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Advani strikes back Big brother
watching |
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Judicial confusion Consensual sex, rape and marriage In a country obsessed with marriage that has generated a full-fledged industry worth billions, where such archaic practices as dowry still abound, where Parliament does not find it worthy to even discuss marital rape and teens want to have the age of consensual sex lowered to 16, it is not uncommon to find young men and women getting confused about how to co-relate love, sex, rape and marriage.
Pakistan’s Afghan
challenge
Books to shoes
The continuing
story of timeless trousers
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Big brother watching A
massive electronic surveillance programme has hit the headlines ever since it was revealed by a whistle blower. Recent newspaper reports have shown the wide-ranging extent of the eavesdropping programme that monitors non-US citizens’ data, including e-mails and chats. The American tech companies named in the expose, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, have been issuing clarifications. Administrators are taking refuge in semantics, seeking to explain nuances. The US National Security Administration (NSA) says that the news stories are “full of inaccuracies,” without denying the claims outright, or even pointing out what the inaccuracies are. Predictably, the government of the nation that takes the privacy of its citizens seriously is under great pressure. President Barack Obama has defended his government’s electronic surveillance programme, and even gone to the extent of saying: “No one is listening to your phone calls.” However, disquiet still persists, since the recent disclosure comes in the wake of the dramatic increase in electronic surveillance since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Even as the US government responded to the attacks by aggressively conducting such operations abroad, it has also increased domestic surveillance. The NSA has also requested for phone call details of a massive number of subscribers of the big US communications company, Verizon. This has raised many hackles among US citizens. In the present security environment it might be foolhardy to expect privacy, more so in the cyber world where the Orwellian Big Brother is certainly watching. Anyone who puts anything on the Net should well consider the possibility of the material being intercepted, by the government or worse still, by those with a criminal intent. The 9/11 terrorist attacks have changed the environment where cyber snooping is now defendable, even acceptable. Indeed, the US President may well have the last word when he says: “You can’t have a hundred per cent security and also then have a hundred privacy and zero inconvenience.” A pity, indeed.
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Judicial confusion In
a country obsessed with marriage that has generated a full-fledged industry worth billions, where such archaic practices as dowry still abound, where Parliament does not find it worthy to even discuss marital rape and teens want to have the age of consensual sex lowered to 16, it is not uncommon to find young men and women getting confused about how to co-relate love, sex, rape and marriage. But if the judiciary reflects the same crisis of cultural values and morals, it is baffling. Or, it just shows how diverse we can be, even in our judicial approach to such issues as what is consensual sex, at what point does it become a rape and whether a promise of a marriage, or breaking up of that promise, can have any bearing on consensual sex between two adults. These are not complex issues in legal terms, but the weight of cultural approval, often borne by women, makes them appear so. On the one hand, society accepts and legalises consensual sex between two adults, on the other the unwritten but well-spelt cultural demand for virginity of a woman in marriage compels young women to take a legal recourse after cohabiting their would-be husbands, as is evident in a case presented before the Delhi High Court. The court has stated that sexual consent obtained under a false assurance of marriage cannot be considered free and full consent, hence the act maybe treated as rape. Contrary to this, in a judgement delivered by the Supreme Court, setting aside a Punjab and Haryana High Court order which had upheld a trial court verdict sentencing a man to a seven-year jail term for rape, the bench of Justices B S Chauhan and Dipak Misra has stated that a person cannot be accused of rape if the girl agrees to have sexual intercourse with him on account of her love and passion and he does not have any mala fide intention.
