[FILM] GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS. Gloria Steinhem’s life and the Women’s Movement.
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CLICK MOVIE POSTER TO WATCH FULL DOCUMENTARY
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Despite decades of opposition from the right, and recent personal setbacks, Gloria Steinem remains one of the most outspoken and visible symbols of the women’s movement today. Produced and directed by Emmy®-winning documentary filmmaker Peter Kunhardt (HBO’s “JFK: In His Own Words” and “Teddy: In His Own Words”), GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS blends interviews of Steinem in her Manhattan apartment, archival footage, photographs from throughout her life and clips from press interviews over the years. Among those interviewing Steinem in the film are Barbara Walters, Helen Gurley Brown, Phil Donahue and Larry King. The documentary also features archival footage of such prominent women’s movement figures as National Organization for Women (NOW) co-founder Betty Friedan, congresswoman Bella Abzug and civil rights advocate Flo Kennedy.
GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS chronicles Steinem’s emergence as a driving force in the modern women’s liberation movement. She recalls beginning her career as a journalist in New York City in the early 1960s and making headlines with an expose on the working conditions of Playboy Bunnies, noting, “I learned what’s it’s like to be hung on a meat hook.”
Having had an abortion at age 22 (which she kept secret at the time), Steinem’s political awakening accelerated when she covered an abortion hearing for New York Magazine in 1969 and learned of the horrifying and humiliating experiences women endured attempting to exercise their right to reproductive freedom. 
She began to seek out everything she could find on the burgeoning women’s movement and helped lead the nationwide Women’s Strike for Equality march on Aug. 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of the enactment of women’s suffrage. It was, Steinem notes, “the first time in my life, and I think for many other women too, that we marched for ourselves.”
Since then, Steinem has been ever-present on the front lines of social activism, co-founding Ms. Magazine, where she continues to serve as a consulting editor, in 1972, despite media speculation about the publication’s viability. She recalls that at the time “there was nothing for women to read that was controlled by women.” Steinem became the public face of the women’s rights movement, participating in marches, making media appearances and also weathering the inevitable backlash, feeling she had to work twice as hard to not be judged by her looks. Indeed, Steinem would become almost as well-known for her distinct style as for her political activism, remembering that her streaked blonde locks were inspired by the character Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Her signature aviator glasses were about concealment, she reveals, saying, “The bigger they were, the more I felt I could hide behind them.” 
GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS also explores Steinem’s early days. Born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, she studied tap dance as a child and watched her mother give up a career as a journalist to have children. Her parents had a rocky marriage and ultimately divorced. Steinem, who attended Smith College, wonders whether devoting so much of her time and energy to the women’s movement was a way to avoid the kind of suffering her mother experienced.
The film also looks at the challenges Steinem has faced in later years. Diagnosed with breast cancer soon after turning 50, she underwent surgery and radiation.
“The cancer served a real purpose, making me a little bit more conscious of time,” she observes. Taking a break from public life after decades of traveling nonstop, Steinem “hit bottom” and began to look internally, writing the self-esteem book “Revolution from Within” in the early ‘90s. Interviewed at the time, she noted, “Being a social activist can be a drug that keeps you from going back and looking at yourself.”
And after decades of remaining single, she married entrepreneur David Bale – father of actor Christian Bale – in 2000, but he died after they had been married just over three years. GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS is produced by Peter Kunhardt and Sheila Nevins; directed by Peter Kunhardt; editing and graphic design by Phillip Schopper; original music by Michael Bacon. For Kunhardt McGee Productions: executive producer, Dyllan McGee. For HBO: supervising producer, Jacqueline Glover.
The Ontario Municipal Board: Villain or Scapegoat?
I wrote (quoting liberally from Moore) for my Law Class paper last year. Personally i think the media sensationalizes and the public react. We as planners should focus more on the facts behind the cover stories.
-rudhro
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December 13, 2011
Written by Isidoros Kyrlan
Aaron A. Moore Ph.D. explores the question ‘Is the OMB a problem to Toronto’s development or just the scapegoat?’ Moore presented his research at the University of Toronto’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance last week. The presentation “Villain or Scapegoat?: The OMB and land use planning in Ontario” was a lead up to his upcoming book “Planning Institutions and Politics – The Ontario Municipal Board and Toronto” due out the summer of 2012. It was a timely presentation given City Council’s upcomingFebruary vote on whether to ask the Province to abolish the OMB for Toronto.
