Powerless - The Ironman and the Goddess

" Powerless" is an engaging documentary film around the theme of electricity in India. It explores the lives of the urban poor and the impact of electricity shortage. It also looks at how the system makes it so difficult, if not impossible, to bring any kind of reform. It tells the stories of two persons - Ritu Maheshwari, an officer who wishes to bring reform; and Loha Singh, an electricity thief, who looks at himself as a kind of Robinhood. "Powerless" is a powerful film, forcing you to reflect on your ideas of right and wrong.

Ironman and the Goddess

When I saw "Powerless", I was immediately struck by the names of its two key figures - Loha Singh and Ritu Maheshwari. Loha Singh, literally means "Iron Lion" and Maheshwari, the wife of Shiva, is the goddess Shakti in Hinduism. With an anti-hero playing with fire and the lady official, using her power in the hierarchy to bring a change, can be seen as the story of the Ironman and the Goddess.

In the initial part of the film, the two start on the opposite sides - Maheshwari wants to reduce the financial losses caused by the electricity theft and Loha Singh wants to ensure that small entrepreneurs and their workshops can continue to run, even if that means that he steals electricity. As the film proceeds, you realize that both have their hands tied and that both will be used and then abandoned by the system.

Maheshwari is an IAS officer, part of the Indian National Administrative service. To become an IAS officer, you need to go through a tough entrance exam and a selection process. Every year, hundreds of thousands of young graduates from the small towns of India try this entrance test and only a small minority manages to get in. Some of them, like Maheshwari, come with idealism and dreams of reforming the system.

Loha Singh is a barely literate nobody, who has come through a life of informal, low paying exploitative jobs since his early childhood. Circumstances have made him a "katiyabaaz", someone who splices the electric wires. His life is still one of poverty and a daily game of roulette that can end with his death.

Kanpur, the city where Maheshwari and Loha Singh come across each other, with 3 million population is an industrial town on the banks of the river Ganges in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in north India.

Story

Kanpur faces chronic electricity (power) shortage, with long power-cuts that last up to 10-15 hours every day. The electrical infrastructure of the city is grossly outdated with loss of electricity and frequent burnouts. Personnel of the electric supply company ask for bribes from the consumers - bribes are needed for everything, including for manipulating electric bills and supply.

Loha Singh knows how to connect you to the electric lines passing on the streets and if needed, he can steal electricity from your neighbours. He has grown up in the city, starting as a child worker. His clients call him Robinhood - it costs less to pay him than to bribe the personnel of electric company and he responds faster to their needs.

Ritu Maheshwari, an idealistic IAS officer is the new CEO of the electric company, she has just arrived in Kanpur. She wants to reform by mobilizing the personnel, answering the needs of clients, and stopping the electrical losses through theft. Persons with long experience in the company and set in their ways (mostly men), tolerate her with smirks and barely masked contempt, but Maheshwari is persistent, and she refuses to back down.

Many persons in the city and the personnel both are unhappy with Maheshwari's reforms. She is disturbing the status quo without any improvement in electric supply. The summer has arrived and the electricity need is increased. People who have the means, use their own generators increasing the pollution.

Loha Singh does not care about Maheshwari. He knows that officials can come and go, but the city is not going to change.

Election time arrives. Irfan Solanki, a local politician, intervenes, asking Maheshwari to back off. However Maheshwari does not understand the rules of political patronage, and refuses to bend. Solanki thunders about the "arrogant woman who wants to command" in his election campaign and gains public support to win the election. Maheshwari is transferred to another city and the life goes back to the old ways.

Comments

Usually such films are made when such stories are already over and have created some news for some reason. The film-makers collect testimonies, share documents and stage some of the key events for making their documentaries. Some times, on some drammatic real-life events, commercial films can also be made. In "Powerless" it is remarkable that the real-life drammaticity of the whole arc of events has been captured with actual protagonists without staging or fictionalizing anything.

The film has three main characters - the city of Kanpur, Loha Singh and Ritu Maheshwari. It gives us an intimate glimpse into some of the complex issues facing the individuals who need to negotiate their lives in the context of local social, cultural and economic systems. "Powerless" does not explain the complexity, you can glimpse the complexity through the lives of Loha Singh and Maheshwari.

The city of Kanpur in the film is a part of the old city. It is not presented in the kitsch magic realism of Bollywood - rather it is a dystopic post-modern scenario where the city is like a dark urban jungle of decaying houses, dirty spaces of garbage and open drains, with hundreds of electric wires criss-crossing the screen like spiderwebs. The usual joie de vivre between the people in India that usually dominates its congested life spaces, is hardly visible in this film. Rather the spaces are dominated by moments of anger, angst and despair. Large parts of the film have been shot at night, sometimes during power blackouts, that deepens the dark mood of the film.

The continuing feudal mentality of the people, after 60 years of independence of India, comes out when the middle aged man pleading his case and asking for leniency, sits down on his knees and calls the officials "Mai baap" (mother and father). It comes out when the local politician Solanki, shouts at Maheshwari in her office, "Lower that finger, don't you dare, I am the representative of the people."

