Italian Election Candidates

It is election time in Italy. If I only could, I would vote for Zappatero.

 

The way his government has gone towards reforms is stuff for day-dreams in other countries where frustrated voters are sick of their governments that can't decide on anything. Like the law on people living together rather than getting married, including the same-sex couples that Zappatero could get through.

 

In Italy they started with a law called Dicos, then tried Pacos and in the end, gave up the idea because the centre parties that have strong catholic public image, felt that the law would discriminate against regular heterosexual families.

The way last Prodi government had been functioning was so frustrating with its thin majority. Every member of the coalition with a handful of parliament seats threatened to quit if they didn't like something. Mastella with his 3-4 parliament seats and Dini with two seats, did it so often. Mastella finally brought the government down and it came out that he had received assurances from the opposition leader Berlusconi about getting a minister seat in the new government. It was disgusting and the public disapproval against Mastella is so strong that he has finally decided to "retire".

So you can understand my fondness for Zappatero. The only problem is that he is too handsome. I am a little distrustful of the handsome public leaders. Just think of what Blair did, turning into wagging tail of Bush. Or what Bill Levinsky Clinton did. Thus if Zappatero first was good, Zappatero-bis may be too much. And then there is Nicholas Sarkozy, a post-modernist nightmare of a prime minister.

Anyway back to the Italian elections. Suddenly people seem distrustful of small parties and small leaders, each of whom gets a few seats and then tries to influence the government. At least I hope so, and that everyone would vote for a main party that can govern the country.

Where I live is called the "Red area of Bologna". Actually the whole city of Bologna has the reputation of being red, in the sense that it has been a stronghold of left-parties, for a long time with communists and later on with centre-left coalitions.

 

Now it is the new left, democratic party of Veltroni, that is the flavour of the season. Last year in October they held the primaries to choose their boss and this was a first in Italy, since usually parties choose their own leaders and don't ask people to vote and elect their leaders. More than 3 million persons voted for Veltroni. Since it is a red area, strong hold of left parties, all the election posters of Northern League, Christian Democrats and other right parties are missing from the billboards. Probably enthusiastic supporters go out in the night to take down all such posters.

Still some of the posters are really funny. Like this one from Northern League, that is the nationalist party of the north of Italy, that does not want immigrants. Their poster has a red Indian on it.

 

"The Red-Indians didn't have rules to control immigration and now they are forced to live in reserves, think about it" their poster says. But they were all European emigrants, I wanted to tell the Northern League leaders. Africans, Asians, they didn't kill civlisations and put people in reserve areas! But I don't think that he wants to listen. The poster is both funny and good-communication, and in the end, that is what matters.

Sex is another theme of elections that continues to surprise me. Not the puritanical Clinton-Levinsky kind of sex, it is more open and ribald. Like the Northern League famous for its "Lega c'è l'ha duro", meaning, "League has it hard" and is just going screw you.

Ms. Santanché, prime ministerial candidate of extreme right, snubbed by Berlusconi, reacted by saying "He wants me to give it to him but I am not, he can dream and die for it." Mr. Berlusconi himself, famous for putting his foot in his mouth every so often, has been trying to keep a check on himself this time. Last time he had announced that for the elections, for one month he was going to give up sex, implying that nearing seventy, he was still having it regularly and thus not too old to be a prime minister.

But it is the porno-stars who catch attention every time during elections. Ilona Staller & Moana Pozzi, both porno-stars were parliament members for the radical parties almost a decade ago. Both had scandalised for refusing to give up their wayward ways even after entering the parliament by continuing their work in hardcore porn, saying that it was their job and they had every right to go on with it. At least Moana was intelligent and able to speak articulately! Now we have Ms. Milly D'Abbraccio, another porn-star standing for the socialist party. Her poster in Rome has created some more scandal.

"Basta con queste facce da c...", the poster uses a common Italian proverb, "facce da culo" that means "ass-faces" and so in a poster showing her well rounded ass, Ms. D'Abbraccio says, "enough of ass-faced" parliamentarians, vote for a more beautiful face. Embarrassed, the socialist leaders, vain about their 114 year old history, were stuttering their explanations about the poster.

