Testing a few IP mapping services. Cluster maps below. Not entirely open source.
DIY Maps. This seems to be the coolest but hardest to configure. I’m trying to configure it here. Not happening so far. Sigh. My dream.
IPCCP is also a cool wordpress plugin.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ipccp/. Testing right now.
I came to Bangalore 6 months ago. To the northern suburb of Yelahanka to be precise. Yelahanka is a conservative place. My college, a design school, definitely isn’t. When conservatism collides with cosmopolitanism, a strange combustion happens. For one, there is resentment from both sides. Secondly, categories begin to collapse. Thirdly, a state of anarchy prevails before new categories are borne.
I’ll elaborate on these states in a later post. But right now I’m concerned about the state of anarchy that prevails as categories collapse.
Three women are walking home after eating dinner at 9pm. It isn’t late. It isn’t a long walk home. 7 minutes. It is, however, dark.
A man, a short man in a blue t-shirt, is walking a few metres ahead. Two women in front, one woman talking on her phone following some 5 metres behind. The man suddenly turns around and walks towards the girls. The women don’t react. They think maybe he’s forgotten something. The woman at the back doesn’t notice him. She’s on her phone. Suddenly, the man lunges towards the woman. Tries groping her breast, grabbing her breast. He’s on his feet. Yet he believes he has the abiltiy, the audacity, to attack a woman. A woman who is decently dressed. A woman who is not alone. A woman minding her own business.
The woman screams. Scared, the man begins to run away. The woman continues screaming, in shock. The shock is soon replaced by an understanding of what just happened. This is soon replaced by anger. She lets go of everything in her hands and chases the man.
They run. The man has a headstart. The woman is screaming as she runs down the street. It is a residential colony. There are houses on both sides. People hear her. People stare at her through their windows. The man turns around, thinking the woman must’ve given up by now. He’s shocked. She is still chasing him. He quickens his pace. His chappals break. He leaves them behind.
The woman reaches the end of the road. She is out of breath. She has no alternative but to stop. The man disappears into a park. He is free.
The women, and her friends, return to the spot where the man’s chappals are. They pick them up. They want to burn them in a public gathering. They want to humiliate the man who thinks he can fuck with a woman. They want to humiliate all the men who believe they can assault a woman, who think it is their right to assault a woman.
The women hide in the bushes, waiting for the slightest chance that the man returns. He doesn’t. They head home. As they return, the conservative neighbours appear at their doorstep. Asking what happened. They are too scared to get directly involved. They suggest the women file a report with the police. The women hear them. But they know better. They have been harassed by the police before – why? For walking home at 2am. Because the night doesn’t belong to women.
For a conservative man to see a cosmopolitan woman, dressed in jeans, smoking, laughing, confidently walking alone at night must be a shock. His traditional idea of what a woman is suddenly jilted. His category has collapsed. He feels a certain sense of insecurity, the possibility that there is a shift in the order of the world. A shift in his world.
What can he do? Can he embrace this shift? Obviously not. Change, especially when it is a loss of power, is rarely appealing. His solution: the transference of fear.
He transfers his fear, his insecurity, into the women. By harassing them. By attacking them. By making them feel vulnerable. There is a certain element of cheap pleasure in touching, groping, a woman’s breast. But it is more than that. As the women grow fearful, they lose their power. They are less threatening. Power returns to the man. He is now strong once again. The man and his ego now have space to grow bigger.
The women have two alternatives. The first is what our mothers tell us – be scared. Be fearful. Stay home. Don’t go out at night. Don’t endanger yourself. They say it out of concern. They want us to be safe. But this is not a solution. It is a reaction, a reaction that encourages men to behave the man more animalistically.
The second alternative is more radical. A reverse transference of fear. Go out at night. Put yourself in danger. Use yourself as bait. With the help of friends, male or female, catch the bastards. Beat them up. Take their pictures, post them up on flyers. Send them to the police. Humiliate them. Make them scared. Make them believe that they don’t have the right. That they’re not stronger. That the night doesn’t belong to them.
Reclaim the night. Your night. No more fear of the dark.
Note: There have been a lot of reports of women being attacked in Bangalore recently. While it’s a new phenomena for the media, the women of my college have been experiencing this for atleast 2 years now. There have been atleast 4-5 incidents a month, where women have been attacked, harassed, assaulted, by men on bikes or on foot. A vast majority of these women have moved away, to the city or to safer residential colonies. Running away is not a solution.
Krzysztof Zanussi is an established, ‘unentertaining’ Polish filmmaker who visited Srishti for a brief talk on 3rd March, 2009. He is a maker of movies for ‘refined’ audiences, such as, The Illumination (1972) and Persona non Grata (2004). Having not seen any of his movies (I’m not the elite 6% he caters to), I won’t be able to comment on his skills as a filmmaker.
However, having met the man, I shall pass some good-natured judgement (as I’ve already done) on his beliefs as a filmmaker.
Before I begin: I’m sure Zanussi is one of the most entertaining filmmakers out there. He was certainly a very entertaining orator. However, he kept iterating that he didn’t make his movies for the unrefined, popular, normally distributed audiences that wanted mindless entertainment. He was catering to the elite 6% of people who lie far above the mean of Gauss curve – in the category of the ‘exceptional’. Personally, I have huge issues with statements like these. Thus, the jesting.
