Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

<Indra>, I'm one of the silent readers who enjoyed this topic and your
contributions here immensely. Thanks.
  

    
Ditto.
  

    
Actually, most of the people in this topic are probably more bored with the
flames than offended by them.  You have to actually know someone to get them
where it hurts.
  

    
Still want to know what "go butt a stump" means. :)
  

    
(David, before you go apologizing for the "sob story" thing, did anyone
actually say that? I didn't remember it and couldn't find it with a search,
and indra has refused to be more specific than "somewhere".)
  

    
O my shoes are Japanese
tirr-ousers English if you please,
My red Russian hat I tip, see,
yet my heart is cybergypsy.
  

    
Mera joota hai Japani
Yeh patloon Inglistani
Surr pe laal topi Russi
Phir bhi dil Cyberistani

The old Bombay hit from the film "Chaar Sau Bees" (420), lyric by the
immortal Shailendra, music by Shankar Jaikishan, ingeniously translated
by Salman Rushdie in "Satanic Verses" and here corrupted, English and
Hindi both, with apologies, by me. If you want to sing along, hit
http://www.cybergypsies.com/music/cyberistani.mid
  

    <scribbled by pdil Thu 30 Mar 00 12:37>
  

    
I loved this topic; wish I'd gotten here before all the scribbles. I'll
undoubtedly be looking for a copy of your book, Indra.

By the way, "Go butt a stump" is a new one on me, but it conjures a fairly
distinct and straightforward image:  The person to whom it is addressed
bends over, head thrust forward, and charges into a sawed-off tree. It's the
funniest non-obscene dismissive imperative I've heard in years!
  

    
This came first thing this morning. 

It prompts me to remind jdevoto, with all the restraint and courtesy
of which I am capable, that as she knew perfectly well before she
posted  (#280), I had replied to her in the members-only News
conference, pointing out that nobody can now find those words, because
a number of messages have been scribbled. I refer her to David's
message #269 here and suggest that she accepts what he says, as I do. 

When he sent the email below, Sathyu was exhausted after spending the
weekend trying and failing to save the life of a young woman who came
to the clinic with severe stomach pains. It's a story he doesn't want
me to tell here. The clinic referred to in the following email isn't
our clinic, the Sambhavna Clinic, which was set up following the launch
of our appeal in December 1994, the tenth anniversary, it was the very
first attempt at creating a free clinic, made by the people of the
gassed communities themselves, within months of the night of horror.


        Subject:an unsob story instead
        Date:Mon, 08 Nov 1999 11:44:16 +0500
        From:SATINATH SARANGI <sambavna@bom6.vsnl.net.in>
        To:indra@jamrach.com




dear indra,
i am sorry i would rather you do not post chanda's story on the well.
i
hope you appreciate my hesitation. instead here is an unsob story.
i am posting it to you and not directly. for some reason i can not
relate to the crowd right now.
love,
sathyu


