The internet patriarchy: Don’t touch my toys

Here is a very small sample of the harassment I deal with for daring to criticize sexism in video games. Keep in mind that all this is in response to my Kickstarter project for a video series called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games (which I have not even made yet). These are the types of silencing tactics often used against women on the internet who dare to speak up. But don’t worry it won’t stop me!

[MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING]

NOTE: These 100+ comments were left over the course of a two hour period on YouTube. They represent only a tiny fraction of the hundreds and hundreds now thousands of similar comments left on my video. The screen capture is unedited.

In addition to the torrent of misogyny and hate left on my YouTube video (see below) the intimidation effort has also included repeated vandalizing of the Wikipedia page about me (with porn), organized efforts to flag my YouTube videos as “terrorism”, as well as many threatening messages sent through Twitter, Facebook, Kickstarter, email and my own website.  These messages and comments have included everything from the typical sandwich and kitchen “jokes” to threats of violence, death, sexual assault and rape.  All that plus an organized attempt to report this project to Kickstarter and get it banned or defunded.  Thankfully, Kickstarter has been very supportive in helping me deal with the harassment on their service. All my backers have also been amazingly encouraging over on the project page too!

Lara Croft had a key code where you could play her in the nude. Now, whether or not you believe in games potential impact on the way people think (when it comes to violence, it seems clearly untrue that they are a major driver – the brain is good at separating fact from fiction) – the kind of response, organized, violent response, that the mere idea of the production of a research into the obvious misogyny of video games elicits is striking.

The fear and threat that these people feel and project on Youtube and Wikipedia is fascinating, and scary.

In fact, I think this is even a more important result than the study of the video games itself. Yes, there needs to be a complete overhaul in the representations of women in all kinds of media. Yes, it’s great somebody is doing public education materials (using Youtube for its very best purposes!) crowd funding it (again Internet at its best). It’s all clear evidence of the most beautiful and important uses of the Internet.

In the end though, it’s the comments that really highlight how far we still have to go and how violent (speech like this, esp. on Internet, is certainly violence) the fight against the domination of patriarchal paradigms still are.

Who is a Dilliwala?

For millennia people have come from outside Delhi from within and outside India and made Delhi their home. It is the same for any urban settlement. Any city and any culture that closes itself to mixing of new elements ceases to grow, any attempt to privilege the claims of one set of arrivals over those of the others can only lead to strife and disaffection that may not remain confined within the city. Delhi will continue to be Delhi as long as it keeps its doors open, welcoming all comers, ‘if you live here you are a Dilliwalla’.

http://kafila.org/2011/01/07/who-is-a-dilliwala-delhi-new-100-years-migration-history/

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Sent from my iPhone

Rotten Tomato Science

taste

The successful sequencing of the tomato genome will lead to tastier varieties within five years say scientists.

They believe that the elusive flavour of home grown tomatoes will by then be widely available in supermarkets.

Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers say the genetic information could reduce the need for pesticides.

Nice, tasty, tomatoes. Two methods.

Method 1

Step 1.1: Get some seed

Step 1.2: Get some compost (or make some)

Step 1.3: Plant seed in said compost

Step 1.4: Wait (water occasionally)

Step 1.5: Pick tomato. Eat.

Method 2

Step 2.1: Sequence tomato genome

Step 2.2: Develop genetic hybrid

Step 2.3: Develop complimentary chemical fertilizer mix and pesticide mix

Step 2.4: Patent said hybrid, genome, fertilizer and pesticides

Step 2.5: Develop marketing materials, sell new gmo tomato to farmers (it’s all new it actually tastes like tomatoes!)

Step 2.6: Get farmer and greenhouse, get oil to run it, grow tomato

Step 2.7: Harvest tomato

Step 2.8: Make deal with supermarket to sell tomato

Step 2.9: Transport tomato to supermarket (spray it some more for good measure)

Step 2.10: Have supermarket sell tomato to customer

Step 2.11: Bring tomato home. Eat.

Anybody think that what we might be missing is not a genome (though that’s all cool to have tomato genome sequenced) but rather a radical rethink?

Drizzles and loshedding

NEW DELHI: After a sizzling, hot day, Delhi experienced some respite on Saturday evening as a drizzle brought the temperature down by 2.6 degrees Celsius in the national capital.

