On April 15, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued a detailed notification outlining the conditions under which economic activities could be restarted in non-containment zones.

The order imposed a string of mandatory dos and donts such as social distancing, the arrangement of private transportation for workers and medical insurance. The violation of any of these directives, the order noted, could attract severe penalties including imprisonment under the National Disaster Management Act, 2005 (NDMA).

Two days before that, on April 13, Indias central trade unions (CTUs) sent a letter to the Union labour minister that expressed their opposition to a proposal that would amend the Factories Act, 1948 (FA), a move which was reportedly being considered by the Centre.

The alleged amendment would have allowed companies to extend a factory workers daily shift to 12 hours per day, six days a week (72 hours) from the existing eight hours per day, six days a week (48 hours).

This move is controversial, because 48 hours per week is what is mandated by global and ILO norms. In fact, the first convention that ILO adopted was the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919 (No. 1) which India ratified in 1921 and it proclaimed 48 hours of work in a week.

While the Centre hasnt yet amended the FA, at least four state governments Rajasthan (April 11), Gujarat (April 17), Punjab (April 20) and Himachal Pradesh (April 21) have issued notifications in the last few days to increase the working hours as mentioned above.

Incidentally, this has become the most popular strategy of carrying out labour law reforms in India both historically and recently.

Labour market reforms at the national level are often opposed stridently by a rather united trade union movement through massive strikes involving crores of workers and in the tripartite forum also. These are supported, on-and-off, by opportunistic opposition political parties. Reforms such as easy hire-and-fire rules create negative outcomes like unemployment, which have adverse electoral costs for ruling parties. This is why core labour law reforms at the national level then becomes problematic for the Centre. What, then, becomes the way out for the Union government? Since the subject of labour figures in the Concurrent List, the Central government allows willing state governments to adopt these reforms and the presidents assent, which is in essence a Union Cabinet decision, is granted for them.

Thus, the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition Act, 1970 was liberalised by the then united Andhra Pradesh in 2003, by Maharashtra in 2017 and by Rajasthan in 2014. Chapter V-B was also liberalised by the Rajasthan government to make it applicable to industrial establishments employing 300 workers in place of 100 in 2014, following which others like Jharkhand did it in in 2016.

The juggernaut of heavyweight labour law reforms therefore moves forward as states dared to effect hard labour law reforms that the Union government otherwise shies away from. The Centre then typically expresses its helplessness by saying that the state governments are well placed to effect these reforms and nothing can be done about it.

A similar strategy has been adopted here with respect to increasing the hours of work during the COVID-19 context.

Legal defects

But there are a few issues with these notifications. Firstly, the legal justifications given for pushing through a 12-hour shift come with their own defects. Section 51 of Factories Act, 1948 (FA) stipulates that no adult worker should work for more than 48 hours in a week and within this framework no worker should be allowed for more than nine hours a day (S.54). In addition to this, the total spread-over time inclusive of rests should not be more than 10.5 hours a day (S.56) and subject to S.51 and S.54, more hours worked will be paid at the rate twice the ordinary wage rate (S.59).

The reasons given by these governments for extending working hours include labour shortage due to curfews because of the pandemic, specifically trying to reduce manpower requirement by 33% and limiting worker movement (Rajasthan) and for safety and social-distancing (Gujarat). In the meanwhile, several industry leaders have been complaining of labour shortages. Himachal Pradesh has not mentioned any reason for the extension in its notification.

Also read: The Streets Are Empty. How Are Hawkers Surviving This Lockdown?

While all of them have increased the maximum working hours to 12 hours a day and 72 hours a week, Rajasthan and Punjab have provided for overtime (OT) pay Punjabs notification specifically mentions that OT pay will be double the normal wage rate as per Section 59 of FA.

Gujarats notification however says, wages shall be in proportion of the existing wages. This means, as the notification points out, that if wages for eight hours are Rs 80, then the proportionate wages for 12 hours will be Rs 120. Thus, the OT wages provided for by Gujarat is less than what is stipulated by S.59 of FA and to that extent it is legally deficient.

While Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh governments have exercised the powers conferred by S.5 and the Punjab government S.65 of FA, Rajasthan did not specify any provision at all. The exercise of S.5 by Gujarat is also questionable as it empowers the state governments on the grounds of public emergency to exempt factories from all or any of the provisions of FA save S.67 (which deals with prohibition of employment of children).

Public emergency means a grave emergency whereby the security of India or any part of the territory thereof is threatened, whether by war or external aggression or internal disturbances (introduced with effect from 26/10-1976). The crisis due to COVID-19 is for biological health hazards and surely is not covered by the definition of public emergency under S.5 of FA even under internal disturbances grounds which must affect security of India.

S.65(2) (3) empower the state governments to amend Sections 51-52, 54 and 56 subject to conditions, viz. (a) the total number of hours of work in any day shall not exceed 12; (b) the spread-over, inclusive of rest intervals, shall not exceed 13, (c) the total number of work-hours in any week, including OT, shall not exceed 60. Punjab only has correctly exercised S.65. However, all the government notifications provide for a total of 72 hours in a week, which is questionable.

Worker health, productivity and employmentopportunity

Apart from these legal issues, serious industrial relations concerns exist.

Shortage of labour and social distancing principles legitimise the extension of working hours as it optimises the deployment of existing workforce and thus partly tackles the extra costs involved in complying with the MHAs order.

But is the extension of working hours needed for all industries? Why arent the existing provisions in the FA adequate to be used to tackle contingencies mentioned above?

After all, where necessary, employers and unions (wherever they exist) could together determine the labour shortage, extra workload and accordingly calculate the over-time that would be required. The issues arising out of labour deployment will differ across industries and cannot be generalised for the manufacturing sector as a whole, which is what these amendments assume.

What is important to remember is that a 12-hour shift effectively reduces the demand for labour. In the absence of company-worker dialogue, employers may unilaterally take calls, and hence provide room for discrimination regarding employee choices and income distribution among workers. These issues may lead to labour unrest. To be sure, social dialogue could mitigate any adverse effects of a 12-hour shift.

Beyond this, there are several practical issues that affect factory workers. Increased hours of work, especially when the tasks are repetitive and mechanical, will raise fatigue and work stress, hence affecting productivity adversely. In cases where workers thanks to social distancing are performing multiple though related tasks, the possibilities of work-related stress will be much higher. It is also plausible that errors could occur, with even accidents at the workplace cannot be ruled out.

Also read: Treat Sanitation Workers Like Health Workers, Pay Them At Least Rs 20,000 Per Month

The most serious setback arising out of a 12-hour workday, though, is that it will place women workers at a disadvantage thanks to their multiple roles in the workplace and homes, and womens employment might be reduced. Women workers are more unlikely to prefer employment which requires them to stay at the workplace, and 12 hours plus travel time will mean less time for family life. Hence, they are least likely to self-select and their economic capacities will be affected.

All these have adverse gender implications. Even for male employees, being away for 12 hours plus travel time in case of travel-based work, scheduling their work-life balance will be affected. Alternatively, in cases of shelter-based work scheduling, their absence from home at a stretch might affect their emotional state, assuming that they will be provided home-like shelter and food.

Also, these notifications will greatly reduce the employment opportunities of precarious workers as when there is a likelihood of non-employment of some regular workers, the question of precarious workers does not arise. However, given the labour flexibility drive of employers, it may be that some cost-optimising employers may prefer these precarious workers.

Taking one step back though, the COVID-19 pandemic and economic slowdown has thrown up a wide range of questions that have grave implications for Indias blue-collar factory workforce.

Also read: Is India Neglecting Its Migrant Workers Abroad?

For instance, what if non-employed workers do not get full wages even if they are ready to offer their services or should they be paid lay-off compensation? Is a pandemic a legally valid clause for lay-offs? Even assuming that lay-offs are legally allowed, as per Chapter V-A of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 workers employed in factories employing 50 or more workers only are eligible for it. One may argue that factories employing less than 50 workers may not start production at all, as some reports indicate.