Loha Singh has the biting carelessness and wistfulness of a man living on the edge. He knows the system and understands that idealistic officers trying to achieve legality are without any hope of success and that his life will continue. He is also aware of his own fragility when he acknowledges that he does not know any other work and has no other options for survival. His hands carry the scars of his daily duels with the naked live electrical wires. He also knows that sooner or later his luck is going to run out and he is going to end with an accident that will kill or disable him.

Ritu Maheshwari has the look of a small town woman. She has a house with a garden and a marble floor. Compared to the dark world of Loha Singh, her life is luxurious (though in comparison with the booming entrepreneur and professional classes of the upworldly mobile India, it would be considered very modest - in fact, few persons from well-off families in India, dream of being part of IAS). She has already been transferred many times but has not yet lost her idealism. In the patriarchal society, women like Maheshwari can be venerated like goddesses at some levels, especially in the media, but at more personal levels and especially with their male colleagues, they are often bitched about as being arrogant or dominating. At the end of the film, she knows that she has lost her fight. Unless she can forget her idealism and learn some of the rules of the game, a life of transfers from one place to another awaits her.

Editing and music are used very well in the film, adding to its quasi-commercial film drammaticity. In fact watching "Powerless" reminded me of a recent commercial film, "Shanghai" (by Dipankar Banerjee, 2012), that had some common elements with it - it was also based in an UP town and had an upright IAS officer. "Shanghai" was about the murder of an idealistic politician who is unwanted because he questions the dominant notions of development and globalization. In that film, the IAS officer manages to extract his revenge from the subservient bureaucracy and the corrupt politicians. Compared to most of the commercial films coming out of Bollywood, "Shanghai" was not bad.

However I prefer "Powerless" because it made me reflect on how each of us, and our interests, influence the system and how that makes it so difficult to change that system! The film's title "Powerless" is about lack of electrical power, but it is also about lack of power in the persons to change the system.

Credits

Directed by Fahad Mustafa and Deepti Kakkar
Assistant director: Jamal Mustafa
Production assistant: Ahsan Iqbal
Associate producer: Leopold Koegler
Cinematographer/editor: Maria Trieb
Editor: Namrata Rao
Music composers: Amit Kilam, Rahul  Ram and Nora Kroll Rosenbaum
Sound designer: Kunal Sharma
Production: Globistan Films along with ITVS and others
Website: http://www.powerless-film.com/ (film stills used above are from this website)

***

An evening on a Delhi street

We were in Connaught Place in Delhi, on the road that has the emporiums selling handicrafts and clothes from different parts of India. That afternoon gave me an opportunity to inadvertently experience being a "homeless old man" for a few hours, surrounded by people who spend large parts of their lives on the street. This post is about that experience.

My sister and nieces were going to visit some of those state emporiums, looking for new clothes for a family wedding. Shopping, especially of clothes, means looking at tens or even hundreds of things, discussing about the colours, textures and other details, comparing them with hundred of similar things you saw in the previous store, and in the end telling the sales-person, "Yes, we like these, keep them separately for us, so that we can go to the next store and repeat the whole thing once again and at the end, we may come back here to buy these!"

I am not very fond of shopping. I told my sister that while they did their shopping, I would prefer to find some good place to sit and read on my ebook reader.

Soon I found myself looking around for a place to sit. I saw many other persons sitting around, some even trying to sleep. Finally, I took the underground passage and walked to the Hanuman temple across the road.

On the stairs that went towards the temple, I brought out my camera from the bag, to click a picture of the temple. An old woman was sitting there with a yellow chunni wrapped around her head. That parapet looked like the right height for my legs, for sitting down and holding my ebook reader. So I decided to sit there, in front of the woman. As I went closer, the old lady raised up her hand to ask for alms. I smiled at her and sat on the other side, putting my bag between my legs. The woman smiled back at me and nodded, accepting my right to sit there.

I had yet not taken out my ebook reader and was looking around, when two men arrived near us, holding between them a big vessel. In a few seconds, a queue formed in front of them. The men queueing were unshaven with hollow cheeks, wearing dirty clothes, some of them in tattered clothes. The two men were distributing food for the poor - puris and aloo bhaji.

"Lo baba!" (Take it grandfather), I suddenly found two puris with the potato mix heaped on them, thrust in my hand. Before I could recover from my surprise, the man had already turned towards the old lady.

I was shocked - Those men had thought that I was some homeless beggar waiting for alms like the woman sitting across me?

I tried to look at myself through their eyes - a well fed man with a mop of white hair and white beard, wearing jeans and a kurta. I don't think that I was looking dirty or poor, but probably they had not stopped to look at me properly. May be all the persons sitting there were supposed to be homeless and poor?

People from middle class homes facing bad times, or those living on meagre pensions or those who were turned out by their children, could have been like me - ashamed to acknowledge that they were homeless and hungry, but forced by the circumstances to come out and sit there! Like the woman sitting across from me.

No one took any notice of me. I watched her eating puris and suddenly I felt like crying.

As the food finished, the two men walked away with the empty vessel and the hollow-cheeked men in dirty clothes disappeared as quickly as they had appeared.

As I sat there with those puris in my hand, life went on without any pause. A woman came, rolled out a durrie in front of us and sat down there. People going to the temple, left their shoes and sandals on her durrie and when they came out, they gave her some coins.

