[ZESTCaste] Caste Manages Sports
http://www.countercurrents.org/chamaria051007.htm Caste Manages Sports By Amit Chamaria 05 October, 2007 Countercurrents.org Commenting that the games like football and volleyball belong to reserve categories like SCs/STs may sound silly. But if one goes by the conclusions of the Thorat committee's recent report, it is not far from the ground reality. The committee constituted under the chairman of University Grants Commission (UGC), Prof. S. Thorat has recently submitted a comprehensive report on differential and discriminatory treatment being meted out to SCs and STs students by the upper caste people in the country's premier institute like All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). The report carries details on how SCs and STs students are being given differential treatment in various echelons of the life that include sports too. Certainly, the discrimination against dalits at the level of sports is not a new thing but it has always been kept shrouded. The mythological story of Eklavya, the Adivasi archer with his Brahmin guru Dronacharya has enough evidences of the discrimination against dalits. As per some bits of the story, Guru Dronacharya refuses the request of Eklavya for making a chance of competition with less talented Kshatriya-disciple Arjun. Even the story of Karna, half brother of Pandavas in the epic Mahabharata, is deemed lowborn, echoes similar sound. Undoubtedly, sports are the vital part of life and entail the cultural aspects of society. Many dalit students have been quoted in the thorat's report alleging that they were excluded from the games like basketball and cricket. A bitter reality is that basketball, as a game, has been exclusively domain for the general category students in AIIMS's cultural events, christened as 'PULSE'. The report mentions that only 68 percent SCs / STs students participate in various capacities in the PULSE. Of them, about 80 percent participate as observers and volunteers and only 11 per cent as competitors and 7 percent as representatives in any committee. The reason, reported for the lower participation in the categories of competitor and representative is two fold. One is the lack of representation of SC/ ST on the organizing Committee and second is it's the unfair working. The committee works in a biased manner to ensure that the SCs/ST students are not given due participation. Broadly, the reach of dalits and rural society to the sports is almost synonymous. The games which are easily available and do not attach much paraphernalia are popular in the rural society and so as among the dalits. Interestingly, the game like football and volleyball never attract a mass appeal and not even due attention of the media. Even the government does not give proper care towards these games even the country has a great potential in it. No doubt, adivasi and dalit can truly excel in these games. Since the games like cricket and tennis are elite sports so they easily hit headlines in the media. Cricket manages a big market and also commands a far greater influence in the media. In India athletics, hockey, football and some others are physically intensive but deglamourised sports that invariably secure the participation of the people mainly from the under-privileged section. As situation prevails in the country, only upper class people can, truly, enjoy sports and Tendulkar and Sania Mirza like sports personalities can become icons and brand ambassadors for the products. The forgotten Indian archer, Limba Ram manifest such indifferences. It could not be characterized as a naïve comment that many dalits and adivasi can become icons in the events like archery if they were trained properly. India hardly manages a medal in this event in the Olympic games. Ironically, the sacking of Saurav Ganguly from the post of the captain of the Indian cricket team can rock the Parliament but the issues related to inaccessibility of a large promising population to the sports, hardly attracts any attention of the Parliamentarians. In the nutshell, the report of Thorat's committee is enough to display the prevailing caste bias in the field of sports too. And it should be highlighted to understand that if these types of biases are evident in AIIMS, what one has to say about rest of INDIA. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [ZESTCaste] prove your caste
The easiest and surest way to over come such problem is to go the Uttar Pradesh way. Original Inhabitant of The Great Prabuddha Bharath must unite ' For The Gain of The Many and For The Welfare of The Many' through their own empowerment and by freeing themselves from the slavery of the Stooges of The Invaders' cults. nirapirikai [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you are a Dalit it becomes very difficult now to prove it in Tamilnadu.The state government has issued a new GO creating district level and state level committees to scrutinise the caste certificates issued to SC/ST people. If a dalit wants to join in an educational institution or a job he has to apply for the verification of his caste certificate six months in advance. Tamilnadu government has issued GO No 108 on 12.09.2007 constituting district and state level committees. District collector, district level SC welfare officer and an anthropologist will be nominated to the District level committee to look after the SC certificates. Secretary for the SC/ST welfare department, Director/commissioner and an Anthropologist will be part of the state level committee to scrutinise the ST certificates. If you find any discrepancies over the decision of the committee, you have to appeal before the High Court. Already the dalits are facing numerous hurdles to get admissions in educational institutions. In the age of privatisation finding a job is very difficult. By issuing this GO the Tamilnadu government has pushed the dalits into inescapable situation. Ravikumar MLA,Viduthalai Chiruthaikal(DPI) Tamilnadu
[ZESTCaste] Dalit Panthers to open doors for all communities (News)
http://www.outlookindia.com/pti_news.asp?id=509457 Dalit Panthers to open doors for all communities CHENNAI, OCT 7 (PTI) Inspired by the successful formula of BSP chief Mayawati who brought other castes and Dalits under one umbrella to win the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls, Dalit Panthers of India has decided to open its doors for all communities. DPI, an ally of the ruling DMK in Tamil Nadu, has already registered its name with the Election Commission as 'Vidulai Chiruthigal' (Liberation Panthers), in a move to accommodate other communities in the party. All the units of the party were dissolved at a meeting here on October two and a high-level committee, headed by its leader Thol Thirumavalavan, was appointed. Though Thirumavalavan had claimed that it was done to abide by the regulations of EC, the move was considered significant, as it could be to accommodate members from all communities as office-bearers. We are no more a Dalit party. We will enroll members from all communities and organisational polls will be conducted within next three months, he had said. Mayavati's experiment of bringing Dalits, religious minorities and Brahmins under one umbrella to win the polls has inspired us, he said. Thirumavalavan, who has also taken a new 'avataar' as a film actor, feels that it would also help his party to widen its vote bank.