But as a legal principle, how will the non-employed workers be compensated, whether for eight hours or 12 hours of work? All these could be left to social dialogue at the firm level. Issuance of legally defective and macro-based notifications are ill-advised and should be withdrawn. In these sensitive circumstances, talk of labour law reforms in terms of introduction of labour codes will be injudicious and even counter-productive.

The first socio-economic task is to balance lives and livelihoods. There are better state interventions to consider, like wage subsidies.

The vexatious question is: Why is there not greater engagement with trade unions at this troubling time? This might help with governance of the world of work and the crises brewing in it.

K.R. Shyam Sundar is Professor, XLRI, Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur. He can be contacted at krshyams@xlri.ac.in

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Factory Workers Can Now Legally Be Asked to Work 12-Hour Shifts. How Will this Change Things? - The Wire

In Coffeeland, Augustine Sedgewick focuses on a single plantation in El Salvador

Apr 23rd 2020

Coffeeland. By Augustine Sedgewick.Penguin; 444 pages; $30 and 25.

WHAT BEGAN as an obscure berry from the highlands of Ethiopia is now, five centuries later, a ubiquitous global necessity. Coffee has changed the world along the way. A wakefull and civill drink, its pep as a stimulant awoke Europe from an alcoholic stupor and improved useful knowledge very much, as a 17th-century observer put it, helping fuel the ensuing scientific and financial revolutions. Coffeehouses, an idea that travelled with the refreshment from the Arab world, became information exchanges and centres of collaboration; coffee remains the default drink of personal networking to this day.

The focus of Augustine Sedgewicks book is not coffees effect on drinkers but its role in the story of global capitalism, as a commodity that links producers in poor countries with consumers in rich ones. Coffee does more than merely reflect this divide, he arguesit has played a central role in shaping it. It is, he notes, the commodity we use more than any other to think about how the world economy works and what to do about it.

To illuminate this history, and the web of connections between workers on plantations and coffee-sipping consumers, Mr Sedgewick focuses on a single planter in one country: James Hill, a British emigrant who by the 1920s had established himself as the coffee king of El Salvador. By telling the story of El Salvadors emergence as the worlds most intensive coffee economy, and following coffee beans from Hills plantation to American consumers cups, Mr Sedgewick painstakingly shows how shifts in the global coffee market have affected conditions for workers on the ground. The result is a portrait of the political and economic consequences of the worlds addiction to coffee.

He tucks many fascinating details into his narrative. Contrary to popular belief, for example, it was not the Boston Tea Party that led to teas dethronement as Americas favourite hot drink: it was the abolition of tariffs on coffee imports in the early 19th century, as the United States sought to build trade ties and buy influence across Latin America. Imports doubled every decade between 1800 and 1850; during the civil war the average Union soldier consumed five cups of coffee a day. By the turn of the 20th century consumption per person in America was roughly double the level in France and ten times that in Italy. Most of this coffee came from Latin America.

A secondary theme is the relationship between food and labour, and the effort to measure human food consumption and energy output. Hill applied ideas from industrial Manchester, the city of his birth, to wring as much work as possible from his team. By paying mostly in food, and removing all other sources of it (such as wild fruit trees), he could manipulate the degree of hunger among local workers, and thus the availability of labour. The resulting coffee was then used to optimise the efficiency of workers in America, as bosses realised that formal coffee breaks improved productivity. Both coffee producers and consumers, Mr Sedgewick scathingly implies, are mere cogs in the remorseless machinery of global capitalism.

After all this readers might expect his conclusion to be a ringing endorsement of the fair trade model (coffee is by far the leading fair-trade product), which adds a small premium to the price of certified coffees to fund projects to improve workers welfare. In fact, Mr Sedgewick thinks the arguments over fair trade obscure a more fundamental issue, which is the lack of other opportunities in places where the local economy is dominated by coffee. In El Salvadors dictatorship of coffee, where coffee planters enjoyed a virtual monopoly on politics, the only alternatives were migration or revolution, leading to decades of strife during the 20th century that pitted coffee growers against their overlords.

Artfully blending together all these strands, and juggling a wide cast of characters, Mr Sedgewicks book is a parable of how a commodity can link producers, consumers, markets and politics in unexpected ways. Like the drink it describes, it is an eye-opening, stimulating brew.

This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "The big grind"

Go here to read the rest:

The story of coffee is a parable of global capitalism - The Economist

Am I going to have to fall out of love with juries? For decades I have defended these curious committees, which can ruin a mans life in an afternoon. It has been a romance as much as it has been a reasoned position. Most people get their best lesson in jury trials from the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men. In that version, a single determined juror, played by Henry Fonda, gradually wins the rest of the panel round to an acquittal, at great cost in emotion and patience. But what really won my heart was Thomas Macaulays account of the Trial of the Seven Bishops, in which a London jury defied the wishes of the would-be autocrat King James II in 1688. It was an astonishing event, a monarchs authority challenged byof all unlikely thingsa collection of Anglican prelates. Their acquittal, perhaps more than anything else, led to Jamess fall a few months later. It was the beginning of true constitutional monarchy in Europe, the genesis of the English Bill of Rights and the forerunner of the very similar American document of the same name. It could not have happened without a jury.

For without a jury, any trial is simply a process by which the state reassures itself that it has got the right man. A group of state employees, none of them especially distinguished, are asked to confirm the views of other state employees. With a jury, the government cannot know the outcome and must prove its case. And so the faint, phantasmal ideal of the presumption of innocence takes on actual flesh and bones and stands in the path of power. Juries grew up in England almost entirely by happy accident, and no government would nowadays willingly create them where they do not already operate. A brief fashion for them in 19th-century Europe was swiftly stamped out by governments that understood all too well how much they limited their power. I believe the last true Continental juries, sitting in the absence of a judge, were abolished in France in 1940 by the German occupation authorities. People in Anglosphere countries, unaware that true independent juries rarely exist outside the English-speaking world, have no idea what a precious possession they are.

I remember actually pounding the arm of my chair with delight as I read Macaulays account of the response of the bishops attorney, Francis Pemberton, when threatened by the chief Crown prosecutor, the solicitor general: Record what you will. I am not afraid of you, Mister Solicitor! So this was England after all, and even the majesty of the Stuart Crown could not overawe the defense. This was wholly thanks to the fact that the trial took place before a jurywhich duly acquitted the bishops of seditious libel, the ludicrous charge by which James had hoped to crush opposition to his plans to reverse the Reformation. Without a jury, the king would of course have won his case, and England would have gone down the road to absolutism (already followed in France, Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg dominions) with incalculable consequences for the whole world. Instead we had what came to be called the Glorious (or Bloodless) Revolution.

And my blood still runs faster when I recall this and other moments at which the mere existence of juries has made us all more free. Yet I also have terrible doubts. Is the independence of juries possible in the modern world, in which the English Bill of Rights is all but forgotten and a new dispensation reigns? All too often, I read reports of trials in my own country that fill me with doubt. I did my fair share of court reporting as an apprentice journalist many years ago, and I have a good understanding of how these things used to work and ought to work. Something has changed. There is a worrying number of sex cases now coming before the courts in which clear forensic proof of guilt is often unobtainable.

The alleged crimes themselves are repulsive, and the mere accusation is enough to nurture prejudice. The defendants have often been arrested in the scorching light of total publicity, in spectacular dawn raids totally unjustified by any immediate danger they present. Pre-trial media reporting has further undermined the presumption of innocence. In England there is still officially a strong rule against the media taking sides before the jury delivers its verdict. But this is not enforced as it once was. The prosecutions are frequently as emotional as they are unforensic, the opposite of the proper arrangement. Yet the defendants are often convicted even so (sometimes by majority verdicts, which in my view violate the whole jury principle). The state seems somehow to have turned the juryoften swayed by emotioninto its own weapon. And it is worse than the alternative. A wrongfully-convicted defendant, pronounced culpable by a jury of his peers, must feel a far deeper despair than one cast into prison by a mere panel of judges.