Another woman was sitting on the ground on one side, asking for alms from the visitors. A dog came cautiously near her. The woman smiled slowly and gave part of her puris to the dog. He gulped it down and then settled near her, his tail touching her legs.

On one side, some disabled persons were sitting there, their crutches and deformed limbs on exhibition. Some were with signs of leprosy, they were sitting a little away from the rest of the group.

Every now and then, some persons arrived with food or prasad for distribution, and those dirty looking men with hollow cheeks and tattered clothes, came out from where ever they had been hiding and quickly formed the queues.

Finally tired of sitting there, I walked around, stopping to give my puris to the woman with the dog.

Going up the stairs behind the group of disabled persons, there was another square with a few trees. Part of this area was occupied by some persons, mainly women, with low tables and chairs - these were temporary shops for getting henna-tattoo designs on hands and forearms.

After some time, I sat down on a low wall near those henna and tattoo artists.

Three palm-readers had their tables and chairs in front of another temple in the left corner. One of them wore the saffron colours of a sadhu. Behind them, on one side a shop advertised horoscopes and future predictions made with a computer. While the palm readers had an occasional client, the computer horoscope shop seemed to have more work.

There were many more persons in that space, most of them simply sitting around. Some were next to me on the low wall, others were sitting under the trees. Slowly the evening fell and the lights came on. It became colder. A chaiwala sitting down on the ground and making tea on a stove, was doing brisk business, continuously surrounded by clients.

Suddenly a fight broke out between one of the woman henna-tattoo designers and a young guy. Apparently, the woman was  a veteran, while the young guy had just set up his henna-tattoo business. The woman had glasses with  bright blue and yellow frame, she started shouting, spewing out violent cuss-words, usually used by men. Then she brought out a blade and slashed the guy's shop signboard, cutting it to pieces. The guy sat there cowering with fright, unable to say anything. After some time, the woman went back to her own table and the crowd that had gathered to watch the fight dispersed.

It was as if different parts of that open space were different ecological zones, each with its group of regulars and visitors, each controlled by its own laws. Around them moved the homeless persons, of which I had become a part, persons waiting for something, persons passing time. Finally I got up, feeling old, tired and cold.

As I walked back towards the emporiums, in the underground passage, an evening school had started. Two persons, a guy and a woman, were sitting on stools, with a group of street children in front of them. I sat down at the top of the stairs, watching their class for some time, till the cellphone in my pocket started vibrating. My sister had finished her shopping.

Finally it was time to go home.

I did not take many pictures that day. Looking at them, brings a node to my throat, and I feel old, tired and cold.

***

The reformist poet-saints of Karnataka

Ever since Gautam Buddha and Mahavir, India has a tradition of social and religious reformers. 15th and 16th centuries' India saw a surge in social reformers such as - Kabir, Surdas, Rahim, Meera Bai, Gyaneshwar, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Tulsi Das, Ravi Das - who had spread their messages through poems and songs. In Karnataka, the tradition of poet-social reformers goes back to 11th and 12th centuries. This post is about three of those poet-social reformers from Karnataka - Basavanna, Akka Mahadevi and Kanaka Dasa.

I was familiar with the works of poet-saints like Kabir, Surdas and Meera, but I had little knowledge about Basavanna. Recently I spent a couple of weeks in Bidar district in the north of Karnataka for a research project. It was an opportunity to visit some of the places linked with Basavanna. This photo-essay is about this visit.

Basavanna statues in the villages

For our research we were travelling in a small town, when I noticed the statue of a man sitting on a horse. I had seen similar statues in many other villages. The statue had a man with wearing a crown and his right hand was raised up in benediction.

"Whose statue is that?" I had asked.

That was Basaveshwara, Lord Basava. Others called him Basavanna, brother Basava.

"Why do people in villages put up his statue?" I wanted to know.

"He was a poet, he wrote vachchanas or prayers. He was also a social reformer, predicating the abolition of castes from Hinduism", someone had explained.

Later on, when I had searched for information on the internet, I had discovered that Basvanna was from 12th century, thus, had preceded Surdas, Kabir and Rahim by about 400 years. While poet saints of north India, including others like Gyaneshwar and Meera, are well known to common public, they are not objects of public worship like Basavanna. I have never seen statues of Kabir or Surdas in the villages in northern India, while Basavanna seemed to be more popular among the people in north Karnataka.

Basavanna was a minister in the south Kalachuri kingdom in the ancient city of Kalyani. Apart from writing vachchannas, he had also promoted radical social changes through the setting up of Anubhava Mantapa, a democratic community decision-making body that had representatives of different groups including women and persons from different castes. He was part of a social reforming tradition, and was succeeded by other vachchanna writers such as Akka Mahadevi. Their followers are called Lingayats.

Basavkalyan - The ancient city of Kalyani

The ancient city of Kalyani, the kingdom of the south Kalachuri kingdom in 11-12th century, is now known as Basavkalyan, and is also the central town of the Basavkalyan sub-district (taluk) in Bidar district.