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Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you. — Delmore Schwartz
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Pakistan’s Afghan challenge In
a historical first, an elected civilian government in Pakistan surprisingly survived its full term of five years – even though its record was uninspiring. Elections were held reasonably smoothly and the transition to a new government has been hassle-free. This has led to the hope that the Nawaz Sharif government will be able to stem the rot in Pakistan. In the recent past, governance has been abysmal, the economy is in a shambles and sectarian violence and creeping Talibanisation have shaken the very foundations of society and are eroding the idea of Pakistan as an Islamic state. The greatest challenge that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will face will be on the national security front. Fissiparous tendencies in Balochistan and the restive Gilgit-Baltistan Northern Areas are a perpetual security nightmare. Karachi remains a tinderbox that is ready to explode. Al-Qaida has gradually made inroads into Pakistani terrorist organisations like Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), Harkat-ul-Jihad Al-Islami (HuJI),
Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), and while it is still far from forming an umbrella organisation encompassing all of them, it is moving perceptibly in that direction. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has consolidated its position in North and South Waziristan despite the army’s counter-insurgency campaign over the last two summers and appears capable of breaking out of its stronghold to neighbouring areas. Only concerted army operations launched with single-mindedness of purpose can stop the TTP juggernaut. However, the fallout of the draw-down of the US-led NATO-ISAF forces by the end of 2014 will pose the most complex challenge to the new government as it is an external security threat with internal security linkages. The security vacuum that will be created by the departure of foreign troops from Afghan soil is likely to lead to a Taliban resurgence as the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF – army plus the police) will be incapable of independently assuming responsibility for security for all of Afghanistan. Though the numbers of the ANSF have gone up to the planned figure of 3,52,000, these are insufficient for the task at hand. The ANSF are inadequately equipped – they lack heavy weapons, artillery, air support and helicopters for logistics support. They are poorly trained, badly led and lack the motivation necessary to sustain complex counter-insurgency operations on a prolonged basis. Fratricide and desertions with weapons are commonplace. The present situation is best described as a stalemate at the tactical level as the US-led forces are not exactly losing and the Taliban are not winning. A stalemate between a superpower and a motley array of rag-tag militiamen of a non-state actor will be seen as a moral victory for the Taliban. The US strategy to clear-hold-build-transfer-exit has succeeded only partially as al-Qaida has not been completely eliminated. Hence, no matter whether the Afghan government agrees to limit the US presence to 10,000 to 12,000 soldiers or a lower number, special forces and drone strikes against the remnants of al-Qaida and the leaders of other organisations considered inimical to US national interest will continue, including on Pakistani soil, with or without the concurrence of the Pakistan government and the army. The recent killing of Wali-ur-Rehman, the deputy chief of the TTP, is a case in point. This will pose a dilemma that Nawaz Sharif, who seeks to bring the army and the ISI firmly under the control of the civilian government, will find hard to resolve. The Karzai government is seen as an obstacle to the realisation of Pakistan’s key objectives in Afghanistan due to its steady rejection of Pakistan’s overtures, including the use of its good offices for reconciliatiory negotiations with the Taliban. The Afghan Security Council has called for Pakistan’s ISI to be blacklisted and, in a weaker moment, President Karzai urged the Taliban to turn its guns on Pakistan. India’s commitment to a strong and stable Afghanistan and its US$ 2 billion investment in the country’s reconstruction are a cause for concern in Pakistan, particularly among the security agencies. They resent Afghan calls for military aid from India due to fears of military encirclement – even though the Pakistan army appears to have realised the folly of seeking ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan. To counter the perceived attempts at encirclement, the Pakistan army and the ISI have begun to reach out to members of the erstwhile Northern Alliance. Another bone of contention is Pakistan’s accusation that insurgent groups like the TNSM of ‘Radio’ Mullah Fazlullah, are operating out of secure bases in Afghanistan. At present the Pakistan army lacks the capacity to fight these groups across the Durand Line. However, it may have no option but to attempt to do so in case these groups step up their attacks post-2014 and the Afghan government is powerless to stop them. Such a scenario could even lead to state-on-state conflict in the worst case. There are approximately 1.6 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan today. Most of them are Pushtoons. Besides being an economic burden, they are seen as a national security threat since the Afghan government does not recognise the Durand Line as the boundary with Pakistan. Though the Pushtoons in Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa are fairly well integrated with the national mainstream, separatist tendencies can come to the fore again. If the post-2014 security situation deteriorates into a civil war four to five years later – a probability that cannot be ruled out – Pakistan will be deluged with hundreds of thousands of additional refugees, further exacerbating the problem. Pakistan is hesitant to back Mullah Omar’s Taliban fully because it is unsure of getting its unfettered support if the Taliban comes back to power sometime in future. The Nawaz Sharif government faces manifold security challenges from Afghanistan, but has very few arrows in its quiver to deal with them effectively. Its inability to do so will lead to further instability in the region. It must consider cooperating with other regional powers, including India, to prevent Afghanistan’s slide into a civil war, which will be disastrous for the region. The writer is a Delhi-based strategic
analyst.