I had been concerned about this for some time. I knew that, since the introduction of majority verdicts in 1966, and the abolition of the old property qualification in 1974, English juries had not been what they were. Majority verdicts effectively made impossible the stand by the Henry Fonda character in Twelve Angry Men. The judge would simply have accepted the guilty verdict of the majority. The property qualificationwhich required jurors to be householderstended to ensure that they were older and more experienced. But it also meant they were mostly male, and mostly well-off, and it is easy to see why it was removed. The problem was that it was replaced by nothing at all. Nobody, it seemed, could devise an educational or age qualification that did not violate some principle of the new egalitarianism. This means that anyone on the voters roll may now be a juryperson, and your whole future could in theory be decided by a room full of 18-year-olds who have never worked, paid taxes, been abroad, broken a bone, or raised a child. I do not find this reassuring.

In 1907, when the English Court of Criminal Appeal was first set up, there were warnings that it would undermine the authority of the jury, since it could overturn a guilty verdict (though not an acquittal). And it is easy to see why some defenders of juries were worried. A principle can be undermined from more than one direction. But as it happened, the danger to juries came from a different sourcefrom the increasing egalitarianism of society itself, and the resulting politicization of so many trials. Judges became less elitist and more political, as did prosecutors. The sexual revolution created a whole new class of crimes, and created a whole new set of procedures to try them. It granted anonymity to accusers, a change that met with surprisingly weak opposition.

I did not really understand the force of this until I found myself unexpectedly defending the long-dead Bishop George Bell against ancient charges of child sex abuse. Bishop Bell could not be tried because he was deceased. But the Church of Englands treatment of his case very much reflected the new arrangements. He was more or less presumed guilty. His unnamed accuser was designated a victim and a survivor, not an alleged victim, before any inquiry began. The procedure that adjudged him guilty, in private, did not follow the presumption of innocence and made no serious effort to discover if there was a defense (there was). I found to my shock that an inaccurate claimthat he would have been arrested if alivepersuaded many apparently fair-minded, educated, and intelligent people of his guilt, though an arrest is evidence of nothing at all. Thanks to some truly dedicated and determined work by many selfless people, and some very good legal work as well, the thing was more or less set right. But a grudging Church of England has yet to make full restitution.

So when I saw the case in Australia against Cardinal George Pell, it was not just the similar name that aroused my interest. I knew from a recent visit to Sydney that Australia had undergone an anti-religious revolution. I knew very well how powerful allegations of child abuse had been in weakening the Church. My instincts were to believe that George Pell, who behaved like an innocent man, had been wrongly accused. But what if this was just bias? I sought to keep an open mind. I would presume the cardinal was innocent, but would not let my Christian sympathy close my mind to serious evidence against him. I had taken the same view in the Bell case. I resolved at the beginning never to be afraid of the truth. If the evidence against George Bell was convincing beyond reasonable doubt, then I would have to change my view of a man whose brave and selfless actions I had much admired. I would have to accept that the world was a bleaker, worse place than even I had feared. I knew well enough that there were pedophile priests. The same had to apply to Cardinal Pell.

And then a strange silence fell over the trial. I know that there were valid legal reasons for this silence, but it still seems to me that some way should have been found for a case of such moment to be heard openly and reported openly, while it was going on. When Pell was convicted, I felt I had to accept the verdict because I was in no position to dispute it, and had not heard what the jury had heard. But the whole sky darkened at the news. If such a man was guilty of such a filthy thing, and a jury had agreed upon this after a fair trial, then the forces of goodness were in rapid and frightening retreat.

And then, amid the dismal suppression of freedom and the economic lunacy now gripping the world, came a sudden shaft of light. The High Court of Australia overturned the verdict and freed Cardinal Pell. And then I read what they had said. It was startling and disturbing, not because there was any ambiguity in it, but because of something else. A court statement declared,

The judges ruled:

This seems to me to be a very polite way of suggesting that the jury did not entertain that reasonable doubt. I may be very grateful that the High Court took this view, because it seems to me that justice was done when George Pell was freed. But will there always be such High Courts, and will most people be able to reach them? In this egalitarian world, in which a series of inglorious revolutions has wholly changed the nature of justice, I am not sure that the old English jury is much of a defense anymore. And I cannot begin to say how sad this makes me.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for theMail on Sunday.

Originally posted here:

The Decline of the Jury | Peter Hitchens - First Things

By G. M. Tams[1]

As was to be expected, authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe have used the coronavirus epidemic as a pretext to enlarge, to extend, to harden their power and, in the case of Hungary, to finally put the constitutional system out of its misery, where for an indefinite period of time the only source of law is now the supreme leader, Mr Orbn. What a bore.

Like always in such cases, people in richer and cleaner, better appointed and better equipped countries are asking themselves piously, how on earth could East Europeans put up with this sort of annoying nonsense.

Well, one thing is that people everywhere are prepared to submit to a new public order that has no precedent in interfering with individual, even physical, liberty to this extent, in regulating individuals movement and proximate human intercourse, prohibiting work, presence in public places and so on, something no outlandish tyranny would have ever dared to demand in the darkest of ages. In this, apparently voluntary, obedience East Europeans are no worse than anyone else, on the contrary, they are as a rule less disciplined than most Western nations.

But politics is different.

East Europeans are not protesting the loss of a liberty they do not believe in anyway.

It is not a question of the preternatural hypocrisy of the bourgeois order where individual freedom has been contrasted for long centuries with the lack of social justice. This is a little deeper and a little more specific than the old thing that (to quote Leonard Cohen) everybody knows.

In order to defend itself and its autonomy, a civic community will have to know itself as such, but East European societies would not dream of imagining themselves to be civic communities.

This, like most things, has historical origins.

In our backward and hidebound imaginations, we East Europeans have only one memory of a civic community, to wit, the one based on common ownership: not the common ownership of the means of production in the strict old-Marxist sense, but the common ownership of everything that matters. Not only the factory, not only the barracks, not only the university, but also the family apartments in the council estates (orPlattenbauin the GDR or theArbeitersiedlungenin Red Vienna), the summer camps, the workers clubs, the libraries and so on, meaning work and leisure, public and private, social and personal literally, everything that matters.

A civic community, according to East Europeans, existed when the community seemed to own and to rule and to arrange for places to live and to work and to be ourselves together. Obviously, not everybody liked that, but those who didnt, did not like communities either. When what was called, rather imprecisely, real socialism was asked to join the company of everybody else, East Europeans calculated that politics which appeared to them to be a question of commitment and mobilisation has ended altogether. No community, no politics. Individual liberty equals the primacy and the preponderance of the personal. (Compare my earlier essay, 1989: The End of What?)

As long as individual variety with all its quirks and styles did not seem to be touched by state brutality and prejudice was tolerated in its virtual infinity, the East Europeanmalaisewas not thought to be a matter of freedom or not.

Power, of course, belongs to the owners separated from the community as it has earlier belonged to the community of owners hence there is no freedom for people who would constitute a civic community if they had power, the power of ownership. But they dont.

So when people such as myself make a fuss about the abolition of the rule of law, of constitutionalism and such, i.e., about the suppression of civic liberty, East Europeans ask, well, didnt you guys of 1989 say that the state is there to protect us from its own interference. But now it isnt the state that interferes, but the virus. The constitution was put there because there is no civic community which could defend itself even without such pieces of paper if it existed. But it doesnt. So get lost.

It isnt true that East Europeans dont care about freedom. They do. But they were taught by quite respectable thinkers from Aristotle to Spinoza to Hegel that freedom without civic power is not much. If they could be tempted, again, by an idea of liberty, the political seducers will have to answer questions concerning common ownership and the ability of a civic community to furnish our lives work and sex and leisure and study and art and sleep with the ability only property confers, as both real socialism and real capitalism are teaching us without a shadow of doubt.

I am in two minds about this.

Quite apart from my old dissident antipathy for real socialism, I believe without any liberal illusions that under capitalism (especially state capitalism that might take over from neoliberal globalisation which had ceased to function a number of years ago in any case) the guarantee against arbitrary rule can only be a guarantee of paper, that is,a text, deemed to be uncontrovertible, both upholding and opposing the rule of fact which is, as everybody knows, money and firepower. Law is where you can, under capitalism, negotiate liberty without an unmediated regard for property.