[ZESTCaste] Verify SC/ST certificates
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=6theme=usrsess=1id=172670 Verify SC/ST certificates, Statesman News Service KOLKATA, Oct. 6: The Centre has asked the state government to carefully scrutinise Scheduled Caste, Tribe and OBC certificates submitted by people while securing jobs in government offices after several cases of caste certificates being forged have been reported. The letter, issued by Mr R Ramanujam, joint secretary of the ministry of personnel, public grievances and pensions to the chief secretary, said stern action would be taken against officers who do not verify the caste status or issue false certificates. A senior state government official said instructions had been sent to all the district magistrates to ensure that SC/ST and OBC certificates are carefully examined by the appointing authorities in the district. He said during police verification of a candidate belonging to SC/ST or OBC, the caste certificate is not examined by police. Only certificates of the candidate's educational qualifications are carefully examined. Police personnel also visit the educational institution where the candidate had studied and his residence for inquiry. On the basis of police verification, a provisional appointment letter is issued and as there is delay in getting the scrutiny report of the caste certificate, the candidate receives confirmation in due course of time . He said it had come to the notice of the administration that particularly in Malda and Murshidabad a large number of teachers had got jobs by submitting forged certificates. They had obtained the certificate in collusion with unscrupulous employees. It has now been decided that all certificates submitted by the SC/ST and OBC candidates will be examined along with the certificates of qualification and within a month, a report will be submitted to the concerned department on the basis of which appointment letters will be issued
[ZESTCaste] A former government employee, Thirumavalvan headed DPI to help Dalits since 1992.
http://www.outlookindia.com/pti_news.asp?id=509430 DPI 2 A former government employee, Thirumavalvan headed DPI to help Dalits since 1992. He was drawn to politics by Tamil Manila Congress founder late G K Moopanar during 1999 Lok Sabha polls, when he formed a minority-Dalit front to contest the polls. Thirumavalavan resigned from the government service to contest the polls from Chidamabram. In the 2001 assembly polls, he forged an alliance with DMK and won from Mangalore in Cuddalore district on the DMK symbol. During the 2004 Lok Sabha polls, he resigned his assembly membership to unsuccessfully contest from Chidambaram. In 2006, he joined the AIADMK front and his party won two assembly seats, but later he shifted to DMK-led DPA during the local body polls on the plea that his party did not get due recognition from AIADMK supremo Jayalalithaa. Thirumavalavan said that the present decision to throw open the party to all communities would help make it a stronger organisation. Now that we have decided to enroll members from all communities, we hope to rope in a major section of the society, he said.
[ZESTCaste] English made compulsory in Uttar Pradesh schools (News)
http://www.gulfnews.com/world/India/10158520.html India English made compulsory in Uttar Pradesh schools IANS Published: October 07, 2007, 00:05 Agra: The government of Chief Minister Mayawati has ordered children in all Uttar Pradesh government schools to learn English - a move aimed at increasing their employment potential. Mayawati has ordered English be taught from Class Two onwards at all state-run schools. All other subjects will continue to be taught in Hindi. The level of English language has gone down in the state, reducing the job-hunting capacity of the students, an official of the basic education department said. The department has also been directed to ensure students from Class Six upwards listen to English news bulletins on radio and read English newspapers. Teachers have been told to train students to speak in English before the class begins. Students should be encouraged to speak and converse only in English, the official said. The department, through its initiatives, hopes government school students will reach a standard similar to that of children studying in English medium schools, an education department official said in Agra. Equipped Schools are to have a separate room for English language teaching. It will be equipped with newspapers, radios, tape recorders and CD players. The walls will have names of household consumption goods painted on them with pictures, the official added. The introduction of English is part of the central government's Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. The books have been published by central agencies for Class Two and Class Three and they are really good, social activist Roller Singh said. Parents have long been demanding their children be taught English because growing job opportunities in the retail sector require good command of the language, added Hari Dutt Sharma, editor of School Prangan, a magazine for schoolchildren.