According to an India Meteorological Department (IMD) official, the temperature at 8:30 p.m. was recorded at 35.4 degrees. At 5:30 p.m. it was 38 degrees Celsius.

Saturday’s maximum temperature was 44.2 degrees Celsius, four notches above what is average for this time of the season, while the minimum was six notches above average at 33.2 degrees. The humidity levels wavered between a high of 41 and 30 percent.

In several parts of the city, it was a double whammy for the residents who not only weathered high temperatures but also had to grapple with long hours of power outages.

According to a power department official, long power cuts were reported from south and west Delhi.

Ah, Delhi summers.

The dark side of Dubai (the wet dream of the Dilli politicians who created Bhawana?)

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.

He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.

The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says.

The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable … This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."

He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.

Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows their anger. You can't. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported." Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.

The "ringleaders" were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. "How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets…" He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: "I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."

Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."

This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities.

Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.

At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits. They down it in one ferocious gulp. "It helps you to feel numb", Sohinal says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai skyline he built stands, oblivious.

Hurrah ! Prickly heat powder to the people

According to Nielsen, in Middle India, 43 of the 53 categories it tracks saw a growth (by value) in excess of 10% in the last quarter of 2011 (October-December) compared with the first. In smaller towns, the number of categories that saw this growth was an even higher 53. The fastest growing categories? Shampoos and conditioners, air fresheners, prickly heat powders, and cheese—not exactly the kind of products that would have been associated with small towns even five years ago.

Broadband Installation 2.0

2012-05-23_15

I did get it connected to a plug inside my house. Very fancy, I thought. However, there was a catch… Maybe I’ll just pass by the store and get some electrical tape later.

Sustenance for all or profit for some?

Barah Anaaj is a mixed farming system wherein farmers grow 12 foodgrains on the same piece of land. These 12 crops include ram dana (amaranthus), rajma (kidney bean), ragi (finger millet), mangjeer, green gram, buck wheat, lobia (black eyed pea), horse gram, a traditional soy called math and a few other crops.

Farmers in Uttarakhand explain that the reason their ancestors used to follow this practice is that in case one crop fails due to climatic conditions, the others can be harvested. This would ensure food for family and a farmer will not have to beg others for food. The system also ensured less pests and diseases. It also helped them fight drought. “Ragi is one of the crops that would survive even in harsh hot weather. Even one rainfall is enough for the seed to germinate,” farmers in the area say.
 

  Shanti Devi  
  “I still remember sowing 12 seeds with my mother. Even in droughts, we had enough food to eat”  
  —Shanti Devi from Panwadhokhan village in Almora  
 
 

“I still remember sowing 12 seeds with my mother. Even in droughts, we had enough food to eat,” says 60-year-old Shanti Devi from Panwadhokhan village in Almora district. It was a laborious work and we used to harvest one crop after another as their maturity times were different. After harvesting, the crop was dried in the sun and stored in huge mud utensils. She adds, “Women in our areas are always busy. Our day starts in darkness and ends in darkness. We get up at 4 am, finish household chores and rush to the farms by 7 am. By noon we come back to cook lunch and then winnow, clean and thresh the foodgrains.”

The practice of growing barah anaaj is generally followed in Kharif season because during Rabi season weather is generally cold and temperatures are very low. The seed sowing starts between mid-May and mid-June. Harvesting is done between mid-September and mid-October. 

But the irony is that this system is already on brink of disappearance in the state. The reason is popularisation of mono-farming, the practice of growing a single crop, to boost the income of farmers. The switch is for betterment of farmers according to government officials. But it leaves me in a dilemma. With climate change and uncertainty in weather conditions like erratic rainfall and long drought spells will this mono-culture help farmers? What is more important for Uttarakhand farmers’–sustenance or commercialisation?

While the 12 grain system described here might not have provided farmers with riches beyond what their family needs, it seemed to have provided at least for that. With mono cropping some will get rich, but on the way many would loose their land, migrate to the cities to become laborers or succumb to pesticide fueled infertile lands (as has happened elsewhere in India)…

We have to question – is the TV set for some and poverty for others as opposed to sustenance for all really the way forward?