Many East Europeans think that this doesnt make a great deal of difference. And it frequently doesnt. However we judge this, arbitrary, lawless authoritarianism is growing, with a true religion of inequality (class, race, nationality, gender, age, health, education, housing, degree of pollution), and socialism real or imaginary is nowhere. But we must admit that constitutionalism is not anywhere, either. It has vanished without eliciting comment. The problem seems to be, whether or not there are enough masks, gloves, protective clothing, disinfectants, intensive-care beds, crematoria, cemeteries and dustbins. Nobody seems to be interested in where would they come from. The civic community is absent, the state functions in a vacuum therefore inefficiently and the increased powers refer to something (such as, say, society) the reality of which is rejected with our distinctive brand of humour.

Meanwhile, people are dying, alone, forced by the current etiquette to eschew saying goodbye to their children.

[1]G. M. Tams(*1948 in Kolozsvr/Cluj, Romania) is a Hungarian philosopher and writer. Forced to emigrate from Romania to Hungary in 1978, he taught for two years at the University of Budapest (ELTE) but was then dismissed for having published (and signed openly) illegal tracts insamizdat. He subsequently became a leading figure in the East European dissident movement. From 1986 to the present day, Tams has held numerous appointments and fellowships Central European University, Budapest/Vienna; Oxford (Columbia); Woodrow Wilson Center, Chicago; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; University of Georgetown, New School at Yale; Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. He was elected to Parliament in 1990 and elected Director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1991. In 1994 and 1995, respectively, he has stepped down from both. Later, he lost his job at the Academy of Sciences this instigated public protests.Currently, he is Visiting Professor at CEUs Department of Sociology, Budapest/Vienna.

The versatility of Tams political philosophy and theory is remarkable: over the course of his lifetime, his views gradually shifted to the left. He is said to belong to the circle of heretical European Marxists.

Selected works:Essay on Descartes(1977),Trzsi fogalmak(Tribal Concepts, Collected Philosophical Papers, 2 volumes, 1999),LOeil et la main(1985),LesIdoles de la tribu(1989),Telling the Truth about Class(Socialist Register,vol. 42, 2006),Innocent Power(2012),Postfascism i anticomunism(2014),Ethnicism After Nationalism(Socialist Register, vol. 52, 2015),Kommunismus nach 1989(2015),K filosofii socializmu(2016),Komunizem po letu 1989(2016).

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The Nationality of a Virus - Pressenza

Ted: Myrrh Bearing Women /flickr

Time is important. What happens in time doesnt merely have temporal significance, it has eternal significance. The transcendence of eternity is an inclusive transcendence. While, theoretically, the transcendence of eternity could mean that eternity is not shaped by what happens in time, in reality, they are related to each other so that what happens in time shapes eternity even as eternity shapes time. The interdependence of the two, the non-duality which connects the two, is one of the great revelations of the Christian faith. Eternity and time are shown to be united as one in the God-man, Jesus Christ. This is because he is what connects them together. He can be seen as the bridge which unites them and makes them one. In Jesus, temporal things are brought over into eternity. Thus, Bulgakov is able to tell us: The life of the future age is not a rejection or nullification of this age, but an eternalization of all things in this age that are worthy of being eternalized; just as the eternity of the future age is not a forgetting or abolition of time but a cessation of its changeable course. [1] What happens in time is not lost in eternity. The ascension of Jesus shows us that what happens in time is taken up to its rightful place in eternity.

Not all events are equal, but all of them will find they have eternal significance. The central event in time is the incarnation, and central to the incarnation is the resurrection of Christ. Jesus brings all things together as one, not as cold, lifeless facts, but rather, as warming living-realities. Death, and with it, the temporal ending death brings to those who have life, does not have the final say. All that has life will be brought to eternal life, realizing in eternity what they established for themselves in time. Important, foundational events in time will likewise find themselves holding important positions in eternity. Because the resurrection of Christ is what establishes this connection, it also holds a central place in eternity. This means what happened in and around the resurrection event likewise have great significance in eternity.

Who do we find around Christ, both in his death, and soon after his resurrection? Women. From his mother (who tradition says was the first to know of the resurrection), to the myrrh bearing women, Jesus had women around him as the first witnesses of the resurrection:

And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they were saying to one another, Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb? And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back; it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you (Mk. 16:1-7 RSV).

It was women who stood by and kept watch over Jesus body. When the Sabbath was over, they came to anoint it. They prepared myrrh and spices, intending on the one hand, to honour the dead, and, on the other, to assuage by their anointing the stench of the body as it decomposed, for the sake of those who wanted to stay beside it. [2]

It was women who first experienced the resurrection event. It is women, not men, who first proclaimed the resurrection of Christ. It was women who first led the church, for there was a time when only women were preaching the resurrection of Christ. We should, therefore, expect women to have a central place in the eternalization of the resurrection event, and therefore, in the church which is centered upon that event.

Despite the fact that the myrrh bearing women are rightfully remembered by the church, rarely are we told to consider the ecclesial ramifications of their actions. But St. Anthony of Padua suggests that we are to do so. The church is the body of Christ. By coming to anoint Christ, they came, in a fashion, to anoint the whole of the church, saving the church from the rot of sin and death. Therefore, St. Anthony of Padua says, when the myrrh bearing women brought spices, they came to anoint the body of Christ, and with it the church, with a mixture made from the blood of Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit:

The oil that is with which the infant Church was anointed on the day of Pentecost. It is made, then, from the Blood of Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit. From these two ingredients the apothecary must make his ointments, so as to anoint members of Jesus Christ, the faithful of the Church, as did the three women of whom todays Gospel tells us: Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, brought sweet spices, etc.[3]

By their desire to anoint the body of Christ, they spiritually anointed the church. They prepared it so that it can be preserved from all the stench of death. That is, through them, we find that women stand at the forefront of the church and protect it from the sins of its members, from the unbelief of its leaders and the cowardly, if not wicked, actions of its leaders.

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists murmured against the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the body of the disciples and said, It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brethren, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. And what they said pleased the whole multitude, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. These they set before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands upon them. And the word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests were obedient to the faith. (Acts 6:1-7 RSV).

Throughout history, we can see a sad fact repeating itself: people within the church, especially its leaders, cause all kinds of harm to the faithful. Even at its inception, it could not get away from such sin. Observe, how even in the beginning the evils came not only from without, but also from within. For you must not look to this only, that it was set to rights, but observe that it was a great evil that it existed.[4] But perhaps this should be expected. At the resurrection event, we know that the church was divided between those who stayed with Christ (which was only a select few), and those who fled, seeking to preserve themselves and their livelihood, fearing the consequences they would face for having been Jesus disciples.

Jesus knew this would happen. He made room for it. But he also knew that would falter and sin, even as he knew many of them would repent and come back to him. He made room for all of this. He made sure that those who sought him out with love would not only receive forgiveness, but that they could experience the fullness of grace found in the resurrection. Not everyone falls in a grievous manner. Some fight and hold strong to the way of love. They might have minor faults, minor mistakes, but they hold on to Christ strongly throughout their life. The church is for them even as it is for those who fall away. Throughout time, the earthly manifestation of the church will find itself filled by both types of people. Those who truly follow Christ and do not fall away should not be surprised at those who fall. They should look to the fallen in the way Christ looks at them, that is with much love and hope. Then, like the myrrh-bearing women, they can go out and preach the resurrection, hoping for the restoration of the fallen.

We must keep in mind, that the first seven deacons were not to be the last; many more we called to such servitude, and we know were women were among them: I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deaconess of the church at Cenchreae, that you may receive her in the Lord as befits the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a helper of many and of myself as well (Rom. 16:1-2 RSV). As the earliest deacons helped reconcile the church from the conflicts which had emerged, it should not be surprising that women would be among those chosen for such a rank, because it reflects the work of the myrrh bearing women at the resurrection event. Indeed, it is hard not to see a diaconal role being played out by the myrrh-bearing women. For the service those women rendered to the body of Christ is now rendered by deacons in their own work to serve the church.

You commanded the myrrhbearers to rejoice, O Christ! By Your Resurrection, You stopped the lamentation of Eve, the first mother! You commanded them to preach to Your apostles: The Savior is Risen from the tomb! (Kontakion for the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women)

We must now stop the lamentation of Eve from all the misogyny which women have faced throughout history. Christ shows us the central place they have in eternity by the place they have in the resurrection event. Women should hold more than a place of mere honor in the church. They cannot and must not be ignored.