Basavkalyan has a temple at the site of the ancient Anubhava Mantapa set up by Basavanna. The central part of the temple is shaped like a giant linga, though inside the Mantapa there are no statues or shrines of Shiva. Instead, the Mantapa is adorned with the pictures of the different social reformers of the Basavanna tradition, while the central part presents paintings showing episodes from life of Basavanna.

Close to the Anubhava Mantapa is a lake and an ancient Shiva temple. From the lake, on the horizon you can see a giant statue of Basavanna.

On the other side of the main road that connects Basvaklayan with the district headquarters in Bidar, a new shrine to Basvanna has come up recently that has his 108 feet high statue at the top of a small hill, visible from far away.

The work on this shrine is still on-going. Underneath the statue, a cave has been dug in the hill which has statues of different social reformers of Basvanna tradition.

Unfortunately, most statues of the new Basvanna shrine seem to be made with plaster of Paris, and some are already showing cracks, loss of colour and some damage. This means that this shrine will require lot of regular maintenance.

Akka Mahadevi

Akka Mahadevi (Sister Mahadevi) was one of the women social reformers in the Basvanna tradition in the 12th century. She had given up clothes and went around nude.

In 2000, film director Madhushree Dutta had made "Scribbles on Akka", where Seema Biswas had played the role of Akka Mahadevi.

The iconography of Akka Mahadevi is challenging for the traditionalists because of her nude female body. Thus, in the paintings, in the front views she is shown with long hair covering her breasts and lower part of her body. Similarly her back views hide her body with her long hair.

In spite of these challenges, her figures continue to adorn the village temples and continue to be an example of emancipation to women. Her poetry (vachchannas) are also challenging to traditionalists because she raises questions about her body and her soul.

In my opinion, the figures of persons like Akka Mahadevi and Basvanna are one of the best examples of the robust openness of Hinduism that questioned the sacred texts and presented alternate views. That these figures continue to be popular with huge number of followers is an important sign of continuing living traditions of Hinduism against those who wish to present a narrower and more monolithic view of the religion.

Kanaka Dasa

Bidar was full of giant posters showing persons of different political parties with the figure of Kanaka Dasa, a poet-saint from 16th century Karnataka. Kanaka Dasa can be considered as a contemporary of  poet saints of north India such as Meera Bai, Kabeer, Raheem and Sur Das. The figure of Kanaka Dasa reminded me of paintings of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, a 15th century poet-saint from Bengala.

In his poetry Kanaka Dasa talked of class differences and inequalities between the rich and the poor. He also talked of getting above the rituals for a true meaning of god.

I asked my companions about those posters and they explained that these were for celebrating the 526 anniversary of Kanaka Dasa and all the political parties want to be associated with his figure. I am not sure if today in north India any poet-saint enjoys that kind of common popular support, except may be for Sant Ravi Das, whose annual processions used to be an important social event in north India, especially for the dalit groups.

Conclusions

In the traditions of Gautama Buddha and Mahavira, Basvanna and his group of poet-saints from 12th century Karnataka were social reformers. I was surprised by the continuing relevance and popularity of these figures in the contemporary rural Karnataka.

Few centuries later, in 15th and 16th centuries, different parts of India had many other poet saints - Meera Bai, Gyaneshwar, Surdas, Kabeer, Raheem, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Ravi Das and Tulsi Das. Today, the poetry and the works of these later poet-saints from north and central India, continue to be alive and known, though none of them has received the iconic status reserved for Basvanna in northern Karnataka. In other parts of India, I have never come across statues of the other poet saints in the villages, like the Basvanna statues in north Karnataka villages.

I was also struck by the dominant statues of Ambedkar in many towns of north Karnataka. I don't know if this is linked in some way to the caste-defying traditions of Basvanna.

Though Ambedkar was not a poet-saint but for dalit and marginalised population groups of India, his messages of emancipation and dignity have achieved an iconic status and perhaps he can be considered a rightful heir to the Basvanna tradition of social reforms.

***

The abusers and the lynching mobs

When Tahehlka's Think Fest had started, we were getting ready to start our research on "Violence and Abuse" in north Karnataka. Reading the list of the speakers at the Think Fest, I had briefly fantasized about somehow flying to Goa to listen to some of them. About two weeks later, as the first news about Tarun Tejpal's sexual abuse of a journalist had come out, we had just started to discuss the preliminary research results. We were trying to make some sense out of the terrible situation that had come out of our research.

Our research was on "violence and abuse, including sexual abuse, towards persons with disabilities in the Bidar district of Karnataka". The research was conducted jointly with local associations of disabled persons and persons working in a community programme.

A group of disabled persons and community workers from Bidar district, both women and men, were trained to conduct the research. The aims of our research were two - (i) to gain an understanding about factors influencing violence and abuse towards disabled persons and (ii) to initiate a dialogue on how can violence and abuse be prevented.

During the initial training of the researchers, it had come out that this issue directly concerned both disabled persons and community workers. In the past 12 months, many of them had also been through personal experiences of emotional, physical and sexual violence.

Our daily feedback sessions during the research, when we discussed the information collected during the day, brought out sharing of peoples' stories and invariably had some of us crying.