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Books to shoes I
have a compulsive habit of entering bookshops in every neighbourhood that I visit. As a student, such sojourns turned out to be merely browsing sessions, since the glossy titles could only be ogled, being beyond one’s capacity to purchase. Nonetheless, God bless their perspicacity, the shop attendants usually indulged avid visitors like myself. Now that more resources are available with me, every outing helps to augment my humble library. Imagine my consternation then when, during a visit to Chandigarh’s elite shopping complex, I found that my favourite bookshop was nowhere to be seen. Numerous brightly lit establishments in the vicinity tempted shoppers with cosmetics, clothes, jewels and the like. But the musty precincts, where I had spent quality hours, well, they seemed to have just disappeared into thin air. Overnight, the book store had been transformed into a shoe shop. Gone was “the precious life blood of master spirits”, as English poet John Milton had labelled the treasures of classical literature. The storehouse of knowledge had been usurped by highly priced, branded, mundane foot ware. Deterred by the mysterious vanishing act of the city’s famous landmark, I rushed to another familiar haunt, a book shop in the hallowed academic premises of Panjab University. Here I was in for another rude shock. Mercifully, one old bookshop, bearing the imposing title, “booksellers and publishers with 100 years of service to the nation” survives, but that proud label is dwarfed by a proclamation, set in huge font, that it is now “a gift shopee”. The establishment no longer offers the classics, histories or bestsellers, as it was famed to do, nor even textbooks or guides for academic and professional examinations. In just one lonely corner, on the bottom shelf, are the sad remnants of a few dozen tattered help books published in the last century. The upper shelves are occupied by, hold your breath! shoes for children. The erstwhile book store is now brighter, more glitzy and sparkling than it ever was. It is loaded with imported goodies. Perfumes, baubles and choice apparel adorn the shelves tastefully. Quaint handbags and designer dresses seduce women shoppers. Not to forget a selection of the ubiquitous dainty shoes for all. There is a special section displaying cards with messages for every loved one. Valentine messages, currently out of season, find pride of place on a shelf dedicated to evergreen lovers. Apparently the display of affection in the present era entails exchange of expensive gifts, matched by romantic outpouring, even if the sentiments contained therein are composed by proxy. It is time to philosophise. Books have, for centuries, provided food for the soul. But the vendors of the published word seem to be a dying tribe. The retail outlets in today’s market pander to the taste and demands of a multitude of fresh clients. Satisfying the hunger of the soul with reading material is out of fashion. There is more glamour attached with owning, and perhaps gifting, costly consumer goods. We now perceive shoes as a more desirable good than
books.
