Arundhati Roy, who, like Arun Shourie, needs a lot of space to have her say, argues over seven pages in Outlook that the continued military occupation of Kashmir must stop, and that we have there a State whose younger generation ha s been “raised in a playground of army camps, checkposts and bunkers, with screams of torture chambers for a sound track”.

Vir Sanghvi and Swaminathan Aiyar assert in columns in the Hindustan Times and Times of India, after citing different sets of reasons, that the time has come to give Kashmiris the right to self-determination.

On Times Now, on prime time over two days, Arnab Goswami celebrates the patriotism of soldiers who have given their lives for Kashmir. On the day of his funeral, two children of an army officer are put on air to tell the channel’s viewers about their father, with Goswami goading them on. “Are you proud of your father, what would you like to tell people on our show today?” he asks the 11-year-old son. The next evening there is a special report, titled We love Kashmir Too, talking to the families of those officers who have lost their lives in Kashmir.

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Sevanti Ninan surveys the reporting on Kashmir. (Thanks, Shivam, who also sends other links. Click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

By Sridala Swami

113° Fahrenheit on
the third day of May.
In Guntur,
every red chilli in the market
as if by concert
bursts
into sharp-tongued flames

and

the air breaks
into loud
applause.

“Red Chillies” from Pratilipi. (Via)

Also, in the same new issue, a short story by Sumana Roy entitled “My Mother’s Lover,” and, for readers of Hindi, an interpretation of Asad Zaidi’s poem about 1857.

At the Invesco Field at Mile High, I asked the Nation Magazine columnist and poet Katha Pollitt to tell me if there had been any moments of poetry at this Democratic convention.

We were in the press box overlooking the rows filling-up with more than 75,000 Democratic faithful. On the Mitsubishi viewing screen in front of us, 96 feet by 27 feet, we could see the projected image of the speakers, mostly older white men, speaking in support of Barack Obama. Above the screen was the statue of a giant white bronco rearing in the air. Under the horse’s hooves were the tiny figures of two secret service agents standing with rifles and binoculars.

“There is poetry in Michelle Obama’s voice,” Pollitt said, “it’s very rich and powerful.” Pollitt felt that the woman who might be America’s next First Lady could be saying anything and it would sound good.

”It’s that beautiful contralto,” Pollitt explained.

There was also a lot of poetry, Pollitt felt, in the old refrain of family, home, and the nation. None of it had been very moving because it appeared that a lot of people were delivering the same message. The repetition was hardly surprising, because the Obama campaign has vetted each speech except for the truly brilliant one delivered by Bill Clinton.

Of course, the Democratic nominee for President has been widely noted for his lyrical gifts. In his memoir, in lines chosen almost at random, Obama writes about his reading the autobiography of Malcolm X: ‘”His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer of will.”

And yet, it is this gift for extraordinary eloquence has also appeared a failing in Obama when people ask whether there is anything substantial behind the soaring rhetoric.

This might be one reason why Obama’s speech at Invesco Field presented, beneath the fluttering penants and sails, the ballast of policy statements. “As President, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power…. And I’ll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy—wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can’t ever be outsourced.”

Over the course of the entire convention, I found that in the degraded landscape of television culture, poetry emerges only in the form of election slogans and put-downs. Weak alliteration and weak rhymes are especially prized. “Yes We Can. And Yes We Will.” “That’s not a maverick. That’s a sidekick.”

The prose that found biggest, and repeated, play was devoted to the mythology of the American dream. The loudest cheers were reserved for the moment when the speaker at the dais said, “You can be anything you want to be.” This was such a cherished thought, and so often repeated, that one would be justified in suspecting that Americans hold elections every four years only to convince themselves of the truth of this sentiment.

The truth, of course, is that one person, with a mix of talent and luck and shrewd strategy, has emerged a winner. When Barack Obama took the stage at the Invesco Field, under the open twilight sky, a breeze stirring the flags on the ramparts of the stadium, he was speaking on the anniversary of the historic “I Have a Dream” speech delivered by the Reverend Martin Luther King. And all the poetry and pathos that he expertly marshaled made his supporters forget that he didn’t get so far without sharp calculations and compromise.

