Lost in Translation

The BBC translation guide for the Middle East (with assistance from Mark Regev, BBC spokesperson for Israel and Palestine):

Word for Israeli combatant captured by Hamas = 'hostage'

Word for Palestinian combatant captured by the IDF = 'murderer'

Holding cell for Israeli combatant captured by Hamas = 'dungeon'

Holding cell for Palestinian combatant captured by the IDF = 'prison'

Description of Israeli combatant on his release = 'pale', 'gaunt', 'thin'

Description of Palestinian combatant on his release = none heard

pleasure

There is a certain species of Londoner that appears at this time of year ... gaunt, pasty, bags under their eyes, starting to develop rickets from lack of sunshine, usually seen wandering around Leicester Square and Curzon cinemas with a moleskin notebook in hand. They are a seasonal reminder that the London Film Festival is on.

Much as I love movies, I am a lightweight in comparison to these seasoned film buffs. First there is the tricky process of selecting which films to see. It used to be that I could throw the programme up in the air and let the fates decide by booking whatever was on the page that was open when it landed. Now I actually have to trawl through webpages which means that any film starting with the letter 'P' onwards is unlikely to get my attention as by that stage my brain hurts trying to decide if the Romanian documentary on water skiing will be more important than the 'dark and gritty' realism of another British film verite. Secondly, I only managed to get tickets to three films. Actually getting any ticket to the festival is in itself a triumph so three isn't bad, but I do wonder how early I have to get up to get a seat that isn't  either so far out in the wings or so close to the screen that there is a need for orthopedic support.

But such discomfort is more than made up for by the pleasure to be had in skiving off in the afternoon to see a film, especially when it is Nadine Labaki's 'Where do we go now?'. Sitting in a warm cinema, with a few hundred others (film and cultural studies departments must just close down for two weeks in October), falling in love with a small village in Lebanon, laughing out loud while eating steamed buns from Chinatown, pondering other scenarios where the judicious administration of hash cookies could bring about peace and good will among men (you have to see the film), and then walking out, smiling, into a soft autumn day with that feeling that only comes from knowing that you have shared something special with a small section of humanity who are, at this moment in time, content.

Swim Grid Grrrl, Swim

So ladies, here's your chance. Airtel are looking for Grid Girls for Delhi's Formula 1 race at the end of the month. You need to be 'confident, fit and glamourous'. There's an aspiration. You also have to take part in a reality programme where you will wear t-backs and hot pants, as well as swim suits and bikinis. But this is not just some beauty pageant, for although you have to share your hobbies and interests, and your height, bust, weight and waist measurements, for the compulsary swim suit round, according to Indian newspaper, First Post, contestants have to not just wear their cozzies but know how to swim.
 
Now, I confess that I do occassionally watch F1, but only because I want to see justice finally done and the Red Bull management acknowledge that Mark Webber is a better driver than Sebastian Vettel and that they were wrong to rob him of his championship hopes last year. And when I do watch it I have to also confess that I've never seen a pool anywhere near the grid. But I guess knowing how to swim could be handy should it suddenly flood in Delhi on the weekend of the race.

Contestants also need to be able to heft weights, at least the weight of any costumes they may wish to use 'to enhance their look', although usage of said costumes is, fortunately for fashion victims everywhere, subject to approval by the programme producer/channel.

One burden contestants don't have to carry is knowing whether her education qualifications and experience will be considered at the time of screening. The answer, according to the 'frequently asked questions' section of the website, is: 'No, contestants will be judged based on the judging parameters. Past achievements or educational qualifications will not be considered as a criterion for selection'. So if you are a mechanical engineer who could actually design an F1 car, forget about it, as long as you can swim that's all you need to worry your pretty little head about.

Running Amok

Yes, we're all fine. We haven't been burnt out or had anything stolen, and still have beds to sleep in. What to feel is the big question as the smell of a singed city wafts over my Hackney  balcony ...

