The Karachi Tram, in Melbourne, was hilarious fun - especially all those people who got on during a monsoon-style downpour and were stunned (ecstatic, bemused, one even annoyed) to find chai and samosas served up, loud beats, dancing and a film crew all rattling along the tramjatra route (there was a Calcutta tram sometime back and a book version called Tramjatra).

W-11 tram is about... (the short trip version)

an art of journeys
travelling the Melbourne City Circle tram route
4.30 - 9.30pm Fridays during summer 2006/07
free entry...no bookings...all welcome

W-11 TRAM is a collaborative art project exploring dialogue, performance and hospitality through providing conditions for the experience of journeys. With its sides bearing the words in Urdu and English: ‘piyar zindagi hai / love is life’, the W-11 TRAM creates a dynamic and mobile public space with a disarmingly warm atmosphere. The project, involving collaboration with Pakistani vehicle decorators, was one of the most celebrated offerings of the cultural festival of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games.

read more....

Sadly, I cannot say when the next tram trip trips out. In the meantime seek out the film Malcolm for your W11 fix.

Tram Connies Zindabad! (Thansk Mick, Peter, Rohan).

Sex Work Writing

Recently, discussions of sex work have been made interesting by activists, and made more urgent by bullshit immigration policies mixed with rabid liberal stupidities, sensationalism, cliche. So, I was reading this book - Bedanabala. Her Life. Her Times by Mahasweta Devi, translated by Sunandini Banerjee (Seagull Books) and was reminded that I need to link with stuff that matters - see below...

Devi writes:

"All I've done is speak of them, the whores of times past. But is that all? Not sought my roots therein? No matter the luxury that smothers me today, my mother lived in a brothel, adopted and reared by the woman who owned it, who owned her, and others like her.
And what of me? My life? To tell of my life I will have to tell of those women, recount their lives from the age of Uttar Veda to the present day. Women whose stories will never be told completely; 'If the sky were a sheet of paper/ If every blade of grass on earth were a pen/ If the seven seas were awash with ink/ if all of that were used up even then/ It would not be enough for their history to be written.'"

Somehow this passage grabs me. Taunts and enchants - to write with such fervor. Fabulous. Let us learn again from such wordings.

And Devi reminds me that a friend called Alex has a friend who also recently started something that deserves a closer look: I quote again:

"Nik found a Anarchist Federation newsletter which had as its front page an article about 'trafficking', that was just pathetic and wrong. As some of you will know mainstream media articles concerning 'sex slaves' appear in the press in London about once a week. The trend for the 'left' is to take up the radical feminist / abolitionist position and recently George Galloway (respect party) has been talking about cleaning up the east end and shutting down strip clubs.
As well the usual raids are still occurring in brothels and many sex workers have been deported. ...on many fronts it feels like we are not winning in the debate -- not from a migrants rights perspective and less still from a sex worker perspective. There are many things that can be done -- and many of them we are already doing.

So what to do when the all seems a little lost? -- start a debate ;) We are hoping to conduct this discussion in a space (libcom) that is supposed to be more radical than many other spaces that are available at the moment - but we will have to see -- nothing like sex work to bring out people's politics about gender and sexuality. Nik has posted a short text on libcom -- and i thought it would be useful to send the link out to people".

So folks - Click here to see Nik's post.

I wrote earlier on Mahasweta Devi here. And on walking the streets here and on writing here

INDIAN MASS MEDIA - Keynote Oct 19 2007

SACREDMEDIACOW

and the Centre for Media and Film Studies (SOAS)
presents:

INDIAN MASS MEDIA
AND THE POLITICS OF CHANGE

One-day conference for Postgraduates & Early Career Researchers,
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Saturday, 19 October, 2007

Keynote Speaker: Dr John Hutnyk (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Advisors:
Prof Annabelle Sreberny (Centre for Media and Film Studies, SOAS)
Dr Mark Hobart (Centre for Media and Film Studies, SOAS)
Dr Rachel Dwyer (Dept of Languages and Cultures of South Asia, SOAS)

Call for Papers:

India has been the focus of much attention in the international media in the recent years. Rhetoric concerning its rapid economic growth, spearheaded by its IT industry and its burgeoning middle classes, suggest that something new and significant is taking place. Something is changing, we are told: India is shining; the elephant is rising; the 21st century will be an Indian century. Even a recent election campaign was debated around this image. India was/was not shining, with disastrous results for the leading political party in power.