[1] Sergius Bulgakov, Churchly Joy. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 112.

[2] St. Gregory Palamas, On the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers in Saint Gregory Palamas: The Homilies. Trans. Christopher Veniamin (Waymart, PA: Mount Thabor Publishing, 2009),146.

[3] St. Anthony of Padua, Sermons for Sundays and Festivals. Volume I. trans. Paul Spilsbury (Padova: Edizioni Messaggero Padova, 2007), 227.

[4] St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles in NPNF1(11):89 [Homily 14].

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Women and the Resurrection | Henry Karlson - Patheos

OpinionColumnistsThe NHS is a public service with strengths and weaknesses like any other organisation and has a disturbing trend of stifling whistleblowing

Sunday, 26th April 2020, 5:34 pm

I have returned from my daily burst of exercise, walking around local streets.

Many of the houses I passed have rainbow pictures drawn by children in their windows as elsewhere in the country, saluting the bravery of staff on the front line of the coronavirus fight.

Sweet images say things such as We love the NHS, Thank you NHS and NHS is the best.

i's opinion newsletter: talking points from today

i's opinion newsletter: talking points from today

Once a week my neighbourhood largely unites when residents stand outside clapping carers, some banging drums or saucepans. One household last week fired off a few fireworks.

Yet I feel a tinge of concern as I pass these signs and hear the cheers.

Obviously I share the immense gratitude towards carers, doctors, nurses and all other workers performing heroics in challenging circumstances.

When you hear of low-paid carers locking themselves in residential homes to protect old and disabled people, or read about medical teams struggling to save lives as they swelter in protective gear, it is impossible not to be moved by their courage and compassion. They deserve all possible plaudits.

But there is a big difference between praising the people performing heroics and sanctifying the system.

Britain entered this crisis locked in weird relationship with its health service, so bedazzled by its supposed beauty that it was given a starring role in the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics to the bemusement of other countries.

Politicians ceaselessly chant the mantra that it is a wonder of the world. During a decade of austerity the NHS budget rose by about 26bn, yet there were constant calls for more cash while the equally deserving care system was quietlyshredded.

Now it is treated like a charity, with millions lavished on heartfelt fundraising efforts, yet real charities such as our incredible hospices are left to struggle.

But behind Britains emotive worship of the NHS lies a more complex reality.

Look at Europe, where alternative models were better at saving lives before this crisis.

A landmark comparative study by four think-tanks with 18 similar nations found that we had lower-than-average life expectancy, with lagging survival rates for eight of the dozen most deadly diseases.

We also had the worst amenable mortality levels (when people die from potentially preventable conditions).

This week Boris Johnson returns to full-time work. His gratitude to health workers, as already seen, will be profound after a frightening brush with death.

This is, after all, a prime minister who won power by exploiting adoration of the NHS as a prop in his Brexit campaign; remember that dodgy slogan on the battlebus?

Like all Tories, he knows this remains his partys weak point for many voters and wants to retain support in the north. He will be even more determined to join theapplause.

But for all the justified admiration for recent efforts by medical personnnel, we do them a disservice if we do not recognise the NHS is simply a public service with strengths and weaknesses like any other organisation.

Yes, some flaws relate to funding shortfalls, which left England with just 4,100 intensive care beds when the epidemic erupted. Some failures relate to political decisions, such as the stupid abolition of bursaries that intensified shortages of nurses and immigration polices that deter carers.

But some are systemic, such as a shocking reluctance to acknowledge mistakes, silencing whistle-blowers even amid a pandemic and disturbing procurement struggles seen in recent weeks.

Already union leaders are muttering about pay rises for frontline workers.

Without doubt, some are deserved such as for nurses and especially in the care sector, so corroded by profiteering private firms that pay peanuts to staff. Yet it is hard to see Tory politicians especially a prime minister whose own life was just saved defying any demands for higher salaries from people, however well paid, fighting this virus.

Having shaken the magic money tree to bail out Britain, ministers will struggle to resist any calls to splash cash on the health system, regardless of logic.

The NHS has performed well to crank up capacity after seeing carnage in Italy and Spain.

I have no problem with trying to innovate on ventilator production.

But we must examine with ruthless honesty and rationality the flaws that proved fatal on testing, protective kit and care homes. Why was the system so sclerotic that ministers had to summon the Army?

Some failures are due to dire political leadership. Others seem down to stifling bureaucracy, systemic inertia, centralised procurement and confused attitudes to private firms. Differing death rates could emerge.

Given the clear struggles of Public Health England, there is a case to sever protection and prevention roles that were unified seven years ago.

Lavishing praise on any institution builds resistance to change and reluctance to learn from others.

But is there any hope Westminster might have the bottle to harvest this wave of emotion to change wider attitudes?

Not just on the health service and social care, along with allied issues of tax and spending, but even on immigration when the public can see in stark terms the role of migrants, some giving their lives in service to our nation.

Certainly ministers must ditch the crass surcharge that forces such staff, including some who treated Johnson, to pay huge and rising sums to use the NHS.

Now we rely on the race to discover a vaccine and effective treatments to find a way out of darkness that has befallen our world. Lifting lockdown is simply the first step on a long, hard road ahead.

This journey will be easier if analysis of our response to the pandemic, with among the highest death rates in the developed world, is shorn of sentimentality. By all means shower praise on people performing heroics.

But if you really want to honour them, do not indulge in shallow worship of a flawedsystem.

Link:

Medics fighting coronavirus deserve to be celebrated but we must not forget that our NHS is deeply flawed and needs reform - inews

Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is situated at the geographic center of Europe. The Gate of Dawn is one of the entrance doors of the city, where there is a chapel dedicated to our Lady of Mercy. It was in that chapel that the image of Divine Mercy was exposed for the first time, 85 years ago.

Not many people know that it was in Vilnius St. Faustina Kowalska - the Polish nun to whom Jesus gave the work of spreading devotion to His Deivine Mercy fulfilled the wish of Our Lordto paint the image that has become known the world over. Jesus had asked her to do that in Plock, according to Sr. Faustina diaries.

The image was exposed for the first time at the Gate of Dawn from Apr. 26-28, 1935.

The image of Vilnius is slightly different from the picture we all got to know.

The famous image of the Divine Mercy is a replica by the Polish painter Adolf Hyla, an ex-voto he made to thank Jesus he was still alive after the Second World War.

Hyla's image has some characters slightly different from the original one. But spread because the original image was believed lost. The story of the image of the Divine Mercy is fascinating and full of turns of events.

Archbishop Grusas of Vilnius says: For a long time, the Lithuanian people themselves did not know much about this picture. Because of the difficult geopolitical circumstances, the world has not known for a long time either of the first picture of the Divine Mercy.

Since 2005, the painting has been in a chapel expressly dedicated to the Divine Mercy, with perpetual Eucharistic adoration. Since the image was transferred there, Archbishop Grusas adds, more and more people are discovering and deeply understanding the Mercy of God, especially in Lithuania.

Why was the image of the Divine Mercy painted in Vilnius?

Sr. Faustina joined the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady ofMercy in Warsaw in 1926. In April 1929, her superiors sent her to a convent in Vilnius, which was then part of Poland. One year after her return from Vilnius, she was transferred to the convent in Plock, where she stayed from 1930 to 1933.

In 1933, after she took perpetual vows, she was again transferred to Vilnius. There she met Fr. Michael Sopocko, her confessor. She reported to him the visions and the conversations she had with Jesus. She told him that Jesus had asked her to craft an image of His Divine Mercy.

Fr. Sopocko took her to the studio of the painter Eugeniusz Kazimierowski. Although an Atheist, Kazimierowski accepted the commission. It was 1934.

Kazimierowski's studio was not far from Sr. Faustinas convent. She went every day to his studio; she checked and oversaw every small detail of the painting. She wanted to make sure that the picture fully matched the indications Jesus gave her.

Kazimierowski finished the painting in 1935.