Veltroni and Prodi were in Bologna the other day. Veltroni has choosen the slogan of Barack Obama, "Si può fare", it can be done. Initially all surveys showed the predictions that Berlusconi was ahead by ten points. Now Veltroni is going around saying that he is the new thing in Italian politics, he is running alone, no arrangements with any party and he has been elected by the people and he is young, only 54. Berlusconi is dismissive.

 

Personally I liked the speech of Anna Finocchiaro, wearing the red cross-checked coat in this picture, along with Prodi and Veltroni. She was simple and effective and to have a woman prime minister won't be bad. But she is not in the race for the prime minister. Bersani, the other minister of Prodi government who was there for the meeting is admired for the series of liberalisation measures he was able to push through in spite of the protests by the different unions.

And this time PD, the Democratic party is proposing industrialists and professionals as candidates, not just union leaders and mechanics. So what will happen in the elections? We are all waiting to discover.

PS: Maybe Mayawati can ask for a ban on Zappatero? His name literally means Mochi or  a "shoe-maker".

Remembering The Massacre of Monte Sole

It was still a little cold but the sunlight was blinding. 

 

A little after the Etruscan museum we turned towards the mountains. The road crossed over the Rhine (Reno) and then started climbing up. These were not really high mountains, they are only around 400 to 700 meters high, but winter must be tough here.

 

In Bologna, the trees are already full of flowers while here the first leaves are just struggling to burst out of wintery skeletons of the trees. The new grass has that lovely shining green colour that looks velvety. When we reached the top of the crossing between San Martino and Casaglia (pronounced Cazalia), the endless hills looked wonderful and far away, we could see glimpses of the highway with cars rushing over it.

It is very beautiful.

 

The first ruins of the church and the houses in San Martino, look like the antique Etruscan ruins. They all seemed to be white-washed, all clean and blindingly white. There were no signs of bombs that were exploded here, of machine guns that had killed so many, fires that had blazed.

 

Did they scream? Those old men and women and children? Did they ask for pity from the young Nazi soldiers?

 

Pietro, our neighbour had told me about the tragedy in Marzabotto. Around end of September in 1944, German soldiers had killed a total of 771 persons in the villages here. Perhaps they were angry and frustrated, because they were losing the war and partisans from Marzabotto were hiding in the hills and attacking them regularly. They took out their anger on children, women and elderly, who were left at home in the villages. Among the dead were 315 women and 189 children below 12 years.

 

In Casaglia, they killed the priest Don Ubaldo Marchioni in the church below. Other persons hiding in the church were marched to the cemetery near by. The door of the church was blown out by a bomb. It seems difficult to believe that all of it happened in this calm and beautiful place. The grass is bursting with tiny Margarita flowers and air is thick with smell of flowers.

 

 

The cemetery is around 250 meters from the church. It is a small and simple place, with a few broken down tomb stones and some old pictures fixed to the wall. A board outside the cemetery says:

"Hitler said, "We have to be cruel, we have to do with our conscience in peace, we have to destroy technically and scientifically."

 

A survivor of the killings said,"29-30 September and 1 October 1944 were the worst days, even if some killings continued even after these days. Early in the morning I could see 54 houses burning. There was a group of them soldiers applying fire to the houses. We had all gathered in the square in front of the church. We were told that Nazi and fascist soldiers were coming but we thought that their fight was with partisans and so we decided that the elderly, women and children could stay in the church. They broke open the door, we were all forced to come out and they beat many of us, laughing all the time. The priest was killed near the altar. We were led to the cemetery. Inside they started to fire at us. We were trying to hide behind the wooden crosses and the tombs. They were firing low so as to kill the children also. They also threw in some bombs." A total of 195 persons including 50 children were killed in the cemetery."