unsob story from bhopal # 001

a hot morning of early june in bhopal. a crowd of men and women gather
round the union carbide factory from nearby bastis. by 10 the crowd
grows to 50. about 100 more march in. chanting slogans : "halla bol,
halla bol" (literally :make big noise)""carbide par halla bol" (make it
against union carbide). women go in front,  very close to the big iron
gate that bars their way. a truck stops at the back on the main road.
about twenty policemen with sticks hop down .thw women take hold the of
the bars in the gate. chanting grows louder. in the middle a man
starts a long "awaaaaaaaz do" (say all of you) and the crowd replies
"hum e........k hain"(we are one).more join the crowd. people at the
back are getting thrashed with lathis and literally thrown on to the
truck. two more trucks stop. more policemen.the women holding and by
now shaking the gate get more intense. the chant of halla bol gets
faster and fiercer. male policemen wont beat up women, ordinarily.the
women know this. but the policemen's chivalary has a short life. the
women know this too. a senior police official gets in to the crowd and
starts pushing women. a frail young woman, worker in a "timber factory"
,  gets pushed. gets up. takes off her worn rubber slipper. the second
seniormost police official in the district learns a hard lesson in
when to stop being a bully. withdraws and his uniformed followers
follow suit.the gate swings in and and out. and suddenly with a huge
thud the entire gate falls down .the way to the factory is open. all of
a sudden it is quiet.dead silence for a fraction of second .the crowd,
or at least those in the front do not know what to do next. the frail
woman
strains her eyes to have a look at the MIC plant which is somewhere
out
there. the one that killed her husband six months back.. then they
rush
in.it is  the first time since the killer factory was set up (and
peddled as a medicine making factory)15 years back that they had gained
entrance. the policemen fail to stop the crowd surging in as it grows.
they cant even stop the ones they had arrested from jumping off the
trucks and getting in to the factory lawns.the policemen gave up. a
gaggle of kids jeered at the trucks as they took off. by evening a make
shift clinic is built on the liberated lawn. two survivors 
organizations, a solidarity organization in bombay and the trade
union of the carbide factory workers have come together to set up a
peoples health clinic. one that would administer sodium thiosulphate
injections an antidote and a detoxifying agent for the poisons that are
still in peoples bodies. union carbide's top doctors in usa  advised
the administration of this drug within the week of the disaster.then  
their legal advisors intervened. advising thiosulphate was admitting
that the poisons had entered the blood stream. causing  local damage to
eyes and lungs (as carbide's pr agencies were claiming) was one thing,
poisons crossing the lung and getting in to the body was a different
order of liability. medicine lost to mammon. four days after he telexed
his medical advice dr. avashia, medical dirctor, union carbide
corporation, usa withdrew it. meanwhile in bhopal senior officials in
the state government long obligated to carbide were doing their best to
ensure that the antidote did not reach a lot of people. politicians,
bueraucrats and people in power got the injections.hardly anybody else 
got it. the organizations in bhopal had to file a petition before the
supreme court which directed the governemnt to ensure that the peoples
clinic got its supply of thiosulphate. young volunteer doctors come all
the way from calcutta, bombay and delhi got the clinic going.
everything had to be created from scratch. and no dearth of volunteers.
with cheap corrugated sheets of iron and waste from the "timber
factory" a clinic stood up in the middle of the lawn almost overnight
almost like magic. hardly literate young people from neighbourhood
communities got themselves trained in keeping records of symptomatic
response to the administration of the drug. learnt clever ways to
distract peoples attention as the doctor pushed the needle in. in three
weeks the clinic had administered more thiosulphate than all the
government hospitals taken together.
  

    
Thanks Patrizia, Andy, for those comments. Also to everyone else who
has taken part in this, either posting or reading, and people who
emailed me. I've found the experience hugely positive -- even the
uncomfortable bits -- there's always turbulence where realities
collide. This has been more than just a bunch of words.
  

    




Only two responses were scribbled, and here they are:



 52, 80 of 83: Colostomy Bagboy (jesuschrist) Tue 26 Oct 99 03:29 10

  Indra,

  Am I not supposed tell everyone how you used the electric stun devices
  on that kinky girl your wife knows nothing about?




  -Colostomy Bagboy, dumping the shit so you don't have to.

 Respond [no]? scribble 80

 Respond [no]? o82

 52, 82 of 83: Jesus Slut Fucker (jesuschrist) Tue 26 Oct 99 10:55 15


  Go back to yer coloring books brat girl, or show us your tits.

  IS THAT A BATON IN YOUR POCKET, OFFICER OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE
  ME?
  -RODNEY KING

  Oh yeah, I'm banned go back to whatever you were doing...
  

    

More than just a few took offense, I suspect.  But I agree that most
thought JSF was simply childish.  What is he, 14?   He'd be eaten alive
and shit out in <weird.> or <flame.ind>.
  

    
Well, yes and no...

The style of sparring is different on The WELL. Instead of cartoon-style
abuse, the tendency is to be more "real" even in being outrageous.  This can
have two implications.  It can mean that if you push a truly painful button,
and others know it, you do get feedback from people you trust that you
genuinely hurt someone, even if you didn't mean to.  The other side is that
if you did mean to get under someone's skin, you are able to do it with more
subtle phrasings.  To slay with a feather rather than a sword.  

Sparring takes a different form.  It's also not welcome in all 
conferences.  One of the joys of the WELL is that playful or even 
honest "abuse" is acceptable some places, but generally ignored by posters 
in other places, and subject to deletion by hosts if they so choose.

Deleting in the moment and restoring later when the situation is not so
heated is a technique I haven't seen before, but one of the great things
about having smart, thoughtful hosts is that defining the scope of a
conversation is an art, and not something which can be automated.