The first exposition took place at the Gate of Dawn, whose chapel had been dedicated to Mary, Mother of Mercy, 400 years earlier. For three days, on Apr. 26, 27, and 28, the painting was hung on display in the chapel, and people venerated it. It was a crucial moment: the beginning of the Divine Mercy devotion as we know it today.

More importantly, it took place on the first Sunday after Easter, the very same liturgical moment of the year that St. John Paul II officially set as Divine Mercy Sunday.

In his memoirs, Fr. Sopocko shared a recollection: During the Holy Week of 1935 Sr. Faustina said to me that the Lord Jesus demanded that I place the picture in the Gate of Dawn for three days where the triduum at the end of the jubilee of Redemption was to be held.

The triduum, Fr. Sopocko continued, was planned on the same days as the coveted feast of Mercy. Soon I learnt that the said triduum was going to be held indeed and the parish priest of the Gate of Dawn asked me to say the sermon. I agreed, on condition that the picture would be placed as a decoration in the window of the cloister where the picture looked impressive and attracted more attention than the picture of Our Lady.

In her Diary, Sr. Faustina wrote: On Friday, when I was at the Gate of Dawn to attend the ceremony during which the image was displayed, I heard a sermon given by my confessor Father Sopocko. This sermon about divine Mercy was the first of the things that Jesus had asked for so very long ago. When he began to speak about the great mercy of the Lord, the image came alive, and the rays pierced the hearts of the people gathered there. Great joy filled my soul to see the grace of God.

Things quickly became more difficult.

In 1936, Sr. Faustina had to return to Poland. At first, she went to Walendow, south-east of Warsaw. After she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, she was sent to the sanatorium in Pradnik. Krakow. She died in 1938.

The image of the Divine Mercy stayed in Lithuania, hidden in the church of St. Michael, where Fr. Sopocko was pastor.

The outbreak of the Second World War battered Lithuania. In 1939, Soviet troops invaded the Baltic state and began the process of imposing official Atheism: shutdown of seminaries, the prohibition of teaching religion, seizing of ecclesiastical goods, and the abolition of the State Church agreement all came in fairly short order.

Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania in 1941, and in 1944 the Soviet Union occupied the country again. After the war, Lithuania remained a Soviet satellite. In 1948, the communist authorities decided to turn the church of St. Michael into an architectural museum.

The church was closed then, and all the decorations and furnishings of the church sold, except the image of the Divine Mercy.

The painting remained hanging for three years on a wall of the former church of St. Michael, until two women in 1951 decided the picture was not safe, and carried it away.

They bribed the custodian with a little money and a bottle of vodka, and carried the painting off, leaving the frame. They took only the canvas, wrapped with care, and they hid it in an old cellar at a friends house.

The women were eventually deported to Siberia, while the canvas, after some years its not clear exactly how many - was brought to the church of the Holy Spirit in Vilnius. When the women were given amnesty and allowed to return from their Siberian exile, they went back to Vilnius to recover the image.

Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz of Minsk has been among those who worked to bring back the painting to Vilnius.

Speaking with Catholic News Agency, he recounts:, In 1956, after five years of imprisonment, Fr. Jozef Grasewicz began searching for the image. He was a great worshiper of the Divine Mercy and a friend of Fr. Sopocko. One day, he visited his friend Fr. Jan Ellert in the church of the Holy Spirit. There, he saw the image, and he asked Fr. Ellert to give it to his parish of St. George in Nowa Ruda, Belarus. Fr. Ellert agreed. The image was then transferred to Nowa Ruda, hanged very high.

Fr. Grasewicz had to leave Nowa Ruda in 1957, and Fr. Feliks Soroko administered the parish for a while, until he was transferred to Odelsk. Nowa Ruda was then without a priest, though the people kept on going to church to pray.

Archbishop Kondrusiewicz also explained what happened when the Soviets turned the church into a storage facility: In 1970, the Soviet authorities closed the church of Nowa Ruda and turned it into a warehouse. All the furnishings of the church were moved to another church, but the image of the Merciful Jesus. It seems there was not a ladder long enough to get to it.

The painting stayed then, abandoned in the church. Fr. Spocoko died in 1975, without knowing what had become of the picture.

Archbishop Kondrusiewicz served as vicar of the Gate of Dawn in Vilnius between 1981 and 1986. Fr. Grasewicz was in the meantime appointed parish priest of St. Anthony and the Epiphany in Kamlonka, Belarus, he recalled. In 1982, [Fr Grasewicz] proposed to move the image of the merciful Jesus to the Gate of Dawn.

The current archbishop of Minsk tells the he "gave the opinion that it was impossible to display the image in the chapel because the walls of the chapel are filled with votiveofferings."

Archbishop Kondrusiewicz then suggested moving the image into the church of the Holy Spirit. Fr. Grasewicz agreed, and so did Fr. Alexander Kaszkiewicz, who was then pastor of Holy Spirit.

The image was moved back to Vilnius during the night a night in November of 1986. A replica was set to replace the image in the parish in Nowa Ruda. The image stayed in the church of the Holy Spirit until 2005, when it was moved to the church of the Holy Trinity, which is now the shrine of the Divine .

This year, therefore, also marks the 15th anniversary of the Divine Mercys translation to its home in Vilnius.

2020 can be considered a Year of Divine Mercy, then, since there are many important anniversaries to be celebrated.

The 20th anniversary of Sr. Faustinas canonization will be celebrated on Apr. 30. Sr. Faustina Kowalska entered the Congregation of the Blessed Mary of Mercy 95 years ago, on Aug. 1. On Aug. 25, it will be the 115th anniversary of the birth of St. Faustina, and, on Aug. 27, the 115th anniversary of her baptism. The 85th anniversary of the revelation of the words of the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy will be celebrated Sept. 13-14.

The original image of the Divine Mercy has a particularity: its face matches the face of the man of the Shroud, but also with the Sudarium of Oviedo and the Holy Face in Manoppello.

All of these images are different, made differently, and still they match: a miracle within a miracle.

Through all these vicissitudes, one message comes through clearly: Europe will be saved only if Christ and his mercy will be at its center.

* Catholic News Agency columns are opinion and do not necessarily express the perspective of the agency.

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The image of the Divine Mercy was exposed for the first time 85 years ago. In Vilnius - CNA Columns: A Vatican Observer - Catholic News Agency

Novels, says writer Saikat Majumdar, come from a wild and unpredictable place, but they end up capturing the spirit of the times, sometimes even of the future. The novelist and critic, who is a professor of English and head of the department of creative writing at Ashoka University, said he sees himself as an ethnographer of memory, not of reality. Majumdar, who explores the mesmeric power of religion and the sensory, amoral nature of polytheistic Hinduism in his third novel, The Scent of God, says the present is a muddled continuum the past always contains the future, and future, the past.

History and memory meet in all my novels. Memory is simply that which is available to you in sensory form. Archives outside the realm of the sensory are what we call history. But our memory is also the memory of others, usually, our elders, and those are the murky zones where history and memory meet, such as with theatre in The Firebird and religion and sexuality in The Scent of God, he said. Excerpts from an interview:

In your novel The Scent of God, you explore the unimaginable hold of religion over a secular democracy and trace the disturbing contours of religious violence, of the kind that recently erupted in Delhi, killing more than 50 people. Unlike your previous two novels, which delved into the lives of women in the past, this novel, based in Calcutta like the other two, has a certain degree of immediacy and urgency. In what ways has this novel been shaped by the rising tide of intolerance and hatred that has now begun to choke us?So far, India 2020 has been a nightmare. The year started off with the worst riot of the decade, and now everything is shut down due to the coronovirus pandemic. Impossible not to see much symbolism here. But thats how it is with history the past always contains the future, and future, the past; the present is a muddled continuum.