This was true of the convention as a whole. In fact, I was stunned by the extent to which the campaign controlled access that the media had to people who had been involved in Obama’s campaign. There’s nothing particularly wrong in it; however, it would be wrong to assume that Barack Obama’s achievement has been anything but a triumph of political management.

This can be put in another way. All the poetry of optimism, the breath of expectation, even the melancholy of small and big sufferings described by ordinary people who spoke on national television—if all of this was poetry of a particular kind, then it had relied on the stolid prose of effort and careful organizing.

Shekar Narasimhan, an Indian American entrepreneur who is a part of the Finance Committee of the Democratic party, has worked on finding money for the party. He participated in a fund-raiser for Obama that raised a million dollars. Narasimhan told me that each day, as a campaigner for the party, he sends out fifty emails and engages in conference calls. Over the past few months, he has attended dozens of meetings.

There’s not only organization, there’s also prayer. Kamala Harris, the first Indian American to be elected District Attorney, told journalists at this convention that her grandmother in Chennai has been going to the temple every day to pray for Obama’s victory in November.

My final report on the Dem Convention for the Indian Express. Remember Wallace Stevens who said “Money is a kind of poetry.”

denver-democratic-convention-day4-poetry-obama-money

Although many of Obama’s recent supporters have been surprised by signs of political opportunism, Preckwinkle wasn’t. “I think he was very strategic in his choice of friends and mentors,” she told me. “I spent ten years of my adult life working to be alderman. I finally got elected. This is a job I love. And I’m perfectly happy with it. I’m not sure that’s the way that he approached his public life—that he was going to try for a job and stay there for one period of time. In retrospect, I think he saw the positions he held as stepping stones to other things and therefore approached his public life differently than other people might have.”

I didn’t want to leave Denver without posting a link to the New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza that had created a stir when it came out a couple of months ago. Also see this and this. Tomorrow morning, I’ll post my final dispatch and catch a plane out of town.

Such sweet folksy music is present in the ritual of the roll-call, when the different states that make up the United States of America address the Chair and offer their electoral votes to each nominee. “Madam Secretary, Maine, the sun comes out in Maine the first in the nation….”

“Illinois, home of Abraham Lincoln.” “Missisipi, home of the blues.” “New Orleans, home of gumbo.”

Each invocation loudly offers the electoral vote-count (“15 votes for Senator Clinton, and 55 votes for the next President of the United States, Barack Obama”) as a proud, hospitable act. But the bland and cheerful tribute to homeliness barely hides the battles over political real-estate that have preceded this glorious moment.

And today, in the afternoon, when the roll call started inside Pepsi Center, the tension was palpable. It dissipated amidst cheers when the delegates from Arkansas, in a spirit of unity, cast all their Clinton votes in favour of Obama. Later, New Mexico yielded their votes to Illinois, and Illinois yielded, in turn, to the state of New York. And amidst the mystery of this procedure, Hillary Clinton appeared, electrifying the crowd. Or perhaps more than her, it was her act, asserting unity, soothing fears and jangled nerves.

Any event that catches the imagination of the audience is as welcome as a drink during a dry month. But such moments are rare. The floor of the convention is always chaotic, full of people talking to each other or posing for pictures.

The speakers that the viewers at home see on their television are usually addressing only the camera. The viewer at home is saved from the tedium of dead speeches and a circus of self-commemoration—a delegate having a photograph taken with a celebrity like Charles Barkley, or dancing in the aisle with an outrageous hat on the head till the cameraman from NBC looks her way.

But why do I mock? Maybe this is the essence of democracy: every person’s shot at fame comes from the fair opportunity to appear on television.

In this wasteland of the television dream, it is wonderful to find someone like eighteen-year-old Ravi Mulani who has been blogging about the convention for sepiamutiny.com. Mulani read Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father, and was struck by its honesty. It gave him a model. “It’s in the teenager’s interest to be painfully honest,” he said.