Afterwards we went to the Sacrario (Bone house) in Marzabotto, where the bodies of 771 persons are buried. Pietro used to come here. His sister, sister-in-law and father were buried here. The day they were killed, Pietro's 14 year old sister wanted to come away with them but Pietro had stopped her. He said that their sister-in-law was pregnant, almost in the ninth month and could need help, so he told her, you stay here, you are only a child, the soldiers won't do any thing to you.

 

"I got her killed, she could have been saved", he would say again and again and struggled with guilt and depression all his life.

As we sat in the Sacrario to remember Pietro, my mind was wandering to remember all those persons I knew and who are now dead - my friends, my maasi, my buas.

 

And, I was wondering about the killings in India, like the 1984 killings in Delhi, like the 1989-90 killings in Kashmir, like 1992 killings in Bombay, like 2002 killings in Gujarat, like the on-going killings in so many places. Most of the time in India, the killers from such massacres are never brought to jail, the persons killed are never acknowledged. At least Pietro had the satisfaction of history condemning those Nazi soldiers, some of them were brought to trials. The memory of those dead is honoured and there bodies are buried in Sacrario, this monument to those killed. The victims of the riots in India, the victims of ethnic cleansing in Kashmir, who remembers them? How do their families, their children, live with this knowledge, with this burden and pain?

 

In India, most of the times these bodies will be cremated. There is no place identified with the person who is no longer there. The person becomes invisible, and memories are only that, memories without places to bind them into. Does that has some thing to do with the way we remember our dead and we ask for justice for them?

Sex and Hypocrisy

Everything related to sex is a taboo in almost all societies. Even those societies which apparently seem broad-minded and liberated. Thus the subject is often linked with hypocrisy. Especially for persons who act moralist and indignant about the loose morals, those who talk of family values, religions, etc.

Here are two news items from today's newspaper that illustrate this hypocrisy:

In Tehran (Iran), Mr. Reza Zarei, head of the police department for ensuring proper moral conduct in the national capital, was discovered in the company of 6 sex workers. Mr. Zerei had become famous for his harsh stand on what he called "immoral behaviour" and had got arrested hundreds of young persons with this accusation.

In New York (USA), Mr. Eliot Spitzer, the 48 year old Governor of the New York state has been forced to resign because he was using his office money on sex workers. His bill for the prostitutes amounted to 80 thousand US dollars.

In India, persons who moralise are a plenty. Just think of the one in Maharashtra government who had banned the women in dancing bars. When people are so vehement about moralising, I always feel that they have something to hide! So I hope experts of investigative journalism and sleuths should go after such persons to look in their cupboards if there are any hidden skeletons!

And to celebrate openness, have a look at the Italian version of the Naked News that started today. This internet and mobile phone based TV channel has news shows where the newsreaders (strictly women) slowly take off their clothes, while reading the news. Obviously the TV channel is available only for paying clients.

I guess learning or practising Italian with this news channel could be great fun - it would help you in staying awake while studying and increasing your general knowledge. Only problem is too much anything is not so good and probably once you have seen it a few times, you will be plain bored.

***

The Tragedy of Being a Sex Symbol

I had gone to work on my bicycle. In the evening, when I finished, there was a slight drizzle and so I locked my bicycle and left it there and decided to take a bus. The bus starts nearby and thus when it reaches our bus stop, it is still relatively empty. I found an empty seat and parked myself there. On that seat somebody had left a folded newspaper.

Soon the bus reached the university area and young students filled the bus. I was going through the newspaper I had found my seat, when I suddenly heard a sharp intake of breath close to me. I looked at the newspaper and I understood the reason for the sudden silence around me. I think all the persons around me were looking at the full page ad on the newspaper.

It was an ad of the March issue of a men’s magazine called Max and the picture showed the cover of the magazine with a breath-taking nude young woman. The picture shows the face and the back of the woman clearly while her breast is seen in a silhouette. The girl is Eva Riccobono and is described as the new Italian top model, a new sex symbol.

As I got down from the bus, I took care to take that newspaper with me. Usually I prefer looking at more mature woman but in this picture, Ms. Riccobono does look wonderful.