During my last visit to Calcutta, I was shocked to see the Islamophobia among bhadralok, middle- and upper-middle class Bengalis, the tenor of conversation in parties, the way they freely mixed class and communal prejudice. Such is how a culture imagined to be liberal reveals itself as otherwise. Now that I look at The Scent of God, I realise I was unconsciously recording the seething intolerance, and the incipient rise of saffron power in Bengal in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

It appeared in apparently innocuous things, such as a group of boys in a boarding school cheering for the Indian cricket team playing Pakistan and engaging in an imaginary rivalry with a neighbouring Muslim village. The young protagonist is drugged by the magnetic charisma of the Hindu monk who supervises them in the hostel. The story is based on a real Hindu monastic order in Bengal, a liberal one, that has, of late, tended to cosy up to the ruling Hindu majoritarian government. Novels come from a wild place, wild and unpredictable, but I realise they end up capturing the spirit of the times, sometimes even the future spirit.

While religious violence is at the heart of your novel, it would be unfair to see it as just about that. Though it takes a look into a breeding ground of hate, it is essentially a story of love. The novel also hovers around other ideas like desire and abstinence, and the commingling of the spiritual with the sexual. The coming-of-age novel, set in an exclusively male boarding school of a Hindu Monastic order, depicts your protagonist Anirbans journey to adulthood a journey that highlights how the wedge between communities is driven early on in young minds, preparing them for a life entrenched in hatred by indoctrination. What brought you to Anirbans story, and Kajol, and their quest for an impossible love in an unlikely backdrop?The Scent of God, as I imagine it, is first and foremost a love story. I was more delighted when Times of India listed it as one of the Best Romance Novels of 2019 than when they listed it as a notable book on same-sex love, because the dream remains for the day when non-heteronormative love will get the same status as heteronormative love and wont have to be singled out as different.

I was intrigued by the first arrival of sexual stirrings at puberty, when a human touch is all the body longs, not caring about the sex or gender of the person touching you. Distinctions that come to you later, perhaps conditioned by society. Of course, the inspiration behind this novel is a life I used to know, as a student at a saffron school similar to the one described in The Scent of God. I remember the peculiar intimacies that grew between students there daily, the friendships hard to name all within the smell of incense and flowers of the monastic world.

The novel also pits several worlds and ideas against each other. The monks narrow, stifling and stultifying version of Hinduism is presented in conflict with Anirbans aesthetic perception of prayer rituals. The sensory world of religious worship is shown to be in sharp contrast to the sensory nature of erotic desire. The idea of purity is contrasted against the profane, and love against lust. Sensual meets the sexual. In the school, detachment from the body and its desires is mandatory. In Anirbans choice of defying this lies an act of rebellion, which is in contrast to the blind adherence to the rules of the school by other boys. The school, in some sense, stands as an embodiment of India, a secular democracy where religious strife runs deep. Did you work on sewing these elements into your narrative?Several reviewers have pointed to the paradoxes of contemporary Indian democracy as they appear in the novel. I did not think of it in quite this way, but on hindsight, it makes real sense. After all, the novel is set in a boarding school which aspires to build future citizens. It is also a school that works under a Hindu religious identity, albeit a liberal one.

But the students, for the most part, do not aspire to be monks our protagonist is an exception but they desire lives of secular success, which in India, is often defined by the yardsticks of careers such as engineering and medicine. So these are boys who pray and sing hymns twice daily but their goal is to crack the IIT entrance tests and become normative and productive members of civil society.

The student body, too, is a microcosm of the nation today, with its class and communal prejudice, chronicled somewhat prophetically for the last decade of the 20th century to the terrifying nation we inhabit today.

There is a lot of empathy with which you portray the love between the two boys. Your depictions of their encounters are tender and nuanced. The novel created a lot of buzz as one dealing with gay love. Did you foresee this happening, considering it has rarely been in the Indian contemporary fiction? Could you tell us about some of the recent novels on the subject you have read and appreciated?Naming non-normative forms of sexuality is important for purposes of political mobilisation. But as an artist, I am less interested in names than in forms of intimacy that are rather hard to name. Some of the attention this novel has received has come from the excitement over the abolition of Section 377 of the IPC that was meant to penalise homosexuality. Queer people have celebrated this novel, and some of them have also criticised it for not being activist enough, but that, I feel, is not the essential call of art.

Indian writing, especially in the vernacular traditions, is rich with instances of such hard-to-classify intimacies. Probably the most famous is Ismat Chughtais Lihaaf, [which] tells the stories of powerfully idiosyncratic intimacies that are often reductively described as homosexual. Or think of UR Ananthamurthys story A Horse for the Sun, where the character Venkat gives a massage to his old friend which is therapeutic and also something more. Or Amrita Pritams story The Weed where intimacies, both between and within genders, seem impossibly poetic and dangerously transgressive at the same time.

Among the more recent novels, I thought Amrita Mahales novel Milk Teeth, which I loved, does a great job showing the self-hatred to which queer desire is often unfortunately doomed in middle-class India. Among other contemporary writers, R Raj Rao, Hoshang Merchant, Nemat Sadat, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar and others have created literature that can be more directly identified as representing homosexuality.

In the novel, you also suggest that the violence unleashed by the students and monks studying in the religious school are linked to the denial of bodily desires. In desperation, the hungry boys secretly kill, roast, and eat pigeons. When he is struck by fits of rage, Premen Swami, a teacher, hits students with his whip, studded with metal, for even minor infractions. Do you see a link between the depraved acts of violence and sexually deprived lives of young men?Yes, I think so. One form of research I did while writing this novel was to interview the alumni of the school on which this is modelled and ask about their experiences. One of them told me that he believed there were very clear links between the monks need to practise celibacy and their acts of physical violence, which included sports but also the brutal beatings of the young boys. Physical punishment thus becomes a channel for suppressed sexual desire, especially as flesh hits flesh.

Same with the violent behaviour of the boys, such as when they catch pigeons and roast them live to eat. The monastic austerity imposed on them creates this simmering hunger and violence, which explodes from time to time, to invite an even more brutal regime of discipline and punish by the monks. And so the cycle continues.

Like your previous two novels, your sentences in The Scent of God are evocative and lyrical. Do you think about the elements of style and the texture and structure of the text while working on your novels?A moving sentence, a memorable phrase, for me these are the basic units of currency in fiction. Without these, gripping story, powerful character, all come to nothing. But good style, for me, does not mean flamboyant style, it is style that is honest and real; it can be either simple or complex depending on the call of the moment or the writer, but it must be a call thats honest.

I think over the years Ive moved away from the idea of style as something clever and flamboyant to style that tries to stay bare and honest, but where honesty makes it haunting and lyrical, not straight and flat. I guess I have a natural writing style by which people identify me, but ones style is simultaneously natural and cultivated. I revise and edit my manuscripts obsessively, and sometimes I wish I could revise subsequent editions, as the process never seems complete.

Calcutta has been central to your stories. How has the city shaped your fiction?Calcutta is the city where I grew up, and the city I left. Writing about a place of memory, always half-remembered, becomes an exercise separated not only by time and space, but also by a certain feeling. Ive come to realise that I am an ethnographer of memory, not of reality. Its hard for me to write interestingly about a place when I am physically there it comes much better to me when Ive left that place, and Im groping my way through memory, which acts as a force of natural selection.

And Calcutta is an aesthetes delight. It is a modern city in the historic sense of the term, in the sense in which that modernity is now in decline, or has been for the last four decades at least. This is the modernity that saw its daybreak with the Bengal Renaissance, and which was effectively stalled by the Communist regime inaugurated in 1977. The decay created by that stalled modernity has inspired both first two novels, Silverfish and The Firebird.

The Scent of God is not set in Calcutta but in its penumbra; the school that inspires this novel is just a short drive off the southern tip of the city. The idyll of the ashram makes up part of the novel, but the other part is the dirt and grit of the city streets, and as you know, the protagonist has to make some hard choices in the end, between the city and the ashram and between a heteronormative life and one that promises a different kind of love.

In many ways, this novel, like Silverfish, unravels a writers experience with the real, the raw and the physical. The Firebird, on the other hand, was more visceral, a work where history and memory met. How did you arrive at each of the three? How do you see these stories to be different? Is writing about the now more difficult since there is no luxury of the distanceI like Silverfish, but it now feels very much like a first novel and not the great first novel that some gifted writers write. I feel that there my approach to reality, including that of Calcutta, was a bit anthropological, with a kind of intellectual distance that took something away from its artistic power.