Moore’s research spans the past 10 years and he finds that the OMB is indeed masking the real issue. That issue is one of a flawed planning system that is arbitrary, and constantly challenged. He cites Section 37 of The Planning Act ’Density Bonusing’ as an example of how a well intentioned intensification initiative may lead to poor city zoning decisions. Density Bonusing is when a developer requests to surpass the maximum density allowed by zoning. The City of Toronto can ask for compensation to allow for the increased density, usually a monetary amount. The idea is that the city will use the money to accommodate the area for the increased density. In the last 3 years there were 261 zoning changes and 118 times Section 37 was implemented to compensate the city. The problem is that the city has an incentive to leave zoning densities low and request developers to compensate for exceeding the zoning. In the case for the City of Toronto, Density Bonusing funds are not accurately tracked to ensure they are invested back in the neighbourhood.
The OMB comes into play when developers exceed zoning density and neighbourhood associations feel they have justification for challenging the development. Neighbourhood associations rally their City Councillors to oppose the development, even if the City Planning Committee favours the proposal. The development is voted down at City Council and then appealed to the OMB. The OMB puts weight on professional planning expertise such as that of the Planning Committee recommendations instead of City Council’s. A development with planning support, but not council support will likely be approved. A Councillor can side with the voters of the neighbourhood association and blame the OMB as to why the development went through without risking growth and development in their ward. Moore cites that the number of OMB decisions favouring developers over city council has increased in correlation to the number of increased neighbourhood associations in the city. The OMB has become a relief valve for local politics.
With the Section 37 incentive and the councillors having the option to blame the OMB, a contentious environment is created of developer versus city planning versus city council versus the OMB. An outsider would view it as a chaotic system where there is no point to planning and zoning if it can all be challenged and changed at the OMB. Moore notes it is not like this in other jurisdictions; the State of Oregon was presented as an example of having institutions similar to the OMB, but with better planning that reduced appeals to those bodies. Moore noted that in Oregon planning is not just done at the local level, but at the state level as well. The state sets a land-use plan and approaches each city for a comprehensive plan of how their zoning will compliment the overall plan. Ontario has a growth plan often referenced in intensification challenges, but the province does not approach every city and ask for how their zoning will meet the growth plan targets. Instead, zoning has to be challenged, often at the OMB level, to meet the intensification objectives on a case by case basis. For comprehensive planning to take place in Ontario more resources would be required. Even in Toronto, Moore notes that city planning staff are evenly distributed among all wards, even though development is usually concentrated in a few wards.
Moore did raise a concern about the Toronto’s recent proposal to abolish the OMB in the city. Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam and Councillor Josh Matlow recommend that the OMB be replaced by the Committee of Adjustments, and any challenge to City Council decisions would be made in a court of law. In Moore’s research he found the courts to be expensive, time consuming, and possibly more in favour of developer arguments of fairness, rather than planning expertise. Where neighbourhood associations today feel powerless against the OMB due to a lack of planning expertise, in the proposed system they could be shut out due to legal costs and endless litigation. The current City proposal does not address Moore’s areas of improvement: comprehensive and transparent planning involving not just local but regional jurisdictions. Moore would like to see the Province and cities agree on growth objectives and have in place the zoning to accommodate those objectives, then developers, residents, and municipalities could stop wasting resources challenging each proposal. Moore has the research and numbers to show the OMB does not have to be a scapegoat. The only concern is that with comprehensive planning, Toronto could lose some of its current dynamism. Twenty years ago who could have planned for Maple Leaf Gardens to become a grocery store or Etobicoke’s motel strip to become a skyline?
Written by Isidoros Kyrlan
CHINA 2011: 16 VERY INTERESTING FACTS
ONE:
By 2025, China will build TEN New York-sized cities.
“[By 2025,] 40 billion square meters of floor space will be built — in five million buildings. 50,000 of these buildings could be skyscrapers — the equivalent of ten New York Cities.”