This incident ran smack dab into confusion about what was going to happen,
whether this was a conversation in the interviewer's library, or a pageant
played out on a stage.  I believe that most of the angst came from that
confusion of expections, or of the setting of the action, if you will.

Something that may have gone unexplained is the concept of YOYOW -- "You
Own Your Own Words" in the vernacular -- refering to taking
responsibility for what you say, and allowing others responsibility for
what they say within The WELL.  Anyone who wants to delve into that social
contract is invited to read 

  http://www.well.com/member_agreement.html

for the community and management collaborated description of rights.
You have to scroll through it when you join, but sometimes it doesn't 
get careful attention until there is a conflict.  

The work of the clinic is inspirational, Indra.  Thanks for that front
line account.  It's orders of magnitude more important than overblown
insults.
  

    

I've also searched <news.> for the alledged remark about the "sob story".

g news
find r "sob story"


Doesn't seem to exist.   Don't know if scribbled responses would show up
in a find, but then, why would it be scribbled?
  

    
When a response is "scribbled," the text is overwritten with a string
consisting of the name of the person scribbling, a timestamp, and I don't
whgat (if anything) else.  That text is written to some other file, at least
temporarily, I'm pretty sure.  But there's no way it can show up in a find or
extract.
  

    
Good question.  15 folks scribbled their own posts in <news.> in the last
ten days.  In a high volume conversation, people do delete posts.

Some scribble because they couldn't live with a typo or bad
formatting and wish to repost. Some because they thought better of
intemperate words or irrelvencies.  Et cetera. 
  

    
David's reponse slipped in just ahead of my reply.  Absolutely true.  Can't
search on a text string that has been deleted.
  

    
OK, so while we can't go back and see for 100%, many of us do not recall the
plight being called a "sob story".  Many people have looked and found no
evidence that it was.  To have allowed Sathyu to labor under the impression
that it was is at best careless, if not cruel.
  

    <scribbled by dloebell Mon 8 Nov 99 12:14>
  

    
Sathyu doesn't stay wounded long, nor do I. He has had to deal with
far more desperate cruelties than disparaging remarks, one of which was
seeing that young woman die in agony on Sunday for lack of proper
care. Sathyu has a strength and single-mindedness of purpose which I
envy and could never match. He is the best human being I know.

"During my wanderings in worlds, real and unreal, I have often come
into contact with currents of pure evil, but I have also known the
touch of great goodness. I think of Morgan, unselfish to the point of
self-destruction, searching for someone upon whom he could lavish his
love. I remember Alastair McIntosh blowing his conch barefoot in the
April slush, and how he once came home with me and narrated highland
yarns to our saucer-eyed children and played tunes on a penny whistle.
But most of all I think of Sathyu, who lived in a slum, thanking the
champagne drinkers at the Grosvenor House."

These are the last words of Cybergypsies.

True to form, Sathyu has already begun to look for the good in this
situation and I salute him.



Subject: Soapy Khan
Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 20:18:42 +0500
From: SATINATH SARANGI <sambavna@bom6.vsnl.net.in>
To: indra@jamrach.com



Dear Indra, 

here's another story, this one of individual victory. Come to think of
it, there are plenty more stories of courage. I'll write up some more,
and let's make a place on the new website, alongside the eyewitness
testimonies.

much love
Sathyu


THE STORY OF "SOAPY" KHAN.

Computers followed the disaster in Bhopal with a bang. Senior
government officials assured impatient crowds of survivors: the
computers are a-coming, the machines will document what each person
needs and then ensure that it reaches the right desk. 

The Chief Minister of the state declared everything will be done on
computers. The official description of the computer came close to that
of a supra human entity that was above bribing and clerical errors. But
of course they were not God. For one the computers did not understand
Hindi. All names had to be entered in English. That didn't allow
accuracy. Often there were serious errors - so Ayesha became Asha - her
identity changed from Muslim to Hindu and Karam got stored in the hard
disk as Karim. 

Then came the doles - Rs 1,500/- (less than 100 $ per family) - and
the computer mix-ups really began. The failed god left behind a large
number of families who were denied dole because the long printouts (a
total of more than 80,000 families) had got the name of the head of the
family wrong.