In the next few weeks, I will be working at the analysis of the information collected during this research. However, the preliminary analysis of our data shows a terrible situation -

• More than 80% of the disabled persons interviewed had at least one experience of significant violence and abuse in the past 12 months. For most of them the experiences were more frequent, some times even daily.
• More than one third of the women interviewed had had at least one episode of sexual violence in the last 12 months.  Married women suffered more violence and abuse compared to unmarried women.
• Disabled men were also victims - more frequently of emotional and physical violence, but about 9% of them had had at least one episode of sexual violence in the last 12 months.

Our research shows that violence and abuse are common in our homes, in our families and in our communities. Few persons had the courage to talk about the abuse they had suffered. Often, those who were supposed to protect them, including police and authorities, were themselves complices and even perpetrators.

While reading about Tarun Tejpal and the journalist, everyday I am listening to the shrill debates, to the cries for jail and stringent punishment, to those who ask for castration and death. And I think of our research.

They shout - kill the rapist, hound anyone connected with them, make examples out of them, better if they are well known persons. The shrill noise means we are exempted from looking inside ourselves, to recognize and understand our societies. We do not need to look at what we do every day in our homes and our communities.

One Nirbhaya every now and then, is fine for breaking news, prime time debates and candle light vigils, so that abuse of hundreds of silent unknown Nirbhayas in our homes, families and communities can go on.

***

Scam with a touch of humour

We are all familiar with the email based scams where they write to you saying that you have won some lottery or the rich widow is dying and has decided to leave you her inheritence. I sometimes stop to admire these emails - the sense of irony and humour they sometimes contain is absolutely marvellous. I Especially remember some of the emails originating in Nigeria!

Here is an example that I found in my mailbox today:

"Attn: Beneficiary,

I am John Dagogo Chairman Debt recovery and settlement mainly on lotto, inheritance and contract payments. The recent meeting of world economic leaders in Davos Switzerland agreed with African leaders present that there is need to pay compensation to the above category of victims in other to qualify African countries for debt forgiveness from the G20 and G8 countries,

The compensation is to be made by the Federal Government of Nigeria and some other bodies like the Nigeria National Petroleum Co-operation (NNPC), Dagote Group of Companies (DGC), Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Federal Ministry of Finance, due to the scam the citizens of Nigeria and other West African countries has done on the internet.

The selection of the people to be compensated was made randomly via internet, so if you receive this mail that means you have been selected among the lucky ones to receive the sum of FIVE MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS (US5,000,000.00).

Note that all necessary documentation to make the withdrawal of the fund legal and free from any breach of the law will be your responsibility. Kindly contact me with the following information for the claim of your fund.
<removed>

I will advise you make sure your fund gets to you through the normal process to avoid any problem in future, so please you have to abide to all information as directed.

Thanks

John Dagogo"

I love the references in this scam-email to Davos, G8, G20 and promises of debt forgiveness. And I really love the reference to compensation for the scams carried out by Nigerian citizens - it is a masterpiece! Is this email an example of a sense of self-deprecating humour or is a scammer from another country pulling the leg of his Nigerian brother/sister?

I really don't know who would believe such a letter but perhaps some of us do and immagining millions in our bank account, fall in this honey-trap. I do not believe in such messages and my recommendation is that when you receive such messages, cancel them straightaway and never write back.

However, at the same time I can smile and express my appreciation at the scammer's sense of humour!

***

Delhi or Mumbai, the rape capital?

Since December 2012, after the infamous and cruel rape of Nirbhaya in the moving bus in Delhi, reports of other rapes in the Indian capital and other metros continue to appear in the news, including the recent news about the rape of a photo-journalist in Mumbai. Recently, I was reading a paper from a social psychology research about the messages used for changing public behaviour, that raised some questions and doubts in my mind about the common communications in the Indian media about rape. This article explains the research and those doubts.

Social psychology

Social psychology is an area of study that looks at how persons relate to and influence each other. At present, I am involved in an online course on social psychology from Coursera. These online courses are run by prestigious American and a few British universities. They are free and open to everyone. If you have never looked at the Coursera website, and you are interested in continuing your learning through online courses, my recommendation is that you should take a look at it!

Cialdini's research

The research that struck me and prompted this article was done by Prof. R. B. Cialdini from Arizona university and was published in 2003 ("Crafting normative messages to protect the environment" in journal of American Psychological society). This article is one of the learning materials in the course on social psychology.

In this research Cialdini looked at undesirable behaviours and the effectiveness of different public messages that were used in USA to limit those behaviours. Cialdini's paper is not about rapes - it is about damage to the environment. He suggests that people's behaviour can be influenced by 2 kinds of norms in our communications -

(1) Descriptive norms: these norms are about behaviours that are popular and are carried out by a large number of persons. If a behaviour is seen as common, other people feel like copying it. Thus, we should use these norms in our messages when we wish people to do something.

(2) Injunctive norms: these norms tell us which behaviour is forbidden or wrong in our society and should not be done. These norms should be used in messages when we wish people to stop doing something.

Cialdini's research showed that often messages given to public for stopping some bad behaviour used both kinds of norms in an inappropriate way so that they become contradictory, and thus may not be effective. Cialdini's research showed that such contradictory messages can be counter-productive - that is, they promote the behaviour, they wish to stop.

Let me explain myself a little better.