““If you’re a typical North American, at the end of a long, stressful day at work, you’re not saying, ‘I can’t wait to get in my car. I would just love to go for a drive.’ It’s much more likely you’ll say, ‘I wish I could go for a walk,’ ” That’s the point at which people run up against what’s called the Marchetti Wall – the psychological barrier against spending more than about an hour getting to work or coming home. The concept is named for a Venetian physicist named Cesare Marchetti, who posited not only that human beings instinctively adjust their lives to avoid travelling more than that amount every day, but that we’ve been doing so since the Neolithic era…”
Cars have ruined our cities, our societies and are relationships–not to mention the more obvious environmental issues. I used to LOVE them…dream about them, yearn for them and have them define my concept of freedom, adulthood and status. I grew up in Edmonton though. Having since driven my last car from Vancouver to Toronto and sold it while it sat unused, cost me parking, insurance and other sundry charges–as I rode my bike or walked in the downtown splendour that is superurban downtown Toronto..I now just view them as moving chambers of internal combustion explosions–whether super new or an old beater: the technology is 150 years old. They are a hassle downtown, and I love that. ”Where do I park?” ”Where’s the gas station?” ”Shit! Another ticket??!!” ”My car’s broken down, I have to repair it for $2500…” “I still can’t find parking!?”
No more for me. And as an Urban Planning Grad Student in 2011, I relish the opportunities awakening in the cities of the world, to go back in time and redesign neighbourhoods and streets for human beings…
To rediscover what Jane Jacobs had referred to as the Ballet of the Streets of her beloved Manhattan. The death of the love affair with the car, is like how smoking is so frowned upon now…a paradigmatic shift is in the works, and as a soon to be professional Urban Planner, I can’t think of a better, practical, more necessary vocation.
Let the War on the Car begin. Let’s rediscover the joys of having Main Streets, not malls, and Eyes on the Street, not eyes in the rearview, and the strengthened Social Capital of familiar faces on the stroll home everyone.
-rudhro
Are we reaching ‘peak car’?
ANITA ELASH
Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011
Anyone who has been stuck in big-city gridlock lately may find this hard to believe, but millions of Westerners are giving up their cars.
Experts say our love affair with the automobile is ending, and that could change much more than how we get around – it presents both an opportunity and an imperative to rethink how we build cities, how governments budget and even the contours of the political landscape.
The most detailed picture of the trend comes from the United States, where the distance driven by Americans per capita each year flatlined at the turn of the century and has been dropping for six years. By last spring, Americans were driving the same distance as they had in 1998. (more…)
How Toronto Lost Its Groove: “As many of the world’s other megacities, including regional rivals like Boston and Chicago, prepare for an era of breakneck global urban expansion, Toronto persists in thinking small and acting cheap. Should the rest of Canada care?”
And why the rest of Canada should resist the temptation to cheer
BY JOHN LORINC
November, 2011
THE CITY OF TORONTO is stumbling toward the end of 2011 mired in a deep civic funk. Mayor Rob Ford, a renegade small-c conservative from the suburban ward of Etobicoke North, bulldozed his way to victory a year ago on a simplistic pledge to slash municipal waste. His mantra: “Stop the gravy train.” While he has yet to identify instances of reckless spending, he has ordered city officials to extract almost $800 million from Toronto’s $9-billion operating budget, the sixth-largest public purse in Canada. This punishing and potentially ruinous process may entail shuttering libraries, firing police officers, and scaling back everything from snow removal to grass cutting to transit. Municipal services — such as public housing, environmental advocacy, and even zoos — that don’t conform to the mayor’s narrow vision of local government may be eliminated, privatized, or significantly reduced.
Toronto’s woes, however, go well beyond the mayor’s fiscal populism. The Greater Toronto Area — a 7,100-square-kilometre expanse of 5.5 million residents who live in a band of municipalities extending from Burlington to Oshawa to Newmarket — finds itself increasingly crippled by some of North America’s nastiest gridlock, congestion so bad it costs the region at least $6 billion a year in lost productivity. Sprawl, gridlock’s malign twin, continues virtually unchecked, consuming farmland, stressing commuters, and ratcheting up the cost of municipal services. Without reliable funding, transit agencies can barely afford to modernize, much less expand, straining the GTA’s roads and highways to the bursting point.
READ THE REST OF THE STORY @ THE WALRUS…
Daughter of ‘Dirty War,’ Raised by Man Who Killed Her Parents
Victoria Montenegro was abducted as a newborn by a military colonel. She testified last spring in the trial over baby thefts.
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
October 8, 2011
BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.
It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.
Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said. (more…)
[VIDEO] CBC’s Kevin O’Leary to NYT’s Chris Hedges: “You sound like a left wing nutbar”
Kevin O’Leary of CBC’s Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank cultivates the persona of a ruthless truth-teller.
But he came across as a shallow blowhard during an interview on his Lange & O’Leary Exchange show with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges in New York about the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Hedges, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and prolific author on social issues, sympathizes with the protesters camped on Wall Street. But he might have been forgiven for thinking an interview on Canada’s public TV network would be a little more high-toned.