Basically, I feel tired. I'm now tired of dissecting what happened, especially when it involves hearing comments like 'they have such low IQs'. I wish I had a bar of chocolate for every time, over years of research, I've heard social conflict dismissed by the fundamental attribution error of assigning low IQs or 'uneducated' to an other. Besides, the guerilla tactics, the out-manoeuvring of the police, the coordination, would seem to suggest among some of these young people at least a high degree of strategic ability. 

I'm tired of 'law and order' arguments without any acknowledgment of the role of poverty, inequality, boredom, gender, rampant consumerism, unemployment, seeing economic and political elites who have done a fair bit of pillaging in recent years getting away with it unpunished, funding cuts, lack of space, opportunism, catharsis. As a young man in Birmingham said on the news last night ... 'People are tired of struggling'. In Tottenham, unemployment among young black men stands at around 50% (Runnymede Trust). Youth services across the city, particularly in the poorest boroughs, have been slashed and burned. And the youth clubs, as daggy as they may be for some young people, were at least, according to one source, a means to avoid being 'stopped and searched' on the streets. One 'stop and search' too many was the catalyst for Hackney's contribution to 'the riots'. It is reprehensible to burn people out of their homes, but these riots were not necessarily senseless or irrational.

I'm definitely tired of seeing TV news images of young black men looting and neat white women cleaning up afterwards.

I'm tired of people who have never had to face a barrage of missiles and hate saying the police are not doing enough. The water cannon and rubber bullets they demand will not make them any braver or any more in control.

I'm afraid that the veneer of civility that holds it all together has been shown to be painfully thin and suspect many others who have been waiting patiently for something to trickle down to them may be thinking that perhaps they too should just go and take it.

And I'm puzzled by those who say they are disturbed because there was no 'politics' involved, no cause these young people were fighting for, no way of defining these actions into either Left or Right. And yet it was, first and foremost, all about power. And for a few nights at least, the estates had it ... petrifying the rest of London.

How to be good ...

So ten minutes out of Buddha Bootcamp and what happens ... I'm on the train trying to find my seat ... And there's a pensioner sitting in it. What to do? At the sound of her husband's excuse that they didnt know they had to reserve a seat it crosses my mind that he's lying out of his arse ... It's summer in France and this is a train. You don't get on it love without a reservation. I didn't actually say that. Just thought it. That probably still counts as bad karma. I pride myself however on actually saying 'ce n'est pas grave', and walk up the carriage to find a spare seat. Bugger. No spare seats. It's jamboree season and the train is full of scouts. Hell hath nothing on travelling during scout season. Facing the prospect of standing for an hour (as the scouts have taken all spare capacity and show no sign of getting out of their seats for a middle aged woman) I moan to the conductor who finds me a spare place. The husband and wife show no sign of gratitude and I give them death stares all the way to Limoges. That's probably bad karma as well. I am very attached it seems to displays of gratitude but then Buddha never had to travel on a train full of scouts. And besides, the principle of unreciprocated gifts sucks.

I'm not surprised really at such unBuddhistly thoughts popping into my head when even at bootcamp I had an attack of vipassana vendetta after someone sat in my meditation spot. Okay, it was her first meditation and she probably didn't realise that non-attached buddhists do in fact often get attached to their meditation spots when we've spent hours getting the stack of cushions just the right height and found the perfect shawls that are long enough to keep toes warm as well as head, it's not too near the front to attract the attention of the teacher in case he asks any tricky questions about non-duality, and not too near the back to get the drafts from the door. Attachment seems to grow even more stronger during periods of resource scarcity ... Everyone seemed to need at least three cushions (just in case knees started hurting and more height was required) even though we're only actually using two, and the shawls were all gone in 60 seconds. Good to know that when the apocalypse finally arrives the buddhists will be fighting for the last spot on the life raft as well. I'll just do it with a trained mind, in full awareness as I boot a pensioner out of my seat.