Mulami was born in Danbury to parents who had migrated from Mumbai, and he grew up in the city of Chicago where Obama had found his purpose. Mulani persuaded all his friends to read the book. He told me, “Barack Obama doubled our debate team.” Later, Mulani went to Washington D.C. to compete in debates, and, because Illinois Senators have a tradition of having breakfast on Thursdays with their constituents, he visited with the young Senator several times.

In the fall, Mulani is going to join Harvard and work on a degree in applied mathematics. When I asked him to tell me about his experience here in Denver, Mulani noted how much more diverse the attendance at the event was. He said, “Whether the country is ready for Barack or not, this convention is showing how rapidly this country is changing. This country has had this feel for a long time, but this is the first time that a convention is showing this reality.”

The 2008 Democratic convention has the largest number of black delegates in history, as well as Asian Americans, and also gays and lesbians. Mulani didn’t say this to me, but wouldn’t it also be a first of a sort that he is here, barely out of high school, reporting on the activism of South Asians?

While I have been writing these lines, dear reader, on the stage to my left, there had been a string of command performances by John Kerry, a very smooth and unambiguous Bill Clinton, and, finally, Joe Biden. Ravi Mulani’s senior colleague from sepiamutiny.com, Abhi Tripathi, is also attending the convention. On the day following Obama’s choice of his vice-presidential running mate, Tripathi had pointed out that that Biden’s expertise on Pakistan was a great strength. For years, Biden has been arguing that Pakistan, and not Iraq, is the seat of terror. The choice of this man meant that one could hope for a better-informed war against terrorism.

There was a surprise appearance, at the evening’s end, by Obama. Tomorrow, he delivers his acceptance speech. While talking to young Mulani, I asked if he had any tips for Obama. Mulani was confident about tomorrow but it was the future he was a bit worried about. He said, “Obama is an excellent speaker, but as a debater he needs to provide a few more catchy sound bites.”

My third dispatch for the Indian Express.

denver-democratic-convention-day3-sepia-mutiny

Near the end of his book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama recalls a phone conversation with his wife Michelle after getting elected to the U.S. Senate, a conversation during which he began to tell her about a significant piece of legislation that he was fighting to get passed. But Michelle Obama had something else on her mind. She said to her husband, “We have ants.”

Ants?

Yes, they were the problem. In the kitchen and in the bathroom upstairs. Michelle wanted Barack to pick up ant traps for their home. This conversation made the rookie Senator wonder if someone like Ted Kennedy or John McCain bought ant traps on the way home from work.

The point of the anecdote, I think, was to establish that Obama’s needs, and his family’s needs, even when he became a Senator, were ordinary. But a part of the story’s purpose is also to tell us that it is Michelle Obama who keeps Barack practical and grounded.

Was this the task that she was once again burdened with on Monday night?

Not to put too fine a point on it but ants just didn’t belong in Pepsi Center. The place is huge, its interiors soar. The very scale of things suggests size and ambition and vast sums of money. It occurred to me as I stood outside was that the building could swallow several of Saddam’s palaces.

In fact, I was still unprepared for the immensity inside and it took my breath away. If the practical entered the picture, as it must, at the level of planning and detail, it was only in the service of something grand. Michelle Obama delivered a powerful and deft speech, telling the story of her family and attempting earnestly to define herself for strangers. Except that she was also responding in a very precise way to criticism made of her in the past, and this open act, because it was being performed on such a big public stage, threatened each utterance by exposing its fragility.

I understood this more fully only when I came out of the Pepsi Center, and a friend of mine, who is black and a writer, sent me a text message from upstate New York saying that Michelle’s humanity had been diminished that evening: the white majority had imposed on her the view that she could be considered acceptable only if she said nothing critical of her own country.

It is of course self-evident that political conventions are merely as real as made-for-television movies. Everything individual or human, even at the moment it is trying to assert itself, gets quickly swallowed up in the staging of the spectacle. Except when life departs from script, as when Obama’s daughters appeared on screen and little Sasha kept interrupting her father during his video appearance from Missouri: “Hi, Daddy.” “Hi, Girardo family.” “Daddy, what city are you in?” While Sasha had the mike in her hand, it was as if television had returned us to the accents of the real.