While walking to home, I was thinking about the tragedy of Ms. Riccobono. When people proclaim you as a sex symbol, when you become famous for your beautiful body, I guess in your head a clock starts ticking like never before.

I think that all professions where your face, your body are the most important part of being you, the pressure must be terrible. The pressure to be thin, to be paranoid about every strand of hair out of place, every little pimple or wrinkle that appears, every bad angle that could show you less than perfect. How long it is going to last, you must be asking yourself.

And when people love you for your body, somehow it means that rest of you is not worth much. Initially you may love being the sex symbol, but soon you must be dreading it and hating it as much as you love it. Not that I was ever a sex symbol so that I can speak about the feelings of a sex symbol, but you only need to look around at all those beautiful people and how they all, sooner or later, try to show that they are not all body and beauty, that gives you an idea of how they feel.

So many of them become a recluse as their bodies start to age. Like Brigitte Bardot. There was a time, she was the epitome of sex symbols.

And then she hid, closed herself in baggy clothes, huge sunglasses and floppy hats, trying to become invisible. Finally she did find redemption in her love for animals and found the courage to come out and be herself. Look at her older pictures and you realise that she is still wonderfully beautiful, even if it is a different kind of beauty, more gentle and relaxed.

Some of them never find the courage to come out, like Greta Garbo, who lived her life behind closed doors and died in her solitude.

More closer to home we have our Rekha. Look at her pictures from twenty years ago and now, she still looks young and beautiful and yet in a way, a caricature of herself. Even as a grandmother in films like Krissh, she continues to be a young woman dressed as a granny.

Relax Rekha ji, we would still like you even if you let yourself go and relax a little bit. It is ok even if you are not perfect always, chill and enjoy. Yet, once you are prisoner of your image, I guess that it requires lot of courage to come out into open.

So don’t be jealous of these moments of glory of Eva Riccobono. She is sure to earn millions but she is also going to pay a heavy price for it. So best of luck Ms. Riccobono. Once the party is over, I hope you will have the courage to come out and be yourself.

***

Sex and the Gods

I had heard about the temples of Khujaraho and Konark, where eroticism is mixed with prayers, but I hadn't had an opportunity to visit them so far. So, during my visit to Odisha, when Dr Mani proposed that we make an early morning trip to Konark temple, I was very happy.

The entrance and the first glimpse of the ruins of the sun temple built around 1250 AD under king Narsimha with a tinge of morning mist was breath-taking.

 

Pilgrims of all sizes and shapes, were every where arriving there in buses, perhaps stopping at Konark on their way to the more famous Jaggannath temple in Puri. 

While the beautiful statues at the initial part of the Konark temple are innocuous enough, the main temple building does not leave much doubts about its sexual component with huge erotic sculptures built high up from the ground, around what was the main entrance to the temple. Only if you look carefully you will see a number of smaller erotic sculptures around the big ones.

The sidewalls of the temple has smaller statues at eye level, organised in three panels. Most of the lower panels and middle panels do not have erotic sculptures and have more innocuous gods, mythical animals and other figures. Erotic sculptures are mainly in the third level of panels. Dr Mani says that this was done in a way so that children coming to the temple will mainly see non erotic sculptures.

The sculptures are very explicit, depicting graphically the different ways of sexual enjoyment. There is oral sex including "69", there are old looking men and women, there are younger looking men and women, mostly couples but sometimes three figures (one man and two women) are also there together looking for orgasm.

 

Thus almost whatever was described in Kamasutra, is expressed here visually in statues. The statues are very life like with expressions of joy and pleasure. At the same time, I think that the artists were asked to make sure that the sexual nature of the statues must be made very explicit and that can explain the unrealistically large penis in most of the statues, that are likely to give a sense of inadequacy to most of the faithful coming to the temple.

 

Konark is not just erotic art but is an incredibly beautiful structure. I really liked the three Sun god (Surya) statues, like this one below sitting on a horse.