When we talk about an issue, usually we feel that it is important to underline the gravity and the severity of the problem, because we think that if people understand how bad it is they will try to stop it. However, it may not work in that way.

Thus, when we prepare messages, we give information that this problem is very widespread. This may give the unconscious message to public that the undesirable behaviour is very common, and that it is carried out by a large number of persons in the society. Some people listening to or watching that message start thinking that "it is something common and popular, so we can also do it". Due to this reason, such messages may have the opposite effect.

Cialdini gives different examples of his studies to support these ideas. For example, in a protected natural park containing important fossils, visiters were taking away small pieces of fossils and it was a big problem. The authorities used a message informing the visiters that every year 40 tonnes of fossils are stolen from the park and asking the visiters not to steal the fossils. However, this message-campaign did not have any effect, rather the stealing increased after this campaign. Thus, Cialdini explained that this message told people that taking away fossils was common and popular, and people felt that if they also take away a small piece it will not make much difference.

Delhi as the rape capital of India

Let me start with some of my own ideas about the issue of rapes in India. Delhi was not a safe city even 40 years ago. From those years, I remember, my sister's worries about the behaviour of guys in Delhi buses going to the university.

I am sorry to confess that at that time even I used to believe that it was because of "provocative clothes" that girls wear, and if they can look like "behen ji" they will be spared. Only much later did I realize that saying that the fault is because of girls' dress or behaviour shifts the responsibility from the guys who behave wrongly onto the girls, and in a way, approves that guys can behave the way they wish and then put the blame on the girl.

I believe that Indian society's emphasis on girls' izzat and how it is equated with "family honour" worsens this situation.

Today the things seem to have worsened. Social phenomenon are almost always complex and have different causes. I think that partly, the number of rapes may have "increased" because now more girls and more families have the courage to report it. In this sense, increase in reporting of rape should be seen as a positive sign.

Asking that police and laws should stop or reduce the rapes can be a superficial solution, because it allows us to ignore the harsh social realities of India where class and caste inequalities are closely interlinked with the way women are treated. It makes us feel that we can continue to be a chauvenistic and unequal society, and that only police or stronger punishments can resolve this problem.

Just listening to the declarations of police officers, politicians, religious leaders and sometimes, even magistrates and judges (including many women), shows how entrenched such ways of thinking are in our society's psyche.

I think that it is the same societal attitudes that are also responsible for dowry killings, female infanticide and violence against women, that are responsible for rapes and the inceased feelings of insecurity perceived by girls and women in India. Unfortunately these are so common among outside the big cities and among more marginalized groups that these are taken as the norm and do not even make it to any kind of news.

However, after reading Cialdini's paper, I was wondering, if in our desire to bring a change in our society, we are not emphasising too much on how frequent and common rapes have become and if this is fueling the perception at least in some men that it is common and even they can do it?

Can talking about "Delhi as the rape capital of India" or "Mumbai as the new rape capital of India" is the wrong message to give to country's men, because it tells them that rape is common or even "normal"?

What do you think?

***

Homelands of my heart

The angst for the far away homelands that emigrants carry in their hearts has been a constant theme for films, fiction and memorials, especially over the past couple of decades as globalization has spread. "Immaginary Homelands" by Salman Rushdie (1992) was part of expressing this angst.  Pico Iyer's talk "Where is home" on TED is another articulation of the feelings of rootlessness. Pico explains that rootlessness is not just angst, it can also be a pleasure, freeing you to decide and choose your homelands.

If you have not yet watched Pico's talk, I strongly recommend it. He is a wonderful speaker with an evocative style.

Pico's talk has two main threads that he uses to weave a word-web of memories, experiences and emotions. First thread is a question asked by others, "where are you from?", and the second is about our own feelings of what defines a home for us. In his talk, Pico often moves between these two threads, implying that both are inter-related.

After watching his talk, I kept on thinking about it. My feeling is that the two threads are not really inter-related in the way Pico seems to suggest. If I ask myself Pico's question, "where is home?", I would not think of the question, "where are you from?", I would ask other questions.

WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

It is the question asked by the new "others", often when we meet them for the first time.It is probably as old as the times when humanity started its journey from Africa and spread to different parts of the world.

In most parts of the world, before the industrial revolution and urbanization, only a tiny percentage of persons ever left the places where they were born. In their life times, at the most they could have hoped to make a few trips to the nearest town. Almost invariably, people married persons from the same region, if not the same village. They spoke the same languages, ate the same food, prayed to the same gods and celebrated the same festivals.

This belonging to the the "birth-place" found common expressions. For example, if Indian traditions forbade crossing of the seas, Italians had sayings like "Moglie e buoi dei paesi tuoi" (Wife and buffaloes should be from your same village). I am sure that different other cultures had similar ideas.

Thus, in those times, when you met new persons, it made sense to ask "where are you from?", because you knew everyone there was to know and you rarely met new persons. With this one question, you were asking many different questions - to which place do you belong? where were your mother and father born? which city/village is linked to your family?

Today the world is profoundly different. Often you do not have the time to listen to the complicated answers to the question "where are you from" and it does not make any difference to you.

