Living within a contagion of chaos

In The Locust Effect, Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros claim, and I believe rightly so, that it's not simply poverty that people in the developing world suffer from, but an acute lack of security.

Violence is rampant in many parts of the world that are also poor. However, when experts in the developed world device plans to alleviate problems in the developing nations, they typically focus on economic measures, convinced that scarcity is the biggest challenge in these countries.

Scarcity is indeed a big challenge, according to the authors, but a bigger challenge is fear. A majority of these nations have no functional institutions of law, order and justice, in place, and if there are police and courts, they serve to protect, not the people, but the regimes against the people. The elites of the developing world have successfully bought the services of the police and judiciary to their advantage.

The tale of Yuri, an 8-year old Peruvian girl, doomed to live in a country "marked by disorder, violence and man-inflicted suffering", says it all. In his discussion of the book, David Brooks quotes the story:

Yuri's body was found in the street one morning, her skull crushed in, her legs wrapped in cables and her underwear at her ankles. The evidence pointed to a member of one of the richer families in the town, so the police and prosecutors destroyed the evidence. Her clothing went missing. A sperm sample that could have identified the perpetrator was thrown out. A bloody mattress was sliced down by a third, so that the blood stained spot could be discarded.

Yuri’s family wanted to find the killer, but they couldn’t afford to pay the prosecutor, so nothing was done. The family sold all their livestock to hire lawyers, who took the money but abandoned the case.

Brooks brings to our attention the gist of the books' perspective-altering argument that "The primary problem of politics is not creating growth. It’s creating order. Until that is largely achieved, life can be nasty, brutish and short."

Life is "nasty, brutish and short" in many parts of the world's places where the average citizen lives beyond the apparatus of law and order, and are victims of "predatory behavior, [and] the passions of domination and submission."

War and the peace of baked beans

The writer here manages to embed his mother's baked beans recipe in a subtle vitriol against the American tradition of violence.

And in these days of multi-platform storytelling, the curious piece is incomplete without a more-curious mini-comic strip:

Mother India

Annu Palakunnathu Matthews, a Professor of photography at Rhode Island University, has a creative way of critiquing sexism in Indian popular culture, a.k.a. Bollywood.

In a project called Bollywood satirized, Matthews uses digital technology to make changes on Indian movie posters and make a commentary, in turn, on Indian gender norms and stereotypes.

Ms. Matthews recalls being the victim of sexist attitudes as a young girl growing up in India and says she felt very angry at the tiresomely repetitive posters that inevitably showed women in various postures and moods of subordination to the men. They were shown to either cry, or laugh (because they were in love) or sing, or rescued from a dangerous situation by a sturdy male figure.

The poster above is not an alteration of an existing movie, but a representation of a real incident--that of the recent gang rape in India's capital of New Delhi, in which a young woman and her male companion was brutalized in a moving bus. The woman went on to die.

There were myriads of responses to the incident and the most terrifying one's were from the officialdom and the politicians of India. Abhijit Mukherjee, Member of the Indian Parliament and son of Pranab Mukherjee, some Minister or the other in his career of acute sycophancy in the Indian Congress hierarchy, said that women ought not to wear anything but "long overcoats" when they venture out in the streets after dark. By "long overcoats" Mr. Mukherjee clearly didn't mean a fashionable Burberry, but some sort of a loose overall like a bloated top of a salwar kameez, is my guess.

The poster above is a meaningful recreation of the anachronistic-ness of Indian male politicians where women and modernity is concerned. 

Can representation be violent?

The recent killing of four Americans in Benghazi over an online video about the prophet Mohammad, has prompted a myriad of responses in the Western media.

Most register a deep anger over the violence and some like Defence Secretary Leon Panetta have labelled the Muslim violence as a terrorist attack. 

The general consensus in the U.S. media is that such acts are violent and violence is unecessary and uncalled for as a reaction against a mere visual representation of a Muslim religious figure. 

Little attention has been given to the possibility of representation, whether visual, written or aural, as being an act of violence itself. 

The assumption is that all acts of violence are physical.

Even academics in their otherwise insightful explanation of the incident, don't consider violence to inhere in certain acts of representation.  

I agree that the Muslim rage over every bit of trivialization of their religious symbols is an overreaction. The trivialization isn't something one condones, but the Muslim reaction should have been a little more controlled and proportionate to the offence committed.

Yet isn't the video portrayal of Prophet in a mocking tone a sacrilegeous act in complicated ways? Isn't representation an act of violation? Do all violence have to be committed on the body?

Edward Said's take on the violence of representation resonates here. He saw representation as an act of power--in a world of unequal distribution of power, the powerful often end up representating the powerless in ways that are violating. In such instances the powerless hit back at the powerful through bodily violence.

The video is a mere video. But the Muslims, in context of a world where Muslims see themselves as powerless victims in the face of Western machination to subordinate them, see the video as an act of violence.

Guns and doses (of reality)

Some of the best insights come, not from The New Yorker (celebrated) staff writers, but from the readers.

So, I pay the same attention to the letters written in response to stories in the magazine ("The Mail") as I do to the stories.

Here's an excerpt from a letter on the great futility of the debate on gun control and gun-related violence in the U.S.

Firearms are potent objects of power; someone who picks up a gun instantly alters his status and relationship to those around him. They provide a quick fix for those feeling profoundly impotent and without recourse. This alteration is the reason that certain young people, feeling especially vulnerable and powerless in their teen-age years, are attracted to violent gun use. [...] The criminal use of guns is a symptom of larger problems of disempowerment in this country. The answer is not to ban forearms or even regulate them, but to provide the social, economic, and emotional tools that citizens need to feel a sense of control over their lives. Guns have become such strong symbols of violence and supremacy that it is much easier to talk about firearms regulation than to talk about the complex social and racial issues in this country, including Americans' lack of access to adequate mental-health care. The problem isn;t that it is easy to get a gun in America; the problem is that obtaining a gun is easier than getting therapy, or achieving racial equality and financial stability.