What unites many of the debates concerning such re-imaginings of India is the notion of change and its different ramifications. Elections, commentators, drawing room debates and activists all cut their teeth around this complex notion. Who, it is debated, benefits from change? Who is left out from these fantasies of progress and economic growth? Do such re-imaginings really reflect the complex economic reality of large parts of Indian populations 'somewhere out there'? In any case, what is certain is that 'change' has now become the new articulating principle par excellence when we speak about India and its contested future.

One of the crucial sites where such debates take place is the Indian mass media: its newspapers, TV channels, advertisements and burgeoning online communities. It is also the loci, we argue, where the politics of change are most visibly played out and that needs to be carefully looked at in order to understand the complex reality of India today. It is important to note here that we believe the nation state is one of categories that needs to be critically investigated when we look at India and change and therefore include the wider Indian diaspora into our definition of what contemporary India is. With this in mind, The Politics of Change conference aims to bring together researchers looking at Indian films and media and interested in the question of change.

We therefore now welcome abstract for papers and presentations of 20 minutes each from post-graduate and early career researchers. Specifically, we are inviting papers that would broadly address the following questions:

● How is change imagined in different forms of Indian media? How are the press, television, film and online communities involved in this imagining? How do different media differ in how they imagine change?
● What kind of day-to-day practices are deployed to articulate these imaginings of change? What kind of verbal and visual images is used towards such imaginings and how do they differ between the media? What are the differences between the English-speaking and the vernacular media? What about the diasporic media?
● What are the politics of such imaginings? Who are such articulations thought to benefit? Who in turn do they disarticulate? What is the political economy of imagining change?
● How have these articulations changed historically? Can we trace historical precedents to such current imaginings? What are the similarities? What are the differences?
● Is there something distinctive about how this change is imagined in (India as opposed to other rapidly-developing countries such as China?)? What do these similarities and differences tell us about Indian media and society?

Abstracts, including a brief biography, should be emailed to papers@sacredmediacow.com no later than May 15, 2007. These will then be discussed with our advisors and team, and we will get back to you by the 15th of June. Please do let us know in advance if you would like us to organize projectors, or any other special requirements you might have.

The conference is jointly is organized by SACREDMEDIACOW, an independent student-led research centre on Indian media and the Centre for Media and Film Studies at the School Of Oriental and African Studies. Having said that, SACREDMEDIACOW is not really a centre for India media research (perhaps a periphery of Indian media research would be a more appropriate title), but more of a Collective. Either way, being both practitioners as well as academics interested in the India media, one of our key aims to build bridges between academics and media practitioners globally. Therefore, a significant portion of the activities around the conference will also take place on our website
http://www.sacredmediacow.com.

Our aim is to include the people we talk about when we research Indian media as much as possible in the dialogue and debates through the possibilities allowed by new technologies: by distributing conference material online, by creating an online platform where the questions raised can be debated during the conference and by allowing distance participation as much
as possible through teleconferencing, video broadcast and other such means.

Please also visit our working space for the conference at http://www.sacredmediacow.com/wikindia)
where many of these ideas will be collectively worked out.

For further information, please email the SACREDMEDIACOW collective:
collective@sacredmediacow.com
or:
Somnath Batabyal, som@soas.ac.uk
Meenu Gaur, meenu@soas.ac.uk
Matti Pohjonen, matti.pohjonen@gmail.com
Angad Chowdhry, angad.chowdhry@gmail.com

Marx had time for Chess in 67

Having revised the first version of Volume One of Das Kapital for the press, Marx took time out to play a certain Meyer...

I have nicked this from Eli Wong, who got it via another fiendishly diligent fan, so this trace of Old Beardo from the annals of Chess history is gonna circulate like the endless adventures of the dialectic (sacrifice the wonky the knight or the promoted pawn, I dunno - reckon its a job for Harpo):

Karl Marx vs Meyer
Casual Game 1867 · King's Gambit: Accepted. Double Muzio Gambit Paulsen Defense (C37) · 1-0

There is some entertaining discussion on the board where this appears, I excerpt some here, mostly from 2005-2006:

Ziggy2016: Marx played like the romantic he was.

Ron: It seems that Karl Marx's chess play was historically conditioned.

euripides: Marx's play shows good knowledge of opening theory. However, Games Like K Marx vs Meyer, 1867 shows that he might have got this theory from games in the 1830s or from recent games in the 1860s. So we can't be sure that 'Capital' took so long because Marx was studying opening theory, though it is quite possible.

euripides: I note this game's authenticity has been questioned. According to Francis Wheen's biography, Marx attended a part given by the chessplayer Gustav Neumann in Berlin in 1867 and this game is meant to have been played there. He acknowledges the help of the Karl Marx Museum and their attached study centre for helping him find it.