The notice about interim relief (as it was called ) meant for Shammu
Khan, (age 50, tall 6'4" and well built and one of the "spontaneous
leaders" of his community of badly affected survivors) arrived
addressed to Saabun Khan. Saabun means "soap".

When Shammu took that chit to the welfare functionaries, they
refused to give him his cheque. Complaints to local officials yielded
no results. It was not easy for Shammu Khan to go from one office to
another. He was blind (not from gas exposure) and had badly damaged
lungs from the gas. He navigated himself with help from his tiny
grandson, whom he followed everywhere, and a large stick. The stick and
his powerful voice were possibly the two most prominent features that
made him the leader in the week following the disaster. When Shammu
(and his grandson) had had enough of to-ing and fro-ing, he decided to
go straight to the top. 

He bought a soap bar from a shop and marched off to the secretariat. I
have less than a hazy notion of how he entered the secretariat and got
to the secretary's room [he must have had to go past armed guards and
scores of others including the chaprasi 'peon' at her door  to stop
him] but he did. He sat himself opposite her and banged the soap bar on
the table. Slapped the notice for dole on it and roared, "This one
here is Saabun Khan and me here, I'm Shammu Khan. Now, today, before
this office closes one or the other of us is going to get the cheque
for 1,500 rupees."  And one of them did.
  

    
(tnf)
Now I understand; I read those posts before you scribbled them.
But why you chose those two, I do not know.
I have read far more vicious and hurtful posts in flame.ind.
And the language used in other topics on the Well is just as vulgar;
worse in fat, because personally directed.
  

    
I didn't choose them.
  

    
David, been reading Diary of a Troubador. Entrancing stuff. I'm filled
with awe for anyone who can get up in front of an audience and perform
solo. (Have played the guitar for thirty-five years without getting
much beyond strumming chords.) Anyway...

...I came to say that Sathyu is flying into New York tomorrow, and
will be there for a week. He's going to be very busy, but if anyone
wants to meet him they can email me <bear@cybergypsies.com>.
  

    
Well, Indra, thank you for a lovely evening.

Girasole is a small restaurant on Locust Street in Center City
Philadelphia, in the theater district.  It was nearly full, a surprise for
a Monday night, and a bit noisy, but charming, and nicely decorated with
paintings of sunflowers.  (Girasole is Italian for "sunflower."  Pam told
me during dinner that the Jerusalem Artichoke, a sunflower-like plant
we've had in our garden, bears that name not due to any connection with
Jerusalem, but because it is a corrupted version of the Italian word
"Girasole.")

I'm not sure who described the service as obnoxious, but I didn't find it
to be.  It was a particularly Italian style of service-- a style I saw
often in Italy but have encountered only rarely in the U.S.-- where the
waiters treat you like you're dinner guests at their home, cajoling you to
eat more, and to have dessert, telling you about the cooking process, and
making gentle fun of your dining preferences.  "Cracked pepper on that?
No?  No, he had enough of the pepper on the salad!" and "The snapper, it's
very fresh; it was really for tomorrow, but I cleaned it just for you."  I
personally like this style, but I could imagine a more stuck-up reviewer
finding it obnoxious.

The food, as expected, was excellent.  We had (for appetizers) a polenta
with mixed mushrooms, which was perfect-- the polenta was just the right
texture, the mushrooms were flavorful, etc.-- and a green salad with fruit
and cheese (and the aforementioned pepper).  Pam's entree was snapper with
a cream sauce and potatoes; it was tender and delicious.  I had risotto
with mushrooms ("risotto ai funghi misti") which was good, but was the
only thing in the dinner that was less than perfect-- some of the risotto
was not quite the right texture, and I would have liked it less salty.
But I'm forgiving-- risotto is tough to do perfectly, particularly in a
restaurant environment.  It was very good.

For dessert, Pam had a mandarin orange sorbet (served in a hollowed-out
orange)-- delicious!  And I had a delightful flaky pastry, the name of
which I've unfortunately forgotten.

After dinner, we took a six block walk to Borders and picked up
"Cybergypsies," which I'm enjoying a great deal.  The episodic style (not
the subject matter) reminds me of Sandra Cisneros's books.  We walked back
to the car, stuffed and very content.

Indra, thanks once again for this random act of kindness.  And I think,
given the cost of dinner, I'm obligated to buy your next book as well.