the exclusive use of  Kaithi  a popular script used for both Urdu and Hindi Given the diversity of languages we have always chosen one spoken by the majority.
• In late 1964, an attempt was made to expressly provide for an end to the use of English, but it was met with protests from states such as  Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Karnataka Puducherry and Andhra Pradesh. Some of these protests also turned violent.
• Given the kind of ethnocentrism we have towards our regional languages English is neutral.
• Learning English does not mean you wont remember another one. There is such a thing as multilingualism.

The idea of us being forced to learn English and not our mothers tongues is lovely for a few sado masochists who enjoy hearing stories of the Raj and its many oppressions or for Indian nationalists. It might be good to back a few centuries in the pure past for a few but for most of us adapting to a language that can help us expresses our current reality suits us best.  Partha Chatterjee's essay   - Whose Imagined Community? questions this assumption by pointing out how the writing in regional languages was encouraged displacing Persian (the language of bureaucracy). 

Reference- Chatterjee, P. (1991). Whose imagined community?. Millennium-Journal of International Studies, 20(3), 521-525.

We used to be known for cinema now we have man and woman dancing around a tree.

I am using films as a methodology in my thesis. Discussing this the other night with a friend made me realise while Indian cinema is now technologically at par with the west it lacks something fundamentally when it comes to writing stories. This has not always been the case. Bollywood films have at times toppled the dominance of Hollywood winning awards and being remembered for telling universal stories that people could relate to. Between the 1940’s and the present day a lot has changed, from this noble, uplifting thing we now have a cinema that says nothing about the human condition but titillates and creates an imagined India. 

The obvious cardboard sets, painted scenery and hastily put costumes were not a hindrance when it came to telling the story. Post independence cinema had all the elements we now consider hallmarks of Bollywood yet they were not mere entertainment. Even the minor characters contributed in some way. I remember watching black and white films about challenging the caste system, skin colour, unwed mothers and so many issues which are still realties. I do not see those films anymore. The 80’s for me was a decade of films with ear piercing romantic songs, man woman and lots of synchronised dancing around trees. The 90’s was about action films. Then the 2000’s saw a return to fluff and over the top affluence and glamour. I do remember art films but they were too few and in recent years always are banned. Often because they depicted a sexual scene, funny as there is worse stuff on mainstream cinema. I have seen mainstream popular films and frankly, they are not the stuff to watch with your kids or anyone for that matter. Art films deglamourise sex yet they become contentious.

What has changed since 1950? Why have we become complacent? We seem to have become a culture that is content to see women’s bodies being used and abused on screen all in the name of entertainment. We seem to look at a screen for three hours and not think or be challenged.

Did you know 20 p in the third world can do wonders…..

Charity is a wonderful thing when done correctly. I have seen too much of it go wrong which is why I clutch at my purse tightly when some approaches me to help people in exotic 3^rd world lands. Being a third world citizen myself I am fully aware of the problems my country faces. It is manner in which this charity is done which makes me angry. Now no longer savages we are noble savages albeit starving ones who would not know what a tap was even if it hit us. Gap year students visit us in the sprit of helping less fortunate people their ancestors might have colonised. A deep sense of guilt and shame is chief motivation to help and right all past wrongs. Yes, aspects of colonialism were terrible however we are free nations now who want to forget our pasts- we have moved on.

The sprit of the thing never feels right middle class kids slumming it out in the third world doing more harm than good. Never listening to us always thinking for us. Seems like history is repeating itself. Are we never to be independent of their gaze? Are we never to be treated as equals, only as poor beggars?

It also positions the poor against each other the poor in first world countries realise they mean nothing either to the government or to their middle classes. In short they are scroungers. Now the same class of people in another nation are to be pitied, deserving of charity. The hypocrisy and injustice makes me angry. It pits people against each other and eroticises poverty in the third world. It creates divides amongst races. Dark skinned people are not expected to do much except wait for white saviours to rescue them, never allowed to aspire always on display.

It is worth asking where all this charity money goes? I am not the first person to ask this. Foreign aid has had negative repercussions on our nations, it fosters corruption and creates suspicion. It is not healthy for growth, but these are not issues to bring up in front of a wide-eyed white student lest they accuse you of racism and callousness. Yes brown as I am I am accused of racism. I am the one who is to be reviled as a middle class person I am the problem in the third world not its solution I am not a noble poor person. I am difficult, which is another way of them saying we have met someone who can talk back.

The benign , patronisng gaze of the white aid worker is not as harmless as it would seem it makes the same old mistakes but more gently, it still holds the same assumptions about dark skinned natives. 

Post Delhi Gang Rape- The Justice Verma Commission

Interesting article -Crimes of Exclusion by  Siddharth Narrain. 
http://kafila.org/2013/03/30/crimes-of-exclusion-siddharth-narrain/

The rape case in Delhi brought a lot of public anger which led to changes in the law which he discusses in this article. 

St Dymphna Seminars, 2013 Manchester

The St Dymphna Seminars was created in 2012 to provide a safe and open environment for those with an interest in mental health to  discuss issues relating to practice and experience. Inspired by the models of community care in traditions established at Gheel, the seminars aim to educate and reveal aspects of living with mental illness and perspectives on predominant models and treatments that are rarely shared. It is hoped that these seminars will also provide an arena for conflicting stances to witness the reality behind the ideology.

Here is t link to the website. http://theswordandfettereddevil.wordpress.com/about/

Blossoms

Affordable proof reading service for students

Gentrification = whitewashing.

You in you small corner and I in mine ..... 

Oh you won’t like it is a very gentrified place. Said a friend to me what she wanted to say was you are brown and that is a white middle class or affluent locality. The term has come to mean one thing only – affluent white people. this is problematic for two reasons one it assumes only white people can be affluent. Two it assumes people of colour come on one class alone- poor.

Areas marked out for their diversity are also the poorest and have some of the highest crime rates. It is all we have to aspire to preserve our culture for public consumption. While I don’t deny our communities have problems they are divided on class lines too just like they are in white society.