A fine day out

At the risk of sounding completely bo-ho, it's been a fabulous London weekend. Saturday was spent walking to Southbank with the weather remembering what it's supposed to do in summer. Okay, it's only 22 degrees but leave me with my illusions. It's warm enough to sit outside and sip my Pimms and that's all that matters. We even have our own urban plage now ... two inches of sand on reclaimed sidewalk next to the Thames. It comes with a replica Chowpatty Beach (Mumbai) cafe, where they serve sides of poetry. And along with these visual memorials to hot days in the past comes auditory reminders of joy ... of the squeals of kids running under the hose pipe in the backyard, chasing the dog and getting scratched from razor sharp kikuyu grass ... although at Southbank there is no dog or lawn but never is there so much squealing as when the dancing fountain is turned on.
 
To these pleasures can be added two seminars at the London Literature festie. The first, a talk on 'London as a Satellite City' with Rana Dasgupta (author of Tokyo Cancelled and Solo) and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (author of What if Latin America Ruled the World?). The second was Owen Jones (who looks all of 16) discussing his book on Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class. There is an absolute hatred held by some in the UK for those who must sell their labour for a living and have no control over what they do once engaged in that labour. It is an indigenous version of social cleansing based possibly on the fear of retribution for the violence of the industrial revolution. 

On my way back home, pondering this hatred, I realised I must now be a Londoner as I could give correct directions to everyone who was lost along the way (although I'm worried the young ladies at Liverpool Street station, heading to Southbank, may not have made it given their lovely high heels had 50 minutes of walking to do).

Home in Hackney, being 90 minutes walk or another world away from Southbank, is having its own festie at the moment: Create (the Hackney Fringe Festival). In an old WWII bunker at the back of a theatre in Dalston, Sukhdev Sandhu created a performance piece of Night Haunts, scenes from the underside of London. I'm not sure I really needed to know that the men who unclog the Victorian sewers of the fat of a 21st century city occassionally eat what they find down there (okay it was an unpeeled orange but really ...!).

The bunker, creating the dark and dank smell of London at night, also provided shelter from the random monstrousness that is a rapidly regenerating Dalston that I pottered through on the way home, just in time to round off my day with the David Hayes vs Wladimir Klitschko heavy weight title fight. It's amazing how watching boxing on a 50 inch high definition plasma screen with slow motion replay can improve one's appreciation of how much it must hurt.
  

Shiny new technology

I have now spent hours pondering the Apple Store, building my ultimate iPad. This may not be the most productive use of my time but I'd like to think that Sherry Turkle would be proud of me. Her latest book, 'Alone Together', seems without optimism. We are, apparently, if we don't learn some cyber-manners, doomed to lose the capacity for solitude, and instead we'll just be engaged in lonely conversations with hundreds of strangers. The best line from her recent presentation in London summed it up in this way: we have moved from a state of saying to ourselves 'I have a feeling, I need to make a call', to 'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text'.

Granted, young Mark Zuckerberg's notions of the death of privacy are ominous, but personally I have cultivated nothing but solitude in the building of my ultimate iPad. It has been hours of uninterrupted, solo, decision making, on colour, memory required, spec, and 'should I wait for iPad3 or go for a cheaper, so-last-year, model'. I know that on Sundays, my iPad, iPhone, laptop and desktop will be turned off (except if I need to read knitting pattern pdfs or am skyping various 'homes', neither of which is particularly detrimental to my spiritual well-being). I know where the 'silent' button is and how to use it. And no technology is ever, EVER, placed on a table during meal times.

The debate over the impact of technology reminds me of doing field work in India in the 1990s when satellite television was rampaging across the cultural landscape, dragging moral panic and fundamentalism behind it. Interviewing three generations of men in one family, the father expressed concern about the impact of channels like MTV on his teenage son, feeling it would 'degrade his morals'. The grandfather told a story of how, at the turn of the 20th century, in a Punjabi village, his parents, respectable village elders, refused to let him go to a travelling theatre's performance of the Ramayana (a classic Hindu mythological story) because they feared it would degrade his morals. Same rhetoric, different medium. The grandfather grew up to be a nice, solid middleclass, gentleman; his son (the father) grew up to be a nice, solid, middleclass gentleman; and I have no doubt his son has grown up to be a nice, solid, middleclass man, with a smart phone. So cheer up Sherry. Give us a bit of time to learn the etiquette and I think we'll be okay.