This is the right moment to turn to Hillary Clinton who is surely the most artificial politician to have achieved prominence in the world in recent times. And tonight, inside a packed Pepsi Center abuzz with anticipation, I was waiting with a barely suppressed dread for her speech to begin. And to see beamed on the giant TV screen behind her, the trademark tight thin-lipped smile stretched while delivering a cutting remark. Or, heaven forbid, her hideous laughter.

But when she began to speak, I was moved by the emotion of the crowd in the tiers that rose above me. In the opening moments, we were looking at a sea of white placards which had Hillary’s name written on them. The crowd seemed to let out a sigh like the sea. It would have been easy to let the moment get drowned in regret, but, instead, there was a shift. Instead of speaking about why she ran in the race, and what she learned during it, Clinton began to speak more clearly about the need to support and elect Barack Obama. Everyone was now waving thin blue signs that said Hillary on one side, and Unity on the other. The euphoria was intense.

After having sat through some good speeches and several bad ones, and, needless to add, worse music, the crowd was on its feet and screaming by the time Hillary Clinton began to quote Harriet Tubman. “If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going…”

But, as always with Hillary, it is easy to fall into the trap of ambivalence and contradiction: the piece of advice in the throats of twenty thousand inside the Pepsi Center tonight—keep going!—was that the advice for the nominee, or more for her own loyal and embittered cadre?

My second dispatch for the Indian Express.

denver-democratic-convention-michelle-hillary

“It is Michelle’s blackness that has deeply disturbed many Americans and much of the press, and it is that same blackness that has endeared her to many, but not all, black Americans. For those of us who share her race, gender and generation, the negative reaction she has inspired is stunning. As with Michelle, we are the daughters of hard working, even struggling, parents.

And, when we went off to predominantly white, elite colleges and universities it was with the reminder that we must do better than well, and that we dare not forget those we left behind. Why are black women like Michelle Obama, black women who have been educated alongside and worked with white Americans as equals, so unfamiliar to so many Americans?”

This from my friend Farah Griffin blogging for NPR from Denver. Read more.

The Sepia Mutineers are here too. I have spent some time with Abhi and Ravi, and will write about them in one of my dispatches.

[P.S.: My friend and colleague Kiese Laymon says anyone but Hillary Clinton as the chief ally.]

The snow-tipped peaks of the Rockies are visible in the distance toward the West, and a raging tornado touched down within a mile of my hotel soon after my arrival, but the most startling sight of the Democratic convention so far has belonged to George Bush’s idea of good government. Half a dozen policemen, in black riot gear, standing on the customized iron boards fixed to the sides of an SUV, slowly sliding by the pavements crowded with delegates.

It’s quite a sight in the heat. The cops wear Kelvar vests and reinforced knee pads; they have pepper-ball guns strapped to their chest and a revolver at the hip; helmets, billy clubs, a cylinder of mace, are their other accessories; and, thin and shiny blue plastic, meant to tie the hands of those arrested, are coiled a little below the waist. These are the designer police, looking like oversized versions of a nine-year-old boy’s fantasy toys.

But there’s been hardly any protest: this isn’t the season of rage, only of hope. If not for a new future, then at least for a new t-shirt. The Democratic nominee’s face has been painted, printed, stenciled by Warhol imitators. Obama might be in Kansas today, but in Denver he is everywhere. In all colours you can imagine. In contrast, the right betrays a muted sense of colour. All the t-shirts I have seen the McCain protesters wearing here—their backs proclaiming NOBAMA!—are the hue of deep mud.

Downtown Denver is overrun with delegates. But more than delegates there are the members of the press, nearly three times as many. And more than the press, there are the volunteers, twenty six thousand in all. In a t-shirt culture, this means that as a volunteer you get to wear an orange shirt and say “Welcome to Denver.” “Thank you,” I heard Ted Koppel say, over and over again, as he walked to the Colorado Convention Center this morning.