The whole temple is made like a chariot with twelve wheels, symbolising the twelve months of the year, pulled by seven horses, representing the seven days of the week. The wheels, the statues, the carvings, the architecture, everything is exquisite.

Thinking about the sense of shame usually associated with anything to do with sex, I was wondering about the impact of these erotic statues on the common pilgrims and school students. However, my impression was that barring a few men, who did look towards these panels from a distance, most of the pilgrims kept their heads down and took only fleeting glimpses of the erotic sculptures.

Why did those thirteenth century persons make these erotic sculptures in their temples?

 

Was it a period in history when human beings in India had been able to shed off the prude taboos about sex to take a more direct look at life, sex and pleasures? Indian poetry in shringar ras can indeed be very explicit. People worshipping Shiv and Parvati in the form of Shivlings, were they initially more reverential towards the sexual act? Was it something linked to the tantrik marg to realization of God? I don't know the answers to these questions.

While visiting Konark, I had wondered if the statues had also depicted gay or lesbian sex, in terms of understanding the public perception towards these aspects of sexuality in the thirteenth century. Though there was no time to look and analyse each statue (and to be honest, looking at erotic sculptures, after an initial sense of novelty, is a bit monotonous and boring), my conclusion had been that Konark statues are about heterosexual love.

***

Describing India - Akbar and Roy

Yesterday M. J. Akbar was in Rome for the release of his new book in Italian "Fratelli di Sangue", or the Blood Brothers. This is how he started his speech:

India is the world’s latest quotation mark. Nepal has become a question mark, Sri Lanka an oversized exclamation mark; and Bangladesh is imprisoned between brackets, the space for leeway decreasing by the day. Pakistan is teetering towards a full stop. China has turned into yesterday’s paragraph: still impressive, but with the contradictions becoming evident through cracks separating sentences.

What a wonderful feeling to be an Indian at that moment in history when the world begins to applaud as India comes within reach of that long-promised tryst with destiny, and shifts imperceptibly towards the centre of the stage.

And last night, I was reading the article by Amira Hass on Arundhati Roy in the Italian magazine, Internazionale. And, I was thinking about the differences in their view points, between the India described by M. J. Akbar and that described by Arundhati Roy. They do not seem to be talking about the same country.

Amira is an Isreali journalist, one who lives in Palestine and writes about the Palestinian human rights. I can imagine that she must be seeing and reporting on things and situations that can't be ever described as happy and optimistic. Yet, even she seemed a little afraid of the sense of darkness and doom in Arundhati Roy's words. Or, may be, it was me, reading between the lines and imagining things that are not there.

But it is true, reading Ms. Roy is not easy, especially when we are used to the shining and glowing descriptions of India as exemplified by the words of M. J. Akbar above. Reading Arundhati or listening to her speak, I often feel that she is a very negative person, looking only on negative side of things, yet, I also understand that the unpleasant things she says do have grains of truth in them that we often refuse to acknowledge because they are so unpleasant.

Both Arundhati and Amira were in Ferrara (Italy) for a conference in early October. I had already written about Arundhati's speech in that occasion. She had mentioned about the evening spent with Amira and how much she had enjoyed it. 

Here are a few examples fromAmira's article about Arundhati Roy's views during her interview (my translation from Italian):

"The cruelty, in some way, is hidden by discourses on Gandhi, about the country where everyone meditates and does yoga. Oh yes, everything is going well, we play cricket, we elect Miss world and win Booker prize, we even have dissent, what a beautiful happy family. Instead no. The country is passing through dark and cruel times and you know what I tell you? That if we close our eyes, they will become darker and even more cruel. India does not have scruples of killings. 

A million persons, the Dalits, the untouchables, still work in direct contact with excretions and what is tragic is that they are willing to fight for their right to work with human excretions, because they don't know what other work they can do. Everyday Dalits are lynched but no one accuses the persons responsible for this. In all of India killings of Muslims continue. In the last years 137 thousand farmers have committed suicide. Only in Kashmir, 60 to 80 thousand persons have been killed ...