[ZESTCaste] Book Review: Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld (Poems 1972 – 2006); Selected, introduced and translated from the Marathi by Dilip Chitre
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2007/10/07/stories/2007100750020500.htm TRANSLATIONS Taste of freedom ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM Vigorous, high-voltage, bruising poetry on the festering innards of Mumbai. There is a tough and unsentimental quality to Dhasal's vision. It crackles with both rage and compassion. Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld (Poems 1972 – 2006); Selected, introduced and translated from the Marathi by Dilip Chitre, With Photographs by Henning Stegmuller, Navayana, Rs. 350. Both my individual and collective life have been through such tremendous upheavals that if my personal life did not have poetry to fall back on,…I would have become a top gangster, the owner of a brothel or a smuggler. It's a colourful range of choices. For most poets the alternatives are far more staid: academic, journalist, copywriter, perhaps, but that's about it. But then Namdeo Dhasal is not most poets. He is Maharashtra's leading Dalit poet with nine collections of poetry to his credit. He's also the only Indian poet to have received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sahitya Akademi. Spacious layout The first thing that strikes one about this book is its spaciousness. An elegant hardbound volume, it doesn't offer the dense maze of print to which poetry readers are accustomed. Although the content alludes to cramped, embattled urban chawls and brothels, the poems are allowed generous amounts of white living space on the page. This hospitality of approach extends to the book's agenda as well. It's not a mere book of translations. It offers instead a portrait — textual and visual — of the poet, his life, his times, his city. Dilip Chitre writes evocatively and passionately of his engagement — of close to five decades — with Dhasal's poetry, offering the perspectives of a fellow-poet, translator and friend. He speaks of his first meeting in the late 1960s with 'a young taxi driver who wrote cutting edge avant garde Marathi poetry in an unusual idiom'. The two have had their political differences over the years. But Chitre says he was riveted by the 'unique ethnolinguistic cocktail' that shaped the young man's poetics: the mix of Marathi, Urdu, Telugu and Kannada absorbed from a world of bordellos and opium dens, integrated with the Mahar dialect of his rural origins. This unique linguistic inheritance was then creatively processed by Dhasal to produce an original, multi-layered idiom — a fascinating archaeology of language. Chitre proceeds to share the frustration and euphoria attendant on his translation of Dhasal, offering a glimpse into the cultural and artisanal aspects of translation as well. The introduction also traces Dhasal's life — from his beginnings in the hamlet of Pur-Kanersar to his growing years in Dhor Chawl on the fringes of Mumbai's red light district; from the vigilante organisation, Dalit Panther, he founded in 1972; to his long-term struggle with myasthenia gravis; from his personal and political challenges to his growth as a poet (who fashioned his prodigious oeuvre from eclectic forms — ovi, bhajans, kirtans, varkari music, tamasha and modern European poetry). Power and fury Above all, there is the poetry — vigorous, high-voltage, sensual, associative, bruising. It flows with the power and fury of Mumbai's drains into the festering innards of the city. This is the city of the sex worker, the drug dealer, the daily wage earner. This is Mumbai without her makeup, her botox, her power yoga; the Mumbai that seethes, unruly, menacing, yet vitally alive, beneath the glitzy mall and multiplex, the high-rise and flyover. The Mumbai of the non-gentrifiable, the untamable, the non-recyclable. There is no doubt that the book's sledgehammer scatology — what Chitre terms the dominance of bibhatsa rasa — isn't for the fainthearted. Consider this extract: 'Man you should explode/…Jive to a savage drum beat/Smoke hash, smoke ganja/…Cuss at one and all; swear by him mom's twat, his sister's cunt/….Turn humans into slaves; whip their arses with a lash/ Cook your beans on their bleeding backsides…' Hypnotic tug But when does suspect testosteronal overdrive and sensationalism, it helps to remember that the work is clearly intended to flout what Dhasal sees as lily-livered bourgeois aesthetics. And whatever one's misgivings about this blistering rant, there is a hypnotic tug to this city-sewer perspective of the universe. 'I am a venereal sore,' says the poet in one of the book's most arresting images, 'in the private part of language.' It is certainly not a world of beaming communitarian outcastes and harlots with hearts of gold — and Stegmuller's city images testify to that. But neither is it a world of unredeemed bleakness. There is a tough and unsentimental quality to Dhasal's vision. It crackles with both rage and compassion. There is an acrid bitterness: 'Death is a better alternative to fear/Rather than get buggered, butcher them back'. But there is also what Chitre terms a