Perhaps I sound bitter. I have suffered. Each day’s press pass is to be given out new, perhaps for security reasons, and this means long lines. I have spent more time in lines for the press credentials than in doing anything else. Standing for hours in a queue of foreign journalists, in the corridor of the Hampton Inn and Suites, I have become intimate with the faded brown wallpaper, the potted plastic plants, and the smell of its disinfectant.

Today, on the first day of the convention, after having done penance in the line at Hampton Inn and Suites, I attended the first-ever meeting of Indian Americans at a political convention. Organized by a group called Indian American Leadership Initiative, the gathering was held in the Denver Athletic Club, its members working out in the next room on treadmills and elliptical machines.

At the Club, I talked to S.R. Sidarth, the Indian American youth who, during the 2006 Senate election, became the centre of a media storm. Sidarth had been working on the staff of Democratic candidate Jim Webb in his home state of Virginia. One week in August that year, he was given the task of tracking Webb’s Republican opponent, Senator George Allen. Sidarth would accompany the Senator on his “listening tour” and videotape his speeches. At one of these meetings, in Breaks Interstate Park, Allen had pointed to Sidarth, and having identified him as “macaca or whatever his name is” proceeded to welcome him “to America and the real world of Virginia.”

Allen later denied that he knew that the word “macaca” referred to a species of monkey. He also stressed that he hadn’t meant to malign Sidarth as an immigrant. But Allen, who had even harboured Presidential ambitions, never recovered from the storm of controversy. Sidarth appeared on major television channels; his op-ed was published in the Washington Post. Allen lost the election narrowly by about 9000 votes out of a total of 2.4 million votes cast. In a tight election year, Sidarth was credited for having helped the Democrats regain the Senate by a single seat.

His parents migrated from India more than two decades ago, and Sidarth was born in Arlington, Virginia. He is now 23, working as a Democratic Party staff-member at this convention. Sidarth told me that he believes that the “macaca” incident guided him to his “calling.” He will work in politics all his life. His enthusiasm for Senator Obama is based on the fact that as a person from a diverse cultural and racial background, Obama understands the place of immigrants in America. Sidarth says, “His story resonates with Indians.”

Sidarth is tall and well-built, with a slightly shy manner, often looking away when making his point. But he was emphatic that there is “unprecedented excitement” about Obama. He said, “This is like a rock concert with the most famous band in the world.”

My brief dispatch for the Indian Express. Watch this space for further reports.

denver-democratic-convention-day-1

Classy, cool, hip, glamorous, even sexy—all these words have been used to describe the presumptive Democratic nominee. He has excited the young, the disenfranchised, the traditionally cynical and apathetic: even I, for the first time in my life, had given money to a campaign—his. Outside Obama events you can buy T shirts bearing his likeness, strangely cartooned, looking vaguely like Malcolm X or Che Guevara memorabilia; you can pick up buttons with slogans like HOT CHICKS DIG OBAMA. I saw a young girl in rural Missouri, upon shaking his hand, scream and hop up and down as if he were John, Paul, George or Ringo: she then called up friends on her cell phone, gazing at her own hand as if it were a mystical relic. He’s repeatedly been compared to JFK, to George Clooney, to Sidney Poitier and, sarcastically, by his opponent, to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears; he’s been both hailed and condemned as a celebrity. We’ve opened every magazine and newspaper to find him profiled, analyzed, taxonomized again, and again, and again, to the point where the American people are tired of the hype. We’ve been apprised of the likes and dislikes of his wife, and of the routines of his children. He has stolen—some would say, hogged—the limelight for months.

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It’s past midnight in Denver. Day 1 of the convention is over. I’ve been up since six, first standing in lines to pick-up my press credentials, then attending Asian American and Indian caucuses, and finally going to the Pepsi Center to hear Teddy Kennedy and Michelle Obama speak. It’s too late to write more but do check out the lovely piece by Claire Messud which I read on the light rail on the way back to my hotel.

obama-claire-messud-newsweek

I’m leaving early tomorrow, making my slow way to the Democratic Convention. Once the tamasha is underway, do check out my reports. I’ll be filing daily stories for the Indian Express, and a commentary at the end for the Hindu.