Instead, O’Leary tore into Hedges, whom he misidentified as a protest organizer, and denigrated the protesters with oft-repeated criticism that they’re unfocused and leaderless.
“They want to reverse the corporate coup that’s taken place in the United States, that’s rendered the citizenry impotent,” Hedges replied.
“You sound like a left-wing nutbar,” O’Leary said.
“I don’t usually appear on shows who descend to character assassination,” said Hedges, clearly surprised by the personal attack but refusing to be baited. “You sound like Fox News.”
He went on to praise the ideas of Canadian thinkers such as John Ralston Saul, and the prudent banking system that helped Canada avoid the 2008 financial crisis that’s one of the motivating forces behind the Wall Street protest.
The “interview” ended civilly and O’Leary’s co-host thanked Hedges “for joining us.”
“It’ll be the last last time,” the former war correspondent replied.
–Yahoo News
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After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck With Nietzsche — By Chris Hedges
CHRIS HEDGES: This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us
"nothing-burger...very weak, low-budget"
O’Leary’s ‘nutbar’ remark breach of policy, CBC ombudsman says
[AUDIO] “OBAMA WAS NOTHING BUT A BRAND”: CHRIS HEDGES IN CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL ENRIGHT ON CBC RADIO’S SUNDAY EDITION: A COHERENT EXPLANATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF THE ‘OCCUPY WALL STREET’ MOVEMENT
HEDGES @ 8:30
CHRIS HEDGES
“It was the night that hope was re-born, Nov. 4th, 2008, Grant Park, Chicago.
That night the young President-elect told his country that everything was possible.
But one year from the next election, the fate of Barack Obama and his country is in serious doubt.
The U.S. teeters on the cusp of another recession; unemployment is up; home foreclosure rates are up; political dialogue is as divisive and diabolical as ever; the war on terror and resultant infringement of civil rights continue unabated.
For the writer and journalist Chris Hedges it is a time when hope turns to ashes in the mouth.
His all-consuming fear is that it is fast becoming too late to turn things around.”
–Michael Enright
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After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck With Nietzsche — By Chris Hedges
CHRIS HEDGES: This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us
[VIDEO] CBC’s Kevin O’Leary to NYT’s Chris Hedges: “You sound like a left wing nutbar”
[AUDIO] MICHAEL LEWIS’ “BOOMERANG: TRAVELS IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD – GREECE, IRELAND, FRANCE, CALIFORNIA…” THE FUTURE OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
CLICK TO WATCH VIDEO CLIP OF MICHAEL LEWIS INTERVIWED BY JON STEWART ON THE DAILY SHOW
October 4, 2011
Hedge fund manager Kyle Bass had made a fortune betting against the subprime mortgage market when it collapsed in 2008. And now Bass is set to make lots more — from a Greek default.
Bass’ story is chronicled in Michael Lewis’ latest book, Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour, which tells the stories of the fiscal recklessness in both Europe and the U.S. that led to the current debt crisis.
Lewis tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that Bass realized that governments around the world weren’t ending the 2008 financial crisis — they were just delaying it. So Bass decided that they would also likely fail.
“What he saw was that the debts that had been accumulating in the banking system were too large for governments to handle in some countries,” Lewis says. “In Ireland, the debts in the banking system were eight times the size of government tax revenues. In Iceland, it was even worse. It was bad throughout Europe. So he basically said, ‘What happens the next time there’s doubt in the system?’ People are going to ask the question, ‘Can governments afford to bail out these banks?’ And the answer the next time is going to be no … and then it’s really ugly because there isn’t a backstop.”
Bass bought credit default swaps, which are essentially insurance policies on government bonds. What that means is that if a government like Greece becomes unable to pay its own debt, Bass gets paid.
“[When he bought them] it was pretty implausible that the governments would not repay their debts,” Lewis says. “[But] we’re in a situation now where Greece will not repay its debt. He’s been proven right. So when he made these bets, he was alone in the marketplace doing this. … His vision was apocalyptic. … He would tell you that it starts with Greece, then with Spain and Italy, and he thinks France has unsustainable levels of debt and the markets will turn on the French government. But exactly how it [will] unfold isn’t clear.”
On Tuesday’s Fresh Air, Lewis looks at some of the institutions and individuals involved in the financial crisis in places like Greece, Ireland and Iceland — to determine what went wrong and who was involved in the current debt crisis.