Today, even if you never leave your home country, internal migrations are a constant part of urban lives and increasingly, even the rural lives. More than ever before in the history of humankind, people from different cities can get married, have children in different cities, send those children to schools and colleges in different cities, and find work and move to different cities in their life times. Thus, emigrants or natives, it has become harder to answer this question "where are you from?".

You no longer have the name of one place to answer this question. You may need to give long and complicated answers describing your shifting home-cities. I think that most of Pico's talk is about this question. The question of "belonging".

But is this question really about the place identified by your heart as your home, as Pico suggests in the second thread of his TED talk? Not for me.

HOMES OF THE HEART

In his talk, Pico mentions different places, buildings and countries where he has lived at different times in his life. He talks of his schooling in Britain and university in the USA. He also talks of his love for Japan and the burning of the family house in California that had "set him free".

However, people seem to be missing from Pico's world. While he talks of his grandparents' house, he never talks of his grandparents themselves. He never mentions his mother or father or siblings or cousins. He does not talk of his wife, his children. There are no friends of his heart in his speech.

And while reflecting over his talk, I asked myself, how can we talk of our home, without talking about the people we love?

When I had left India, my home was mainly in Delhi, in the rented house where my mother had lived. But parts of my home were also with other family members and close friends. In the past three decades, as our family has spread to different parts of India and some persons have emigrated to other countries, parts of my home have also spread with them. My feelings of "home" are linked to my family.

Over the years, the memories of the intense friendships of adolescence have dimmed and none of those childhood friends is active on the social media or even emails so our contacts are rare - thus today I am not so sure how strong are the links between them and my "home" feelings.

As long as my mother was alive, my strongest feelings of home continued to be linked to her. Today, while I sit in Bologna (Italy) and talk to my sisters on telephone, one in USA and the other in India, I feel at home in that moment. Their voices, and our shared memories are my home.

The voices of some of my cousins are also indelible part of my "home" feelings. Even just to think of them, makes me feel at home.

And, I have my new home, linked to my wife and my son. Strangely, though I have lived for more than two decades in Bologna and we own a house here, in Italy my feelings of "my home" are stronger towards Schio, the town of my wife's family - again, I think that this feeling has something to do with close family members and not so much with the cities themselves.

So, for me, the place that I feel in my heart as my home, has to do with my emotions - feelings of family, love, affection, friendship - and little to do with geography or other things.

And for you, where is the homeland of your heart?

***

The Wonderful World of Wall Paintings

Wall painting is an ancient art that goes back to thousands of years, when prehistoric humans started living in caves. The colours and techniques used by prehistoric humans were very different from the way contemporary humans use wall paintings. Yet across these thousands of years, in many ways, wall paintings show a continuity of ideas and functions. This is true across cultures, countries and continents.

This photo-essay on different kinds of wall paintings presents images from my travels in different continents.

WALL DECORATIONS

Wall paintings, that is using colours to make designs and illustrations on the walls, is one way of decorating our private and public places.

Some other ways of decorating the walls include -

Murals: Mural is a generic term, indicating wall decorations including wall paintings, but also designs made by applying stone or other materials. In the contemporary world, increasingly designs and art works are printed on canvas, plastic sheets or even paper and then fixed to the walls.

Mosaics are designs made by putting together small pieces of glass or ceramics, similar to the way pixels of different colours compose images on the computer screens.

ANCIENT WALL PAINTINGS

Prehistoric humans used wall paintings for different reasons such as to record events, as part of religious rites and as part of rites linked to hunting.

The image of a prehistoric wall painting shown below is from Chinhampere in Manica region in Mozambique, not far from the border from Zimbabwe. Ms. Mbuye Aghonda is a widow and is the guardian of the sacred paintings of Chinhampere. The paintings are made on an enormous and relatively smooth rock surface that overlooks a valley from the top of a hill.


To visit these wall paintings, you have to be accompanied by the sacred guardian. As you climb up the hill, first the sacred guardian will go to the paintings to pray and ask for their permission, before you can see them.

The paintings were made over different periods of time and show different wild animals and the hunters. Thus, probably they were part of the ancient hunting rituals. Now there is little wild life in Chinhampere. According to Mbuye, the paintings tell the story of persons who had come from some where across the border of the present-day Zimbabwe, and they had some discussions, after which part of the persons had returned back to their original village, while remaining had decided to settle near Chinhampere.

The ancient wall paintings of Chinhampere are part of a living tradition - every year, there is a village procession and festival, when people walk to the wall to pray and to celebrate.

WALL PAINTINGS IN TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES

In rural areas, and especially among tribal population groups, wall paintings continue to be part of people's lives. Here are two examples of traditional art.

The first image is from Koraput in Odisha (India) from the museum of tribal population groups. It shows the kind of figures used in traditional wall paintings in this area. These wall paintings have social and religious uses, as well as they are people's artistic expression. Even in cities in India, similar paintings can be made during festivals and marriages.


The second image is from Alua in Nampula region in the north of Mozambique, close to the Indian ocean. The village house-wall shows a contemporary scene with a truck bringing liquor or beer bottles, a bar or hotel, where people drink alcohol and the man with the knife illustrates the impact of alcohol drinking. Thus this wall painting is for public awareness, while the hut may belong to some public building or to a village leader or a pastor.