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The continuing story of timeless trousers
Impacting five generations of art, music, design, lifestyle and creativity, and influencing social revolutions thrice, the simple pair of jeans has become one of the strongest symbols of gender equality through its 160-year-old history
When German-born Jewish immigrant started the Levi Strauss & Company in San Francisco in 1853, little did he know the power of denim as an icon synonymous with American pioneer spirit.Strauss started off importing fine dry goods including clothing, bedding, combs, purses, handkerchiefs from his brothers in New York and peddled canvas for tents to prospectors of the California Gold Rush two decades prior to Jeans being patented. In 1872, Levi received a letter from Jacob Davis, a Reno, Nevada based tailor. Davis was one of Levi Strauss’ regular customers who used to purchase bales of cloth for his own business. In his letter, Jacob explained an interesting new approach to stitching pants with metal rivets at the points of strain for the working man — pocket corners and at the base of the button fly. The rivets made the pants stronger. He wanted to patent this new idea but needed a business partner to get it off the ground. Levi was enthusiastic about the idea and the patent was granted to both men on May 20, 1873. The 24-year-old Levi Strauss started to increase the pant production made out of left-over, heavyweight brown canvas tent material, to fill a need that the California gold miners had for sturdy trousers. He then switched to a lighter but strong fabric made in Nimes, France, called Serge de Nimes, later shortened to “deNim.” Movies, music and museums Hollywood fuels fashion. Never in the history of movie-making has a pair of pants reigned timelessly supreme as the Jeans unleashing trends transcending geo-political boundaries, straddling generations of stars and sundry in one of the most ubiquitous unisex garment ever worn in the human history. The Jeans moved from the domain of miners to movie stars to factory workers and personified the Great Depression and post-World War II industrial era that included denim-clad female workers. Continuing to wear jeans in the post-war era was a symbolic refusal to reintegrate into mainstream capitalistic society and consequently a rejection of social norms of propriety. Beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg wore denim as a kind of anti-fashion statement. Others formed motorcycle clubs banding around cult-brands spawned by Harley Davidson and Indian, and drifted in droves from town to town in jeans, boots, bandanas and GI leather jackets. The pants that became the pantheon of the cool was aided by Hollywood superstars wearing them in western Cowboy movies by John Wayne immortalizing the Levis 501 Jeans in the 1938 Classic Stage Coach.The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando and Rebel Without a Cause (1954) with James Dean captured that anti-social biker attitude on film, and put this relatively new underground sub-culture smack in front of every teenager in America. The mania exploded three years later with the release of Elvis Presley’s musical film Jailhouse Rock that showed jean-clad prison inmates-- gyrating a generation of crazed consumers, quadrupling the global sales of denims. The 1959 movie Blue Denim was a popular hit as it highlighted liberalism exemplified by teen pregnancy, this was opposed by the media. The Denim Council banded together to fight the notion with powerful media campaigns against what was the cultural influence of Jeans. From Clint Eastwood to Jack Nicholson to Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor (1975), Jeans moved from the edgy anti-hero drain-pipes to low-rise to boot-cut ruggedly suave fashion statements with endless creative iterations of unisex inventiveness, year after year. Last November the Centraal Museum in Utrecht paid homage to Jeans by presenting the first large-scale exhibition in the Netherlands on this unique material. The exhibition includes the traditional 19th century Levi’s for miners, JurgenBey’s window installation commissioned by Levi’s RED and Dutch design label Droog, as well as designs by Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, Maison Martin Margiela and Marithé + François Girbaud and Yves Saint Laurent.
Fade fad to acid wash The marketing machine behind the famed jeans openly bucked the prim traditions of the times by flaunting that Levi’s blue jeans are guaranteed to shrink, wrinkle and fade. These characteristics were built in as the core style ingredients over the years to enhance the untamed wildness, popularity and unbridled-charm of the tsar of trousers donned by gold-prospectors, cowboys, presidents, celebrities, hippies and socialites alike and became synonymous with the American spirit. The next genre of movie icons took away the rough edge of the denim psyche from Levis, Wranglers and Lee, with the arrival of Calvin Klien, Guess and Jordache.Even as the barely 15 Brook Shields purred her infamous advertisement commercial lines “nothing comes between me and my Calvins”, teenage girls went wild by adding everything from studs, paint, and patches to their jeans. The most common artwork to find on these jeans were collages of their favourite rock idols. In the early sixties, these jazzy jeans made a comeback with the flower children. Men and women both became slave to this fashion by spending weeks to get their jeans to look perfect – skintight and faded. Unlike the decals of the forties, jeans from the disco era had a more drug-oriented flavour, as leafy hemp plants and cigarette logos graces thousands of legs. From frayed jeans, stone washed distress, rips, holes, to pumice and chlorine induce acid wash, this magic garment transcended from pants to infiltrate the world of accessories including bags, totes, moccasins, jackets to belts. Synonymous with heavy metal, head-bangers, skin-heads, rocker bands and punk phenomena, these influenced the post-Woodstock, anti-war angst among identity seekers and drifters. Late Indian cinematic legend Dev Anand projected bell-bottomed Jeans in his films as a visual prop engaging a nation struggling with the fine line between liberal values and conservative heritage as a lifestyle. Epitomized with jean-induced iconoclastic notions, it swept through the mindset of a generation of youth in irreversible ways. From Dev Anand to Devgan or Zeenat to Zinta, Jeans are the ultimate, eternal, irreplaceable fashion denominator that steals the numerator.