We missed most of the beginning of his talk and were fortunate enough to sit through the question-answer session that
followed, as well as the ‘so-that-i-remember-you-students-from-bangalore-university’ photo session (which will help us get a place to stay in his open house in Poland!)
One of the things Zanussi stressed upon was the importance of the narrative. This is in opposition to films having visual appeal and no narrative depth. Zanussi incorporates a lot from his life into his stories. To the extent that most of his talk was anecdotal. So his life pretty much gets transformed into his movies.
As a writer, a writer of fiction that too, I often have pangs of guilt when I incorporate things from real life into my
stories, whether its things I’ve experienced personally, anecdotally or even read in a newspaper. Somewhere, I believe, the line between reality and fiction is blurred. This discomforts me. I feel like im stealing from world to another.
Clearly, Zanussi doesn’t experience this problem. For him the story is derived from reality, all fiction is ‘transformational’ – meaning can be transferred from reality into fiction. Funnily, ‘transformation’ literally
translates into ‘across forms’, which is exactly what Zanussi is doing.
An interesting point he made was about cross-over cinema. It’s the in-thing today. The west, ie europe, isn’t all that open to it so far. They don’t have the exposure to the east to the extent that the east has exposure to the west. We know the Iliad, we know Shakespeare, and we know our Mahabharat, our sanskrit narrative traditions of the sutradhar. So to be open, is much easier for us – than for modern day Europeans to know the Vedas or ancient Chinese literature. As the world shrinks, the art world has to remove it’s formal boundaries, has to become one. Jai ho, slumdog (who’s going to kill me for saying that!? :D )
One thing which I really enjoyed was hearing about zanussi’s experiences as a scriptwriter. When asked about how he copes with a writers block, he answered (to the effect), I’m like a wild animal. The cross over, from the real world to the imaginary world isn’t hard. But to stay there is. The imaginary world is all consuming, it is your world, you know all the details, all the angles, all the strokes, the colour of the ring in the hand of the woman on the left edge of the frame. When you are called back into the ‘real’ world, it is disturbing. How can you let go of your imagination, let go of that woman with the ruby ring, even for a moment, just to answer some silly question like where is the bottle of water.
I’ve experienced this sooo often. I get irritable, angry, become a wild animal, when im writing. To the extent the only solution is to be up all night when the world sleeps – or quit writing. Zanussi’s solution (not really a solution as a call for world understanding):
Leave us alone for 3-4 days, we’ll create a world in the clouds, be happy with it, and then only return to earth. Don’t force us. We’ll be back.
Zanussi doesn’t belong to here or now. He belongs to the time of my grandfather. He belongs to the old school of art – which derides ‘entertainment’ and survives for the elite. He wouldn’t say elite, he’d refer to his audience as those with
‘refined taste’. In fact, he even mathemetically proved his point. The Gauss curve in statistics – saying the majority of
people, whether it comes to cinematic taste or even, when running a 100m race, fall into the median range – the
ordinary, middle class – which looks for the ‘entertainment’ created by Hollywood or Bollywood. Then there are some
exceptions, those who fall far below the curve (exceptionally bad) and those who are far above the curve, those with
exceptionally refined taste. Zanussi caters only to them.
However, he does admit that on rare occassion, a movie meant for the ‘normally distributed’, does crossover into the exceptionally good. These are the gems.
So comes the question, who is this person with refined taste for whom Zanussi caters. In the olden days, says Zanussi,
it was simple. the middle class didn’t have money, so they weren’t catered to. The rich/ the elite/ the monarchs, the
maharajah’s – had money and fine taste.. or with moderate tastes which were refined by training. These people became the patrons of artists. So it was simple.
Zanussi didn’t really answer his question. But as a professor, as the owner of an open house for artists, I think the answer is implied. He is the patron that he no longer sees around him. It is people like him, believers, who will be the support of future artists, in whatever capability. Obviously, in today’s world of markets it’s not economically viable – not for the patron nor for the artist.
His last words of inspiration: We should look at what our fathers and grandfathers achieved. And then take it one step, or even two steps, forward. We should not be satisfied with the things that our fathers or grandfathers woudl be satisfied with. It is our job to take what we’ve inherited from them, and push the boundaries further. That is our duty.
He’s a great man. Even if I don’t agree with everything he says. He gave us his wisdom.
Image from here.
I think that there are two types of people in the world. Those who have faith and those who don’t. Now I’m not talking about faith in the religious sense. Whether you believe in God or not is great or watever, I don’t really care.
The faith I’m talking about is the belief in belief. Do you believe in anything? Not to stand up and fight for it. But to fight within yourself for it.
Do you believe the art world sucks? And the corporate world is the place to be? Then are fighting for your position in the corporate world.
Do you believe in open source? Enough not only to take from it, but to give back?
Do you believe in yourself, that you are a great filmmaker? Enough to make movies, and not only to dream about them.
That’s the difference between do-ers and thinkers. Thinkers believe that they believe, but they really dont. Believer’s dont spend time thinking. They just do.
Ha. I’m finding it sooo incredibly different to publish such an opinionated post!