FRESCOES IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

Frescoes are a special kind of wall painting made on fresh lime plaster, so that the painting becomes part of the building. This art of making frescoes developed especially in medieval Europe. Below you will find an example of frescoes from medieval houses from the city centre of Trento in north-east of Italy.



ACCEPTED CONTEMPORARY WALL PAINTINGS

Contemporary wall paintings can be broadly divided into those that are acceptable to the society and those that different societies usually criminalise. First let us look at different ways in which societies use wall-paintings as a device to attract attention and to tell people about the functions of a building.

The first image is from Guwahati (Assam) in the north-eastern part of India. It shows images painted on a Hindu temple wall. Such use of temple walls is very common in Asia and especially in India. It tells people that the building is a temple. It is also a time-saving device so that if you do not have enough time to go inside the temple to do proper prayers, you can do a hurried prayer, while passing in front of the sacred images.



The image below is from Kunming in Yunnan (China). I am not sure if it is a wall painting or if it is a painted canvas or plastic sheets fixed to the wall. It shows tribal dresses and costumes. As the contemporary world moves away from traditional societies to cities where people are more homogenised with western clothes and apartment houses, often cities create museums and images in public spaces to remind them about tribal dresses, songs, rites and customs. Usually this means simplifying the earlier complex societies into something that can be marketed for selling souvenirs and attracting tourists.


The next image is from the university area in Bologna (Italy), showing the shutters of a restaurant that have been painted to make publicity for the restaurant and to tell the passers-by about the kind of food available there.



The next image is once again from a rural area in Yunnan province of China and shows a nursery school. Often schools and children's wards in hospitals have bright and colourful images of happy and playing children, to increase their attractiveness and to make the small children forget the pain or the separation from their families!



The image below is from Amsterdam (Netherlands) showing an art shop for tourists. Here wall paintings are useful to attract customers.



The next two images are from the tiny medieval town of Dozza, near Bologna, in Italy. Every two years, Dozza invites some painters to come and use its houses as a canvas for making paintings. Over the decades, this has turned Dozza into an open air art gallery, where most houses have paintings on their walls. In a country full of quaint medieval towns with cobbled streets and castles with moats, the wall-paintings of Dozza help to give it a distinct image for attracting tourists.

The image below is one of my favourite paintings in Dozza, because it uses the windows of the house as the ears of the two gossipping neighbours.





Similar to Dozza, the seaside holiday town of Caorle near Venice (Italy) uses colours in two ways - for wall-paintings as shown in the image below, and also to paint the different houses in bright colours so that together they give a bright colourful look to the city. Once again, colours are used here to attract tourists.



Some time back, on TED video talks, I remember watching a video in which Mr. Edi Rama, the mayor of Tirana in Albania, tells of how he used colours to give optimism and self-confidence to his city. Do watch this video if you have not seen it.

The next image is from Vienna in Austria, showing a hotel that uses colour on its walls to give itself a distinct image and to attract people. As you walk in front of such a colourful building, it is natural to feel curious about it and to remember it.



All the above are different examples of how societies use colours and wall paintings as part of their information-providing, awareness raising and marketing.

GRAFFITI ART

Some times persons, especially young people, use wall paintings in street art to express their anger, to provoke and to protest. Often, such wall-paintings are done at night and in most countries, making such paintings is considered as a crime. However, sometimes, cities provide space to their young people where they can express themselves freely, without criminalising it.

Here are some examples of this rebellious art, also known as graffiti. The first two examples are from the university area in Goiania in Brazil (South America). Note the person with a cape on his/her head and the face covered by a handkerchief in the second image, an almost universal sign of protesting youth all over the world.




The next two examples are from Bologna (Italy) and are the works of a young artist called Ericailcané, who makes graffiti on abandoned buildings. Giant sized animals are a characteristic of his works. He expresses the alienation of youth in the contemporary society, usually seen as controlling (like the robotic hand turning the key in elephant's ass in the second image).





The next two images are also from Bologna, from the university area and these show expression of protest. The first one is about economic crisis and it has a message targeted at banks and governments, it says "We won't pay the bill for Your crisis".

The second image was made during Libyan war, probably by Libyan students (it is signed as "autonomous collective of students"), and shows Qaddafi with a no-entry sign and expresses solidarity with Arabs (it also has the student's website address, so even while protesting, students use it as a tool to get interested young people to their website).





The last image of this photo-essay is from the downtown in Nairobi (Kenya) and was clicked during last year (2012). It is a scathing satire, protesting against the political corruption and abuse of democracy.


CONCLUSIONS

Today as we move towards the digital world, perhaps our blog-walls can also be considered as wall-paintings - they are certainly used in different ways like the wall-paintings - to inform, to protest, to pray, to market or may be, just to express our sense of beauty. What ever be our goal, the wall paintings continue to be a potent and contemporary medium to share our message.

I hope that you liked this quick world-tour to the wall-paintings in different continents.

Personally, I feel that the graffiti made by the protesting youth, is also an art form. It is an important way to let people express themselves. I agree that if someone uses the wall of my house to give a protest message through graffiti, probably I would not be so happy about it. Still, I think that the cities can provide official spaces to graffiti makers. Apart from the protests, it also brings some vibrant colours and a human touch to our cities. What do you say?

***