Denim dynamics With 7 pairs being sold every second worldwide, a 2006 survey indicated that the massive global demand for jeans was concentrated on the production abilities of a small number of countries with Bangladesh, Tunisia, Mexico, Turkey and China capturing 70% of the manufacturing, while the United States leading combined consumption of the rest of the economies. Designer brands projecting jeans as a hipper dress pants have penetrated markets in Japan, France, Netherlands, Germany and Italy with Tommy Hilfiger, Vanderbilt, Dolce &Gabbana, Gucci, Guess, Armani, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Peppe, Fiorucci, Nudie and Zara. In a significant tectonic shift, India with its booming middle class and consumerist overdrive is turning into one of the biggest consumers for jeans. It is the most donned legging among the 96 million or so college and university students across campuses nationwide with another 100 million pairs walking the streets and sites at any given time. The numbers are mind-boggling. So what lies in the future of the Jean Genie, this feisty combination of fabric and function? The Pandora pants will likely live through another century of crazed creativity and outlive more generations of functional fashion than every other trend combined. With Japanese designer creating the emotional jeans that change color with mood, to the South Korean Eco Yaa’s “Jeather” jeans that offer a leather-like denim finish, blue denims are on a flight through limitless blue skies seeking new pots of gold under the rainbows yonder the California Gold-rush a 160 years ago, that let loose a trouser-trail of
stardust.
FRAYED FACTS
Jeans’ desi connection Jeans have more European and Indian connection than American. Both words, jeans and denim, are of European (and not American) provenance. The term jeans owes its origin to the Italian city of Genoa, whose navy ordered it in large quantities for its sailors from the French town of Nimes (hence 'denim' ) where the fabric was made. Jeans were dyed blue even at that time . The dye came from Indian indigo, from the plant (Indigofera Tinctoria) which was first domesticated in India. At some point, the Genoa-an denim trousers for sailors evolved into what were called overalls or boilersuits, probably to protect their shirts. The overalls were made from coarse undyed calico, a fabric which owes its name to Calicut (now Kozhikode). The main manufacturing centre for these overalls, for which denim eventually began to be used, was the Bombay area now called Dongri. Hence Dongris, which came to be known as Dungarees. One principle beneficiary of the worldwide spread of denim and jeans manufacturing was India, in particular Arvind Mills. Like Levis, Arvind has had its own share of troubles, but it is now said to be one of the largest denim makers in the world. The company was born in Gandhi's Gujarat in 1931 and its patriarch, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, was a Gandhi acolyte. Today, the firm's licensed brands include Lee and Wrangler. Gandhiji supported khadi, which was close to denim.
Blue and white collar Things changed in the 1990s. The rock-and-roll generation gave way to the hip-hop crowd. Blue collar made way for the white. The craze for jeans began to fade. For the dot-com dudes, the sartorial key was khakis. Denims made way for Dockers. A company that once had a 90 per cent of the market and made 90 per cent of its jeans in the US started to fray. Today it has branched out to khakis and other apparel and it now parcels out 90 per cent of its production far and wide so that it can have a leg up on the fast evolving market. George Jacob is a museologist and a free-lance writer based in Canada
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Blue Indigo from India aided this material to be dyed in the familiar friendly blue and riveted for extra-strength. The term ‘Jeans’ drew its roots from the cotton trousers worn by ancient-day sailors from Genoa, Italy, which the French called ‘Genes.’ And voila, the legendary blue jeans were born!