In contrast, both The Firebird and The Scent of God had stories that took me by my throat and demanded to be told, there was indeed a visceral quality to them that I think was missing in my first novel. I think history and memory meet in all my novels. Memory is simply that which is available to you in sensory form; archives outside the realm of the sensory are what we call history.

But our memory is also the memory of others, usually, our elders, and those are the murky zones where history and memory meet, such as with theatre in The Firebird, and religion and sexuality in The Scent of God.

In Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of the Empire, you wrote about how the sense of banality and boredom were common elements of the daily experience for people on the colonial periphery, and how this affective experience of colonial modernity has shaped the innovative aesthetics of modernist fiction. In your novels, how do you see yourself straying away from the conventional impulses of narration and its distinct narrative aesthetics?Prose of the World celebrated literatures rootedness in what I felt was the most distinctive feature of Western modernity: modern literatures preoccupation with the banal of stories about marks on the wall and entire novels about men and women just walking along city streets. The prose of the world, as in the title of the book, was disdained by the philosopher Hegel as the trivial stories of daily life, but that was, I argued, the most defining characteristic of literature since Enlightenment and Romanticism, and in a more radical way, with the broken interiority of modernism in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The universe of my first novel, Silverfish, was made up of the pulsation of this modernity quotidian life, the deadening impact of bureaucracy, the throbbing banality of modern cities.

The Firebird was where things started to change. It sought to capture the wilderness of the non-modern in the composure of modern prose. The milieu, as before, was the stalled modernity of the late-20th-century Calcutta. But the real force in the novel, I now feel, is that of the pre-modern. It came through the primal terrors of childhood, the obsession with blood-kinship, the incestuous love for ones mother and sister, and a persisting engagement with the spectacle of death. Most importantly, the novel sought to capture the ritual and energy of performance, which long predates the modern category of literature in print.

In many ways, The Scent of God continues my fascination with the non-modern. This time, it is the mesmeric power of religion. Particularly, it is about the sensory, amoral nature of polytheistic Hinduism, and endless erotic possibilities that lie within its layers. It all comes together in this boys life where spiritual and sexual awakening happen in the same moment, and in the same body. Hence the scent the sensory aura of the ultimate abstract, god.

Shireen Quadri is a marketing and communications professional who has worked with several publishing houses. She is founder and publisher, The Punch Magazine, and Project Coordinator with Mathrubhumi Festival Of Letters. On Twitter and Instagram, her handle is @shireenquadri.

This interview was published on The Punch Magazine.

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I was unconsciously recording the seething intolerance and incipient rise of saffron in Bengal - Scroll.in

Hello, Tom, whats up? I am at your side, Im going to turn on the tape recorder. Yes, of course. I just hope I wont get infected. Tom Holland threw this pullita tongue-in-cheek to this journalist, the past march 3 in the cafeteria of madrid, Hotel Riu, in a scenario radically different from the one in which you write these lines and, probably, the one that will be read.

The writer has come to present Domain (Attic books), essay in which places christianity as a vertebral axis of the western culture, that today, against all odds, it would be affected by a biblical plague. People enter and exit the hotel, laughing and drinking coffee, oblivious to the carnage that is coming. The confining world come slowly a few days after, but for Holland today is a day to chat and stroll.

This Tuesday also has his own surprises. The first, when Holland declares christian and, at the same time, fan broken of the ancient Greek and roman: Contemporary christianity has always seemed to me a bit boring. They are much more charismatic and attractive to the Roman Empire and the Greek deities. I started this book as a study on christian Romebut as we go deep to see the world through their eyes, I realized that some traits of yours at first sight to be saved like this was misleading. There was a haze that prevented me from understanding how they think and behaved like those of the romans, and the mist came out of christianity, shaping my assessment of their ethics, their family structures, their sexuality or their leisure activities, which are completely different from those of today. So I decided to track how it has come to that change, and if, as some historians believe, christianity had been the main agent in transformer. And I have concluded that this is so.

It is risky to ask a believer what you think of the saying that the religions are the cancer of humanity, but the journalistic ethics rules. Those who think they do, in fact, for religious reasons. Criticism western to christianity part of christianity itselfthat today , it is devouring itself because a part of him wants to impose its own rules. Since the Enlightenment confronted the idea of light, which is identified with reason, and the darkness, that related with religion and superstition. Wanted to eradicate the superstitiona principle that today no one questions. What many do not know is that the origin of those ideas is the protestant Reformation. For Luther, the superstition was the roman Church, and advocated for an end to the idolatry of the santoral, and by filling the heart of the spiritual light.

The connection does not end here. In turn, the protestants looked on the christians of ancient Romeand these are in the Hebrew prophets, that they wanted an end to the superstition of egypt. Essentially, in the XXI century, who apostatan of christianity do so for the same reasons that embraced by the first christians. In Hitchhikers guidepublished in 1979, Douglas Adams told us a spacecraft whose fuel was the paradox. Historically, christianity is precisely that.

The historical evolution of christianity is crossed by the paradox. Today, it is devouring itself because a part of him wants to impose its own rules

Of The life of Brian to the cartoonists of Mohammed in Charlie Hebdo, question is a must what is the role of satire in the religionswhose common bond is its essence dogmatic. After the attacks against Charlie Hebdo, some voices said, why you have killed muslims on these comedians if christians did not kill the Monty Python? It is not that christians are more tolerant.

What then? What happens is that the satire of christianity is very deeply rootedespecially from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. And that impulse to drink, again, in protestantism, that revile the icons catholics throwing crucifixes into the river or burying statues of the Virgin Mary in the brothels, quite a bit more aggressive than what they did Monty Python. In all cases, the purpose is the same: to destroy idolatry. On the contrary, in islam there is a tradition of mockery, so that for his faithful aggression to their symbols is much more shocking. The movement of Je suis Charlie, which sought to universalize the values of Charlie Hebdo after the attack, is very culturally conditioned, because The west is the fruit of a christian tradition, which itself has taken on that mock. Blasphemy should never be punished, neither legally nor by any other means, it forms part of the freedom of expression.

For the sociologist, ethnocentrism is the main sin of christianity: They have convinced the world that their values are universal, especially in the last two centuries. The Declaration of Human Rights emerges from the canon law. Bartolom de las Casas defended the rights of native americans as christian, but those ideas were the basis for the abolition of slavery. In the NINETEENTH century, the international law absorbs all that christian traditionalthough the enlightened europeans because they did not recognize its origins. The western values are so conditioned by his culture as the rest of them.

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The writer Tom Holland reflects on how christianity governs everything (even his detractors) in the Domain, his last work - Play Crazy Game

the public authorities in the current situation should almost automatically increase the term of the lease. This will significantly reduce the bureaucratic burden so that the tenants can focus on more important issues of preservation of their business and labor groups, not to waste time on repetitive procedures of preservation of land rights. Should be enough statements from the lessee to extend the lease as soon as possible said Abramchenko RG.

constitutional court decided to change the Forest code

this is the extension of the lease of such land to three years. For any business and individual businessmen is a serious help. And heres why.

In todays challenging environment, many tenants of the land which is in state or municipal ownership, are practically forced to suspend work. However in the Russian legislation says nothing about the possibility to suspend the term of the contract. No rules that take into account the current virus situation when extending the extension of the lease, if it runs out or conditions change.

As explained correspondent RG, now it is necessary to support citizens and organizations that rent public land, to study the possibility of concluding additional agreements extending the lease of their land for up to three years.

the government is confident that such a right must be unconditional. That is, does not depend on whether there was a lease at the auction or not, whether there was a debt on a rent. In such a situation the landlord will not be able to refuse conclusion of the agreement.

the House and the land under it will be one object, not two different

the Exception may be cases where before the introduction of the whole system of restrictive measures, the landlord had already come to court and initiate the termination of the lease. And even this measure of support, according to the government, should not be subjected to unscrupulous tenants, at which the Supervisory authorities to all pandemics found violations, and they are not eliminated.

in addition, in the case of prolongation of the lease meant the abolition of the state duty for carrying out registration actions.

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Abramchenko instructed to protect the tenants of public land - Wire News Fax