In the middle of the country, there is a proper civil war going on. Now they have discovered those damned mines of Bauxite in the states of Orissa and Chhattisgarh, that is used for making Aluminium and the multinationals are doing everything to exploit it. You have to see what they are doing, bringing down whole forests, removing hills, deviating rivers, devastating the earth and forcibly evicting the inhabitants..."

Is Arundhati exaggerating or is Akbar talking about illusions? Probably the truth lies a little on both sides. Persons like Arundhati, I guess that it is not so pleasant to listen to them. Like for me. I would rather listen to Akbar any day.

Even Arundhati does not have any illusions about the persons for whom she raises her voice. "If at the end of so many battles, we shall win, the persons whom we are defending, you will see, those same persons will be the ones to first hang people like us on a tree. I am talking about Maoists and Islamists of Kashmir: at times we take sides of persons, who do not have place for us in their imaginations."

This last part of her words was not understandable to me. When we know that they are brutal exploiters, we need to fight for their right and ask that they become in control of people's lives? What does it mean to talk about the rights of Islamists and Maoists that she is advocating? When the butcher is standing next to the goats, he is going to kill, how can she talk of the rights of the butchers?

I feel that Arundhati uses her eloquence and her beautiful words full of raw emotional power to propose something which is opposite of sanity, it is a sickness. 

***** 

Overdose of writers

It was wonderful to meet so many writers from India, to interact with them, to learn about them as persons and a little bit about their creative way of working, the differences among them, their individuality and their conflicts, their fears, their pet phrases. 

Now I need to be quiet and calm for some time to digest all that I heard and saw.

I spoke to almost all of them individually about their books and writings  (except for Shashi Tharoor, M. J. Akbar and Vikas Swarup). However, I did speak with Shashi Tharoor in the bus-ride as we went to see an opera (Rigoletto).

I had long chat with Bhagwan Dass Morwal right on the first day. With Uday Prakash, there was lot of interaction and somehow, I found myself contradicting him often, perhaps to provoke him! Gayathri Murthy seemed to be familiar right from the first moment, while Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal, initially thought that I won't like him but later, I changed my mind. 

 

I also had some morning conversations with Tarun Tejpal, Lavanya Shankaran, Anita Nair and Altaf Tyrewalla. I specially liked Altaf. It was also nice to sit with Sudhir Kakkar during a lunch.

One of the most interesting discussions we had was during a lunch break with an Iraqi journalist living in Italy, a Singaporean journalist of Indian origin married in Italy (a coincidence that she knew my sister in Delhi) and Nirpal Singh, a writer of Indian origin living in UK. The discussion about our mixed identities, our roots, our families, our feelings and the absurdities of our worlds, was both moving and challenging.

Apart from Indian writers, it was a wonderful opportunity to meet some of the well known writers from all over the world. I have loved reading books of Luis Sepulveda and Tahar Ben Jaloun and meeting them, listening to them was wonderful.

Some others like Rosetta Loy, Peter Schneider, Bjorn Larsson, Alain Elkann, Gianni Riotta, Lorenzo Mondo, Francesca San Vitale, I knew less well because I had never read their works, but after knowing them, I am going to read them too.

Only Federico Rampini, I missed. I was looking forward to listen to him and to get him sign a copy of his book for me but when he spoke, I was busy giving an interview. Afterwards, when I went out to look for him, he was busy in an interview.

Listening to Prof. Sanpietro and his wonderful wife, Myra as well as Prof. Alessandro Monti was equally rewarding. Interviews, speeches, long lunches, longer dinners, an evening at Rigoletto and meeting so many persons, you can understand my sense of indigestion.

I have recorded many of my discussions with the Indian writers, so perhaps one day I will be finish transcribing all of them for you.

I was introduced in the event as an "Indian blogger-writer living in Italy", which made me feel as if I was not a real writer. However, in the end, we are all writing, so I guess that I can also call myself as a writer!

 

 ***