In Greece, he says, the government initially disguised the true state of its finances with the help of U.S. bankers. Goldman Sachs, for example, did off-market currency trades with the government of Greece.
“[Those trades] enabled the Greek government to book upfront a big profit, but down the road [the Greek government] would have to repay Goldman Sachs quite a bit,” Lewis says. “So [Goldman Sachs] lent the government money without saying that’s what they were doing. If you did this in the corporate world, a bunch of people would be put in jail. They helped the Greek government rig its books so that they looked acceptable to the European Union so they’d be admitted to the euro[zone].”
After adopting the euro, Lewis says, Greece borrowed huge sums of money to do things like run the world’s most unprofitable railroad and pay people not to show up to their jobs.
“It’s a corrupt enterprise,” he says. “When a party came to power, they’d give away lots of goodies. You talk to, for example, Greek tax collectors and they say, ‘Our job is to be bad at our jobs. If you’re too good at trying to collect taxes from Greeks, you get fired.’ You talk to people who work for the government, and people are pretty clear that they regard these jobs as basically sinecures. It’s a horribly inefficient society, and the inefficiency has been encouraged by the financial markets.”
And Greece wasn’t the only country that hid its true financial state, Lewis says.
“This was not a one-off situation,” he says. “You look at the financial crisis in Europe, and the fingerprints of American investment bankers are everywhere. The financial collapse encouraged the worst sort of behavior. At the same time they were making bad loans in the United States, they were encouraging the same sort of behavior at the government level in Europe. The basic problem was, historically the role of the financier was to vet risk and make sure risk was evaluated. That got perverted in recent times, and instead the financier helped disguise risk.”
Michael Lewis is also the author of Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, The Big Short and The Blind Side. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. (more…)
[VIDEO] TORONTO NUIT BLANCHE 2008 – CITY HALL BLINKENLIGHTS INSTALLATION– “STEREOSCOPE”
MY FAVOURITE ART FESTIVAL IN TORONTO
MUSIC: EVIL 9 – WE HAVE THE ENERGY
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WITH SOME BENNY BENASSI ACCOMPANIMENT:
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BLINKENLIGHTS PREMIERE – BERLIN:
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BLINKENLIGHTS STEREOSCOPE – BEHIND THE SCENES
Nuit Blanche (All-Nighter, literally White Night, in French) is an annual all-night or night-time arts festival. A Nuit Blanche will typically have museums, private and public art galleries, and other cultural institutions open and free of charge, with the centre of the city itself being turned into a de facto art gallery, providing space for art installations, performances (music, film, dance, performance art), themed social gatherings, and other activities.
Noam Chomsky on the Dangers of American Empire and Why the US Continues to be Bin Laden’s Best Ally
We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1st, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo.
A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. “He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” Eric Margolis writes. “‘Bleeding the U.S.,’ in his words.” The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap… Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction… may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States” (more…)
The tale of Rob Ford and how he’s lost the plot
Dan Yashinsky
Special to the Star
Aug 19 2011
Stories capture more votes than policies, and the strongest metaphor wins the election.
Humans are story-tropic creatures, we like suspense and we’re drawn to tales of heroes, quests, and courage, even in politics.
The right understands this better than the left these days. We saw, south of the border, how the positive rallying cry of “yes we can!” lasted about two years before the “tea party” — a perennially evocative trope in American politics — kicked its metaphoric butt. President Obama, a master storyteller before his election, lost his narrative mojo as the Republicans found a vocabulary that, true or not, was more emotionally vivid. George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics, rather wistfully pointed out in a blog last winter, it would be good to “loosen the conservative grip on public discourse.”
The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, a great believer in the power of stories, wrote that, “Storytellers threaten all the champions of control.” Stories enrich our expressive vocabulary, and give us new ways to imagine and talk about social and political change.
Aesop knew this well. In one of his more subversive fables, Lion, Fox, and Donkey go hunting. Lion asks Donkey to divide the meat, and Donkey divides it into three equal parts. Then Lion kills him, tosses the carcass on the pile, and asks Fox to try. Fox pushes everything over to Lion except for one dead crow. “How did you learn to divide things so equally?” Lion asks. “I studied with the dead donkey,” replies the fox. A useful, if chilling, story to remember in the age of Enron, Lehman Brothers, and the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us. (more…)
[VIDEO] I LOVE THIS SONG – “Syrian protest song that killed its writer: When Syrian musician Ibrahim Qashoush began singing his protest song calling on Bashar al-Assad to leave the country he could not have realised it would cost him his life.”
Alastair Good
10 Jul 2011
The lyrics to the song are simple, the meaning clear “It’s time to leave, Bashar,” its lyrics go. “Freedom is near.”
But according to a video circulating widely online, Mr Qashoush was found with his throat slit floating in the River Orontes in his home-town, Hama.
Hama has been the scene of large protests against the regime of President Assad and the Syrian leader has sent tanks and troops to quell the dissent.
In singing his song to crowds that gathered there, Qashoush made himself a target for the Syrian security forces who, local dissidents have confirmed, silenced him forever.
What Happened to Obama’s Passion?
By DREW WESTEN August 6, 2011
IT was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.
The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. (more…)
[VIDEO] BETWEEN GANDHI AND HITLER –> NETAJI SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE
This guy experienced more global intrigue than James Bond.
Sunday , June 5 , 2011
Excerpted with the permission of Penguin Books India from His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire by Sugata Bose
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To Emilie, with love
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| That Subhas Chandra Bose met and fell in love with Austrian Emilie Schenkl in Vienna in the 1930s is well documented. But in a new book on his granduncle, historian Sugata Bose explains why they chose to keep their relationship and marriage a closely guarded secret. Despite the ‘enormous, intense’ love that Bose felt for Schenkl, his ‘first love’ was his country. An extract | |
 WIFE AND DAUGHTER: Emilie and Anita, November 1948. Courtesy: Netaji Research Bureau From the second week of June 1934, [Subhas Chandra] Bose settled down in Vienna, since he had a contract from the publishing company Wishart to write a book on the Indian struggle since 1920. In the course of looking for clerical help with preparing the manuscript Subhas met a woman who would bring about a dramatic change in his personal life… It was June 24, 1934. A petite and pretty young woman named Emilie Schenkl arrived to be interviewed for the clerical job. Born on December 26, 1910, to an Austrian Catholic family, she knew English, could take dictation in shorthand and had competent typing skills. Jobs were scarce during the Depression. Her father, a veterinarian, was initially somewhat reluctant to let his daughter work for a strange Indian man, but in time her whole family — father, mother and sister — developed a warm relationship with Subhas. Emilie had a gentle, cheerful, straightforward and unselfish nature, which Su-bhas found appealing. He came to respect her strength of will and affectionately called her “Baghini” meaning “Tigress” in Bengali. “He started it,” Emilie states categorically about the romantic turn in their relationship. Their intimacy grew as they spent time together in Austria and Czechoslovakia from mid-1934 to March 1936… Subhas Chandra Bose, according to his close friend and political associate A.C.N. Nambiar, was a “one-idea man: singly for the independence of India.” “I think the only departure,” he adds, “if one might use the word ‘departure’, was his love for Miss Schenkl; otherwise he was completely absorbed. He was deeply in love with her, you see. In fact, it was an enormous, intense love.” … (more…) |
HIMANI BANNERJI: “On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of “Canada”" AKA “RUDHRO, DON’T FORGET TO BRING SAMOSAS TO THE ‘WE LOVE MULTICULTURALISM’ PARTY!”
Copyright Trent University Fall 1996
On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of “Canada”
HIMANI BANNERJI
This paper is primarily concerned with the construction of “Canada” as a social and cultural form of national identity, and various challenges and interruptions offered to this identity by literature produced by writers from non – white communities. The first part of the paper examines both literary and political – theoretical formulations of a “two – nation,” “two solitudes” thesis and their implications for various cultural accommodations offered to “others,” especially through the mechanism of “multiculturalism.” The second part concentrates on the experiences and standpoint of people of colour, or non – white people, especially since the 1960s, and the cultural and political formulating derivable from them.
I am from the country Columbus dreamt of. You, the country Columbus conquered. Now in your land My words are circling blue Oka sky they come back to us alight on tongue.
Protect me with your brazen passion for history is my truth, Earth, my witness my home, this native land.
OKA NADA”: A New Remembrance, Kaushalya Bannerji
The Personal and the Political: A Chorus and a Problematic
When the women’s movement came along and we were coming to our political consciousness, one of its slogans took us by surprise and thrilled and activated us: “the personal is political!” Since then years have gone by, and in the meanwhile I have found myself in Canada, swearing an oath of allegiance to the Queen of England, giving up the passport of a long – fought – for independence, and being assigned into the category of “visible minority.” These years have produced their own consciousness in me, and I have learnt that also the reverse is true: the political is personal. (more…)
